She stared at him. His face was carved from granite, his body rigid. Her hopes dashed against his implacability like a bird against a glass pane.
His little sister.That is how he sees me…how he’ll always see me.
“But I love you,” she said brokenly. “I will always love you.”
“You think that because you are young and innocent. When you see more of the world, you will find a better man. One who will give you everything you deserve…or he will have to answer to me, hmm?”
Hadleigh’s gentleness somehow hurt more than his firmness, a feather-tipped arrow that struck into her tenderest core. She had always known that she had his protection and care. If she could only have his love and desire as well, then she would have had…everything.
But you don’t.Despair seeped through her.You never will.
“Come, dry your eyes, silly chit,” he murmured. “Then I had best escort you back inside.”
She realized that he had pressed his handkerchief into her hand and wetness was trickling down her cheeks. His concern was more than she could bear.
“I can see myself back in,” she said stiffly. “Good-bye, Hadleigh.”
“Livy…”
She dashed toward the house without looking back.
4
You hurt Livy, you bastard. She is like your sister, for Christ’s sake. The only good, pure thing in your life, and you’ve ruined everything—again.
The sound of the gong cut through the maelstrom of Ben Wodehouse’s thoughts.
He opened his eyes, returning to the Spartan room. Dimly lit by candles, the walls were bare and the floor covered in mats of woven bamboo, from which his fellow attendees of the nightly contemplation session were rising. The crowd was a mix of Chinese, Lascar, and Spanish sailors, as well as a few Englishmen who had found their way to Master Chen’s clinic in Whitechapel.
Chen was a Chinese healer who specialized in the treatment of opium habits. The drug’s tentacles reached all strata of society and could pull you into the depths of oblivion, no matter where you came from or the color of your skin. Even a title and wealth were no protection; Ben had found this out the hard way.
Two years ago, after a visit to an opium den in Whitechapel, he had been ripe pickings for a gang of cutthroats. They hadn’t been satisfied with taking his money; they’d wanted to punish him, a well-dressed nob, for daring to tread through the streets they considered their own. Lying half-conscious in that filthy alleyway, agony radiating from broken bones and torn flesh, Ben had been certain he was going to die, slowly and painfully.
A part of him had felt he deserved it: a miserable end to a miserable life.
As he had awaited the final blow that would deliver him from his pathetic existence, a masked figure had emerged out of nowhere. It had moved like a figment of feverish imagination. Through swollen eyes, Ben had made out the bodies of his attackers hurling through the air, thumping with a groan against the alley walls. He had heard curses and retreating footsteps before blackness claimed him.
When he had awakened, it had been in this clinic. His injuries had been treated, and he had met his rescuer, the man who approached him now. Chen, whom many of the men respectfully addressed asshifu,or“master,” was the founder of this center. The practitioner of Chinese healing arts had made Ben see his opium use clearly for the first time.
“It is not a mere habit if you cannot stop, Your Grace,”Chen had said.“Opium rules you, not the other way around.”
Chen’s treatment of Ben’s noxious cravings had involved cleansing the body and the mind. With the master’s help, Ben had wrestled free of opium’s grip. He had purged his demons—the ones involving opium, at any rate—and come out stronger. Yet he never forgot how close he had come to succumbing to that abyss. The sensual and inexorable gravity of that despair. Nor did he forget the debt he owed to the man who had pulled him from those abominable depths.
“Gor, guv, that were the longest ’our o’ my life.” While the others had filed from the room, a lanky, ginger-haired lad remained. He approached Ben, cracking his neck and grimacing. “Watching grass grow would be a sight more interesting.”
Peter Watkins, also known as Pete the Pinch, was a relative newcomer to the clinic. At sixteen, the barest hint of fuzz upon his chin, the lad was an accomplished pickpocket whose budding career had been compromised by his opium use. The drug had hampered Pete’s reflexes while inflating his sense of invincibility, and he’d been beaten half to death by a brute he’d tried to rob. After Chen had nursed the boy back to health, Ben had taken Pete under his wing.
Privilege had buffered the impact of Ben’s need for opium. He could afford to use the drug until it killed him, and being titled and rich, his use would always be viewed as “recreation.” Pete’s drug use, however, was seen as a vice and evidence of moral failure amongst the lower orders, even though Ben knew that he and the lad had more in common than many would think. Class differences aside, he, too, had been a brash youth, a neck-or-nothing whose impulses had led him to trouble time and again. He wanted to steer Pete in a better direction than he himself had gone.
“Contemplation gets easier,” Ben said.
Pete shook his head. “Not for me, guv. Makes me right twitchy, it does. Where I come from, you don’t stay still ’less you’re crippled or dead.”
It was the harsh reality of Pete’s life as an orphan of the slums. While Ben’s own background had been far more privileged, he understood the feeling of restlessness. He had been a hotheaded rakehell at Pete’s age.
“Have you thought about my offer?” Ben asked.
“Right kind o’ you to give me a job in one o’ your mansions, guv, but that life ain’t for me.” Pete shrugged his shoulders, his grin cocky. “My skill be in pinching silver, not polishing it.”
