Irene laughed at Sarah’s outrage. “’Tis, isn’t it? You know the fancy bucks, they think they own the world and we are just here for their pleasure.” Her tone had turned bitter.
Sarah understood. She looked down at the handbill. “Ten pounds.”
“It is good wages,” Irene said. “Especially after one has been rooked from what should have been an excellent payday.”
A person like her fellow actors in the Naughty Review.
“Perhaps some of those lads have gone for a pint, but you’d best be careful, Sarah. They might also be going to pay a call on his lordship.”
“I hear your warning,” Sarah answered, “but in truth, I can’t worry about Rovington. Who I want is Geoff and Charles and I shall find them.”
“If I were them, I’d be flying to the Continent,” Irene countered. “Can you imagine how much money we took in last night? They could live for years on it. They lived for years off the first review we did.”
“This is not right,” Sarah said.
Irene gave a fatalistic shrug. “What can we do? Life is not fair. There are those who take and a host of us who are taken.”
“But they are playing with me,” Sarah answered. And her dreams. Her hopes. Her ambitions.
The play she so carefully held in her arms felt heavier than a cord of wood. Her blood boiled with anger.
She could well imagine Geoff and Charles laughing at how gullible she’d been, how utterly, to their larcenous minds, clueless.
But they had underestimated Sarah Pettijohn.
Chances were that if the two crooks were not in London, then they might still be in England. She’d chase them to the ends of the earth, if possible. And while perhaps she couldn’t hunt them down, she knew someone who could.
If you ever need me, send for me.
The duke’s words echoed in her mind. Did she dare . . . ?
Did she have any other choice? This was survival. Geoff and Charles were attempting to crumple her dreams. She would not let them.
“Are you all right?” Irene asked. “You have the most fierce expression on your face.”
“Fierce? Yes, that is right. I’ll do anything to find Geoff and Charles. I will find them.”
“And how are you going to do that?” the other actress asked.
“I’m going to call on the Duke of Baynton.”
Irene laughed and then stopped as she saw Sarah was serious. “Do you really know Baynton?”
Sarah nodded. “And I know how to convince him to help me.” Baynton wanted her. Well, then, here was her price: she wanted Geoff and Charles brought to justice. Sarah set off walking. She’d not reached the end of the street before the skies opened and it began to rain.
She kept walking.
Gavin had left Sarah Pettijohn’s room feeling as if someone had stirred up his insides with a red-hot poker. He was surprised he could walk away from her with any sense of dignity. He moved as if the world around him had slowed.
His horse waited where he had tied it. He glanced at the whorehouse across the way and found himself hoping that one of those randy bucks who had gone in earlier would come out now and challenge him. He’d like nothing better right now than a good mill.
The thought flitted across his mind that any reasonable person would tell him to cross the road and climb the steps into that house. His was a problem easy to solve, as both of his brothers—and Mrs. Pettijohn—had pointed out to him, but he wanted her. Mrs. Pettijohn . . . Sarah, because after a man kissed a woman the way he had her, didn’t he have the right to address her by her given name?
God, he burned for her, and she had rejected him. Him, the man that supposedly every blasted woman in London wanted.
Save for two others. He could almost hear her voice dryly reminding him of the truth.
And perhaps that is why he was so taken with her. She told him the truth. She’d done that during the escapade with Lady Charlene and she certainly had spoken her truth a moment ago.
