Her eyes went wide. He raised his knee and tipped her forward. Her hair rained down on him and her face hovered just above his.
“What’ya say, love? On top? Can you manage?” He used the voice of the Old Joseph, who was really the Young Joseph, the much younger man he used to be, the boy with whom he thought he’d been finished—and good riddance. Now, he was so very glad to have him on hand.
“Love?” he repeated. “How’s about a kiss?”
Tessa made a delighted noise, a delighted hungry noise, and Joseph captured her mouth with a kiss and held her against him and thought there was never a man more fortunate than he.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Four months later....
Tessa was alone on the day she reencountered Captain Neil Marking, except for Christian and his new nursemaid, Jeanie. They were in Hartlepool, walking from the dockyard to Church Street.
If the weather was fair, Tessa had Jeanie bring the baby into town by carriage to meet her at the dock master’s office when her work was finished. The three of them would walk to a café and take tea and then travel home to Abbotsford Cottage before sunset.
It was a stretch, perhaps, to say the weather was fair that day. The cold of winter had settled in along the villages of the North Sea held them tightly in her icy grip. December had given way to the sleet and snowfall of January. But there was neither rain nor sleet today, merely cold sunshine, and Tessa bade Jeanie bundle herself and the baby and make the trip. Joseph also had business in Church Street that afternoon, and his partner Stoker was in town—he would sail back to Barbadoes with a hold full of coal Tessa had arranged herself. The baby would be asleep by the time dinner was served at Abbotsford, and she wished to show him off, despite Jon Stoker’s alleged unease around babies.
Tessa snuggled more deeply into her fur-lined overcoat, bouncing Christian on her hip as she walked along Hartlepool’s thick, barnacle-frothed seawall. Dollop remained a large baby, growing larger every day, but Tessa insisted on carrying him. They’d spent the day apart, after all, and Dollop thrilled to the sights and sounds of the ocean, which were much easier to see from his mother’s arms than the deep bowl of his pram. Behind them, Jeanie pushed the empty baby carriage and hummed.
The red wool of an officer’s coat was the first thing to catch Tessa’s eye.
She’d never quite gotten over her visceral reaction to the bloodred coat of any soldier in the Royal Army. Long after every other anxiety had begun to fade away, Tessa still startled when she encountered a red-coated soldier. Her insides turned to ice, and she had to remind herself to breathe, to look away, to walk on.
But today, enjoying the rare full sun and the bracing sea wind, Tessa saw the crimson coat on a man in the distance and she didnotlook away.
Today when she spotted the red and gold, the braids and buttons, she looked harder. She stared and took a few more steps and stared more.
There was something about the line of his shoulders stretching the wool. Something more about the way the man in the jacket had propped his hand against the side of a distant building and loomed over someone, a girl—
Tessa took two more steps closer and squinted. Was it a girl? Did the soldier with the broad shoulders and the propped arm lean over a young, pretty girl with her face turned up and a bright, hopeful smile?
Fury and purpose spiked inside of Tessa like birds launching for the sky. She spun around and tucked Christian in the empty pram.
“Jeanie, will you locate Mr. Chance at the Mallet and Mole in Church Street and tell him to come here, to me, at the seawall? Tell him its urgent. And then please keep back. You and the baby remain far back. Do you understand?”
Jeanie, who was biddable but also smart, nodded and wheeled the pram around, hurrying away.
Tessa turned back and glared at the stain of the red coat against the grey bricks. She continued to walk. With every step, she thought about the months of shame she’d endured; about believing she’d invited the attack, that her own vanity had lured and teased and been impossible to resist.
She thought of the white-knuckle fear she suffered when she discovered she was with child, the guilt, the certainty that her parents would not recover from the shame.
And then she thought of Joseph, whom she’d almost lost because he’d believed she’d used him.
Her life had been saved, saved by her own ingenuity and the will to discover some other life for herself and the baby. And saved by Joseph, who forgave her, who insisted that there was nothing to forgive, who loved Christian as if he was his own son.
But this had all been chance and providence and the love of two people with so very much love to give. Easily, so easily, her life could have taken another route. How many young women, she wondered, had been attacked and abandoned?
When she stepped close enough to hear the sound of his voice, his laugh, his signature low whistle, sheknew. She would never forget the sound of his voice—orvoices. He’d used one voice when he’d called on her and danced with her and walked her home from the village, but another voice to say sickly sweet, nonsense words in her ear while he attacked her. A third voice had been used to tell her she was a Very Bad Girl and to turn her away with a slammed door. She knew them all. For months, these voices had been phantoms howling in her nightmares.
Here today, Captain Neil Marking seemed to be employing his charming, conciliatory voice. His daytime voice. Tessa could just make out the young woman looking up, dazzled, of course, at his handsome face. Tessa continued to come.
As she approached, she prepared herself to see Christian’s eyes, Christian’s chin, Christian’s smile. When she was close enough to make out the fine details of his face, he would be more than familiar, he would be features and mannerisms that made up her beloved son.
By luck, his head was turned, and his profile betrayed nothing. Black hair was the only sign that this had been the man who had, in his only generosity, given her Christian.
When she drew close, close enough to hear his ridiculous platitudes, to hear the reedy tenor of his voice, Tessa called out.
“Neil?” she said.
