After a moment it was clear it was perhaps the quietest place he’d ever slept in his life. How ironic would it be if the quiet kept him awake.
The sough of the wind. The steady tick and splat of rain against glass. The intermittent creak and pop of wood swelling or settling.
Entwined with all of it a steadier sound he could not quite identify. Perhaps a cat meowing? Or distant laughter?
No. He realized it was weeping.
In the room next to him, Lady Worth was weeping.
Quietly. In a constrained way.
“In a constrained way” was likely how she did everything. Likely she simply couldn’t help it. It was how she’d been raised, like a Japanese bonsai tree. Confined to a precise, decorative shape.
Something had obviously blown the lady far, far off course, the way they sometimes discovereddazed, frazzled birds far from their native lands perched on the rigging when they were out at sea. Refugees from storms.
Lifewas suffering, he could have told Lady Worth. She’d fast lose that sense of suffering if she gave up the notion of how things ought to be and instead dealt with them as they were. They never did, though, the gentry. He in fact had counted on this, and prospered from it. They wanted what they wanted, war or no war. They wanted life to go on as it always had, with no sacrifice, no obstacles, and often, no expense. They might have their precious manners and rituals, but morals never got in the way of this wanting.
He’d made certain they got what they wanted. Silks and liquor, mostly.
In St. Giles, morality was a luxury. Or rather, it was subject to interpretation. When you came from nothing, when you had nothing, when everything around you conspired against your very survival, you soon learned what you could transform into currency. And for Lorcan, that was his wits.
The trouble with Captain Hardy was that the army had shaped his sense of moral rightness and it was now as rigid as his spine.
And people tended to break along the places they could not bend.
He didn’t suppose he could fault him. It was a matter of luck and luck was fickle. They had been boys together, for a short time. Tristan had found work when he was ten years old as the assistant of a naval commander, and this was what had shaped him.
If Lady Worth was a bonsai, Hardy was the mast of a ship. He had found a way out of St. Giles and into the daylight of respectable society.
While Lorcan had been left to find his way in the shadows.
And he’d learned dozens of invaluable things: How to sail. How to lead. How to charm, when necessary, bully when necessary, how to skillfully negotiate. How to manage money, and to invest it. How to speak French and German and Spanish. He’d learned byways and alleys all up and down the coast of England, and he had friends everywhere. Enemies, too.
He’d been proud of the way he’d conducted his work.
Seeing Captain Hardy was a bloody unwelcome reminder that he’d never been proud of the work.
There came the day when Lorcan was approached by a man off the coast of Cornwall he quickly suspected of being less interested in commerce than in spying for the French. He’d bartered the man’s name to a bloke who worked in intelligence at the Alien Office, a certain Mr. Christian Hawkes, a man whose morals were as situational and as pragmatic as Lorcan’s, for a privateer charter. And Hawkes had made sure he got one.
Because he’d wanted a chance to work in the daylight, too.
And now Lorcan was well on his way to being wealthy.
He didn’t know if he believed in portents. But perhaps seeing Hardy again was a way to measurehow far he had come. A way to remind himself that he’d done it almost entirely on his own. That not even a proud man like Hardy had been able to outsmart him. That there was likely nothing he couldn’t have or do now.
His consciousness began to drift, the sound of Lady Worth weeping dissolved into and became all of a piece with all the ambient sounds of his life so far, rain and the crash of waves, weeping and laughter and screams, gunshots, laughter, moans, flesh striking flesh, the snap of sails, and he slept.
Chapter Six
“I’m sorry I’m so late to bed,” Delilah whispered to her husband as she climbed in next to him. “Delacorte finally came home, but he brought Lord St. John Vaughn back with him, because St. John couldn’t get a hack back to St. James Square in this weather. Apparently, St. John went with him to sing songs in pubs. If you can believe that! We had to put him in a suite.”
Angelique and Delilah had been none too pleased about this. But they could hardly throw out the young heir to an earl. Delacorte had done the right thing. And they knew St. John’s parents, the Earl and Countess of Vaughn, would pay for their son’s lodging. They were good people.
“Do you remember the time Gordon brought in a live mouse and put it in his food dish, and the poor thing ran around the room and tried to climb the walls and the furniture?” Angelique said. “I think that’s what St. John will be like after a few days trapped inside due to the weather.”
St. John was young and very handsome, and reveling in this was his favorite pastime. He enjoyed making young women blush and basking in their attention, gambling modestly in gaming hells and buying fine horses. He quickly grewbored when deprived of any of these activities. He was rather indolent, but not fundamentally a bad sort in any other way. His family was lovely and rich and it wasn’t his fault his father was an earl, not really.
Learning chess had been an act of desperation born of boredom during his first visit, and this was how St. John and Delacorte had forged an unlikely bond—Delacorte had taught him. Their former guest Mr. Hugh Cassidy had fallen in love with St. John’s sister Lillias and whisked her off to America. He missed his sister, and would not outright admit it. Delacorte missed his bosom friend Mr. Cassidy, and said so all the time. He missed everyone when they left. This, too, rather bonded them, though Mr. Delacorte had found Lillias unnerving.
