It had shaken her, and thrilled her nearly beyond bearing. Because something in her responded to it as powerfully as one wolf calling to another in the dark. She thought she might never be comfortable again.
“I don’t feel well,” she said abruptly to the Glossops.
And she quickly slipped away and went out the door to find a hack to take her back to The Grand Palace on the Thames.
“You’ve been quiet all night, Kirke.”
White’s was as lively as it ever was during the season. Dominic had joined some fellow Whigs for a game of five-card loo, brandy, and a discussion about developing apprenticeship programs for some of the children who were in the worst of the workhouses, like Bethnal Green.
He was, in fact, miserable. As restless as if hewere wearing a hair shirt. Nervy. Which was unlike him. He was beset with a guilt that he for a change probably didn’t quite deserve.
“I can’t tell if you’re complaining or celebrating, Holmquist,” he said finally.
“Can’t it be both?” Holmquist said idly.
Dominic smiled.
“He’s probably dreaming of ways to make Farquar uncomfortable.”
Dominic didn’t reply. The whole of his mind was elsewhere. He was playing badly which was also unlike him, and unfair to the other players. It took all the fun out of beating him.
He reached into the pocket of his coat and touched the blossom he’d tucked in there earlier. His fingers caressed the petals.
Finally, slowly, he laid down his cards.
“Gentlemen, I fear I must take an early leave of you. Try not to mourn.”
He departed swiftly, leaving behind a ring of startled faces and a losing hand.
On a typical night, hacks swarmed White’s like gnats about a picnic, ready to ferry home drunk lords. Dominic hailed one straightaway, and gave him the directions to St. James’s Square.
“Hurry, please, if you’re able,” he asked the driver as he boarded, and filled his palm with coins.
He didn’t know why he should feel so anxious.
He leaned forward the whole of the way there, as if he could compel the horses to go faster.
As they pulled closer to the Hackworth resident, twilight had turned the tops of the buildings into shadows and the sky mauve. But there wasenough remaining daylight that he knew, at once, the woman standing in front of the town house was Keating.
He knew it was her by the way she held herself, and the way the light glanced from her hair.
She was shivering, pulling her shawl tightly around the shoulders of her muslin dress. Her expression was hunted.
He tensed.
She appeared to be craning her head, looking for a hack.
“Why the devil is she...” he muttered.
Why had no one noticed that she had left the town house, and alone, to boot? This infuriated him as irrationally as the fact that he hadn’t been there to see her out.
He thumped the roof of the carriage and the driver pulled it to a halt.
He pushed open the door and leaned out.
“Keating,” he called. Quietly. Gruffly.
She halted and her head swiveled all about looking for the voice. She actually looked upward for a moment. The notion that she might think of his voice as the voice of a deity amused him. Or perhaps she thought it was instead the voice of a gargoyle lining the roof.
