“Was it really true, that story about two men fighting over you?” she asked. “Or did you make it up to shock me?”
“It happened in Paris, seven years ago, in front of dozens of witnesses—none of whom would admit to being there, of course. But should you ever meet Matthew, he would gladly give you a highly embroidered version of it, and tell you that it was a battle royal between a Bourbon and a Bonaparte.”
So much for her secret hopes that Georgette was dead wrong about him. “But it was not between a Bourbon and a Bonaparte?”
“No, they were a banker and a poet.”
“Was it…was it gratifying for you to watch?”
“Gratifying?” He glanced at her as if she’d lost her mind. “No, I was terrified. I was twenty years old. I’d been in Paris only weeks. And I’d thought the…the French a cheese-mad lot of weaklings. The men were both well over six feet in height, barrel-chested, and savage. I’m not ashamed to say that I fled that night and would flee again if I saw either of them today.”
A chuckle escaped her. They stood for a few minutes in a silence that, though not precisely companionable, brooded no dark, uneasy currents.
“I’ve been there,” he said. “It was a harsh life. No matter what I know or think I know about you, I would never subject you to the same.”
The minuet de la cour ended. The dancers drew apart. The center of the ballroom emptied in an exodus of soft laughter and elaborate trains.
He’d faced her nightmare—poverty and alienation—and lived to tell about it. There was a curious strength to him, a resilience not immediately obvious and probably easily overlooked by most people, including herself.
“If you are not rushing to a symphonic concert, or the music hall, perhaps you’d like to escort me to supper, Mr. Marsden?” she heard herself say.
He looked at her a moment, the way one might gaze upon a much-changed old friend. Then he smiled. “For that privilege I’ll give up music altogether.”
Chapter Fifteen
Verity spent much of her Sunday cooking at the soup kitchen on Euston Road that handed out thin stew and bread in the cold months. She preferred that to attending church, where she usually fidgeted during the service. She didn’t think God minded that she was off feeding the poor—if He did, then she was doomed anyway, church attendance or not. She’d taken Marjorie with her—she and Becky divided the task of looking after Marjorie when the latter wasn’t in the kitchen, with Becky responsible for the half days, and Verity taking the full day on Sundays. They returned to the house in the middle of the afternoon. She made Marjorie an omelet—the girl needed more substantial food than what the soup kitchen had to offer—set Marjorie in the servants’ hall to eat, and climbed up to the attic to wash her face and take off her dress for a good brush, so that it didn’t smell permanently of turnip.
She grabbed her stockings and drawers from the back and arms of the chair where she’d hung them to dry and put them back in her valise. Then she rebuilt the fire in the grate, changed, and ruthlessly scoured the hem of the dress she’d worn. More ruthlessly than either the soil or the fabric of the dress called for, no doubt, but the agitation inside her made greater gentleness impossible.
She could forgive herself for rushing out of her hiding place to embrace him—it wasn’t always easy to remember that he knew her only as Bertie’s former cook and paramour. But why, oh, why had she given into the impulse to taste him, when he’d already, mostly politely, told her that she should let go of him?
Every time she remembered the way he’d thrown her, she had to close her eyes and wince in mortification. To be rejected with such unequivocal force. To have to be told that he would not lower himself to hobnob with her—if only she hadn’t been so vain as to want to impress his breakfast guests with her croissants, for which she had to make midnight trips down to the kitchen to turn the dough.
But then he had held her face and kissed her tears. And his lips had lingered close to hers for so long she had been convinced he’d kiss her any moment, only to pull away and leave her completely alone.
She was confused. As much by his enigmatic intentions as by what she wanted from him. There had been so much that was impossible that what little remained in the realm of plausibility had all seemed tawdry. But things had gone in unpredictable directions. And sometimes, when she let her guard down, she could almost believe that he loved her.
Mr. Darcy’s love it wasn’t: This was no bright, honorable admiration for a pair of fine eyes and a lively wit. If anything, it was like a love for the bottle: full of guilt, shame, troubled dreams, and dark compulsions.
And she both hated it and thrilled to it: It made her vulnerable, miserable, and strangely happy all at once.