Devilish Lord, Mysterious Miss

Fred raised his hands in surrender. ‘I was just being friendly,’ he protested.

‘Well, stop it!’ snapped Molly. ‘She don’t like men. They make her…’She paused, considering her choice of words. Mary stared fixedly into the depths of her drink, torn between gratitude to Molly for defending her, and sickening dread at what she might be about to reveal.

‘Jumpy!Yes,’Molly declared, ‘that’s what she is round men what don’t mind their manners. So just watch it!’

Having settled the point to her satisfaction, Molly climbed on to Joe’s lap, and took up where she had left off.

Mary felt like a coin that had been tossed in the air, unsure whether she was going to come down heads, humiliated at having her deficiencies broadcast, or tails, grateful for Molly’s spirited defence. Though Molly had only spoken the truth. Men did make her jumpy. She had not wanted Fred to speak to her, and she certainly did not want to have to answer him. In fact, she wished she could just shrink down into her coat and disappear. To conceal her confusion, she took another, longer pull at her drink.

Once it had gone down, she found her initial surge of contrasting emotions had settled down into a sort of dull resentment.

Molly had just told all these people that she was simple, and she did not think she was, not really. It was true that when she first came to London she had been confused about a lot of things. But she had been ill. She had still been getting the headaches for months after Madame took her in.

But now she wondered if some of those headaches had been due to the fact she had slept so poorly back then. For one thing, the streets were so noisy, at all hours of the day and night, and for another, she was not used to sharing a bed…

Though how she was so sure of that, when so many other things that other people took for granted were complete mysteries to her…She sighed despondently. Perhaps Madame and Molly and the others were right about her. Perhaps she was a simpleton.

In an effort to distract herself from the perplexing muddle of her thoughts, she applied herself to her gin. Gradually she felt the knot of anxiety that was normally lodged somewhere beneath her breastbone melt away. What did it matter, really, if there was something wrong with her mind? She had a good position, where the skills she did have were put to good use. And she had friends.

Joe’s friends, too, she realised, raising her head to look about the table, were not such a bad bunch, for all that they were so repulsive looking. She felt a giggle rising up inside as it occurred to her that if she had to come into a dirty, smelly drinking den, she could not have better companions than a group of hackney-cab drivers. Experienced as they were with handling highly strung creatures for a living, they had taken Molly’s words to heart, and acted on them. Oh, not overtly. But they were not speaking so loudly now as they had been doing before. They were not crowding her with their big, male bodies, and they seemed to be trying not to make any sudden movements, that might startle her.

It was…quite touching.

London, she mused, cradling her cup of gin to her chest, was turning out not to be such a dreadful place at all. It had taken her a long time, but she was slowly growing accustomed to it. The more she explored its alleys and byways, the more familiar it became, the fewer terrors it held.

She would be all right.

One day, she would…

‘Why did you do it, Cora?’ A man’s harsh voice rudely interrupted her reverie.

She looked up to see a gentleman standing over her. The gentleman. The one who had chased her clear across Berkeley Square. Same dark clothes, same forbidding expression, same angry voice.

She sucked in a sharp breath, waiting to feel the onset of that fear that usually surged through her whenever she felt threatened by something unfamiliar.

It did not materialise.

She peered into her beaker, wondering if this was why so many women grew so fond of gin. It seemed to be making her uncharacteristically brave.

Or maybe, she pondered, it was knowing that this man was outnumbered by Joe’s pals. That she was, in effect, surrounded by a burly, bewhiskered, badly dressed cohort of bodyguards.

And so she didn’t tremble. She did not shrink away. She just sat there, calmly looking up at him.

His face grew darker.

‘You have to make me understand it, Cora,’ he grated. ‘Why did you run away?’

Cora? Ah, so that was it! She must resemble…her. That was why he had chased her, shouting so angrily. He must have been waiting for…Cora…and been completely perplexed when she had taken fright and run away.

‘You have mistaken me for someone else, I think, sir,’she said gently. For she could see that he was really upset, and had no wish to add to his distress.

Yet he looked at her as though she had slapped his face.

If he had been mistaken in her, it had been seven years ago, not seven days!

She had said she loved him so much she did not care if they had to live in a bothy, whatever that was. Yet one afternoon, when nobody was watching, she had sneaked out on him. Without warning. Without excuse. Without reason. And started a new life. Here in London. Not half a mile away from his own lodgings. He might have passed her in the street countless times and not known…

Sheer rage gripped him at the magnitude of her deception. His whole existence, for the past seven years, had been based on a tissue of lies. She had lied to him. Robbie had lied about him. He had been lying to himself.

‘You are supposed to be dead,’ he hissed between gritted teeth. That she wasn’t made him feel like a complete fool. What kind of an idiot would harbour the maudlin, pathetic sentiment that a woman could ever be true, let alone from beyond the grave! Since the day she had…no, not died. Left him, was what she had done. Left him with an accusation of murder hanging over his head. But since that day, he might as well have been dead. For nothing had mattered any more.

But what irked him most was the fact that he had still wanted to carry on believing all that claptrap after he had seen her in Curzon Street. When he had sobered up, after a few fitful hours of sleep, he had been determined to deny the evidence of his own eyes, preferring to believe alcohol had fuddled his senses so much that he had imagined the resemblance, rather than let go of his insane delusion she was haunting him.

And if Grit had not been heartless enough to sell information to a man of his reputation, he would probably not be standing here now.

He had only come here to get confirmation that he had imagined the woman’s resemblance to Cora.

He had never expected to find himself looking at Cora herself.

A slightly older, careworn version of Cora, but Cora none the less.

Her voice had changed. Her accent was now almost indistinguishable from that of the other girls who lived and worked in this area. But there was still an unmistakably soft Scottish burr underlying the sharper vowel sounds, and a cadence to her speech that proclaimed her origins. The rest of her had hardly altered at all. Same fair skin that would break out in freckles at the most fleeting exposure to sunlight, same delicate features that made her face look all eyes, same mannerisms. The way she held her cup, the way she tilted her head as she looked up at him, though those green eyes, that had once blazed at him with what he had believed was the sort of love poets wrote sonnets about, were cold now. Blank.

Empty.

The enormity of her betrayal, her sheer deceitfulness, struck him all over again. There was no consolation in knowing she was not dead after all! He slumped down on to the bench beside her, in the gap that had opened up when her co-worker had climbed into the hackney-cab driver’s lap and sucked in a sharp pain. Why had he not seen how deceitful she was back then? Look at her now, calmly sipping her gin after colluding in a clandestine meeting between her co-worker and her fancy man. Abusing the comparative freedom of her trusted position without so much as a qualm! His upper lip curled into a sneer. This woman was not trustworthy! She had waltzed off with his heart and his ring…

His ring! How could he have forgotten that? That ring had been in his family for generations. It was the only item of jewellery his mother had managed to prevent his father from selling. It was extremely valuable. Far too valuable to waste on a deceitful, brazen…He grabbed her hand, determined to take it back.

Her ring finger was bare.

‘You sold my ring!’

How had she managed that? He had put up a reward, which he had been ill able to afford at first, in the hope that if it turned up, it would lead back to her. The antique ring, a blood-red ruby surrounded by tiny pearls, was such an unusual piece that he had been sure he would have heard if it had come on to the market.

She had somehow outwitted him, even in that. She must have sold it and used the proceeds to fund her flight to London. He scoffed at his own naïvety in thinking the paltry reward he had put up would have tempted a fence to turn in his supplier!

‘Why, Cora?’ he asked her again. That was what he simply could not comprehend. ‘At least, tell me why you ran away.’

If she had changed her mind about wanting to marry him, why had she not just told him, broken off the engagement and gone home? There was no need to have gone to such lengths to disappear so completely.

Mary’s heart went out to the poor gentleman who looked so bleakly baffled. For she knew exactly how he felt. At one point, her world had frequently seemed to make no sense at all. And that in turn left her feeling scared and lonely and confused.

And when she had felt like that, a few kind words, or a smile, had helped her get back on an even keel. Summoning up a smile that she hoped conveyed her sympathy for his state of mind, she gently explained, ‘I really am not who you think I am, sir. My name is Mary.’

‘How can you sit there and lie to me?’he snarled. ‘To my face! You got on your horse and rode off without a backward glance…’

‘A horse?’ Mary’s eyebrows rose in surprise. If this man thought she was capable of climbing right up on top of a horse, when she was far too timid to even bring herself to pat one—no matter how earnestly Joe promised it was quite safe—then that just proved how badly mistaken he was about her identity! The very prospect of touching one brought on waves of uncontrollable panic. Panic so strong she could smell it. The smell came flooding to her nostrils right now. She swallowed down hastily, but her heart was already pounding in her chest. And she could smell damp leaves, mixed in with the scent of horse and leather, and taste that horrid, metallic tang of blood…