Innocent Courtesan to Adventurer's Bride

‘We fell in love with brothers,’ Clara had said with a bitter twist to her smile. ‘And they seduced us and abandoned us here in St James’s, where we had innocently followed them. We were young and lost and heartbroken and it did not take long for us to be found by a brothel keeper.

‘We grew up fast,’ she added, seeming to look back down the years. ‘We saved, we found wealthy “friends” and I started my own house that grew eventually into The Blue Door. Your mama, bless her, never became accustomed—she took over the housekeeping and the books, just as you have.’

There was so much to come to terms with there. Lina asked only one question. ‘But however did Mama meet Papa?’ For surely the fiercely moral Reverend Shelley had never been inside a brothel in his life, except perhaps to harangue the occupants on their evil ways and the certainty that Hell’s fires awaited them?

‘She met him in Green Park. Annabelle always dressed well, like a lady. He tripped over and sprained his ankle, she stopped to offer him assistance—it was love at first sight. Then he was not the Puritan prig he grew into,’ Clara said with a sniff. ‘That came later. She never told him what she was, of course. He believed her when she said I was a widow and she was my companion. They married, he took her off into the wilds of Suffolk, they had three daughters and he became, year by year, more rigid, more sanctimonious. And she fell out of love and into a sort of dull misery with him.

‘I do wonder,’ her aunt had said thoughtfully, ‘if your father found out, or came to suspect, something about your mother’s past. We will never know now, although her letters tell of him becoming more and more suspicious and unreasonable. She met Richard Lovat and they eloped. She wrote to me, confident that your father would let you all come to her—you were only girls, after all. But he refused. Annabelle was beside herself—Lovat took her abroad, but she died in Italy two years later. I do not think she ever forgave herself for leaving you.’

Now Lina felt her vision blur and she wrenched her attention back to the man on the other side of the desk. She had left Bella as her mother had left her daughters. Well, she was paying for her heedless, selfish, panic now, it seemed. ‘What do you mean to do?’ she asked, trying not to show how she felt. Like all bullies he would feed on her fear.

‘Realise some assets, for a start. You, to begin with.’

‘Me?’ She swallowed.

‘You are a virgin, are you not, Miss Shelley? A most valuable asset—a pretty, well-bred young lady.’

‘No!’ She stood up so abruptly that the chair fell over with a thud.

‘But yes. Or I will demand the return of all my investment, and to meet that your aunt will have to sell the entire establishment, for I am certain she does not have the ready cash.

‘I will buy her share, of course, and then the pampered little trollops who work here will service all the clients—in every way the clients want. I’ll have none of this picking-and-choosing nonsense. Some flagellation rooms, a Roman orgy every week, an auction of virgins—those will get us off to a good start. I’ve got the ideas and very profitable they are, too.’

Lina edged around to the far side of the chair. Her heart was thumping, her mouth was dry. Perhaps Aunt Clara’s illness was contagious after all. She must be in a fever, dreaming this. ‘You…you would auction me off to the highest bidder?’

‘Oh, no, not an auction. I have an offer for you already from Sir Humphrey Tolhurst.’

‘The magistrate?’ But Sir Humphrey was fifty if he was a day. And pompous and only came to play cards and ogle the posture girls. She had seen him from the screened gallery that her aunt used to watch the activities in the salon.

‘That’s the man. I pointed you out to him in the street and he was very taken with you. He would not want to be involved in anything like an auction, of course; he values his privacy too much for that. I was able to set a very good price in consideration of that accommodation.’ Makepeace chuckled. ‘A very good price indeed.’

‘And then what?’ Lina asked, surprised to hear herself sounding defiant. She had never before turned and faced danger, or her father’s bullying anger. She had always been the timorous sister, the nervous one who ran if she could not hide. But it seemed that, if pushed to extremes, she could try to fight.

‘You can only sell my virginity once.’ Legitimately, that was. The girls had told her all about the ways to feign a maidenhead, as they had so much else that should have shocked her to the core. But their open, cheerful acceptance of the commerce between men and women, in all its weird and puzzling manifestations, had left her much wiser—in theory—and reluctant to judge them.

‘True,’ he said. ‘But it will give me a tidy sum to invest in the equipment this establishment is lacking. Flagellation is all the rage.’

‘Mother Moll’s is the specialist in that,’ Lina retorted, parroting the girls’ gossip. ‘There is too much competition for another flogging school so close.’

‘Oh, no. Not for the gentlemen who require chastising. This would be for those who wish to administer the punishment.’

‘But the girls—’

‘Will do as they are told or be out in the gutter.’

Lina clenched her teeth to stop them chattering. One of them, Katy, had shown her the scars she had received after a vicious flogging at another brothel. She had been imprisoned there until she’d managed to escape by climbing down the drainpipe.

‘I will leave,’ she said, trying her best to sound confident. ‘I will go back to my father.’

‘To the vicarage?’ he enquired, startling her with his knowledge. ‘Oh, yes, I made it my business to find out all about you, Miss Celina. Both your sisters are gone now—did you know that? And your doting papa has struck your name from the family Bible and denies he ever had daughters, so my man tells me.’

Bella gone? But where? She had soon realised that her letters home were being destroyed, just as her father must have destroyed those from her sister Meg after she eloped. But she had always thought that Bella was safe at home. Sensible Bella, housekeeping for their tyrant of a father…Please God that wherever she was, she was safe and happy as Meg must be with James, the young officer she had run away with six years before.

She realised Makepeace was still speaking. ‘You’ll do as you’re told, my girl, or your ailing auntie loses this house and her precious girls start earning their living like the common whores that they are.’

‘When?’ Lina whispered. There was the sound of doors slamming all around her, but they were in her head. If she had only herself to worry about she would run, even though she had nowhere to go. Anything, even going back to Suffolk and begging forgiveness on her knees, would be better than this. But that would leave Aunt Clara and the girls at the mercy of this scheming reptile. She could see no way out, none at all.

‘Tomorrow. They will send a carriage at seven in the evening. And you be nice to Sir Humphrey or I know who will be the first one to try out the new flogging horse.’

Lina edged towards the door, unwilling to turn her back on him. The handle turned and she was out. But not alone. A big bruiser, a man she had never seen before, stood in front of her aunt’s door.

Lina turned and walked away on unsteady legs to the room shared by Katy and Miriam. They were sprawled on the bed, laughing and playing with Miriam’s collection of paste jewellery. As Lina walked in they looked up, their smiles of welcome freezing as they saw her face.

‘What is it, Lina love?’ Katy slid off the bed, her dyed red curls bouncing.

‘Mr Makepeace has sold me to Sir Humphrey Tol-hurst.’ Lina heard her own voice, so flat and expressionless that she could hardly recognise it. She swallowed hard. If she gave way now she would collapse into hysterics, she was sure. ‘Tell me what to do so it will be over quickly. Please, tell me.’

Chapter One

Dreycott Park, the north Norfolk coast—April 24th, 1815

‘He’s coming!’ Johnny, the boot boy, came tumbling through the front door, shirt half-untucked, red in the face with running from his post in the gazebo on top of Flagstaff Hill. He had been up there every day since the message had arrived that the late Lord Dreycott’s heir was on his way from London.

Lina gave up all pretence of sewing and came out into the hall. Trimble the butler was snapping his fingers, sending footmen scurrying to assemble the rest of the staff.

She had not been able to settle to anything in the four days since Lord Dreycott’s funeral. When she had fled from Sir Humphrey Tolhurst’s house, terrified, desperate and wanted by the law, her aunt had sent her to an old friend’s rural retreat—to safety, so Clara had believed. But now her elderly protector was gone.

Lina smoothed down the skirts of her black afternoon dress and tried for composure. This was the end of her sanctuary, a brief seven weeks since she had fled from London, a price on her head for a theft she had not committed. The heir was coming to claim what was his and, no doubt, to eject hangers-on from his new house—and then what would become of her?

‘Where are the carriages? How many?’ the butler demanded.

‘No carriages, Mr Trimble, sir. Just two riders and a pack horse. I saw them coming through the Cromer road gate. They’re walking, sir, the animals looked tired. They’ll be a while yet.’

‘Even so, hurry.’

Hurry. Pack, take this money and hurry. The elegant square entrance hall blurred and faded and became a bedchamber. Aunt Clara, white-lipped, her face drawn after a week of racking sickness, dragged herself up against the pillows as Lina sobbed out her story.

‘He did not touch you?’ she had whispered urgently and they both glanced at the door. Makepeace’s bully boy might be back at any moment. ‘I swear Makepeace will suffer for this.’

‘No. Tolhurst did not touch me.’ The relief of that was still overwhelming, the only good thing in the entire nightmare. ‘He made me undress while he watched. Then he took his clothes off.’ It took a moment to push her mind past the image of indulged middle-aged flab, mottled skin, the terrifying thing that thrust out from below the swell of Tolhurst’s belly. ‘And he began to reach for me…And then he gasped, and his eyes bulged and his face went red and he fell down. So I rang for help and pulled on my clothes and—’

‘He was dead? You are certain?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Lina hadn’t been able to bring herself to touch him, but she could tell. The bulging blue eyes had seemed fixed on her, still avid with lust even as they began to glaze over. She had stared in horror as her fingers fumbled with ribbons and garters. ‘They all came in then—the valet, the butler, the younger son, Reginald Tolhurst. Mr Tolhurst knelt down and tried to find a pulse—then he sent the valet for the doctor and told the butler to lock me in the library. He said his father’s sapphire ring was missing.’

‘The Tolhurst Sapphire? My God.’ Her aunt had stared at her. ‘Wasn’t he wearing it when you—?’

‘I don’t know!’ Lina’s voice quavered upwards and she caught her herself before it became a shriek. ‘I wasn’t looking at his rings.