Twice Tempted by a Rogue (Stud Club #2)(43)

When Meredith moved to put the kettle on, the girl intervened. “Oh, let me do it, ma’am. When I lived in London, I always made tea for the girls in the house. I’ve a knack for it.”

Meredith surrendered the kettle. As she watched the girl fill it with water and place it on the hob, she cleared her throat and brought out her sternest voice. “Listen, Cora. We both know this discussion is coming, so we may as well have it over with now.”

The girl’s eyebrows arched in surprise, as if she’d no idea what Meredith was going to say. “Yes, ma’am?”

“This is my inn, and it’s a respectable establishment. The local men who come in here of an evening—they’re going to take quite an interest in you. But even if you are a friend of Lord Ashworth’s, I warn you now, I won’t abide any mischief.”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. I’m not wanting any mischief. I know Mr. Bellamy said he’d pay my account, but I’d rather work for my keep.”

Meredith narrowed her eyes. “I thought I just told you—”

“Oh, not that kind of work.” The kettle rumbled. Cora plucked a towel from the table and wrapped it about her hand before removing the kettle from the hob. “That life was never what I wanted. I hardly know how it happened. I was living in Dover—that’s where I was raised. My mother worked as a seamstress there, and one day she sent me to the market. I was dallying with friends on my way home, and a fancy gent drove by in a splendid coach. Handsome as anything, he was. He opened the door and called me a pretty little thing and asked, would I like to ride with him to London? Why certainly I would. Always wanted to see London, what girl didn’t?” She frowned. “Where’s the tea?”

Meredith motioned toward the tea caddy.

Biting her lip, Cora measured tea leaves into the pot with childlike concentration. She was such a strange mix of girl and woman. Meredith couldn’t decide which she was feigning: the innocence, or the worldliness.

“So you went with him to London …” she prompted, vaguely wondering why she was even taking an interest.

“I went with him to London. And when I arrived there, I was a whore. The handsome gent shoved me out in Covent Garden and tossed me a shilling.” She gave a matter-of-fact shrug as she covered the tea leaves with steaming water and set them to steep.

“How old were you?”

“Thirteen.”

Meredith gasped. “Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. Thirteen and alone in the world, with no other way of earning bread, no coin to go home … I didn’t think my mother would even want me back.” A little smile curved her lips as she stared down at the tea. “But she did. When I went to see her just last month, she told me she’d prayed for me every single day.”

“Of course she had.” Meredith poked at the fire. Smoke stung her eyes, giving her a convenient excuse to blink away a tear. The girl’s story was undeniably moving. Stirring enough to blow years of accumulated dust off her maternal instincts. She might be barren, but the Three Hounds worked like a magnet for unwanted adolescents in need of a friend. First Gideon, then Darryl. Now this girl, too.

She took the towel from Cora’s hand and prepared to remove the rolls from the oven. “And how old are you now?”

“Eighteen, ma’am. And I don’t want to go back to that life, I don’t. Please let me work for you, Mrs. Maddox. By the time I leave here, mayhap I’ll have prospects for better employment. Perhaps Mr. Bellamy or Lord Ashworth would see fit to furnish me with a character reference, and I could find a post in service. Could send my mother some money from time to time, and she wouldn’t have to worry where it come from.”

“Well, I can see you’ve thought it all through.”

“Lay awake half the night, ma’am. I suppose that’s why I overslept.”

Meredith offered her a fresh roll, and Cora accepted it eagerly, crying out in alarm when it singed her fingertips. Meredith smiled at the ensuing juggling act, and at Cora’s bubbly, girlish laugh.

“Is there jam?” she asked hopefully, her cheeks flushing pink.

“Yes. Yes, there is. And honey too.” And the next time she saw Gideon, Meredith would ask him to bring round some chocolate.

As she retrieved the pots of sticky sweetness, Meredith thought of herself at Cora’s age. She’d already been caretaker to her invalid father and the family’s only potential wage-earner. All that, plus desperate and hungry. Fortunately, thanks to her father and dear late mother, she’d had some skills and education. Sometimes she’d suspected Maddox of marrying her out of pity. Or perhaps simply because she knew how to read and write and do sums better than most anyone in the village. Certainly better than Maddox himself.

She’d been lucky. By contrast, Cora had found herself friendless, penniless, uneducated, and transplanted to an unfamiliar city at the age of thirteen … after being crudely indoctrinated into womanhood by some passing “gentleman” with a high-sprung carriage. It was remarkable that she’d survived at all, and her tale certainly explained why she acted like a girl who was thirteen-nearing-thirty.

It made a tragic sort of sense that a child stripped of innocence might cultivate another, more willful naïveté to replace it. She thought of Rhys, and his stubborn belief in fate. What lies would an abused boy tell himself, rather than believe he’d somehow earned such vile treatment?