Unclaimed (Turner #2)(55)

“No,” he said softly. “It is not.” He turned from her and began to walk down the path again.

She followed.

“She nearly killed my brother, Smite. It was a…a matter of punishment and neglect. Not intentional, I don’t think. But she’d gone so far beyond rationality. She put him in the cellar and hid the key from me. Ash had been in India at that time, and we’d gotten word that he’d be coming home soon. When I managed to get Smite out, we walked the thirty miles to Bristol to wait for him.”

He wasn’t looking at her, but when she put her hand on his arm, his fingers closed around hers.

“We waited three months. We ran out of the shillings we’d taken within the first month. We spent the next two months on the streets. I don’t know if you can understand what it means to be starving—not merely hungry, nor even famished, but slowly starving. You stop caring about anything except food—not laws, not manners, not right nor wrong. The world disappears, until there is nothing but you and the constant struggle to put something— anything—in your belly.”

She’d never got to that point. She’d never come near. All she could do was listen in horror.

Mark didn’t look at her. “At least,” he said, “that was how it felt to me. My brother, now…Smite would have fed his last scrap to a hungry cat. He had no sense of self-preservation, not even when matters were at their worst. We hid in an alley one evening. I woke in the middle of the night, to see a woman walking through the gloom. She didn’t see me. There was a pile of refuse in the back of the alley—moldering bits of food that even I would not have tried to eat, discarded fabric that had worn so thin it was little more than a collection of threads—that sort of stuff. She set a bundle on the heap, and then, without looking back, walked away.”

Jessica felt a pit in her stomach. She could feel her hands start to shake. She knew what was coming. In the wretched sisterhood of whores and courtesans, there were some things that never changed.

“I went,” he said. “I looked. Of course I looked. But the bundle was an infant—tiny and red. It could not have been more than a few hours old.”

He paused. The sun had disappeared beneath the horizon; only a ring of red painted the hills.

“Even starved, homeless and desperate, I knew what the right thing to do was. As little as my brother and I had, we had more than this wretch. We could have done something. And knowing Smite, he would have done it.” His hand balled into a fist. “I knew the right thing to do. And I also knew that if I picked that child up, my brother would not let it starve—even if it meant that we would. And so I walked away. And I didn’t tell him.”

He stared off into the twilight.

“You cannot blame yourself for that. How old were you?”

“Old enough to know right from wrong.”

“Fourteen? Fifteen?”

“Ten.”

She balled her hand and brought it to her mouth. Ten years old and starving on the streets.

“Ash arrived that afternoon. I insisted that we go back, but the infant was gone by then.”

“You were ten. You had nothing. And in any event, that baby needed a wet nurse, not your leftover scraps.”

He said nothing in response.

“While we’re at it, the reason it was gone was probably that someone else found it and brought it to the parish.”

“But I didn’t. Every time I have been tempted to sin since—and I have been tempted a thousand times since—I have remembered that discarded, unwanted bundle of humanity. I think of the woman who left her newborn child in an alley. But mostly, I think about how alone she was. I think about the man who was not there in that alley at all. I am not going to be him.”

Her hand was on his elbow. She let it slide down his forearm until his hand engulfed hers, warm and alive.

“I see,” she said. He’d earned his knighthood years ago.

His grip tightened around hers. “That’s what I mean when I say I’m not a saint.”

“You’re a good deal better, Sir Mark.”

He reached with his free hand and caught her other elbow. Their fingers twisted together. In the fast-fading light, his expression was shadowed. “No.”

“Yes.”

“I meant—no. After what I’ve told you, I had better be just Mark to you. Only Mark.”

“You will never be only Mark to me,” she said fiercely. “Not in a thousand years. You’re—you’re—”

“What, just because I know a little thing like chastity would make the world a better place? I’ve said nothing that every woman does not already know. Tell me, Mrs. Farleigh—if your Mr. Farleigh had kept to the laws of chastity, what would your life be like now?”

There was no Mr. Farleigh. There never had been. But there had been a man, once…

She shut her eyes. “He seduced me,” she finally said. “At that age, I didn’t think. Or if I did, I believed I was indomitable. When you’re young, nothing can ever go wrong. Bad things happen to other people—people far less clever, and far uglier—than I was. The rules of propriety existed for stupid, unlucky girls.”

She swallowed. “I thought nothing would ever happen to me. Until it did. He kissed me, and I didn’t think about chastity or right or wrong. I didn’t think about the consequences, or what effect my choice would have on my parents or my sisters. Before I knew it, I was compromised so thoroughly that my family wouldn’t have me in the house. It did happen to me, and I was the stupid girl.”