“Good morning, madam.” The girl bobbed a curtsy. She couldn’t have been more than a year younger than Anne. “I’m Meg, your maid.”
Anne had always shared a maid with her mother, as the family could not afford the expense of two, so to have one all to herself seemed a tremendous luxury. It seemed odd, though, that Meg had appeared without being summoned. Perhaps things ran differently in a household that never went into arrears and paid their servants on time.
“Has my clothing been unpacked?” Nearly all of her garments had come straight from the mantua maker, but some were hers from before.
“Yes, madam. Is there a particular gown you want?”
Anne realized she had no idea what constituted her new trousseau. Everything had been purchased so quickly, with hardly any consultation on her part. Still, she didn’t fancy the idea of the servants knowing that she’d come to their master nearly penniless.
“I trust you, Meg,” she said.
The girl brightened and hastened to the other clothespress. Eventually, she emerged with an open gown of peach-and-green Indian cotton, as well as all necessary undergarments. Anne resisted the impulse to peer into the clothespress to see what other gowns had been purchased for her, just as she fought the urge to admire the quality and newness of the gown Meg now helped her into.
As Meg fastened the dress, Anne looked at herself in the cheval glass and felt as though she put on another woman’s skin. The thought made her shudder, thinking that a woman’s flayed body lay somewhere, its muscles and innards exposed as the corpse cooled. She had a sudden vision of an attic chamber, perhaps in this very house, where other brides’ bodies hung.
You haven’t married Bluebeard, for heaven’s sake.
As if to counter her own fears, she said aloud, “Do hurry, Meg. I want to join my husband for breakfast.”
The maid blinked up at her. “He’s gone, madam.”
Now it was Anne’s turn to look blank. “Gone?”
“I only started working here last week, making ready for you, but the master always leaves the house by seven.”
“Where does he go?”
“To Exchange Alley, I reckon.” Meg glanced at her from beneath the frill of her mob cap, perplexed by Anne’s ignorance of her own husband.
“Of course,” Anne said, far more brightly than she felt. She pasted on a smile. “I’ll just take chocolate and rolls in here, then.”
“The master had Cook fix you a proper breakfast. Eggs, bacon, seed cakes. It’s waiting for you downstairs.”
She couldn’t refuse, not without possibly insulting the cook. Since Anne would be responsible for consulting with the cook about meals, she must be politic and make herself eat a meal she did not truly want. “Sounds delightful.”
After Meg finished her toilette, Anne quit the bedchamber. The hallway was very quiet, almost sepulchral in its stillness, barely interrupted by the sounds of servants attending to their daily tasks elsewhere in the house. If Anne had not left Meg in the bedchamber only a moment prior, she might believe herself completely alone. Maybe even the last person alive in the entire world.
Stop this ridiculous ghoulishness!
She
never
indulged in thoughts of the macabre—she stayed clear of the hangings at Tyburn, and even went out of her way to avoid the occasional traitor’s head piked on Temple Bar.
It was simply nervousness at her unfamiliar surroundings, and trepidation as a new wife. Last night had been very tumultuous, so there might be lingering emotions. But there was truly nothing to fear. These awkward first days would soon pass.
Yet as she made her way down the stairs, that prospect seemed dim. It felt even farther away as she entered the dining room. Without all the guests from the day before, the chamber was an empty cavern scoured by gray morning light. All signs of the wedding celebration were gone—not even a crumb or wine stain on the carpet. Almost as if it had never happened, save for the music and laughter ringing in Anne’s remembrance like broken glass.
The large table was laid for one, and as Anne moved farther into the room, a footman hurried in from a side door to pull out her chair. She smiled her thanks and sat, and helped herself to far more food than she wanted. There was nothing she could do but force food down her throat as the footman stood in attendance. Everything tasted like pasteboard.
“Please tell Cook that the meal is delicious,” she said to the footman, who bowed. “I trust we will have more exquisite dishes for supper.”
“Suppose so,” the footman said. “Seeing as how the master don’t take no meals here, I wouldn’t know.”
“No meals at all?”
“Maybe a cold collation late at night, but he’s often out.”
“Are we to expect him today?”
The footman shrugged.
Leo’s absence at the table and in the house was a silent humiliation. Had she so little to offer her husband beyond her bloodline that he willingly left their bed to attend to business? She had believed him compassionate when he’d forestalled the consummation of their marriage. Yet now, with her alone in his house, alone in every way, she wondered if it had been kindness or merely disinterest. If the scandal rags were to be believed, Leo was accustomed to wild living, indulging in every vice. Nothing checked his desires, his impulses.
Would he consider his wife another obstacle to ignore? He had said that he wanted them to wait, to learn each other before consummating their marriage. Perhaps without the inducement of his wife’s body, there was little to interest him at home.
As she picked at the congealing remains of her breakfast, she felt a rush of blood to her cheeks. Disappointment—and anger—roiled within her. She had no expectations of marriage, yet even in her most hypothetical imaginings she had not anticipated being an afterthought to the man who claimed her hand. Clearly, however, that was how Leo saw her: a parenthesis.
Abruptly, she stood. The footman hurried to help her with her chair, yet she was halfway out the door.
As she climbed the stairs, resolution took shape. She would
make
herself essential to him. This house—its baleful silence, its icy shadows—she would find a way to transform it. He shunned his home. Yet under her care, home would become the warmth of the fire drawing him in from the cold night.
His hunting ground. Leo breathed in its aromas as a predator sniffed the air for the acidic scent of prey. The smell of coffee was the smell of money—brewing, percolating, waiting to be consumed. He barely needed the jolt of energy from the drink. All he required for strength was here, fed by the sights and sounds of Exchange Alley. And his own deeds gave him unstoppable momentum.
Leo strode down Lombard Street, its narrow confines bound on all sides by coffee houses that served as the financial heart of London, and thus, the world. New Jonathan’s Coffee House. Garraway’s. Lloyd’s. Dozens, maybe scores more. Lombard Street and the cramped alleys of Cornhill and Birchin Lane demarcated the boundaries of the commercial kingdom. The air was thick with talk, hundreds of men’s voices all crashing together in a din some might call discordant. To Leo, the sound rang as clear and sacred as an oratorio.
“Seven hundred shares of the coffee venture. No less.”
“The demand for cotton only increases. You’re a fool not to buy now.”
“The Quakers have me by the stones, but there’s no help for it. Our future is made of iron.”
“There’s Bailey, the Demon—if you’re looking for deep pockets, he’s your man. But mind, he asks scores of questions and is anything but a silent partner.”
This made him smile. Rich gentlemen might mutely provide funds and collect returns, content with the fiction that, if they kept their interaction with actual business to a minimum, they would be less sullied. Leo didn’t give a damn. He’d get as filthy as necessary to wring the greatest profits. He had no man of business. He did not deal with brokers or jobbers. Everything that needed doing, he did himself.
The sun had not yet topped the spires of Saint Paul’s, yet the frenzy of the ’Change was at its height, and Leo in the thick of it. Precisely where he wanted—needed—to be. Within the few hours he had been here, he’d invested in a quarry whose slate tiles would be used to roof mill towns in the north, provided capital to ship English wheat to the Caribbean, and sold his shares in a Scottish timber venture. And the day wasn’t half over. There was still so much to be done. Fortunes to be made—his.
“Oranges, Spanish oranges.” A barefoot girl with a basket full of fruit picked her way through the crowd. Her cry could barely be heard above the clamor.
“I’ll take one,” Leo said.
“Two for a penny, sir. One for yourself, one for your wife?”
God, he
was
married now, wasn’t he?
“Two, then,” he said, handing the coin to the girl. She passed two oranges to him, like a dirty-footed goddess creating new suns. With the transaction finished, the girl moved on, her cry of “Oranges, Spanish oranges” soon swallowed by the din.
Leo pocketed the fruit. Though surrounded on all sides by men and chaos and noise, his mind drifted back to his house in Bloomsbury, and the woman who now lived there. Anne had been sleeping when he slipped from bed. In that expanse of white linen, she had looked very small, insubstantial. Yet one of her hands had been curled into a fist, as if ready to swing should she be attacked.
Had she been protecting herself from
him
? The thought had troubled him, and he had summoned his valet and dressed quietly, careful to keep from waking her. She would arise later to find him gone.
Something edged and acute cut through him. It took several moments for him to recognize the feeling: regret. Or at least, he
believed
it to be regret, never having felt it before.
Perhaps he ought not to have left her. At the least, he might have woken her or left a note to let her know where he was. Damned strange. He’d been accountable to no one for a very long time. Even his fellow Hellraisers. To feel any sense of obligation, even to a wife, chafed. Yet he couldn’t expect to marry and have nothing alter, could he?
Last night had been ... puzzling. Disturbing. To feel her fear shuddering through her body and into his. He had expected some nerves on her part. Hell, there had been nerves on his part, as well. He’d never made love to a virgin before, and he’d wondered about the best possible means of doing so. Gentle, slow. That much he knew. Yet Anne had still been afraid.
His desire for her—that he felt even now, in this crowded, noisy alley—was unexpected, and a relief. Despite his ambition to marry a nobleman’s daughter, he never would have given his name to a woman he could not want in his bed. Anne’s quiet beauty stirred him; her intelligence and subtle humor intrigued him. As he had touched her and discovered her slim, soft body, he felt her respond. Not just with fear, but with hunger. There was promise, of what could be. He wanted to explore that, see where it led.
It was for these reasons that he had forced himself to wear a nightshirt, to hide his markings. Last night had shown him that what he had begun to learn of Anne, he discovered he actually liked. Which meant he would feel obligated to offer her an explanation for the markings—and that he was not certain he wanted to do.
What he
did
want was to see her again. He should go back.
“To hell with the
geminus
,” he muttered to himself, “and the demands of Mr. Holliday.”
The ’Change could do without him for a day, a week. And in that time, he and Anne could come to learn each other, become more than acquaintances. He had decided to wait on the consummation of their marriage until they knew each other better. He needed to learn more. That couldn’t happen with him sequestered in the madness of Exchange Alley.
Though Leo’s expertise at bedsport could not begin to match Bram’s, he had a suspicion that, once her fear diminished and she was initiated into the realm of sexual pleasure, Anne would prove herself an eager student. She had a quickness of mind that revealed itself in her ready wit, in the keenness of her gaze. He’d touched and caressed her, discovering a hidden sensuality in his wife, a banked fire that needed a bit of encouragement to blaze to life.
But that fire would remain cool until he brought it forward. Which he could not do from miles away.
He’d return home now. Take Anne for a jaunt in the carriage. They’d stroll in Saint James’s Park, perhaps have a mug of fresh milk from the cows that grazed there. Then they’d go back home for supper, and talk, maybe flirt a little over their meal. He knew a bit about flirting. Admittedly, not very much. Courtesans cared less for flirtation and more for generosity, which he had both in bed and out. Flirtation, though, was newer to him. Wordplay seemed to be involved, and compliments. Beyond that ... he’d have to think of something.
Hopefully, the flirting stage would not last overlong. He was much more comfortable once the woman was already in bed. Last night had given him just a taste of Anne. Learning more about her body and what gave her pleasure ... the prospect sounded damned pleasant. He already felt the quickening of his pulse, the heated edge of emergent desire.