Wicked Little Secrets (29 page)

“A woman rarely becomes pregnant after her first experience,” he said, trying very hard to believe the old myth his mates tossed around at Cambridge.

“Oh,” she said, sounding bereft, her head drooping. He didn’t know if she were disappointed that she might not have a child or that her marriage trap had failed.

“I need to think,” he said. He grabbed his shirt off the floor and yanked it over his head.

“But—”

“I can’t breathe!” he shouted.

“What is happening?” she cried.

“For God’s sake, don’t look at me like that. I’m a little upset at the moment. J-just put your clothes back on.” He wrapped his cravat around his neck and made a weak knot with his shaking hands.

“But I’m compromised. You have to marry me.”

“Not necessarily,” he said absently.
Where
the
hell
are my
shoes?
He had to get out of here so he could breathe again. “Just… just get some sleep, and we’ll discuss our situation tomorrow.”

“
Situation?
” Vivienne echoed. They were a
situation
. She had experienced the loveliest moment of her life, and she’d thought he felt the same.

She remembered the prediction his angry red-headed lover had made not a week ago:
You’re not different. Soon this bounder will break your heart and bring you to tears, like he did all the other ladies.

“You don’t love me,” she whispered.

Her limbs felt weak, her face trembled, and hot tears poured from her eyes. But she wouldn’t sob hysterically, or throw ancient vases, or hurl insults at him. At least she would be unique in that respect. She clutched her falling nightdress about her, grabbed the robe from where it had fallen on the floor, and ran for the passage. She hoped he might move to stop her or call her name. Once in the study, she waited a moment, giving him a last chance. Nothing. She jammed the panel back into place. With a mighty push, she shoved the bureau back and then kicked its side, again and again.

Foolish
girl. You made John leave you and then you gave away your virtue to the worst rake in London. And now your family is going to starve because of you.

***

Dashiell shot back a glass of brandy and then poured another. He stared at the crumpled bed cover. Hot tears burned in his eyes.

“Damn me,” he shouted and threw the tumbler so hard the glass exploded when it hit the fireplace, spraying the floor with tiny shards. This time he had gone too far.

He shoved his feet in his shoes and did what he always feared he would if Vivienne got too close… he fled.

Sixteen

Two hours or so later, Dashiell was drunk in a grimy timbered tavern off Soho Square with his new best lads Lionel, a reed-like, nasal-voiced young man who had just lost his fiancée to a bank clerk, and Gilbert, a big mountain of a bartender.

“I’ve known her all my life,” Dashiell told them with a wave of his hand, splashing the drink he was holding. “She was my little sister, and she grew into this beautiful lady. Stunning. Ravishing. Helen of Troy couldn’t rival her. And her mind. The female Aristotle, I tell you.” He gulped from his glass and then set it and his head on the bar. “She wasn’t supposed to grow up, dammit, and become dangerous. I’m a loggerhead, a coxcomb, a lout. I can’t help myself. I didn’t want to hurt her, but I did. I did.”

“You want another drink, my good fellow?” Gilbert asked.

Dashiell raised himself and looked at Lionel. “You know what I want? I want you to punch me.” He pointed to the side of his chin without a bruise. “Right there. Give me a good hook.”

“Really?” Lionel slurred. “You want me to hit you?”

“Go ahead, I deserve it,” Dashiell assured him. “I’m a low, cowardly cully. A fatheaded, faithless blackguard.”

“If you insist.” Lionel pulled back his thin fist and drunkenly gazed at it for a moment, as if he didn’t recognize his own hand, and then let it fly. He missed Dashiell entirely, stumbled, and then fell into the husky gentleman next to them, seemingly embracing him.

The man flashed them a dark eye. “Sorry, old chap,” Lionel said, straightening himself. He slinked back. “I never was a fighter,” he cried. “Lost every fisticuffs at Eton. A regular dandyprat, I am. That’s why my fiancée left me for that bank clerk.”

“Now, now, just have another drink,” Dashiell said, patting him on the back.

Gilbert set another glass down before each man, including himself, and poured. “So what’s your problem, old boy?” he said to Dashiell “Why did you have to hurt her?”

Dashiell stared at the flames from the coal fire dancing on the amber brandy. In his drunken mind, he was reeling back through time to the little boy, clutching his history book to his chest, calling out for his mama who wasn’t there. To the same little boy, writing letters to his mama, begging her to come home. To all the still stone goddesses in his house, beauties who couldn’t hurt him or leave him. The words fell from his mouth. “My mama abandoned me. She didn’t love me.”

Lionel banged his fist on the wood. “My fiancée abandoned me for a bank… wait a minute, did you say your mama? Why are we talking about your mother?”

Gilbert started to sniff, his big shoulders heaving. “My mother said I was one child too many and sent me to an orphanage.”

“That’s so sad!” Lionel hunched over and began weeping into his brandy.

Meanwhile, a slew of memories began falling on Dashiell: his mother fighting with his father, her tears, the tears of the actresses and courtesans Dashiell had hurt, Vivienne’s tears, the beautiful light in her eyes as she rested on his chest after they made love, the young girl hanging from a tree asking him what “whoremonger” meant, her mischievous grin and the way she wrinkled her nose, the day his father sat Dashiell down and explained that his mama wasn’t coming back, the night his father lay bleeding from a lover’s bullet, Vivienne whispering “I love you.”

His body started to quiver, and he felt as if he would come out of his skin. He leaped onto the bar. “Ladies and gentleman, I would like to talk about marriage and mating customs,” he declared. “Let’s start with China, where I shall soon be traveling.”

An hour later, Dashiell had finished two more drinks and moved on to lecturing about the harems of the Ottoman Empire, despite the fact that the patrons were booing him, a few even throwing utensils at him, and his now not-so-best-lad Gilbert had threatened to call the watch. “Unknown to many in the west, harems have a rigid hierarchical structure,” Dashiell slurred and then stopped, recognizing the wild gray hair and hat of his grandfather coming through the tavern door.

“What the hell?” he said, approaching his grandson. “One of the boys told me I was supposed to come get you. That you were embarrassing yourself.”

“Actually, I was just leaving,” Dashiell said.

“Damnation, son,” the earl said as he helped his grandson off the bar. He tossed an arm over Dashiell’s shoulder as if he were injured and began to guide him to the door. The entire tavern broke into applause.

Outside, the night air felt dense and wet with unfallen rain. In the narrow gap between high rooftops on either side of the street, Dashiell could see the dark gray clouds blanketing the night sky. Low fog flowed in from the alleyways. He supported himself against a lamppost and swallowed hard to keep the contents of his stomach down.

“Let’s get a hack and take you home,” the earl suggested.

Dashiell panicked. He couldn’t go back to his room, where Vivienne’s scent still lingered on the sheets. Not yet. He shook his head. “I can’t go home.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But—”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it!” He shouted so violently he lost his balance and had to grab his grandfather’s shoulder.

From one of the windows above them, a gravelly male voice yelled, “Then shut your damned ’ole!”

“I just want to walk.” Dashiell pushed off the post and concentrated on the ground, trying to walk an unwavering straight line. After a block, he gripped his belly, feeling the brandy wash up in the back of this throat. “I need to sit,” he muttered. Up ahead, he saw the open iron gates of Wesley Congregational. He just needed to make it a few more steps.

“What are you doing?” his grandfather asked as Dashiell stumbled into the brick courtyard. The earl waited at the gate, as if he might get struck by lightning or suffer some other horrible kind of Biblical death upon entering the church grounds. “You can’t go in there.”

Dashiell staggered over to the steps and slumped down on the cold brick.

His grandfather cautiously tiptoed across the yard. “Tell me, what’s the matter?”

Dashiell opened his palms and closed them again. “I bedded Vivienne.”

“You did
what
to Vivienne?” his grandfather shouted, his voice echoing in the courtyard. His right hand lashed out like a whip and popped Dashiell’s bruised chin.

“Bloody hell!” Dashiell spat through his clenched teeth. In the tall narrow house connected to the church grounds, he saw the spark of a match and then the brightening glow of a lamp being lit behind a sheer curtain on a third floor window.

“What’s going on out there?” Mr. Charles stuck his head out his window.

“Hell’s fire,” Dashiell hissed to himself, then cleared his voice and tried to speak in a polite sober tone. “Nothing, we’re leaving,” he said, trying not to slur. “A th-thousand pardons.”

“Brother Lord Dashiell, is that you?”

“Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.” Dashiell cursed under his breath. “Why, yes. Just out for a night stroll.”

“Wait there, I’ll join you.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary.”

“I couldn’t sleep anyway. I’ll be just a minute.” He shut the window before Dashiell could protest again.

Dashiell leaned back and propped his elbows on the upper steps. “I think this could be the worst night of my life.”

“Are you going to marry her?” his grandfather asked.

Dashiell studied the faint outline of the gibbous moon, obscured by drifts of clouds. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.

The hard edge of his grandfather’s knuckles slammed Dashiell’s jawbone.

“Will you stop that?” Dashiell yelled, cradling his face.

The door to the minister’s home opened, and Mr. Charles padded out, holding a lantern and wearing a black night robe and bright knit slippers. “Good evening, gentlemen.”

Dashiell and his grandfather mumbled their greetings, keeping their eyes averted and focused on the bricks at their feet.

“Is something wrong?” the minister asked.

“Yes,” the earl said. “Dashiell deflowered Vivi… er, someone he shouldn’t have.”

Dashiell bolted up from his step and staggered dizzily for a moment before his head cleared. “Now, now, you just stop that!” He pointed to his grandfather. “This scoundrel, this cur, this… this Caligula thinks he has the moral rectitude to judge me.” Dashiell lurched forward and shoved his chest into his grandfather’s, causing the old man to stumble backward. “You’re a bloody d-degenerate.”

“Careful now.” Mr. Charles inserted his arms between the men. “I’ll have no fighting or swearing in the Lord’s presence. Do you understand?”

Dashiell slumped back down on the step. He felt light-headed, and his body rocked on some drunken current.

“Does this have to do with Miss Vivienne Taylor, Sister Gertrude Bertis’s niece? I thought I overhead her name before I came out to meet you.”

Dashiell couldn’t answer the minister. He let out a long breath through his nose. He should have said no, but he couldn’t. He was desperate for counsel that his grandfather couldn’t give him. But he feared Mr. Charles would launch into a miniature sermon, condemning Dashiell and Vivienne’s sin and saying that they deserved to languish in the furnaces of hell. Instead, the minister sat beside Dashiell.

“Are you going to marry her?”

“I d-don’t know,” Dashiell replied, burying his head in the darkness of his palms.

“Do you love her?”

Dashiell’s throat throbbed. His head ached, his heart ached. Yet he said nothing. For several seconds, the men stood in silence, except for the crunch and rattle of passing carriages and the low calls of the nightingales in the trees that grew out of the pavers on either side of the chapel.

Dashiell felt the minister’s reassuring hand on the back of his neck. “You want to marry her, don’t you?” he said softly. “You want to return home every day and see her smiling, so happy to be reunited with you. Or come to her bedside as she lies exhausted yet beaming, proud of the little newborn she nourishes at her breast. Or to simply sit with her in the evening and recount your day, what book you read, or who you met on the street. You want her to know every aspect of you.”

Dashiell wiped his eyes. God, he was so drunk he was weeping like a little boy. “Yes,” he tried to say, but the words got mangled in his throat. “But I—”

“You want to be the good husband, the faithful husband, the loving husband. But you’re afraid you’ll disappoint her… and yourself, as you have been disappointed before. You’re afraid that in your heart, you are unworthy.”

“Yes,” Dashiell choked.

“And you’re right.”

Dashiell bit his lip. What he always knew was now confirmed by a man of faith. The little light of hope he harbored was snuffed out. He just wanted to slink back to some grimy gaming club, drink himself to death, and then slip quietly into hell.

“Look at me, Brother Lord Dashiell,” the minister ordered.

Dashiell lifted his eyes, too far gone to be ashamed of his tears.

“But this love you have for Miss Taylor is worthy,” Mr. Charles said. “It is far more noble than yourself. This love offers salvation for you, but only if you give it a place to grow. Stop being afraid, stop running away. These fears are mere shadows. Put your faith in that hope for love, trust that it will give you strength and help you be the man you want to be.”

“I love her,” Dashiell cried, the words repressed for years now tumbling from him. “I love her. I love her.”

“I know you do,” the minister said quietly. He rose, stretched his arms over his head, and yawned. “Now you boys go home, get some sleep, and sober up. Then ask Miss Taylor properly. If you bring around a special license tomorrow, I’ll marry you.”