‘Why?’ Phyllida picked up her reticule and dropped in the front-door key.
‘In case there is any danger, of course.’ Ashe followed her out and pulled the door to. Phyllida told the driver where to go and they climbed into the hackney.
‘You will deal with that by throttling assailants with your sash?’
‘You are more exhausting than my sister,’ Ashe complained. ‘No, I will stab them with one of the three knives I have about my person.’ He settled back against the battered squabs and crossed long legs.
Knives? Gentlemen did not stroll around London armed to the teeth with knives, not these days. He was teasing her, he had to be. Phyllida resisted the temptation to look for betraying bulges in case he thought she was studying his body.
‘Who is Miss Millington?’ he asked in a rapid change of subject. ‘I couldn’t find her in either the Peerage or the Landed Gentry.’
‘You can’t have her!’ Phyllida sat bolt upright and gripped her reticule. ‘She is for Gregory.’
‘I didn’t say I wanted her, I was simply trying to place her.’
‘Her father is a prominent banker.’
‘Ah, I see. She will come with a substantial dowry and your brother comes with land and title.’
‘Exactly. And they like each other, so I have every hope they will make a match of it.’
‘Your doing, I suspect.’
‘Certainly. It is no secret that our father left Gregory the earldom, a crumbling house, a great deal of entailed land in poor heart and a mountain of debt. We sold off everything that we could and cleared the debts, but that left virtually nothing to live off and certainly no resources to restore the Court and the estate.’
‘So you support the pair of you with your dealing and the shop. What happens to you when Fransham marries? You appear to be a notable matchmaker—can you not turn your talents to your own benefit?’
‘I will not marry.’ Phyllida began to fiddle with a darn on her right glove. ‘In my position…’
‘Nonsense. Someone will fall in love with you—a professional man, a younger son.’
And then she would have to confess the truth about her past. ‘I will not marry,’ Phyllida repeated stubbornly. ‘I have no wish to.’ And even if she could find the right man, and even if he did not care about her birth or her past or the shop, could she bring herself to be a wife to him?
She shivered. Just because she found one man attractive and still dreamt about his kiss and the pressure of his fingers on hers did not mean that if things went beyond kisses that she could bear it. Her body’s instinctive reactions, female to male, were one thing, her mind’s capacity to overcome horror and memory was quite another. Better never to risk it. It felt as though Ashe was tugging her closer and closer to a cliff edge and she had no strength to resist him.
‘We are close.’ She pulled the check string. ‘If you get out here and walk around the corner to the left, you’ll see the warehouse. Tell the driver to take me to the entrance in a few minutes.’
When she entered the warehouse with a nod to the guard on the door and the scurrying clerks, she found men she recognised inside. Taciturn, shabby figures with notebooks, they made secretive jottings as they passed amongst the packing cases and racks. Her fellow dealers spared her curt greetings and assessing looks, their faces as blank as those of card players in the midst of a high-stakes game.
It was not hard to locate Ashe. He was strolling along the crowded aisles, a faint sneer curving his lips, Joe Bertram, the warehouse manager, at his heels. She watched as he stopped and shook his head over a display of just the sort of small items she was interested in.
‘Who the blazes is that?’ One of the dealers stopped next to Phyllida and jerked his head at Ashe, who was rolling his eyes at a large vase.
‘I have no idea,’ she said, hardly able to recognise the supercilious Indian gentleman they were looking at. ‘But he looks as though he knows what he is talking about.’
‘He’s putting the wind up old Bertram. Might lower the prices for all of us,’ the man said with a chuckle and moved on.
Ashe approached her, paused and produced a slight inclination of the head. His face was expressionless, an aristocrat showing courtesy to a lesser being. Phyllida ignored him and made a pretence of studying some vast urns before going to the small items. Her heart was racing as she picked up the first delicate tea bowl. There was high-quality famille rose, some exquisite blue-and-white incense burners, charming unglazed terracotta miniature figures, plates… She would have to consider very carefully and bargain hard.
On the edge of her concentration she could hear Ashe, his voice strongly accented as he condescended to take an interest in a suite of vases. She put the pieces she wanted to one side, added some more as sacrifices once the bargaining began, and looked around for Bertram or one of his assistants. At the doorway there was jostling, laughter, a string of swear words, then Harry Buck and his bullies swaggered in. All around her the dealers faded into the background, like terriers yielding to a bulldog at the bear pit.
Only Ashe, inspecting the base of a bowl, the nervous Mr Bertram and herself were left exposed to the stare of Buck’s muddy brown eyes. They flickered over Ashe, visibly dismissed him as a foreigner, over Bertram, who hurried to Buck’s side at the jerk of his head, and then fixed on her. Phyllida could feel the stare like the touch of greasy fingers on her skin. Her nightmares began and ended with Buck, his coarse laughter, his thick fingers, the smell of onions on his breath. Why was he here? She was trapped.
She kept her eyes fixed on the bowl she was holding, its sides so thin she could see the ghosts of her fingers through the white porcelain. If it had a mark, it was blurred. Phyllida put it down before it fell from her fingers and pretended to make a note.
‘Wot we got ‘ere, then?’ Buck sauntered over. ‘Some dolly mop looking for a nice teapot, eh? Bit pricey for you, darlin’, best look down the market. Or I can put you in the way of earning some dosh. Take the weight off your feet.’
Perhaps he wouldn’t recognise her. He never had in all the times he had glimpsed her in the East End after that first time and she had taken great care that they were only glimpses. She fought to reassure herself. Why should he recognise in the drably dressed woman in her mid-twenties one terrified seventeen-year-old virgin? How many other desperate girls who needed to earn some dosh, bargaining with the only thing of value they possessed, had passed through those dirty hands since then?