Tarnished Amongst the Ton

‘No. No, just very frightened,’ she admitted.

‘But not so frightened you could not think,’ he said with a glance at the open window, the shattered mirror and stripped bed. ‘Clever. That could have worked.’

‘You!’ Buck burst into the room behind them, blood on his face, a wicked knife in his hands. He waved it at Phyllida. ‘You bitch, I’ll gut you.’

‘You’ll go through me to do it.’ Ashe drew a long blade from his sleeve. Feet pounded along the corridor, voices shouting in a foreign tongue coming closer.

Buck looked like a cornered rat. He bared yellow teeth at Ashe. ‘Some other time. You’ll pay.’

He was at the open window in one long stride, threw a leg over the sill and ducked out, his big hands grasping the sheet rope. Lucifer gave a sharp caw and flapped away into the alley.

‘No! It won’t hold,’ Phyllida shouted as Buck vanished from sight.

There was a sharp cry from the bird, a scream of ‘Get away from my eyes, you—’ from below the open window, then a sickening thud.

The room filled with silent, turbaned men. One man leaned out of the window and spoke to Phyllida in a language she did not understand, then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they melted back, leaving her alone with Ashe.

‘Oh, God. I’ve killed him?’ She had never meant it as a trap, had never meant to do more than create a diversion.

‘You are responsible for nothing. He lived the life he chose and he died of its consequences,’ Ashe said harshly. ‘If anyone killed him, it was Lucifer. Come on.’

‘Where are his men?’ She followed him into the corridor and down the stairs.

‘Engaged in a battle royal with your friend Ashok and his followers in the basement, by the sound of it.’

She saw the way his eyes went to the head of the lower stairs, the tension in his body. ‘Go. I will be all right here now.’

‘No.’ He turned away and led her to the front door. ‘That is Ashok’s fight now. We agreed he would deal with Buck and his men, and he’ll take the spoils of that. My part was to find you.’

‘What would you have done if Buck had not fallen?’

Ashe took her arm and strode up the street towards Smithfield. A hackney carriage stopped at the top of the road and he hailed it, then turned to look down at her, but he answered only obliquely. ‘He touched you, threatened you, put fear in your eyes. Now we get clear of here before someone calls the law.’

He would have killed Buck, she saw it in the cold, hard glitter of his eyes, the set of his jaw, and offered up a silent prayer of thanks that in the end it had been an accident and there was no blood on Ashe’s hands.

‘Now what happens?’ she asked as they sat back on the battered squabs of the carriage and it rattled into motion.

‘I take you home and we say nothing to anyone of this. I will speak to Ashok in the morning, make certain everything is tidied up.’

Make certain Buck is dead, you mean, she thought, but did not say it. ‘I had not realised that Ashok was more than a trader,’ she ventured. It seemed that Ashe was not yet ready of speak of what now lay between them.

‘In his way he is as hard and as ruthless as Buck,’ Ashe said. ‘You will not go into the East End again, too many people have taken notice of you now.’

Part of her wanted to defy him, simply because he was giving her orders, but she knew he was right and she would have come to the same conclusion herself. ‘I was going to get a manager for the shop, once Gregory was settled. I will do that now; there is a man at one of the auction houses who I have in mind.’

‘And what will you do to occupy yourself?’ Ashe asked.

The tiny flame of hope that had flickered into life when he had taken her in his arms in that sordid room wavered and died. Ashe was not going to say they could put it all behind them, carry on as they were before she had met Buck again. But then, how could he? He had learned that she had sold her body, had been prepared to keep that from him at the risk of a scandal that would tarnish his whole family if it came out. And she had always known, deep in her heart, that a marriage was impossible.

‘I will do what I always planned, go and live in the Dower House.’ There was silence between them, a heavy stillness that felt physically hard to break. After a minute she said, ‘I will tell you what happened, when—’

‘No. I do not want to hear. It is not my business.’ Ashe was looking out of the window as though Leadenhall Street was of abiding fascination.

‘You saved me just now. You know what he was going to do.’

‘I would have done the same for any woman I knew to be in that danger,’ Ashe said politely, as though she had thanked him for rescuing her parasol from a gust of wind.

I love you.