Once Upon a Marquess (The Worth Saga 1)

“I thought about it,” he finally said. “But here’s the thing about having been in love that first time: I always knew, every time after, that what I was faced with was a pale imitation. I never found someone else I could trust with my soul. After the first time, nothing else was acceptable.”

The pain was impossibly sharp. Trust him with her soul? Yes, that’s what she’d done.

Like her brother, when Christian had to choose between her and his principles, he’d chosen his principles.

He didn’t say anything else, and she didn’t trust herself to speak. The carriage came to her street. The conveyance was too wide to bring down the narrow cobblestone road, and so the footman dismounted and held the horses.

“I’ll see you to your door,” Christian said.

“There’s no need. I’m known hereabouts. I’ll be perfectly safe.”

“Nonetheless,” he said, by which she understood that he intended to be stuffy.

“What of you?” he asked as they walked down the road in the dark. “You could have made a match. Not a brilliant one, I suppose. Not after that scandal. But you’re an earl’s daughter. You might have chosen someone who would have provided everything you wished.”

He had asked her. After her father’s funeral. He had found her and made her look at him. He’d told her he wanted to marry her, and damn what had happened with her family.

She’d been outraged.

She didn’t answer. Not as they passed the dark-windowed house where her friend Daisy likely no longer lived on the second floor. Not as they skirted a group of men in the middle of the street, huddled under the single street lamp.

“Aw, Miss Worth,” one of them called. “Come join us.”

Christian took a step forward, but Judith set a hand on his arm. Once, she’d been scared of these men. Now she knew them. It was Fred Lotting, Mr. Padge, and the fellow that everyone just called Crash.

“Padge, you know I never gamble,” Judith said. “Especially not on…what are you betting on tonight?”

Mr. Padge indicated the street, where rough circles were demarcated in chalk.

“We’re betting on which of these, ah, crickets, will be the first to escape the third circle,” answered Crash.

She looked over at him. “It’s not that dark. Those are roaches, and I don’t even want to know what you’ve attached to them to slow them so.”

“It’s—”

Judith set her hands over her ears, and the men laughed.

Crash took a step closer. “And who’s your sweetheart?”

“Mr. Trent,” Judith said repressively, “is a family friend.”

“Aw, well, give her a nice, long friendly kiss good night for us, then,” Fred put in.

Judith felt her cheeks flame. “Kiss your cockroaches,” she snapped back.

They laughed once more, and she wished them good night and continued down the street.

Once, Judith had slipped on Theresa’s discarded petticoat—who leaves petticoats on the stairs?—and had fallen, thump thump thump, down the steep steps of their house.

She’d had a wicked black and blue bruise on her hip for three weeks. She’d complained that everything hurt.

“Not everything,” Theresa had told her. “What about your left middle finger?”

Her left middle finger had not hurt. And somehow, that one discovery had been a gateway to all the things that hadn’t hurt. Not everything hurt.

“If I had married,” Judith said, “I’d have thought men like that were rough and coarse and boorish all my life.”

Christian tilted his head to look at her. “And aren’t they?”

She shrugged. “I suppose. But Fred Lotting fixed my roof when it nearly collapsed after the snowstorm four years ago.”

He frowned.

“Before you ask what he wanted in return, he did it because his wife said he should, and he adores the ground she walks upon. He doesn’t even try to hide it. I’ve had men address me in an unwanted, unmannerly fashion before. It happens in Mayfair as much as it happens here. More, even.”

“I see.” He stopped in front of her house.

Not everything hurt. To discover that now, when so much had broken, seemed almost freeing.

“If I’d married,” she said softly, “I would never know what I was capable of doing. It turns out that when you take away my kid gloves and my morning dresses, I can do quite a bit. This may sound ridiculous, but I’m proud of myself.”

She climbed the steps.

She had intended to send him on his way, but when she opened the door, the entry had a view on her parlor. The events of that afternoon had seemed so distant that she’d almost put them out of her mind. But splintered wood and broken crockery were still spilled across the floor. She’d forgotten.

“Well,” she said with as much faked brightness as she could manage. “Thank you very much. Good night.”

“Really, Judith?” He shook his head in disgust and walked in. “It’s almost as if I’m a complete stranger to you. You can’t even move this much wood all on your own.”

“Of course I can,” she shot after his back. “No kid gloves. No morning dresses, if you recall?”

“Of course you can,” he mimicked. “Just not easily. You do the crockery. I’ll manage the wood.”

Half the good plates were salvageable—just cracked and not actually shattered. There were two bowls, too, and almost all the wooden eatingware had survived. Her good tea service, though, had been on the top shelf. It had the farthest to fall.

And…

Christian set the last piece of her splintered hutch outdoors as she contemplated the one item that had been truly irreplaceable.

Her clockwork shepherdess with its dancing sheep. The china shepherdess was smashed beyond all possibility of repair. The base was in shards, and the inner clockwork was mangled, gears bent, springs broken.

He came to stand by her.

She remembered the day he’d given it to her. When she’d realized that he’d noticed her, really noticed her, and her imagination had built castles around the two of them. She hadn’t been wrong; it was just that those castles existed in some other world, and she was living here.

Two of the sheep were unscathed. She gently pulled one off its little post.

“I can replace it,” he said in a low voice, and she knew he was talking about more than the shepherdess.

“You can’t.”

“No, I can. I remember preci

sely where I got it. A visit, a little money, and…”

Judith felt suddenly tired. “You got it from Arthur Levitt,” she said. “Four streets over, on Carlson Street. You can’t replace it.” She slid the sheep into her skirt pocket. “That first year, I sold everything I could. Gowns. Jewelry. Any property that hadn’t been forfeited, I sold. I tried to sell the shepherdess back to Mr. Levitt six months after you asked me to marry you.”

He inhaled.

“He wouldn’t buy it,” Judith said. “But he was very interested in the fact that I’d managed to make the sheep go backward. And when I showed him what I’d done, and how I’d managed it, he said he’d never seen the like. He offered to introduce me to a man he knew in Edinburgh, who arranged for the purchase of clockwork designs. It turns out that between my experience taking your shepherdess apart and that book you got me...” She shrugged. “Over the course of seven years, I made just over a thousand pounds.”

He looked at her.

Not everything hurt.

“Mr. Levitt died six months ago. There really would have been nothing without his help,” Judith said. “Instead, I made enough to send Benedict to school. Enough to set aside some money for my sisters. Some four hundred pounds apiece, sent anonymously because the only thing that would hurt their chances of some kind of decent marriage more than a lack of money would be having a sister who made that money in trade.”

He hadn’t looked away from her.

“There was a great deal of luck involved,” Judith said. “But it’s as I said. If I had married, there is much I would not have learned of myself. This has been hard and painful and horrible.” She swallowed. “But I’ve learned that I’m stronger than hard, better than pain, and that with enough luck, horrible can go away.”

“Judith.”

She held out the second sheep to him. “Here,” she said. “There’s a reason I didn’t tell you the full truth about the source of my sisters’ money from the start.”

“You thought I’d tell people the money was made in trade?”