Prue left Newgate in the late evening. The murders of Dupont and the maid had convinced Gifford that the case against Prue wouldn’t stand. The coroner was already doubtful about her guilt, but the jury had bound her over for trial. According to Gren, who spent the afternoon shuttling between David and Prue, carrying messages with every evidence of huge enjoyment, David was calling in favours and expending bribes with reckless abandon in order to have a magistrate hear her case immediately.
When he finally succeeded, he and Gren both arrived with the men sent to escort her to the interview, and he stood at her side, a silent guardian, until Gifford had explained the circumstances to the magistrate. A few questions, and she was free to go.
On the road outside, she stopped and put her head back, just so she could take a deep breath.
David stood behind her, one hand lightly supporting her elbow, a human touch that anchored her in the here and now. Gren leaned out of the waiting hackney.
“Is all well?”
“Yes, she’s free. Just give her a minute,” David said.
“I am fine.” Prue let David help her up into the hackney.
“Where to now?” Gren asked.
Prue turned uncertain eyes on David. She could, of course, go back to Mrs. Moffat’s boarding house, where she kept a room in between assignments. Or…
“Prue?” David lowered his voice, though in the close confines of the hackney it was no more than a pretence at privacy. “You need a place to stay, hot water, a comfortable bed. Will you let me provide them? I have a spare room. Several spare rooms.”
She nodded, doubting the last sentence would save her reputation with the young aristocrat. Respectable young women did not stay in the houses of bachelors, however many bedchambers they could provide.
Perhaps tomorrow she would care. Convention and respectability would not keep her warm tonight, would not chase away the memories. Tonight, she wanted to be with David.
Gren, to his credit, showed no reaction, and David gave the address to the jarvey.
It was a silent trip of some twenty minutes to a small but neat town house in a quiet street, just off Kings Road in Chelsea. Prue was almost asleep when they arrived, exhausted from the stress of the past few days.
David helped her down from the carriage and unlocked the door, while Gren fetched her trunk and started to follow them inside. David took the trunk from him. “Thank you, Gren.”
“I should go?” Gren said, making a question of it.
“For tonight. I’ll meet you tomorrow, at the coffee house, and we’ll discuss our next steps. And Gren, Mrs. Worth was never here.”
Gren shot him a glare, then turned to Prue and took her hand in both of his. “Prue, I hope you know I would never gossip about you. We are friends, are we not?”
Prue, woken by the brief walk through the cool night air, wanted to ask him to say nothing to his mother, but that would only make both men curious. Instead, she smiled to reassure him. “I know, Gren. I trust you. And Gren, thank you for all you have done, yesterday and today. I will never forget it.”
Gren disclaimed. “I’ve had great fun, you know. I haven’t once been bored. I should thank you. But David’s right. I need to leave you to get some sleep. Good night, Prue.” He saluted her cheek, a brotherly peck that nonetheless prompted a glower from David. Gren was well aware of it, too, giving David his most impish grin before he loped off in pursuit of the departing hackney.
David locked and bolted the door behind Gren.
“I have a couple who live in,” he explained, “but they’re very discreet. And Gren is a fribble, but I think we can trust him.”
“Gren has been a rock,” Prue said. “Thank you for sending him, David.” She looked around at the entry hall, sparsely furnished but clean and neat, with a Sheraton-inspired hall table and umbrella stand, and a pair of elegant shield-backed chairs with slender, curved wooden arms.
“I should send a note to Tolliver.” He might have left her to die or rot in prison, only if he felt that necessary for the investigation.
From David’s frown, he was less forgiving. “Let him wait. He should have had you out of there the first day, Prue.”
She shook her head. Tolliver would always put the Crown first. Which made David’s neglect of his own investigations even more precious.
“You have been neglecting your work, David. Is Lady Georgiana angry? Your other clients? Should we compare notes? Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Let us forget about the investigation for tonight. You are tired. You need to eat and sleep.”
David led the way up the stairs He stopped in the hall upstairs, frowning, looking from Prue to the row of doors.
“You’ll want a bath. I know I have when I’ve been in such a place. I’ll organise that, but… which room, Prue?”
How like him to ask. Apart from that one angry outburst five months ago, he had always treated her with respect, as if she could still lay claim to being the gentlewoman she aped.
“Which is yours, David?” It was the right question. He smiled, and leaned down to brush his lips lightly across hers. “Mine would be perfect, if you’re sure it is what you want. Here.” He opened the door behind him and stood aside to let her through.
She was content to let him order things. The room was spacious enough for two comfortable chairs by the fire, and she sat and watched while he and the servant, Allen, fetched a hip bath and then made a number of trips with buckets to fill it. Mrs. Allen brought her a pot of hot tea and a plate of biscuits, then returned with two large towels, which she set on a rack by the fire to warm.
Neither servant hinted, by word or glance, that they found her presence scandalous. Her father’s voice in her head insisted she was acting the whore, but that was nothing new. He had been accusing her of immorality since she was a small child, though she had been twenty when she had permitted Aldridge to talk her into his bed. Could one fall from virtue more than once? If so, she was about to be ruined for the third time. She already lived with the guilty conscience; she might as well enjoy the pleasure.
“I’ll have thy dinner up to thee in an hour, ma’am, Mr. Wakefield,” Mrs. Allen said, as she took her leave.
Prue, half dozing by the fire, roused herself to undress for her bath. David had seen her naked before, on the island. Shyness was silly. Did he sense her hesitation? He crossed to help with her buttons.
She backed away. “I have to find something to put on,” she said.
But when she opened the trunk, everything smelt of the prison. She stopped, staring into it without seeing a thing, drowned in the odour and bewildered for a moment.
“What’s wrong, Prue?”
His kindness opened the floodgates again. This stupid crying! He’d turn her out in the streets, and quite right, too. She couldn’t bear a weepy woman.
“It all smells,” she sobbed. “I have nothing to wear.”
He enfolded her in his arms and murmured that they’d send everything to be laundered; they’d fetch something fresh for her in the morning; she could wear one of his shirts for tonight… “If, that is, you insist on wearing anything, my Prue. I certainly would prefer you did not.”
She gave him a watery smile, as he had intended.
“Forgive me, David. I am not usually a watering pot.”
“I know you are not. You have had a trying time,” he said, and his choice of words, the same as Gren, made her smile more genuine.
She wiped her sleeve across her eyes, and began to undo her buttons, all brusque business until she sat in the bath in water up to her shoulders.
He sat in the chair she’d left, pretending to read. He’d offered to put the screen up, so she could have her bath out of his sight, but she had refused. Why be excessively polite? When they had been lovers already and would be again? Still, she had blushed so red, he’d chosen to give her at least the semblance of privacy. He hadn’t turned a page in the last ten minutes, and his eyes flicked towards her every time she moved.
He was the most considerate man of her acquaintance, but he was still a man.
“David.” She would tell him some of her story. She didn’t want him to believe she fell apart at the least provocation.
He looked up at his name, and smiled. “What do you need, my Prue?”
“Can I tell you about last time I was in prison?”
He came to high alertness, like a scent hound catching the odour of fox. “If you wish,” he said.
“I was twenty,” she told him. “And I was there for a week. For theft and slander—to be hanged or transported, they said.” The memories made her shudder: the close confines of the cell in the county lockup, which she shared with ten others, all stronger, meaner, and more assertive than she.
“It was worse, perhaps, because Father used to lock us in the cellar if we were bad. Well, me, mostly. The twins covered for one another, and Charity was everyone’s pet. I’ve always hated being locked in.”
Bit by bit, she told him the story, or most of it. How she had worked as a companion from the age of seventeen, three years with the same elderly aristocrat. The lady’s house was in prime hunting countryside, and her grandsons, great-nephews and other assorted young men ran tame in it through the hunting season.
Those who attempted to flirt with the shy companion were soon put in their place by the lady, until the favourite grandson decided to pay her his attentions. He could do no wrong in his fond grandmama’s eyes, and Prue found him hard to avoid, until one of his friends warned him off.
Grateful, she let her guard down with her rescuer, and before long, was convinced she was in love.
It was a magical time, marred only by her new friend’s insistence that they keep their growing intimacy secret. “The others won’t understand,” he said.
Soon they were lovers, and she waited for the declaration that must come.
“Later, of course,” she told David, “I realised he had never spoken of marriage, never promised to love me forever. He said the word love, but his actions… I should have seen that his actions spoke a different language.”
David had come closer while she talked, and now he stripped off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. He took the soap from her fingers and began soaping her shoulder. She made no comment, relishing the comfort of his touch while she relived the memory of those long-ago days.
At the time, her happiness had been marred only by the disappearance of several of her employer’s more precious and portable possessions. Searching didn’t find them, and the lady became convinced they were being stolen.
The grandson had been passing through the halls on several nights when Prue was on her way to meet with her lover. She made her own investigation and told her lover, who said it was none of their business and she should say nothing.
Prue ignored him and spoke to her employer, who called in the grandson to explain. Indignantly proclaiming his innocence, he accused Prue of being the thief, and—as evidence of her moral turpitude—told his grandmama she was warming the bed of at least one of the guests.
Prue waited for her lover to rescue her, waited for him to proclaim her innocence, at least of the theft, and to announce their betrothal.
She waited in vain. He watched her taken away by the constables and said not a word.
A week later, he fetched her from the prison, explaining the charges had been dropped when the grandson ran off with the contents of the lady’s strongbox and her lady’s maid. Everyone except the lady, apparently, had known he had outrun his allowance and lived in fear of his creditors finding him.
At first, Prue was grateful to be out of prison, but as the first euphoria wore off she became more and more angry. He’d known all this, and he’d still said not a word in her defence?
Challenged, he’d become angry in his turn. “It was your own fault,” he had told her. “I told you to say nothing.”
Prue protested. “How could I! He was stealing from her. Did you expect me to say nothing? As you did?”
She vividly remembered the put-upon sigh with which her lover deigned to explain. “She knows my mother, Prue. You must see. If I’d admitted taking you to my bed, Mama would have had my ears. She does not interfere, as a rule, but she would draw the line at me selecting her friend’s companion as my mistress.”
“What a piece of slime!” David said.
Prue shrugged. “He was very young. And very spoilt.”
“You’re too generous, Prue. I’d like to rearrange his face for him. What did you do?”
“I told him I had been his lover, not his mistress. I would never be his mistress, and I would not be his lover again, either. He was… astounded, I think. He had spent the entire week I was imprisoned buying me a house, and it had cost a great deal of money to bribe my way out. I told him I would write it in the ledger as an amount to be subtracted from the value of my maidenhead.”
“Good for you. That’s my brave Prue. Well said. The slime.” David was clearly still considering physical violence. Prue was glad she hadn’t identified her lover. She did not want to add to the distance between the brothers.
“We shouted at one another a bit more, and in the end he took me to my sister. I am grateful for that, when I think back. I was utterly at his mercy and he could have abducted or abandoned me, but he accepted my refusal and took me where I needed to go.”
It was not Aldridge’s fault that her sister did not make her at all welcome, and eventually shuttled her on to the next sister, and then to the last, where she stayed, grudgingly given houseroom. No need to discuss all that happened in the following eighteen months.
“After a time, I met Tolliver. He had heard about… my investigation, and he offered to train me and employ me, and here I am.”
“Lean your head back and let me do your hair,” David said.
He was silent while he soaped her hair and then rinsed it.
“I’ve always wanted to do that,” he said, after a while. “You have lovely hair, Prue. So soft and silky. I’ve been dreaming of it for months.”
She stood, and let him pour the vinegar-laced rinsing water over her from the buckets that had been set out by the fire to keep warm. She resisted the urge to hide herself with her hands, and was rewarded by the intense, almost worshipful way he studied her body as he sluiced and trickled the water over her.
“You’re very beautiful, Prue,” he said. “I understand why that man wanted you. I can’t comprehend how he could walk away from you.”
She shrugged again. “Family, he said, and duty. People of his lineage marry for advantage, not for love. And I had no lineage. I was barely a lady before I let him…”
He handed her out of the bath and wrapped her tenderly in a warm towel. “Don’t tell me the slime-sucking waste of air actually said that to you?”
“He was angry at the time.” Prue revelled in David’s indignation. Her sisters had agreed with Aldridge, told her she was unfit to take part in society and should live in penance for the rest of her life.
“Prue.” He cupped her face in his hands and looked intently into her eyes. “He was wrong. You do know, don’t you, that you are a lady to your fingertips? Yes, and better than most ladies I know: honest, loyal, generous.”
It was kind of David to say so. Prue could act the part of a lady: she had been practising most of her life. But these were not ladylike thoughts surfacing as she stood before him, clad only in a towel.
He bent forward to kiss her, a gentle benediction on her forehead, but she twisted her head back so that his lips met her own. Enough talking.
He drew back again, and she reached for him, alarmed.
“You said ‘later’,” she reminded him. “Now is ‘later’.”
“Now is ‘later’,” David agreed, “but we have all night—all of tomorrow, too, if we wish. As long as we want, Prue.”
Her cheeks heated again as she countered his argument. “As long as we want,” she agreed. “But I seem to recall that more than once a night is a possibility.”
He choked back a laugh that was almost a groan. “A distinct possibility, Prue.”
She twisted her head, avoiding the kiss he bent to give her. “In that case, David, you are overdressed for the occasion.”