Kingsley waited until Søren was in the cab before giving the driver their address. The cab lurched forward. Once they were moving, Kingsley drew the shades down. They were master and servant no more, but two lovers, alone and talking.
“Just when I thought,” Søren said, eyes closed and head back, “that I had plumbed the depths of my father’s evil…he does this to Claire.”
“Marriage isn’t evil,” Kingsley said. “Boring, useless, and monotonous, but not evil.”
“The last time I spoke to my father,” Søren said, “I swore to him I would never capitulate to any of his schemes to make me marry. Now he’s found the one way to do it—by using my love for Claire as a weapon against me. I almost want to applaud him for his ingenuity.”
Søren’s tone was light, but Kingsley sensed the brewing rage underneath his words.
“Your father’s in Hell being spit-roasted on the fiery cocks of Satan and Beelzebub as we speak.”
“You’re trying to cheer me up. It’s not working.”
“Just get married,” Kingsley said.
“Just get married? Wonderful idea. Tell the driver to stop by the Bride Shop. I need to buy a bride. We’ll take two. One for me and one for you. Perhaps a third to keep as a spare. Grand idea. Brilliant.”
“There’s no need for sarcasm. You’re a fucking Baron with the face of Adonis, the body of Michelangelo’s David, and the cock of…I don’t know. Some mythological or biblical figure with a very large cock. There are dozens of poor Lords in this town who’d sell their daughters to you for ten quid and a new horse.”
“You get what you pay for,” Søren said.
Kingsley sighed. The time for joking was over. “Søren, you know—”
“Don’t.” That one word was an order and a threat. Kingsley ignored both.
“Talk to her,” Kingsley said. “That’s all.”
“She’s my ward,” Søren said. “She’s barely out of the schoolroom.”
“She’s nineteen now, almost twenty. More than old enough to marry.”
“She despises me.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“We haven’t spoken in three years. My first words to her can’t be ‘Hello, Eleanor. Sorry I left you without saying goodbye, but I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to marry me?’”
“She was destined for prison or the workhouse before you came along and saved her. She owes you.”
“I’ll tell her that,” Søren said. “But I’ll make certain you’re standing in front of me so that when the gun goes off, the bullet hits you, not me.”
“I’ll take that risk.”
Søren fell silent a moment.
“He knew I wanted her,” Søren said softly.
“Your father?”
He nodded. “I took Eleanor in, made her my ward, and somehow he found out. When I saw him last, he mocked me, saying for all my pride, all my self-righteousness, I was no better than he was, taking home a fifteen-year-old girl.”
“Your father forced himself on your mother when she was barely seventeen, and he only married when he found out she was carrying you. And that was the least of his crimes. All you did was give a good home to a poor motherless girl whose wastrel father had forced her into a life of crime. You didn’t lay a hand on her.”
“I wanted to, though,” Søren said. “God, I did want to. The thoughts I had…” He closed his eyes, took a long shuddering breath. “At midnight, the night before we left, I found myself standing outside her bedroom door, the doorknob in one hand, a leather strap in the other. She was sixteen by then, and I was twenty-nine. What decent God-fearing man dreams of strapping and sexually violating his sixteen-year-old ward?”
Most of them, Kingsley imagined, but he didn’t say that aloud. He knew a rhetorical question when he heard it.
“You didn’t do it. That’s what matters. I want to slit your throat most mornings when I’m shaving you,” Kingsley said. “I don’t. The thought isn’t what counts, only the deed. You did not do the deed. Not only did you not do the deed, you packed up and left for three years. You are nothing like your father. In fact, you are his opposite.”
Kingsley knew what he had to say to convince Søren to talk to Eleanor. He knew but hesitated to say it because it was as manipulative and cruel as it was true and certain. But needs must when one is being buggared from the grave by an evil insane Baron.
“If you don’t marry your Eleanor, someday…some other man will.”
Søren’s eyes flinched, just his eyes, and Kingsley knew then exactly the expression Julius Caesar wore when he saw the knife in his belly put there by his dearest friend, Brutus.
“Tell the driver to take us to Regent’s Park,” Søren said.
Regent’s Park. The townhouse where Søren’s sister lived. And Eleanor, his ward.
Kingsley replied, “Where do you think the driver’s been taking us the last ten minutes?”