Page 27 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul (Scandalous Sisters #3)

It’s a lovely house,”

Charity said almost begrudgingly as she slid one fingertip along the nearest bookshelf in the library, examining it for any hint of dust.

“Tasteful. Elegant. What is it that Mr. Carlisle does, exactly?”

“I don’t know,”

Felicity said as she sank onto a couch.

“I’ve never asked. Some sort of speculative endeavors, I think. He alluded to some sort of investment in a railway scheme a few days past.”

But he hadn’t mentioned it since, probably owing to the wretched turn of the evening after their visit to the theatre.

“Ah,”

Mercy said as she browsed the books upon their shelves.

“Not a tradesman, then. A financier. Probably—if this house is anything to judge by—he makes money hand over fist. Oh!”

She tipped one book off its shelf into her hands.

“This one is recent,”

she said by way of explanation.

“Do you mind if I—”

“Not at all.”

Felicity gave a careless wave of her hand.

But her brow furrowed as she watched Mercy’s fingers curl around the book.

In the month of their marriage, she’d never once seen Ian with a book in his hand.

Newspapers, nearly constantly. They stacked upon his desk, ended up discarded upon chairs and tables, and wreathed his plate at dinner.

“Difficult to find books so deep in the countryside,”

Mercy said with a sigh as she dropped onto the sofa beside Felicity.

“At least newer offerings. One has generally got to go to a city of some size to acquire them.”

“Which is it?”

Felicity inquired.

“The Queen’s Page: A Romance,”

Mercy said, as she extended the book to Felicity.

“How did you like it?”

“I haven’t read it,”

Felicity said.

“That is—I didn’t purchase it.”

But it was here nonetheless.

One she likely would have purchased, had she ever had the money for such expensive indulgences as books.

Once, years and years ago, she had had a subscription to a lending library, which she had often used to share classic, edifying books with Ian.

But he hadn’t had much interest in the dramatic romances she had enjoyed.

He hadn’t purchased this book that Mercy now held in her hands for himself.

He’d purchased it for her.

Because she had once enjoyed them.

Restive and fidgety, Felicity shoved herself to her feet once more, making for the shelf from which Mercy had taken the book.

“Felicity, is something wrong?”

Charity asked, a thread of worry in her voice.

“No, no,”

she said, though the words had come out far too high, far too shrill to provide any comfort.

Not wrong, exactly.

But not right, either.

She hadn’t spent much time within the library.

No—she’d not spent any time within the library.

Not since that night that Ian had first shown it to her.

She hadn’t wanted to; hadn’t wanted to develop any sort of fondness for the house that she had felt was more prison than home.

She’d spent as little time within the house as was possible; an aim that was aided significantly by the fact that she had a career, one which kept her out of the house for the best portion of each day.

So she hadn’t ever really looked.

Hadn’t ever really just wandered and explored.

She’d felt no need to test the bounds of her cage, to examine the gilding painted over the bars.

And now she did, her eyes scanning the titles printed upon the bindings with a sense of—of—

She didn’t know.

She didn’t know anymore, and that was the problem.

This dreadful, wretched miasma of nebulous, confusing emotions swirling in her gut, in her head…it could so easily infect her heart if she let it.

Every damned book.

They were all hers.

Every one of them.

She had hoped to summon forth some sort of anger, like she had with the garden, but it wouldn’t come.

She could feel it twisting in her chest behind her heart, and still it wouldn’t come to the fore.

Like those embers she’d spent a decade steadfastly tending to had begun to starve themselves out.

Like that vicious I hate you she had cast into his face only days ago had become a little less true the moment she’d spoken it aloud.

Like the very fact that she had spoken it, finally, to his face, had allowed her to begin to sort through those things she’d packed so deeply away, and which he had sent spilling out of her into an undignified, inelegant mess.

“Felicity,”

Mercy said delicately, her fingers picking at the fringe upon the border of a decorative pillow.

“I have got a feeling that there is so much we’ve missed. Is it safe to assume that you have got something of a history with Mr. Carlisle?”

“Something like that,”

Felicity admitted in a small voice.

“We were…we were nearly engaged ten years ago.”

But they hadn’t been. Because Ian had never asked. And eventually it had become clear enough that he never would. That he intended to leave her behind—just as everyone else had.

“Engaged!”

Charity said on a gasp.

“And you never told me?”

“It was a secret,”

Felicity said defensively.

“Not only from you. From everyone.”

She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.

“He wasn’t always like this,”

she said.

“This—this cutthroat financier that he’s become. Once, he was just like me. Nothing. No one.”

“You are not nothing,”

Charity said fiercely, and her shoes clicked out a rapid, incensed tattoo upon the floor as she crossed the room to place her hands on Felicity’s shoulders.

“You have never been no one.”

But she had never been someone, and had never aspired to be. She had found happiness in the obscurity of her little life, far away from the infamy that might have found her otherwise. She had liked being Felicity Cabot. Had felt more kinship with her assumed name than the one to which she had been born. As if she had been reborn into a new life entirely, far from the chaos and the pain that had marred her younger years.

She said.

“I was never like you, you know. I was never a great beauty, nor had I any great aspirations. I was never going to be the sort of woman who would have been the talk of the town, or have a bevy of ardent admirers—”

Charity gave an inelegant snort, consigning the thought to perdition.

“Having a great number of admirers has often been more trouble than such popularity is worth,” she said.

“But I had Ian,”

Felicity continued.

“And at the time I thought—this is my story. A small life; a quiet one. A teaching position for myself. A husband in some sort of respectable career. A little house with a garden. Children, eventually. It was all I wanted.”

“He didn’t want the same?”

Mercy asked, unfolding herself from the couch and tucking the book into her pocket.

“I thought he did, once,”

Felicity said.

“But his dreams changed.”

They had grown ever so much bigger that hers. So big that her own small dreams had become barely a pinprick amongst the vast scale of his own. He had outgrown her—and it had happened so gradually. A bit at a time. The threads that had bound them fraying so slowly.

“He has no family to speak of,”

she said.

“He lost his parents rather young. He’d been working as a courier to support himself, and occasionally boxing for a bit extra. It provided him a meager income. Enough to eat, to take a room in a boarding house.”

And little else.

“But he was clever. He had a particular talent for numbers, for calculating payments due upon delivery in his head with incredible speed and precision.” And it had been entirely self-taught. He’d simply learned it through habit, through years of repetition. A cunning mind put to use, but capable of so much more.

“Mm,”

Charity said.

“A true rags to riches story, then, is it?”

“Not quite rags,”

Felicity said. But not too terribly far away from them.

“How did you happen to meet?”

Mercy asked.

“I can’t imagine it would have been an easy thing to accomplish.”

Felicity gave an awkward little one-shouldered shrug.

“I was seventeen, I think. Ian had often made deliveries to the school, from the chandler or the butcher or—or really anything with a weight beyond what a maid could be expected to lift and carry herself. With so many girls and staff in residence, the weekly orders alone amount to quite a lot. I’d…noticed him.”

He’d been young and roguishly handsome. Most of the girls had noticed him at some point or another.

She’d simply never expected him to have noticed her. Especially since in those early years, she had gone to such effort not to be noticed. To never draw so much as a sharp word or an askance look from anyone. To coast through life toward some unknowable future without making waves or upsetting the even keel, the stability that she had not yet settled into, one which still felt precarious.

“And did he…notice you?”

Charity inquired tactfully, her head canted to the side in curiosity.

Felicity took a sharp breath. “Yes,”

she said.

“Sometimes—some nights—the house was too quiet for comfort.”

And the inside of her head had been just too damned loud, filled with memories she’d have paid good coin to forget. And on the nights when her head had been loudest, when she could feel a scream roiling at the back of her throat, one she feared she might let loose in her sleep and wake the whole household with it, she’d removed herself from it.

“I’d been at the school long enough to learn which steps on the stairs creaked. To learn that the girls who shared a room with me could have slept through a cannon blast. To learn that the window in the salon led right out into the garden, and it didn’t latch properly like the others, didn’t shriek when opened. It was easy enough just…slip out from time to time, when I needed a bit of a walk to clear my head.”

“Oh, Felicity.”

“Don’t fuss at me, Charity. It was so long ago, and nobody ever noticed me. I was—very good at going unnoticed.”

Except by Ian.

“The first time I spoke to him, it was because I’d happened upon him while on a walk. I learned later that he’d lost his most recent boxing match, but he looked like he’d come out the wrong end of a tavern brawl, slumped in an alley outside.”

She still remembered that crooked half-smile, overriding the grimace of pain owing to the split in his lip. The faintly slurred.

“You’re one of Mrs. Lewis’ girls. You’re always watching me through the upstairs window.”

How embarrassed she had been! And he had only laughed, as if he could so easily make out the vivid blush that had spread across her cheeks in the darkness.

“I panicked,”

she said. “I ran.”

She had always run, at any perceived danger. Because the consequences of being caught could be dire.

“I made it safely back to the house—but I couldn’t make myself go up the stairs. I just kept thinking of him there in that grimy alley, suffering in silence. Too injured to move. Too injured even to take himself home again. And then—and then I found myself making for the stillroom instead, where the bandages and salve were stored.”

“You went back?”

Mercy asked.

But Charity only placed her hand upon Felicity’s shoulder in silent encouragement. She knew—they both knew—what it was like to be beaten. But neither of them had suffered alone. And Ian had, and she couldn’t have left him to it.

“Yes, I went back,”

she said.

“I think he was surprised. I patched him up, I suppose you could say. He told me that I didn’t have to worry, that he had no intention of informing upon me to Mrs. Lewis. We…talked.”

“Only talked?”

Charity inquired.

Felicity narrowed her eyes.

“He was so bruised and bloodied that it took him nearly an hour to climb to his feet.”

And it had looked like it had been a difficult endeavor.

“I helped him back to his boarding house,”

she added.

“It wasn’t far, but I don’t think he could have managed it on his own. And then—he told me I ought not to be out so late alone.”

“He was right,”

Charity said. “What?”

she added, when Felicity cast her a sharp look.

“Right is right. I can’t control that.”

“He told me that if I wanted a walk, he’d accompany me. That he’d meet me by the garden fence on Thursday nights if I liked.”

Which had been rather a lot to offer, when one considered that the sacrifice of even one evening a week had meant a potential loss of earnings.

“So you continued to meet him,”

Mercy said.

“Yes. For years. At first it was just on Thursdays.”

And eventually she had noticed that those regular Thursday walks had safeguarded a portion of her sanity. That when the walls felt too close and her mind seemed too loud, just the promise of Thursday could give her the reassurance she had needed to simply breathe—and to let whatever distress had tried to plant itself in her mind dissipate.

“And then it was just…whenever I wanted to see him. I knew which window at the boarding house belonged to him. It was easy enough to rap upon his window whenever he happened to be in. It didn’t begin as a romance,”

she said defensively. But it had fallen into one so easily. As naturally as breathing—which she had always done better at his side. He had quieted the restlessness in her soul; helped her to feel without feeling overwhelmed.

“But it must have been difficult,”

Mercy said.

“To keep such a secret. Mrs. Lewis would hardly have approved.”

“No; not while I was a student, and not when I eventually became a teacher. He wouldn’t have been considered a suitable match, a suitable husband in any capacity. At least—not when he was only a courier, an occasional prizefighter.”

“Ah,”

Mercy said.

“I believe I begin to understand. So he bettered himself. For you?”

She had thought so, at first.

“I suppose you could say that he was my first real student,”

she whispered. And it hadn’t even been difficult. He had soaked up knowledge like a sponge, always hungry for more. She’d helped him to improve his diction, his posture. Refined his manners. She had lent him books, which he had devoured like a man starving for them. Quizzed him on various subjects, improved his penmanship dramatically.

“Eventually,”

she said.

“he managed to save up enough money to buy a few second-hand sets of clothing, and to have a proper haircut. And he applied for a position with a local bank as a clerk. I’m given to understand that the manager was impressed with his ability to work complex sums in his head.”

And ever so suddenly, he had acquired a certain standing, a legitimacy that he had lacked before. Well on his way to being someone.

Charity’s hand squeezed her shoulder; a gesture of comfort. Felicity wondered if she could sense that the story was nearing its awful conclusion, racing toward the heartbreak that loomed, shadowing her words in an undertone of misery.

“And then,”

she said, and heard the odd little catch in her voice.

“and then he was always working. Often well into the night. Our little meetings, which had once been so regular, grew rare. Once, I did not see him for well over a week.”

He’d not come round on Thursday. There had never been a light within his window, never a response to a tap on the panes.

“He’d gone to London on business,”

she said with an awkward little shrug.

“He’d simply forgotten to tell me. Proving himself had eclipsed all else. It was as if I had been shoved into a dusty corner of his mind, occupying his thoughts for scant seconds at a time…only when he was reminded of my existence.”

“Did you complain of it?”

Mercy asked, with a lift of her brows.

“I would have done. Strenuously.”

“Of course.”

When had she started crying? Felicity scrubbed at her cheeks with her sleeve.

“I sounded like a harpy even to myself but…I had built such dreams upon him. And I could see them crumbling before my eyes, every one.”

And still she had held onto them desperately, even as they slipped through her fingers like water through a sieve. For far too long.

“He’d outgrown me,”

she said.

“I knew it before he did. We had once been in perfect agreement, and then—we weren’t. He hadn’t yet established himself to his liking; his employer was grooming him for further responsibilities which would not yet support a marriage. And then he told me that he was going to London. To live. To work.”

The next step in the career that had become all-important. So much more important than she had been.

Mercy’s mouth dropped open in shock.

“But—London? Your work is here,”

she said. Her eyes narrowed.

“Don’t tell me he hadn’t considered it.”

“Considered and disregarded,”

she said.

“I couldn’t hope to earn more than the tiniest fraction of what he could, after all.”

But she had never thought her salary, however meager, had had the slightest bearing on the value of her work, on the importance of it.

“He had promised we’d be married, that we would have a house and life here. And then, so suddenly, he’d reconsidered. He said he’d send for me,”

she muttered.

“In a year or two. When he was settled.”

And that—that had been the end. The moment that last thread to which she had desperately clung had been severed between them.

He had meant to leave her, too.

“That cad,”

Charity hissed.

“And he expected you—what? To wait? To follow at his convenience?”

“It matters little,”

Felicity said.

“I couldn’t have gone, even had I been willing to make that sacrifice for him.”

Which she hadn’t. Why should all of the sacrifices have been hers.

“Father was still alive. Probably the chance was small that we would have ever encountered one another, but—”

Just the thought set her heart into a panicked race. Even now, when the man was dead and buried.

“I understand,”

Charity whispered.

“And you would have been so very young, still. Had you even reached your majority?”

“Only just,”

Felicity said. Though she doubted even that would have stopped Father from dragging her home by her hair had he happened to encounter her. Still she had been petrified by the very thought, paralyzed by it.

“That was the end,”

she said.

“The end of us. He had used everything I had taught him, and then he abandoned the dreams I had once thought we shared between us to travel to a place I couldn’t follow. It happened a bit at a time. In casual dismissals of my concerns. In missed assignations.”

Each thing that had slipped through the cracks of increasing importance, widening that fissure which had erupted between them. Until at last she had slipped through the cracks.

“But then it was just…all too much. I think I knew it was coming. And still it broke my heart.”

Because she had desperately wanted him to be the one that stayed.

“Of course it did,”

Mercy soothed, and she reached out to wrap her arm around Felicity’s shoulders.

“Of course it did. And I am so sorry for it.”

Something in her—that wounded child that had longed so desperately for affection—simply relaxed into the comforting embrace of her sister and accepted the tears that she had never before let herself cry as an inevitability now. Perhaps they were the last remnants of the ice that had encased her, frozen just as she had once been, into a shield to protect her battered heart.

Charity’s elegant fingers smoothed her hair.

“My poor darling,”

she said.

“When did he return, then?”

With a fierce sniffle, Felicity cleared her throat of the lump of emotion that had settled there and swabbed once more at her eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“From London,”

Charity clarified. With her free hand she gave a little fluttering gesture of her fingers, which Felicity assumed was meant to indicate the house as a whole.

“Clearly he’s been back for some time, if he has got himself a house like this one with all of its accoutrements.”

Felicity’s brows knitted.

“He never left,”

she said.

“In the end—in the end, he never went to London.”

For a moment there was only a stunned silence, as Charity and Mercy exchanged baffled glances. “Why?”

Charity asked at last.

“Why, if it was so much a part of his grand plans?”

“I have no idea,”

Felicity admitted.

“That night—that last night—was the very last night I ever spoke to him. At least, until I had to barge in upon him and make a devil’s bargain to save Nellie from a debtor’s prison.”

Another odd little look shared between them.

“And you did not find that…strange?”

Mercy asked, in a tone of hesitance.

“Of course I found it strange,”

Felicity returned.

“But it didn’t matter any longer. I had no use for his excuses, for platitudes and promises already broken once. He’d shredded my heart a piece at a time already.”

And her trust along with it. Not for anything would she have given him the scraps of it again to desecrate further.

“But still you went to him,”

Charity said.

“When you were in need of funds, you went to him.”

“I hadn’t time to go to anyone else,”

Felicity said.

“Nellie kept the accounting books. I had no idea what a precarious position she was in, what a precarious position the school itself was in, until it was very nearly too late to save it. Had she confessed to all of it a week sooner, I would have applied to you instead.”

“But you went to him,”

Charity stressed again.

“He had money!”

Felicity said, with a wild little gesticulation of her hands.

“And I knew—I knew he would give it to me.”

Just as she had known that it would come with conditions.

“I would have done anything to save Nellie. So I made a bargain.”

“But how could you know he would give it to you?”

Mercy asked, her brows drawn.

“Because—because—”

Felicity swallowed hard. Because he had never stopped trying. She’d sent back dozens of letters unopened. At first they had come every day, and just the sight of that neat penmanship which she had helped him perfect had boiled her blood in her veins. Each another cut upon the hundreds he’d already inflicted, day after dreadful day.

But the days had passed, and then weeks, and months, and years, and gradually those letters had tapered off. Once a week. Once a month. Once a year—and that had been the hardest to reconcile. He had learned, eventually, that his letters would never garner a response. That if she happened to pass him on the street, she would only turn her head away.

And still she could expect that single letter to arrive eventually, even after years of her stalwart silence. Just to test her resolve, she thought.

“I just knew,”

she said, in such a small, pitiful voice. But it wasn’t the truth. The truth was something so much worse, so much more complex than she could ever put to words. She had known because he had never given up hope. Even if it had reduced itself down to the contents of a single letter, still he had clung to that small bit of it, all this time.