Page 35 of Felicity Cabot Sells Her Soul (Scandalous Sisters #3)

Butler had brought the brandy eventually, though even the deep drink of it which she had taken had failed to soothe Felicity’s frazzled nerves. The girl had settled somewhat in the last few minutes, though her eyes still darted about nervously, skating across various features of the elegant little drawing room to which she had been escorted. Her small fingers clutched at a mug of cider, and she huddled upon the couch, withdrawing into the folds of the blanket draped over her thin shoulders.

She had noted, Felicity was certain, the two hired men stationed outside the door, must have surmised that escape was impossible. She’d not uttered a single word as of yet. Had hardly allowed her gaze to settle upon the three of them seated across from her for longer than a moment.

Just a girl. Felicity exhaled slowly, felt her shoulders relax along with it. Just a girl, more ragged and neglected than she had first appeared. Like a scullery drudge, with tousled, lank hair and a smudged little face. Clothes that had perhaps seen better years, the hem of her skirt frayed and dirty. Holes worn into the threadbare coat that looked as though it might’ve been pulled off of a corpse.

No wonder the girl had stolen her reticule. Probably thievery was the only way to keep herself fed. And despite the lavish attention Mama paid to her own wardrobe, she had clearly not put much of an effort into outfitting her daughter properly.

Charity spoke first, in a low voice.

“There is…something of a resemblance, I think.”

Yes, though not one Felicity would have noticed, had Ian not done so first. But then, Charity looked like Mama, Mercy most resembled her own father, and Felicity—

Well. She’d never felt she much resembled anyone in particular. Perhaps some distant ancestor she’d never met, nor ever had any hope to. She hadn’t been expecting to see echoes of her own face in someone else’s. But the resemblance was there, in bits and pieces, beneath the dirt and the grime. To all three of them. Charity’s nose, she thought. Mercy’s brows. And her eyes.

They’d known there could be more of them. But it had been an abstract sort of thought. Distant, vague. A mere possibility that would never come to fruition without some outside intervention. And yet, here she was. This girl, so much younger than the rest of them. Another sister; one Mama had kept.

The girl’s empty mug clattered noisily onto the small table between them, released too soon by fingers too twitchy to keep hold of it. At last she spoke, in a small, birdlike voice.

“Are you—are you going to send me to the magistrate?”

Felicity hesitated.

“I don’t want to,”

she admitted. Her eyes strayed to the longcase clock in the corner, noting the time. Five hours more, and Mama would be waiting. Ian was already arranging for her capture, time now to their advantage.

“Will you tell me your name?”

she asked.

The girl shuffled her feet upon the floor, her hands clasping in her lap. “Grace,”

she said softly, directing her reply to her toes.

“Grace Seymour.”

Grace. It was a confirmation they hadn’t truly needed, and still Felicity felt tears well in her eyes. Beside her, Mercy smothered a small sound with the tips of her fingers, and Charity swallowed back a sniffle. “Grace,”

Felicity said.

“How old are you?”

A small shrug which threatened to wrench the blanket from her shoulders. “Sixteen,”

she said.

“Please don’t send me to jail. It’s dreadful in there. There’s rats.”

Felicity startled. Just sixteen—and she’d already been jailed.

“When were you in jail?”

she asked.

Another shrug, awkward and shy, as if suddenly cognizant she’d admitted to something she ought not to have done.

“Two years ago,”

she said.

“Just—just for a week. I stole a penny bun and got pinched for it right quick.”

A week in jail for the theft of a penny bun! Atrocious.

“Surely your—your mother came to your aid?”

If Grace noted the stumble, she gave no sign of it. Instead she gave a firm shake of her dirty blond head, sending her hair flying.

“She said I was lucky enough that she’d waited for me to be released. That she hoped a week in the clink was enough to make certain my fingers would be more nimble next time.”

Her shoulders slumped, her hands knitting in her lap.

“I was just hungry,”

she said in a disconsolate mumble.

“And were you hungry the night you pickpocketed me?”

“I’m always hungry.”

Again her gaze flitted away, and she said in a faint mutter, as if she were repeating words that had been spoken to her.

“Don’t steal, don’t eat.”

“She shouldn’t have made you steal to eat,”

Mercy blurted out.

“She’s your mother, she ought to have—she ought to have—”

She gave a great sniffle and swiped at her eyes.

“She ought to have loved you.”

Yes. She ought to have loved all of them. But it had become abundantly clear, now, that Mama had never loved anyone other than herself. It had hurt once, so deeply, to have been abandoned. To know that Mama had chosen to leave them behind, and it hadn’t even been a difficult choice. And now Felicity wondered if she and Charity and Mercy hadn’t been the lucky ones. They had all found places for themselves, but it seemed that Grace—Grace had no one at all, no place of her own.

Someone had to give her one. Someone had to care for a girl who had no one else. A girl alone and frightened, dragged off the street and into a strange home. Surrounded by strangers, and likely with the utter certainty that she would be abandoned once again by the mother who by all rights ought to have come to her aid. Above all else, this girl was her sister. Another missing piece of her family, like Mercy had once been.

This girl was no villain. She was only a child. One who had been shown too little love, too little care.

“I’m not going to send you before the magistrate, Grace,”

Felicity said.

A fierce relief swept over the girl. Her eyes glittered with tears; her chin quivered.

“I’m sorry that I—I stole your reticule,”

she said, swiping at her eyes.

“I oughtn’t to have done it.”

No, perhaps not. But she had been hungry. Near to starving, by the look of her thin frame.

“You followed me to the theatre that evening?”

Felicity asked.

Grace ducked her head, shamefaced.

“Mama knew where you were going to be. I was supposed to create a distraction after the play had let out, to lure you away. But I never had to, because—because—”

Because she had left of her own volition. So Grace was absolved of that much at least.

“Your mother gave you that note this evening? Told you where to deliver it?”

Another awkward shuffle. Grace hunched her shoulders, gave a small nod.

“She just told me to put it through the mail slot,”

she confessed.

“And to be sure no one saw me do it.”

A little hiccoughing sob, half-stifled in her fist.

“She’s going to be so angry with me.”

“Do you know what was in the note?”

Charity asked.

“No, I—I can’t read,”

Grace confessed, shamefaced.

“And Mama never tells me anything. I just do what she says, or she slaps me.”

Poor child. Poor, frightened child. Exactly the same as Felicity had once been. Almost the same age, even. She remembered well enough how wretched it had felt, to be suddenly bereft of her only family. And Grace hadn’t even had much of that to begin with.

“She told you to put the note through the mail slot,”

Felicity said.

“But you knocked upon the door, didn’t you? Why is that, Grace?”

Grace gave a little shrug, and her eyes darted guiltily.

“Mama never tells me anything,”

she reiterated.

“But sometimes I overhear her. Sometimes I eavesdrop when I’m not meant to. And a few days past I heard her say that you were her daughter, and I thought that might make you—that you might be…”

Her voice drifted away into silence, and her shoulders slumped.

“Those men grabbed me and dragged me here, and I was so frightened,”

she said.

“But I only wanted to ask. I only wanted to know.”

“If I was your sister?”

Felicity asked.

A tiny nod. Hesitant, ashamed. So afraid to be slapped down once again, when it had taken all of her courage only to knock upon a door in search of answers.

“We all are,”

Mercy said softly.

“All three of us,”

Charity added.

“We’re all Mama’s daughters. We’re all your sisters.”

Grace choked on a sob and swiped desperately at her eyes.

“I’m sorry,”

she said.

“I didn’t know what to do.”

A flicker of fear slid over her face, her complexion paling.

“Mama is going to slap me if I’m not back soon,” she said.

“No one is ever going to slap you again,”

Felicity said.

“Grace, Mama is in a great deal of trouble. In the morning, she is going to be apprehended. She’ll be taken before a magistrate herself. She is going to be the one headed to jail this time. It’s likely she’ll even be transported.”

And they would all be rid of her for good.

Grace’s face crumpled in grief, and she clasped one hand over her mouth, a thin wail squeaking through her fingers. Felicity’s heart wrenched for her. Better, she thought, the devil she knew rather the uncertainty that would afflict her life without even a negligent, uncaring mother. Better even the absence of any affection than to be set adrift in the world.

“But where will I go?”

Grace asked mournfully.

“What will I do? I don’t have anyone else.”

Well, there went the niggling fear that the nasty brute of a man who’d attacked her might be Grace’s father.

“You have got family, Grace,”

Felicity said as she rose from her spot on the couch.

“You have got three sisters, and brothers-in-law, and even a little niece.”

She rounded the small table, knelt by the side of Grace’s couch and placed one hand upon her knee, so small and thin beneath the dirty skirt of her dress.

“Here, there is always enough food to eat. No one will make you steal to feed yourself. And no one ever slaps anyone.”

An unbearably fragile expression flitted across the girl’s face. Just the smallest stirring of hope, there and gone in an instant, as if she were all too familiar with having it crushed before it had the audacity to bloom.

“And you’ll—you’ll let me stay? Even after what I did?”

she asked in a whisper.

“Yes. Oh, yes, Grace, of course you can stay,”

Felicity said. A rustle of skirts somewhere behind her, and then the pressure of Charity’s gentle hand upon her shoulder. And there was Mercy, too, settling onto the couch at Grace’s side, dabbing a few stray tears from her cheeks.

With a wild little sob, Grace pitched forward, falling into Felicity’s arms. She threaded her arms about Felicity’s neck and buried her head against her shoulder, crying her heart out there upon the floor of the drawing room.

Surrounded, finally, by the family she had never known she had.

“It’s all right, now. You’re safe,”

Felicity soothed as Mercy drew the blanket up once more about the girl’s shoulders, and Charity stroked the disheveled hair away from the dirty little face.

“You’re home. At last, you’re home.”

∞∞∞

Felicity roused to the sound of the bed chamber door opening, squinting in the cold winter sunlight that poured through the windows. She’d slept, but not nearly enough. Dawn had already been climbing over the horizon before she’d retired for the evening; perhaps a few hours had passed since.

She thrust her elbows beneath her, struggling to sit up. “Ian?”

“Here. I’ve only just returned.”

There was the clattering sound of coals layered upon the fire, and Felicity shifted, bracing her back upon the mound of pillows as she watched him tug at the rumpled linen of his cravat, working free the elaborate knot. Every bit of him was rumpled, actually, from his dark hair to the fresh wrinkles pressed into the clothing he’d worn since yesterday and had never had much of a chance to change out of. A new growth of beard shadowed his jaw; dark circles scored beneath his eyes attesting to his own lack of sleep. Tucked beneath his arm was a leather folio.

“Nobody woke me,”

she said.

“Mary usually—”

“I asked her to let you sleep. It’s been a long night all around.”

A heavy sigh as he shrugged out of his coat, tossing the folio to land upon a chair before the fire.

“Grace is still asleep as well, from what I’m given to understand. I thought you’d prefer to be here when she wakes.”

He looked dead on his feet, entirely run through. But instead of crawling into bed as she was sure he would have preferred, he collapsed upon a chair, stretching out his legs and casting his head back.

Gingerly, she swung her legs over the side of the bed. There ought to have been some sort of conflict within her, some dread over the coming revelation of what she had missed while she’d been asleep. But the anxiety which had shadowed every moment since she had received Mama’s very first note did not come.

“I don’t think she’s had a decent night’s sleep in ages,”

Felicity said as she padded across the floor.

“And she was ravenous, poor girl.”

And cold, and dirty. It had been an effort of hours just to scrub the filth from her skin. Four changes of the bathwater before it had at last run clean.

“Probably,”

Ian said as he scrubbed at his face and closed his eyes.

“I don’t imagine your mother ever saw her as anything more than a pet. And not one especially well-liked.”

“Not a pet. A tool,”

Felicity corrected as she settled upon the arm of his chair.

“I think—I think that’s how she saw all of us. Not her daughters. Not even people. But things to be used.”

She smoothed at the folds of her nightgown, reached out to pluck a bit of lint from the front of his shirt.

“Probably she would have abandoned Grace, too, had she not shown an early talent for thievery, for burglary. Mama kept her—”

She gave a soft, shuddering sigh.

“Mama kept her because she was useful. A ready scapegoat to be sacrificed if she had need of one.”

“Did you learn how she found you?”

Ian asked.

Felicity nodded.

“Grace said they were first in London,”

she said.

“Charity was notorious; it wasn’t difficult for Mama to locate her flat. Grace didn’t know who Charity was, then, of course—but she knew better than to argue with Mama. She picked the lock one evening while Charity was out.”

“To steal from her?”

“No; she didn’t dare.”

Ian’s hand found the small of her back, rubbing in soft, circular motions.

“Charity’s former protector is…quite a dangerous man. It’s well-known that they are still friendly with one another. Even Mama quailed at the thought of invoking his wrath. No,”

she said.

“she was there in an attempt to find me. And she found Charity’s letters. My letters to her. Mercy’s letters to her.”

“Ah,”

he said.

“I had wondered.”

So had she. Being Felicity Cabot had not protected her there; not from someone with reason enough to know better.

“So she knew we had all found one another,” she said.

“And then she met Graves,”

Ian said.

“And by chance, he told her all she needed to know to make you her target in truth.”

“Yes. Grace didn’t know the significance of any of it. She knew only that Mama intended to extract a great deal of money from me.”

And she had expected Felicity to be such an easy mark. Without the protection of a noble title or friends well-positioned within the seedy underworld. Reliant upon her good reputation, one which could so easily have been sullied.

“More fool, her.”

There was a sliver of malevolence in the words. That warm hand at her back instead curled over her hip; a possessive gesture she doubted he was much aware of in the moment.

“Was…everything else as Grace said?”

Felicity asked tentatively. After that fraught scene in the drawing room had concluded and amidst the consumption of what was probably the first proper meal the girl had had in days, Grace had talked endlessly. Of everything. Where they’d been, how they’d arrived here in Brighton, what had happened since. As if a great weight had lifted from her chest, she had surrendered every secret she had been forced to keep. She hadn’t understood what it had all meant, what Mama’s intentions had been, precisely—but she had understood enough to give the deciphering of them over to someone else.

Every bit of it. From the name of the man who’d accosted Felicity on her way back from the theatre, to his likely location, to the inn at which Mama was presently residing. More than enough to render even the tiniest possibility of Mama’s escape moot, provided the information which Grace had given proved to be correct.

“Yes. All.”

Ian blew out a breath.

“Ludlow—the brute who attacked you—was found sleeping off a night of drink at a tavern. He was less than happy to be rudely awoken at the hour I found him.”

His fingers flexed on her hip and he gave a little hiss of pain.

Felicity glanced down, surprised to find spots of blood dotting his knuckles, the skin red and raw.

“Ian! What did you do?”

“Pummeled him,”

he said, without so much as a shred of remorse.

“Don’t glower. I would have preferred to kill him. Regrettably, the arse has got the hardest head I’ve ever encountered and I’m far less practiced than once I was. I think I dislodged a tooth or two.”

“Ian.”

“I left him still breathing,”

Ian said.

“And in more capable hands than mine. He’s a ruffian, but not one of any particular intelligence or wit. Last I saw of him, he was pressing the thief-takers to tell him which of his crimes had seen him done in. The damned fool hadn’t even the presence of mind to shut his mouth; he’s going to end up talking himself straight into a lengthy prison sentence, if not transportation.”

The pressure of his fingers eased.

“He was only hired muscle,”

he said.

“Bought for the price of a few pints of ale on the nights your mother had need of him, and the promise of more when she’d received the payment she expected. I don’t believe she ever intended to pay him what she’d promised, given that she intended to be on the first post coach this morning.”

Felicity might have managed to spare a shred of pity for the man—another unwitting victim of Mama’s—had he not frightened her so terribly that evening after the theatre.

“And Mama?”

she asked.

“Was not well pleased to find herself taken into custody the moment she stepped out of her room at the inn this morning. Screeched fit to wake the dead, right up until she was told she was to be taken before the magistrate to answer for her crimes. Then, I am given to understand, her tune changed rather drastically.”

“Oh?”

She leaned her shoulder against his. “How so?”

“She began asking for you,”

he said.

“Insisted there had been a dreadful misunderstanding, and if she could only speak with you, you would see it for yourself.”

He hesitated.

“Do you want to?”

“Want to what?”

“See her,”

he said.

“Speak with her. Before she is taken away. It is…unlikely in the extreme that you will ever have another opportunity.”

“There is nothing she could say that would alter my opinion of her,”

Felicity said.

“I know now who she is.”

There had once been a time that she had wondered after the mother she had lost. But after today—she never would again.

“Do you know,”

she said softly.

“She might simply have come to call. Made a show of caring about me. About any of us; all of us. Asked for funds instead of demanded them. But she didn’t. Probably she could not have maintained the fiction of caring long enough. Probably,”

she said.

“it was simply easier to send a few threatening notes and wait.” Perhaps even more satisfying.

It had suited her purposes to conceal her involvement—to a point. But once she had been caught out, she hadn’t cared enough even to don a mask, to present the fa?ade of a loving mother. Extortion had been the lesser effort to a woman who had never given so much as a passing thought to the daughters she had abandoned beyond what service they might be of to her.

“No,”

Felicity said firmly.

“I never want to see her again. I never want even to think of her again.”

“Charity and Mercy said much the same,”

he said, and his hand slid up her spine in a soothing stroke.

“I’m so sorry. Felicity, I’m so sorry for what she did to you. To all of you.”

Yes; it had been a tragedy. But it was over at last. And now she knew the answers to those questions that had haunted her since childhood. It wasn’t a relief, per se, but something more akin to a resolution. As if she had come full circle, confronting the spectres of her past. Healed the wound of abandonment that had been left upon the child she had once been, when she had been too young to bear it. Now she could examine it with an objective eye; this scar that had shaped her, but which had now been deprived of its power to hurt.

She said, quietly.

“I don’t know how to forgive you for things for which you are not sorry. I’m not the sort of person who can overlook them, who can simply pretend that they never happened. I cannot manipulate those things in my mind into something less than they were, or make excuses for them. Even if—even if some good came of them, even if I do find myself grateful for certain things—”

“The ends do not justify the means.”

He uttered the words with a deep, fatalistic inflection. Almost as if he had reached a similar conclusion himself.

“I am sorry,”

he said.

“For trapping you into marriage. For using your friend against you and ensuring you had no other choice but to stay.”

The words were…not quite enough. Not now; not yet. Felicity scrubbed at her eyes with a corner of her sleeve.

“I don’t know how—how not to be resentful of things that cannot be changed.”

Things which had been decided for her without her consent.

“I don’t know how to mend it,”

she said, hearing a shameful little squeak in her voice, born of that aching part of her that wanted to forgive. That desperately wished there were something that could ease the hurt, that wished the clock might turn back upon itself and give her the opportunity to choose for herself, knowing what she now knew.

A long, low sigh. “I do,”

he said. His fingers fell from her back as he leaned away from her to snatch that leather folio from where he’d tossed it on the neighboring chair. There was the rustle of papers within as he resettled himself.

She’d seen that folio before, she realized. The cover still bore the marks her nails had scratched into it on her frantic flight home that first night she’d come to his house.

Ian withdrew a stack of papers.

“This is every copy of that agreement between us that was ever drafted,”

he said.

“No others exist.”

She believed him. She simply didn’t understand what he meant to imply with the words.

“I can’t change the past,”

he said.

“But the future is still mutable. Your future is for you to decide.”

And with a flick of his wrist, he cast the papers straight into the fire.