Silent Surrender (12 page)

“Walk. Think.” He shrugged. “You worry?”

“Little.” She would not chide him for it. “All my fault.”

He opened his arms to her and she went to him, falling against him the way she had longed to so many times in the past year. She’d wanted to cling to him this way after her parents had died, after she’d learned from disgusting old Poole that her father had conspired to send her away. She’d wanted Jude’s comfort then and he’d only been able to give her safe platitudes.

All that was forgiven now. She lifted her face and welcomed his kiss, not borne of reckless passion, but true, deep affection. How long had that been there, and she’d thought it unrequited?

Pulling back, he asked her with his voice, “Can you be happy with me? Without him?”

How could she give him any answer other than “yes”?

Chapter Nine

Esau had forgotten how his room smelled of mildew and how the bed dipped down in the middle where one of the iron rungs had rusted through. He’d forgotten how small it was, almost as small as the little attic room at Honoria’s house, and how stiflingly hot.

Esau pushed the window open the few scant inches it would go. Too many past lodgers had climbed out it, the landlady had explained, and now all the windows on the second floor had nails driven about a third of the way up to prevent them from opening. The fetid breeze off the harbor washed in and it was no better than the smell of the moldy walls.

A sharp rap on the door startled him. That would be her, then, the landlady with her fat arse and blackened teeth. He opened up and said nothing, because she never listened to anyone, anyway.

“Don’t think you’re not gonna pay me for the days you were away. Left your stuff all about. I couldn’t rent the room if you didn’t clean up after yourself, and if you’d been gone any longer, I would have sold your things.” She pushed a lock of gray hair back from her head. Some women, you could tell they’d been beauties once. Not with this one. She’d probably been as homely at fifteen as she was at fifty.

She looked him over, her eyebrows shooting up as she took in his new clothes. “But maybe the price is about to go up. For my troubles?”

“Bugger off, these were a gift.” If she wanted to raise his rent, he’d just sleep in the alley. It wasn’t like he owned much that he couldn’t carry with him, and he’d been on the streets a time or two before. Hadn’t liked it, but that wasn’t the point.

“Ooh, a gift, he says.” The woman’s phlegmy laugh turned into a fit of coughing, and she braced herself with one meaty hand against the door. When she recovered, she said, “Who gave you a gift like that?”

“A friend.” He would be damned if he were going to admit the real reason he’d got them. Not to her. She’d already tried to make “arrangements” regarding his rent. All that had gotten her was the rent three days early every week.

“Friends in high places, I can see that.” She pulled her pipe from beneath her dirty blue shawl and shined the bowl on her skirt. She was always smoking the thing, squinting up one eye as she drew on it, shouting at the working girls who got too close to the stoop. “I’ll buy ’em off you. Half a crown for the lot.”

The clothes were worth far more than that. “Harry said he’d take them for his shop, and he’s willing to pay me what they’re worth.”

She made a noise of disinterest. “All the same to me, so long as I get my money out of you. You didn’t lose your work, I hope, with your little holiday, did you?”

“I’ve got work.” He moved to close the door on her.

“Because if you don’t have work, you ain’t stayin’ here,” she warned, a threat she could recite by rote. When she was out of earshot, her lodgers mocked her with that phrase, though she would turn them out quick if they lost their pay, and well they all knew it.

She shuffled off down the creaking hall, hacking and wheezing the whole way, and in a moment the acrid scent of her tobacco wafted up to the window. Esau shut it, and damn the heat.

He slowly unbuttoned his shirt, taking a care. Before, if a button popped off, it wouldn’t have mattered to him, because the thing was just a costume anyway. Now he wanted all them on, so he could get the money Harry had offered.

Grimly, he remembered the way Honoria had torn the shirt open, how the buttons had scattered, and how they’d been on again, right as rain, the next morning. The poor housekeeper had probably stayed up all night sewing them back on. He shook his head in disgust. People like Honoria and Jude, they didn’t realize how good they had it.

Still, the memory brought back the feeling of her small, white hands on him, and those same small, white hands gripping the bedpost as he’d fucked her. His cock got hard, the traitor.

He wasn’t a prostitute to be fucked whenever the girl felt like it and he wouldn’t be treated like one. What had she thought, that he would just blindly accept her plan to uproot him from his home and send him away to America? A man like him, he had to have his pride or he’d have damn near nothing at all.

But what would his pride do for him here, in a room with moldy paper on the walls and a landlady sure to keel over dead from consumption in the next year? He’d have to find a new place to live then anyway, and wasn’t America as good a place as any? He wasn’t likely to find a wife as pretty as Honoria and he’d never really thought to get married, anyway. To live with her, to fuck her when she wanted and to wear fine clothes and go to big houses, that might be good enough for a while. If she tired of him, he could always come back and start over. He was good at that.

How would Jude like that? A grim smile bent Esau’s mouth. The teacher was as in love with his pupil as any man could ever be with a woman, and she’d still wanted a rough dock worker. Esau could take a mean sort of pride in that, if he wanted to. He wasn’t sure he did, though, because he would have to acknowledge that what she felt for him was just base, animal desire.

What was wrong with that? Sure enough, the whores he fucked had never been wild with passion for him. Still, it rankled him to have her treat him as an object. He’d thought maybe they could be friends and she’d gone and made plans for him like she was moving a piece of furniture to another room.

He dressed himself in his old clothes. They’d washed them at Honoria’s house, and they smelled like soap and flowers. It would take a long time to get his comfortable stink back into them, and he chuckled at that. From dock worker to male mistress and back again. That was a story no one would ever believe. He was like Cinderella with a cock.

He folded the shirt, trousers, jacket and vest up, then folded them into the wool coat and put the shoes on top of them. He hated to see those go, but what use did he have for them working on the dock? They’d just get ruined anyway.

He left and headed to Harry’s shop. It was the finest shop on the street, but that wasn’t saying much, considering the street. A little bell chimed over the door when he entered, and Harry motioned him over to his counter. “Put them down there, let me see. You shouldn’t have wrinkled the sleeves.”

“You can take the wrinkles out, and put them on my tab.” He wondered if he shouldn’t have kept one button at least, to remember her by. Memories like that, they only led to trouble and pain. If he couldn’t be reminded of her, he couldn’t miss her.

Harry made a noise as he checked over the shirt and vest, and he wiped the tips of the shoes with his sleeve, coming away black. “No wear on these. Jesus, man, how did you get them? No, don’t tell me, I don’t need to know that.”

“I didn’t do anything illegal.” Had he? Prostitutes got taken in all the time. No, he was no prostitute. The clothes were all he’d taken away with him. She could keep her damn money.

With the profit from his new clothes in his pocket, Esau was almost to the door when Harry called out, “Wait, there’s a handkerchief here, I’ll pay you for that, too. I won’t have anyone saying I’m a crook.”

Esau turned and saw the scrap of white, edged with lace, in the man’s hand. It was crumpled and lined, and immediately he remembered when he’d last seen it.

“No, mate. That’s not for sale.” Esau took the handkerchief from the man quick as a thief.

Harry shook his head. “Suit yourself.”

On the street, Esau stuffed the lace into his pocket, his heart pounding. He remembered that hanky, sure enough. He’d used it in the park, after he’d put his hand under Honoria’s skirt and she’d trembled in his arms. He could still feel her wetness on his fingers, could still hear her cries muffled by his hand. God, but she got wet when she came, all slippery and hot. A man could drown in her.

He adjusted his aching cock and hurried back to his room, barring the door behind him. He sat down on the dirty bed and pulled the handkerchief out, his fingers trembling. He lifted the fabric to his nose and smelled her there, a thousand heated memories flooding his mind. He thought of things he’d done with her, and things he’d never done, that he’d never get a chance to do now.

Would she leave for France after all? Could he sit idly by and watch her condemn herself to that bleak life? Condemn Jude as well?

With shaking hands, he folded the handkerchief and tucked it beneath his pillow. He couldn’t go to her. He’d been dismissed clear enough. Maybe Jude would convince her to stay. How they would get their money out of old Mr. Poole, that was still a mystery.

Anger boiled up in him, hot with wounded pride. That wasn’t his worry, not anymore. She didn’t want him as a man, she’d wanted him as an employee. A toy to be played with. If that was the way she intended to treat him, then he was better without her.

Still, when the sky grew dark outside his window, he wondered where she was. Alone, sobbing herself to sleep? With Jude, safe in his arms? Either way, Esau was alone.

He didn’t prefer it the way he once had.

* * * * *

It seemed strange to Jude to hold Honoria in his arms, to sleep with his face against her hair every night. Since their argument days before, they had not spoken of Esau. They had not spoken of much, really, too consumed with their passion for each other. They woke, they made love, they blushed and smiled through breakfast, they made love again, and the day went on in such a way until they were both too exhausted to carry on, and then they would sleep, sometimes through dinner. It was as though the aching loneliness of years needed fulfillment in just a few days.

The servants noticed, he had no doubt of that, but they were too busy to complain, boxing up what few possessions Honoria could spirit away from under Poole’s nose.

In the dim twilight of the room, Honoria turned in his arms. He would never tire of seeing her this way, her dark hair wild against her pale skin, the white of the sheets. Her eyes held a spark of mischief that had been missing since her parents had died. Some new kind of joy, untempered by sadness, had come over her.

“You think I smart?” she signed, leaning up on her elbow.

His eyebrows went up at that. He’d never considered it a particular concern of a woman. He knew they worried about their appearance, and what others—particularly other women—thought of them. “Yes,” he signed without hesitation. “Why?”

Her gaze fell to the bedclothes and she walked her fingers over the crisp linen, up his arm, to his chest, where she stroked the hairless skin there. When she looked up again, she signed, “I take my money from Poole. Know how.”

“Really?” He had wondered how, himself. He’d planned to take her to America with him, anyhow, but he hadn’t counted on her inheritance. Poole was a mean-spirited, greedy man.

She made the sign for “ship”, the prow of her three fingers cradled in the sea of her other palm, once and then again in the space beside the first. “I buy ship. Sail from America.”

Jude sat up. It was not a terrible idea, but he doubted Poole would agree to it. “Poole think you idiot.”

“Poole idiot,” she signed quickly, rolling her eyes. “Money important him. He not refuse.”

Jude pondered that a moment. She had a point. Before his death, Mister Wallis had longed to expand his shipping trade to his own port in America. “The fees I pay the colonists are crippling us,” he’d confided one night over brandy. Though Jude had been an employee of the house, Wallis had never shied away from candid conversation. He’d been as poor as a young teacher once himself, and he’d gained no air of wealth when he’d made his fortune. Surely, he’d spoken of such to Poole, his business partner?

“You run business,” Honoria continued, her hands moving fast in her excitement. “Poole not refuse man. Hearing man.”

“True,” he agreed. Though Poole was a disrespectful cuss, a man would have a better chance bargaining with him. “I not know ships, trade.”

“I know.” There was a confidence and resolve in her that Jude had never seen before. “You face. I brain.”

He wondered how well that would work, trying to pull the wool over the suspicious old man’s eyes. At least trying would be better than doing nothing, and trying to keep a wife on a salary as small as Jude could earn himself. If they had as much luck in America as Wallis had in Plymouth, they would be very comfortable indeed.

“I go tomorrow,” he told her, his mind already formulating the words he would use to win over the old man.

“No,” she signed emphatically. “We go. Both.”

“Not good idea.” If she were to go to Poole, he would only be reminded of her supposed inferiority. He’d probably kidnap her and force her onto the ship to France himself, so desirous was he to steal her money.

“My money,” she argued. “I go. Poole, I have business.”

He wondered at that, but he wouldn’t press her. Honoria kept her secrets to herself and nothing would pry them out of her before she wished to share them.

She laughed, obviously pleased with herself, and he smiled at her and would not caution her that her plan might not work. She was intelligent, perhaps he should have told her so more often when she’d been his pupil and not his lover. She would know the risk of failure, and if Poole rejected them, she would know how to cope with that as well.

He had protected her for far too long. Everyone had done, and he saw now how unfair that had been. Perhaps it had been the mantle of tutor that had made him feel so responsible for shielding her from the world. Perhaps it had been her deafness, though he’d prided himself for so long that he didn’t see her any differently than any other woman.