Swearing, he crossed to the cupboard and unlocked his guns. He would be prepared for the same force others hadn’t been and if anyone crossed his path and threatened Cassandra... For the first time in a long while he felt a sense of energy and release, and a vitality that had been lost in France. His eyes went to the clock. Almost six. Five hours to wait.
* * *
He was dressed in black from head to foot as she came through his window, the effect making him appear even more dangerous than he normally did.
‘We will be back well before dawn and I do not expect trouble, but if it comes then I should probably warn you that...’ She made herself stop babbling by an enormous effort of will. She was nervous, of him, of being here, of Nathaniel Lindsay looking so much like he had done in the Languedoc, the battered edge of a soldier in his clothes.
‘I have nothing else planned,’ he drawled and smiled, the languid, beautiful smile he had given her in Saint Estelle and in Bagnères-de-Bigorre before they had made love and she had forgotten that the world existed.
Shaking her head, Cassandra tried to clear her mind of the past. The past years had been so busy with taking care of Jamie and of trying to protect others that she had barely left a moment for herself. The woman in her ached for Nathaniel’s touch, even though she knew she had long since forfeited the desire for him to care.
‘I have been told of a place where young women are being kept against their will.’
‘Who informed you?’
‘The woman who lives in a house across the road.’
‘And you can trust her?’
‘As much as I can trust anybody.’ She hoped he could not hear the hollow uncertainty as well as she could. Last time at Whitechapel a trap had been set and she hoped that it would not be the case again tonight.
‘Are you armed?’
‘Yes.’ Lifting the material of her sleeve, she allowed him to see the knife in a leather sheath. He was good at hiding surprise, she determined, for not a single muscle in his face changed in reaction.
‘Dangerous?’
The word had her chagrin rising. ‘I am not the same person you met in France and I do not wish to be either. I shall never again be beholden to another and if you want to rescind your offer of help because of such an admission then I will understand.’
‘I don’t.’
Swallowing, Cassie tried to regain a lost balance. She was seldom off guard with anyone other than him, her certainty coming easily and without too much thought. ‘I will be in charge.’ She needed to regain the lead.
He nodded.
‘Good.’
Sometimes, she mused, I do not like who I have become, this person who is hard-hearted and tough-minded. Her thoughts went to Acacia, the beautiful woman whose eyes had had poems written about them, and she frowned.
The crossroads in life had taken her in directions that had not all been her own choice and once she had traversed some pathways there was no going back. The burning boats of chance. Ludicrous to wish for some literary offering from a man, but there it was. She did. And not just any man, either, but the one who stood before her now, his pale grey eyes shaded, dressed entirely in black.
She gathered her words in carefully. ‘I do not expect trouble, but sometimes it comes anyway. If it does, I will hold you in no account for the protection of my life.’
* * *
Nat could hardly believe the detachment she laced those words with. ‘Because you no longer see me as your husband?’
The rush of red upon her cheeks surprised him before she turned away, a scarlet tide rising from her throat. Not all indifference, then. Already she had opened the window and climbed through into the cold darkness.
A carriage was waiting at the end of the street, a hackney cab with a driver who did not turn to greet them, but looked straight ahead.
‘I pay him well for silence,’ she clarified as they got in. ‘The fewer people involved in this the better.’
‘Does your sister ever help you in these night-time sojourns?’
‘Of course not.’ Shock was inherent in every syllable.
Suddenly he understood. ‘How ruined does society imagine you to be?’
He caught the deep frown on her forehead through the gloom. ‘Very. Societal judgement on the moral poverty inherent in prostitution holds a power that is difficult to fight.’
‘But you are trying to?’
She shook her head. ‘I help those without prospects or a place to live and most of these young women see their chosen profession in very different terms than those of wealth and power have a wont to.’
Nathaniel paused, trying to understand exactly what it was she was saying. ‘You condone this activity? I thought you rescued such women.’
‘The Daughters of the Poor encourages financial and social independence. Sometimes the only way of doing that is to make certain that those we aid are safe in their work.’
‘You help them remain on the streets?’
‘As opposed to leaving them in the throes of a fourteen-hour day inside a cold dank sweatshop run by punitive men.’
‘That, I suppose, is another way to look at it.’
‘The ideal of refined and protected ladies who are not only good, but who are to know nothing save for what is good is workable only for the rich, though some might say it is repression with a different face.’
At that he did laugh because he had never had a conversation quite like this with a woman. Such discourse was freeing and he wondered how far she would take her arguments.
‘You are an advocate of sex for pleasure rather than for procreation? A dangerous threat to male authority?’
‘Look around you, Nathaniel. Women, making their way in the world by the use of their bodies, are a highly visible aspect of our society now. The hope of the Daughters of the Poor is to keep them unharmed.’
Her use of his name was soft and familiar and when the carriage lurched to throw Cassandra against him, his arms closed around her in a movement all of their own.
Protected. Like you were not.
The scent of soft knownness was intoxicating, a small familiarity amongst everything that was changing as the carriage hurtled through the darkness of London’s poorer areas.
* * *
Cassandra smiled. Nathaniel had never been a man to step back from risk—she had seen that again and again in France, and now even after a conversation of ideas that he could not have been brought up to believe in, it wasn’t debate he was offering, but comfort.
A generous man. A generous lover, too. She sat up and away from him. ‘You did not marry again?’
‘No.’
‘You did not wish to?’
He was silent.
‘I thought you might be dead after Perpignan.’ Cassie tried to keep the terror from her tone.
I went to Paris to look for you, to scour the streets for every face that might have been yours. I stayed there for as long as I could manage it and even as I left I looked back.
‘Lebansart’s men made certain I could not call for help when they dumped me by the river.