calm as a stone statue.
Mrs. Pooley looked frightened. The children simply stared, great saucer eyes following his every move.
Though the rooms were ancient and decrepit, the high ceilings hinted at better days in some long-ago time. Once, this had been part of a great house. It was no longer great, but this part of it was clean. Mrs. Pooley was shabby but not slatternly. Except for the breakage Crummock had done—and which he’d pay for—the place was neat. Even Sommers would approve.
“I know you don’t want charity,” Ashmont said. “But a loan wouldn’t be taken amiss, I hope. To carry you through the interval. Until we can see about Mr. Pooley’s wages and further employment.”
Miss Pomfret approached then. She took out her purse and counted out the money she’d brought. Ashmont added something rather more substantial, which he assured her was a loan. Mrs. Pooley wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron. He looked away.
To his relief, the women moved aside to talk quietly.
To his alarm, the smaller child, who’d been set down on a threadbare piece of rug or blanket—it was hard to say what it was—crawled to Ashmont, and levered herself up by grabbing his trousers. He took her up, and after a moment’s panic about what to do with her, finally rested her on his hip, the way her mother had done. She weighed nothing.
They had nothing.
He wanted to weep.
She makes men cry, Morris had said.
Maybe they ought to.
Ashmont and Miss Pomfret made their way out of Bleeding Heart Yard and into a tangled conglomeration of yards and courts. He wasn’t at all sure where they were, or why they’d come this way, but she seemed to know, and he followed her lead. For the moment he had all he could do to absorb what he’d seen and the sorrow and anger churning inside him.
He was dimly aware of the rain, the light drizzle quickening into a steady pelting as they continued. The dim byways grew darker still, and finally he said, “Are you lost?”
She grabbed his arm and pulled him into a doorway. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m lost. You undermine me at every turn.”
A leaden weight settled into his gut. “What have I done? Why didn’t you tell me?”
She looked up at him, but it was too dark in the doorway to read her expression—not that her beautiful face was easy to read in the best of circumstances. “Do you remember that day at Camberley Place? The party for the children, when you fought Godfrey Wills?”
“Of course I remember. How could I forget?”
“Ah, but you forgot me.”
“Not altogether. What do—”
“I loved you. I was eleven years old, and I loved you for what you did. I went on loving you, though, when there wasn’t a reason.”
“I don’t—”
“I believed you’d grow up and be a hero, somebody fine and noble and true. I waited and hoped and waited and hoped. But it never happened. You disappointed me, again and again. At last I gave up waiting and hoping.”
He was chilled now. “I didn’t know.”
“How could you know? After that day, you never saw me, even when I was there. Almack’s. I stood in front of you and I might as well have been furniture.”
No. No. But it was true. He didn’t remember, and he knew she wouldn’t lie, exposing herself like this.
“And after a time, I gave up,” she went on. “I had other things to do and others to believe in. But now you do this.”
“I didn’t mean to spoil your plan.”
“You were splendid today, don’t you understand?”
He understood nothing anymore. The world was all awry. A woman and her children with everything they owned lying in the dirt. Hundreds, thousands of women like that. He wanted to hit somebody.
Now this. She’d loved him and he hadn’t known or cared. He’d hurt her, the elfin girl she’d been and the young woman she’d become, repeatedly. He’d been oblivious, too busy with his own pointless life.
She grasped his shoulders and shook him. “Today you were everything I ever wanted you to be. Oh, Lucius, what am I to do with you?”
“Wait.” His spirits had lifted and sunk and risen again at a dizzying rate. They rose once more. “You’re not disappointed. I’m . . . splendid.”
She flung her arms about his neck and kissed him.
Not tentatively. When was she ever tentative? She kissed him hard on the lips. She kissed his cheeks, again and again. She kissed his chin. Her fingers slid up his