The Virgin Who Ruined Lord Gray - Anna Bradley Page 0,51

still can’t believe he’s gone. It seems incredible a life like his could end so quickly, with so little fanfare, like…snuffing out a candle.”

Sophia gave the long fingers in her hand a hesitant squeeze. “How did you know him?”

“The three of us—myself, Lord Lyndon, and Henry—were at Eton together, and later Oxford.” A sad smile lifted one corner of his lips. “His high spirits got us into no end of trouble, but he always managed to talk his way out of being sent down. He had a good heart. No one could stay angry at him for long.”

Sophia nodded, waited.

“His son, Samuel, is just two years old. His widow, Abigail…all she and Henry wanted was to be together, to watch their son grow into a man.” Lord Gray trailed off with a shake of his head that said more than words could have. “They should have had that chance. None of them deserved this.”

“No, they didn’t.” How wrong it was, that a man like Henry Gerrard should suffer such a tragic fate, while men like Peter Sharpe went about their lives unscathed.

Lord Gray met her gaze. “Jeremy Ives doesn’t deserve it, either.”

Sophia’s heart twisted at his words. Until he said them aloud, she didn’t realize she’d ached to hear them. Not from Lord Gray, exactly, but ever since this nightmare began, she’d been waiting for someone, anyone from outside the Clifford School to listen to her, and believe her.

Believe Jeremy.

The tears she’d been holding back stung her eyes. They didn’t fall, but Lord Gray saw them. He brushed his fingers under her eyes and caught the moisture on his fingertip. It was the last thing Sophia expected him to do, and from the stunned look on his face, the last thing he expected of himself.

They stared at each other, tension crackling between them, until Lord Gray broke their gaze. He cleared his throat. “I intend to speak to Sampson Willis about Jeremy. He may be able to do something to help him.”

Sophia nodded, but she already knew it wouldn’t do any good. The courts had pronounced Jeremy guilty. Sampson Willis wouldn’t challenge the verdict, and even if he did, it would come too late to save Jeremy.

But she didn’t say so. There was no point.

Yesterday she’d accused Lord Gray of not caring if an innocent man were sent to the gibbet, but she’d been wrong. He did care. Perhaps he even cared as much as she did, but he was still the Ghost of Bow Street. He still had faith in men like Sampson Willis. He still believed in justice, in courts and witnesses, in magistrates and scaffolds.

Perhaps she’d believed in those things once, too, but if she ever had, it was so long ago it was a mere echo in her memory. But perhaps once, before her mother’s death, there’d been a time when she believed in justice. She’d been too young to call it that then, of course, but when her mother had promised her good little girls were rewarded for their behavior, Sophia had believed her.

She’d been a good little girl, once upon a time, but it hadn’t made any difference. She’d still been that little girl who’d torn strips of linen from the hem of her mother’s petticoat to try and bandage her head. She’d still ended up in a dismal, empty room, her pinafore soaked with her dead mother’s blood.

Somehow, it was this image of her childhood self, still young and naïve enough to believe a bandage could heal every wound, that haunted Sophia. A child, crooning broken fragments of lullabies to her murdered mother, waiting for her to wake up.

Good little girls didn’t get rewards. Justice didn’t have anything to do with goodness, any more than it did with evil. So, there was really no point in being good at all, was there?

That was the lesson Sophia took with her on the day of her mother’s death, when she left the only life she’d ever known behind. A small, hard kernel of knowledge, buried deep inside the layers of her heart.

It was a lesson she never forgot.

But she wouldn’t try and explain this to Lord Gray. He’d never learned that lesson, because he’d never had to. For him, one made a wrong right again by taking the matter to a magistrate.

There was nothing Sampson Willis could do for Jeremy. Sophia looked down at the hand still cradled in hers and thought about the scars on Lord Gray’s knuckles. She’d been surprised to find he