time, after she’d drawn her hood up into place, Lila placed her palm in his and allowed Hugh to lead her outside.
East London had already come alive; the streets were overflowing with vendors hawking their wares and small children weaving amongst the crowds in a bid for work to be found. As they walked, he felt the press of Lila’s body against his. Stealing a glance down, he caught a glimpse of her face from within her hood.
Her cheeks stood out, pale. But it was the sheer panic emanating from within her eyes that gave him pause. She was terrified. “Here,” he said, leading her onward.
Lila, however, gave no indication that she’d heard him.
Catching sight of their approach, one of the drivers jumped down.
Hugh fished a purse out from inside his jacket. “See the young woman on her way. Any harm befalls her, I’ll end you.” He proffered that promise as casually as he did the coins he turned over to Lila.
The balding man blanched.
“Don’t pay him a pence until you’re deposited where you need to be.”
Lila remained absolutely motionless, her focus on the crowds of people behind them.
“Lila?” Hugh quietly urged. “Lila,” he repeated more insistently, managing to snap her free from whatever trance she was in.
Blinking slowly, she looked to him as if she’d forgotten him, as if she were seeing him for the first time. “Hugh?”
Bloody hell.
Drawing the door open, he helped her up. “You’ll be fine,” he promised. “I won’t ever be far.”
And he was staggered by how very much he wanted that vow to hold true for moments beyond this one.
Hugh stepped away, and a short while later, Lila’s carriage sprang into motion.
And she was gone.
Chapter 17
Following Peterloo, when Lila had returned home, carried in by servants and deposited in the confines of her four-poster bed, she’d lain on her back and simply stared at the garish pink wallpaper that adorned her walls.
In the immediate aftermath, amidst the silence and solitariness, of all there’d been to think on . . . she’d reflected upon . . . her hands.
Given how very close she’d come to losing her life, and because of it, never again seeing her family, her hands had been the oddest of things to dwell on.
More specifically, she had pondered how much she’d failed to properly appreciate her hands when they’d been whole. She’d not thought about what gifts they were capable of . . . the chords they could pluck into hauntingly beautiful medleys. She’d failed to appreciate the feel of her older sister’s hand twined with hers, their perfectly formed digits perfectly interlocked.
Nor had she understood that hands were, in fact, the carriers of memories. Each protuberance and bend contained within their imperfect lines remembered horrors.
She’d come to dislike her fingers.
Nay, in all honesty, she despised them.
Oh, they weren’t her only scars. She bore the bayonet’s mark upon her leg, and the ragged line left by a spur down the middle of her forehead. But she could avoid mirrors and forget that her face had been transformed. And the ugly mark upon her leg could be hidden under skirts and chemises—or, as she’d recently learned, by trousers.
After she dressed each day, she was spared from staring at and remembering all the ways she was broken and all the nightmares she carried.
But her fingers she couldn’t hide. Even the leather gloves she donned curved about those bent fingers, reminding her when she didn’t need to be.
And the whole of her now small world noticed, too: her mother and brother, who could not bring themselves to look at the twisted digits. And Sylvia had gone out of her way to pretend that she didn’t see them.
Seated at the pianoforte in her sister’s music room, Lila studied them now, seeing in them new memories.
Those she’d made this day with Hugh.
Lifting them close to better inspect them in the dim lighting, she scrunched her brow.
They remained the same slightly crooked digits they’d been that morn, but today, she’d used them differently, freely. She’d used them to learn and defend herself, and then after, she’d stroked Hugh Savage with these same broken fingers. And he’d not been at all repulsed.
Today, for the first time in the whole of her life, in his arms, she’d felt . . . beautiful.
Not almost beautiful.
But rather, Hugh had helped Lila see that for all the ways in which her body and mind were scarred, she was still very much a woman.
And he’d desired her.
In his apartments, in his rooms, she’d