Chapter 14
Rule 14
Never bind yourself to a man.
For ten years of her life, Helena would awake, visit her office, open her books, and work through the accountings of her brother’s club.
In the whole of those ten years, with the exception of that morning of madness with Robert’s invasion of her chambers, she’d never deviated from her safe, predictable routine.
How vastly different one’s life could become in a handful of quick moments. Her mother going from beloved mistress of a duke to lover of a violent gang leader in London had been proof of that.
And sitting here, on the stone bench in the Duchess of Wilkinson’s walled-in gardens, with her head tipped up toward the sun, after years of her safe morning routine, was now proof.
It was not that she didn’t miss her work. She did. It was just . . . this new sense of discovering life beyond the Hell and Sin Club. In the immediacy of Ryker’s sending her away, she’d not seen past her own sense of hurt betrayal. How dare he simply turn her out? Not only because in doing so he’d devalued her role with the Hell, but also because it had proven his inconstancy in a sea of already faithless men.
Helena angled her head back and the sun’s rays bathed her face in a warm, soothing heat.
Mayhap this is why Ryker sent her here. Mayhap, he’d known that she needed to confront the life she could belong to outside of the Hell and determine where her place truly was. She absently skimmed her fingers over the puckered flesh on her opposite hand. The nicked skin, brutally and meticulously carved away, a testament to the truth that she could never truly belong here.
She’d long ago pledged to never bind herself to a man the way her mother had, not with her flesh, nor her heart, and certainly not her name. Now she appreciated how very easy it was to make those very mistakes.
“The marquess is waiting for you.”
The Duchess of Wilkinson’s sharp tone brought Helena’s head around. Robert.
The harsh glint in the woman’s eyes quelled Helena’s initial rush of pleasure and she slowly came to her feet, warily eying the other woman. For her brothers’ ribbing about her inability to accurately read a person’s character, they’d proven wholly wrong. The unrestrained hatred in the duchess’s gaze contained a level of evil to rival the darkest soul in the Dials. Apparently that emotion knew no regard for rank or title. Nor would it send a woman of the duchess’s station all the way to the gardens to announce Robert’s arrival. Such a task would be reserved for a servant.
“Your Grace,” she greeted, and started toward the doorway. A frown formed on Helena’s lips as the duchess pulled the door closed.
The woman flicked a glacial stare up and down Helena. Peeling her lip back in a sneer, she said more powerfully than any words could her every thought on her duke’s by-blow.
Helena didn’t care if the woman was a duchess, queen, or princess, she’d not be browbeaten. “If you’ll excuse me? Lord Westfield, as you indicated, is waiting.” She squared her shoulders, and used the additional four inches she had over the duchess to look down at the woman.
“I do not want you here, Miss Banbury.”
She stiffened.
Well, that made two of them. Or it had . . . Four days ago . . .
The duchess dusted her palms together. “Your mother was a whore,” the woman spoke with the same casualness she’d use if she’d remarked upon the weather. Helena schooled her features, while all the while rage slithered around. In living in the streets, you learned quickly that your enemies sought to uncover and exploit your weakness. If you revealed a crack, they’d slip in and destroy you. The older woman’s eyes disappeared within thin, narrow slits. “And with your wiles, you’ve stolen the attention of the marquess away from Diana. He’ll bed you, but he will never wed you.” Her voice shook with the force of her loathing.
At Helena’s continued silence, the duchess snapped. “Do you have nothing to say to that?”
Helena turned her lips in a slow, hard smile. “About my wiles? This is the first I’ve ever been credited with such.”
“Because of your scars?” The sharp, piercing, shriek-like quality of those hateful words hinted at a woman with a thin grasp on her control.
Helena nodded. “Yes. Because of my scars.” Those intersecting marks upon her person, as clear as numbers, that stood as testament to her origins and her very existence. If the duchess thought to use those old wounds to break her, she’d be very disappointed. She took a step around the duchess, when the woman shot a hand around her forearm, gripping her hard enough to raise bruises.
“The marquess will find out about you. He will find you are not one of us. Trash from the streets like your brother.”
Helena stared blankly down at those fingers upon her, crushing the flesh in a painful grip. It had been nearly nineteen years since she’d had a hand raised to her in violence. Distant cries from long ago echoed around her mind, stealing her breath . . . Ye brat . . . Oi should kill ye . . . Ryker’s enraged face, as a boy in the streets bloodying Diggory within an inch of his life, drove back the remembered horror. Then, that had been the man Ryker was. Fearless. Undaunted. The memory of that long-ago day brought Helena’s shoulders back. “My brother has more honor and worth in his smallest finger than you have in your entire person.” She leveled her with a look. “Now, unhand me, madam.”
The duchess released her suddenly. “My daughter was born to be a duchess, and you’ve inserted yourself in this family,” she seethed. “Just as your mother inserted herself in my husband’s life. So you may bed Lord Westfield, but he will belong to Diana. Is that clear?”
“She doesn’t want to wed him,” she shot back.
“It matters not what she wants. It matters what she was born to.” Just as it hadn’t mattered to Ryker what Helena wished. Regardless of birthright, decisions were made for women. Robert belonged with a woman of his station, and when he should wed, Diana, in her kindness and properness, would make him an ideal bride. Even with the girl’s protestations, she would be no match for her parents’ desires for her. Those two families would one day unite, and Robert would no doubt see himself to Diana. A dagger-like pain stabbed at her chest.
“I see you understand,” the duchess said, searching her gaze over her face, and Helena hated being exposed before this ruthless woman. “I’ve no problem if you bed him,” she said, the way she might offer a guest the last pastry on a refreshment tray. “As long as you do not think to make yourself a duchess. You are not one of us, Miss Banbury. It is important you remember that.”
How could she ever forget such a detail when Society had ingrained that lesson into her since the moment she’d come wailing into the world? Still knowing it, accepting it, that savage blade turned all the more. “You may go to hell,” she bit out, ringing a gasp from the other woman.
Helena yanked the door open and strode the same halls she’d wandered yesterday when Robert had led her to the gardens and awakened her body to a dangerous desire. The duchess’s unneeded reminder only heightened the truth of that great divide between Robert and her. From their births, they’d been each set upon a different course. Even his talk of his childhood had marked that gulf. He, a child who’d had guest chambers and soaring foyers and played, and Helena, who’d . . .
There were bannisters. She jerked to a stop and stared unblinkingly at the end of the long corridor.
I slid down the bannisters whenever the duke came to call . . . and he would laugh and capture me in his arms . . .
Her lower lip quivered, and she pressed her eyes firmly shut against the force of that long-buried memory, unleashed by Robert’s laughing revelation yesterday afternoon. Helena fisted her hands in her skirts. She did not want those memories. She did not want to think of life as it had been in those short five years before her world had been filled with violence and evil.
Coming to the moment, Helena continued onward to the foyer.
Robert stood, head bent as he consulted his timepiece. At the sight of him, not even a day after he’d strummed her body with his skilled touch, heat exploded in her cheeks. By his actions yesterday, and the duchess’s accusations a short while ago, they no doubt expected her to be a skilled whore long past shame.
At the sound of her approach, he glanced up and she braced for the leers she’d observed on the faces of too many gentlemen inside the Hell and Sin. He smiled. “Helena,” he greeted, dropping a short bow.
Blast him. Emotion lodged in her throat. Why must he continue to unsettle her world by contradicting everything she expected where powerful peers were concerned? “My lord,” she said softly, as he took her gloved fingers in his. He bowed over her hand, and then made to pick his head up—and froze.
A hard, lethal sheen iced his eyes, and she staggered back under the force of that emotion. He held tight, and she followed his brutal stare to the finger marks on her forearm. No one except her family at the Hell and Sin had ever radiated such palpable rage over the marks left by another on Helena’s skin. She captured the inside of her lip between her teeth, hating that his volatile reaction should so matter.
Quickly disentangling her hand from his, Helena accepted the cloak from a footman with a word of thanks, eternally grateful as those bright red marks were concealed. Next, she collected her bonnet, placed it on her head, and neatly tied the ribbons under her chin.
The butler drew the door open and she hurried outside.
Wordlessly, Robert handed her up into the curricle, and climbed in behind her. A moment later, he snapped the reins and the carriage lurched forward. She closed her eyes and welcomed the gentle spring breeze slapping at her face. Mayhap he’d let the matter rest.
His gaze trained on the busy streets ahead, Robert asked in crisp tones, “Who put their hands on you?”
She sighed. “No one.” The lie formed easily. She didn’t care to speak about the duchess or her dark words.
“Helena,” he growled, and his knuckles whitened over the reins.
“I slid down a bannister.”
He briefly shifted his attention from the road to Helena, and then retrained his attention forward.
Helena plucked at the fabric of her skirt. “You asked if I was a mischievous child. Whenever my . . . the duke,” she quickly amended. She’d ceased seeing the Duke of Wilkinson as her father long, long ago. “Came to visit, I would straddle the bannister and shimmy down, and he would capture me in a hug and swing me about.” Not the actions of a man who’d then easily cut his mistress and child from his fold, and yet . . . that is what had happened. “I forgot that until now,” she murmured. “Until you shared your story.”
Someone had put their hands on her.
And Robert wanted the name of the person so he could take them apart with his bare hands, and stuff his limbs into his bloody mouth. From the corner of his eye, Robert evaluated Helena. She leaned against the seat, her eyes closed. Her face relaxed, showing no hint of the guardedness that she cloaked herself in. Using her distraction, he fixed on the rippled flesh of her right cheek.
Until now, he’d not allowed himself to think about how a young woman came by those marks. Coward as he was, he wished to believe they were marks of her birth.
He was a nobleman; however, he was no fool. Someone had hurt her—and badly. The kind of hurt that moved beyond the physical and stretched into every aspect of a person’s existence.
Twelve years ago, inside his grandfather’s office, he’d bore witness to depravity and ugliness. But he’d wager his very soul on Sunday that what someone had done to Helena was the level of evil that indelibly marked a person.
Robert fisted the reins.
Only, it hadn’t been any person—it had been Helena Banbury with her bold and unflagging spirit.
Even though in just three months’ time she would leave, return to the Hell and Sin, and he’d never again see her but for, perhaps, maybe a glimpse if he visited the club, he wanted to know—about her and the secrets she carried.
They arrived at Hyde Park, and Robert shifted the reins, guiding the curricle through the quiet path, onward.
“You do not say much do you, Helena Banbury?”
She opened her eyes. “No.”
They shared a smile.
“My brothers often teased that I was far more comfortable with numbers than people.”
He started. “You have brothers.” Of course she’d just indicated as much. But how odd he’d not known that particular detail.
Helena nodded. “One brother and . . .” She scrunched her mouth. “Three who, though I don’t share blood with them, are more family than my actual father.”
How casually she spoke of three men who were not related to her by blood. That piece she shared would have shocked any member of polite Society. In what capacity had she known those men? Questions tumbled around his mind. She’d called them brothers, but had there been one of those men who’d, in fact, been more to her? Had one been a lover with whom she’d resided at the Hell and Sin? Robert gripped the reins hard as a seething jealousy worked its way through him like a slow-moving cancer.
“You are shocked,” she observed when he still said nothing.
“I shock far less easily than you believe.” In a bid to conceal the volatile emotion thrumming through him, he winked.
They reached Kensington Gardens and Robert brought the curricle to a stop. Birds happily chirped their morning songs, while the thin branches of nearby elms danced gently in the spring breeze.
“They are beautiful.”
The soft, wistful quality of Helena’s voice carried to his ears.
Robert followed her gaze to the floral gateway that spilled into Kensington Gardens. Colorful blooms lined each side of the graveled path.
“The flowers,” she clarified.
“Do you know, in all my rides through Hyde Park, I’ve never much noticed them?” he admitted. When in London, he rode through Hyde Park nearly every morning. Yet, he’d never looked about him. Not truly. Not in the way she now gazed almost longingly at those blooms.
Her startled gaze shot to his. “Surely not.”
“Surely,” he said, hating the flash of disappointment in her eyes. She’d found him wanting. The death of her smile and glimmer in her eyes said as much.
She stared out at the blanket of purple flowers with their yellow centers. “I’ve never left London.”
He blinked at that sudden change in conversation.
“I have always lived here,” she continued, a faraway quality to her husky contralto. “First, in a townhouse rented by the duke and then . . .” She breathed slowly through her lips. “Then, we lived in a small room in St Giles.” His heart hitched. St Giles was a place safe for no man, woman, or beast, and certainly not a child. He struggled to draw breath. What hell must she have known? “I always wanted to go to the country.” She may as well have spoken of her preference of milk and sugar with tea. “My mother grew up in Kent and she spoke of the blue skies and fields of wildflowers, and I could not believe there was a place where flowers just . . . grew. How could that be?” she asked softly, a faint smile on her lips. “How when there are only grounds of stone and dirt?”
A weight pressed on his chest.
“There were many days we didn’t have food.” She motioned to the purple flowers. “I was in the streets where shopkeepers would empty the refuse and one day I saw this . . . blanket of purple lying upon the streets.” A soft laugh escaped her, and she gave her head a wistful shake. “I raced over believing I’d found the flowers my mother spoke of.” She paused. “They weren’t.”
“What were they?” he managed; all the while shame ate away at him, and he hated a world in which a small Helena Banbury had foraged for food like a starving pup, just as much as he hated himself for a self-absorption that had prevented him from truly seeing those children about him.
Flecks of silver danced in her eyes, as she leaned up toward him. “They were red cabbage leaves,” she whispered. “I’d found something more magnificent than even flowers. I would pretend I was in a meadow, collecting flowers, but then we could cook those leaves and eat them, too.”
A groan lodged in his chest. “Helena . . .” He was useless. Utterly useless, incapable of any words that could or would ever be able to erase the suffering she’d known.
Then, in the midst of the darkness of her story, she did something he suspected, even when he was one of those old, doddering dukes with a cane and monocle, he would forever recall—she smiled. Such joy lit her face that a powerful warmth exploded inside him. Something intangible and terrifying that he could not sort out in this moment.
“There was a time I could not speak of those days. I called them my ‘dark days.’ You never forget what it is to have a hungry belly, wondering and worrying about where your next meal will come from, but as time passes, and you have food, and a home, and safety, you begin to appreciate all you had to do in order to survive.” She again tipped her face up toward the sun. “And there is something very wonderful about surviving.”
Oh God, with her every unwitting admission, agony tore at Robert’s heart, threatening to cleave him open. While he’d been a boy tying together his mother’s fine linens and learning to ride his first mount, she’d been a girl who’d hunted flowers in the stone, and pillaged for food. Emotion wadded in his throat, and he struggled to get words past it.
She was far braver than he ever had been, or ever would be. Selfishly he’d come without a servant so he could be alone with her. Now with that faraway glimmer in her eyes, he wished he’d brought someone to attend his bloody carriage. So he could escort her down, and lead her through those gardens he’d never before noticed, never would have noticed, until her.
Relinquishing his death grip on the reins, he claimed her left hand. Slowly, he pulled off one of her gloves.
She made a sound of protest, but he continued on to the next so that her palms lay bare between them. “What happened?” he asked quietly, stroking his thumb over the scars on the top of her hand.
A sheen of tears filled Helena’s eyes, and she averted her gaze. When she looked back, the familiar strength radiated in the depths of her green eyes so that those fleeting mementos of sadness may as well have been imagined. “I prefer to think about bouquets of red cabbage, Robert.” He wished to press her for everything she withheld. Wished to know everything when he had no right. But somewhere, in the course of four days and a chance meeting at gaming hell a month earlier, this fiery woman who’d openly challenged him in Lord Sinclair’s parlor had slipped past his defenses.
And for the first time since Lucy’s betrayal, Robert wished his heart were intact . . . because Helena Banbury would have been a woman worthy of it.
Another quiet laugh spilled past her lips, rusty as though from ill use. “I suspect we’ve been here a sufficient amount of time? We’ve been seen?”
The pretend courtship. Her fleeting time here. And her eventual return to the Hell and Sin Club. He imagined her reentering that world, amongst lascivious lords and powerful proprietors of that hell . . . and something dark, and primitive, roared to life.
Robert gave thanks for the years of practice he had of false smiles, for he forced his lips upwards in a half grin. “Indeed, Miss Banbury. Shall we return?”
“I’ll . . . see you tomorrow then?” Was there truly a hopeful quality to that hesitant question, or did he simply wish there to be?
He tweaked her nose. “I am afraid tomorrow, I’ve a previous engagement.”
This time, there was no imagining the crestfallen expression that fell over her face and a lightness filled him.
“Of course,” she said quickly. “I was just wondering. Curious. Given the true nature of our . . . our arrangement; however, we do not need to see one another every day.”
“What if I say I want to?” The hushed question left his lips before he could recall it.
And just like that, their world was restored. Helena rolled her eyes to the sky. “I’m not one of your conquests you need to waste your words on, Robert. It is not my intention to take you away from your . . . pleasures.”
He flexed his jaw. Long ago he’d earned the status of rogue and it had been one he relished. Never more had he despised that reputation than with her flippant charge. For the time they’d spent together, short though it was, did she still only see him as a lord living for nothing but his own pleasures?
“My family is in deep,” he said in solemn tones.
Her gaze shot to his. Then, like a fish plucked from the sea, she opened and closed her mouth. “What?” Consternation weighted that word.
Robert expected there should be suitable reservations in confiding this secret. If it were discovered, it would open his sister and father up to nasty gossip, and where he didn’t give a jot about what they said of him, there was Bea to protect. But he’d no doubt in trusting Helena with this.
“My grandfather made some substantial investments,” he said finally, keeping his stare forward. “And our pockets are nearly to let for it.”
“What type of investments?”
Once again, she held him frozen in awe for how unique she was to all other ladies he’d ever known. With his revelation, any other woman would have been slack-jawed with shock or disdain, and yet Helena spoke with a rational precision better suited to a skilled man-of-affairs.
“Steam,” he said.
“You are certain it is so very . . .” Her eyes raced quickly over his face. “Dire.”
He gave a rusty chuckle. “Oh, quite. I’ve been in frequent meetings and short of letting go the whole of our servants, selling off unentailed properties, and abandoning those steam ventures, there are few options, except . . .” He grimaced, and promptly firmed his mouth.
“What?” she asked, too clever to ever miss that telling word.
A muscle jumped at the corner of his eye. “My father would tell you the only option is for me to marry an heiress.” As soon as that admission left his mouth, he cursed.
Helena swiveled her gaze up to his.
And he, long jaded by life, found his neck going hot with embarrassment . . . and shame. He forced another laugh, and it emerged sharp with enmity. “He wished it so much that he’d even faked he was dying and staged a summer party to marry me off, all with the purpose of salvaging our depleting coffers.” Once again, the still-fresh resentment brewed under the surface, and threatened to spill over.
“Oh, Robert.” Helena covered his hand with hers, pulling him from the brink of bitterness. “And you do not wish to save your family’s fortune that way.” As hers was more statement than anything, he remained silent. Helena caught her jaw between her thumb and forefinger and tapped. “You’re certain there are no other ways. That the man-of-affairs is competent?”
Actually, for his father’s faith in the man, Robert wasn’t entirely certain of the aging man’s skills. With Stonely’s disdain for investments, he very much harkened back to rigid strictures on nobles dabbling in trade. “I believe my family would do better with someone more capable,” he settled for.
“Perhaps I can look at your—”
“Let us speak of something else,” he said quietly. Shame needled at his insides. What a purposeless existence he’d lived for so long. All Helena had shared this day, and she would worry with her eyes and words about his family’s finances. Finances he’d not given thought to in the course of his life. “Please,” he added, when she made to speak. “I just wished you to know why I cannot visit on the morrow.” Even as I desire it more than anything. More than is wise.
She gave a reluctant nod.
As he gathered the reins and guided the carriage from Hyde Park, he reflected on what an utter fool he’d been these years.
How much he’d failed to see. Not only his family’s finances, but beyond that. To something so much more important—the suffering others had endured around him. And how much more he would have failed to see if he’d not stumbled into the wrong chambers in that forbidden hell.