Chapter 13
Elsie’s fingers still shook.
Before, they had trembled at unwanted memories raised by William’s mistrust and ruthless reminder that men… and women were given to evil acts, but now they quaked for altogether different reasons.
A short while later, with the items she’d requested delivered by a small army of servants and laid out upon the boulle shaving stand and mirror, Elsie stood with her back presented to William.
Her nape burned from the intensity of the stare he directed on her. And she stole a quick peek at the mirror. Her gaze collided with his. A faintly mocking smile ghosted his lips—and hers burned with the remembered feel of his mouth upon hers. Stop. Elsie redirected all her focus on the task at hand. What accounted for that cynical, mirthless grin? Had he sensed her unease and reveled in it? Was it that she’d been so rubbish at her furtive observation of him?
Either way, the gentleman remained a mystery in every way.
Nay, not necessarily in every way.
He’d agreed to her request—yet again. When the cynical glint in his eyes had hinted of a man who wanted to order her gone, he’d capitulated. He’d also allowed Bear to enter his rooms. What did it all say about William Helling, Duke of Aubrey, and this state of isolation he’d imposed upon himself?
It indicates he wants to be free…
It proved he was a man who carried guilt and pain.
She picked up the scissors and tested their sharpness. All the while, she contemplated William. No doubt, based on her own experience with those within the Brethren, William flagellated himself for crimes that he could never atone for. Why, he’d brought misery upon her own household and did not even recall the man whose life he’d so upended.
The scissors slipped from her fingers and clattered noisily upon the wood.
“Are we ready?” His melodious murmur rumbled around the room.
Elsie stiffened. “Just a moment more.” To steady herself, she hurriedly shifted the straight-edge razor, shaving scuttle and brush, and scissors so they lay in a neat row. When she’d finished, she stared at the items. “You may sit,” she called, directing that to the scissors.
The floorboards offered not so much as a groan to indicate the stealthy gentleman had moved. Silent as night, William slid into the ridiculous Venetian Green Man carved and gilded wood throne befitting a king. But then, William was not very far from that exalted state. He would sit on such a hideous piece of furniture that would cost more than all her personal possessions combined and would have been more beneficial to her to burn the mahogany wood portions for warmth.
“You disapprove,” he noted when she reached for a towel.
“Of?” Elsie dipped the fabric into the washbowl.
“The chair,” he clarified.
Elsie squeezed out the cloth, splashing droplets within the bowl. “I don’t like it,” she said matter-of-factly. “There’s a difference between disapproving and disliking.” Good God, was there nothing he missed? She was in over her head with him. And in being here, in helping him, she was making the same naïve mistakes her father had. “It is hard to disapprove of an inanimate object.”
A laugh exploded from William’s lips. Coarse and ragged, it was a primitive half growl that originated in his chest and shocked her motionless, for there was also a sentiment she’d not witnessed from him—genuine mirth. Unlike the cynical half grins he’d flashed since her arrival. He cradled his jaw as he laughed.
William stopped abruptly. He opened and closed his mouth. And then tried again. “I haven’t laughed…” he whispered, letting his hand fall to his lap. “I…” Shock-filled eyes met her own, an almost-plea buried within their depths.
Her heart squeezed. This raw pain was something she knew something of. In this, the two unlikeliest of people paired together were kindred spirits. “I haven’t either,” she confessed into the quiet.
His body went still, the silence encouraging her to continue.
And yet, she couldn’t. Elsie wrung the cloth out once more, squeezing out the remaining drops. She applied it to his thick beard and held it in place.
“It was a gift from my wife,” he said quietly. The jolting admission came out slightly muffled by the damp cloth covering his mouth.
Elsie lifted the fabric and returned it to the bowl.
“I hated it,” he confessed, another laugh escaping him, this one less raw and containing memories that only he saw but wished to confer. “I thought it garish and better fitting a place in the king’s palace than in my chambers.”
Her lips twitched. She and William were alike in that thought, too.
His laughter faded to a distant smile. “But it was a gift from her, and she was so very proud of the piece she’d had commissioned. And so, I told her thank you and that I loved it. It’s been here ever since.”
William gave his head a little shake, dislodging an errant drop of water that clung to his beard.
Propelled back into movement, Elsie gathered the towel once more, dunked it several times, wrung it out, and pressed it to his cheeks. “My father whittled me a dog.”
She’d not shared the memory before because there had never been anyone to share it with.
Over the edge of the white cloth, William met her eyes. Mayhap this was why men such as he probed the secrets of strangers on behalf of the Home Office, for an unexplainable need to share that part of herself slipped forward.
“My father knew of my love of animals, and it was my birthday. I wager he could have talked circles around any scholar trained in medicine, but”—amusement bubbled in her chest—“a whittler he was not. The dog had five legs.”
Another laugh exploded from him. “Five?”
She joined in, and their laughter melded and rolled together, his heavy and deep, hers lighter and lyrical. And it felt so very good to laugh again. And with him, the most unexpected of men to make her feel… anything outside of her own resentment. “It… it was to be a tail,” she managed to squeeze out through her hilarity. She shook with the force of the healing amusement until tears streamed down her cheeks and William’s visage blurred. “A-and because the additional leg was slightly larger than the two hind ones, he was perched upright, perpetually s-standing.” Elsie doubled over and clutched at her sides, letting the lightness fill her chest and spread out to every corner of her being. How she missed this… carefreeness.
Their laughter dissolved together as the present intruded, along with the memory of her role here.
Elsie dusted the amusement from her eyes and, with a soft sigh, removed the damp cloth from William’s face.
Collecting the scissors, she set to trimming the slightly coarse hair of his beard.
As she worked, she felt his stare on her. No further words passed between them.
Elsie paused periodically to assess the length of William’s beard. She tugged lightly at the errant strands, cutting them. “There,” she murmured, setting the scissors down. She traded them for the brush scuttle and stirred the warmed soap into a frothy lather. The quality brush knocked a calming staccato against the porcelain. Next, she applied the lather to his bearded cheeks.
His eyes slid closed, a tiny but infinite evidence of his trust. Did he even realize what he’d done?
“How does a young woman learn how to shave a gentleman?” The quiet murmur came so hushed, she thought for a minute she’d imagined it, until William opened his eyes and revealed the question there.
“You are bound to be disappointed, I fear, William,” she explained, setting the shaving scuttle aside. “Alas, my experience has largely come from the animals who required their wounds tended.”
Cursing, he jerked upright with an alacrity that pulled another laugh from her. “Bloody hell, Elsie,” he hissed, ensnaring her wrist in his larger, firmer grip. Yet, there was a gentleness to that touch, and her pulse picked up its beat where William held her.
“Hush,” she scolded. “I was teasing.” Another moment of brevity had felt so cathartic.
He eyed her for a moment with his usual darkened gaze, and then the faintest glitter danced in his eyes.
All the air lodged in her chest as she caught a fleeting glimpse of the man he must have been… before his life had fallen apart. “You have shaved those of the human sort?”
“I have.”
As he weighed that promise, there was a boylike suspicion in his gaze that transformed him from a ruthless, angry duke into someone endearing. Her heart flipped over in her chest.
“Minx.” William slackened his grip and then seemed to think better of it. “How many?”
Ah, so he was taking no chances. “Enough that I’ve not nicked one’s cheek in more years than I can remember.” She’d not point out the reason for that had more to do with her lack of human companionship than any real improvement of her skill.
He roved his eyes over her face. “Have you ever been married?”
It was a deeply intimate question that had no bearing on her place here. However, in order for her to help him, they had to have a reciprocal relationship in which she sought information and answers from him and he was entitled to the same.
“No,” she said quietly. “I told you my name is Miss Allenby, and I didn’t lie to you. I’ve never been married.” The dream of a husband was not one she allowed herself.
“And why not?” he asked, pulling another little laugh from her.
“I don’t know if I should be insulted by your question—”
“No insult was intended,” he rushed to reassure in crisp tones that spoke to the dual role he played for the world. Proper. Polite. A duke in every way. That was, in every way when he was not doing the work of the Home Office.
“It is fine.” She waved off his apology. “I was teasing.” For a second time that day.
William sat forward in the throne-chair, shifting his body closer to hers.
Elsie curled her toes into the soles of her serviceable boots to keep from squirming under the force of his scrutiny. “Has there been no kind village boy to earn your affections?”
“Given I’m nearly thirty-one, Your Grace, I’d hardly desire a match with a boy.”
His jaw went slack.
“I’m short in stature, William,” she said dryly. Lather slipped down his chin, and she caught it with her hand. “There’s no correlation between a grown woman’s height and years. Now, turn.”
He complied, presenting his right cheek.
“So why no husband?”
He was… tenacious, and on the unlikeliest of topics. Nonetheless, if he wished to engage in discussion, she’d encourage those attempts. “I don’t know, William,” she murmured, wholly concentrating on her hand as she scraped the razor along his cheek. “Mayhap I was too busy. Mayhap there was no man who’d be a good match for me.” She paused and stared at the bit of skin she’d exposed. “Mayhap time simply marched on, and I failed to note its passing.” Until it was too late. And because of that, there would never be a family of her own, no babe to birth or child to hold, or husband to laugh with freely. Sadness swept through her.
Elsie dipped the foamy blade into the water, rinsing it off. She added lather to his right cheek and resumed her efforts.
“So it was not a father you shaved, nor a husband, nor a beau,” he murmured, his lips barely moving as he spoke. “It begs the question, just who were these… clients?” Before she could replay, he ventured, “Patients?”
“Patients,” she conceded, running the razor carefully along his chin. Those patients had also no doubt been the poor, wounded souls who’d answered to this very gentleman.
“Ah,” he said, as if he could see. When, in fact, he saw not even the truth of who she was. Would it matter to him either way?
William flinched.
Elsie gasped and jerked the razor back. A single crimson drop pebbled on his flesh. “I am so sorry.” Dropping the razor onto the table, she collected a damp cloth and applied faint pressure to the mark.
“I assure you I’ve suffered far greater injuries than a nick from a razor,” he said from around the towel. His eyes sparkled again with amusement. “And I fear you’ve shattered your impressive run on uninjured clients.”
“You are correct on that score,” she said, returning his smile. “In full, if belated, disclosure, I should have indicated that I’ve not shaved anyone in nearly five years.” As soon as the statement left her mouth, she wanted to call it back, for it ushered in a heaviness, tossing darkness where there had just moments ago been light.
Swallowing painfully, Elsie picked up the razor and, pulling the skin taut at the right corner of his sharp cheekbone, glided the sharp edge of the blade over the growth. She continued scraping the razor downward to his neck. The faint scratch of the razor filled the quiet, punctuated only by William’s measured breaths. Setting the metal blade down, she reached for the brush and reapplied lather to his face and neck. All the while, his gaze remained trained upon her.
“Your father has been gone five years, then,” he said in somber tones, as if she’d only just now mentioned that passage of time. “You’ve been on your own… five years.”
“Yes,” she murmured. Five years going on forever. “Turn slightly,” she instructed.
He complied, and Elsie’s fingers tightened on the razor. She forced herself to lighten her grip and resumed shaving him. William was again drifting too close to topics she’d rather not talk about. And certainly not with him. The unlikely connection they shared marked a barrier between them. Focusing on that past, revisiting that resentment made it impossible for her to do the work she’d been brought here to do. Work her father would have wished her to oversee.
For the first time in the whole of her life, she hated how very much like her father she was, because when everything inside her implored her to run from this man with his piercing eyes and probing questions, her promise to help him kept her at his side.
*
William had proven long ago he was a selfish bastard.
The greatest of that sin being that he’d married a woman he’d had no place marrying and had done so when a union to him only opened her to peril.
And now, plying each secret and story from Elsie Allenby’s lips when she didn’t wish to give them, and when he had no intention of sharing in return, was just another mark of his selfishness.
His reasons for wanting to know more about her, however, had nothing to do with the reasons she’d sought his information. Simply put, he wanted to know about her. He wanted to again witness her eyes sparkle and her expression light up with joy at those stories she carried. He wanted to know how she’d become this woman before him: composed and honorable enough that she could apologize when he himself had always been too proud to so easily muster those words.
Elsie alternated the razor for the brush and worked the soap into a finer lather before then applying it to his nearly shaven cheeks.
“You don’t wish to speak of him,” he surmised, his lips barely moving as she scraped the edge of the blade along his upper lip.
“Shhh.” Her brow puckered in deep consideration of the task she attended. “I’ll cut you.”
“You worry you’ll cut me? Or rather, you wish to distract me?”
Her full crimson lips pulled at the corners in the hint of a smile. The delicate expression of amusement pulled him deeper into her snare. “Both,” she conceded.
“You don’t wish to speak about your father, then?” Or more specifically, about his passing. The man who’d sired her, whom she spoke of with such fondness, was not one she carried rotten memories of.
“No,” she agreed unashamedly. “I don’t.” Elsie dropped the razor and dusted her palms together. “But I will.” She stared expectantly at him. Waiting. Waiting for any query he put to her, fully prepared to answer.
As the Sovereign, he’d all but written the code followed by the agents within the Brethren, detailing countless brutal ways to exact information one sought. Simply asking and receiving a direct answer had never been a possibility in the work he, or the men who worked for him, did. “Why would you do that?” he shot back, ignoring the dull ache that had begun to settle into his jawbone from overexertion. William eyed her through narrowed eyes. Surely there was a trap there. The men and women he’d dealt with in his line of work divulged nothing, even under the cruelest tortures.
Elsie resumed shaving him. “I’ve nothing to hide,” she said with an innocence he’d not even been born with. “Secrets are dangerous,” she murmured, scraping away more of his previously thick beard. “They destroy.”
Ice coursed through his veins, freezing him from the inside out.
Elsie Allenby might be innocent and unjaded, but she proved markedly accurate in that. His currency, by nature of his role with the Brethren, had been the secrets of those who sought to harm the Crown or country. Those who sought to bring down English men of power and influence. Why, his very identity among Polite Society had been false, crafted by the Home Office with the intent to deceive. “The people I deal with do not simply turn over intimate parts of themselves to strangers,” he said gruffly, not so much as moving his lips as he spoke.
“Then those, sir,” she murmured, her brow puckered from the depth of her concentration, “are not people I’d wish to keep company with.”
Which begged the question… “Who are the people you do keep company with?”
Pain contorted her features, twisting them into a briefly ravaged mask of grief. “It was just my father and me.” She paused. “And the men who required care. Patients. The occasional villagers who needed medical attention.”
A niggling rooted around the back of his mind, an unpleasant one he didn’t want to ask, because he didn’t want to know that she lived alone, without a soul in the world for friendship or companionship. And yet, the question was pulled from him anyway. “When your father passed… did you continue your work with his patients?”
“Turn,” she instructed, gently guiding his chin sideways so she might reach his opposite cheek. “The villagers in Bladon are hardly so progressive that they’d enlist the help of a woman.”
His gut clenched. There it was. A confirmation he didn’t want. She’d existed on the fringe of the world, with no one there. “Fools,” he muttered.
She chuckled. “I’ve not helped you in any way,” she pointed out.
Her observation was a matter-of-fact. There was nothing she’d provided in the way of medical treatment to alleviate the oft-times debilitating jaw pain that made a chore of meals and speech.
And yet, at the same time… Of its own volition, his gaze drifted over her endearingly focused face. She’d also, in her brief time here, pulled him from an abyss of despair and made him feel… something other than the dark emptiness that he’d descended into.
She’d infuriated him. Amazed him. Held him completely captivated. This, whatever it was, was a betrayal of Adeline’s memory. Because this was not the emotionless sexual encounters he had with the whores and actresses who wanted nothing more than his coin and connections. This draw to Elsie Allenby came from a genuine fascination with who she was—as a person.
While his mind was in tumult, Elsie drew back and assessed her work. “Nearly finished.” She again reached for the lather brush and swirled it in small, soothing circles over his face.
“What manner of man was your father?”
“Are you asking if he was kind?”
“No,” he corrected. “A man who so knew his daughter’s interests that he’d whittle her a dog is a man who was devoted.”
“Loving,” she whispered. Her heartbroken expression wrenched at a heart that proved itself not so very broken after all. “He was loving.”
“What happened to him?” Again, her fingers slipped, and she cursed.
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly and grabbed for the damp cloth. She made to press it to the slight nick in his flesh, but William relieved her of the fabric.
“It is nothing,” he assured, applying pressure himself.
Elsie chewed at her lower lip and glanced over her shoulder at the door. She contemplated escape. That hungering for flight was clear from the tension in her slender frame and the tightness of her lips.
She wouldn’t, though.
He’d come to recognize Elsie Allenby as a woman who’d never run from any challenge or threat. Even for self-preservation.
Moments, or minutes, might have passed, with time blurring before she returned her attention forward. Elsie brought her shoulders back and, with a skill and ease his former valet would be hard-pressed to learn, reapplied herself to William’s grooming. “My father was a man who’d not reject any request or demand for help.” As she spoke, her voice rang with both pride and regret. “It was a virtue but also a fault, and it would prove to be my father’s downfall,” Elsie explained, shaving the remaining hair from his neck, the blade scraping over his throat. One slight flick of her wrist, and she could end him if she wished. He’d not put himself in such a vulnerable place at the hands of any stranger. Until her. She made one more expert stroke with her impressively steady hand. “There.” She set down the razor and assessed him. “We’ve finished,” she said softly, her eyes lingering on his face before she returned her attention to cleaning up the work area she’d set up.
William followed her every methodical movement.
They’d finished. Which meant Elsie would leave, which he should vastly prefer. So why did a slight panic build in his chest at the thought of her departure?
“…I’ll send servants for the dirtied waters,” she was saying. Elsie bowed her head. Not a curtsy, as was customary, which made this unconventional woman all the more intriguing. “Until tomorrow, William.”
Tomorrow? He shot to his feet. “What of your requests to take meals…?” His face went hot, and he yearned for the restoration of that hair to hide his flushed cheeks.
She gave him a reassuring smile. “Is this a test?”
A test? He puzzled his brow.
“I promised I’d not seek to trick you into spending additional time with me. I can gather all the information I need when you break your fast.” She stared expectantly at him, prodding him into saying something.
“Tomorrow,” he said gruffly, the realization leaving him oddly bereft. His eyes went over her narrow shoulders to the clock atop his mantel. Nearly two and twenty hours. What did she intend to do in that time?
Elsie offered another smile and then snapped her fingers twice. “William,” she said in parting, and moments later, with Bear close at her heels, Elsie closed the door behind her and left William feeling more alone than he had in the whole of the year.