“It was a secret,” Felicity said defensively. “Not only from you. From everyone.” She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “He wasn’t always like this,” she said. “This—this cutthroat financier that he’s become. Once, he was just like me. Nothing. No one.”
“You arenotnothing,” Charity said fiercely, and her shoes clicked out a rapid, incensed tattoo upon the floor as she crossed the room to place her hands on Felicity’s shoulders. “You have neverbeenno one.”
But she had never beensomeone, and had never aspired to be. She had found happiness in the obscurity of her little life, far away from the infamy that might have found her otherwise. She hadlikedbeing Felicity Cabot. Had felt more kinship with her assumed name than the one to which she had been born. As if she had been reborn into a new life entirely, far from the chaos and the pain that had marred her younger years.
She said, “I was never like you, you know. I was never a great beauty, nor had I any great aspirations. I was never going to be the sort of woman who would have been the talk of the town, or have a bevy of ardent admirers—”
Charity gave an inelegant snort, consigning the thought to perdition. “Having a great number of admirers has often been more trouble than such popularity is worth,” she said.
“But I had Ian,” Felicity continued. “And at the time I thought—thisis my story. A small life; a quiet one. A teaching position for myself. A husband in some sort of respectable career. A little house with a garden. Children, eventually. It was all I wanted.”
“He didn’t want the same?” Mercy asked, unfolding herself from the couch and tucking the book into her pocket.
“I thought he did, once,” Felicity said. “But his dreams changed.” They had grown ever so much bigger that hers. So big that her own small dreams had become barely a pinprick amongst the vast scale of his own. He hadoutgrownher—and it had happened so gradually. A bit at a time. The threads that had bound them fraying so slowly. “He has no family to speak of,” she said. “He lost his parents rather young. He’d been working as a courier to support himself, and occasionally boxing for a bit extra. It provided him a meager income. Enough to eat, to take a room in a boarding house.” And little else. “But he was clever. He had a particular talent for numbers, for calculatingpayments due upon delivery in his head with incredible speed and precision.” And it had been entirely self-taught. He’d simply learned it through habit, through years of repetition. A cunning mind put to use, but capable of so much more.
“Mm,” Charity said. “A true rags to riches story, then, is it?”
“Not quiterags,” Felicity said. But not too terribly far away from them.
“How did you happen to meet?” Mercy asked. “I can’t imagine it would have been an easy thing to accomplish.”
Felicity gave an awkward little one-shouldered shrug. “I was seventeen, I think. Ian had often made deliveries to the school, from the chandler or the butcher or—or really anything with a weight beyond what a maid could be expected to lift and carry herself. With so many girls and staff in residence, the weekly orders alone amount to quite a lot. I’d…noticed him.” He’d been young and roguishly handsome. Most of the girls had noticed him at some point or another.
She’d simply never expected him to have noticedher. Especially since in those early years, she had gone to such effort not to be noticed. To never draw so much as a sharp word or an askance look from anyone. To coast through life toward some unknowable future without making waves or upsetting the even keel, the stability that she had not yet settled into, one which still felt precarious.
“And did he…notice you?” Charity inquired tactfully, her head canted to the side in curiosity.
Felicity took a sharp breath. “Yes,” she said. “Sometimes—some nights—the house was too quiet for comfort.” And the inside of her head had been just too damned loud, filled with memories she’d have paid good coin to forget. And on the nights when her head had been loudest, when she could feel a scream roiling at the back of her throat, one she feared she might let loose in her sleep and wake the whole household with it, she’d removed herself from it. “I’d been at the school long enough to learn which steps on the stairs creaked. To learn that the girls who shared a room with me could have slept through a cannon blast. To learn that the window in the salon led right out into the garden, and it didn’t latch properly like the others, didn’t shriek when opened. It was easy enough just…slip out from time to time, when I needed a bit of a walk to clear my head.”
“Oh, Felicity.”
“Don’t fuss at me, Charity. It was so long ago, and nobody ever noticed me. I was—very good at going unnoticed.” Except by Ian. “The first time Ispoke to him, it was because I’d happened upon him while on a walk. I learned later that he’d lost his most recent boxing match, but he looked like he’d come out the wrong end of a tavern brawl, slumped in an alley outside.”
She still remembered that crooked half-smile, overriding the grimace of pain owing to the split in his lip. The faintly slurred, “You’re one of Mrs. Lewis’ girls. You’re always watching me through the upstairs window.” How embarrassed she had been! And he had only laughed, as if he could so easily make out the vivid blush that had spread across her cheeks in the darkness.
“I panicked,” she said. “I ran.” She had always run, at any perceived danger. Because the consequences of being caught could be dire. “I made it safely back to the house—but I couldn’t make myself go up the stairs. I just kept thinking of him there in that grimy alley, suffering in silence. Too injured to move. Too injured even to take himself home again. And then—and then I found myself making for the stillroom instead, where the bandages and salve were stored.”
“You went back?” Mercy asked.
But Charity only placed her hand upon Felicity’s shoulder in silent encouragement. She knew—they both knew—what it was like to be beaten. But neither of them had suffered alone. And Ianhad, and she couldn’t have left him to it.
“Yes, I went back,” she said. “I think he was surprised. I patched him up, I suppose you could say. He told me that I didn’t have to worry, that he had no intention of informing upon me to Mrs. Lewis. We…talked.”
“Only talked?” Charity inquired.
Felicity narrowed her eyes. “He was so bruised and bloodied that it took him nearly an hour to climb to his feet.” And it had looked like it had been a difficult endeavor. “I helped him back to his boarding house,” she added. “It wasn’t far, but I don’t think he could have managed it on his own. And then—he told me I ought not to be out so late alone.”
“He was right,” Charity said. “What?” she added, when Felicity cast her a sharp look. “Right is right. I can’t control that.”
“He told me that if I wanted a walk, he’d accompany me. That he’d meet me by the garden fence on Thursday nights if I liked.” Which had been rather a lot to offer, when one considered that the sacrifice of even one evening a week had meant a potential loss of earnings.
“So you continued to meet him,” Mercy said.
“Yes. For years. At first it was just on Thursdays.” And eventually she had noticed that those regular Thursday walks had safeguarded a portion ofher sanity. That when the walls felt too close and her mind seemed too loud, just the promise of Thursday could give her the reassurance she had needed to simply breathe—and to let whatever distress had tried to plant itself in her mind dissipate. “And then it was just…whenever I wanted to see him. I knew which window at the boarding house belonged to him. It was easy enough to rap upon his window whenever he happened to be in. It didn’t begin as a romance,” she said defensively. But it had fallen into one so easily. As naturally as breathing—which she had always done better at his side. He had quieted the restlessness in her soul; helped her to feel without feeling overwhelmed.
“But it must have been difficult,” Mercy said. “To keep such a secret. Mrs. Lewis would hardly have approved.”
“No; not while I was a student, and not when I eventually became a teacher. He wouldn’t have been considered a suitable match, a suitable husband in any capacity. At least—not when he was only a courier, an occasional prizefighter.”
