What little pride she’d had left.
He should have known it would be something like this.
Back at Sowerby House, Simon ripped open the carriage door, slammed it shut, and ignored the footman already pressing close to him, as if begging to offer assistance.
Simon had been home only days, and already he was sick of being coddled and waited upon. For mercy’s sake, he could put on his own coat, cook his own meals, and handle his own bloody reins.
“Sir, may I—”
“Tell my children I will not be home until dark.” Simon marched for the redbrick stables, saddled a muscled gray horse, and rode his way past the Sowerby House gates.
The road stretched out before him, the fields a dull green, the trees naked and lifeless. Cold air smacked his face—as jolting as the words still stirring in his gut.“You are to marry Miss Georgina Whitmore…marry Miss Georgina.”
He’d be hanged first.
Flashes of her face, her startled expression, rushed through him. She had changed so little. Even nearing the age of a spinster, she had the same soft look, the same innocent blinking eyes as the girl he’d left behind twelve years ago.
She was beautiful.
Not even a fool could deny that.
But she embodied everything he despised about his past life. He remembered so well. The balls she had excited over. The extraordinary dresses, the jewels dripping from her ears and neck, the perfect light blond curls decked with flowers or hairpins.
Every gentleman who ever chanced a glance at Georgina Whitmore looked twice.
A fact she knew too well.
Had she not teased all the young dandies who smiled at her? Had she not encouraged them despite the promise of marriage to Simon?
“Perhaps she would not seek attention elsewhere,”Father had once scolded,“if her own betrothed paid her a bit of heed.”
Maybe there was truth in the words. Maybe he had been less than attentive.
But it did not change the fact that Simon had a right to choose his own wife. All the anger that had sparked in the office and mounted during the carriage ride now simmered into something else. A raw sadness. A strange disappointment.
Father, how could you?
How many times had he asked that question? How many times had he stood before Father, begged him to understand, only for the pleas to be unheard?
Father had never understood anything.
All he’d ever wanted, the whole of Simon’s life, was to enforce each new decision he made for his sons. Nicholas had complied. Indeed, he’d seemed apathetic to the fact that someone else orchestrated every detail of his life—down to the books he read, the meals he ate, and the woman he would marry.
Simon had resisted everything. Even the painting he did alone in his upstairs bedchamber was a pastime he’d adopted because Father had called it pointless and unrewarding.
Urging the horse faster, Simon clenched his jaw and swallowed back the bitter taste in his mouth. He would not think of Father now, nor the infuriating will.
He was certain Mother would badger him enough upon his return.
Right now, he had an address to locate. Before the meeting at Gray’s Inn, he had taken the time to ask after Friedrich Neale and Reginald Brownlow in London’s most elite shops.
No one had heard the name Neale, but several had seemed familiar with the surname Brownlow. “Don’t knows the bloke by name, but me guv sews the articles for a fellow wot writes Brownlow on the ledgers.”
A gaunt-faced bookkeeper at Wimwick Tailor Shop had pointed to an address in one of his overly large records.
As the dimming tints of evening cast over the London streets, Simon turned his horse into the orange lamp glows of Vanprat Avenue. He dismounted before a white-hued town house, whose facade and well-trimmed boxwoods were as opulent as the surrounding neighborhood.
His fists balled as he strode to the black-painted door. Ruth’s scream, her blood on the pillow, the shreds of her blue dress in the corner of the cabin—all struck his memory with force as he banged his knuckles into the wood.
