Page 7 of How to Seduce a Viscount
What an awful story. There were gaps but they were easily filled in and some things were best left unspoken because they were too hurtful to say aloud—that her family had sold her to the pickpocket gang. It did happen. A family with too many mouths to feed would often trade their children in exchange for coin.
Luce’s stomach twisted at the thought of abandoning, or worse—selling one’s own child.
She would not want his pity. She had barely tolerated his help when she needed it. Pity would be met with scorn. He understood the reasons, though. She’d been forced to be self-reliant, forced to distrust. She’d lived a life devoid of love and connection. She’d not let it destroy her. Instead, she’d forged her strength from it. Impressive. And sad.
He wasn’t sure his reaction was entirely one of pity. He wanted to protect her. To show her what life could be like when people were surrounded by family. By the caring of others.
‘After all of that schooling, what do you do for Grandfather?’ He asked his question again. If she was a messenger, she was certainly a high-end one with an education equal to that of he and his brothers.
‘I pass messages for your grandfather and I collect bits of information here and there. I go where the Horsemen cannot,just like any of his many agents and messengers.’ She stifled a yawn with her hand.
She was being vague again and she was tiring, perhaps thanks to the brandy or perhaps due to being out of bed for the first time in nearly a week. Luce reached over to take her brandy glass and set it aside. ‘I’ve worn you out. I’ll help you back to bed.’
‘No, please. I’ve had enough of bed for a while. We haven’t talked about the code yet.’ She yawned again.
‘We can talk about the code later,’ Luce insisted.
‘You’ll send me back to bed and forget about me like you have all week. You disappeared once I was out of danger.’
‘Because I had work to do. The code must be solved.’ And because staying beside her had proven to be too distracting. He had originally brought his work to her bedside but he’d spent more time wondering about her than he had trying to create a cipher. He’d been entranced by her hair and by the ethereal expression on her face. He’d made up stories in his head about who she was. All proof perhaps that he’d been too long without a woman beside him or that his brothers’ married states were taking a toll on him. So, he’d put himself beyond distraction and removed himself to the library where he staunchly remained except for the few minutes each day he allowed himself to check on her at dinner and assure himself that her recovery was well under way.
‘A compromise then,’ she negotiated with a smile. ‘I’ll rest here on the sofa and when I wake up refreshed you can share what you’ve discovered about the code with me.’
Which wasn’t going to be much. He’d made little headway on it. ‘Fine, we have an accord. But let me help you to the sofa for my peace of mind.’ Perhaps the best way to assist her would be to make her feel as if she were helping him instead.
‘I feel silly taking a nap at eleven in the morning,’ she murmured as he settled her on the sofa. ‘It’s not even time forluncheon.’ But she was visibly losing the fight. Already, her eyes were shut.
Luce tucked the blanket about her. ‘You have two hours until lunch, plenty of time to nap. You forget you left half your blood on my doorstep along with the bodies.’ It would be a long while before he would be able to erase the memories of that night, watching her blood seep out of her as fast as he could staunch it. He studied her face. She did seem pale. ‘Grandfather would never forgive me if something happened to his pickpocket princess.’ She didn’t hear his jest. She was already fast asleep.
Chapter Four
It turned out he lied. He did not wake her. Luce let her sleep through lunch for both their benefit, although if anyone had asked he would have argued it had been primarily for her sake. She was the one recovering from a serious wound, after all. The adventure to the library had taxed her nascent return of strength. The other part of that reality, though, was that he was recovering too from the force of her revelations, which had both intended and unintended consequences. One of which was that they made it impossible for him to get back to work on Grandfather’s memoir.
She looked like an angel when she slept. He knew. Empirically. This wasn’t the first time he’d watched her sleeping. He’d spent a hellish two days at her bedside watching her do the same thing. Even in the midst of fever and pain, she’d slept with a serene quality. And now, she was at peace again while his own personal world and tenets he’d once believed unequivocally true, were, if not in turmoil, teetering on the brink of it.
His grandfather—a man he’d grown up admiring as the grandest, smartest, most powerful and yet kindest man in the world; a man who was busy but always made time for his grandsons; who saw to the welfare of every family member even if they weren’t in the line of succession, had recruited an eight-year-old orphan with the intention of grooming them for the network. For life as an agent, private spy or courier. For entrance into a game one could never leave.
To Luce, whose own relationship with the Horsemen was fraught with the tension between uniformity and individuality, making that decision for another, especially a child, seemed ethically and morally wrong.
He and his brothers had a saying ‘once a Horseman, always a Horseman’. The expression was meant in many ways. A motto of solidarity. A reminder that your brother always had your back, even when he disagreed with you. But it was also a reminder of the permanence of membership. One could not quit the game, one simply survived it. After Stepan had gone missing Luce had tried to leave, tried to retire to his newly gained estate and forget about the game. For various reasons, he’d been unsuccessful. He could not leave his brothers out there alone without him. He might be willing to give up his loyalty to the Horsemen and the network, but he’d never give up his loyalty to his brothers, and so the contradiction bound him. Now, a new contradiction was testing his loyalties to the grandfather he loved.
At its core, Grandfather’s decision to recruit Wren made sense, too much sense. Where there was one, were there others? Was the network full of orphans deliberately recruited as agents, spies and couriers for one of the most powerful private citizens in the country?
An orphan was the perfect candidate, Luce mused. An orphan had no family who might be used against them. The younger the better, too. If recruited young enough, there would be no fraternal or sororal bonds of the street, no friendships or loves to compete for their loyalty. All their loyalty and gratitude could be saved for Grandfather and the network.
That had certainly been the case for Wren. Luce watched Wren make a small adjustment in her sleep, a long lengthof her exquisite hair falling over the edge of the sofa. It was hard to imagine this angelic beauty as a street urchin. But that was testimony to Grandfather’s efforts. It was no small thing he offered the orphan—shelter, food, clothing, education and a career. Where else would the street rat have such an opportunity?
That was the rub, Luce thought. The answer was nowhere else. Grandfather had to know that what he offered could not be duplicated. That for the child looking to break away from the streets, there was no choice but to accept. There was no choice but to be bound to him and the network. It was a deal even a canny street child could not truly fathom. A Faustian deal indeed, as Grandfather was no doubt aware.Thatwas what made Luce uncomfortable. There was a remarkable lack of consent in the arrangement when all was stripped away. The child was trading a street boss for another boss who would exact his payment just as the street boss did, only in subtler terms and under a different guise. Which begged the question—was that what Grandfather had also done with him and his brothers?
Luce rose and went to the long windows, looking out over the clean, white snow. He didn’t want to let his thoughts run in that direction but how could they not? He and his brothers were not much different than the parentless orphan whom no one was counting on. He and his brothers were the sons of his grandfather’s third son. The spare to the spare, in a male rich family tree where the prospects of inheriting were less than nil. In terms of the succession, no one was counting on them. Luce’s uncle, the heir, had multiple sons of his own. All of whom would be married within the year given the developments of this past Season.
Grandfather would have seen the succession dynamics early on when his sons started having children. Had Grandfather decided then to recruit him and his brothers? No one wascounting on their branch of the Parkhurst family, no one except Grandfather and the network. It was to Grandfather and the network that they owed their purpose, their lives and now their estates and titles.
To be untrue to that would be to be ungrateful for the things that had come their way and to be ungrateful to the man who’d made all that possible. Luce looked out onto the snow-covered grounds of Tillingbourne, a place he was coming to love as his own. He knew sons of third sons had a difficult go in life, that Society felt they weren’t truly gentlemen because they had to work for their living.
He and his brothers had been allowed to rise above that. Which made his own lack of abject appreciation harder to grasp. What would his brothers think if he raised such speculation with them? Caine was devoted to Grandfather and the purpose of the network.
If Caine had to choose between his brother and the things that had shaped so much of his life, which would he choose? The old dilemma whispered. Belonging to the Horsemen meant acceptance within the family, equal footing with his revered brothers. Would that acceptance still be there if he stepped outside of it? And did he truly need to step outside of it to find what he was missing?
