sparsely furnished and strewn with rags and stale remnants of food and empty jugs.
“I tell you, Mags,” he was saying in his piping voice, which nevertheless did not sound as pathetic as it had sounded in the countess’s bedchamber the previous day, “I took me life in me ’ands comin’ ’ere in these togs.” He indicated the white shirt and breeches, obviously of an expensive cut and equally obviously part of a suit of livery belonging to some grand house. “But there weren’t nothin’ else.
They burned all me other things.”
The Mags referred to shook with silent laughter. “I scarce knew you, young Nick,” he said. “I always thought you ’ad black hair.”
The child touched his soft fair hair. “Such a scrubbin’ you never did ’ear tell of,” he said in some disgust. “I thought she’d rub me skin away for sure.”
“So yer can’t be up to the old lark no more,” Mags said, the laughter passing as silently as it had come.
“Naw.” Nicky scratched his head from old habit. “Thought she was bein’ a blessed angel, she did, that woman. And ’im standin’ there arskin’ me if I wanted to stay at their ’ouse. Exceptin’ I couldn’t say no. I would’ve given an ’ole farthin’ to ’ave seen old Thomas’s face.” He giggled, sounding for a moment very much like the baby the Earl and Countess of Lisle had taken him for. He was in reality almost eleven years old.
“This might be better,” Mags said, rubbing his hands together thoughtfully. “You can go ’round the ’ouse at leisure, young Nick, and lift a fork ’ere and a jeweled pin there. P’raps they’ll take you to other ’ouses, and yer can ’ave a snoop around them too.”
“It’ll be almost too easy,” Nicky said, rubbing the side of his nose with one finger. His voice was contemptuous. “They’re a soft touch if ever I seen one, Mags.”
“Got anythin’ for me tonight?” Mags asked.
The child shifted position and scratched his rump. “Naw,” he said after a few moments’ consideration. “Nothin’ tonight, Mags.Next time.”
“It weren’t hardly worth comin’, then, were it?” the older man said, his narrowed eyes on the child.
“Just wanted yer to know that me fairy godmother come,” the child said, leaping lightly to his feet. “Did yer give the money to me maw for that thimble I brought you last week?”
“ ’Tweren’t worth much,” Mags said quickly. “But yes. Yer maw got her food money.” He laughed silently again. “And yer sister got ’er vittles to grow on. Another two or three years, young Nick, and yer maw’ll be rich with the two of yer.”
“I got to go,” the child said. And he climbed down the stairs from the attic and went out into the street, where for the first time in his life he had something to fear. His appearance made him fair game for attack.
Only the filthy stream of curses he had been quite capable of producing had discouraged one pair of tough- looking urchins when he had been on his way to Mags’s attic.
And unexpectedly he still had something to protect on his way back home.
He still had the ring and the diamond pressed between the band of his breeches and his skin, although the main reason for his night’s outing had been to deliver them to Mags for payment. One of his better hauls.
But he had not given them up. That woman, whom he had been told he must call “your ladyship,” had bawled like a baby after the man had left her, and flung the ring across the room.
And she had had food brought to him, and had sat and watched him eat it, and smiled at him. And she was the one who had told the big, sour-faced, big-bosomed woman to give him back his bundle-the bundle that held her ring and diamond, and who had stooped down and kissed him on the cheek before he got dumped in that hot water up to the neck and scrubbed raw.
She was pretty. Silly of course, and not a brain in her brainbox-calling him a baby, indeed, and believing his story about the orphanage and about his mother’s lock of hair! But very pretty. Well, he would keep her ring for a day or two and sell it to Mags the next time he came. He would have more things by then, though not much. The reason he had never been caught was probably that he had never been greedy. He had learned his lesson well from Mags. He had never taken more than one thing from each house, and never anything that he had thought would be sorely missed.
Nicky darted in his bare feet along a dark street in the shadows of the buildings and cursed his clean hair and skin, which would make him more noticeable, and his clothes, which would be like a red flag to a bull if the wrong people were to spot him on these particular streets.
The bed was empty beside Estelle when she woke up the following morning.
She felt only a fleeting disappointment. After all, he never had stayed until morning. And if he had been there, there would have been an awkwardness between them. What would they say to each other, how would they look at each other if they awoke in bed together in the daylight?
And remembered the hot passion they had shared before they had fallen asleep.
When she met him downstairs-in the breakfast room perhaps, or later in some other part of the house-he would be, as always, his immaculate, taciturn, rather severe self again. It would be easy to look at him then. He would seem like a different man from the one whose hands and mouth and body had created their magic on her during the darkness of the night.
It was a good thing that he was not there this morning. The night had had its double dose of lovemaking and silent tenderness. At least she could image it was tenderness until she saw him again and knew him incapable of such a very human emotion.
Estelle threw back the bedclothes even though Annie had not yet arrived and even though the fire was all but extinguished in the fireplace. She shivered and stood very still, wondering if she really felt nausea or if she were merely willing the feeling on herself. She shrugged, and resumed the futile search for her ring. She had combed through every inch of the room the day before, more than once. It was not to be found.
What she should do was repeat what she had done the day before. She should send for Allan before she had time to think and tell him the truth. If he ripped up at her, if he yelled at her, or-worse-if he turned cold and looked at her with frozen blue eyes and thinned lips, then she would think of some suitably cutting retort. And she need not fear him. He had never beaten her, and she did not think she could ever do anything bad enough that he would.
And what could he do that he had not already done? He had already decided to banish her. There was nothing he could do worse than that.
Nothing.
“Oh, my lady,” Annie said a few minutes later, coming into the room with her morning chocolate and finding her standing in the corner of the room where she had thrown the ring, “you will catch your death.”
Estelle glanced down at herself and realized that she had not even put on a wrap over her nightgown. She shivered. And looked at her maid and opened her mouth to tell the girl to go summon his lordship.
“It is rather cold in here,” she said instead. “Will you have some coals sent up, Annie?”
The girl curtsied and disappeared from the room.
And Estelle knew immediately that the moment had been lost. In the second that had elapsed between the opening of her mouth and the speaking of the words about coal being brought for the fire, she had turned coward.
It had been easy the morning before to have Allan called and to tell him about the missing diamond. She had still be smarting from the accusations he had hurled at her the night before, and the sentence he had passed on her. She had derived a perverse sort of pleasure from telling him of the ruin of his first gift to her.
This morning it was different. This morning she could remember his kindness to a little child. And his gentle tenderness to her the night before. And she could hope that perhaps it would be repeated that night if nothing happened during the day to arouse the hostility that always lurked just below the surface of their relationship- except when it boiled up above the surface, that was.
This morning she was a coward. This morning she could not tell him.
She had arranged to go shopping with her friend Isabella Lawrence. There were all sorts of Christmas gifts to be purchased before their houseguests began to arrive to take up all her time. There was Allan’s gift to be chosen, and she did not know what she would get him. She did have one gift for him already, of course. She had persuaded Lord Humber, that elderly miser, to part with a silver snuffbox Allan had admired months before, and she had kept it as a Christmas gift. But that had been a long time ago. And Lord Humber had refused to take anything but a token payment. Besides, she had given him a snuffbox the year before too. She wanted something else, something very special. But what did one buy for a man who had everything? Still, she would enjoy the morning despite the
