LITMIR.BIZ

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society. I’ve since discovered anything remotely akin to society turned its back years before, but at the time I hated “society” almost as much as I hated the gaming hells for letting him in.’

      ‘Understandable in the circumstances,’ Hugh Darke said.

      ‘I was worse than he was, easily as selfish as he was,’ she condemned herself. ‘Anything Mama asked me to do, I ignored. Any task I had to perform because we were too poor for any of us to be idle, I did with ill grace and escaped from the boarding house my mother ran as soon as I could. Then I went into the rookeries and the mean streets around them, so I could play at being all the things girls and boys my own age were forced to do in order to put food in their bellies.’

      ‘In your shoes, I’d have done the same.’

      ‘You’d have been off to sea with Kit and Ben and left me more alone than ever, in my own eyes at least.’

      ‘Well, if I’d been born a girl I dare say I’d have followed in your footsteps, then,’ he assured her with a smile in his voice she suddenly wished she could see.

      ‘You’re a better man than me,’ she said on the whisper of a laugh. ‘Make that a better woman,’ she added; for a moment, none of it felt bad after all.

      ‘Best make it neither. I’m very glad I’m a man and you’re a woman, but I still know I’d have felt as frustrated and rebellious in your situation as you did, Louisa Alstone. You’re spirited and clever and if you managed to survive alone in such a harsh world, then you’re evidently extremely resourceful as well.’

      ‘Don’t make me into someone better than I deserve, Captain,’ she cautioned.

      ‘And don’t make yourself into your own demon.’

      ‘No need for that, I killed Peter and Mama,’ she remembered bleakly and all temptation to take herself at his inflated value disappeared.

      ‘How?’ he asked and she marvelled that he didn’t draw his arms away or try to set her at arm’s length.

      ‘Kit and Ben had gone back to sea again and I hated losing their company and the exciting adventures we had, so I ran off one day when I’d finished my daily ration of sewing and chores about the house. It was high summer and the nights were almost as light as the days, so I climbed out of a bedroom window and stayed away all night. I found a roof in Mayfair to sleep on and it was a good deal cooler and more comfortable than our bedroom under the eaves in a rotten old house that should have been pulled down half a century ago. Then I decided to run back through the streets before the world was awake, just for the devilment of it. Except this time I ran through the wrong ones and picked up the typhus fever,’ she said, then stared blankly into the darkness as she finished her tale. ‘It killed Peter first and then I don’t think Mama could fight it for her grief at losing him. Maria was only ill for a couple of days and I recovered in time to know what I’d done and wish I hadn’t. Maria and I bungled along somehow, running the boarding house as best we could with Mrs Calhoun and Coste’s help, and Papa came home every now and again when he had nowhere else to go. Then Kit came home with his share of a cargo in his pocket and arranged for Maria and me to live with our uncle and his wife. So Kit has paid for our keep and education ever since and I stayed there and tried to make up for the terrible thing I did, but nothing could wipe out that particular sin.’

      ‘You did nothing wrong, you idiotic woman. I can understand a grieving child taking on a terrible burden of guilt, but surely not even you are stubborn enough to cling to it now, in the face of all logic and mature consideration?’

      She shrugged, knowing he couldn’t see her, but they were so close she could feel the frustration come off him. It was both unexpected and kind of him to try to absolve her of guilt. It also confirmed he had all the instincts, as well as the upbringing, of the gentleman she now knew him to be.

      ‘If I had only stayed at home as I should have done that day, Mama and Peter would probably still be alive today,’ she said sadly.

      ‘And if any number of things in history had happened in a different order we might not be standing here tonight, futilely discussing ifs and maybes. You know as well as I do that disease is rife in the slums of this city, especially in the summer, and anyone could have given them that illness. Would you expect the butcher or baker or candlestick-maker to carry a burden of guilt for the rest of their lives if they had carried it into your home?’

      ‘No, but they would have spread it in innocence, not after disobeying every rule my mother tried to lay down for my safety and well-being and probably worrying her sleepless all night as well.’

      ‘So you were headstrong and difficult—what’s new about that, Louisa?’ he asked impatiently and for some reason that made her consider his words more seriously than sympathy might have done.

      ‘Not much,’ she finally admitted as if it came as a shock.

      He chuckled and she kicked herself silently for feeling a warm glow threaten to run through her at the deep, masculine sound of it. ‘I doubt very much those who love you would have you any other than as you are, despite your many faults,’ he told her almost gently.

      ‘But Peter’s dead,’ she told him tragically and if he couldn’t hear the tears in her voice at the very thought of her loving little brother, now six years in his grave, she certainly could and bit her lip to try to hold them back.

      ‘And just how do you think your brother Kit and Ben Shaw would have felt if they came home to find you or your sister gone as well? Such epidemics are no respecters of what is fair and unfair, Louisa. None of you deserved to die or to bear blame for deaths that happened because the poor live in little better than open sewers at the heart of this fair city. Blame the aldermen and government ministers who allow such abject poverty to thrive in what’s supposed to be the most advanced nation in the world, but don’t be arrogant enough to take the blame yourself. And don’t you think your mother would hate to hear you now? It sounds to me as if she loved her children very much, so she’d certainly not want to hear you talk like a fool and refuse to bear children yourself, just because she’s not here any more and your little brother couldn’t fight a desperate and dangerous illness that can just as easily take strong men in the prime of their lives.’

      ‘I still shouldn’t have gone.’

      ‘No, but all the other times you climbed out of your window and ran wild through the streets you probably should have been sewing samplers or minding your books. It sounds like the natural reaction of a spirited girl, denied the pleasures and luxuries of the life you should have had, if your father wasn’t selfish and shallow and self-obsessed. Taking the burden of guilt for what happened when it clearly belongs elsewhere is arrogant, Louisa. All you were guilty of was a childish rebellion that you would have grown out of, once your brother was able to provide you and your family with the sort of life you should have lived from the outset.’

      ‘He was so sad, Hugh,’ she confided with a sniff to hold back her tears that he somehow found deeply touching. ‘At night when he thought Maria and I were in bed and asleep I would hear him weep for them. Then Papa came home one night, drunk as usual, and they argued and raged at each other until Papa stormed off into the night and swore not to come home again until Kit was back at sea. They found his body floating in the Thames two days later and only my sister was ever soft-hearted enough to think he’d drowned himself out of grief for my mother, when he was so drunk he probably couldn’t tell the difference between high water and dry land. Yet it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t argued with Kit and I hadn’t done what I did.’

      ‘And no doubt Kit feels guilty about that as well, being made in the same stubborn, ridiculous mould as you and the rest of the Earl of Carnwood’s rackety family. There’s no need for you to take on his regrets as well as your own, since I never met a man more able to own his sins and omissions than Christopher Alstone.’

      ‘I suppose you could be right.’

      ‘Of course I am. Now, kindly inform me what you were planning to do to me once you had me guyed up in that ridiculous disguise and let’s have done

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