Читать книгу Wicked: - Noelle Mack - Страница 7

Angelica struggled to open her eyes, knowing only that her cheek was pressed against something that scratched like wool. She lifted herself up on one elbow and looked warily around her. She had been dumped on a carpet in a different room and there were no boots, rough or polished, near her face.

Waiting for she knew not what, she held her breath and listened for the faint sound of someone else’s breathing. There was nothing, but other sounds outside filled her ears.

She knew was still in London—she could hear the raw-voiced cries of street sellers and a hack driver clattering by, roaring at his horse in foul language that was nonetheless English.

Still, she could be anywhere. Good neighborhoods could be right next to rough ones like as not. Angelica was not about to dash to the window and scream for help when she was not even sure that she was alone in the room.

She seemed to be on one side of a high bed that boasted a mahogany frame with posts carved in spirals and a canopy in draped silk that would have been the pride of a Parisian demimondaine.

She was near the windows of the room, away from the door or doors that she could not see. She looked up and around herself again taking in every detail of the expensive but somehow tawdry furnishings. Affixed to the tasseled corners of the canopy were tiny cupids, swarming thickly as mosquitoes.

The louche décor was luxurious and sensual but the bizarre contrast to the austere chamber where she had first been imprisoned made her uneasy. She stayed where she was, convinced by now that she was alone in the room.

For now.

Knowing her stepbrother, he had brought her to a pretty prison for a reason that was bound to be ugly. Victor Broadnax was capable of ingenious and elaborate cruelty.

What he was planning—what he might do next—made her shudder and she forced her fears aside. Then she thought suddenly of the iron cuff around her ankle and curled over to feel for it. That too was gone. She rubbed the sore marks that gave evidence of it having been there at all, feeling as if she were moving through a waking dream.

Angelica moved closer to the bed and raised her head, venturing a look over the puffy coverlet. She saw no one but located the door, telling herself that it was undoubtedly locked.

Her only ways out were it or the windows. The angle of the sunlight streaming in and the distant quality of voices she’d heard from the street told her that she was probably on a high floor. She lifted herself up noiselessly by gripping one of the bedposts and took a few stealthy steps to the nearest window.

There was no betraying creak of floorboards underneath the carpet she’d lain on. Well and good.

Angelica stood to one side of the window’s sheer curtains, looking down at the iron railing that completely surrounded the narrow area between the house and the street.

A burly man stood there, thick-fingered hands clasped behind his back, wearing a heavy coat with an upturned collar and a nondescript hat. Passersby glanced into his face, which she could not see, and hurried past him.

So this side of the house was guarded. No doubt the back was too. She looked up and down the street below, not recognizing it at all. But then she had not been long in London.

The houses seemed new but they had a raw look, as if they had sprung ready-built from a former field on the outskirts of London. They were jammed together with no alleys or cuts in between, which would make an escape difficult to hide. She could not slip away unnoticed when she still wore the same plain white gown that had done for the hot little room with the cloaks. Not when she was…Angelica looked down…barefoot.

She heard heavy footsteps approach and pause. It seemed to her that were there were two sets, walking in almost perfect synchrony, but she was not sure. Then she heard the tiny grind of metal on metal, and realized that a key was turning in the lock. After another second it was withdrawn and the doorknob turned in the same stealthy way.

Angelica shrank back into the curtains, knowing that their gossamer folds would not hide her. But if worse came to worse, she could smash the window and jump—she glanced down again.

She was three storeys above the street, by her guess. She would be badly hurt, perhaps impaled on the railing. The guard below would carry her broken body swiftly away and someone else would pay handsomely for the silence of inadvertent witnesses.

The slowly turning doorknob completed its revolution and the door opened a crack. A plainly shod foot thrust through at the bottom and a woman came through with a tray. She didn’t seem to see Angelica, didn’t look around, just went straight to a table where she deposited the tray in her hands. She said nothing.

The woman turned and went back out, closing the door with a click. Her heavy footsteps retreated and eventually there was silence. Angelica breathed again. It occurred to her that she hadn’t heard the doorknob turn again or the key and lock, and she wondered why.

It had to be a trap.

She could not open the door and run down the stairs. It could not be that simple.

Then, breaking the silence, the doorknob turned again and the door was locked once more. Someone on the other side—she had heard a second set of footsteps—withdrew the key.

Angelica wanted to shriek, to beg for her freedom, batter her way out—anything other than this sinister game of cat-and-mouse.

All she could do was listen very carefully. Her captor’s footsteps echoed as he went away, sounding as correct as the polished boots he wore.

She looked again at the tray and the covered salvers on it. So Victor wanted her to eat. She remembered the crystalline poison in the rose and felt a wave of nausea. Weak as she was, she would not eat.

Angelica paced about the room, her thoughts in a tangle of fear and useless resolve. Until Victor decided to talk to her, she was his prisoner.

She sat down on the whorish bed and burst into tears.

Some hours later, when the sunlight was swallowed by the gathering blue of dusk, she found water in an ewer standing in a matching basin. Lifting the ewer, she splashed a few drops on her arm, testing it too for poison. Her skin did not sting or peel off. It seemed to be only water. She soaked a cloth in it and scrubbed at her face, then combed her hair.

She knew that Victor would come to her in due time—he preferred the night as a rule. Angelica wondered how he was connected to this house and whether he owned it. His recent inheritance would have been more than enough.

If he lived here, the room she was in held no trace of him and seemed entirely feminine.

Quietly as she could, she looked on shelves and opened and closed drawers, finding nothing of note. It seemed the sort of room that was used for assignations, with every sensual comfort but nothing of permanence about it.

Hungry and unbearably thirsty—she would not drink of the water in the ewer—she sat in an armchair and thought of when she had seen him last.

Victor had been dashing in his way, the younger image of his oafish father, her stepfather. Late and unlamented, Samuel Broadnax, who called himself a gentleman and was nothing of the kind, had been stricken with a fatal fever and died two days after her mother.

Try as she might, Angelica could not summon up any tenderness for that lady, who had wanted nothing to do with her from the very day of her birth, handing her over to a string of nursery maids and governesses.

They were all disagreeable and severe women to begin with and none had ever shown her the least kindness, per her mother’s command. Of that Angelica had no doubt, having found written instructions to each of them in her mother’s own handwriting.

The least infraction earned her a vicious birching on her bare legs well into her teens, a punishment that she, too cowed to think of escape, simply endured after a lifetime of intimidation and petty cruelty.

The revelation that her slightly older stepbrother had enjoyed watching the sessions shocked her greatly. She had never known at the time that he was there.

She had come to understand, from the only sympathetic servant in the household, that young master Victor got his way through bribery and mutually satisfying exercises in perversity with the woman who administered her beatings and lessons in geography with such vigor.

Still, the geography had come in handy—Angelica could not have found her way about London at all without her study of Roche’s map of it when she finally did escape from her stepfather’s country house.

With a small sack of money and only the clothes on her back, she had survived, hired out through a servant’s agency as a lady’s maid owing to her good looks and breeding.

The Congreves had been the last of three such assignments, and eluding Mr. Congreve’s moist grasp had proved impossible. Angelica had loathed his wife, and longed to leave, knowing on the night she was left to handle the cloaks and furs that it might be her last.

Until Semyon Taruskin has come in to bring his coat to the wrong place, she had thought only of walking the streets as she had done.

He had been kind. Even courteous. She was not accustomed to either. When he’d told her his name, she had remembered it from the endless flow of gossip among the female servants in the Congreves’ house.

Besides that, it had seemed to her that she had seen him somewhere before and perhaps she had in her rambles. The parks of London were a respite for her and she wandered into them on the rare occasions when she had a half-day to herself.

She was sure he rode and often. Her downcast eyes had not missed the strong muscles of his thighs, nor the strength of his calves. And he had the erect posture of an experienced horseman, from the top of his tousled dark head through his broad-shouldered back and long legs.

He’d seemed every inch the gentleman to her. If he lived near or on a fine square by the parks that the ton frequented to see and be seen in, then perhaps he had noticed her and she had smiled back…

Angelica strained to breathe through the sad tightness in her throat and forced all thoughts of her brief encounter with Semyon Taruskin away.

She would have to save herself somehow. No one was riding to her rescue.

Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her face, hot as her own blood. She didn’t have the strength to dash them away. As the last glimmering of day faded from the sky outside the windows, she fell into a troubled sleep in the armchair.

An aching in her legs made her stir and slowly open her eyes—that, and the honeyed smell of beeswax. A man stood with his back to her, touching a lit candle to each wick of the tapers in a tall candelabra.

She recognized him and tried to get up without making a sound, but her stiffness from sleeping in a chair kept her trapped for the moment. So Victor had come in while she was as good as unconscious. She had no doubt he had looked through the keyhole first—she remembered him doing that at the country house, so often that she stuffed a tattered handkerchief into the keyhole when she disrobed or dressed.

“Did I awaken you, Angelica?” he asked without turning around, intent on his task.

She wanted to grab the candelabra, thrust the burning candles into his face, and run for her life. She half-rose, steadying herself on the arms of the chair, but her legs wobbled.

He turned around to face her and folded his arms across his chest. He seemed to her to have filled out, no longer a young buck of slight build, but a powerful, fully grown man.

The evil that drove him had grown in strength as well. She could see it in his eyes.

“It seems that I did. You can sit down. I will bring you the tray. You haven’t eaten a bite.”

“And I will not. Take it away.”

His expression hardened. “Do not give me orders, my dear sister.”

“I am not your sister!”

He only shrugged. “The law would have it so and who am I to argue with the law?”

Angelica was standing fully on her feet, feeling the blood flow again in her legs. Still, she doubted she could push past him, let alone escape.

“What do you want with me?” she asked desperately. “It was you I ran from, after you—you tried to touch me.”

“So you did.”

“You let me go then,” she said in a pleading voice. “You cannot keep me prisoner in this house, Victor!”

“Are you a prisoner?” he inquired in a maddeningly calm tone.

She shook a fist at him, a futile gesture, for it only made him laugh. “You drugged me and kidnapped me or had someone do it—that man out there, was it? And I woke up shackled to a wall—where was that room? In this house or another?”

“So many questions,” he reproved her. “I don’t know where to begin.”

She took a step forward and her skirts swung as she did. He glanced down, making her shrink back as if he had hit her.

“You are not shackled now,” he said pointedly. “I don’t do things like that to women, unless it is a game they like to play. Some do, you know. Guard and prisoner. Crime and punishment.”

Angelica flushed with shame. “You thought such things were games. You and that filthy little bitch who did her best to hurt me.”

“Miss Hopkins was hired to correct your wayward nature, Angelica. Dear Nancy. She taught me much.”

“She let you watch!”

Victor smirked. “Indeed she did. And it was not only you who was birched. At least you were permitted to keep your skirts down and receive your strokes only upon your legs. Things were rather different for the housemaids, you know. A well-run household cannot tolerate impertinence from the staff. I helped her with those sessions. And it was my very great pleasure to do so.”

Angelica spat full in his face. Victor wiped away the few drops she had worked up from her dry mouth and took two steps toward her, holding her by the throat with one large hand and rubbing her spittle into her face with the other.

“Do not ever do that again,” he growled. “You must show me respect at all times from now on.”

She struggled to breathe, pulling at his hand. He kept it where it was, but loosened his grip fractionally.

“Wh-why d-don’t you just kill me?” she gasped. “I will not be b-broken by you again—never!”

He let her go and pushed her back into the chair. Angelica fell into it like a rag doll cast aside by a petulant child.

“You are a valuable commodity, Angelica,” he said after studying her for some moments. “And I am now a man of business.”

“You are a dirty bastard and nothing more!”

He sighed and began to pace the room. “I should not have taken you by the neck. Your remarkable beauty must remain unmarred. You will fetch a higher price that way. Are you still a virgin, Angelica?”

“What?” The depth of his depravity was revealed in his last question. Truly, she would rather die if she could not escape!

“I could have the ox outside control you here and now. My bawd knows how to check, you know.” He snapped his fingers. “Shall I do that?”

“No!” Her thoughts raced as she figured out the nature of his business. “Is that why you had me kidnapped? Why me? There are—there are thousands of women in London who would willingly sell themselves!”

He nodded sagely and stopped his pacing. “But it is the struggle that some customers desire—the unwillingness of the truly pure excites them, you see—I thought of you the first time I was asked to procure such a one.”

“For shame, Victor!”

“Shame?” He grinned. “I don’t know the meaning of the word. You will have to explain it to me. I believe Miss Hopkins instructed you in that humbling emotion often enough.”

She fell silent, appalled and afraid. Yet she felt a flicker of hope. Nothing more. If he wanted to sell her unmarred, then she had a chance, however slender.

“How long has it been since you ran away into the night?” he mused. “Two years? Three? I thought I might find you when I came down to London but only once did I catch a glimpse. You were riding in a carriage by a lady, dressed in her second best as far as I could tell. I assumed you had gone into service as a maid.”

Angelica let him talk.

“After all, you had no references and no sensible family would entrust their precious brats to an unknown girl who called herself a governess.” He cast an assessing look at her. “And you are too proud to whore. I knew that.”

She drew herself up unthinkingly.

“So that left working in a shop, which I did not think you would do. Too public. Or becoming a lady’s maid. I was right, wasn’t I?”

His expression was unbearably smug. She did not reply.

“But finding you was a problem, and of course I was establishing my business and had many other things to do. As you just said, there are many women in London who are willing to sell themselves. But my enterprise was specialized.”

Shut up. She wanted to scream it a thousand times. She wanted to choke him, squeeze the foul life from his body and consign his soul to hell, but the thought of his far superior strength, to say nothing of his underlings in this house, put paid to that wild idea.

“It did also occur to me that you might become the mistress of a wealthy man, perhaps even the wife of one who didn’t care to ask questions,” he continued. “I see that didn’t happen.”

She shook her head, not that she was entirely surprised by his obsessive pursuit of her in the intervening years. “How did you find out that I worked for the Congreves?”

“The old man and I belong to the same club. He was in his cups, boasting of his conquests from a list he had in his hand. He happened to describe a young beauty, a new maid he’d hired for his wife and I thought it might be you. Then I looked at the list and I saw your name, plain as day. Angelica Harrow. He’d put a star by it.”

“Why?”

“He explained that it meant you were next.”

“I dodged him,” she said flatly. “His wife had her suspicions, but she was entirely wrong.”

“I see,” Victor said cheerfully. “I do like the forthright way you say that. It sounds as if you are done pretending to be outraged.”

He looked at her through narrowed eyes and it began to dawn on Angelica that she would do well to play along for the time being.

“You must know by now how the world works. Women do not choose their destinies unless luck is on their side and it is not on yours. What do you think? Shall we come to some sort of agreement concerning your, ah, employment?”

She hesitated, unable to formulate a plausible lie in time.

“You don’t want to be a maid or a draggletail, do you? My man found no money on you when he rolled you in burlap and took you out the back way of that huge house. Going downhill is all too easy for a woman with no family.” He smirked again, more widely this time. “Am I not right, Angelica?”

She nodded and sank upon the bed, twisting her hands until they hurt, not looking at Victor, not seeing anything in her pain.