A faint rumble went up, ominous, cutting across her musings.
It froze Verity in her tracks.
Squeak. Squeak.
She cried out as a flurry of rats bolted toward her, and she raced out of their path, hugging the brick wall.
Just as several loose stones overhead gave way, toppling into a heap, the clatter of those rocks crushing the rats who’d found themselves in the place where she’d just been.
Breathless from relief and terror, those competing emotions twining in her chest, Verity struggled to get air into her lungs. Leaning against the wall, she took support from the dank bricks.
“Everything about this damned place is dank,” she whispered, needing to hear herself talk in this underground crypt. Fearing the drip-drip, drip-drip pattern of sewer water plinking would drive her mad. “The air, the walls, the ground . . .” She froze. “The ground,” she echoed. No. With dread slipping through her, Verity lifted her left foot from the water.
She groaned. “Noooo.” Her heart plummeted to the sole of her now naked foot.
She’d lost one, which may as well have been a pair of shoes. And what was worse . . . it wasn’t Verity’s, but Livvie’s.
Closing her eyes once more, she knocked her head lightly against the brick.
Damn all men.
The one who’d loved her mother, but not enough, and for it, had left Verity a bastard with few supports in place when he’d died.
Lowery and his damned son with his ill opinion of women and their capabilities.
And Fairpoint. Hatred sizzled through her veins, crackling and lifelike.
She forced her eyes open.
And damn the gentleman busy playing at street rat for the perverse devil he was. Her fury compelled her away from the wall, and she found solace . . . nay, strength in it. It enlivened her and gave her a focus that would keep her from surrendering to the panic of her circumstances.
Gathering up her wet skirts, she trudged through the water, scraping her toes along bricks slicked with grime.
She flinched. “What in God’s name is that?” she whispered. As soon as she gave the question life, she shook her head hard. No. Don’t think about it. “Think about the fact that you’re scurrying around the gutters like a rodent.” And all because a man who had a fortune and future awaiting him was more content to dwell here? “Lunacy.” She exhaled a hiss of anger. Sheer lunacy was all that accounted for it.
Verity toed the floor.
How far could the damned scrap have gone?
And then her foot caught a patch of grime, and she cried out as her leg came out from under her and she tumbled onto her buttocks, landing with a sharp splash.
Freezing water immediately soaked her skirts, the sting of cold as biting as the pain that throbbed up her spine from where she’d fallen. There, braced on her elbows, up to them in grime, she didn’t want to consider, until she was out of this hell, bathed, and the gowns she now wore properly laundered, just what she was drenched in. Every part of her, from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes, was soaked.
Her toes.
My toes.
She froze, and with a sickening dread winding through her once more, Verity slowly lifted first one bare foot from the water—and then the other.
Two slippers, gone.
Something built in her chest; a half groan, half sob rumbled up and then exploded from her lips. Verity hugged her arms around her middle and laughed.
It could not possibly get worse than this.
With that empty assurance rolling around her mind, she struggled to her feet and set to searching for two missing slippers.
Chapter 4
THE LONDONER
At last, the world has the name they’ve been searching for. Questions have swirled, cloaking society in the same fog that rolls over the darkened streets inhabited by the man whose identity everyone longs to know.
V. Lovelace
Every muscle in Malcom’s arms ached. His biceps and triceps bulged and screamed in protest.
Sweat dripping from his brow, he shoved himself up another fraction, using the wood bars to lever himself higher. And then he held himself there, suspended.
And even that torturous exertion was preferable to the man droning on behind him. Or attempting to. Since he’d let the fancily clad old man in nearly thirty minutes ago, the servant had done more stammering than speaking.
“My lord.” Sanders, the aging man-of-affairs Malcom had inherited some several months back, sifted through yet another stack of papers. “I—”
“I told you not to call me that,” he said coolly as a bead of sweat slipped down his forehead and hit his eye.
“But you are the Earl—”
Malcom silenced the rest of that protestation with a look.
Even if Steele had laid a paper trail that could stretch the length of London with proof of Malcom’s claim to the Maxwell title, Malcom wanted nothing to do with the earldom. With any of it. It might be his past, but that was precisely what it was . . . his past. At that, one he didn’t have a single recollection of. “It’s enough that I’ve accepted my rightful claim to the damned title.”
He blinked back another bead of sweat from his eye, the sting of discomfort transmuted by the strain he put his body through. God, how he despised the blighter. The reason—and the only reason—Malcom forced himself through the old man’s company was to spare himself from having to oversee the mess he’d inherited. “I also advised at our last meeting—of which there had already been too many—that we were done,” he gritted out through the strain of his efforts, fixing his gaze over the top of the older man’s head. Everything Malcom had gleaned about his new circumstances changed nothing. Or he’d been determined that would be the case.
“That is also true,” Sanders said with more aplomb than he’d shown since he’d entered. “However, my . . . Mr. North,” he amended, and then grimaced as though the reduction in title, even in speech, were physically painful to concede. “I also informed you that there would be matters that came up.”
“Matters came up when Steele came to me,” he muttered, inching his frame along the parallel bars.
“Yes.”
“And the following week after that.”
“Yes, but given the extreme nature of the circumstances, it was to be expected that—”
“And then when you came to me, each week thereafter.” Malcom may have dwelled outside the world of Polite Society, but he knew enough what the servant had done—he had set himself up weekly appointments with the intention of tricking Malcom into taking a role in his newly inherited business.
Footsteps sounded from the hall. A moment later, the door opened, and Giles let himself in. The only person in London who’d dare that insolence, and yet, here they were.
Sanders paused midsentence, his gaze lingering on the empty place the larger man’s left hand should be.
Catching that horrified focus, Giles raised the empty nub to his forehead in mock salute.
Sanders’s skin was leached of color, his throat moving frantically before he shifted his focus back over to Malcom.
“You were saying?” Malcom asked coolly.
His man-of-affairs swallowed loudly. “I—I understand your concerns—”
“If you understood them, then you’d not be wasting my time now.”