A Season to Be Sinful Read online

  She made a face but drank it down. “May I have a pillow to place under my foot?”

  “Of course.” He took back the glass, then made her as comfortable as her pain would allow. “Aren’t you tired?”

  “It will take some time for the laudanum to work. I only woke a short time ago.”

  Sherry was aware of Lily’s quiet regard; she was studying him in a way that discomfited him with its thoroughness. “What is it?”

  “You never fought being won over by them, did you?”

  “No. It seemed pointless.”

  “Why?”

  Sherry eased himself down on the edge of the bed. “You will perhaps want to hear that it was a selfless act, but I can tell you it was one of extraordinary selfishness. They are like a balm for my soul.”

  Lily frowned. “Is your soul so wounded, then?”

  “Mayhap not so much as it was.” He felt her hand slide over his. “I do not know what it was like for you when your parents died, but when mine were killed I blamed myself. It was not unreasonable, given that they were journeying to Eton at the time. I learned later that only the innkeeper and one guest survived the fire. If they had not been asked to attend me at the school, they might yet be alive.”

  “Attend you?” asked Lily. “Because you were being recognized for excellence? An award perhaps?”

  He shook his head. “But you are kind to champion me. No, I was in trouble with the headmaster—again. I was organizing a coup that would have replaced one of the prefects. The plan—all of it committed to pen and paper by my own hand—was flawed. There were not to have been any blows exchanged, and certainly the blood was not anticipated, but I didn’t know that Gordon Olin was going to leap over a banister and break his leg, nor did I think that when I butted the prefect with my head that it would bloody his nose.”

  “It was a brawl,” Lily said.

  “It was the last in a series of trials to the headmaster, thus the invitation to my parents to take me in hand or take me home.”

  “And they never arrived.”

  “No. Never.”

  “Is that when you began to embrace your well-ordered life?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I am imagining you said or did very little after that to call attention to yourself. No more tricks. No plots. Nothing out of the ordinary. Am I right?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “And now it nettles that you have been such a model of rectitude and good sense.”

  “A model of rectitude.” He pretended to give that serious consideration. “That is puffing the thing up a bit, for I am simply accounted to be toplofty. You cannot pretend it is otherwise because you have named me so yourself.”

  She flushed. “I did not understand then. I wish you would not mock yourself.”

  “It is a talent recently acquired and one I find with much to recommend it. You should be encouraging me, not asking me to stop. In any event, I do not believe one can properly be called a model of anything at only eight-and-twenty years.”

  “You are so young?”

  He gave a shout of laughter. “Oh, pray, say you will never try to flatter me because I enjoy this so much more.”

  Lily felt a surge of heat to her face. “Forgive me. It is only that your eyes . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “They seem older.”

  Sobering, Sherry laced his fingers with hers. “Do you know that is precisely what I see when I look at you?”

  It did not surprise her. She had seen it for herself in the mirror. “We are two old souls, then.”

  “I had choices, Lily,” he said, “about the things I have done.”

  “You told me that before.”

  “Then believe it. I do not think it was true for you.”

  She shook her head.

  “Where did you go when you left the abbey?” He held his breath while he waited to see if she would answer this time.

  “Le Havre.”

  He exhaled softly. “Then on to England?”

  “That was the plan. It would have been a smuggler’s vessel, but I didn’t understand that. Sister Mary Joseph gave me a young man’s identity papers and a letter of introduction to her brother.”

  “She wanted you to go?”

  Lily nodded. Perhaps it was the laudanum, she thought, that made her less cautious, or perhaps it was that Sherry had finally breached her defenses. It probably didn’t matter; she was ready to tell him some piece of the truth. “Because of him,” she said. “She wanted me to go because he came to the abbey looking for a governess, and he chose me. They had a party for me that same afternoon, to say farewell, because he was to return for me the following morning. I did not want to go, but I thought they were sincere in wishing me well. When Sister Mary Joseph sought me out that night and told me I should leave, I thought she could not mean it. You cannot imagine how frightened I was at the prospect of setting off on my own.”

  She was right; he could not imagine. “So you did leave.” “Yes. She saw me off. I walked most of the night. That is what she encouraged me to do: to walk at night and sleep and hide during the day. It would take weeks, she said, to do it that way, and she was right. I counted a full twenty-one days before I saw Le Havre.”

  Sherry had not been certain Lily had made it so far. He waited for her to go on, applying no pressure, not even where his fingers laced with hers.

  “He was there,” she said. “Waiting for me. He knew I was dressed as a boy; he knew the name I had been given. I do not believe Sister Mary Joseph gave me up willingly. She was compelled to do so by Reverend Mother or Bishop Corbeil, perhaps threatened with the loss of her immortal soul.” Lily studied Sherry’s features. “Do you think I am being dramatic?”

  “No. I cannot imagine a nun being compelled to speak for less.”

  “He enjoyed some influence with the bishop, though I did not understand it at the time. It was money, I think, that held sway, not his devotion to the church. He was not a Roman Catholic, nor even particularly religious—not in any accepted fashion. What he knew was sacrilege.”

  “He is the one who taught you to say your prayers.” Sherry thought he had said too much when he felt Lily go still. Her eyes darted away from his.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “He is the one.”

  Sherry felt her shudder slip from her and into him. “Where did you go after Le Havre?”

  “To Paris. That is where his children were. It was no fabrication that he required a governess for them, and he employed me in that position for more than ten months before there was the least impropriety.”

  “Then he was very clever.”

  She nodded. “I was frightened of him when I met him at the abbey, and those fears were borne out again when Sister Mary Joseph insisted I should go. When he appeared in Le Havre, I tried to run, but his footmen caught me and took me to his carriage. I was trembling so violently I thought I would faint.”

  “But he put you at your ease.”

  Her eyes met his again, wondering this time. “How did you know?”

  “Because you are describing the sort of man who enjoys watching a butterfly in a bottle. He waits until the wings have stopped beating frantically against the glass to observe what he has caught . . . and only then does he make it part of his collection.”

  Lily pressed her lips together and nodded quickly. “It was exactly that. I was wary but, in the end, too naive to understand how I was being manipulated. He calmed me enough to get me away from Le Havre without further incident, then gradually wore me down over the course of the next weeks and months. The children helped, though they could not know how they were also being used. They simply made it easier for him to approach me. He visited them often when I was about. He inquired about their progress and invited them to dine with him on occasion. I was asked to attend them.” Her smile was rueful. “It was considered a privilege.”

  Sherry listened, but he heard her words as a succession of small blows,
struck each time they pointed to how he had inadvertently fashioned the same path for her. He was humbled by her courage to extend him even a modicum of trust.

  “Did he make you love him?” Sherry asked.

  “No.”

  “There would be no shame in it.”

  “No,” she repeated. “He had no understanding of how a thing like that might be accomplished. He was able to encourage me to lower my guard but not engender any fine feeling for him. I do not think he understood how truly innocent I was. He knew I was untouched, but he could not entirely comprehend that it was as much a matter of mind as it was a physical state.”

  Sherry watched Lily’s eyelids droop suddenly and recognized the effects of the laudanum. “Will you not lie down?”

  She smiled faintly. “Then you have heard enough?”

  “I will listen to whatever you want to tell me, but I hope you will also rest.”

  Lily lifted Sherry’s hand to her mouth and brushed his knuckles with her lips. “Will you lie with me, my lord?”

  “What of your ankle?”

  “It barely throbs.”

  He hesitated, then agreed. “Very well.”

  “Snuff the candle,” she said quietly, releasing his hand. “There are things I must say that can never know light.”

  Eleven

  Sherry lay on his side, propped on one elbow, and listened to the sound of Lily’s quiet, even breathing. She had been asleep only a short time, and he was loath to move away and perhaps jar her awake.

  It was a well-deserved respite. He understood why she required the cover of darkness to speak of what had been done to her. Though she never said she suffered, there had been suffering. In a matter-of-fact voice, Lily described the teachings of her nameless employer, the impiety of the prayers at his feet, the mock confessional where she might be locked away for hours before he came to hear her sins and require that she do penance on her back. He spoke of cleansing when he gave his seed to her belly or her mouth, and if he gave his seed to her womb, then it was because she had tempted him and was punished for it with the same scourge he used on occasion to flay his own back.

  She was expected to be with his children during the day and conduct herself as if nothing untoward happened after they were abed. Like a whipping boy, she was made to accept their punishments, then was punished herself for not setting a better example.

  In a voice that Sherry had to strain to hear, Lily told him how her employer would not come to her for weeks at a time, as though testing his will over his obsession, then use her body without relent for days. It did not take long before it was the anticipation of his arrival that she came to dread more than whatever act he forced upon her.

  Sherry asked if there was a wife who might have intervened or a servant she could have applied to for help. Lily told him that she knew her employer only as a widower, though some servants gossiped that his wife had fled when the younger child was yet an infant and that she was too ashamed by the use he made of her to go to anyone for help.

  There were visitors to the house in Paris. Her employer entertained guests at least once each sennight. Usually these evenings were exclusively male, and the company stayed long after dinner was served. Occasionally there were cards played, but more often it was merely talk. If there were ladies among the guests, sometimes she was asked to present the children, and Lily believed it was during such an introduction that she attracted the attention of one of the gentlemen in the party.

  Later that night, her employer made a gift of her to the gentleman. A sacrificial lamb, he had called her, in the cause of peace, and he had remained in the room to observe that she was obedient to every demand made on her. When he was invited to join them on the bed, he did so, and they agreed they would take her at once so that the cries that one forced on her were smothered by the act of the other.

  The following day she tried to leave. It was not her first attempt at fleeing, but she had never gotten so far before. Instead of trying to reach Le Havre, she set off in the direction of the abbey, intending to apply for sanctuary. It was not her employer who found her but one of the gentlemen who was a frequent guest in his home and by happenstance was traveling the same road as she. When she realized she was recognized, she threw herself at his mercy, telling as much as she dared and begging to be taken to the abbey.

  Lily described perfectly the revulsion the gentleman demonstrated for her tale and ultimately for her. To prevent her from spreading what he was certain were lies and ruining the reputation of a man of some importance, he returned her directly to her employer and suggested the asylum that once held the notorious de Sade as being a fitting place for her.

  “Do you think he considered it?” Sherry had asked. In the deep quiet of the room his voice seemed harsh, though Lily didn’t flinch from it. She found his hand instead and drew it just under her breast so that his palm cupped her steady heartbeat.

  It was then that Sherry fully comprehended the dual purpose of the darkness she had insisted upon. It was not that she did not want him to see her face as she spoke but that she did not want to see his. Perhaps it was her experience with the fellow traveler that made her wary. Her clearest memory of her escape was not where she had been when his carriage met up with her but rather the man’s repugnance as he listened to her story and his revilement when she finished.

  It was what she could not bring herself to risk with him; she had taken his hand to her breast only partly as comfort for herself. It was more important to her that she ease his mind.

  That was why, having asked the question, he did not wait for her reply. With his hand held to her heart, Sherry bent his head and placed his mouth gently on hers. He tasted the tears she had not allowed him to see, the ones that had given her voice a note of huskiness and forced the occasional pause in her words so that she might swallow the ache of them.

  His kiss was gentle, healing, and without any expectation that it would be returned. It was what he wanted to give that prompted it, not what he wanted to take. When he drew back it was because he sensed her watery smile under his mouth and knew she was in need of another handkerchief. Because they couldn’t find the one she’d had earlier, he gave her a corner of the sheet instead.

  He helped her carefully change position so that she could rest her head on his shoulder and his arm would shelter her. He thought she would sleep then, but she was fighting the soporific effects of the laudanum and wanted nothing so much as to have the whole of the story behind her.

  “I think he did consider the asylum,” she told him as if there had been no interruption. “But he was not willing to be parted from me yet. I learned there were other governesses before me, three in all, though none remained under his roof as long as I did.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “I was told only that they left. I think it is more likely that the servants themselves did not know and refused to speculate in front of me. Perhaps he committed them as was suggested for me, but I know their fate was different from my own. Within four days of my return to the house in Paris, I was on a ship bound for England with the children and my employer.”

  “England? A Frenchman making his way to England during wartime?” It was when Lily fell quiet that Sherry found his faulty assumption and realized the truth was fraught with complications. “He is English, then, this employer of yours.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he was in Paris for so long.” Sherry spoke more to himself than Lily, musing on the problem with no anticipation that there would be an answer from her. He could think of only two reasons an Englishman would have spent so many months in Paris: he was either traitor or diplomat. The fact that he returned to England made Sherry suspect it was the latter, and if it were the latter, then there was a real possibility that he was also a spy. Diplomacy and spy work, all of it in the service of the Crown. It virtually assured Lily would not know justice for what had been done to her. Her tormentor was beyond the reach of law.

  It was why She
rry knew he was vulnerable to those forms of justice that existed outside it, the type that Sherry himself had been called upon to mete out before he announced that he was leaving his other well-ordered life.

  “I beg you not to think on him any longer,” Lily said. “I have not protected his identity to save him but to save myself and those I—” She hesitated. “And those I have come to care for deeply. He is not deserving of your consideration in any manner you give it.”

  “It is like demanding that I not remove a splinter from my thumb,” he said. “It is bound to fester.”

  “Please,” she implored softly. “Do not cause me to regret what I have already said.”

  Sherry had to make a decision, so he honored Lily’s wishes and put the gentleman he would cause to be killed someday from his mind. “Was it to London that you were brought?”

  “Yes. We stayed for a time there, then retired to the country. It seemed that he was less interested in me when we were at his estate. I saw him in the company of other women and was glad of it. For a few months there was talk of an engagement, but it came to nothing. I thought I should be able tolerate my life there, such life as it was, then he informed me of his wish to make me available to others. He liked watching, you see, and had discovered it when he gave me over to the gentleman in Paris. He was having a hunting lodge built that would serve but one purpose: it would be the setting in which I would entertain his most particular friends.”

  Sherry had stroked Lily’s hair for a time, winding soft strands around his fingers, giving her respite from the effort of speaking.

  “He sought my permission, if you can imagine it. It was a peculiar source of pride to him that I could be made to sanction not only my own captivity but what would be done to me once I agreed to it. I refused in the beginning, but not overlong. I deemed that too quick a surrender would have made him suspicious, while denying him might have made me a cripple.

  “I left him before the lodge was completed. It was not a well-planned escape, merely taking advantage of an opportunity. I hid away in the tinker’s wagon almost as far as the next village, then found a hayrick where I could burrow. I walked west to the ocean, not south, and stole aboard a ship.”