The Blushing Bounder (An Iron Seas Short Novella) (2 page)

How long had Temperance waited after her father declared that she had a choice between living the remainder of her life working on her back, or marrying Edward Newberry?

“Just one day,” she said—and that only three weeks ago.

Temperance had just settled into bed when she heard her husband come into the flat. Quickly, she dropped her book to her lap and snuffed her bedside lamp. If he did not see the light, perhaps he would not bother to check on her, and she would be spared his presence for almost a whole day’s span.

But she had no luck. The tread of his boots approached her bedroom—and then silence, as he paused. As he always did.

Even in happier days, he’d paused. How very long ago that seemed, though it had only been two years since she’d first taken a position as governess to Baron Shiplan’s two young daughters. Two years since she had first noticed the constable who’d patrolled the park where she’d daily taken her charges for exercise and fresh air. He had not been the only constable, of course—but there had been no others so tall, with shoulders so wide, and hair so red. There had been no others whose nod and rumbling “ma’am” as she passed gave her a shiver, and no others who had charmed her with a deep blush the first time she’d offered a smile and a “constable” in return.

And it had only been a year and a half since she’d been sitting on a bench, watching the Shiplan girls skate on the frozen pond. A year and a half since she’d turned to find him holding a handkerchief that she’d dropped on one of the paths—he’d paused a few feet away, as if working up the courage to take the final steps, to speak. His face had burned when she’d thanked him and taken the handkerchief, her gloved fingers brushing his.

In the year that followed, how many times had she turned on that bench to find him standing, waiting for her invitation to come closer? Not that he’d sat with her, oh no—that wouldn’t have been proper. But he could stand at the other end of the bench, and they could speak softly enough not to be overheard.

She had told him
so
much. Her life seemed to start at his first pause, and she told him all of it. Every bit, beginning with how she was born the youngest daughter of the estranged youngest son of a viscount. She had laughed at herself as she’d described her seasons and her family’s efforts to find her a husband—she was too tall, too plain, and too poor to secure more than pity—and yet her constable had looked at her as if she were beautiful. She had told him how pleased she’d been to find a position as agreeable as governess to the Shiplans. And when her grandfather had begun to wither away, she had confided that sometime in the future a small inheritance would be hers—very small, but enough to keep a flat of her own, if she dared defy convention and live by herself. What would it matter if she did? At twenty-four, she was all but a spinster; in another few years, she would very firmly be one. What harm would it do if she used her money in a manner that would make her most happy?

No harm
, he’d said, and it was the first phrase he’d spoken that hadn’t been accompanied by red cheeks.

Very casually, she had mentioned him in her letters to her sisters—the constable from the park who blushed so charmingly. Perhaps she mentioned him too many times; Prudence had replied with the caution that men whose blood rose so easily were usually
Men With Appetites
. Temperance couldn’t believe it of her constable, however, not when he’d been so unfailingly kind and courteous. Indeed, she was certain that if he knew how the sight of his ungloved hands could make her blood run hot, if he knew that she often sat on the bench with her thighs clenched and pressed so, so tightly together, her constable would only blush—he would not give in to appetites. She had thought to respond to Prudence that perhaps men whose blood rose so easily created
Women With Appetites
—but she hadn’t written that, of course. She’d only thought it.

Then six months ago, she spent three weeks in bed coughing and sweating, and with no appetite of any kind. Her constable had waited then, too, and after three more weeks had passed and she’d finally had strength enough to return to her bench, he was already there. She’d seen the clench of his hands, as if he forced himself not to reach for her. She saw how he swallowed and turned his face away when she told him that if the illness came again, if it worsened, she would not spend her inheritance on a flat, but a sanatorium surrounded by a park, so that she could live out the remainder of her spinsterhood in quiet and peace.

For a while, that hadn’t appeared to be her future. She’d been a bit weak and tired, but capable of teaching and fulfilling her duties. She had hope—until she was struck by the debilitating coughing again, the night sweats, and she’d begun to shed weight like water. An advance on her inheritance was given, and arrangements were made with the sanatorium. She’d bundled her things, and she’d still been strong enough to walk with her employers and their children out the front door to the waiting steamcoach.

But Edward Newberry had been waiting, too. For a farewell look, she’d thought, and her pleasure had been so great that she’d been unable to stop her smile—the same smile that had always been her invitation when she turned to find him waiting near her bench.

She had not cared that he approached her now. How lovely was it, that she would see him a final time, that she had an opportunity to say good-bye? It was a blessing. An improper one, perhaps, but she had been short on blessings of late, and she would not turn away from this one.

Except that day, he didn’t pause at all. With his eyes locked on hers, he’d advanced swiftly, cupped her face in his giant hands, and kissed her.

He kissed her though Baron Shiplan struck him across the back with his cane, shouting that he was a filthy cur. He kissed her though two footmen tried to wrestle him away from her—and though she regained her senses halfway through, and began to struggle, too. He kissed her until the Shiplan girls were pulled away from the scene by their mother; as they went the elder one said,
“That is only the man she speaks with in the park every day,”
and the focus of everyone’s outrage shifted to include Temperance.

Newberry had been dragged away, Temperance sent to her father’s home. In tearstained letters, her sisters confessed that they’d known how she’d encouraged the constable, and they hadn’t done enough to warn her against it. The sanatorium’s directors heard rumors of her wanton behavior, and suggested another location for Temperance to spend her remaining years. No one would have her, no one wanted her, and suddenly it mattered little that Edward Newberry didn’t know who his father was, and his late mother had been an actress who’d entertained a string of men throughout her career, and that he was three years younger than she. Her grandfather’s solicitor met with Newberry—now unemployed as well, dismissed from the police force for his unbecoming conduct—and it was agreed that he would have her inheritance if they married and moved to London.

He’d immediately agreed; Temperance had taken a day longer. When she’d seen him again, moments before they were wed, she’d asked him—still hoping that he was her friend who’d simply been swept up by an impulse—whether he’d planned all of this to happen when he’d kissed her: the marriage, the inheritance, and London?

Yes
, he’d said, and his answer had shattered that hope.

She’d been sick on the airship journey from Manhattan City to Bath. She’d been sick on the locomotive to London, on the steamcoach from the station to their flat—and feeling sick again, listening to him pause outside the door, and remembering how deceived she’d been, how
stupid
she’d been, for smiling every time he’d paused before.

Nothing left of her heart allowed a smile now. She closed her eyes when the gentle knock sounded, followed by the creaking hinges. Light spilling in from the small parlor warmed the darkness behind her eyelids.

His voice came, low and gruff. “Forgive the disturbance—I saw your lamp through the window as I was coming in, and hoped you hadn’t yet fallen asleep.”

Drat. “I’m awake.”

“How did Miss Lockstitch work out?”

She was vulgar and wore a disturbing contraption in place of her hand. “Very well,” Temperance said, and because it was ridiculous, she opened her eyes.

His big body filled the doorway, nothing but a silhouette. He’d removed his domed hat and the shape of his shoulders seemed less stiff than usual. He must have also taken off his uniform jacket…which meant he stood at her door in his shirtsleeves.
Oh.
She closed her eyes again, trying not to remember the night when she had woken in a sweat, not only from the sickness but the sweltering summer night, and he’d heard her walking about and had come to the door of his room. He had been very solid, her husband, as if he spent many hours in a pugilist’s ring rather than simply patrolling a quiet park.

“Have you thought more on the infection?”

The memory of his bare chest dissolved easily. “I have told you, I will not end up…a thing. And you
know
I will. You’ve heard of the zombies as well.” Ravenous, mindless—consuming other humans, filled with
bugs
. It was unthinkable. Only a horrid man could think a short lifetime could be worth an eternity of
that
. “I do not understand why you pursue this. You have my money. Is that not enough?”

“It’s not hardly enough. You
must
risk—” he began, but the exertion of her anger had squeezed at her lungs, caught at her throat, and the cough had ruptured up, cutting him off. Then another, and another, until her throat was raw and her muscles aching and blood spotted her handkerchief. She curled up on her side, bracing herself against each wracking cough, tears slipping into the pillow. He crossed the room during her fit, and as the coughing eased his hand made warm circles on her back. But she could not bear his touch, not when she had wanted it for so long and now it came like this.

“Leave me be,” she whispered. “Let me sleep.”

He paused, then, and she thought he might refuse. But he turned away, quietly closing the door behind him, and she struggled up in her bed and fixed her draught of laudanum. The bitter medicine coated her tongue, her throat, and was all that she could taste as she lay back again, listening to her husband move about the flat, retrieving his cold dinner from the stone slab in the larder. Chair legs scraped lightly against the floor in their small dining area, then there was only quiet as he settled in to eat.

The laudanum warmed her chest, weighed down her limbs. She closed her heavy eyelids, and it was so easy to imagine him sitting at their table in his shirtsleeves, at the table that was so similar to the one she’d once imagined for her own flat. A cozy combination of rooms converted from an old mews, she wouldn’t have wanted anything more—except that this was in London, and she shared the flat with a deceitful man, and she was dying in it.

2

T
HE NIGHTMARE CAME,
and she saw herself emaciated and pale and ravenous. Temperance opened her eyes to the dark, heart pounding, her linen shift twisted and clinging with sweat. As always, the laudanum weighed on her chest, pressed her into the bed, and she had a moment of terror that she wouldn’t be able to get up, that she was already dead.

But her legs moved, and she swung her feet to the wooden floor. From the other room, she heard a deep coughing. Newberry, but he didn’t suffer as she did. His cough was of his own making.

Desperate for air, she opened the window to the warm night, but it wouldn’t be
fresh
air—not in London. The gray haze of smoke that hung over the city during the day was still visible at night, the glow of the gas streetlamps casting a dirty yellow into the dark sky. She breathed it in, though the filthy air would kill her faster and was already clawing at her husband’s lungs, air that she could hear being made dirtier in the distance, on the busier streets of London, the never-ending rumble of the steamcoaches and lorries and carts belching their exhaust.

Their second-level flat overlooked the cobblestone alley between the mews and the lockstitch guild’s great stone house—an aristocrat’s house, perhaps, before the Horde had come and most of the nobles had fled to the New World. She looked to the end of the alley. Miss Lockstitch had told her that a park lay not far away, the Embankment alongside the River Thames. From there, she would be able to see the bridges, the colorful tents over the Temple Fair, and the crumbling tower that had once broadcasted the radio signal the Horde had used to control the bugs.

She would like that—the tower was only a curiosity, but the Embankment’s gardens sounded like heaven, and the strange amusements of the Temple Fair diverting. Perhaps she and Miss Lockstitch could hire a cab this week, and if Temperance could not manage a walk through the gardens, at least she could sit.

Feeling light, lighter than she usually did after a draught of laudanum, Temperance idly glanced to the other end of the alley, and realized that she was still in her nightmare. What else could that man have sprung from?