The Secret Pearl(8)

She sat numbly listening to the impossible, the unbelievable. She was going to be a governess. She was to live in the country and have charge of the education of a five-year-old child. She was being handed enough money to buy herself some decent dresses and bonnets and shoes. She was to live with a respectable family in a respectable home.

What would Mr. Houghton say, she wondered, how would he look at her, if he knew the truth about her? What would happen if he ever did find out? Or if Mr. and Mrs. Kent ever found out? How would they feel if they knew that their man of business was employing a whore to teach their child?

“No,” she said, rising from her chair as Mr. Houghton stood at his side of the table, “I have no questions, sir.”

“I shall bring your stagecoach ticket within the next few days, then, Miss Hamilton,” he said, inclining his head dismissively to her. “Good day to you, ma’am.”

She left the room and the agency in a daze, hardly noticing Miss Fleming, who nodded to her graciously as she passed.

Inside the inner room, Peter Houghton pursed his lips and stared at the closed door through which his master’s ladybird had just passed.

He could not see the attraction. The girl was thin and pale, with unremarkable features and reddish hair that lacked luster. When she had some weight on her, perhaps she would have a pretty-enough figure. But when all was said and done, she was but a whore whom his master had picked up outside the Drury Lane a few nights before.

He had never known his employer to house a mistress even in London. And yet this girl was not to be set up discreetly in a town house of her own, where she could be visited and enjoyed at the duke’s leisure. She was to be sent to Willoughby, housed under the same roof as the duke’s wife and daughter. She was to be the daughter’s governess.

His grace was a strange man. Peter Houghton respected his master and valued the employment, but still there was something strange about the man. The duchess was ten times lovelier than the ladybird.

Wife and mistress under the same roof. Life could turn interesting. Presumably his grace would soon decide that a return to the country and domestic bliss would be in order.

Peter Houghton smiled slightly and shook his head. One thing was certain, anyway. He would be delighted to be free of this room and Miss Fleming’s simpering and flirtatious smiles after four whole days of waiting for thin, red-haired Fleur to put in an appearance.


FLEUR LEFT LONDON ON the stage six days later, having had one more brief meeting with Mr. Houghton. She took with her a trunk of modest size in which were folded neatly her blue silk dress and gray cloak as well as several plain but serviceable new clothes and accessories.

It was a long and an uncomfortable journey, in which more often than not she was squashed between large and irritable and unwashed passengers. But she would not complain, even in the privacy of her own mind. The alternatives were all too real to her.

If she were not on this journey, she would be living in her little hole of a room by day and plying her trade as a whore by night. By now she would have experienced several different customers, and perhaps she would have discovered the truth of what her first had told her. Perhaps it would have been possible for other men to treat her more roughly. And perhaps they would have paid her less, so that she would have been forced to work every night.

No, she would not complain. If only Mr. and Mrs. Kent did not discover the truth about her. But how could they? Only one man on earth knew the truth, and she would never see him again, though he would live in her nightmares for the rest of her life.

Of course, there was another truth for Mr. and Mrs. Kent to discover too. And once London and its terrors were left behind, she was reminded more strongly of it again and found herself looking nervously about her for she knew not what.

She saw Hobson’s dead face more often in her mind once she was back in open countryside, the eyes staring, the jaw dropped open, the face ashen and surprised. She was amazed it had not haunted her dreams more than it had during the past seven weeks. But of course there had been the even greater terror of surviving in the slums of London.

It haunted her waking dreams now.

She had killed him. As well as a whore, she was a murderer. What would these people in the stage do or say if they knew who she was or what she was? There was something almost hilarious in the thought. Horrifyingly hilarious.

“What’s the joke, ducks?” a buxom woman carrying a basket almost as large as herself asked from the seat opposite.

Fleur sobered instantly. “I was just thinking how we might all be bounced to a jelly by the time we cross this particular stretch of road,” she said, and smiled.

It was a fortunate answer. All the inside passengers brightened as they aired their grievances against the parish responsible for the repair of that stretch of the highway over which they were passing.