Three Weeks With Lady X(19)

"Lala has a very charming figure," she offered.

He looked up and grinned. He had lovely white teeth. "I know."

She was beginning to feel owlish and drowsily content, so she put her  elbows on the table. Even not having had a governess, she knew it was  deeply improper. Actually, worse than that: maybe it was criminal.

Thorn wouldn't care.

"I think you'll be quite happy together." She poured more wine for him,  thought about it, and poured more for herself as well. "Will you tell me  about growing up in East London?" she asked, propping up her head with  one hand.

"It wasn't fun," he said. His voice dropped in register.

"I didn't suppose it was fun. I imagined it was terrible. But I don't know, which is why I asked."

He had curious eyes, a gray that looked almost green in the lamplight.  With a thick fringe of black lashes. "Why do you want to know?"

"Why not?" She took a sip of wine, feeling heat pool in her stomach. It  was his fault for being so damned handsome. She pushed the thought away.  "I am curious about any number of things. Almost every moment, I  realize something else I don't know. For example, I don't know who  Leonardo was, any more than I understood Rose's French verbs."

"No particular reason why you should know about Leonardo," Thorn said.  "He was an artist, though I don't care about that. I'm interested in his  inventions."

He was looking down at what remained of the cheese pie as if he were  about to take another piece, even though he'd already eaten three. India  reached across and took it away. "You've eaten enough. You will grow  fat."

"I won't get fat." He growled it.

"You've probably grown a paunch from all the food you've just eaten," she said, enjoying herself.

His eyes narrowed and he stood up wordlessly, pulled his shirt from his breeches, and bared his stomach.

India barely stopped her mouth from falling open. He looked like . . .  like something. Like no man she'd ever seen. Not that she'd seen many  men. But she knew they were soft around the middle, the same as she was.  Thorn wasn't. His torso was rippled with muscle under taut skin. Rather  than white, it was sun-browned, and a little line of hair led straight  into his waistband.

"I trust I have made my point," he said, sitting down again. "Now I  shall have a slice of strawberry tart with cream." He cut the tart and  took half for himself. He cut another quarter and put it before her. And  then he poured thick cream on top of both plates.

India never ate sweets because she figured that there was about the  right amount of her. Besides, Adelaide was convinced that dessert went  straight to one's breasts, and India was wary of becoming more bosomy  than she already was. Speaking of which-speaking of whom?-her godmother  must have gone to sleep wondering why she hadn't returned for supper.                       
       
           



       

"Eat," he commanded.

She ate. He poured more wine and she drank that too.

"You appeared astonished at the sight of my stomach," he remarked,  glancing at her from under his eyelashes. There was something sinful in  his voice that made her feel muddled.

"If you look at the satyr's waist from the side, very carefully, his torso is almost as rippled as yours," India said.

Thorn burst out laughing.

"Most gentlemen's stomachs are quite different. Lord Dibbleshire's, for example," she confided.

"Who the hell is that?" He had finished his tart, but he leaned forward  and stole a forkful from the plate, even though it was the public dish  and his fork should never have touched it.

"He's the latest to ask me to marry him," India said, faintly surprised  to hear that her words emerged a bit slurred. She pushed away her  wineglass.

"How many proposals have you received?"

"Ten. Or perhaps only nine-I think that Sir Henry Damper didn't actually  mean to ask me to marry him. He meant something else, but Adelaide  appeared and he had to change what he was saying very quickly."

Thorn's eyebrows drew together. "How many have asked you for ‘something else'?"

"Oh, a few," India said. "But mostly they ask me for marriage because,  you see, it would be much cheaper to marry me than to hire me. I'm very  expensive." As he'd done it first, she decided to take a bite from the  dish.

"Bloody hell."

"Will you tell me what it was like to live on the streets?" she asked.

"I didn't grow up on the streets," he said, beginning to peel an apple.  "I was cared for by a nice woman until I was around six years old, when  my father's solicitor took me away and placed me in an apprenticeship."

"All right," India said, thinking this sounded a good deal better than  it could have been. "What did you learn?" She pulled her wineglass back  and took another sip.

"It wasn't a real apprenticeship. My master was an old bastard who had a group of boys and forced us to do whatever he wanted."

Her glass froze in the air.

"Not that. We were mudlarks. Do you know what that is?"

"As I told you, I hardly know anything."

He shook his head. "You're an odd duck."

"No, just an ignorant one."

Dautry leaned forward. "Who gave me a primer on the differences between plaster, paint, and silk for walls?"

"Those things are not important."

"What is?"

"How to speak correctly. In French and Greek. Knowing who famous people  are, like Leonardo." She said his name carefully. "And Cellini. You say  that with a chee sound in front, but you don't spell it that way."

"That's important?"

"I suppose you wouldn't know, because mudlarks don't have tutors. Do they?"

"Definitely not." He began to cut the apple into precise slices.

"What does a mudlark do?"

"Scavenge things from the Thames."

"Do you mean that you went swimming?"

"Sometimes. But mostly we waited for low tide and waded into the mud to  pick up whatever we could. Sometimes we found silver spoons and coins.  But most of the time it was teeth, scraps of iron, buttons. Even  handkerchiefs."

India stared at Thorn in horror. "That's awful! And it could have been  dangerous. Were you in danger of drowning when the tide came in?"

"Broken glass was a bigger problem. It lurks in the mud, and if you're  unlucky with your foot or your hand, it will slice you, as easily as I'm  slicing this apple."

" ‘Slice you'?" India whispered. "Slice you?" she said, louder, because  she didn't believe in whispering, even when the word was frightening.

"Infection took a lot of the boys." He was watching her over his glass.  "There are corpses in the water, and if you went into the water with an  open wound, you were likely to get infected."

"What?" She shouted that. She didn't mean to; it just came out of her  mouth. "He made you go in the river when there were dead people in  there? Did you step on them?"

"No."

"That's despicable!" she cried. "Despicable! How did he force you to wade into the mud?"

"He was a violent man," Thorn said, without a trace of emotion in his  voice. "Though he never hit me. I would have killed him, and he knew  that."

"You should have."

"I would have, sooner or later. Just to make him stop shouting at us."  The memories didn't appear to bother him much, but they had to,  somewhere deep inside.                       
       
           



       

But the story explained for her why Thorn wanted to marry Lala, besides  the obvious fact of her beauty. She was such a sweet girl: she would  make him feel better. She would smooth over all those bad memories.

India told him that, leaning on her elbow again. "Lala is just right for  you. She's like sugar icing. She'll make it all sweet again."

He looked up at her, a bit squinty-eyed. "What are you talking about? Make what sweet again?"

"Life. She's the perfect antidote to such a terrible experience." But  there was one more thing she wanted to know. "Did he feed you enough?"

The look in his eyes was sardonic, as if she were an idiot. Which she was. Whom she was?

"I hate being hungry," she said. But really, there wasn't much to be  said about it, and she knew it as well as anyone, so she stood up, just  catching the edge of the table before she lost her balance.

"And I never drink to excess," she added.

"You're more interesting when you do. What do you know about being hungry?"

India ignored that. "I must go to bed. The carts will begin arriving at  six in the morning. I promised a twenty percent bonus for every piece I  take."