The Historical Collection. Stephanie Laurens
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words. She’d never understand unless he showed her the truth.
“Come along, then.” He pulled her arm through his, roughly. “We’re going to take a little stroll, you and I.”
She pulled against his arm. “Where are you taking me?”
“On a tour of Hell.”
Penny stumbled as he pulled her around a corner, off the bustling street of shops and onto a smaller, crowded lane. Passing women eyed her with a mix of curiosity and contempt. Men raked her with lascivious gazes.
“Stay close.” His voice was dark and bitter. “This is where the ladies of the evening hawk their wares, and in a neighborhood like this one, it’s evening ’round the clock.”
Penny’s face heated. As they stepped off the pavement, she lifted her hem to keep it out of the muck.
He clucked his tongue. “Mind you don’t raise those skirts too high. Another inch, and you’ll be mistaken for one of them.”
The air was foul with the stench of filth and gin. People called and whistled to them from glassless windows and doorways on either side of the lane.
“Let’s have a little tour of my childhood, shall we? I was likely conceived in one of the many rooms above this street. Fathered by a man who could be any of dozens, and born to a prostitute who was a slave to gin. Nonetheless, she made a better mother than many. She didn’t abandon me to die of exposure. Not as an infant, at least.”
Together, they weaved through a dense warren of twisting, fog-smothered passages. Derelict buildings crowded either side of the alleys. Streets so narrow, one couldn’t see the sky.
Penny could have never retraced their steps. If he left her alone here, she would wander helpless in the fog forever.
But Gabriel never paused—and she didn’t suppose it was because masculine pride made him reluctant to ask for directions. He knew precisely where he was going. Every twist and turn belonged to a map etched in his mind.
They passed a beggar woman with her palm outstretched for a farthing. Penny slowed on instinct, but he tugged her past.
“There’s a cellar down that way that used to have a broken window.” He tossed out the observation as if he were pointing out a church with unremarkable architecture. “I spent a winter sleeping in it. Along with a great many rats.”
She tripped on a stone, and her boot sloshed into a shallow river of … well, of things probably best left unidentified. Gray gutter muck splashed her hem.
They ventured farther into the maze of tenements and doss-houses. Every minute or two, he paused to point out, in a tone of complete indifference, a doorway that could offer as many as six huddled urchins shelter from the wintry wind, or the baker’s shop where it was easiest to steal bread. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him here as a child. Everywhere they turned, she glimpsed the pale, grime-streaked face of a boy dressed in rags. A face that could have been Gabriel’s, once.
By the time he brought them to an abrupt halt, Penny’s feet were aching, her lungs were burning, and her heart was in tatters.
“Here’s the best part.” He took her by the shoulders and turned her to face the other side of the street. “That gin house, right there … ? That’s where my mother sold me.”
“Sold you? A mother can’t sell her child.”
“Happens in the rookery all the time. Husbands sell wives. Parents sell children. I was sold to the pub’s owner.”
“You said you were in the workhouse.”
“I was, after the owner pushed me out the door. But not before I spent three years in that gin house. Hauling coal, carrying water, scrubbing vomit from the same floors I slept on at night.”
“Gabriel …” She wanted to beg him to stop, but that didn’t seem fair. She couldn’t refuse to hear it, when he’d lived it.
“Do you want to know what those years of my life were worth? Can you guess the price a mother sets on her own child?”
Penny suspected she knew the answer. A sick feeling gathered in her stomach as he reached inside his coat.
“A shilling.” He produced the coin from his pocket and held it up for her to see. “That’s what I was worth. A single shilling.”
“Don’t say that. You were always worth more than a shilling.”
“You’re right,” he said. “A shilling was an absurdly low price. If she weren’t so desperate to buy gin, my mother could have haggled for as much as a half crown.”
“I won’t listen to you speak that way.” Penny wrested the coin from his hand and tossed it on the ground.
“Oh, you will. You will listen, and you will hear.”
He grabbed her by the wrist and led her down a dark pathway scarcely wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side. When they’d reached a place out of view, he turned to her.
“Do not speak to me of homes or comforts or love,” he said through gritted teeth. “There is nothing the two of us could share. Nothing.”
“Why not?”
He tugged at his hair. “Look around you. We’re not in Bloom Square, Penny.”
“I don’t care whether you were born in a gutter or a palace, whether your mother was a beggar or a queen. It doesn’t matter to me.”
“Perhaps it matters to me. Have you thought of that? You’re so enamored with the idea of deigning to be with a lowborn man, you haven’t stopped to wonder if I want anything to do with a highborn lady.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in class distinctions.”
“This isn’t a matter of different classes. We come from different worlds. When you were eating buttered toast and jam for your tea, I was starving. While your nursemaid was dressing you in crisp white pinafores, I went without shoes. While you had candles burning in every room, fires laid every night, quilts heaped atop a warmed bed—I shivered in the street, in the dark. Waking at the slightest noise, ready to flee at any moment. I couldn’t trust a soul in the world, and you’ve lived to the age of six-and-twenty believing every problem can be cured with a goddamned kitten.”
“I do not believe every problem can be cured with a kitten. I do believe in love. And perhaps love can’t cure every problem, but it makes the wounds heal a bit faster, with fewer scars. I understand why you don’t believe that. How could you, if you’ve never known it yourself? But perhaps you should give it a try. Let someone care for you, Gabriel. It doesn’t have to be me, but—” She broke off. “No. Forget that last. It does have to be me. I’m generous, but I’m not that generous. When it comes to this, I’m not willing to share.”
“Penny, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re on about.”
“I love you.” She exhaled in a huff. “There. Is that simple enough?”
Simple?
Gabe stared at her. No, it wasn’t simple. It was incomprehensible.
“I love you,” she repeated.
“And what of it? You love everyone.”
“Not this way.” She reached for his hand and gave it a tender caress. “I love you.”
“Penny, stop.” Emotion held his throat in a vise. “You have to stop.”
“I don’t think I could if I tried. And I don’t want to try.” She brought his hand to her lips and kissed it.