Temptation In Regency Society. Margaret McPhee
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where he was sitting next to an elderly woman on the solitary piece of furniture that remained within the room, a mattress in the middle of the floor. He wriggled free of the thin grey woollen blanket that was wrapped around his shoulders and ran to greet her.
‘Archie.’ She smiled and felt her heart shift at the sight of his face. ‘Have you been a good boy for your grandmama?’
‘Yes, Mama,’ he answered dutifully. But Arabella could see the toll that hunger and poverty had taken in her son’s face. Already there were shadows beneath his eyes and a sharpness about his features that had not been there just a few days ago.
She hugged him to her, the weight of guilt heavy upon her.
‘I have brought a little bread and cake.’ She emptied the contents of her pocket on to the mattress. Everything was stale as she had pilfered it last night from the trays intended for Mrs Silver’s drawing room. ‘Wages are not paid until the end of the week.’
Arabella split the food into two piles. One pile she sat upon the window ledge to sate their hunger later, and the other she shared between her mother and son.
It broke her heart the way Archie looked at her for permission to eat those few stale slices, his brown eyes filled with a look which no mother should ever have to see in her child.
There was silence while they ate the first slice of bread as if it were a sumptuous feast.
Arabella slipped off her cloak and wrapped it around her mother’s hunched shoulders before sitting down beside her on the edge of the mattress.
‘You are not eating, Arabella.’ Her mother noticed and paused, her hand frozen en route to her mouth, the small chunk of bread still gripped within her fingers.
Arabella shook her head and smiled. ‘I have already breakfasted on the way home.’ It was a lie. But there was little enough as it was and she could not bear to see them so hungry.
The sun would not reach to shine in here until later in the day and there was no money for coal or logs. The room was cold and bare save for the mattress upon which they were now sitting. Empty, just as they had arrived home to find it four days ago.
‘How was the workshop?’ Mrs Tatton carefully picked the crumbs from her lap and ate them. ‘They were satisfied with your work?’
‘I believe so,’ Arabella answered and could not bring herself to meet her mother’s eyes in case something of the shame showed in them.
‘You look too pale, Arabella, and your eyes are as red as if you have been weeping.’ She could feel her mother’s gaze upon her.
‘I am merely tired and my eyes a little strained from stitching by candlelight.’ Arabella lied and wondered what her mother would say if she knew the truth of how her daughter had spent the night. ‘A few hours rest and I shall be fine.’ She glanced up at Mrs Tatton with a reassuring smile.
Mrs Tatton’s expression was worried. ‘I wish I could do more to help.’ She shook her head, and glanced away in misery. ‘I know that I am little more than a burden to you.’
‘Such foolish talk, Mama. How on earth would I manage without you to care for Archie?’
Her mother nodded and forced a smile, but her eyes were dull and sad. Arabella’s gaze did not miss the tremor in the swollen knuckled hands or the wheeze that rasped in the hollow chest as Mrs Tatton reached to stroke a lock of her grandson’s hair away from his eye.
Archie, having finished his bread and cake, wandered over to the other side of the room where there was a small wooden pail borrowed from one of the neighbours. He scooped up some water from the pail using the small wooden cup that sat beside it and gulped it down.
Mrs Tatton lowered her voice so that Archie would not hear. ‘He cried himself to sleep through hunger last night, Arabella. Poor little mite. It broke my heart to hear him.’
Arabella pressed a fist to her mouth and glanced away so her mother would not see her struggle against breaking down.
‘But this new job you have found is a miracle indeed, the answer to all our prayers. Without it, it would be the workhouse for us all.’
Arabella closed her eyes against that thought. They would be better off dead.
Archie brought the cup of water over and offered it to her. Arabella took a few sips and then gave it to her mother.
And when the food was all eaten and the water drunk, Archie and Mrs Tatton lay down beneath the blanket.
‘It was noisy last night,’ Mrs Tatton said by way of explanation. And Arabella understood, the men’s drunken shouts and women’s bawdy laughter echoing up from the street outside would have allowed her son and mother little sleep.
Arabella spread her cloak with her mother’s shawl on top of the lone blanket and then climbed beneath the covers. Archie’s little body snuggled into hers and she kissed that dark tangled tousle of hair and told him that everything would be well.
Soon the only sounds were of sleep: the wheeze of her mother’s lungs and Archie’s soft shallow rhythmic breathing. Arabella had not slept for one minute last night, not after all that had happened. And she knew that she would not sleep now. Her mind was a whirl of thoughts, all of them centred round Dominic Furneaux.
When she thought of their coupling of last night she felt like weeping, both from anger and from shame, and from a heart that ached from remembering how, when she had given herself to him before, there had been such love between them. And the anger that she felt was not just for him, but for herself.
For even from the first moment that he had come close and she had smelled that familiar scent of him, bergamot and soap and Dominic Furneaux, she had been unable to quell the reaction of her body. And when he had taken her, not out of love, not even knowing who she was, her traitorous lips and body had, in defiance of everything she knew and everything she felt, welcomed him. They had known his mouth, recognised his kiss and the caress of his hand, and responded to him. And the shame of that burned deeper than the knowledge that she had sold herself to him.
She thought of the offer he had made her. To buy her. To be at his beck and call whenever he wished to satisfy himself upon her. Dominic Furneaux, the man who had broken her heart. Lied to her with such skill that she had believed every one of those honeyed untruths. Could she put herself under the power of such a man? To be completely at his mercy? Could she really surrender herself to him, night after night, and hide the shameful response of her body to him, a man who did not love her, a man who believed her a whore for his use?
She clutched her hands to her face as the sense of despair rolled right through her, for she knew the answer to each of those questions and she knew, too, the ugly truth of the alternative.
Arabella relived the moment that the group of gentlemen had entered Mrs Silver’s drawing room, and it did not matter how hard she had tried to deaden her feelings, no matter how much she could rationalise the whole plan in her head, when it had come to the point of facing what must happen she had felt an overwhelming panic that she would not be able go through with it. She closed her eyes against the nightmare, knowing that there was only one decision she could make. Even if there were certain aspects of the negotiations that she would have to handle very carefully.
And as she lay there she could not help but think how differently things might have turned out if Dominic Furneux had been a different sort of man. If he had loved her, as he had sworn that he did, and married her, as he had promised that he would, how different all their lives would have been.
Dominic arrived at Mrs Silver’s early and alone. The drawing room was filled with a woman of every colour of Mrs Silver’s rainbow, every colour save for black. He knew with one sweep of the room that Arabella was not there and he felt a whisper of foreboding that perhaps everything was not going to go quite how he had planned.
‘Variety is the spice of life, your Grace. Perhaps I could tempt you with another colour from my assortment?’ Mrs Silver smiled at him and gestured towards the girls who had