Wicked:. Noelle MackЧитать онлайн книгу.
stood to one side of the window’s sheer curtains, looking down at the iron railing that completely surrounded the narrow area between the house and the street.
A burly man stood there, thick-fingered hands clasped behind his back, wearing a heavy coat with an upturned collar and a nondescript hat. Passersby glanced into his face, which she could not see, and hurried past him.
So this side of the house was guarded. No doubt the back was too. She looked up and down the street below, not recognizing it at all. But then she had not been long in London.
The houses seemed new but they had a raw look, as if they had sprung ready-built from a former field on the outskirts of London. They were jammed together with no alleys or cuts in between, which would make an escape difficult to hide. She could not slip away unnoticed when she still wore the same plain white gown that had done for the hot little room with the cloaks. Not when she was…Angelica looked down…barefoot.
She heard heavy footsteps approach and pause. It seemed to her that were there were two sets, walking in almost perfect synchrony, but she was not sure. Then she heard the tiny grind of metal on metal, and realized that a key was turning in the lock. After another second it was withdrawn and the doorknob turned in the same stealthy way.
Angelica shrank back into the curtains, knowing that their gossamer folds would not hide her. But if worse came to worse, she could smash the window and jump—she glanced down again.
She was three storeys above the street, by her guess. She would be badly hurt, perhaps impaled on the railing. The guard below would carry her broken body swiftly away and someone else would pay handsomely for the silence of inadvertent witnesses.
The slowly turning doorknob completed its revolution and the door opened a crack. A plainly shod foot thrust through at the bottom and a woman came through with a tray. She didn’t seem to see Angelica, didn’t look around, just went straight to a table where she deposited the tray in her hands. She said nothing.
The woman turned and went back out, closing the door with a click. Her heavy footsteps retreated and eventually there was silence. Angelica breathed again. It occurred to her that she hadn’t heard the doorknob turn again or the key and lock, and she wondered why.
It had to be a trap.
She could not open the door and run down the stairs. It could not be that simple.
Then, breaking the silence, the doorknob turned again and the door was locked once more. Someone on the other side—she had heard a second set of footsteps—withdrew the key.
Angelica wanted to shriek, to beg for her freedom, batter her way out—anything other than this sinister game of cat-and-mouse.
All she could do was listen very carefully. Her captor’s footsteps echoed as he went away, sounding as correct as the polished boots he wore.
She looked again at the tray and the covered salvers on it. So Victor wanted her to eat. She remembered the crystalline poison in the rose and felt a wave of nausea. Weak as she was, she would not eat.
Angelica paced about the room, her thoughts in a tangle of fear and useless resolve. Until Victor decided to talk to her, she was his prisoner.
She sat down on the whorish bed and burst into tears.
Some hours later, when the sunlight was swallowed by the gathering blue of dusk, she found water in an ewer standing in a matching basin. Lifting the ewer, she splashed a few drops on her arm, testing it too for poison. Her skin did not sting or peel off. It seemed to be only water. She soaked a cloth in it and scrubbed at her face, then combed her hair.
She knew that Victor would come to her in due time—he preferred the night as a rule. Angelica wondered how he was connected to this house and whether he owned it. His recent inheritance would have been more than enough.
If he lived here, the room she was in held no trace of him and seemed entirely feminine.
Quietly as she could, she looked on shelves and opened and closed drawers, finding nothing of note. It seemed the sort of room that was used for assignations, with every sensual comfort but nothing of permanence about it.
Hungry and unbearably thirsty—she would not drink of the water in the ewer—she sat in an armchair and thought of when she had seen him last.
Victor had been dashing in his way, the younger image of his oafish father, her stepfather. Late and unlamented, Samuel Broadnax, who called himself a gentleman and was nothing of the kind, had been stricken with a fatal fever and died two days after her mother.
Try as she might, Angelica could not summon up any tenderness for that lady, who had wanted nothing to do with her from the very day of her birth, handing her over to a string of nursery maids and governesses.
They were all disagreeable and severe women to begin with and none had ever shown her the least kindness, per her mother’s command. Of that Angelica had no doubt, having found written instructions to each of them in her mother’s own handwriting.
The least infraction earned her a vicious birching on her bare legs well into her teens, a punishment that she, too cowed to think of escape, simply endured after a lifetime of intimidation and petty cruelty.
The revelation that her slightly older stepbrother had enjoyed watching the sessions shocked her greatly. She had never known at the time that he was there.
She had come to understand, from the only sympathetic servant in the household, that young master Victor got his way through bribery and mutually satisfying exercises in perversity with the woman who administered her beatings and lessons in geography with such vigor.
Still, the geography had come in handy—Angelica could not have found her way about London at all without her study of Roche’s map of it when she finally did escape from her stepfather’s country house.
With a small sack of money and only the clothes on her back, she had survived, hired out through a servant’s agency as a lady’s maid owing to her good looks and breeding.
The Congreves had been the last of three such assignments, and eluding Mr. Congreve’s moist grasp had proved impossible. Angelica had loathed his wife, and longed to leave, knowing on the night she was left to handle the cloaks and furs that it might be her last.
Until Semyon Taruskin has come in to bring his coat to the wrong place, she had thought only of walking the streets as she had done.
He had been kind. Even courteous. She was not accustomed to either. When he’d told her his name, she had remembered it from the endless flow of gossip among the female servants in the Congreves’ house.
Besides that, it had seemed to her that she had seen him somewhere before and perhaps she had in her rambles. The parks of London were a respite for her and she wandered into them on the rare occasions when she had a half-day to herself.
She was sure he rode and often. Her downcast eyes had not missed the strong muscles of his thighs, nor the strength of his calves. And he had the erect posture of an experienced horseman, from the top of his tousled dark head through his broad-shouldered back and long legs.
He’d seemed every inch the gentleman to her. If he lived near or on a fine square by the parks that the ton frequented to see and be seen in, then perhaps he had noticed her and she had smiled back…
Angelica strained to breathe through the sad tightness in her throat and forced all thoughts of her brief encounter with Semyon Taruskin away.
She would have to save herself somehow. No one was riding to her rescue.
Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her face, hot as her own blood. She didn’t have the strength to dash them away. As the last glimmering of day faded from the sky outside the windows, she fell into a troubled sleep in the armchair.
An aching in her legs made her stir and slowly open her eyes—that, and the honeyed smell of beeswax. A man stood with his back to her, touching a lit candle to each wick of the tapers in a tall candelabra.