Cora (Virtue & Vice #4)

Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

CORA

Gryphon House, Two Weeks Later

“T iti!” Cora whisper-shouted, crouching with her hands on her knees to peer through her half-brother’s slightly ajar door. Lysander was at his desk, head bent, while the besotted Yorkie gazed at him longingly.

“Get your pet out of my study, Cora,” Lysander grumbled without looking up. “Animals do not belong indoors.”

“Where do you propose I put her on a frigid day in January?”

“Outside. Where animals belong.”

She stood up with a huff and went to collect her deranged dog, who had taken an inexplicable liking to him. Poor Titi’s affections were not returned. The duke grumbled every time he saw her, which happened several times a day ever since they had been forced to decamp to Gryphon House.

Cora stroked Titi’s head and closed the study door behind her noisily. Not quite loud enough to be called a slam, but enough to convey that after a week of having to live with her half-brother, she was ready to consign herself to a nunnery just to get a bit of peace and quiet. Assuming she could find one that accepted pets.

“Ignore him. The duke is the worst sort of grump. I cannot figure out why you like him so well.”

Titi merely whined and gazed forlornly in the direction of Lysander’s study.

Few people would consider moving into a duke’s mansion to be a hardship. Cora was not most people. She was being coddled to death. Unlike at home, where she was perfectly content with a single maid, there was literally nothing for her to do here except read, sew, shop, or nap.

All were things she enjoyed, but they could only occupy so much time. Cora rattled around at loose ends, constantly in the way of obsequious servants, bumping into Lysander’s Important Visitors (she always thought this in capital letters), who scorned her as a too-tall, too-old, disgraced spinster. They weren’t outright rude, but they made it clear she did not belong here.

She took up space, both physically and in conversations where she refused to either simper or fall silent, and she was therefore a perpetual embarrassment to the titled men and pompous politicians who regularly called upon the duke.

The way they flattered and fawned over Lysander only inflated his already gigantic head. Someday, someone was going to put a pin in his excessive self-regard and finally bring him down to size.

Until that day arrived, the seventh Duke of Gryphon was a beast to live with.

Cora hoped Eryx would find a solution to his bank’s problems soon. Ideally very soon. But even if he did, she would still be stranded here with her half-brother until construction was finished on the house.

“Where are you going?” Lysander demanded when he stepped out of his study and found her dressed for the outdoors. His lip curled in disdain at the sight of Titi’s knitted sweater.

“Out. Like you wanted us to. We’re going to visit Miss Caldwell.”

“See if she’ll keep that rat you call a pet.”

Cora didn’t dignify his comment with a response. Instead, she swallowed her loneliness and frustration and set out into the bracing winter to Mayfair with Miss Marnie for a companion. Honey ignored Cora in favor of the dog, patting her knees until Titi jumped into her lap.

“I’ve heard such horrid gossip about your brother.” Honora Caldwell was a woman of no artifice whatsoever. Every thought that entered her head came out of her mouth seconds later, no matter how daft or inappropriate. Cora loved her for it. Few others did.

“Which one?” Cora asked wryly.

“Not the duke this time,” she said, offering Titi a bit of cheese from her sandwich. “The banker.”

“The rumors are terrible, Honey, yet most of them are true.”

Her friend’s eyes widened. “Tell me everything.”

Anything she said to Honey would be all over the ton within hours.

Cora described the disappointing start to her year, as much as she dared to share. She took pains to insist that all would be well if people simply stopped withdrawing their deposits out of fear that they wouldn’t get their money back. Perhaps, if Honey spread that message around the ton , the run would stop and the bank could recover.

But talk of business matters soon glazed her friend’s eyes with disinterest, so Cora switched to complaining about Lysander and his aversion to Titania. This, Honey could relate to.

“Poor Titi,” Honey sighed, stroking the dog’s soft ears. “In love with a hard-hearted man. We have all been there, have we not?”

“No.”

“Not even with Mr. Markham?”

Cora shook her head somberly. There was only one man she had ever fancied herself in love with, for a few weeks, before he viciously ruined her reputation.

A few years after her disgrace, once it became clear that no one was going to forgive her for accidentally playing a bawdy-house tune at a formal event, never mind her illegitimate birth, she had taken to answering ads men placed in the newspaper in search of romantic prospects. By that point, she had long since written off the fantasy that Gideon Wentworth would fall on his knees and apologize, beg her forgiveness, beg her to become his wife. Which was a strange notion to entertain, considering all that had transpired.

Meeting men began as a simple amusement to pass the time. She was not lonely. She was perfectly content with her own company. But at one point, she’d decided she wanted to be married, even if it was to a working man. She always met them in public places, like museums or tea houses. Her penny-farthing bicycle had been an easy way to get around town without the risk of a footman reporting back to one of her overly protective brothers.

She had never told any of the men she’d met about her dowry. She sought someone who was interested in her, not her money. Although she found this modern arrangement infinitely better than the antiquated courting methods of the ton, she encountered no small number of cads, scoundrels, and outright villains. Still, she persisted in her letter-writing attempts, for once one decided to be free from convention, a world of possibilities opened up like an endless feast.

A feast consisting mostly of mediocre pudding.

She soon grew sick of flowery, insincere compliments and having the same conversations over and over again. Once she agreed to meet a man publicly, he was usually put off by her height or her straightforwardness or both. Cora eventually concluded that few men were interesting enough to warrant romantic pursuit, and those who were, weren’t interested in a woman like her.

Yet there had been glimmers of hope.

Mr. Markham had been the most serious of her affairs. For him, she would have considered matrimony.

But then he set sail to America. The last thing she heard from him was that he’d met another woman and was setting up shop in a place called Chicago. At least he’d had the decency to inform her of his plans. She wished him well. Her heart had been dented, not broken, though in a moment of weakness she’d cried about the end of her affair to Honey.

When she didn’t respond to her friend’s provocative comment about her prior beau, Honey returned to the subject of Wilder & Co.’s woes. Eryx’s troubles had the family’s name on everyone’s lips, and that meant the inevitable rehashing of her own mortification at Lady Pindell’s eleven years ago.

Cora sighed and picked a crumb off her skirt. All she wanted was for the ton to forget she existed. Instead, she was their perpetual punching bag. An endless joke. Eleven years, this had been going on. She would give anything for a truly fresh start.

For that, she might have to move to America, too, she mused wryly.

“What do you think Mr. Wilder will do?” Honey asked pensively as she was leaving.

“I am certain he will find a solution,” Cora said with all the reassurance she could convey, knowing that in a day’s time it would be repeated throughout the city, if not beyond.

She was right. Eryx did conjure a solution, though Cora found herself rather horrified at what it entailed.

* * *

Meanwhile, in France…

Bella had suffered in life, but never like this.

Her wrists ached. Her hands had gone numb after hours of pain. If she survived this ordeal she was going to have to wear long sleeves for the rest of her life to cover the marks from the ligatures. Her hips and back radiated pain from slumping awkwardly on the cold, damp, dirt floor. She had aged during her time in captivity. Undoubtedly, when and if she emerged alive, she would discover gray hairs threaded through her sable strands.

A sob burst past her cracked, parched lips.

I want to live.

She didn’t know where she was, or how long she had been here.

These were questions that could be answered if—when—she escaped.

Bella yanked at the rope holding her to the wall of this dank cellar and growled with frustration. She reeked of her own unwashed filth. Her stomach had given up complaining and settled into a constant aching hollowness. Her clothes hung loosely from her ravaged body.

Why hadn’t they killed her?

Helpless anger churned her empty belly. Bridget Ross and her loathsome toad of a son, whom she had christened Gibface in lieu of knowing his name, had taken her captive in her own flat in Paris, a place of many happy memories with her husband before his death. Now those memories were tainted forever.

Hawke had warned her she was in danger. He’d promised her that she would be safe if she left. Instead, he’d driven her straight into the arms of her enemies.

Her wounded heart ached. He’d sent her here to die in a dank cellar in unknown parts of France.

Had he done it on purpose?

The only thing keeping her alive now was her burning need to know the truth. If Hawke had been in cahoots with Bridget Ross, the wretched procuress of children called the Witch of St. Giles, then Bella was a great fool to have trusted him.