in his current predicament. Though she wouldn’t have accepted him, not with men like the Comte sniffing about her skirts, but he hadn’t known that back then.
His big toe rubbed at the ragged edge of the hole in his stocking. If the soft weight of her cheek on his chest and the delicate tears moistening her lashes during their last night together in Paris hadn’t muddled his thoughts, he might have caught her ruse. Instead he’d strode out to the card rooms like some besotted fool, thinking himself the hero for finding the money to get them home before the impending blockade could trap them in France.
It’d been a nasty awakening when he’d returned to see her driving away in the Comte’s carriage. She hadn’t even possessed the decency to write him a note. Instead, she’d left the empty wardrobe and missing portmanteaus to explain everything, the finishing stanza of her message delivered when he’d overheard Lord Rollingham in a card room discussing her marriage to the Comte.
Never once in all their time together had he thought her so manipulative, so hard hearted and cunning. How wrong he’d been.
The sneaky wench.
The crowd shoved past Rafe, knocking against his shoulders as it surged forward to congratulate the winner. The boxer raised his hands in triumph, flashing a near-toothless smile through a cut lip and one swelling eye.
Rafe ground his jaw at having been so easily duped, but as much as he cursed the Comte for winning Cornelia, he should’ve thanked the decrepit crook for forcing their separation. Marriage was never meant to be part of their partnership. He hadn’t saved her from one disgrace only to pull her into a poverty he couldn’t even describe as genteel, living with his mother in the few habitable rooms of Wealthstone Manor or huddled in his draughty lodgings in Drury Lane.
Two men dragged the unconscious boxer from the ring and into one of the brick buildings flanking the yard. The crowd moved away from the centre, breaking into small groups to commiserate over their losses and plan their next wager.
‘Last chance to bet, Densmore.’ Hartley moved forward in line, eager to part himself from his blunt.
‘No, thank you.’ Rafe stepped to one side to make room for others.
Movement in a small window overlooking the square caught Rafe’s attention. He looked up at the sagging building to meet the hard eyes of a dark-haired woman watching the gathering. The image of Cornelia in the hackney rushed back to him and he swallowed down the foul taste in his mouth.
He could imagine a number of reasons why she might want the register, none of them good. It certainly wasn’t to protect her father’s name. The soused country Baronet couldn’t have known anything of value to sell to the French. There was something more nefarious behind her acquisition. If there wasn’t, she wouldn’t have skulked past him this morning like some sharper creeping off to plan her next swindle.
Worry crept over him like the small hand sliding into his pocket.
Rafe snatched the arm of the ragamuffin standing next to him. ‘Nothing for you there.’
‘I didn’t do nuffin’,’ the boy squealed, trying to twist free, but Rafe held him tight. ‘I’m only running an errand for me ma.’
The panicked boy shot a look up at the building and Rafe followed it to see the dark-haired woman gripping the window pane. Her narrow chin and the mole above her lip reminded him of the daughter of a squire, a Miss Allen, he’d met some years ago at a country garden party. It was the last one he and his mother had attended before his father’s mounting debts had forced them to shun invitations. If it was the same young lady, then she’d fallen a long way since he’d last seen her in Sussex.
Rafe studied the thin boy, his face streaked with dirt, his hair covered with a threadbare cap. He was hardly worth the hangman’s rope. He dug a coin out of his pocket and pressed it into the boy’s grimy palm. ‘Take this to your mother and don’t come back in this crowd again.’
He let go and the boy staggered back, clutching the coin to his chest as he darted through the door of the tumbledown rookery. Rafe tipped his hat to the woman in the window.
She mouthed ‘thank you’, then receded back into the shadows.
If only all cheats were so easily dealt with. The sense this round was lost to Cornelia still rubbed, the frustration of Rafe’s current situation more annoying than the ever-widening hole in his stocking. Without the register, any effort to protect and build back the Densmore fortune and name, to spare his mother from further poverty and degradation, would come to nothing. If Cornelia showed anyone in the House of Lords the evidence of his father’s crime, he and his mother were finished. The Bill of Attainder was still in place and the greying Lord Twickenham still intent on enforcing it. Wealthstone would be seized and Rafe’s title forfeit.
It was enough to ruin a good boxing match.
Hartley appeared at Rafe’s side, holding his ticket and practically fluttering with excitement. ‘Come on, I want to get a good place.’
They walked around the edge of the circle of men. Rafe’s height gave him the advantage in the crowd, but they moved three times before Hartley was content with his view. A cheer went up as the fighters appeared in the doorway of one building. The crowd parted, allowing the two boxers to pass into the circle of spectators. They stood across from each other, looking less like a pair of Hercules and more like two blocks of stone some sculptor had hacked at to give them arms, legs and something of a face.
‘Which one is your man?’ Rafe asked.
‘The ox with the scar on his arm.’ Hartley rubbed his hands together in anticipation. ‘This should be good.’
Rafe studied the scarred fighter, agreeing with Hartley’s description of his bovine features. The man walked in a tight circle, his steps heavy, his arms swinging about his body like two logs. ‘A fiver says your man goes down in the first round.’
Hartley adjusted his hat. ‘That’s no way to wish a man luck.’
‘You’re confident in your tip?’
‘It’s the best one I’ve had in weeks.’
‘Then ten pounds says he falls like a chopped oak.’
Hartley levelled a finger at Rafe. ‘I’ll take the bet and you’ll wish you hadn’t made it.’
The fight began and the two boxers moved to the centre of the ring, circling and jabbing at each other. The unblemished man moved faster than his opponent and landed one good punch to the ox’s gut before catching him with a right hook. The crowd went silent as the ox tipped on his heels and landed flat on his back in the dirt.
The smaller man lifted his arms in triumph.
Somewhere in the distance a dog barked.
Grumbles rippled through the crowd as men exchanged money.
Hartley groaned, peeled a ten-pound note off his roll of money and handed it to Rafe. ‘I should have known better.’
‘And next time you will.’ Rafe tucked the note into his pocket.
He thought of Cornelia and his determination swelled with the crowd’s excitement as the next pair of fighters took to the ring. Rafe might be short his entrance fee,
