didn’t recognise the house or the room because he had never been here before. But he did recognise the woman lying on the bench with blankets draped over her thin frame. The sickness had ravaged that frame and sucked the glow from her cheeks.
He didn’t remember her name, her station, or the night he found temporary relief within her body.
He didn’t remember the thick gold of her hair because every woman he’d lain with had a similar colour. However, he did remember the colour of her eyes. He remembered that all too well, for when he first saw her he calculated that colour against his own dark grey and wondered whether the dark blue was too close to his own. That if there was a babe, it would be mistaken for his.
No woman was worth any unnecessary risk. But he remembered her false haughtiness and her weakness. Traits that suited his purpose as well as the feminine parts of her body. So they shared a bed for an hour or two and he paid her well. He always paid them well.
‘You,’ the woman whispered.
‘Me,’ he answered.
Weak and dying, but at his appearance, she attempted some dignity. While holding her lips together didn’t cease the coughs from racking her body, she daintily held a blood-crusted cloth to her mouth instead. When they eased, she shifted her eyes from Reynold back to Cilla. ‘You brought him.’
‘You’re sick, mistress,’ Cilla said with oily concern. ‘The babe needs her father.’
A widening of blue eyes, a flash of fear that no tainted cloth could cover. ‘That’s not her father. I told you who her father was. I told you.’
Despite the mother clutching the child close to lay down with her, it sat up fully and crammed its mouth with its fist. A girl, but only because the mother had called it such. Black hair, but in this dim light and his distance he could not tell the colour of her eyes.
‘We both know you didn’t mean it,’ Cilla said. ‘This child has hair like her father’s, not that dandy you pointed out with his balding pate.’
The woman kept her eyes and her conversation solely with Cilla, as if ignoring him or pretending he wasn’t there would make him disappear.
He wouldn’t leave now that he heard her terrified protestations. This dying woman was frightened by his presence.
His family connection, and their ruthlessness, was enough for her to worry, but wasn’t enough for her horror, or the sense of helplessness in her gaze and the vulnerability straining her frail body.
He saw it all though she refused to look at him. Her body convulsed again, worse than before. Great racking contortions as her knees drew up and she curled around herself and the babe.
Reynold did not move, nor did the child. Whatever illness was taking its mother, it had been doing so for a long time. Long enough that it didn’t concern the child. To the babe, the stench, the decay, the coughing was what a mother smelled and sounded like.
‘I told you,’ the woman said, her voice gasping, the coughing, the illness too much for her. ‘I trusted you.’
‘You’re alive, you are, and so is your babe,’ Cilla said.
The woman tried to draw breath. Too weak to protect her child from the servant who could easily pluck her away again. Too ill to protect the child from him. But he watched her push the child across her stomach until it rolled behind her so that it was wedged between her and the bench’s back. As if her prone wasted body could be any sort of a shield against him.
It was possible this child was his. ‘Is it mine?’
The woman never opened her eyes. Her pretending he didn’t exist was her last and only defence against him.
‘Is it mine?’ he repeated.
‘Of course it’s yours,’ Cilla retorted. ‘Little demon’s a year if it’s a day. A year of me waiting in this filth and waiting on this corpse for you to return.’
‘How could you...?’ the noblewoman said.
‘I did what you wanted,’ Cilla said. ‘What you begged so prettily for. What was it again? Not to let anyone know you were sick. Mustn’t let anyone know such common illness affected your noble blood.’
The woman opened her eyes again, not to look at Reynold, but to the servant. ‘I beg you... Save her.’
With hot certainty, Reynold knew it was no longer a possibility. The child was his... For this mother asked not to save the babe from poverty or sickness, but to save the child. From him.
‘Why would I do that?’ Cilla said. ‘He’s here to collect.’
The child... All his life women claimed pregnancy. None of them were true. The noblewoman ignored him, but he needed his answers.
‘How did you know who I was?’
All eyes went to him.
‘You don’t...remember me?’ she said.
No rejection in her reedy voice, only the slight sound of victory.
‘Your man...a carriage.’
He always hired a man. A temporary hire, for a temporary solution. He found a woman who would suit his needs, found a man for hire to procure her and bring her to an awaiting carriage.
All his women were done this way. A protection for him, a protection for them. This significant memory of hers provided no more information for him.
‘You couldn’t have known who I was,’ he said. ‘Who told you? Who—?’
‘It stinks and I don’t need to stay,’ Cilla interrupted. ‘It’s her, you know that now. You know that’s your babe—I want what’s my due.’ She laughed a cruel greed. Gleeful that her plan for great wealth had paid off. ‘I brought the happy family together. Don’t I deserve something?’
He’d forgotten the wretch was in the room. With his spare hand, Reynold brought his purse to the front. Let the full weight of it sound as he jangled the coins. It was heavy. He’d purposefully filled it to the brim.
The woman’s eyes bulged. For him, this wasn’t but convenient coin. The enamel gold box at his home was worth more than his purse, but she wasn’t a smart villain. Not smart at all, because she had threatened him.
‘I said I’d reward you amply. I came prepared.’
‘’Cause I spoke the truth,’ she said, her eyes remaining on the purse, not on the blade he hid in the folds of his cloak.
He walked slowly to her, raised the purse so it raised her eyes and exposed her neck. Her hands reached—and then...something that he had never done before. Something he was unprepared for: he hesitated.
The servant registered the blade and attacked with outstretched claws across his cheek. Feeling the sting, he turned the hilt and struck her across the head.
She collapsed to the floor like another bloodied rag. He stared at her incredulously as her chest rose and fell, as blood trickled from her temple. He hadn’t killed her.
