Page 19 of Tempting Mr. Vincent

Remy,

I have gone to Lilian. Please don’t come after me—there is nothing to come after; I am only a young woman with a bag going two streets over to sit in a friend’s kitchen, which is the most ordinary thing in the world and the first ordinary thing I have done since the autumn.

Gauthier wants a story. There is no story if I am not in your house. In a month nobody will remember, and you will win your election, and that matters, whatever you said. You have done more for this city in six years than the last three men together, and I have read every word of the municipal news since January, so you cannot argue with me about it.

I am taking two dresses and I will pay you back for them. Do not laugh.

You gave me a home for as long as I wanted one, and I want it very much, which is exactly why I can’t stay in it. Please believe that I know the difference between a man who bought me and a man who saved me. I have always known.

Laurell

She put it on his desk, where he would see it at six o’clock, and she went down the back stairs, because Mrs. Curry would have physically barred the front.

It was a raw gray morning and the wind came up off the river with rain in it. The Kilnworthy house was two streets and a corner away; she had walked it twice with Lilian in January, and it had taken eleven minutes.

She had gone perhaps three hundred yards, past the shuttered Aucoin place and the empty lot where the fig trees were, when she heard a carriage slow behind her.

She did not look round. Women who looked round invited conversation. She shifted the bag to her other hand and walked faster, and the carriage kept pace, and it was only when it drew ahead and stopped at the curb ten feet in front of her that she felt the first real prick of fear.

The door opened. A man got down—big, sandy-haired, in a good coat that didn’t suit him—and Laurell knew him instantly, though she had seen him only twice: he was the one who had carried the bags from Giselle’s upper rooms, the one who had come to the mayor’s house at midnight for the bank draft.

“Miss Beaumont,” he said. “There’s a gentleman wants a word.”

She turned and ran.

She got four steps. The bag went into the gutter and her cloak caught, and a hand closed round her upper arm hard enough to bruise, and then there was an arm around her waist lifting her clean off the pavement. She screamed with everything she had, and the sound went out over the wet empty street and hit nothing at all, and she thought, with a clarity that surprised her, not the stomach, keep your arms across your stomach—and then she was in the carriage and the door slammed and the horses went.

Abelard Gauthier was sitting on the opposite seat with his gray gloves folded in his lap.

“Good morning,” he said. “You’ve made this very much easier than I expected.”

Laurell pressed herself into the corner of the seat. “What do you want with me?”

“Very little.” Gauthier considered her without any interest whatever, which was the worst part of it. “You’re not to my taste and you’re carrying, and I have no use for either. But your mayor stood in his office and told me what sort of man he has decided to be, and I find I should like him to spend a few days learning what it costs him.” He looked out at the wet street. “You’ll be fed. Sit still and don’t make me have you tied.”

ANN was scraping carrots at the kitchen window of the Kilnworthy house when she saw a woman running in the street.

She was up on the sill before she’d thought about it. She saw the cloak and she saw the dark hair come loose, and she was through the kitchen and up the back stairs shrieking before the carriage had reached the corner.

“They’ve took her! They’ve took Miss Laurell!”

Remy came home at ten minutes past six and knew before he had his coat off.

The house was wrong. Every house has a sound; his had been a hollow one for twenty years, and for two months it had been something else, and standing in his own hall he heard the hollowness back again like a note struck in an empty church.

Winston’s face told him the rest.

“The note is in your study, sir,” the butler said. “She left before nine. And Baron Kilnworthy is in the front parlor. He has been here since half past ten.”

Half past ten.

Remy read the letter standing up, in eleven seconds, and it was as if the floor had gone out from under him.

“Mrs. Curry.”

The housekeeper had been waiting in the doorway with her hands folded, and she came in with the expression of a woman who had been composing a speech for eight hours and meant to deliver it whatever it cost her.

“She went down the back stairs, sir, so as not to have to look at me.”