And besides, “Want isn’t worth the trouble.”
“God knows that’s true,” Caleb said, dry as sand. “But no one has ever said men cared for the truth.” Though he hid it well, Caleb nursed his own broken heart. A lost love, never to be regained. “I don’t know much, darlin’, but I know that you deserve better than whatever that dandy aristocrat could have given you.”
What a good man Caleb was. Decent and proud and with a heart bigger than any she’d ever known. She sighed. “Why couldn’t it have been you?”
He shrugged a shoulder and took another long puff at his cheroot. “Timing.”
She smiled. “If only you’d been here three years ago.”
He gave a little laugh. “I could’ve used you there five years ago.”
Sera reached for her friend’s face, placing her hand on his strong, stubbled cheek, tilting his chin up until his gaze met hers. “If you could erase it—all of it—all of her—would you?”
He did not hesitate. “Hell yes. You?”
His hand came to cover hers at his cheek as she let herself consider the question. She’d lost so much. Her love, her life, the promise of her future. So much loss that her heart ached even at the hint of the thought of it.
If she could take it back, she would. Without doubt.
Caleb saw the answer in her eyes, and squeezed her hand in camaraderie. He lifted his chin in the direction of the center of the raised platform. “Show me how it feels up there, Sparrow.”
She turned in a slow circle on the stage, trying to put the events of the last day from her mind, wanting to lose herself here. “I am not painted.” She never sang without her disguise—even in Covent Garden, someone might recognize a Dangerous Daughter.
“There’s no audience.”
“Another reason not to sing.”
“Pah,” he said. “You don’t need an audience.”
She smiled. “It helps.”
“Sing for me, then.”
“I’ve an excellent one for you, as a matter of fact.” She placed one fisted hand on her waist and listing to the side, belted out a raucous verse from a song she’d learned from the sailors on the ship that had returned her to London. “Let every man here drink up his full bumper. Let every man here drink up his full glass.”
She stopped, but Caleb didn’t laugh. Instead, he waited, arms crossed, for her to finish. She straightened. “And let us be jolly and drown melancholy, drink a health to each beautiful, true-hearted lass.”
He nodded. “You shall own London’s hearts in mere weeks. What else have you got?”
She hadn’t planned to sing. Not honestly. Not from her heart. But she did then, sliding from the shanty into another, less playful melody, slower, filled with the melancholy she’d just vowed to drown. “Oft in the stilly night, ere slumber’s chain has bound me, fond memory brings the light of other days around me.”
The song was Caleb’s favorite and one of hers, as well—a tribute to memory and childhood and love and loss. And when she sang it, it was always about the life she might have had, if only things were different. The life she allowed herself to consider only in slumber.
There were few places better than an empty, dark tavern to sing, the notes clear in the silence, unhindered by clinking glasses and wild chatter and scraping chairs, the melody finding purchase in the dark corners of the room, fading to whispers, making memories in the walls to be recalled by strangers.
She closed her eyes and let herself fill the room. And for a few, short moments, the Sparrow was free.
Caleb did not applaud when she finished. He simply waited for her to return to the moment, and then he said, “The bastards who spout shit about it being better to have loved and lost have either never loved or never lost.”
She laughed at the crass words and came toward him. “Shall we drink to that?”
“With pleasure.” He dropped his hands to her waist and lifted her from the stage.
Her feet had barely touched the floor when the main door to the tavern opened, letting in a flood of late-afternoon sunlight. Caleb’s gaze flickered past her to the imposing figure in the doorway. “You owe me fifty dollars, Duchess.”
She caught her breath as the looming shadow growled, “Get your hands off my wife.”
Chapter 6
Calhoun Clocked; Tory Toff Tossed from Tavern
January 1835
One year, seven months earlier
Boston, Massachusetts
The Duke of Haven had barely found his footing on American soil before he was headed for the line of taverns overlooking the wharf. Salt and cold hung in the night air, clinging to the uncomfortable wool of his greatcoat, heavy and full of the lingering smell of weeks at sea.
There was a time when he would have made straight for an inn after interminable nights aboard a frigate in an uncomfortable berth, unable to find sleep or an inch of dry air, his nights spent pacing the deck of the ship, staring at endless black sea and sky made star-bright with the bitter cold.
There was a time when he would have left the ship and gone instantly in search of a warm bath, fire, and bed.
But that was before he searched for her.
Before he’d spent months crawling the cities of northern Europe after she’d left, certain she’d fled Highley for passage on a ship to Copenhagen, believing her sisters when they’d offered their suggestions for her destination. Oslo, Amsterdam, Bruges.
He’d forgotten that, however much his wife loathed him, his sisters-in-law loathed him far more. That was, until the one he’d nearly ruined had taken pity on him and told him the truth. “She might have left us, Duke, but she left you first. And we shall honor that wish above all.”
Damn women and their loyalty. Did they not wish her found? Did they not see she could be in danger? Did they not see what might come of her leaving? She could be—
He stopped the thought. She wasn’t dead. If she were dead, he would know. Even now, after all they’d been through, after all the sorrow and hate, he would know if she were dead. But gone was nearly the same. Worse, perhaps, because of the lingering, flickering, barely-there promise of it. Because of the memory that came with it, impossible to forget. He couldn’t forget an instant with her. Not since the night he’d stepped from a crowded ballroom to a balcony in search of fresh air, and there she’d been. As though she’d been waiting for him.
And so she had been.
It wasn’t a trap. It was all real.
Her words echoed in the cold wind. He hadn’t believed them. And now, he didn’t care if she’d been waiting for him. He could only hope she waited for him now. Here.
It was a year since she’d left, nearly to the day, and he found that as the time passed he only became more dogged in his search for her. It did not help that the anniversary of her leaving marked a different anniversary—one that brought an ache to his chest that could not be relieved. An ache he knew she felt, as well. He could not bring back their child. That, Haven knew, just as he knew there would never be another.