Angel of Hawkhaven
Chapter OneBy Maren
Copyright ©2006
Angel of Hawkhaven
Chapter OneBy Maren
Copyright ©2006
There were two kinds of hells in London: the one preached about from the pulpit, and the city’s underworld where poverty, drinking and gambling ran rife. The former hell had held my attention through all of my childhood, mainly at that Sabbath services. I was gently raised, the only child of Lord and Lady Rayette of Devonshire. Devout Catholics both, who not only accepted fire and brimstone as a matter of course at prayer time, but it was mentioned often during all my young life...until at the age of nine, my father took his life.
That one pistol shot did more than destroy my family. In the next year, my whole world changed forever. My mother and I never recovered from either the financial or social ruin that my father had left us in, which brought us both to a hell far worse than anything the priests could conjure. It was a hell on Earth called Barlow Street and this is where I lived until I was twenty-two.
Only the foolish, the strong, or the desperate came to this shadowy underworld of London. But when they did come, in particular they came to the Duck and Dog, which was situated at the very hub of the worst gambling dens. Pickpockets and thieves made the streets here a deadly adventure. No woman walking outside at night was expected to be, nor was treated as, respectable. Not even the most ambitious of constables was fool enough to send his men into these quarters. Ruffians made the gaming hells their homes and, once in a while, noble-born men, young and restless, abandoned their side of the Thames to indulge their taste for dangerous living. For me, the Duck and Dog was the only place where I, without skills or references, could find work.
I waited tables, dodging clouts from Old Hodges at the bar, ducking pinches from both his son and the customers who left my thighs and bottom perpetually stained in varying shades of black and blue. How the mighty have fallen. Those few proverbial words described me to a tee. Once upon a time, I had worn satin dresses, now my clothes were coarse and patched near to rags. I did my best to fight it, but it was only a matter of time before I joined the miserable ranks of the other women, Unfortunates all, who worked the dens on their backs, their legs spread wide for pennies a turn.
The hot stare of Old Hodges’ son, Bax, followed me from tables to bar and back again. Every night it grew harder and harder to fight my way out of this place with my maidenhead still intact. I was headed for ruin, and I knew it, but helplessness and poverty went hand in hand. My mother was dead now, too, and with no one left to turn to, I could no more change my fate than I could alter the path of moon or sun.
Only one of hundreds living in this district, I don’t know how it was I came to be singled out. But I do know this: as my very last ray of hope began to die into darkness, I was saved by an angel straight from God.
“Move your arse, yer lazy strumpet!” Old Hodges’s fist caught my ear, knocking me into the bar. Thankfully, I’d not yet picked up the drinks or I’d have dropped them. I still bore bruises on my back from the last broken crock that had slipped from my hands. It was not an experience I wanted to re-live.
I ducked, my feet scurrying to get the rest of me out of Hodges’ reach. My ear throbbed and rang, but other than to cock my head, momentarily pressing it to my shoulder, I could not pause to give it comfort. Grabbing the drinks, I turned and almost ran head on into Bax.
“Oh ho!” His hands caught me about the waist, steadying me. Though the caress was soft and light, I felt it when his thumbs left my waist to stroke along the undersides of my breasts. “Are yer all right, El?” he asked, but there was more lust in his eyes than any real concern.
Everything inside of me cringed. I jerked back out of his grasp, accidentally bumping into a patron who immediately elbowed me back into Bax. “Ge’ offa me!”
I twisted before his hands could close about me and escaped into the dense crowd, his hard laugh chasing me through the smoke and noise.
“Get to pullin’ pints, boy!” Old Hodges barked.
Bax obeyed his father, but not before ducking through the patrons behind me to give my bottom one last pinch before I could get away completely. After thirteen years in the Hells, I was used to such humiliating manhandling. At least I thought I was. Except that usually when Bax pinched me, he caught the outside curve of my buttocks or the backs of my thighs. This time, however, his fingers pushed so far betwixt my legs that he caught the tender folds of my sex.
To this day, I truly do not know if he hurt me or if it was the shock of feeling him there, but I jumped. Yelping, I jerked around to face him and in my carelessness, the drinks on my tray went flying. One hit the back of a customer’s head, dousing him in watered down ale. The other hit the floor and the pint crock shattered.
For one perfect second, the whole tavern fell to absolute silence. Barely one second. One heartbeat. Just long enough for an icy grip of absolute fear to clutch in my belly, and then all Hell truly did cut loose about me. Both Old Hodges and the customer roared their outrage. Grown men parted from around me as if I were plague-ridden. Even the noble lords, playing dice at a back table, gave up their game in favor of moving out of the way. Me, I dropped to the filthy floor, banging my knees as I scrambled to scrape the broken pottery together. I willed with all my soul for my eyes to be deceiving me. For that cup to still be in one piece. In hindsight, perhaps it would have served me better if I’d run.
“Yer lazy good fer nothin’!” Old Hodges actually came up over the top of his bar after me.
Customers flattened themselves against the walls to be out of his way. I was the only one too preoccupied to heed the warning of Old Hodge’s notoriously bad temper. He was on me, his huge fist knotting in my hair, before I knew I was a target.
A big man, he not only jerked me to my feet, but he hauled me clear up off them, shaking me like a rag by my hair. I grabbed his hand in both of mine, honestly afraid that he would rip away my scalp, but in the next instant I was thrown face down over the nearest table. Patrons jumped out of the way and more pints fell to the floor as my arms flailed, an involuntary reaction as I struggled to free myself of the attack.
“Ye’ll pay fer them cups!” One massive meaty hand planted between my shoulders, pressing me down on the scarred wood. And then I heard that dreadful sound as Old Hodges stripped his belt from his waist.
“No!” I clawed back over my shoulder, struggling to wriggle out from under his hand. He may as well have been made of stone for all that I moved him. “No, please! Mr. Hodges, I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
“I’ll bloody make yer bleedin’ sorry!” he snapped back, and not a single person anywhere in the Duck and Dog stepped forward to stop him. The closest customer to me still dripped from the drink I’d accidentally spilled. By the look on his face, it was clear he’d rather be swinging the belt himself than observing Hodges’s handiwork.
Across the tavern, Bax was leaning against the bar, arms folded across his chest, his dark eyes burning with an equally dark amusement at my expense. He was grinning.
Oh Lord, I panicked and my nails raked the table as I gripped it, bracing myself for the blow.
“Ah!” The belt wrapped across the small of my back. I could have been nude for all the defense my clothes held against it. The pain chewed into me, shooting up my spine and down my legs. They kicked of their own accord, but Hodges stood well back of me, leaving my feet to connect with nothing more vital than a discarded chair.
“Oh no! Oh no!” I grit my teeth tight together, but there was no biting back the scream when he whipped into me a second time. The length of his belt caught me low, wrapping around my hips, the cruel buckled end of it striking the outside of my right thigh. The third followed the length of my legs, flicking leather across the tender backs of my knees and sending my toes scrambling against the rough wooden floor again, as if I could run right off the table.
“No!” My voice cracked and my whole body cringed as I felt Old Hodges draw back his arm yet again. A big man, he could make his beatings last forever, but that’s when my angel appeared. I only had to endure three cruel strokes; the fourth one never fell.
Through the pain, a voice as calm and soft and gentle as ever I’d heard said, “That’s enough.”
My benefactor. My angel. With tears streaking my face, I opened my eyes and tried to twist back far enough to catch a glimpse him over my shoulder. All I saw was a black coat and a gloved hand, which held the end of Hodges’ belt captive and would not let it go.
“Release her,” my angel told him. “I will pay for the broken cups.”
Still pressing me into the table, Old Hodges yanked ineffectually at his belt, but my angel did not give way. His eyes narrowed. He clenched and re-clenched his jaw. “This is none o’ yer concern.”
“Nevertheless, you will do as you are told.”
I released a shuddering breath as, ever so perceptibly, the air in the Duck and Dog changed. Bax was no longer leaning against the bar, nor was he smiling. Neither was anyone else. A sly wave of hostility crept like shadow through the room. Deprived of their amusement, the men I had served so willingly took an ominous step closer around us. To a man, they did not look ready to help me.
Still my angel did not back down. After a long stretch of silence, Hodges gave in. He let go of his belt first, and then me. My back screamed in pain when he yanked me up off the table by the scruff of my dress and virtually tossed me at my savior. I could not get my feet under me fast enough; my legs felt as sturdy as pudding. Were it not for the quick reflexes of my angel, surely I’d have fallen at his feet.
“Stand,” he told me softly.
My nails raked his coat, but I somehow managed to do as he said.
“Take ‘er and get the ‘ell out,” he snarled.
My back hurt. My bottom hurt. My right knee burned and throbbed with every step, but not so much that I did not go immediately with the stranger in the black coat when he obligingly took my arm. I caught only a glimpse of his face before he pushed me ahead of him. “Walk.”
“El,” Bax hissed after me. I jumped at the sound, but with one smooth, solicitous gesture, my angel maneuvered himself between us. Releasing my arm, his hand gently planted itself between my tense shoulders and he kept me moving before him. Stepping through that door would mean the end to my job here, but I could not make myself stay.
The night outside was cool and foggy. Gas lamps scattered sporadically up and down the street, bathing the cobblestones in an eerie yellow glow.
“Step lively,” my angel directed, urging me faster until I was nearly jogging to keep abreast of his long-legged strides.
We headed down the sidewalk, which was crowned at one end by a long line of gentlemen’s coaches and waiting hackneys. The drivers were huddled en masse, not far from their horses, their coats pulled in tight against the chill of the night, laughing together as they passed a warming flask between them. One almost choked on the drink in his mouth when he glimpsed our rapid approach. He quickly handed the flask to a companion and, scrubbing his lips on the back of his wrist, quickly disassociated himself from the others.
“Buckley,” my angel greeted as we neared. “I trust we are in good form to drive the horses?”
Even in the dim light of the distant gas lamps, I could tell the driver blushed. “Very good, sir. I’m right as rain. No worries there.”
I took a shaky step back when Buckley opened the carriage door for us. Allowing a stranger to pull me from a bad situation and climbing into a closed carriage with him were two vastly different things. Too many things could happen in closed carriages with kindly, gentle-seeming noblemen who smiled one minute and turned savage the next. My mind, befuddled as it was, balked and so did my knees. “W-wait.”
But my particular nobleman would have none of it. His strong hands caught me about the waist, lifting me effortlessly off my feet and pushing me right up onto the cushioned seat. I shrank back against the far wall, feeling an almost stark panic when he climbed in beside me and quickly shut the door. For all the times that I’d had to dodge the questing hands at the Duck and Dog, I had never felt the nearness of a man so overwhelmingly as I did right then.
He sat down beside me, blocking my way to the door. Barely more than a shadowy form in the dark, he was still big, and his shoulders twice the breadth of mine. I struggled to breathe. The stripes that laced my back and bottom throbbed against the cushions, but there was simply no room for me to shift without bumping up against him.
“P-please,” I whispered. “I-I-I can take m-myself home.”
The outline of his head turned to look at me in the darkness. “Of course you can. However, since you are already sitting here, there is no harm in making certain you arrive there in one piece.”
The whole coach rocked, bumping my knee into his, as Buckley climbed into the driver’s perch. I flattened myself that much tighter against the far wall. “I-I do not wish to ride with you.”
In the act of taking off his coat and gloves, the shadow-cloaked man beside me paused. “Are you afraid of me?”
Since my father’s death, I had learned to be afraid of many things. A woman’s position in life was tenuous at best. We could be assaulted, killed and discarded, sold as entertainment during those long voyages to the colonies, and all on the whim of a man. Even those women lucky enough to find a gentle man willing to take her to wife, even those women had no guarantees. But women without men, women like me, were thrown to the wolves.
I shivered, whispering, “No. Of course, I-I’m not afraid.”
The shadow that was his head angled to one side, and I heard the smile in his voice. “I do believe you have just lied to me. Well, that’s all right. I am a stranger, after all. But for future reference you should know I regard the telling of untruths as being,” his voice dipped lower, “a very naughty thing to do.”
There was no censure in his tone, only a mild amusement, still I sidled a little further away on the carriage seat. The wall at my back restricted my retreat, though, and I would have had to dart past him in order to reach the door.
“What is your name?” he finally asked, turning to look out the window. “El?”
“Ella Rayette.”
“Mrs?”
“Miss.”
“Miss Ella Rayette. Very pretty. I like it.”
“Please let me go now. I don’t live far. I can wa—”
The nobleman held up his hand, silencing me mid-sentence, then reached up to tap the carriage ceiling. The vehicle lurched into motion against my wishes, but I quickly learned why. Bax had followed us out of the tavern and partway down the sidewalk, several of his friends in tow. Though Bax did not call after me, he did step out into the street to watch our passing with a look of intense frustration on his grim face.
I clenched my suddenly damp palms in my skirts, but managed to hold my tongue until the carriage turned that first bend in the road and both Bax and his father’s tavern disappeared from view. I released a shaky breath. “I—I...thank you.”
“You are welcome, Ella with the beautiful name.” He leaned back in his seat, mingling so completely with the shadows that all I could make out with any great distinction were his knees directly below the window and a single broad hand as it rested lightly on his thigh. “Now, where should I take you?”
“I would be fine if you let me out right here.”
“I doubt that. This is not the place for ladies to wander in broad daylight, much less the middle of the night. At this hour, all the worst sort of ruffians have come out to play. No, I could not in good conscience leave you here to fend for yourself.” His hand rose into the air when I opened my mouth, staying my protests. “Buckley and I will take you home and that’s all there is to it. Now be prompt, girl, where do you live?”
Thirteen years in Hell could make anyone wary, and I knew better than to give a man—any man—my address. My eyes flicked from him to the door and nervously back again. My breath caught in the back of my throat. Every carriage accident I had ever heard of came rushing through my mind as I considered whether or not to simply rush the door and throw myself out. We weren’t moving much faster than I could walk, but broken ankles did not require speed as much as they did uneven cobblestones, of which the London streets were notoriously filled.
But right on the heels of those gruesome images came even worse ones. Those of the battered women I had known who had found themselves trapped on rooftops, or in doorways or back alleys, or in hackneys, with men they didn’t know. My mouth ran dry as my eyes locked upon the world passing steadily by outside. The carriage rocked gently as we bumped down the uneven street.
“Are you ashamed to tell me?” he asked suddenly, halting me in the bud of what I personally believe might very well have been a suicidal attempt to gain my freedom. “If so, then I promise not to look out the window when we arrive.”
“Ashamed?” I stared at him in silent disbelief, not blinking until my eyes began to burn because of it.
“Of your home. Believe me, I am not too lost in my own extravagance not to realize we can’t all live in palaces and townhouses.”
Palaces and townhouses. I remembered a flash of marble and Grecian columns and tall multi-pane windows that let in the sunlight in a white, white drawing room where once I had played. In comparison, my home these days was a rented room above the corner pawn shop. It was windowless, which made it stuffy in the winter and oppressively hot in the summer, and only just barely big enough to house the narrow cot I slept upon. There was a communal bathroom down the hall, and twenty-six tenants to share it. Another eight tenants were yet in nappies, which meant that at least one of them was guaranteed to be crying at any given time of the night, and the man in the room above me had somehow smuggled in a cat, which had peed on the floor so many times that an ugly brown stain was beginning to leak through to my ceiling. The smell was horrible.
Still that nasty little room was a veritable lap of luxury compared with the alternative. Unless I found a way to make my rent—fifteen shillings, due in full tomorrow evening—I could just as easily be sleeping on a rooftop somewhere or in a doorway.
I turned my face away to look at the curtained window to my left and I tried not to cry. Maybe if I went back right now, just maybe Old Hodges would let me have my job back again. He would almost certainly finish the beating he’d begun, and I knew it would be even worse for me than before. But I could take it. I could, if it meant I wouldn’t have to live on the street.
My eyes began to tear. “I don’t see any point in being ashamed of something I probably won’t have for much longer.”
My companion drew in a deep breath. “That sounds vaguely as if the rent must be due.”
I clenched my hands tightly together, wishing I’d not said anything at all.
“Which, I suspect, would also mean you are thinking of the job you no longer possess.” He tsked and said, not unkindly, “There must be a hundred taverns on this side of the Thames alone. Surely one of them is lacking a server.”
My eyes began to tear and my lower lip quivered. I was glad the darkness hid my emotional foibles from the man beside me. Slow and deep, I forced each breath I took to be like normal so he would not know I was crying. There were definitely more than a hundred taverns; over the years, I must have worked for at least half of them at one time or another. I was not a good server. I could not seem to suffer the indignities that other girls seemed to accept as a matter of course. Like when Ames at the Donkey’s Long pushed me up against the butcher block in the kitchen one night, sweating and panting and pawing at my breasts. I laid a flat iron up against his head as hard as I could and spent the next two months hungry and cold in prison. Last I heard, Ames was still drooling and his brother now ran the Donkey’s Long.
Very few taverns would hire a troublemaker, and that was my reputation.
“There’s a fish market one street over, I believe,” the stranger suggested. But I had been fired from Dubby’s Fish Mart two years ago when my mother had first fallen ill. There had been no one else to care for her. To this day, I still could not bring myself to eat fish.
“There’s always a call for buffer lasses. Heavy work, I know, but the wage is extraordinary with practice. You see, the opportunities abound; you simply have to look for them.”
So sayeth a man who’d probably never had to work for a living. Ever. Not one day in all of his life.
“Which brings us back to the unanswered question of the hour: what to do with you.” He lay his neatly folded coat and gloves on the seat between us. “Home again, home again, jiggity jig, as the rhyme does go.”
“Why are you so insistent on gaining my address?” I turned practically into the wall just so I could dash away my tears unnoticed. Then I faced him, frowning and tight-lipped. Defiance was not a normal thing for me, and from where exactly I had managed to summon this remarkable little thread of it, I just don’t know. “Why must you know so badly? You did spare me a thrashing; should I show you my gratitude by giving you some sort of reward? Will a kiss be enough to satisfy my debt, or shall I raise my skirt, lie back and think of England? Do you believe I will fancy the pawing of a nobleman above that of Bax and his eager friends? Will you take pity on me when you see how poor my accommodations and perhaps compensate me for the pleasure of my time? I may be poor, my lord, but I am not Unfortunate.”
We passed another street lamp and for a brief moment the inside of the carriage became illuminated enough for me to see his mild surprise and for him to see the tears in my eyes.
“I don’t believe I ever suggested you work as an Unfortunate,” he finally offered. “Nor do I think I have pawed you or shown you disrespect in any way. They do not call these streets ‘hells’ without reason, and I am not a man in the habit of helping people, only to leave them in situations worse than when I found them.”
No, he hadn’t. And I should have been ashamed of myself for my outburst. But I was hurt, far removed from my element of comfort, and scared all the way down to the very core of me. No longer feeling rescued, I felt myself a prisoner. No longer my angel, he had become my captor. And who was I that anyone would miss me if I simply disappeared?
“Let me out here,” I said again, this time my voice did not waver.
“You truly are determined to make me into someone nefarious, aren’t you?” he asked, his tone painstakingly mild and yet developing some of that same calm authority that he had used with Old Hodges.
In contrast, my tone was rising and growing more wild. “I will not give you my address!”
“What if I promise to cover my ears? You can shout it to Buckley, and I’ll never be the wiser.”
“All right then, you shall simply have to come home with me. At least then I will know you are safely ensconced in someone’s house for the night.”
He broke off sharply when I dove for the carriage door, accidentally stepping on his foot and tripping myself. I would have cracked my chin on the window ledge had he not caught me about the waist. He probably meant to drop me back on the seat, but for all my struggling I ended up sitting in his lap and that made my franticness to break free of him all the more urgent.
“Let—ugh! Let me go!” I thrashed and the welts across my back and hips exploded in a new agony of throbbing. “Oh!”
“Easy,” he said soothingly.
But nothing about tonight had been easy; nothing about tonight had been soothing. My elbow jabbed back into his ribs, and I launched myself again for freedom, this time managing to kick the door open. I had one foot out over the moving ground before his arms again locked around me.
“Are you trying to break your fool neck?” my captor demanded, and then yelled to Buckley, who immediately reigned in the horses.
“Let me go!” I cried, not caring whether the carriage was moving or not.
This time when he pulled me back to him, instead of sitting in his lap I found myself flipped about and dropped belly-down across his hard thighs. I kicked my feet outside the open door, fighting to right myself or, failing that, to simply slide backwards and down onto the street, but a strong arm like a band of worked iron locked around my waist. With the easy strength of a grown man, he hauled me center across his lap and pinned me there.
“Oh!” I beat my hands on both the seat, the floor and even reached back to claw and scratch him, anything to break his hold. But in an instant, all my struggles came to a sudden halt when I felt the flat of his hand come to rest on the seat of my upturned skirts.
As light a touch as it was, his fingers unwittingly pressed over one of the welts left by Old Hodges’ belt, and I came completely apart.
For the first time in my life, I wished my father had found the courage not only to end his life, but to take me with him when he’d died. I burst into tears.
To Be Continued
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