“That’s a great deal to ask of a man who is offering to help you.”
She glanced over at him. “But then, you’re not offering to help me. You don’t give a damn about me. You want me to help you achieve revenge. You’ll surely put up with a little inconvenience for that, won’t you?”
She hadn’t missed a thing. Edward conceded this with a wave of his hand. “Continue on. I stay here all day. And then what will happen?”
“I’ll accompany you to Shaughnessy’s room this night,” she said. “I’ll search it. We’ll see if that item is there together.”
“And if it is, you’ll trust me?”
She tapped the forged reference he’d left on her desk and smiled even more brilliantly. “If it’s there, I won’t turn you over to the authorities. It was good of you to demonstrate your skill with forgery so beautifully in front of me. You’ve even left me evidence. So if you’re telling the truth about this, I suppose I’ll let you go free. For now.”
He absolutely should have been annoyed with her. Instead, he wanted to laugh—and to shake her hand and tell her that she played a jolly good game.
Come to think of it, he didn’t precisely want to let go of her hand, once he’d given it a shake.
“Miss Marshall,” he said, “are you blackmailing me with my attempt to blackmail you? Can I now threaten to go to the authorities and turn this convoluted double blackmail plot into triple blackmail?”
She leaned forward, gesturing him to come close with a finger. He set his hands on the desk and leaned in close. They were separated by twelve inches and an expanse of wood. She licked her lips, and he felt his mouth go dry. Oh, no. There was nothing boring about her. He was riveted, in fact.
She smiled at him, and then spoke in a low voice. “You said you’d done your research, Mr. Clark. You said you knew who I was. You obviously didn’t look very hard. A woman doesn’t run a newspaper and perform her own investigations without learning how to deal with scoundrels. You think you can push me around, that you can traipse in here and take charge. You can’t. If you really want your revenge, you’re going to have to work for it.”
He tried to muster up a sense of annoyance. She was complicating everything. She watched with an expression that struck him as halfway between severe and impish. But—alas—he couldn’t come up with even a trace of exasperation.
It was going to be downright fun working with her.
So instead of agreeing, he picked up her pen again and pulled the letter he’d forged back from her.
“Postscript,” he narrated aloud as he wrote. “Don’t let Edward Clark’s patent humility fool you. He is maddeningly brilliant. Beware. It will creep up on you over time.” He passed the letter back to her. “There. That makes it rather better, don’t you think?”
She perused the line he’d added with a dubious raising of her eyebrows. “Not particularly, no.”
“Should I have underlined maddeningly?” he asked. “Or brilliant? I ask because if you’re going to have me up for forgery, I want to make sure you have a perfect specimen to present to the court. A man has his pride.”
“Underline neither,” she said calmly. “I’ll let you know when you’ve earned my italics. For now, you may only lay claim to regular type and full stops.”
He couldn’t outblackmail her, outthink her, or outcharm her. He couldn’t even outbrazen her.
“Tell me, Miss Marshall,” he said. “Do you ever bend to anyone?”
She shook her head. “Only if it will get me what I want. I’m a very determined woman.”
He could believe it now. He’d been misled by her idealism, her smile. A man might see her trim form seated at her desk, her fingers slightly stained with ink, poised above the letter he’d written, and see only a small, lovely woman. He might see that and completely miss the steel in her character.
Edward wouldn’t make that mistake again. A hint of a smile touched her lips as she looked down. She was maddeningly…everything. This entire endeavor had tilted, and now, like a cart on a hill without a driver, it was careening away. He didn’t know when the crash would come, but he wasn’t about to jump off.
This was so terribly bad that it had actually come full circle round to something…enticingly good.
“Well, then.” He stood. “Lead on, Miss Marshall. If you’re to keep me under lock and key, I suppose you must let me know where I will be staying.”
Chapter Four
MISS MARSHALL PUT EDWARD in something she called the archive room. In actuality, it was little better than a dusty closet. A single high slit of a window allowed barely enough daylight through to illuminate a chair, a spindly desk, and a mass of cabinets.
“Mr. Clark is considering advertising with us,” she told the other women in the main room. “He wants to look through the archives of the paper.”
Which, actually, was not a bad idea. He thought he’d done the necessary research, but he’d had only the vaguest notion of what Miss Marshall was like when he arrived here—and that had been gleaned from five minutes in her company and the combination of notes in his brother’s file. The reality of her had smashed all his dimly held expectations to bits.
He started reading her paper from the first issue.
It took only four issues for Miss Marshall’s thrice-weekly paper to leave him properly terrified. She’d had herself committed to a government-operated lock hospital—one of those dreadful institutions established for the protection of the Royal Navy, where they held prostitutes suspected of carrying venereal diseases. Miss Marshall had stayed for twenty-six days. She’d been examined, mistreated, starved, and frozen. When she’d finally been sprung by her brother, she’d written a scathing report on the conditions inside.
Nobody had been willing to print it, so she’d started her own newspaper.
Her report on the mistreatment of suspected prostitutes gave her material for her first week in operation. In subsequent weeks, she’d taken work in a cotton factory. She’d worked as a maid in the home of a peer rumored to despoil the virtue of his servants. She’d interviewed courtesans and prostitutes on the one hand, and the great dames of society on the other. She wrote about all these things in plain, simple, damning language.
Over the years, she’d added on writers, a second page to her paper. Her newspaper featured pieces from female thinkers like Emily Davies and Josephine Butler. Advertisements had bloomed. The columns covered everything from mundane advice on how to grow a few extra vegetables in a tenement to biting criticism of the newly-established colony on the Gold Coast. And it was all written by—and about—women. Stephen Shaughnessy’s acerbic column on Wednesdays was matched against a woman by the name of Sophronia Speakwell, who gave equally biting advice on Saturday.