“Why are you still here?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t think it was right to leave you alone, asleep, in the middle of the night with the door open.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I know,” he said. “You’re thinking that between the certainty of me and the unknown dark, you’d rather have the dark. Not that you have any reason to believe me, but I’m not that sort of scoundrel.”
She rubbed her eyes, coming to herself. “That’s not what I was thinking. My cousin is near enough that she’d come on a scream. I was thinking that it was an absurdly protective gesture.”
He’d said he felt sexual attraction, and she didn’t doubt he did. But that could mean anything. He might feel the stirrings of lust toward a thousand women a day. No, she was safer remembering his first words to her. He didn’t give a damn about her.
Impossible to think that while remembering the sketches he’d made of her.
He looked away from her, glancing at the sheets that hung from large wooden rods. “Tell me what needs to be done, Miss Marshall. I’ll do it, and then you can head off to bed.”
“Check to see if the ink still smears.”
He stood and crossed to the sheets that were hanging. “The pages are still damp, but the ink is fast.”
Under her direction, they got the proofs ready for the mails. He worked with her, fetching envelopes and ink, folding the sheets of newsprint.
He talked as he worked. “Tonight was interesting. I always imagined that a printing press used wet ink, like from an inkwell.”
“This press can put off twenty thousand sheets per hour. It cost me five hundred pounds. You can’t get that sort of speed with wet ink without smearing it. So instead, you wet the paper and use lampblack…” Free smiled. “Now listen to me babble on.”
“I like hearing you babble.” He wasn’t looking at her as he spoke, just folding up sheets. “This is as far from that first press as a chisel and stone tablet are from a fountain pen. Twenty thousand sheets in an hour, and every one of them a weapon. I wonder if Gutenberg imagined this when he made that first Bible.”
She wondered if Mr. Clark saw the same thing she did when she looked at her press. It wasn’t just a thing of metal and gears, a machine that chopped and printed at an astonishing rate. It was a web of connections, from the account of life in the mines from a woman in Cornwall, to the description of the latest parliamentary machinations.
But no. No matter what he said, how charming he was, she had to remember who he was. A liar. A realist. He might care about her in the casual way that men cared about women they wanted, but he didn’t care about anything she did.
Such a shame.
He watched her address the envelopes. “Do you really know Violet Malheur? And is that the Violet Malheur? The one they call the Countess of Chromosome now?”
Free smiled dreamily. “A little known fact: I invented the word chromosome. Also, Lady Amanda is her niece. So, yes, we do know her. She’s penned a few essays for us on female education and vocation.” Free scrawled a brief note to Violet and folded it in with the proof.
“Is there anything you don’t do?” he asked.
“Sleep.”
He laughed softly. Free could almost have forgotten that he’d threatened her with blackmail, that he couldn’t bother to spare a single cheer for her future. She could almost believe that he was a friend.
They packaged the proofs and added them to the mailbag left on the stoop.
He took his scarf from the hooks at the door; she took a light cloak.
He went outside, but waited on the stoop for her to lock up. “Do you need someone to walk you home?”
Free pointed fifty feet down to her house. “I live there. I can manage that on my own.”
“Ah.” But he didn’t move, and for some reason, she didn’t either.
“Right,” she heard herself say. “Good night, then, Mr. Clark. Go get some sleep.”
He smiled wearily. “Not yet. I’ll be watching the mailbag, to make sure that our culprit isn’t interfering at this point. You go, Miss Marshall.”
Still she didn’t. “Why are you doing all this? You say it’s revenge, but I can’t make sense of you.”
He looked down the street, away from her. “Just…wrestling with my conscience.”
“What?” She gasped in fake shock. “Mr. Clark! I didn’t know you had one of those.”
“I didn’t think I did, either,” he said wryly. “That’s why it’s proven so hard to defeat. I’m out of practice.” He sighed. “Very well, then. A while back, I told you that you would always know the score between us, even if you didn’t know the details.”
She turned toward him. “And now you want to tell me details.”
“God, no.” He looked disgusted. “Now I’m debating if I should tell you that the score has changed.”
The air shifted subtly between them. She turned to him. “You’ve given up on revenge, then.”
“No, Miss Marshall.” His voice was low and warm, so warm she could have sunk into it, let it enfold her. “I told you that I didn’t give a damn about you.”
Her breath stopped in her lungs. He was watching her ever so intently, so intently that she shut her eyes, unable to meet his gaze. “Oh?”
“That has changed. I find myself giving a damn. It’s an unfamiliar experience, to say the least.”
Free let her breath cycle in and out, in and out. But it was the sound of his breathing that she listened for, as if his inhalations might provide some clue to untangle what he meant.
She kept her eyes shut. “Well, Mr. Clark. You have not given me enough information to proceed. Precisely what sort of a damn are we talking about here? Is it a little damn? A big damn? Do you give more than one damn, or are we talking of damnation in the singular?”
She could hear his shoes scuff against the ground, taking him closer. Closer to her. She couldn’t see him, and that made the moment all the more intimate. She could imagine the look in his eyes, faintly approving.
“Free.” His voice dropped low, so low that she could almost feel the rumble of it in her chest. And then she felt it—not his hand, but a waft of air brushing her cheek, and then the absence of any draft. The warmth of him heating the space next to her.
“This,” he said, “is about the shape of it.”
She couldn’t help herself. She leaned forward, letting his hand brush against her jaw. His finger ran along her chin; his thumb brushed against her lips. Her eyes fluttered open.