Free To Seduce an Angel by Kate Moore Page A

the empty rolling landscape.
    He regretted that he would not dine with the boys and their tutor but with his estate manager and the local vicar, who wanted to consult him on a matter of tithes.

Chapter Seven

    ON her third afternoon at Daventry Hall Emma set off for the town. On the way she tied a thread to those places in hedges and trees where she might later conceal the items needed for her escape. Adam Digweed had not returned to the hall, and each night Emma fell asleep waiting for the man in the room next to hers to succumb. She could not match him in wakefulness and doubted that he actually slept. He walked the roof. He read insatiably. He didn’t sleep. She knew little more about him than she had learned that first day. What she did know—that he cared for a ragtag band of boys—was not something to tell his enemies. She formulated her report to Aubrey’s man as she walked.
    The village of Somerton sat on a rise above the same river that flowed past the hall. Wood-timbered buildings with overhanging upper floors lined Bridge Street on one side of the green. Rows of plastered cottages extended down the side streets, and a tall old church with a spire sat back in a large churchyard opposite a brick town hall. The Bell, where she was to meet Aubrey’s man, was a whitewashed building with a prominent bow window and a busy yard. A redbrick malting house stood on one side and the town shop on the other.
    Josiah Wallop leaned back from a pigeon and beefsteak pie in one of the inn’s private dining rooms when Emma arrived. His imposing girth stretched the closure of a purple silk waistcoat below a brown-stained napkin tied about his neck. His doughy face had a broad genial expanse like the face of a prosperous farmer with ruddy cheeks, abundant black side whiskers, and multiple chins nesting in his linen, but his eyes were sharp and sly and the tufts of his brows rose like wicked tongues of black flame. No other man in Somerton wore purple silk.
    Wallop looked her over.
    Emma did not know any English farmers, but she knew jailers. You could tell a good guard from a bad guard by the way each handled the fish soup. It was always fish soup. The good guards were the indifferent ones, the ones bored by the long stretch of hours in the Castello di Malgrate. They were cardplayers who would place bets on the liveliness of the fleas. They shoved the soup forward into the cell and went back to their next wager.
    The scrupulous guards with neat uniforms and trim moustaches were not half bad, either. They played by the rules, were punctual to the minute in their routines and predictable in all their movements, even to the glance of their unseeing eyes. They set the soup down warm or cold in the same spot every evening. New guards, green ones who did not know yet what power was theirs, were the best of the lot. They sometimes brought a bowl filled to the brim.
    Bad guards were a different lot. They expected a little bite, a bribe for bringing the soup into the cell. A prisoner with nothing to offer could watch his soup sit on the cold stones until yellow islands of congealed grease floated in the broth. The worst guards were the dictators, the pashas of the prison, who let girls know what would happen to them if they didn’t obey orders. They spit in the soup.
    In Emma’s judgment, Josiah Wallop combined all the worst guards in his large person. He would insist on his little bite and then spit in your soup. He pretended to check on Emma as a chance acquaintance he’d helped along the way. The waiter left, closing the door behind him with a firm tug, that popped a cupboard door open a crack behind Wallop. It gave Emma a bad feeling to see that thin black crack as if the cupboard watched her, too.
    â€œSo you got the position, eh?”
    Emma nodded.
    â€œGood thing for you. Now if yer smart, missy, ye’ll know whose side yer on, and ye’ll end up plump in the pocket with His Lordship Aubrey