Free The Rake's Mistress by Nicola Cornick

no sound in the studio but for the diamond scribe scratching the glass as she meticulously picked out the pattern of the wicked angel. Beneath its point the figure came to life, wings folded neatly, the line of cheek and jaw giving the impression of strength and grace,head bent, as if in devout contemplation of sin. On the evening of the fourth day she laid her scribe aside and considered the engraving. She knew at once that there was something wrong with it. The problem was not in the execution, but in the finished picture. She had given the wicked angel Lucas Kestrel’s face.
    It was undeniable. The detail was perfect: the high cheekbones, the hard line of the jaw, the watchful eyes, the mouth… Rebecca put her head in her hands in despair. All this time she had been shutting Lucas out of her thoughts by concentrating on her work. She had refused to think of him, refused to dream of him. Yet he had come to haunt her nevertheless, taking life beneath the point of the scribe and showing her just how foolish she was to think that she could dismiss him.
    Rebecca pushed the bowl away dispiritedly. She knew she should have spent longer practising on old glass before she started work on the crystal, but she had been desperate to finish the commission, desperate for the money, if she were truthful. And there was no real need to despair, for Lord Fremantle was likely to be very pleased with the work. She would deliver it to the Club in the morning. It was undoubtedly amongst her best work. Technically it was beautiful and perfectly executed. It was what it told her that was worrying.
    Rebecca stood up, wiped the palms of her hands on her apron and walked restlessly across to the window. Night had fallen long since and the lights of the Jerusalem Tavern twinkled faintly in the dusk. A distant murmur of voices drifted on the night air.
    Rebecca turned away. She knew that she should put in some time on her accounts, which consistently refused to add up. The mere thought of it made her head ache.
    She wished with fierce longing that her uncle, George Provost, was here with her now. She had never felt so alone as she did these days, not even when she had been a child and her parents had died and she and Daniel were obliged to go their separate ways. George and his kindly wife, Ruth, had taken her in and over the years she had become much attached to them, but now she had no one. She knew that she had tried to bury her grief in her work, but every so often it would bubble up as it did now, making her eyes sting and her heart ache.
    Rebecca had never minded working on her own before. Engraving was a solitary profession, but she was beginning to realise that there was a difference between working on her own commissions with the buzz of the workshop going on around her, and working in silence because she had lost all her colleagues.
    With a little sigh, she went into the storeroom and took out an old wineglass that she used for practice. Now that the angel was completed, she needed to start practising birds of prey. She went back to her desk, sat down and picked up her diamond-point scribe and the little hammer. Stipple work engraving was slow and expensive, for each dot was placed individually on the glass with utter precision. For Lord Lucas Kestrel’s commission, however, nothing but the best would do. Her professional pride demanded it.
    She picked up her engraving scribe and the little hammer that she used for stipple work. She placed the scribe against the glass and tapped it gently.
    An agonising pain shot through her left wrist, so sharp that it felt as though she were hammering into her own bones. Rebecca cried out, dropping the hammer so that it spun away across the bench. The glass fractured all the way around the top and broke off cleanly in a band half an inch wide. Rebecca felt sickness rise in her throat. She grabbed the edge of the desk to steady herself, then sat down and clutched her wrist with her other hand. The pain