Page 1 of To Save a Scoundrel’s Soul

Prologue

London, 1810

MICKEY SHIVERED, PULLING his too-small coat a little tighter. He couldn’t recall a time when he wasn’t shivering or hungry, invariably both. He couldn’t recall much about the past at all, except for the morning, not so long ago, that his cousin Tommy had found him wrapped around his mother’s cold, lifeless body and told him to get out quick before he was carted off to the workhouse and an even worse fate befell him.

He wouldn’t ever forget that.

“Here, get your laughing gear around this.” Tommy tossed him an apple. “Two rolled off a barrow as they were unloading down at the market.” He winked. “I’ve already picked the shit off it for you, bleeding fusspot.”

A chill wind gnawed at Mickey’s bones as they sat on a wall behind the market, watching smart gentlemen trotting in and out of the coffee houses. Tommy didn’t seem cold at all. Ten years older meant ten years more meat on him, and Mickey huddled closer to his bigger cousin. These days, home was wherever Tommy was, at present a molly house over on Vere Street. Seeing as Tommy brought in good money, the madam pretended not to notice if Tommy’s scrawny cousin crept inside after dark whilst Tommy was turning tricks.

“You think it’s cold enough to snow again, Tommy?” Mickey chomped on his apple. Sweet juice flooded his mouth, the fruit crunchy and tart in all the right ways.

“I reckon.” Tommy tilted his head up to study the leaden sky. “It’s all gathering up there, waiting to drop on us.”

“You never know,” Mickey took another bite. “It might drop somewhere else, like France or…or…”

Mickey didn’t know of any other places except London, but he’d heard folks talking of France.

Tommy polished his own apple on his sleeve before taking a big chunk out of it. “That fancy lordling of mine, who comes on a Saturday, he says there are some countries where they haven’t ever seen the snow. ’Cos it’s too hot all the time.”

Mickey couldn’t even begin to imagine what too hot felt like. “Has he told you about them?”

Tommy’s handsome lordling was full of stories. He was full of rubbish, too, mind. Last week, he’d told Tommy he was in love with him and was going to spend the rest of his days in Tommy’s bed. According to Tommy, most of the punts came out with that crap once his clever mouth had emptied their ballocks.

The only difference with this bloke was that Tommy was in love with him too.

“He says there’s places in the countryside—deep in the fields and the hills and shit—where the only thing you can hear is the sound of the birds chattering and the trees rustling. He says he’ll take me there one day and show me. He says he’ll tup me on a bed made of leaves and moss and then take me swimming in the stream.”

Mickey pulled a face. “Sounds chuffin’ freezing. You’ll catch your death.”

“That’s what I said. And then he said there’s these other places where all you can see are carpets of flowers—violets, lavender, and daisies, and some little yellow flowers I forgot the name of but that he said smell like…”

Mickey closed his eyes for a moment, letting his favourite dream unfold in his mind, letting it cloak his cold, thin, hungry body. like the patchwork quilt he craved, drying on the madam’s washing line. Before him stretched the lordling’s soft, undulating hills. The sun hung low in the sky, a fat lump of gold, casting long, slanted shadows across all the flowers the lordling promised Tommy were real. A brook babbled at the foot of a far-off hill, its waters clear and inviting; Mickey imagined dipping his toe in it. In this dream, the water was warm, and the wind wasn’t like London wind, stinging his lips until they were chapped and sore. Nor did it whistle through the alleys and down the back of his thin shirt. Instead, it whispered across his skin, balmy and comforting, similar to one of Tommy’s rare hugs.

“I’m going to live somewhere like that one day, Tommy,” he announced sleepily. “When I’m rich. I’ll grow my own apples. Big, shiny red ones.”

“Yeah?” Tommy chuckled. That was rare, too, unless his lordling had recently paid a visit. “Who with?”

“Dunno yet.” Mickey munched through his apple core, spitting out the pips. “Someone special though. You and your lordling can come and visit us if you like.”

Tommy laughed again. “Honoured, to be sure. And how are you gonna get rich, Mickey, so you can grow all these apples?”

Mickey hadn’t worked out the details. After all, he was only a little nipper, as Tommy often reminded him. But, like Tommy, he had plenty of big ideas.

“I shall find a diamond,” he declared. “A big one.”

Chapter One

London, Winter, 1825

MOST OF SQUIRE’S well-heeled patrons were unaware of the private room tucked away from the clamour of the main floor. The air held a comforting blend of cologne and aged leather, and a fire smouldered lazily in the hearth, sending shadows dancing across the rich mahogany wall panels. A thick Persian rug, worn smooth by years of use, stretched across the floor.

Only a very select handful of gentlemen were privy to this space. That Tommy Squire, his older cousin and boss, admitted him to this rarefied group was a privilege Mickey Maurice felt he’d waited for half his life. He had no intention of squandering it.

Two wingback armchairs framed the hearth, both boasting tasselled cushions and a whiff of superiority. Tommy’s darkly handsome lover occupied one—Benedict Fitzsimmons, Fourteenth Duke of Ashington. Tommy’s innocent lordling, all grown up.

The eleventh Earl of Rossingley sat opposite, of fairer, slighter frame, yet no less imposing. His own lover, Kit Angel, stood before a window draped in velvet curtains the colour of midnight, looking out onto a rainy St James. He sipped from a brandy balloon, the leaded crystal catching the flickering firelight as if he cradled a cup of glittering diamonds in his palm. On the deep, inviting settee sprawled the duke’s brother, Lord Lyndon Fitzsimmons, a scapegrace whose fearsome reputation was in grave peril if he didn’t stop making doe eyes at the Honourable Rollo Duchamps-Avery, a blond wisp of a young man curled up next to him.