But, still . . .
Before she realized it, he'd lifted back her yellow hair and kissed her deeply on the mouth. Suddenly it was all she could manage, keeping her hands on the mattress.
Then he faltered, mumbled something about the heat, and plopped back onto the sweat-soaked sheet.
Well, God damn him too.
She studied his face again, wondering why he seemed so distracted this trip. It wasn't like Hugh to let things get under his skin. Though admittedly affairs were going poorly for him now, mainly because of the damned Civil War in England. Since he didn't trouble about taxes, he'd always undersold English shippers. But after the war had disrupted things so much, the American settlements were wide open to the cut-rate Hollanders, who could sell and ship cheaper than anybody alive. These days the Butterboxes were everywhere; you could look out the window and see a dozen Dutch merchantmen anchored right in Carlisle Bay. Ever since that trip for the Council he'd been busy running whatever he could get between Virginia and some other place he hadn't said—yet he had scarcely a shilling to show for his time. Why else would he have paid that flock of shiftless runaways he called a crew with the last of his savings? She knew it was all he had, and he'd just handed it over for them to drink and whore away. When would he learn?
And if you're thinking you'll collect on the Council's sight bills, dear heart, you'd best think again. Master Benjamin Briggs and the rest of that shifty lot could hold school for learned scholars on the topic of stalling obligations.
He was doubtless too proud to own it straight out, but he needn't trouble. She already knew. Hugh Winston, her lover in times past and still the only friend she had worth the bother, was down to his last farthing.
She sighed, telling herself she knew full well what it was like. God's wounds, did she know what it was like. Back when Hugh Winston was still in his first and only term at Oxford, the son of one Lord Harold Winston, before he'd been apprenticed and then sent packing out to the Caribbees, Joan Fuller was already an orphan. The hardest place you could be one. On the cobblestone streets of Billingsgate, City of London.
That's where you think you're in luck to hire out in some household for a few pennies a week, with a hag of a mistress who despises you for no more cause than you're young and pretty. Of course you steal a little at first, not too much or she'd see, but then you remember the master, who idles about the place in his greasy nightshirt half the day, and who starts taking notice after you let the gouty old whoremaster know you'd be willing to earn something extra. Finally the mistress starts to suspect—the bloodhounds always do after a while—and soon enough you're back on the cobblestones.
But you know a lot more now. So if you're half clever you'll take what you've put by and have some proper dresses made up, bright colored with ruffled petticoats, and a few hats with silk ribands. Then you pay down on a furnished lodging in Covent Garden, the first floor even though it's more than all the rest of the house. Soon you've got lots of regulars, and then eventually you make acquaintance of a certain gentleman of means who wants a pert young thing all to himself, on alternate afternoons. It lasts for going on two years, till you decide you're weary to death of the kept life. So you count up what's set by—and realize it's enough to hire passage out to Barbados.