Granville’s thugs had been beating him daily, sometimes twice a day, for a week now. His right eye was swollen shut, the left not much better, his lip split and resplit. At least two ribs were cracked. Several of his teeth were loose. There wasn’t more than a handspan on his entire body that wasn’t covered with bruises. It was only a matter of time until they hit him too hard or in the wrong place or until his body just gave out.

And then the rats . . .

Harry shook his head. What he couldn’t understand was why Granville hadn’t killed him at once. When he’d woken the day after he’d been caught at the stream, there’d been a moment when he had been stunned just to find himself alive. Why? Why capture him alive when Granville surely meant to kill him anyway? They kept telling him to confess to killing Will’s gran, but surely that didn’t really matter to Granville. The baron didn’t need a confession to hang him. Nobody would care much about Harry’s death or would protest it, except maybe Will.

Harry sighed and leaned his aching head against the mildewed stone wall. That wasn’t true. His lady would care. Wherever she was, either in her fancy London town house or her Yorkshire mansion, she’d weep when she heard of her lowborn lover’s death. The light would go out of her beautiful blue eyes, and her face would crumple.

In this cell he’d had many hours to ponder. Of all the things in his life that he regretted, he regretted that one thing the most: that he would cause Lady Georgina pain.

A mutter of voices and the scuff of boots on stone came from without. Harry cocked his head to listen. They were coming to beat him again. He flinched. His mind might be strong, but his body remembered and dreaded the pain. He closed his eyes in that moment before they opened the door and it all began again. He thought about Lady Georgina. In another time and place, if she’d not been so highborn and he not so common, it might have worked. They might have married and had a little cottage. She might have learned to cook, and he might have come home to her sweet kiss. At night he might have lain beside her and felt the rise and fall of her body and drifted into dreamless sleep, his arm draped over her.

He might have loved her, his lady.

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

“Is he alive?” George’s face looked like a piece of paper scrunched up and smoothed out again. Her gray dress was so rumpled, she must have been sleeping in it all the way from London.