Loving Julia Read Online Free PDF

the boy in the bed. He would be her husband. Every nerve in her body shrank from the idea. But of course he would never be her husband in anything but name. He was dying. She would not have to put up with the reality of a man who owned her as he might own a dog, and use her worse—as man after man had used her mother. She forced the thought from her consciousness.
    “I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”
    Jewel nodded in reply to the priest’s soft statement, but remained by Timothy’s bedside, staring down at him blankly long after Father Simon had gone. She felt very calm, almost unnaturally so. If the toff lasted until Father Simon got back, she would go through the ceremony required to make her his wife, be he delirious or crazed or what. Be a bleedin’ fool if she didn’t, she told herself again, and settled down with a blanket on the floor to wait.

III
    Rain fell in icy sheets that had long since soaked through the thin shawl that Jewel had wrapped around her red silk dress. She was soaked to the skin, with long strands of her black hair straggling down from the fancy upsweep that had looked so elegant in the glass when she had fixed it to lie in freezing, dripping rat’s tails against her bare white neck. Her grand red velvet hat with its perky ostrich plume—which, like the shawl, she had “borrowed” from a friend—tilted soggily over one eye, its wide brim allowing a torrent of water to stream down a scant inch in front of her reddened nose.
    But still she stood on the edge of the small triangular park like a foolish gawk, staring up wide-eyed at the imposing stone facade of the mansion on Grosvenor Square. She had been standing there for nearly three hours, heedless of the occasional splashing carriage or hurrying maidservant, all the while trying to work up the courage to march to that massive oak door and make use of the gleaming brass knocker. It was formed in the shape of a lion’s head, and for some reason, that made the knot in her stomach twist even tighter. Even the bloomin’ knocker was grand.
    But she belonged to that house now. Or so she had been telling herself for the past week, ever since Timothy had died. She had married him, all legal so Father Simon said at the time. Timothy had told her to come to this address with the proof of their marriage after he was gone. He had told her to present their marriage lines to the Earl of Moorland, whom he claimed was his guardian, with his compliments. So Jewel had decided to try her luck. The worst they could do to her was throw her out on her arse, right?
    After Timothy had passed over, only hours after they were wed, Jewel had been considerably shaken. In fact, although it shamed her to admit it, she had shed more than a few tears. Father Simon had put his arm around her shoulders, and Jewel had had to stifle an urge to collapse sobbing against his chest. But instead she had lifted her chin and pulled away to stand alone. As she had always been alone…. Father Simon had told her not to worry, that he would see to everything, including the body. Jewel had not waited around to see what happened next. There were too many problems—Willy for one, and what might happen when Timothy’s family was notified to claim his body. It seemed likely they would send a runner to investigate, and she wasn’t having truck with no runner.
    Thoroughly unnerved, she had instinctively melted into the streets. For a week she had scavenged for food in the alleys behind Kensington Palace, taking care to stay out of her old neighborhood. At night she had cadged pallet space from an old friend of her mother’s, an ex-opera dancer turned whore named Cilla. But staying with Cilla meant trying not to listen when the woman brought her customers home with her. Jewel had hidden beneath her blanket on the floor, feeling sick at the sound of a man’s earthy groans and the wildly creaking bedsprings.
    Then, last night, when she had slipped from Cilla’s flat rather than