The Last Days of a Rake Read Online Free PDF

Lankin crept in and took a seat, glancing about. He spotted Susan almost immediately, and his heart was tugged, just for a moment.
    She looked like she had been ill. She was thin, and the dewy freshness was gone from her skin, replaced by an ashen cast. Lady Stoddart, her chaperone, appeared even more grim than the previous spring. Susan listlessly watched the recital, never looking to the right, or the left, her attitude one of submission.
    After the recital, they all filed into the supper room, and Lankin approached, unable to leave her alone. What did he hope to accomplish? The gambling debt had been collected, her maidenhood was gone and, to his mind, no dire consequences had erupted.
    She turned away from some friend who was speaking animatedly to her, and saw him. In that instant, as she gasped and fell back, he saw all that had happened since his desertion. The hours spent crying, the betrayal she felt, the loss of her innocence that was only partly to do with her deflowering. She whispered something, shook her head and backed up one step, bumping into her friend, who looked up toward Lankin.
    Susan spoke rapidly to her friend, who glared at him as if he were something she had discovered slithering out from beneath a rock in the garden. He was indignant. He had forced Susan Bailey to do nothing. It had been she who suggested meeting at the cottage folly. What had she thought would be the outcome?
    The friend, a plain young lady with glasses, strode toward him and said, “Sir, I suggest you leave immediately, or Susan will do that which she has not seen fit to do as yet, and that is inform her father of the disgusting advantage you took of her.”
    His ire intensified. “Do you know, I think she should go ahead and do that, if she thinks she has been so dishonored.”
    The girl gasped and retreated, scuttling away like a mouse from a dangerous snake. Lankin drifted closer to Susan. Sending her friend to warn him away had the opposite effect. He resented the notion he should hide his face in shame. Society was a male bastion to which men only allowed women access as a favor, his youthful arrogance informed him.
    Instead he stayed, and because of his wealth, which was a well-known quantity in society, he was smiled at by mothers and patted on the back by fathers. Young ladies laughed at his jests and he was invited to more than one home for the upcoming season of frivolity and festivity. “Come down to the country for hunting,” one man said. “Come to Berkshire for Christmas,” said another. “Join us to ring in the new year,” said yet another.
    And all of this while Susan watched, her face bleached of all color, her lips trembling and causing those around her to gaze at her with censure at such a public display of emotion.
    What prompted such callousness on Lankin’s part? In the spring, when he defiled the poor girl, he had congratulated himself that he was not a brute. What had changed in the intervening months? For he was not done with her. Had Susan left that moment, or looked less vulnerable, he probably would have ceased, but every display of emotion urged him to new cruelty, and one particular young lady, an acknowledged diamond, allowed his extravagant flirtation and even left the room with him for a stroll on the terrace.
    When he returned, Susan had left the recital, and that was the end of it. Or so he thought.
    He had rooms, in those days, the top floor of a once extravagant London townhome, now the dominion of an old woman who provided meals, laundry service and cleaning, as well as an airy suite with plenty of space for Lankin and his valet. His horse was kept by the livery down the street, and he could come and go as he pleased.
    That very night, after the recital, he arrived back home from hours in a gambling hell. He had drunk too much, and was staggering, so when a young woman darted out of the shrubbery, he reared back in fright and fell up the steps to the front door.
    “Edgar,” she said.