If I Fall by Kate Noble Read Free Book Online Page B

the block, with Whigby’s trunk still up on the back.
    “Oy!” Whigby yelled after the coachman, breaking into a run. “Wait for me!”
    Jack, shaking his head, turned to the front door of number sixteen. And the men there that blocked his path.
    They were a variety of ages, from just down from school to those with white hair. But all the men wore their money: Jackson saw at least three gold cravat stickpins and seven watch fobs. They eyed his rumpled naval uniform with severe distaste.
    Jackson narrowed his eyes, and stepped into the gauntlet.
    “They come fresh off the boats now?” one man murmured to a friend. “I’m amazed they get the gossip sheets out at sea.”
    “What’s amazing is that he thinks he stands a chance,” his friend replied, sniggering.
    Jackson kept his eyes straight ahead, ignoring these men.Their talk made no sense to him, but their manners did. They didn’t think much of him. Well, the feeling was mutual.
    Jack reached the butler, who stood guard at the door with a hulking giant of a footman. Normally, the door would be opened with the butler standing inside, but here, they had gone so far as to stand outside the door, keeping it barred.
    “I’m sorry sir, but the Forresters are not receiving today,” the supercilious man said, his nose in the air.
    “Then why is everyone else here?” Jack asked before he could think better of it.
    He was met by chuckles from the peanut gallery behind him.
    “We are staking our place in line!” one of the younger ones cried.
    “Making sure people see us here,” one of the others drawled.
    “Besides, they have to come home sometime,” another—the sniggering one—said, clamping his hand on Jack’s shoulder, trying to pull him back.
    One look from Jack had that man removing his hand forthwith.
    “I have an invitation,” Jack said, directing himself only to the butler.
    But that sentence elicited raucous laughter from the men behind him.
    “Of course he does!”
    “And I’ve a recommendation from Prinny himself!”
    “We all do!”
    Jack reached into his pocket and produced the letter from Lady Forrester—as he did, the men behind him grew quiet for the first time.
    The butler perused the letter with an unseemly amount of leisure. (Jack felt certain that the old servant took no small amount of pleasure in the power he wielded.) Then, with a curt nod to the burly footman beside him, he handed the missive back.
    “If you’ll follow me, sir,” the butler said, as the door behind him opened with silent efficiency.
    Cries of outrage came from the assembly.
    “What?”
    And … “You can’t mean to admit him! I’m a viscount!”
    And the deferentially desperate … “Er, I’m with him! We came together!”
    But of course, these were ignored and shortly silenced by one flex of the footman’s muscles, as he took up the central position, while Jack, hauling his own trunk, followed the butler inside.
    “Wait here,” the butler intoned, leaving him to go seek out his mistress, Jack assumed.
    Jack removed his tricorn, shaking out his sandy hair into something resembling neatness. He pulled at his cuffs, straightened his coat, like the nervous schoolboy he used to be.
    Alone in the foyer of the Forresters’ London home, he was immediately struck by a sense of remembrance. He had never been in this house before, but he had been in this position before, long ago.
    There is little more frightening to a thirteen-year-old boy than being removed from all you know, he thought, letting himself drift into memory. Even the horrific, tantalizing prospect of thirteen-year-old girls compares little to no longer being in the daily presence of your parents, the paths you know to the village where everyone knows you. Even when one begs their father to let him go to sea seeking adventure beyond those well-trod paths, those faces fading away makes a thirteen-year-old boy feel like nothing so much as a thirteen-year-old man, but without any means by which to