Cry for Passion Read Free Page A

First Lord of the Treasury and wife of James Whitcox, Barrister, Queens Counsel.
    Shock widened her eyes. Understanding slowly ate up her surprise.
    He had represented one man for the sole purpose of destroying another. He had not cared that he would also destroy the members of the Men and Women’s Club.
    In that, at least, he had succeeded, Jack thought: Their lives would never be the same.
    Jack had butchered their reputations in the witness box. The papers would serve them up piecemeal to a public hungry for scandal.
    The condemnation Jack expected did not blossom inside the cornflower blue eyes. Instead Rose Clarring asked the question that every night robbed Jack of sleep: “Do you ever wonder, Mr. Lodoun, if she would be alive still had she divorced Mr. Whitcox?”

    Chapter 2
    A sharp snap of wood pierced the grating whine of wheels and a wafting chorus of “. . . God save the Queen! These times are times, seldom to be seen. . . .”
    One second Rose stared up into eyes so blue they looked purple; the next moment the cab into which Jack Lodoun had disappeared merged into a stream of traffic.
    Her gloved fingers clenched around silk, metal and wood.
    She had needed him, and he had turned away. As if the stark yearning inside his eyes had been a figment of her imagination.
    And perhaps it had.
    Hot tears pricked her eyes.
    What could she—a woman who inspired only pain in her husband—know about the needs of another man?
    “Gi’ ye a cab, missus?” permeated the disjointed cacophony of traffic and song.
    Taking a deep breath, Rose turned.
    Gentle, sympathetic eyes captured her gaze. They were on a level with her own.
    The ageless, stooped man smiled a toothless smile. “ ’Ad a bit o’ a lov’rs spat, ’ave ye?”
    Memories of endless blue skies and smiling blue eyes slashed through Rose.
    They had been lovers, she and Jonathon, when they married.
    “Yes.” Rose swallowed the loss that swelled inside her. “I would like a cab.”
    No sooner did she fish out of her reticule a copper coin than a hansom pulled up to the curb.
    Rose pressed the penny into gnarled fingers. “Thank you.”
    Slowly—feeling as fragile as the old man who had procured the cab—she stepped up onto the eighteen-inch-high iron stair.
    The cabby indifferently enquired: “Where t’, missus?”
    She could not go back to Jonathon’s house that echoed with the lament of his unborn children. But neither could she keep the trial today a secret.
    “Langham and Great Portland Street, please,” Rose said.
    The cab reeked of masculine cigars and feminine perfume. Blindly she closed the door on the celebration of another woman’s victory and stared through water-spotted glass.
    What should she tell her family? she wondered. The truth?
    But what was the truth?
    She had discussed provocative topics in the company of men. She had read books society deemed sexually perverse.
    Above pointed horse ears, the black top hat and stiff back of a cabby materialized.
    It had seemed so innocent two years earlier, congregating in the Museum of London, each meeting of the Men and Women’s Club called to order with the rap of a gavel.
    Rose braced herself as the cab she occupied lunged in between careening carriages.
    The trial today had also been called to order with the rap of a gavel, she recalled. The impact had bored through the floor of the windowless room where she had waited, alone, to be called as a witness.
    The left wheel of the cab dropped into a pothole. Immediately the seat shot up underneath Rose.
    She grabbed a leather pull. The cab irrevocably jolted forward.
    Through the streaked glass, storefronts gave way to brick town-homes. Each row a community. Each house a home. Every woman filling a niche: wife, mother, daughter.
    The cab slowed, jerked, horse stepping backward . . . forward . . . halting.
    Rose stared up at the gray clouds that striated a blue sky.
    The wind had chased away the rain. But now the wind had died.
    Rose still did