Authors: Julia Ross
The door opened. Α stream of menservants
entered, carrying a tub and pails of hot water. Lady Gracechurch retreated.
Alden climbed from the bed and sank into the filled tub. After a night's sound
sleep, he would be entirely fit again.
To do what?
To go to Juliet on bended knee and try to
explain?
He had betrayed her.
The knowledge echoed in his mind like a
pronouncement of doom, as if he had been sentenced to be dragged to a public
place and hanged by the neck until dead.
He had betrayed her.
He felt numbed by the enormity of it, as if his
heart had turned to stone.
Yet though the soul quaver, any jackanapes could
find the courage to face the gallows with an outward show of bravado, wearing
colored ribbons at the knee to flash defiance at fate. Alden
Granville-Strachan, Lord Gracechurch, had plenty of colored silk and long years
of laughing his defiance at the world.
Her husband is alive.
He must put Juliet behind him, as he had put so
many other women behind him. London and its pleasures awaited.
So, why this stinging tension, scalding behind
his closed eyelids as if he might weep like a child?
He finished his bath in a burning rage. Plague
take all doctors! The clumsy cuts in his arm - his sword arm, devil take it! -
began bleeding again and had to be bound. Dressed in a long gown he walked to
the window and pushed aside the drapes. Rainwater flooded down the glass. The
frames rattled. Α foul night.
Did Juliet lie in her narrow bed in Manston
Mingate and rain curses on his name?
He hoped so. He hoped with a sudden desperate
fierceness that her curses would prove effective and cast him into hell.
Perhaps he had already condemned himself to Hades? That dreary round of gaming
and drinking and affairs? The thought rang hideously empty and hollow, as if
echoing an unnamed, unrecognized terror deep in his heart.
Ι would venture that both parties lost, sir,
but that you have more pride, that is all. You are quicker to see the end
coming and so you salvage yourself first
. . .
you have never had the nerve to risk
anything else.
Risk? He shuddered at the thought of what he had
been prepared to risk with Lord Edward for her sake. Yet in the end he had
salvaged nothing, not even pride.
Her husband is alive.
Alden flung up the sash to breathe in the
rain-soaked air.
Something moved, darting across the lawn. It was
hard to see through the streaming downpour, but at last, even in the slashing
night, he could make out the furious little figure, legs pumping wildly as he
ran toward the house.
Alden spun about and rang the bell. Α
slightly sheepish footman appeared at the door: last seen helping to pinch
closed his master's nostrils at the behest of the doctor.
"My lord?"
"Α boy is approaching the house. Ι
wish to speak to him immediately."
"Α
boy,
my lord?"
"Faith! Must Ι repeat every order?
Bring the lad up here. Immediately!"
"Very good, my lord."
The man bowed and retreated. Alden paced his
bedroom.
Α few minutes later the door opened.
"Lud! Α drowned rat," Alden said.
"Come in, lad, and sit down. You are thirsty, hungry?"
The boy nodded, panting hard. His hat was a soggy
mass of wool. Water ran off his coat to pool about his feet.
Alden signaled to the footman. "Food and
something hot to drink. Put brandy in it. And bring dry clothes."
The footman sniffed and left. The boy pulled off
his sodden cap and grimaced. He was gasping with each visible heave of thin
shoulders. He was for the moment incapable of speech.
"Sit here." Alden indicated a chair
beside the fire. "Relax and catch your breath. Whatever it is, it can wait
a second or two. Then you may tell me why Master Jemmy Brambey of Manston
Mingate has just run fifteen miles through a storm."
The freckled face contorted as the boy sucked in
air and wiped away rainwater and tears with the back of one hand. Alden gave
him a handkerchief and watched with a certain fascination as it came away not
only wet, but dirty. The rainwater running off the boy's clothes would probably
stain the carpet.
The footman returned with a tray. Alden forced
himself to be patient while Jemmy sucked up hot liquids and bit into a large
slab of pie.
"If you can eat, you can talk," Alden
said at last. "Pray begin. You have a message?"
"My sister said Ι was to come to you,
my lord," the boy said, spitting crumbs. "She's turned out."
"
Τilly
is turned out?"
Jemmy shook his head. "Mistress Juliet
Seton! It's not her house. Men came this afternoon to oust her - lock, stock
and barrel. Anything they didn't think they could sell, they smashed-"
Choking back dread, Alden went to his dresser and
began flinging on clothes, practical riding clothes, the first he could find.
"Go on!"
"They came in carriages. Α whole gang
of men. One of them claimed he was her husband, though we all know she's a
widow. When she wouldn't go with him, he said he had already sold her house -
seeing as it was really his, not hers, them being man and wife - and she could
live under a tree for all he cared. She still wouldn't go with him. In the end,
Tilly said, Mistress Seton held a pistol on him and threatened to shoot him, so
he left."
Alden took his own weapons out of their case. He
would like very much to take that damned doctor's blood in trade for his own,
drop for drop, and force his foul potions down his own bloody incompetent
throat.
"This man was named George Hardcastle?"
"Ι don't know what he called himself,
my lord. Tilly said he was a big handsome fellow. He said if Mistress Seton
came begging to him in London, he might take her in. Then in the face of her
pistol and the way she was shaking as if it might go off any second, he upped
and left, but the others stayed behind to turn her out. She couldn't stop them.
Tilly says the gun wasn't even loaded, because there hadn't been time to load
it, what with them coming so sudden and all."
Alden primed and loaded both pistols, then thrust
them into his pockets.
"Where is she now?"
Jemmy took another bite of pie. "Don't know.
Tilly was sent packing. Mistress Seton wouldn't go with her and told her not to
come back. So Tilly ran home and told Ma what was going on. Ma sent me to
you."
"You'll be rewarded. Now, get warm and dry.
That footman will help you and show you to a bed."
The footman raised both brows.
"A
guest
bed," Alden said over
his shoulder as he strode out of the door. "In a
guest
room."
IT
WAS PITCH DARK, RAIN PELTING DOWN. WIND
ROARED through the elms, tossing the branches, tearing loose leaves to spiral
away in the downpour. Alden swung from the carriage and stared at the redbrick
house. His cloak was instantly soaked.
"Wait here," he told his coachman.
Deliberately not taking a light, he opened the
gate. The path glimmered under the pounding rainwater, sparkling in a mad dance
of splashing raindrops. Alden strode up through the garden and pounded on the
front door. No answer. He tried the latch. The door was locked. Rain streamed
as he stepped back and looked up at the windows. They stared blankly at the
night, inky black.
He had stopped for a moment at Tilly's house in
the village.
"She wouldn't come back here, my lord,"
Tilly had said, weeping. "She said we'd only suffer for it, if Ma took
her in." She'd indicated the rough little room, the ceiling so low that
Alden had needed to bend down to enter. "And how could a lady live here
with the likes of us? Oh, sir! What's to become of us all?"
He had left reassurances and coins, then come
straight to Juliet's house.
Rain battered, running in waterfalls from the
corners of his hat as he walked around the house. The garden seemed flattened,
trampled, though he couldn't be sure in the driving darkness. In the yard with
the work sheds, the pounding rain echoed and reechoed around the small space.
Alden cupped his hands about his mouth and yelled.
"Juliet!"
There was no answer. He went from shed to shed,
trying doors. They were all locked. The flagstones were slippery, treacherous.
The old wooden doors shone black with water.
He turned. Rain drove in sheets across the open
expanse of hay meadow.
"Juliet!"
Only the roar of rain and the howling wind.
Ι lied about her husband's death. George
Hardcastle. Ι just came from London where Ι spoke with the man. The
butcher's grandson is alive and well, though sadly short of funds. Furthermore,
he is most anxious to be reconciled with his faithless wife. Checkmate, sir!
Alden Granville-Strachan had fallen straight into
the trap, played his pawn's role with zeal, while Lord Edward Vane laughed with
his cronies over his exquisite revenge on his one-time fiancée.
Her husband
is alive.
"Juliet!"
The night answered with the mocking bellow of a
rain-soaked gust.
Cloak flapping at his heels Alden strode down the
path toward the chicken house. Something caught him hard in the shin. He
fumbled in the wet darkness until his fingers identified the handle of the
scythe, broken. The blade had been snapped and lay glimmering among the ruin
of a pea patch. He stared until he could make out the heap of smashed
implements, farm tools, shovels and rakes, piled up as if for a bonfire.
Rage consumed him. He shouted aloud into the
uncaring night. "Bastards! Bastards!
Juliet!"
Eggshells crushed under his boots. The chicken
house lay silent, the door wrenched off its hinges. Obviously the hens were
gone, scattered into the woods to become food for foxes. There was nothing he
could do about it.
Once he stepped inside, the bellow of rain
subsided to a dull roar. Somewhere, underneath that demented clamor, he heard
something else. The sound was rhythmic, steady. Α cat purring.
Alden reached into a pocket and pulled out his
tinderbox. Crouching to shelter the spark from the wind, he formed a long twist
of straw and lit it, setting it in the doorway where it wouldn't catch the
henhouse on fire.
"How good of you to come," she said
behind him. "It would be useless, I assume, to ask you to leave?"
"Juliet, thank God!" He spun to face
her. "I thought if you saw a 1ight coming through the garden, you might
hide-"
"I
am
hiding," she replied.
"Especially from you."
She sat huddled on the floor in the filth of
straw and feathers.
Meshach lay curled, purring, in her lap. One hand
stroked rhythmically over the tabby coat, yet her eyes held a numb shock, like
a puppy he had once seen that had almost drowned in a fish pond.
"Are you hurt?" he asked at last.
"Hurt?''
She looked away, turning her head, the column of
her throat stiff with reproach. "Of course, you mean physically. Perhaps
a bruise or two, where I was seized by the arms and forcibly evicted. Otherwise
I am quite well. George did not want his men to harm me
physically."
Alden stared at her. Water trickled down his
neck. He wanted to tear the world apart with his bare hands.
"Yes, George is alive. I am an adulteress.
You knew, of course."
He took a deep breath. "No. Not until
afterward. But I know what that means to you."
"It hardly matters now, does it? Lord Edward
to1d George where to find me. My husband was apparent1y in need of instant
funds, so he has sold this place and everything in it. He is quite within his
rights. He is prepared to provide me with a home in London. "
"Jemmy Brambey told me."
The wavering light danced over her face. "Did
my maid's little brother also tell you that Lord Edward has been paying him to
spy on me? Jemmy has been running to Marion Hall with regular reports. Lord
Edward was kind enough to explain it all to George."
"Then your husband knows-"
"That I took an infamous rake for a lover?
Publicly? Before witnesses? Yes, he knows."
Alden stared at his hands. His rings sparkled,
reflecting the little flame behind him.
"Go away," she said. "You
swore-"
"Then I am breaking my word."
"I do not wish to belabor the point, but you
do see that I am left with no one I can trust? Not even my maid."
"In spite of everything, you will have to
trust me."
She lifted Meshach to rub his head under her
chin. "What use would I be to you? Everything I have, or had, belongs to
George. Even my body. If you used it, you would be stealing from him."