The Handmaiden's Necklace (30 page)

N
eil McCauley stood next to Rafe in Danielle’s bedchamber at Sheffield House. Her still figure lay limp and pale beneath the covers; her deep red hair fanned out around her pillow.

Since the night of the shooting, she had not awakened, and though he prayed her condition would change, it had not. He recalled that night and his chest tightened. According to the jumbled tale he had been told by his friends, Cord and Ethan had stopped by the house, worried about him and Dani, just minutes after his departure.

Robert had just been leaving, determined to follow Rafe to Green Park. The three men went together, which turned out to be a very good thing.

When the pistol shots quieted and the smell of gunpowder lifted, one of Philip Goddard’s henchmen was dead, along with the Marchioness of Caverly, who was struck by a stray ball fired during the melee, though no one knew for certain which gun the shot had come from. Cord and Ethan had brought Goddard down, and Robert had taken down the other henchman.

With a bit of persuasion, the location of the abandoned carriage had been obtained and Mr. Mullens rescued.

Both Oliver Randall and the Marquess of Caverly were in mourning. The marquess himself had come to Sheffield House to speak to Rafael.

“It is over,” he vowed. “Revenge has cost me a son and a wife. Oliver has confessed the truth of what happened that night five years ago. You have nothing more to fear from anyone in my family.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Rafe had said.

“I wish your wife a swift recovery,” the marquess replied.

But so far that had not happened. Instead, Danielle lay near death and there was nothing that anyone seemed able to do.

Rafe looked down at the woman he loved and barely heard the doctor’s words.

“I need to speak to you outside,” McCauley said.

Rafe nodded dully. For the past five days he had been sitting with Danielle, holding on to her hand, telling her how much he loved her, that he couldn’t live without her, saying the things he had been afraid to say before.

But Danielle had shown no signs of improvement, had made not the least response.

She simply lay there dying, and he felt as if his heart were being torn out of his chest.

He followed Neil out the door and closed it softly behind him.

“I’m sorry, Rafael. I wish I could tell you she is improving, but she is not.”

His chest squeezed until it was hard to breathe. “You said she was young and strong, that there was a very good chance
she would heal. You were able to remove the ball. You said that in time she should get better.”

“I said those things, yes. I’ve seen far worse cases mend.

But in this instance, there is something missing.”

“What is it? What is missing?”

“The will to live. Little by little your wife is drifting away. She seems content to die. It is rare in someone so young. I really don’t understand it.”

The words burned like a hot coal in Rafe’s stomach. Neil might not understand, but Rafe did. He remembered the afternoon Danielle had summoned him to the drawing room and told him that she wanted him to divorce her. She wanted to set him free so that he could remarry, so that he could have the heir he so badly needed.

There would be no divorce, Rafe had told her. Now dying had become her solution.

He raked a shaky hand through his hair, shoving it back from his forehead. He hadn’t slept in days, hadn’t eaten, couldn’t summon the least bit of appetite.

“I don’t know how to help her. I’ve talked to her, told her how much I love her, how much I need her. I can’t seem to reach her.” His voice broke on this last. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Perhaps there is nothing you can do.”

The swish of a feminine skirt marked his mother’s approach along the hall. She looked nearly as exhausted as he. “I don’t believe that is true—not for a moment.”

Rafe rubbed his weary eyes, wiping away a trace of wetness. “What are you saying?”

“You’ve done your best, Rafael. You’ve done everything
you possibly could. Now it is my turn. I wish to speak to Danielle.”

He eyed her warily. “Why?”

“Because I am a woman and perhaps the only one who can make her understand. I’ve had a great deal of time to think this through, and I believe, if anyone can reach her, I am the one who can.” She pushed past them, opened the door and walked in.

Rafe watched her through the open door as she sat down in the chair next to Dani’s bed, reached over and took hold of her pale, limp hand. She cradled it carefully between both of her own.

“I want you to listen to me, Danielle. This is Rafael’s mother speaking…your mother now, as well.”

Danielle made no move.

His mother took a breath and released it slowly. “I’ve come to beg a favor, Danielle, a boon for me and my son. I am here to ask you to return to us, to make our lives whole again.”

Rafe swallowed and glanced away.

“You know by now that Rafael loves you,” his mother continued. “He has said so a thousand times since you have been lying here so gravely injured.”

She pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt and dabbed it against her eyes. “But perhaps you don’t know that without you, he is dying just as you are. Perhaps you don’t understand that if you leave him, he will never recover. I know that it’s true, because I saw what happened to him when he lost you before. Losing you nearly destroyed him. When you came back to him, you brought him back to life. You made him whole, Danielle, in a way he wasn’t while he was without you.”

The dowager sniffed, pressed the handkerchief beneath her nose. “I know you believe that if you go away, Rafael will remarry, that he will be able to have the son he needs to carry on his name. But I am here to tell you that is not what is most important. In these months since you married my son, I’ve learned any number of things. I’ve learned there are things more important than titles and money. Things like happiness. Like loving someone with all of your heart and being loved in return.”

She wiped away more tears. “We are all of us Sheffields and we are survivors. We always have been. My sister and I, Rafael’s cousins, if something happens and the title passes to Artie or somebody else, we might not have all of the things we have now, but we would not starve.”

She raised Danielle’s cold hand to her lips and kissed the back. “When you married Rafael, you gave my son back to me. You gave him the chance to be the man he was meant to be. He needs you, Danielle. He won’t be that man without you. Please come back to us, darling girl. Come back to my son. He loves you so very, very much.”

Rafe ignored the lump in his throat as his mother rose from beside Danielle’s bed. As she walked past him out the door, he stopped her, then bent and kissed her cheek.

“Thank you, Mother.”

She nodded. “It took a while for me to figure things out, but I see it all very clearly now.” She wiped away a last unruly tear. “I only pray that she heard me and that she will return to us.”

Rafe just nodded. Walking past her into the room, he returned to his place next to Dani’s bed, reached over and took her hand.

“Return to me, my love,” he said softly. “I don’t want to live without you.”

It wasn’t until the following day, Rafe completely exhausted and utterly without hope, that Danielle opened her eyes and looked up at him.

“Rafael…?”

“Danielle…dear God, I love you so much. Please don’t leave me.”

“Are you…sure?”

“Very, very sure.”

Faint color seeped beneath the pale skin over her cheeks. “Then I’ll stay with you…forever.” And when she smiled at him, Rafe believed her and his heart soared.

Six Months Later

D
anielle stood at her bedchamber window, looking down on the garden below. It was a warm August day, the sun just beginning to sink below the horizon. There were children in the garden. Dani smiled as she watched little Maida Ann and Terry playing hide-and-seek along the gravel pathways, laughing as they darted in and out among the blooming flowers and leafy green foliage of the garden. Their nanny, Mrs. Higgins, watched over them from her perch on a wrought-iron bench near the fountain.

Maida held one of Robert’s carved wooden horses tightly against her small chest, a treasure she prized above all the wonders she had received since she had become the adopted daughter of a duke.

Dani’s heart squeezed as she watched them, the children who had made her house a home. Rafael had brought the little boy and girl to her bedside during the days of her recovery after the shooting, telling her that he remembered her
talking about them and that Caro had explained that her fondest wish was to adopt them.

“Maida and Terry will be our first children, but not our last. We’ll have as many as you want, my love, an entire houseful, if that is your wish.”

She had wept when he told her, and silently vowed to make an even speedier recovery.

She was well now, back on her feet with little more than a scar in her side to remind her of the dark days back then. After all that had happened, she rarely thought of the bitter time before that night in Green Park, a time when she had believed that her husband would be better off without her.

Though Dani couldn’t really remember the words Rafe’s mother had spoken as she lay unconscious, somehow they had reached inside and called her back to the world she meant to leave behind.

She was needed, the dowager had said very firmly.

And she was loved.

And so these past six months, she had been happy, wildly, deliriously happy, and madly in love with her husband, who seemed to be equally in love with her.

They took long walks together, planned Sunday outings in the country, took the children to Wycombe Park for a weeklong visit with Aunt Flora. They often spent time with Caro and Robert, who had repaid his indenture to Edmund Steigler and returned the money Rafe had spent to redeem the necklace.

At present, the earl and countess were staying at Robert’s home, Leighton Hall, enjoying their time in the country, but they would soon return to the city.

Dani’s life was filled with boundless joy, and yet as she
rang for her lady’s maid, a shy young woman named Mary Summers who had been with her since Caro’s wedding, Dani could barely contain her excitement.

Something had happened. Something wonderful that she had discovered only this very day, a grand miracle that could not be and yet… And yet she knew deep inside, deep in the womanly recesses of her body, that the miracle was true.

She heard a light knock and hurried for the door, though it wasn’t the timid knock she knew to be Mary Summers’s. Instead, Rafael stepped into the opulent, refurbished duchess’s suite, adjacent to the master’s suite, where she slept each night with the duke.

“I ran into Mary. She was on her way up to help you finish dressing, but I thought that I would help in her stead.”

She blushed at the heat in the blue, blue eyes that skimmed over her body. She was gowned in emerald silk, dressed for an evening at the theater then a late supper with their best friends, Ethan and Grace, Cord and Victoria.

“I see you are nearly finished, much to my chagrin. I would rather have found you naked, but perhaps later on, we can take care of that. In the meantime, what can I do to help?”

She laughed as she turned her back to him, thinking that his plans exactly matched her own. “I just need you to do up the buttons and fasten my necklace.”

She waited as he closed up the back of her gown, then set the pearls in the palm of his hand. Rafe draped the elegant strand around her neck and fastened the clasp. In the mirror, the glittering diamonds nestled between each perfect pearl sparkled in the light of the lamp. Rafe bent and
pressed a kiss to the nape of her neck, then turned her to face him.

She was smiling so brightly his eyebrows went up. “You look extremely pleased with yourself. What is it?”

She reached up and touched the necklace, felt its familiar, comforting warmth, and took a deep breath. “I’ve news, Your Grace. Very exciting news.” She blinked, but couldn’t keep the happy tears from brimming, then spilling onto her cheeks.

“You’re crying.”

She nodded. “I went to see Dr. McCauley today.”

Worry crept into his features. “You’re not ill? There is nothing—”

“No, it’s nothing like that.” Her smile went even wider. “A miracle has happened, Rafael. I don’t know how or why. I know it isn’t possible but it’s happened just the same. I am going to have your child, my love. I’m going to have your baby.”

For long moments, Rafe just stared. Then he swept her into his arms and crushed her against him. “Are you certain? Is the doctor sure?”

“He is very sure. I am more than four months gone with child. He says he doesn’t understand how it could possibly have happened, but it has. And I know it is true. I can feel your child growing inside me.”

Rafe simply held her and she felt faint tremors running through his tall, lean frame.

“I never thought…it was no longer important, but I…I am the happiest man in the world.”

She laughed through her tears and clung to him and there were no words to describe the sheer joy bubbling inside her.
She eased a little away, reached up and touched the pearls at her throat.

“It was the necklace,” she said. “I know it.” She thought that he would scoff, say that she was being foolish, that there had to be some other explanation.

Instead, he bent his head and very softly kissed her. “Perhaps. I suppose we shall never really know.”

But Danielle knew. She had received the gift of great happiness the necklace promised. Caro and Robert had received that same gift, as had Victoria and Cord, Grace and Ethan.

Dani thought of Lady Ariana of Merrick and the great love she had shared with Lord Fallon.

Though it could never be proved and most people wouldn’t believe it, deep in her heart, Dani knew the legend of the Bride’s Necklace was true.