"You deserve someone better—"
"Who would that be?" he demanded.
"Someone ... untainted."
Barnes snorted, but Gideon would not give him the satisfaction of looking at him, not even when there was the sound of a blow and a curse that implied one of Gideon's brothers had heard enough from Radford Barnes.
"Untainted? Do you mean someone like myself? Someone with no history of insanity in their blood?"
"You are not insane, Gideon."
"I could be, someday. We never know. But this is the sanest question I have ever asked. Elizabeth, will you have me?"
Uncertainty remained in her eyes. "You ask me to be impetuous," she said very softly. "But it is impetuosity that has brought me nothing but terrible heartache these weeks just past."
"It also brought you to this moment," Gideon pointed out. "To me."
"Yes," she said slowly. She reached to arrange the folds of his cravat, but when she raised her gaze back to his, something else had replaced the anguish that had been there. "We are both undeniably mad—"
"Then let us be mad together."
Elizabeth lifted her chin, and something in the look she gave him told him she knew what a concession he had just made, to not weigh the consequences, to let the future bring what it would, and to do this for himself. "Yes," she said. "Let us be mad together then. I will marry you, Gideon."
He let out a pent-up breath. "I hope all your decisions are not so long in coming," he complained, causing her to give a teary bubble of laughter as she leaned her forehead against his chest.
Gideon cupped her chin with a finger and lifted her face to his. He lowered his mouth to her lips and kissed her, not caring they had witnesses, caring only that she kissed him back.
"Tears?" he questioned when he lifted his mouth from hers, reaching to wipe a tear track from her cheek.
"Happy tears," she assured him, wrapping a hand around his wrist to pull it to her lips to plant a kiss there.
"Well, dear girl," Barnes interrupted, tossing the bloodstained handkerchief back at Sebastian, "I pray Greyleigh's offer of marriage is more sincere than mine ever was. Personally, I doubt it, since you are soiled goods—"
Gideon spun to face the man, and would have planted him another facer were it not for a sudden scream. The hair rose on Gideon's neck as he turned to see the red-haired girl standing in the library doorway, her mouth open, her scream turning into a name. "Radford!"
Barnes sucked in a breath sharply.
"Where the devil is Frick?" Benjamin asked in irritation, striding toward Lily. "Why is this girl unattended?"
Before Benjamin could reach her, Lily cried out again, a scream that turned into a long moaning wail, and she flew at Barnes, hands outstretched. "Where have you been?" the girl cried, almost incomprehensible in her agitation. "Please, Radford, I beg you, you have to help me with the baby!"
"Let me go, you... you creature!" Barnes cried, trying to pry Lily's hands from his coat.
As he loosed one hand, she grabbed him with the other, sinking down to her knees before him, her hands clutching at his breeches. She sobbed and repeated over and over, "My baby! I will give you money, all the money you want, but you must give me another baby!"
Elizabeth gasped audibly, her gaze flying from Lily to Barnes. "You cur!" she declared with loathing. "You seduced her, too, this child! She had your baby," Elizabeth accused with steely certainty.
"Nonsense!" Barnes cried, pale as chalk. "There is no proof of that!"
"There is proof that the girl had a lover, for she had his child," Gideon said.
"Not my child!" Barnes tried to squirm free of Lily's embrace, but was nearly tripped for his efforts. "Get this thing off me!"
"Yes, your child," Gideon said with certitude. "We all heard Lily call you by name! We all saw that the sight of you made her hysterical. I saw your response to her when she came in, that you knew her. These are proofs enough for court, and yet we have not even asked Lily's family for confirmation of your identity, which I highly suspect they could and will provide."
"What a farce! A fairy tale—"
"Alderman Wallace," Polly, the maid with the eyepatch, announced nervously from the library doorway.
"Ah! Here is the very man who was able to tell me a great deal about Lily. Let us see if Alderman Wallace thinks Lily's tale is to be believed," Gideon pronounced, waving the man in.
Barnes paled, still fighting against the hold Lily had on him, her moans and sobs buried against his legs. He only exceeded in tripping himself and falling to the carpet with a painful-sounding thud.
Alderman Wallace entered, spying Lily at once. "Good gad, what happens here?" he cried, looking between Lily and the sprawled man whose legs she clutched.
Gideon quickly explained that they all suspected Barnes was the man who had seduced Lily, fathered a child on her, and abandoned her.
Alderman Wallace eyed Barnes with disapprobation. "I daresay Lily's father, Mr. Tuttle of Westbury, will be able to tell us if this is true. The scoundrel who seduced his daughter also tried to blackmail him, only to discover the Tuttles are far less affluent than they appear to be. The man got not a groat for his trouble, and promptly abandoned poor Lily."
Barnes began to squirm again and got one foot free. He kicked at Lily once, but then Gideon's brothers descended on him, pinning him to the floor until Gideon could gently but firmly pry Lily from the man.
"Poor girl," Elizabeth said, sinking into her seat once more. She opened her arms, and Gideon led Lily into them, where the girl lowered her head to Elizabeth's lap, continuing to quietly sob.
Alderman Wallace went on to explain that Lily was never right, but when she took a lover who then deserted her and the child she was to have, her grasp on reality faded. When the child was born, her family took it from her in the night and fostered it out to a childless couple, telling Lily that the fairies had taken the babe. "I have heard from Mr. Tuttle myself that Lily has been seeking the infant's return from the fairies ever since."
The reason Wallace had spoken with Mr. Tuttle was simple enough. Four months earlier, Lily had wandered from her home, and no one had known where she went. Lily seemed to have disappeared, for even though her father rode from village to village for weeks, seeking word of the girl or a sighting of her, none were reported.
"As happens, sad to say, everyone began to assume the girl was dead. Her father stopped looking."
"How has she lived? Or eaten? Or slept?" Benjamin asked no one in particular. "How has she avoided being found?"
"If she lived in the hidden passages of this house, she left no sign of it. At least, not beyond her visitations," Gideon supplied. "But her presence in the passages explains a great deal about items that have been 'lost' and others that were 'found.' I know for a fact that Cook once had a wheel of cheese taken from the pantry."
"Ah! Our home's 'ghost,'" Benjamin said in comprehension.
"Exactly," Gideon said, turning his attention to Barnes, who had scrambled to his feet and was dusting his breeches and his coat with his hands. Gideon strode across the room, satisfied to see a look of alarm come over Barnes's face as Gideon raised his hand. But instead of hitting him, Gideon placed his hand in the center of Barnes's chest and shoved the man back until his knees hit a chair and he sank ungracefully to its surface.
"How dare you, sir!" Barnes cried. "I will not tolerate any more of your brutish brawling. I am leaving—"
"You go nowhere, sirrah," Gideon said in a dark voice, standing over Barnes with clenched fists. "You have to answer for what you have done to this poor creature." He pointed to Lily.
Gideon turned to Alderman Wallace. "Do you believe Mr. Tuttle would be willing to swear out a warrant for the arrest of Radford Barnes for attempted blackmail?"
Wallace looked from Gideon to Barnes, then nodded slowly. "I believe he would, my lord. His poor daughter has no reputation left to ruin. And I can only think it would not go amiss if Barnes was made to pay restitution for his acts!"
"Then I suggest you arrest Barnes today, or it is unlikely you will see his face again on English soil," Gideon warned.
"You cannot have me arrested!" Barnes shouted, sounding truly alarmed.
"Alderman Wallace can, under the law," Gideon said, turning from the man in dismissal, disgusted that anyone could use a young woman, little more than a child, so cruelly as Barnes had used Lily.
Elizabeth still held the red-haired girl, Elizabeth's expression torn between sympathy for Lily and gratification that Barnes must answer for his deeds. "He will go to prison?"
"Or be transported, if he is not hanged," Gideon assured her.
"No!" Barnes screamed, leaping up from the chair. He dashed for the library door, but Sebastian put out a foot and tripped him, sending him sprawling. Benjamin had Barnes's arm up behind his back with a military precision, pinning the howling man to the floor.
"Get him out of here," Gideon growled.
"I've a lockroom in my barn where we can keep him until he can be delivered to the Assizes," Wallace offered, and Gideon nodded his thanks.
Benjamin wrestled Barnes to his feet and out into the hall. "You there, bring rope!" Gideon heard Benjamin call out to a footman.
Confusion broke out then, for Frick entered, frantically seeking Lily. It seemed the girl had faked sleeping, and the maids assigned to watch her had been distracted by kitchen duties. Lily began to sob anew when she was lifted to her feet and led away. Alderman Wallace was thanked by Gideon, and then took his leave, just as two maids arrived at the library door with fully loaded trays filled with the luncheon Sebastian had ordered some time before.
"This room smells of knave's blood," Sebastian said, wri kling his nose. "I would far rather eat in the dining room now. he instructed the maids.
Chaos reigned for several long moments more, but then just as suddenly as they had all filled the room, now everyone was quit of it except for Gideon and Elizabeth. They turned to one another with stunned expressions.
Elizabeth took a deep breath and gave her head a little shake, as though to clear it of cobwebs. She folded her hands together, perhaps striving to appear calm. "Now is your opportunity to recant your offer," she said to Gideon.
"Do you mean speak now or forever hold my peace?" Gideon asked, looking at her from where he stood across the room. "The same is true for you. We need not marry, I think, to protect you anymore. Barnes is done in."
"Exactly my point," Elizabeth said, rising to her feet despite her injured heel. "
I
am one of Barnes's indiscretions. I cannot imagine what your brothers must think of me, or of your precipitate offer to me."
"I can. Benjamin is horrified, because he does not know you and doubtlessly thinks you an adventuress, and Sebastian is delighted by the idea of our marrying for the very same reason." Gideon smiled at her, to take any sting from the words, even as he slowly crossed the room and took up both her hands. "You do not have to change your mind now, not unless it is something you wish to do."
She shook her head. "Of course I do not wish to change my mind, even though it would be the intelligent thing to do. We would be fools to plunge ahead with this demented scheme. Yet, I wish to plunge ahead. How can I like you so well, when I know you so little?"
"Because I am very charming," Gideon said, and then they both had to laugh.
Their laughter soon trailed away, however, and Gideon stepped even closer to her. He did not ask any sort of permission, but pulled her into his arms. After a long, searching look at her face, he pressed his lips to hers, and both knew it was a kiss that sealed a pledge between them.
He raised his head, met her tremulous smile with one of his own, and kissed her again. When, some minutes later, he finally took half a step back, there was a different manner of smile on her mouth and a slow fire in her eyes.
"Look at them," came Sebastian's voice from the doorway, causing the occupants of the room to spin and find him casually propped against the doorjamb, Benjamin gazing over his shoulder. "Light and dark. I tell you, Benjamin, their children will be striped like skunks!"
There was no answer to that, of course, except to laugh anew, and then for Gideon to reintroduce his bride-to-be to his brothers, because she could now lay claim to a surname.
Chapter 19
Elizabeth waved and tossed an airy kiss from the phaeton toward her happily weeping sister, her new brother-in-law, Broderick, and Papa. Her stepmama remained in London, just recovering from the grippe, which occasion had suited Elizabeth at least as well as it must have suited Francine. Elizabeth tossed another kiss, then turned to find Gideon still in conversation with Benjamin.
'That bottom field will need draining," Benjamin was saying. "I was thinking of—"
"Hush, Benjamin!" Elizabeth said in mock severity as she slipped her hands over Gideon's ears. "Gideon is on his bridal journey. He does not need to hear one more word about the home farm."
"He asked!" Benjamin protested.
Gideon looked from his bride to his brother and said, "Do with the field as you see fit."
Benjamin nodded and gave a rare smile. "See you in two months. That is, if I am able to transfer my service to Bristol. Otherwise, you must call upon me in London."
"We will," Gideon assured him. "Unless we like Bath or Brighton so well that we settle and never continue our journeying."
"Come now, good fellow, you must return here. Sebastian is not nearly so clever as you, and certainly nowhere near so clever as your wife. The estate will eventually suffer at your absence. More important, you cannot deprive Severn's Well of its ghost and its madman all at once, can you?" Benjamin teased.
"I suppose not." Gideon rattled the reins and clucked to the horses, setting them in motion. "There is the family reputation to keep up, after all," he called over his shoulder as the carriage rolled away from Greyleigh Manor.
Benjamin laughed, and Elizabeth turned to wave one last time to Lorraine and Papa. She sighed happily when she turned to face forward once more, her husband of two days beside her.
Gideon glanced at her. "I am glad we found your topaz ear-bobs. They suit your coloring and of course the dress."
It was the same dress that Elizabeth had been married in, a sunny yellow one ordered from the Severn's Well modiste while Elizabeth had lived at Lady Sees's, awaiting Lorraine and Papa's arrival at Greyleigh Manor. Gideon had not wanted any whispers of a lack of chaperonage until they were married, which had been exceedingly amusing to Elizabeth. How many times had he held her close, carrying her, sometimes while she wore nothing more than a thin night rail? And had he not held her while a servant had stripped her of her clothing? Still, it was the thought that mattered, and Elizabeth had docilely gone to Lady Sees's, where she had happily learned that the maid she had recommended had been hired.
"We will see that you have plenty of other new dresses," Gideon told Elizabeth now.
She slipped her arm through his, laying her head against his shoulder. "I have everything I want already."
"Flatterer," he teased, but the warmth in his gaze made Elizabeth long for the night ahead, when she could lie in his arms once more and know she was not wicked as she had imagined, but only very, very lucky.
'Tell me, my dearest Elizabeth," he said, and she was glad to hear the excitement coursing through his voice, the joy he could not hide at leaving Greyleigh Manor for this tour of England together. "Is there anything you regret? Would you change our courtship, if you could?"
"Not one moment of it," she said with conviction, and when he smiled down at her, she knew he felt exactly the same.