A True Lady

by Edith Layton

  The three men moved closer, still grinning like death’s heads. The air was very still, exactly like the atmosphere before a storm, so it was not so shocking when the roar of thunder finally came—except to the man who held the pistol, as he stood and wavered as his forehead grew a gaping hole in it. He fell before any of them knew from where the bolt had struck. Until they heard the screeches. They were so bloodcurdling, the sound of them made a man’s hair stand up on end, and several women in nearby houses said afterward that they nearly fainted when they heard it. But it made Cristabel smile. She was used to a pirate’s war cry. It meant her friends were near, and that they were the ones who had already dealt a blow for her.

  She relaxed, leaning back against Magnus’s own back. Which was a mistake, because her eyes widened as she saw the remaining two men grip their weapons tighter—and run straight for her.

  Magnus cursed and spun around. He managed to pierce the arm of the man holding the cutlass, who spun on his own heel and slashed back at his attacker. His attack was sloppy because he was so eager to turn back to his primary target again. That was why Magnus was able to leap out of the way of his glittering blade and fight back. He lunged, striking up and under the man’s arm with the supple tip of his long sword, burying it deep in the man’s chest. Still, Magnus had to dodge and duck and try to pull his sword out with all his considerable strength, for even spitted as he was, the fellow was slashing back again, as if his brain hadn’t yet told his body the fight was over. From the corner of his eye, Magnus saw the man with the sword feint at Cristabel. His heart grew cold because she faced a long sword with a meager dagger, and his own blade was wedged too deep in flesh and bone for him to immediately run to aid her.

  He spat a curse and pulled as he ducked, feeling his weapon come free just as the saber hissed past his ear. He turned as his opponent finally toppled—to see the swordsman who was facing Cristabel grow a look of sheer amazement, and crumple to his knees, Cristabel’s knife in his neck, blank astonishment as well as death growing in his eyes.

  There were three dead men at their feet, and what seemed to be a dozen pirates suddenly surrounding them, knives and guns flashing, still defending them. Magnus looked to see if there were any more assailants, and then his eyes narrowed. He thrust Cristabel into the arms of a startled pirate, shouted, “Hold her fast,” and ran off, his bloodstained sword in his hand.

  Cristabel struggled to follow, but the pirate held her tight. “’Tis no place fer you, missy,” he growled. She didn’t show steel because she recognized the lad, and gave up to his superior strength. She didn’t argue because she was winded and had no idea of whom Magnus was pursuing anyway. Three men had attacked them, three men lay dead. The street before them had emptied of pedestrians when the fight began, and there was only a carriage standing empty at the far curb, and a sedan chair going down the street.

  But it was the sedan chair that Magnus raced after. When he got near enough to see the faces of the men jogging fore and aft of it, he let out a thundering roar. “Hold,” he shouted, “or I’ll gut the lot of you!”

  London’s sedan men were a tough and ready-fisted lot, half of them from Ireland and the other half from hell, as the jest went, but their faces went dead white when they turned to see who was chasing them. Magnus’s sword was held high, its bloody blade clear to see, and there was blood on his clothes and in his eyes as he neared them.

  They stopped and stared at the big man pounding on down the street toward them. Then they dropped the poles supporting the chair. As it fell to the street, they took to their heels, abandoning it. There was a madman after them, and it seemed he was followed by a score of enraged pirates. The passenger in the chair tried to right himself, but by the time Magnus reached him, he was terrorized, crawling on his hands and knees, trying to scuttle away from the overturned chair. He was a well-dressed older man, with snowy hair and a beet red face. It got redder when Magnus knelt, jerked him upright, and held him up by his neckcloth.

  “Who?” Magnus snarled. “Damn you, tell me who. And now!”

  The man croaked a word, and then another. Magnus scowled and shook him again. “More, damn you,” he shouted. The man gasped, and then jabbered and gargled, and his eyes rolled up in his head as he went limp in Magnus’s grasp. But Magnus continued to shake him and curse him, until Black Jack came up beside him and put a hand over his.

  “Softly, me lord,” he said in a curiously quiet voice. “He’ll not be saying anything more until Gabriel’s horn, methinks.”

  He didn’t try to make Magnus release the man, because he’d boarded ships in his time to find himself fighting like a madman against madmen. He knew when a man was lost in a berserk rage. Magnus’s eyes were wild with a killing light. He was a big man, and strong, but now he was even stronger and no longer knew his own strength.

  It was a moment or two before Black Jack’s words reached Magnus. Then he opened his hand. The man dropped like a stone to the ground. Black Jack knelt beside him. He rose with the man’s wallet in his gloved hand. He looked through it with interest as Magnus’s breathing slowed.

  “Dead. Entirely. His heart guv out on him, belike,” one of the pirates announced after checking the man on the ground.

  Black Jack nodded; he’d thought as much. His eyes slewed to Magnus as he wondered what he would say.

  “Too bad,” Magnus said in a bleak voice. “There was much I had to ask him. He watched the whole of it; I saw his face as I was fighting for my life. He was interested, damn his soul, merely interested. I hardly thought of it until I saw him set the men running away when he saw the tide turn. Then I knew. Damn,” Magnus said, his hands fisting tightly. “I didn’t mean to kill him; there was much more I had to ask him.”

  “No need,” Black Jack said, handing Magnus papers he’d found in the wallet, after he’d counted and pocketed the money.

  Magnus glanced at the papers, and nodded sadly. Then he looked over to where Cristabel was watching them. “I know,” he said. “It’s as I thought. Not a word to her, you hear?”

  “Of course not,” Black Jack said. “Be you forgetting? I love the lass too.”

  But Magnus didn’t hear; he was walking back to Cristabel. He took her in his arms when he reached her, without saying a word. She went into his embrace silently and he felt her shaking. He wondered if he, too, was shaking. Not from the battle, and not from the shock of it, But from what he’d seen with his own eyes. Looking over Cristabel’s head now, he saw Black Jack’s grim face.

  The men had been after Cristabel. They were trying to kill her—not him. They’d never been after him. They’d tried to murder her, just as the wild horseman had, and just as the other had tried the night he’d been shot, trying to defend her. That was bad enough. Worst of all, he knew who had sent them now.

  “Are you well?” Magnus asked her, drawing back and cupping her face in his hands.

  She nodded. “But you,” she asked anxiously, “your wound—are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “We’re lucky,” he sighed, and held her close.

  “That man,” she whispered, “the one you chased. Who was he? Was he the one who wanted me dead?”

  She felt his body tense at that dread word, and he hugged her closer. “Later,” he said. “For now, I think you should go back to Martin’s house. Jack can take you. I have to stay to explain things to the watch, but I don’t think he’ll want to stay around for that.”

  “No,” she said simply, “my place is with you.”

  As soon as curious decent citizens began to venture back on the street, the pirates vanished like vapor rising from the cobbles, leaving Magnus to explain the matter to the watchmen. When all questions had been answered, except for Cristabel’s own, Magnus walked back with her to Martin’s house.

  “You say you’re well, but I think you should lie down and rest,” Magnus told her when they got there.

  “You say you’re well, too, and you’re the one who took a ball in your chest
just recently,” she said.

  He was prevented from answering by Sophia’s horrified cries when she saw them standing in the hall, bloodstained and disheveled. The footmen ran for Martin, and when he rushed in, he grew pale.

  “Again?” he cried.

  “We’re not hurt,” Magnus told him immediately. “But not from want of trying.”

  “Thank God Mother and Father and the others went out today to pick out wedding clothes, as you wished,” Martin said. “They’d die if they saw you like that. What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you everything,” Magnus said, “but first I’d like to wash and change my clothing, and I think Cristabel should too—and quickly.”

  Cristabel couldn’t argue that, but she frowned. Martin followed Magnus up the stair, and she realized that she really couldn’t, if she was to change her clothes. She had to go to her own room to do that, because that was where all her clothing was. Although she and Magnus now shared a bed every night, they had decided to do it so recently and abruptly that she still had her own room, and he had his. That meant that he could talk to Martin without her knowing what was said—and perhaps not knowing what the man in the sedan chair had said. Magnus hadn’t spoken to her about it, and now that the shock was over and her wits were returning, she was keenly interested. He’d gotten very grim around the mouth when he left the man, and still hadn’t said a word about it. The fact that he hadn’t, troubled her.

  “We’ll meet down here directly after we refresh ourselves, not a moment later,” she said forcefully, glaring at Magnus, “and best be quick about it, because if I have to wait to find out what I need to know until after your parents and sisters are abed, I’ll burst.”

  He smiled for the first time in an hour. But it was a crooked, tired smile that made her heart clench. “We can’t have that,” he said. “Exploding pirates are very dangerous things. Agreed then, little madwoman, I’ll be down directly after I’ve changed my clothes. Now, let me tell you how she fought—like a tiger, I swear,” he told Martin as he went up the stair with him, making her sound like an Amazon, and talking just loudly enough to be sure she heard him.

  She grinned, but when he and Martin went into his room and closed the door behind them, she couldn’t hear another word.

  “Quick,” she told Sophia, as she hurried up the stair herself. “Call me maid to fetch me a clean gown and some soap and water. I must know all, and soon!”

  “But so must I,” Sophia protested, picking up her skirt and following her.

  Cristabel told her what happened, glad for something to do, if only to talk about what she’d done as she endured being scrubbed and dried and correctly gowned, and then sat impatiently as her maid combed out her hair. As soon as the maid was through, Cristabel broke off her story and bolted for the door. Sophia stopped her by putting a light hand on her arm. Cristabel paused and looked at her. Sophia’s eyes were reddened with unshed tears, and her mouth quivered. She looked very young.

  “I’ve been terrible to you,” she said, “and I know it. If anything had happened to you…Cristabel, if I was ever cruel or rude to you, it’s because I envy you so much. I know you can’t understand it, but it’s so. You seemed to me to live life so fully, you seem to be afraid of nothing, not like me. It makes me more cowardly when I see you, do you understand?”

  “I see you need spectacles,” Cristabel said in astonishment, “for I’m afraid half the time. Can’t you hear it when I speak—switching from being a lady to being a pirate every time I get upset?”

  “I didn’t know that was what it was,” Sophia said.

  “Well there’s a relief,” Cristabel sighed, “for it’s fair maddening to me. The only time I’m not afraid is when I’m with Magnus—and aye, some of the time with him too. I’m always afraid of putting a foot wrong, of embarrassing myself or him, of losing him—or myself. Why, I’m the most fearful woman I know!”

  “But you don’t show it.”

  “Well, I try not to,” Cristabel said. “Go cowering, and everybody steps on you; that’s a natural fact. My father didn’t teach me much good, but he taught me that. You’ve got to face up to things you’re afraid of, and that’s all I do. But that doesn’t stop the fear.”

  “Can you ever forgive me?” Sophia asked tearfully. Cristabel grew very still. “Depends on what for,” she said carefully.

  “For not being nicer to you, for treating you so badly,” Sophia sniffed.

  “Oh, that. Certainly,” Cristabel said, losing interest and heading for the stair.

  “But what did you think I meant?” Sophia asked.

  “I thought you might be apologizing for trying to kill me,” Cristabel said, and as Sophia gasped, she added, “Someone sure be trying to, you see.”

  Cristabel ran light-footed down the stair, but no one was in the parlor. She ran back to the hall, as angry as she was frightened. And then her heart sank.

  Magnus was coming down the stairs, with Martin and Black Jack behind him. Which meant that though Magnus had probably kept his word to the strict letter of it, he had outwitted her. They’d obviously already met without her knowing—and that could mean only one thing. They were keeping something from her.

  CHAPTER 18

  The men paused at the foot of the stair. “We have to go out for a while, Cristabel,” Magnus said when he saw her in the hall, staring at him. “We’ll be back before long. There’s no danger for us,” he said, when he saw her face, “but there is something that we must take care of.”

  She stood facing him, her head back, her silken curls framing a face that was as still as one of her father’s figureheads. Her eyes gleamed with unshed tears. But her voice was clear and cold.

  “You leave me now, Magnus Titus,” she said, “and you leave me for all time. I am not a fool. I know you go to seek vengeance—on my enemy. Aye, this I know. And I’m thinking it’s for one of two reasons. Either you think me such a weakling and a child that you feel you must protect me, even from the truth, or else you think it is man’s work entirely, and I am of no account at all. Neither is acceptable to me. I am your wife, and your equal—in danger as well as in comfort. And if ye don’t agree, then be damned to ye, me lord. For I am what I am, and twist and turn as I might, I cannot be yer version of a lady. Nor do I want to be.”

  Cristabel fell still and waited for her husband to speak.

  Black Jack was grinning ear to ear, and Martin seemed troubled. But she couldn’t read Magnus’s face; it might have been carved from stone.

  “And if the truth be bitter,” he finally asked, “and I wish to spare you that, because I love you?”

  “I appreciate it,” she said simply, “but I still want to know for myself. Think on—would you like it if I did the same to you? For sure, there’ll be times in our lives to come—if we have such lives together—when I’ll know a thing that I may fear to tell you. Would you wish me to keep it from you because I was afraid it would pain you? Or would you rather I told it to you and let you take it like a man? I be a woman, but I be no less strong than a man. And if you think so, why, you’re not the man for me. But,” she said softly, with the first hint of emotion in her voice, “I truly thought you were.”

  Magnus’s big chest rose and fell with the power of his great sigh. Then he nodded, reluctantly. “I’d have you no other way. But I’d give my arm to spare you pain. Come with me, if you wish.”

  She nodded, and sent for her cloak. Magnus wrapped it around her, and paused, only for a minute, to hold her shoulders hard in his hands. Then he signaled to the others and they went out into the night.

  “Be careful,” Sophia cried at the door, as they entered the coach Magnus had sent for.

  No one answered as the coach pulled away from the door. They rode in silence, each thinking his or her own thoughts, although Magnus held Cristabel’s hand in his own warm clasp all the while. There was so much Cristabel wanted to know, and so little she dared ask, that she stayed silent. Not from fear of coming danger, because Magnus
was by her side. But from fear of the unknown. She could honestly think of no one who might want to harm her—unless they were trying to get at Magnus. The one man who might be his enemy could never be hers—and would certainly not be Magnus’s if he knew they were truly wedded now. To the contrary, he’d be ecstatic. But someone had tried to kill her. It still seemed impossible, though she’d seen it with her own eyes, and had, in fact, had to kill someone to save herself this very day. That was real enough for her.

  The carriage stopped on a pleasant street on the outskirts of town, where inns and hotels served travelers newly arrived in London. The men got out silently, and Cristabel took Magnus’s arm as she stepped down the stair from the coach to the street. She suddenly didn’t want to be there. She didn’t know what she’d find, but whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good. The only thing she did know was that it was something she had to face. She knew how to do that. At least this time, she thought, she didn’t have to do it alone. She held Magnus’s hand and went into the inn.

  It was a homey place, old as the gate it stood beside that had been built around the city itself. The walls were whitewashed as best they could be over centuries’ worth of soot from woodsmoke, the floors tilted crazily, and the low ceiling was held up by old, blackened timbers. But the scent of many good suppers hung in the air, a fire roared in the hearth, and the place held the peace that a building earns by simply existing through so much time.

  Magnus murmured something to the innkeeper, who bowed and showed them into a private dining parlor. They waited there. Black Jack slipped into the shadows, and stood watching. Martin put his hands behind his back and stood by the fire, waiting. And Magnus held Cristabel’s hand hard in his.

  When the door opened, they all started. But only Cristabel made a sound. She caught her breath with a small, choked sob, before her hand flew to her lips to hold them still as her heart seemed to be.