Lady X's Cowboy

by Zoë Archer

  A dull roar of shock went through the guests.

  “I pay an exceptional amount of money to keep the supply pure,” she declared.

  “Just like a Bayswater parvenu to believe money to be the answer to all questions,” Pryce sneered. “Your purchased title is as polluted as your well.”

  “And I suppose that your inherited title makes you somehow superior,” she said, making herself frosty and clipped.

  “Of course it does,” Pryce snapped. “My family’s title can claim hundreds of years of history. The very foundation of England has been built by my title. But you,” he scoffed, “you and your kind, throwing filthy money at everything you see, believing that a few pounds sterling can make you somehow equal, or superior, to hundreds of years of history. Our country deserves better.”

  “One business cannot change the course of nations.”

  “You and your arriviste kind must learn that the nobility of England will not be humiliated; we will not be denied! Not by the likes of commoners.” He spat his words as if they were base insults.

  Some of the guests, particularly those with purchased titles and those with no titles at all, grew restive and murmuring, while those who did lay claim to inherited titles shifted uncomfortably and refused to look at George Pryce. Olivia wondered if others shared Pryce’s sentiment, but she hadn’t time or interest to discover if this was true.

  “And this has to do with Greywell’s water?” she asked.

  “As I said, it is just as contaminated as you are,” Pryce shot back.

  “My water is kept under very tight security. It would take someone quite extraordinary to be able to breach it.”

  It didn’t seem to matter to Pryce that moments ago he was forcing himself to be sick; he was still gratified and eager to have his vanity stroked. “Yet I was able to do just that,” he gloated.

  “You, Mister Pryce? I cannot believe it,” Olivia cried. “You could never harm the well undetected.”

  “But I did,” Pryce taunted.

  As one, the guests gasped out in shock. No one could speak except a wordless articulation of horror. Seeing the looks of dismay and revulsion on the crowd’s faces, Pryce’s triumphant jeering quickly faded, to be replaced by a growing agitation.

  Olivia found it strange but somehow unsurprising that Pryce would take the credit for his thug’s deviousness. “So the water I sold to make the bitter was tainted, too,” Olivia pressed.

  “Bitter which I drank,” Pryce said acrimoniously. Louder, to the crowd, he said, “You should all rush home to your physicians before you become too ill. As I intend to do.”

  The guests began to move to the double doors, horrified.

  “It is quite fortunate, then,” Olivia said, raising her voice so she could be heard by the panicked crowd, “that this beer has been made with water I purchased from another brewery.”

  The crowd reacted again, stopping by the doors to hear this newest development.

  The reporter from the Times stepped forward. “Didn’t you say earlier that the bitters was brewed with Greywell’s water?” he asked, and it almost made Olivia smile to see that his notepad was at the ready, eager for a story.

  “That was a fabrication,” she conceded. “The bitters came from a completely different water source.”

  “So you were aware of the problem with the well, Lady Xavier?” the reporter pressed, scribbling furiously.

  “My associate, Will Coffin, discovered that the well had been tampered with by Mr. Pryce’s mercenary. And so I purchased several hundred gallons of water from another brewery, and invited you all here tonight to witness Mr. Pryce reveal his treachery.” She looked at him, his face ashen, the front of his evening clothes now stained with sick. “And so he has.”

  Maddox bounded up the stairs, knocking footmen aside. Will was fast after him. The mercenary cleared the basement stairs and charged down the first-floor hallway, heading towards the next flight and up to the ballroom on the second story.

  He’d just gotten midway up the flight of stairs leading to the second floor when Will dove and grabbed his feet. Maddox fell hard, knocking against the steps with a grunt. Will scrambled up and turned Maddox over, then unleashed a barrage of punches to Maddox’s face. Maddox’s knife came up, catching Will lightly across the shoulder. The blade nicked him, a hot thread, and he bent back just enough for Maddox to wriggle out and continue up the stairs.

  Will caught up with him just outside the ballroom. Olivia and Pryce were shouting at each other, the guests standing around, their eyes wide as moons.

  “She’s talking nonsense!” Pryce yelled. “I’m not responsible!”

  “You just admitted it not a minute ago,” Olivia countered, more calm.

  “And everyone here witnessed your confession,” Lawford added.

  “Outrageous!” one man said hotly.

  “Poisoning Lady Xavier’s well, Lord Hessay’s son—a scandal!” someone else added.

  “Looks like you’re too late,” Will said as he and Maddox faced each other, knives ready.

  “I finish my work, no matter what,” Maddox snarled. “Poison the well: done. Kill you.” He grinned wolfishly. “Nearly done.” Then he charged.

  Will sidestepped, and both men whirled around to face each other again. Maddox swung his blade, trying to cut Will where he could. Will made himself calm, focused. When Maddox made a wild cut, exposing his left side, Will moved in fast. He sunk his bowie into Maddox’s shoulder. The hired gun howled and dropped to the carpeted floor, clutching his injury. Will grabbed the handle and pulled the knife out.

  The guests near the ballroom door looked back and forth between Will and Maddox in the hallway, and Olivia and Pryce inside with them. They looked stunned. “Someone’s been stabbed,” a few murmured. A woman fainted.

  Olivia came running to the door. “Will,” she cried. “Are you all right?”

  Before Will could answer, Pryce came charging past. “Get out of my way!” he shrieked. He managed to bolt around Olivia and head for the stairs, but he suddenly jerked to a stop and flopped to the ground, sitting upright like a marionette. Pryce stared dumfounded at the tail of his cutaway coat, which was pinned to the wall behind him with a coffin-handled knife.

  Will straightened himself from his knife-throwing stance as the guests crowded around Olivia in the doorway. Exclamations of shock and amazement tumbled into the hall. But Will turned just in time to see Maddox disappear through a second-story window.

  Will ran to the window, but Maddox was already on the ground. He ran, limping, down the street. Will was about to charge after him when he felt Olivia’s hand on his sleeve.

  “Let him go,” she said. “We’ve accomplished what we wanted.”

  The police, summoned by Mordon, were already coming up the stairs for Pryce, who struggled feebly with his pinned coat. He stopped when Graham stood over him, glowering.

  Will looked at Olivia, pride bursting in his chest. She’d done it—she’d managed to snare Pryce through her cleverness, bravely facing him down. Will wanted so badly to scoop her up in his arms and kiss her senseless, but he caught sight of the curious faces of the high society guests staring at them. Tomorrow, the papers and gossip would be filled with nothing but what happened here tonight.

  “Just about,” Will said. “We got just about everything we wanted.”

  Olivia had spent an exhausting hour talking with the police, giving her statement, preparing to testify against George Pryce. Most of the guests had been detained as well, excitedly telling everything they’d heard to the detectives.

  “It’s like something out of a novel,” she heard a member of Parliament say to his wife.

  “A very shocking novel, my dear,” his wife replied. “Imagine, the Earl of Hessay’s son involved in such despicable schemes! It chills the blood.”

  Olivia sat on a chair in the ballroom, dazed, as people milled around her. But Will was nowhere to be found.

  “It went marvelously,” Charlotte sa
id. “I will call on you tomorrow.” Frederick draped her cloak over her shoulders and led her from the room.

  “Tomorrow,” Olivia murmured, dazed. But Charlotte and her husband had already gone.

  A cluster of attendees stood nearby, talking.

  “Did you see the American?” an industrialist asked.

  “Quite astonishing,” the Times editor said.

  “What a brute, as I hear all Americans are,” a woman added. “Clearly a laborer. Despite his evening clothes. Did you see his hands?”

  “And the bruises on his face,” the industrialist put in.

  “Leave my house,” Olivia said, standing to face them. When everyone blinked in astonishment, she repeated, forcefully, “Get out.”

  “But, Lady Xavier—”

  “I refuse to sit here and listen to you denigrate the finest man I know,” she said hotly. “It doesn’t matter what country he is from, and it matters even less whether he has a fortune or works hard for a living. I’m glad he knows what it means to work—because he never takes anything for granted. Because he knows what is valuable and what is not. Because,” she added, “he isn’t afraid to stand up for what he believes in, unlike everyone else I know. Including myself.”

  Abashed, the guests quickly shuffled out the door. The police had already gone, promising to contact her tomorrow, and the servants had finished cleaning up. Having won her greatest victory, Olivia stood in the ballroom completely alone.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “What shall I tell the man from the Illustrated London News, Lady Xavier?”

  Olivia looked up from the piles of papers in front of her, eyes watering from strain and lack of sleep, into the agitated face of Mr. Huntworth.

  “Tell him that I have nothing to say, and I won’t have anything to say, so he may as well go back to his paper before he wastes anymore of my time,” she answered wearily.

  “He is most persistent,” Mr. Huntworth added.

  She rolled her shoulders to stretch them. After the furor of last night, she had been unable to sleep. She had sat up all night, her mind whirling, staring out her window into the garden as though the orderly flower beds and neatly trimmed hedges could help calm her. She knew she ought to be feeling triumphant—George Pryce was well and truly ruined, no longer a threat, her brewery would recover from the setbacks it had faced—but without Will to share the victory with, all she could muster was a vague sense of relief oddly combined with disappointment. Her old fatigue had returned, the sense that she had a tremendous burden to shoulder on her own, and she felt it as surely as if it were a physical weight pressing on her back.

  Will had gone as soon as he could, having fulfilled his obligation. Just before he disappeared last night, he had said to her, “I’m leavin’ for Colorado tomorrow, Liv.”

  “But what about your grandfather?” she had asked, startled.

  Will had shrugged. “He’s a decent man, but he’s just like the rest of this country. Tellin’ me who I should and shouldn’t care for. And stayin’ here, with you so close by, it’d be like havin’ a brandin’ iron against my heart.”

  Her own heart had felt shriveled and dried. “Don’t let me keep you from your family.”

  “It ain’t that,” he said. “I thought findin’ Ben would make me settle, give me somethin’ to hold to, but it turns out the person who can give that to me is the one I can’t have.” He tipped his hat to her. “‘Night, Liv.” And then he was gone.

  So it was over between them. For good. He would not seek her out, and she would not contact him. He was leaving England for his home. The island would be a small and cold place without him. And so would her soul.

  These thoughts tormented her all through the night. At first light, she had dressed and gone to Greywell’s. There was still much to be done, and she buried herself beneath stacks of correspondence and paperwork to take her thoughts elsewhere. But reporters seeking a juicy story had been hounding her all morning, distracting her from the comfortable numbness of work.

  Mr. Huntworth was still waiting for an answer.

  “I am most persistent, too, Mr. Huntworth,” she replied. “And I will not speak to the gentlemen of the press. We have already prepared an official statement. They will have to be satisfied with that.”

  Nodding, the manager hurried off to convey her refusal to the men clustered at the brewery gates. Olivia glanced at the clock. It was after ten. Was Will booking passage back home? Could he have already sailed? She leaned her hot eyes into her fists to keep the tears at bay.

  Gone, gone. He was almost gone, or gone already. She had to keep moving, keep herself busy or she would easily collapse, just as she had done when Will had moved out of Princes Square. She abruptly stood, pushing her chair back and startling some of the clerks in the office, and walked into the brewery itself.

  This was all hers. She had fought for it. Every tank, tun, keg and bin. Three years ago, she had shocked society by taking active control over the business, but she made damned sure that Greywell’s would thrive, and eventually won some public opinion for herself. She had been so proud of herself. She had made real progress with Greywell’s, and loved seeing her work come to fruition. But beneath it all, she knew something wasn’t quite right. She was a businesswoman and a member of society, existing in two worlds that were not particularly compatible. She’d felt that disparity, but accepted it as a natural consequence of being a woman living on the cusp.

  She went into the room that held the mashing tuns. Out of habit, she checked the temperature of the steam-heated jackets. They were at a consistent 145 degrees—excellent. Uniformity was vital in brewing, the ability to produce a dependable and unvarying product. Beer drinkers did not like change.

  Nor did England, she realized. It was a land that craved fixity, stability, and woe betide anyone who tried to change that. Ever since she was a child, she had been made aware that there were certain people who did and did not belong together. Rich and poor. Men and women. The leisured and the workers. In school, and as a young bride, she had not examined this. Yet once David died, she had begun to question these divisions. And since she had known Will...everything had become very different.

  Peering out a window, she saw Mr. Huntworth speaking to the journalists, and the men’s disappointed faces as they were turned away. The reporters would return, though. Their readership would relish the story of Lady Xavier, George Pryce, and rumors of a wild American. Everything in the public eye.

  But, curse it, what was the public to her? She thought about the values everyone struggled to uphold—class consciousness, excruciating decorum, smothering etiquette—and understood that those things had no value. The one man she loved was leaving England, and all because it might upset someone’s delicate sensibilities.

  “Oh, God,” she said aloud. She leaned against the window and stared out into the gray sky. “I love him.”

  When she was with Will, she no longer felt that horrible split within herself. She was whole, united through the generous warmth of his heart. And he accepted every part of her. She didn’t care what he did for a living, or who his parents were. All she knew was that he had become her friend, her lover, the one person she could not possibly live without. And she had let him slip away, because of her own fear, because she was still too dependent on the good opinion of people who didn’t matter.

  But he did. And she might lose him forever, if she didn’t act quickly.

  Olivia grabbed her skirts and ran back to the office.

  “Mr. Huntworth,” she said breathlessly, finding him returning from his errand.

  “Yes, Lady Xavier?”

  “I want your best clerks to check all the ships departing for America today. I want to know who is on those ships and when they are leaving. And if Mr. Coffin has already sailed,” she added, “then book me passage to America immediately.”

  Mr. Huntworth stared for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, Lady Xavier.”

  Olivia watched her clerks hurry to do
her bidding. She hoped, if she did catch up to Will, he could forgive her. And if she didn’t, she would never forgive herself.

  The fancy suit Will gave to one of the Donleveigh’s footmen. He reckoned he didn’t have a use for it anymore, and there was a cut across the front that he hadn’t the skill to mend. The cut on Will’s front was bandaged up by the housekeeper, who gave Ben many baleful looks. In the two nights Will had stayed with his granddad, he’d returned to the house bruised and bloodied.

  “I don’t know why you have to leave so soon,” Ben said, sitting on the bed and watching Will pack.

  “You could come with me to Colorado.” He folded a shirt and threw it into the open bag on his cot.

  Ben shook his head. “Me home’s here, in England. I’m too old to start over.”

  “And I’m too old to start livin’ like an Englishman,” Will answered. He buckled on his gun and laid the Winchester next to his luggage. “America’s got its share of troubles, but there’s freedom to be had.”

  “That’s why they went, too,” Ben said softly.

  Will turned and looked at his grandpa, a questioning frown on his face.

  “‘I can’t breathe,’ Luke said to me,” Ben continued. “‘We’ve got to go.’ It could be stifling for a young man trying to make his way in the world. He didn’t want to be in service any more, and didn’t want his children to be anyone’s servants. He said, ‘There’s fair land for the taking, and nobody to tell me or Hetty what we can and can’t do, how high we can rise.’ And he wanted to go as high as he could.” Ben smiled sadly. “I suppose that’s why he picked Colorado.”

  “It touches the sky,” Will said with his own smile. He was about to close his bag, when Ben got up and put the daguerreotype of his parents into the duffel.

  “Take them with you,” he said. “I’ve spent nearly thirty years staring at them, wishing they could come back, and in a way I guess they have. In you.”

  “Thanks,” Will said, humbled.