by Edith Layton
He was not so surprised at the invasion of his solitude as he was at where the sound was emanating from, as he lowered the light and stole closer to the front door. This was, after all, London, and large cities bred thieves as frequently as they produced bad vapors, and there was little way to filter either evil phenomenon out of the best areas or the worst ones. A good thief could evade the watch like a night-born shadow, but why a good thief would be trying the front door at this empty hour was more than he could imagine. There was a gaslight directly in front, and never half so many shadowy niches as either the back entrance or that tempting library window offered. He waited with a grim smile, for whatever the fellow’s reckonings, his final accounting would be the same.
So when Lord Deal, secreted in the darkness of his entry hall, at last heard his door knocker openly, blatantly, and thunderously sounded, he almost dropped the pistol he’d collected from his desk in his startled confusion as the din at the door reverberated throughout his sleeping house. But he was a resilient gentleman, so it took only two more sharp knocks before he flung open the door wide and confronted his nocturnal visitor. And then, he let out all his indrawn breath in exasperation, for it was lowering to discover the imagined assassin or burglar was only a midnight reveler, disheveled, likely tipsy, and obviously strayed from some riotous celebration. And a woman, at that.
“My dear lady,” he said in annoyance, “your comrades are not within. Try your luck elsewhere.”
He was already beginning to close the door in her masked face, when he realized she stood unnaturally silent. The vague troublesome thought that she might not be merely a drunken reveler, but some lost young woman come to the sort of harm that can commonly befall a female who travels the nighttime city streets alone, by choice or chance, caused him to hesitate.
It was then that she said, in weary despair and unmistakeable accents, “Oh Lord Deal, please, please get me Will.”
And before his heart stopped beating altogether, he caught her up in his arms and bore her, unresisting, inside his door.
He’d gotten her to the library and the chair he’d so recently vacated, and was lowering her gently into it when he heard Mr. Fielding, his butler, ask in quavering but game fashion, “My lord? Do you need assistance? Shall I call the watch? I’ve young Tredlow here,” the butler went on with rising courage and authority as a few more bare running feet could be heard pounding down the hall, “and Wemberly as well now, do you require our assistance with ... ah ... anything?”
This last was said with a bit less certainty, since even at a distance and in the light of the one wavering candle he bore, the butler could see that his master was bending over a recumbent female. No more than that could be ascertained, since Lord Deal’s own large form bent over the chair obscured most of the sight, and as one of the taller and more enterprising young footmen later remarked in chagrin, the mort was wearing a mask as well. Lord Deal was usually the most circumspect gentleman, but as Mr. Fielding was later to comment ruefully to the housekeeper, he was, withall, a young gentleman still. And though it was his usual practice to take his entertainment in more discreet fashion, there was never any doubt, his valet often confided importantly, from the sort of scent, powder, and paint that sometimes clung to his evening wear, that he took it. This time, the butler sighed, in the manner of one whose life’s work was to be put upon, he obviously was taking it home. For after a pause, his master’s abstracted voice came back clear and curt, “No, Fielding. Thank you all anyway. Everything is under control now. Good night.”
It was a dismissal, and a dismissal was an order, so Mr. Fielding swept all in front of him, from envious footmen to curious kitchen help, back to their beds, if not their slumbers. He himself only paused a few more moments, to be sure that his master’s guest, Mr. Rossiter, still slept soundly, and to ascertain with a bit more gratification that Mr. Hodges, my lord’s valet, had also slept through the entire disturbance. Then the butler went off to his own room, with a dollop of importance to sweeten his sleep, secure in the knowledge that the morrow would see him king of the servants’ breakfast table.
When the house had returned to its stillness, after Lord Deal had closed the door to the library and poured Faith a cordial and seen her drink it down, he at last moved to do more than wait for her to speak. For it did not seem as though she would ever speak again. She sat quite still and seemed to be in shock. He bent slowly, and carefully untied the mask and drew it away from her face. Then he saw the tearstains, then he saw the complete exhaustion and deep sorrow plain in her lovely, drawn, and white face. Then, at last, his own composure broke and he turned away for a moment so that she would not see his own face, or hear his jagged sigh.
After that lapse, he turned his attention to her again, and his dark tanned hands knotted into white knuckled fists as he asked in a tight voice, “Faith, only tell me who it was. If you know. If not, tell me where it occurred, and I will discover all. He shall not go unpunished. I’ll call a doctor as well,” he went on, trying to keep his voice even, “and we’ll keep it close, Will and I. Only please, trust me and tell me.”
“But,” Faith said, as she closed her eyes as if to deny him, “I wanted to see Will. I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Bother?” he said desperately. “Don’t you count me as your friend as well? This changes nothing, I swear it. I only regret it with all my heart, and,” he vowed, finally enclosing her small cold hands in one of his, though he longed to catch her up in his arms and rock her like a child and weep with her for the indignity and despair of it, “I want to help you through it. So tell me, who has done this thing? Or,” he asked, as he started at his own thought, and understood for the first time what precisely the expression signified when someone said that their blood ran cold, “who were they who did this thing to you?”
But then she opened her eyes and at last looked beyond herself and directly at him. Something in his face, or in his troubled eyes, or in his voice, had woken her from her self-absorption at last.
“Tell you what?” she asked.
He drew a deep breath and said as unemotionally as he was able, so as not to distress her more, “Faith, I must know only because for my own sake I must make reprisal on your behalf. Or if not for that, then so that other young women will not be made to suffer as you have done. Plainly then, who was it who attacked you?”
At that she sat up and stared at him in lively terror, the little color remaining in her cheeks draining away.
“Oh lord,” she gasped, “not that. Never that,” she swore, as he in turn looked ill at her distress. “I mean,” she said, her gray eyes luminous and wide, “no one. I haven’t been attacked. I was abducted,” she said angrily, “and humiliated as well, but not physically, and I did escape. But I wasn’t attacked, not in the way that you mean, oh no,” she said, looking very frightened now, where, he suddenly realized, she had only looked worn and wretched before. That, and the petulance that he had definitely heard creep into her voice when she’d said “abducted,” convinced him as no disclaimer she could have spoken would have done.
It was a night of revelations for him. He was so relieved and yet so angry with her at the same moment that he suddenly understood now, decades after the fact, just why after he’d gotten himself lost on a shopping expedition when he was five, his governess had exclaimed that she didn’t know whether to kill him or hug him first when she found him strolling homeward, unharmed and whistling to himself.
And since he liked indecision no more than any other man, and having been prepared for tragedy had instead found himself playing the fool, he tossed the leftover unnecessary tact and delicacy of feeling to the winds and glowered at his surprising guest. He rose to his feet, forgetting that they were bare, and planting his long legs apart, crossed his arms and in his bright robes, unintentionally resembling a fierce medieval warrior, he glowered down at her where she huddled in the chair he’d just so tenderly deposited her in.
“Just what in God’s name are y
ou doing here at this ungodly hour then?” he demanded.
“I thought,” she said in a small voice, “that Will could help me, I think. I didn’t know where else to go,” she whispered even lower, as her eyes began to fill with tears for the first time since all her adventures began this evening, “and well, oh I don’t know, it just seemed the only place to go. I was so confused and unhappy and I just found myself heading for here, since I knew Will was here, and you and...” But she didn’t finish saying what naturally came next, for she couldn’t bear to admit her unthinking, unhesitant reliance on someone who now looked as though he wished to murder her and cast her lifeless from his house.
“And you were right,” he said, shaking his tousled head, even as her first tear doused his white-hot rage and tempered it to cool, keen reason, “this is exactly where you should have come.
“Exactly where you belong,” he whispered as she at last came into his open arms with a sob, as he gently pulled her there. He held her close then, and comforted her, and only that—no matter what his butler thought as he sniffed and turned on his side in his bed, and imagined his employer doing with the young female in the library, and envied him heartily all the long way down to sleep for, as well.
THIRTEEN
She looked very well there, he thought, though he couldn’t utter the compliment aloud. It was an entirely inconsequential thought, anyway. But now, as she rested and sighed with relief as though she’d put down a heavy weight, the first thought that sprang to his mind was how very well she looked tucked up into his favorite chair, with a lap rug he’d ferreted out of the closet covering her. She looked like a sweetly sleepy child peeking out of her coverlets, no never a child, he corrected himself, for if she really put him in mind of one, he’d have no difficulty speaking to her now as she awaited his reply.
Her color had returned after she’d done weeping in his arms and he’d administered another cordial and wrapped her into the rug, and then sat quietly and heard out the whole of the story. Now she was pink-cheeked and shining-eyed. Her long lustrous hair spilled around her. In the dim light, the manner in which she lay back and cuddled comfortably into the rug, the disarray of her clothes and hair, all made her a delicious vision that conjured up disorderly thoughts of tumbled bedclothes, coverlets, and pillows for him, as well as a great many other untidy delights that he had to forget entirely before he spoke one more word to her.
There were yet other things that came to his mind that he would have to strictly set aside before he could speak. What Methley had done, her bedeviled listener had thought all the while that she related the abortive “adventure” she’d endured, was far worse than villainous, it was stupid. There were gentlemen who subscribed to the belief that cold women could be warmed by heated stories and pictures. That made no more sense, Barnabas thought, than believing someone terrified of dogs would become a fancier of the breed if locked in a kennel with a pack of them overnight. But he couldn’t tell her this either, not yet.
Because there was one grain of pure reason that had shone through all of Methley’s clouded thinking, which doubtless had spurred on the madness. She did fear men, there was no doubt she did, if he had not heard it from her lips, he had nonetheless tasted it there, it had shaped her life, it had touched his, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, for any man to win her as things were. Shyness in a well-bred young female was understandable; reluctance, or a good imitation of it, to engage in lovemaking was often encouraged, but Faith’s reaction to an embrace transcended this. Her immediate response was very close to sheer terror.
That very point had been troubling him for the past days easily as much as it had evidently preyed on the earl’s mind tonight. But bringing her to a bordello so that she might see the act and so put aside her fears of it? Methley might have done more damage this night, Lord Deal sighed, than even he had originally intended. Likely the earl had planned ruination for her, if only of her reputation, so that she’d have to accept his suit, and hadn’t thought of any damage done to her mind or soul. Or did he even care, Barnabas thought savagely, so long as her fortune remained intact?
It was the devil of a coil, he realized, running his hand through his thick, shaggy hair for want of something more constructive to do. Here he sat with a delectable creature he liked very well, alone and at an hour past midnight, and he couldn’t even tell her how lovely she looked to him. Nor did he dare touch her, certainly not after what she’d seen tonight. Nor could he admit that he understood why her abductor had treated her to the sights he had. All he could do was to be her friend, a better friend than he’d ever been to any man or maid, for whatever else transpired, he was determined that he not let her down as he’d failed Nettie all those years ago.
But even if he succeeded in that, he couldn’t win. For as he was coming to see too clearly with each passing hour, what he wanted was to be far more than that to her. His instant, deep, and horrified reaction when he’d thought the worst had finally brought it home forceably to him. When he’d thought her violated, it was as though he himself had been. It was no longer any use denying it to himself, she’d crept, all unnoticed, which was perhaps the only way any female could have gotten past his guard, too deeply into his heart for him to ever pluck her out again.
He ought not to be surprised, he thought. She, after all, exemplified all that he had admired in the New World, and all that he valued in the old. She had morals (albeit it was possible she couldn’t help that), manners, wit, and beauty, as well as a warm heart and high good humor. She could be a man’s friend and partner, as so many of her countrywomen in the new wilderness had to be, since being decorative alone was never enough for a man there. Yet she could remain unquestionably a tempting female, as so many in his old world required a female to be. The problem was, he sighed again, it well might be that she could never be more than tempting, and would eternally appear to offer all that she could never give. And unfortunately for himself, he could never take that which was not given.
But now, it was he who must give something, and if that were only to be comfort, why then, he thought, he would try to give that in abundance. That commodity, he’d often found, came best if packaged in laughter, for the healing touch was often the lightest one.
“Would you like another cordial?” he asked pleasantly, watching the level of liquid in her glass shrink. “That way, we can float you home when the time comes, and won’t have to bother to call a carriage at all.”
“Oh dear,” she said with a guilty start, for since she’d arrived she’d been taken up with so many things she’d never given a thought to her eventual return to her noble host and hostess’s house. She’d been so glad to get here, away from the nightmarish streets she’d somehow managed to traverse, shrinking into the shadows at every coach that rattled by, running the faster for every man who’d looked to her or called to her or come near to her. Barnabas said it was a miracle she’d gotten to him safely, and so it was, and if it was, it wasn’t the only thing to be grateful for. Barnabas himself had been rather a miracle too.
The moment she’d been able to wrench away from the earl and sprint down the deserted street, she’d known she couldn’t go back to Lady Mary to see her guilt or return to the duchess to read the spite and deceit plain in her face. She’d thought of Will, and remembered he’d been lodging with Lord Deal. Or, she wondered only now as she sat safe and comforted, had she thought of Lord Deal, and then remembered Will might be with him? No matter, it might have been a miracle that she’d found a homeward-bound lamplighter who’d known the street and hadn’t thought to taunt or terrorize an unescorted female. But the true miraculous revelation had come the moment she’d seen Barnabas open his door. Then she’d known she was saved from the night and safer than she’d ever been. Somehow she trusted him implicitly to protect her from any threat, even from herself.
But it had been odd when she’d found herself within his house, in his very chair, to see the athletic gentleman she’d always thought so vigorous a
nd hardy turn pale with shock at her distress. She’d only managed to speak at last so that she could spare him further discomfort. His hazel eyes had been bleak with despair, his strong, long hands had shaken as he’d handed her a goblet of liquor to down. She’d never known she could affect someone so strongly, it amazed her still. Yet in a small, secret, dreadfully perverse part of her mind that she examined briefly now and then quickly hid again, she had never felt so powerful before either.
Then, of course, when he’d realized she was unhurt, she’d feared he might correct that circumstance in his rage at her. In all, she’d been through so much emotion, both hers and his, in the last hours, that she felt curiously numbed to all sensation, just as her hand felt sometimes when she’d leaned on it for too long.
Now she was safe, and it was very good to sit and talk with him in the dim quiet of the late night. It was singular for a well-bred young woman to visit a gentleman in the dead of the night and sit alone in his home, sipping strong spirits and laughing with him. It wasn’t done in any country she knew of, it was shameless behavior, but it was very good, and she no longer cared a fig about all the rest. Too much had happened, there simply wasn’t any emotion as strong as shame left to her. So when he mentioned her ultimate, proper destination, instead of being horrified at being reminded of her odd behavior, she pulled a face that made him laugh.
