The Undoing Of A Lady

by Nicola Cornick

  “I hear,” he said, touching a finger to the sapphires that were still about her neck, “that you are very rich.”

  She laughed. “And I hear that you are a fortune hunter.” She trailed her hand down his chest. “Tom Fortune,” she said. “How inappropriate when you are penniless.”

  He kissed her, hard and deep, one hand covering her breast the other tangled in her long blond hair. “Perhaps we could share your money?” he suggested when they broke apart.

  “Are you proposing to me?” Her sapphire eyes mocked him. “Here, now? How romantic.” Her languid gesture swept over the tumbled sheets and the frowsty little tavern room. “No, dear Tom-” she took his erection in her hand, stroked, rubbed, fondled him with such ruthless efficiency that he struggled not to come there and then “-you are good for one thing-” She squeezed his cock to make her point. “and at that you are very good indeed, my dear-but not to marry. I have other plans. Don’t come,” she added sweetly as he struggled with both his anger and his arousal, and the fusion of both of them into a mad desire, “I need you.”

  With a swift, voracious movement she straddled him and took him inside her. He gasped aloud.

  “Your plans-” he said, grabbing her hips to control the tantalizing pace she set. “Do they involve Nat Waterhouse? Do you want to be a countess?”

  She checked for a second and her eyes narrowed. He felt a flash of triumph and a return of a modicum of control. With this woman, he suspected, it would always be a battle.

  “They might,” she said, punishing him with the most shallow of movements atop him. “I might. Why do you ask?”

  “Because-” Tom was struggling to keep his mind clear against the onslaught of sensation. “Because if so you should know that your gallant earl is not as honorable as you might think.”

  She was so surprised that she stopped moving altogether. Her palms rested on his chest. Her thighs pressed closely against his. He was captured, encased, held still.

  “Whatever can you mean?” she said.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Tom said, savagely pleased to be able to thwart her. “Trust me, though-he is not as worthy as you think.”

  She squeezed him tight and he writhed beneath her, groaning. “Do you have some sort of hold over him?” she asked. “Are you extorting money from him?”

  “I wouldn’t tell you if I was,” Tom panted.

  “I suppose not.” She started to move again and Tom felt relief and a renewed hunger. “Perhaps it just makes him more exciting,” she whispered. “Perhaps he would not be as boring in bed as I suspected-”

  Tom rolled over suddenly, impaling her beneath him. “Are you thinking about him now?” he demanded, his mouth hot against her breast, biting hard, wanting to mark her white skin.

  She gasped, but not with displeasure, and arched upward to his mouth.

  “I might be,” she whispered.

  Tom pulled on her nipples until she screamed.

  “You think about your plans,” he taunted, “and I will think about mine.”

  “Not my frumpish little cousin Mary,” she gasped as he started to drive into her with ferocious strokes. “She’s so dull.”

  “But her money is lovely,” Tom said. He forced her legs further apart. “I worship it. Lovely,” he repeated as the violence of his thrusts almost lifted her from the bed. “Lovely.”

  LATER, MUCH LATER, Sir Montague Fortune awoke in his bedroom at Fortune Hall. Lizzie had instructed the servants to put him to bed but Spencer, his valet, had done the bare minimum of work and merely removed his jacket and cravat, not even bothering to take off his boots. Nor had the man closed the curtains and it was the moonlight, falling across his face, which woke Sir Monty up. For a moment he lay quite still, for his head hurt vilely and there was an unaccustomed sickly sweet taste in his mouth. Then he realized that he needed both the jakes and a drink of water, and he groaned. His whole body felt soft and leaden at the same time, too heavy to move. He knew he should not have had that last glass of claret, but he had been celebrating the advent of yet more money into his coffers. He had never planned to wed, but now he could see what a splendid and enriching idea it was…

  The moonlight flickered as a shadow crossed the room and Sir Monty turned his head. His heart jumped. Just for a moment he thought that he had seen the figure of a woman there; a woman in a cloak with her hood up carrying, most bizarrely, what looked like an umbrella in her hand. But there was no one there. The moonlight rippled across the room and Sir Monty groaned again and closed his eyes.

  He did not see the blade and only opened his eyes a second before the knife slid silently between his ribs and by then it was too late to do anything at all.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  L IZZIE WOKE with a headache from the brandy and a bad taste in her mouth. The house was silent. Monty, she knew from past experience, had taken so much drink that he would not wake until past noon. Tom was probably not even home yet though the bright yellow of the sun cutting through the gap between the curtains told her that it must be late morning.

  What had happened the night before? Her evening gown and shawl were lying in a puddle on the floor. Her evening slippers, resting in a patch of sunlight, looked discolored and spoiled. She stared at them and the memory flooded in, pushing back the tide of brandy-induced forgetfulness. Of course-she had walked into the wood, amongst the dew-stained grass. That was why the hem of her gown and slippers were ruined.

  Other memories were impossible to ignore. Nat had followed her and had proposed marriage to her and she had turned him down. He had kissed her and it had been as deliciously seductive as before. The temptation to melt into his embrace and promise to wed him had been so strong. But instead she had found the strength to reject him. She loved him too much to condemn them both to half a marriage. She knew that he did not love her, and marriage, to her mind, should be about the building of a future relationship, not about regrets over a past one. Love should be overwhelming and all consuming, the type of love she felt for Nat and that he so manifestly did not feel for her. Otherwise there was too much inequality in it.

  Nat had kissed her with lust and this time she had not confused it with love. Desire was delicious, hot, strong, seductive, but she had been burned so badly that night in the folly, confusing lust with love in her naïveté, that she was never going to make the same mistake again.

  She thought of her mother then, as she so often did when she was unhappy. The Countess of Scarlet had been reviled for her unfaithfulness, but the truth, as Lizzie well knew, was that her mother had been a victim of love not a heartless wanton. She had run away from a husband who gave her everything in a material sense and nothing in an emotional one. Lizzie had only been young when her mother had fled but she had sensed Lady Scarlet’s unhappiness with the acute sensitivity that children can possess. She had known that her mother wanted nothing other than her husband’s love and had been driven to despair by the lack of it. People thought that her mother’s bad example should be a warning to Lizzie and it was, but not in the way they imagined. All it had taught Lizzie was not to give her heart when there was no prospect of seeing her love returned. She had forgotten that, briefly, that night in the folly. She had loved Nat and thought she was loved in return. She had been wrong and now she was never going to forget that painful reminder.

  So it was over. She felt miserable. Nat had proposed and she had refused and that was an end to it. Now she really was free to forge that pretence, to remake her memories, wiping out that night in the folly whilst the days, weeks, months passed and after a while the new memory became the truth.

  Nothing happened…

  She sat up and hunted about for her underclothes. There was no point in calling for a maid. Tom had tried to seduce her most recent lady’s maid and the girl had left in high dudgeon a week ago. There was only Bridie, the housemaid, left to do everything. Besides, she could manage perfectly well on her own. She always had done.

  What if there was a child…r />
  Nat’s words echoed unbidden through her head and she froze for a second, her blood feeling stone-cold despite the warmth of the summer morning. That was one aspect of her situation she had blindly refused even to consider until Nat had put it into words the previous night.

  She allowed her hand to slide down over her night rail, following the flat planes of her stomach. She looked the same. She felt the same. In fact she felt sick, but that was the brandy rather than anything else. She could not be pregnant. That truly would be a disaster. The thought of it terrified her. It was all very well for Laura Anstruther, for example, to have a child. Laura was old-at least thirty-and already had a daughter and anyway, she was a grown-up. And Lydia Cole-well, Lydia’s pregnancy had caused a most terrible scandal but Lydia herself would be a wonderful mother because she was so sane and so calm and so loving that she could surely look on her baby and feel all the right emotions rather than the sheer terror that Lizzie would feel if only she permitted herself to think about it for a second…Her thoughts ran wild like rats in a trap until she took a deep breath and calmed herself.

  Nothing happened…

  Her heart steadied. She would carry on as before. What to do today? Life felt strangely empty. All her tomorrows stretched out before her now and it was odd that she could think of nothing that she wanted to do with them. She realized that so many of her activities had been shared with Nat in the past. They had particularly enjoyed riding out together. A summer morning like this was made for a gallop on the Yorkshire fells. Except that she would be going out on her own in future.

  She found a clean gown folded in the wardrobe and struggled to put it on, bundling her hair up with a ribbon. When she threw back the curtains the sunshine was bright and hot, pouring into the room and showing up the dust and cobwebs. Something had to be done about Fortune Hall, Lizzie thought. It was going to rack and ruin whilst Monty grasped after people’s money and spent it all on drink. Soon-in two months time, in fact-he would be entitled to enforce the Dames’ Tax and to take half the dowry of any heiress left in the village who had not wed. That included her, of course. She was the only heiress left, apart from Flora Minchin and Mary Wheeler. Monty’s money-grubbing ways really had to be stopped once and for all, Lizzie thought. She knew that Laura Anstruther had instructed her lawyers to start working on the case the previous year. She needed to talk to Laura and see what they could do about Monty. She would go to the Old Palace after she had scraped together some breakfast. She could see Laura and Lydia, too, and inquire after their health, for both were advanced in their pregnancy now. And she need have no fear that her friends would suspect that anything was wrong with her because all was settled.

  Nothing happened…Lizzie remembered her childish nightmares, and how she would pretend that if she did not look at the monsters that would mean that they really weren’t there at all.

  She went out onto the landing. The door of Monty’s bedroom was closed whilst that of Tom’s stood ajar with the light streaming out into the corridor. Dust motes jumped and danced in the sunlight. The plaster was peeling from the walls and the floorboards creaked beneath Lizzie’s feet. At times like this Fortune Hall seemed every one of its three hundred and more years old. It feels like I do, Lizzie thought, old and worn. She had come to Fortune Hall to live with her half brothers after her father had died. She had been eleven years old and to be plunged from the warmth, laughter and hedonism of Scarlet Park into the peeling and decrepit existence of Fortune Hall had been a terrible shock. Scarlet Park had been a bright, shining world. Fortune Hall was its opposite in every way.

  Shivering, Lizzie hastened down the wide wooden stairs and into the kitchen, where a sullen youth was listlessly sweeping the flagged floor and the kitchen maid was peeling a pile of rotting vegetables and grumbling to the Cook at the same time. They all smiled as Lizzie came in though, and Cook pushed a plate of eggs and gammon toward her along the trencher table.

  “There you are, pet,” she said. “Thought you might need something solid after last night. You should keep off the brandy,” she added, “or your head will be as addled as your brother’s.”

  “God forbid,” Lizzie said, shuddering. She looked at the plate of congealing food and felt her stomach lurch. How on earth did the servants know of her drinking habits? Nat was right when he said they knew everything. She felt a little shiver of apprehension.

  “Get it down you,” Cook said, slapping a beaker of strong tea down beside her. “Nothing’s so sovereign for the headache, in my experience.”

  Lizzie managed to force some of the gammon down and drank the tea, then clapped a bonnet haphazardly over her head before setting off down the drive toward the village. None of the gardeners were about. The weeds grew plentifully through the gravel and even Sir Monty’s flower garden, for many years his pride and joy, was a tangle of nettles and dock now that he had abandoned gardening as a pursuit in favor of stealing people’s money.

  Lizzie walked along the river to Laura’s house, The Old Palace. The day was hot and the water glinted appealingly in the sun. Lizzie’s spirits lifted as she contemplated a swim later on. As a child she had swum in the lake at Scarlet Park and then the moat at the Hall and she had no time for the shrinking of those who considered bathing to be unhealthy and unladylike.

  She could hear voices on the terrace as she approached The Old Palace and coming up through the meadow gate she found not only Laura Anstruther and Lydia Cole but Alice Vickery as well. They were sitting beneath the shade of an enormous striped umbrella and taking tea. Laura and Lydia looked hugely pregnant for they were both near their time now and as Lizzie stood unnoticed in the shadow of the gate, she felt another pang of emotion like the one that had struck her earlier as she was dressing. The mysteries of motherhood were utterly unfamiliar to her and she was not sure that she could even begin to comprehend them, yet there was something about having a child that felt infinitely precious to her even as it terrified her. She took a deep breath. It would not happen to her. She was sure of it. It was better simply not to think about it at all and pretend once more that nothing had happened. She pushed open the gate and went forward onto the terrace, a smile firmly fixed on her face.

  “Laura, you are blossoming!” she said. “I am so glad to see you well!”

  “Lizzie!” Laura’s face broke into a warm smile and she grasped Lizzie’s hands and drew her forward to kiss her cheek. She had been sick for most of her pregnancy but now she was indeed looking extremely well, her skin glowing and a very warm and contented smile in her eyes. “We were worried about you,” she added. “Alice said that she had called several times but that you were either indisposed or from home. I would have come myself but it takes me a good half hour to move five paces!”

  “I’m sorry,” Lizzie said contritely, going across to kiss Lydia and Alice before taking a seat back beside Laura on a long, cushioned bench in the shade of the parasol. “It was only a trifling chill and I am quite well now.” She did not miss the look that flashed between Alice and Lydia. She knew what it meant. They were her best friends and they knew her so well and they did not believe her. They knew she had never had a day’s illness in her life.

  “Lemonade or tea, Lizzie?” Laura asked, breaking the rather odd moment. “And would you like some plum cake?”

  “If Alice has made it then yes please,” Lizzie said, smiling at Alice. “And I shall have lemonade please, Laura.”

  “We heard that you were at Lady Wheeler’s dinner last night,” Alice said, her blue eyes bright as they rested on Lizzie’s face. “Mary called this morning. She said that Viscount Jerrold was paying you a great deal of attention.”

  “Oh, Johnny is an old friend of mine, as you know,” Lizzie said lightly. She noticed that Lydia had blushed a little at the mention of John Jerrold’s name and she wondered at it. Lydia had been completely ruined by not one but two love affairs with Lizzie’s half brother Tom and had sworn off men forever as a result, but Lizzie remembered that John Jerro
ld had paid Lydia considerable attention before Tom had trampled all over her heart and her reputation. Lydia had also lost her fortune and her parents had been arrested for murder and her life was utterly in tatters. Lizzie knew that no man of consequence was ever likely to pay Lydia any honorable attention in future yet she could not but hope that one day her friend would find happiness. She wondered how Jerrold felt about Lydia now.

  “There is nothing going on between Johnny and me,” she said. “It was a dull evening and I drank more than I ought and now I have the headache, which I suppose serves me right.”

  “Mary said that Nat Waterhouse was also there,” Laura said, passing Lizzie her glass of lemonade and cutting a slice of the cake for her. “I was surprised to hear it-I did not know that he was a friend of the Wheeler family.”

  Lizzie felt the jealous bile rise in her chest as it had done the previous night. The others were all looking at her and she tried to keep her face blank. She had never been particularly good at hiding her feelings although she suspected she was getting better at it lately. She had certainly managed to deceive Nat as to how she felt about him. But she wished she could stop thinking about him. That would be a step forward.

  “I believe that Nat was there at Lady Willoughby’s invitation,” she said. She stumbled a little over Nat’s name, which was odd. She could not call him Lord Waterhouse, of course, for they had been friends for years and everyone would think it odd. But nor could she apparently talk of him with the same casual carelessness she had always used. She felt very self-conscious, all the more so as Lydia’s steady gaze was on her and was making Lizzie feel horribly vulnerable.

  “Lady Willoughby is Lady Wheeler’s cousin and I understand she is also an old flame of Nat’s,” she added hurriedly.