by Lena Dowling
The earl came to an abrupt stop outside the stables, and Thea all but forgot about Mr Hunter for a moment as her father let out a sound she had never before heard in her life.
He bellowed.
‘Come here, Smithie, now!’
George Smithie emerged from the stable, coming to stand in front of her father. He trembled, his eyes downcast to the cobbles.
‘Turn around,’ the earl’s voice boomed, as loud as it had been before, his face now contorted, turning a deep red.
George did as he was told.
‘And take off your shirt, unless you want it cut to ribbons.’
The stableboy pulled his arms over his head and dragged the garment off, dropping it to the ground. He stood bravely, but shaking hands gave away his fear.
A lump the size of a stone expanded in Thea’s throat.
This was so unlike her father. She had rarely seen him the least bit animated before, let alone enraged. Surely a harmless kiss hadn’t riled him to this extent, and he didn’t mean to hurt the boy? Frighten him, yes, but horsewhip him?
It was unthinkable.
Yet it seemed as if that is exactly what he meant to do.
She wrung her hands together. She wouldn’t see George punished for something that was not his fault, but surely this was only a scare tactic. There was no need to admit that she had been responsible unless she had to.
If she held her nerve…
But then her father raised the whip, moving to bring it down. If she didn’t do something, he was going to strike the boy.
‘Stop, Father, stop! I was to blame.’
The earl dropped his arm, pausing halfway, his elbow crooked, as if he were undecided. He looked back over his shoulder at Thea.
‘Come now, you surely don’t expect me to believe that you tried to seduce him?’ The words came harsh from the back of her father’s throat, spittle forming in the corners of his mouth.
She struggled for a response until Mr Hunter’s mellow, assured voice cut through the silence.
‘I will take the boy’s punishment on the condition that he retains his employment.’
Mr Hunter took up a position beside her and proceeded to remove his tailcoat and waistcoat, followed by his cravat and shirt. A gasp reverberated around the courtyard. Thea brought a hand to her lips as she realised that one of them was her own. A group of female servants, all clustered at a safe distance, had reacted to Mr Hunter’s hard torso in the same way she had done.
Mr Hunter pushed his clothes into her hands. A musky masculine scent wafted up from the warm material. The effect made her jittery. Her knees wobbled, threatening to give out beneath her, until the earl’s hardened voice jolted her back to the present.
‘Why would you make such an offer, Mr Hunter?’
‘Lady Thea admitted fault, and I won’t see an innocent man thrashed. Besides, he is only a boy, and for me it would be barely more than a tickle.’
Thea stole another look at Mr Hunter. Muscles rippled down his stomach despite his relaxed pose. In comparison, her father looked like an old rag doll, temporarily pumped up in a tantrum.
Mr Hunter turned and Thea clapped a hand over her mouth. The servants gasped a second time. The strange marks she had observed on Mr Hunter’s neck at Almack’s were revealed as the very tips of a hideous crisscrossing of raised red scars, the thickness of a finger, covering his back.
A wave of nausea broke in Thea’s stomach. Mercifully, however, the appalling sight seemed to have the dual effect of quelling her father’s fury.
‘Very well, if your future husband is satisfied that you were at fault and is prepared to take the boy’s punishment, who am I to argue?’
The earl raised the whip again, this time in Mr Hunter’s direction.
Future husband.
The words were even less conceivable than her father inflicting an injury on another human being.
Thea struggled to stay upright as a great weight alighted on her, pushing her down. The cobbles moved, and then her legs buckled as she folded to the ground.
Chapter Three
The lash James had every sinew in his body tensed up to endure never came. In truth, a horsewhipping would have been more than a triviality, but compared to the flogging he had endured during transportation it would have been bearable. Tied to the mast, he had been whipped until his flesh tore open and blood ran in rivers down the deck. He had only managed to tolerate half the allotted lashes before he lost consciousness. After almost allowing the wounds to heal, the guards dragged him out again a few weeks later to take the balance of the strokes.
Instead of the knifing pain he had been expecting, squeals followed a thud. He ventured to swivel around. The noise had come from a group of servants. Lady Thea lay on the cobbles, her body wilted on the flagstones with her father flapping about her like a demented wench. Ignoring the earl’s idiot mitherings for the moment, James pulled her into his arms and carried her to the house.
Once inside, he started up the stairs to the bedchambers, pausing only when he reached the landing to seek directions to the lady’s room.
The earl, who had gone ahead of him, motioned through a door. Turning sideways so as not to strike her head on the jamb, James entered the chamber and placed Thea on the bed. A female servant who had followed them into the bedroom produced a bottle, and he stepped back to allow the appropriate ministrations.
A fragile angel, drained of colour, her already pale skin almost translucent, lay on the coverlet. Guilt washed over him. In the course of his discussion with Lady Thea at Almack’s, however offhandedly and in jest, he had been the one to suggest she fling herself at a man, and this was the result.
But, whatever had possessed her to choose some simpleton ostler as opposed to a scoundrel of her own rank? One who would at least have managed the overture with some discretion? He couldn’t fathom it.
Thea’s nose twitched. Her eyes flew open.
‘I won’t marry you, or anyone for that matter.’
‘Shush, my dear, you’ve had a shock. Rest and we will discuss this later.’ Eastbourne’s voice was quiet, the rage aroused when James had told him that he meant to call in the earl’s promise of Thea’s hand in marriage having subsided.
‘No, I want to talk about it now.’
Lady Thea pulled herself up into a sitting position, swinging her legs down to the floor, grasping the corner of the four-poster. Her gaze shifted to her father slumped on a seat by the dressing table. The earl opened and closed his mouth without making any sound.
It was time the woman knew what had been promised, yet it appeared that when it came to the necessary explanations, the earl was going to be worse than useless.
‘Perhaps I should explain then, Eastbourne?’
‘Yes, that would be best.’
The earl exhaled and dropped his shoulders.
‘Well, someone needs to.’
Lady Thea looked daggers from her father to him, her blue eyes darkening to the colour of fired steel.
At Almack’s, James had been sure Thea was going to swing for him with her purse. What he was about to say was likely to upset her a hundred times more than foiling her scheme in the supper room. James took a breath, and as a precaution glanced about for any blunt objects within the lady’s reach.
‘Just over eight years ago I worked as a clerk at Willers Bank when your brother Stephen was in training to take his place on the board.’
‘That’s Lord Willers to you, Mr Hunter.’
Thea thrust her gorgeous bosom outwards as she pulled herself more erect. The gesture, meant to intimidate, was oddly endearing from one so delicate and he had a sudden and ridiculous urge to spare her the truth.
Then he dismissed it.
Any sympathy now would be weakness. However difficult it might be for her to hear; a deal was a deal.
‘Yes well, Lord Willers your brother may be, but I also regret to say he is a dishonest reprobate. While employed at Willers Bank he uttered several counter
feit bills. Investigations were commenced that if allowed to proceed would have resulted in his conviction for fraud. I struck a bargain with your father to take Lord Willers’ punishment in return for a sum of money and certain bounty on my release.’
‘The bounty being me?’
‘Yes. Until I set eyes on you I wasn’t sure whether or not I wanted the prize. But now I have, I intend to keep the earl to his word.’
Thea blushed, blood rising to her cheeks like claret seeping through fine linen. So, her ladyship was not immune to his charms. James managed to force back down a stupid smile that threatened to engulf his face. Why did he care how the woman was disposed to him? The reaction irritated him. It mattered little what she thought, as long as he didn’t repulse her. Lady Thea was his key to Sydney’s elite, by whom he was tolerated as a man of wealth, but into which, as an emancipated convict, he was yet to fully penetrate.
At the time he made the bargain with Eastbourne he could have asked for a greater sum, rather than the earl’s daughter, but he had been canny enough to anticipate that if he survived his sentence, he was going to need more than money to return to society. A lady for a wife, with a wealthy earl for a father-in-law, would be the passport he required to infiltrate the New South Wales’ governor’s inner circle.
‘But unless you were also implicated in the deceit in some way, why put yourself to so great a risk?’
James scratched his chin. Her question impressed him. If he had been involved in the scam, his credibility would be nil. His claims about Stephen would be unlikely to be believed and she could justifiably refuse the marriage.
‘Until my older brother, Sir Harold Hunter, gambled the family fortune away the Hunter’s lived a comfortable existence, but Harold left us destitute. I subsisted on a meagre salary from the bank and was barely able to protect my mother from the poorhouse. When the opportunity arose to return my fortunes, I am not ashamed to admit that I took it.’
His fool of a brother’s inability to keep away from the gaming establishments had seen the Hunter’s punting down the River Tick for years. By the time Lord Willers’ fraud was discovered, they had reached the end of the line. Without Eastbourne’s money for taking Stephen’s place, the family home would have been sold, and his mother would have been on a one-way ticket to bankruptcy.
‘But the risks? How could you be sure you would be transported?’
Biggs had been right about her mind. She had immediately appreciated the wider ramifications of the plan.
‘Through my mother’s family I had connections to a high ranking officer in the Colonies Office. With him as the go-between, I was able to obtain the necessary guarantees any sentence of death would be commuted to transportation before I made the bargain.’
It also helped that educated men with commercial expertise were in short supply in burgeoning Sydney town. It had not been difficult for his mother’s relation to persuade the appropriate officials to transmute his sentence.
Thea’s face was strained in distress and concentration in equal measures.
‘I see.’
‘The earl and Lord Willers accepted my offer with gratitude. Forgive me for saying so, but Stephen is of a weak disposition and would not have stood the privations of convict life.’
Thea was silent. He followed her glance; a mixture of pity and disgust that fell on her father, now collapsed and impotent on a woman’s beauty stool.
‘I wagered my health and body strong enough to withstand seven years at His Majesty’s pleasure. The earl, on the other hand, gambled, not unreasonably, that I would die in chains…’
‘And lost me like a trinket at the card table,’ Lady Thea said, finishing his sentence.
The spark had fled her eyes. Her voice was tinged with resignation. He knew the pain that lay behind her expression. The memory of the moment he had discovered Harold’s treachery assailed him as if it were fresh. With only twelve months in age between them, they had shared the same adventures. They had ridden in the hunt for the first time and been blooded together. Harold’s first stag was taken by him only by virtue of his proprietary rights as the oldest, having been stalked by the both of them together. They had used the occasion of Harold’s coming of age as the excuse to make their first visit to a house of ill repute. He had chosen a buxom blonde and Harold had lost his innocence with a brilliant redhead. They still liked to raise a toast to the ‘white and the red’, something everyone else took as a reference to the wine.
He caught himself.
It had been their private joke. Now Harold was nothing to him.
But for the indisputable evidence of the family bank balance, he would never have believed Harold was capable of such treachery. If family betrayal had been outside his experience the exercise of gaining Lady Thea’s hand would have been a great deal easier. Before he could stop himself, he gave in to the temptation to comfort her.
‘My lady, I would never compare thee to a mere frippery — a treasure maybe, but never a trinket.’
Idiot.
The words intended as a salve slid off, useless, failing to cheer her in the slightest, and as if sensing a vulnerability in his concern, Thea thrust out her chest again.
‘And if I refuse to marry you?’
He had underestimated her, but surely she wouldn’t send her brother to the gallows?
He had allowed his feelings to get the better of him, confusing the past with the situation at hand, and she had sniffed out his weakness. He wouldn’t make that mistake a second time. He was here to see Eastbourne fulfil his promise and that was all.
‘Then I’m afraid the contract I made with your father is repudiated, and I will take my evidence of Lord Willers’ dishonesty to the authorities.’
He had no wish to hurt the woman any more than he had to. After all she was no more than an unwitting pawn in his contract with Eastbourne, but a man’s word was his honour. His side of the bargain had been fulfilled with him macerating in convict filth for seven years, and so far he had received only half of what he was due.
Lady Thea studied him with keen eyes.
‘Leave me. I need to think about this.’
She jumped to her feet and turned her back, her forehead dipped to the bedpost in thought, or pain, or both.
Of all the stupid, feckless….
While her indolent brother hadn’t amounted to much, she hadn’t pegged him as dishonest. Now the full horrors of his true character had been revealed, the result was that she was to be handed over to this Mr Hunter like a piece of horseflesh.
Even more mortifying was the little voice which, before she silenced it, asked if being surrendered to Mr Hunter might not actually be such a bad thing. There was after all something strangely attractive about the man’s agricultural physique, ruffian good looks and admirable fortitude in the face of adversity.
Where had that come from? Agree to marry Mr Hunter?
Never.
No, let Stephen, the toerag, go hang.
That should have been her first instinct, but the possibility he would actually swing by the neck was too great a chance to take. As much as he exasperated his family, he was her brother and, despite his shortcomings, when he wasn’t intoxicated, which sadly wasn’t often these days, he was tremendously good company.
‘What in God’s name is going on?’ The countess had broken her train of thought, standing over her, fists clapped to her hips. ‘The maids tell me you have agreed to marry that man who looks no better than a navvy in fancy dress, and he has set up like he means to camp here. You are to break off this ridiculous engagement immediately.’
‘I can’t, Mother.’
‘If you have done this to spite me, Dorothea—’
‘I have done nothing, Mother. You should speak to Father. He, and your darling Stephen, have put us in this fix.’
‘Steeeephen!’
The countess left her bedchamber, shrieking out for her brother, who was probably still unconscious, if he had been able to prise himself away
from the taverns to depart for Marven at all.
Thea pressed her two index fingers to each temple.
Think, Thea, think.
There had to be a way out of this.
There just had to be.
Chapter Four
Coming up with a plan took Thea most of the day and almost until the end of dinner. The meal had been a wordless affair. Her father did not look at her mother once, keeping his eyes on his plate, while the countess never ceased sending icicle glares in his direction. Her brother, who despite the circumstances would have lightened the affair with some humour, had failed to turn up at all. No one spoke to Mr Hunter, who had the good grace to eat his food in silence.
Thea stole a look at him. He had loaded his plate and attacked his meal with a full appetite while everyone else at the table toyed with theirs.
How could he be hungry?
She wanted to hate the man, but she couldn’t quite summon the requisite depth of resentment. He might have saved Stephen for his own selfish reasons, but Mr Hunter had spoken the truth when he said her brother would never have survived convict life; and for no reward at all Mr Hunter had bravely bared his back to save poor George.
Thea owed Mr Hunter nothing. Any debt was all her father’s doing, but wandering thoughts of charity and compassion took her to his side at the time of the atrocity that had caused his terrible scars, cleaning his wounds, and providing soothing words.
Instead, Mr Hunter had been the one to attend to her, sweeping her up into his arms. The strength in his touch had pulled her out of her faint as soon as he laid his hands on her. The sensation of his steady protective grip beneath her, one hand hooked under her knees, and the other below her arm, her head resting against his naked chest and his fingers almost touching her breast, sent her dizzy all over again.
Stop it, Thea.
She must not allow herself to be swayed by Mr Hunter’s courage, thoughts of his naked chest or naked anything else. She had to cease thinking like this and concentrate on getting out of this engagement. She was good with plans, or at least she had been until Mr Hunter turned up. Anyway, she already had the beginnings of an idea.
