Black Widow: A Spellbound Regency Novel

by Lucy Leroux

  Gideon snorted and found the strength to take a deep breath. “Have the men who followed it come back?”

  “Not yet, but they will soon. And then, we’ll have them both.”

  He nodded, continuing to trudge through the scrub brush before turning to the cliff. “We need to get down to the beach.”

  How else would the monster move without being seen? It had to be walking along the deserted beach. If something of Sir Clarence was still in there, he wouldn’t want to be seen.

  Clarke understood his reasoning without explanation.

  “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 32

  Amelia’s knees ached. She tried to stand up and walk, only to bump her head on an unseen stone ceiling. So she crawled and crawled until she could feel the space around her opening.

  By that time, her knees were scored and likely bloody, but she couldn’t see them. The monster had attacked after she’d prepared for bed, and though the thick material of her sleeping gown had offered some protection, it hadn’t been enough. Her hands had also suffered.

  It could be worse. She could be trapped alone with the beast.

  She had woken alone, no pair of glowing eyes staring down at her. Amelia tensed at every imagined sound, expecting the golem to jump out at her. Had it abandoned her here to die?

  All Amelia knew was it wasn’t here now—it might not even return. She had to find her own way out of the dark.

  Fighting tears, she stiffened her spine. I’ve done it before, Amelia told herself sternly. She had made her way out of a stark and unhappy childhood, finding some measure of happiness with her best friend. It had been a pure but loving marriage. Then when she had lost Martin she had mourned him, finally reaching a place where she could live a life full of love and happiness with Gideon, the man she had adored almost her entire life.

  Martin would have approved. In fact, he would have gloated and said, ‘I told you so’ a dozen or so times.

  True, she had more or less fallen into the relationship of her dreams, but it took some courage to forget the scars of the past and accept love, didn’t it?

  No one, not even a monster, was going to take that from her.

  Her brave words fell to dust a few minutes later when she made her way into a big cavern where part of the ceiling had collapsed, letting in the moonlight.

  The golem was sitting against a stone wall on a big boulder. It looked right at her and hissed, the sound sending a bolt of fear through her.

  Oh, God. Oh, God. What do I do?

  Amelia clutched her hands together, afraid to breathe, let alone move.

  It hissed again and she trembled.

  Stop. Don’t panic. She needed to think clearly or she would never get out of this—never see Gideon again.

  Meeting the monster again was terrifying, but also revealing. Its massive size mocked her earlier resolve to destroy it. She didn’t have the strength—and then there was her child to think of.

  According to Mrs. Spencer, the golem had taken some of Sir Clarence’s anima, so there should be enough of him in there to understand her.

  “You should congratulate me, Sir Clarence. I’m carrying Gideon’s child.”

  The banked hellfire of its eyes brightened to red glowing coals and the hissing grew so loud it hurt her ears.

  Amelia clapped her hands over them and sobbed, immediately contrite. “I’m sorry.”

  The creature didn’t respond, but the hissing abated. Sniffling, she racked her brain for what else the mistress had said.

  Mrs. Spencer hadn’t been able to get close enough to get the chem, the script with the sacred words, out of the golem’s mouth. Would it let Amelia get close enough?

  Sir Clarence had never been an affectionate or trusting man. Pretending it was him and trying to hug it wouldn’t work.

  Amelia’s stomach roiled when she remembered the only time Sir Clarence had allowed—nay demanded—she be close to him.

  After my lessons.

  A pit opened in the bottom of her stomach, threatening to swallow her up. More than anything in her childhood, she had hated going to her guardian’s study to recite what she had learned in her lessons that day.

  Her hands shook as she brushed an errant curl out of her eye. This is the only way to get close enough.

  She wiped away the moisture that was making it hard to see and stepped forward, her head down, hands clasped in front of her, the way she had every time she’d done this as a girl.

  “I’m finished with my tutor, Sir Clarence.”

  She waited, and then inhaled sharply when it whistled and moved its hand to wave her over, exactly the way Sir Clarence always had.

  Inch by inch, she stepped closer, her thrumming heartbeat deafening her. She couldn’t even hear her own footsteps.

  The clay hand reaching for her was an abomination. She knew that. But buried inside the earthen automaton were the memories of a man—Sir Clarence—whose consuming lust she had been trying to evade her whole adult life.

  She had to use that now. Amelia nodded to herself, reaching deep inside for the detachment she had discovered those long-ago afternoons in Sir Clarence’s study.

  When she reached the golem, she curtsied. It leaned back, making room to let her sit.

  Just like before. Sick with fear, she turned around and sat on the golem’s lap.

  Buried memories rose. In her mind’s eye, she could see Sir Clarence’s hands opening her bodice, stroking her fourteen-year-old breasts. She’d already had a womanly shape by then, but Sir Clarence had insisted she was still a child—even when he was touching and weighing their fullness while asking, almost to himself, what he was going to do with her.

  All the details she had avoided recalling for so long came rushing back—the sickly sweet smell of tobacco and stale peppermint. To this day, she couldn’t abide tobacco smoke. Then there was the way he would sit, positioning her so her backside would rub along his hard staff.

  It had never progressed farther than that. Amelia had been so ignorant back then; she hadn’t even known what she was being spared. All she had known was that she abhorred Sir Clarence’s touch.

  She had been too ashamed to tell anyone…even Martin. But he had found out anyway when he’d arrived home from school unexpectedly one afternoon. Martin had walked in on them. Sir Clarence had yelled at him and sent him away, but he’d come to her later and she’d burst into tears.

  That was the afternoon he’d first promised to take her away.

  Yes, that was it. It had been his idea at first. She had repeated the request so often in the following years, she’d forgotten that detail. For years, she believed it had been her plan from the start.

  The golem hissed in her ear, and she started in fear. Of course. She had to recite her lessons. “Decem, viginti, triginta…”

  As if on cue, the clay hands moved to her bodice, but the woolen gown didn’t have lacings.

  Amelia opened her eyes wide. Now. She had to do this now before she lost her nerve entirely.

  Turning around slowly, she rose to her feet in a slow sensual movement.

  If she was right, there was a twisted little fragment of Sir Clarence in there that had been waiting, longing, for this moment.

  “Happy birthday, Sir Clarence.”

  The kisses she had been forced to give him once a year had been perfunctory—quick closed-mouthed pecks finished as quickly as possible.

  This was not one of those. Amelia stared down at the golem, imagining she could see Sir Clarence’s whiskered face between her hands. Then she knelt with parted lips that it met with a slow heavy movement of its head.

  Ignoring the sharp exhalation of air that accompanied the creature’s hissing speech, she met its clay mouth with her own. It didn’t have lips, just a slash of an opening. But it acted as she predicted—like a man aware of a woman.

  A little more. Amelia gingerly parted her lips. Her tongue touched the edge of paper—the chem. Fortunately for her, it stuck, allowing her to withdra
w it enough to grasp it with her teeth.

  Snatching it back, she reared away before the golem—Sir Clarence—realized what she had done.

  It seemed to know. It looked at the chem, crumpled in her hand, and hissed a final time before slumping over. The light in its eyes dimmed and died.

  Amelia stared at the creature for a long moment. The hazy outline blurred, and she realized she was crying.

  Whatever Sir Clarence had been in life, he hadn’t deserved becoming this.

  And I didn’t deserve what he did to me. That was something she had never admitted to herself before.

  She shed a few final tears and resolved that the golem would stay here. She wouldn’t let Gideon take it out. If he insisted on destroying it, he could send men here to do it, but this place—this would be Sir Clarence’s final tomb.

  Picking up the hem of her woolen gown, she turned around and walked away, leaving her most terrible memories behind.

  Chapter 33

  “My lord, we heard her!”

  Manning and John came running up to him.

  “Where?” Gideon asked, his heart in this throat.

  “Back up at the house. Simmons was standing near the hole in the Abbey floor, and he heard her. We yelled, and she answered. Just her.”

  Oh, thank the good Lord. Gideon staggered, accepting Clarke’s bracing hand before he fell out of sheer relief. Together, they struggled up the narrow cliff path. Heedless of how he looked to the other men, he ran across the grounds and into the house like a madman.

  “Amelia?” he called down into the pit.

  “Gideon!” Her voice was a little hollow as it echoed through the vast space below their feet.

  Tears blurred his vision as he got down on his hands and knees. “Are you all right? Where is the golem?”

  “It’s dead, Gideon. I destroyed the chem.”

  Stunned, he stared down at the dark. Was it his imagination or was the touch of white her face?

  “My lord, we have ropes, but they’re too short,” Manning said. “We are tying them together, and thought we would secure a lantern to the end so we can see her better.”

  “Yes, do it. But make sure those knots are secure,” he ordered, glad someone had kept their head.

  Good lord, Amelia had destroyed the chem. She had single-handedly slain the monster—without his help!

  “We’re lowering a lamp,” he called down, pushing his astonishment and misgivings to the back of his mind.

  The lamp in question was thrust into his hand, and he lowered it down himself. It bobbed at the end of his tether, lighting the rough brick walls that formed the basement of the old ruin beneath them.

  A flurry of white moved toward the glow, growing brighter the closer it came to the source of illumination.

  “Amelia!” She really was all right. In fact, she might have been smiling up at him as she took the lamp and grasped the handle in her hand.

  “Get more rope,” he called out, eyeing the jagged edges of the floor. What if they frayed the rope? “And blankets,” he yelled behind him.

  Feet pounded away to obey his orders, but Amelia called out to him before they got too far.

  “Gideon, I think there’s a way out to the beach from down here. I can see a bit of it through a gap in a cavern adjoining this one. I can even feel the wind!”

  If they could break through the wall, it would be much safer than hauling her through the hole in the Abbey floor. He didn’t even know if she could tie a proper knot to secure around herself. “We’ll go down there,” he decided. “Which direction is it in?”

  Amelia held the lantern up to illuminate her arms better and pointed.

  “Go. Wait at the gap. I’ll be right there,” he promised.

  “Hurry!”

  Calling all the men to him, Gideon and Clarke searched the shoreline for a break in the stone walls that would lead them to the cavern where Amelia was.

  Worried when he couldn’t hear her, Gideon was about to send someone to rouse the local magistrate. He would insist on having every able-bodied man join the search.

  A shout went up, and he and Clarke rushed forward.

  “Gideon!” Amelia’s white fingers almost glowed against the unrelenting darkness of the stone around them. They were poking out of a small gap the width of his hand.

  He grabbed them and swore. “Tell me you’re all right!” he barked, his voice sharpening in his distress.

  “I’m fine. My head hurts a bit and I’m cold, but I’m fine.”

  Gideon put his mouth to the gap. “Is it really dead?” he asked.

  He could see some movement on the other side and realized she was nodding.

  Gideon didn’t want to know anymore. Explanations could come later. Picking up the axe himself, he ordered her back and got to work.

  Breaking down the wall was the work of a few minutes. They had been prepared with picks and mallets to use on the golem. Instead, he and his men used them to break down the rock face—alternately using their hands to expand the narrow opening of the cavern when necessary. The space must have been part of the network the Abbey had been built over.

  As soon as the opening was wide enough, Amelia squeezed through, practically leaping into his arms.

  Gideon didn’t care if everyone was watching them or that they were cheering, or like young John, crying in relief. He held Amelia tightly to him, his grip a little too hard.

  “Take me away, Gideon,” she whispered into his neck.

  “Anything you want,” he promised.

  Confirming that the golem was really gone—and cracking it to pieces—could wait.

  His wife wanted to go home.

  Epilogue

  “Martin Wells, you come out from behind there immediately.”

  Gideon paused to admire his wife’s rounded backside as she knelt on the floor in front of one of her office’s many cupboards.

  A boyish giggle emerged from inside the cupboard, and Gideon smiled. He found his son’s new habit of hiding and jumping out to scare him priceless. It reminded him of Martin. His cousin had done the same thing as a child.

  Gideon could never admit to being amused aloud of course. The game of hide and screech was driving Amelia daft. She was always worried baby Martin would be lost forever in the vast interior of Tarryhall.

  He had learned a trick that helped, however. A few berry-flavored biscuits would lure his son out of wherever he had secreted himself. Gideon had taken up the habit of carrying them in his pocket and leaving them out in whichever room he suspected his son of hiding in. Inevitably, the treat would get Martin’s chubby little legs moving. He might take the cookies straight back to his hidey-hole, but a telltale trail of crumbs would usually point the way.

  The housekeeper did not agree with his method, nor did Amelia, who chided him for it outright.

  “You may as well hang out a sign welcoming vermin, Gideon,” she would scold every time she caught him putting the biscuits out.

  Instead of arguing with her, he’d distract her with a kiss. If he remembered right, it would be a few years before they’d be able to break Martin of this new habit.

  Today, he was able to take advantage of his wife’s current position to kneel behind her, running his hands against her lush curves.

  “Do you need a biscuit?”

  He laughed and ducked when Amelia turned to swat him.

  “You only encourage him to hide so he can wheedle more sweets out of you.”

  He acknowledged her words with a hum. “Perhaps, but we’ve already lost the war, love. It’s time for concessions. Or—”

  Gideon reached into the cupboard suddenly and pried his son’s fingers away from the interior, pulling him out with gentle force. “Or it’s time for outright trickery. And possibly a nap.”

  Martin laughed in his face and yelled. “No nap!”

  “I understand your reluctance, my son, but I must insist. Naps are a necessary evil.” He walked to the door and called for the nurse. She took
his son away before Gideon added “bath” in a whisper before nap.

  He waited for the resulting howls to die away before turning back to Amelia with a wicked grin.

  She rolled her eyes and went to her desk.

  “The invitation came today,” she said, waving a cream-colored envelope at him.

  He groaned aloud. “We just came back from town.”

  “The wedding won’t be in London. Mrs. Chisholm finally gave up the idea of having the ceremony in St. Georges.”

  “Good for Crispin,” Gideon murmured. “I didn’t think he would prevail on that score.”

  Lord Worthing’s future mother-in-law was a termagant. He worried for Crispin’s future wedded bliss, but also worried for Clarke, his closest friend. It couldn’t be easy to watch the man one loved marry another, even if it was destined to be a typical polite and bloodless ton union.

  “Cecily is a far more reasonable creature.”

  “But equally determined,” he pointed out. “It’s been at least two seasons since she started chasing Crispin. One must admire her persistence.”

  “Yes, well, I can’t really blame her for setting her cap at him,” Amelia said loyally. “He is a wonderful friend and will make a doting husband. Her finances aside, theirs will prove an advantageous match on both sides. She gets the security her family needs, and Crispin gets the understanding wife he always wanted.”

  Gideon sniffed, aware Lord Worthing had once wanted Amelia to fulfill that role. But it had worked out as well as was possible given the circumstances.

  Cecily Chisholm was in fact, an imminently practical young woman. Her family had spent the last of their dwindling fortune on her two seasons. They needed her to marry well or the whole lot would be ruined. Cecily had taken stock of the ton’s eligible bachelors with a startlingly discerning eye. She had chosen Lord Worthing, apparently aware that his inclinations lay elsewhere—and not for Amelia as the ton had assumed.

  Yes, Cecily had been very perceptive. Her next move proved it. Giving up on gaining ground with Worthing himself, she had spoken to Amelia. After their private conversation, the details of which neither would disclose, his wife had agreed to champion Cecily’s cause. After all, Crispin still needed to marry and produce an heir. He also had sufficient wealth to be able to overlook a lack of dowry and some family debt in his prospective bride.