by Sophia James
Her brothers had bought her a gift of inestimable value, a man she could respect and admire and adore—a man who had risked his life to save hers and who now lay unconscious as payment for his valour.
Already the sun had fallen, daylight leached from dusk, the long shadow of night upon them. Holding him closer, she tried to impart some of her warmth into his cold, her fingers tracing the shape of him in the darkness.
He was hers and she would protect him. At Alderworth now the alarm would surely have been raised and help would be coming.
The sounds of others came quietly at first and then more loudly, the length of rope trailing above twitching and raised. She could see nothing now, the black complete.
Then there were more voices, men’s voices. She recognised some of the tones of the Alderworth servants as another line dropped down beside her. A thicker rope this time and longer.
When a figure came from out of the gloom she could only watch, scared to move in case she hurt Taylen further.
A tinder flared and then there was light, a face outlined by the flame. He pulled three times on the rope and another one dropped, a man she did not recognise at all on the end of it. In his hands was a long roll of heavy calico, the ends tied to folded poles of wood.
‘Briggs, your Grace. The dog led us here. Has he woken at all?’
She shook her head in answer.
‘The doctor has been summoned and will be at the house by the time we are back with him.’
Laying the fabric of the stretcher to one side, they pulled the contraption into a narrow bed. The mud and water had soaked through the canvas even before they lifted Taylen slowly on to it. The pain must have leaked into his unconscious mind for he groaned, the ache in his voice making Lucinda grimace.
‘Be careful,’ she pleaded as the stretcher was hoisted, one foot up from the ground and then two, both men steadying an end each as they all rose, the eerie shadows of the torches showing up broken patches of the sheer earthen walls.
She was the only one left down here now, and she got to her feet unsteadily after such a long time sitting, the stretcher disappearing over the top of the lip in a calm and easy way.
Safety. Lucinda could almost taste the relief of it. The dog was barking and more lights above took away the gloom. She could make out the flares against the black sky as another figure descended. Briggs again and holding the rope she had fashioned into foot and finger holds out to her.
‘I will come up beside you, your Grace. Just hold on and they will pull you up.’
A moment later jostling hands helped her over the top and she was once again standing in open air, the huge blackness of sky above her, a few stars twinkling through the gaps in the clouds.
Taylen lay motionless, his cheeks pale and the dark runnels of dried blood powdered on his temple. He barely seemed alive, though when Lucinda laid her hand against his he tried to turn and say something. His green eyes were lost in the swollen bruising.
‘You are safe now,’ she said. ‘There will be no more pain, I promise.’ As if he understood his eyes closed of their own accord and he breathed out, heavily.
The blankets covering him were thick and warm and Lucinda felt someone place another one across her shoulders. When a cart was drawn into place a few yards away she watched as more blankets were laid down on the floor as a cushion to transport her husband back to Alderworth.
Swan the dog crawled in beside him.
‘The Duke will need complete rest and quiet,’ the doctor proclaimed as he regarded Taylen a few hours later. ‘He has had a nasty knock to his head and concussion has resulted. From my experience with similar cases it may be a week or so until he comes to his senses, for Briggs told me it was at least twelve feet to the bottom of the well.’
The Ellesmere physician stood to one side of the bed as he stated his findings, a passionless man with little in the way of a comforting bedside manner.
‘But he will recover?’ Lucinda asked the question with trepidation, for Taylen was looking worse and worse as the hours marched on.
‘The brain has its own peculiar timings and reasons to stay inactive; some people come back to consciousness very quickly, others languish on the netherworld for weeks or months or even years. Some stay there for ever. It is God’s will. Talk to him. Tell him all the news of the house. There is a new school of thought gaining traction that says those in a deep coma are none the less aware of things about them if they have a constant source of translation from a loved one.’
A loved one? Did she qualify as that or would any interaction between them make him even worse?
‘If you need me in what is left of the night, send a messenger. Otherwise I will return tomorrow afternoon to see how my patient is progressing.’
Then he was gone, Taylen lying still and Mrs Berwick fussing about with the sheets at his side.
‘Are you certain you do not wish me to stay, your Grace?’
Lucinda shook her head, not trusting herself to speak and when the woman finally took her leave she sat on a chair beside her husband and reached for his hand. The nail on his right thumb had been pulled off and there were cuts across the fingers. ‘If I could heal you, my darling, I would,’ she murmured, tucking the blanket in further and dousing the candles so that only one still blazed, protected by a glass cover as a precaution against fire.
She watched him as the sun appeared above the hills that she held no name for, the horizon aglow with pink and yellow. She watched the rise and fall of his breath, too, and the pulse in his throat where the stubble of a twelve-hour growth darkened his skin.
His chest was bare and she could just make out the tail end of the scars by his neck where the marks had curved around from his back and licked at the sensitive folds of his throat.
Hurt by life and by his family, and then censured by society and tossed out of England all because of her lies. And all the time he had stood up to her brothers with the knowledge of what he had not done. Halsey, too. The broken ribs and the ruined face. Nobody had ever believed in him and loved him as they should have.
Nobody until now. Her grip tightened.
‘I love you, Taylen. I love you so much that it hurts.’ She hated the tears that were gathering in her eyes. ‘If you die I don’t know what I will do because there is nobody else who understands me, who makes me feel … perfect.’
Not flawed, not foolish, not merely pretty, but beautiful and strong and completely herself. Finally after all these years she knew what she had been missing, a friend, a lover, a man who might sacrifice his life to save her own.
Anger came next and she shook his hand before holding it to her lips. ‘Don’t you dare leave me, Taylen, because if you do I will kill you, I swear that I will …’
‘Water?’ The voice came croaky and deep as dark-green eyes found hers, dazed with the strong painkillers. She could not quite believe that he was conscious.
‘You can hear me?’
He nodded. ‘You were … threatening me.’
‘And loving you.’ She had to say it, had to make him understand.
‘That, too.’ The creases around his eyes deepened.
‘For ever. I will love you for ever.’ She did not try to stop the tears now as they fell in runnels down her cheeks.
Tipping his head, she offered him a drink of boiled water from a jug, careful to give only small sips in the way that the doctor had directed.
Pain scrawled deep lines into his face and he grimaced as he tried to move.
‘You have a bad bump to the head and your ankle is sprained. The doctor says you are to stay very still. He will be pleased to know you have woken.’
‘How … long?’
‘Just a few hours. It is five o’clock in the morning and they brought you to Alderworth last night after eleven.’
Reaching for her hand, he held on.
‘Don’t go.’
Before she could even answer he had fallen back to sleep.
Everything hurt. His hea
d and his eyes and his neck. He had a tight bandage wound around the top of his forehead and a flickering light had been left beside him.
Lucinda—his last moments of seeing her safe, climbing up the rope from the well at the bottom of the Thompson’s Ranges. She had spoken to him some time later in the cold and the mud and then again somewhere else.
Here. His bedroom. A small hand entwined in his own. Warmth and hope and safety, her breathing even and deep beside him and the moon waning towards the dawn. Home. With his wife. Closing his eyes again, he fell asleep.
Asher Wellingham was there when he next woke up, stretched out on a chair, his long legs before him. Lucinda had gone. He felt around for her with the hand that she had held and found the bed empty.
It was almost noon because the sun was high and the shadows at the window folded down on to one another. The blue openness of sky through the drawn curtains hurt his eyes with its brightness.
‘You saved Lucy and put your own life at risk. I want to thank you for that. If you had not come when you did …’ He stopped, regrouping emotion before beginning again.
Seeing him awake, Asher spoke, as if his message was urgent. ‘Lucinda has told us that she was mistaken about her allegations of intimacy with you at Alderworth three years ago. We had you thrown out of England on a lie, Alderworth, and you would have good reason to hate us.’
All these words at once, Tay thought, tumbling into the air around him. Where was his wife? He wanted her back.
‘Lucinda?’
‘She has slept beside you for the past three nights since the accident. We all thought it was time she looked after herself and took a break, though I should imagine she will be back before the clock strikes the next part of the hour. It seems she cannot stay away.’
Exhaustion hammered at Tay like a mallet and he let his eyes close.
The next time he awoke it was night and Lucinda was there, watching him.
‘Welcome back.’ Her smile was shy and her hair was loose, dancing in pale waves across her shoulders and down her back.
‘Beautiful.’ And she was, in every single way that he might imagine.
‘Thank you for saving me, Taylen.’ Her fingers traced the lines of a scratch across the back of his hand as though measuring the hurt. ‘If you had not come …’
He stopped her. ‘But I did.’
Tonight the world was sharper, less hazy. He could even lift his head from the pillow and it did not ache.
‘How many days?’
‘Four.’
He brought up his free hand to feel the bandage.
Memories. After Rouen. A small child without a hope in hell of protecting himself.
Lucinda knew everything hidden and still loved him?
A bunch of wildflowers sat in a vase opposite the bed, and for the first time ever the bile did not rise up in Tay’s throat as he thought of his uncle. It was over, finished, and there was all of the future to look forward to. The peace of it made him smile as he spoke. ‘You look happy.’
‘I am. With you here next to me and a whole night of just us. Ashe also sat with you each time that I did not. Taris came, too, and Cristo. They all hope you can forgive them.’
This time he laughed. ‘Forgive them for forcing you upon me? Forgive them for making my life … whole?’
Catching her hand, he brought it to his lips and noticed an injury on the top of her knuckles from the fall. Further up on her wrist an older scar from the carriage accident lingered. He wanted to wrap her in his arms and keep her close.
When she lay down beside him to sleep he knew that he would never be lonely again.
They were all in the Alderworth dining room at the end of dinner, celebrating the first time that Taylen had been able to come downstairs unaided.
A week since he had fallen down the well. Lucinda thought it seemed like a lifetime ago.
Everyone was present, her brothers and their wives and Posy.
Cristo made certain that a comfortable chair was angled in the best way for Tay to sit in and Asher got him a drink. It was strange to see her brothers fussing over a man they had hated not so very long ago.
When Taris raised his glass he gave a toast. ‘Here is to you, Taylen, and a warm welcome to our family. The beginning may not have been exactly comfortable, but we have many years now to make up for it.’
Tay smiled and took Lucinda’s hand. ‘Without your … help—’ he gave the word the inflection of a question and everybody laughed ‘—I may not have found my wife.’ He raised his own glass now and looked directly at her. ‘To you, Lucinda, and to family.’
His green eyes brimmed with a happiness that softened the lines in his face. To Lucinda he looked the most beautiful man in the world, her man, and a husband who made her feel strong and real.
Intrinsically flawed? No, she felt far, far from that.
‘To life and to laughter,’ she toasted in return and looked around the table at the smiling faces as she held up her glass.
Happiness was a feeling that was almost physical. Emerald’s jade talisman was warm in her palm and she knew for certain that she would ask Emerald if she could give it to Posy, who sat next to her with a look on her face that she thought might have been her own a few months back.
An observer of life, but wanting so much more.
‘Has your memory returned fully yet, Lucy?’ Beatrice asked the question.
‘It hasn’t. But there are new memories now which have replaced those old ones.’
‘Then let us drink to that.’ Cristo stood and poured fresh brandy into all the glasses. ‘But be warned, Duke, once a Wellingham, always a Wellingham. Eight of us now and that is not counting any of the children.’
Lucinda’s eyes met her husband’s. Children. How she hoped that the time would come when she held the heir of Ellesmere safely in her arms.
Chapter Sixteen
London—three months later.
Tay had always hated these big society events for all of the falseness and the inherent censure within them. As the Duke of Alderworth he had been invited because of his title, but the ton had tiptoed around him, feared him, he supposed, and worried about what he might do or say next, every new and over-exaggerated myth that had built up around him adding to their trepidation.
An outsider. A Duke asked because it was harder to leave him out, such a slight a reminder of how far the Alderworth star had indeed fallen. Oh, granted, there were those amongst the ton who would gravitate to him, but they were often men he felt no true communion with or else young bucks satisfying their first urges to kick the traces and to irritate their more-than-disapproving families.
But tonight with the lights of the chandeliers full upon him and a dozen of the Wellinghams around him it was different. Every eye in the place might be turned towards their party, but the usual alarm that prickled inside him on entering such a salon was missing.
Safety. Belonging. The feel of his wife’s hand tucked through the crook of his arm and her oldest brother beside him.
‘A smile might persuade those who are here to criticise you to do otherwise, Tay.’
‘You think it that easy?’ Months of getting to know Asher Wellingham had brought them together as friends.
‘The ton revolves around a large measure of deceit. Surely you have learned at least that?’
Such an answer did make it easy to smile, to simply laugh at all the implied deceit and make use of it. Taylen saw Taris smile, too, his wife, Beatrice-Maude, beside him in the company of Cristo, Emerald and Eleanor. Asher’s friend, Jack Henshaw, also lingered amongst them, Posy Tompkins on his arm and dressed in the most absurdly expensive gown, the diamonds on the cloth glittering in the light. The plain jade pendant she had around her throat seemed very out of place in the ensemble and Tay remembered seeing the piece around Lucinda’s neck and wondered.
Altogether they made up a high-ranking and prominent group and although the power of money and title was behind them, it was something much more t
han that again that made Tay’s heart swell with pride.
Respect was something he was not used to, but it came tonight in waves from those who watched them, the consequence, he supposed, of the years of good works and care of others the Wellinghams had been involved in. And he belonged, not in the game room amongst the card sharps and the drunken care-for-nothings, but here in the bosom of the protective custody of the Carisbrooks. One of them. For ever.
His hand tightened on his wife’s. ‘Can I reserve every single dance, sweetheart?’
‘I have already pencilled you in, Tay.’
In a light gold dress Lucinda looked unmatchable, her hair wound into curls and the décolletage on her dress showing off the creamy skin of her breasts.
‘Should your bodice be quite so revealing?’
She simply laughed. ‘This from a man who insists I come naked to bed every night?’
‘There it is only us, but here …’ He looked around. A good percentage of the men in the room had their eyes fastened upon his wife and he knew exactly why. It was the joy that seemed to well up in Lucinda like a fountain, spilling around her as laughter and honesty and delight. And there was something else that only he was privy to, a wild and wonderful secret that had not yet been told to anyone, save him.
They would have a child in less than six months, and there had been no payment except for love involved in its conception.
His whole being filled with a feeling that almost frightened him with its intensity and yet when he looked at Taris and Ashe and Cristo he saw the same desperation in their eyes, too. Men made whole by their women and astonished by the fact over and over again.
‘How many hours until we can be back in our bedchamber?’ he whispered and saw the flush of pleasure stain her cheeks. God, he loved her puritanical bent because it was so much fun dismantling it every single night.
‘Five waltzes at least, Duke,’ she replied, knowing how he enjoyed holding her close to feel the slight swell of her stomach between them. Three months along. The newest Ellesmere. Another Wellingham. A cousin for all the numerous children who ran and laughed in the great estates of Falder and Beaconsfield and Graveson. Another belonging. More protection. A tight circle of safe-keeping.
