The Secret Pearl

by Mary Balogh

  She might have hanged. She might still hang. But she would not think of it. Today her new life had begun, and she was going to be happier than she had been at any other time in her life—since the age of eight.

  She removed her dress, folded it neatly over the back of a chair, and lay down on top of the bedcovers in her chemise. How different from her room in London, she thought again, looking up to a silk-covered canopy over the bed, and looking about at neatness and cleanliness and hearing nothing but silence about her, except for the distant chirping of birds.

  She closed her eyes to float on blissful drowsiness. And saw him again—his face dark and angular and harsh, the scar a livid slash across it from the corner of his eye to his chin. Bending over her, his dark cold eyes looking directly into hers.

  His hands on her, first between her thighs and at the most secret place and then beneath her. And that other part of him searing its red-hot and relentless path into her very depths. She could feel it tearing her apart.

  “Whore,” he said to her. “Don’t think ever again to escape that label. You are a whore now and will be for the rest of your life, no matter how far or fast you run.”

  “No.” She shook her head from side to side on the bed, braced her feet more firmly on the floor, tried to pull back against his powerful hands so that he would not push so deeply into her. “No.”

  “This is not rape,” he said. “You have sold yourself to me of your own free will. You are going to take my money.”

  “Because I am starving,” she said, pleading with him. “Because I have not eaten for two days. Because I must survive.”

  “Whore,” he said softly. “It is because you enjoy it. You are enjoying it, aren’t you?”

  “No.” She squirmed to release herself from the strong hands that held her while he worked his pleasure in her. “No.”

  No. No. There was nothing of herself left. No dignity. No privacy. No identity. Deprived of her clothes. Held wide by his knees and the powerful muscles of his thighs. Invaded to the very core of her being. No.

  “No. No. No!”

  She was sitting up on the bed, sweating, shaking. The familiar dream. The dream that was haunting her nightly. One would have thought that it would be Hobson’s dead face that would come to her as soon as she released her hold on consciousness, she thought, but it was not. It was that of the gentleman with the ugly scar who had hovered over her, taking the very last possession that had been hers to give—or sell.

  Fleur got up wearily from the bed and stood before the window to cool her face. Would she never forget him? The sight of him? The feel of him?

  Had he really said those words to her? She could no longer remember. But his face and his body had said them even if he had not uttered them aloud.

  There surely could not be an uglier, more evil man in the world, she thought. And yet, memory reminded her, he had bought her food and insisted that she eat it. And he had paid her three times what she had asked for outside the theater. He had not done anything to her that she had not freely consented to.

  And he had brought her a cold cloth with which to cleanse away the blood and soothe herself.

  She rested her face in her hands. She must forget. She must accept this gift of a new life that some benevolent power had granted her.

  “THAT IS PRETTY, DARLING,” the Duchess of Ridgeway said, bending down to kiss her daughter on the cheek and glancing smilingly at the painting the child held up for her inspection. “I will certainly see her, Nanny. It must be made clear to her that she is to be subordinate to you and that she must not force Pamela into doing anything she does not wish to do.”

  “She is expecting to meet her charge this morning, my lady,” the nurse said. “I have explained to her that Lady Pamela likes to be quiet in the nursery during the mornings.”

  “Must I meet my new governess today, Mama?” the child asked petulantly. “Did Papa send her?”

  “He did it to provoke me, did he not?” the duchess said to her nurse. “He must have heard of my plans and thought to have his revenge by sending a prosing schoolmistress for my darling. But I have a right to company, don’t I? Just as much as he does. He is enjoying the Season in London. Does he think I can live here all alone and be dull? Does he think I do not need company too to dispel this endless boredom?” She coughed dryly and reached for a handkerchief.

  “I told you to wear a pelisse yesterday, lovey,” the nurse said. “It is still just spring, even if the sun does shine. You will never get rid of your chill if you don’t take care of yourself.”

  “Don’t fuss, Nanny,” the duchess said crossly. “I have had this cough since winter, even though I always bundled up warmly then, as you told me to. Do you suppose he will come home if he hears?”

  “I daresay he will, lovey,” the nurse said. “He usually does.”

  “He does not like me to have any enjoyment or company,” her grace said. “I hate him, Nanny. I really do.”

  “Hush,” the nurse said. “Not in front of Lady Pamela, lovey.”

  The duchess looked at the child and touched one soft dark ringlet. “Send her down to my sitting room, then,” she said, “this Miss Hamilton. Adam may have hired her, Nanny, but she must be made to see that she will be answerable to me. After all, Adam—”

  “Hush, lovey,” the nurse said firmly.

  The duchess kissed her child’s cheek again and swept from the room, her morning robe flowing out behind her.

  Her daughter watched her go wistfully. “Do you think she liked my picture, Nanny?” she asked.

  “I’m sure of it, lovey.” The nurse bent to hug her. “Mama adores you and everything you do.”

  “And will Papa like it?” the child asked. “Is he coming home?”

  “We will keep it carefully until he does,” Mrs. Clement said.

  WHEN FLEUR WAS USHERED into the duchess’s sitting room a short time later, it was empty. She stood quietly inside the door and waited, her hands folded before her. It was a small room, but quite exquisite. It was oval, with a painted dome for a ceiling and slender gilded Corinthian columns supporting the entablature. Decorative panels on an ivory-colored ground in pale reds, greens, pinks, and gold leaf made the walls delicate and feminine.

  She did not have a long wait. The door at the other end of the room opened to admit a small and dainty lady in a delicate blue muslin dress, her silver-blond hair piled in soft curls and ringlets on her head and about her face. The duchess was extremely beautiful and looked younger than her own twenty-three years, Fleur thought.

  “Miss Hamilton?” the duchess asked.

  Fleur curtsied. “Your grace.”

  She found herself being openly surveyed from head to foot by the duchess’s light blue eyes.

  “My husband has sent you here as governess to my daughter?” The voice was sweet and breathless.

  Fleur inclined her head.

  “Do you realize that at the age of five she is not yet in need of teaching?” her grace asked.

  “But there is a great deal even so young a child can learn without actually sitting over a book all day long, your grace,” Fleur said.

  The duchess’s chin came up. “Do you presume to disagree with me?” she asked, both her voice and her face pleasant and somewhat at variance with her words.

  Fleur was silent.

  “My husband sent you,” the other said. “What was your relationship with him, pray?”

  Fleur flushed. “I have not met his grace,” she said. “I was interviewed at an employment agency by Mr. Houghton.”

  The duchess looked her up and down once more. “As you will have gathered,” she said, “I am in disagreement with my husband on my daughter’s need of tuition. She is a young and delicate child who needs only her mother’s love and her nurse’s care. You will not tax her brain with useless knowledge, Miss Hamilton, and you will take your orders from Mrs. Clement, Lady Pamela’s nurse. You will consider yourself one of the servants of this house and keep to your own
room or the servants’ hall when your presence is not needed in the schoolroom. I do not expect to see you on this floor of the house unless expressly summoned by me. Do you understand me?”

  All was spoken in a light, friendly voice while large blue eyes regarded her from a fragile, beautiful face. An adoring mother afraid of releasing her child from babyhood, Fleur thought with some sympathy despite the imperious nature of the words themselves.

  “Yes, your grace,” she said.

  “You may leave now and spend half an hour with my daughter under the supervision of Mrs. Clement,” her grace said.

  But as Fleur turned to leave, her grace spoke again.

  “Miss Hamilton,” she said, “I approve of the way you are clothed this morning and of the way you have dressed your hair. I trust that your manner of dress will always meet with my approval.”

  Fleur inclined her head again and left the room. And since she was dressed in a severe gray cotton dress, one of her new purchases, with a small white lace collar, and had her hair combed entirely back from her face and confined in a heavy bun at her neck, she thought she understood the duchess perfectly.

  Was the duke the type of man to harass his younger servants, then? Was that why her grace had asked about her relationship with him in London? She hoped fervently that he would keep himself there for a long time to come.

  Well, she thought, thinking back, with a slight chill, to the duchess’s words and manner, she had been warned that neither her grace nor Mrs. Clement would be pleased to see her. And she must not complain. Neither of them had been openly hostile to her. They would come around, surely, when they realized that she had no intention of standing over Lady Pamela with a stick all day long in a stuffy schoolroom.

  MR. SNEDBURG WAS AT the end of a long day’s work. He had unbent enough to take a seat in the parlor on St. James’s Street and even to accept a glass of port.

  “Much obliged, sir,” he said, taking the glass from the hand of his host. “The feet get sore from so much walking and the pipes dry from asking so many questions. Yes, indeed, Miss Fleur Hamilton. Too much of a coincidence not to be the same young lady, would you not say? And she fits the description.”

  Mr. Snedburg did not add that both his informants, Miss Fleming and the young woman’s landlady, had described Fleur Hamilton as a very ordinary-looking young lady with very ordinary-looking reddish hair. He understood that his client rather fancied his cousin even if she was a murderer and a jewel thief. And men in the throes of an infatuation were to be forgiven if they occasionally waxed poetic. Sunshine and sunset tangled all together, indeed. It was enough to make the Runner want to toss up his victuals.

  “And?” Lord Brocklehurst was watching him keenly, his own glass of port halfway to his lips. It had taken the Runner well over a week to make his first report, despite his reputation.

  “And she has been hired as governess to the daughter of a Mr. Kent of Dorsetshire. By”—the Runner paused for effect—“a gentleman who waited four whole days at the agency just for her, for a red-haired Fleur. She has left on her way already.”

  Lord Brocklehurst frowned. His glass was still stranded several inches from his mouth.

  “There can’t be that many Kents in Dorsetshire,” Mr. Snedburg said. “I shall look into the matter and see if we can’t nail our man to one single spot on the map, sir.”

  Lord Brocklehurst drank, deep in thought. “Kent?” he said. “Not the Ridgeway Kents, surely?”

  “As in the Dook of Ridgeway?” the Runner asked, raising one hand to scratch the back of his neck. “Is he a Kent?”

  “I knew his half-brother,” Lord Brocklehurst said. “They lived in Dorset. Willoughby Hall.”

  Mr. Snedburg dug into his ear with his little finger. “I’ll see what I can find out for definite, sir,” he said. “We will run her to ground in no time at all, take my word on it.”

  “Fleur,” the other said, gazing into the swirling contents of his glass. “She used to have tantrums as a young child because my mother and father would not call her that. Apparently it was the name she went by until her parents died. I had forgotten.”

  “Yes, well, right you are, sir,” Mr. Snedburg said, downing what remained in his glass in one gulp and getting to his feet. “I’ll see what I can find out about this dook and his governess.”

  “I want her found soon,” Lord Brocklehurst said.

  “It will be soon, or sooner,” the other said briskly. “My word on it, sir.”

  “Well,” Lord Brocklehurst said, “you were recommended to me as the best. Though it has taken you precious long to find out this much.”

  The other chose not to comment on either the compliment or the criticism. He saluted in almost military manner and hurried smartly from the room.

  FLEUR’S LIFE WAS BY NO MEANS ARDUOUS DURING her first two weeks at Willoughby. She had been instructed to take her orders from Mrs. Clement, and Mrs. Clement, it seemed, did not approve of schooling for her young charge any more than the duchess did. The new governess was lucky if she was granted an hour morning and afternoon with her pupil.

  She was somewhat uneasy, perhaps a little worried that she would be dismissed as a servant of little use or that the duke and Mr. Houghton would come home and find that she was not after all earning her keep. But she tried to take the advice of Mrs. Laycock, who told her to relax and do her best, and who assured her that when his grace finally arrived home—and he would surely come when he heard about the party that her grace had organized—all would be set to rights.

  In the meanwhile Fleur became familiar with and comfortable in her new home. There were long hours of quiet and peace in which to allow the old fears to die and the old wounds to heal. Sometimes a whole day would pass without her feeling that old urge to look anxiously over her shoulder for a pursuer. And sometimes she could sleep for a whole stretch without seeing that hawkish and scarred face bending over her and telling her what she was while making her into just that.

  She was eating well and had put back on some of the weight she had lost. Her hair seemed thicker again and shinier. The worst of the shadows had disappeared from beneath her eyes. There was color in her cheeks. There was energy in her muscles. She was beginning to feel young again.

  Mrs. Laycock found the time over those two weeks to stroll over much of the vast park with her. And always Fleur found out more from the quiet conversation of the housekeeper about her new home and the family for whom she worked.

  “It was laid out years ago to give the impression of natural beauty,” Mrs. Laycock said of the park. “The lake was dug and the cascades created and every tree planted in order to give a pleasing prospect from almost every vantage point. A little silly, I call it, Miss Hamilton, when nature does very nicely on its own without the help of men to make their fortunes out of landscaping the gardens of the rich. I would prefer to see flat formal gardens with a good show of flowers myself. But that is only my opinion.”

  Fleur loved the park and its rolling and seemingly endless lawns and groves of trees. She loved the winding avenues and stone temples and other follies. She felt that she could wander there forever and never tire of the views or the sense of peace that it all brought her.

  His grace, she discovered from Mrs. Laycock, had fought with the English army in Spain and at the Battle of Waterloo, even though he had always been the heir to the late duke, and had already succeeded to his title when he left for Belgium.

  “He never shirked any duty,” the housekeeper said. “There were those, of course, who said that his duty was to remain here safe and alive in order to take over his responsibilities. But he went.”

  “And he came back safely,” Fleur said.

  Mrs. Laycock sighed. “It was a dreadful time,” she said. “He was so happy before he went back to fight again when that monster escaped from Elba. He had just become betrothed to her grace—the Honorable Miss Sybil Desford she was then—and was as happy as the day was long. They had been intended for each other for
years before that, but it was only during those months that he really had stars in his eyes for her.”

  “But he came back to her,” Fleur said. “All ended happily.”

  “We thought he was dead,” Mrs. Laycock said. “News came that he had been killed in battle, and his man came home all broken up—he had been with his grace for years. I don’t like to remember that time, Miss Hamilton. First the old duke and then our boy. Boy!” She chuckled. “Just listen to me. He is past his thirtieth birthday already.”

  They sat on a wrought-iron seat beside the path they were strolling along and looked down through trees to a crescent-shaped lake with an island and a domed pavilion in its center.

  “Lord Thomas assumed the title,” Mrs. Laycock continued. “His grace’s half-brother, that is. They look alike, but as different they are as chalk is from cheese. There are those who prefer Lord Thomas because of his sunny nature and his smiles. He betrothed himself to her grace—to Miss Desford.”

  “All so quickly?” Fleur asked. “But surely the mistake was discovered very soon?”

  “It was a whole year,” the housekeeper said with a sigh. “His grace was taken for dead and stripped on the battlefield. Those French, or those Belgians, behaved just like barbarians, Miss Hamilton. But one decent couple discovered that he was still breathing and took him to their cottage to nurse him back to health. He was dreadfully wounded.” She shook her head.

  “He was unconscious or in a fever for weeks,” she continued. “And then he could not remember much. He did not know who he was for months, and then apparently he had trouble convincing anyone that he was who he said he was. He was naked, poor gentleman, when he was found.”

  “So for a whole year he was thought to be dead?” Fleur asked.

  “I’ll never forget the day he came home,” Mrs. Laycock said. “Still limping and sadly disfigured, poor gentleman. I’ll never forget it.”

  “What happened to Lord Thomas?” Fleur asked when her companion stared quietly down to the lake.