“My, my, Dulcina, I do believe you almost made yourself presentable,” Agina commented.
Dulcie might have choked on a swift, angry response. Instead, she replied calmly, “Thank you, Mother, I’m pleased you noticed.”
“I always notice your appearance, dear girl. I’m simply glad you are no longer the eyesore you were when you arrived to London. Goodness, what a horrid sight that was!”
Dulcie sucked in a deep breath and pressed her hurt down deep where she knew it would fester if her stepmother kept up her nasty comments.
Why in the world had Agina bothered to come here? Was it only to taunt me, bring me down a peg? Make me feel small and meaningless the way she used to?
I never thought of myself as being above Agina, although I am the daughter of an earl and a lady in my own right. I heard somewhere—probably from one of the servants—when my father married her, gossip stated that Agina had come from a common background. But, actually, that is all I know about my stepmother other than her extraordinary beauty and her unkind attitude.
“I was a bit surprised that my nephew was attracted to you enough to tumble you in his bed.”
Griff never had been that nasty. Just the opposite. He always bolstered my ego each time we spoke, even told me I was pretty. Well, perhaps, she retracted that thought. I should take those words with a grain of salt. They may have been simply flirtation. But he made me feel good—worthwhile and happy about myself. He made me feel…well, wanted…in the ways a man wants a woman he cares for.
“I’m sure I don’t know why either, Mother,” Dulcie replied, “but can we talk about something else? Trent, would you be good enough to pour me a taste of that exotic tea?”
Agina nodded to her lady’s maid. “If you wish,” the woman answered.
The countess next directed Dulcie’s attention to the latest news in The Times.
“I believe Griff’s unit was engaged in the siege of San Sebastian. His friend, the viscount, gave me that bit of news, but that was last month. The army since moved on, I believe. Spencer could be anywhere now—maimed—or even dead.”
The countess passed the newspaper over to Dulcie who was anxious to read the latest news from the Peninsula, praying Griff’s name wasn’t amongst the missing or dead.
“I urge you not to wait for Spencer, Dulcina. Marry now, and be done with it. I can procure you a more worthwhile mate even though you are secondhand goods. Griff may come back in terrible condition, badly scarred, awful to look at, and of no use to you or anyone—if you know what I mean.”
From the countess’s raised brows, Dulcie took her words to insinuate that Griff might not be able to sire children.
Meanwhile, Trent prepared Dulcie’s tea and brought it to her.
“Thank you, Trent,” Dulcie said and took a sip. “Oh my! It’s quite nice. Very sweet, the way I like it.”
“It needs a prodigious amount of sugar, my dear, otherwise it tastes slightly bitter. I myself use two teaspoonfuls, so I’m sure that is how Trent fixed it for you. By the way, I am persuaded that Chinese concubines…umm…depend upon this particular blend to keep them young, beautiful, and…er…interesting. I asked Cook to use only this blend while I am here. Perhaps, it will work as well on you, eh?” In Dulcie’s eyes the countess’s smile was less than encouraging. “You will acquire the taste in no time, I’m sure, as I have. Just be certain to use plenty of sugar. You do wish to make an impression if and when your fiancé returns, do you not?”
“Of course. Yes, I’ll try to get used to it. Thank you, Mother.”
* * * *
The early days of autumn rolled along the Surrey hills without additional animosity between Dulcie and her stepmother. The weather held, so Dulcie and Simon made the rounds to the estate’s various tenants almost daily. Her stepmother and Trent made trips into Pinkney-on-Barrow to shop and gossip with the shopkeepers about London and the war.
Dulcie began to feel rather listless in early October. Evening fell more quickly, and it seemed to bear down on her daily. She no longer had the same stamina she had during the summer months. She often cut short her walks with Simon. Her appetite lessened, and she realized some of her gowns had grown a bit loose on her. She also developed an unusual thirst, and often consumed several saucers of her stepmother’s exotic tea each afternoon to slake her dry throat.
The countess had commanded Dulcie to take tea with her and Emma Trent every day. The women habitually napped before supper, and Dulcie often followed the pair above stairs. It was becoming her habit to do so also. She felt weary and dull-witted by the time late afternoon came. Perhaps, it had something to do with the blended ingredients in the Chinese tea, or perhaps it was simply that she was on edge with the countess staying on. She was lonely and missed Griff terribly. It dawned on her that she didn’t wish to let him go, had no wish to cancel their agreement when he returned from the war. But, of course, she must. They had agreed to it when he left England.
During Dulcie’s sojourn in London, Denny Wall had found himself a lively, pert girl that suited him. He spent his leisure time with her now that he was serious about marriage and a family. Dulcie missed their time together, felt somewhat jealous of the girl. She no longer had anyone to talk and laugh with unless she visited Bitsy Bowden. Even walking the short distance to the Bowden’s cottage was becoming a chore.
Dulcie began suffering headaches. More than once, after supper, she excused herself to her stepmother and took to her bed to rid herself of the throbbing in her temples. The powders and tisanes she requested from the housekeeper didn’t work very well, and she turned and tossed, wrapped up like a shroud in the bedcovers before sleep finally took her.
She found herself snapping at servants, and even at Denny if she ran into him on her short ambles in the garden. Her sudden outbursts of temper were something she never thought would occur to her at Bonne Vista.
Most odd of all, her thirst grew to prodigious proportions. Her stepmother took to ordering a second pot of tea in the afternoon especially for Dulcie. Most of it was poured into Dulcie’s cup, and she was given her own sugar bowl.
“I’m so glad you like this blend,” Agina told Dulcie several weeks after the countess and Trent had arrived at Bonne Vista. “I noticed it is doing you some good. You have lost some of your baby fat. If I recall, Griff was attracted to slender women, and of course, you were a bit on the plump side when you two met.” She even winked at her stepdaughter. “I’m sure he will approve when…er…he returns.”
Dulcie poured herself more tea and added three teaspoonfuls of sugar.
In another few weeks, she took to her bed for the better part of each day. She felt impossibly tired and somewhat weak. But she dragged herself out of her chamber to make her presence known belowstairs. She now skipped a hearty breakfast and drank tea with, perhaps, a day old slice of bread in order to keep food down. She vomited regularly but never complained and made certain she did it outdoors where no one saw her or heard her.
She was certain she was with child. She counted backward and realized her final encounter with Griff took place in late June. However, she still had her monthly courses. July and August passed without undue cramping. It was normal for her to be irregular, but always, the bleeding arrived before her next moon cycle.
Unfortunately, she was almost a month late now. How could this be? Did one begin breeding two or three months after the fact? It was very strange. There was no way she would question her stepmother. Or anyone else, either. She would simply go along and see what happened during the next few weeks. Perhaps she was mistaken entirely, and her flow would begin again in a day or two. Meanwhile, she was growing weaker and feeling sicker.
Now, painful stomach cramps bothered her, and the headaches came with more frequency. Dulcie stopped eating, but she continued to drink the exotic tea her stepmother had brought with her to Surrey.
The second week in November, Dulcie was too debilitated to lift her head off of her bed pillows.
Chap
ter Thirty
The short sail on the Atlantic Ocean crossing the rougher waters of the English Channel to Dover was uncomfortable. Besides being wounded and in pain, many of the English combatants went through spells of mal de mer.
Leaving Dover, the walking wounded had been loaded onto covered wagons where they hunched together on wooden benches for the trip north to London. Those more seriously hurt were given a large dose of laudanum to deaden the pain and shoved into ambulances where they lay on thin straw pallets as the vehicles bounced along on the rutted roads. Pedestrians, hearing them pass by, looked away, aware the pitiful groans and moans came from dying men. Only a certain hospitals accepted those in dire straits, the badly wounded or terminably sick. Men with no hope of recovery were sent to less well-trained medical facilities to die in peace.
Griff was on the endangered list. Shrapnel had punctured one of his lungs, and he’d contracted lung fever. Ague raged through him, drenching him with sweat, and alternated with devastating bouts of tremors attacking his body with sudden, vicious chills that went on for hours. He lay, scarcely breathing, aboard the hospital ship. He was out of his head for most of the time. He didn’t eat and had nothing left to vomit up over the side of his bunk. Instead, he suffered spasmodic dry heaves, which weakened him even more.
Arriving in a London hospital, Griff was given a fifty-fifty chance for survival. He needed to fight to save himself; since there wasn’t much else the physicians could do but dose him for the fever and keep him sedated with opiates. Laudanum was highly addictive, but he was heavily dosed with it to ease the torment of his festering wound and to keep him quiet.
* * * *
Griff’s mind wandered in a painless torpor, as if he were floating above the hospital’s thin mattress. Whatever was happening beyond the grim reality of war, death and destruction gone from his purview, he was damned relieved to be out of it.
His befogged unconscious mind took him on a journey of its own. He felt well enough to call upon Lady Dulcie, his fiancée, at her home in Surrey. His uniform was brushed and his boots polished to a mirror shine. He remembered to have his hair barbered for the occasion, because he planned to surprise her.
Everything fell into place although he had never been to Bonne Vista. He believed himself traveling in a carriage during summertime. He knew because of the searing heat sizzling his scorched skin. He was sweating and went to wipe his forehead, but he lacked a handkerchief or enough strength in his hand to do so. He remembered how Dulcie described her home during their many conversations, and he envisioned it as a red brick edifice with an imposing entrance surrounded by lush gardens. Soon the coach approached the mansion. Beds of flowering bushes and plants bloomed in his imagination. He thought back on his youth, how his own mother loved flowers. She especially loved roses, just the same as Eloise Trayhern had. He reminded himself to tell Dulcie that when he saw her.
I hope she is glad to see me. I missed her terribly while I was fighting the French. That seemed like a hundred years ago. He thought he heard himself sigh, long and deeply. Another thought led his mind on a different tangent.
Of course, I couldn’t ask her to follow the drum with me before I left London. It was a horrid and difficult life for a wife of a soldier in Wellington’s army, and Dulcie was an aristocrat. But I knew that Dulcie was courageous because of the way she stood up to her stepmother. Possibly, she would have married me then and gone to war with me, nonetheless.
The idea made him feel better, and he exhaled.
Ah, but I had other things on my mind when I left London, and now…well, now I can’t wait to hold her in my arms again. Tell her all the things I never said to her that I want to do now that I am back home again.
He was about to descend from the carriage when suddenly everything changed in an instant—evolved into a different season, a new scene playing out in front of him. There were no flowers in bloom, only large evergreens bordering the façade of the mansion. With a blink of his mind’s eye it seemed, he now saw a heavy snowfall covering the ground, crystal flakes still fluttering from the sky. A raw, wet wind stung his cheeks, whipped his hair, brought tears to his eyes, and sneaked beneath his tunic to freeze the marrow in his bones. The winter’s blast captured him with its chilly arms, and he shook with violent tremors. He had forgotten to wear a hat when he hopped down from the carriage. What month was this? The last time he looked, it was summertime. Then, Dulcie greeted him warmly. Where was she now?
The next thing he knew, they were in bed together. Naked. He was making love to her, kissing her, touching her silken body in places he never expected to caress again. She was murmuring his name very softly, begging him to come inside her, asking him to give her what she wanted so desperately. When she noticed his wound, the scarred depression in his lean back muscles, she had seemed to hesitate. He watched as tears filled her extraordinary eyes, recognized the pain and compassion down deep inside them.
“No, you mustn’t cry for me, love. I’ve accomplished what I meant to do to change my life. I’m on good terms with my family. My tainted name and reputation is wiped clean…and now, I only need to speak with you.”
Hidden in those dark pupils of hers, there was a flame of desire burning bright. He saw she lusted for him, wanted him as much as he wanted her. His breath accelerated; his heart thudded heavily against his ribs. She reached her arms up to hug him to her. He bent down for a passionate kiss and a sweet taste of a rosy, pert nipple awaiting his suckling. After that, he would plunge his engorged cock into her delicious, hot sheath just the way he remembered…
He wasn’t sure what happened next, why time warped into another dimension. He was back in the carriage, careening along a country road. All he knew was that he had to get to her, see her again, talk to her, make sure she was all right, embrace her if she would let him. Even now, he wasn’t certain if they were still betrothed, or if she had given him a coup de grace, and sent him packing. Everything seemed bolloxed up and vague. It lay like a thick, impenetrable mist clouding his mind, obliterating everything he knew, everything he wanted. He exhaled one more long breath and gave up fighting it. He simply couldn’t remember…
* * * *
“I think we almost lost him,” the nurse, Annie Potts said, grabbing for Griff’s wrist while frantically gesturing to the physician who had just entered the ward. She felt for the soldier’s pulse and but found it beating fast, strong enough that she managed a tiny smile. “I would have wagered a shilling that he took his final breath a moment ago.” She shook her head in amazement and tucked her patient’s hand back under the thin blanket.
“But we never can tell, can we?” Dr. Johnson replied.
“Yes, as of now, Lieutenant Spencer is very much alive.” Annie Potts ran a weary palm over her patient’s forehead. It was soaking wet with perspiration. “His skin is cool. Lawdy, I do believe he’s coming back to the land of living. Can you beat that?” She smiled up into the physician’s tired eyes.
“Give him a sponge bath and get some fluids into him. I’ll check on him later.” The physician paused. “He’ll want to thank you, you know, Annie.”
“Seeing him come back from the dead is thanks enough for me.” This time the nurse really grinned.
* * * *
Griff Spencer had returned to England the first week in November. It was the second week in November when Rand Titus came to take his friend back to his family’s town house to recuperate. The wounded soldier was shaky on his feet and as weak as a kitten. Rand’s valet, Bronson, helped Griff leave the hospital, handing him into the viscount’s comfortable carriage.
“Gadzooks, old chap, you look like the wrath of God! But, look now. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll have you fixed up in jig time. Wait and see if I don’t!”
“Rand, I must go to Surrey. I need to see Lady Dulcie.”
“All in good time, Griff, all in good time. Get your strength back. First things first, eh? I’m sure your fiancée would throw a fit if she clapped eyes on you no
w the way you look.” Rand chortled, trying to keep the conversation light. “You ain’t the handsome Adonis you was when you left London, you know.”
Griff persisted. “Rand, I figured some things out while I was lying in the hospital. Things I think pertain to both my father’s death and Dulcie’s father’s death. I need to talk with her before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what? To get leg shackled? Don’t be a fool, Griff, you’ll be flat on your back again if you go gadding about until you are well. And no good for anything you have in mind. Give yourself a week here, let my cook get some food into you, then I’ll go with you if you wish to go to Surrey.”
“Rand…”
“No, clam up, chum, and sit back. We’ll be at my house in ten minutes. You’re going nowhere, hear me? Not until I say so. I have strict orders from your family. They wanted to take you in, but I insisted you’d do better staying with a friend. Meaning me.”
“Really?” Griff sounded surprised. “I can’t fathom that.”
“Well, it’s true. And by the way, I had Bronson go over your civilian clothes. The trunk you left with me. Your duds are fashionable enough to wear in a pinch, but you’re going to have put on two stone or more to fit well in them.”
“Rand…”
“You’re a hero, Griff. A damn, bloody, live hero, my friend. The Burlingtons are up in the boughs about your heroics on the Peninsula. They’re anxious to see you, talk to you, make a fuss over you, but only when you feel up to it.”
“My aunt and uncle are anxious to see me?” Griff slumped back against the velvet squabs. Finally, he thought, I’ve been accepted. He drew in a satisfied sigh.
Thank God. At last, I’m home.
Chapter Thirty-One
The household servants noticed that Dulcie’s skin lacked its healthy color. It flaked and looked like parchment. Her lips were dry and cracked. And all she asked for constantly was something to drink.
Carnal Pleasures Page 23
