Countess of Scandal

by Laurel McKee

  The sunlight glinted off the barrel of a gun, deep in the shadow of the trees. A mere flash, but that was enough. She leveled her gun at that spot and fired. The deafening explosion, the kick of that hot metal in her hand, was deeply satisfying.

  "Eliza!" Will shouted, firing off his own weapon. He fell with his back to the riverbank, reloading. "What are you thinking, woman?"

  "I'm thinking two shooters are better odds than one," she said. "I'm thinking I will not just sit here and die, and I won't let you die, either."

  He stared at her, and she was sure he would push her farther under the bridge, shout at her to run away. But he just handed her his gun, taking hers as she reloaded.

  By the time they ran out of ammunition, the hail of gunfire from the woods had ceased, as if their attackers fled. Eliza slumped down in the dirt next to Will, her eyes shut as she listened closely for any sign they were still there. Waiting. There was nothing, not even the rustle of leaves, the snap of a twig. Even the birds were silent

  Long, taut moments crept past as she thought of her mother and sisters and prayed they had fled. The rush of pure, hot energy was drained away, and she was exhausted.

  "I think they've gone," Will whispered, a strange, tight sound to his voice.

  Eliza turned to him, opening her eyes to find that his wound had reopened in the right Blood spotted his shirt, and his lips were pressed together in a white line.

  "Oh, Will," she groaned. She quickly unlaced his shirt, peeling it back from his shoulder.

  Some of the stitches were torn, the flesh around them red and angry, blood oozing through. She pulled out her handkerchief, pressing it against him to stop the flow.

  "Why didn't you say something?" she said.

  "It hardly seemed the right time to pause during a gun-fight and say, 'Excuse me, Eliza dearest...'"

  "We'll have to find a place to mend it" She stooped down to dip the cloth into the river, wiping away the blots of fresh blood. "You're not hurt anywhere else, are you?"

  "Not at all, thanks to you, my warrior goddess."

  "I doubt any goddess was ever so frightened out of her wits!"

  "You didn't seem frightened at all."

  "I wasn't" Eliza dragged in a ragged breath. "Not until now. You could have been killed!"

  "Eliza!" she heard her mother say, and she glanced up to find Katherine peering down at them from the bank above. Her hem and shoes were stained with mud and dried blood "Has William been shot?"

  "Mama, you should have stayed away," Eliza protested.

  "Nonsense. The villains are quite gone. I saw their shadows creeping away, like the bloody cowards they are."

  "Mama!" Eliza cried, almost laughing at the ridiculous sound of that curse in her mother's cultured voice. "No, he's not shot, but he opened his wound again."

  "Such a nuisance. Here, let me see." Katherine scrambled down the bank to kneel beside them in the dirt, peering beneath Eliza's handkerchief.

  "Ladies, really," Will said, trying to draw his shirt over his chest

  "Oh, William," Katherine said sadly. "lf you think the sight of a bit of bare male flesh is going to give me the vapors after what I saw on the bridge, you are quite mistaken. We'll have to fix those stitches, but we can't do it here."

  "We can't go into Rossmorland now," Will said. Despite Katherine's words, he managed to pull his shirt and coat back into place, wincing as the cloth slid over his shoulder.

  'Indeed," Katherine said. "But Houghton Court is not far. I heard that family fled weeks ago. Hopefully the place is deserted, and we can stop there for the night"

  "Can we afford to lose the time?" Eliza asked.

  "No, we cannot" Will said. "I vowed to get you all safely to Dublin."

  Katherine peered down at his shoulder. "William, I fear we have little choice in the matter. Eliza, help me get him back to the cart"

  "I can certainly walk," Will insisted, shaking them away. *T tell you, it is nothing. We have to press on."

  He scrambled up the riverbank, hurrying back over the horrible bridge as Eliza and Katherine ran to keep up with him. They went back to the cart where Anna and Caroline waited, watching them with white, tense faces. Caroline sat in the back while Anna held on to the horses' bridles.

  "Where do we go now?" Anna asked, her voice subdued and sad. How much had she seen? She always did seem to be watching just at the worst times.

  "To Houghton," Katherine said. "We can rest there for the night"

  "No, toward Dublin," Will insisted. "We should be to the next town soon after nightfall"

  "Denton stubbornness," Katherine said, shaking her head. "I tell you, William, you will be no good to us if you faint from blood loss."

  "Denton stubbornness is nothing at all to that of the Blackballs " Will muttered. "And I never faint."

  Chapter 25

  Despite her deep tiredness, Eliza could not sleep, even in the perfect stillness of the deepest part of the night. They had taken refuge for a few hours in the woods, near a burned-out farmhouse on the road to Dublin. There her mother had repaired Will's stitches, and they had all fallen into fitful sleep, but Eliza was too wary to join them. She was alert to every birdsong in the trees, every twig crackling.

  Will could not sleep, either, she knew. He lay beside her on a pallet of blankets under the cart, his breath quiet as he stared out from their meager shelter. It was so hard now to think of the past or future, or anything more than that one, single moment

  "Will?" she whispered. "Are you asleep?" "No," he answered. "But you should be. We'll have to cover many miles tomorrow."

  "I'm not the one injured and needing rest" "My shoulder is fine; I promise. Your mother is an excellent physician."

  "But will it be fine if we meet with another gunfight?"

  "We won't, and if we do, I will be very careful." He turned his head to smile at her in the darkness. "I don't want your mother to scold me again."

  Eliza laughed despite herself. "Nor do I." She propped her head on her arm, gazing down at him in the lacy patterns of moonlight "Will?"

  "Yes?"

  "I am very sorry about your friend General Hardwick."

  He just nodded, as if he could say nothing.

  "Earlier today you said we all have regrets."

  "Of course we do," he said. "We're all forced to see the truth of ourselves in times such as this, even when we would rather not."

  Even if they would rather hide and pretend? Surely that would be the prudent course, the course that would allow them all to go on with their lives. But hiding had never been in her nature. Nor had it ever been in Will's.

  "I do regret that a dream that seemed so wonderful has turned terrible in so many ways," she said.

  "But you can't regret what led you to those convictions."

  "No, I can't regret that Freedom should be every human's right But are convictions, abstract ideas, worth pain?" She frowned. "I don't know."

  "Is duty worth it?"

  She glanced down at him, puzzled. "What do you mean?"

  "I spent all my life hearing of duty," he said, turning his face back to the night "Duty to my family, to England, to our estate. It seemed everything."

  And that was the tale of their whole Ascendancy world, the one Eliza had fought against Had imagined she could fight against, underestimating the strength of its hold. "Do you think that still?"

  "It was all I knew, until I met you "

  "Me?"

  "I loved the way you spoke of Ireland, Eliza. You made me see my home in a new way, the true beauty of it that was all around us. You made me think it a source of pride to be part of it all, not something shameful to deny, as my family does."

  Had he really thought that, when her younger self peppered him with tales and lectures, fired by her own youthful enthusiasm? She laughed softly, lying down beside him again. "I thought you were just trying to steal kisses."

  "I was, of course. But I also listened, more than you could know."

  "Yet you
still went off with the Army."

  "Well, duty is a tenacious thing, after all. We're all bound to it—even you, Eliza."

  And so she was. "Yes. I did marry Mount Clare when I was told to, and I tried to live my life as I was told I should. Perhaps it would have been better if I simply went along with that life and all it entailed."

  "And perhaps it would have been better if I had rebelled," he said in a bitter tone.

  Eliza's head was spinning, so she hardly knew what was up or down, right or wrong. "Oh, Will. What really happened to you while we were apart?"

  "I saw a man flogged," he said flatly.

  "What? But that is nothing, surely. I saw such terrible things myself."

  "But you did not order it done, did you?"

  Eliza sat up in shock. "You ... ordered it?"

  "Yes. Soon after I rejoined my regiment after leaving Moreton, we captured a man suspected of being a Defender, of knowing some of their strategy in Wexford. He refused to give us the names of his cohorts, and the order came that we were to publicly flog him as a warning. To show no mercy. I said such a thing was likely to make the populace even more recalcitrant, not less, but the order was repeated."

  "You... you did not flog him yourself?" she whispered. She shook her head hard, but the image of Will wielding a bloodstained whip would not be dislodged. That was just the sort of brutality and injustice she fought against

  "Of course not But I sent the order through, I had the proclamation read, and I witnessed the punishment. The man nearly died, and the next day in retaliation, an Anglican bishop's house was sacked and burned."

  "So your warning was quite right. It made the rebels more recalcitrant."

  "I took no comfort in being right."

  What was right? Eliza did not know any longer. She lay flat on her back, staring up at the slats of the cart as she felt Will watching her. She thought of the burned village, of pregnant Annie and her missing husband. Of her mother and sisters, forced out of their home, of General Hardwick and his family. So much pain on all sides, and the divisions between them blurred.

  His hand touched hers in the darkness, the merest light brush. She curled her fingers around his, holding on to him. They said nothing else. What could they say? They just lay there, so close, but so very, very far apart

  Anna lay very still in the darkness, huddled beneath a tree not far from her sleeping mother and sister. She could hear Will and Eliza whispering under the cart, indistinguishable words that blended with Caroline's soft snores, but she could not rest herself. Her thoughts raced through her mind, one after another, and would not be quieted.

  Once when she was a child, her father gave her a kaleidoscope from Italy, an enameled tube containing bright shards of colored glass. With one twist of the wheel, the mosaic's patterns shifted into something entirely new, the old picture never to be found again. That was what the whole world was like now. They were all trapped in an ever-moving kaleidoscope, where nothing could ever be familiar or comfortable again.

  She closed her eyes, shifting on the hard ground. The heroines in the novels she loved were in danger all the time, menaced by villains, their lives and virtue at risk. They usually reacted by swooning or running away in the midst of a rainstorm.

  Anna doubted swooning would solve their problems, and there were no rainstorms on the horizon. Their danger was all too real. Those dead men on the bridge were all too real. And sleep still would not come, would not give her forgetfulness for even an hour.

  She sat up slowly, sliding off the edge of the blanket Caroline sighed and rolled over, but she did not wake as Anna tiptoed from the clearing. The farmhouse nearby was a burned-out shell, but she had seen the stable just behind, a space with two walls still standing. Maybe if she sat there for a few minutes, away from the others, she could breathe again and find one moment of solitary peace. Then she could think straight again and not be sucked down into blind fear.

  She crept into the ruins of the stables, two standing walls and two that were crumbled onto piles of scorched hay. It smelled of smoke rather than the comforting scent of horses, but there were no moaning ghosts. There was no sound at all. She leaned her elbows on an intact stall railing, wondering what would happen tomorrow. Where would the next turn of the kaleidoscope take them?

  A rush of wind swept through the stable, startling her and making her spin around. Her skirt hem caught on a loose nail, causing her to stumble into the railing. It collapsed beneath her, sending her tumbling into a loose pile of moldy hay. She gasped in surprise, her hand shooting out to catch herself as she fell to the floor.

  But she did not land in soft, yielding hay. She fell onto something hard, something that shouted and grabbed her by the arms.

  Fear seized her by the throat, an icy, strangling grip that killed her terrified scream. The hay-monster pushed her to the floor, holding her down hard as warm breath touched her cheek.

  Was this what those novel heroines felt, then, as they were menaced to the point of death? Cold, tingling, terrified, yet so strangely removed from the whole terrible business? It was most odd.

  "Who are you?" the monster rasped. "What are you doing here?"

  Certainly monsters should not have human voices. That irrational thought somehow gave her a burst of new strength, and she kicked and pounded at him, trying to break that steel-trap grip.

  "Who are you?” she shouted. "How dare you frighten me! Let go of me at once."

  "Cailleach," he said, gasping as her booted foot connected with his shin. His human shin. "Quit fighting me. I mean you no harm, if you mean me none."

  "What, I'm supposed to believe that just because you say so?" Anna cried. "You're probably a marauder!"

  "A marauder?" A strange hint of laughter crept into his voice, and it was oddly familiar. His voice was deep and rough, tinged with an Irish brogue. "Someone is an over-educated English colleen."

  "I am not English—I was born here in Ireland, which by my calculation makes me Irish," she insisted, twisting in his grasp. "But I know a marauder when I meet one."

  "I am not a marauder or a rapist," he said, tightening his grip on her even more. "I merely sought refuge here for the night, as I suspect you did."

  "And maybe you planned to steal our horses in the morning?"

  "I hadn't planned anything at all."

  Anna twisted her head, biting at his shoulder. She felt the barbarically satisfying give of his flesh under her teeth.

  "Cailleach!" he shouted again. "Witch." He rolled over, carrying her with him. A stray beam of moonlight from the window landed on his face, illuminating the harshly elegant features, the dark stubble of beard along his square jaw. Long black hair was tangled over his brow, but she still recognized him.

  The Duke of Adair. The dark, brooding man she met on her way to Killinan. She remembered him all too well. And now she was in his power.

  "You," she whispered, frozen with fear for Will, for all of them.

  "Ah, so it's the fairy trespasser," he said, his hands loosening on her arms. "I thought I hadn't seen the last of you."

  She wrenched angrily away from him, sitting up in the tumbled hay. Her head was spinning so wildly she wasn't sure she could rise yet. He watched her far too warily, glittering perception in his dark green eyes. "What are you doing here?" she whispered.

  "I told you, taking refuge here for the night," he answered, sitting up stiffly beside her. He did not come too close, but she could sense him there in the darkness, the heat and power of him. It was unlike anything she had ever known before. "Believe me, I had no more desire to encounter an English witch than you had to see me."

  "But why are you not at your home?" she asked, trying to distract him, to turn that penetrating stare of his away from her. "Or did your cousin seize it from you again?"

  "So you heard that tale, did you?"

  "Kildare County is a small place."

  "And a gossip-ridden one, especially among you Ascendancy folk, who have nothing better to do. As
it happens, I have business in Dublin I must see to. Not that it's any of your concern." He stretched his leg out in front of him, gasping as he straightened the knee.

  Anna glanced down to see a dark stain on his doeskin breeches. "You're hurt!" Yet somehow that thought gave her no comfort, no surcease from her fear—or her strange excitement. Even a wounded Adair was a powerfully strong one.

  "A scratch, that's all," he said tightly. "You may have noticed it's not the safest time to be traveling, cailleach"

  She scrambled to her feet "I will fetch my mother's supplies; she has medicines, bandages...." And she could warn them, too, so they could flee.

  "Nay!" He grabbed her skirt in his fist, holding her still. His fingers brushed her bare legs, sending a shiver over her skin. "No one must know I'm here."

  "But you're wounded."

  "I'll be fine. I told you, it's nothing. I've had worse." He smiled up at her, a teasing, white grin in the darkness. "And you tried to wound me yourself not five minutes ago, English witch. You ruined my shirt with those sharp teeth of yours."

  'That was before I knew who you were."

  "And now that I'm a rogue Irish duke, everything is safe and well?"

  Far, far from it. She had never felt less safe in her life than she did at that moment staring down at him as he held her fast She couldn't breathe, couldn't think. Run, you fool! she thought frantically, but still she stayed. Perhaps he had her under a magic Irish spell, after all.

  His dark eyes narrowed as he stared up at her, a muscle in his jaw flexing. Slowly, slowly, his fist tightened in her skirt, drawing her closer to him. His stare was intensely focused on her parted lips, his breath warm on her throat as she landed half on his lap.

  Yes, it was a spell. That was the only explanation for not running away; she knew that His palm flattened on her leg, and she moaned at the new, delicious sensation.

  "Cailleach," he whispered, just as his lips met hers, soft at first as he explored her taste, her texture. He rubbed slowly back and forth, his own lips rough, his long hair brushing her skin like silk. She had never imagined a kiss could be like this at all, could make her feel all hot and cold at the same time, frightened and yet... yet she wanted to scream out with joy.