Jack grinned in disbelief. “Aye, then. Best of bloody luck to you both. Come on.”
“Jack!” a woman’s voice exclaimed from the door of the chophouse they hurried past. “Bless my soul, I knew you wasn’t dead.”
A minute later Jack tipped an off-duty waterman for the usage of his small wharf. Griffin thanked God that he had spoken with Sir Daniel’s men before venturing on this quest.
They waited on the wharf forever. They waited until Griffin was convinced that this was the last place in London that he would find his niece. How many barges traveled the river at any given time? How many secret stairs served as launching places for illicit deeds that only the river would ever know?
He had taken the word of a criminal, a professional liar, a father who still gave his grown daughter nightmares. She had escaped evil. Griffin had walked openly into its arms.
He pulled his pocket watch from his waistcoat. “It’s almost seven,” he said under his breath.
Grim Jack glanced appraisingly at his rather battered timepiece.
A small flat-bottomed barge drifted toward the adjacent dock. Griffin stared absently at the three passengers hurrying down the pier. A gentleman carrying a portmanteau, his wife nudging a slender hooded figure who might have been an invalid or-
She turned her head. He couldn’t make out her face. But he’d known her from the day she appeared like a changeling on the castle drawbridge. He had carried her on his shoulders and caught her when she tired of swinging from the chandelier. He thought she called his name. The woman at her side raised a pistol to Edlyn’s head.
His mind froze. Jack shoved him aside and Griffin shoved him right back, shouting out the one word of warning that he knew Edlyn would understand.
“Drop!”
Four shots erupted, two from the cabin of a shallop drifting by, another from a boarded-up window in the deserted tenement that overlooked the wharf. The fourth came from his own gun.
Rosalie Porter fell in her final performance, her male accomplice crumbling in her shadow. And Edlyn dropped with the death-defying grace of her former self, only to be surrounded by more bodyguards than Griffin could begin to number.
“Oh, God,” he said, aware of footsteps pounding down the pier and a jubilant shout from the captain of the shallop. And… surely that was not the Boscastle battle cry, resounding from the cabin of the shallop that had floated by? “Jack Gardner, I will seek your pardon if it costs me a dukedom. And if any man brings evidence against you-”
He turned.
Grim Jack was gone, and so was the enameled pocket watch and gold-link chain that had been attached to Griffin’s waistcoat pocket. The mate to his dueling pistol, however, lay at his feet.
He carried Edlyn back to his carriage on the bridge, escorted by an entourage of well-wishers, mudlarks, and river policemen. She was crying against his neck, and nothing he said could have stopped her.
“You’re all right, Edlyn. It’s over. It’s done. If they hurt you… well, that will never happen again. We’ll be together. It’s going to be fine now.”
He could have sworn that his first footman, Trenton, was fighting tears himself as he opened the carriage door. “I want to tell you something,” Edlyn whispered, her hands knotted around his neck. “I was on the turret when my father took that jump. I knew it was an accident, and I didn’t tell. I let everyone blame you, Uncle Griff. I saw that it wasn’t your fault, and I never told. I wanted to find my mother, and no one helped me.”
He nodded. “We shall search for her together.”
He deposited her on the seat. He knew that Edlyn expected him to be angry at what she had confessed. But he could not find it in him. He should also have known that the woman who had seen him at his worst, and loved him anyway, would be waiting in the carriage. And that he wanted her, needed her, to be there.
“Thunder all you like,” Harriet said, gripping Edlyn to her with one hand, the other grasping the cuff of his coat. “I’ve heard it all before, duke.”
“Doubtless you shall hear it for a long time to come.”
She stroked Edlyn’s hair. “My heart stopped when I saw you both standing on the pier and heard that gunfire.”
He bent his head to kiss her. “Is it beating now?” he asked, lacing his fingers through hers.
“Harder, I fear, than I can stand.”
His thumb sculpted the fine bones of her face. “Then I shall take it into my safekeeping so that nothing can ever threaten it again. I am yours, Harriet. And you are mine.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
He had vowed to be with me on my wedding-night, yet he did not consider that threat as binding him to peace in the meantime.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
The Duke of Glenmorgan got arrested on the night before his wedding.
He’d considered refusing when two of his Boscastle cousins, Lords Drake and Devon, appeared on his doorstep that evening and innocently announced that, as he would be taking a wife tomorrow, they would escort him for a last night on the Town.
He shrugged. Why not? Harriet, Aunt Primrose, and Edlyn had been whisked off in an impressive coach-and-six by a bewigged driver and a haughty assembly of footmen, who closed the carriage door before Harriet could blow her betrothed a kiss. The ladies would spend the night at Lady Sedgecroft’s Park Lane mansion, discussing… he didn’t know. The mysteries of the marriage bed? That Primrose should have an opinion on such matters chilled his blood. As long as it did not involve raising an Egyptian pharaoh from the dressing closet, he assumed he would be able to deal with it.
“Are we taking my carriage or yours?” he asked as he walked out the front door, where the two blue-eyed brothers awaited him.
“Neither,” Drake said, staring up at the cloudy sky. “We’re walking.”
Shoulder to shoulder, the Boscastle men owned the streets. Only a fool would cross a member of the legendary brood and hope to escape unscathed as well as with all his teeth intact.
Still, more fools come out at night than do stars, and it was only a matter of time before the boys ended up at a low-stakes silver hell, where Lord Devon not only lost his proverbial shirt but sheepishly realized he didn’t have a sixpence on his person to pay up.
The other player, who was not only missing a few teeth but had obviously never heard of the Boscastle family, reached across the table to grab Devon by the lapels of his double-breasted gray frock coat.
Devon’s hand shot up and caught the man’s wrist in a paralyzing hold. “Ask him to pay,” he said, grinning in Griffin’s direction. “He’s a duke.”
The man spat a stream of spittle on the table, shaking his wrist as it was released. “Dook, my arse.”
The clink of glasses, the rattle of dice, and uninhibited conversation ceased. Lord Drake Boscastle looked up from his hand of cards with a half smile. The guard who stood at the iron-grilled door turned in expectation.
Griffin bestirred himself from his private musings of bedding Harriet and glanced around the smoke-filled den. For a moment he wondered if some bawdy toast was about to be made in his dishonor. But suddenly the player who’d beaten Devon lifted a stool over his head.
“Be ye deaf, boy?” he shouted at Griffin. “I said, ‘Dook, my arse.’”
Griffin smiled, rolling up his sleeves. “I could do that.”
And so he did, with Drake and Devon at his back joking that this hell was nothing compared to what they would go through when they returned in a disheveled state to their wives.
Griffin tore off his coat, flung it into a leering face, and threw a punch at another. “If this is your idea of a bachelor party,” he said with a laugh, “I bloody well hope I wake up tomorrow for my own wedding.”
Drake upended a table as the last of three entry doors splintered open and the guard yelled, “Raid!” The den swarmed with bludgeon-armed Bow men who had only yesterday been on Griffin’s side. Gamblers scrambled for secret passageways, their cards and dice boxes swooped up
before Griffin could even find his coat.
“All right.” A club prodded his ribs. “Party’s up. There’s a penalty for illegal gambling, as if you didn’t know.”
“Oh, for the love of God. I’m the Duke of Glenmorgan.”
The constable shifted his gaze to the two other men leaning idly against the wall. “Right. And those would be your duchess and her hairdresser, I suppose?”
Who would have dreamed that the wicked Duke of Glenmorgan would learn everything he needed to know about love in a gaol cell, from one of London’s premier rakes? A helpless audience, he slumped on the hard wooden bench he shared with Devon’s lanky frame, while Drake paced and waxed philosophical in the dark. Griffin felt his skull throb with what might evolve into the worst hangover of his life. At least he would meet Harriet on the morrow with all his teeth.
“I will give you only one piece of advice,” Drake said, pausing as if he were about to reveal the mystical powers of the Holy Grail. “It is something that Grayson, our Marquess of Scoundrels, once confessed to me during a family crisis.”
Devon thumped his head against the wall. “Here we go.”
Griffin shoved his foot into Devon’s back. The gaol had not been built that could house three Boscastle men at the same time.
“‘Love is horrible, Drake,’” Drake quoted. “‘Horrible,’ he said. ‘Don’t let it happen to you.’ And then, in the next breath, I vow, when I had just escaped into the hall, he said, ‘I was wrong. Don’t listen to me. Love is a wonderful thing.’”
“Indeed, it is,” said the mordant voice of Sir Daniel Mallory, to the accompanying rattle of keys in the prison door. “And let it not be said that those of us who sacrifice our lives in the name of justice would ever dare obstruct its path.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
And every beast of beating heart grew bold, Such gentleness and power even to behold.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
The Witch of Atlas
It was to have been a private wedding.
If both parties had obeyed the protocol set down by the stone-faced senior footman, Weed, the nuptials might have taken place in the secrecy befitting the ritual of holy matrimony. At nine o’clock that morning, to the distress of those who observed tradition even if it killed them, a horde of aristocrats and street people alike jostled elbows for a coveted place at the ornamental gates of the Park Lane mansion.
Lord Sedgecroft’s well-trained staff might have dispersed the crowd had the future duchess not appeared at an upstairs window a few minutes before the ceremony to shake her wedding veil in victory.
“Wish me luck,” she whispered to the blur of faces. “I’m in love with everyone today.”
The ceremony went off as planned, with another duchess-Harriet’s personal creator, Emma Boscastle-dabbing away tears of pride at appropriate intervals, with a delicate brush of a white-gloved hand. Never before had the academy produced such a perfect diamond from the dust.
The girls of the elite school watched their beloved Miss Harriet and her handsome duke exchange vows in an enrapt silence. The male guests, including Harriet’s half brothers, whistled and stamped their feet in irreverent disregard for what no man should put asunder.
The Marquess of Sedgecroft gave the bride away. Harriet thought of her father for only a moment. God only knew when, or if, she would ever see the old louse again.
Still, in his way, Jack had proved that he loved her and taught her to stand up for those she loved.
Harriet abandoned the rules of etiquette on her wedding night and let her instincts lead her where they would. Gone for the evening, if not for the rest of her life, was the dependable companion who had been forced to stay in the background and disregard her personal needs. From the coffin of her former being rose a young duchess who shivered in delight as her husband divested her of her wedding garments.
Thus beheld by him in her rawest state, Harriet could hardly be expected to fade into the background. And as to disregarding her personal needs, the duke seemed devoted to encouraging just the opposite. She doubted he would leave an inch of her not completely kissed and conquered before he was done. His tapered fingers made a leisurely study of her back, stroking across her bottom, then sweeping up again to her breasts. She would have expressed her enjoyment quite eloquently had he not rendered her too aroused to articulate a sentence.
Indeed, he paid her unclad form such tribute that she became impatient for the chance to return the favor. At length, with one arm wrapped around the bedpost, she brought the other up to the hair knotted at her nape and pulled out all the pins.
He drew back.
The dark flare in his eyes acknowledged her desire to participate. She unwound her arm from the post and brought her hands to his chest. His eyes widened in pleasure.
“I have never let a woman undress me before tonight,” he confessed as she went to work on his coat, waistcoat, neckcloth, and shirt.
She smoothed her fingers over his well-muscled chest. “And I never knew you were a champion archer until the breakfast party.”
He bent his head, his kiss leaving her dizzy and breathless. “It’s a damned good thing you didn’t walk past me as I took aim.”
He caught her hand on its way into his waistband. “I shall take care of that. Lie down, my love, and let me gaze at you while I do it.”
She reclined back on the bed, grateful that this was his suite and there were no hideous decorations on the headboard to wake up to in the morning. She still couldn’t believe she would sleep beside him and see his face whenever she opened her eyes.
She could see far more than his face right now, and her heart pounded at the beauty of his lithe virility. In fact, the warm reality of his body filled her with a wonderful desperation. She parted her thighs without prompting as he slid up the bed between her legs. His mouth grazed her soft white breasts. Her nipples darkened and stiffened instantly. With nary a thought to propriety, she reached up and allowed herself full knowledge of her husband’s amorous skills. The world fell away as she applied herself to unparalleled midnight pleasures and acts of creation that were anything but polite.
She hooked her legs over his backside. He groaned, slipping his hands under her rump until the head of his erection pushed deeply into her passage. She ran her hands down his back and felt his beautiful body tremble.
“‘Fear not,’” her wicked husband quoted as he possessed her in the throes of uncontrollable passion, “‘that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is nearly complete.’”
Great God! What a scene has just taken place!… I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself… It is true we shall be monsters… but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.
Author’s Note
Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818 in three volumes (not as a single novel) and became an instant bestseller. Thirteen years later Mary Shelley admitted authorship and confessed to the public that her groundbreaking novel had been conceived one rainy summer in Geneva during a competition against three other novelists to produce the best ghost story.
Mary won, still a teenager, and invented the science-fiction genre. I became fascinated with her life and work over a decade ago while researching a short novel I was writing about a horror novelist.
Mary was sixteen when she ran away with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Their marriage was plagued with scandals and personal tragedy and reads nothing like a modern-day romance. Percy drowned in 1822. Mary died of a brain tumor when she was fifty-three.
For errors made and liberties taken, I hope that Mary and my readers will “compassionate” me. If not, let Percy have the last word:
“What!”-Cried he, “this is my reward
For nights of thought, and days of toil?
Do poets, but to be abhorred
By men of whom they never heard,
Consume their spirit’s oil?”
I hope you will be inspired to read Frankenstein if you h
ave not done so, and discover Mary Shelley’s brilliance and her fascinating life as a writer and feminist.
Cheers,
JILLIAN HUNTER
***
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The Wicked Duke Takes a Wife Page 21
