“Will she hang?” Barrett asked. “The scandal—”
“I’m more concerned with the fact that my husband is bleeding profusely, Father,” Jane snapped. “Cassandra’s fate can be decided later!”
“She will not hang,” Marcus said through gritted teeth. “As much as it pains me to say so, we are better off if the nature of my father’s demise remains unknown.” He looked pointedly at the servants gathered and at Mr. Barrett.
“There is a convent in Scotland, near one of our estates,” he continued, “Cassandra will live out the remainder of her days there, or the truth will win out and she will pay the ultimate price for her crimes.”
“She will never consent to that,” Jane insisted. “That would be tantamount to death for her regardless.”
Marcus offered a casual shrug. “I hadn’t planned on offering her a choice.”
Jane noted how pale his face had become. It was obvious to Jane that he was in a significant amount of pain. She’d seen the scars on his legs, knew that he’d been injured in battle before. That Charles had taken such precise aim led her to believe he’d been aware, as well.
“Get bandages and bring me a pair of shears to cut away his clothing. He’s losing blood very quickly and we need to staunch that wound or calling for the physician will have been a pointless endeavor,” she ordered.
“Speaking of Napoleon,” Marcus said as Jane went about issuing orders like a general, “I believe you may be something of a tyrant yourself.”
“Hush. This is no time to be flippant. You always do that at the worst possible moments!” she snapped as she cut away his clothes with the scissors that had appeared as if by magic. Without the bunched cloth in the way, she tied another tourniquet about his leg, much tighter than before. When the task was done, her hands were coated in blood.
He smiled much like a drunkard. It was clear the loss of blood was impacting him and he would not be conscious for much longer. “I will endeavor to do better, Wife.”
Jane watched his eyes flutter closed and her heart stuttered in her chest. Only that morning, she had wondered if perhaps what she felt for him was love. With the very real possibility of losing him forever staring back at her, she could finally freely admit that it was. She loved her husband.
“He can’t die, Riggs. Don’t let him.”
“Begging your pardon, your grace, but I fear that isn’t up to me,” the butler answered.
“Of course, it is,” she said. “You rule this house with an iron fist. You only have to forbid it and then it will not be.” Then, for the second time in her life, Jane fainted.
Chapter Nineteen
The grounds at Thornwood Hall were bare and desolate. Winter on the moors was harsh and yet strangely beautiful. As Jane walked through the dreary garden, the skirt of her black mourning dress snagged on a rose bush, the thorns tugging at the fabric. She leaned down to try and extricate the dress without doing more damage, but a hand on her arm stopped her.
“Let me,” Marcus said. “You’ll prick yourself.”
She looked at him, still leaning heavily on his cane. “If you bend over here, then we’ll have to call the footmen to pick you up off the cold, hard ground. I can weather the sting of a few thorns,” she assured.
“You should not have to,” he said softly. “You’ve weathered enough already.”
Jane rose, her dress freed and only a few minor scratches for her troubles. They’d fled London, seeking solace in the country away from the gossipmongers. J.E. for the London Ladies’ Gazette had been curiously quiet on the front of the scandal-ridden Elsinghams. Jane had, in fact, retired her pseudonym but had allowed Lord Highcliff to have use of it should he ever need to flush out another criminal in the upper ranks of society. The former duchess had not gone quietly into the convent. She’d attempted to flee and Bow Street had been called after all. She’d been caught with jewels and silver taken from the family home.
She looked at the letter clutched in Marcus’ free hand. “I take it that is from Highcliff?”
“It is. There was no trial for Cassandra. He saw to it. By what means, I cannot say. Regardless, she has been committed to an asylum for the remainder of her days. No doubt, the convent looks infinitely better to her now. Pity she could not have had the foresight of her namesake.”
Jane shuddered at the thought. “They are horrible places, and she is a horrible person. I cannot feel sorry for her even though I know that if I were a better person, I would.”
“You are the best person I know,” Marcus offered. “You’ve certainly been unwaveringly kind and sympathetic with me when I have been the worst patient one could possibly have.”
She smiled at that. “You haven’t been so bad… of late. The first week, when you had to remain abed—well, it’s a thousand wonders I’m not in an asylum next to Cassandra.”
As she walked on ahead, he caught her hand and pulled her back. “Let’s stay here a moment longer,” he urged. They were hidden from the house by the tangled branches that comprised the maze. The house was barely visible over top of it.
“You are not up to whatever it is you have in mind,” she stated. “It’s too cold out here by far!”
He laughed. “You’d be surprised what I’m up for, my darling. There is something I need to say to you, Jane, and I’d prefer to say it in a garden. It seems many of our most meaningful conversations have taken place there.”
“Or in galleries,” she retorted.
“Yes, but our conversations in galleries tend more toward the wicked side of things,” he replied. “Do you recall the night of my return and our conversation in the garden?”
“I do. You asked to court me,” she said, “for us to get to know one another and then decide if we should wed.”
He grinned. “So, I did. Things did not work out quite that way, did they? We resolved your initial animosity to me but, sadly, my ability to offer you the time you had asked for to make a decision fled in the face of our families’ machinations was compromised.”
She nodded. “So it was… and so was I. What are you getting at, Marcus?”
“I only wish to ask… do you regret it?” He uttered the question softly, with far more hesitation than she typically saw from him. “Given that we shall forever be so scandalized we can do nothing more than rusticate in the country with only one another for company, I feel I ought to ask.”
Jane stepped closer to him and wrapped her arms about his middle, pressing close to his side. “I’ve many things to regret… my father’s unfortunate temper and even more unfortunate choice of bride, the sad circumstances that led to your inheritance of the title, the fact that Charles actually shot you at my refusal to do his bidding… but I do not regret that our courtship was interrupted by marriage. In truth, I feel I have the best of both worlds.”
It was true. He was forever making unexpected and romantic gestures toward her. Only the day before, he’d gifted her with a beautiful writing box of dark mahogany inlaid with mother of pearl. She had yet to confess to him her true ambition of writing a novel, but suspected that he was already aware.
“I should have said something sooner,” he whispered. “I offered to make a declaration of affections to you once, in exchange for your cooperation in going to a more secure location. You refused me. I would make that declaration now.”
Her heart was pounding. He’d shown her in a dozen ways the depth of his feelings. But neither of them had ever made a proclamation to one another of just where their hearts lay.
“And I would not stop you from doing so. Indeed, I am waiting with bated breath,” she murmured.
“There here it is, Jane, and it matters not if you feel you cannot yet say it in return. I believe that, in time, this marriage between us will offer us both the greatest of happiness. It’s already given it to me. I love you, Jane, and I’m content to wait forever until you feel inclined to return the sentiment.”
Jane laid her head against his shoulder, her ear pressed just above his
heart. “You are the most foolish of men, Marcus. On the morning of our wedding, I questioned myself. Even then, I suspected that I had fallen in love with you. It would not have taken much as I’d spent the better part of my life quietly worshipping you from afar. But when Charles shot you, when I saw you bleeding so profusely and had to accept the possibility that I might very well lose you, then I was certain.”
“Certain that I am a foolish man or certain that I am the foolish man that you love?” he teased.
She laughed in spite of the serious nature of their exchange. She would always laugh with him, Jane realized. Their lives might never be perfect, but they would always be joyous. “I am hopelessly in love with you. And lord willing, I will remain that way until I die.”
His arms tightened about her, pulling her even closer. “Is that the book you’ll write then? A sweeping tale of love and romance? Will it be dashing?”
She looked him then and playfully smacked his arm. “You’ve been snooping!”
“Only a little. That was why I bought you the writing box. I found some of your discarded drafts tossed about the library in a fit of artistic pique,” he said. “Do you miss writing for the Gazette?”
“No. I do not miss having to bribe servants for gossip, having to conceal my identity and sneaking about in the mews to ferret out what I could from other households. I never liked gossip. It was simply the easiest thing to earn a decent wage at,” she muttered. “All in my ill-fated bid for freedom.”
“Would you really have run away on your own?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was imagining some little cottage on a cliff in Cornwall where I could stand against the wind and watch the angry sea. I thought it would be rather romantic. Now, I see it would only have been lonely. I’m far happier right where I am.”
“With me,” he finished.
“Always, my darling.”
The End
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Please enjoy an excerpt from The Vanishing of Lord Vale.
Prologue
London, 1796
The elegant townhouse in Grosvenor Square had recently been refurbished and expanded, the viscount having annexed the abode to its left through what was rumored to be less than pleasant persuasion. It was now the largest home on the square. The Georgian facade, precise and symmetrical, faced the street much like a haughty dowager, daring any and all to defy the propriety demanded by its esteemed location. From the outside, with its trappings of wealth and privilege, it was a thing of beauty. But it hid dark and ugly secrets within, much like the man who owned it.
“I ain’t never seen a ’ouse that big,” one of the men said. Large and rough spoken, with broad shoulders and a barrel chest, his cockney heritage was evident in his speech. The man removed his hat and scratched his shaved head, courtesy of the prison he’d recently been discharged from. Shaving the heads of inmates was the best way to curb infestations of lice and other vermin.
“It ain’t so big, Henry,” Alfred, the smallest of their crew, said. Short, wiry and deceptively strong, there was a coldness in his eyes that was very different from his companions.
Fenton Hardwick cursed his luck to have joined up with two such dimwitted criminals. “Do not use names, you fools! Our goal is to get into that house, get what we’re looking for, and then be gone from it without anyone being the wiser.”
“You sure they’re gone from ’ere?” Henry asked. “Don’t seem right that a body with a warm hearth and a nice young family would be out and about, not on Christmas like!”
“I’m certain of it. I heard it from Lord Vale himself,” Fenton snapped. The man had told him where they’d be, where to find the item in question, though in somewhat vague terms. He owed Fenton and this was how the debt would be paid. Better spoken than his friends, from a far different background, they had little understanding of how the upper echelons of society worked. Though given his own poor dress at the moment, he would be hard pressed to convince anyone that he was more well-versed in the ways of that world. “I was standing in the mews right behind the house when he told the driver to have the carriage readied… that he and his lady would be attending the theater!”
“Toffs is strange,” Henry said, shaking his head.
“Don’t much matter. We’ll get in, get the goods and be gone,” Alfred said. “Then we’re all square like wiv’ the boss and can get on with honest work. Now ’ush up and let’s get on wiv’ it.”
In the darkness, with the mist and smog shrouding the muddy streets, they slipped toward the house and the back gate that Henry had disabled earlier. It hadn’t taken much effort to break the locking mechanism on his way out after he’d delivered a load of meat to the kitchens. Now, they’d slip inside, up the stairs, and directly into the lady’s chambers. They’d retrieve the item the “boss” wanted and, perhaps, help themselves to a few trinkets to ease their way into a life of, as Alfred had said, honest work. It was The Season, after all. She’d have all her best jewels and fripperies about. They could take what they liked and sell it to the highest bidder.
As they entered the garden, a loud chorus of singing erupted from the servants’ quarters on the lower floor. It was the perfect cover. With his hand wrapped in heavy cloth, Henry gave the glass farthest from the servants’ hall a tap. The pane fell inward, but the sound of it was muffled by the carpet and masked by the revelry inside.
“Check the corridor. Make sure no one is coming to investigate the noise,” Fenton urged. They had a sound plan, a free pass as it were, in and out of the house, yet he found himself unaccountably nervous.
Alfred rushed ahead to do his bidding, watching through the narrowest crack in the door. Several moments passed and no one appeared. “We got the all clear,” he said.
Opening the door fully, he stepped out into the hall and the other two followed suit. They made for the back stairs. Henry’s sister had worked as a maid there once, until Lord Vale tried to put his hand up her skirt. She’d only been too happy to give them the information they asked for about the layout of the house.
Once on the upper floors, the house was unnaturally quiet. With all the servants below, enjoying their Christmas feast, and the lord and lady of the manor out for the evening, the grand house was like a tomb.
“Gives me the shivers, it does,” Henry said crossly. He might have been the biggest of them, but he’d always been more heart than brains, not to mention the fact that he was often gutless. Were it not for his compatriots goading him on, he’d have been more than content to continue delivering luxurious cuts of meat to the wealthy toffs his butcher employer served.
“Only a ’ouse,” Alfred replied. “Tis the people inside it we’ve most to fear from. Let’s keep it moving. I don’t want to still be standing ’ere, yammering on about it, when the lord and lady decide to come back ’ome.”
“The master’s chambers will be at the end of the corridor. You go there and get anything he might have of value. There will be coin, jewelry, gold buttons off his coats. Cut every last one of them off. I’ll head to her ladyship’s rooms and see what she might have laying about.” He hadn’t told the others about the book. That was an agreement between him and the “boss” only. Fenton turned to Henry and added, “And you stay here. If anyone comes up those stairs, you come find me. Understood?”
Henry nodded his understanding and Fenton continued. “And cover your faces. In the off chance someone returns, we can still make our escape if they cannot identify us!”
Dutifully, the other men pulled up the cloths tied around their necks so that the lower halves of their faces were covered and each one headed out in the direction they’d been given. Henry took up sentry in the hall, monitoring the stairs. Big as he was, he managed to blend his hulking shape with the shadows.
Shaking his head at the conundrum of his large but dimwitted companion who could seemingly vanish in plain sight, Fenton headed toward Lady Vale’s rooms and the riches that awaited him there.
*
“I don’t want to sleep in my room. I want to sleep in yours… there are beasties in my room.”
Sarah, Lady Vale, smiled down into the upturned and cherubic face of her son. In this one thing, she thought, she’d done something right. Her husband might find fault with her in every other regard as a wife and as a woman, but she’d provided him an heir and never had a more beautiful boy graced a family than her dear Benedict. Brushing the blond curls from his furrowed brow, she shook her head.
“There are no beasties, Benedict. There is nothing in this house that would harm you!”
“Maisy said there was,” he protested. “She said there were all sorts of nasty things going on in the corridors. Said it were nothing but evil.”
“It was nothing but evil,” she corrected automatically. “You mustn’t repeat things you hear from Maisy as the girl is full of superstitious nonsense and her grasp of the language is utterly atrocious.”
“What’s atrocious mean?” he asked, hugging the small, wooden horse that was his favorite toy.
“It means awful.” And there were awful, evil things occurring in the corridors. But she couldn’t possibly tell her son that his father was the perpetrator of them. James seemed to feel that any female servant was fair game for his unwanted advances. She’d made it a point to stop hiring pretty girls and, instead, only hired those who were significantly older or who would be willing to tolerate his advances for whatever reward it might bring them. It was a lowering thing for any woman to look at the servants in her own house and wonder which one was warming her husband’s bed for the night. Of course, she was relieved when anyone warmed it other than herself, so there was also a strange sort of consolation in it. “And Maisy didn’t mean evil like monsters or beasties. She was talking about people playing pranks on one another. You’ve nothing to worry about, darling. I promise.”
The Missing Marquess of Althorn (The Lost Lords Book 3) Page 22
