“His Grace has been dead these twenty-three months.”
And didn’t Fury know every blasted moment of it?
“How can Thomas be visiting him?”
Oh. It was over, wasn’t it? Unless she could think of something, something to save herself from what was coming next.
“Indeed he could not, Mama.” She licked her lips, which were not unaccountably dry all of a sudden. “Certainly not, His Grace. I am sorry you have that impression.”
Lady Margaret’s eyes narrowed as Fury stumbled on. Malmesbury’s too. Which was why she wished that silly little smile wouldn’t play around his mouth.
“His holy father in Rome is who Thomas has been visiting.”
“His what?” Lady Margaret gaped, her mouth open.
Truth to tell, Fury was utterly surprised herself.
“Thomas is a protestant. A pillar of the church. And a freemason. Why on earth would he be visiting the Pope?”
A freemason? Fury barely swallowed her shock. To think there were things she had not known about Thomas. But why shouldn’t he have been visiting the Pope? What else was she meant to say here?
“Thomas went on a pilgrimage, Mama, concerning matters, it is a little too delicate to discuss here.”
“I think you had better discuss them.”
“Indeed.” Fury cast Malmesbury a sideways glance. “But these are matters which, alas, I cannot before a gentleman.”
“Before a—”
“Please, Mama.”
So long as she got Malmesbury to leave, she believed she could do this. Lady Margaret was all sorts of awful, and were she to know her son lay at the bottom of the bay, she would be that and more. But she was still a woman. A woman who wanted a grandchild.
“I see.”
“Lionel, you will leave us? Lady Margaret is of a delicate constitution.” Another lie. Lady Margaret had the constitution of a rhinoceros mated with a hippo. But if Malmesbury didn’t go she would lose this. “There are things her ears would blush to hear, concerning the necessity of Thomas undertaking the journey to Rome.”
She just needed to be careful not to hint she was pregnant. Then he would be back here demanding Flint. Hopefully the carrot she dangled was enough though. She prayed so because her head ached, and it was all she could do to stand here, the way her stomach churned.
“I will ring for Susan.”
Fury approached the little brass hand bell, rusted with disuse, and jangled it. Susan would be around somewhere, and then they would begin. As for Malmesbury, well, saying His Lordship was just leaving, was certainly the way to deal with him. When Susan arrived to escort him out, she shot Fury a look of pure admiration.
Fury waited till the door had closed again, then, suppressing a shudder, sat forward. “It’s like this, Mama, those conditions you set us were difficult to meet.”
Fury hesitated. It was all very well knowing the focus Lady Margaret’s presence brought to the sorry situation she was in. It was equally fine knowing she was pregnant. The question here was what to say about Thomas’s demise. Should he be still visiting his father in Rome? Or…what was she going to say?
“And Thomas—Thomas felt it best to—” She folded her hands together. “In truth, he believed he had led a sinful life marrying me.”
“I’m not surprised. You know my feelings on the matter.”
“A sinful life in many regards, and that was why God visited on him that brain tumor. So he went…” Fury felt her palms prickle. “I have news. The pilgrimage Thomas left on has in fact been blessed, whatever you may think of his change of heart and faith. Even before he left it must have been. I am two months pregnant—James?” Her voice shot up to a shriek.
Flint strode in from the garden. Strode, not ambled, in that way that generally precluded a getting to it.
“James?” Lady Margaret’s expression was different from most women’s in that her brows slammed down, not up, as if she confronted a viper.
Fury’s heart scudded across several beats. If the mixture of hunger and fury in his eyes was anything to go by, he didn’t intend being sociable.
Her lungs tightened. She could feel each breath sharpen there in her throat, as if something too large clogged it. For just an instant she felt as if she were drowning in some great depth, as if the ocean rose around her and she was no more than a tiny cork being tossed around. But at least his attention diverted. He hadn’t grabbed her and kissed her.
“C-captain Ames.” Fury attempted to rise.
What was he doing here? What had he heard? Whatever it was, it was sufficient for him to prowl the room, with a panther’s grace. Tall, sleek, and silent. The sunlight shone on his unsmiling face, and his gaze scrutinized the floor.
Thank goodness it did. If he had leveled it on her, she’d collapse. Because there was only one thing that could make him look like that.
“You…you scared me.”
“Captain? Who?” Lady Margaret demanded.
Somehow, Fury tore her eyes from his seething presence and raised her chin. “Lady Margaret, this is—”
“I’m afraid it’s no good.” He growled, in that low drawl of his. “We can’t keep what’s been going on to ourselves. We need to tell Lady Margaret everything.”
“Everything?”
Fury was going to faint. But she shot to her feet in a ruffle of red silk. At a minimum she should have told him she was pregnant, instead of having it seem she only wanted to extract something from him, and that he was of so little consequence, now she had, there wasn’t even the need to say so. But was he mad? Did he want her to hang?
“Captain Ames, I am afraid I don’t know what you mean.” Even as she stepped forward she felt her legs shake. Her throat clogged further, and perhaps that was why the room swayed, because her lungs were starved. Now, when she most needed to be strong, for her voice to sound confident and bold, it shrunk. She quivered. Her hands went cold. Pride alone commandeered her tongue. After what he had done to her seven years ago, she should have remembered he wasn’t safe to be with. “There is nothing to tell. You know that.”
“There is.” He approached her. “And Lady Margaret here has a right to know, seeing as it concerns her son.”
Whether she was going to faint or not, she was going to pretend to do it anyway. What other choice did she have? Especially when she caught a glimpse of Flint’s eyes and knew it was over between them. The room spun in sickly waves around her.
She shut her eyes, bracing for the cold smack of the floor tiles against her knees, for the moment when her body jarred. Then she let herself go, sagging downward. Except the hard smack never came.
Instead, someone caught her.
“Get the maid.” Flint didn’t care if he yelled at Lady Margaret. So long as he didn’t do something stupid, like calling Susan by name. He wanted her here now, so he didn’t demonstrate his knowledge of the route to the bedroom.
“The maid?”
“She’ll be about somewhere. Hurry.”
He gathered Fury up and held her against his chest. It was the first time he’d ever done so and he wished he hadn’t. She felt so light it surprised him. She made his heart hammer. And he didn’t want his heart to hammer. Or feel what thrummed in that second. Or her to fit against him like a glove for that matter.
For two pins, if he didn’t get her up the stairs, he’d carry her out this house.
Even if he knew her well enough to know she was probably pretending.
“I need to get Her Ladyship upstairs but I don’t know where the bedroom is.”
“The bedroom?” Lady Margaret shot to her feet. “But that is…that is completely unheard—”
“I don’t much care what it is. Her Ladyship’s condition’s delicate. And what she’s hiding from you is the fact His Grace is missing. Now, unless you want to be responsible for Her Ladyship losing this baby or you have another successor to the dynasty, she needs a physician.”
“Thomas is—Thomas is—”
; He didn’t abhor the idea he might scare her. Lady Margaret needed more than scaring. So if she dropped to the floor, the way Fury almost had, it wasn’t his concern.
Fury, for perhaps the first time ever, was his immediate concern. Which was why, while it relieved him to see Lady Margaret get off her big backside, he left her and strode into the hall.
Fury might be pretending. She might not. But she might lose this baby and for the first time Flint didn’t think he could face it.
Chapter Twelve
“It’s all right, you can open your eyes now.”
Fury gritted her teeth, not only to hear Flint speak but to find the neck of her dress undone.
Still, she would have been more incensed to see him grin when she edged her eyes open, adjusting them to the shuttered darkness of the bedroom.
He leaned over her, regarding her with easy intimacy. A gentle amusement, which was the complete opposite of the way he’d carried her up the stairs. But there was the faintest look of apprehension too.
She recalled the strong, tight way he’d held her against the hard wall of muscle in his chest. He had been worried. Maybe just for the briefest instant. Only now, of course, the crisis ended, he wasn’t the type for fuss. Merely the type to enjoy opening her dress.
She took a deep breath. “Where is she?”
“Lady Margaret?”
Who else? Fury had a horrible feeling this wasn’t over.
He drew back. “She’s lying down in the Blue Chamber. She’s got the smelling salts and Susan. She’ll be fine.” He eased himself down onto the edge of the bed.
“What did you say to her?”
“What do you think? I told her that her precious son was lost at sea.”
“You didn’t!” Fury did her best to keep her voice lowered, even though the Blue Chamber stood at the other end of the landing. The prescience that this only made things worse intensified. As if Thomas’s ghost had risen up to haunt her for pushing him on that staircase and keeping him in a box. “How could you?”
He frowned. “Because you didn’t leave me a whole lot of choice with that little story you told about his holiness, the Pope.”
“What was I supposed to say? That Thomas is lying dead at the bottom of the bay, because you put him there, after I kicked him down the stairs and kept him in a box in the cellar for several days?”
He canted his jaw. “Well, how about a thank-you for getting you out the hole you were in?”
“It wasn’t a hole. I just didn’t know he was a freemason. They keep these things secret.”
“And you didn’t seem to know he was a protestant either. Is there anything you do know?”
They were going to quarrel. It was not the place with Lady Margaret along the corridor. Maybe Flint had left Susan with her. But no doubt Lady Margaret had disposed of her and had her ear to the wall. Then there was Malmesbury. The thought of Malmesbury made Fury sick to the pit of her stomach.
“Flint, I am grateful. It’s just her. Lady Margaret. You have no idea how much she hates me.”
“Isn’t that funny? She was soon guzzling out my hand.”
Of all the nasty, recalcitrant, self-seeking toads. She supposed she should just be grateful. Even Lady Margaret wasn’t immune to this man. But when Fury thought of all she had suffered at that woman’s hands, and Thomas too, because of her silly dictate…
“Of course, you like to imagine.”
It was just the thought of Flint encountering that lack of immunity with other women. Women far younger and more beautiful than Lady Margaret. He was going to now. There was no question of it. Despair engulfed her.
It wasn’t wrong he was so handsome, so beautiful. It wasn’t wrong she had succumbed to him as all other women did. It was terrible.
Sighing deeply, he turned his face to the side. “Look, I did it for you.”
“Me?” Oh, that was rich.
“Hell. It’s not exactly like it’s a lie, you stop and think about it for a moment. It’s probably quite smart. Smartest thing either of us could come up with in the circumstances. ’Specially if his body ever washes up.”
Fury felt sicker. As if the whole thing had suddenly come home to her. And she could see Flint was right. It was just she’d had no idea, when he had stridden through the sitting room shutters, this was what he intended.
She should have. Flint was an astonishing man to have around in a crisis. It just—well, she wasn’t going to have him around. Not after this.
“Go on.” She touched a hand to her temples where a headache gnawed.
“She accepts he left Massa along the coast some time ago in a skiff, but never arrived here.”
“A skiff?”
He eased his long legs out. “Could have been hired anywhere. And you hired me to find him.”
“I hired you?”
“As Captain Ames. All right, it doesn’t solve Malmesbury, if he finds out Ames and I are one and the same man. So, you better pray he doesn’t. But it’s the best I could think of at short notice.”
It was. But she couldn’t stay here now anyway. She’d realized that before she opened the sitting room doors. It was just ironic it should take Lady Margaret’s presence to bring her to her senses and show her the sheer idiocy of her situation.
“You’ve been waiting for news. Confirmation, which I’ve just brought you. Now, of course, you’re lying down. As is she. Maybe she’s pretty well devastated about Thomas, but she’s not exactly displeased about the fact the fish wasn’t off.”
A delicate way of putting it. Fury felt the color seep into her face in hot waves.
Even his handling of this, his behavior down the stairs was something she couldn’t fault. There had been no talk of rat’s tits, as in he couldn’t give one. Or unseemliness about her condition, as in how she got into it.
She only wished to her bones, there had. She loved him so much. And she was only one more woman to him.
“I was going to tell you. But I just found out myself,” she lied.
He tilted his chin, the faintest smile carving his cheekbones. Whatever he was going to say, she couldn’t afford to hear it.
“I had my suspicions.” She adjusted the neck of her dress. “You will appreciate, now you have met Lady Margaret and seen for yourself what she’s like, I needed to be sure before I went home to England. She would throw me out otherwise. Cut me off without a penny. But then, this morning, just before you arrived…”
“Really?”
He stood. Maybe it was the fact that Malmesbury had called, but she could see how this might look to him.
But that was false. She would never have betrayed him. They’d been so close. Tears pricked her eyes. The funny thing was, he hadn’t seemed to notice she was pregnant. How was that? He knew this was a business transaction.
She sat up. “Listen, you need to go. I don’t have much but there’s money there at the back of that drawer in the dressing table. It’s my passage back to England.”
“You don’t need it?”
Of course he’d ask. Because he didn’t know about the things she’d pawned for this God-awful passion. But it wasn’t her place to take issue, despite the alacrity with which he prowled to the drawer and yanked it open on various things. That damned book included, she realized, remembering she’d forgotten to lock the drawer yesterday.
Still, he was hungry after all, for what he wanted. And he hadn’t been bad to her. Not this time. And when she thought about that welt on his back, she knew it was dangerous for him in Genoa now. She didn’t want Malmesbury anywhere near him.
“I won’t need money now Lady Margaret is here.” Her throat clogged. How ridiculous, when she had always known how this would end. And it was with him raking in a drawer like this, for her last penny. And it was on her to reclaim Signor Santa-Rosa’s candlesticks and other sundry items, including the dining room silver, from the pawnshop too. “I’m sure I can prevail on her to pay what needs to be paid. Anyway, I don’t know I can travel on a ship right
now, so it won’t be needed. Take it to get away from here. Down to Massa, or wherever. Malmesbury has merchant ships. So you mustn’t leave from here. You need to go somewhere else.”
Even as Flint reached into the drawer to enclose the purse she’d stuffed at the back of it, he paused. It wasn’t just the sight of the book that made him fear to leave her here at Malmesbury’s mercy. He could feel each word she said sharp in his breast, sitting there just hard enough, so that if he moved they pricked him.
His mind told him it was ridiculous. This was his chance to be free of her. Finally. To get out of here and get back to his old life. But his deepest self said that life would be nothing without her.
He couldn’t understand it. How could he even contemplate walking out the door? He tried conjuring every conceivable joy, every conceivable memory of that life: The dockside whores, the clink of gold, the laughter of his crew. Because he couldn’t understand it either, how the hell she could win over that. He supposed she always had. He just hadn’t wanted to see it.
He lowered his gaze, catching sight of himself in the glass. And even worse, seeing her, beneath that damned pale-faced hanging of Messalina. Something in him stilled.
“You know, sweetheart, it’s been nice.”
“I know. But—”
If she didn’t mind him leaving and all she wanted was the heir, then why had she pretended? When she could have ended it? It must be, no matter how she’d cut him and treated him with contempt, the same reason why she’d kept Storm.
He exhaled sharply.
What was more, she was pregnant with his child. He wasn’t sure about the kind of father he might make, but he wanted to find out.
“Fury, come with me.”
She regarded him with an intense gaze. Above her Messalina’s face was a white oval and every bit as shocked as he suspected his own must look.
“We could head to Massa now. Or wherever.”
The Unraveling of Lady Fury Page 20
