Knight of Love

by Catherine LaRoche

  Becker cursed again under his breath. “You must leave with Helga now, Lenora. I’ll see to Wolf. A British cavalry unit rides into the town as we speak. They’ll be at the castle very soon. The commanding officer will get you home to safety. But no one must find you here and implicate you in Kurt’s death.”

  “I can’t leave Wolfram!” She desperately packed more linen around his wound. But the blood wouldn’t stop.

  Other men ran into the chambers. She vaguely registered them as Müller, Krause, and some of the other revolutionaries from Wolfram’s militia group. Becker barked commands in German, and Krause knelt at her side to take over her ministrations.

  Becker tugged her to her feet. “You must leave Wolf, and now. I’ll see to him. It’s over, Lenora.” He pulled her from the room, Helga following them.

  On a sudden impulse, she grabbed the annulment documents that Kurt, Wolfram, and she had signed earlier and threw them into the blazing fireplace on her way out of the chamber.

  “It’s over,” she whispered to herself. “All over.”

  The rebellion at Rotenburg.

  Her marriage.

  Dear God, perhaps Wolfram’s life.

  And any of her secret, foolish hopes.

  Chapter 13

  London

  Late September 1848—six months later

  The marchioness of Rantham’s ball opened the Little Season. As the marquess’s cellars ranked among the best in London, the Belgravia mansion filled early. Lenora noted, however, that the crowd wasn’t huge. Most of the ton families still kept to their country homes—attending to estate business, hunting, and enjoying the quieter amusements and cleaner air outside the city. They wouldn’t relocate to town until February, when parliament reopened, or even until after Easter. But for those more deeply involved in government or the diplomatic corps or simply without a country estate, the ball was not to be missed.

  This year foreigners were in particular evidence. Members of the deposed French royal family circulated in the reception rooms, champagne cups in hand. Prince Metternich, in exile from Austria, had ventured forth from his leased London home in full dress uniform for the event. Indeed, frightened and angry aristocrats from France, Austria, and across Europe flooded London this summer, clinging to the city as a lifeboat of security amid the tempest of uprisings on the Continent.

  After the British troops contacted by Lord Becker had brought Lenora to the safety of her parents in late spring, she’d retreated to Sherbrooke Abbey. The social whirl of the regular Season occupied her parents in town, but her badly frayed nerves craved the quiet of the Devonshire countryside at the family estate. Her mother and father had seemed to understand her desire for solitude and hadn’t pushed her for explanations.

  When they’d returned to Sherbrooke Abbey at the beginning of August, however, she could tell they hoped to learn more of what had transpired in Germany. But their too-intent eyes and probing questions only set her heart to hammering. She begged leave to depart for town, where she’d arranged to stay with her girlhood friend Lady Beatrice DeBray, who lived in one of Mayfair’s grandest mansions under the chaperonage of her aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Norton. As those two kindly souls were amateur scientists madly passionate about the scientific craze of dinosaur-fossil hunting and distracted about most else, the chaperonage was not onerous. Even better as chaperone was Lenora and Bea’s dear friend Callista, married just over a year to Lord Rexton, the formerly notorious “Master of Love.” With Callista and her husband back from a literary tour in Europe and settled in London for the book writing and selling that occupied them both, most days the three young women spent hours together.

  Avoiding her parents and reconnecting with these friends aided enormously in helping Lenora heal. Bea and Callista seemed to sense she wasn’t ready for questions and allowed her to get away with blessedly vague accounts of her months in Germany. She had managed to tell her friends and parents some of what had transpired, but not that Prince Kurt had beaten and abused her and that a half-German rebel leader who happened to be a British lord now believed himself her husband. She’d merely made brief mention of Lord Ravensworth as someone who’d helped her get to British authorities after she’d left a fiancé who’d proven incompatible and overpossessive.

  All that was true enough, although it left out a quasi-marriage, a forced consummation, a night of passion at Dremen, and the fact that she’d planted a knife between the eyes of the ex-fiancé. She didn’t dream of broaching such topics with her restrained and upright parents. Living with Bea was much easier in that regard—darling, energetic Bea, who’d become England’s richest heiress due to the carriage accident that had killed her parents years ago, was always bouncing off to some new cause as patroness of the philanthropic Society of Love. But not even with her dear friends could Lenora bring herself to discuss Wolfram.

  The truth was, she didn’t know what to think of the man. For several desperately anxious weeks, she hadn’t even known if he was dead or alive. Lord Becker had finally managed to get word to her that their “mutual friend” had pulled through a tricky recovery and was convalescing slowly in the Netherlands before an expected return to England. Nightmares of Kurt still haunted her. Strangely, she didn’t regret killing him. She slept easy on that count; the nightmares were all of his hands at her neck, her mouth forced around him. She would wake choking, gagging—and thinking how her intimate time with Wolfram had left no such dreadful memories. Instead, he filled her sleep with the most confused dreams about armored knights and huge wolves, dreams where her body clenched in remembered pleasure and she awoke panting, throbbing with the afterglow. Most days the confused and tangled muddle of her feelings exhausted her. Anger and regret twisted with a gnawing sense of loss, as if she’d let go too early on some bright promise whose potential she’d barely had time to understand. Everything had ended too soon, without any proper resolution, before she was ready.

  And then, before she felt remotely prepared to face him again, suddenly there he was.

  The night of the Rantham ball, Callista’s gorgeous Greek god of a husband escorted his wife to the event, along with Lenora and Bea. The three young women glowed in new gowns designed for the occasion by Marie Beauvallon, Callista’s brilliant French dressmaker friend. Rexton had seated the ladies in a group of gilded chairs along the ballroom wall and gone to fetch champagne, when Lenora spotted him.

  Wolfram, Lord Ravensworth, the Black Knight.

  Her somewhat husband.

  He stood across the ballroom, speaking with an older foreign diplomat who was wearing Arabian robes. The breadth of Wolfram’s shoulders stretched as massive as ever, and his head, as always, rose above the heads of all the other men in the room. His black hair curled toward his collar again, and she was startled at the difference it made in softening the harsh lines of his skull and jaw. Different also was how thin he’d become—far too thin—and pale, even in the ballroom’s gaslight glow.

  As if he sensed her regard, he looked up.

  Their eyes caught and held. The connection sizzled in her gut.

  Damn those sky-blue eyes of his! They pulled her in still. How or why, she couldn’t fathom. Truth be told, she and he barely knew each other, although what that meant about the intimacies they’d shared, she did not care to ponder.

  And what new note was that in those blue eyes of his as he frowned and put down his glass?

  “Are you well, Lenora?” asked Callista with some concern. “Your cheeks have gone quite flushed.”

  “Do you become overheated, dear?” Bea laid a gloved hand against Lenora’s forehead. “Thank goodness the autumn cool is coming on! Callista, do you recall how hot it was in here at Lady Rantham’s June ball, with the mad crush of the Season in full swing? At least the ladies could blame their flushes on the heat that night, and not on all the champagne that flowed!”

  “I’m fine, you two, really,” Lenora answered, clearing her throat. She angled to see around her hovering friends. Was Wo
lfram preparing to leave? Not because of her, surely. She’d supposed she must run into him eventually in London; he must have known the same.

  Bea almost fell off her chair with a little shriek as Lenora pushed her aside for a better view. “Lenora, whatever is it?” asked her friend.

  Yes, the man was bowing to take leave of the Arab diplomat! The coward! Did he seek to avoid her? She winced as she saw how stiffly he favored his left leg, a bad limp in evidence as he headed toward the ballroom stairs.

  Before she could decide what to do, Lord Durham, the ambassador to the German Confederation whom she’d thought to reach in Frankfurt all those months ago, intercepted Wolfram with a rough hand on his arm. From the newspapers, Lenora knew the ambassador to be in London for meetings with the foreign secretary. Why he seemed intent on starting up a belligerent conversation with Wolfram, she knew not. But as the ambassador sneered up at Wolfram, she decided to find out.

  “Oh, good, Lord Rexton, you’re back,” she said as the viscount arrived with a servant bearing champagne on a silver tray. “Bea, come with me.” She hauled her startled friend to her feet.

  “What? Where are we going?”

  “Over here—just come, quickly!” Lenora linked her arm with Bea’s to steer her to an open spot in the crowd behind Wolfram. If they feigned a promenade around that section of the ballroom toward the ladies’ retiring room, she should be able to overhear the gist of the conversation.

  “You fought with the revolutionaries, Ravensworth,” she caught the ambassador saying as they neared, noting how he drew out the term with disdain. “Or so say all the reports. Do you deny it?”

  “I deny nothing,” replied Wolfram. “The revolutionary cause was, and is, just. The people in Germany ask for no more than the same rights to democracy enjoyed by every good Englishman on this side of the channel.”

  Lenora tugged on Bea’s arm to slow down her friend and craned her neck to better catch the two men’s conversation.

  “That may well be,” Lord Durham replied with a tight smile, “but our good Englishmen won their rights through peaceful petition to Parliament and the enlightened benevolence of our own monarchy. What you helped bring about was anarchy and carnage in the streets.”

  “Lenora, what are you—” Bea began to ask.

  “Shush!” Lenora hissed at her. “There’s something I need to hear.”

  Wolfram bristled and stepped closer to Lord Durham. “The people of the German Confederation had no such parliament to petition. The princes and grand dukes had shut down the presses and censored the universities. When the leaders take away all paths to peaceful protest and refuse any reform, they must expect true men of conscience and honor to fight back.”

  “Men of honor know that their loyalty must be to the crown,” the ambassador said derisively. “As a German imperial knight and a British earl, I cannot imagine you betraying your class to fight with the rabble laying ruin to Germany.”

  Wolfram glowered so fiercely, Lenora feared fisticuffs breaking out on the dance floor. “I betrayed no one.” A muscle ticked dangerously along his jaw. “My grandfather and his ancestors before him all swore an oath to protect the people of Germany from tyranny and harm. I know where my duty lies, sir. And I know who they are that betray their duty to rule for the good of the people and seek instead only to enrich their own coffers. Such rulers lose all claims to legitimacy.”

  A restrained fury vibrated between the two men. Although Wolfram’s height forced Lord Durham to crane his neck to hold the earl’s fierce gaze, the ambassador didn’t back down. “Your views veer dangerously close to the seditious, Lord Ravensworth. Be warned about what you say.”

  Oh, dear. She needed to break this conversation up immediately. Lenora dragged Bea back to Lord Rexton at a most unladylike clip.

  “Where are we going now?” asked Bea rather breathlessly. “I thought we were headed to the retiring room?”

  “There’s someone I need to talk with. Do hurry, Bea.”

  They arrived back to where Callista and her husband sat along the wall, sipping their champagne and ignoring the crowd of the party. Lord Rexton appeared to be whispering rather scandalous mots d’amour in his bride’s ear, judging from her delighted laugh.

  Lenora grabbed hold of Lord Rexton’s arm, almost causing him to spill his sparkling wine. “My lord, do you know that man over there? The one with the British ambassador to Germany?”

  Rexton looked to where she pointed none too discreetly. “That’s Ravensworth, isn’t it? Back from the German revolution, looks like, and rather the worse for wear. Some say he deserves it, from what I hear in the clubs.”

  Her heart sank further at that news. “Would you get him, please?” She let the words rush out before she could think twice. “Could you say that there is someone—an acquaintance from Germany, you might say—who would like a word with him?”

  Rexton quirked up an eyebrow. “You, my lady?”

  “Yes, yes—oh, please just do it, and hurry!” She snatched the glass from his hand and gave him a little shove. Wolfram might be getting himself into real trouble. The mood in England was so delicate these days. The Continent still blazed with insurrection. Austria and Italy had gone up in arms, with France, of course, in ongoing chaos. Luckily for the Queen, the working-class Chartist scare in England and the demonstrations by Irish nationalists had died down. Parliament managed to defuse the populist fervor without any major disturbances. But many in England still longed for the sense of change sweeping Europe—or were determined to avoid it at any cost.

  An earl fond of revolution was a dangerous—and vulnerable—man.

  But then a different panic gripped her. What was she doing, confronting him here in public? What if he tried to claim title as her husband? Or make a scene here in the ballroom?

  To her shame, she scooted her chair behind Bea’s just as Lord Rexton arrived with Wolfram in tow.

  “I’ve found Ravensworth, back in the country,” said Lord Rexton to the ladies. “Not bringing any of that Continental revolution with you, I hope,” he added lightly over his shoulder.

  Wolfram, looking grim and stiff, offered up a tight smile. “I trust to the government and Queen, Rexton, to save us from the abuses that made revolution inevitable in Germany and France.”

  “Quite right. Especially with this pack of social reformers hard at work helping the London poor.” Rexton smiled at the ladies, that infamous charmer’s smile on reliable record as literally setting women to swoon. Lenora marveled again at the blond perfection and charisma of the man. No wonder they called him Lord Adonis, or at least they used to, before their Callista tamed him.

  But how odd that Rexton’s smile, blinding in its male glory, had no effect on her insides. Not like those blue eyes now resting on her with such a disconcerting gaze.

  Rexton caught the direction of the earl’s gaze as well. “Ravensworth, may I have the honor of presenting my wife and her two lovely friends, Lady Beatrice and Lady Lenora? Although I gather you have already had the pleasure of Lady Lenora’s acquaintance?”

  Lenora caught the tension in Wolfram’s left side and his slight grimace as he bowed to her and her friends. A buzzing filled her ears as memories flooded back of that horrible last day at Rotenburg. Dear God, his blood pooled even now in her imagination, soaking both the floor and themselves.

  She looked down at her hands, clutched dangerously tight around the stem of her champagne cup. Her ears cleared in time to hear Wolfram’s words: “. . . had the pleasure of attending in years past the famous Society of Love ball, hosted by Lady Beatrice’s much-missed parents. Have you taken over the duties of that charity ball, Lady Beatrice? I’ve heard you are the real power now directing the Society of Love.”

  He exchanged further pleasantries with Bea and expressed his belated congratulations to Rexton over his marriage last spring, wishing Lady Rexton a lifetime of happiness.

  Then he stepped around Bea’s chair to face Lenora.

  “And, y
es, I had the honor of meeting Lady Lenora when our paths crossed a few months ago in Germany. A most tumultuous time. I trust you are enjoying better the peace and security of our native England, my lady?”

  She managed to nod and mutter some inanity in greeting.

  “You were involved with the revolution, weren’t you, Ravensworth?” asked Rexton when Lenora made no further move to speak. God’s truth, she’d never felt more tongue-tied in her life.

  “Here and there, yes,” the earl replied stiffly. “There was a particularly vicious prince abusing his people not far from the ancestral lands of my mother’s family. The people had risen up against him. I was pleased to join in his defeat.”

  Lenora finally broke in with a forced laugh. “For shame, sirs! Are we ladies not enough to distract you from such gruesome talk? How can you dwell on stories of battle when a waltz is starting up?” She batted Wolfram’s arm with her fan and cast him a simpering smile. “Would you not much prefer to dance?”

  It was a blatant move, almost worthy of a Drury Lane doxy. She was practically begging the man to dance with her. Even Bea looked rather startled.

  Lord Rexton saved the day with his usual charm. “In the presence of such beautiful ladies, Ravensworth, we certainly shouldn’t waste our time with talk of battlefield and revolution. And, most fittingly, I believe it’s to be a German waltz next.”

  Lord Rexton’s flattery would normally have annoyed her for its condescension, but she silently thanked him for it today.

  Left with little choice, Wolfram held out his hand to her. She took it and rose to her feet, all without taking her eyes off his cold blue gaze. Lord help her, she wanted to dance with him, wanted to be in his arms again. But only for the chance to talk, she told herself fiercely, breaking their gaze.

  “Are you well enough to dance?” she asked him in a whisper as they took leave of her friends. “You are limping, I see.”

  He stared straight ahead, his face a mask. “I will manage, thank you.”