The Bachelor's Bargain

by Catherine Palmer

“Oh, Prudence!” Anne gasped.

  Bonnet cast aside, Prudence threw back her head and laughed. Her hair of pale gold shimmered in the bright sunshine. She stretched out her arms to the blacksmith, beckoning, welcoming. After only a moment’s hesitation, he took both her hands. She swung backward, lifting her face to the sky.

  Anne had never seen anyone so radiant. The young woman glowed. Her cheeks had blossomed into pink roses, and her eyes sparkled in her bright, lively face.

  Anne leaned forward on the windowsill, entranced. The blacksmith said something to Prudence. She laughed and whirled away from him, lifting her skirts in her hands and spinning in giddy circles. His own face transfixed, Mr. Walker set his hands on his hips and watched the young woman, a smile softening his dark, craggy features.

  “Prudence!” Anne whispered. “Oh, Prudence, what have you done?”

  Golden hair flying, the young woman skipped across the grass toward the blacksmith again and flung her arms around him. With a look that somehow mingled both sadness and joy, he caught her up, swung her around, and kissed her gently.

  “Prudence, you are truly in love,” Anne murmured. “And Mr. Walker is in love with you.”

  As Anne let the curtains fall together, she discovered she was crying. She drew a handkerchief from her sleeve and buried her face in it, understanding at last why her friend had wept.

  What could be more hopeless than the certainty that a love so rich and true must never be? What could be more numbing than to exist, as Ruel had said of his parents, in a marriage with no common purpose other than getting through life in the most comfortable fashion possible?

  Anne pressed her handkerchief into the corner of her eye and stared down at her lap. Existence as the wife of the Marquess of Blackthorne offered at its best nothing better than routine and getting through life. At its worst, it might bring her a prison sentence.

  There was only one thing to be done. She must put all romantic nonsense of her husband into the rubbish heap where it belonged, do her best to maneuver through the coming few weeks without becoming trapped like a spider in the marquess’s web of intrigue, and then hope . . . wish . . . pray that somewhere, somehow she might find a true love who would lift her up, swing her around in his arms, and kiss her gently on the lips.

  Though fear nearly paralyzed her breath at dockside on the Thames, Anne watched her baggage loaded into the ship’s cargo hold without incident. Of course, it hardly mattered if she arrived in Flanders with a lace machine in her trunks. It was not there but in France that both the lace and the looms had been prohibited.

  Barely in time to board the same ship transporting his party to the Continent, the marquess arrived from the purported inspection of his properties. By that time, everyone in the group had settled into their rooms. Too angry to confront him about her trunks, Anne avoided her husband at every turn.

  The group sailed the short distance across the North Sea from England to Flanders. They then traveled by carriage to Brussels, where they put up in the Gothic fifteenth-century Hotel de Ville near the center of the city. Anne took a large suite next to her husband’s rooms, but she could not bring herself even to dine with the man. Though she would have no choice but to accompany him to balls and parties each evening, she refused to consider spending time with him alone. Instead, she ordered all her meals sent up to her, and she watched the city through her long, open windows.

  Brussels. Anne could not have been more filled with wonder had she been escorted into heaven itself. Flanders was the birthplace of lace. Each city’s artisans had developed their own special techniques and decorative styles. Antwerp lace, known for its vase-and-lilies motif, was called pot lace. It symbolized the Annunciation, for lilies in a pot were shown often in early illustrations of the visit of the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary. At Bruges, the very best lace cravats were made, and no English gentleman of an aristocratic bent would be without one. The marquess himself owned five, though Anne felt humbly certain that her own length of Honiton far surpassed them. Beautiful lace also was made at Ghent, Mechlin, and Ypres. Anne had heard of a parasol cover once made in Ypres using eight thousand bobbins.

  But Brussels . . . ah, Brussels! The best of all Flanders lace always had been made in Brussels. Lacemakers in that city used exceptionally fine thread to work the most delicate creations Anne had ever seen. Indeed, she had been privileged to witness such lace only twice in her lifetime. The webbing was so fine that it was easily discolored by a worker’s hands. To overcome this, each airy bit of handwork was powdered with either white lead or lime.

  Anne treasured the hope of visiting lace schools in Flanders, or at the very least speaking with some of the designers and pattern prickers. She mentioned her desire on their second evening, as she and the marquess were returning to the hotel after a particularly late ball. He informed her that what little lace still was being made in Flanders was created by nuns in closed religious communities.

  “Abandon your interest in lace for the time being,” he whispered to Anne, leaning against her shoulder as they entered the hotel foyer. “The less you are associated with the subject in people’s minds, the better.”

  “Shall I deny the essential quality of my character for your enterprise?” she snapped in return, annoyed that he must always look so handsome and smell so intriguing when she wanted nothing more than to despise him. “You jeopardize my person with your illicit activities. Will you also jeopardize my very soul?”

  Turning on her heel, she started up the stairs. He caught up and took her elbow. “Anne, what are you talking about?”

  “I am speaking of the lace machine, of course.”

  “Shh!”

  “I assumed we would depart as all proper smugglers do from Devon—that we should leave from Mount Pleasant Inn in the Warren or from Sladnor House near Torquay. I imagined us slipping away from England into France with our cargo secreted on some small boat. Instead we sailed gallantly away from London as though we had no other purpose than a pleasure tour. We are smugglers, are we not, Lord Black-thorne? Villains whose true mission is to transport a lace machine?”

  “Will you be quiet?” He opened her door and shoved her roughly into the room. “Do you want the whole of Brussels to know our plan?”

  “Your plan.”

  “Your own life is at stake in this, Anne.”

  “Thanks to you.” She tore off her gloves and flung them on a side table. “Where is the loom?”

  “It is better that you not know the exact location.”

  “And why is that? So I may be properly shocked when the authorities in France open my trunks and discover your machine neatly packed away among my possessions?”

  “Lower your voice, please.” He stripped off his coat and tugged his cravat loose. “What leads you to believe the loom is in your luggage?”

  “Is it not?” She walked over to the stacked metal-and-wood boxes and gave the bottom one a swift kick. “Locked, are they? Filled with a brand-new wardrobe for your darling wife, are they?”

  “Did you not believe my letter to you?”

  “Not a word of it.”

  “Of course not.” He drew a set of keys from his pocket, pulled one from the chain, and tossed it atop the nearest trunk. “Open it, then.”

  Anne stared at him. Could she have been wrong? He had not truly bought her new gowns, had he? Of course not.

  “Open it,” he repeated. “Go on, Anne. Open the trunk.”

  Thirteen

  “Have a look at the glorious machine I hid in your trunks,” Ruel said, gesturing at the locked chests.

  Suddenly unsure, Anne eyed them warily. Pandora’s boxes? Would she open them to find beauty and delight in the form of a hundred new gowns—or all the evils of the modern age worked in the shape of hard, cold machinery? All at once she was not certain she wanted to see what was inside at all.

  “If the loom is not in my baggage,” she asked the man who stood so cocksure before her, “where is it?”

  �
��As I told you, it is better for you not to know.” He took a step toward her and slipped his hand behind her neck. Warm fingers pressed against her skin. “Are you frightened, Anne?”

  She clenched her jaw against an unbidden shortness of breath. “I prefer to know what is to befall me.”

  “What is to befall you is nothing more than the Duchess of Richmond’s ball. It takes place tomorrow night, the fifteenth day of June, 1815, and it will be attended by some two hundred persons. I feel certain you will look magnificent in one of your many new gowns.”

  “And after the ball?”

  “Another ball. And then, perhaps another.”

  “I cannot bear this game of endless waiting!” She jerked off her headdress of ostrich plumes and diamonds. “I am suffocating in feathers and silk. When will we go to France?”

  “When the time is right. As the daughter of a minister, Anne, you should know better than anyone how little control we have over our lives. No one can really determine his own fate.” He tilted her jaw upward with his thumb, forcing her to meet his eyes. “We shall go to France when the situation there warrants.”

  “Are you to be the judge of that?”

  “I am doing what I believe to be right and prudent. Please trust me.”

  “Have I any choice? You claim we have no control over our lives, yet you control everything about me. You say where I may go and when. You predetermine how I must behave and what I must say. You regulate everything about my existence from what I do each day to how I dress. You even lock my trunks to keep my own clothing from me! I feel as if I am hemmed in by walls of your construction—a prisoner to your every whim.”

  “Far from it.” His mouth fell into a grim line. “Far from it. Though you may feel confined by our present situation, I am no more able to capture you than a man can capture a hummingbird.”

  “You speak in riddles.”

  “Hummingbirds are found in America. They are small, very bright, totally entrancing. Their wings move so quickly they cannot even be seen as the little birds hover to sip nectar from red and orange flowers. A man is free to observe them and to be both enchanted and mystified. But to make a hummingbird a prisoner? Impossible.”

  Disturbed by his words, Anne found she could no longer meet his eyes. She turned away and went to the window. Was it possible her husband was as tormented as she by this impossible marriage they had made?

  Opening the curtains, she looked down on the tree-shaded boulevards and imposing monuments that characterized the city. She had hardly admitted to herself the torture of endless hours in his presence—unable to touch him, hardly able even to look at him. She felt as though she were burning up inside, like a volcano on the verge of eruption.

  How could she endure another ball? He would take her in his arms and hold her tightly. She would smell that maddening scent of cedar and spice that clung to his skin and clothing. She would hear the rumble of his deep voice inside his chest, feel the warmth of his breath against her ear, and look into eyes whose messages of desire belied every glib and careless word of his mouth.

  Everything about the man was familiar now—as common to her as her own reflection in a mirror. She knew the exact breadth of his shoulders, knew the solid ripple of the muscle in his arm, knew the curl of his hair at the back of his neck. She knew what made him laugh and what made him angry. She had memorized the shape of his hands with their long fingers—large, strong, and far too brown to be fashionable. She was intimate with the ridge of toughened skin on the middle of his palm where he had labored at some task in America of which he would not speak. The veins that coursed down his arms like narrow blue ropes had held her spellbound. Even the crop of short black whiskers that he daily shaved away were as familiar to her as old friends.

  “You asked if I were frightened,” she said softly. “Indeed, I am. I am terrified.”

  “Why?”

  Could she tell him? Dare she admit that her own feelings for him disturbed her beyond words? Could she let him know how deeply it had hurt to believe he might have meant to betray her if the authorities discovered his detestable machine? Could she tell him how she ached at the things that separated them—their conflicting beliefs, their values, their backgrounds? Of course not. She could reveal nothing. She must go on playing their game of charades until he finished what he had to do and could cast her aside.

  “Anne?” he asked, touching her arm. “What frightens you? You must tell me.”

  She swung around, replacing her anguish with anger. “You and your friends continue to play at silly balls and parties as though the arena of war were nothing more than a picnic ground. Everyone in your elegant Society has come to Brussels as they would flock to a cricket match or a game of croquet. Are they so completely ignorant of the potential for violence here?”

  When he said nothing, she forced herself to meet his gaze. “I do not believe you have known violence, Lord Black-thorne,” she said in a low voice. “But I have.”

  He frowned. “You?”

  “You must not forget my father is a Luddite. I observed the secret meetings of his fellows, heard their plans, witnessed the fire of righteous indignation burning in their eyes. I saw those men take their hammers and their axes and rush to the factories. And I saw them when they returned—bloodied, injured, ultimately defeated.”

  She held her folded hands to her lips, lost in memory.

  He laid a hand on her shoulder. “Anne, I shall protect you, whatever we may encounter.”

  “So you say. But you must understand that the passion to right wrongs stirs deeply within my own blood. I know what sort of ardor leads to war. I myself feel convictions so strong I would fight to the death to defend them.” She lifted her head. “I cannot believe that the forces of Napoleon in France and the companies of English and Prussian troops stationed here in Flanders are willing to lay down their lives for a cause so unworthy as to be made a spectacle of by the aristocracy. For those soldiers and for the people they defend, the issues at stake have nothing to do with balls and parties. These are men who would kill and die for what they believe. We are wrong to treat their cause so lightly.”

  “Do you understand their cause, Anne?”

  “I do not, nor do I care to. I only know that to dance blindly into the midst of their war as though waltzing through a ballroom is a mistake. To believe we can transport ourselves and our great load of lace machinery across a battleground is foolish. If we undertake an outing into the open country—me garbed in a silk pelisse and satin gown, Sir Alexander in his cossacks and vest, you in your tall hat and polished boots, and Prudence with her silly . . . oh, we shall be cut to pieces, and we shall deserve it.”

  Ruel pushed his hands into the pockets of his trousers and began to pace. “You are right, of course. Again, I have failed to give your wisdom and insight the credit they deserve. No matter how my Society might wish to view the wife of a marquess, I know you are no giddy debutante. Like the hummingbird, you are aggressive and fearless in the face of attack.”

  “I have witnessed violence,” she said in a low voice. “I understand it. I shall never passively allow myself—or anyone else— to be injured senselessly.”

  “I made you a vow on our wedding day,” Ruel said, turning and taking her shoulders. “I swore to protect you, Anne, and I shall.”

  “You have made me far too many vows—few of which you have kept.”

  “What promise have I broken?”

  “You swore if I married you, you would return my lace. You have not done so.”

  Letting out a breath, he turned away and stalked to the trunk. “If you will not unlock it, I shall.” He inserted the iron key, gave it a turn, and stepped back. “Open the trunk, Anne.”

  She drifted to his side, curiosity conquering her uncertainties for the moment. Bending, she grasped the heavy lid and lifted. The moment she saw what was inside, she gasped. A gown of fragile blue satin lay draped across a length of white silk. Like nothing she had ever seen, the garment shimm
ered in the lamplit room. Its low neckline had been edged with delicate white lace, and the puffed sleeves were trimmed in a pale gold fringe. From the short gathered waist, a divided overskirt of blue crepe cascaded down in luxurious folds. And carefully stitched to the very center of the satin slip, in prominent view, lay . . .

  “My lace!” She caught up the dress and hugged it to her bosom, her dark mood suddenly vanished. “Oh, this is the most beautiful gown I have ever seen!”

  “I am pleased you like it.”

  “So I do!” She laughed in spellbound disbelief. “You had my lace worked into the gown! I can hardly believe it!”

  “I could not very well go traipsing into France with a panel of elegant Honiton in my pocket, now could I?” He grinned. “Besides, it is your lace, and I promised to return it to you.”

  Immeasurably relieved, Anne skipped across the room to a tall gilt-framed mirror in the corner. “This is splendid. Magnificent.” She laughed again, turning this way and that with the gown held in front of her. “And it is a soft sky blue! My favorite shade. Oh, sir—”

  “Ruel.” He crossed his arms, as if forcing himself to keep from taking hold of her again. “My name is Ruel.”

  “Just see how the fabric sets off the lace. It is perfect! I might have created it for this very gown.” Aglow with delight, she smiled at him. “Thank you. Thank you for the gown, and thank you for keeping your vow to me. I felt sure you would never return this lace. I thought you meant to keep it forever. After all, it does bear your crest.”

  “And yours.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Mine, too.”

  Ruel watched Anne as she laid the new gown across the trunk again. He was pleased at her happiness over his gift. At the same time, this woman he had bargained into a sham marriage confused him to no end.

  When confronted by his brother about Anne’s nerve and stamina, Ruel had defended her with utmost confidence. The closer they came to the moment of adventure, he had predicted to Alexander, the more alive and fiery she would become. Anne would plunge into her role with relish and would be a key to the success of their lace manufacturing venture.