Raven's Vow

by Gayle Wilson

  “No choice?” he questioned, his black eyes studying her.

  “Raven went north to finish the arrangements for the rail system before last Monday’s meeting. He intended to return on Sunday, but… he hasn’t yet come home.” She refused to put into words the reality; that he had disappeared. “And now the partners are demanding to be repaid, but with the expenditures he’s already laid out for the land and the rails, the contracts he’s already signed…” She hesitated, but was forced by the situation to admit the rest. “Even if Reynolds sells what he can and uses my trust fund, there won’t be enough capital available to repay the investors. If they pull out now, the entire venture will collapse, and Raven will lose everything. Unless you convince them that Raven’s railroad is still a sound investment, and…” She paused before she finally found the courage to suggest, “And that you’re standing behind your son-in-law.”

  “What do you imagine has happened to your husband, Catherine?” her father asked, his eyes still on her face.

  “I don’t know. I can’t imagine. It’s so… But I know something’s happened to him. He promised…” Her voice faltered, but again she forced herself to continue. “I’ve hired people to look. To follow the route he took, but so far there’s no word. I don’t know what else to do,” she admitted. That admission was very painful. An admission of her failure.

  “Let me arrange a divorce,” the duke suggested softly.

  “A divorce?” she gasped, unable to believe that was his response to her plea. “I don’t want a divorce. Why would you believe that I want a divorce?”

  “It seems apparent to me you’ve been deserted, my dear.”

  “I haven’t been deserted. That you could suggest such a thing shows how little you understand. Raven would never…” Knowing the futility of continuing that line of argument, she shook her head. What could she say about their evolving relationship that would make the duke as certain as she that her husband had not voluntarily walked away from their marriage? “Raven always honors his contracts,” she ventured finally, knowing as she said it that words would never convince her father.

  “I would imagine Elliot and the rest are finding little comfort in that claim,” he suggested cynically.

  “Then they don’t know him as well as I do,” Catherine said, meeting his eyes with conviction in the depths of hers.

  “Not, perhaps, in the biblical sense,” her father agreed, his thin lips moving slightly. “Admit it, my dear. You’ve simply made another mistake. Whatever you’ve done, however outrageously you’ve acted in the past, you’ve always been just this certain that you were right. And clearly, again, you were wrong. But because I’m your father, I am willing to help you. More than willing, if you’ll allow yourself to be guided by me.”

  “To divorce my husband? To make a more suitable match? With someone like Amberton, I suppose,” she said bitterly, remembering the announcement to the Past and the viscount’s subsequent actions. But given Raven’s disappearance, it would be hard to persuade her father he was the one who had been wrong.

  “I haven’t heard much from Lord Amberton. At least not since their confrontation. Broke his arm, you know.”

  “Raven?” Catherine asked, fascinated. She couldn’t imagine how her father could possibly know about that incident, but she wasn’t surprised to find out that Raven had hurt the viscount, given Gerald’s actions that day. “No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t know. But I’m not surprised. He stabbed Raven. With a sword. And Raven wasn’t armed.”

  “Apparently to deal with the viscount, he didn’t need to be,” the duke said, the trace of amusement still in his voice. “What happened? Did you lead Amberton on to make your husband jealous? Lead him on enough that it became a blood feud?”

  He knew her too well, Catherine thought. He knew her recklessness would have had something to do with the incident.

  “Gerald objected to my marriage to Raven. He had expected I’d marry him. You had led him to believe I would, and that such a union would have your blessing.”

  “I thought you liked Amberton.”

  “I didn’t want tomarry him. Especially…” She remembered Gerald’s actions at the dance, and how he’d treated her in his apartment. And how he’d stabbed Raven, who hadn’t been armed.

  “Especially after you met the coal merchant and fell in love,” her father finished for her.

  “No,” Catherine admitted, smiling at him for the first time. “Our marriage, in the beginning, was a business arrangement.”

  “And now?” he asked softly.

  “And now…” She hesitated, remembering. “Now it is something very different. I don’t know what’s happened to Raven, but I do know that he hasn’t disappeared by choice. He wouldn’t do that.”

  “What do you want from me?” Montfort asked.

  “Help me find Raven. And until we do, protect his investment by agreeing to come into the partnership.”

  Raven forced his body up from the cold dampness of the stone floor. He knew as he moved that it had been a mistake to allow the brief respite. His swollen knees and the cramping muscles of his thighs had convinced him that a few moments of precious rest would enable him to go back to the task he had stoically accepted as the only way out, the only hope that he might escape. Now, however, he knew what a serious mistake that pause had been.

  He had believed his hands had lost all feeling. Had feared it. In the back of his mind had stirred the horror that the condition might be permanent, but he’d pushed the possibility away, realizing that even if that were true, he had no other choice. Not if he intended to fulfill the vow he’d made.

  He had finally found, inching carefully on his knees around the pit into which he’d been lowered, a small, rough outcropping. He had then spent hours, still on his knees, working the rope against the sharp edge of rock.

  And now, with the first renewed abrasion, he was forced to acknowledge that there was still a great deal of sensation in those damaged hands. Swollen far more grotesquely than his knees, bleeding and raw with their continual contact against the rock face he was using to sever the ropes that bound him, they still, definitely, had feeling. The edge of rock that seemed to have so little effect on the hemp had abraded the flesh of his hands extremely well. There was only one position in which they would fit over the narrow outcropping and allow it to make contact with the rope—at least, now that the rock had removed a great deal of flesh from his hands.

  He closed his eyes, pushing the pain again toward the small dark circle he began to create inside his head, to be swallowed and lost in the darkness. The fakirs in India could do this—destroy their consciousness of sensations that should be too painful for human flesh to bear. As his grandmother’s people had been trained to do. Raven tried to remember the lessons she had taught him so long ago. Tried to close off the unending agony of forcing his mutilated hands over and over against the rock.

  He allowed the sibilant whispers of the old woman’s voice to circle in his mind, fighting the pain and fear. He could destroy his hands, will his mind to allow that destruction, in spite of screaming nerves and raw flesh, but he had no control over the rope. No control over how long it would take its strands to fray and part. No control. Only prayer. And a remembered vow.

  Catherine’s father had proved a valuable ally during the days following Raven’s disappearance. The shattered coach had been found by the searchers, and Tom’s body brought home, but there had been no trace of the American in or near the wreckage. The duke expanded the search Catherine had begun, sending his agents to areas far from the route Raven had taken.

  Although she believed she had held up remarkably well under the pressure, Catherine was beginning to fear they wouldn’t find him. Indestructible, she constantly reminded herself. Raven was indestructible, but she came to dread the entrance of one of the servants and felt an almost euphoric relief when the interruption turned out to have been caused by some household question.

  She had racked her brain for
any explanation for Raven’s disappearance, other than the one everyone else believed. She had found herself remembering the fight with Amberton and her husband’s subsequent disappearance. Gerald’s attack had been done in fear, a reaction to Raven’s anger; one might even argue that Gerald had acted in self-defense. She imagined that a furious John Raven would certainly produce terror in most men. Amberton was physically no match for her husband. When she suggested to her father the possibility that Raven’s disappearance might somehow be laid at Gerald’s door, he was reassuring.

  “We have no reason to believe Amberton harbors any ill will against your husband. They both suffered from their encounter. Gerald has been peacefully tending to his own affairs. I can’t think of any reason to connect the viscount with this business.”

  “And I can’t forget the cowardly way he stabbed Raven when he was unarmed. That alone speaks to the character of the man.”

  “The man I intended you to marry?” her father reminded her.

  Her lips lifted in a small, twisted smile, but she didn’t reproach him. She was surprised when he went on.

  “My apologies, Catherine. I was mistaken in that intent.”

  It was unusual for the Duke of Montfort to admit to being wrong about anything, but owning that he’d erred about a matter of such importance was almost unheard of.

  “Thank you,” Catherine said. “I hope…” She paused, thinking that all she had hoped might now never come to pass.

  “What is it, my dear?” the duke asked, and at the kindness in his tone, she felt her eyes burn with tears, which were nearer the surface with each passing day. Resolutely, she had not allowed herself to shed them. Except in the dark loneliness of her bedroom, the last place she had seen Raven.

  “I just thought that I would like you to know Raven. I would like very much for the two of you to be friends.”

  “We may never be friends, Catherine,” Montfort replied, his tone amused. “Not given our past relationship.”

  She had a brief mental image of his raised hand bringing her crop down across Raven’s face and knew he was right.

  “But,” he continued, “if we are successful in locating your husband, I will attempt to make amends for my previous behavior.”

  It was quite a concession for a man as proudly stubborn as His Grace, the Duke of Montfort, and Catherine was well aware of what an about-face it represented.

  “Thank you,” she said again. “I would like that. I’d like for you to know Raven as I do.” And then realizing what her father believed about her relationship with her husband—a relationship that had not yet become conjugal—she amended, smiling at him, “Not, of course, in the biblical sense.”

  The staggering figure blended with the shadowed twilight that had crept over the back garden of the Mayfair mansion. There was no stealth employed in the approach, so that the Duke of Montfort’s hireling had been aware of the man who transversed the alley behind the town house since he’d appeared on the edge of John Raven’s property. His grace had employed the watcher to be alert to just such an event as was unfolding. As the intruder left the shadows to cross the broad expanse of lawn, which would give him access to the vulnerable doors at the back of the house, the duke’s man moved silently into position behind him.

  John Raven paused before the completion of this endless journey, a journey that had begun at the bottom of the hellhole the old duke had intended to be his tomb. He looked up at the welcoming glow from the windows of his London town house, feeling his throat close with emotions he had forced himself to hold at bay until now. He had won, and he stood at last on the threshold of his own home. He blocked from his mind the toll he’d paid for that escape. Blue eyes lifted to find the windows he knew were Catherine’s, and finally he allowed himself to imagine what she might be doing in that room as he stood below.

  The point of the knife biting into his back was totally unexpected. He was a fool, Raven suddenly realized, to think that Montfort would not have planned for the possibility of his reappearance—would not have prepared forevery eventuality. Panic clawed in his belly at the thought that he might have come so far, might have given up so much, only to now be denied.

  No, damn it, you old bastard. Not when I’ve come so close, Raven swore. As that resolve formed, his body automatically began the graceful series of moves he had been taught during his years in the Orient. A downward twist accompanied the hammering blow of his elbow into the gut of the man behind him. Knowing he had already exceeded the limits of his strength, Raven also knew that if he did not succeed in his first attack, this would be a fight he would ultimately lose.

  The remembrance of the old man’s insults flashed into his head.Your stench offends me, Montfort had taunted. And so the two kicks with which Raven disarmed and then felled his assailant were fueled more by the idea of how satisfying it would be to assault his elegant father-in-law than by any anger against the duke’s hireling. Gasping, Raven watched as the man dropped, but his opponent had already been forgotten.Your time will come, Montfort, he found himself thinking instead.

  Threatened now only by his own exhaustion, Raven leaned against the wall of the coach house, watching his attacker for any sign of returning life and wondering what he thought he could do if the man did revive. But when a hand reached out of the growing darkness and touched his arm, Raven reacted to the new assault with the same unthinking skills he’d used to free himself before. Sweeping his attacker’s legs out from under him, Raven threw him to the ground, even as a belated recognition swam to the surface of his mind.

  Jem lay on the smooth lawn, looking up at him as if he belonged in Bedlam. “Mr. Raven,” the groom whispered, his voice full of concern.

  “Get that man up, Jem,” Raven ordered, making no effort to hide his condition, but not acknowledging the anxiety he had heard underlying the groom’s shock. “I have something I need to ask him.” The henchman’s answer would only be confirmation of what Raven already knew, but made now before a witness.

  Unquestioning, from astonishment or from force of habit, the groom obeyed, pulling the man Raven had downed to his feet. Raven stepped behind his attacker and, using the advantage of his height, positioned his forearm around the man’s throat, exerting as much upward force as he could without snapping his neck.

  “Who hired you?” he asked.

  “Go to hell,” the man gasped through a windpipe he expected to collapse like rotten fruit under the pressure. In answer to that foolhardy bravado, his head was suddenly jerked upward, so that he strained on his toes, desperate for relief. He’d seen enough public hangings to know what was happening—his face darkening, tongue protruding as he fought for air.

  “I’m sure they know you there.And your master. I want you to tell me his name, and this is your last chance,” Raven warned.

  Something must have broken through to the thug, so hardened by violence and deprivation he had believed he had no fear of death. Suddenly confronted by someone who promised it with such quiet conviction, he found he very much wanted to live.

  “Montfort,” he acknowledged, and felt the blessed air trickle through his bruised throat.

  “Get out,” Raven ordered, releasing the pressure he’d been maintaining with the last of his strength. And more than willing to obey, the man disappeared into the shadows. Startled by the unexpected command, the groom darted after him, realizing almost immediately that he had no chance of finding his quarry in the gathering darkness. Giving up, Jem returned, to find his master leaning, eyes closed in the sunken sockets, against the wall.

  “You shouldn’t ‘a let him go, Mr. Raven. We should have-”

  “He’ll report to the old man.”

  “You wanthim to tell Montfort you’re back?” Jem asked, puzzled by that idea.

  The blue eyes opened, full of amusement. “Someone will have to. Let him bear the brunt of his grace’s displeasure. I should think that would be punishment enough for his role in all this.”

  “Displeasure?” Jem ec
hoed. “But—”

  “Get Edwards,” Raven said, allowing his eyelids to fall again. Slowly the aching muscles of the legs that had carried him so far gave way to the weakness he had fought, and finally the abused knees bent. As the groom watched, the massive body folded as gracefully as a lady’s fan, and John Raven slid down to lie on the comforting grass of his own back garden.

  Catherine could never remember exactly what Jem told her, but by the time she arrived in the garden, her knees were trembling uncontrollably. The fear engendered by whatever the groom had said wasn’t lessened by the sight of Edwards bending over the figure that lay collapsed on the lawn.

  She was kneeling by her husband’s side in a heartbeat. Edwards had slipped one of the maids’ cloaks, a makeshift pillow, under his head. Raven’s lashes were resting against the parchment gray of his skin; she had never before realized how long and thick they were. His hollowed cheeks were stubbled with a heavy beard and his lips were cracked and slightly parted.

  “Raven,” she whispered, touching his temple with her hand.

  His lashes flickered, as if responding to her voice with the greatest effort, and then finally his lids lifted, revealing the heartbreakingly beautiful blue eyes trying to focus on her face.

  “Catherine?” he breathed, and as she watched, the lids again begin to drift downward.

  “What’s happened, my darling?” she whispered. Glancing up, she found Edwards’s eyes reflecting the same anxiety she felt.

  “I tried so hard to reach you,” Raven whispered, his voice faltering. She had to lean close to hear him. “I can’t…”

  His lids fell, hiding the unfocused paleness of his eyes.

  “No,” Catherine said. Her hands framed his face, turning his head. She could feel the thrust of cheekbone, too prominent beneath the gray-tinged skin. “No, damn it. Don’t you dare die on me, John Raven. Don’t you dare,” she ordered in terror.