When Vashon stumbled back, the viscount desperately scooped up the emerald. He rubbed the jewel in his palm and appeared to relish the scene before him.
Hunched over, Vashon removed his hand from his stomach. It was covered in blood. Aurora cried out and Isaac aimed his pistol at Peterborough.
A wild glint appeared in Vashon's eyes and before Isaac could kill the viscount, Vashon reached out to Peterborough.
"Take my hand, Josiah," he said. "Don't be afraid. This blood is your blood, brother."
Peterborough blanched.
"Take it, Josiah," Vashon gasped, the pain obviously becoming too much for him. "Take it as my atonement for the past."
"Stay away, Vashon."
"I said, take it, brother!" Vashon pushed forward.
Frightened, Peterborough backed to the edge of the bluff. Below him was the straight treacherous fall to the beach. All too aware of this, Josiah looked around for an escape. He stepped back onto the outcrop that had held Michael Dayne's box, but he misjudged his mark. He slipped and desperately reached for a horribly stunted wych elm that protruded from the cliff. Vashon was in no shape to assist him, so Isaac released Aurora and went to the edge of the cliff.
"Help me," Peterborough begged, clinging pitifully to the wych elm.
"Do you know who I am, viscount?" Isaac asked in a low monotone.
"Help me, you fool! I see you're a captain of a ship! I'll get you a thousand ships with my emerald, just help me!"
Isaac leaned down. "I'm the captain of the Leviathan, Lord Peterborough. I'll give you my hand so that you may climb back to the top." Isaac held out his hand, the hand that Peterborough himself had crippled. Peterborough grasped it for dear life.
The two men stayed suspended like that for a moment: Isaac not wanting to save Peterborough yet unwilling to be the one to plunge him to his death; and Peterborough pleading desperately for pity and more assistance.
In the end, the issue was decided by fate. Isaac tried to save him, but with only two fingers a solid grasp was nearly impossible.
"I can't hold on!" Josiah cried, slipping inch by inch, ever closer to the jagged granite boulders below.
When he finally fell, Isaac's only words were, "You could have."
Peterborough met his end at the rocky bottom, the emerald tumbling just beyond his limp grasp.
Horrified, they all stood at the top and stared down at Peterborough's sprawled broken figure. As if he couldn't help himself, Vashon whispered, " 'Whosoever possesses the Star of Aran shall see his enemies die.' " Vashon then crumpled to the ground.
"My love, my love," Aurora cried softly, the blood running down his shirt frightening her. Isaac's face grew grim as he saw Vashon's condition.
"My love, it will be all right," she whispered, weeping beside him, unable to keep her gaze away from his face. "It must be," she said, weeping.
"Isaac," Vashon whispered, his features taut with pain.
"I'm here, Vashon." Isaac bent down and took Aurora by the shoulders.
"You recall your promise on the Seabravery?"
"Vashon, don't do this." Isaac's voice shook.
"No, now's the time. You promised me. Do you recant that now?"
Isaac nearly wept with reluctance. "No, Vashon."
"Then you'll do it?"
"I'll keep by my promise."
"Good. Aurore?" he rasped to her.
"I'm here, my love. We'll get a surgeon—"
Vashon touched her face. His fingers became wet with her tears. "Even though the words were never spoken, you are my wife, Aurora."
"No, Vashon, no. We'll speak the words. Someday. I swear."
"This," he reached down to the emblazoned brass key still hanging around her neck, "this is all you'll have left of me. Go there."
"Vashon, don't say such things."
He turned from her and she saw a tear slip down his cheek. That more than anything affected her. He'd feared she'd make him vulnerable, and that the prophecy had come true. He finally loved her, and it had been that love that had forced him to spare her life at the expense of his own. She began to sob madly until Isaac pulled her off him. Cook, who served as the Seabravery's surgeon, arrived on the bluff and began quickly ministering to Vashon's wounds. Other seamen arrived to help also, and soon she was lost in the pandemonium.
"Come along, Aurora," Isaac said numbly. "I've got to return you to London."
"No, I cannot go," she cried, watching Cook bandage Vashon while another seaman took off his shirt and placed it under his head.
"I've got to take you. He made me promise. We've got to go now."
"I won't."
Isaac roughly grabbed her arm. "Don't you see he's dying? Don't you see he doesn't want you around for you to see him like this?"
"But I must be around. I love him," she sobbed.
Her tears softened him, but he stood by his promise. "It's what he wishes, Aurora. Do as he wishes." He pulled her away.
"Please, let me be there when he goes. Let me hold him. I have nothing but him." She wept bitterly and fought him. He nearly lifted her off her feet to drag her unwilling body along the heath-covered down. There were men everywhere on the bluff now. He snapped an order to a few oncoming men to return to the ship to help prepare her for sail.
"I beg of you, Isaac, I would rather you kill me than force me from him now!" she lashed out, viciously pulling his arm.
"I gave him my word, Aurora."
"I have nothing to return to. I have nothing to live for," she cried. "Don't do this to me!"
"He wanted you to go on. You will go on."
"Don't make me." She wept in a small wretched voice. "Don't make me live without him."
"My child." Isaac finally broke down and wiped the tears streaming down his own cheeks. He held her to his burly chest. She wept against him and he rasped the crudest words he'd ever had to speak.
"You must."
THE
DRAGON
TAMED
The beggar begs by God's command,
And gifts awake when givers sleep,
Swords cannot cut the giving hand
Nor stab the love that orphans keep.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Fragments on Nature and Life
Chapter Thirty-one
Aurora stood at the door to Peterborough's former residence, Blackwell House, the London mansion of the titled Blackwells. She was pale, her eyes swollen as if she still spent long hours weeping. To Isaac, she looked as tragic and inconsolable as that afternoon when they had sailed from Hugh Town, leaving Vashon behind on that bluff covered in blood and swarming with the Seabravery's men.
But this day, when Isaac watched her stare up at the enormous wainscoted front doors of the mansion, he was struck by the subtle difference in her face. Gone was the stiff armor of propriety she'd used so frequently on their voyage; gone too was that air of offended innocence that Vashon had found so titillating and yet so annoying.
He had always thought of Aurora as beautiful, but today her beauty haunted him. Her face held a softness that he'd never seen before and a strength that looked as if not even a tidal wave could break it. Isaac considered himself an old hardened Jew, callused by brutality and prejudice, too jaded to appreciate the sublime things like beauty and grace. But even he found himself inspired by the fact that both this woman's softness and her strength came from loving a man as hard and brutal and wild as Vashon.
"Use the key," he whispered, urging her forward.
Aurora stared at him, then impulsively took his hand. In their shared grief, Isaac had become the father she never had. He smiled at her and squeezed her hand. Finally she found the courage to look down at the brass key in her hand. Holding her breath, she fitted the key in the enormous brass lock.
Isaac opened the doors and led her into a huge marbled hall with a staircase that looked grand enough to be in a Roman temple. But everything was dark, for all the shutters on the house were closed, verifying t
he previous occupant's expected long absence.
In silence she sauntered through a great saloon done entirely in red and gold, the furniture looking ghostlike with its dust shrouds of linen. They went from room to room, each more elegant and more abandoned.
The house depressed her. There were no servants to fling open a window and let in some fresh air, nor to light the lusters when evening came to call. The house was the finest she'd ever been in, but as she wandered its passages and formal rooms, she couldn't picture herself living there. There were no dragons on the carpets, no gilt dolphin feet on the settees. The beds weren't draped in muslin; instead they were dressed in fine silk brocades.
Vashon was nowhere to be found. She couldn't picture, him anywhere, not on the tapestried fauteuils in the saloon, not having his breakfast in the Wedgwood morning room, nor reading a book in the Egyptian-inspired library. He was not there. She could find evidence only of Peterborough.
She'd seen enough. She'd asked Isaac to escort her out when they came to a small mahogany door that led up to the fifth-floor attic rooms. To satisfy her curiosity, she lifted her skirt and mounted the stairs, only to find herself in an old, unkempt nursery. Dust grayed everything from the rotting lace curtains at the dormer windows to the painted floor cloth that had once been bright blue. There was a schoolroom beyond, and she was just about to walk to it when her skirt caught on something. She stopped and looked down.
It was a small wooden rocking horse, a dear little toy, obviously well used and well loved. She brushed away some of the dust with her hand and revealed chipped blue paint, faded to the color of a robin's egg. The horse had a real mane and tail. Enchanted, she tried to set the thing in motion, but one of its runners was split off and it wouldn't move.
She tried not to think of him as a little boy, riding his rocking horse in the nursery, impressing his nanny with his talent. She tried desperately not to think of him, but when her hand lovingly ran over the cracked leather saddle and she saw the name "Vashon" painted in gold lettering on its cantle, she couldn't stop the lone tear from escaping and christening the little horse. In her pain she wanted to hug that little rocking horse to her breast and sit in a corner, never to rise again. And for one wild moment she thought of doing just that before Isaac touched her arm and bade her rise.
"There's more to see beyond this room," he said.
She shook her head. "I don't want to see any more. I can't find him, Isaac. He's not here," she said with a truth that stabbed her like a knife.
Vashon wasn't there. She could only picture him on Mirage, running along the surf, or eating genips beneath the silk-cotton tree. And smiling at her with that dazzling, dangerous smile. That man with his long black hair and sinful earring didn't belong in this staid, aristocratic mansion, and even the little boy who owned the rocking horse was gone, for that tame and innocent child had long been excised from Vashon in the streets of Algiers.
Taking one last look at the little broken rocking horse, she asked, "Would you mind taking me to the Phipps-Bluefield Home, Isaac?"
"Why there, Aurora?"
"I'm going back," she said with a finality that surprised even her. "It's what he wanted, wasn't it, for me to return to my former life?"
"Vashon wanted that in essence, but not literally. I think he wanted you to live here, Aurora."
"I couldn't."
"If it's the funds you're worried about—"
"No. I have a place back at the Home. They can use me, and I need to be busy."
Isaac stayed respectfully silent.
She took a deep breath, needing to collect herself. It was very hard for her to speak. "How strangely life works. When I first left the Home, Isaac, I thought the emptiness within me was because I had never found out who that little girl was that Michael Dayne left at the orphanage so long ago. But now that I've found her, still there's that emptiness. And the only time it ever left . . ." Tears stung her eyes. She ignored them, then shook her head, unwilling to go on.
"Come with Flossie and me to St. George's. Don't stay here in London where you have no friends, child."
She looked up at him, and suddenly realized how dear he and Flossie had become to her after this terrible adventure. But she had to refuse his offer. They were to be married and already had a tumultuous relationship. They didn't need her in the middle of it.
"No, thank you, captain. The Home waits for me. Don't take me away from my purpose."
"You didn't kill him. You know that, don't you, Aurora?"
She turned away. Her face was so consciously without expression it appeared ready to crack. "I believed in my heart that living without caring and emotion was not living at all. I forced him to feel what he did not want to feel." Her voice lowered to a hush. "He told me not to love him."
"You didn't kill him."
She glanced at Isaac, then away. Her voice wavered. "I beg you, take me away from this place. I can't stand to stay here another minute." To prove her point, she fled down the stairs all the way to the marble hall. She dropped the brass key on a gilt console and was out the door before Isaac could stop her.
"He's been in such a fine temper since you've been back. I daren't ask him for another shilling. But, oh, Aurora, would you ask him? We must have some more milk. I don't know how the children will fare when it gets colder if we don't have it." Faith held her hands out in supplication, and Aurora put down her pen.
A month had passed since she'd left Hugh Town. John had taken her back into the Home and now, when she thought by all rights things should be better, they were worse. It was as if John knew everything that had happened to her on her voyage. That was impossible, she kflew, but something had given her away; perhaps it was the way she didn't shrink from confrontation now, or the cool, level, knowledgeable way she met his eye when he spoke to her. She wasn't the same, and he hated it. And now he made everything more onerous. When before he was testy, now he was outright belligerent.
"I'll talk to him." She nodded. "Did you get the notices from Queenhithe?"
"No ship today. The only ships that have docked are the Tenacious and the Sleeping Beauty."
Aurora jumped upon hearing the latter name. A flood of bittersweet memories came back to her, but she pushed them away, forcing herself to concentrate on the matters at hand. She didn't think of Vashon during the day. That was reserved for night, when it was dark and she was alone. Then she pictured him as she'd seen him that very first time on the Seabravery, caped in black, his eyes cold and frightening and mysterious. She'd known so little about him then, only that he was dangerous. Yet she'd grown to love him. Her eyes clouded when she thought of that last look he had given her, right before he'd lowered that pistol away from Peterborough. She cherished that look, for it was the essence of all his love for her, but, too, there were nights when she found that memory so painful she wondered if her love wouldn't destroy her as well.
Faith stared at her and grew glum seeing her so far away. "The ship that you wait for, it will come one day, I know it," she whispered.
Aurora came out of her reverie and tried to smile at the girl. She knew she was foolish to even look for the return of the Seabravery, but for some reason she'd been overcome with a torturous hope that it might return. She refused to even express her next hope for it was too crazy and too wrenching. Still, every day she looked at the notices from Queenhithe.
"I'll go speak with John this very minute."
Faith sighed in despair. "He grew worse while you were away. Today he's rambling about the Dark Continent, sure he can take Wilberforce's message to the heathens. I'm sorry I'm too lily-livered to speak with him myself. I just can't face him again this morning."
"If only we could buy this place from him. Pray, let him do his calling then. What a blessing that would be— to everyone but the heathens, that is." Aurora rolled her eyes.
Faith giggled. "How glad I am that you've come back, Aurora. It was terrible without you, quite terrible."
Aurora smiled softly.
"Oh, I forgot!" Faith opened wide her eyes. "While you were taking the children to the rag fair for their coats, a gentleman came to see you, Aurora. He was—"
Aurora almost grabbed her. "Did he have long black hair? Or a hoop through his ear? Was he frightening?"
Faith looked overwhelmed with all her strange questions. Shocked, she stuttered, "No, Aurora."
She slumped to her chair, believing surely she was going mad with her desire to see Vashon again.
"He said he'd return at three to discuss something with you. From his appearance I think he might have been titled. He was finely dressed and restrained in his manners." She lowered her voice. "I suspect his case is like that of the other gentlemen who visit here. His mistress has inconvenienced him with a child."
"I see," Aurora answered numbly, chastising herself for her foolish notions. "Then tell the gentleman when he returns that I'll speak with him in the parlor."
"I will." Faith studied her. "Are you all right, Aurora? Ever since you've returned you seem so distant and sad."
Aurora stood and squeezed both of Faith's hands. She was going to have to confess her state at some point, so she resolved herself to begin now. "On the contrary, I feel a great joy. Knowing my circumstances as you do, you may not see this the way I see it. I'm going to have a baby, Faith. And though the future is uncertain, I beg you to be happy for me."
Faith gasped.
Aurora trembled a smile. "Do I shame you?"
"You never could!" Faith protested.
"I suppose this means I may have to leave. When John finds out, he will be most displeased."
"You know I hardly make more than my bed and board, Aurora, but what I have is yours, for you and the babe."
"No, no. I have friends who I believe will help me. But they're not in London. I hate to leave the Home again. If John will let me stay, I would like to stay."
Till Dawn Tames the Night Page 36
