by Julia Ross
The end of the rope snaked back up the wall. Miracle sat wrapped in Guy’s embrace with her blood frozen in her veins.
“I can’t bear it,” she whispered. “I could never go on without him. I don’t deserve him, but surely God can’t take him away from me this soon?”
“It’s all right,” Guy said. “Ryder loves you. He won’t die for nothing.”
Lightning flashed again. A man was dropping hand over hand down the wall with the aid of the rope.
Flames burst from the top of the Whitchurch Tower with a sudden roar. The upper half of the rope whipped away into space. The man hanging from the lower end plummeted like a falling stone into the river.
Spray splashed. The boat rocked. Guy thrust off with the oars. Frantic with fear, Miracle scanned the black water for several long moments, before a dark head surfaced and shook spray like flung diamonds.
Wet sleeves flashed white as the man’s arms cleaved the water. In a couple of strokes he swam up to the boat. His strong hands grabbed the gunnel.
“Hanley said he’d rather die,” Ryder said. His face looked ravaged. “So I gave him the pistol and he shot himself.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“I DO HOPE,” THE DUCHESS SAID AS SHE EXAMINED THE RUINS of the Whitchurch Tower, “that all this was worth it?”
Ryder glanced up at the blackened stone walls, the soaked remains of burned beams and plaster, and hugged Miracle to his side.
“To keep Miracle alive? What the devil do you think, Your Grace?”
“I think Hanley made some most injudicious choices. The duke is furious. I have, however, put it about that the earl perished heroically trying to assist with the fire.”
“Instead of starting it?” Guy asked. “He set the blaze in the stables first, knowing that the hay and all those dry wooden partitions would go up like fireworks. Thank God the grooms knew how to get the horses out.”
“Yes,” the duchess said. She turned and led them back into what had been Ryder’s bedroom. Parts of the floor were missing. All the contents had been destroyed by either smoke or water, or both. “I understand the staff also made heroic efforts with those newfangled pumps of yours, Ryderbourne?”
Ryder nodded. “Yes, the servants were splendid.”
“Exactly as you had trained them to be. If they had not kept their wits about them, the fire would have spread to the rest of the castle.” The duchess stared up at the peeling wall near what had been her son’s bed. “However, I regret the loss of that painting. I was fond of it.”
“But why make Hanley into a hero?” Guy persisted.
“He leaves a widow and several young children,” the duchess said. “No one—not even Blackdown—need know anything more, except those of us in this room. I want no further scandal attached to Miracle’s name. It is difficult enough to continue with the wedding arrangements as it is.”
“How many high sticklers have threatened to turn up their noses?” Ryder asked.
The duchess stalked out into the fresh air of a courtyard. “I can only say that I have done my best. Only time will tell whether curiosity will win out over prejudice. However, we must make plans to go forward. Fortunately, other than your rooms and the stables, the rest of Wyldshay is relatively untouched. Though I am most annoyed about the St. George tapestry that Duncan hauled out of the Great Hall. Along with several undistinguished portraits of your ancestors, for which I can hardly pretend grief, the tapestry escaped the fire, only to be half-ruined by the rain.”
“Then you think the wedding can go forward as planned?”
“It must.”
“Even at the risk that no one will come?” Ryder asked.
“My dear son, the Duchess of Blackdown does not gamble her influence and reputation for nothing. Should we decide that Wyldshay is too greatly damaged, Arthur has offered us Stratfield Saye for the wedding.”
“Arthur?” Miracle asked. For no apparent reason, she felt a little faint.
The duchess glanced at her. “My dear child, surely the Duke of Wellington was not yet another of your lovers?”
“No,” Miracle said. The walls of the courtyard had begun to spin in long, lazy arcs. “I wasn’t thinking of the living man. I never met the Iron Duke to speak to. I was thinking of his face on an inn sign.”
The duchess stared at her for a moment, then she turned to snap at her son.
“Ryderbourne! Help your wife to sit down!”
“It’s all right,” Miracle said. “I’m quite well!”
“I hope so,” the duchess said, “since you are quite obviously with child.”
“YOU really didn’t know?” Ryder asked.
Miracle gazed up at him. He had carried her into the set of guest rooms where they had been living since the fire, laid her on a chaise longue, and was cradling her head in his lap.
“I thought I was just worried about the future,” she said. “Sometimes I felt sick in the mornings. I even missed my courses, but I assumed it was anxiety about the wedding. How could I guess it was a baby?”
He seemed lit from within. “I cannot begin to express how I feel.”
She reached up to stroke his face. “Do you think our son may have been conceived in a bolt of heavenly fire, the night of the meteor shower on Ambrose’s Folly?”
“Very possibly. If it’s a boy, should we call him Ambrose?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Part of me hopes that we have a girl, because no baby of mine is ever going to ride in that dreadful dragon carriage you keep at Wrendale.”
“But our first son will be a future duke,” Ryder said with a grin. “You’d deny him his heritage?”
“Only those parts of it that might have been damaging to you.” Miracle sat up and dropped her feet to the floor. “What really happened at Harrow, Ryder? Will our sons have to suffer the same way?”
He pushed to his feet and strode away across the room.
“I suppose we shouldn’t have any secrets.” He spun about to look back at her. “Should we?”
She stood and walked up to him. “No, we shouldn’t, though it might take a lifetime to share all of them.”
“We have a lifetime,” he said.
Miracle studied his face. “Yet I will tell you now about those other men who came between Guy and Lord Hanley, if you wish. I used to think it would be disloyal for me to do so. Now that I know that you are part of my heart, you deserve to know that it wasn’t as bad as you might have feared.”
“I don’t really care,” he said, “except insofar as it was painful for you.”
“No. I think you have cared very much, Ryder.”
“I cannot bear to think that you were used casually or cruelly.” A shadow flitted over his face. “Why else would you have chosen to favor Hanley?”
“My only real mistake! But after Guy there were only four others: Richard Avedon, Lord Dartford, Sir Robin Hatchley, and Lord Burnham.”
The shadow lifted a little as he smiled down at her. “All good men, though Avedon’s a bit of a fool.”
She gave him a wry grin. “I did not keep company with him for his brains.”
He laughed. “And then he married—and Hatchley, as well?”
“Exactly. Being young men of a certain integrity, they each decided not to keep a ladybird after that.”
“But Dartford’s a bachelor.”
“Alas, Lord Dartford’s a little too fond of his wine and the tables. After one run of bad luck, he was on the brink of leaving the country, so he introduced me to Sir Robin.”
“And Burnham died in a hunting accident, didn’t he? I’m so sorry, Miracle.”
“Yes,” she said. “He was dashing and amusing and very kind to me. I think I could almost have loved him. When they brought his body back on a gate, I was a little . . . distraught, as you can imagine.”
Ryder put his arm around her shoulders and led her back to the chaise longue. “And Hanley was there?”
“Yes. He seemed kind enough and I was numb to anythi
ng else. Three weeks later I accepted his offer.”
“Yet he intimated some rather dreadful things about you.”
“Did he?” She looked up at him, her heart open and entirely at peace. “Perhaps that was simply a reflection of the way he felt about you. I was with him once when you entered a ballroom. He insisted that we leave right away, then that night he demanded that I tie him down and beat him with a riding crop. We argued very terribly when I refused. I don’t think he ever quite forgave me: not for my refusal, but because he had broken down in front of me, and revealed something he wanted to keep hidden forever. What horrors lay between you, Ryder?”
“Nothing that matters now.” He took her hand and stared at her fingers.
Miracle closed her palm over his. “You don’t need to tell me, not if it’s too painful to you.”
“Painful? No. Not anymore. I had simply buried it. I was not even his primary victim. Yet I will tell you, because I would leave nothing hidden in my soul.”
She leaned her head against his shoulder and waited quietly.
“I suppose it’s just what boys do,” Ryder said at last, “when they’re torn from their homes and left without much adult supervision. I wasn’t quite prepared for it, because I was the first St. George to go to a public school. My father was taught here at Wyldshay. It was the duchess’s idea that her sons learn to get along with other boys. Of course, she had no idea what form that might take.”
“You’d never met Hanley before?”
“Not to speak to. He was three years older. Yet he took an instant dislike to me. I’d not been there long, when he led a gang of older boys who subjected newcomers like myself to what they liked to call an initiation. I resisted. They held me down and did it anyway.”
“And it was something pretty barbaric, I assume?”
He leaned back and pulled her head down onto his shoulder. His fingers stroked softly over her hair, as if he took deep comfort in her presence.
“Hanley held our faces under water until we thought we were drowning, while his friends tore away our trousers. It was meant to be both terrifying and sexually degrading, but I was lucky. I was able to hold my breath far longer than most. All those years of swimming in the Wyld, no doubt. When they let me up for air, I fought back like a demon and was knocked out. Probably a blessing. I have no memory of what happened next.”
“Only the knowledge.”
“My primary emotion was a deeply outraged pride. There’s very little fun, after all, in assaulting an unconscious carcass. Yet little boys in those circumstances form very deep friendships, and a boy that I loved like a brother wasn’t so fortunate.”
She shuddered. “He was raped?”
His fingers stopped for a moment, then he kissed her forehead. “Though he had the courage of a tiger, my friend was fine-boned and small for his age. He didn’t stand a chance. If we hadn’t shown Hanley that we couldn’t be intimidated, we might have been attacked over and over again. So my friend and I swore a pact.”
“Lord Ayre must have looked like an angel when he was little,” she said.
“How the devil—?”
“Never mind! That’s his secret, not ours. It was just something that he said when we were traveling down from Scotland, to the effect that the ties between you were unbreakable. And his mother must have had some reason to be so very forbearing. So you organized yourselves to take revenge?”
Ryder kissed her again. “With all the fiendish ingenuity of little boys. Hanley didn’t get a moment’s rest. He never knew what humiliating surprises lay in wait, until he went up to Oxford.”
“Then he didn’t retaliate further against you?”
“He tried to, but I think our outraged defiance simply defeated him. That’s what he could never forgive: We refused to be cowed.”
“Perhaps he was ashamed, as well,” Miracle said. “I don’t think he really wanted to be cruel.”
“No. He wanted to win acceptance. A display of ruthless savagery always impresses other boys.”
“It was the same in the apprentice house. I was glad to be a girl and separated from the boys’ dormitories. The girls’ nastiness was mostly confined to words and petty meanness. But the boys always fought a ruthless struggle for leadership.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s how it was at Harrow,” Ryder said.
“And Lord Hanley was always so desperate to assert power,” Miracle said. “He knew you’d grow up to outrank him, and that’s probably why he singled you out. Do you think he suspected even then that he might be illegitimate?”
“God knows!”
“It would explain a great deal. Yet you forgave him in the end, didn’t you?”
“If it hadn’t been for Hanley, you and I might never have met. Though I’m glad that our child wasn’t conceived until after I’d emptied my heart of my loathing for him.”
“That night on the roof of the Folly, I think the heavens conspired to erase all the pain of the past,” she said. “Until I met you, I had never known that sex could be made radiant with love, that life could be made radiant with love. A heart filled with love leaves no room for hatred.”
“Then we’ll marry this time like two virgins, after all,” Ryder said with a grin.
“With one of them carrying a child? That sounds a little blasphemous! Let’s just say that we shall marry again with our hearts filled with brilliance.”
THE day of the wedding dawned under promising blue skies. Carriages had been rolling into Wyldshay all that morning and most of the previous day. The castle was bursting at the seams. The Whitchurch Wing had been cleaned up and repairs begun, but Ryder and Miracle planned to leave for Wrendale immediately after the ceremony.
Dillard seemed stiff and nervous as he moved about among so many aristocrats, but no one seemed to notice. Mary had stayed behind in Derbyshire with her new baby and the children.
“I’ve turned over a new leaf, Mirry,” Dillard said. “Since my latest little daughter was born.”
“Mr. Davis has helped set your business to rights?” Miracle asked.
“Aye, and more than that. I’ve sworn off the drink. It was the ruin of our father. I think it was fair on the way to becoming the ruin of me. I’ll never touch another drop.”
“Not even my wedding champagne?”
“Not even that,” he said with a fond smile. “Especially if I’m to give you away in front of all these damned Tories.”
She kissed him. “They may all be aristocrats, Dillard, but they’re not all Tories.”
“And there’s more, Mirry,” he said. “You’re not completely ruined, after all. Mr. Davis just told me. Some of my creditors were cheats. He’s recovered most of your investments, including the jewelry that damned rascal O’Neill took in Manchester. You don’t need to marry this rich lord, not if you don’t really want to.”
“My dear, foolish brother,” Miracle said. “I’d wed Ryder even if he were as poor as our father. Like you and Mary, we’re marrying for love.”
“Then may God bless you with just as fine a family, Mirry,” he said. “Now, if you’re ready, it’s time, I think.”
The ancient chapel was filled with the flower of society. Guy was there, of course, sitting stoically beside Ryder’s sisters and their aunt, Lady Crowse. Perhaps a few high sticklers were prominent by their absence, but Miracle knew only the confident bliss of a woman in love.
Heads craned, in curiosity, in admiration, as Ryder, tall and elegant in his wedding clothes, welcomed her to his side.
“Dearly beloved,” the minister began. “We are—”
A ripple ran through the crowd as if it had been stirred with a stick. Heads began to swivel. The minister lowered his prayer book.
The door at the back of the chapel had swung open. A tall, hook-nosed man strode inside. He gazed about with an air of absolute command, then he nodded his head at Ryder’s mother.
The duchess returned the man’s greeting with impeccable dignity.
A quartet of
footmen in glittering livery entered behind the newcomer and set down a litter. The occupant climbed out. He was enormously fat, his face shining with rouge beneath an old-fashioned wig.
The tall man offered his arm. The two men began a slow progress up the aisle, until they reached the very front.
Every man in the church bowed, and every lady dropped into a deep obeisance. Ryder grasped Miracle’s hand.
“Yes, I know,” she whispered as she sank into her curtsy. “It’s the Duke of Wellington.”
He winked at her as he bowed deeply from the waist. “Bringing Mother’s ultimate conquest, it would seem.”
Miracle stared at the decorations splayed across the other man’s capacious chest.
“Oh, God,” she said. “It’s the King!”
The Duchess of Blackdown glanced up at Miracle and smiled.
EPILOGUE
AMBROSE KICKED AT HIS QUILT AND SQUALLED LIKE A SEAGULL. Ryder picked him up, then carried him to the window, where his son could gaze out on his future inheritance. The baby gurgled and reached out his hands toward the distant ocean, as if he had already fallen in love with the far reaches of Wyldshay.
After the triumph of the wedding, autumn had drifted by in the mellow beauty of Wrendale, where Dillard and his family always found a ready welcome. Amanda and her brothers had discovered the glories of a rocking horse with a real leather saddle, even though their father—soberly rebuilding his business—was too busy to visit very often.
When winter threatened to close in about the Peaks, Lord and Lady Ryderbourne had returned south. The Whitchurch Wing had been completely refurbished. No trace of the fire remained, and Wyldshay was always splendid at Christmas.
The duchess threw parties. Richard Avedon and Sir Robin Hatchley were among the guests, yet they each seemed strangely forgetful, as if they had never met Miracle before. Certainly, they had never seen her like this: carrying a child in her womb, and in love with a husband of her own.
