Devilish Lord, Mysterious Miss

by Annie Burrows

  ‘Come back to me, Cora. I swear I won’t force you to marry me if you can’t bear the thought of it, only don’t die. I couldn’t stand it!’

  ‘Kit…’ He sounded so upset, she wanted to comfort him, but nothing emerged from her throat but an agonised croak. Oh, it hurt to try to speak. In fact, it hurt to breathe. She wished she did not have to bother. It would be so much easier to sink back down into the velvety soft darkness…

  ‘Oh, thank God! Thank God!’ she heard him say. ‘She tried to speak. She’s waking up! Come back to me, Cora, and I will give you anything you ask. Only don’t leave me alone!’

  No, she did not want to leave him alone. And so she breathed. And reached out for him.

  And a room materialised around her.

  The morning room. And she…she bit back a groan…in spite of determining she would never do so again, she had wound up lying on Lady Matthison’s sofa!

  ‘You will give me anything?’ she rasped. ‘Truly?’

  He was kneeling on the floor beside her, his eyes glistening with what she suspected were unshed tears.

  ‘You heard that?’ His face went white. But then a look of resolution came over him. ‘Whatever you ask of me, I will give it. Just tell me what you want!’

  ‘I want you to burn this sofa,’ she whispered, discovering that whispering caused her less pain that proper speech.

  His eyes widened in surprise, but making a swift recovery, he said, ‘If that is what you want…’

  ‘And a drink…’ Her hand fluttered to her throat, which felt bruised inside and out. Though there was not an inch of her that did not hurt to some extent. Her back, her legs, and especially her arms. Her right arm also felt strangely stiff and awkward. Raising it slightly, she saw that someone had torn the sleeve off her dress, and applied a bandage to her forearm where Frances had cut her.

  ‘Do not try to talk any more,’ he said, darting away and coming back with a tumbler of what looked and smelled like brandy. He slipped one arm under her shoulders, and raised her head while he held the glass to her lips.

  ‘I know you don’t like spirits,’he said, as she opened her mouth to voice a protest, ‘but this is one of those times when nothing else will do.’

  Ruthlessly he tipped the liquid into her mouth. She spluttered a little as it burnt its way down, but presently she welcomed the reviving warmth it sent flowing through her veins.

  She welcomed the feel of his arm round her shoulders, too. And the depth of concern she read in his eyes, and the persistent way he had kept on calling to her. He had not let her go.

  She breathed in deeply through her nose, savouring the spicy scent of his soap, and his clean linen, and his warm skin. She tilted her head so that she could rest it on his shoulder, and sighed out her gratitude. She was alive. And for quite some time it was enough just to lie there, feeling him close as she breathed in and out.

  But eventually she knew she would have to find out what had happened.

  ‘Where is Frances?’

  Lord Matthison’s shoulder tensed under her cheek. ‘Locked up,’ he said grimly. ‘She has gone completely mad! Even after Robbie dragged her off you, she kept trying to break free and get at you. In the end, I had to pick you up and run with you to the house, or I don’t know what she might have done.’His arm tightened protectively round her shoulder. ‘It took both footmen and the butler to subdue her. She did not calm down completely until the doctor who came to tend your injuries, gave her a sleeping draught. And even asleep…’

  ‘Not in the dark!’ she gasped. It was horrible to hear of another woman suffering the same indignities that had been heaped on her. But then she recalled Frances’s pious tone as she had declared that the punishment should fit the crime…

  No! No, she did not want anyone to go through what she had done.

  ‘Don’t lock her up in the dark, alone. Frances is sick,’ she whispered. ‘She needs care, not punishment.’

  Lord Matthison nodded gravely. ‘Her aunt is with her for now. They are up in one of the guest rooms, which has a good stout lock on the door. But I will find a place where she can get the help she needs. Where they will treat her kindly.’

  She relaxed immediately. But then she felt him shake his head. ‘I am so sorry I left you unprotected. I brought you back to Kingsmede, promising to protect you from your enemies. Instead I exposed you to the most dangerous of them all.’

  ‘You did not know what she was like,’Cora murmured.

  ‘Not when I brought you here,’ he said earnestly. ‘But after last night…’ He shifted his position, looking so guilty that she reached out and took his hand. He grasped it, as though she had flung him a lifeline.

  ‘Robbie and I sat up for hours last night, going over it all, and gradually piecing together what happened to you. It was Robbie who worked out that the woman who kept you up in her attic was Miss Farrell. I did not recognise her from the description you gave, in fact I argued that it could not have been her. But he was adamant we at least check out his theory. Because he had seen that other side of Miss Farrell, during that last summer when he had begun courting her in earnest. He discovered she had eyes for nobody but me.’He cleared his throat self-consciously. ‘He never told me about her infatuation. He did not have the time. It was shortly before you disappeared, and then everything fell apart between us…’He pressed a kiss to the hand he had been crushing between his fingers.

  ‘Last night he told me that your description of a hard-faced, hard-eyed woman tallied exactly with the opinion he had formed of Miss Farrell just before he returned to Scotland. Her behaviour towards him was…unforgivable,’ he grated. ‘She offered him no sympathy, no condolences on his loss. Just told him it was all for the best. The best!’

  Lord Matthison ground his teeth. She felt his jaw working against her forehead. She looped her injured arm about his waist, and hugged him.

  He snatched in a ragged breath. Then another. Then, with a strangled moan, he flung both arms round her, and hung on to her tightly.

  It seemed to take him an effort to continue talking, but eventually he went on, ‘This morning, we went over to the vicarage, and once we saw her leaving, we…This will sound reprehensible, Cora, but we broke in. Well, not exactly broke in. The back door was open. Sneaked in, is what we did. And ransacked the attics. And we found it.’

  He drew the arm that had been round her waist away, and dipped into his pocket. When he withdrew it, he was holding the ring.

  The ruby ring.

  ‘It was concealed in a secret drawer of an old bureau, under a mound of moth-eaten curtains, just as you described it.’ He turned it slightly, so that it caught the light, making it gleam and throb as though it had a pulse of its own.

  Cora stared at it in sick fascination as he continued, ‘When we got back to the house, and heard that Frances had come to visit you, we came straight in here to confront her with what we had found. But by then, you were entering the orchard. I could not understand why you had gone so far from the house, but Robbie, bless him, knew at once she was up to no good. He ran out after you. And caught up with you just in time. I was only a second or two behind him. But it was as well he got to you first.’He tilted up her chin, and ran the backs of his fingers gently over the scratches she could feel scoring the skin of her throat. ‘That woman has the strength of ten men. I never want to have to see a sight like that, ever again.’ And he lowered his head, and touched his lips gently to the livid wounds.

  The sensation sent a shiver of longing through her. She felt his lips curve briefly into a smile against her neck.

  ‘Does that response mean what I hope it means?’ he said, reaching down for her hand, and positioned the blood-red ring over her third finger.

  ‘No!’ Cora snatched her hand away.

  ‘Don’t…don’t you want to marry me?’ His voice was as hoarse as her own when he went on, ‘Can you at least explain why? I deserve to know that much, don’t I?’ He withdrew his arms and sat back on his hee
ls so that he could see her face. His own eyes were bleak, his mouth a taut line bracketed by two deep grooves.

  ‘I have always wantedto marry you,’shewhispered, determined he should not suffer even one more second of pain on her account. If only Robbie had not seen them kissing!

  ‘And even though I learned that it was not your choice to begin with, if you really, truly want to marry me now…’

  ‘Not my choice?’ He reared back. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I know that Robbie forced you to propose to me. After he saw us kissing in the boat…’

  ‘He did no such thing!’

  ‘You don’t need to try to cover it up, Kit,’ she said wearily. ‘I don’t care about that any more.’

  ‘Just you listen to me, dammit!’ he growled. ‘It is true Robbie confronted me about us kissing out on the loch. He accused me of toying with you, the minute his back was turned. Said I had betrayed his trust, and I would never be welcome in any home of his again. How he could have thought…’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Well, his opinion of me was so poor that not long after he accused me of murdering you!’

  His face took on what she thought of as his devilish mask.

  ‘He would have thrown me out of his house right then, only I refused to go. Not until I had the chance to at least find out if you were willing to have me. That was when he went berserk. And said he would never consent to a penniless degenerate like me marrying his little sister. I had to fight him for the right to let you make up your own mind, Cora.’

  ‘You fought him for the right…’ Her mind was in a whirl. ‘Does that mean…?’ but she lacked the courage to ask what she really wanted to know. She turned her head away, shutting her eyes against the foolish hope she could not bear to have snatched from her.

  ‘What else could it have meant? I was in love with you. Desperately in love.’

  Her eyes flew open. She stared at him in wonder, still hardly daring to believe she had heard him correctly.

  ‘I think I had been in love with you for years. It was not only Robbie I came to Auchentay to see. I looked forward to seeing the changes in you, as you grew from an enchanting girl, into a lovely young woman.’

  ‘But you never said…’

  ‘Your father guarded you too closely for me to get anywhere near you. And you were so shy.’ He stroked the curve of her cheek with the back of his forefinger. ‘I feared that if I went blundering in, telling you…’ He thrust his fingers through his hair, his cheeks flushing a dull red. ‘Well, what would I have spoken to you of, at that age? A boy’s thoughts are of touching, and kissing, not love and marriage! And you were so prim and proper…

  ‘Only the way you looked at me sometimes kept my hopes alive. And the little things you did for me.’ He knelt up, and took her hands between his own. ‘I will never forget opening my trunk when I got back to school, and finding you had tucked a couple of new shirts in amongst my ragged collection of clothing. And recalling how many nights, during my visit, you had sat sewing, with a little smile playing about your lips.’ He bowed his head and kissed her fingers one by one.

  ‘I put my heart into every stitch,’ she admitted, raising her free hand to stroke his hair.

  ‘When your parents died,’ he went on, ‘and Robbie was making all those plans for your future…there was some aunt or other he said he was going to send you to…well—’ he looked up at her as though pleading for understanding ‘—I knew very well that you were far too young to be thinking of marriage, but I could not bear the thought I might never see you again. I felt as though it was my last chance. I know it was wrong, the way I went about binding you to me, but I did at least ask your permission before I kissed you,’he pointed out. ‘I know things got out of control pretty quickly…hell, I’m not surprised Robbie was furious with me. I threw you down in the bottom of that boat and practically ravished you!’

  Cora blinked at him, wondering how two people could have such divergent memories of the same event.

  ‘And then, when you kept raising objections to my proposal…I…kissed you into submission. That afternoon, in theboat…you came alivein my arms.You had been repressed for so long, that when I began to rouse you, it was like letting the genie out of the bottle. We both discovered what a sensual person you are. And I shamelessly used that discovery against you. Because you are highly moral, too. I did not believe you could accept feeling that degree of passion, without linking it to a deep emotional commitment. So I stoked up the passion until you fancied yourself in love with me. Don’t deny it,’ he said, when she would have interrupted. ‘Subsequent events have shown me that it was never more than lust that I could rouse in you. But, oh, how I longed to believe you meant all those things you said to me…’

  ‘I did mean them,’ she husked. ‘I do! I love you so much.’

  His answering smile was sardonic. ‘But you won’t marry me.’ He glanced at the ruby ring he still held in his hand, and the determined way she was keeping her left hand well out of its reach.

  ‘Do you love me, Kit?’ she asked him earnestly. ‘Do you really want to marry me?’

  ‘I do not know how you can even ask me that,’ he replied bleakly.

  ‘Because I saw you with that other woman!’

  He looked completely baffled.

  ‘Other woman?’

  ‘In the hut. In the forest. That last day!’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘There was no other woman. There has never been another woman for me, Cora.’

  She felt his denial like a blow. ‘Why bother to lie about it now?’ she hissed angrily. ‘I saw you with my own eyes. She had hardly any clothes on. And you kissed her!’

  ‘In a hut…’ he echoed, mystified. And then his expression cleared. ‘Maggie.’He shut his eyes, and bowed his head. When he opened them, they were flat, and dead looking. ‘I had forgotten all about that, in the light of everything else that happened that day…’ He leaped to his feet. ‘You seem determined not to believe a word I say!’ He stalked across to the window, where he stood with his back to her.

  Cora struggled to sit up, every muscle in her body protesting. ‘Kit,’ she croaked. Then, forcing as much volume from her battered vocal cords as she could, ‘Kit, please! I need to know why you lied to me.You told me you were going to Bamford, when really you were going to meet that woman. What was I supposed to think?’

  ‘Oh, obviously—’ he spun round and looked at her bitterly ‘—that I was being unfaithful.’

  She sank back, exhausted. But with her eyes fixed on his silhouette, outlined against the bright sunshine that poured into the room, she grated, ‘Kit, you had never once told me you loved me. I thought Robbie had forced you to propose to me. And then Frances told me you loved that other woman. It was…awful…’ She covered her face in her hands as the tears began to flow.

  But then she felt the cushions dip as he sat next to her.

  ‘Frances again, damn her!’ he grated, and pulled her into his arms. ‘She was lying, Cora. About everything. She knew I was never in love with Maggie. Maggie was just…one of the reasons Robbie thought I was not fit to go near you. And you saw her, for goodness’ sake. You must have seen she was a good bit older than me.’

  ‘I was not looking at her face,’ she mumbled into his neckcloth.

  ‘Ah, yes, the enthusiasm of her greeting took me by surprise, I must confess. But did you not see that a kiss was all that passed between us?’

  Cora shook her head. ‘The kiss was all it took to make me lose my breakfast.’

  His arms tightened convulsively about her. ‘And then you galloped off in that storm, and Bobby threw you. My God, I can see it all now. You were too upset to think straight.’

  ‘It felt as though my heart was breaking,’ she admitted.

  ‘You did not mean to run away for ever,’ he said, a tremor of hope in his voice. ‘You galloped away from that hut, all upset because you thought I had played you false,’ he mused, as though to himself. ‘You were never all t
hat good a rider. Because of the storm, and your state, you lost control of Bobby, and fell. When you came to, you did not know who you were, did you? It had all been wiped away. What did you do, make your way to the nearest house?’

  ‘I saw a light,’ she whispered.

  ‘The vicarage. Frances opened the door…the vicar was here most of that night, trying to bring us consolation…but I have never felt any, until now. Cora, you don’t know what it means to finally know you did not mean to leave me.’ He hugged her tight. ‘You didn’t, did you?’

  She shook her head. ‘I think I would have come back here eventually, when I had calmed down, and told you I could not bear to share you with another woman, and begged you to give her up.’

  ‘I was giving her up,’ he broke in. ‘That was why I sent for her! Maggie could not read or write. So I had to meet her, one last time, to tell her I was getting married. I did not want her to hear it from anyone else, and think I did not care about her feelings. She did not deserve that. Besides, I needed to make sure there were no…obligations I needed to meet.’

  ‘She was—’ Cora sniffed ‘—just your mistress?’

  ‘Not even that. She was a very generous woman, willing to share her favours with a growing lad. I am sorry you had to find out about my baser instincts the way you did.Would it do any good to explain that it meant nothing? That all young men experiment to some degree…’

  ‘You met her to end it,’ she sighed. And then she reexamined the scene that had all but destroyed her, because Frances had primed her to see Kit meeting the woman he loved. All she had actually seen was Kit, entering a tumbledown hut, and a woman, who had been in the act of stripping off her blouse, flinging herself into his arms. He had smiled, she had seen that much. But she had not stayed to see any more.

  She had not trusted him. She had told him she loved him, but she had believed the very worst of him. Guilty tears sprang to her eyes. But she had been so insecure! She had never had much self-confidence, and what little she had, Frances had whittled away with her cutting little remarks.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she wept. ‘All these wasted years…’