by Darcy Burke
“Correct me if I am wrong. The plot was to seduce and marry me, wait until I die of an asthma attack, and marry a newly divorced Lizzie a few months after the funeral. Am I correct?” Miriam asked.
“That was not my plan,” Richard insisted.
“But you agreed to it,” Miriam clarified.
Richard didn’t speak. He shook his head. “I...” He snapped his mouth shut.
She had her answer. Miriam inhaled sharply. She’d told herself this man might be a fraud. A cheat. A liar. But it did not stop the truth from cutting into the quick of her soul.
“I knew it,” muttered Mrs. Kent, her eyes blazing. Miriam sent her a quelling glare. Her world narrowed to a pinhole. Her father would lock her away in the countryside forever once he discovered how badly Miriam had missed her flying leap toward freedom. Livingston could take over her investment accounts with a single quill stroke—and he probably would. She had taken her shot at living life and found humiliation instead.
Richard turned to Lizzie and said, “I will give you five hundred dollars in cash if you promise to disappear the instant this ship lands. I will give you the name of my family’s solicitor, who will arrange for a trust naming the baby as the beneficiary until the age of majority, if you promise never to cross my path again.”
Lizzie’s strawberry lips parted to respond.
“I have a better plan,” interjected Miriam, her heart pounding. “I shall settle sufficient funds upon you both in exchange for full legal custody of the infant.” She had the momentary satisfaction of watching them both turn to her in shock. Richard’s scowl deepened.
Lizzie shook her head. “This is my child. I won’t give him up.”
“Why?” Miriam demanded with a harsh laugh. “I cannot see you, of all people, tending to a shrieking, demanding baby.”
Lizzie scoffed and tossed her head in reply. “I’ll dose the creature with laudanum so it sleeps or hire a nurse.”
Miriam raised one eyebrow. Beside her, Mrs. Kent gasped in horror. Richard blanched.
“Of course, I’ll take care of it,” Lizzie muttered, mulish.
Miriam scoffed. “The same way you care for everyone else in your life? For me? For Arthur?”
Miriam turned her back and picked her way back to her cabin across the foredeck. The crack of canvas and rope overhead blasted her eardrums like whips and dynamite.
“Miriam!” Richard hastened after her. “Please don’t leave me. Lizzie’s motivations were not mine. Don’t confuse us. I promised that I would support the child, and I will. That has nothing—nothing—to do with us. On my honor.”
“Oh, such honor,” Miriam snapped. She paused and let him catch up with her but didn’t turn to face the husband who’d betrayed her so deeply she could hardly breathe. Richard came alongside and peered at her, agony writ into his features. Miriam touched his face. “Richard, I can’t believe anything you say ever again. There is no us. Not anymore.”
“Give me a chance to tell my side of things, Miri.” The ferocious hurt in Richard’s voice pained Miriam’s heart.
“I have heard everything I need to know, Richard.” Embarrassingly, a tear trickled down her cheek. Miriam swiped it angrily away.
Mrs. Kent was at her elbow. “That’s enough now. Miss Walsh needs to rest.”
“Miriam. I know this isn’t what you expected of our marriage,” Richard said, following them. “I trust you understand now why I left you a way out.”
Of all the things to bring up now. Miriam stopped so fast that Richard nearly bumped into her. “Lord Northcote. You have done enough damage. I thank you for sparing me the pain of looking at you over the breakfast table for the rest of my existence. If you will excuse me.”
This time, he did not trail them. Miriam and Mrs. Kent made their way to their tiny shared cabin. The walls closed in around her like a coffin. She could not leave the safety of this room for the next two weeks without risking an encounter with either Richard or Lizzie. The thought of seeing either of them made her sick with fury.
Once her father heard about Lizzie’s betrayal, Livingston Walsh would never countenance her having another friend. No adventures. No family.
No love.
“How could I have been such a fool?” Miriam hissed through her tight throat.
“Miriam, you mustn’t say that about yourself. You are no less intelligent because of what two schemers did. I was as taken in by Lord Northcote as you were. I believed him enamored of you. I know you don’t want to hear this right now, but I still believe that to be true.” Mrs. Kent shuffled into Miriam’s vision.
“How can you say that about a man who only ever wanted me for my fortune?” Miriam flopped back onto the bed with a wheeze. If she suffered an attack this time, Miriam had no will to fight it.
“Just breathe. Inhale slowly. Exhale slowly.”
The harsh sound of Miriam’s breath went on for a long time in the dark, cramped, wave-tossed room. The draught of medicine Miss Kent gave her tasted like punishment. Miriam gagged, but the laudanum in the concoction ushered Miriam into a haze of almost-sleep. She shuddered in the darkness.
Richard had warned her that he was a bad man. She hadn’t believed him.
Now she knew the truth. The Dishonorable Richard Northcote was her husband, and he had no heart for her to win.
Chapter 18
The woman was certifiable.
Richard stalked over to Lizzie with enough menace to make her take a step backward. He was a hair’s breadth from tossing her into the sea. “Leave Miriam alone. I expect you to apologize to Miriam and spend the rest of the voyage atoning for your rashness.”
“Me? Rash?” Lizzie’s arched eyebrow. Richard held his ground.
How could a woman who weighed eight stone soaking wet intimidate him? A nobleman, if not an earl. A man, not that he felt like one.
Humiliation, his familiar shadow, sat on his shoulders like the very devil. It was followed by a wash of anger Richard could hardly control. His words came out clipped and terse. “Yes, Lizzie, you. Rash. I see you for what you are. You treat people lower than the barnacles clinging to the hull of this ship.”
“My husband adores me,” Lizzie mocked.
Richard guffawed humorlessly. “Then why aren’t you with him? Your husband is the only man who wants you.”
He needed this to be a final break, whatever it cost him, however low he needed to sink. A man who’d killed his own father had no honor to preserve. Lizzie slapped him twice. The first time, he deflected the blow, but the second time he hadn’t seen coming, and she had hit him hard enough to hurt her own hand.
“You are mine, Richard Northcote. I make the rules. Not you,” she hissed as she shook her fingers.
Unable to think of a single other thing to say, Richard had stomped away. He hadn’t had a single drink apart from the morning of their wedding. The champagne had scarcely touched his lips. Perhaps, if he had not been trying to drown his shame at losing Briarcliff and his father, he might have extricated himself from Lizzie before he’d become enmeshed in this awful situation. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been aware of her worst traits. He simply hadn’t cared.
He definitely cared now. The look on Miriam’s face was going to haunt him for the rest of his existence. Richard kicked at a barrel lashed to the deck. He had not felt this friendless since he’d washed up on the streets of Boston. This was worse, by far, and there was no Howard to pick up his half-dead carcass this time.
He made his way toward the bow. Richard stared at the moon bright and high in the night sky. Soon it would be dawn. The night watch might not notice if he chucked himself overboard. Even if they did, the ship would plow him under in its wake, drowning him before his body bobbed up at the stern. Or sank, to be eaten by monsters of depths unknown. He might bob in ocean water, but he had never learned to swim like his brother Edward had.
No one would stop him. Only his honor as a man, what remained of it. No one would argue that what scraps of gentlemanliness Richard still clutc
hed were threadbare indeed.
Yet there was the future child’s safety to consider. Lizzie was, if not half-mad, far from stable. Richard finally understood why New York’s high society rarely called her to account for her misbehavior. Lizzie used her peculiar gift for cunning and angelic appearance to search out the most vulnerable chinks in people’s armor.
The metal teeth of the key to Miriam’s bedroom at Cliffside bit into his palm. Richard had moved the key to his pocket, replacing it with a new one to her cabin door. He had a strong sense that a midnight visit would no longer be welcome.
She had wanted an adventure. Hell, if he hadn’t delivered one. Just not the one Miriam had sought.
Bells clanged as the watch changed. The sun sank below the horizon in a blaze of sunset pink and orange. Wind ruffled his hair. Richard traced the key’s rough shape idly with his thumb. Temptation to end this farce of a life called him as tempting as a siren’s superficially dulcet voice. There was no pity in the moon’s cold visage.
He was going to make it up Miriam Walsh if it cost him every last ounce of his pride.
She’d taken an enormous risk on him, and he had betrayed her in the deepest possible way. It didn’t matter if it took him the rest of his life, Richard was going to wash away the expression of hurt and betrayal that he and he alone had brought to her wide gray eyes.
Fifteen long days passed before they sighted land. Miriam ticked them off in her palm-sized diary, placing a thick black X over the number printed in the corners of each page. Each deep bold line marked a longer distance from her home and took her deeper into the unknown.
“Why don’t we land?” she asked the captain at dinner that evening. Richard took his meal in his room under the ostensible excuse of a weak stomach, as he’d done every night since Lizzie’s appearance. Lizzie had not been invited to dine with the captain even once. Mrs. Kent surmised she had chosen a lower class of passage. Odd. Lizzie could certainly afford better. “We’ve cargo to go straight to London. I could put in at Portsmouth, but you’d spend extra coin to travel over land.” With impatience, Miriam watched the land glide past, counting the hours until she could get off this ship and onto another to make the same journey in reverse.
Miriam had wanted adventure, but not the one she was living.
She’d believed that getting out from under her father’s thumb and experiencing the world would be fun, exhilarating, and exciting. Reality had proven to be quite different. Ever since leaving New York her adventure had been by turns monotonous, frightening, and humiliating. Her heart ached with missing her father. She cursed her naïveté.
“We’re making good time,” the Captain observed. “In all my years of sailing I’ve never seen such a streak of fine weather. We must have set a record with this crossing. Four weeks and six days.”
Miriam bit into her dry chicken and raised her eyebrows in a gesture that could be interest, or approval, or what it actually was—impatience.
Richard had been nowhere to be seen since the argument that had cracked Miriam’s heart in two. If he emerged from his cramped cabin at all, Richard timed his forays with precision to avoid her. The sting of disappointment at his absence each day confused her. She shouldn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to see him. And yet each day she scanned the deck half in fear of running into him and half yearning for a glimpse of the broad span of his shoulders. Then, self-loathing would curdle in her stomach.
Why did her chest ache hollowly whenever she thought of Richard’s touch?
On the morning their boat came around Margate, Miriam’s step faltered at the sight of Richard’s coattails fluttering in the breeze. He froze in place. Her heart hammered as they stared one another down like a wolf and deer spying each other in a forest. Miriam held no illusions. She was her husband’s prey.
The emotions she read in him even at a distance of ten paces were as confused and sad as her own. Their gazes glancing past one another as though to cross them might immolate them both. Given the way he’d manipulated her, Miriam was disinclined to be overly solicitous of his. She raised her chin in the haughtiest way she could.
“Excuse me, Miss Walsh. I did not intend to intrude upon your time above deck. I have something to return to you.” Richard sketched a bow.
“You needn’t leave. It is a public space.” Words she hadn’t meant to say spilled from her lips in a rush. Mrs. Kent tugged her elbow, one thin eyebrow arched high. Miriam resisted her nurse’s unsubtle hint to move on.
“We have been blessed with a run of excellent weather,” Richard responded warily. “I shouldn’t wish you to deprive you of it.”
“It’s so wonderful to know you won’t deprive me of fresh air. At least I shall have enough breath to scream as you deprive me of my money, husband.” Miriam remembered her anger and glared.
He winced as though her words landed with a physical blow. Richard gazed out over the churning ocean, his jaw tight. Why did he have to be handsome? The devil could at least do her the favor of making him physically unappealing.
“Did you never wonder why I didn’t come to your bed, Miri?” he asked softly.
Miriam swallowed.
“Why I insisted you manage our funds, as well as the monies invested in the shipment expansion? I could easily have left you destitute. But I didn’t. I tried…” He broke off. Haughty pride crept into his voice as Richard pinned her with a hard glare. “I warned you that I was a bad man, Miri. You were a fool to believe I was anything but a liar. Yet I have left you a way out. As long as I don’t touch you, we can have the marriage annulled upon our return to New York. I will repay your father. I will make this right.”
He reached for her hand. Miriam tried to pull away as the contact seared through her. Her husband tipped her palm upward and placed a hard object in her grasp. Miriam’s fingers closed around it as she pulled back.
Richard bowed again and stalked away. Her key. Miriam inhaled sharply.
Miriam allowed her nurse to lead her onward. Richard stalked to the port door to the lower decks and descended, leaving her and Mrs. Kent to partake of the fresh air and sunshine at their leisure. Miriam’s heart shriveled a little, watching him go. It wasn’t fair of the man to treat her decently now, not when he’d lied so outrageously in courting her. Miriam paced the deck for hours with her nurse at her elbow, taking in the fresh air that cleared her lungs and mind and let rumination take hold of her thoughts.
“What do you intend to do upon arriving in London?” her nurse asked quietly.
“I suppose we ought to find a hotel and book passage on the first ship back to New York.” Miriam sighed. More weeks spent cooped up on a boat with Mrs. Kent were not what she’d had in mind when she’d desired an adventure.
“Don’t you think we ought to make something of the visit, since we’ve come all this way?” asked Mrs. Kent. Miriam peered at her friend. “And there’s the business to consider. You’re meant to protect Mr. Walsh’s investment. You can hardly leave matters in Richard’s hands.”
Miriam shuddered at the thought. “Agreed. If we were to stay, what would you like to see?” Anything to avoid being with Richard.
“I have always fancied visiting a castle. Every little girl grows up dreaming of marrying a prince and living in a castle, doesn’t she?” Mrs. Kent squeezed her arm, trying to tease her back to good humor.
“I didn’t,” Miriam pointed out. They rounded the deck, neatly avoiding two sailors laboring to coil a rope as thick as her wrist. No, it had been Lizzie who dreamed of grand gowns and grander houses.
“You are more hardheaded than most,” commented Mrs. Kent, truthfully. “Soft-hearted, hard-headed. It’s no wonder Lord Northcote took to you so keenly.”
“How can you say that, when he has confessed that he was after my inheritance all along?” Miriam demanded.
“Men can have more than one motivation,” Mrs. Kent replied mildly, scanning the horizon. “As can women. I never had the sense you cared as deeply about Lord Northcote as he
did about you. You wanted to get out from your father’s thumb, and I can’t blame you. A young lady must have some memories to look back on fondly in her dotage.”
“A man who cared for me wouldn’t have seduced me under false pretenses,” Miriam responded sharply. Her companion glanced sidelong, but they continued to walk. There was little else to do. She had read all the books she’d brought.
“If I understand the situation correctly, he did not seduce you. It speaks well of his motives.”
“Is that enough to compel my forgiveness?” Miriam asked sharply. Considering how low she felt, the prospect that Richard’s sadness weighed deeper than hers was enough to drive all hope from the world.
“Of course not. I shall personally hand Lord Northcote his own testicles if he dares to whisper in your general direction without your explicit consent. I am only ruminating on the significance of his efforts to maintain your financial and personal independence.” Mrs. Kent winced. “With apologies for my inappropriate reference to the male body, Miss Walsh.”
Miriam waved away her nurse’s transgression and grinned. “Never mind that. If you want to see a castle, or multiple castles, we shall make it happen, Mrs. Kent. Even if we need to hire a fleet of bodyguards to protect us.”
“A fine plan, Miriam.” Mrs. Kent gave her a rare smile back. “If you want to experience the world, you cannot wait for it to come to you.”
The idea of salvaging some part of this misbegotten escapade brought a fleeting smile to Miriam’s lips. She felt them curve upward at the corner, and her cheeks did not crack as she’d thought they might a week ago. The ache in her heart eased fractionally. There was no possible way Richard cared more deeply for her than she did for him. She had wanted him, yes. Miriam had been keen to speak the words I love you, yet she had not done so. Not even on their wedding day. Deep down, Miriam had known she couldn’t quite trust Richard Northcote, yet she had married him anyway. What did that say about her?
Chapter 19
