The Slide Into Ruin

by Bronwyn Stuart

  He sat only in his shirtsleeves and trousers but she was too polite to have mentioned his lack of wardrobe. Perhaps that was why she had so much trouble meeting and holding his gaze? She did spend an inordinate amount of time staring at the flames in the hearth. Puzzling still.

  “Please let me help you,” he offered again when she couldn’t untie the laces of her worn boots with her thick gloves on.

  “It would be highly inappropriate.”

  “Would it also be improper for you to remove your gloves? Perhaps your coat?”

  She shook her head again. “I won’t be staying long enough to make myself comfortable, thank you.”

  Stubborn? He wouldn’t have picked it when he first laid eyes on her and it didn’t bode well for his plans. Society ladies were supposed to be meek and timid and agreeable. “Either take off your gloves or I will remove your shoe. What will it be?”

  Muttering beneath her breath, Eliza straightened and held her foot out. It wasn’t the option he thought she would choose but he wouldn’t sit and continue to watch her struggle. Taking her ankle gently in his hands, he slowly untied her laces and slipped her worn boot off onto the carpet. Beneath his fingertips was some swelling but he couldn’t assess the damage while she had her hose on still. When he flicked her skirts back, she shrieked and tried to back away.

  “What are you doing?” She pushed at his hands and resettled her petticoats.

  “I need to remove your stockings to see how much bruising there will be and where to place the compress.”

  “No you don’t.” She leaned forward and slapped the compress against her well-covered foot.

  “You’re going to be wet now. And cold.” He added obstinate to the growing list of her flaws.

  “It’s not nearly as bad as I first thought anyway,” she responded with a flex of her toes and a ginger turn of her limb.

  “Why do women get so caught up with the sight of their own feet?”

  “It’s not the sight of our feet,” she tried to tell him with an accompanying huff. “It’s not proper to reveal one’s skin to a member of the opposite sex who is not your kin or your husband. You, sir, are neither. Did you grow up in the wilds or somewhere equally as uncivilised?”

  He wouldn’t tell her he grew up right here under this very roof. He wouldn’t tell her that his manners had been impeccable and his morality unquestionable, though his hygiene had been. All those years ago, his grandfather had spent every night grooming him to be a gentleman for the day Darius’s father finally accepted him and gave him his name. As days turned to week and weeks to months, months to years, he had to hide his breeding from the other servants lest he be treated differently, badly.

  His name day never came. He still wasn’t sure if he was fortunate or not. He’d rather be invisible and forgotten as a servant than pitied and scorned as a bastard. He’d rather be both than have to admit to others who his sire was.

  All of that was moot anyway and he’d since learned there were far worse names a man could call another man.

  Clearly Eliza waited for an answer even though he’d assumed her question rhetorical. “It has been some years since I’ve had to have a care for propriety so I apologise if you find my behaviour offensive.”

  *

  Offensive? Eliza stared hard at her new neighbour. No, offensive wasn’t the right word for how she felt. She was nervous and anxious but those emotions bothered her very little. It was envy that gnawed away her insides and unsettled her. It wasn’t fair that Darius had a great burning fire in the grate when she and her siblings had barely enough fuel to ward off a chill in only one room of their home. It wasn’t fair that he was strong and in control when she felt weak and out of sorts. It also wasn’t fair that he’d been nice and gentle or that his voice, when he spoke, warmed her more than the heat from the roaring fire. She should hate this agent of fate more than anything in the world but as she met his gaze, weary and wary, her stomach flipped over and she almost smiled. Almost.

  “What brings you to the county?” she asked, hoping her question sounded more like inane small talk rather than life-altering inquiry.

  He paused before answering, his jaw clenched, his hands also. “I have business with a few gentlemen in the area.”

  “Out here in the countryside? In winter? When most are kicking up their heels in the capital?”

  He shrugged but only said, “I am not most men and the gentlemen I seek were not there when I paid calls. Why are you rusticating, Miss Penfold, rather than dancing your nights away at some ball in the arms of a beau?”

  Staring back at the flames once again, Eliza didn’t know how to respond to that. She couldn’t tell this veritable stranger her father’s fabricated illness kept them confined, otherwise he would assume he was at home, with his children caring for him. Darius could look as hard and as far for her father as he could, he’d never find him. She also could not very well tell him that even if their father was about, there were no funds for London seasons. There never had been. She was saved an answer when one of Darius’s men entered the room with the news that a horse had been readied for her to return to Penfold Hill.

  Eliza snatched her boot up before Darius could touch her again, however innocently, and pulled it on, knotting the laces with more urgency than finesse. “Thank you for your hospitality, my lord.”

  “Please call me Darius. I am no lord, Eliza.”

  A shiver traced along her spine when he murmured her given name, despite her asking him not to do so. She didn’t respond, didn’t argue, barely batted an eyelid. She just needed to be gone from there. “Thank you for your hospitality, Darius. I really must be going before the children worry.”

  “Duncan will accompany you to your door,” he replied, much to her very great relief.

  Dropping a curtsy, the best she could with her ankle smarting and her stomach churning and the blood in her veins roaring in her ears, Eliza turned and quit the room before he changed his mind and came with her.

  She’d dodged more than one bullet that morning but with his studied gaze prickling her senses all the way down the long drive, Eliza knew it wasn’t over. If wishes came true, she would never see Darius again but she was no longer a girl who put stock in such fanciful things. She was a desperately terrified woman who believed the Fates hated her with a passion bordering on the edge of lunacy and she had nowhere to hide, nowhere to run to and everything to lose.

  The coming days would see if she survived once again or if she was indeed doomed the way her father intended when he’d taken his pistol in hand and left the world of the living.

  She hoped he was burning in hell right now.

  She hoped she wasn’t soon to join him.

  Chapter Three

  Darius wasn’t particularly comfortable nor intimate with guilt. He didn’t feel it over his years as a pirate, or the following years as a privateer. He didn’t wake from nightmares about the lives he’d taken or the ships he’d sunk. What point was there in feeling bad over events that had already transpired and therefore could neither be undone nor forgotten? Better to ration with the mistakes of the past and move on from them, learn from them. Not that he did. He still seemed to fall into the same holes. The only thing that had changed over the years was the speed at which he could climb out of said holes.

  Feeling another figurative hole in his very near future, he should have fled in the opposite direction. Unfortunately for him, guilt bit at his insides over the state of his neighbour’s well-being. It had eaten at him for most of the night. He felt a great deal of agony for causing Eliza’s injury and then not seeing her home. It had been her wish to go alone and he, like the gentleman he was attempting to portray, had let her go. Not entirely alone since he’d sent one of his men along. The polite course of action would have been to accompany her back to her estate, apologise to her father for almost shooting her in the back, and then forget all about this part of the matter.

  But he couldn’t. It was almost as though her body h
ad imprinted itself to his arms and he couldn’t overlook how little she weighed or the fire she answered back with, the sass she threw his way when he attempted to lighten the moment or be funny.

  Darius certainly could never say why he and his men had just cut down seven fine pines that likely would have grown into excellent pieces of timber to be used to make a table or chairs or a bed. It wasn’t his guilt over sending her home to explain to the brothers and sisters that they couldn’t have a tree because he would accuse them of stealing said tree and set the magistrate onto them.

  The fear in her eyes, the fear she’d tried to hide, had been genuine and instant. He should have hounded her about it then. But gentlemen did not hound ladies. This much he knew.

  But you could have asked more firmly.

  Damn it all, it was not guilt! He was curious. He didn’t get to ask her how many brothers and sisters she had or what the scandal had been that she’d mentioned and then very quickly wandered off to a different topic. He was curious, not worried. And he certainly hadn’t shaved just for her. The beard had been making his chin and cheeks itch like the devil. With a bare face and his hair pulled back at his nape, the cold wind bit harder than the day before.

  If he had to go so far as to admit anything else, it was that he was making amends. He didn’t need a war with his neighbour’s daughter. He needed Penfold onside, sooner rather than later, or war with his daughter would be far easier than the alternative.

  “I’ve seen brothels turned out better than the ruin they’re living in,” Duncan, a sailor of around fifty years, said gruffly to his left. He’d said much the same when he’d returned from Penfold’s estate the day before.

  “I bet you have,” Marcus said with a loud laugh at the back of their ragtag crew.

  Who wouldn’t be curious about her living arrangements when it was reported that the house his neighbour resided in seemed to look as though it would collapse in the first of the spring rains?

  Darius bet Duncan exaggerated and wanted something to do. It bored them to be respectable and it grated on all the lads’ nerves. He didn’t need a fight to break out or someone to get hurt so he’d suggested they could find Eliza’s saw, cut down a few trees and deliver the gifts as a sign that they would be good, quiet and proper neighbours for a time.

  “Ghaw, get a load of that!” Wes, the youngest of Darius’s crew exclaimed with a hiss when they finally broke the bloody never-ending tree line.

  Darius almost had to rub his eyes. He couldn’t quite believe what he saw. His hand went to his pistol and his men dropped the trees and did the same, all drawing weapons and crouching low.

  It was Marcus who spoke first. “How long do you think that scrap of a girl can hold that rifle like that for?”

  On the front step of a manor house that was indeed in need of demolition and a rebuild, stood Eliza Penfold. She wasn’t wearing her muffler or coat this time. In her bare hands rested a very powerful hunting rifle as she stared down its barrel at two well-dressed men. Neither man appeared overly worried about the situation but Darius could easily see the tension holding Eliza and that gun.

  Snatches of the conversation drifted on the breeze but Darius couldn’t make out what they said or what they argued about over the roar of blood in his ears, only that they argued. He thought he heard Eliza demand they leave. It was all he needed.

  “I do believe the lady asked you gentlemen to get off her land,” Darius called as he stood and began his approach, his gun in front of his stomach, his finger on the trigger, adrenaline surging in a most welcome way.

  “This doesn’t concern you, friend,” the shorter of the two gentlemen said as he backed two short steps away from the house.

  “Any concern of the miss is a concern of ours, friend,” Duncan added as he and his men came to stand on the stoop beside a trembling Eliza. Darius hadn’t noticed how she shook from a distance but it was unmistakable now as he paused at her side.

  “We just want the money we came to collect, nothing more.”

  Now that Darius stood front on to the men, his blood ran cold and his trigger finger itched when he finally saw the taller one’s face. Shit. Taking a second glance at the other man he was tempted to shoot without question. Fuck.

  The tension wound up a notch when the shorter, older man narrowed his gaze in Darius’s direction showing disbelief and something else. Probably anger. Perhaps even a touch of murderous intent. “Jonathan?”

  “The one and only,” Darius said, the effort monumental to unwind his grip to salute with his pistol to his forehead, a slight nod, then back to the ready.

  It could have all been that simple. From such a close distance, Darius could discharge a bullet. If his aim was true—and he’d make sure it was—half of his father’s malicious face would be splattered on the drive. Darius would have empty pockets but the torment his father had started all those years ago when he’d raped a maid would be over. Just one bullet, he thought, to make up for a lifetime of debauchery and depravity. His finger began to curl.

  “You said your name is Darius,” Eliza hissed. Her arms trembled and he wondered if she was deciding to turn the rifle on him. “Are you with them?”

  “Never in a million lifetimes.” He said the words with purpose, with sincerity, with a sureness he felt to the bottom of his very soul. He turned back to the two men, still debating murder. “I do believe it’s time for you to leave.”

  “Is that how you’d speak to your father after all these years?”

  “It is precisely how I’d speak to the spineless cur who had me beaten and thrown onto a random ship going anywhere but here.” Those were the words he’d used that night, the words his half-brother had sniggered at, the words his father had said to a random sailor as coins jingled from one hand to another. They had all known what the young Jonathan’s fate would be when he was discovered and assumed a stowaway—half-dead, weak and hungry.

  His grandfather would never know where he went and no one else would ever have been able to confirm his sire’s dirty secret. That he’d fathered a bastard two months before wedding the woman he’d claimed to all of England was the love of his life, the woman who came with one of the biggest dowries in London’s history. If he loved her so much, he wouldn’t have fucked the upstairs maid at the very moment his future wife was being fitted for her wedding gown. That’s how crudely the cook had put it when Darius had been barely six years old.

  In every quiet corner, for the first half of his life, his sire had made it well known that Darius was a bastard and if it hadn’t been for the old Earl of Wickham stepping in, Darius would have been drowned at birth. Well, Jonathan would have been and the man, Darius, would never have come into being. He thanked his grandfather for it now. His father, however, he yearned to wipe from existence.

  “Should have just killed him,” his half-brother, Harold, muttered beneath his breath.

  “Perhaps,” the earl said slowly. It wasn’t what his sire said or meant by the word that chilled Darius, it was the contemplative way his gaze moved from Darius to Eliza and then back again. “What are you doing here?”

  Eliza answered before Darius could spit out the lies he’d spent months rehearsing. “He is my new neighbour.”

  Shit, shit, shit.

  *

  Eliza knew almost instantly that she had made a grave mistake. It was written all over Wickham’s face and Darius’s now clean-shaven mouth tightened to a line so white and thin that he almost appeared to have no lips at all. She wished she could turn and face him, demand more of the story, but she already knew the real danger lay at the other end of her rifle.

  “How?” the earl asked Darius, his furious gaze finally leaving the barrel of Eliza’s gun, swinging upon Darius in a way that would have cleaved head from shoulders had it a sharpened edge.

  Darius shrugged and leaned against the newel post as though he hadn’t a care in the world. “Never mind the particulars. The house is mine now and most fairly acquired.”

&nb
sp; “But, I…” the earl started to stutter and then his words trickled off.

  “You lost it on a bad hand of cards. Whist of all games, I do believe. And to your most trusted business partner? For shame.” Darius looked to be enjoying himself. Eliza was not.

  Wickham puffed his chest out and took a step closer. Eliza firmed her clammy grip and raised the weapon not in line with the trespasser’s heart but with his head. She could take it clean off. She knew she could.

  If there’d actually been ammunition left to load into the blasted gun.

  “I was going to get it back. How did you get your grubby hands on it? Last I heard of you, you died in the sea after being shoved off the side by pirates.”

  A small smile played over Darius’s face but it didn’t quite reach his eyes as he scratched the scar on the side of his neck with his free hand. “Those stories are mostly over-exaggerated, I’m sorry to say. As to the hows, as I said, they don’t matter. The house is mine and I won’t ever be letting it go to the likes of you.”

  “I’ll buy it from you,” Harold said, his own self-importance only slightly lower than his father’s.

  “You, brother, have no money. Neither does your father have any to lend you. I suspect that is the reason you accost a lady, the daughter of one of your peers, on her own doorstep.”

  Wickham stepped forward once again and Eliza closed one eye, the other looking right down cold metal, her finger at the ready as though just wishing hard enough would make the thing fire. “Stop right there,” she commanded. Not believing in wishes or divine intervention didn’t prevent her from sending silent words up just in case some deity took note.

  “I’d listen to her, Wickham. If she knows how to hold it, I’d wager she knows how to shoot it.”

  The earl stopped but the effort it took him saw Eliza not backing down in the least. She did not trust these men any more than she had the others before them. Her father owed so much money to so many people and for now they would all receive the same welcome.