A Lady's Honor

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  This time her foot met empty space.

  “The ditch.” Rowan caught her upper arms. “You need a keeper. Don’t you think before you—”

  “Rowan, let her go.” Penvenan’s shout rang through the air. Her grandparents and Senara were close behind.

  Rowan drew her closer to him, onto solid ground. “Take better care of yourself.”

  “By staying away from you.”

  And from a sudden impulse to throw herself against his chest and cling to him, feel the tenderness of his hands on her face, his lips on hers, a moment of feeling cherished.

  “Rowan.” Penvenan plunged out of the fog and slammed a fist into Rowan’s shoulder, shoving him back. “I told you to get away from her.”

  A white line formed around Rowan’s lips, and lightning flashed through his blue eyes. He clenched his fists.

  Elizabeth gasped. Surely he wouldn’t strike Penvenan, though she wouldn’t blame him. Penvenan had struck him an unnecessary blow.

  Rowan turned away. “I beg your pardon, Miss Trelawny.” And he walked away, vanishing into the misty shadows beneath the trees. Cowardice or respect. Or simply no desire to lose his position?

  “Are you all right, my dear?” Penvenan’s arm slid around her waist.

  “I slipped and he caught me is all,” Elizabeth offered as an explanation.

  “Your dress is torn.”

  She glanced down. So it was, and her knee throbbed beneath a warm trickle of blood. “Clumsy of me,” she muttered.

  “Let me help you home.” He kept his arm around her so firmly she couldn’t break away without another fiasco. She welcomed it, though, as she hobbled the rest of the way to Bastion Point. But where Rowan’s merest touch left her aching for more, Penvenan’s near embrace left nothing in its wake. Not an auspicious way to feel about the man courting her. More than an inauspicious way to feel about the man he employed.

  With the excuse of changing her gown and tending to her scrape, she abandoned his lordship to the grandparents and went to her chamber for Miss Pross’s nursing.

  Senara followed. “I thought they were going to resort to fisticuffs over you.” She perched on the edge of the bed and bounced. “Would you have enjoyed that, having two men fighting over you?”

  “Certainly not. The entire incident was unnecessary.”

  Senara’s eyes gleamed. “And was it unnecessary to have his lordship’s arm around you all that way?”

  Elizabeth winced as Miss Pross picked gravel from her knee. “No, but neither was making a scene to get him to take it away.”

  “He certainly looked happy about it,” Senara said.

  “I’m not, and think I should send him packing for such familiarity.”

  Miss Pross and Senara stared at her.

  “Truly?” Senara’s eyes, dark and thick-lashed like Elizabeth’s cousin’s, widened. “But will that not make your grandparents unhappy?”

  “Yes.” Elizabeth sighed. “So I likely won’t.”

  Not yet. Not until she found a truly good reason to convince the grandparents he wasn’t suitable. That momentary flash of temper wasn’t enough. They would claim he had been provoked.

  He had been—more than he knew.

  Her knee bandaged, Elizabeth stepped behind the dressing screen to don a fresh gown. “Senara, will you go down and tell the grandparents and his lordship I’ll be along straightaway?”

  “Of course.” Senara departed.

  Miss Pross began to unhook the soiled dress. “What’s troubling you, child?”

  “Noth—” Elizabeth took a deep breath. “I don’t think I can continue the courtship, not even to please the grandparents. But what if I tell them so and they send me back to London?”

  “My dear, you are old enough to go where you will. It might not be proper, but if you’re unhappy with the gentleman, you shouldn’t keep making a pretense.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere else. This is the only place I’ve ever been happy.” She faced her companion turned lady’s maid. “I want that again.”

  “You won’t find it in stone and mortar.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. I hear the sermons. I’ll only be happy when I turn my life over to the Lord. Sounds rather like turning my inheritance over to a husband. And that won’t please me. But then, without the husband, I may not get the inheritance.”

  Unless she found a way to persuade the grandparents she had found a treasure in life that transcended being a man’s chattel.

  “Enough talk. I’d best get downstairs.”

  Yet when she wore a fresh gown and Miss Pross had made repairs to her coiffeur, Elizabeth didn’t go downstairs to the parlor, where the drapes would be drawn against the cold and damp and everyone would have their chairs close around the fire. She needed what Bastion Point had always given her—fresh air and freedom, room to take a deep breath and feel the sea air on her face.

  She slipped through a side door and into the garden. The fog lay so thickly over the ground she doubted anyone could see her from the house. Water dripped from tree branches and trellises in a rhythmic plop, plop, plop. Her kid slippers made no sound on the gravel path. When she opened the garden door to the cliff, even the sea sounded distant, its roar muted beneath the blanket of water. But she tasted salt spray on her lips and the tang of the water in her nostrils. The cold dampness awakened something deep inside her, a stirring need to run and shout and dive into the flattened waves.

  For a moment, she paused at the head of the path. It would be treacherously wet. No matter, she had traversed it in the dark. She could traverse it in the fog.

  She took two steps onto the path. Stones clattered away from her feet. She hugged the wall of rock from which the path had been carved and continued with care. One step. Two. Three.

  Something crunched behind her like another footfall.

  She paused. “Is anyone there?”

  No one responded. The roar of the sea lured her on. One step. Two—

  Something struck her right shoulder, throwing her forward. She screamed and flailed at the wall, scrabbling for a handhold. Her left hand met smooth, wet rock. Her right grasped empty air. Loose, damp stones slid from beneath her thin soles, and she began to fall, sliding faster and faster, rolling and tumbling and plunging over the edge of the path toward the sea.

  CHAPTER 15

  ROWAN HEARD THE SCREAM. IT TRAVELED THROUGH the fog like current through an electricity machine. On his way to see Morwenna when no one could see him do so through the fog, he halted and turned his head toward the cry.

  The sea. The scream had come from the direction of the sea, the cliffs, Bastion Point.

  He started to run. Tendrils of mist wrapped around him like vaporous vines thick and blinding. He waved the water from his face, trying to see through the gloom.

  The sea. A female’s cry had come from the sea. A female who loved the sea enough to walk the cliffs in the fog.

  “Elizabeth.”

  He prayed for another scream to guide him. He heard nothing but the muted rumble of the surf warning him to slow his pace so he didn’t miss the path and topple over the edge.

  The edge, a sixty-foot drop to sand at low tide and pounding surf at high. Which would this be? He calculated. High, or nearly so. Incoming waves to pound a body against the rocky cliff, if someone had lost her footing and fallen. Other alternatives were as bad—or worse. Lawless men operated in darkness and in fog. He’d heard of wreckers luring ships onto the rocks to have their cargos picked clean and passengers and crew murdered.

  He paused altogether and peered through the fog in search of lights where none should shine. Briny mist stung his eyes, and another cry, as faint and weak as that of a distant gull, teased his ears.

  He commenced running again, heedless of the proximity of the cliff. The Bastion Point garden wall loomed up before him as welcome as a beacon. He could find the cliff path from there, winding and steep, treacherous on a fine day, deadly now.

  No, not deadly, merely ha
zardous to a body who knew the way. One body, one lady, knew the way well.

  He descended the path as swiftly as he dared. Halfway down, he began to call her name.

  No one responded. Below him, the sea rumbled and splashed with the incoming tide. It surged up the path, retreated, swelled higher.

  Rowan paused at the edge of the surf, peering through the fog. “Elizabeth, are you there?”

  Broken, helpless, weighed down by petticoats and gown.

  He plunged into freezing water that swelled to mid-thigh. “Elys? Are you—”

  A flash of white caught the corner of his eye. He turned, pressing against the cliff to keep his balance in the heaving sea. Another flash of white, a hand, an arm ghostly pale against the water.

  He dove for it, caught the hand, caught a fistful of long hair, dragged her forward, lifted her face from the surf.

  She spluttered and choked and emitted a high, thin shriek. Her arm resisted his hold. The other hand came up. Her hand, wet and slippery in a kid glove, wrenched from his grasp.

  He held on to her hair. “Stop struggling. I’ve got you.”

  Grasping the frill around the neck of her dress with one hand and holding her head up with the other, he dragged her toward the path, digging his heels into the sand to keep his footing against the waves buffeting his legs. In seconds, his hands and feet went numb from the cold. In moments that felt like an hour, he reached the path and lifted her above the waterline.

  “Stay there.” He rested one hand in the center of her back. “I’ve got you.”

  She lay coughing and choking and scrabbling at the stony ground. Her hair tumbled around her like seaweed. Her dress clung to her body and legs in sodden folds that revealed far too much smooth, white skin. Both shoes and one stocking were completely gone. The more she struggled, the more she revealed—such as a livid mark through the torn shoulder of her gown and a growing bruise on her thigh.

  He averted his eyes and laid his cheek against hers. “Calm yourself. If you keep struggling, you’ll come right back into the water, and I need to let go of you long enough to get out myself. Understand?”

  She nodded, coughed up a quantity of water, then dropped her face onto her hands still clad in once elegant kid gloves. Shudders ran through her in waves, but whether she wept or merely shook from cold wasn’t obvious.

  What mattered at the moment was her lying still enough for him to release her and haul himself onto the path. For a few minutes, he sat with his back to the cliff and his legs still buffeted by water. He couldn’t move for the numbness in his limbs, but if he didn’t, they would catch a chill or lose consciousness and slip back into the water.

  “Must. Get. Up.” He rolled to his hands and knees. With the aid of handholds in the rock, he hauled himself to his feet. “Can you walk, Elys?”

  “I think . . .” She too rose on hands and knees, but swayed so alarmingly, he grasped her around the waist and lifted her himself.

  “I’ll carry you.”

  “You cannot. I—” She bent and coughed up more water, and this time the sound she made afterward was definitely a sob.

  “It’s all right.” He held her against him, her back against his chest, his arms around her waist. “You picked a stupid time to go swimming, but you’re not the first person to do so.”

  This time the snort she made was definitely an attempt at a laugh.

  “Good girl.” He freed one hand to smooth her hair away from her face and over her shoulders, exposing the tear in her gown and the beginnings of a bruise.

  “You banged yourself up good when you fell. Do you think anything’s broken?”

  She shook her head. “Just . . . hurts.”

  “These stones are going to hurt worse. I am going to carry you.”

  “No, you cannot. I can walk.”

  “If you insist. Let’s get to a fire.”

  He kept his hands on her waist, supporting her as she took her first step. With each footfall up the path, she winced, possibly from that bruise he mustn’t think about having seen, possibly from the stones beneath her bare feet. Likely from both. When they reached the top of the cliff, he didn’t ask any more questions; he picked her up and cradled her in his arms.

  “You cannot. I’m even heavier from the water.”

  She was, and his boots felt like anchors on his feet, but he couldn’t bear for her to feel more pain.

  “It’s not far to the house.” Though he could scarcely see it through the fog. “I’ll be happier with you safely away from the cliff.”

  “Me too.” She wrapped one arm around his neck and laid her head on his shoulder. “So tired.”

  “It’s the cold. We’ll get you warm soon.” He held her as close as he could, though his body held little heat to warm her. “Whatever possessed you to go walking on the cliff in a fog?”

  “I needed to think.” She tugged at his hair. “You were out in it too.”

  “And a good thing for you I was, and was wise enough to not risk falling off the edge of the world.”

  She turned her face away from him, then took a deep breath that rattled just a little but pressed her against him in a way sure to warm him in a manner he didn’t need or want under the circumstances. “Rowan.” She coughed and clung to his lapel with her other hand. “Rowan, I didn’t fall. I was pushed.”

  He staggered, nearly dropped her. “How do you know?”

  A stupid question if ever he heard one.

  The look of disgust she flashed him said as much. “Something struck my shoulder.”

  “The right one.”

  “Yes, how do you— Oh, my gown is torn there.”

  “You have a bruise forming. But it could have been a falling rock.”

  “And struck my right shoulder and not my left or my head?”

  “Right. Not likely.” Now his insides felt as though someone had replaced them with an anchor. He stopped walking. “What happened? Tell me everything you remember.”

  “I can’t now. They’ll miss me. But you should know that Senara fell down the stairs a few days ago and says she was pushed too.”

  “Will you talk to me at some point for the sake of your beautiful skin?”

  Of which he’d seen far too much that day for his comfort.

  “Perhaps . . . Perhaps now I should. I didn’t think—”

  “When?” he asked.

  “We go to Truro a week from tomorrow. Grandpapa has a meeting with his solicitors and I’ll be shopping. I’ll arrange something and let you know if you can manage to be there.”

  “I’ll be there. With Miss Penvenan claiming she was pushed down the steps, and now this with you . . . Yes, I must talk to you.” He brushed his lips across her brow, then carried her up the front steps of the house.

  The front door opened before they reached it. “Miss Trelawny? Whatever happened?”

  The butler’s exclamation brought a half dozen people crowding into the entryway where Rowan stood holding Elizabeth, both of them dripping half the Irish Sea onto the rug.

  “What’s happened to my granddaughter?” Sir Petrok demanded.

  “What are you doing with Miss Trelawny?” Penvenan nearly bellowed.

  Lady Trelawny, Senara, and Miss Pross swarmed around them exclaiming, touching Elizabeth’s face, issuing orders of a practical nature. In moments, two footmen were bearing Elizabeth upstairs, Miss Pross bustling ahead and the other ladies trailing behind, Lady Trelawny still issuing orders, the last one directed for him. “Petrok, take that young man into the parlor and get him dried off.”

  Sir Petrok motioned for Rowan to precede him into a parlor with a blazing, crackling fire, but Rowan hesitated. “I’ll ruin anything I go near, sir.”

  “I think you should return to Penmara,” Penvenan said. “Immediately.”

  “I’d like an explanation of why he and my granddaughter look like they’ve been swimming.” Sir Petrok’s eyes were hard. “We’ll get you a blanket. Teague?”

  The butler spoke to a foo
tman, who hastened down a corridor behind the staircase. In moments, the servant reappeared with an armful of blankets. “And if Mr. Curnow will remove his boots, no harm will come to the furnishings or carpet,” the butler said.

  Rowan leaned against the front door to remove the ruined footwear. As he swathed himself in the warmth of the blankets and headed into the parlor, two maids with mops and buckets appeared to clean up the floor.

  So much for servants having Sunday afternoon off. Only, apparently, when the “family” didn’t need them.

  “Were you meeting her in secret?” Penvenan attacked the moment the door closed. “How did you lure her onto the cliff, and why—”

  “Enough, sir.” Rowan crouched before the fire, not sure he would ever feel warm again, and tried to be firm yet respectful to a man he knew he was supposed to show respect to but whom he found difficult to serve, let alone honor. “I don’t know why she was on the cliff. I was out walking—”

  “In the mist?” Sir Petrok asked.

  “Yes, sir. I have many concerns with the new moon in a few days’ time.”

  “Don’t we all.” Sir Petrok nodded. “Continue.”

  “I heard a scream. You know how sound travels in a fog. So I went to investigate and found Miss Trelawny in the water.”

  “So you saved her life.” Sir Petrok sank onto a chair and picked up a teacup. His hand shook, and he set it down. “How can I thank you?”

  “No thanks are necessary, sir. I was honored to be of service.”

  Penvenan opened his mouth, then snapped it shut and cast Rowan a glare.

  Rowan didn’t care. She had agreed to talk to him, and he’d gotten to hold her.

  “Maybe,” he said, “while the ladies aren’t present, we should talk about what we will do if the smugglers decide to operate during this new moon.”

  “I doubt they will,” Sir Petrok said. “After last month, they’ll want to lie low. Nonetheless, we’ll have riding officers spread out along the cliff and beaches and a few tucked inside the caves. If anyone tries to land cargo, they’ll get an unwelcome surprise.”