A Proposition for the Comte

by Sophia James

  Lian could see she was quite distraught and that any discourse now would be futile.

  He had estates that needed tending and the inheritance of a title that was one of the loftiest in France. To abandon the hope of children, of lineage, of the future and of the past was a thing he had not contemplated. The coldness around his heart made him wince but he could not quite find the words to dismiss her worry.

  ‘This is not the end of our conversation, Violet. We shall speak again when we can both muster our thoughts.’

  She nodded her head and pulled her cloak tighter around all the hotchpotch of her garments.

  ‘I would rather go home alone.’

  ‘Very well.’

  When the butler came at his summons he asked him to have the carriage brought around. He was up dressing as she stood there uncertain in her silence and when he was ready he took her down. They barely spoke and Violet did not glance back at all as the conveyance began to move away, her posture stiff and her hands tight fists in her lap.

  * * *

  She stood in her room and looked around the chamber with eyes that were different from the ones she’d had before she’d left here at the noon hour.

  She had told Aurelian her greatest fear and he had not shouted at her, had not despised her but had calmly said they would speak of it again when they had both gathered their thoughts. But she had seen the blank shocked hurt on his face and he was a man who usually hid any emotion with ease.

  What did that mean? She closed her fingers around the ring he had given her and wished that she was a different woman, a happier one, less scared and more fertile. For him.

  But she could not change. Harland had punished her for it but Aurelian merely looked sad.

  That was the worst of it all. He was a good man who deserved more. Turning to the window she gazed out over the rooftops and at the cold grey sky. She was so sick of being frightened and of being not enough and a day that had started with such promise had run down into disaster.

  Tomorrow she would be different. Tomorrow she would claim her life back again and visit the bookstore. Perhaps she might find some medical treatises on the subject of bearing children at Lackington’s and glean some hope of one day conceiving a child. Perhaps, too, on reflection, she could speak with Aurelian without so much emotion and try and forge another pathway forward for them both.

  Harland’s battering of her self-confidence had been most effective. He’d jammed the portraits of the two children he’d had with a mistress in her face at every available opportunity and she had been mortified. The basic reasons for marrying and being a wife were beyond her and as their relationship became more and more embittered she almost understood his desperation for an heir. The social status of being a lord meant everything to him and to have his title pass into the hands of a far-flung relative with living sons was a hard pill to swallow.

  She shook her head. If he had taken the care Aurelian had with her, she might have managed something but his hard and brutal lovemaking in the first few years of her marriage had left her stiff and dry, the feelings engendered ones of loathing and fury.

  With Aurelian she had only felt the magic. She let out her breath and dashed a tear from her cheek. If she could provide Aurelian with an heir she would never ask for another thing in her life, she swore she would not.

  ‘Please God,’ she began, and tapered off. There were more pressing problems than her own in the world and if she could just relax her body might begin to soften and ripen.

  She ran her hands across the flat of her stomach and whispered her words with fervour.

  ‘Please, God, please help me. Please.’

  * * *

  Aurelian met Lytton Staines later that night at Whites, and was relieved to see the Earl of Thornton already well enough into his cups to make him easy company.

  ‘You look browbeaten, Lian. Is the Lady Addington running you into the ground? I heard you were at Wakes today and that you left before even eating.’ He raised his glass and drank deeply. ‘Here’s to beautiful red-headed women and their penchant for histrionics.’

  Without meaning to, Aurelian laughed, but Lytton was not finished.

  ‘To give Violet Addington her due it seems that everyone in society is enamoured of her. Half the men have pleaded for her hand in marriage and the other half are already married. Did you know that?’

  This observation coming on the back of his own failed marriage proposal had Lian looking up quickly but he could see no true sign of any knowledge on Thornton’s face. A mere conjecture and a remark that had been thrown off casually.

  ‘You seem under the weather, Thorn. Was your recent Scottish sojourn unsuccessful?’

  ‘Very’ came the reply and for a moment Lian had the distinct impression that Thornton was not quite as drunk as he made out. ‘I’m thirty-five next week. God, thirty-five. Where did all those years go to? If I don’t find a bride soon and have children this will be all that is left of the Thornton line.’ Long, thin fingers gestured to himself. ‘Well, be damned if I will let that happen.’

  ‘You are thinking of marrying, then? Who did you have in mind?’

  ‘Anyone. The next woman who catches my eye and is passably attractive. I no longer require great beauty but I do want wide hips.’

  Lian couldn’t help smiling as he took a glass of brandy from the table before him. Thornton had ordered half a dozen so he didn’t think he would miss this one.

  Breathing out heavily, the melancholy of the day wrapped itself around him. He wanted to simply stand up and go and find Violet. He wanted her so desperately that he shook with it. He also knew that he couldn’t.

  Still, Lian felt Thornton was waiting for some sort of confidence and racking his brain he found something to say. ‘Perhaps just living is the best anyone can hope for. Politics and the raw reality of life can take things away from you before you knew you wanted them.’

  ‘That’s deep, Lian, and tonight I only can deal with shallow. My sister is ill, deadly ill, for it seems she might not survive even another month. I found this out today. She is young and mortality is staring us all down a barrel.’

  The truth of the words was shocking, the laughter from a nearby table unwanted and intrusive.

  ‘The antics of a spoiled society lord doesn’t hold as much appeal as it used to, Aurelian. I want to settle down, to be a better man.’

  ‘Five glasses of strong brandy won’t be helping that and it looks like you’ve had more before these turned up.’

  Staines had the grace to look guilty. ‘You were always the best of us all, Lian. The cleverest and the most...mysterious. Everything comes easily to you and yet lately I think that perhaps it has not. You’ve lost a portion of your third finger to some hideous accident and your face has been almost sliced in half. These things don’t come from living the life of a landed and coddled comte.’

  Thornton raised his glass, his smile perplexed. ‘Shay was the hero of England and you...perhaps you are the anti-hero with your French heritage? Not that it worries me for I like you anyway but...’ He stopped.

  ‘But?’

  ‘There are rumours you are in England for more than a holiday and Viscount Harland Addington had his enemies. Is this the reason you were at lunch with his widow?’

  Lian swore under his breath. He had forgotten the way London held its gossip in such high regard. In Paris, too, there was the propensity for such tittle-tattle but it was less noticeable somehow. He decided to be honest.

  ‘Violet Addington has nothing to do with why I am here. I simply enjoy her company.’

  ‘Then let us drink to simple, Lian, and to hell with it all.’

  Thornton went to raise a toast but his elbow slipped, the brandy glass falling to shatter on the black and white tiles below, the frowns from those around directed their way.

  ‘Come, I will take you home,’
Lian said. ‘Tomorrow the day might look brighter.’

  But even as he said it he knew that it wouldn’t. Lytton’s sister was sick and Violet was barren, the future shrivelled into fragments that could not be put back together with a simple hope no matter how much one might want it.

  The fine crystal crunched under his boots as they walked towards the door.

  Chapter Nine

  Violet knew she was in trouble as soon as she climbed the stairs at Lackington’s. She had asked her guard to stay with the carriage, reasoning that a small allotted time in the bookshop would not be a risky thing. She had barely slept last night, the conversation with Aurelian running around in her head. Had she ruined everything? She could not imagine life without him there, his smile, his cleverness, his honesty.

  She had seen the man about ten minutes after her arrival at the bookshop, a thickset, swarthy gentleman who made no attempt at hiding his interest in her. Leaving the less peopled section of the library she made with haste for the busiest area of the room, sitting with the pretence of reading her book, a rush of panic sliding down her backbone when she saw the man was still there. When he came over to her she looked up.

  ‘I have a pistol in my pocket and I need you to come with me now.’

  His words were quietly said but she could hear the truth in them. Her eyes fell to his jacket pocket, the shape of something heavy there in the fold of cloth.

  ‘If you do not, I shall shoot a person at random and their death shall be on your head. Do you understand? I am being well paid for this mission and I mean to complete it.’

  His gaze took in a young mother on the far side of the room, two small children at her side.

  Violet knew he meant what he said for she had spent enough years with her imbalanced husband to recognise another of the same ilk.

  With care, she placed her book to one side and stood. When he gestured for her to go out through a small door at the back she could do little else. No one watched her leave. No one looked up as though things were not quite as they ought to be. The world of books and their patrons just carried on even as she was spirited out through the back and into a dark connecting passage. Then an arm came heavily around her and a pad of sweet-smelling cloth was applied to her nose. As she struggled, her limbs became heavy and numb and then all she knew was darkness.

  * * *

  Eli Tucker was waiting at the front gate of Lian’s town house when his carriage arrived back in London just after six in the evening. The man looked furious and Lian’s heartbeat skipped in his chest.

  Violet. Something had happened to her.

  Snatching open the door to the wind and the rain he leaped out.

  ‘What the hell is wrong?’

  ‘Lady Addington disappeared at Lackington’s bookshop in Finsbury Square, sir, this afternoon around three. We were waiting out at the front with the carriage and when she did not reappear we went in to look for her. She was nowhere to be found and no one could remember seeing where she went. There one moment and gone the next. This was left on the seat of a chair in the main reading room.’

  His gold signet ring sat in the palm of Tucker’s hand.

  ‘Someone has taken her.’

  He should have stayed in London himself with the danger all around her and why the hell had she gone into the shop alone? He was furious at his own shortcomings and that of his guards, the red roar of blood in his ears.

  ‘Why didn’t you damn well go in with her, Tucker? Everywhere is dangerous.’

  ‘Lady Addington specifically asked me not to, my lord. She said she needed a moment of private reading.’

  That sounded so like something Violet would say that Lian breathed in and tried to take stock of his fury. ‘Take me to the bookshop now. There must be something we can find out.’

  ‘I doubt anyone would be there at this time, my lord.’

  ‘There will be a night watchman. He will have to do.’ The fury in him mounted as he gestured for the guard to get in and commanded his driver to take him to Lackington’s.

  Twenty minutes later, Lian stood in the main room of the bookshop, a gas lamp in his hand as he looked at the chair his ring had been found upon. It was a good thirty feet from the main door but only five or so feet to a smaller door at the back. Whoever had taken Violet would not wish to garner attention, though Lian found it hard to believe she would neither yell nor scream as he forcibly kidnapped her. Yet another problem to think on. The skin on his arms puckered with fear and he shook such panic away, the cold of logic a far more reassuring emotion.

  Striding through the now opened door into a passageway that was small and dark, he turned to the night watchman.

  ‘Where does this lead?’

  ‘The back entrance, sir. It is usually locked, though...’ He petered out for plainly today it was not.

  Peering at the ground, Lian hoped to see something, anything that could lead him to Violet. There were traces of a recent passing, the dust swirled in the sort of patterns that the hem of a passing skirt might make. Kneeling down, he shone the light closer.

  ‘There.’

  Footprints. Boots. Above a size eleven. Where were the corresponding ones of Violet’s in the turned dirt further on? As he looked he came to the realisation there were none which meant she had been carried. Had her abductor used force to hurt her or to render her unconscious? Would it have been a blow to the head or the quieter use of some drug? He would stake his life on the latter. They wanted her alive, at least for a while, though the note she had shown him threatening death preyed on his mind.

  Another door before them was also unlocked, a key and chain discarded on the ground outside. Lian picked them up and saw the cut through wide steel link. They had come prepared for the metal was thick and heavy.

  ‘Where does this road lead to?’

  ‘The main road, sir. It doubles around and then turns north.’

  Everything was wet out here and he knew any clues that might once have been found would now be long gone. Still, he pulled at a broken twig in the hope of finding strands of red hair entwined about it. But there was nothing.

  ‘You said she went missing around three?’

  ‘Yes, my lord. The clock at the church had just struck the hour. I looked down to check on my own timepiece because it was running fast.’

  ‘Then we will ride two hours from London and visit the inns. The dark would have been here by five at the latest and I have my doubts they’d have ventured further than that.’

  Unless they had turned south or east or west? Or ridden on through the night?

  He could not think about everything that might not be. He had to concentrate on what was likely. With sense and reason he would find Violet, he could only believe that.

  * * *

  They had stopped finally at a posting house, at least two hours having passed since they’d left the city. Her kidnapper had uttered barely a word for the whole journey leaving Violet to surmise that others would be there to meet them.

  Her stomach felt sick with fear, the pad of sticky sweetness that had been held over her nose leaving her with a heavy head ever since she had awoken. Had Aurelian found the signet ring? Would he come to find her? Everything rested on him for she knew there was no other man in the world who could save her now. The tone of their last meetings also worried her for the closeness she had felt with him had dissipated somewhat under all the confessions between them.

  The man in front leading her into the inn stopped. ‘If you try to run I will use my gun, do you understand? I have nothing at all to lose by it now that we have come this far.’

  She did not meet his glance as she nodded. With Harland any eye contact always annoyed him further and she did not want to risk the same here. What would they want with her? What could she tell them that would allow her more time?

  Surprisingly once inside she was taken to a ti
dy room, the door closing behind her. Walking to the window she tried to open it but it was jammed tight with paint and age. One storey up. It would be possible to jump if she could only open it.

  Taking her knife from her pocket she began to shave away the wood, rattling the window every second or so just to see if she had loosened it. The panes were too tiny to crawl through even if she could break them so she would have to pull the window itself free.

  Forty minutes later, the key turned in the lock. Hiding her knife in a pocket she stood before the glass, hoping that the newcomer would not notice the pile of wood shavings on the sill and floor.

  A different man entered and this one looked more dangerous than the last. He was older, larger and altogether angrier.

  ‘Come.’ He gestured to the door and she had no alternative but to follow him, down a passageway and then some stairs. At the end of another corridor was a tiny cell, solid iron at its entrance apart with a small grated peephole high up.

  ‘There has been a change in plans and you are to stay here for the night.’

  Swallowing, Violet looked into the gloomy dark as she heard the scurrying of tiny feet. The smell was of old hops and alcohol and fermenting straw. Further off were the louder voices of men.

  When she did not step forward he grabbed her roughly, hitting her on the side of the head with his fist and shoving her in.

  ‘Be quick about obeying instructions, my lady, or you will be dead.’

  Did he know who she was or was he just being facetious? The pain of his blow had her falling to her knees, her arms wrapped around herself in order to fend off another punch.

  Then the gate was shut and the light went with him, leaving her in a complete and utter darkness.

  * * *

  Aurelian reached the third tavern just after eleven. There was a carriage in the stables and five horses bedded down. Not a busy place, then, and largely off the road. He was thankful for the full moon which allowed them light.