by Lydia Joyce
Every moment, she thought of Raeburn, Byron, him, lurking in the corridors of Raeburn Court, growing farther away by the breath. Even inside the carriage with no point of reference to judge their speed, she could not fool herself into thinking—hoping—that she was somehow standing still or going in circles around the estate. No, she was leaving him, even if she could not bear to think of that.
She tried to dredge up the memory of every moment she had spent in Raeburn's company, every word he had spoken, every look, every touch, every kiss. She assembled the pieces slowly, deliberately in her mind, adding layer upon layer until she had a simulacrum so real it might have stepped into the carriage and said her name. She would memorize it, she swore, assimilate it into herself, every flaw as precious as every virtue. Then, perhaps, she could take some little piece of him with her always.
Victoria must have slept, for she opened her eyes with the realization that the carriage had stopped moving. She sat up, smoothing the front of her dress. She didn't even have time to put on her bonnet before the door opened and the steps clattered down. She blinked in the light, as faint as it was, and it took her a moment to recognize the Leeds station, only a dozen feet beyond the carriage. Andrew stood on the pavement, rain dripping from his hat, and beyond, under the shelter of the overhang, Dyer waited with folded hands and a shamefaced expression.
Victoria set the bonnet on her head and tied it with two efficient moves. With the last quick tug, it seemed as if she were tying up the past week, too, and locking it away, and she felt some quiet part of herself begin to die.
She set her jaw and took Andrew's arm, hopping awkwardly down the steps and using his shoulder like a crutch to hurry through the downpour into the waiting arms of her abigail.
"Has thoo got her, miss?" the footman asked.
"Yes, thank you," Dyer replied.
Victoria ignored them bom. A clock stood before her; she had three hours until the London train arrived. Three hours of waiting, and then she'd be hurtling toward Rushworth, every instant putting yards between her and Raeburn Court. Her stomach clenched, and she tightened her grip on Dyer's arm.
"Are you all right, my ladyship? I never would have left if I'd known what would happen—"
"I am fine. Just—fine." Victoria turned back toward the carriage, and Dyer had no choice but to turn with her or let her go.
A curtain of rain hung across the pavement, and through it, Andrew moved, preparing the carriage for its return. He snapped the door closed, raised the steps, and scrambled up to the driver's bench. A hunched shape in his oilskin cloak, the coachman flicked his whip, and the carriage started off, making a wide, slow turn in the road. Heading back toward Raeburn Court.
Heading back toward the man she loved.
"Hold!" Victoria cried. They'd hardly gone a dozen yards, but there were other carriages and horses clattering down the street, and neither the coachman nor footman turned.
"Did you forget something, your ladyship?" Dyer asked, staring uncertainly out into the rain.
"Hold!" Victoria cried again after the retreating equipage, and she pulled away from Dyer's grasp to lurch forward, gasping when pain lanced up her leg from her ankle. She grabbed an iron support post, and Dyer hurried to her side.
"Your ladyship!"
"Stop that carriage!" Victoria ordered. "Whatever it takes, stop it!" Still clinging to the post, she watched Dyer plunge out into the downpour and run across the street, shouting and waving her plump arms. Andrew started and turned, and at his wave, the coachman pulled the team to a stop. Dyer caught up, and lifting her face toward them, she pointed back at Victoria at the edge of the overhang.
Slowly, slowly, the carriage turned, coming back toward the station, and once again it stopped. Victoria glanced again at the clock. It was enough time. It had to be. And if it weren't, then a few more hours of waiting for the next train couldn't hurt that much, could it?
She sent a silent message to her mother, begging her forgiveness. Then she squared her shoulders and turned to face Andrew, who swung down from the bench and gave her an inquiring expression.
I'm coming, Byron. I'm coming to tell you what I should have admitted days ago.
Noon. It was almost noon already. Where had the time gone?
Byron tucked away his watch as he swung past the porter's lodge and up the road, wishing he dared ask more than a canter from Apollonia. But there were forty miles between Raeburn Court and Leeds, and there was nowhere to change horses along the way.
If Apollonia threw a shoe, if the weather cleared suddenly, if the road got worse… Fear wriggled its way into his brain, but he ignored it. He would not even think of failing.
He ducked his head against the cold rain as it slanted into his face, eyes on the mud-churned road and the deep, fresh ruts that led him like a promise. Follow, follow. Apollonia's hooves threw up clods at every stride, splattering her black flanks and the tail of his long gray coat. His legs grew numb with cold, and water dripped down inside his low, soft shoes not meant for riding.
Weatherlea—he hardly registered the turnoff and the pale, startled boy who jerked away from the horse's thrashing hooves as he surged by. Now he could not feel his hands, for the kidskin had soaked through miles before, nor his face—a good omen, he had the presence of mind to think wryly before he turned his attention back to the road.
He did not know how many miles he went, his path stretching out in a long brown blur. He did not want to consider failure, so he filled his mind with the rhythm of Apollonia's strides and the two square yards of mud under her hooves, and the seconds and minutes blurred until time seemed to stop.
Suspended in that interminable moment, he almost lost his seat when Apollonia suddenly shied sideways and his numb legs refused to keep their grip. He scrabbled at the pommel with one hand as he brought Apollonia around, with the other. She danced in a tight circle, head tossing and nostrils wide; as they passed, he caught a quick glimpse of a black carriage stopped on the road, its door finishing an abrupt swing open, and then he was facing the road again. But that instant was all he needed to take in the faces of his footman and driver, and he bit back a curse as he wheeled the horse around to face them.
"Where are we?" he demanded, unbuttoning his greatcoat with cold-stiffened hands to find his pocket watch. "And how long ago did you leave Lady Victoria?" He could have sworn he should not meet his carriage for another half hour—and that he should have met it much farther up the road. Had that much time passed? Was he going that slowly? His fingers closed around his watch, but a voice arrested them.
"They did not leave me."
His stomach lurched, fear and joy and anger surging up until all he could manage was a strangled, "Good God." Disbelief struggled uppermost in the welter, but it was shattered by the pallid, narrow face peering out of the door.
"You should not have followed. It could stop raining at any moment, and you're still burned." Victoria's fine eyebrows knitted under her hideous, hateful black bonnet.
The absurdity of her reproach made him blink, and then his irritation blossomed into ire. "You left me. What was I supposed to do, sit and twiddle my thumbs after you got into my head, under my skin, and then ran away as if it didn't matter?" Byron swung down from his saddle, ignoring Apollonia as she sidled away, blowing. He glared up at Victoria through the rain, one hand braced on either side of the doorway.
Two spots of color appeared high on Victoria's cheeks, but almost as quickly, they disappeared. "You idiot. You damned, blind idiot." She spoke softly, shaking her head, and Byron abruptly felt like a scolded schoolboy. "This isn't how it's supposed to go." She looked up at him, her gray eyes damp but clear. "I love you. I know that, somehow, you must sense it, but mat isn't enough. And I couldn't leave without telling you so."
"You can't leave at all," he said roughly, forcing the words past the constriction in his throat. "I won't let you. Not now that I know… I want you with me, not scandalizing London or shocking your priggish parents. Ride
the moors like a madwoman every day; develop a passion for small, obnoxious dogs; take to reform dress and open the manor doors to every Chartist agitator—I don't care what you do. Just don't leave me again. God knows I have no right to demand this"—his voice roughened—"but I can't stop myself."
"What are you saying?" Her voice shook, but she collected herself and tilted her chin up. "My mother is ill. I must go to her."
He clenched his hands into fists. "I'm not talking about visiting your mother, dammit. Can I make myself any clearer? I can't live without you. I don't know what to call it, but if it isn't love, I don't know what is. So stop looking down your prim little nose at me and say you'll marry me so I don't have to kill myself." The last words pulled out of his control, wavering with emotion instead of cool with dry humor as he'd intended them to be.
Victoria just shook her head, gaping at him, the edge of her ugly hat dripping with rain where it thrust beyond the carriage roof's edge. His importunate agitation faded in the face of that mute response, his gut plummeted, and he was beginning to fear that was all the answer he would get when with a strangled cry, she lurched to her feet and threw herself at him from the doorway.
The air rushed from his lungs at the force of the impact, and he reeled backward and pulled her against him to keep her from sliding into the mud. Her hands were clasped behind his neck, dislodging his hat and forcing his head down, and it wasn't until her lips found his that he realized what she was going to do. Impetuous, demanding, searing his mouth with her need. Dazed, he surrendered to her assault, opening his lips under the pressure of her tongue as she tasted him, teased him, loved him, an answering if confused passion heating his skin and tightening his trousers across his groin. Finally, she broke away, tipping her head back to the sky and letting loose a wild peal of laughter, looking younger and more striking in her mournful weeds than any woman had a right to look.
"Is that a yes?" he demanded.
"Yes, yes, yes!" she cried, turning her rain-wet face back to him. "It is the most foolish, impractical thing I have ever done in my foolish, impractical life, yet I doubt I shall ever regret it."
A shard of sanity broke into his wash of exultation. "You know there is no cure for my condition." He voice was thick with the pain of that admission. "I will let Merrick plague me with a thousand of his useless cures for your sake, but hope is faint, very faint. You will be consigning yourself to a life of darkness."
"No," she said, cupping his still-tender cheek in one hand, keeping the other wrapped around his neck. "Thick curtains can be opened as well as drawn shut. But even if what you said were true, I wouldn't care. You are all the sun I need."
Something dark and terrible within him broke then, something so deeply rooted in its old, hard bitterness that he had not felt it as separate from himself until the moment of its shattering. And a sense of sweet solace washed into the emptiness left by its passing, snatching the breath from his lungs and tightening his throat in wonder.
"And you are mine, Victoria. Always mine."
He kissed her, pulling her to him and drinking the raindrops from her lips, that dampness soon mingling with the saltier moisture of tears that could have come from him or her or both. He didn't know. He didn't care.
He nudged her lips open to trace with his tongue the almost imperceptibly uneven line of her teeth. He would never tire of her teeth, he thought, giddy disbelief bubbling through him. Her mouth was hot, welcoming, insistent, so gloriously and uniquely Victoria that he could get drunk on the taste of it. Her fingers twisted in his hair, and his own ached to bury themselves between her legs and smear their wetness across her belly until the air was heavy with her dark smell. Then he would kiss her, taste her damp flesh, tear out her hairpins and let the pale waves tumble across him, his alone…
The bump of her bandaged ankle against his leg brought him back to himself, and he drew away with a sigh. "Our betrothal does not end your mother's need for you."
"No, it does not," she agreed, sobering. Her pale, clear eyes met his. "I must still catch my train. But I swear to return the earliest moment that I may, pausing only long enough to write ahead so that you may round up the local parson to await my arrival."
The thought of letting her go even for such a short time ached sharply, but he suppressed it and replied in the same light vein. "If I even begin to suspect that you are gone a minute more than you must be, I will chase you down and demand you fulfill your promise at the nearest chapel—be it dissident, Quaker, or Catholic."
"Even in London?" She quirked an eyebrow, a smile playing at the corner of her mouth.
He tightened his grip. "Especially in London, Circe. Especially in London."
* * *
Epilogue
April 1866
Dusk came, setting the spent storm clouds afire in a blaze of orange. In the shadows of the shepherds' shelter, Victoria leaned against her husband's chest, loosely grasping the letter that Fane had brought to her as they mounted for their rainy ride.
According to her mother's missive, she was still doing well, having swiftly recovered from the fits that had slurred her speech and made her hands and mind unsteady a year and a half before. As usual, she was also in a tizzy about Jack's latest escapade. Victoria couldn't find it within herself to care. She loved her brother—as strange as it was to realize that—but Jack was old enough to make his own decisions and suffer the consequences of them, however it might besmirch the family name.
"So, what has the reprobate done this time?" The vibration of Byron's voice through his chest was as soothing as it was familiar.
Victoria laughed. "You know my mother too well, and you've only met her once."
"I don't need to know her. I know your brother." Byron snorted.
"He is facing charges of some sort for importing French pornography. That's what I think, at least; it's hard to tell from the letter exactly what's happened."
"Do you think he might go to gaol this time?" There was a hint of wistfulness in Byron's tone.
"Are you still hoping to get your revenge?" Victoria teased.
"No. I have everything I want right here." His voice dropped.
Victoria craned around to catch his eye, and she didn't need more than a year's marriage to him to know what his expression meant.
Gladly, she dropped the letter and turned in his arms, sighing in pleasure as he kissed the sensitive place on her neck and skated one hand down her still-flat belly toward her thighs.
That reminder made her stiffen slightly, and Byron, almost more aware of her body than she was, broke away and opened his eyes.
"I started my courses this morning," she said. She knew he read the rest in her face—her awareness of her age, the fear that she could never produce the heir he needed. The child she wanted.
Emotion flashed in his eyes, regret and acceptance mingled with pain for her. "It is not your fault, Victoria. Perhaps it would be best, after all, if the family debility were to stop with me."
She lifted a hand to his lips to silence them, and he kissed her fingertips. "Do not say that," she told him, even as she shivered at the little trills of pleasure that traveled up her arm. "It is rare, even in your family."
"Yes, it is," he said against her hand. She dropped it, and his expression turned wicked. "So we might as well try, try again then, hmm?"
Victoria sniffed with feigned derision. "I couldn't get pregnant now."
His chuckle was throaty. "Practice makes perfect, or so they say."
Helplessly, the last of Victoria's tension dissolved, and she laughed, too. Then she took his face in her hands and pulled his lips down to hers.
Unheeded, the red sun finished sinking below the horizon, dragging the veil of night behind it across the moors.
* * *
Read on for a preview of
Lydia Joyce's next novel
The Music of the Night
Coming from Signet Eclipse
in November 2005
The ferry dipped
and rocked on the choppy waves, its. movements more queasily abrupt than the graceful rise and fall of the steamer they had left the day before.
Sarah Connolly stood at the rail between Lady Merrill and Mr. de Lint, straining through the mists for her first glimpse of Venice as the lady's granddaughter chattered with her Mends, their backs to the gray view of the Adriatic.
Venice. The name was pregnant with promise. Of Trieste, she carried only an impression of stuccoed houses in failing light as they were driven from the steamer to their accommodations, and their hotel had been disappointingly similar to the one in Southampton. But Venice—surely Venice would not, could not disappoint. Her imagination had feasted on the promise of La Serenissima since her employer first stated her intention of spending spring in that city, and Sarah's quiet, half-desperate gratitude for such an opportunity allowed her to bear the delicate tortures of Mr. de Lint with greater composure then she had thought she possessed.
Sarah stared at the low smear of darker gray that stood as a divider between the undifferentiated expanse of sea, land, and fog. Finally, she saw a break in the land ahead, and a few minutes later, the ferry was sliding between the narrow arms of two barrier islands.
Now they were within, and Sarah strained her eyes for the first hint of the glorious city. Hummocks, hillocks, and sea reeds thrust through the silty water everywhere she looked, and between them hundreds of wooden posts were sunk into the lagoon bottom in a baffling pattern. In front of the ferry, sleek black darts pierced the fog, shallow boats sliding among the more wide-flung isles.
For a hundred heartbeats, that was all, until finally, a bone-white mass detached itself from the unquiet waters in the mist-shortened distance, resolving as they approached into blocks of towers and colonnades in pale marble and red brick, cut through by avenues of the brackish lagoon.