by Maren Smith
I stared at her, my face turning a slow hot shade of red. I was at once both horribly embarrassed and yet determined to let her continue to believe he’d punished me rather than suffer the humiliation of admitting what really happened between us. Unfair though it was to Matthew, his pride could take the lie much easier than mine could bear the truth.
“I suppose,” Victoria continued, looking down at her hands, clasped so elegantly in her lap, “I have known for a long time that Albert didn’t love me, but I sure liked it when he said he did.” She gave me a slight wince as she admitted, “I was already awake this morning when I heard you and Albert… when you started screaming… I think if I had loved him—really loved him, I mean—I think I would have felt something.” She hesitated. “Well, that’s not true. I did feel something.” She winced again, guiltily turning her face back to the window. She worried her bottom lip, barely whispering when she admitted, “Ella, I was relieved that he was with you. That’s a horrible thing to say, I know. You were screaming so obviously you didn’t like what he did any more than I did. But really, of the two of us… because I am a lady, you know… if anyone is better able to tolerate that sort of thing… well, we don’t need to talk about that. I was just grateful that he wasn’t lying on top of me, that’s all.”
I stared at her, hardly able to believe what she was saying. Eventually, I was even able to shut my gaping mouth.
To her credit, Victoria seemed to find meeting my shocked eyes difficult. “I know I shouldn’t feel that way.”
“It’s all right,” I heard myself say. It wasn’t, at least parts of it surely weren’t, but I still said it anyway.
“That’s very kind of you to say.” Her stiff shoulders relaxed just a little, and she even managed a quick glance in my direction. “But what I want to know is…well, it can’t all be… grunting and pushing. You… you sounded as if you liked what my brother did… when he went in there to be with you, after they took Albert away and after Matthew spanked you. You made noises. It didn’t sound… all that bad.”
I only thought I was embarrassed before. My face burned. I burned all over, in fact. But her blue eyes locked on me, unwavering, unblinking, plainly trying to understand something she found unfathomable. I suppose it would be unfathomable to me, too, if Albert had been my only experience.
“Tell me, Ella, please,” Victoria begged. “What did he do that was so nice? I mean, have you had other men do… nice things… when they’re on top of you? It certainly sounded nice… all that came after the spanking?”
I would never be anything but red ever again.
“Didn’t you?” Victoria pushed.
“Yes.” I quickly faced the window.
“I liked parts of it, too, but not as much as you apparently did. I certainly didn’t cry out, thrash around and move furniture.” Victoria half laughed, and for a moment she looked a mirror image to her smiling brother. “Heavens, the two of you made the wall shake! I suppose it must be different with a man you love. I thought I loved Albert, but I was watching at the window when they led him away in irons. All I felt then, was relief.”
“The Constable is a good man, too,” I offered.
Victoria hummed her agreement. “He’s a very good man. John’s had puppy eyes for me since we were children. He used to have land, but his family lost everything over a decade ago in a bad investment venture. He may be only a Constable now, but his blood is as blue as any of us. And because he likes me so much, he’ll be a lot easier to control than Albert ever was. No, I don’t mind marrying John.”
Control? I almost felt sorry for her. But then an odd look crossed her face, pinching her brows together in an expression that bordered on worry. Her lips pressed tightly together and her fingers picked at one another. There were certain lines that servants just did not cross with their betters, even those servants that were close enough to be confidants. Of course, I hadn’t observed those lines; not once since my employment to Hawkhaven began.
Guarding my tongue only half a moment, I gave in to my curiosity. “What’s wrong? Why are you looking like that?”
Victoria didn’t even look at me. “I’m pregnant.”
My jaw hit my chest. Oh Lord, no! There were some scandals that a woman of Victoria’s status could overcome with time. Being stolen from her family’s home and kept overnight by her captor was bad enough, but could be endured if marriage quickly followed. A pregnancy outside of marriage was the equivalent to social murder.
Victoria had the grace to blush as I stared, hardly able to calculate the ramifications of her frightening predicament.
“Are you sure?” My eyes flew wide and I covered my mouth with both hands. “Oh God,” I whispered, suddenly feeling as if I were about to lay my head upon the chopping block. “When did this happen? How—how far along, do you think?”
Turning her head, she listened to the men talking not far behind us before softly admitting. “I should have had my flow before you came. It was before your watch, Ella. Don’t worry. No one will blame you.”
“Does Matthew know?” I whispered.
“No!” Victoria quickly snapped. “And you’ll not tell him!”
“What about the Constable?”
“You’ll not tell him, either! Lord, that’s the last thing I need!”
Again, my jaw gaped as I stared at her. “Victoria, you have to tell him! He has the right to know before he—”
“Ties himself to me irrevocably for life?” she asked, almost sweetly. She snorted, a very unladylike sound. “If I said a word, you know as well as I, I’ll spend the rest of my life imprisoned at the nearest nunnery.” She looked down at her lap, and then back out the window as she made a slight face. “At least I won’t have to kneel at every bell.”
“You have to tell him,” I persisted. “You can’t keep something like this a secret for long! He’ll find out, and he’ll be furious when he does!”
“Who are you to lecture me?” Her blue eyes locked on me and her face hardened. Our moment of camaraderie was gone. Once again, she became the coolly bitter aristocrat I was accustomed to. “How dare you tell me what I can and cannot do? As if you haven’t spent the morning rutting with my brother. And my fiancé! And who knows how many other men, all of them pounding their way to happiness between your perfect legs! You think you’re so much better than I am? You came from the sewers! How dare you! You—where do you think you’re going?! I have not dismissed you! Ella! Get back in here!”
Dismissed or not, I had had enough. Without signaling Shaver to stop, I threw open the carriage door and jumped blindly. Sitting in the carriage, it hardly seemed we were going as fast as we apparently were. I hit the ground on my feet, but promptly tumbled backwards onto my bottom and very nearly landed underneath the carriage’s rear wheels.
“Ella!” Hawkhaven shouted. He was off his horse and pulling me well out of danger before I had time to do more than blink once or twice. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
“Get back here!” Victoria screeched as the carriage rumbled on another six feet before the driver got the horses stopped. “I didn’t tell her she could go!”
“Be quiet!” Hawkhaven and the Constable both snapped in unison.
“I’m all right,” I mumbled, shuffling to get my borrowed and too-long skirts out of the way of my feet.
“Are you sure?” Hawkhaven caught my arm. “Can you stand? Do you hurt anywhere?”
“I’m fine, I said.” Rising, more embarrassed than anything else, I bent to slap the dirt and grass from my knees. But as I straightened again, I jumped when I saw the thunderous look he wore.
Catching my shoulders, Hawkhaven gave me a furious shake. “Don’t you ever do that again! What are you trying to do, break your fool neck?”
Ever so slightly, his expression changed from enraged to downright dangerous. It was a look I had come to know very, very well, and when he yanked me suddenly closer, my whole bottom tensed, knowing what would come next. Just as quickly, Hawkhaven stopp
ed himself. His hands shook, but he turned and looked back over one shoulder to the Constable, Victoria, and Shaver. I had just been spared for the sake of a promise.
Other than the trembling of his hands, he didn’t move. Neither did I. Promise or not, people present or not, I had a niggling feeling if I made one struggling attempt to free myself from his grasp, I’d very likely find myself tossed over his knee right then and there.
Hawkhaven took several deep calming breaths, and then faced me again. Slowly, he made his hands let me go.
“I’m sorry,” I said, very quickly.
He backed one slow step away from me, but that dangerous fire stayed in his eyes. “If you ever,” he held up a cautioning finger, “ever do anything like that again, I promise you won’t have a bottom left for me to spank.”
“Matthew, you are as weak and biddable as she is unmanageable!” Victoria spat. “You always take her side of everything! You should be beating her right now, not coddling her!”
Only bare feet behind us, the Constable got down off his horse. He strode up to the carriage, his shoulders filling the narrow carriage doorway as he squared off against his soon-to-be wife. “Close your mouth, Victoria. I think you’ve said more than enough for one day.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that,” Hawkhaven’s sister snapped back at him. “You didn’t hear what she said to me! Me! As if I weren’t her better!” She slashed her hands widely back and forth to encompass the whole inside of the coach. “I don’t want her back in here anyway. Let her walk, for all I care. Better yet, let her ride with my brother. He wants her so badly, they’ll probably couple on the damn horse!”
Fuming, Victoria reached for the door, but the Constable caught it before she could slam it shut.
“I said, that’s enough,” he warned.
“Who are you to scold me?” she demanded, her eyes widening until her whole expression was one of wounded disbelief. “You all look at me as I’ve done something wrong! That little whore is the one who—”
“Jumped from a moving carriage to escape your razor tongue,” he finished for her, not falling in the slightest for her act of innocence. “It’s not hard to see why. Keep this up, my girl, and while I know you can’t stand for our wedding, I guarantee you won’t be able to sit for it, either.”
The wounded disbelief vanished without a trace behind calculating blue eyes and a fierce frown. Victoria leaned over to grab the door again. “Get your hand off my carriage, Constable.” She sneered the word, degrading it. “We aren’t married yet. Until we are, there’s nothing you have to say that I would care to listen to.”
The hand he held at his side, flexed ominously. He arched both eyebrows with painstaking politeness. “Is that a fact?” Without loosening his grip on the door, he turned around, his body stiff with a near grim purposefulness. “Hawk?”
Hawkhaven deliberately kept himself neutral. He merely held up his hands, open palms held outward, averting his eyes to the ground. “Sorry, my friend. It comes with the dowry.”
Neutrality, at this point, was as good as permission, and Victoria knew it. She stared at her once over-protective brother, her mouth fell open. “Matthew?”
The Constable knew it, too. “I was hoping that would be your position. Mind my horse, if you would.”
“No!” Victoria grabbed at the door with both hands in a frantic attempt to keep him out. “I said, no! Matthew!”
I watched in wide-eyed, rapid-blinking surprise as the Constable ripped the door from her hands and threw it open. And Hawkhaven just stood there, his arms folded across his chest, watching as another man purposefully prepared himself to do serious harm to a certain aspect of Victoria’s anatomy. I had tried to help her, and he’d walloped me!
“What are you doing?” Victoria demanded, her pitching rising as the Constable bullied his way up into the carriage alongside her. “Matthew, don’t just stand there! No! I didn’t say you could come inside!” The door shut firmly behind him, the window drapes snapped closed, and suddenly she cried out, “No! You can’t!”
If ever a woman deserved to have her skirts hiked and her bottom smacked, Victoria was she. While I probably should have been ashamed for thinking such a thing, on the other hand I had been bottom-up enough times on her account to know, as uncomfortable as she was about to find the experience, she’d still survive it. The whole carriage rocked with the force it took for the Constable to throw Victoria, screaming and fighting like the spoiled little girl she was, across his very capable lap.
A corner of my mouth curved. It was about time!
“Take care,” Hawkhaven warned, and I quickly pressed my mouth into a somber line. “You haven’t completely escaped my notice, either, you know.”
I took a healthy step sideways, my hands tucking cautiously behind me in a woefully ineffective attempt at shielding my already clenching bottom. Half-heartedly, I tried redirecting his attention. “I don’t think the Constable intends to throttle her feet.”
“I’m hoping he does something quite a bit more dire, actually,” he said, as Victoria screeched and the whole carriage jostled dreadfully. Sitting atop the rocking vehicle, Shaver stifled a sigh and did his best to keep the restless horses from being disturbed by the unusual noises behind them.
“You mean, you aren’t going to let her get a good scare and then put a stop to this?”
“Get your hands off me!” Victoria shouted at the top of her lungs. “No! Not my dress! No-o-o!”
“Nope.” Catching my arm with one hand and the Constable’s horse with the other, Hawkhaven turned his back on the thrashing carriage and led me around the rear to where his own mount stood grazing at the roadside. “Would you like to ride or walk?”
“B-but… Matthew, I don’t think he’s going to stop at just one or two smacks. He’s really going to spank her. Roast her, even. Very hard.”
“One can certainly hope so.”
“But that’s not fair!” I complained. Behind us, Victoria let out an ear-piercing shriek as a sharp rhythmic slapping began. Over the last few weeks, I had become something of a reluctant aficionado on spankings, and the sounds I heard now were undoubtedly that of a bare hand abruptly meeting an equally bare bottom. I still think it couldn’t have happened to a nicer woman, but Hawkhaven’s suddenly permissive attitude was irritating beyond belief. “All I did was stretch her legs a little, and I got spanked! Very hard, too. It hurt!”
“It was supposed to.”
“But it’s not fair! He—”
Victoria screamed as if she were being killed, and the sharp smacking became louder and sharper.
“He’s sorting it out,” Hawkhaven finished for me.
“That’s an unfair double standard,” I grumbled again.
“It certainly is,” he said, trying not to laugh at me. “Now, do you want to ride or walk?”
“Walk.”
While he led the horses, I walked alongside him, still grumbling and muttering at the injustice of it all. As we passed the carriage, I stopped and cupped my hands around my mouth, shouting into the window just to be heard over the ruckus Victoria was causing, “Oh yes, he’s certainly wrapped around your tiny finger! Very easy to control!”
For all I knew, this could be Victoria’s first and last spanking. It may as well be a good one.
Two sharp slaps echoed around that carriage simultaneously: the extra hard one the Constable landed on the now frantically crying Victoria, and the one Hawkhaven laid to the seat of my skirts, knocking me forward a step.
“I couldn’t help it,” I groused, rubbing the seat of my skirt.
Although still smiling, there was a flicker of warning in the depths of his eyes when he gestured for me to keep walking. “Try harder.”
The Constable and Victoria were married in a small Scottish church shortly before noon. Hawkhaven paid the fee and, though I tried to keep myself unobtrusively to the back of the church, he took my arm and pulled me right up front to stand beside him while the vows were read.
With my hand captured in his, I watched as Victoria, wincing and shifting uncomfortably in her seat, quietly promised to love, honor and obey. A flush of defiance kept her cheeks stained a constant pink, but she kept her head down and her mouth shut except where she was required to speak for the ceremony.
I kept my mouth shut, too. When the Scottish father asked if there were any reasons why the marriage should not take place, I kept my eyes downcast, my lips firmly locked together, and the secret of Albert’s growing baby exactly that. A secret. It was not my place to mention the infidelity. As Hawkhaven had said, they would have to sort that out on their own.
“You realize, of course,” Hawkhaven bent to whisper in my ear, “things have changed now between us.”
I nodded, but I was doing my very best to avoid thinking about any of that.
He squeezed my hand. “I’m tempted to make an honest woman of you, right here and now.”
All of Victoria’s problems fled my mind in an instant. I snapped around to stare at him, my heart forgetting to beat in my chest, my breath catching at the back of my throat.
But then his smile turned rueful. “If it weren’t for the scandal, I would.”
Oh yes. The scandal. My heart fell into the pit of my stomach like an icy rock. That thick, fat, horrible line between servants and masters was once again drawn and I was entirely on the wrong side of it.
‘What did you expect, Ella, really?’ I scolded myself. Men like Hawkhaven did not marry their servants. And that’s all I was anymore. To him, to everyone. A servant.
Chapter Twelve
Even leaving the church shortly before noon, it was well after ten that night before we arrived home again. Until that point, I didn’t realize just how vital Bess really was. She had that house like a well-wound clock. The spare guest room was set up for the Constable, the beds were all turned down—including mine—and the formal table in the dining hall was set to accommodate a veritable feast. We could smell the food cooking before we had even disembarked from the carriage and our stomachs rumbled. Even mine, tired as I was.