Hesitantly, she nodded. Jane went to the nearby sideboard and poured her a generous measure, which was accepted, then sipped, without so much as a quiet thanks.
At least she’s consistently quiet, thought Will.
He had tended her for several hours, employing himself assiduously to ensure that her fever would abate. Whatever the reason, and he did not believe it to be a disease that anyone in Blackbrook could fall prey to, she had been running a fever. More than likely, it was due to a lack of proper nourishment. Once he was confident she had sufficiently warmed, he went to work on the vicious welts. He ruefully wished that he could remove her clothing without causing either her or his aunt’s undue alarm—because he was already concerned that the open wounds might attract infection on account of her having been exposed near the brook for so long. He did his best to clean and dress them.
Her dress was filthy but he tried not to dwell on it.
When the sky was starting to lighten to a glowing blue, he was delighted that she opened her eyes. Even Jane perked herself up at the movement.
But the young woman took one look at Will and clamped her mouth shut.
First, he surmised this was out of fear—of him, of her new surroundings—but he now had the sense that she was hiding something.
His strained efforts were rewarded with silence when all he wanted from her was a name. Her name. He wanted to see her sent home at the earliest opportunity. But she gave him no indication of her origins. I cannot send a mystery woman away. A mystery woman has no suitable relatives, he thought dourly.
If word got out about her presence in Blackbrook, he would be slightly concerned about two things: one, that both his own reputation—such as it was—would be tarnished, as would hers, and two, that if the village was inclined to be more forgiving of such an arrangement coming to light, people would soon be asking him to care for their sick or injured. He thought he knew which was more likely and it would be the latter, but relished neither scenario.
Praying for patience, Will made another attempt.
“Forgive me if I do not know your proper title, such as it may be, but Miss… do you not think we are owed at least a syllable of thanks? I’ve no idea why you were where you were last night, but it very well could have been your resting place.”
He did not mean to frighten her, but the time he’d spent away from the ton had rendered his speech and manners quite blunt.
Jane was horrified. She gave a little, strangled noise of disapproval, but he ignored her.
He turned slightly to see the young woman a little better. He could see her quite well in the copious indoor light but, still, there were certain sides and angles that left him almost—almost—feeling like he could see perfectly. It was an illusion and nothing more, as the improvement was not so drastic. But sometimes it helped him keep a sense of normalcy.
Her head bobbed up and down. But still, no words escaped her lips.
Will sighed.
“You should not be so hard on her,” said Jane reproachfully. “The nerve to mention such a thing, William.”
“Well, we may never know the truth of anything if she carries on so quietly.”
Will knew from the woman’s reactions that she was neither deaf nor mute. She was simply not speaking.
Jane was less sure that she had all of her senses and had asked earlier if Will was trying to get blood from a stone, in the way that perhaps their unexpected patient could not answer either of them. His aunt was such a good sort that she still refused to treat the young woman as though she were somehow deficient, even if there was some question of her ability to comprehend what was happening and what was being asked of her.
Jane rolled her eyes at Will, then smiled graciously at the woman, leaning forward slightly in her chair. “Pay him no mind. He does growl and bark frightfully, but he never bites.”
The woman returned her smile with a weak one of her own.
“I am so pleased you can hear us,” said Jane, despite having already been given Will’s professional opinion that the woman could, indeed, hear them.
Will glanced up at the ceiling, counting to ten to cultivate the patience that he had only just been praying for. God seemed more content to play with him than grant his prayer.
The blasted woman nodded, casting a fearful look at the duke.
“Splendid!” said Jane, clapping gleefully like a child. She calmed herself and gazed thoughtfully at the woman. “I must confess that I do love a good mystery.”
“Aunt, you must not encourage her reticence!” Will said.
Ordinarily, he loved Jane’s sense of whimsy but, currently, he felt that she was being a turncoat.
“I’m not, Will. It is just that this is, whatever way you want to interpret it, something of an odd situation.”
Will opened his mouth. Closed it. Only hours ago, she had been worrying him over the bounds of decorum and propriety when he had suggested bringing a strange woman into his home so that he could administer aid.
Now, she was condoning this woman’s presence in the manor for the sake of a good mystery.
“How can we help her further if we do not know where she came from?”
His words caused some distress to his patient; her fingers skittered nervously along the chaise’s sumptuous brocade. She drank the last two-thirds of her glass of brandy in one gulp without flinching.
Her eyes pleaded with his aunt and, for the life of him, Will could not tell why she would not be more forthright in her explanation of, well, everything. If someone was mistreating her, he, as the duke, could potentially help more than anyone else.
Jane, on the other hand, seemed to divine something he could not. “Very well,” she said, as if the woman had spoken to her. “William, this poor thing needs her rest. We must leave her for now.”
“She has only just awoken from sleep! Besides, she should be returned home this very morning.” Will tried not to sound too acrid. He was starting to have misgivings about sending her back to wherever she’d come from.
Surely she would not have been wandering around at night unless she was actively trying to escape something, his traitorous mind thought. It was a logical assumption to make about the circumstances, wasn’t it? And she did not seem to be a lady of the night, so that did not explain her presence outdoors at such a late hour. Besides, if she was, what customer could she have hoped to gain down near the brook?
Will’s aunt gave him a look that would have caused Wellington himself to back down in mere seconds. “You would turn her out in such a poor state?”
His gaze went most unwillingly to the woman. At the very least, he conceded, she was exhausted. As he had established, nothing was broken. She did have a sprained ankle. He had wrapped it tightly and elevated her left foot. The welts gave him the most pause because they signified something insidious, as did her rather frail build. He knew that some women were naturally very small creatures, but she was half-starved.
He could not have her turned out. He gave a profound sigh.
“I thought not,” said Jane. She turned gracefully, holding out her arm, wordlessly inviting him to walk her out of the room. “The maid shall be in with some food,” she said to the woman, as Will obeyed her silent request. He saw no reason to continue exhausting himself over a situation that had no apparent solution for the moment.
Before Jane could shut the parlor doors, Will took one last look at the woman on the chaise. His eyes met hers from across the room and he fancied he felt something like an eddy in the air, almost like a caress along his skin.
He frowned slightly, wondering if the night’s events had strained him and he was imagining strange phantom sensations. But he did not imagine the stranger’s small smile as the doors clicked shut. It was the first expression she had given him that was not either a frown or a grimace.
Chapter Two
She jumped up as soon as the scarred duke and his kindly aunt left the room. But it made her hurt all over and she fell back onto the chaise,
groaning in pain. Her ankle in particular made it impossible to move properly, but all of her was aching horribly.
Last night, her father had almost killed her.
Again.
That is the last time I will suffer such a thing, she vowed.
Brom Copperweld, formerly a hostler, was a petty man of little consequence, an inveterate gambler and an unrepentant drunkard. His life’s current business included gambling away the meager earnings his daughter made from selling wares she knitted or cleaning business establishments in the village, and its pleasure was solely to beat her up when he was roaring drunk and, therefore, even more cantankerous than he was naturally.
As a child, Augusta Copperweld fantasized that she and her father were not at all related. They had moved often and generally at a moment’s notice, hastened by the bailiffs who came to take everything and found nothing, and she cultivated very few friends. It was difficult when your father scared everyone in each village, from hostler to innkeeper to maid, and made doubly difficult when he forbade you to socialize with anybody.
So she dreamed each night and every spare moment she had that someone from her real family would take her away from Brom.
Last night, he had come home, drunk as usual, and instantly taken to hitting her because she was with fever and had been for several days. It was not her fault, of course. She had simply been ill, then taken more time than she would have liked to recover. He flung curses at her, accusing her as the bearer of ill-fortune who had caused him to lose at the gambling tables.
His nonsensical ramblings were as familiar as the beatings.
He was as massive as she was small, and all attempts at escape were suppressed by his brute strength. There was little to do but to cover her face and body with her arms and take the blows quietly until her father wearied and fell into a stupor, collapsing onto a spindly chair that always looked as though it could never bear his considerable weight.
It took a while to regain her strength. Half an hour, perhaps. But she did and, moving painfully, she found her way out of the house and into the night. Augusta was hazy on the details, but she remembered thinking how oblivious or unkind their fellow villagers were. There was no mistaking the signs of a beating. She despised all of them for not coming to her aid.
But then, people were cowardly.
It occurred to her that while her father was so soundly asleep, she could leave and never return. She decided right then that she was going to leave. Whatever it took. She had had enough.
She had only continued to stay with him because, well, she had few options as a woman of low birth, and her late mother would have cried for days at the thought of Augusta leaving Brom. Sweet Mary Copperweld had never quite experienced her husband as Augusta experienced her father, or if she had, she did not say anything against him. When Mary died, Augusta had been fifteen years of age and she reasoned that Brom’s black mood would pass, that it was the result of his wife’s abrupt death. It never had and, instead, increased over the last five years.
Augusta did not know what had possessed her to remain under such conditions, and the only thing she could come up with was she had no choice.
As she wandered slowly down a narrow lane, she admitted to herself that her father would gladly bash her over the head and bury her in the garden if he was so inclined.
If she let him.
She had to make her escape or face horrible consequences. Of that, she was positive.
Putting action to her thoughts was woefully slow – sharp pain jolted through her body with each step she took. It was all she could do not to give up and allow the sensation to overtake her. But she knew with certainty that should her father wake up and find her gone, he would hunt her down, find her, and return her to a fate worse than death.
Or death itself.
On she went, feeling like a living incarnation of injury. Her sole aim was to leave Brookfield before the night was over. She had no idea what she would do or where she would go, and thought only of leaving. Thinking too far ahead would only frighten her, so as sobering as it was, she concentrated only on how she felt—horrible—and putting one foot in front of the other.
She had reached the brook, the outer boundary of the village, when she tripped over a large tree root and fell. She felt her ankle twist and, in conjunction with everything else she had experienced that evening, it caused her stomach to lurch and she almost retched. It would not have been unbearable had she not been so shaken and injured already. But in her weakened state, she found herself fading from consciousness. It was impossible to fight.
Then throughout the night, she had barely been aware of gentle hands tending her, applying herbs on her skin to cool her fever. She couldn’t even open her eyes to see who her benefactor was – she knew already that it could not be her father. He would rather strangle her than tend her at all. At last, she had fallen into a peaceful sleep, the best she had slept in what seemed like an age.
If it weren’t for her blasted ankle, Augusta would have preferred to leave the company of the duke. It couldn’t be more apparent that her departure was his most ardent desire, and she did not blame him a jot. She was new in the village but the tales abounded and she had gained sufficient intelligence about the Duke of Ravenwood by just listening to those who murmured about him. He was, they said, a recluse who would rather tend to his library than his people. It was a pity he was not more like his father because, as a boy, he’d seemed so promising, they said. Melancholy had overtaken him after the war.
Then there was gossip about his appearance, which Augusta had to say, was startling. He resembled one of the frightening creatures carved from stone and set on old churches. A dragon, perhaps, or, what were they called? Gargoyles, she thought. It was tragic, she felt, because she could conjecture that he had once been handsome, and maybe even devastatingly so. She was so intent upon not telling him anything of importance that she did not dwell upon his face.
If she had come across him in public, things might have been different. She might have cared more about his appearance or let him frighten her.
But the fact was, she was exhausted and far more scared of her circumstances than she was of him. In the end, he was only a man. An injured man, she told herself, trying to reason past her immediate and morbid curiosity. Same as Gabriel, who mucks the inn’s stables. His face had been marred by a horse that had kicked it in on his right side. He was somewhat compromised in his intelligence, which the duke was not, but he did look almost as shocking.
One just got used to Gabriel. She had, anyway, and she’d only been to the inn a few times to clean the kitchens when Maria, the wizened cook, needed the extra help.
Though she could admit the truth to the murmurings about the duke’s face, she did not think that he was heartless or greedy. She couldn’t, not after passing a night in his care.
Most of what she had heard about him came, of course, from her father. Brom cursed the duke to perdition and back for the heavy excise he apparently imposed on local market produce. Having had quite a bit of luck at the tables some months before, her father had won a little farm of his own in Brookfield, and that was the reason they had settled in the village.
In Augusta’s opinion, the old farmer who’d lost to her father must have been the grandest fool for staking his farm on a stupid bet. But such were the ways of men.
According to her father, vegetables would have fetched him a handsome profit, but the duke supposedly took more than half his earnings away. Even though her father never set sight on the man, he harbored a hatred for him.
At first, Augusta suspected that Brom either drank or gambled half of his money away, blaming it on the duke to ease his conscience, not that his conscience was large or well-developed. It was just easier to blame the nobility than it was to admit one’s chronic shortcomings. But she started to listen to the other villagers while she was out, and some of them lamented the same very high taxes in hushed tones and wondered what on earth the duke was thinking.
Augusta had always wondered about Lord Ainsworth, Duke of Ravenwood. Many times, she would gaze up at the large manor tucked in the hills that surveyed the village, and imagine the creature that lived within it. Her imagination ran wild, and her mind’s eye painted a vivid picture. She idly wondered if he was more like a dark, wicked ogre ready to devour any person who dared to trespass on his estate.
His reputation was vague and undecided, though, and Augusta was not by nature a mean-spirited woman. She was simply often bored and, paired with her intrinsic sense of fancifulness, this meant she had constructed many possible stories of the duke’s appearance and disposition.
Whenever she sold her wares or worked in the village, Augusta heard tales about him. Some despised him for his detachment from daily affairs, but then, more dissented with this attitude. Instead, they remembered him as a kind young man who tended the ill and helped the midwife birth babies. From the latter group, Augusta gleaned that the duke had once been Brookfield’s trusted physician and he’d, in fact, saved many from sickness and injury. This last group consisted of people who felt pity, and so, they called him the “Duke of Sorrow”. She didn’t know who started it but, these days, it was likely that someone who spoke compassionately about Lord Ainsworth would not use his proper name.
However, of all the tales surrounding the mysterious duke, the most tenacious regarded his appearance. In that, all of the villagers agreed. Everyone said that he’d returned from the war disfigured, with such an injury to his face that he could not turn it to the sun ever again. The only disagreement found within discussions of this matter was whether or not he deserved such a fate. Some said he did. Most denied it.
At least they were right about the nature of his face.
Opening her eyes to the sight of a man dozing off near her, she had known almost instantly who he was. While he dozed, she had been fortunate enough to observe him without his awareness for a full minute before he awoke.
Since Augusta had had no history of meeting with titled men in all of her twenty years, she did not possess the slightest inkling of how the gentry were supposed to look. She only knew what fairy tales and gossipmongers told her and, thankfully, her mother had instructed her on how to address them. Mama had once been a nanny to three young ladies before Augusta’s birth and, as such, understood how to comport herself in a multitude of situations.
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