First Season / Bride to Be

by Jane Ashford

  “What was your favorite game when you were a child?”

  “What?”

  “Mine was making villages. I would clear a patch of grass and build houses of twigs, with leaves for the roof.”

  Her voice was meditative. She was searching for a distraction. It wasn’t a bad notion.

  “There were streets of pebbles, and usually a little square. A delphinium blossom makes a splendid church steeple.”

  “Does it?” Richard could see her, suddenly, a small girl with bright hair bent over, placing a blue flower at the peak of her creation. The vision made his throat tight for some reason.

  “Of course, in a day or two, it would wilt. But that didn’t matter because I wanted to keep working on it, making it better. Once, I dug a whole little river—coming out of a stream—to run through my village, with a bridge and a waterfall. That was the best one.”

  Her voice was beginning to soften toward sleep.

  “What was your favorite game?” she asked again.

  Richard considered. “When I was very small, we lived in Somerset. Before my father died.”

  She made a sympathetic sound.

  “I liked the usual sorts of games.” Richard suddenly remembered something he hadn’t thought of in years. “I liked to build things, too. Not villages.”

  “What?” she murmured.

  Her head had come to rest on his chest, and he felt her voice there. “Machines.” A self-deprecating laugh escaped him. “That’s how I thought of them. They weren’t, really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were mechanisms, made of things I found around the place—bits of wire, gears from a broken clock—but they didn’t do anything.”

  “And a machine must do something.”

  “Yes. That’s the beauty of it.”

  Emily raised her head as if to look at him. In the thick darkness, she sank back again at once. “Beauty?”

  He groped for the thought. “It begins as an idea of how to accomplish some task. And when the machine is manufactured, the idea comes to life. It works. It must be such a thrill when you start up something you have conceived, and it goes, it succeeds.”

  Emily said nothing. Richard suddenly felt self-conscious. He had never talked to anyone like this.

  “Why did you stop?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you stop building your ‘mechanisms’?”

  He’d not only stopped, he’d forgotten all about them. “My father got me a pony,” he remembered. “And he was teaching me to fish and…other things I was supposed to do. There wasn’t time any longer.”

  “Supposed to,” she echoed.

  “Yes.” Richard grimaced in the darkness. “A country gentleman has no interest in machines. Still less a man of fashion.”

  “Your father wished you to be a man of fashion?”

  “No. That was my mother. He would have settled for a country gentleman, I believe.”

  “As he was?”

  Richard tried to remember his father’s face. “I don’t really recall. I was very young when he died.”

  “That must have been hard,” said Emily softly.

  “I missed him. But I was small. All I knew was that we were moving to London to my grandparents’ house. I’m sure it was much harder for my mother.” He’d never thought of that before, he realized. She must have been frantic, with the abrupt loss of a young husband, debts left behind, a child.

  “Everything suddenly changing,” said Emily, echoing his thoughts.

  Almost the way his life had shifted when he was shipwrecked, though they hadn’t had to eat grubs, he thought with a smile. “You know what that’s like,” he said, recalling things she had told him about her own childhood.

  “But both my parents were always there.”

  “Very much so,” he joked.

  She nodded against his chest. Richard felt a kinship vibrate between them. Their lives hadn’t been alike in the particulars, yet the end result was similar.

  A sudden certainty descended on Richard. She was the only kind of woman he could admire now. He would never tolerate a partner without her unique blend of courage and sensitivity and humor.

  Ideas opened out in his mind, one after the other, like curtains parting to reveal a wide vista. Perhaps the things that had pushed them toward an engagement—for he had been pushed—weren’t mere convention or accident. Perhaps it was larger, more portentous, than that. “We’re meant to be together,” he murmured.

  She made no reply, and Richard was shaken by a dread that she didn’t feel this, that it was a delusion he’d woven of longing and fatigue. The idea was so bleak he couldn’t speak for a moment. And then when he could, he didn’t know what to say. Why didn’t she answer him?

  The silence was heavy and lightless. The brick storage room seemed to close around him, the walls drawing in to stifle.

  “Emily?” he managed at last.

  There was no response but her even breathing, the weight of her head on his chest. It was another few moments before Richard realized that she had fallen asleep.

  Relief coursed through him, and he didn’t know whether it came from the explanation of her failure to answer, or the knowledge that she hadn’t heard his admission in the first place.

  She stirred, nestling closer to his side. His body responded with a jolt of desire and a confusion of emotion. He could taste her lips, feel her skin in his fingertips.

  Richard closed his eyes and rested his head against the brick wall, fighting the images in his mind and the echo of sensation demanding repetition. It was far too dangerous, in several senses, to give way.

  Twenty

  Richard woke to a dim filtering of light, yellow green along the brick of the walls. There were narrow slitted openings near the ceiling of the room, closed with glass and overgrown with vines. They were well out of reach.

  Carefully sliding away from the still sleeping Emily, he rose and surveyed their prison. The room was nearly a perfect cube, and it was perfectly empty. There wasn’t a scrap of metal or a bit of lumber he might use as a weapon. And the brickwork looked solid. By the time he could pry one loose and break a window, it would certainly be too late. Nonetheless, he took out his penknife and began scratching at a line of mortar.

  Emily sat up. Putting her hands to her hair, she pulled out pins and held them in her mouth while she tidied the unruly mass. Richard couldn’t take his eyes off her as she pinned it up again. When she smoothed it back and looked up, he looked quickly away.

  “I wish we hadn’t eaten all the bread,” she said.

  Richard laughed.

  Bracing one hand against the wall, she stood. “At least we’re dry.” She brushed at her skirts. “Though covered with dust.”

  Richard watched her examine the room. He could almost hear her coming to the same conclusions he had reached himself. She went over to the door and tried the lock, rattling it quietly.

  “Mrs. Farrell keeps her house in annoyingly good order.”

  “An estimable housekeeper,” he replied dryly.

  Emily turned to him. “Will they come for us this morning?”

  “I imagine so. Lydia probably had to search the hills for her hired killers.”

  “I hope they were out in the rain all night!”

  Another laugh escaped him. Richard felt a kind of irrational joy bubble up. He wished with all his heart that she was safe elsewhere, but if he had to face death, he couldn’t think of anyone he would rather face it with.

  “When we hear them unlocking the door, we can hide behind it and grab them,” she suggested.

  “I’m afraid it opens outward.”

  “Oh.” She examined it again. “If we pressed ourselves against the bricks right beside it”—she demonstrated—“they wouldn’t see us at first. Perhaps we coul
d surprise them.”

  “We will certainly try that.”

  “But you don’t believe it will work.”

  “They’ll have guns, I imagine. And Lydia will most likely keep them from rushing in.”

  “She leaves a great deal to be desired as a family member,” declared Emily severely. “It is enough to make one glad not to be well acquainted with one’s family.”

  “I imagine it is. I am scarcely well acquainted with Lydia, however.”

  Emily stared at him. “You seemed such good friends.”

  “She took care to make it seem so,” he answered ruefully. “I might have suspected something, since I had met her only once before.”

  “Only once?”

  “When I was fifteen,” Richard replied, and then wondered why she cared.

  Emily turned away from his gaze. “We will escape,” she said staunchly. “The men she hired are incredibly inept.”

  “They haven’t been clever.” He thought back over the attacks. They would have better direction this time, however.

  “We’ll outwit them.”

  He didn’t want to discourage her.

  “A distraction,” added Emily. She nodded. “I will…”

  Without any warning sound of footsteps, the key rattled in the lock. Richard quickly joined Emily against the brick wall beside the door, pressing his back against it.

  “Watch me,” she whispered.

  Before he could ask what she meant, the door swung open.

  Lydia Farrell walked in. She was alone and unarmed, Richard saw incredulously.

  A wail like a steam whistle reverberated through the little room, and Emily flung herself onto Lydia, wailing and pleading like the most volatile of hysterical women. The room was suddenly filled with flailing arms and frothing skirts. Richard, astonished, stood stock-still.

  The melee ended with Emily sitting on top of his cousin, pinning her arms to the stone floor with both hands.

  “What are you doing?” cried Lydia, “Have you lost your mind?”

  “You think I should simply let you kill us?” demanded Emily. She threw Richard a harassed look, as if wondering why he did not help her.

  “Kill you?” cried Lydia in horror.

  The emotion was so obviously genuine that Emily eased her grip and sat back a little. “So you can get Lord Warrington’s land and the coal on it.”

  Lydia looked ashamed. “You found out about that.” She glanced at Richard and away.

  “You hired thugs in London to murder him,” accused Emily.

  “No!” Lydia frowned. “Is that who they are? But…” She looked bewildered.

  “I think you had better let her up,” commented Richard.

  Slowly, Emily released her captive and rose. Lydia sat up, making no move to flee.

  “Tell us about the coal first,” said Richard.

  Again, she looked ashamed. “We discovered it about a year ago. The deposit is very large. I didn’t see why you…that is, you had no connection with this place and you never…”

  “You didn’t think I deserved a share in it,” finished Richard.

  Lydia looked at him almost fearfully. “You are very different now.”

  “But what about the attacks, the men who shot at us?” asked Emily.

  “There is a madman in the neighborhood,” Lydia blurted out. “He’s looking for Richard, and he has two very sinister individuals with him.”

  Richard and Emily stared at her.

  “He had just been at the front door when you arrived last night. He threatened my family—my sons!”

  Richard and Emily looked at each other.

  “You have to go,” insisted Lydia. “Your mother too. I’m sorry, but I can’t have my boys put in danger.”

  “A madman?” said Emily. “But who…?”

  “Can you describe him?” asked Richard.

  Lydia shook her head. “He wore a hooded cloak, and he had a scarf swathed around his face. But his eyes…” She shivered.

  “What about the men with him?”

  “Large,” she answered. “Scarred all about the face and hands. Not countrymen.”

  “Bob Jones and Ralph the Thumb,” cried Emily. “It must be.”

  Lydia gaped at her. “You can see why you must go?” his cousin added pleadingly. “He said if I tried to help you, he would kill my sons.”

  “You will have to lend me a horse,” responded Richard.

  She bit her lower lip and clenched her hands together.

  “Can’t we just send for help?” objected Emily.

  Lydia made a gesture of denial. “I doubt that a messenger would get through,” replied Richard before she could protest. “I will draw them off, and then you can get word out.”

  Emily swung around to stand right in front of him, her hands on her hips. “You cannot mean to leave here alone?”

  “It is the only answer. You and my mother will be safe, while I…”

  “While you are shot as soon as you ride out of the stable!”

  “I can evade…”

  “This is not the jungle,” she cried. “We are not talking of snakes and panthers. They’re lying in wait for you out there.”

  “There is no other way.”

  Emily glared at him. “Oh yes, there is.”

  “You all have to go,” interjected Lydia.

  When they turned to look at her, she was scrambling up from the floor. Under their eyes, she took a step backward. “I’m sorry. But I will not risk my family.”

  “If I am gone,” began Richard.

  Emily turned to Lydia. “They can’t be certain we’re here. No one saw us come in. Unless your servants…”

  “They wouldn’t speak of it.”

  “You must lend us a carriage. Lord Warrington and I will conceal ourselves in the vehicle while it is still in the stables.”

  Richard started to object, but she waved him to silence.

  “When it pulls up at the front door, only his mother will get in. It will appear that she is leaving. They will probably follow, but…”

  “No,” said Richard.

  “It is a much better idea than yours,” declared Emily.

  “I’ll tell Lady Fielding,” said Lydia, and slipped out before anyone could speak again.

  “This won’t do,” said Richard.

  “It will have to.”

  The courage and sheer will in her blue gaze reached into the most guarded coverts of his spirit. “I cannot put you in danger,” he murmured. “I can’t bear it.”

  “So you ask me to bear it instead?” Emily demanded. “I am to endure what you cannot?”

  Richard couldn’t speak.

  “Well, I won’t,” she added almost saucily. She smiled, and Richard’s throat grew tight with unprecedented tears.

  * * *

  Emily sat silently in the Farrells’ traveling carriage as the stablemen finished harnessing the team. The curtains had been fastened down at the windows, so no one could see inside the vehicle. In the dimness, she clasped her hands and made herself stay still. She was trembling, but it was exultation more than fear that shook her. The way Richard had spoken to her, and looked at her—he had to feel as she did. The emotion in his face had been unmistakable. He cared for her. Even the threat they faced couldn’t outweigh that revelation.

  The carriage door opened, and Richard joined her on the forward seat. “Ready?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes.”

  The vehicle jerked and rolled out of the stables and around to the front of the house. Emily shrank back as the door was opened and first Lady Fielding, then her maid were handed in. They both looked irritated. “You are here,” said the former as she sat. When Richard gestured sharply for silence, she glared at him.

  The door was closed, and t
hey started off at a brisk pace. “I do not understand this at all,” continued Lady Fielding in a harsh whisper. “Everyone seems to have lost his wits. First Lydia tells me I must go—not very hospitable! And then she gives me some rigamarole about ruffians threatening her family. It made no sense whatsoever. And you!” She fixed Richard with an accusing stare. “Hiding in the stables? Really!”

  “I’m afraid it was necessary, Mother. Things are rather serious.” Quickly, Richard told her the whole story. When he had finished, Lady Fielding sat back in her seat, white and silent.

  The carriage rocked as the team increased its gait. Richard raised a hand to the window, then let it drop, clenching it on his knee. Hoofbeats sounded off to the side. “Mother, would you look out and see what is happening?” he asked in a rigidly controlled voice.

  Lady Fielding complied. “There is a rider coming in from the right,” she said. “Check the other side, Jevers.”

  Her maid looked and said there was another horseman on the left.

  Richard looked frightening. “If they hurt the coachman, I will…”

  “Mrs. Farrell told him not to take any risks,” responded Emily.

  A shot rang out up ahead. A horse squealed. The carriage rocked on its springs, then started to slow.

  “They will have to open the doors to kill us,” Emily said. She was pleased to find her voice steady.

  “That will be the time to move,” agreed Richard.

  “They will not expect me to do anything, so I should be first.”

  “What sort of woman are you?” wondered Richard’s mother.

  “The sort who does not sit back and let herself be killed,” Emily replied.

  Surprisingly, Lady Fielding took this in without hysterics. “So I will leap…” she began.

  “You will not,” Richard interrupted.

  “But it makes sense for me to…”

  “It’s out of the question.”

  “They will be most wary of you,” she argued. “If we are to take them by surprise, we must…”

  “I should do it,” put in Richard’s mother.