“I’ve brought the magistrate, your lordship. And ’twas quite a task getting him to come, I must say. Didn’t believe me, he didn’t!” Henricks’s voice was both triumphant and indignant.
“Your man here tells me you had a break-in, my lord?” With a single annoyed look at Henricks, the magistrate focused on Graham. His voice conveyed polite skepticism.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” Graham said shortly, clearly not pleased at the interruption. He turned back to Anna, lowering his voice so that she alone could hear his words.
“I mean to have you, and I won’t be put off any longer. When I’ve dealt with this, I’ll be coming along to your room. I expect to find you there, warm and welcoming. You always were a sensible little puss.” He smiled at her. Anna, hating him, also hated herself as, in the face of that hot stare, her eyes faltered and dropped.
His hand came to rest briefly against her neck. She jerked away. He scowled.
“You’ll lie with me, Anna, one way or another.
You don’t have a choice.” Then his voice rose so that the others could hear. “Go along up to bed now.”
He turned away from her and moved to join the men. Anna, feeling as if she had just been punched in the stomach, slowly left the hall, Graham meant what he said, she knew he did. He would have her, by force if necessary, or he would toss her and Chelsea out of his house.
It was frigid December, she had exactly five pounds and her clothing to her name, and there was no place for her and her innocent child to go.
She shivered as if from a chill and drew the enveloping cloak more closely around her neck. Something hard bumped against her thigh, and she was reminded of the emeralds concealed in the folds. She must return them to the library.…
And then a thought so evil that it must have been prompted by the devil popped full-grown into her brain.
Concealed on her person was a fortune in emeralds that no one short of heaven knew she had.
The housebreaker had stolen them. When they were missed, he would be blamed. If she kept her mouth shut, no one would ever connect her with them at all.
And he was gone, escaped, certainly never to be seen around Gordon Hall again. He would suffer no punishment for her misdeed.
Stealing was wrong. But so was succumbing to Graham. Of the two evils, stealing was probably the lesser. And certainly it was the more bearable.
The miracle she had prayed for earlier had just been delivered into her hands.
VII
Julian Chase rode through the icy night like a centaur. Bent low over Samson’s neck, his knees gripping the stallion’s heaving black sides, he might have been a part of the horse. He’d learned to ride before he could walk, as most gypsy children did, and this wasn’t the first time the instinctual communion between man and beast would stand him in good stead. Already the hallooing pursuit set on him by his beloved half-brother was fading into the distance. In another few miles he would be free and clear.
Damn, his head hurt! Throbbed so much that he could barely focus his eyes, let alone think! What the hell had the little besom hit him with? Impossible to imagine that a chit that small and fragile-looking could inflict such a blow.
Who the devil was she, anyway? Not Graham’s wife, he knew. He’d seen Lady Ridley twice in London and once during a scouting expedition to Gordon Hall. She was a handsome enough woman, tall and full-bosomed, with a loud voice and an obviously high opinion of herself. But she wasn’t a patch on the angel turned hellcat who’d clouted him on the head.
Masses of blond hair, green-as-grass eyes. For some reason that combination stirred a vague memory.
But of what, or whom, he couldn’t have said. Besides, his head hurt too much to make the effort to sort it out.
A six-foot-high stone wall, nearly hidden by a copse of trees, loomed up out of the darkness, Julian scarcely saw it before Samson was up and over, landing lightly with hardly a slackening in his pace. At the barely felt impact a sharp pain shot through Julian’s head. He reined Samson in, blinking in an effort to drive away the pain as he slowed the animal’s headlong pace. For a moment he swayed in the saddle, on the verge of losing consciousness, before the iron control that had played a large part in keeping him in one piece for the thirty-five years he’d been alive asserted itself. He would not pass out. To pass out would almost certainly result in a fall from the saddle, and then he would very likely be taken by Graham’s men. Might as well shoot himself in the head here and now as let himself be captured by men loyal to his brother.
Samson bunny-hopped over a fallen log that lay in his path, and another blinding pain pierced Julian’s head. Good God, had the thrice-damned chit actually managed to crack his skull?
But then, Julian supposed he was lucky to have escaped with no more hurt than that. If his brother had succeeded in holding him, he would be in worse straits indeed. Graham had hated him ever since he had first been made aware of his half-brother’s existence, half a lifetime ago when Julian was sixteen and Graham was twelve.
With the cockiness of youth, Julian had traveled down to Gordon Hall to confront his supposed father about the truth surrounding the circumstances of his birth. His granny had always told him that he, Julian, was the lord’s rightful heir, as her daughter Nina had been the earl’s legal wife and not his mistress at all. In Julian’s only other encounter with his father, Lord Ridley had had all the advantages. But then Julian had been a frightened eight-year-old, painfully eager for his father’s love. At sixteen, he considered himself a man grown, toughened by years of living by his wits and fists in London’s meanest slums and well able to take care of himself.
If the memory weren’t so painful still, he might smile at the recollection of his sixteen-year-old rashness. Instead of being greeted with the common civility his father would have accorded even a chance-met stranger, Julian had, after being admitted no farther than the front hall by the servants, been ordered by his icy-voiced father to take his person from the premises and never return. When Julian had attempted to argue, the old lord had had him bodily thrown out. The mother and father of a fight had ensued. By its conclusion, fully half a dozen fellows wielding stout sticks had joined together to beat Julian to a bloody pulp. Finally the servants, at Lord Ridley’s direction, had thrown the barely conscious Julian into the road, where they had let him lie.
And then a pudgy youth had run up to him and spit full in his battered face, hissing “Gypsy bastard” with hatred glittering in his pale blue eyes. That youth had been Graham, and Graham hated him still. Julian suspected that he feared him, too. If, as Julian suspected, Graham had somehow gotten wind of the notion that Julian might, just might, be the legitimate offspring of the old earl instead of a by-blow, then seeing his brother shot or hanged for thieving would simultaneously soothe Graham’s anxiety and fill him with glee.
No doubt he’d been a fool to put himself within Graham’s reach. But the emeralds were his, and he wanted them. And wanted, too, the mysterious “proof” they were said to contain.
His granny had always insisted that her girl Nina would never have lain with a man outside of marriage. Of course, mothers being what they were, Julian had taken that pronouncement with a grain of salt. But soon after the old earl’s death, he’d received an anonymous note that had read simply: “The proof is in the emeralds.”
From whom it had come, or exactly what it meant, he had no idea. But he knew about the emeralds. He’d been raised on the story, heard it nearly every day of his life until his granny’s death when he was eight.
The emeralds had belonged to the Rachminovs, a sprawling gypsy clan whose chieftain had been Julian’s grandfather. No one knew precisely how such an itinerant tribe had come to possess such a treasure, but Julian, knowing his relatives, had his suspicions. When Nina, his mother, had run away with her noble lover, she’d taken the emeralds with her as, presumably, her dowry. Months later Nina had returned, heavy with child. The emeralds had not returned with her, and Nina had died giving
Julian life.
His granny always insisted that Lord Ridley, having gotten what he wanted from the gypsy girl, had cast off Julian’s mother because he was ashamed of her low birth. But he’d kept the gems. After his granny’s death Julian had learned that something of the sort was indeed the case.
An uncle had taken him to Gordon Hall. He’d been a tall, sturdy boy of eight with a shock of black hair and a sullen air that had proved most successful at disguising the mingled fear and longing that overwhelmed him at the idea of confronting the nobleman who was supposed to be his father. The uncle had tried to barter Julian and a sheaf of papers that supposedly proved the nobleman’s paternity for the emeralds. The earl had agreed, extracting the emeralds from the same hidey-hole in the library from which Julian had retrieved them just a short while earlier. The exchange completed, the uncle has hastened away with the emeralds. Julian had been left at the mercy of his father.
The old man had regarded him as if he were a garden slug, rung a bell, and ordered him removed to the stables until “something” could be arranged. Six days later one of the grooms had taken him to London, where the “something” had turned out to be a stint as a cabin boy in the Royal Navy. That hellish voyage, complete with almost daily floggings and never-ending, violent seasickness, had lasted years. The ten-year-old Julian who had returned to England had been a far different boy from the green lad who had left.
Looking back, Julian thought that it was a near miracle he had survived. The other cabin boy on his ship, the Sweet Anne, had not. Perhaps it had been assumed that he himself would not survive. Julian heard long afterwards that his uncle had been found murdered not far from Gordon Hall on the very day he had left with the emeralds. The emeralds had not been on his body when it was discovered.
Somehow the gems had found their way back to Gordon Hall. While the evidence might not be enough to convict Lord Ridley in a court of law, it was enough to convict him in Julian’s mind; the earl had engineered the murder of Julian’s uncle, and quite possibly schemed to rid himself of the problem of Julian as well.
But here he was, some twenty-five years later, hale and hearty (except for his damaged head) while his doting father rotted in his grave. There was some justice in the world, after all.
He would not be satisfied until he had the emeralds that by rights should have been his anyway and seen for himself what proof they did or did not contain. If he had not been such a nodcock as to let the green-eyed little vixen’s delicate appearance prompt him to a quite ridiculous chivalry, he’d have the emeralds at that very moment. But he’d wrapped her in his cloak to protect her from the cold, and now he was paying the price for his quixotic act: the emeralds, his emeralds, had been left behind at Gordon Hall. Graham was no doubt crowing over his brother’s failure, and would certainly keep the gems closely guarded for some time to come.
But Julian meant to have them, by whatever means it took.
Tonight’s debacle might slow him down, but it wouldn’t stop him. Nothing short of his own death could do that.
VIII
Two months later, Anna stood on the deck of the India Princess, watching as the islands of Adam’s Bridge, an archipelago stretching from the southeastern coast of India to Ceylon, slid past one by one off the port bow. Taking a deep breath, she drank in the heady smell of the tropics. A scent like no other, it was rich and thick, composed of exotic flowers and spices and rotting vegetation. That, and the ever present heat, assured her as nothing else could have done that she was truly on her way home again.
Funny that she, an Englishwoman by birth and breeding, should consider a small emerald island in a sapphire sea her home. The happiest days of her life had been spent in its exotic environs, and her daughter had been born there. And Paul had died there, of course. His grave on a small knoll just beyond the Big House at Srinagar seemed to call to her.
“Mama, will Papa be there?”
The tiny voice recalled her attention to Chelsea, who stood beside her at the rail, her hand tightly enfolded in Anna’s, Looking down at her small daughter, her flaxen hair braided into a single thick plait down her back and her soft blue eyes wide and serious as they looked up at her mother, Anna felt her heart swell with fierce maternal devotion. How she loved this child! She had done the right thing, she knew, to return Chelsea to the only true home she had ever known. Even if she’d had to put her immortal soul in jeopardy to accomplish it.
“Papa’s in heaven, darling. You know that.” Anna tried hard to keep her voice matter-of-fact. She and Chelsea were close, but Paul had adored his silver-haired little daughter, and Chelsea in turn had thought the sun rose and set on her Papa. The hardest thing of all about Paul’s death—and there had been so many hard things—had been explaining to Chelsea that her beloved Papa had gone away and was never coming back. Since that time, Chelsea had changed from a giggling, romping little girl to the preternaturally serious child she was now. She seldom smiled, and Anna had not heard her laugh since they had lowered Paul’s body into the ground.
“What about Kirti?”
That question was easier to answer. Kirti had been Chelsea’s ayah since the child’s birth. Parting from Kirti had been a wrench for both Chelsea and Anna, but Graham had simply not included enough money for the elderly Tamil woman’s passage when he had sent for Anna and Chelsea to come to Gordon Hall. Not that Anna would have been entirely easy in her mind about taking Kirti with them even if there had been available funds. Kirti was as much a part of Ceylon as the rough stone Buddha of Anuradhapura—like the Buddha, which had been there for hundreds of years, it was impossible to imagine Kirti existing anyplace else. When the time had come for Chelsea to leave, Kirti had flung the end of her sari over her head and parted from her charge with loud wails of grief. Anna had no doubt that Kirti would welcome their return as a blessing from above.
“Kirti may not be at the Big House, but once she knows you’re home she’ll come running.”
“I’ve missed Kirti.”
“I know. I have too.”
“Will–”
“All right, missy, enough of badgering your poor mum with questions. Tell me something, young lady, did you wash your face like you was told?”
The fierce voice belonged to Ruby Fisher, a handsome, buxom woman of middle years whom Anna had turned to for help when she had fled Gordon Hall the morning after the housebreaker’s advent. Ruby was a former London prostitute who had had the good fortune to wed one of her clients, a tenant farmer who had been a member of Anna’s father’s parish. John Fisher had been a godly man as well as a hard worker, and he had resolutely brought his wife to church every Sunday. Ruby, with her penchant for garish dresses and occasional booming vulgarities, had scandalized the congregation. The vicar had stood her friend when his parishioners would have ostracized the sinner brought to live in their midst, and Ruby had never forgotten it. Fiercely loyal to those who had shown her kindness, because few people ever had, she had ever afterwards had a special fondness for the vicar—and for Anna.
Ruby’s attempts to pass on nuggets of worldly wisdom to his “poor motherless chick” had at times horrified and at times amused the good reverend, but it had forged a link of friendship between Anna and Ruby that never had been entirely broken. Even after Anna had wed Paul and gone to live in Ceylon, they had stayed in touch by regular, if infrequent, correspondence. Ruby was the only person Anna knew who would not be horrified by her theft of the emeralds. Indeed, Ruby was the only person Anna knew who might be able to tell her how to convert them into what she needed most: cold, hard cash. If Ruby, then several years widowed, had not been living on a minuscule income in a tiny rented room in an unsavory section of London when Anna had discovered Graham’s foul intentions, Anna would have run to her long since. But such an environment would have been unsuitable in the extreme for Chelsea, and Ruby’s income, which barely fed one, could not have been stretched to feed three.
Anna, a tired and hungry Chelsea in tow and the emeralds stit
ched securely into the hem of her cloak, had arrived on Ruby’s doorstep unannounced after a harrowing two-day journey by public stage and then a hackney. After her initial surprise Ruby had greeted the pair of them with open arms. Too tired to be shy, as she usually was with strangers, Chelsea had allowed Ruby to tuck her into bed while Anna sipped a restorative cup of tea. Then, when the child was settled, Ruby sat down and listened while Anna spilled the whole of what had happened into Ruby’s fascinated ear. Ruby, chuckling over the note Anna had left behind in which she had told Graham that she would sooner starve with her child in a gutter than give in to him, was not shocked by the theft; she applauded it. She was also comfortingly practical. It had taken her less than a day to dispose of the bracelet—the whole set, unique as it was, could not be sold together for fear of attracting unwanted attention, she said—through “a gent” she “knew,” and she had returned with more money than Anna had dreamed the trinket could be worth. When Anna would have given her a share, Ruby had indignantly declined. What she wanted, she said, was to accompany Anna and Chelsea back to Ceylon. After all, what was there for her in England, now that her John was dead? And who would look after Anna and her daughter, babes in the woods that they were, as they traveled to that heathenish place?
Over the course of the journey, Anna had thanked her lucky stars a dozen times for Ruby’s presence. The other woman’s fierce manner and blunt talk accomplished miracles when it came to dealing with shipping clerks and overly free-mannered sailors, and Chelsea had grown to like her very much. Anna herself was heartened by Ruby’s presence. It was a relief to have another adult to share the inevitable problems that accompanied such an undertaking as the removal of three females to such a faraway place as Ceylon.
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