His lips quirked, and he sat down beside her in an easy movement. “I trust you slept well.”
She checked the toast. “Yes, thank you. Amazingly well—better than I had expected. And you—have you quite recovered from your indisposition?”
“I have.” His tone made it clear the subject was off-limits.
“Did you enjoy your swim?” She flushed as she recalled the sight he’d made emerging from the waves and added hastily, “Um, Stevens told me you went for a swim. Not that I saw you swimming, you underst—” She broke off, flustered, when he gave her a piercing look. What did it mean? Did he know she’d peeked? She hurried on, “It’s a beautiful morning. Was the water cold?” Oh heavens, what had made her ask that? She’d seen it was cold! Her whole face flamed.
“Och, give it here!” Mac grabbed the toasting fork. The toast was smoking gently.
“Oh dear, I’m sorry! I was not looking!”
“Aye, I noticed,” he grunted. “I’ll have tae scrape this lot wi’ a knife!” He pulled a knife from his boot and with a long-suffering expression started to scrape toast.
It was only one piece and not that badly burned and Faith was inclined to tell him so, but Stevens interrupted. “Don’t worry, miss. Mac is a rare talent at scraping toast. As he said, he’s our usual toast maker.” Stevens winked at Faith, and she felt better.
“Now, here’s yer breakfast. Eat it while it’s hot.” It was a feast; golden scrambled eggs, thick slices of bacon, and toast, carefully scraped and lavishly spread with the rich local butter.
Now, Miss Merrit, I think it’s time you told me your story,” Nick said when they’d finished breakfast.
“My story?” she said, with a not-very-convincing air of innocent surprise.
“You know very well what I mean,” he growled. “The story of how a gently bred young English lady comes to be alone, hungry, and sleeping among French sand hills. At the mercy of any passing villain.” His bluntness was deliberate. This was no time for false pride. She could not be allowed to continue like this. The consequences of last night—had he not been there to prevent them—were unthinkable.
“None of us will repeat a word of what passes here. You have my word.”
She looked down and mumbled a thank-you. “I suppose the story will be all over London in a few weeks anyway…” She hugged her knees and wiggled her bare toes, stretching them toward the fire. The slender, dainty feet were a mess of blisters. Healing blisters, Nick saw, but still! He made a resolution to do something about those big ugly boots at the first opportunity.
When it seemed she wasn’t going to say any more, he said, “Come on—spit it out! What the devil are you doing in this mess?”
She raised her head and gave him a cool look. He attempted to moderate his tone, make it sound less like a prisoner interrogation. “I mean, who is responsible for your current predicament?”
She shrugged. “I have no one but myself to blame.”
Nick’s brows knotted. It was his experience that most people’s problems were invariably someone else’s fault. “How so?”
She hesitated, then said, “I fell in love.” She broke off, and for a moment it seemed as though she would leave it there. Nick opened his mouth to prompt her further, but she said, “I fell in love in England, but he was—well, I thought he was a Hungarian violinist. He asked me to marry him, to elope with him! And…and so…I did.”
“I see.” Damned fool romantic notions!
Stevens swore under his breath. “You didn’t even think about the disgrace, miss?”
She gave him a rueful look. “It never even occurred to me, Stevens.”
“Why ever not, miss? Surely you knew what people would say!”
“No,” she said simply. “The thing is, eloping is something of a tradition in my family. My mother and father ran away to Italy to get married.” She hugged her knees, and her voice grew wistful. “I grew up hearing about it. They were completely and wonderfully in love until they day they died…”
The fire sputtered, and far away, seagulls fought over some morsel of food.
“You said you thought he was a Hungarian violinist,” Nick prompted. “Wasn’t he?”
“No! Well, yes—he is most definitely a violinist and an extremely talented one, but he wasn’t Hungarian at all! He was Bulgarian.”
Nick frowned. “And it mattered—his being Bulgarian?”
“No, of course not. What mattered was that he has five children! Five!”
“Five children?” he nodded. “Rather a quiverful, I agree. I gather you’re not fond of children.”
“Of course I’m fond of children. I love children! It wasn’t the children!”
“Then what?” He was puzzled.
“He was married. His wife and children are living back in Bulgaria. He lied to me.”
“So when he refused to marry you—”
“Oh, he married me. I would never have lived with him without being married. I am not so lost to propriety as—”
Nick leaned forward. “But you just said—”
“The thing is, I thought we got married.” Her voice was a mixture of desolation and anger. “He faked the wedding.”
“How the devil did the bast—” Nick bit off the word and tried again. “Er, how does one fake a wedding?”
“He bribed a priest for the use of the church, and he got a friend of his to dress up as a minister and perform the ceremony.”
Nick carefully unclenched his fists. He wanted to throttle the bastard. “How did you discover the cheat?”
She sighed. “It was our one month anniversary, and I wanted to do something to celebrate. Felix was busy, so I decided I’d go to the church and take some flowers there. I took a bottle of wine for the minister, too. But when I asked for him…I found the real priest and…well, it all came out. He said he hadn’t realized what Felix wanted the church for…” She shook her head.
Nick flexed his fists. Two people to throttle; a Bulgarian fiddler and a crooked priest. “What did you do then?”
“I went home and confronted Felix about it. I…I thought it would all turn out to be a misunderstanding, but…he didn’t deny a thing.” She bent over so he couldn’t see her face. Trailing sand through her fingers, she said in a low voice, “I discovered he’d never loved me, had never really cared about me at all.”
Nick said nothing, just waited for her to explain.
“I was a bet, you see.”
“A bet?” His body was like a coiled spring.
“Yes. He bet one of his friends he could elope with me.” She added in a tight voice, “Actually, any wellborn English girl would have done. But I was the stupidest girl in London that season. I thought I’d found my true love, just like Mama.”
There was a long, awkward silence. If he ever met him, the violinist was a dead man! To ruin a sweet young girl for a bet!
Nick could imagine it. A shy, sheltered, naive little creature, raised on stupid romantic fairy tales. She’d be no match for a slick Continental flatterer. She ought to have been protected from such a villain. “Did your parents not see what was in the wind, try to stop you?”
“My parents died when I was seven.”
Nick dismissed them with a curt mumble of sympathy, but he was not to be distracted. “Did no one try to stop this impostor from targeting you?”
She shook her head. “The thing is, Felix had assumed the name of a real Hungarian family. The Rimavska family is well-known, very rich and aristocratic, so he was accounted a good match. Great Unc—”
She bit off the sentence unfinished, but Nick could put two and two together. The lax guardian was her great-uncle. It made sense. Only a very sheltered girl, a girl brought up by an elderly man, would have been so easily deceived.
And it would account for why the guardian was willing to turn a blind eye. Anything for a chance of a fortune, he thought savagely.
She continued, “He wasn’t Felix Vladimir Rimavska at all. His real name was Yuri Po
pov.”
“I’d bloody well pop him off!” muttered Stevens angrily.
Mac noisily shoved some wood onto the fire. It blazed, creating a gush of smoke, before the wood caught.
Nicholas, coughing, gave Mac an irritated look but turned back to the girl sitting hunched and desolate next to him. “That still does not explain why you are apparently destitute and abandoned, unprotected. Do you tell me this”—he carefully unclenched his fists again—“this violinist threw you out with not a penny to your name?”
“Oh no.” Her voice was dull. “He wanted me to remain as his mistress.”
Nick swore.
“Feli—” She caught herself up. “Yuri did not see why his wife and children should be any sort of an impediment to his pleasure. After all, they were in Bulgaria.”
“Did the fellow have no shame at all?” exclaimed Stevens.
“No. He was not the slightest bit put out by my discovery of his lies. He knew I was ruined, that I could never return to my former life. He thought I had no choice but to stay with him until he tired of me. So many people knew we had run away to get married, you see.” She added in a brittle voice. “I cannot believe the extent of my folly now, but when we eloped, I wrote to everyone to tell them. I thought it was the most romantic experience of my life.” She gave a dry laugh. “I even thought Mama and Papa would approve if they knew.”
Mac crashed around, rattling dishes noisily. “For God’s sake, Mac, will you stop your dammed noise!” Nick said irritably.
“The dishes need tae be cleaned.”
“Then take them down to the beach and wash them there!”
“Aye, I will that!” There was another lot of rattling and clashing of tin implements, and then he heard Mac stomping away, his displeasure evident. Nick ignored him. He wanted the whole story.
“So what did you do?”
“I could not stay there another minute. As soon as he left for his concert—he really is extremely talented, you know—I packed a few things and fled. I did not take the diligence—it was booked out and—”
“Do you mean to say you left Paris at night, to travel back to England on your own and in the power of complete strangers?”
She gave him a narrow look. “I had no choice.”
“Didn’t you have a maid?”
“No.”
“What? But—”
“Look!” she flared. “I was upset, and I wanted to leave Paris as soon as I could. I didn’t think it through, and I haven’t had much experience of planning journeys. I did the best I could at the time, and yes, I know it was a stupid and dangerous thing to do. Does that make you happy?” She glared at him.
“Not a bit.” Nick glared back at her. Why the devil should she imagine he’d be happy that she’d put herself in danger? He thought he’d made it quite clear that he didn’t approve of her being in danger.
“So what happened, miss?” Stevens asked in a soothing tone.
“I found—well, someone in the boardinghouse arranged it for me—a private carriage taking passengers. It was very old and rather dirty, but I did not care.” She paused for a moment, then added in a defensive voice, “Yes, I know! I should have cared. I will in future!”
“Why? What happened?” Stevens prompted.
“After they’d dropped the last of the other passengers off, I heard them talking—they did not realize I understood French. They—they planned to rob me—and worse. I managed to escape them but had to leave my baggage behind. Which is how you find me now,” she said with an air of having finished her tale.
Nick disagreed. She hadn’t left Paris in those disgusting big boots. She hadn’t left Paris half-starved. She’d left out several significant details. But he hadn’t been a wartime serving officer for nothing. Skilled questioning could elicit unexpected details.
“How did you escape?” Blunt questions could also do the job.
“I jumped out of it.”
“Out of a moving carriage?” Nick caught himself up and followed the explosion with a mild. “And don’t tell me—it was dark, too, correct?”
“The moon was bright, though luckily it went behind the clouds for all the time I was hiding in the vineyards. And as soon as they stopped searching for me and went away, it came back out, and I could see to walk.”
Nick closed his eyes. Dear God, she’d jumped from a moving carriage in unknown territory in the dark. He heard himself say, “You little fool! You could have been seriously injured!”
She retorted with an edge in her voice, “I might have been hurt, but I wasn’t. If I’d stayed, however, I would definitely have been hurt, for I would have fought them.”
He had an instant image of the way she’d stood beside him last night, waving that burning stick, attempting to look fierce. He sank his head in his hands and groaned.
Faith didn’t notice. She shivered as she recalled that terrifying time after she’d jumped from the moving carriage, crouching between rows of vines in the dark, praying for the moon to stay behind the clouds. It was hours before the driver and guard gave up. And then she was alone in the dark, somewhere in northern France, with no money, dressed only in a thin silk gown, a Kashmir shawl, dainty kid slippers, and a tiny, elegant bonnet. She shivered. It wasn’t until they’d left that she started to feel the cold.
“Whereabouts was that, miss?” Stevens interrupted her thoughts.
“Somewhere past Montreuil.”
“Montreuil!” Mr. Blacklock’s head snapped up. “How the devil did you get from Montreuil to here?”
She gritted her teeth. She was not some—some skivvy to be snapped at. She answered pleasantly, a counterpoint to his rudeness. “I walked.”
Stevens whistled, impressed.
Mr. Blacklock muttered savagely, “Hence the atrocious state of your feet!”
Embarrassed, Faith tucked the atrocious feet under her skirts so he wouldn’t have to be offended by them any further. How on earth had she imagined him as kind? He was rude and bossy, and she just itched to get up and walk away. But after all he’d done, she did feel she owed him an explanation—even if he spoke to her as if she were a criminal in the dock.
She said with dignity, “I traded my kid slippers and my Kashmir shawl to a farmer’s wife for these boots and the cloak.” And some soup and bread and cheese, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. He’d probably snap her nose off again for the crime of needing to eat.
“It was a good trade. My slippers would never have lasted the distance; I could feel every stone through their thin soles. She offered me her sabots—wooden clogs—but I could never have walked in them, so I held out for her son’s Sunday boots. And my Kashmir shawl was very fine, but not warm enough for the nights.”
“Did no one offer you shelter? Assistance?” Mr. Blacklock said.
“No.” She hung her head. “People…when they see a young woman on foot in a dirty silk dress and peasant boots…they…misunderstand. They took me for…for—”
“We know what they took you for.”
She felt her face reddening. “Yes, so I learned not to ask. But I did ask some English ladies in Calais—I mean, I was speaking English—but they, too, seemed to think…” She swallowed and looked down at her boots. She would have to—somehow—accustom herself to being despised by respectable ladies.
“Forget the stiff-rumped English ladies.” Nicholas Blacklock sounded almost bored. “The solution to your difficulties is clear.”
“Oh, is it?” Faith was nettled by his calm announcement. Her future seemed clear to her, too, only she didn’t feel half as sanguine about it. “What is so clear? Would you care to share this solution?”
“It’s obvious. You will marry me.”
“Marry you?” Faith choked. She jumped to her feet. “Marry you?” With great dignity, she stalked off.
The trouble with stalking off, Faith reflected some time later, was that while it was very satisfying in some respects, it would have been a lot more effective if she’d had som
ewhere impressive to stalk to. A castle, or a tower: a place from where she could sit and glare loftily down at him.
Sitting on a rock, even quite a big, impressive sort of rock, did not have the desirable remoteness. Nor that feeling of solid impregnability combined with superiority that a tower in a castle could bestow on her. A rock on the next beach was not the sort of place from which you could extract a groveling apology.
She hovered between fury and tears.
“You will marry me” indeed! Did he think she was a complete fool? Totally gullible and naive? That she would fall—again!—for such an obvious ploy!
She thought of the way he’d tended her injured feet last night—with gentle hands and a savage diatribe about her foolishness—and wanted to weep. With anger, of course. She would not give him the satisfaction of tears. Arrogant brute. And quite impossible, of course.
Because even if he was sleeping under the stars, he was obviously not a poor man. His clothes and boots were of the best quality, and he traveled with a servant. He was educated and well-spoken and he had that air of command—not to mention arrogance!—that informed her he was a gentleman born.
And what gentleman born would offer to marry a destitute woman of unknown background who, by her own confession, was a fallen woman? It was inconceivable, impossible. Ridiculous. And Faith would not stay to be mocked.
Because even though she knew he hadn’t meant it, it hurt. And why on earth the careless words of a stranger she’d known for less than a day should be allowed to hurt her was something she didn’t care to think about.
A tear rolled down her cheek. She dashed it angrily away. Stupid man! He probably thought it was a joke! She never wanted to speak to him again!
The trouble was, her boots and her cloak were back at his campsite. She had no choice but to return. She set her jaw and marched around the small headland, determined to collect her belongings and leave in dignified silence.
The campsite was deserted, though everything remained in place. The fire was still burning; in fact, something smoked dreadfully, and the stench was horrible. Faith peered through the smoke and gave a gasp of indignation.
“My boots!” She stared in stupefaction. Her boots—or rather, what remained of them—were sitting in the middle of the fire, a blackened mass of misshapen, smoldering leather.
Anne Gracie - [Merridew Sister 03] Page 5