by Kim Bowman
“That will be his undoing.”
“Don’t underestimate him, Wil. Chauncey is a treacherous, dangerous man.”
“So am I,” he shot back with a smile, and she seemed to shudder.
“I don’t know how you got away with doing in Vorlay, but it won’t work that way with my father. What if you hang for it?” She swallowed over what sounded like emotion. A sign of affection?
“Three more stitches left,” came his answer. So much he couldn’t tell her. Even if he wanted to.
“I hate when you do that.”
He feigned ignorance. “Do what?” Before she could complain about his stonewalling their discussion, he interjected, “So now you tell me why I came home to find my wife bedraggled and bleeding to death.” His throat still tightened around the word wife. Put in the same sentence with Sophia, it made him a silly besotted fool.
“I let the girls go exploring with Fritz, because I was unaware you were hosting a caper on your property. When I heard him barking, I took the mare and followed—”
“You rode the old mare? She’s for pulling the cart. She has no saddle.”
“Did you think I stopped to look for the best Montegue livery?” She closed her eyes again, and the sight of her blue-tinged eyelids and lips in stillness frightened him. Too close to the images of death cataloged in his brain. “Are you going to let me tell it or not?”
“Proceed, by all means, my lady.” He finished the last stitch and bound her arm with linen strips, tighter than would be comfortable, but she simply could not afford to lose any more blood.
“The girls reported being accosted by a man who I now assume was one of LeRoy’s henchmen. Fritz scared him off, but Madeline caught her hair in the gate. By the way, did you know your east gate was unlocked? When I climbed over, it came right open.”
“You climbed the gate?”
“No, I ripped my skirt like this in hopes of attracting fast men. Anyhow, I couldn’t free Madeline’s hair. I had to cut it off, with a letter opener. Fritz startled everyone, and in the jostle, the blade slipped and I cut my arm. That is all.”
Wilhelm wet a cloth to clean the blood from her arms, face, and collar, wrestling terrible visions of his nieces and Sophia suffering at the hands of that filthy East End mongrel. At least Fritz seemed to come through when it mattered; those dogs had proven a worthy investment. He drew a deep breath of relief once he washed the last of her blood from his hands.
Her words slurred. “So, whom were you chasing?”
He had already told her. Confusion, another symptom of serious blood loss. He lifted Sophia and carried her up the stairs, remembering to grab her bottle of brandy. “LeRoy and two others. At first I thought it was the gypsies, but Philip—”
He saw skirt flounces as his eavesdropping nieces fled back through a bedroom doorway.
“You saw us trying to draw them against the base of the hill. We caught Grover, the man who I presume came through the gate and frightened the girls. Philip is delivering him to the constable in St. Agnes.” She looked too still; he wondered if she was fainting. “Sophia, how do you feel?”
“Strange… Weak and surreal.”
Wilhelm called for the housekeeper again and asked for salt and water, which she quickly brought. He measured and stirred the salt into a glass of water. “I am sorry, but you will need to drink this. The saline will replace some of the lost fluid.”
She obeyed and made a face. “You sure know how to charm a lady.”
He tucked the ends of the bandage under the wrappings. “Move your fingers. Do they have full sensation?”
“Yes, as normal. It is my brain that feels numb.”
He almost blurted, “Oh, how I adore you.” He could listen to her talk all day, always wondering what irreverent, outlandish tidbit would come out of her mouth next. “Now you must keep your arm raised awhile.”
He sat next to her on the bed and wrangled the remnants of her dress off, followed by her stays and stockings, leaving her a lovely sight in only her lacy Parisian shift. The one with the peach lace that only reached partway down her thighs. Delightfully naughty.
He mentally slapped himself awake, trying to remember what he’d meant to say next. Oh, yes. “I owe you my gratitude, Sophia, for your bravery. I once thought you were the forces of nature embodied, and I was right — at least about your being some sort of force.” That made her laugh, a bewitching sound he never got enough of. “Thank you for taking care of my girls.” He stroked her forehead, brushing away wild strands of hair. “How is the pain?”
“Clamoring for attention.”
Wilhelm left her then returned with the bottle he’d stashed at the bottom of his trunk and poured her a glass.
“Pomegranate?” she asked, heartened.
“I brought it for you, only I imagined a more pleasant circumstance for it.”
“I assure you I will feel entirely pleasant if I drink enough of it.”
After he’d refilled her glass more times than was ladylike, Sophia finally set it down and started taking the pins out of her hair. He guided her wrists to rest on the mattress. “I will get them; you rest. But don’t fall asleep, not yet.”
He gently loosened the curls and shook them out, chortling to himself at the assortment of flora and fauna he plucked from her hair, including a ladybug. Then he couldn’t stop stroking the strands and lacing them through his fingers. He leaned to reach her hairbrush and combed the mass over her pillow. Thirty-nine inches of glossy sable curtain, fragrant like rain and soft as satin. His to touch whenever he pleased. Iridescent in blue and red, waving in graduated patterns from root to tip. It could have been minutes or hours until he next became cognizant of the passing time. Damned trances. And she seemed to take them in stride.
He feared he was coaxing them both to sleep, so he sat straighter and read to her from the book on her desk — Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. She could not be a romantic, his fire-breathing pragmatist? After a few hours, she had color back in her cheeks. She rested her temple against his heart, his arm draped loosely around her shoulders, and she leaned so far onto her side she was more accurately in his lap. Sweet torment.
“How do you feel?” he muttered, and she was oblivious to the strain in his voice.
“Much better,” she answered without moving her lips.
“You look much better. You may sleep now.” He kissed her hand then her forehead, testing the temperature of her skin. No fever, but she would feel weak for a few days.
“Hmm. How much I love you, Wil,” she mumbled.
His heart kicked and he warmed from head to toe. “You are drunk, Sophie.”
“Yesh.”
She slipped unconscious, leaving him to wonder if it was the alcohol or a secret part of her mind speaking. Seemed too wonderful to be true.
At least she should be too wary to pursue her crusade of luring him into bed play. She had no idea how badly he wanted to give in, how near to surrender she’d driven him. Before her, celibacy had become easy with time and distraction, but now he had tasted the forbidden fruit, per se.
She seemed to resent his self-control, uncomprehending that the dual forces of his mental illness and decades of careful discipline worked in his favor. Not to mention that he was plainly a stubborn bastard, and he refused to bed her if it frightened her. Of course she was a sublime temptation. Especially like this, pliant and disheveled, tantalizing him with such a view of her olive-creamy skin.
Wilhelm needed a long jog uphill or a dip in a cold lake, but instead he stalked down the hall to check on the girls. They mobbed him before he reached their bedroom, flocking around him like pigeons fighting for peanuts.
He tried to disguise his shock at seeing Madeline’s ringlets reduced to a short mop of curls around her head. Sophia had warned him. “Calm yourselves.” He pried Elise’s hand from his biceps and pushed a hand to Mary’s shoulder to keep her from bouncing up and down. Madeline seemed content to lean against his side.
“Merci
ful saints, she isn’t… morto?” Mary breathed, immersed in drama as usual. The girl was a character right out of a Shakespearean tragedy.
“Morta?” he corrected her Italian conjugation. “No. Sophia is sleeping. She will recover. Please be considerate in the meanwhile. I hear you had an adventure, ladies.”
They all started talking at once, so he herded them into the nearest open room and sat them in seats near a tea tray. Perhaps food would slow their rambling. “I am sorry you were frightened by that bad man. Sorry, but I must know what he said to you.”
After two plates of pastries and three wet handkerchiefs, he assembled the dialog Grover had been sent to deliver from LeRoy, ultimately from Chauncey: “Sooner or later we will get her and cut down anyone in the way.”
Elise came to whisper in his ear what she’d heard that Mary and Madeline didn’t understand: “Is she knapped yet? We want the brat. Give her over or the girls get it with a chiv.” Cockney for asking if Sophia was with child, and threatening his nieces with slit throats.
He swallowed his rage and scoffed for their benefit. “What nonsense. Sounds to me like Fritz took one bite out of his hind end, and the man ran away terrified.” They were all about to burst into tears again before Wilhelm promised, “Philip went to toss the bad man in jail then will come here to look after you.”
He distracted them with an offer to read from the Lewis Carroll novel, and they all curled up on the rug. He read in character, throwing his voice, and Madeline giggled every time he spoke in fluttery falsetto for Alice’s lines.
He turned over an idea growing in the corner of his mind, liking it the more he considered it. If the mob of bounty hunters were as stupid as he suspected, a classic game of cat-and-mouse might do the trick. Sophia would go for it. He suspected she would gladly play the cheese in the mousetrap. She had to be as frustrated and outraged as he, and they could not afford another attack like the one today. They had come out lucky, and the only thing Wilhelm distrusted more than luck was fate.
~~~~
Sophia walked the footpath between St. Agnes and Rosecrest, alone, pretending not to be frightened out of her wits and ignoring the persistent ache low in her abdomen. Wilhelm was supposedly near, stalking along the trail out of sight, but she had neither seen him nor heard the slightest noise from him for at least a mile. Now she noticed every odd sound and wondered what could be making it — a forest was a noisy place.
She certainly felt like bait, imagining a target painted on her back, her nerves raw. Wilhelm thought LeRoy’s bounty hunters just might be either stupid or desperate enough to try nabbing her if she appeared unprotected. Here came her chance to be useful, to end the infuriating game with LeRoy. Philip waited home at Rosecrest, guarding the girls and Aunt Louisa. No more opportune time to attempt it than now. But what if the silence meant something grievous had happened to Wilhelm?
She paused, not because she heard a noise. Silence. That was the problem. The forest had fallen completely quiet. Finally a twig snapped a few paces ahead. A lanky Roma vagabond sprang from the bushes lining the side of the road. He gripped a dagger and bared his teeth. “Hand o’er th’ goods, lady.”
What? A gypsy? She’d expected a London thug. A small chuff escaped her, a noise of derision that seemed to confuse the gypsy, who stood frozen. He looked behind her just as she heard rustling from the same direction. Human growling, sounds of struggle and muttered curses. None of the voices belonged to Wilhelm.
She was dying to turn around and look, but used the distraction instead to back away from the gypsy, who edged closer. He seemed unsure of his actions. She was waiting for Wilhelm to do something and couldn’t take her eyes off the dagger. An unlucky someone was losing the fight behind her, and the voices grew silent one by one. Did she imagine her gypsy robber anxious? Her question was answered seconds later when he retreated, scrambling for the cover of the forest.
Before she could turn around, Wilhelm ran past in a blur. He leapt and tackled the gypsy, sending them both crashing to the ground, like a nasty game of rugby. Wilhelm wrenched an arm high on the robber’s back with a knee crushing his face into the dirt. Wilhelm held his own knife in his other hand against the throat of the gypsy robber. She hadn’t seen him draw it. Sophia had not yet taken her next breath; it had happened so quickly.
She watched as he drew a leather cord from the back of his waistband and lashed the gypsy’s wrists and ankles. All so coolly without aggression, without sound. In fact he seemed void of emotion despite his physical efficiency. Such a contrast to the hot-tempered man she’d expected. This cold, machinelike Wilhelm frightened her more than his moody half-crazed doppelgänger did.
She wondered if he was going to kill the gypsy, but then he rose to his feet and listened intently with his head cocked for a long minute. Seemingly satisfied, he wiped his blade on the cuff of his trousers, and she finally recognized that his knife was stained with blood, and also his hands. Oddly, his clothes appeared unspotted, except for dirt stains on his knees.
Finally she turned to see four men lying on the ground twenty paces behind her, the men she’d expected to accost her — seedy East End types. Two appeared unnaturally still, and the other two groaned and writhed, hog-tied with wrists and ankles lashed together. She almost didn’t dare look closely but saw it anyway: the dark crimson smile across the neck of one thug. Black pools of blood spread over the leaves and roots. A slit throat. The other appeared to have a broken neck, judging by the odd angle his head lolled away from his shoulders. It should have terrified her, but instead she felt curiously little about it. It almost looked false, like a scene on stage.
Wilhelm approached slowly, an apology in his expression. He had felled five men in less than a minute without making a sound, so none had laid a hand on her. No chance to be frightened of the robbers; he’d handled everything so quickly. Or perhaps her mind was healing. Then a revelation: she felt safe with him. Sophia closed the space between them and brushed the dirt off his lapel.
“Glad you didn’t wear your silk suit today,” she said pleasantly.
Lovely — the ice in his eyes melted as he smiled. He became himself again. “I’m sorry you saw that. They got a bit frisky.” He nodded toward the slain thugs. That he’d left the other two bound and done the same to the gypsy told her he didn’t kill unless he had no other choice. She could live with that.
But she was growing tired of always watching her shadow, of putting the others at risk. “You don’t seem particularly triumphant. I assume none of these is LeRoy?”
“His henchmen.”
“And the gypsy?” They turned to look at the very flustered Roma tied on the ground.
“I have no idea. Coincidence? I have hosted gypsies on my land for years, and this was the first violent incident.”
“We have kept the St. Agnes constable busy.”
“He’ll be glad to see the back of us. Troublemaker,” he teased, raising a hand to touch her face, but saw the blood stained on his hand and hid it behind his back.
He didn’t seem in the mood for questions, but she had to ask. “So, what about LeRoy?”
“I honestly don’t know. How does one fight a coward?”
Then it hit. First a wave of nausea, but it was the sudden blast of pain in her womb that doubled her over. Radiated outward to the small of her back, raked down her legs like blunt needles. The familiar nerve-riding throb magnified, robbing her of her senses. Why were her legs wet?
Her temples pinched, she drew a shaky breath through strained lungs, and felt the gradual fading of consciousness. Seemingly from a distance, she heard Wilhelm’s frantic voice, felt the firm grip of his arms, but she was beyond him. When she floated away into the black, her last thought was of relief.
~~~~
Wilhelm knew he was blinking, staring like a moron, but he couldn’t help it. “What?” he grated, his voice hoarse from shouting.
The young country doctor wrinkled his nose to keep the spectacles from sliding down. He stu
ttered before answering, “Abortive expulsion. Miscarriage, my lord. Deepest condolences.”
Wilhelm turned his gaze on the man and saw him flinch. Then he made himself look at Sophia, pale and ghostly in a white shift, motionless in her sleep. Aunt Louisa had insisted on having the bed linen changed before he was allowed in. The sterile scene before him looked all wrong, considering what he knew had taken place. His wife appeared peaceful, except for the peak to her complexion and the lines of strain etched on her face, even in rest.
“She was pregnant?” The sudden attack of pain, the seizure, the screaming? That is what happened? And it was his fault?
The doctor winced again, either frightened of Wilhelm or a greenhorn unused to delivering bad news to patients. “Lady Devon was indeed expecting, my lord. Early, a pair of months, judging by the evidence.”
That evidence should have been his child.
The doctor cleared his throat. “She has a rather acute case of Adenomyoma, an illness of the womb, but I suspect after a few weeks of rest, Lady Devon should be particularly ripe for another attempt. It is widely believed that the womb is prepared by…” He trailed at Lord Devon’s fearsome expression.
Wilhelm felt his knees weaken. He couldn’t make it to a chair; he sank to the floor, watching the infuriating pristine white linen on the bed where his wife slept. Absently he noted the doctor take his leave, speaking in a low voice with Aunt Louisa. But none of that mattered.
He could have killed her.
Even though Sophia had sworn she felt well, he should have insisted she rest a few more days. She must have perceived how anxious he was to bait LeRoy and wanted to help. Sophia was headstrong, but he could have prevailed. He should have. No doubt her lingering weakness from loss of blood, along with overexertion and the excitement of being attacked by a rogue gypsy had given her the shock that had killed their child.
His heart made a sound like a tortured groan, and he nearly let it past his lips. His child, dead. Along with his wife, nearly. In fact, it seemed since their paths had first crossed, Sophia had spent more time injured than well. He caused her suffering.