“Less jostling,” the old man agreed. “Iffin she ain’t too ’eavy for you.”
Cassandra too heavy for him to carry a block or two? He could carry her a mile or two, a league or two, however far necessary to get her help.
“My dearest,” he murmured. Aloud, he said, “I can carry her. Samuel—”
But the footman had slipped into the crowd, and the coachman had charged off with the horses and vehicle. Surely gone for help, not fleeing in fear.
“’Tweren’t their fault, milord,” the old man said. “’Tweren’t nobody’s fault.”
“No.”
Except his, for taking liberties he knew better than to allow, going home alone with her with the full intent of taking those liberties.
His gut wrenched and twisted as though between the blazing tongs of a blacksmith. He loved her so much, adored her so intensely, he could not stop himself from touching her. And with the marriage a week away, surely a few touches weren’t unacceptable. And if they were, why would God punish her? Whittaker should be the one burned, groaning and gasping in agony as Cassandra was. She should have remained unconscious, oblivious to the pain.
“She should not be hurt at all, God,” Whittaker cried aloud.
“God ain’t got nothin’ t’ do with it,” the old man said, puffing between each word.
Like her elder sister, Cassandra was not a small female, slender but tall and broad in shoulders and hips, blessed with womanly curves. The more they jostled her over the rough cobbles of the street, the more she cried out and struggled in their hold.
“We need a third man.” Whittaker glanced around for someone to recruit. Other than a few shadows hidden in the darkness of areaway steps, no one showed himself. Torches had gone. Houses and shops lay in darkness. Only the remnants of the burned carriage lent illumination to the scene. No one wanted to be blamed for injuring a lady.
“Where is Cavendish Square?” Whittaker asked. “I do not know London.”
He’d spent too much time in the wilds of the north of late, too much time away from Cassandra. If she died . . .
“This-a-way.” The old man released Cassandra for a moment to gesture to the right.
She cried out and began to struggle. “It hurts. Make it stop. Make it stop.” She was sobbing now, gulping wails that echoed off the tall, deserted houses.
Whittaker could not stop the moisture from forming in his eyes again, a few droplets from trickling down his cheeks. He saw little of the path before him, heard Cassandra’s whimpers and wails in turn, felt the ripples of chills racing through her body, her fading efforts to push away from him.
“Go to sleep, my love,” he said in a soothing tone, as though speaking to a child. “Sleep.”
“She needs a good dose o’ gin,” the old man said. “Kills t’ pain every time.”
“I would never give her gin.” Whittaker realized how haughty he sounded, condemning the man who stank of the spirit, and added more gently, “Her mother will have laudanum at hand.”
“What’s the difference?” The man shrugged, making Cassandra shriek in pain. “Gin or opium? Both’ll kill ye.”
So could burns. Gangrene. Sepsis. Amputation.
Cassandra without one or both of her legs?
Whittaker choked on something suspiciously like a sob. His hands shook. His body shook. He feared he might be sick like a drunkard. He stumbled along like a drunkard, gut churning, heart racing, conscience . . . Oh, his conscience stabbed him like a rapier in a duel he had lost. He’d come too close to dishonoring Cassandra, justifying it with the closeness of the wedding.
“Lord, please do not let her die, suffer, be scarred because I was careless,” he mouthed to the night. “Dear God, please.”
He feared his words reached no higher than the mostly blank chimney stacks of the houses. Then the buildings parted to reveal the round, grassy area of Cavendish Square and Number Sixteen close at hand, brightly lit in front, unlike most of its neighbors. Scarcely anyone was in town right now, but Lady Bainbridge wanted at least one of her daughters married in St. George’s Hanover Square. Lydia had avoided that twice. Cassandra would not be so fortunate.
“If she had gotten herself married at her parish church in Devon,” Whittaker cried aloud, “this would not have happened.”
But other things may have. The countryside afforded so many opportunities for privacy.
His conscience twisted in his chest, and he gasped as though he were the injured party. Cassandra seemed to have lost consciousness again—a blessing.
They reached the bottom step of Bainbridge House. The door flew open and what seemed like a dozen people swarmed out of the opening—porter, housekeeper, butler, Lady Bainbridge, and her companion, Barbara Bainbridge. They knew. The apothecary was on his way. A bed had been prepared. Someone had sent for Lydia and Christien . . .
Information, instructions, and people swirled around Whittaker and Cassandra. Then suddenly she no longer lay in his arms and the little man had disappeared. Coatless, his shirt and waistcoat dotted with scorch marks and burn holes, Whittaker stood in the center of the entryway like a beggar seeking a favor from Lord Bainbridge. They had removed his lady from him, leaving him feeling as though the most precious part of his life had been wrenched away.
“Come into the library.” Lord Bainbridge spoke from the depths of the hall behind the staircase. “Let the apothecary do his work while you tell me what happened.”
Whittaker’s ears heated beneath his hair, which was too neglected and shaggy for fashion. He intended to have it barbered before the wedding, though Cassandra loved to bury her fingers in it—
His whole face grew hot. The dimly lit entryway might disguise his blush. No matter. Bainbridge was no fool, and Whittaker had learned this past spring that he himself wasn’t the best of liars. He had honesty too instilled in him to play the role requested of him. How Christien had kept up his work for a decade, Whittaker could not imagine.
“You will not help her standing there catching cold.” Bainbridge strode toward the entryway. “And the womenfolk will never let you near her.” In the candlelight now, the older man’s face appeared gray, haggard, the lines on either side of his mouth more deeply etched than earlier that day. “We need a coherent explanation of what happened. The coachman arrived babbling like a lunatic.”
“The unruly crowd.” Whittaker’s voice was hoarse and tight from the smoke he breathed and the tears he would not shed in front of another man. “May I have some tea, my lord?”
“Already ordered.” Bainbridge gripped Whittaker’s shoulder and steered him toward the library.
“I am all over mud and soot. I’ll ruin the furniture.”
“One of the maids is bringing down a sheet. We can place it—ah, here she is. That’s a good child.” Bainbridge took the sheet from the pale maid and continued into the library. With a firmness that suggested no one should open it without his permission, he closed the door, then flung the sheet over a chair. “Now sit before you fall. Are you in need of the apothecary?”
“No, my—Lord Bainbridge.” Whittaker’s right arm began to throb, blaze with the raw pain of a burn. He ignored it. It was nothing compared to Cassandra’s hurts. “Sir, I must know . . . It looked so bad . . .”
“All in good time.” Bainbridge pushed Whittaker into the chair. “Start from the beginning. Why did you not leave the party with Lydia and Christien?”
Whittaker met his future father-in-law’s dark gaze without flinching—much. “We have not been alone together in weeks.”
“No, and with good reason.” Bainbridge smiled, but tightly. “The two of you seem to exercise little self-control when you are alone together.”
“No, my lord.” Whittaker wanted to close his eyes and avoid the hard, dark eyes with their gaze that probably set the new prime minister, Lord Liverpool, quaking in his Hessian boots.
“Have you dishonored my daughter?” Bainbridge inquired in a deceptively quiet voice. He still stood, his
fists clenched against his thighs.
“No, my lord. That is—” Whittaker’s face heated again, a flush that spread down his torso. “Not as I think you mean.”
“I see.” Bainbridge stalked across the room and stood at the curtained window without parting the draperies. He clasped his hands at the small of his back, and the knuckles gleamed white in the lamplight.
“We were ignoring the roughness of the crowd,” Whittaker began. “Then someone threw something through one of the windows and Cassandra fell out of the door. She collided with one of the rioters with a torch, and he dropped it against her skirt.”
“An accident?”
“What?” Whittaker shot to his feet. “What are you suggesting?”
“That you have enemies, Geoffrey Giles of Whittaker. You did not make friends in the north this past spring.”
“But they would never attack Cassandra.”
Yet they had pushed on the carriage, had mentioned his lady inside, had thrown the missile through the window, knowing she was there. And all the while, he thought of nothing but having his hands on her.
Bainbridge turned on him so swiftly Whittaker had to clench his own fists against his thighs to stop himself from jumping back. “I should call you out for this, if what you are implying is true. I should have called you out last spring when you and Cassandra were too close in this very room. But you are less than half my age and, I think, not skilled with weaponry.”
“No—no, sir. I was the scholarly one of the family.”
The reason Cassandra said she had first taken an interest in a younger son rather than his dashing older brother, John.
“I never thought I’d become the earl. Though,” he added with a need to defend himself a bit, “the Luddite rebellion taught me a bit more about the use of firearms and blades. Still, I am not in your class.”
“And if my daughter so much as loses a toe, let alone dies from her burns, I will be sorely tempted to forget that fact.” Despite the harshness of his tone and words, Bainbridge’s eyes glistened with unshed tears.
He was a harsh and often dictatorial father, but no one, not even the daughters who complained of his strict rules, doubted that he loved them, especially after the events of the spring.
Whittaker held the obsidian gaze. “It would be nothing less than I deserve, my lord. I fully confess that I am in the wrong.”
Not that Cassandra had protested against his advances. On the contrary. She read things in Greek and Latin her family would never approve of. Probably things a Christian lady, let alone a single one, should not read at all. Things no lady should read, perhaps. She was curious, something he loved about her and despaired over at times.
If she died, he would have worse things over which to despair—guilt, the hole her absence would leave in his life . . .
He suddenly had the urge to run out of Bainbridge House and seek the quiet shelter of his house in Grosvenor Square, where he could send out his valet on a trumped-up errand to give himself the privacy to release his fear and pain in unmanly tears.
He swallowed down the impulse and held his ground. “I love Cassandra and will marry her no matter what happens, so long as she lives.”
And she would live. Whittaker vowed to get on his knees and pray for a day, a week, however long it took to ensure Cassandra did not succumb to any of the ways people died from serious burns.
“The wedding,” Bainbridge pronounced like a judge giving a prisoner his sentence, “will of course be postponed yet again. You may leave now. We will keep you informed as to her condition and progress.”
Whittaker stared at the older man. “I cannot stay to see what the apothecary says? I would like to see her.”
“I expect she has been dosed with laudanum.” Bainbridge’s mouth twisted and his jutting chin grew more firm. “For the pain.”
“Of course.” Whittaker’s arm began to pulse with pain too. It was one blister the size of the pad of his thumb, big enough it would leave a scar but nothing serious, nothing debilitating. But Cassandra’s entire skirt . . .
Unable to hold back the lump rising in his throat, he swung toward the door. “Send someone for me with news, please.”
“Of course.” Bainbridge was as cold as the torched gown had been hot.
Whittaker hurried to the front door. He did not wait for the footman to open the portal but flung the latch up himself and raced into the night, to the cooler, if not fresher air of the city. Not until he reached his house in Grosvenor Square did he realize he had forgotten that his coachman and footman had vanished into the night. No matter. They would come home, and he could send them for news.
But when they arrived in the mews, shame-faced and contrite, having missed him at Bainbridge House, they did not have any information other than the apothecary calling in a physician. Other than them arguing between the use of ice or oil on the burns. Other than both agreeing Miss Bainbridge should be kept sedated, for she cried out in pain when awake.
The wedding was postponed too late to stop half a dozen of Whittaker’s relatives from arriving in town. Whittaker sent his mother to Bainbridge House to make enquiries. Five days had passed since the celebrations that ended in riots and burnings in protest over too few illuminations to honor Wellington’s victory. Five days since the torch caught Cassandra’s skirt on fire. Five days since Whittaker’s conversation with Lord Bainbridge in the library. No one had sent him word of any kind, and his own enquiries had gone unanswered. When he called at Cavendish Square, the porter told him the family was not at home, which was too absurd a lie for response. But surely they would allow Lady Whittaker into the house, if not the sickroom.
They did. An hour after departure, Mother returned home, her beautiful face blotchy, her eyes puffy as though she had been weeping.
“I am so sorry, my son.” She pressed a damp cheek against Whittaker’s. “Lady Bainbridge’s companion and Miss Honore received me. Miss Honore gave me this.” She handed him a folded but unsealed piece of foolscap. “And yes, I did read it.” She dabbed at the corners of her eyes.
Whittaker sat down at his desk, the strength having left his bones. Mother would not be crying if Miss Honore had conveyed something good.
She hadn’t. The note was short and scrawling, as though penned in a hurry.
Cass wants me to tell you, W, that she never wishes to see you again. HB.
3
“The last place I want to go right now,” Cassandra declared from the chaise longue in the corner of her bedchamber, “is Lancashire.”
The last place she wanted to go was anywhere near people, not two floors below her bedchamber, let alone be more than two hundred miles north of London and mere yards from Geoffrey Giles, Earl of Whittaker and his dear, dear mama.
“Just take me home to Devonshire,” she continued.
“But we cannot.” Mama perched on the stool to the dressing table, her thin white hands clasping and unclasping on the lap of her blue cambric dress. “We will not be there.”
“His lordship is hiding us in Scotland until this new scandal dies down,” Barbara Bainbridge added.
Cassandra’s younger sister, Honore, flopped inelegantly onto the bed, sending her golden curls tumbling from their ribbons. “Bainbridge is going to become a byword for scandal if this continues. First Lydia takes up with a French spy—”
“Honore Elizabeth, that is enough,” Mama scolded.
Cassandra shifted on the chaise, a welcome change after four weeks in bed, but nothing truly lent comfort to the legs with streaks and whirls of smooth or puckered flesh pulling taut on undamaged skin and muscle. That would improve with mild exercise, the physician had assured her. Some of the scars would even fade. Some would be there forever as a reminder of her folly. Of her sinful nature.
She leaned her head into the corner of the chaise and closed her eyes. “Take me to Scotland with you then.”
Hundreds of miles from anyone she knew and from Geoffrey Giles, Lord Whittaker.
Honore sighed. “Because we have not been invited. This is for old people.”
“Honore Elizabeth, that is not true and you know it.” Mama’s scold sounded as effective as a whack with a handkerchief.
The icy glare Barbara shot from behind Lady Bainbridge slammed into Cassandra as well as Honore. “Your mother has suffered enough distress over the past few months because of her daughters. Children are to be a delight, not a burden, and the three of you have caused nothing but trouble.”
“Yes, Honore,” Cassandra drawled like a bored young Corinthian at a gaming table, “we mustn’t forget your tendre for—”
“Do not mention that name around me!” With a shriek, Honore bounded off the bed. “I made a fool of myself, I know, but it will not happen again, which is why I am going to Lancashire with you. I will meet respectable men in Lancashire, if any men at all.”
“You may have Whittaker.” Cassandra managed the pronouncement with a smile and a flippant tone in full force. “I expect he is honorable to a lady who isn’t a freak.”
“A freak?” Honore stared at Cassandra. “You’re not a freak. I mean, it is not like anyone will see your . . . um . . . legs.”
“A husband will.” Cassandra swallowed the lump rising in her throat and willed back the tears threatening to spill from her lashes.
“For shame, the two of you.” Barbara’s face turned as red as a costermonger’s apples.
“It isn’t proper talk for unmarried young ladies,” Mama agreed.
If only Mama knew . . . But everyone protected Mama from the truth of her middle daughter’s wantonness. Father knew. He’d almost called Whittaker out for nearly dishonoring Cassandra, as though it were all Whittaker’s fault, as if she weren’t complicit in, or even responsible for, their behavior the night of the fire. She had played the frightened maiden when she hadn’t been frightened at all. She simply wanted to be held, reassured that he loved her in spite of her interest in ballooning. And once she had him enamored with his attraction to her, she would ask him not to forbid her ballooning once they were wed.
Laurie Alice Eakes - [Daughters of Bainbridge House 02] Page 2