“No doubt he appreciates the challenge, wee Becca,” Connor observed wryly.
“It is somewhat amusing to watch him flail about when I do it. Sometimes he becomes overbearingly gallant—during our last stroll in the garden, just to change the subject, he said he would happily face Napoleon Bonaparte with a drawn sword to defend me.”
“Ah. We should all have such gallant defenders.”
“But other times . . . well . . . he . . . ”
Something in her voice made Connor look up alertly. “What is it, wee Becca?”
“Well, truthfully, it was only the one time, and perhaps it meant nothing, which is why I did not mention it before . . .”
“What was ‘only the one time,’ Rebecca?”
She took a deep breath. “Edelston said it would be his right by law to beat me once I was his wife. And that he suspected he may wish to beat me rather frequently.” Her eyes were wide and hopeful and slightly abashed, as if she hoped Connor would find this amusing but feared he would not.
A red haze drifted over Connor’s eyes. His breath nearly stopped.
“I beg your pardon, wee Becca.” He measured each word out with great care; his voice shook almost imperceptibly. “Did you say Edelston threatened to beat you?”
“Well, you see . . . it was just the once. Doubtless it was because he did not want to discuss circulatory problems. He did also threaten to kiss me frequently.”
Connor was silent for a very long time. In his mind, he was neatly and slowly rending Edelston limb from limb, savoring the lordling’s screams.
“You don’t suppose he . . . he actually would? Beat me, that is?”
Connor’s breaths still came short and shallow; it was a struggle to speak under the weight of his rage. “Only a very weak man would threaten to beat a woman, wee Becca. Was he perhaps jesting?”
“I’m not sure Edelston knows how to jest, Connor. He takes himself very seriously. I do rather deliberately provoke him. Perhaps if I never spoke of circulatory problems, or the army, or . . .” She trailed off.
“. . . or anything else, for that matter,” Connor completed for her curtly. “Perhaps if you never spoke at all.”
Suddenly Sultan tossed his great black head and switched his tail, perhaps sensing the tension in the man leaning against him. Connor murmured to the horse soothingly, apologizing. And the act of soothing the animal soothed Connor a little, too.
“I do believe you would best him in any contest, regardless, wee Becca.” A weak attempt at levity.
“Oh, of course.” Rebecca shrugged. Connor smiled a little.
“And who wouldn’t want to discuss circulatory problems?”
“My point precisely,” Rebecca agreed sadly.
There was another dismal little silence. Funny, but there had never been any dismal little silences between the two of them before Edelston had appeared.
“Connor?” And now Rebecca’s voice was shaking, too.
“Yes, wee Becca?”
“I have tried and tried. For Papa’s sake, for everyone’s sake. I honestly have. But I think . . . I mean, I don’t think . . .”
He waited.
“Connor, I cannot marry him.”
Two pairs of eyes, gold-shot brown and clear gray-green, met and locked, in silence, for the space of perhaps a dozen heartbeats.
“Well, then, wee Rebecca,” Connor said at last, moving the comb across the horse’s flanks as though his next words were a comment on the weather and not the pivot on which her future would turn, “you shall not marry him.”
Oh, you bloody, bloody, bloody great fool. “ ‘Then,’ ” Connor said, mimicking himself out loud to himself rather nastily, “ ‘you shall not marry him.’ Dear God in heaven.”
Connor sat morosely at the table in his quarters, the bottle of whiskey he preserved for only the most serious occasions standing at attention next to his right hand. He tipped it into his glass for the third time this evening and held it up to the light, eyeing it with grave tenderness.
“To hanging by the neck until dead,” he said, the whiskey coaxing his native morbid humor out of him, and tossed it back.
Connor did not have a plan. Thanks to an impulse this afternoon, he now had exactly eight days to decide and plan how to whisk a gently bred seventeen-year-old girl away from a dreadful impending marriage. Most likely the whisking would have to happen in the dead of night and involve the theft of a horse or two. Now there’s something to look forward to, he thought, an evening filled with activity, each activity a hanging offense. A noble way to cap my checkered career.
There was, however, no question that he would do it. For somewhere during his second glass of whiskey Connor had admitted to himself that Rebecca was very likely the reason he had stayed with the Tremaines at all.
For five years, Connor’s life had been peaceful and relatively uneventful here on this remote country estate.
But from the moment he had retrieved her from the apple tree, Connor had felt somehow responsible for Rebecca. He recognized in her a kindred spirit; he knew that the reach of her soul far exceeded the confines of her circumstances, and she ricocheted more or less happily off the walls of those confines on a daily basis. Rebecca never deliberately set out to displease her mother or startle her father with her predilections, but she was nearly helpless not to. To be female and possessed of a hungry mind in 1820 England was to be cursed, indeed, Connor thought, and he had often quietly sympathized with Rebecca while wondering what on earth would become of her.
The main difference between Connor’s upbringing and Rebecca’s, however, was that the magnitude of Connor’s destiny had been pounded into him from the moment he could walk. His father had defined a template for his life, and any digression from this template was simply not tolerated; indeed, it was viciously punished. With every breath he took, it seemed, he drew in the cold, leaden immensity of responsibility. His old life had been a hand that pressed against his chest, limiting his motion, his thoughts, his spirit.
How ironic, and fitting, somehow, that a war would be the doorway to his freedom. Connor had walked away from his life at the very first opportunity, and though guilt occasionally played faintly in his mind like a half-remembered tune, he never really felt regret; in fact, each time he thought about it, he relived the rush of gratitude he had felt the day he had finally managed to slip the shackle of his birthright. Only one element of his old life had followed him into the new: Melbers, the dear, reliable, discreet old Blackburn family solicitor, sent him a small but welcome sum at the same time each year. It was Melbers’s own quiet way of protesting the brutality of the old duke. That sum should have, in fact, arrived at the end of last month. Perhaps Melbers had been preoccupied this year.
Connor had found peace and equilibrium of a sort with the Tremaines, and for this he was grateful, too. But he was twenty-nine years old now, and he felt as though he was biding his time, though for what he knew not.
Rebecca, as a woman, would never be able to simply walk away from her life. And Connor cursed the indulgence of her parents, the father who treated her with benign neglect and the mother who clucked and fussed and badgered but who had never managed to instill in Rebecca a true sense of the . . . smallness . . . of her future.
But perhaps Rebecca would be a different person if they had.
Funny, but he had always half suspected that Rebecca Tremaine would someday mean the end of his peace of mind, she of the astonishing vocabulary, courtesy of her father’s scientific journals (“Oh! My gluteus maximus!” she had exclaimed one day, after a long ride on Pepper) and embarrassing questions (“Can puppies have more than one father? Because I saw Bonnie underneath both Bruno and Glider”). He had long ago vowed never to fight another battle, but for Rebecca’s sake, he surveyed his own raw memories tonight, looking for something useful, because it appeared as though another battle was going to begin, after all.
He examined the elements of his past the way he would examine a chessboard, each p
iece potentially useful if maneuvered with skill. And little by little, an idea, a strategy, began to take shape. He rolled the idea around in his mind for a bit, tasting it the way he’d been savoring his fine whiskey, and thought, yes, of course, it could work, it must work . . .
Once accomplished, it would be off to America and a new life for Connor Riordan, the life he knew he had only been postponing here with the Tremaines.
Finally, satisfied, Connor tipped the bottle again, held his fourth and final glass of whiskey up to the fire, and toasted himself.
“To my brilliant plan,” he said wryly, and tossed the whiskey back.
Edelston’s feet had grown wings; he had not walked upon solid ground for more than a week. A laughing, green-eyed, red-haired angel-devil had liberated him of the need to eat or drink or speak to other mortals, and all he needed now was the divine pleasure of her company and a few sheets of foolscap for his poetry. Rebecca. Rebecca. Rebecca. It was really a pity she didn’t have a more rhymable name, but this was a surmountable obstacle, as she could be compared so easily to so many other things . . . flowers . . . showers . . . bowers . . . hours . . . spring . . . suffering . . . inspiring . . . it was heavenly.
Ever since that day in the garden, Rebecca had excited him peculiarly. Perhaps it was the light in her eyes when she asked her horrible startling questions, or the thrum of something he couldn’t quite identify that ran through her words when she spoke to him. It made him feel strangely unsure of himself for perhaps the first time ever, and it was an intriguing sensation. At the very least, it was an alternative to boredom. It seemed a distant, desperate memory now, his plan to rid himself of her once they were wed. Now he could not imagine ever relinquishing this maddeningly intriguing female. Fortunately, she would be his wife in a mere week.
He needed a piece of foolscap for something other than poetry, though: a brief letter that would put an end to one ongoing, regrettable circumstance, one that had proved profitable and serendipitous for him; indeed, one that had kept him afloat financially lo these many months.
From nervous habit, Edelston moved over to the wardrobe and opened the door. He reached in and felt about in the inner pocket of his overcoat, and when a reassuringly solid lump met his questing fingers, he sighed with relief. The lump was the subject of his special arrangement: it meant he was guaranteed at least one consistent source of income. The marriage settlements offered by Sir Henry Tremaine, however, had rendered this special arrangement unnecessary, and in light of the . . . er . . . warm relationship Edelston had once shared with the party involved, he felt that concluding the circumstances would be the honorable thing to do. Edelston had recently discovered honor, and he found the concept very compatible with the notion of true love.
An apology and a polite invitation to meet to conclude business was all that seemed necessary. Strange to think that another female face and body had at one time caused him fits of longing. And yet the memory seemed trivial in light of the vast celestial emotions he felt for Miss Tremaine. He wrote the letter; he posted it; he returned to his rhymes.
“Did you know, Connor, that I am a ‘creature divine, with eyes so fine, any fool would vastly prefer them to wine’?”
“Ah. So Edelston’s poetry is . . . improving?” Connor was rubbing oil into a saddle.
“Difficult to say, isn’t it? However, I can tell you what isn’t improving: my mood. Yesterday he read the poem about my fine eyes to me aloud, and then do you know what he said to me?”
“I am all ears.”
“He said: ‘You are never so appealing as when you are listening, Rebecca.’”
Connor nearly choked on a burst of startled laughter. “Oh, I think I may miss Edelston when we’ve gone, wee Becca.”
“But now do you see, Connor? If I suffer through too much more of Edelston I may expire or go mad with boredom.” She lowered her voice. “When are we leaving?”
“In four days, wee Becca—two days before the wedding,” Connor answered. “I will give you more instructions one day prior to our departure.”
“Why won’t you tell me everything now?”
“Because, wee Becca, I think it is all you can do now to maintain a secret, and if I gave you a head full of instructions and still more secrets to keep, I think your face would betray your thoughts to everyone who saw you.”
“Don’t you trust me?” She sounded wounded.
“If I didna trust you absolutely, we would not be having this conversation,” Connor said firmly. “’Tis a compliment I’m giving you, wee Becca. A talent for playacting is not an admirable skill in a female. I do not wish to burden you with the need to become an actress.”
“But what if I were a spy?” Rebecca said dreamily. “In service to my country? Then I would need to know playacting, would I not?”
Connor rolled his eyes. “You are not a spy, you shall never be a spy, and I have a few questions for you. Are you listening?”
“Yes,” Rebecca said obediently, which fooled Connor not at all. He gave her a quick mock-warning frown, and she grinned in return, but stayed quiet.
Connor spent a few moments brushing Sultan’s hindquarters before he spoke again.
“After we leave,” Connor said slowly, “there is a possibility that you may never see your family again. Not a certainty, but a possibility. You may never again live the comfortable and carefree life you live here. Have you truly given thought to this?”
Rebecca gazed somewhere over his shoulder for a moment, as though looking toward the future he described and assessing, and then met his eyes frankly.
“I have weighed the possible consequences, Connor. My life is not really carefree, is it, nor so comfortable, if I am essentially to be imprisoned by marriage to a man I neither like nor love? It would be slow death by strangulation, and I like to think that my family, if ever I could make them understand, would prefer that I leave. I would rather have risk and freedom. I have made my choice.”
Connor nodded, satisfied; he had needed to hear her say it aloud.
“Are we going to America?” Rebecca asked suddenly.
Connor stared at her thoughtfully, with some surprise, for a long moment.
“Perhaps,” he said finally.
“Because . . . you have mentioned America so many times, and I know they need doctors in America. Perhaps the need will be such that they will not be prejudiced against female doctors,” Rebecca said shyly.
“Perhaps,” Connor said again, and smiled, to soften his change of subject. “Now, tomorrow, bring a picnic hamper out to the stables. Pack in it just one gown and an extra pair of boots. You will have two such picnics, this week, wee Becca. Keep in mind, however, when you are choosing gowns and shifts and cloaks and what have you that we must travel light.”
Rebecca’s heart began to hammer.
“The wedding is Sunday,” she said.
“A pity we shall not be there for it, eh, wee Becca?”
“Lady Montgomery—”
“Yes, dear, that was very fine, very fine indeed,” Gillian, Lady Montgomery said absently.
Her young pupil beamed, encouraged, and bent to her trumpet again. The resulting blats and squeals were meant to be “Greensleeves,” and someday, Lady Montgomery thought distantly, perhaps they would actually sound like “Greensleeves.” This particular pupil, the daughter of a rich and eccentric Scottish landowner named Honeywell, showed no real aptitude for anything, but she made up for it by throwing herself into everything she undertook with a great deal of enthusiasm. Lady Montgomery believed in rewarding enthusiasm. Nothing worthwhile is ever accomplished, she thought, without enthusiasm.
She held a letter that had been delivered to her earlier. It was addressed to her in a hand that seemed vaguely familiar, and while her pupil practiced, she thought she would read it. Lady Montgomery had always been able to do a number of things at once; listening critically to a trumpet pupil while absorbing the contents of a letter posed no real challenge.
She fumbled i
n her apron pocket for her spectacles, and pushed them up to sit snugly on her nose.
Dear Aunt, she read while Miss Honeywell blatted away. Dear Aunt! Who on earth—
I pray you continue in good health. If I did not have a good deal of faith in your remarkable constitution and a very pressing reason to make myself known, I would not risk startling you with this letter. However, at the moment, I have both. The Aunt Gillian Montgomery I remember would be pleased, and even amused, I think, rather than distraught to hear from me, and would find it in her heart to forgive me when I appear in person to tell my whole story.
I am alive and well, Aunt, not killed in battle as previously assumed. I am sound of mind and sound of body. And though I hardly dare hope you will receive me, I write to beg a favor: I bring a friend, a young woman, who wishes to escape a hateful impending marriage. Her mind will delight you, I am certain of it, and I think in her you will find an eager pupil and kindred soul. When you meet her, I know you will not think my action rash; rather, I think you will believe as I do: that I have done the right and only thing that could have been done under these circumstances.
I apologize if this places a burden on your conscience, but I beg of you, do not mention this letter to anyone. I do not intend to take up my title or properties, or to displace Richard from his current role. I will deliver my friend into your safekeeping and then depart the continent. You may expect us in Scotland before the end of June. I remain your Loving Nephew,
Roarke
She read the letter twice, first to understand the content, then merely to savor it, and then Gillian Montgomery slowly lowered the letter to her lap.
Well, then. The young scoundrel was alive. Memories began flapping about in her mind, haphazardly, like sleeping bats disturbed by a blast of sunlight.
Julie Anne Long Page 5