by Mary Balogh
Unfortunately for them, their only listeners were those who had seen as much as they. The wedding guests would not deign to recognize their presence.
As soon as the abduction had happened, Martin, it seemed, had jumped back inside the duke’s carriage and roared for it to follow the horseman, but by the time the carriage had been turned and the horses set in motion, all trace of his stepsister and her abductor was lost. There must have been a carriage waiting just beyond the square, all agreed. And so Martin had been obliged to return, direct that the duke be helped back into the carriage, and undertake the unpleasant task of going inside the church to make the announcement.
At first it was assumed that the kidnapper had had the simple motive of drawing a handsome ransom. The wedding guests returned reluctantly to their homes and waited for news. The Duke of Chicheley would doubtless pay whatever sum was demanded.
Everyone knew that he was as rich as Croesus and that he would not hesitate to spend the. last penny of his fortune on his only daughter.
Had not events already proved that? And yet all waited in eager anticipation to know exactly what the ransom demand would be.
The principals in the matter behaved predictably. The duke raged and roared. But raging and roaring would do no good whatsoever until he had the kidnapper in his own power. He swore that he would not hand over a single pound to such vermin, but everyone knew that when it came to the point he would part with considerably more than a single pound.
Christina cried bitterly and inconsolably. But no one took a great deal of notice of her. No one, that was, except those who were paid well to do so.
Manley Hill, Lord Poole, was beside himself with fury. He had overlooked everything that had happened in the past and chosen Lady Elizabeth as his wife, he explained to Martin, and now this! Did the woman have a gift for placing herself in the middle of scandals?
She was hardly responsible for either of the two scandals in which she had been embroiled, Martin pointed out. But Lord Poole had been humiliated in front of the whole ton, and so his chagrin was perhaps understandable. He could not afford to be the subject of ridicule. As it was he was a Whig in a capital city that was going mad for a military victory that the Tory government appeared to have won for them. Yet he had hoped not so long before that his party would be swept to victory on a wave of public reaction against the war. He was an ambitious man. He might have expected to win respect from his marriage into a prominent Tory family, not lose it in such a manner.
“Whoever he is,” he said irritably to Martin, “he had better not think he can apply to me for ransom. Elizabeth is not my wife yet, and perhaps never will be now. Perhaps she went willingly. How are we to know that it was not all staged, that he is not her lover? Eh?”
Martin felt sometimes that he was the only one who grieved.
The wedding guests and the populace of London were enjoying the sensation, which for the moment had displaced even the victory celebrations in their minds. His stepfather thought only of the affront to his person and position. Christina thought only of her own comfort. Lord Poole thought only of his dignity.
Only Martin thought of Elizabeth, or so it seemed to him. He blamed himself for having agreed to bring her back to London the autumn before when they had lived so peacefully and contentedly in the country for several years. He should have persuaded her to stay there, though it had been becoming increasingly difficult to persuade Elizabeth against doing anything she had set her mind to. He blamed himself for not having held her hand more firmly as he helped her down from the carriage outside the church and for not guessing the intent of the horseman who had galloped into the square, taking them all so much by surprise. He could have bundled her back inside the carriage. But he had not been able to think fast enough.
And now she was alone with that masked man, perhaps in discomfort, perhaps having to suffer indignities. She would be frightened. And perhaps a whole night would pass before the ransom note was delivered and an exchange of money could be made for her freedom.
Martin waited in impatience and frustration for the note to arrive.
He paced the hall of the duke’s house on Grosvenor Square, his usually good-humored face so tight with fury and his eyes so wild with anxiety that the servants watched him nervously and gave him as wide a berth as they could.
The night came and yet no ransom note, no message from the abductor came with it.
Chapter 5
SHE must have slept again. The room was light. But he was still there, she saw at a glance, standing at the window with his back to the room. Christopher Atwell, Earl of Trevelyan. Her husband.
She closed her eyes again and accepted the fact as an everyday reality. She relaxed and tried to trick herself into remembering. Of course he was her husband. Christopher. They . . . But the trick would not work. There was nothing there at all beyond the bare facts he had given her—his name and his title and his relationship to her.
She was lying in a bedchamber at Penhallow. Her home. Their home. Where was Penhallow? What did the rest of the house look like? Who else lived there?
She could feel panic rising like nausea in her nostrils as she let her mind slide toward the greatest blank of all. Perhaps if she did not try too hard or allow herself to become too anxious it would all come back to her. Who was she? Elizabeth Atwell, he had told her. The name sounded quite unfamiliar. Was it really her name? Had she lived with it all her life? Or since her marriage at least?
There was nothing. A frightening nothing.
“Christopher,” she said, and he turned sharply from the window and strode to the side of the bed. He looked even more handsome than he had looked in the candlelight earlier that morning. His skin was dark as if he spent much of his time out of doors. And his eyes were blue—her first impression had been correct. Wonderfully knee-weakeningly blue.
“Is that what I call you?” she asked. “Or do I call you ‘my lord’ or ‘Trevelyan’?”
“Christopher,” he said.
He looked very tense. This must be as dreadful for him, she thought, as it was for her.
“I am so sorry,” she said, biting on her lower lip. “I can remember nothing. You are a stranger to me, and I am a stranger to myself. I will panic if I do not keep a tight hold on myself.”
He sat down on the side of the bed and took both her hands in a strong clasp. His hands were warm and very reassuring.
“The memory will come back,” he said. “Just relax and don’t worry about it. You are alive and not badly hurt apart from the lump on your head. That is all that matters at the moment. How are you feeling?”
“Sore all over,” she said, “and rather as if someone must have been trying to hammer me into the ground like a nail. What happened?”
“You fell out of the carriage,” he said. “The door had not been shut securely and you leaned against it.”
“You were with me?” she asked.
“Yes.” His eyes looked haunted for a moment. “I thought you were dead.”
She let her eyes roam over his thick dark hair, over his face and his broad shoulders. She tightened her hold slightly on his hands. But there was no sense of familiarity at all. She sighed.
“How long have we been married?” she asked.
“Seven years,” he said.
Seven years. All wiped out by one bump on the head. Seven years!
“Was it a love match?” She wished she had not asked the question after it was spoken. She was afraid that perhaps it had not been.
“Yes,” he said.
“And is it still?” She searched his eyes. “Do we still love each other?”
He nodded and raised one of her hands to his lips. It felt good there. Very good. She smiled at him, but she sobered quickly.
“Oh, Christopher,” she said. “There must be so much familiarity between us, so many things that we usually say to each other and do together. I don’t remember any of them. I am forced to treat you as a stranger. It will be very distressing
for you.”
“No.” He shook his head and held her eyes with his. “I will treat it as a fantasy. A romantic fantasy. I will make you fall in love with me all over again.”
“I don’t think that will be difficult,” she said. “You are so very handsome. Do I usually flatter you like that?” She smiled again.
“I think I am going to enjoy this,” he said. And his eyes smiled back into hers for a brief moment.
“I must have taken one look at you seven years ago and fallen in love with you,” she said. “Did I? Was it a whirlwind courtship?”
“Yes,” he said.
“And did you take one look at me and fall in love?” she asked.
But the deliberately lighthearted talk would no longer hold the terror at bay. Her smile faded and she felt as if she might faint.
Her head was throbbing painfully. “Christopher, what do I look like?”
Terror was an ice-cold and a clawing thing, like an army of demons while she waited for him to bring a looking glass from an adjoining room. She did not know whom she would see in the glass. Would she recognize the face? And then would she remember everything?
It was a heart-shaped face, quite unremarkable, though not ugly, she saw with some relief. It was totally devoid of color. It was more colorless than her hair, which was honey blond and rather untidily spread on the pillow about her. Her eyes were large and dark gray and framed by long lashes, darker than her hair.
He took the looking glass from her hand after a while and set it down beside the bed. “You are the most beautiful woman I have known,” he said.
Her head felt as if it must burst at any moment. It was perhaps, she thought, everyone’s nightmare that one might one day look in a mirror and see a stranger looking back. For most people fortunately that fear never became more than a nightmare. For her it had become reality.
“Christopher,”—her eyes closed and she reached blindly for the comfort of his hands again—”what am I going to do? Oh, what am I going to do?”
And then she felt his chest against her own and his hands sliding beneath her until his arms encircled her. He raised her to a sitting position and held her close against him, her head turned on his shoulder.
“You are going to relax and let your body heal,” he said. “And you are going to get to know yourself and me again. And Penhallow. When your memory returns, we will both be happy, but we will both look back on these days as an almost pleasant interlude, when we had a chance to get to know each other all over again.”
She was in pain and her head hurt, and she felt dizzy with the shift in position. But there was warmth too and enormous comfort, both from his strong masculine body and from his words, murmured against one of her ears. She was where she belonged, she thought, and the thought brought enormous relief.
“I do love you,” she said, rubbing her cheek against the cloth of his coat. “I can feel it, Christopher. It is a memory of feeling even though there are no facts to go with it. But it is something, is it not?”
“It is something,” he agreed. “We will have to provide the facts in the coming days.”
She lifted her head and winced. She did not know if he meant what she thought he meant by those words. His eyes were very steady on hers. And even more gloriously blue from this close than they had appeared a few minutes before. But of course he must have meant that. He was her husband. Her husband of seven years.
“Is this my room?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “We had you brought here so that you could be quiet for a few days,” he said. “Your room is also mine.”
“Is it?” She felt herself flushing and laughed a little uncertainly. “It must seem very funny to you that such a fact can make me blush after seven years.”
He spread one hand behind her head, careful to avoid the lump.
“Rather arousing actually,” he said. And he kissed her mouth, his own closed and light and warm.
And wonderful.
“Hungry?” he asked her, laying her carefully back down against her pillows again.
“I could eat a bear,” she said, breathless from the light kiss of a husband of seven years. “Do I usually eat them?”
“For breakfast every morning,” he said. “I have never been able to break you of the habit.”
She laughed and winced. “Christopher,” she said, “where is Penhallow? And who else lives here? Oh, I have a million and one questions to ask. And there are daggers twisting through my head.”
“No more questions for now,” he said. “I am going to leave you for a while so that you can rest. And when breakfast is ready, I will have Nancy bring it up to you.”
“Nancy?” she asked.
“My sister,” he said. “Your sister-in-law.”
“Oh,” she said. And she could feel terror waiting to invade her mind again. “Christopher?” She stretched out a hand to him.
“Come back soon. I love you. I do love you, don’t I?”
He took her hand, kissed the palm, set it carefully back down on the bed, and left the room.
She did love him, Elizabeth thought. She did. It was the one memory of which she was certain. Though it was not exactly a memory, perhaps. A feeling. But a feeling too powerful to have attached itself to a mere stranger, however handsome and attractive he might be. It could only be a remembered feeling.
She loved him. She clung desperately to that one certainty in her life.
Nancy took a breakfast tray up to Elizabeth half an hour later, though she did so with the greatest reluctance and with the uneasy feeling that she was acting as an accomplice to a wicked crime. They were jailers, she told her brother angrily. They were holding Elizabeth captive in both body and mind.
He looked harsh and implacable. “I don’t want you telling her anything to contradict what I have said, Nance,” he said. “That will only confuse her. She is bewildered and frightened enough as it is.”
“So I am to lie for you,” she said quietly.
He said nothing.
“This is not at all the homecoming I imagined,” she said.
His expression softened and he reached out to touch a hand to her hair, which she was wearing loose as usual. “Your letter said that Papa’s death was not a hard one?” he said.
She shook her head. “It was all over in two days,” she said. “He was in a coma for most of that time. I wanted so much for you to be here, Christopher. I have longed every day since to see you ride into the valley.”
“I am here now,” he said.
She raised troubled eyes to his and went into his out-held arms.
“Christopher,” she said, “oh, Christopher.”
“It will be all right,” he said. “You will see. You will take her tray up, Nance? I told her you would. And you will say nothing to confuse her?”
“I will take her tray up,” she said, turning to walk from the room without answering his other question. But he knew, and she knew, that she would say nothing to spoil his little game. Though it was hardly a little game either.
He would be found out, she thought as she ascended the stairs with the tray. If he kept Elizabeth at Penhallow, sooner or later someone was going to trace her there. And then they would come and all hell would break loose.
Her safe haven would be a haven no longer. There would be nowhere else to run. Who would come? she wondered. The Duke of Chicheley? John? She did not want John to come. She had spent seven years trying not even to think of him. But surely he would be in Spain or France with the armies. She did not know. Perhaps he was even—She tried not to complete the sentence in her mind.
Some men always came back safely from war.
Martin, then. Yes, Martin would be the one to come. He had always been exceedingly fond of Elizabeth. Nancy had even thought at one time that he was in love with his stepsister, but perhaps not.
Anyway, he would be the one to come, she thought with dull certainty. Her haven would „ be lost indeed. And there was nowhere else to run.
Elizabeth was very pale. Even her lips were colorless. And yet she looked quite as beautiful as she had ever looked. Nancy hated her.
“Nancy?” Elizabeth said.
Nancy smiled and set down the tray. “Yes,” she said. “I know you don’t recognize me, Elizabeth. Don’t worry about it. Your memory will return. Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, though she just swallowed and stared down at the tray when Nancy placed it across her lap. “You cannot imagine the terror of remembering nothing. Of not knowing people one should know or places one should know. Of looking inward and finding only a blank where the memories and the sense of self should be.”
“It will all come back,” Nancy said, seating herself carefully on the edge of the bed, careful not to tip the tray and not to jar Elizabeth’s aching head. “Just give it time.”
Elizabeth smiled at her gratefully and picked up a slice of toast.
Nancy sat and watched her as she ate and talked on unthreatening topics like the weather and the quality of the food and coffee. She suggested a bath when Elizabeth finally leaned back against the pillows, her food half eaten.
“Oh, I would love one,” Elizabeth said. “I.feel so dirty and untidy. Is this my nightgown? It seems very large.”
Nancy laughed. “We put it on you, thinking it would be more comfortable with your bruises,” she said. “I shall fetch one of your own while you bathe.” She got to her feet and took the tray, smiling cheerfully as she left the room.
She felt like a jailer again as she walked down the stairs. And the trouble was that she had found Elizabeth rather likable—as she had on their first acquaintance, before the woman destroyed Christopher and sent him in flight even across the ocean. She did not want to like Elizabeth. She did not want to have anything to do with her. Or any other member of her family.
Chapter 6
After two and then three days had passed and brought with them no demand for ransom, it became obvious that the exchange of Elizabeth for money was not the primary motive of the kidnappers.