The Bride who Vanished_A Romance of Convenience Regency Romance

by Bianca Bloom

  Miss Courtenay stood, trying to decide whether she’d understood what I’d said and if she should be insulted. “I’m sure you do not need to say anything rude about my family, Miss Quinton,” she managed.

  “Of course not!” I reassured her. “After all, I have never met them.”

  Smiling to myself, I reflected that if I were to meet Miss Courtenay’s family, I might well have all sorts of scathing things to say of them.

  “Well, that must be because of the circles in which you have moved,” hissed the girl, still standing.

  Mrs. Barlow was quick to take Miss Courtenay’s arm. “Oh, my dears, what an exhausting evening! You must favor us with your songs again very soon.”

  As soon as the pretty pair had exited, the younger woman fairly dragged off by her trembling mother-in-law, I asked my young charge what on earth was going on in her family.

  “Miss Courtenay does not seem like she will be an easy sister-in-law,” I said, raising my eyebrows.

  Young Miss Barlow’s smile was much more wry than I would have expected. “She is willing to be the next Mrs. Barlow, though, and that is good enough for us. It is not many women who would come here and endure the, well, the peculiarities of my family.”

  She was flushing so deeply that I considered not saying anything else to her, but I could not let the subject rest.

  “Why is your granddad allowed to wander about?” I asked her. “He is mad.”

  Little Lillian Barlow looked at the floor, as if it would give her an answer to her family’s impossible question. “He is not right in his mind,” she said gently. “But he is still the head of the family. We haven’t the right to displace him.”

  She looked so cut up over it that I hadn’t the heart to chastise her the way I had snipped at her brother.

  “He is quite awful,” she said, nearly in tears. “Oh Miss Quinton, I am sorry.”

  “Well,” I chortled, “At least we should be thankful that he is not dangerous.”

  “Not dangerous,” said Miss Barlow, and she twisted her long shawl as she said it. Her tone was doubtful.

  “Tell me,” I said to her. “Am I right and thinking that your granddad is not dangerous, or is it worse than I supposed? Is he running at night to rattle the doors of your maids?”

  “The servants’ quarters are closed off at night, Miss Quinton,” said poor Miss Barlow, sinking back into a chair and squeaking out an explanation. “Grandfather cannot get near them.”

  For a moment, I wondered if I was being too hard on the young girl. It really should have been her mother’s duty to keep the old man away from the young woman, and she could hardly do so without locking him away somewhere.

  “It is our rooms that are the trouble,” Miss Barlow said, her voice low. “He broke through my door last week, though it was locked.”

  “How does your mother not protect you?” I cried, rising up. “Your grandfather broke down your door!”

  “Please, Miss Quinton,” said Mrs. Barlow, returning to the room. “Do kindly keep your voice low.”

  I did as she asked. In a growl, I asked her why she did not protect her only daughter.

  “I sleep in her room now,” said Mrs. Barlow. “So you see, I do protect her.”

  It was all of the information I needed to understand the way that the household was run. “But you do not protect me. I shall be quite defenseless.”

  “Miss Quinton,” simpered Mrs. Barlow. “I was given to understand that your upbringing had not been, well, one of luxury.”

  I was shocked. Did the woman think that, because I had to go out and work, I might have some magical solution to the problem of vicious men?

  “And what has that to do with any of this?” I asked, glaring at her.

  She sniffed. “It was my understanding that you would be more than able to protect yourself.”

  4

  That night, I was cold when I went into my bed, and could not think of any way to warm myself. The fire was dead and the house seemed even draftier. The wind rattled my window, but when I went to look, I found that the moon and stars were covered in clouds. Nothing could be seen from the window, and there was nothing to do but wait for the sun.

  Rubbing my feet together, I realized that there was one way for me to get warmer. Though I could not give the young man of the household more than the briefest of acknowledgements in my daily life, I could behave quite differently when I was in bed with my own thoughts to warm me.

  And so I imagined what the scene would have been like had I been fortunate enough to have the handsome and smart Luke Barlow as an ally. First of all, I would have had Mrs. Barlow grab a broom and chase the old man out of the house. Lillian would have been sent to the servants’ quarters, where she could be safe, and Miss Courtenay could have gone to play the instrument and simper over how lovely her silvery voice was.

  That would have left me alone with Luke Barlow. And with the door barred, I would have been able to work out my nervous energy by pulling the man to me and kissing him.

  I had only been kissed twice in my life, and those times were just in silly alleyway games when I was too young to derive any sort of feelings from the act, other than a sense of disgust that someone’s mouth had touched mine for the barest instant.

  But I was more than old enough to know that a kiss from Luke Barlow would be different. His hands would run over my body in a way that only my own hands had ever done. I shuddered, teasing the tender flesh around my nipples, plunging one hand down between my legs while the other entered my mouth to drown out the possibility of sound. Luke Barlow might pretend to be innocent of the lust driving his grandfather, but as his father’s son, surely he also had dark and secret desires. And if the desires were there, a little romp under the dining room table with a woman who could not be his wife was sure to awaken them.

  Eventually, the thought calmed me instead of just exciting me, and my body shook until it was warm, tired, and suddenly quite free of lust. For years I had been using this particular method to soothe myself when my mother was away from home. It was silent and effective. At the best of times, it satisfied some of the ache that I felt when I knew that I would likely never be in a position to marry, unless I were willing to stoop to being a very old man’s wife.

  And with that calm, I was finally able to sink into slumber. After all, the travel had been taxing, and so I was able to close my eyes in spite of the madness that had passed at the dinner table.

  But before I had slept an hour, the door to my room burst open. If I had believed that the old man were strong as a horse, I would have found a way to place a great chest against it.

  As it was, it was too late. The man was already hobbling over to the bed, and I had to leap out of it.

  “Don’t fight, girlie,” he panted. “You ought to know that you have tempted me.”

  He followed me until I was in the corner, with only a little table behind me. I knew that I might be able to bite him again, or even to get at his eyes, but that doing so would make me lose my place. If he were badly hurt, then I could end up locked up for years.

  So I grabbed the cold candlestick behind me, but instead of using it to take a whack at the man’s skull, I simply held it over my head.

  The room was dark, but the clouds must have moved, because there was enough moonlight even for him to see the glint of the metal. And for one critical moment, he shrank back.

  It was enough for me to scurry out of the room. Insulted though I had felt by Mrs. Barlow’s assertion that I “must” know how to defend myself, she had not been entirely wrong. My feet were fast and I was determined to lose the old lech, and not to return to my own room while he was there.

  Once I got into the halls, it was easy for me to move without tripping. I was in my shift and a rather threadbare dressing gown, which once might have struck me as shameful but was currently working well for the unfortunate situation. There were no stays to make me short of breath, no fine shoes on my feet that would have made me slow.r />
  Navigating in the great place was more difficult. There were so many rooms on the first floor that I could not quite tell which might be the drawing room. It was not necessarily the best place to sleep, but I felt certain that what little remained of the man’s brain would keep him away from a space associated with ladies and fine instruments.

  I ended up pulling open the doors to what I thought was the drawing room, and by that time, I was panting and wishing for refreshment. There was a fire burning, and though I was already hot with the angry pursuit, I ran to it and warmed my hands, only letting go of the candlestick when it grew too hot.

  “Do you require a book, Miss Quinton?” asked a man behind me.

  In an instant, I had turned. It was Mr. Luke Barlow, the very man who had been part of my earlier musings, and yet I wanted no part of his family.

  “I require safe haven,” I hissed at him. “Your mother insists that I sleep in the room she gave to me, your grandfather insists that I not sleep at all. Books are the least of my worries.”

  He set down the one that he had been reading. “Grandfather has been after you, then?”

  I laughed bitterly, clutching my dressing gown about me. As the panic abated, I felt rather more conscious of my nude body underneath the gown, and the way that my hard nipples were visible even through two layers of cloth. It was far too close to where my thoughts had been earlier in the evening, when I had imagined the chill in my room to be my most pressing concern. “You do not even seem surprised. All of you talk about him as if he is a mad dog. But for some reason, you cannot bear to shoot him.”

  He drew back. “Shoot my own grandfather?”

  I took a step closer to the man, and he did not draw back this time. “It is not the worst idea. If he were in his right mind, he would not wish to see this monster that he has become.”

  He looked at me, then looked away. “To be quite frank, Miss Quinton, he was even less pleasant when he was in his right mind. Only then, there was no getting rid of him. He was unstoppable.”

  I hid my hands in the sleeves of the dressing gown, realizing that they had grown cold but unwilling to abandon the discussion with Mr. Barlow before he had come around to my way of thinking. “Well, you are all waiting about for him to die. I cannot see how that is superior to taking him behind the woodshed and letting him end his own life quickly.”

  He frowned. “We are not waiting for him to die. And you need not wait for anything. If you have such a low opinion of my family, you may go, Miss Quinton.”

  I smiled at him so sweetly that he ought to have seen it as a warning, though it was immediately clear to me that he did not. “Oh, so it is as easy as all that, is it?”

  “You are not our prisoner here.”

  I glanced over at the poker by the fireplace, wondering if I might use it to stab this maddening man. “And I could leave without a reference, and without wages? My mother would starve. Do you have any idea how much it would cost me to get back to town, particularly if your family paid me nothing for my trouble? Far more than I have.”

  His voice grew quiet. “I am sorry, I had no idea of the cost. I have never been to London.”

  The fight flew out of me, replaced with despair. “Well, you have been all your life in a home that is quite twenty times as big as it ought to be, so you’ll forgive me if I am wanting in sympathy, Mr. Barlow.”

  5

  It was a miracle that I woke in the morning. If they had not sent a maid in to get me, I might not have been able to get up at all. My sleep had been quite solid, as I simply did not have the energy to worry that the old man might come back, but even so the hours I had wasted on the night’s incidents meant that I felt as though I had not slept at all.

  And if the household did not already know what had occurred, they were soon to discover the truth. For the door was quite clearly broken, and I had to remove a chair that I had used to prop it closed before the maid who was knocking could enter.

  This maid did not comment on the broken door, and said only that she had been sent to wake me for my breakfast. But only minutes after she had left, she returned to my room again, this time with a tray of hot tea and three perfectly round biscuits.

  “Mrs. Bicester said to give this to you, miss,” she said, and with an embarrassed curtsey she left the room.

  What a farce. Clearly, the woman had been embarrassed but not shocked. The whole household knew of the mad old man, though I was the only person willing to speak of him. And I knew that in my anger I would not be able to face any members of the family early that morning. In fact, it seemed that rage was the only thing keeping me awake. That, and the sweet biscuits, which were truly uncommonly delicious. They should have advertised them in the description of the position.

  After all, apparently what the Barlows wanted was a governess who would gently fight off the grandfather, protect herself without complaint, and not ask for anything but a relatively modest salary in return.

  Bypassing the breakfast table, and thus avoiding my despicable employers, I went straight to the study. The day before, Miss Barlow had shown it to me very briefly, confessing that she did not spend quite as much time there as she ought.

  When she came in, fresh from breakfast, I was rummaging through her books. It was a beautiful library, to be sure, but there was nothing in it that had been purchased in the past ten years.

  “Not very modern, is it?” I asked Miss Barlow when she entered. “Don’t mistake me, it is fitting for an old house.”

  She grew a bit pink. “I do wish to buy more books. But ever since our father died, nothing has been added. Mama does not like to buy them, and my brother rarely disobeys her. Granddad has not been able to read for years.”

  Everything I said to the poor girl seemed to bring up another horrid tragedy.

  “I’m very sorry about your father,” I said to her. “I did not know that he had died.”

  In truth, I had known, as the family was a famous one and anyone could have looked up that fact. But Lillian Barlow accepted my condolences with sincere regard and good breeding. Her social graces were indeed impressive, and I knew my assumption that she would easily find a husband had been a correct one.

  “Thank you,” she told me. “I’m afraid I only know about papa’s love for books from Luke. I scarcely remember.”

  “I was also young when my father died,” I told her, and realized that we shared that peculiar experience. My mother only sighed when she talked about my father and how he had not been able to provide for us. But I knew that his birthday had been March 30th, and I saw my mother pass that date each year with great sadness. I felt sure that if I had known him, our lives would have been very different, and I would not be trapped in an old house trying to teach the granddaughter of a horrid and dangerous man.

  It didn’t do to dwell on that little revelation, though.

  “Anyway,” I told Miss Barlow, “We ought to get started on your French.”

  Her French was tolerable, a fact I had noted the day before when I had gotten only a few minutes alone to quiz the girl. She had an excellent accent, apparently due to her mother’s having learned the language from a Gallic grandmother. But when Miss Barlow read and tried to translate, she had very little confidence in her interpretations. And when she used the dictionary to aid her, she only grew flustered.

  So I assigned her a stack of translations, then decided to tackle the hardest of them for her. If I could translate the dusty tome called “The French Heritage” myself, that might provide inspiration to my young charge.

  Not an hour later, I was learning about France in quite a different manner.

  “Paris is worth seeing, of course,” said Miss Courtenay, her voice hissing into my ears like a poisoned serpent. “But it doesn’t compare to London. Nothing does, my dear. You shall learn that soon enough.”

  As my eyes fluttered and I began to wake up, I heard Miss Barlow’s response with a mix of apprehension and pleasure. “I should like to see all Europe,”
she said. “Not just France, but Rome and Istanbul.”

  “Oh,” Miss Courtenay said, with a laugh that was high and sharp. “Those savage men of Istanbul would eat you alive, my dear. If you take your future sister’s advice, you shall stay in London, and then in only the best of quarters. There are plenty of French people in London, you needn’t even bother crossing the channel. Especially since in these times, those barbaric French would not give your rank any respect. Quite the opposite, I am sure. No, darling, do stay in England.”

  I tried not to move. It was the opposite of the advice I would have given. Since my girlhood, I had dreamed of seeing Paris, and the danger inherent in such a trip only made it seem more exciting. But unlike Miss Courtenay, I could not claim firsthand knowledge.

  “You can learn French in London,” she was tittering. “At any rate, much more French than you are learning here! What a scandal.”

  I felt her hand pointing at me as clearly as if I had been able to see it, and I flushed in spite of myself. I could imagine what the scene looked like. The diligent young girl with a well-worn French dictionary, the scheming young bride with her fancy little fan, and the would-be governess slumped in a sleepy heap over the table.

  With a spy like Miss Courtenay about, my position was not safe. And though I hated to admit it, her analysis was not completely wrong. I had abandoned my charge in order to nap with my nose in a book. If I were to hold my position and get even a farthing of the wages that I had been promised, I would have to find a way to get more sleep.

  6

  Just when I was about to doze off, I heard the man’s voice. “More wine!” he was screeching, somewhere in the front hall. “I say, you’ve all stopped giving me my wine! Well, I know where the old turkey keeps the key to the cellars, and I’ll get the wine myself, don’t you know.”

  I shuddered, wondering how much wine it would take before he decided to go to sleep for the night.