Outside she heard the driver’s deep country voice making soothing noises to the pair drawing the carriage. A stamped hoof, more caressing words… But, thought Melissa, not a single thought for his passenger. She yelled for his immediate aid. The voice stilled and then approached.
“Ye not dead then, madam?” The upper door opened and fell back and his grizzled head appeared. “Ah. Good. Ye were not hurt. Give me your hands then,” he said in the slow placid tones that had soothed any tendency his horses might have had to panic.
Melissa was not about to panic but she was angry and growing angrier by the minute. “Where are we? What happened?”
“Axle snapped in that rut, ye ken.” He thrust his chin toward the deep groove. “We be miles yet from the next inn.”
“And?”
“And?” he asked, frowning.
“What do you mean to do?”
He blinked. “Do.”
She stamped her foot. “I am stranded in the middle of nowhere. Do something.”
He chewed on his lip, the frown deepening. “Happen, I could put you up on old Sorry’s back and lead you to the next inn?”
“Happen you could, but not only does it sound uncomfortable, it sounds as if you are not completely certain that sorry creature would carry me.”
“Sorry’s the animal’s name,” said the coachman, reproachfully.
“I am not sorry to hear it. Sorry appears to be fittingly named.” She crossed her arms and glared.
Realizing the woman would not be soothed so easily as his horses, the driver looked around, noticed a chimney with a wisp of smoke drifting up into the windless sky. The house itself was hidden by a rise of ground and a spinney. He pointed. “Mayhap they’ve a gig I could borrow to drive you to the inn?”
“Mayhap they do.”
He didn’t move.
“And,” she added waspishly, “mayhap you could go ask before it becomes too dark to do anything at all.”
The driver gave a start, looked around and, sliding into the shallow ditch and up the other side, he forced a way through the hedge. Before Melissa could think to ask him to restore her inside the coach where she’d be protected from the rather nasty wind and, incidentally, hidden from anyone who happened to drive by, he was gone.
She had struggled back into her broken carriage. Now she leaned toward the window for a look at the man descending from the chaise that pulled up before her own wretched vehicle. Her eyes widened and her lower lip curled in between her small pearly teeth. “Lester…” she whispered. “It is Lester…”
The driver, who had returned and told her help was on the way, had managed to set the carriage up so that it no longer leaned at such a very odd angle. It wobbled, however, when the gentleman opened her door. He stared. Then, a bitter laugh escaping him, he shook his head. “You,” he said.
She swallowed. “Lester…” she whispered.
“Nemesis. One cannot escape nemesis, can one?” he asked, falsely pleasant.
Melissa’s lapse into old dreams of the might-have-beens abruptly vanished. Her nose rose ever-so slightly into the air.
“It would have to be you,” he said on a sigh.
“It wasn’t my fault.”
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Was it not? A coward never thinks herself at fault,” he said and then sighed. “Well, come along. You cannot stay here. The nights are too cold.”
“You’d leave me here if they were not,” she said, half serious and half teasing. The shock had faded. How long was it since she’d last seen the man who had been her first and only love? A man who obviously no longer loved her…
Even so, her mind turned to how she might take advantage of this unexpected meeting.
“Yes,” he said, drawing her attention, her gaze meeting the cold look in his eyes for the first time. “Yes,” he repeated. “If it were warm enough, I might leave you as you left me. But it is too cold for such revenge, so come along. My dinner was about to be served and will be ruined if you dawdle as you are doing.” He held out an imperious hand and, again feeling shock, this time at his tone, Melissa set hers within it.
And felt a different sort of shock that pulled her gaze to meet his. Melissa relaxed slightly when she realized he’d felt it too.
* * * * *
Melissa, seated at the end of a long table, stared at the huge epergne that hid her host from view. She shifted to one side, peered around it… Still she could not see him. She cleared her throat. Instantly, a footman was at her side, pouring wine into her partially full glass. She murmured a thank-you, an absentminded courtesy, but one that did her no harm in the footman’s eyes. Suddenly making a decision, she rose to her feet. “I would sit down there,” she said to him and walked the length of the table until she reached the man toward whom her curiosity—to say nothing of the corner of her heart in which the memory of him lived—drove her.
She stared down at him, a half pleading, half defiant look.
His eyes narrowed and then, looking beyond her, he nodded. The footman moved her silver and glasses and pulled out the chair.
Melissa sat. “It was not my fault,” she said, catching and holding his gaze.
“Was it not? I have a great deal of trouble believing that, given the letter I received in your place.” He spoke in a cold voice, his eyes hooded.
“Letter… I wrote no letter.”
“No. Not a word. It was from your father and couched in such terms that, if a generation had not separated us, would have led to challenge and a duel.”
“I know of no letter. I was locked into my room. When food was brought me, John attended my maid. You remember my brother? He never liked me. He was always spying on me, carrying tales to my parents always couched in the worst possible light. John, no matter how I begged, would not help me.”
“You needn’t have married that man.”
“Need I not? I should have starved myself to death instead?”
“It would not have come to that.”
Melissa opened her mouth for another sharp retort and then closed it. “I was seventeen, Lester. I believed him when my father said I could stay there and rot if I did not do as commanded.”
“You still need not have wed the man. All you needed to do was refuse to say your vows. Nothing could have been done if you’d only stayed true and refused. But you didn’t…” He frowned. “Why do you stare so?”
“Refuse? Stand before a priest at an altar with the congregation staring at me and refuse?”
Lester tipped his head. “And only seventeen,” he muttered and nodded. “Yes…I see how that might have been difficult.”
“Impossible.”
His mouth firmed. “Oh no. Not impossible.”
“There was another solution,” said Melissa slowly, her eyes narrowed in turn. She lifted her wineglass and stared at it. “You might have come to the church. You might have objected, informing the priest there was a prior commitment, that I was not free to wed that monster.”
“Our decision to wed was informal, Melissa. I’d never obtained approval from your father. You were underage. You will recall that our only hope was to wait until you came of age…or to elope. You were too cowardly to elope even though you’d pretended to agree to it.”
“I was not. I tried. John suspected. He watched me. He caught me when I tried to escape the house secretly to come to you. He returned me to my father, told him what we planned—and how did he know that?” She frowned, trying to figure it out, but then shook her head and continued. “My father slapped me. Hard.” Her hand rose to her cheek in memory. “Then they locked me up.”
He stared at her. Gradually Lester relaxed and sat back in his chair, an elbow on the wooden arm, his wineglass cradled between fingers and thumb. “I have spent many years angry with you, Melissa. Angry with your father. Angry,” he said with just a touch of black humor, “with the world.”
“I was told you left the country. I was told you went to India.”
“I did.” He
gestured around the richly appointed room. “And finally I came back…oh, not a nabob, but quite comfortably wealthy.”
She stared at him, her lip between her teeth. “I envy you,” she said softly.
He blinked. “Envy?”
“You are a man. You could go seek your fortune, find it, return to live the life you choose to live. I haven’t that freedom.”
“From all I’ve heard,” he said, the caustic note back, “you’ve led your life pretty freely.”
Melissa didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. Her spine stiffened. Her features took on a harshly rigid stoniness. “I was married to a hateful old man who, having got what he wanted, no longer cared if I lived or died—except when he wanted—” She broke that off, her face a mask of pain. Finally she took a deep breath. “And then he grew ill and it was worse. He beat me because he could not—” Again she stopped short of telling what she’d suffered at her husband’s hands. She turned her head away. And then, defiant, turned back. “So I found some pleasure, some affection such as it was, elsewhere. Why was that so bad of me?”
“You took vows, Melissa.”
“Not in my heart.” Her voice rose, became shrill. “In my heart I was screaming at God that I lied, that I didn’t mean it, that, forced to say the words, they couldn’t possibly count!”
He stared at her for a long moment, his expression blank. “You are tired. When you’ve finished dining, you will be shown the way to your room. I will talk to you again in the morning.” He rose, bowed ever-so slightly, and stalked through the hastily opened door.
Melissa slumped, staring after him. When the footman, hesitantly, came to her side and offered the sweet course, she hid her embarrassment that the servant had overheard them by turning her gaze onto the tray. The various tarts, tiny fairy cakes and other sweets turned her stomach. Sweets lover that she was, she still could not face a single bite. She shook her head and the tray was withdrawn. Melissa didn’t move for a long moment. Then she reached for her wine, took a sip—or tried to—found the glass empty and held it up to be filled.
It was more than an hour later when, with help, she wove her way to the bedroom in which she was to sleep.
Chapter Nine
They had attended services that morning but that was the last Melissa had seen of Lester. Now she glanced hopefully at the salon door when, after a brief knock, it opened. She was disappointed. “Well?” she asked the servant.
The footman bowed. “My master requests the pleasure of your company in the library, Mrs. Rumford. I will show you the way.”
Melissa, her heart beating faster, rose to her feet. One hand went to her hair, the other to straighten her skirts. She wondered if she should demand she be taken to her room to freshen up before going to Lester… But then, remembering his barely suppressed anger, his disinclination to believe her, she felt herself slump with dejection. Her pride rose and she straightened. “I am ready.”
The footman bowed again and turned, holding the door for her. She departed from the comfortable salon and waited for the door to close and the footman to step out in the right direction. The house was not overly large but well laid out. She suspected she knew the way even though she’d never before been there. Still, docilely, she followed.
“Good morning,” she said with a smile upon entering the library. The smile faded as she looked around and saw that Lester was not before her. She stood still for a moment and then started for a chair near the fireplace—but halfway there, shifted direction and headed toward the windows looking out over the gardens at the side of the house. They were not well laid out and, for a long moment, she made plans for changes that would improve them…and then told herself she was a fool for dreaming. Lester would not forgive her. He would not, once again, ask her to wed him.
And why should he? She was…what she was. The new Lord Everston had called her a whore. The name wasn’t exactly accurate. She didn’t take money from the men who shared her bed. But she hadn’t exactly taken them there for the love of them either. She sighed. Perhaps she should have accepted her fate, should have played the role of proper wife to the mean creature to whom she’d been married out of hand.
Melissa’s mouth drooped, a sadness coming into her eyes. Life, she thought, is not worth the bother. The door opened and she turned, expectant, hopeful, wondering…
“Your carriage, such as it is, has been pulled into the nearest carriage maker,” said Lester. “Being Sunday, I don’t expect it to be repaired today. Is your journey north desperate? Should I supply you with transport so you may go on your way immediately?”
“My journey is not…desperate,” said Melissa, thinking quickly. “There is no rush for me to reach my…destination…immediately.”
“High Moor Hall,” he said, nodding. “I understand it has been left to Jacob Moorhead. You are joining your lover there?” he asked, swinging his quizzing glass from the end of its ribbon.
“My former lover…” She hung her head. “He said goodbye when he went north.”
“You appear to have little luck with the men you choose, Melissa.”
She turned away. “I have little luck. Period. End of sentence.”
He laughed a sour laugh. “We are alike in that respect. I wonder how we are otherwise alike.”
She turned back, a faint frown creasing her brow. “Alike?”
“You and I. Once I thought we were soul mates. I was disillusioned in that belief of course. You’d have found some way of coming to me if we’d been so well matched as I’d thought.”
“I told you—”
“Yes. And young girls are not raised to know they have a choice when it comes to wedding a man they cannot like. I have remembered that in the long reaches of the night while I studied your story from one end to the other, over and over, and wondered how much of it was true.”
“He was a monster, Lester. You do not know…” She bit her lip and turned away.
“I suspect I do know,” he said gently. “I had him investigated. After I returned from India I retired here to the estate my godfather left me, but I learned what sort of slavery you were sold into. It is only recently I have occasionally ventured into society and only recently I’ve learned of how you…rebelled?”
She nodded, accepting the word.
“Rebelled against what he’d demanded of you. Not the best choice you could have made perhaps, but very likely the only one an innocent thrown into London society with no one to guide her could manage.”
“You do understand?” She cast him a hopeful look.
He laughed that sour laugh again. “Understanding doesn’t mean I approve, Melissa. Or that I accept. But I can, perhaps, play the gentleman while you are here and pretend you are a guest I’ve chosen to entertain.”
She turned on her heel and stared out the window.
He watched her rigid spine, watched it gradually relax, but perhaps a bit too much, and then saw her stiffen it back into proper posture. With mixed emotions, he watched her turn to face him.
“Then it behooves me to act like the guest you would have chosen to entertain, does it not?” she asked, her smile falsely bright. “Tell me, what is there in this benighted part of the world that one might find worthy of a visit? Ruins? A particularly fine view? Perhaps a village not totally unworthy of one’s time?” She stepped nearer. “Or would you play cards? Chess? Billiards? Or we might ride? I haven’t ridden for a long time now, but I don’t believe it is something one forgets.”
His smile hardened. “You have not mentioned one thing we might do…”
His suggestive tone wiped all expression from her face. “No. I did not, did I?” she asked, not pretending to misunderstand him. “There is that too, if that is what you want,” she said tonelessly, her gaze off somewhere to the side of him.
He chuckled. “You would be the perfect guest, I see, falling in with your host’s wishes in all things. Well, it is a fine day and I think your suggestion we ride would please us both. We can combine our ride wi
th visiting the nearby ruins of an ancient castle. There isn’t much left but it is on higher ground with a lovely view. I am told it is an excellent site for a picnic so I will have saddlebags packed. You did, I assume, pack a habit?”
“It is old but I do not think I have changed shape to the point it will not fit.” She turned toward the door. “At what time would you care to leave?” she asked and, when those details were settled, she exited, hesitated only a moment and then went directly to her room where she found a maid had not only laid out her old dark green habit but had sponged and pressed it. It looked better than she expected!
Her eyes widened. He had expected her to agree to his plan! But what if he did? She walked to her window, her mind running ‘round and ‘round the things he had said to her. The insults. The understanding. The mixed cues she’d received from him. What did it all mean?
She sighed. What, after all, could it mean? He and she had changed so much, she feared that there could no longer be a meeting of minds as there once had been.
Oh, but if only there could be…if only one could go back…
* * * * *
The next day, Melissa turned her head and watched Lester as he passed the coach. When it was discovered that far more than a broken axle must be repaired and the driver would not agree to the work until the owner agreed to the cost, it was decided that Lester would escort her to High Moor, where, she hoped, he might stay for a few days. She’d not told him why she must go there and, at this point, she wasn’t at all certain she’d keep to her original intention to lure Jacob away. All the tearing young emotions of her first love had been roused by the ride and picnic she’d shared yesterday with Lester. All the longings and hopes and fears…
She looked out the other side of the carriage and, blurred by the distance, saw the towers of York Minster. Their route, it seemed, meandered a trifle farther north than she’d have thought necessary from what she remembered of the map she’d bought. But then the carriage slowed, so perhaps it was time to turn west? She hoped so. Lester had refused to ride with her, saying he preferred horseback to jouncing along in a carriage, so, as usual, she was alone…and lonely.
The Ghost and Jacob Moorhead Page 11