Devil's Bargain

by Marlene Suson

  “I love to wear all my necklaces at once,” she confided. “The duke teases me about my pretty paste, whatever that means.”

  Tia was too flabbergasted to enlighten her. Jennie, despite her voluptuous body, had the mind of an enfant. She was not at all the kind of woman Tia would have thought would interest her husband.

  Recollecting the reason for her visit, Tia said, “I have come to warn you that you may be in grave danger. A man I saw at Vauxhall last night made a threatening rem—”

  She was cut short by Jennie’s frightened gasp. Her limpid eyes, focusing on something behind Tia, widened in alarm. “Who are you?” she asked.

  Tia looked around. A large, shabbily dressed man with greasy, unkempt hair and two lengths of rope looped around his neck was standing behind her. His size was almost as alarming as the pistol he was pointing at the two women.

  “You, me pretty one, is comin’ with me,” he told Jennie. “Get on yer dew-beaters now.”

  Her beautiful face twisted in terror. Instead of obeying his order to stand, she shrank back.

  He waved the gun menacingly at her. “On yer dew-beaters,” he repeated.

  But Jennie was paralyzed with fear. Cursing, the man turned his back on Tia to grab Jennie’s arm and yank her viciously to her feet.

  Tia hastily grabbed the heavy silver candelabra from the little pedestal table. Lifting it with both hands over her head, she brought it down on the kidnapper’s skull. Unfortunately, she could not bring herself to do so with as much force as she knew she should.

  Nevertheless, he lost his grip on both Jennie and his pistol. Momentarily stunned, he fell to his knees, clutching at his head with his hands.

  Jennie fled for the door. Tia scrambled for the abductor’s weapon, which had fallen to the floor and lay amid the broken wreckage of the wax tapers that had tumbled from the candelabra.

  Retrieving the weapon, she pointed it at the intruder, who was struggling woozily to his feet.

  “Put your hands above your head and do not move, or I shall shoot you,” Tia told him. “You will not be the first brigand I have shot.”

  He eyed her with uneasy suspicion. “Is ye that Castleton duchess that likes to use barkin’ irons on culls?”

  Although this seemed a gross exaggeration to Tia, it was no time to quibble. She assured him, “The very same.”

  His hands promptly shot into the air.

  Now that Tia had him in her power, she was not precisely certain what to do with him. She was distracted from this consideration by Jennie’s bloodcurdling shriek from the hall.

  It was followed by much crashing and cursing. Tia, keeping the gun trained on the intruder, backed toward the hall to discover what was happening.

  She saw at a glance that the door to the street had been flung open and that Jennie had vanished. Sebastian had run into the house and was grappling with another intruder, almost as formidable in size as he was. They were struggling for possession of a second pistol.

  A third man, considerably better dressed than the other two brigands in a fashionable brown riding coat, buckskins, and polished, tasselled Hessian boots, alternately cursed and encouraged his henchman. Tia recognized his distinctive voice.

  At last, she was seeing Lucifer unmasked.

  She had been right to think that Jennie was in danger. Thank God she had come to warn her.

  Sebastian broke free and delivered a wicked facer to his opponent, who collapsed upon the floor. Seeing him fall, the man who masqueraded as Lucifer turned and disappeared into the back of the house. His sudden flight distracted Tia from the intruder in the living room.

  He took advantage of this opportunity to knock the gun from her hand. He did not waste time attempting to retrieve it but instead fled out the front door just as Doris, followed by the coachman, ran awkwardly up the steps. He would have ducked past the maid, but she skilfully delivered a blow to his breadbasket that knocked the big man flat.

  Tia called for Jennie but got no answer.

  Doris told her, “If that be the lady whose scream a-brought Sebastian, she run out the door faster ‘an a deer and hopped in a hack.”

  The maid plopped herself down on her gasping, groaning victim as Sebastian ran toward the back of the house in pursuit of the man who called himself Lucifer. Tia followed but the man had fled out a back door that stood open and was nowhere to be seen.

  When they went back to the hall, Winton, the coachman, stood guard over Sebastian’s victim. Doris was still seated atop hers. She threw one of the lengths of rope that had been looped around his neck to Sebastian. In response to her demand for one of his ruffles, the footman pulled a pair of hand shackles from his pocket and tossed them to her.

  Tia watched with amazement—and growing suspicion—as Doris fastened them on the intruder’s wrists. With the remaining length of rope, she proceeded to tie his feet, demonstrating considerably more skill in this endeavour than she had ever manifested as a maid.

  Meanwhile, Sebastian busied himself trussing up his opponent in a similar manner. When he finished, he and the coachman carried the two brigands outside and dumped them into the boot of Tia’s carriage. When she asked what they meant to do with them, Doris replied mysteriously that they would be delivered to the proper people.

  This further reinforced Tia’s suspicion that her maid and footman were something other than servants. Marc had employed them immediately after she had twice been set upon by outlaws. Both he and her aunt had ridiculed her fear that there could be a connection between the two incidents, but now Tia wondered uneasily whether they had been telling her the truth.

  On the way home, Tia demanded to know whether her husband had hired them to guard her. The loquacious Doris suddenly became as mute as Sebastian.

  Doris’s silence convinced Tia that her surmise was correct. When they reached Castleton House, the footman Robert was standing on the street by the portico talking to another young man whose back was to Tia as she descended from the carriage. Robert’s abandonment of poor Marie had sunk the handsome young man beneath reproach in Tia’s estimation, and it was all she could do to be civil to him.

  Alarm flickered on his face at the sight of his mistress, but recovering, he quickly bestowed upon her an ingratiating smile that no doubt won him much favour among some members of Tia’s sex. She, however, saw it for what it was—calculating. Both Robert and his smile irked her.

  His companion edged away, his back still toward Tia. There was something familiar about him, but she could not think what.

  “The duke has returned at last,” Robert said, distracting her attention from his retreating friend. For a second, she thought she detected a malicious gleam in the footman’s eye, but his voice was quiet and respectful. “He is upstairs in the yellow suite with his guest.

  “What guest?” As far as Tia knew, none had been expected.

  “I do not know the young lady’s identity.”

  It must be Jennie, Tia thought. The terrified child- woman had fled to Marc

  Although Tia was greatly relieved that Jennie was safe, she was not happy that her husband would take her into their home.

  Robert was watching intently for her reaction, which Tia was certain would soon be the talk of the servants table. But not for nothing had she diligently schooled her face these past weeks not to betray her emotions, and she said with calm dignity, “So Miss Martin has arrived. I shall go to welcome her.”

  She bit back a smile at the disappointment her serene reply produced on the odious Robert’s face.

  But her amusement vanished abruptly when she opened the door to the yellow suite and found Jennie wrapped in Marc’s arms, his head bent over hers, murmuring to her in a soothing voice that was too soft for Tia to make out his words of love.

  All the weeks of discipline abruptly deserted her, and she stared in stricken horror at the entwined couple.

  Then the pain and hurt that had been building in Tia during the months she had been in London exploded into fury. It had
been bad enough that he should install his incognita in their home, but to find him brazenly embracing her like this was the final insult. She hated her husband! Nothing on earth would induce her to stay under the same roof with them.

  At that instant, Marc lifted his head and saw his devastated wife in the doorway. The look on his face was all one might expect of a noble gentleman who discovers his wife is watching him make love to another lady.

  Tia turned and fled, running blindly down the stairs past Doris and Sebastian who were still in the entry hall, past the astonished porter, and out of the house, determined never to return to it.

  Chapter 23

  Hackney drivers, standing by their vehicles parked in Piccadilly, commiserated with each other about the scarcity of business. Not a single swell had required their services all evening. Suddenly the door of an unprepossessing brick mansion burst open. An elegantly dressed young woman ran out and rushed up to the first hackney.

  Although its driver was unused to seeing ladies of quality fleeing out the front door of Piccadilly mansions as though the hounds of hell were after them, he rose to the occasion, hastening to open the door for her entrance into his conveyance. As he did so, he entertained dreams of a generous vail pressed into his hands by m’lady, grateful for her rescue from an ungentlemanly gentleman.

  As she threw herself into his vehicle, he recognized the house from which she had issued as the Duke of Castleton’s and was stricken by his first qualm. Only a fool would get in the way of that most noble duke and his pleasure.

  A second individual ran out the open door, a big, burly man whose size and rough face contrasted ludicrously with the duke’s rich crimson and gold livery that he wore.

  The hackney driver, who was small both in stature and courage, shrank back, wondering if this brute meant to drag the woman back to his master. Instead, he, too, jumped into the coach as yet another person, a tall angular woman who ran with all the grace of a cow, issued from the house.

  The driver tried to block her entrance into his coach, and she crashed into him, sending him sprawling upon the cobblestones. Without so much as a ‘Pardon me,” she scrambled into the coach.

  He began to protest this rough treatment in colourful language, but the error of this approach was brought forcibly home to him when the livened brute leaped out of the carriage, heaved him to his feet as if he were no heavier than a babe, and told him in a ghastly hoarse voice to stop his gab or he would find himself nursing a broken noggin.

  The terrified coachman, visions of vails giving way to nightmares of mayhem, looked to the driver of the second hackney for support, but the cowardly oaf merely gaped at the goings-on.

  The lady informed the beleaguered driver that he should deliver her and her companions to an address in Grosvenor Square

  .

  He climbed on his box post-haste, eager to be rid of his ill-assorted fares as quickly as possible.

  Urging his beast to its fastest pace, he spent the trip to Grosvenor Square

  nursing strong misgivings about the characters of his passengers. He concluded that the woman he had mistaken for a lady must be a fancy piece and the second woman her abbess, He had not been aware of a bawdy house in the haute ton preserve of Grosvenor Square, but he would tuck the address away in his memory Such addresses were valuable at 3 a.m. when a party of young bloods was seeking new diversions to wile away the rest of the night.

  Drawing up in front of his party’s destination, however, he was fairly flummoxed to recognize the house as of that noted leader of the ton, the Marchioness of Mobry

  When the young woman disembarked, she put the driver in considerably more charity with her by pressing a golden coin into his hand. He would, however, have given all of this reward to witness the reception the marchioness, by all reports a formidable high stickler, would accord her very odd visitors.

  Perhaps, he thought, he would remain in the square for a little while in hopes of seeing the outcome, which he suspected would be the trio’s hasty ejection from the house. And maybe, he thought greedily, he would earn another gold coin for the next leg of their journey.

  Marc ran out the door of Castleton House past the startled porter. Jennie had clung to him like an anchor, and it had taken several precious minutes to extricate himself from her hysterical grasp.

  He asked the goggle-eyed driver of a hackney coach parked in the street whether he had seen a lady run out of his house. When the man nodded affirmatively, Marc ordered him to follow her. He flung himself into the vehicle, and it rattled forward. Marc surmised that Tia was headed for her aunt’s house in Grosvenor Square

  .

  He knew what his wife must think. Had the situation been reversed, he would have been ready to commit murder. He prayed that the sight of Jennie in his arms had not been the final straw for Tia, coming as it did on top of the cruel charade he had been forced to play in order to protect her.

  He would be damned, however, if he would continue this deception any longer. He would tell Tia the truth, even though his deadly enemy had not yet been captured. Surely it would not be long now. They had come so close to Pitson, lying in wait through the night for him to return to the house that had been his hiding place.

  By mid-morning it had become clear that he would not. Someone or something must have alerted him to the trap. Marc and Mr. Keller returned to the detective’s temporary headquarters to consider what to do next. Marc, exhausted, fell asleep upon a sofa. Mr. Keller, not wanting to disturb his employer, had let him sleep away the day.

  After he finally awakened and went home, Jennie arrived in strong hysterics. He was not able to make much sense of the tangled story pouring, between sobs, from her lips—only that Pitson had invaded her house. But then it disintegrated into an incoherent tale of his wife somehow saving her. He was trying to soothe Jennie when Tia saw them.

  The stricken expression on his wife’s face seared him. He wondered morosely whether she would ever again look at him as she had at the Stratfords’ ball with love glowing in her eyes.

  How he treasured that moment. Unfortunately, she had not been the only one who had unwillingly betrayed her emotions, Her angry aunt had descended upon them, dragging him off to berate him for endangering Tia’s life by revealing his love for her to the interested ton.

  Marc had been so certain he would never lose his heart to a woman that he had tried to deny that he loved Tia.

  Lady Mobry had replied impatiently, “If you think that, you are hoaxing yourself as well as me. And you are putting Tia in grave danger in the bargain. You must make the world think that you are utterly indifferent to her.”

  He had not really believed then that Tia was in any peril, but his respect for Lady Mobry’s judgment had made him uneasy enough not to return to his wife’s side. Instead he ostentatiously lavished attention upon the beauties in attendance until his hostess brought him word of the message Tia had received about her brother.

  He instantly suspected something queer was afoot and commandeered Purple Pruitt’s ridiculous horse to go after her.

  When he saw Tia slumped on the cobbles, the front of her cloak soaked in blood, his heart very nearly stopped. It hit him then with the force of a lightning bolt how right Lady Mobry had been about both his love for her niece and the deadly danger that it placed her in.

  After a sleepless night, he summoned Lady Mobry for advice on how best to protect Tia. The marchioness gave it in her usual blunt way, and most unpalatable he found it: he must pretend disdain for his wife not only in public but even at home. The bogus messenger had been wearing his livery and had called Nurse Gowan by name, which indicated his enemy had a spy among his servants. Tia could not be told that her husband’s sudden coldness toward her was a sham, for her expressive face would betray it immediately.

  “She is incapable of subterfuge,” her aunt said. “She must believe that you care naught for her.”

  Marc was aghast. “I cannot deceive her like that!”

  “Then y
ou are condemning her to death.”

  “I cannot be so cruel to her. I love her!”

  “Then prove it by doing what I say. It is the only way to save Tia’s life.”

  Marc doubted that he could carry off this terrible deception, but after the incident on Hounslow Heath later that day in which both Tia and Freddie nearly died, he knew that he had no choice. Twice coming within a hairsbreadth of losing his wife taught him that he had fallen more deeply in love with her than he would ever have thought possible.

  Taught him, too, that he would do anything, no matter how distasteful, to safe her life.

  And Freddie’s. For the runaway landau demonstrated to Marc that the boy’s life could also be in danger if his enemy suspected how much he had come to care for his small brother-in-law. He was forced to ignore the bewildered child as well.

  Marc’s deception was as painful to himself as it was to his wife. It took all the discipline his uncle had instilled in him to maintain his facade of indifference to her when all he wanted to do was to kiss away her hurt and love her as she deserved to be loved.

  Week after frustrating week passed with Keller and his detective unable to find any clue to his fiendish enemy’s identity while Marc watched Tia’s love for him wither away.

  At first, she had been hurt and puzzled. Then abruptly, her behaviour toward him had changed. No longer did her wonderfully expressive face light up at the sight of him. No longer did she look at him with yearning in her eyes. No longer did she seek his company or want his attentions.

  He could trace this shocking transformation to the night she had overheard him tell Lynnock that Banbury tale about preferring an incognita to his wife. He and Keller had thought then that Lynnock was behind the attacks on Tia, and Marc had been desperate to make Sir Gregory believe that he did not care for her. The duke had been proud of the convincing performance he had given—until he learned that his wife had witnessed it.

  No wonder she now preferred the charming Czar. Marc had never before cared enough about a woman to be jealous, but now he was consumed by it.