Devil's Bargain

by Marlene Suson

  The hackney deposited Marc in front of Lady Mobry’s house. He hoped that with her aunt’s assistance, he could make Tia listen to reason. But when the porter opened the door, Marc learned to his dismay that the marchioness was not at home and was not expected for some time.

  Doris, who was waiting in the hall with Sebastian, told her employer that his wife was in the drawing room, and Marc immediately went to her.

  At the sight of her husband, Tia’s chin rose to a stubborn angle. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “I, however, have a good deal to say to you.”

  “I will not listen.” Tia clapped her hands over her ears.

  Marc promptly possessed himself of these extremities, pulling them away from her ears. “Yes, you will. When you saw me with that girl, it was not what you think.”

  “What you do is a matter of supreme indifference to me,” she retorted, with far more hauteur than truth.

  “Be that as it may, what you think is a matter of supreme importance to me.”

  “Of course it is!” she exclaimed sarcastically. “Of so much importance that you make love to Jennie before my very eyes.”

  “I was doing nothing of the sort,” he protested, surprised that his wife knew his visitor’s name. “I was trying to calm her. She was hysterical because she had been attacked in her home—”

  “I know,” Tia interjected coldly. “I was there.”

  “It was you then!” He was thunderstruck at this revelation. “Why did you go there?”

  “Because I was afraid she was in danger, and I had to warn her.”

  “What do you know about Jennie?”

  Tia’s gray eyes kindled in anger. “That she is the beloved incognita you told Sir Gregory about.”

  “Good God—thinking that, you still went to warn her!” he exclaimed in astonishment. Clearly it had not occurred to Tia that some aggrieved wives might be less generously inclined toward their rivals.

  “But—” Tia’s voice was frigid. “—you had no right to humiliate me by installing your convenient in our home.”

  “What a poor notion you have of my character,” he said bitterly. “I would never do such a thing. Jennie is not and never has been my mistress. She is my ward.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  Marc winced as though Tia had slapped him. “Why not?”

  “You said she was the most beautiful woman you’d ever seen.”

  “That much is true. Can you name me one woman of your acquaintance who is lovelier?” he challenged.

  “No,” she snapped.

  “But some beauty is better appreciated from a distance. I have no taste for children. If you talked to Jennie today, you surely observed that she is a child inhabiting a woman’s body—albeit a very beautiful body. I cannot conceive how you could think she would interest me.”

  “Because I have seen the way she looks at you! Because you are keeping her! Do you deny that you have given her a carte blanche?”

  “Yes! I—”

  “You dare to deny it!” Tia cried in outrage. “When you happily paid an exorbitant price for an inferior piece of horseflesh while denying me a mount that cost only a fraction of that.”

  “What are you talking about?” He was genuinely puzzled.

  “Lady Todd’s horse! How faulty your memory has become. She wanted only forty pounds for her magnificent chestnut.”

  He’d forgotten that incident. “I fear it is your memory that is faulty” he said grimly. “She asked forty pounds and another paltry consideration. It was not the money but that other consideration that was too dear a price for me to pay.”

  “But she did not even say what that was.”

  “She did not need to. I knew. That paltry consideration would have enabled her to win a thousand- pound wager she had made with Lord Oldfield.”

  “What would you have had to do?”

  “Bed her. And that was not a price I was willing to pay,” he replied with undisguised repugnance.

  That surprised Tia. She had not thought that so lovely a lady would have disgusted her husband.

  “Furthermore,” he continued, “I was livid at her effrontery in using you as an innocent pawn in attempting to manipulate me. But enough about that wretched woman. What made you think that Jennie was in danger?”

  Tia told him about the man who masqueraded as Lucifer.

  Marc’s blood ran cold at the realization of how close his diabolical enemy had been to his wife. “Why, madam, did you not tell me about him?” he demanded.

  “How could I when you had not been home since last night? When you had not returned by this evening, I was afraid to wait any longer, and I went to Jennie’s. I thought I would find you there. Is this Lucifer Sir Francis Pitson?”

  Marc nodded.

  “What is his connection to Jennie?”

  “He is the reason she has the mind of a child,” Marc said bleakly. “I fear I have no choice but to tell you her story but it is not a pretty one.”

  And it wasn’t. The enormously rich Sir Francis had devoted himself and his great fortune to debauchery. He preferred young virgins and used them savagely. One had died at his hands. Six years ago Jennie, then an orphan of fifteen, had been sold to him by her venal guardian.

  One morning, as dawn was breaking over London, Marc had been returning home from a ball when he beheld a half-naked young woman, screaming hysterically for help, fleeing down the street. A man as sketchily clad as the girl was pursuing her.

  Marc had recognized him as Pitson. Even had he not known the reprobate’s reputation, the ugly bruises and welts on Jennie’s body were silent testimony to the treatment she had endured. Marc had saved her from her captor, giving him in the process the beating he deserved.

  Nauseated by what Pitson had done to her and to other young girls, Marc had used all his influence to see that Pitson was brought to justice.

  Although Jennie’s physical injuries eventually healed, her mind was severely affected by Pitson’s brutal treatment of her. Marc, pitying her and her unhappy situation, paid for her care.

  He told Tia, “I swear to you that my feelings for Jennie are paternal, not amorous.”

  Tia knew he would not swear to such a thing unless it was true. The pain that had weighted her heart for so long began to dissolve. But she still had so many questions. “Was Pitson involved in your brother’s death?”

  Marc nodded. “The bogus Major Hetton was hired by Pitson to seduce Amelia, then provoke Paul into a duel and kill him.”

  “But why Paul instead of you?”

  “Because my brother was the one living person that I truly loved. As your astute aunt pointed out, what better way to make me suffer.”

  Tia shuddered. “I thought the man mad, but I did not suspect how mad.”

  “You can imagine the effect his grabbing Jennie today had upon her.”

  Yes, Tia could, even had she not heard the poor child’s awful scream when she had seen him.

  “Jennie fled to me in hysterics,” Marc said. “I was trying to quiet her when you came upon us.”

  Although Tia did not doubt this, she was far from mollified, “If Jennie is not the incognita you told Sir Gregory Lynnock about, who is?”

  “No one. I have no mistress.”

  “Then why did you tell Sir Gregory what you did?” she demanded indignantly. The charity that was slowly building in her toward her husband abruptly evaporated. “Why would you humiliate me like that?”

  “To protect you.”

  “Protect me!” she exclaimed in disbelief. “What very odd notions you have on how to do that!”

  “I thought initially that Lynnock was the enemy who would destroy anyone that I loved. I was desperate to make him believe that I did not care for you.”

  “Which you didn’t!”

  He touched her cheek caressingly. “Pitson was more discerning than either of us, my dearest. It was not until he came so close to robbing me of you that I realized how much I love you.
But ironically, the only way I could protect you from my mysterious enemy was to pretend disdain for you.”

  Tia stared at him in shock and bewilderment. Once such a declaration of her husband’s love would have made her the happiest woman alive. But now, she thought of the misery that his cold, indifferent behaviour had caused her, of all the nights that she cried herself to sleep in her lonely bedroom. And he was telling her that his uncaring conduct, which had inflicted so much pain, had all been a hoax! She was outraged.

  Seeing the flash of anger in her eyes, Marc said hastily, “Those attacks on you when you were lured from the Stratfords’ ball and on Hounslow Heath were not random incidents.”

  That was what Tia had thought, too, but both he and Lady Mobry had scoffed at her concern.

  He said, “I recognized the attacks immediately as the work of my enemy.”

  “But you and my aunt both laughed at me.” Tia regarded her husband with acute hostility. She had been in terrible danger. They had no right to keep that from her in some misguided notion that they were protecting her. They should have warned her so that she could be on her guard. Instead they had mocked her concerns. She was furious at both her husband and her aunt for deceiving her so. “You should have told me of the danger I was in.”

  “Are in until Pitson is captured. That loathsome devil is capable of any evil, any cruelty. He would not hesitate to kill you or your little brother if he had any inkling how much I care about both of you.”

  “Freddie, too!” she exclaimed in horror, even more shocked that her beloved little brother was also in jeopardy, and still they had not alerted her.

  “That is why, when I learned my enemy was Pitson, I had your cousin take Freddie to the country:’

  “Yes, you could hardly provide a seven-year-old boy with a maid and a footman,” Tia said acidly.

  “I did what I could to protect you.”

  “If you had wished to do that, you would have told me the truth!”

  “You don’t know how desperately I wanted to, but your aunt insisted I must not.” Marc tried to take Tia in his arms, but her body was so stiff and unbending against him that he gave up the effort. “Lady Mobry persuaded me that to do so would mean your death. Your expressive face would have surely betrayed my charade.”

  She was appalled and deeply wounded at how little faith her husband and her aunt had in her. “How can you think I would be such a ninnyhammer if I knew what was at stake?” she demanded, her eyes radiating anger like sparks from a flint stone. “That is the worst insult I have ever been dealt. I will never forgive you for it!”

  “For God’s sake, Tia, listen to me,” Marc pleaded. “I desperately wanted to tell you, but I dared not risk discovering that Lady Mobry was right. I loved you too much to chance anything happening to you.’,

  “If you loved me, you would have told me what you were doing.” Tears of rage welled up in her eyes. “Instead you let me think myself humiliated and rejected!”

  During the weeks Marc had been forced to play the false role of uncaring husband, watching in helpless dismay as Tia withdrew more and more from him, he had lived for the moment when he could at last tell her the truth, hoping that it would end the breach between them.

  Now at last that moment had come, but her furious, tearful eyes and the unyielding set of her face told him his hope had been in vain.

  She swiped angrily at the tears rolling from her eyes. “Even when you knew I had overheard what you told Lynnock, you continued to let me think the worst!”

  “I told you, my love, not to believe everything you heard, that sometimes for reasons I could not explain I was forced to say things that I did not mean.”

  “Had you the smallest affection for me, my most noble duke, you would never have needlessly subjected me to such anguish and humiliation as you have.” Her agitation was so great that it was all she could do to remain standing in one spot. “You loved me so much that even in the privacy of our home you were scarcely civil to me.”

  “Sweetheart, Pitson had planted a spy among our servants. How else would he have known you were going to Hounslow Heath that day?”

  “Which one of our servants?”

  “I believe Marie, which is why I discharged her.”

  Tia cried indignantly, “Marie would never…”

  “But I could not be absolutely certain,” he interjected, “so I was forced to feign indifference to you even in front of the servants.”

  “Fustian! No servants would have been in my bedchamber had you cared enough to join me there, but you could not even bring yourself to do that.”

  “Tia, it was known that I had married for an heir. I was terrified that if you became pregnant I would have signed your—and our unborn child’s—death warrant. Believe me, the past weeks have been as agonizing for me as for you.”

  “Well, I don’t believe you!” She tossed her head scornfully. “What a clanker!”

  “I swear that I will make this up to you,” he promised desperately. “I swear that I will make you happy.”

  “That is beyond your power, my most noble, deceiving duke!”

  “Don’t say that! I adore you. Can’t you understand that my deception, which caused me as much pain as it did you, was motivated solely by love?”

  “Love does not deceive,” she cried furiously. “Love means confiding, sharing, facing danger and adversity together. Love is faith in your beloved. Don’t speak to me of love. You don’t know what it means. You are crueller than Pitson!”

  “Is losing your love to be my reward for trying to save your life?” Marc asked in bleak despair. “If Pitson has cost me that, his revenge will have been more complete than even he could imagine.”

  “Then he is to be felicitated!”

  Tia ran from the room.

  Chapter 24

  Knowing that it would only harm his cause to argue further with his wife in her current state of high dudgeon, Marc wisely opted to abandon his efforts. Perhaps her aunt, when she returned home, would be able to persuade Tia of the injustice she was doing him.

  As the duke left Lady Mobry’s, he warned Doris and Sebastian, still waiting in the hall, that they were not to let his wife out of their sight.

  “She knows the truth about you now, and she’s in a rare taking,” he told them, “but you are to stay with her, no matter what she tells you.”

  Outside in Grosvenor Square

  , Marc rejected the hackney driver’s offer of a ride and opted to return home on foot. It was a long walk, but Marc reflected that he had no reason to hurry to a house that would seem a dreary empty shell without Tia.

  He secretly nursed the hope that if he took long enough to reach Castleton House, Lady Mobry might have brought Tia round and that he would find his wife waiting there for him.

  He ambled over to Hyde Park and strolled slowly along its edge, contemplating the cruel irony that, having fallen deeply in love with a woman for the first time in his life, he could not persuade her to believe him.

  Darkness had long since fallen when, ninety minutes later, Marc finally sauntered up to his house.

  The door was opened by Robert, the footman, and Marc asked casually whether his wife was home. But she was not.

  As he started across the threshold, he belatedly wondered aloud where his porter, who normally tended the door, was.

  “He is ill, Your Grace, and I had to take his place,” Robert replied as Marc stepped inside.

  The door slammed shut behind him, and he felt the muzzle of a pistol in the small of his back. His arms were seized by two men who had been pressed against the wall on either side of the door as he came through it.

  Robert’s voice hissed in his ear. “Don’t make a sound or you are a dead man.”

  At last, Marc had learned the identity of Pitson’s spy among his servants.

  When Lady Mobry arrived home more than an hour after Marc’s departure, she confirmed what he had told Tia.

  “He cut up stiff over my insisting tha
t he deceive you,” the marchioness said. “But the two attempts on your life convinced him that I was right, that he dare let no one, not even you, know that he loved you.”

  “If either of you cared a groat for me, you could not have duped me so cruelly,” Tia cried angrily.

  “Was it cruelty to try to save your life? Your face would have betrayed the truth in an instant. We could not risk that.”

  “I will never forgive him!”

  “If you blame anyone for Marc’s treatment of you, Tia, blame me,” Lady Mobry said. “He did not want to perpetrate this deceit upon you. It was no easy matter to convince him he must do it, but in the end I prevailed. Believe me, he has suffered as much as you have in this affair.”

  “Fustian!” Tia was as angry at her aunt as she was at her husband. She would not remain under her the marchioness’ roof either, and she turned to leave.

  “Where are you going?” Lady Mobry demanded. Tia paused in the doorway. “To the Pulteney Hotel.” The Duchess of Oldenburg would give her refuge.

  “Tia, you cannot stay under the same roof as the Czar,” her aunt exclaimed in alarm. “If you go there, everyone will assume the rumours about you and him are true. Marc will never forgive you.”

  “I never wish to lay eyes on him again!”

  “If Pitson has his way, and he very well may, you won’t!” Lady Mobry retorted.

  Tia eyed her aunt suspiciously. “What are you intimating?”

  “Now that Marc has exposed Pitson’s return to England, the scoundrel knows that his time for vengeance is growing short. I comprehend how his twisted mind works, and I am persuaded that he means to kill Marc in some particularly horrible way as his final act of retaliation.”

  A shaft of fear pierced Tia at her aunt’s words, but Lady Mobry had told her too many untruths of late for her to trust her now. She strongly suspected that her aunt was merely trying to manipulate her into returning to her husband. Her chin rose to a stubborn angle, and she marched into the hall where Doris and Sebastian were waiting.

  Tia told them that she did not want their company, but she might as well have been speaking to two deaf-mutes. They fell silently into step behind her when she left Lady Mobry’s house and piled into the hackney carriage she engaged to take her to the Pulteney. When she protested, Doris said firmly, “Beggin’ yer pardon, Yer Grace, but Oi takes me orders from yer husband. For himself it was who hired us to protect ye.”