Much Ado About Jack

by Christy English

  ***

  When they were riding back to her rented cottage, James said, “You haven’t told your posh friends that we’ll be marrying.”

  “That’s because we won’t.”

  “I beg to differ, Your High and Mighty Ladyship.”

  Angelique ignored his words. “Will you stay for supper? It will be a cold dinner, just a bit of meat and bread and a little fruit.”

  He smiled at her, and she felt as if she might warm herself by the light of his smile for the rest of her life. She toyed with the idea, trying it on as she might a new bonnet. She was surprised to find that it fit.

  “I will,” he answered.

  His large hand covered her, the warmth of his palm draining into hers. The leather of his glove and the smooth kidskin of hers did nothing to hold back that heat. She felt a little breathless and shivered as a bolt of pleasure spread up her arm. He could make her want him with just the touch of his hand on hers. She did not know how she was ever going to recover from this.

  “And you will be marrying me,” he added.

  She laughed at his tenacity and let him hand her down onto the clean white gravel in front of the cottage she had fallen in love with.

  She had sent word to Smythe, and he had written back that the house was indeed for sale. In spite of her business worries, she would buy it and put it in Sara’s name. Every woman needed a home of her own, a refuge from the world. Aeronwynn’s Gate was hers. This place would be Sara’s.

  They took supper out in the back garden, and Hawthorne and his threats, her shipping business and London, all seemed very far away. Mrs. Beebe laid the table with fresh flowers and honeysuckle. Soft white bread was left in a basket sitting on the white tablecloth beside bowls of strawberries and cream. Some cold mutton lay on each plate, warmed by the sun as it slanted into the garden, shedding its golden light on them all.

  Lisette retired to her room early. Angelique had seen the looks that had passed between her and Sam, and was surprised at Lisette’s condescension at flirting with a mere coachman, no matter that he was a strong, good-looking one. Perhaps it was true love between them, though no doubt Lisette would have rolled her eyes at the notion.

  Sara retired next. Her ward had warmed up to James over milk and bread, but she shot him a look of warning as she left him alone with Angelique. He stood when each of them left, as if they were great ladies. Lisette winked at him, and Sara managed a smile, even as she sent a worried glance at Angelique.

  “Good night, Sara. All will be well.”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  The girl curtsied as if she agreed with her, but she knew Angelique well already. She looked miserable as she climbed the stairs to her room.

  “I find that I do not want to fight with you this evening,” Angelique said. “Can our usual rough-and-tumble wait awhile longer? Until sundown?”

  “That won’t be until nearly midnight,” James said, his smile lighting his face.

  She did not answer that.

  He sighed in mock sorrow. “What will we do, if we’re not making love in your bed, if we’re not fighting for dominance like a pair of apes?”

  “Let’s sit in the garden and listen to the wind.”

  He rose and drew his chair close to hers. The wicker kept them a decorous distance apart, and he did not try to draw her onto his seat with him or onto his lap. Instead, he took her hand in his and held it. They had discarded their gloves in order to eat, so his great hand swallowed hers with nothing in between them.

  Angelique sighed when he touched her, as if a piece of the puzzle of her life had just fallen into place. She knew that this was an illusion, but it was one she could keep, at least until the sun went down.

  She had not slept much the night before, so she found herself drifting off, her hand in his. He did not speak a word but watched over her as she slept.

  Thirty-six

  After the sun had set, the air began to cool. James listened to the cicadas in the distance, singing beneath the oaks and hawthorns. He picked Angelique up from her wicker chair and carried her into the house, placing her on the settee in the sitting room, leaving the door to the back garden open behind him. The fire had died down, and he built it up again as she slept on. He found a bottle of Burgundy and poured a glass of it, bringing it back to the fire to warm it. He turned to her then and saw that her eyes were open and watching him.

  “I’m glad you slept,” he said.

  “So am I.”

  Her voice was hoarse but beautiful, like a layer of raw silk. He wanted to run his hand over the soft curve of her cheek. He wanted to reach out and touch the curls that had slipped from their pins to fall around her shoulder. He did neither but brought her the warmed glass of wine instead.

  “Drink this,” he said. “And I will ask you to marry me again.”

  “I am not changing my answer tonight,” she answered him.

  “You may yet.” James did not smile but pressed the glass into her hand. “Drink.”

  She did as he said, and as he watched, the color returned to her cheeks. She drank the wine down, and he took the empty glass from her and refilled it for himself. He drank deep, as if to seal a bond between them, as she had done the first night she had brought him home, before he set the empty glass aside.

  He stood between her and the door as if he feared she might bolt. He knew that she would not run from any room, much less from one in her own house, but he took the precaution anyway. He would not have her slip away before she heard him out.

  “I love you, Angelique.” He spoke with no preamble. “I know no poetry to use to woo you. I am not an educated man. I love the sea, as I was born to, but I love you more.”

  Angelique did not speak but sat huddled on the wooden settee. She held a pillow over her heart, as if to ward off his words. She had kicked off her slippers, and her feet were drawn up beneath her gown.

  “My father owns a ship and looks to own more. My family carries cotton from the colonies to the factories in the North and makes a tidy profit at it. Bring your ship into alliance with ours, use our contacts, work with our company, and keep all the profits your ship brings in. You will be free of Hawthorne and free of all the fancy people you call friends. We can live in London, or Shropshire, or wherever you wish.”

  She blinked at him. He paused, to give her the opportunity to interrupt him, as she was always so eager to do. But this time, she said nothing, only gazing up at him in the firelight with those clear sapphire eyes.

  He reached into his coat pocket and drew out the ring he had been carrying with him all the way from London. He bent down on one knee to take her hand in his, and he slid his ring onto the fourth finger of her left hand.

  “I will leave the sea for you. Or I will return to it, if you go with me. Marry me, Angelique. I would have you for my wife.”

  ***

  The next moment passed like one in a dream, but a dream that changed in mid-thought, as a stream sometimes did, coursing over stones. Angelique lost her breath as soon as he spoke the word love again, as he slid the most beautiful ring she had ever seen onto her finger. She knew that this time, she would have to answer him and mean it.

  But before she could, before she could even gather her thoughts, James grunted once as if in pain and slumped to the floor at her feet. Horrified, she watched him fall. Rising to her stocking feet as quickly as she could, Angelique managed to keep his head from striking the oak floor. There was blood on the back of his head, clumped in a mass at the base of his skull.

  She looked up then and saw the Duke of Hawthorne step out of the shadows to stand over them.

  “That was a moving scene,” the duke said. “I was almost sorry to interrupt it. But we have unfinished business, you and I. That one cannot stand in the way of it.”

  Angelique saw that his arm was in a sling, that he had been wounded in the sh
oulder and that his wound had been dressed by a surgeon. In his other hand, he held a pistol, its grip coated with James’s blood. As she watched, Hawthorne turned the pistol so that it was now pointed at her.

  She drew her handkerchief from her sleeve, pressing it to the gash on James’s head, her mind whirling as she thought of Sara asleep abovestairs. She wondered how she might get the duke to leave the house and her charges in peace.

  There was a gleam of madness in his gray eyes, the same gleam she had caught a glimpse of when he came into her home in London. Only now, he seemed to burn from within with the light of that madness, as if Arabella marrying another had pushed him over some internal edge no one had known was there.

  Angelique stood very slowly, her hands held in front of her where he could see them. She did not move her arms but stepped away from James in the futile hope that she might be able to draw all of Hawthorne’s focus to herself. Unlike Anthony’s young wife, she knew nothing of combat, nothing of self-defense. She had Sam for that, though the need had never arisen. Now Sam was down at the pub in the village, where he could do her no good.

  “Your sweet-faced friend ruined my life,” Hawthorne said.

  Angelique took one more step closer to the fireplace, where the poker lay close to the blaze. She stopped her progress when he gestured wildly with the pistol. He had not fired a shot from it yet, and it was double-barreled. He could shoot her, then turn the gun on James without even reloading. Angelique stopped moving and stayed where she was.

  “Arabella would have married me,” he said. “She would have had no choice. But you and Pembroke and Ravensbrook ruined that. You took her from me. I cannot strike at either of them; they are too powerful. I can strike at you.”

  “Because I am a defenseless woman?”

  “Because you are a whore. Because no one cares when a whore is dead.”

  He raised the pistol, not as if to shoot her but as if to strike her with it. She shrank back, her heart rising in her throat, but she had the sense even still to take one step closer to the poker.

  Then she heard Sara shout, and her heart went into her throat. She had not even heard the girl’s step on the stairs, and now she was there, in danger, and there was nothing Angelique could do to save her.

  “No!” The girl threw herself at Hawthorne, as a puppy might throw itself at a mastiff. Hawthorne took Sara by her night braid and lifted her high, brandishing her as he might a rabbit he meant to kill. Her feet went out from under her as she clutched his hand, her toes barely touching the floor. Angelique had the horrible notion that he might rip the girl’s hair away from her head.

  “Your husband’s bastard. Born of an opera dancer who died birthing her. But your demon husband didn’t have the sense to let the chit die in the dirt she was born in. He brought her to clean country, to that woman at that benighted inn. And now you’ve taken her in and think to make a lady of her. I might as easily make a thoroughbred out of a mule. We are born what we are, Lady Devonshire. Not even your wiles and connections can change what this girl is.”

  Angelique felt her ire rise to join her fear, and she struggled to push it down, struggled to keep her head clear in the face of her enemy. “I don’t care who her mother was. Sara is mine now. I am the daughter of a sea captain, a man who built his own fortune, and his own life, and lived by no one else’s leave. Sara will have the chance to build her own life, or I will die trying to give it to her.”

  “She’ll die here, and now, as you will.”

  Hawthorne raised the pistol toward her daughter then, and Angelique reached for the poker. But before he could fire, James rose from behind him, hitting him once over the back of the neck and once at the wrist.

  The pistol flew, striking the floor and sliding across the oak boards. Angelique leaned down and took it up. She leveled it at the mad duke even as James pulled Sara away from him.

  Hawthorne stood straight, not caring that the gun was pointed at his chest. “You think to best me, to shoot me with my own pistol? You do not have the mettle. You are nothing but a whore.”

  Angelique knew that she would never see the end of this man. If he did not kill her here and now, and Sara with her, he would be back another day, or he would send a minion to do his killing for him, and she and Sara would die then.

  She tuned out the sound of Sara’s weeping. She disregarded the sound of James’s voice as he tried to speak to her. In her mind, the room was suddenly silent, and there was only herself and her enemy, staring back at her.

  She did not hesitate, but fired.

  The smell of smoke and sulfur filled the sitting room. Angelique heard Sara cry out, and Lisette screaming from above, first in French and then in broken English.

  “Stay upstairs,” Angelique called to her maid and Mrs. Beebe. “We are all safe here. I will tell you when to come down.”

  She listened as Lisette and Mrs. Beebe spoke in high-pitched horror at the sound of the gunshot below, each babbling in her own language, for in times of stress, Lisette always lost her English.

  Angelique turned her mind to the task at hand and to the man who lay dead on her rented rug.

  She had aimed for his chest, but the kick of the gun had sent her shot higher into Hawthorne’s forehead, the lead ball exiting in a fist-size hole through the back of his head. His brains and blood lay everywhere, on the rug, on the floor, on James’s coat, on the wall behind him, in Sara’s hair. Angelique took in the carnage before her, beginning to shake, the gun, suddenly heavy in her hand, falling to the floor.

  Sara ran to her then and clutched her, getting the duke’s blood all over Angelique’s dark blue gown. Her arms were around her daughter, holding her close, the girl she had saved, the girl she would never let go of.

  “I will hang for this,” Angelique said. “But it was worth it.”

  “You will not hang,” James said. “We will say that I did it.”

  Before they could get into an argument, a sharp knock sounded on the front door, and Titania’s voice called to her.

  “My lady! Was that the prop gun I heard go off? I knew I should not let you borrow it for a lark. Let me in.”

  Angelique laughed, hearing the edge of hysteria beginning to enter her voice. She did not move, but still clutched Sara close while James passed into the hallway to open the door. Titania came quickly into the sitting room and took in the scene with one glance before turning to Angelique.

  “What a shame. It looks as if the Duke of Hawthorne fell to a robber’s pistol along the road. I wonder what he was doing there all alone in the dead of night? Nothing good, I imagine.”

  Angelique blinked, thinking for a moment that Titania had lost her wits. Her friend was as calm as a lake on a windless day. “No one else has seen this?” Titania asked.

  “Only you, and the three of us,” James said.

  “Good then. My people and I will set him by the road.” She turned to look down at the duke as if he were a pile of refuse to be removed. “This death was too good for him. The evil do flourish, don’t they?”

  “This one no longer will,” Angelique answered.

  Titania nodded. “And we have you to thank for that.” She turned to James. “Give me the gun. I’ll lay it by him. It looks as if the highwayman shot the duke with his own pistol.”

  ***

  Angelique sat on the settee, and James stood between her and the door. She had changed out of her bloody gown and had helped Sara do the same. Their clothes, along with James’s bloodied coat, had been taken into the kitchen until Sam could build a fire in the yard the next morning and burn them all to ash. Sara, her hair freshly washed, would not lie down with Lisette but slept next to Angelique on the too-small settee.

  Titania had brought her two strongest men back from the inn, and they had wrapped the duke in the bloody carpet and loaded him into a wagon in the stable yard. They drove quietly into the night w
ith the duke’s body in tow, the hooves of the mule muffled in cloth. “We’ll burn the carpet in a bonfire of our own when we reach the next town,” Titania said.

  Angelique rose to her feet, carefully covering Sara with a blanket. The girl did not wake.

  “I can never repay you,” Angelique said.

  Titania drew her close. The heavy scent of the actress’s perfume engulfed her just as her arms did.

  “There is never any need to speak of payment between us.”

  Another shadow loomed in the dark of the doorway, and Angelique jumped at the sight. James moved without a word between her and that shadow, so that she had to peer around him to see Anthony Carrington standing in the doorway of her sitting room.

  “Captain Jack, isn’t it?” Anthony raised one eyebrow, taking James in, as if sizing him up for a thrashing.

  Unlike any other man she knew, James did not retreat at the sight of Anthony’s narrowed gaze. Instead, he took a step forward, blocking her from Anthony completely, as if he would stand between her and her old lover, between her and the rest of the world.

  “The name’s Montgomery,” James said. “Captain James Montgomery. And Angelique Beauchamp is mine.”

  Angelique felt the blood rise into her cheeks, and beside her, Titania smothered a laugh in her velvet handkerchief.

  Anthony smiled, a small quirk of his lips. “Captain Montgomery it is then.” He turned to the center of the room, where the rented rug was missing. The expanse of bare floor had been scrubbed clean of blood, as had the walls behind him. Anthony’s eyes ran over the surface, looking for traces of the murder she had committed less than an hour before.

  “I understand there is news of Hawthorne’s demise,” Anthony said.

  James did not answer but stared him down. Angelique reached for him, and he seemed to feel the weight of her gaze, for he left off blocking Anthony from the room and came to stand beside her. She took James’s hand just as Caroline slipped in, passing her husband in the doorway like a cat.