They had not opened far when he winced, the muscles in his jaw bunching in obvious discomfort. “Ummm,” he groaned, almost inaudibly. Evangeline wanted to cry out with joy at the sound.
“Elliot?” she asked quietly. “Are you awake?”
She felt his fingers curl weakly about her thumb. “Evie?” he murmured, his voice a nearly inaudible whisper. “Took—took it in the leg, did I?”
Kemble moved to the other side of the bed and braced his arms against the mattress as he leaned across to study Elliot’s face. Elliot’s eyes were still closed, his face fixed in an expression of stoic resolve.
“Yes, in the thigh,” she answered softly. “But it’s a clean wound, though Potter says you’ve lost a good bit of blood.”
His lips tried, with limited success, to turn up into a weak grin, while his feeble grip on her thumb tightened another notch. “I’m nothing but trouble, Evie,” he whispered, clinging to her hand, “but I love you.”
As Kemble turned away to give them privacy, Evangeline let her gaze drift over Elliot’s face, the fear and anger suddenly melting in the crystalline light of her love for this man. The sting of disappointment eased, and Evangeline grappled with the words she knew Elliot needed to hear. When she did not respond immediately, he finally forced open his heavy eyelids.
“I love you, too, Elliot,” she managed weakly, but Evangeline knew she had hesitated a moment too long. Yet how could she express, in mere words, the complexities of her feelings for him? His gray eyes, deeply set, dark, and wearied by pain, dropped shut, his disappointment all too obvious.
Evangeline reached out to smooth the tangle of thick, dark hair from his brow and set her cool palm against his forehead. “Does the leg hurt?” she asked gently, fumbling for something to say.
“Aye,” whispered Elliot, his voice kind but unmistakably indifferent. Suddenly, his face contorted in obvious discomfort as his back arched off the bed.
“Potter left a bottle of laudanum,” she responded, shooting a quick look at Kemble, then jerking her head toward Elliot’s night table. “Kem will give you a bit. Can you take it?”
“I’ll try,” he answered, his clenched jaw relaxing once again.
“And some warm, sweet tea?”
“Aye,” he tried to respond, but his respiration was already settling back into the deep, rhythmic breathing of a body exhausted by trauma. Suddenly, a light knock sounded on the door, and Kemble slid quietly across the room to admit one of the footmen.
“I do b-beg your pardon, your ladyship,” stuttered the servant as he presented an outstretched salver. “MacLeod took himself off to—to retire to his rooms. I did not know what might best be done … but there’s a caller below who begs to see you for a moment.”
The word no was almost out of Evangeline’s mouth when the footman interjected, “I am afraid, ma’am, that she’s terrible overset, and desperate to see you. On account of his lordship, she says.”
Evangeline quickly changed her dress, twisted her hair into a severe arrangement, and strode toward the blue drawing room in a state of agitated resentment. Her nerves were worn raw; furthermore, she had not slept. She had no recollection of the lady who awaited her beyond the drawing-room doors. She had barely glanced at the card, and the unfamiliar name had flown from her addled mind as soon as she set it down again. Resolutely, she pushed open the door and entered to find her guest anxiously pacing the floor. The scene made Evangeline feel, by comparison, utterly composed.
The tall, broad-shouldered woman careened to an abrupt, teetering halt in the center of the carpet. Clearly, she was nearly wild with anxiety. The woman could never have been described as handsome; indeed, her long, heavily boned face would have been decidedly unattractive, even under the best of circumstances. Today, however, her nose was raw, her eyes swollen, and she gave every appearance of having spent the night on the edge of hysteria.
At the moment, however, she seemed almost resigned to a horrible fate as she bowed formally and announced herself as Lady Howell. She then paused expectantly, as if she had anticipated a less than welcoming response from Evangeline.
Evangeline, emotionally drained and sleep-deprived, recognized neither Lady Howell nor her name. Before she had time to consider the matter carefully, however, Lady Howell closed the distance between them and caught Evangeline’s hand in a desperate grip. “Pray forgive me, Lady Rannoch,” she whispered, her voice suddenly catching in her throat. “My call is ill timed, and I know the pain you are suffering, but I beg you for five minutes. I would speak my piece and have done with it—please?”
Evangeline pulled her hand gently from the woman’s clasp. How could this woman know about Elliot? And yet his injury was almost certainly the circumstance to which she referred. Given such knowledge, what matter could be so urgent as to compel her to call in the midst of a tragedy? “I am very sorry, ma’am,” she answered with as much patience as she could muster, “but I really cannot spare—”
“Oh, please?” interjected the dour woman. There was a wrenching agony in her voice, and Evangeline was shocked to see tears pool in her eyes again.
Nervously, Evangeline smoothed her hands down the silk fabric of her skirt front. “Yes. Yes, of course. I did not mean to be unfeeling, but as you must undoubtedly understand, I wish to be at my husband’s bedside.”
“Oh, yes,” murmured the woman weakly, “Yes, I am but too well aware.”
“Please,” offered Evangeline, with a flick of her hand, “do take a seat. And pray excuse me for remarking that you seem not at all well yourself.”
The woman, trembling now, sank with apparent gratitude into a nearby chair. She withdrew a small scrap of linen and blotted quickly at her eyes. When she looked up at Evangeline, her hands still shook, but she looked somewhat more composed.
“Lady Rannoch,” she began in a hollow voice, “I beg your forgiveness, for I must tell you that I am responsible for your husband’s accident.”
Evangeline was rocked by confusion and fatigue. While she had certainly supposed that a woman was involved, the lady before her was most assuredly not what she had expected. Uneasily, she began to mutter, “Why, I am sure, ma’am, that you cannot be!”
“Oh, my dear girl, you cannot know how I wish that were true! You must let me speak. My only regret is that I did not do it weeks ago—no, ten years ago!”
“Ten years?” replied Evangeline softly. “I am not sure I understand, ma’am. Indeed, I think we need not speak of this at all. Not until you are more … yourself.”
Evangeline’s guest wrung her handkerchief wildly. Suddenly, she looked almost mad. “No!” she wailed pitifully. “Others have paid the price for my silence, when I should have spoken out. I can hide my shame no longer. Now your husband lies near death, and the blood of that—that actress—Antoinette Fontaine—is on my hands.”
“I cannot think what you mean,” Evangeline began to interject, but one look at Lady Howell’s tortured visage forestalled any further comment.
The woman’s plain face twisted in agony, and she reached out to grasp Evangeline’s arm, her long, thin fingers digging into the flesh despite her gloves. Evangeline winced, but the woman seemed beyond noticing. “I must tell you a dreadful story, Lady Rannoch,” she whispered furtively, her eyes growing increasingly frantic as she tried to pull Evangeline forward in her chair. “It all began ten years ago, when I took on a new housemaid. A plain girl—a country girl. I insisted upon it, you know, for I had good reason.”
“Yes,” muttered Evangeline, now thoroughly confused. Was Lady Howell demented? Evangeline was growing increasingly disturbed by her wild eyes and tormented voice.
“I was fond of her,” continued Lady Howell in her veiled tone. “And she quickly became an excellent servant. Yet, not six months later, I returned from a visit to my father’s estate, only to discover that my husband had turned the girl off without notice. Oh, he was very cool about it! He insisted that Mary had stolen a gold watch chain from his room. Immediate
ly, I knew it for a lie.”
Evangeline stared at the woman’s expression, transfixed. Perhaps she was indeed raving mad. Yet she did not look exactly deranged; she looked … guilty. And clearly, she believed that she was imparting critical information. “Yes, do go on, Lady Howell,” she said softly.
“Well, you see, I fear that I knew rather too much about my husband’s proclivities. I was convinced he had seduced the girl, then found it necessary to rid himself of her. It would not have been the first time …”
“I—I do not know what to say, Lady Howell …”And, indeed, she did not.
Evangeline’s visitor continued as if no one had spoken, her eyes darting anxiously about the room. “She was so young, so rustic. I asked myself, what if she was with child? Or starving? Oh, I knew my husband, you see, and I put nothing—absolutely nothing—past him.”
A feeling of great unease began to settle about Evangeline. “I cannot think what bearing this has on my household, ma’am, but pray continue if you feel you must.”
“I must,” she insisted, returning her wide-eyed gaze to Evangeline as if she had forgotten to whom she spoke. “I called at the agency from which I had hired her. Of course, without a reference, they had refused to place her again. But they did give me her direction, and on pretext of visiting Papa, I went there instead. To Wrotham Ford. I still don’t know why I did it.”
To Wrotham Ford? Evangeline hid her surprise. “And did you find her?”
“Oh, God, yes! Mopping floors in her father’s filthy taproom. Beaten black and blue.” In the woman’s lap, one gloved hand began to open and close spasmodically. “At the very sight of me, she was seized by fear. But I had to speak with her! Then there was a terrible row with her parents, but finally, when I encouraged her, she began to babble. My husband had indeed lied to me, while her words were, I somehow knew, horribly close to the truth.”
“The truth?”
Lady Howell suddenly froze and looked across Evangeline’s shoulder into the distance. Her gaze was detached and unfocused.“She denied being with child. She swore my husband had never touched her.”
“Was— was she a thief?” Absently, Evangeline pressed her fingertips against her temple and rubbed hard.
“No,” answered Lady Howell in a disembodied voice. “What she was, was a witness! She had seen something she ought not to have seen. I am haunted by that poor child’s huge gray eyes, for I begged her—I begged her to tell me the truth! Only then did she confess that she had seen my husband engaged in—in wickedness. In his bedchamber with … with his niece, Cicely Forsythe.” Lady Howell had begun to sob quietly through her words.
Evangeline gasped. Cicely? Elliot’s dead fiancée? The thick air seemed to press in around her, hot and urgent, yet before she could make sense of it all, Lady Howell drew a ragged, hitching breath. “Oh, yes! In truth, I was not terribly surprised. I think I knew it all along. And poor little Mary was so reluctant to hurt me, despite her own wretched situation! Turned off by my husband, beaten by her parents … so I gave her a reference to a dear friend in Mayfair. They were in want of a scullery maid. I took her back to London and begged her never to tell what she had seen. And she didn’t, but I fear that her family had overheard much of our conversation.”
Somewhere deep within Evangeline’s subconscious, this nearly deranged woman was beginning to make frightening sense, yet she could not quite bring the facts together. “Oh, Lady Howell, I cannot think what to say.”
Lady Howell lifted up her head. Her eyes were still distant. “I make no claim upon your sympathy, Lady Rannoch. Believe me when I tell you that I neither need it nor deserve it. In truth, I had long suspected why my husband brought Cicely into our home. Ha! She was hardly a green girl. But at Howell’s insistence, I humiliated myself by taking Cicely into society, until her constant flirtations became too much to bear. By the time I learned the truth from Mary, it was too late. Cicely was with child, and may God help me, I suppose I knew it was Howell’s.”
“Oh, no,” whispered Evangeline. The room began to tilt, and Evangeline felt her nausea returning.
“Oh, yes,” she whispered hollowly. “And then marriage became a necessity. Given Cicely’s flagrant flirting, however, finding a husband was no simple matter. No decent mama would let her son wed her. Yes, Cicely and Howell were desperate, and soon they began to quarrel over who it would be. She laughed at Howell and told him she’d have nothing less than a wealthy husband. Indeed, she said she deserved it, if you can believe that.” The woman began to sob quietly. “She thought herself so very, very shrewd.”
“I—I am so sorry, Lady Howell,” murmured Evangeline, but she was almost certain that her guest had ceased to hear anything save her own echoing voice.
Lady Howell drew another ragged breath. “At last, it appeared that Godfrey Moore—Lord Cranham’s bastard—might offer for her, though he had neither title nor fortune to recommend him. Cicely had flirted quite coyly with him throughout the season, yet she turned up her nose when he finally came to the point. I flew into a rage! I told Howell to make her accept him. To get her out of my house! God help me, I even asked Papa to pressure Howell, and so he did. He threatened to cut Howell off. And that made him desperate.”
“And then what happened?” Evangeline’s hands, too, had begun to shake.
“Within the week, Lord Elliot Armstrong arrived from Scotland. He was wealthy and handsome, but in truth little more than a country innocent. He knew nothing of town, for his father had not been disposed toward London. But his parents decided it was time he wed, and his mother insisted on an English bride, and so he was sent down for the season.”
“Oh!” answered Evangeline in a strange, tight voice.
“Yes. Lady Rannoch had planned to attend her son, but her husband fell ill, and it was agreed that her ladyship’s brother would keep an eye on the boy. How laughably ironic! Sir Hugh was too busy light-skirting to worry about his nephew. By the time he realized what was afoot, Elliot had sent the betrothal announcement to the Times.”
Evangeline gasped. “What did you do, Lady Howell?”
“Nothing,” she answered in a grim whisper. “I did nothing then. And I did nothing when Rannoch returned from Scotland to find my niece’s belly beginning to swell with child.” Lady Howell exhaled suddenly, her eyes focused somewhere far away. “I must own, I admired that boy’s nerve. He may have loved her to distraction, but he was hardly the besotted fool Cicely thought him. He saw the way of things at once and stormed out of the house. But he made one faulty assumption and challenged Godfrey Moore. Again, another irony …”
“In what way?” asked Evangeline, her hand fluttering weakly to her temple.
Lady Howell gave a sharp, bitter laugh. “Cicely could have had Godfrey, but she held out for Rannoch’s money, and that stung Godfrey’s pride. By the time she realized Rannoch wouldn’t have her, Godfrey had been shipped off to India to avoid Rannoch’s challenge—or the scandal, rather—for his father wouldn’t have much cared if Godfrey’d been shot dead.”
“And then what happened?”
“I don’t know!” Her haunted voice broke then, and she began to sob in earnest. “Cicely never deserved such a fine young man. His storming out that night was the last straw. I ordered Howell to get the girl out of my house. A few weeks later, I learned of her death.” Lady Howell’s voice began to rise, taking on a hysterical edge. “After that, I wanted to know nothing further! I never asked!”
“Calm yourself, Lady Howell,” insisted Evangeline, struggling to maintain her own composure. “You are not at fault.”
“But I am! Had I done as I ought, and spoken out—”
“Oh? To say what?” challenged Evangeline softly. “That your husband was an incestuous pig? Had you any proof ?”
“No, but by saying nothing, I let an innocent man suffer. And now we see what has come of heaping silence upon sin!” Her already homely face had crumpled into a hideously swollen mass, and tears were streaming down her r
eddened cheeks. Violent, choking sobs began to wrack her broad shoulders, jerking her repeatedly as she bent almost double.
Wordlessly, Evangeline left her seat and slid onto the sofa next to Lady Howell. She wrapped her arm around the wretched woman and tried to make some sense of all that she had heard.
There was some truth in what the woman said. An innocent young man had been allowed to pay the price for another’s grievous sin. It horrified her, and she wondered to what extent, if any, this poor woman was to blame. What, given such terrible circumstances, would most wives have done? Evangeline did not know the answer to that question. But as she watched Lady Howell, tormented by guilt, she realized that whatever crime this woman might have committed, she was now paying a horrific price. No doubt, she had done so for many years and would continue to do so for as many more.
Slowly, Lady Howell collected herself and began to wipe her face. “Oh, Lady Rannoch! I pray you will forgive me. Please forgive me for everything that I have done. Everything that I have allowed to happen—”
Evangeline took her hand into her own and pressed it encouragingly. “You are indeed forgiven, Lady Howell, for whatever part is mine to forgive. But indeed, ma’am, I do not understand why you are telling me this today, after all these years.”
Lady Howell’s face drew into a taut, bitter expression. “Because it will all come out now. I cannot help it. Moreover, I no longer care. I shall go abroad as soon as the funeral is over. My husband’s death releases me from any obligation I may have had to protect him.”
“Your husband’s death?” Evangeline stared at the woman in horror.
Lady Howell lifted her gaze to hold Evangeline’s. Her bleary eyes were wide with alarm. “Yes, my lady, his death. Have you not understood me? My husband attacked Lord Cranham. At Vauxhall last night. Rannoch tried to intervene, then Matthew Winthrop was forced to shoot …”
As Lady Howell’s words faded away, Evangeline felt caught in a tangle of emotion. She struggled to understand the implications of Lady Howell’s convoluted tale. “Why would Lord Howell—?” she managed to whisper.
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