For Love of the Earl

by Jessie Clever

  "But you didn't kill him," Sarah whispered.

  Alec looked at his wife who was sitting next to him on the bunk, obviously being careful not to let any part of her touch him.

  "How do you know?" he asked with a touch more accusation than he intended.

  Sarah's face colored a deep shade of pink.

  "I followed you," she said.

  Alec swallowed the instant burst of anger.

  "You followed me?" he whispered because he really felt like screaming.

  Sarah nodded, not looking at him.

  "I thought maybe she would be there, and I would be able to see what she looked like."

  "Who would be there?" Alec asked, even though he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.

  "You know," Sarah said, shrugging one small shoulder, "Your mistress."

  Alec bobbed his head more than nodded.

  "And why would you want to see my mistress?"

  Sarah shrugged that shoulder again, and Alec wanted to touch her. He wanted to hold her in his arms, so she wouldn't feel so insecure. He didn't like her feeling insecure. She was beautiful and smart and funny and...nice. Sarah was nice. Above everything else, that was what he loved most about her. She had never really been nice to him though, but that didn't really matter. He had seen her be nice to other people, had seen her innate caring sense just seep out of her into others. Had seen the way she didn't know she did it, and how other people were affected by it. And now, he felt like giving her a little of her own caring, so she wouldn't look so sad. If he couldn't make her laugh then maybe he could let her know he cared. Even if he wasn't sure how.

  "There was no mistress," Alec whispered as Sarah continued to look so heartbreakingly miserable.

  "I didn't know that."

  "If there had been a mistress, why would you have wanted to see her?"

  Sarah looked anywhere but at him. He raised his hand and caught her chin, turning her head toward him. She looked at him briefly and then shut her eyes.

  Alec was not going to have this conversation without her looking at him. And if they couldn't talk, there was really only one other thing that he wanted to do just then.

  He kissed her.

  He kissed her softly, gently holding her head between his hands, so she couldn't pull away from him without ripping her ears off. She didn't respond, but he didn't know if that was because she didn't want to or because she was too scared to. He traced the line of her lips, and finally felt a tremble pass through her, but she still didn't participate in the kiss. She stayed still beneath his hands, her lips unmoving. He coaxed her lips open with pressure from his. One of her hands came up to his chest, but it didn't push him away. So he changed the angle and invaded her mouth, invaded her resolve in order to crush it. She moaned softly, and he thought she leaned into him.

  But then she tore herself away from him, and he did nearly rip her ears off. She stood up, ungracefully as the ship pitched beneath her, and slid over to the corner. She wrapped her arms around herself.

  He hated it when she did that.

  "Sarah-"

  The sound of the lock scraping back had him lurching out of his seat. Sarah turned around and took one step toward the door, but he was already in front of her. He stretched out his arms to both sides, brushing the walls of their prison and effectively caging Sarah behind him.

  Harpoon Man stuck his head in the door.

  "C'est," he began but seemed to change his mind, "There is une problem."

  Sarah ducked her head under Alec's arm.

  "Quelle problem?"

  Harpoon Man backed up a step, withdrawing his head from the crack in the doorway. He frowned at Sarah and carefully closed the door.

  Sarah removed her head from under Alec's arm, and Alec heard her take a giant breath.

  Alec turned and looked at her.

  "What?" she said when she realized he was looking.

  Alec shook his head.

  "I only asked him what the problem is," she said as he continued to look at her.

  She opened her mouth a third time, but he cut her off.

  "Why did you want to see her, Sarah?"

  Her mouth remained open and unmoving a full five seconds after he finished his question. And then she swung around to face the corner again.

  So he grabbed her and spun her back around.

  "Sarah, answer me." He paused, watching her nostrils flare. "Please."

  Her eyes went dangerously flat after that, and her nose stopped flaring.

  "I wanted to-" she began, staring hard at his chin.

  He shook her a little when she stalled.

  "I wanted to see what...what..." She shrugged her shoulders beneath his hands. "You know," she finished, looking down at her feet.

  Alec leaned his head down, resting his forehead against hers.

  "Sarah, I-" He didn't know what to say. What could he say that would convince her that it was all right to talk to him? To really talk to him? To pour out her heart to him? But what? Normally, he would have delivered an inappropriate jest just then, but Sarah didn't laugh with him.

  "Sarah," he finally said, "when I was young, about eight or nine, I fell out of a tree and landed on Nathan, who was trying to catch me."

  Sarah's head moved, and Alec straightened to let her look up at him.

  "I squashed him, Sarah. He was unconscious for at least a minute after I landed on him. And I shook his shoulders and slapped his face, but he wouldn't wake up. I thought I'd killed him, Sarah. And I was never so scared in my life. But then he did wake up, and he called me a name, and I started to cry. And then I yelled at him for almost dying on me. By then Father and Jane had heard me screaming and had come running to see what was wrong. I had broken Nathan's arm, but he was alive, and Father carried him back to the house, and everything was fine.

  "But I had nightmares for weeks after that, only in the nightmares, Nathan didn't wake up. I was afraid to sleep at night. I would lie awake and stare at Nathan's bed just to make sure he was breathing. Sometimes I would get so scared, I would go down the hall to Father and Jane's room. I never knocked though. I didn't want my father to think I was scared of something like nightmares. So I just sat on the floor and...listened...and stared at the shapes the moon made on the scary portraits that lined the hallway. "

  Here at least he stopped his story long enough to roll his eyes in mock horror of the portraits at the Lofton estate. But the gesture had no effect on Sarah. No smile came to her face as he had expected it would not. Sarah just watched him, still beneath his hands. His thumbs moved against the softness of her shoulders in a sort of calming motion, and he wondered when they had started doing that.

  "Father and Jane used to talk. All night sometimes. They had only been married then for about three years, and Jane...well, you know about Jane's first marriage, do you not? To the Earl of Doring?"

  Sarah nodded once, but he felt her tremble beneath his hands. The Earl of Doring had abused Jane until he had suddenly dropped dead beneath a lady employed at Madame Hort's House of Leisure.

  "Jane wouldn't talk to Father about her marriage to Doring at first. She wanted to keep all of those terrible things from my father. She didn't want that kind of thing to taint her new happiness. But in the end, she couldn't do it. She couldn't keep all of those things welled up inside her. She needed someone to witness it. She needed someone to know. So she started to tell my father. He knew about most of it anyway, but Jane needed to say it out loud, to have someone listen while she told her story. And I would lie by their door and fall asleep listening to their whispered voices as Jane told my father everything."

  Alec stopped because he didn't know how much to say to make her understand. He had never had such a conversation in his life. She looked at him and not at his chin or his feet, so he thought maybe he'd said enough. And then Sarah opened her mouth, and he felt relief start to spread through him.

  But then the door opened, and Alec was spinning around, covering Sarah with his body.
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  Teyssier stood in the doorway, his unusually blond hair as perfect as before, contrasting starkly with the dark stubble of his jaw.

  "It seems," he said, "That the weather has worsened considerably. I fear we must remain in port until it clears." He adjusted his wrinkled jacket. "I am certain you understand."

  He bent his head and withdrew.

  "Alec?" Sarah whispered, sounding hideously small behind him.

  "I know," Alec nodded, not turning to look at her or moving away so she could move again.

  "Do you think...Thatcher..." Sarah's voice faded away as her reluctance to form the question burned in Alec's ears.

  Alec did turn now and pulled Sarah roughly against him. Her arms came quickly and tightly around him, shocking the breath from him. He held onto her, rocked her in a basic gesture of comfort, comfort for him or her, he didn't know.

  "Thatcher will make it, Sarah. I promise you."

  ~

  Dover, England

  More than a few hours earlier

  "We are going to get bitten from that," Sarah said, wrinkling her nose and taking a step back.

  Alec agreed with her, but he still felt slightly out of sorts from the shock his system had taken from the freezing ride through the English countryside. So he collapsed on the bedbug-ridden mattress in the room they'd been led to at the inn and closed his eyes. He could feel his body turn on its internal repair mechanism, and it was almost as if a charge of energy began to seep through him as his body began to regain its strength.

  He felt the mattress dip as Sarah sat down beside him. He wanted to open his eyes to make sure she was where he thought she was, but he didn't have either the energy or the guts to look.

  She sat right next to him.

  Not on the other side of the bed. But on the side he had collapsed on. She perched on the edge with her back rubbing against his hip. He groaned and turned his head into the extremely smelly pillow.

  "Alec, what's wrong? Are you getting worse?"

  Sarah moved, and he thought she stood, leaning over him. He could smell her and not in a romantic, smells-like-lilacs sort of way. They had been traveling for roughly eight days without any sort of bath, and neither of them smelled like a bouquet of roses.

  But the thought of Sarah leaning over him in concern seemed ridiculous to him. No matter what had happened the last time they had stopped for the day. His body stiffened as memory burned brighter. He groaned again and rolled over burying his face in the pillow, hoping bedbugs would go right for his eyeballs so that pain would block out the excruciatingly dim yet amazingly clear memory of what had occurred during that last stop.

  Then Sarah grabbed his shoulder and shook with such force that he thought his eyeballs would fall out before the bedbugs could get to them.

  "Alec! What is it? Please! Do not frighten me so, my lord!"

  She shook him again, and the bed threatened to collapse at her onslaught.

  "I'm fine," Alec murmured into the pillow.

  He did not need his wife bouncing on the bed with him just then. He really did not.

  Then Sarah slugged him and got off the bed. Alec felt much better.

  "Where are we, do you think?"

  Sarah's voice was further away now. She had probably moved to one of the two windows he had seen before he had collapsed. The sun was just starting to rise, and a thin crack of orange spread through the drab curtains and illuminated their various holes and tears.

  "Dover," he mumbled.

  "Really?"

  He heard the rustling of her skirts as she turned toward him.

  "Yes."

  "What are we going to do?"

  Alec rolled over and opened his eyes but didn't even contemplate sitting up.

  "Unless you have the strength to take on the two men standing outside our door, the ones with the pistols in their belts, then I think we do nothing," he said, looking up at the cobwebs spread over the ceiling.

  "So we're just going to let them take us without a fight?"

  "We already fought. Well, at least I fought. Feel free to engage in your own fight though. I won't stop you."

  "Must you be so immature at a time like this?"

  And wasn't that the truth put into words? Sarah thinking him immature when all Alec ever tried to do was to make her smile. Was to make her love him. If she thought he was being immature, she should really enjoy him when he was being downright childish.

  "We should do something," Sarah whispered, but he wasn't sure she was speaking to him any longer.

  Sarah moved the curtains then, letting in more of the strengthening daylight. Their captors only moved them during the night, so it had been quite a while since they had seen much of the daylight. Mostly, they had tried to sleep when they weren't being bounced around in a carriage, or for Alec, being raced through a blinding, numbingly cold rainstorm without a jacket or a hat tied to the top of the carriage. That was something he did not want to relive. Hell, he didn't want to live it the first time.

  But it wasn't the cold or the stinging rain or the jarring every time the carriage had hit a rut that had tormented him. It was all the images that plagued his mind when he thought of Sarah left alone in the carriage with the oaf with the gold teeth. You can call me Sven, he had said. Alec had called him every name but Sven in those long hours on top of the carriage. Thinking on what that bastard could have been doing to his wife had stabbed deeper than any of the shafts of rain that had pierced him.

  Of course, what had happened after they had untied him from the top of the carriage and hauled him into that shack where he and Sarah were to remain for the day had helped cure him of any of the lingering fear of what had happened to Sarah, but then it had made everything in general by far worse than it had previously been.

  "Is that Matthew Thatcher?"

  Alec was out of bed and standing at the window faster than he had ever thought he could possibly move mere seconds before. He leaned over Sarah's shoulder, unconsciously wrapping his arm around her waist to draw her to the side so he could see. He didn't notice how she stiffened at his touch.

  "That is Thatcher."

  Matthew Thatcher's decidedly American hat was fairly hard to miss in England, but now it was hardly perceived as Dover was a port town and saw all sorts of people. Thatcher could be any bloke off of any ship that had made port at Dover. People sifted past him on their way to the shops that were just opening. Thatcher stood almost directly across the street, his head bent as he lit a slim cigar. The light of the match cast his face in an unearthly glow.

  "He doesn't smoke," Sarah said.

  Alec, whose arm was still around his wife, shook his head. "It's a signal."

  "A signal?"

  "He's telling us he knows we're here, but he's going for help."

  "Why is he going for help? There are only two of them out there!" Sarah whispered so harshly it was almost loud.

  "I don't know," Alec whispered, feeling unease settle on his bones like a jacket that was tailored too snugly on one side.

  Thatcher looked up, his cigar clenched between his teeth. Alec met his eyes briefly, but Thatcher was already turning away.

  Sarah spun around so quickly Alec almost fell off of his feet.

  "What are you thinking, Stryden?"

  Sarah's eyes were squinted to an unnaturally sinister degree, and Alec backed away.

  "I think this is much bigger than two men outside our door."

  He stepped further away.

  "I think we've been brought here to be exchanged. Traded."

  "What?" Sarah's mouth moved into a serious sneer of doubt. It was a look with which Alec was well acquainted.

  "Thatcher could have taken those two men," Alec pointed at the door as if Sarah could see who was standing beyond it. "But he didn't. I think there's something much bigger and much worse than we had originally thought."

  "Like what and why? Why are you so important?"

  Alec frowned at her. "I know you do not think very highly of me,
but in some circles, I'm quite the thing."

  He sat down on the bed with greater force than he had intended, and the bed sagged precariously. Both he and Sarah stopped to watch and see if it would completely break. It didn't, so Sarah picked up the conversation.

  "What I think of you is not important. Why do others think you're so important?"

  "I'm a titled spy. Meaning I'm a nobleman in a dangerous, potentially treasonous position."

  "Treason? How do you figure treason into this?"

  "I could be bought."

  "No, you couldn't," Sarah said, which had Alec looking up at her sharply. But then her face paled, and Alec knew she hadn't meant to blurt that out.

  "You're right. I can't be bought, no matter the price. But they don't know that. So, I'm valuable in the right hands."

  "And now, French hands want you?"

  Alec stared at her as the images that question suggested floated in his head. Sarah blushed, and Alec thought he could probably savor her embarrassment, but for some reason, it tasted sour. So he continued on in a rush to let her awkwardly worded question slip by unnoticed.

  "Yes, but for what is the real question. And why go through all this trouble to get me to Dover?"

  "There can't be anything going on in Dover. This place is filled with agents. Your father said so."

  "He did?" Alec asked.

  Sarah nodded. "The morning you left I went to his house to look for you. At breakfast, he said nothing could be going on in Dover because there were so many agents here."

  Alec felt a familiar dislike grip his stomach. "I'm glad to hear that my sudden departure did not cause you such anxiety as to upset your appetite."

  Sarah opened her mouth, but her eyes darted quickly to the side. Alec felt the hairs on the back on of his neck rise. Sarah was hiding something.

  "My appetite is not the point, my lord," Sarah said to the wall behind him. "Why is Dover important? Why did they bring you here?"

  The door swung open then, and Sven walked in carrying a basket covered in a dirt smudged cloth. He flashed his gold teeth.

  "To trade the earl, of course," Sven said, answering Sarah's question.

  Alec had the sudden urge to say I told you so to Sarah, but he thought she would find such a gesture immature as well. So he settled for crossing his arms over his chest in victory.