“She’s a very pretty thing, I recall. And while I realize she might not be one’s first choice for a wife, from her letters I suspect there are depths to her well worth—”
“Go to hell, Merrick!” Thomas shouted. The violence in his sudden outburst startled Ash to such an extent that he stopped in the midst of experimentally swinging the épée he’d chosen and regarded his opponent with dawning incredulity.
“Begads! You offered and she declined,” he breathed in fascinated tones.
Thomas did not reply. Instead he gave Ash a cursory salute. “En garde!”
With no recourse but to defend Fia’s honor, Ash returned the salute, and both men engaged. They fought in silence, Ash on the attack, Thomas proficiently parrying his thrusts. Both men’s increasingly harsh breath condensed in the chill air, the dew glistening on their hair as the wet grass beneath their feet grew slick.
Some minutes passed before Ash realized that Thomas fought from an entirely defensive posture, taking no advantage of his lunges to riposte. The fleche he performed met no stop-thrust or counterattack, merely mechanical blocking. Oh, Thomas masked his intent, but most of the exploratory finesses Ash attempted met with success. Twice he’d pierced Thomas’s defense, drawing blood first from his shoulder and then from his wrist. With the realization of what Thomas hoped to achieve, anger flowed through Ash’s lean body.
He was being set up as Thomas’s executioner.
Furiously he drove inside, determined to hammer Thomas’s hand guard with as much force as possible, striking the blade from the bastard’s hand. Then … they would have a little talk.
Thomas countered perfunctorily, his apathy further inciting Ash’s ire. Ash ground his teeth together, dodging beneath a slapdash lunge and—
“No!” A woman’s voice rang in the mist-drenched silence. “No!”
Both men lowered their weapons and turned. A slight feminine figure raced down the knoll, her petticoats swirling about her feet, her black ringlets rippling behind her. In a trice she was down the hill and pitching herself at Donne’s rigid figure, wrapping her slender bare arms around his torso and pressing her head against his chest.
“No!” She turned to Ash. “Stop this. I could not bear it were either of you to cause the death of the other.”
It was Fia. Ash stared at her in disbelief. Perfect, composed, suave Fia. She’d not dressed completely, her gown was loosened, her hair a tumbled tangle, and her feet—By God! Her feet were bare.
“Go home, Fia,” Ash heard Thomas say. He’d made no move to touch Fia; his hands remained at his sides, the épée’s point buried in the ground.
“No. Not until you stop this,” Fia said, and to Ash, “You can’t hurt him because of what he did, what he tried to do, so many years ago, Ash. He had cause. Just cause. He isn’t Thomas Donne. He’s Thomas McClairen. And he’s bought McClairen’s Isle and he’s deeded it to you!”
Ash looked up at Thomas’s impassive face. “Is this true?”
“What difference does it make?”
“A bold bit of difference, I’d say,” came a furious rejoinder as Raine Merrick strode toward them through the thickening fog. “Because if old Ash here hadn’t succeeded in killing you, I was going to have a go. And my wife, who will have much explaining to do when I return home”—his face was dusky with emotion—“might have had a few things to say about my killing her brother, you damned heathen Scot!”
“I don’t suppose she would be any more pleased if I killed her husband,” Thomas returned coldly, and would have stepped forward to meet Raine but for the fact that Fia held him so tightly, so tenaciously that he could not move without hurting her. He grasped her arms, determined to pull himself free, but when his efforts caused her to flinch, he gave up, the anger in his face turning to agonized frustration.
“Ah, little sister,” Raine said softly. “How good of you to join us.”
“Don’t speak to her in that fashion,” Thomas said. “Can’t you see how this is hurting her?”
Both brothers looked at Fia. Ash frowned. Fia’s ravishingly beautiful face was as smooth and unreadable as ever. If Thomas thought he read something in that enigmatic—
Ash tossed down his sword, wheeled around, and grabbed his larger, younger brother by the arm. “We’re going now,” he said loudly. “And you needn’t fear we’ll return to finish this nonsense.”
“But Fia’s honor!” protested Raine.
“Is already being well tended, you ass,” Ash hissed as he half dragged Raine behind him.
Silence descended on the couple standing in a parody of a lovers’ embrace.
“Please, Fia.” His voice was thick with pleading. “Don’t interfere like this again.”
“I’ll interfere every single time you put yourself in danger. Every time,” she declared hotly.
His big, taut body trembled against her.
“Then what am I to do?” he asked faintly, in a voice unlike any Fia had ever heard from him. “You will not renounce me and you will not have me,” he said. “And I find I must have one or the other.”
She smiled softly at that, at the gruff insistence in his voice, at the hard, uncompromising slant of his brows. He’d wrested victory from enslavement, found and brought home his Scottish clan, and fought to regain their island; he’d never known lasting defeat.
But it was possible to live with it. It had to be.
“No,” she said quietly. “You have only to turn away from this place and leave. I know it will hurt you to feel that you abandoned me, but you haven’t. I forgive you for abducting me. Do you need society to forgive you as well? I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“You know that’s not what I want,” he said.
“Then it’s society’s absolution of me you seek, and there’s no reason to do so, because I do not care for society’s approval or condemnation. See? Once again your suit is unwarranted.”
“But you will,” he said tensely. “Someday you will want a home and family of your own and a man to share it.”
How could she reply? Tell him that she would never want anyone but him?
“I know, Fia,” he said slowly, his voice low and resonant, “that you think yourself lesser than others and I know I did that to you. I would cut my heart from my chest if it would take back my words.”
She put her fingers over his lips, but he drew them away, holding them tightly in his fist.
“You never acted on any hateful thought or impulse. You married a rich man and when he died you loved his children so much that you were willing to sacrifice your future for them.
“You found the means to set yourself forever free of a monster and you gave it up, had given it up before I ever said a word. I know about the letters, Fia. Swan told Johnston, who told me. Just as I know you would never have used them to procure your own freedom.”
“I might have,” she denied.
“No.” His gaze was clear, focused, absolutely certain. “You never acted on the darker impulses, but I did. I purposefully played the part of friend to your brother and then used that friendship to hurt him,” he said, his voice ragged and low. “Yet you forgave me. You never even challenged me with it. Being Carr’s daughter does not diminish who you are, Fia, it only testifies to how extraordinary you are.”
She caught back a sob. She had never dared think of being Carr’s daughter as anything other than a stigma, a poison that she carried. He couldn’t mean it.
“It’s easy to be good, Fia, if you are never tempted.”
“I am no saint, Thomas.”
She could not lift her gaze; her hands remained folded at her waist, her fingers curling round one another. She stared at his boots, vaguely aware that the wet grass had soaked them through, and then that her own feet were wet and cold.
“Please, Fia. I love you.” His eyes were afire. “Do you love me?”
“Yes,” she exclaimed, surprised into honesty by the stunning realization that he’d not known.
“Then be my w
ife!”
“Oh, Thomas, however you look at it, whatever you hope to see in it, I am still Carr’s daughter.” There it was, the inescapable truth, and yet it never had felt so much true as inescapable. She did not wait for his reply, for there was no reply to such an unassailable fact. She turned, forcing her numb legs to move, her gaze fixed unseeingly on the blank empty fog that surrounded her.
“Fia.”
She kept walking.
“Fia!”
A few more steps and she would be lost in the soft, cool, faceless void.
“For God’s sake, Fia. Please.” His voice broke on the last words, bringing her spinning around. Pain and sleeplessness and hunger had taken its toll, but it was she ultimately who’d accomplished what no sadistic gaoler, no harsh transport ship’s galley guard, no bond-master’s whip had accomplished; she’d broken the spirit holding that great, tall body defiantly straight. He was on one knee, one palm flat against the earth, his head bowed as though he’d taken a blow.
He looked up. His eyes were like stones, and she hated herself for hurting him.
“What can I do, Fia? I swear to you that Carr’s blood in you is no curse. I would give you my heart’s blood, but you will not let me.”
She approached him slowly, more fearful than she’d ever been of anything in her life, a small tentative hope unfurling its fragile wings. His ravaged gaze scoured her face, and what he read there ignited a fierce light to his dimmed eyes. He pushed himself to his feet and waited for her.
“Thomas, don’t you know who I am?”
But this time Thomas answered with poignant certainty. “Why, you are yourself, Fia. No more, no less, and that is what you have always been and always will be. My love, my life, more than I ever dreamed was possible, and far more than I will ever be able to surrender. So either bury this blade in me, Fia, or be mine. Forever.”
The tears started in her eyes and they would not stop; they fell from her gem-colored eyes and coursed unimpeded down her cheeks, wetting her lips and dropping from her chin.
Blinded, she reached out, stumbled, and before she’d taken her second step she was in his arms, his embrace like steel bands, his heart thundering against hers, and he was kissing her lips, her cheeks, her eyelids, her temples, and her mouth.
“Forever,” she vowed.
Chapter 27
MAIDEN’S BLUSH
MCCLAIREN’S ISLE
SEPTEMBER, 1766
The flinty land-bridge connecting McClairen’s Isle to the headland was in danger of being submerged by the rising tide. The hired chaise had gone only a third of the way across when the driver thought better of the proposition, no matter what the monetary incentive, and gave his passenger the option of turning back or going the rest of the way on foot.
Ronald Merrick, Earl of Carr, chose to go on. He emerged from the carriage and tossed the driver a coin and waited for the peasant to be gone.
He turned, one hand on his hip, the other poised on the silver knob of his walking cane, and regarded the great hulk of Maiden’s Blush. Gray, monolithic, workers crawling over her surface like termites on a nest.
Lud, he loathed the place. Particularly as someone—presumably Thomas McClairen—was endeavoring to rebuild it in keeping with the deplorable style in which he’d originally found it. Perhaps, Carr thought, he would repossess it, particularly since he’d found it necessary to leave London for a while.
He began walking up the land-bridge, his countenance rippling with hatred, like worms beneath a thin silk glove. Not that he was destroyed. No! Not by a far cry. He still possessed damning evidence against many important and powerful people, and if since his return from France one or two—or perhaps more, why should he keep count?—had flown in the face of his wrath and exposed their little secrets themselves, well, not everyone develops balls so late in life.
He approached the base of the castle, careful to keep out of sight of the workers as he headed round back, toward the sea-facing facade, where he could enter the place unseen.
So what if his name was anathema and people who’d last month crept on their knees to petition him now crossed the street to avoid him? His malevolent gaze turned to the castle. He’d been told the wretched place had burned to ashes. All of it. Who would have foreseen that his second packet of materials would survive and be found by his darling youngest child?
Once more, hatred erupted like a boil on his features. With a deep steadying inhalation he brought himself under control. Fia and her paramour, Thomas McClairen, would pay, in spite of Tunbridge’s efforts to thwart his revenge against the Scotsman.
Carr dug inside his jacket for the front page of the London Times newspaper, and reread the letter reproduced there.
I, James Wells, Lord Tunbridge, do hereby avow as my last act on earth the truth of the testimony provided herein. I, James Wells, Lord Tunbridge, in anticipating that Ronald Merrick, Earl of Carr, will denounce Thomas Donne and subsequently accuse him of being the traitor and deported criminal Thomas McClairen, offer incontrovertible proof that this man is not the aforementioned Thomas McClairen and that Lord Carr’s enmity and spite have led him to make this accusation in the hopes of bringing about an innocent man’s death.
I know Thomas Donne is not Thomas McClairen because I, James Wells, killed Thomas McClairen in cold blood at the behest of Ronald Merrick on February the 20, 1752, in a tavern in Kingston, on the island of Jamaica. I did this for no reason other than to fulfill Lord Carr’s command, because of his long-standing hatred of the McClairens, just as I have killed others at his behest, including his butler, Rankle.
I can no longer live with my deeds and so now commit myself to God’s mercy, swearing this and everything I have written herein to be true, as God is my judge. May He have mercy on my soul.
James Wells, Lord Tunbridge
Clever, Carr thought. Tunbridge actually had once been arrested in Kingston for the murder of “persons unknown.” As to the rest … apparently Tunbridge had not placed much faith in his God’s mercy, since he’d offered his eternal soul testifying to a lie just before severing his wrists.
But why? Carr lifted his hand, as though holding a silent exchange with another. Tunbridge must have hated McClairen for achieving what Tunbridge had spent years trying for, a way into Fia’s bed.
“Because he hated you more than McClairen.”
At the sound of that long-silent voice, Carr wheeled around, smiling.
“Ah, Janet. I knew you’d speak to me someday soon. Over your sulks, are you?”
Lud, she was lovely. Her dark eyes sparkled and her hair fell in rich, ebony waves. Her one-sided smile, so piquant, so enchanting, lit her white face. He truly had loved her.
She curtsyed, her lovely face alight with humor. “I might be.”
“And perhaps you ‘might be’ right about Tunbridge,” he said magnanimously.
“I know I am. Why are you here, Ronald?”
He waved his cane in the air. “I’ve come to kill McClairen.”
“Ah,” she exhaled. “Why?”
“Poor, simple Janet. Because if I kill McClairen others will see that I am still a man to fear, a man to obey, a force to be reckoned with.”
She laughed, the ghostly trill like sunlight dancing on water, and beckoned him closer.
“I don’t think so,” she said as he approached. She turned, floating above the flinty ground, as graceful as a feather on water. He followed her, mesmerized by her beauty, captivated as he’d been so many years ago by her freshness, her obvious adoration of him.
“Wait! What don’t you think?”
She looked over her shoulder at him, gesturing for him to come with her. “I don’t think that’s the real reason you’re here, Ronald.”
How dare she question him!
“Really?” He invested the word with haughty intonation, but she only laughed again and moved on, and he hastened to follow her.
“I think you want to kill Thomas because as long as he lives, the McClairen
s will have won!” she whispered like a naughty child revealing a secret.
“They haven’t won!”
“But they will.” She finally stopped.
“Oh, yes, Ronald,” an older feminine voice said.
He turned slowly. An old hag stood before him, bent beneath the weight of her gray dress, a black veil draped across half her face, leaving exposed a twisted and deformed countenance, a smashed nose, a drooping eye, a slack and malformed mouth.
“Who are you?” he demanded, angered that she should have interrupted his conversation with Janet.
“Gunna,” she said.
He searched his memory. “You’re Fia’s nurse!”
“Aye.”
He snorted. “Begad, does she keep such as you around still? Has she quite lost her faculties?” He laughed cruelly, glancing over his shoulder to see if Janet appreciated his wit. Her gaze was fixed on the deformed creature in front of him, clear recognition in her pretty black eyes.
“No. But methinks you have,” Gunna said. There was something wrong. The way she spoke … His eyes widened. Where was the creature’s thick, near unintelligible burr? Why did she suddenly sound like Janet?
“Who are you?”
“I told you,” she said. “Gunna.”
“No.” He shook his head, violently aware as he did so that Janet was mimicking him, her spectral head shaking in increasing agitation as she mouthed the words, “No, no, no.”
Gunna’s mouth pleated into some semblance of a smile. “But there was a time, a long time ago, when I was someone else. Someone who no longer exists.”
“Who’s that?” he demanded, a little river of fear running through his bowels.
“Janet McClairen,” she said softly.
He jerked his head around and met Janet’s impish smile. She shrugged expressively. “Impossible,” he said. “I killed you. I pitched you from—” He stopped abruptly and looked about as if coming out of a daze. Only then did he realize where he was, where she’d led him.
He stood on the cliff path beyond the old kitchen garden, above the rocks where Janet had died. In horror he stared as the surf below bludgeoned the shoreline.
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