Ash Paignton, Eswara's son, Ellen's husband
Ellen Jerome Paignton, Martin's cousin, Ash's wife, Georgina's sister
(for their story, see The Model Husband)
Simon Drake, Assistant to Randall Avenel
Gabrielle Drake, Simon's beloved, devoted sister to Lucinda
(For their story, see Madness)
Lucinda Howell, wife of the Earl of Oxnard, locked in Bedlam mental asylum
Baby Christopher, her son
CHAPTER ONE
Miranda lay on her back in the straw in a haze of pain. Every breath was agony, and she could barely move without wincing. Motes of dust twinkled through the cracks in the wall of the old wooden barn, giving her a tiny ray of hope.
She heard the creaking of the door as it opened. She pushed the heavy fall of dark hair from her eyes and stared as a small child of about five came in.
Miranda released her breath in sheer relief. They hadn’t found her. Probably wouldn’t now. They had had their sport, after all…
She had ruined it by convincing them she was amenable to their disgusting acts in order to get them to free her from the manacles that had bound her. It had been the performance of her life. Literally.
Her stomach heaved at the mere thought of it. But the ruse had worked. No sooner had they unchained her than she had picked up and flung the heavy dressing table stool. She's smashed the window and jumped out straight after it.
She didn't remember much after the pit of darkness had reached up to snatch her in its maw, but some instinct had led her to the relative shelter of the barn.
As for the men who had imprisoned her, they might have assumed her to be dead on the slabs below, or hoped she had crawled into a stream bed and drowned. They might be looking for her, but who was to say she was not already with the authorities, telling all that had befallen her.
She hoped the miserable cowards would flee rather than pursue her. Otherwise, they would probably make up some plausible story, much as Oxnard had when he had convinced her to marry him, and then….
She shuddered again and her shiver set the straw arustling.
The child now caught sight of the bloodied naked woman and screamed. "Mum! Mum! Look! There's a…" The tiny footsteps scampered off into the distance.
Miranda fell back against the straw, feeling the darkness only a heartbeat away, closing in on her once more. She almost prayed it would take her forever.
But George’s beloved face was in her mind’s eye. Her prayer for a quick death became a fervent plea for the man she truly loved to once more find her, save her…. If he had ever loved her at all….
CHAPTER TWO
George ground his teeth in sheer frustration. Another wrong turn. Gods above, please help me, he prayed. Help me to find her before it's too late.
Becky protested again that they had not really been paying attention to the road on either their jaunt out or back to the village of Oxnard, if that was where they had indeed gone.
But eventually his prayers were answered when she narrowed her dark eyes for a time and then nodded. "I’m sure this is it."
In the daylight, the red-brick Elizabethan manor house looked in a sorry state, as if it had been neglected for years. Not that his own family seat could possibly be much better, he told himself. But then he had always loathed the place. Thought he’d loathed England. Now he could never imagine living anywhere else. Or living with anyone else apart from Miranda…
He felt his fury boiling over as he went up to the front door and rapped sharply with his fist. Only now as he stood on the desolate, windswept stairs feeling vulnerably alone did he wish he had not been so hasty. He should have taken a bit more time to summon Philip Marshall or Alistair Grant to come with him. They might have proven more useful in a fight to get Miranda back than one timid tiny actress with a runny nose who looked terrified of everything, especially him in his anger and despair over losing his beloved.
Miranda married to another? And on the very evening that he was about to propose to her himself? It simply made no sense….
George sighed as he rapped again, this time using the corroded old knocker. What the hell had he hoped to achieve dashing off in a state like this? At the very least he should have brought Daniel. But something told him time was of the essence…
He pounded on the door once more and practically tore the knocker off trying to get a reply. God, this was even worse than being confronted with a smugly smiling bridegroom.
Eventually George descended the front steps and strode all around the house, trying every door and window. Nothing. All locked. There wasn't a sign of life anywhere that he could see.
He felt his heart sink, but told himself to approach the problem logically. He strode around to the back of the house once more, forcing himself to look for any clues as to Miranda having been there.
"You're sure this is the house."
"Aye," she said, after squinting and furrowing her brow. "When we was havin' wine and cake, I remember seeing that old barn from the window."
"This window here, at the back of the house."
She peered and nodded. "Aye, the small drawing room. With books on one wall. She stretched up. "Aye, this is it for sure."
"Good girl, thank you."
As he looked up himself, he noted that one window had been hastily repaired, quite recently by the look of it. It was about ten feet up from where he was standing, and had covered over with some rough planking.
Squatting down underneath it, his heart lurched in his throat. There was broken glass, splinters of wood, and rusty dark stains on the paving slabs.
He drew a finger over one of the stains, scratching it with his nail, and then lifted it to his nose and sniffed. Blood.
George's head swam as he stood and looked up once more. He felt more certain now than he had ever done in his life that Miranda was in terrible danger. Between the bizarre occurrence of her going off with another man and Castlereagh's summons and sneering that he would never see her again, his puppetmasters were once more jerking his strings, he was sure of it. And poor Miranda was the innocent pawn in this struggle for power.
Where Oxnard fit into all of this, he had no idea. Surely the man was too much of a fool and lecher to be a spy. Or was that part of the act, the better to fool people as he had clearly tricked Miranda.
He bunched up his fists, pacing. "Think, George, think. What game is afoot here?"
Miranda had been a more than respectable woman, for all she had started out in his theatre as a orange wench. So she was clearly a woman of some breeding, down on her luck. Oxnard had been a devoted admirer, but then many of the men had been attempting to pursue her. But Oxnard had a title. Seemed respectable, trustworthy. Not much of a seduction there, for she had not seemed to pay him any heed compared to the rest, or his own blandishments, which made him burn with lust and shame just to think about it.
Had she been cast out by her family, and jumped at the chance to get them to take her back again by marring well? Or was something else going on here entirely. He halted in his pacing as he felt his whole body shiver with pain and fear.
"Miranda," he gasped. Now he felt sure she was in trouble, had been betrayed. Castlereagh was behind this, he was sure of it. He knew her. She loved him, not Oxnard and no considerations of rank or fortune would ever make a woman like her marry for anything less than love. She had been tricked in some way, he was sure of it.
Something terrible had happened at the house. At that window. And recently too. Had someone jumped, or had they been pushed?
"Oh, God, no please," he groaned, kneeling on his hands and knees, heedless of the glass grinding into his flesh.
"Sir, sir! ‘Twill do no good to carry on so," Becky said, genuinely alarmed. "There’s no one here, that's clear. We can go ask in the village, see if they know anything. Liz and I were in the coach. They’d have had to take horses or another coach once they were leaving here. I saw only the one, and the coachman said he was the only
one in the Earl's employ when we chatted to him during a rest stop on our way back to town. Someone must know something hereabouts. Come on."
She yanked at his coat sleeve, and eventually got him to his feet. Within half an hour, her guess proved correct. The Earl and his companion had indeed hired a vehicle to take them to Dorset and had left immediately, heading west as fast as if fleeing a town afire.
But it hadn’t been a man and a woman travelling. It had been two men, Oxnard and the vicar only, judging from the descriptions the innkeeper and blacksmith were able to give.
So where on earth was Miranda?
CHAPTER THREE
George tried to pull himself together and subdue his worst fears, that his beloved truly was dead. The broken glass, blood and debris could mean any number of things, including that she had fled her new husband. For her to have done so in such a shockingly dangerous manner, and for what ghastly reason, completely horrified him.
Not sure what else to do now that Oxnard was so far ahead of him on the road with his male companion, he began a door to door search of the district. If she wasn't on her way to Dorset, and she had not taken a conveyance back up to London, according to the innkeeper, then if she were still alive, she had to be nearby.
At every house he was met with blank stares of incomprehension. He described Miranda over and over again, but no one had seen her. Or if they had, they certainly weren’t saying.
George and Becky stayed overnight at the local inn, and tried all over again the next day. He even prowled around the entire estate once more, looking for any sign of earth having been dug up, a hasty burial…
But no. He would not, could not, think her dead. The very idea of her light being gone from his life was so unimaginable he refused to consider it after his first couple of pokes at what proved to be an old compost heap.
Finally he lost all patience and battered down the stout back door to the house. He took the axe from the nearest woodpile and swung it with all his might, smashing in the portal with one mighty blow.
For a house which was so untended on the outside, the interior seemed pristinely clean. That in itself seemed most strange. It was as if whatever had taken place inside was being covered up.
At first, he saw no sign that Miranda had ever even been there, just some empty wine bottles. There were signs of hastily washed up dishes, but since they were all stacked neatly, it was impossible to tell how many people had been there, or whom.
There was no sign of clothing, a reticule, nothing.
Becky looked around in wonder. "There be no servants here. Those two men certainly made a clean sweep of the place. What exactly were they trying to hide?"
"Since Miranda clearly wasn't with them on the coach, I really hate to think what it could be. Come on, keep searching for her, or any idea where she might have gone."
"I don't get it, though. Why would she go anywhere, what with them being married and all? Or do ye reckon the wedding night was so terrible that she---"
George ground his teeth together. "I'll ask her all those questions and more when I find her, damn it. Just keep looking."
"But boss, we've been looking for how many hours now. What will you do if you don't find her?" she ventured to ask as she began to pull out all the drawers of the desk to see if anything of Miranda's might be there.
"You're not to say that, do you hear? I WILL find her. I will. I just have to hurry."
"I'm going to head upstairs, then," she said, backing away from his fury.
It was only when he headed up to the room with the boarded window that he found what he was looking for--one long dark hair on the pillow in the bedchamber.
George tore the rest of the bedding right off, layer by layer until he came to the ticking.
Becky’s eyes widened and George's stomach lurched. He staggered over to the corner convenience just in time and vomited wretchedly into the chamberpot.
He had seen something similar once, in a place the French had used to torture their prisoners. He looked at the bed again, the smudge of blood on the headboard, the scoring of the wood on the bedposts where the manacles had been jerked and twisted.
"That bastard. I’m going to bloody well kill him," he rasped, before swallowing heavily to tamp down the bile still rising in his throat.
Becky said tearfully, "You know you can’t do nothin’, sir. What a man does with his own wife is up to him. It’s the law."
"It’s a bloody sick one, I tell you. Who on earth would do this to the woman they claimed they loved." He collapsed to his knees then as the horrid thought took possession of his mind at last. "Oh, God," he said, head in hands. "She’s dead, isn’t she? Isn’t she!"
She put her hand on his shoulder. "It could have been more than one—"
He shook his head. "That mattress is almost new."
"Well, it’s like this, sir. Blood always looks worse than it really is each month, if you take my meaning."
"Except that it’s everywhere!" he rasped.
He retched again weakly, and she held his head and wished to God she had never allowed Oxnard to talk them into attending a supposedly joyous wedding which had become nothing but a nightmarish blood sacrifice.
CHAPTER FOUR
George reported their horrifying discoveries to the local magistrates, but he was in so wild a state that they didn’t believe any of what he was telling them. Not least because so far as they knew, the Earl of Oxnard was a respectable man with a lovely fair-haired wife who was certainly not called Miranda.
They told him to leave the area at once or he would be hauled up on charges of defamation, not to mention breaking and entering. As for the disappearance of Miranda, well, what was one whore more or less….
Becky had held him back with all her might before he buried his fist in the constable's face, and then hauled him back to the coach.
"What next, Boss?" she demanded once his breathing had leveled off. "They're not interested in helping us, but we need to find her."
George shook his head in despair. He had no real choice other than to head back home, checking at every inn along the way. He had done all he could, though it had been little enough. All hope was dwindling now. He only wished he had asked her where her home was. Perhaps she was not without friends and if she were still alive, had even thrown herself upon the mercy of her family to help her in her time of dire need.
If she had indeed jumped out the window, it would be a miracle that she survived, but she would have to be injured in some way. He needed to find her. Now.
Yet he was only one man. If the person had been pretending to be the Earl of Oxnard had been a friend of his, used the house, he could be anyone, anywhere. He had little enough to go on and would need a great deal more help. At the very least he could send more men down to widen the search. The Devil with what Castlereagh thought or said. In fact, he had half a mind to...
They did stop at every inn to look for Miranda, but it was still daylight when he reached the capital. Castlereagh undoubtedly knew that George was on his way, for the Foreign Office Minister had apparently conveniently disappeared for parts unknown, according to the servants, when George stormed into his home demanding to see him late that afternoon.
Becky had stuck with her employer, terrified at what he might do, and clung onto one of his arms like a terrier with a bone.
Castlereagh’s men were decimated by his fury, even with only one hand, but eventually they regrouped and forcibly hurled him into the gutter in full view of the entire street.
"You tell him if I ever lay eyes on him again, he’s a dead man!" George roared. "A dead man, do you hear me? Do you have any idea what they’ve done?"
Castlereagh listened from the behind the curtains at an upper window and shivered. He didn’t know how, but he was sure that his foolproof little plan had gone badly awry somewhere.
He scurried back to his desk and began to gather his papers and stuff them into a valise willy-nilly, most unlike his usual precise and meticulous
manner.
Maybe he would leave Town for a few days after all...
Becky dragged George to the theatre, convincing him that if there was any chance of Miranda being alive she would have gone back there to find them all.
When they arrived, the theatre was in an uproar. George and Miranda both gone? The audience had been outraged.
Maggie and Hugo had assumed they could keep the lid on things, but their performances were as lacklustre as always, and George found it too painful to watch.
As grim-faced as anyone had ever seen him, he signalled to Daniel, who was up in his box, and told him when he came over, "Just refund everyone’s money and close the theatre until further notice."
The Rakehell Regency Romance Series Boxed Set 6 Page 60