“I do not want to enjoy myself with them or any other females.” He paced across the room and stood behind her, trying to read her expression in the mirror. “I want my wife’s company.”
“No, Kieran, you do not want me to embarrass you in front of your guests.” She stood up and let her dressing gown slip to the floor. “Look at me.”
She wore only a chemise. The soft, white fabric clung to her, revealing every curve—breasts far larger than when he met her and a taut, round belly.
“I’m too big,” Deirdre said, and started to cry. “Even Sally says that her mother never looked this big this far along, and all her children have been plump and happy when they were born. I know it’s yours, but how can I convince you now?”
“I should believe you because you say so.” He produced his own handkerchief and slipped it into her hands, then wrapped his arms around her. Guilt nearly strangled him. “I never should have doubted you for a moment.”
She wiped at her eyes. “But you do doubt me, if you’re honest.”
“I did not until . . . the talk . . . I do not know about these female things. Joanna was barely showing but had to be five months along when she fainted and I loosened her stays so she could—Deirdre, stop.”
Mention of Joanna made Deirdre cry harder. “I am not Joanna.”
“I know.” He retrieved her dressing gown and wrapped it around her, then held it in place with his hands on her belly.
She curled her hands around his wrists. “Right now I wish this was your neck I had my hands around.”
“I know.” He stroked her through the silk of her chemise.
The past six weeks of celibacy, sleeping in his own room at her request, began to take their toll.
He groaned. “I wish I could trust you not to do something stupid behind my back. Right now—”
She pushed him away with an elbow to his belly. “You have guests waiting.”
“So do you. Without you, we are a female short, and I cannot sit out dinner without offending my sister and the Cantrells.”
“Invite Miss Pruitt down. She may as well be bored in company than in her rooms.”
“We would rather have you. You are far more enjoyable to grace our presence.”
“A female who looks as I do right now is not fit for that company.”
“I do not know any female I find more beautiful.”
“I understand how you earned your reputation with females if you have always talked like that to my sex.” She slipped away from him and shoved her arms into the sleeves of her dressing gown. “Go down and charm the ladies. Juliet will be crushed if you aren’t there. She doesn’t want me there looking like I swallowed last year’s jack-o’-lantern. And tell your mama—discreetly of course—that Madame Blanchette did not make the extra seams quite deep enough on my gown.”
Kieran started to protest, but her clock said five minutes past eight of the clock, and Mama would likely send up Father or Chloe if he did not return soon. Besides, Deirdre looked honestly weary as she sank onto the chaise. Dark circles shadowed her eyes, and the corners of her mouth drooped.
“As much as I wish to stay and persuade you to let me back into your bed, I will go.” He settled for a chaste kiss on her lips. “I will be back as early as I can.”
“I will be in bed.”
Hoping she was softening toward him and that was an invitation, he cast her a warm smile and departed.
Mama met him halfway up the stairs. “Is something amiss?”
He shook his head. “She is feeling embarrassed about her condition.”
“Of course. I will send up for Miss Pruitt.” She drew her brows together. “I should be preparing to take the girls to London, but I dislike leaving Deirdre in these last few months. She could deliver as soon as—”
“The end of June at the soonest.” He spoke with finality.
She patted his arm. “Of course, my dear. Let’s go down to the company.”
He went down. He played the gallant to the ladies present, and all the while he wanted to end the separation from his wife.
He wasn’t going to be separated from her that night. He knew it the moment he walked into the bedchamber and saw her in bed curled on her side, her hair spread out on the pillow, not braided. Quickly, he undressed and crawled in beside her.
Her skin was freezing.
“I had to get up.” She sounded sleepy. “You know how things are.”
“Yes, but—” Suspicion raised its ugly head. “The room is warm.”
She inched away from him. “Of course it is.” Her tone was as cold as her skin. “I built up the fire before getting back into bed.” She nestled against him. “Warm me.”
He warmed them both, but for all the pleasure he found in being with her, he could not set aside the burden of knowing something was missing between them.
Deirdre grew to look so burdened in body and spirit the next few weeks he feared the worst. When he tried to talk to her about why she seemed so sad, she said she wished the war would end and that she could at least walk along the sea, if not sail upon it.
Neither seemed likely. The weather was foul and the war showed no signs of ending soon. America had yet to win a decisive land battle, and she had no navy to speak of, yet she had defeated two British naval vessels, and her privateers were decimating Britain’s merchant shipping.
Needing something to do, he asked his father if he could take over the running of Hampshire for the spring lambing and planting rather than waiting until autumn after harvest.
“Besides,” he concluded, remembering Deirdre’s ice-cold skin the night of Juliet’s birthday, “she will not need to be such a prisoner that far from Dartmoor. And with the girls in London, we will all be safe from any machinations those two can conjure.”
“The girls are not going to London,” Tyne announced. “Chloe refuses to go, and Phoebe will not take Juliet without Chloe there to help watch over her.”
“Can you not make Chloe go, sir?”
Tyne raised his eyebrows.
Kieran laughed. “No, I can understand that that would not be a wise idea.”
“Nor, I think,” Tyne said, “would taking Deirdre from here be wise. Her condition seems to be her best jailer at present, and Phoebe wants the midwife here to attend her. She does not know anyone reliable in Hampshire.”
“Of course.” He had to leave the female details in his mother’s hands. “But, sir, I need something to occupy my time. She seems to barely abide the sight of me, let alone want me near her.”
The night of Juliet’s birthday had been the last time she welcomed him for more than another body in her bed to stave off the winter chill. Tyne’s smile was grim. “Just wait until she enters her confinement. Even your mother said some rude things about me then.”
Kieran grimaced. “She does not seem to like me overmuch at the moment as it is. How can matters get worse?”
As spring touched the countryside with daffodils and crocuses blooming in Mama’s garden, Deirdre told Kieran to return to his own bed. “I’m too uncomfortable at night to have someone else about. If I want to sit up, I want to do it without disturbing you.”
“You may disturb me all you like.”
“Please, Kieran, I don’t want you seeing me in my nightgown any longer. I look ghastly.”
“I think you look rather beautiful. So . . . well, um—”
“Fertile?” She frowned at her middle. “I feel like a Dutch round ship. Now leave me in peace.”
He left her, but whether or not she had peace, he did not know. He did know that he experienced anything but comfort alone in his bed, waking to every creak of a floorboard or draft of air across his face. He expected to stumble into her chamber in the middle of the night and find her gone, though he couldn’t imagine how she would manage to leave. Footmen guarded each end of their corridor at night, and groundskeepers patrolled the outside of the house. Yet more than once, he did rise and look in on her. Each time, she at least pretended
to sleep, half sitting up against a mound of pillows.
You are a fool, Ashford.
But he could not help himself.
So he welcomed the urgent message his father received in the first week of April requesting that someone post off to Bishops Down in Hampshire, at once.
“Seems that someone is stealing the lambs,” Father reported over breakfast.
“That is horrid,” Juliet cried. “Why would someone steal lambs?”
“Fricassee,” Chloe murmured.
Juliet glared at her. “You are the horrid one. Papa, what shall you do?”
“Go, of course. Kieran?”
Kieran rose. “I will come, too. You can take this opportunity to introduce me to the estate manager.”
“But who will be our jailers?” Chloe asked with too much sweetness.
Kieran smiled. “Deirdre is, at present, providing her own jailer. And as for you”—he met and held her gaze—“you will do nothing to endanger this family, will you?”
Chloe did not so much as blink. “I never have.”
“That is debatable,” Father said.
“You can trust me not to do anything stupid,” Chloe said.
“If she thinks the prison is so terrible,” Juliet added, “she would never want one of us to end up there.”
“Wise child.” Kieran rumpled Juliet’s hair, kissed his mother on the cheek, and ran upstairs to bid Deirdre to take care of herself.
The morning after Tyne and Kieran departed for Hampshire, Deirdre found a use for the laudanum. She dosed her morning chocolate, then offered it to Sally, who was eager to take the special treat. On the ground floor, Chloe carried mugs of hot, sweet tea and more laudanum to men patrolling the grounds between terrace and parkland. It worked better than had the rum Deirdre gave the men aboard the Maid in St. George’s Harbor. Later, if Tyne was inclined to dismiss the men for sleeping at their posts, Deirdre would confess what she had done to lay them blameless. Worse confinement for her wouldn’t matter after today until the fourth day of June, and she had plenty of time to devise another form of escape by then.
Once the guards slept, Chloe and Deidre wended their way through the parkland with its budding trees providing plenty of shelter, and reached the wall. Carrying a rope Chloe had found in the attic, Deirdre clambered up the stones, with the aid of low-hanging branches, and lowered herself panting and a little shaken onto the turf beyond the boundary.
Chloe, not as adept with finding hand- and toeholds, used rope and branches and tumbled to the ground beside Deirdre. “I am not as agile as I thought I was.”
“I’m not as agile as I used to be.” Deirdre pressed her hands to her middle, where the Ashford heir or heiress seemed to be practicing tumbling off walls. “This will have to be the last time.”
“If we’re caught, Papa will build a tower to lock us in and toss away the key.” Chloe held a hand up to shade her eyes. “And here is our transport so we won’t be caught right away.”
She seemed to possess an endless stream of loyal tenants eager to do her bidding with or without the largess of her pin money. The amount of time she spent watching children so tired mothers could rest, or left discreet packages of food on doorsteps of those struggling to fill their bellies, was more likely the reason. Now one of those devotees tooled up to them in a two-wheeled cart, a sad-looking mule in the harness.
“He’s old,” the farm lad said, “but he’ll get where you want to go and back without complaint.”
He helped Deirdre into the cart and handed the reins to Chloe, and they were off. At the abandoned cottage, they stopped to don hats and veils to give themselves the vague appearance of widows.
“If they truly wanted to imprison us,” Chloe said, “they should have kept us apart.”
“Maybe Tyne thinks we are safer getting up to mischief together.”
They laughed, but all the way to the gorge, they kept looking over their shoulders.
“If only we could do this at night.” Deirdre began to survey her surroundings with attention to the details. “Getting out of the house was sadly easy the night of Juliet’s party.”
With extra servants in the house due to guests having brought their own maids, pretending to be one of them on an errand for her mistress had made slipping away from the doorkeepers go off without a hitch.
“Celebrations are the key. People pay less attention during a party.” Deirdre noted a boulder perched above the track and called a halt. “I’m going to ink an X on this one, on the back, where no one will see it from the track.”
“What is it for?” Chloe asked.
“I’ll tell you when the time comes.” Deirdre started to clamber from the cart.
Chloe took the ink bottle from her. “Let me. You may think you are invincible, but I have known ladies who have stumbled and gone into labor early.”
“That would prove everyone’s suspicions right, wouldn’t it.” Deirdre couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice.
Chloe said nothing, but she stomped up the steep side of the gorge and slipped behind the boulder. Once she was back in the cart, she huffed out her breath and flipped back her veil to frown at Deirdre. “Kieran is a beast. How could he doubt you just because Joanna tried to pass some other man’s by-blow off on him?”
“So you believe him even though the emissary hasn’t returned from Greece yet?”
“I believe him.” Chloe’s voice grew distant as she gazed at the rising walls of the prison ahead. “Do you?”
Deirdre rested her hand over the acrobatics going on inside her. “Yes.”
“Then why does he not trust you?”
“I am the enemy.”
They reached the prison, and Chloe said nothing more. Deirdre hauled herself out of the cart and wrapped herself more fully in the quilted cloak that camouflaged her condition. Ross needed to know the truth, since using it was part of her plan, but she feared his reaction.
They had to find him in the market crowd. He stood alone holding a carved box as though intending to sell it, as prisoners were allowed to do. Somehow, he had found the means by which to shave and look fairly clean, though his clothes were patched and dingy, and his hair hung loose over his shoulders, longer than Kieran’s, whipping about in the wind.
He looked barbaric and dangerous, and Chloe caught her breath.
“He will make a formidable enemy,” she murmured.
“He had made a formidable friend.” Deirdre held back, allowing Chloe to approach him.
She didn’t know what kind of a friend he was now.
Chloe glided toward him with her mother’s grace combined with the regalness of her height. Deirdre watched Ross watching her, caught the gleam of appreciation in his eyes. That was a poor idea, the two of them finding attraction to one another.
“That is fine workmanship, man.” Chloe spoke with hauteur. “Do you intend to sell it?”
“Even our barracks are finer than standing here in the wind,” Ross returned. “One guinea.”
“Heavens. That is robbery.” Chloe glanced back at Deirdre. “Is it not utter thievery to ask that price for a little trinket like this?”
Deirdre shrugged, then grabbed for the edge of her cloak. “He is a charity case, is he not? Give him two guineas.”
She mimicked Chloe’s accent, but Ross started, stared at her, took a step back.
He didn’t say her name aloud, but formed it with his lips. “What’s happened to you? You look—” Understanding dawned, and he paled. “You won’t come with us.” He didn’t look angry; he looked bereft.
Deirdre shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t leave my baby behind.”
She would not—could not—think about the possibility that Ashford power and money might separate her from her child. That notion hurt so much she couldn’t think at a time when she needed to think hardest of all.
“But how . . . ? When . . . ?” Ross appeared dazed. “D—you can’t help us like . . . you are.”
Deirdre wept behi
nd her veil. “I can.” She glanced around, seeking anyone who might be listening. “Be ready on the king’s birthday. That will provide one distraction with the revelries in Princetown.” She patted her belly. “I will provide the other.”
Now Chloe and Ross both stared at her.
“When is the king’s birthday?” was all Ross said.
“June fourth,” Deirdre said. “Be ready.”
“But the baby,” Chloe whispered as a guard headed in their direction.
“I will only be starting my ninth month then,” Deirdre answered. “We have plenty of time.”
Chapter 23
Deirdre half reclined in a ground-floor sitting room and squinted at the tiny garment she was attempting to sew. She would allow Phoebe to execute the embroidery, but Deirdre wanted to stitch her baby’s christening gown herself. Why, she didn’t know. Maybe sheer boredom drove her to pick up needle and thread and commence setting miniscule stitches along the seam of fine, white cambric. She could do little else.
At Phoebe’s suggestion, Deirdre had taken over this ground-floor room, normally used as a lady’s retiring room during large parties, as her bedchamber so that she could still join the family for meals without having to negotiate the steep and somewhat treacherous steps. With French windows leading onto a terrace and the weather growing finer by the week, Deirdre could enjoy plenty of fresh air and take a short, daily walk in the garden.
No one guarded her closely any longer, and with the easing of external restrictions came a thawing of hostilities between her and Kieran. Either that or boredom drove her to accept his company in addition to that of the Ashford ladies and Miss Pruitt. Her own body seemed to be her prison warden, her middle growing ever larger and larger until she wished that she were in her ninth month instead of her eighth.
“I feel like I’m carrying half the Maid’s cargo in my belly,” she announced one afternoon in late May.
Kieran, who sat on the floor beside her sofa, rested his head against the mound. “You rather look like it, too.”
She yanked on a strand of his hair. “Let us hope it is a big, healthy boy with black hair as pretty as yours.”
My Enemy, My Heart (The Ashford Chronicles) Page 30