Mesmerized as she stared at the darkly handsome features, her heart began to beat in hard, painful strokes. She knew that face. She had seen that smiling gentleman before…Only he had not been smiling…not when she had seen him. The room tilted and a wave of nausea swept over her, her left leg trembling violently. The pounding of her heart became almost unbearable as memory clawed its way free from the deepest recesses of her mind. Oh, God. She remembered. She gasped, swayed and the world went black.
She awoke to find herself cradled in Julian’s arms. Struggling upright, she became aware of movement and the rattle and jingle of a harness and realized that she was in the Wyndham coach.
Julian pressed her back against the dark blue velvet squabs of the coach, saying, “Easy, easy—you fainted.” In the dim light of the coach, he stared into her face, brushing back a lock of her hair that had come loose. “How are you feeling now?”
“Oh, Nell, you scared us to death!” cried Lady Diana. “It was awful. You were standing there one minute and the next you were lying motionless on the floor. I thought you had died! I was never so terrified in my life.”
Nell looked across at Lady Diana and Elizabeth as they sat together on the opposite side of the coach. Both wore anxious expressions, their eyes wide and worried as they stared at her.
She supplied a wan smile. “I’m sorry for frightening you—twice.” Her gaze shadowed, she stared at her gloved hands in her lap. “I do not know what came over me. The fall must have shaken me more than I realized.”
The two women took her words at face value and during the remainder of the journey they chatted away about the events of the day. Julian said nothing, but a peek at his shuttered face told Nell that he did not believe that the fall from her horse had caused her to faint. It hadn’t. A shudder rolled through her and wearily she shut her eyes. It seemed that nightmares didn’t only happen when one slept.
Arriving at Wyndham Manor, Nell sought out her rooms and Becky’s eager services. A hot bath was waiting for her and later, wearing a nightgown of softest lawn and a warm dressing robe of amber velvet, she nibbled at the tray of food put before her.
“Now you eat that up right now!” fussed Becky, her big brown eyes full of anxiety. “What will his lordship say when he discovers that you haven’t hardly swallowed a morsel?”
Nell pushed away the half-eaten bowl of broth. “I only fell,” she protested. “No bones are broken. I’m fine. I was just…badly shaken.”
Becky sniffed. “If you say so, my lady. And since you aren’t going to eat anything else, I’ll just take these things back to Cook, who will probably go off in a decline when she sees how little you appreciate her hard work.”
“Oh, Becky, please don’t scold so,” Nell begged, her head beginning to throb, terrible memories crawling into her thoughts.
Becky’s face softened. “Very well, my lady. You go get in bed now.”
Nell followed Becky’s orders and had just settled into bed with a huge bank of pillows at her back when Julian walked into her bedroom. He came up to the edge of the bed and sat down.
Taking one of her hands in his, he asked, “Feeling better now?”
She forced a smile. “Yes. I’m sorry that I caused such a disruption. It was only a fall.”
His gaze searched hers. “That may be, but I don’t believe that it was your fall that caused you to faint in such a dramatic fashion at the Westons’.”
“It wasn’t,” she admitted. Looking away from him, she bit her lip. “My lord, that, that portrait where I fainted, who is it?”
He looked surprised. “My cousin John and his son, Daniel. Don’t you remember? I’ve spoken of both of them to you.” Staring at her averted features, he leaned forward. Catching her chin with one finger, he pulled her face around to him. “What is it, Nell? Tell me!”
Nell swallowed. “Do you remember,” she began, “when I told you about my nightmares?”
He nodded, frowning.
“Well, do you remember that in the first one, I said that I dreamed that a man was murdered?”
Their gazes locked. Her voice trembling, Nell said, “I recognized the man in my nightmare…The man I saw murdered was your cousin John.”
Chapter 12
Julian leaped up from the bed and took an agitated step away, only to swing back and stare at Nell with disbelief. “Impossible!” he burst out. “It was a nightmare. How could you have seen John in your nightmare?”
Looking miserable, Nell shook her head. “I do not know. I only know that I have never forgotten that man’s face—and it was your cousin John’s.” She leaned forward, saying urgently, “I tell you that I recognized him! Your cousin is the same man that is in my nightmare. Julian, you must believe me! I saw his murder.”
“Don’t talk such fustian!” Julian ordered. “How can it be? My cousin was murdered ten years or more ago. You never met any of us until you married me. How could you have seen his murder?”
Nell pushed back a lock of tumbled tawny hair. “I cannot tell you, I do not understand it myself. I only know that after I was brought back from the cliffs and I began to have the nightmares that the first one was of a man being murdered. I swear to you that man wore your cousin John’s face!”
Julian did not want to believe her, every instinct cried out against it, but there was no mistaking that she believed what she was saying. Approaching the bed once more, he reseated himself and taking her hand again, he said, “Nell, you cannot have seen John’s murder. By your own admission, until today, you didn’t even know who he was. How can he have been the man in a nightmare you had ten years ago? How can you be so sure now that it was my cousin John and not just a man who looked like him?”
“I cannot explain it,” she admitted, “but I know it to be true—the man was your cousin.” She swallowed convulsively. “I was unconscious for several days, but I dreamed all during that time, a horrible dream of a man being murdered. The same dream over and over and over. It was very vivid…as if I had actually seen it happen.”
“It’s impossible! You cannot have seen John murdered,” he protested, his troubled gaze on her face.
Her sea green eyes met his steadily. “Tell me, where was your cousin murdered?”
Julian made an impatient gesture. “I don’t remember exactly. Near some damn little provincial town. Somewhere in Dorset, near the coast.” He stiffened, staring at her. “Meadowlea is in Dorset…near the coast,” he said in an odd tone. Collecting himself, he muttered, “But that must be a coincidence.”
She didn’t argue with him. “And when? What was the date of his murder?”
“The tenth of October 1794.”
She gave a twisted smile. “My accident occurred on October tenth that same year and my nightmares began around then. Another coincidence?”
“Yes, of course. It has to be,” he insisted. “To think otherwise is utter madness.”
“Very well, believe that if you will, but let me tell you the details of my nightmare and see if you still believe it is merely coincidence.” He nodded curtly and she began softly, “I was riding my little mare, Firefly, that day, but she’d thrown a shoe and gone lame. I was leading her home, not two miles further down the road. We came upon a small copse of wood and as we began to walk through it, I heard the loud voices of men arguing ahead of me. I did not understand what they were saying, only that they were very angry. I was frightened, uneasy perhaps, but as this was the only way home I had no choice but to press on. Besides, I told myself, it was probably only some locals having a disagreement and once they recognized me, they’d stop their fighting until I’d gone on by or perhaps even give me a ride home. At worst, I hoped that I might pass them without incident.
“When I came around a curve in the road, I passed a small closed carriage parked off to the side and just beyond that, I saw two men, strangers, fighting.” She took a deep breath. “They did not see me. I stopped and stared, transfixed by the violence. I had never seen men strike each other so savagely
, so furiously before. They were both tall, evenly matched I would say. The man I now know to be your cousin gained the upper hand. He knocked the other man down and was kneeling astride him when the other man dragged forth a dagger and drove it into his chest. The man on the ground struck your cousin once more in the chest, then once in the shoulder and once in the throat. The blood…The blood seemed everywhere.” Her voice shook. “I cried out, I could not help myself, and it was then that I became aware that there had to have been someone else in the copse. There was a sound, a whisper of movement behind me, and as I turned in that direction, I was struck on the back of the head.”
Sinking against the pillows, she said, “The rest you know—they found me over the cliff, lying on a small ledge…Firefly dead on the rocks below.” Turning her head away from him she added, “Believe what you will, but I know that the man I saw murdered was your cousin.”
Julian’s cool logic rejected her story, denied that her nightmare could be so accurate in the details surrounding John’s murder. But he could not dismiss the impact her words had upon him. Against his will, he asked, “In your nightmare, how were they dressed—especially John?”
“The one who stabbed your cousin wore a green jacket and…” She frowned, trying to remember the other man. How peculiar…Julian’s cousin she could recall right down to the way his black curly hair was arranged, but the murderer…It was as if he had been blocked from her mind. But as the minutes passed and she concentrated, memory trickled back. “And buff breeches and boots,” she finally said. “Your cousin John was garbed in Nankeen breeches, a dark blue coat with large silver buttons, a white waistcoat with black spots and upon his finger the same ring that is in that portrait at Stonegate.”
Julian’s breath sucked in as if he’d suffered a blow to the gut. He stared at nothing for several moments, fighting to understand. He could not judge the details of the murderer’s clothes, but his cousin’s he could. Reluctantly, he admitted, “John was dressed as you describe when his body was found. He always wore the sapphire ring—it was a family heirloom…It always puzzled me: if it had been mere robbery, as the local constable proposed, then why had the ring been left on his finger?” He rubbed his forehead. “The wounds you describe…John’s were the same.”
“Do you believe me now…Or do you think it is all just coincidence?”
He got up from the bed and stalked around the room, dragging a hand through his dark, unruly hair. “I do not know what to believe! This is beyond comprehension! What you tell me is incredible and I want to dismiss it out of hand…And yet you know too many things for it to be just a mere coincidence.” He took another turn around the room. “Tell me,” he demanded, “how did you end up on the cliff?”
“I have no idea,” she replied simply. “As I told you, I was unconscious for days afterward and I have no memory of my fall or of even being in the vicinity where I was found.”
“And the nightmare, the one where John is murdered, you had it ten years ago?”
She heard the skepticism in his voice, but she didn’t blame him. Ten years was a long time to remember a nightmare. To remember a face. Even to remember a murder, but she did…as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.
“Yes,” she answered, “ten years ago, repeatedly for weeks.”
His expression harried, he stared at her. “And the other nightmares? Tell me about them.”
She did so, trying to convey the horror, the fear, the unspeakable brutality that occurred in that terrifying place…those dungeons.
He was quiet for several minutes when she finished speaking. “And you are positive that it is the same man in all the nightmares?” he finally asked. “That the same man you saw kill John is also the man who savages these women?”
She nodded. “As best as I can tell.” When he continued to stare at her, his demeanor giving nothing away, she said passionately, “You must remember that I’ve never seen the man’s face. It was gloomy in the copse, thickly wooded, and when I first came upon them fighting, the murderer had his back to me. When your cousin knocked him down, your cousin was facing me, his murderer lying on the ground looking up at him. I was still several feet away and I only saw the top, the back, of his head. And in the dungeon, it is a dark, shadowy place and his face is always averted.”
“Then how do you know they are the same man?”
“I sense that they are…There is something in the build, in the way the man moves, the shape of the head…that convinces me that they are the same person. And I find it easier,” she confessed, “to believe that it is the same man rather than to think that two such monsters are abroad.”
Wearing an expression of frustration, horror and anger, Julian loomed up next to the bed. His voice grim, he demanded, “If I believe you…If I accept that your nightmare reflects an actual occurrence…Do you realize what it means?”
Nell nodded. Bleakly she said, “It means that he is a real man, a real person, and that he’s still out there somewhere, killing the women that I see in my nightmares.” She bit her lip. “And that those dungeons actually exist, that I have not imagined them.” She hesitated and flashed him a look before saying, “And I think I know where to look for them.”
He glanced at her. “What are you saying?”
“Lady Diana and Elizabeth told me about the dungeons beneath this house,” she said.
“And you dare to think that it is in the dungeons beneath my home that he does his killing?” he asked incredulously, his eyes blazing. “Isn’t it enough that you’re asking me to believe that by some unexplained black magic, witchcraft, you saw my cousin killed, that you see other women murdered? Must I now search out my own home to find proof of these vile crimes?”
“I don’t know,” she cried. “I don’t understand any of it, but I do know that my nightmares cannot be dismissed as the results of my fall over the cliff any longer. I recognized your cousin! I saw his murder. And if his murder was real, then the dungeons are real and what goes on there is real, too.”
Julian threw himself across the bed and lying on his back stared up at the silken canopy overhead. He lay there a long time, fighting against accepting her words as true. Yet what other explanation was there? It would be so much simpler if he could discard Nell’s nightmares out of hand, blame them on feminine hysteria. If only he could convince himself that it was his misfortune to have married a woman of a nervous disposition, an excitable creature given to spasms and fanciful ideas, but he could not. True, he had not known Nell long, but he had seen her in a dangerous, difficult situation and she had kept her head. A smile lurked at the corner of his mouth as he remembered that first meeting. If she had been the type of woman to go off into screaming convulsions it would have been then, but instead she’d proven herself pluck to the backbone. While he wished violently that it was otherwise, he could not pretend that her nightmares were just the wild imaginings of a hysterical woman. She knew things—things for which he had no rational explanation.
“I do not want to believe you, but I find that I must,” he said finally. He turned to look at her. “There are forces at work here that I do not understand. How you could have dreamed John’s murder…!” He swore under his breath and sat up. “Upon my soul! This is an impossible situation! I must believe that in your nightmare you saw my cousin’s death and that somehow you have a connection to the villain who killed him. A vicious villain who is still killing innocent women—in dungeons.” His voice full of disgust he added, “Dungeons that you think might be beneath my very home.”
“I don’t think that I dreamed your cousin’s murder,” Nell muttered. “I think I actually saw it.”
He jerked upright, his expression full of speculation. “And the events come back to you in the form of a nightmare?” he asked, a spark of interest in his eyes.
She nodded. “Yes, that’s it precisely.” She frowned. “The other nightmares…They feel different, as if I am watching them through a veil, but with your cousin…The colors are bright, viv
id, I can smell the air, the forest, feel the coolness of the day, Firefly’s reins in my hands—but not in the others.”
It was Julian’s turn to frown. “If you actually saw the murder, how did you end up where you did?”
Her fingers plucked nervously at the counterpane on the bed. “I think that your cousin’s murderer, and whoever else was there in the copse with him—that after I was knocked unconscious, that they carried me to the cliffs and threw me over and then drove poor Firefly over the same cliff. They left me for dead.”
An icy dagger ripped at his heart at the thought that she might have died that day…that he might never have known her. Rage against those faceless, nameless bastards filled him, but he throttled it back and coolly considered her words. “Wasn’t that dangerous for them? After all, your family is prominent in the area. Surely they must have known that you’d be missed, that within hours someone would be looking for you?”
“I am positive that they were strangers to the area, that they did not know who I was.” She made a face. “I did not have a groom with me that day and I was wearing my oldest habit. There was nothing about me, other than perhaps Firefly’s quality, that would give them a clue that I was anything more than some local female who had stumbled across something she should not have.” A shudder rippled through her. “I feel that they did not plan on anyone, except mayhap a worried parent or husband, to go looking for me. Certainly they never thought that nearly everyone for miles around would be in on the search, or that I would be found alive.”
Julian rubbed his forehead again. His thoughts crashing against one another like waves on the rocks, flying in all directions, splintering into a million pieces, only to re-form and repeat the process. He could see no good in what he had learned tonight. His wife, like the witches of legend, appeared to have the “sight” or whatever name one wanted to call it, and that this gift, he thought sourly, manifested itself in her dreams. Graphic, violent nightmares that woke her screaming and trembling from their black, bottomless depths.
Scandal Becomes Her Page 19