“Colin.” I looked into his clear blue eyes, not knowing how to proceed.
“Look,” he continued, drawing a small velvet box from his pocket. “Open this and see if you still have doubts of how I feel toward you.” He put the little container into my hand.
I raised the lid and gasped. Inside, a large sapphire surrounded by a starburst of diamonds glistened from its setting in a gold ring.
“Colin, it’s beautiful.”
“Do you really like it?” he asked, boyishly shy and grinning.
“Of course! It’s magnificent.”
“I’m glad.” He took it in one hand and the fingers of my left hand in his other. “Because I’d like you to wear it as a wedding ring. Will you?” He paused and looked into my eyes. “Please?”
“Colin, it’s much too fine,” I protested. “A simple band would have been proof enough.”
He slid the extravagant jewel onto my finger and raised it to his lips. “With this ring I declare you my partner in life,” he said, his voice husky with emotion. “With this ring, I seal our bond of mutual affection and trust.”
****
Later, when Colin left me at the door of the academy and drove away, I waited only until he was out of sight, then hurried back into the street. I hailed a cab and headed back to the King’s Inn.
After a footman at the King’s Inn who’d seen us having dinner together had identified me as Mrs. Douglas, the hotel clerk gave me directions and a key to Colin’s room. Trembling with anticipation and apprehension, I mounted the stairs.
Moments later, I eased open the door of Room 14 a few inches and slid inside. I was careful to let as little light as possible intrude. I didn’t want to awaken Colin before I’d set my plan in motion.
Once the door was closed behind me, I tiptoed across the room to stand by the bed. The quilt-swathed figure silhouetted in the glow of a fire dying on the hearth did not stir. I almost sighed aloud with relief. I bent and removed my fur-lined leather boots.
A moment later, cloak, gown, undergarments, and stockings joined them in a discarded heap on the floor. I pulled the pins from my hair and shook it loose about my shoulders. Then, clad only in a thin silk-and-lace chemise, I bent over the form in the bed and carefully pulled the covers from his shoulders.
“Colin,” I said softly. “Colin, darling…”
The rest of my words died in my throat as raven-haired Barret Madison rolled sleepily to face me.
“What are you doing here?” I gasped.
“Might I not ask you the same question, madam?” he asked as he struggled up on one elbow. “I don’t remember inviting a lady to pay a midnight call this evening.”
In the shadowy gloom, groggy from sleep, he hadn’t yet recognized me. I could escape before he learned my identity. I grabbed up my gown and struggled into it.
“There’s no need for such haste, ma’am,” he said, a jesting tone invading his voice as he came fully awake. “Although you were uninvited, you’re not unwelcome.”
The dress fastenings fumbled out of my fingers. I grabbed my cloak, flung it over my ill-donned gown, pushed bare feet into my boots, and made a dash for the door.
The captain was quicker. He leaped catlike from the bed and was between the exit and me before I could reach it. In the darkness beyond the reach of the fire’s weak light, his hands seized me and I was pinned against the wall and kissed with arousing thoroughness.
I floated, swirled, my solar plexus sending out shafts of incredible pleasure. He thrust his tongue into my mouth over mine and I lost touch with reality. Was this love? Or lust? I didn’t care which it was. I only knew I wanted more…and more.
But as he brought his body full length against mine and began to pull the cloak from my shoulders, I came to my senses. Slashing down my burning passion with strength-sapping effort, I wrenched away from his demanding mouth.
“Come, now, missy, don’t be coy,” he chuckled. “Let’s get to the purpose for which you obviously came. I assume you’re a Christmas gift from one of my friends. Captain Fletcher, perhaps? Good for Jared.”
“Let me go, you filthy bastard!”
My curse brought him to a halt. As my outer garment fell to the floor, he gave a sharp intake of breath.
“Starr! Sweet Jesus!”
His arms fell from me, and I collapsed against the wall, gasping for breath.
“What in God’s name are you doing here?” he muttered.
“What are you doing here?” I cried. “The desk clerk told me this is my husband’s room.”
“Colin couldn’t sleep because of the noise downstairs,” he replied. “He found my room at the rear of the inn quieter. We exchanged lodgings.”
“You brought Colin to Halifax, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “We sailed out of the Miramichi through shell ice hours before the final freeze. I brought Colin to you, and Jared and Caroline to attend the Nova Scotia Governor’s Ball. Randall was too involved in the political struggle for a mail contract to come with us…or, at least, so he said.”
He crossed the room and struck a match. The room brightened as he lighted a lamp, and I saw his blatant virility in all its power as he was revealed to me, naked except for a pair of form-hugging undertrousers, his dark hair tousled from sleep. Barret Madison physically and emotionally stirred me to the quick of my being.
“Why did you come to Colin at this hour? Did he invite you?”
“No… Yes… That is…” I could not conjure a fitting reply.
“Starr, sweet princess.” His fingers touched my flushed cheek with great tenderness. “You came here to seduce Colin, didn’t you? He hasn’t made love to you yet, has he?”
Strangled by his compassion, my bitter reply died in my throat. Tears slid down my cheeks.
“Hush,” he soothed against my hair as I broke down, sobbing. “I know. I understand. You were terrified by a sexual attack, and Colin’s desires lie elsewhere.”
“What am I to do, Barret? Colin’s father is pressuring us to have a child, but Colin won’t…can’t…make that a possibility. I don’t know if I could let him…if I love him in that way.”
“Starr, look at me and be honest.” He held me out from him and gazed into my eyes. “Isn’t some of your confusion attributable to what is between you and me? It’s time we faced reality, my love.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I don’t understand, but yes.”
“It’s simple. We’re in love and have been since we met aboard the Maris Stella. Denying it at first was a matter of false pride and mistrust on my part. You were, after all, from the steerage. Then suddenly you were married and it was too late, as it will now forever be too late.”
He turned away and took a cigar from a box on the dresser. At the hearth, he bit off the cigar’s tip and spat it into the fire, then took up a burning bit of kindling, and lit the tobacco. “At first I told myself that, in spite of the fact that you may or may not be Captain Morgan Reynolds’ daughter, you were a mercenary little whore, and I set out to harass you out of Colin’s life. Then, on the way to Halifax, you saved my seaman’s life and I saw another side of you…that night as I tucked you into my bed, I admitted the truth to myself for the first time. Your actions on that night made me respect you for the person you truly are and made me realize that I was in love with you. I also realized it was an impossible obsession. You are my best friend’s wife.”
The truth of his words broke over me. I tried to return to his embrace, but he shook his head. “I love you, too, Barret.”
“Hush,” he said, putting a finger to my lips. “Remember Colin, remember his gentleness, his caring. Can you hurt him?”
I sank down on the edge of his bed, covering my face with my hands.
“You said you love me,” he said, going to put a log into the fire. “I believe you. That entitles you to know the truth about me.” He walked away from me, across the room, then turned back. “I’m a bastard in the true meaning of the word, love. My father n
ever married my mother. He deserted her long before I was born. She was a French governess on one of France’s Caribbean islands. When her employer learned of her condition, he cast her out. She was forced to make a living as a singer and pianist in one of that island’s brothels. I was born there and grew up in it.”
“Barret, I had no idea. When I called you…that name…I had no idea. I’m so very sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He hurled his cigar into the flames with a vehemence that denied the calmness of his words. “My mother was an exceptional woman. She remained a kind, loving person who gave every ounce of her energy to raising me. She taught me to read and write, to sing and play piano and guitar, the only knowledge she could provide to me as a means of making a living one day. When she died the year I was ten, I thought I would die, too.”
”I understand.” The sharp pain of remembrance in my chest told me I did.
“But I didn’t.” He drew a deep breath and continued. “I recovered and took her place, entertaining the clientele in the grand salon with my music. I passed my adolescence in an atmosphere most children never even know exists. Whores were my friends, a madam named Maggie my surrogate mother. Other children sneered at me in the streets, boys of my own age shunned me as a whorehouse bastard and whoremaster of prostitutes. You may well imagine the scars such a life left on a young boy. Until I met you, I never thought I dared expect love from a decent woman. But you’re an exceptional woman, like my mother. You look at people with your heart.”
In the flickering firelight, his face appeared emotionless, but a glisten of sweat on his upper lip betrayed the pain he was suffering.
“Even if you were free, you could not bear to let me touch you, knowing what I’ve just told you,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion. “I’ve lain with whores since I was sixteen, Starr.”
I stood and went to stand before him. His jaw twitched with a nervous spasm, and his eyes were hot and moist.
“I’m the victim of a sexual attack, as you’re aware,” I said. “I know how eternally dirty a person can feel. I also know love can wash away those feelings. If I were free, if it were not for Colin, I would not hesitate to make love to you, to love you body and soul.”
“You’re a generous woman, angel,” he muttered, his voice gruff with emotion. “Now I must take you back to the academy before we do something we’ll regret.”
He took my face between his hands and leaned forward to kiss my forehead.
“Barret!” I grasped his fingers. “Is this to be all we shall ever have? A knowledge of our love, and that it can never be?”
“You know it as well as I. If we loved Colin less…but we don’t and never will.” He released me and handed me my cloak. “Hurry. Lingering will only prolong the pain.”
****
It had begun to snow. Huge, soft flakes as gentle as a chick’s down floated to the earth amid a hush in the still, after-midnight air as we left the inn by a rear door and made our way through an alley to a back street.
An excruciating, burning ache like a hot knife blade seared through my body and soul and made each breath a painful necessity. Love shouldn’t hurt so badly. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair.
And then the shot rang out.
Like cannon fire in the silent night, and as blasphemous as Barret’s half-yelped curse of anger and pain that seemed to accompany it, the explosion rent the cold air. He staggered and fell against me.
“You’ve been shot!” I gasped as his weight forced us to our knees.
“Get me on my feet.” He struggled to get up. “Whoever fired that shot at you will try again.”
“Me?”
“Remember Colin’s beating? You and your husband have a vicious enemy, sweet princess.”
Together we staggered to our feet. With him leaning against me, we made a crooked lunge around a corner and into an alleyway. In the shadows we paused, gasping for breath. Barret fell back against the clapboards of a shop.
“Are you badly hurt?” I asked, clutching at the arm he held across the front of his body to hold his injured shoulder.
“I have some lead in me.” His words were calm but his breathing harsh. “I’m going to need your help, love. You’ll have to get me to a doctor who’ll remove this damned bullet and ask no questions.”
“Of course,” I said. “But is he a good doctor? If his claim to fame is simply that he doesn’t question his patients, then I don’t think…”
“My darling innocent,” he breathed in exasperation. “You’re Abe Douglas’s daughter-in-law. It’s past midnight. We’re on our way from my bedroom. It would all look rather shabby if that story got about. But I do need a doctor, and I can’t get there alone.”
****
The doctor’s house was in a disreputable-looking section of the city, not far from the docks. Shuttered and dark, it sent a wave of foreboding over me the moment we paused before its scarred, weather-bitten door.
“Keep your hood up and your face hidden,” Barret muttered. “Mrs. Colin Douglas must not be recognized here with me in the middle of the night.”
A dwarfish, bent, stubble-faced creature wearing thick, eye-distorting spectacles, a stained white shirt, and unbuttoned black vest opened the panel a crack and asked in a grating voice who came to his door at that ungodly hour.
“Captain Madison,” Barret snarled. He had grown excruciatingly heavy against me; his breathing ragged and shallow. “Let my lady and me in at once, you vile little butcher.”
“Ah, so you’ve finally been forced to bring me one of your ladies.”
The door fell wide ajar, and we were admitted into a poorly lit room furnished with a crude plank table and a rough sideboard filled with jars, knives, and pans. The place stank of human sweat, carbolic, and other odors I dared not let my reeling mind identify. From behind a curtained door at the rear, a woman sobbed softly; a man, his voice often breaking with emotion, was trying to console her.
“She’s a young one, Captain,” the weird little man peered into my hood in the lantern light with those grotesquely glassed eyes. “They always fare best. Take off your clothing, dolly, and climb onto the table. The captain will be taking you home within the hour.”
I looked up at Barret in horrified confusion.
“I’m not looking for an abortion,” he snapped. “I’ve got a bullet in my shoulder.”
“Ah.” The gnome sighed in disappointment. “Well, then, help him undress, dolly.”
“Slowly, my love.” Barret grimaced as I started to slide off his greatcoat. Beneath, his shirt was crimson. I cringed as I saw the dark hole in its shoulder.
“Help him up on the table, dolly,” the little man ordered. As I obeyed, he went to the sideboard and selected an instrument.
“Lie down,” he ordered, as he returned to where Barret sat on the table’s edge. “Let us get to it.”
“Very well.” Barret bent with an effort and took a small, black gun from a pocket inside his boot. He forced it into my cold fingers. “Point this at him. If he makes the slightest wrong move over me with that knife, kill him. Understand?”
I nodded, the horror of the place and the immediate future making me dumbly obedient.
Barret stretched out on the table. The strange little creature proceeded to tie him to its sides with leather thongs. Then he sliced the bloody shirt from the man’s body with a few deft strokes of an ugly-looking knife.
“It’s not pretty, Captain,” he said, peering at the wound. “It’ll take a deal of work.” He returned to the dirty sideboard to bring a liquor flask back to the table. “Take a good swallow, my lad.” He raised Barret’s head with a gnarled hand. “You’ll need it.”
Barret obeyed, choking and cursing over it.
“Get a good hold on yourself, dolly.” The doctor looked over at me and grinned sadistically when Barret’s eyes grew heavy-lidded. “I wouldn’t want you fainting and becoming unable to protect the good captain while he’s at my mercy.”
“Never fear,”
I heard myself replying confidently. “I’m not about to give you a chance to let your scalpel slip.”
“Tough little wench, aren’t you?” he jeered. “Dressed like a fine lady though you be, I’ll wager you’re only another of Madison’s whores. Well, watch this and show your mettle.”
The knife went into Barret’s oozing shoulder. The captain jerked and bellowed an oath. I fought nausea and giddiness as I steadied the tiny, cold weapon at the doctor.
****
A half hour later, the weird dwarf wiped his crimson hands on a towel. Leaving Barret barely conscious from shock, pain, and loss of blood as he lay sprawled on the table, he came around the crude bench to squint up at me in the lamplight.
“Well, dolly, it’s done,” he rasped. “Now whether he lives or dies is up to you. What happened? Did your father, or perhaps your husband, catch him in your bed? You both have the look of having dressed in haste.”
“None of your damn business!” I snapped, although my knees seemed barely able to support me and my stomach was ready to relieve itself of its contents.
“Of course, of course,” he chuckled, rubbing his hands on a filthy towel. “My fame rests upon my discretion in such situations. Due to your lack of preparation for this visit, however, I fear neither of you has about your person coin with which to pay me. And I do not grant credit.” He paused, then touched the fur of my hood with a bloodstained hand. “But, now, this pretty thing would just about cover my charges.”
I lurched back from him and snapped the gun to a level of his head. “Stay away from me,” I hissed.
“Don’t get excited, dolly,” he chuckled, but backed away. “I was merely offering a suggestion.” He returned around the table to leer at me over Barret’s prostrate body. “But,” he continued—and suddenly he was holding a long scalpel poised over the captain’s heaving chest—“I can’t let you leave without paying. If you choose to shoot me instead of making good your debt, I’ll fall across your lover and sink this useful little tool three inches into his belly. Without immediate help, he’ll die in minutes.”
Cold sweat ran over me. “Take the cape,” I said, reaching to unfasten it.
Shadows of Love Page 19