Ever His Bride

by Linda Needham

  She sent Betts and Andy scurrying away from her and from Rundull’s wrath.

  “Let go of me!” Felicity dug her fingernails into his wrist, but he shoved her forward. She couldn’t afford to panic, or lose her head, but she had the horrible feeling that she had only made matters worse than ever. Any moment Rundull’s guards would descend on them all. And what would happen to the children?

  “Leave her alone, I tell you!” Giles came shouting out of nowhere, and leaped upon Rundull’s back, fists flailing.

  “No, Giles! Let me—” Felicity pushed at Rundull, but he threw Giles off and tightened his grip on her hair and dragged her toward the door. Giles had the sense to keep Andy and Betts out of the way when they tried to help her.

  “This way, missy.” As Rundull propelled her forward, a great roaring cleaved the air, a paralyzing sound that sliced through the stone walls.

  “Keep your filthy hands off my wife!”

  Suddenly Felicity was looking past Rundull’s shoulder into the eyes of an angel—a seething, angry-beyond-words angel.

  Rundull’s forward motion stopped abruptly. His fists opened so fast that she stumbled forward and landed on her hands and knees. Rundull then made a gagging sound as he arched into the air, a rangy, flightless bird twisting against a sky of rafters.

  Then her husband stood above her, his face gone hard as marble, his eyes locked on hers.

  Hunter had seen it all through a red haze, his vision narrowed tightly on his wife and the suicidal man who’d seemed bent on hurting her. She was rumpled beyond recognition, her skirts floured and blackened, her hair sprung every which way. He sought details— his wife’s enduring, familiar details. Gratitude in her eyes, a trembling courage on her lips, she stood up and brushed herself off.

  His wife. Yes, Felicity. Her lovely details: quizzical brows, her head canted in concern, a cautious step toward him.

  “Mr. Claybourne?”

  Details only. He didn’t dare look around; he knew what he would find: spidery, yellow-stained fingers; bent and broken limbs. The stink. The tanning pits. He had recognized the smell the moment the train had pulled into town. He’d fought the effects, chided himself for his weakness. But he had come here anyway, against his judgment, against every promise he had ever made to himself that he wouldn’t.

  He’d done it for her.

  “Hunter?”

  She touched his hand and he flinched.

  Rundull stirred. “Get off my property, sir!”

  He straightened from his stupor. He yanked Felicity roughly behind him. “Be thankful you escaped with your life.” He scooped up Felicity’s fallen portmanteau and took her elbow. “Come.”

  But she stayed rooted to the planking, caught in Rundull’s mire. “I can’t leave, Mr. Claybourne. Not without the children.”

  “You will come with me, wife.” His hands were clammy and cold, didn’t work as they should, but he tried to pull her along with him.

  “No, Mr. Claybourne!”

  She slipped easily out of his hands and ran to the two children who’d been cowering between crates of finished shoe tops. She grabbed them up into her arms while her young cutpurse stood nearby. Giles. The boy from London. She’d come to Blenwick for him.

  “I will not leave without these children, Mr. Claybourne.”

  Rundull puffed himself up like a toad. “You can’t take them. I am paid twelve pounds a year per student. I’ll not let them go for a penny less.”

  “I need a loan, Mr. Claybourne,” she said, fixing her glare on Rundull. “Thirty-six pounds.”

  “Per year,” Rundull added, tapping his tented fingertips together. “Times ten years for the girl and the older boy, and twelve for the youngest.”

  “I need three-hundred eighty-four pounds, Mr. Claybourne.”

  But Hunter couldn’t move, was rooted to the sagging wooden flooring, barely able to concentrate, drenched in sweat. The corners of the room hung in boiling shadows, the twilight too weak to filter through the filthy glass. Welcome shadows that blotted his vision. Yet he didn’t have to see to remember.

  “Please, Mr. Claybourne.”

  His guts were knotted and nagging. He would surely disgrace himself if he turned back to her.

  “Mrs. Claybourne,” he managed, his breath escaping in trembling, ragged torrents. “You can’t rescue them all—”

  “Maybe not, Mr. Claybourne, but I can rescue these three.”

  She stood like a pagan warrior out of myth, a child on each hip, indictment in her eyes. A threat to everything he held dear.

  Still, he lifted the banknotes from his breast pocket, then dropped them on the floor. “Tell the bastard to keep the bloody change.”

  He waited until his deluded wife and her wretched foundlings had gone ahead, placing himself between her and the workhouse. She was a cloud of freshness amidst the foulness.

  And then he noticed it. Noticed the lack. His stomach reeled.

  Her wedding ring. It was gone.

  Felicity watched her silent husband load her portmanteau into the private carriage he’d hired.

  “You’re not going with us?” she asked, hardly expecting an answer from him. He hadn’t spoken more than a word to her since he’d dropped her off at the inn with the children the night before.

  “No.” His eyes followed Andy and Betts into the carriage as if they were vermin. He didn’t even look at Giles.

  Felicity had spent hours cleaning up the two younger children, scrubbing years of neglect off their tender skin, from under their fingernails, soaking them until they both were pink and glowing and squealing with laughter. She’d burned their clothes, and they had slept in Claybourne’s shirts.

  Giles’s mood had been as detached as Claybourne’s had been. And she hadn’t pressed him. There would be time for that later. He took his own bath down the hall and grudgingly wore the clothes she found for him. He’d slept in the chair that Claybourne had claimed the night before, and now sat stiffly inside the carriage looking out the window. She wondered what he would do when they returned to London.

  She had bought clothes for Andy and Betts, and now they looked like any other children one might see in Kensington Park.

  And still Claybourne disapproved of them.

  All of which drove her temper through the top of her head. “May I have a word with you, Mr. Claybourne?”

  He grunted and followed her a few steps to the hitching post in front of the Brightwater, but said nothing, keeping his gaze fixed on something in the distance.

  “Are they so far below you, sir?” she asked, keeping her voice hushed so the children wouldn’t overhear. “Is that why you won’t ride to London with us?”

  “I have business to tend to.”

  “They’re children, Mr. Claybourne. If you’d only give them time—”

  “Do not board them in my house.” His eyes were clear when he fixed them on her, and as distant as the hills.

  “In that dismal rabbit warren you call a home? They’re better off on the streets of Bethnal Green.”

  His hands gripped the hitch rail, his knuckles white, his fingers flexing. “Then take them there, Mrs. Claybourne. Leave them. And let them forget about you.”

  “I will not let them forget. They will know that I care.”

  “How very honorable of you. And what of all the other children enrolled in the Blenwick School for Apprentices? Will they know you care?”

  She had tried to put the horrible truth from her mind, but he bewildered her with his guttural questions. “They must know I care: I cooked for them—”

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. Claybourne. How sweet, Mrs. Claybourne! A hearty meal and one of your charming smiles, perhaps a heart-stealing caress from your mothering hand—just enough to tantalize, just enough to send a child to bed with his hopes soaring. And when they woke this morning to the hunger and that spark of hope gnawing in their bellies, how do you think they felt when they remember you deserted them?”

  “I didn’t desert them
.”

  “Would you care to go back and ask them? Rundull’s little apprentices, his bony-fingered drudges stitching shoe tops for no pay at all, while Rundull himself collects three pence a pair from a partner in the London slop-trade, twelve pounds per child per annum, and calls himself a school.”

  “The slop-trade?”

  “Those fashionable shoes you’re wearing no doubt came from a place just like Rundull’s. If you look closely enough inside, madam, by the instep, or down near the toe, you’ll find bloodstains—”

  Arthur’s words exactly. “Stop it, Mr. Claybourne!”

  “Blood from a pricked finger, or from a chunk of flesh gouged out by a dull-bladed awl—”

  “How do you know this? Are you a partner in one of these enterprises, Mr. Claybourne? Do you—”

  His head reared back. “It doesn’t matter how I know!” He recovered and bore down on her, his dark eyes hot and unrelenting. “Did you see their faces when they looked at you? Did you see precious hope twisted up in despair, Mrs. Claybourne? Did you smell it? Could you taste it? Because I did. God help me, I did.”

  Felicity swiped at the tears coursing down her cheeks. “But we brought out three—”

  “And left how many more behind, praying for their own bright angel? Did you think of them?”

  “We had no choice.”

  “Self-serving charity, Mrs. Claybourne! The kind that makes you feel good.”

  “Yes, it does, but—”

  “God damn you, woman!”

  “Mr. Claybourne, how dare you speak—”

  But he took her by the elbow and lifted her into the carriage step.

  “When are you coming home, Mr. Claybourne?”

  “I don’t know.” He ground a twenty pound note into her hand and strode away without a backward glance.

  Andy and Betts huddled together beside her, their eyes wide in dread. They couldn’t have heard or understood the sense of the argument, but they must have felt the heat.

  Giles had obviously heard everything. He sat opposite, his jaw clenched and working. She knew he wanted to say something, but he kept his opinions to himself and settled his gaze out the window as the carriage jolted off.

  “Well, my loves, we’re on our way to London.” Felicity wiped her nose on her kerchief.

  Andy and Betts snuggled next to her, one under each arm, leaving her to stare at the empty seat where Claybourne ought to be.

  He was quite mad. He had damned her for caring at all about the children, and then had damned her for not caring enough. It was one or the other, Mr. Claybourne. She couldn’t be blamed for both.

  But he’d made her feel callous and vain and guilty, made her shoes pinch. He was the one who had blustered his way into the workhouse, who had demanded she leave without the children.

  He was the heartless one.

  He was the one who had stood mutely in the midst of the squalor, his face ashen, his eyes as wild as a spooked horse.

  He’d known all about the shoe tops and the sharp tools …

  “Why was the big man so very wrothful, miss?”

  Felicity brushed the curls from Betts’s forehead and nuzzled her sweet-smelling hair. “I don’t know, Betts. I really don’t know.”

  And then a tiny, jangling thought came to her, something that had not seemed quite right at the time, something that haunted her now… .

  Hunter Claybourne hadn’t been disgusted or enraged. He’d been terrified.

  Chapter 16

  Hunter returned to Claybourne Manor on a drizzly moonless night, feeling as solitary as he ever had in his life. He had consulted with his business contacts in the north, sat in on the inquest concerning the accident, and made substantial progress in his bid for recognition by the Board of Trade. But he’d been restless to return home, and honest enough with himself to know the cause.

  Felicity.

  He’d said her name a hundred times a day, and cursed her with every breath. Yet he hadn’t been able to shake her from his thoughts, nor could he quiet the hammering of his heart. And now she seemed to live there inside him. Like a determined morning glory, she had entwined herself and her inclinations into his life. He damned himself for basking in her comfort.

  And yet he had worried what she would think of him and his rage that final morning. Even at the time, the rational side of him knew his reaction was out of all proportion. He must have seemed a lunatic outside the inn; and yet he couldn’t recall a single word he had said to her. He had probably ranted and swung his wrath around like a cudgel. He had felt insane after pulling her from the workhouse, had stumbled into a field, stripped off his clothes in the moonlight and scrubbed himself clean in the Wear.

  He would try somehow to explain himself, to ward off her queries with concessions and reasonableness. And if she wanted to waste her time and money on ill-conceived charities, that was her choice. Condemning her would only make her delve deeper into his reasons, and he couldn’t risk that.

  Claybourne Manor was dark and battened down for the night. The wild perfume of flowers of the summer shower lingered in the air, a foreign and familiar scent that chipped at his self-assurance. She was here in the house somewhere, no doubt fast asleep and taking up too much of her bed.

  He shucked off his slicker and started across the broad expanse of the foyer. He’d only taken a dozen steps when he ran smack into something that caught him across the waist.

  “Blast it!” The woman had stuck a damn table in the middle of the entry!

  And something in the center of the table was teetering, wobbling, growing ever more precarious in its circling tilt. His eyes adjusted to the dark just as an extraordinarily tall vase pitched forward and smashed against his shoulder. Flowers rocketed everywhere, the vase landed on the floor with a ringing crash.

  “Mr. Claybourne!”

  He knew the whisper. It came floating down from above stairs, and the music of it set off his pulse. Its owner padded barefooted down the staircase, the white glow of her night-robe making her seem ghostly and untouchable.

  Without sparing him a single glance or another word, she set her candlestick on the table and bent to the sloppy mess on the floor, sifting through broken stems and shards of ceramic.

  Her hair was more golden and wilder than his memory could construct, her scent more searching. He stood there like a simpleton, fisting his aching hands into his coat pockets to keep from harrowing his fingers through the flaxen cloud of her hair at his knees. Spots of heat singed his cheeks, blotches of bitterness to know that she would consider the distressed state of the flowers above his own.

  She raised her eyes and they glistened in disappointment. Her mouth glistened, too, her lower lip caught between her teeth as she stood, having rescued a sprig of honeysuckle. The fragrance hooked around his nose and made him step closer.

  “If I’d known you were coming I’d have left a lamp burning for you in the window.” She smiled then, but hesitantly.

  “No matter,” he said, hearing soft voices and lighter footfalls receding into the darkness, into other parts of the house.

  He watched as she smoothed her alabaster hand across his coat, and slipped it comfortably beneath the ridge of his lapel. Her fingers idled among the buttons; he wanted to lift them to his mouth, to touch his lips to the ring that shone there again, the bright ring he was sure she had abandoned.

  “Though I rather thought you would return during the daylight, Mr. Claybourne.” She tucked the sprig of honeysuckle into his breast pocket and patted it. “I didn’t mean to leave a trap so that you might rouse the entire house.”

  “You smell very nice,” he said, instantly thinking himself a dolt for saying it aloud.

  “Thank you, Mr. Claybourne.” She looked shyly up at him from beneath her lashes. “But I think you’re smelling the honeysuckle.”

  He’d never given a thought to the name of that particular flower, but the breathy way the word lifted off her mouth and stirred against his throat carried erotic pic
tures to his mind and a sheen of sweat to his brow.

  “Did I wake you?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t sleeping. I heard a horse in the drive.”

  “Hired in Hampstead. He’s put away now.”

  “And so should you be, Mr. Claybourne. It’s well after midnight. Come, I’ll take you to your chamber.” She hooked her arm into his and led him up the stairs.

  He knew the way to his bloody chamber, but he followed her anyway, his senses dilated, marking the soft skiffing of her bare footfalls and his own hard-booted ones, separating lavender from honeysuckle, sequestering the heat of her hand that kindled its way through his coat sleeve to his arm.

  He hadn’t expected this sort of welcome: fragrant flowers and her feathery whispers. As he opened the door to his chamber, he knew even less what he ought to do about it.

  Felicity felt her heart flitting around inside her chest like a bird demanding its freedom. He smelled of the coldest night, and trailed honeysuckle after him. His profile was resolute, but had lost its sharpness.

  She had prepared herself to be annoyed with him, and unaffected by his nearness, but he’d looked confused and contrite when she found him standing among the fallen flowers and the shattered vase, as if he were a clumsy child awaiting a scolding.

  She had never known a man who could confuse her as this one did. In the last week, she had revisited everything they had said to each other after the incident in the workhouse, everything he had done, every gesture and scowl. And she was no closer to an explanation. She only knew that something was dreadfully wrong, and that she had missed him.

  Missed him! She must have: she’d waited every night at the window for him, turning his ring on her finger, and had made excuses for Branson to drive past the Claybourne Exchange every day on her way to the Beggar’s Academy; and she had drifted in and out of bliss at the memory of his kisses—but that couldn’t mean she actually missed him. Missed him? No, it was more than that. Much more. Oh, dear God—

  She loved him!