“How obedient you have become,” he observed. “Not even the smallest outcry.”
“As you pointed out to me, it would have done me no good. I see no reason to waste my strength or my voice in futile exercise. I can do naught but accept the unhappy fact that I am your prisoner. Where are you taking me?”
“To Beauchamp.” Seeing the shock on Alyssa’s face at his answer, he sneered. “You will never be mistress of it, as you thought. But you may be mine until I tire of it.”
This statement, delivered with such careless certainty of her character, left Alyssa both mortified and heartsick. Her chin rose unconsciously to a proud, defiant angle. “I will not be your convenient.”
“As you wish,” he said indifferently. “It is immaterial to me, but you might as well have the enjoyment as well as the notoriety of what the world will believe you are.”
She stared at him, horror at her imminent ruin mingled with pain at his hatred for her. “Must you refuse to believe the truth? I swear to you, Your Grace, that Jeremy was not lying this morning when he told you that our betrothal is ended.”
The stunned look on Carlyle’s face told Alyssa that, whatever else Jeremy might have said to his father this morning, he had not revealed that he was crying off the betrothal.
“That was one lie Jeremy spared me!” the duke exclaimed. “It would have been very awkward for him to tell me that and in the next breath ask, as he did, for eight hundred pounds to purchase you a diamond necklace as a betrothal present.”
Alyssa could have cried aloud in vexation. So that was the excuse Jeremy had used to get the money he needed for the trip to the Gretna Green! “He did not want it to buy a present for me. The money is to finance the journey to the border.”
“So you admit that you two planned to travel to Gretna Green tonight.”
“Yes, I admit it,” Alyssa cried. “But we were not going there to be married!”
“What other earthly reason would you have to go there?”
Alyssa remembered how certain Jeremy had been that his father would do everything in his considerable power to stop Sarah’s and George’s elopement if he learned of it. She looked dubiously at the duke, wondering whether she dared to tell him of it. Would he insist on stopping them, thereby condemning Sarah to a dreadful fate?
Carlyle’s eyes, which had been studying her intently, narrowed. “What Banbury tale are you going to tell me now?” he demanded scornfully, settling back against the squab. “Go ahead. I look forward to your performance.”
Alyssa swallowed hard. “Remember Sarah Turner, the girl that Thomas Stokes was mistreating at the theatre last night? She and George Braden are wildly in love, and it is they who are eloping. Jeremy and I were only helping them.”
The duke roared with laughter. “I congratulate you on coming up with such an imaginative tale on the spur of the moment. You would have made a magnificent actress, Miss Raff.”
His scorn ate at Alyssa like lye. “You have to believe me!” she cried. “I swear to you it is the truth.”
“Just as you swore yesterday that you would not travel to Gretna Green with my son?” he demanded mockingly. “Tell me, Miss Raff, why you found it necessary to accompany this poor runaway couple.”
“To lend respectability. You see...”
His shout of derisive laughter cut short her explanation. “You lend respectability, you strumpet?” he jeered.
The insult was more than she could bear, and her hand lashed up toward his taunting face. But he was too quick for her. His own fingers closed about her wrist before she could slap him.
“Do not try that again, you hellcat,” he ground out, “for the consequences will be exceedingly unpleasant for you.” He stared into her eyes for a long moment, continuing to hold her wrist in his punishing grasp.
Alyssa met his furious gaze squarely with eyes as angry as his. There was a strange glint in his eyes when he at last released her wrist. “I will grant you this: You have a remarkably fertile imagination when it comes to lying to me. Will it be equally fertile when you try to explain away why you have been living under my protection?”
“You are determined to ruin me, aren’t you?”
“But, my dear Miss Raff, I have told you that is impossible, since Lord Eliot has already done so. I can only improve upon his effort. But be assured I shall do so with a vengeance.”
“He was not my lover!” she cried in desperation.
“Was he not?” The look in his hazel eyes made her want to shrivel up on the soft velvet seat and die. “Given that magnificent imagination of yours, my dear Miss Raff, what will you next try to convince me of? That the old goat was in reality your grandfather?”
Her head fell back in despair against the scarlet squab as if her slender neck were no longer able to bear the weight.
“So you actually intended to tell me that whisker,” he observed mockingly. “Good God, next you will assure me that the sun rises in the west.”
Alyssa could not blame Carlyle for refusing to believe her. If only she had told him the truth that night at the Hagars’ instead of letting her anger and wounded pride coerce her into seeking retribution. She had taunted him that she would elope with Jeremy, and now he was convinced that was what she had been doing. By failing to confess the truth in the beginning, she had brought the duke’s revenge upon herself. Now he was determined to ruin her, and he would succeed.
Her proud posture drooped as she contemplated the bleak future before her. If her puritanical grandfather learned that she had been under the notorious Duke of Carlyle’s protection, he would never take her back, and she would have nowhere to go. Never again would she see Ormandy Park. The thought was very nearly her undoing. She had to fight to hold back the tears that threatened to overwhelm her, unaware that her expressive face betrayed her painful emotions to Carlyle.
He had been expecting her to turn into a watering-pot in an attempt to soften him and was much surprised by her successful struggle to keep from crying. It softened him toward her more than tears ever would have.
After several minutes of silence broken only by the sound of the carriage hurtling through the night, she asked in a subdued voice, “I beg of you, Your Grace, to restore me to my home. Only consider what Jeremy will think of you when he learns that you have abducted me.”
“I am taking a page out of your book, my lying Miss Raff. I have left him a note, saying that you came to me offering to jilt him in exchange for my carte blanche.” His voice was taunting. “Being a doting father, anxious to save my son from the clutches of such a harpy, I sacrificed myself and accepted your offer.”
“He will never believe you.”
“Yes, he will. I will soon be able to present him with proof of your former liaison with Lord Eliot. That will disillusion him as nothing else could.”
“You cannot find proof of a liaison that never was!” she cried.
“Spare me your lies,” he snapped. He moved on the velvet seat, and his thigh brushed against hers, setting off a quivering within her that made her shrink into the corner to escape his touch. Feeling her reaction, he laughed and moved closer, deliberately brushing against her again.
“Don’t! Please!” she cried.
His lips curled in cynical amusement. “Good God, you are an actress of the first water. One would think you were an innocent!”
Alyssa, remembering what Lady Braden had said about his never bringing his women to his country seat, said, “Surely you cannot mean to take me to Beauchamp! What will your daughter think?”
“Ellen will know nothing about you. She will be in Bath, taking the waters with her aunt, for two more weeks. By then you will be gone.”
Gone and my life ruined! “What a brief affair you have in mind,” she remarked bitterly.
“All of my affairs are brief. I am easily bored.” Cynical amusement glistened in Carlyle’s gold-flecked eyes. “But perhaps you can banish boredom by amusing me with tales from your vivid imagination. You can be a latt
er-day Scheherazade, entertaining her master with her tongue as well as her body to stave off the end.”
“I will entertain you with neither!” she cried, wounded to the core by his insouciance.
He grinned wickedly at her. “Won’t you, now?” His hands moved suddenly, locking her face between them, forcing her chin up. His lips closed over hers in a hard kiss. She tried to escape him, but he held her fast and continued his plundering kiss. The harder she tried to struggle against him, the more punishing his kiss and his hold upon her became. Clearly, fighting him would only prolong his embrace. He would settle for nothing less than her surrender. She gave it to him, relaxing against the velvet cushions and parting her lips to accept his kiss. When she stopped resisting him, his kiss softened and his mouth explored hers so provocatively that she was soon quivering with excitement. She was both shocked and thrilled by the strange currents running through her, and suddenly she was returning his kiss with a passion she had never known she possessed.
It was he who broke off the kiss, a strange light in his gold-flecked eyes. “No wonder you have so bewitched my poor son,” he said hoarsely, flinging himself upon the opposite seat where he silently scrutinised her in the pale light of the carriage lamp.
Alyssa turned her face to the scarlet satin lining of the coach to hide the two large tears that she was powerless to keep from coursing down her cheeks.
Chapter 17
Jeremy was chafing at the inexplicable delay in hitching four horses to a sleek travelling-carriage. Mr Marsh remained genial and unperturbed in the face of Jeremy’s irritable and increasingly frequent exhortations to hurry, explaining that a wheel had been found to be loose, and he could not permit any patrons of his establishment to set out on such a long journey in a vehicle that was in anything less than prime condition.
For what must have been the twentieth time in the past thirty minutes, Jeremy pulled his watch from his pocket and consulted it only to find that scarcely sixty seconds had passed since the last time he had examined its face. It was already fifteen past nine, and it would take him at least twenty minutes to drive to Alyssa’s, then another twenty-five to drive back to get Sarah and George, which was the most critical part of the whole plan.
They would be waiting for him at nine thirty, and he dared not delay picking them up because of the very real danger that Sarah’s flight might be discovered and a search instituted. Jeremy hastily revised his itinerary. The Turner home was only a few minutes away, and common sense dictated that he go to Sarah’s first, even though it meant keeping Alyssa waiting for him for more than an hour. Jeremy deeply regretted that, but it could not be helped. He hoped that she would not be so poor-spirited as to back out of the scheme when he was so late in appearing for her.
At last the horses were hitched, and Jeremy, somewhat mollified by the quality of the two matched pairs that had been assigned to him, bundled Letty’s abigail into the carriage and set off to collect Sarah and George.
By travelling through the streets of London at a speed approaching insanity, Jeremy reached Sarah and George at nine thirty-three. Crouched in the shadows round the corner from the Turner residence, Sarah was in tears that, once she was inside the carriage, turned into strong hysteria.
Jeremy’s nerves and temper were further strained when at five past ten, more than an hour after the appointed time, they reached the corner where Alyssa was to await them and found no sign of her. What they did see, however, was her mother and Rosina climbing the steps of their home, having just stepped down from the hackney that had transported them from Vauxhall Gardens.
“Oh, we are in the suds!” Jeremy exclaimed. “Alyssa must have gone back into the house. Now she will be trapped there until her mother and sister are asleep.”
“We cannot wait,” George said firmly, the first decision that he had made without Jeremy’s help since the elopement plans had begun. Over his beloved’s tearful protests, he said forcefully, “We must go on immediately. Already Sarah may have been discovered missing and the alarm gone out.”
Jeremy signalled the coachman to drive to their next destination, the posting-house on the outskirts of London where the two saddle horses he had bespoken earlier in the day awaited him and George.
Sarah was again in hysteria because she would have to make the journey to Gretna Green without Alyssa’s respectable and sustaining company. By now, Jeremy was sorely tempted to throttle his friend’s beloved. It would be a long, long trip to Gretna Green.
The elopement party was an hour out of London when an unnerving thought struck Jeremy. What if Alyssa had not gone back into the house before their arrival? What if something dreadful had happened to her during that long hour she would have had to wait for his appearance? The more he thought about it, the more worried he became that all was not right with her.
Elsewhere, another journey was reaching its end. After Alyssa had turned her face into the scarlet velvet to hide her tears, she laid her head back on the scarlet squab and feigned sleep rather than meet Carlyle’s scowling study. Eventually, as the well-sprung equipage raced through the night, her pretence became reality.
Now as the carriage halted, she stirred and reluctantly opened her eyes. The night, which had been warm when they left London, had grown brisk, and Alyssa saw to her surprise that a fur rug had been tucked round her while she slept to ward off the cold. She glanced at Carlyle on the seat opposite. She had not thought he would have so much consideration for her comfort.
“We are at Beauchamp,” he said as the carriage door opened. Jumping lightly down, he extended his hand to her, and she stared up at a stone building that, even in the darkness, was impressive in its size. Twin stone staircases, illuminated by large lamps, curved round from the ground to a broad doorway, its triangular pediment supported by Doric columns.
As they reached the large door, it was swung open by an unseen hand from within, and they stepped into a large entry hall that was more austere than welcoming in its grandeur. Its walls were decorated with alternating round and square reliefs set between engaged columns of porphyry. The deep wine of this stone was echoed in the ornamentation of the frieze and in the colour surrounding the intricate circular plasterwork in the ceiling. Across the hall from the door rose a broad marble staircase.
“Pedley,” Carlyle said to the owner of the unseen hand that had opened the door, “I expressly said in my note that no one was to wait up for me, did I not?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” said the butler, a portly man in his fifties with thinning gray hair. The start he gave when he saw Alyssa on the duke’s arm was very nearly imperceptible. He was less successful, however, in concealing his contempt. Although it flickered only briefly in his shrewd, observant eyes, it told Alyssa that he was in full agreement with his master’s low assessment of her character. Unconsciously, she held herself even more regally in the face of his interested gaze. Let him think what he would; she knew her own worth.
The coachman carried in her single portmanteau and small case, setting them on the polished floor. The butler looked down his proper nose at them, but when he spoke, his voice was tonelessly correct. “Your Grace neglected to inform us that he would be accompanied by a guest. In which chamber do you wish us to put her baggage?”
“Do not concern yourself with it, Pedley,” the duke ordered in a voice that prohibited dissent, “and take yourself off to bed.”
The butler, knowing better than to question his master when he used that tone, reluctantly did as he was bid, leaving Alyssa and Carlyle alone in the hall.
“If Your Grace will excuse me, I wish to follow Pedley’s example and retire,” she said coolly, bending to pick up her two bags.
‘I will handle them,” he said, taking them from her. “I would think stooping to carry bags would be beneath you,” she said coldly, “even though abduction is not.”
“I warned you that I would do anything to keep my son from marrying you, and I meant it,” he said as they went up the broad marble staircase.
She started to tell him again that his son had not been eloping with her but decided it would be useless.
On the upper floor, he stopped before a closed door, saying, “This is my apartment.”
“Where is mine?” she demanded with icy dignity. “Or is your thirst for revenge so great, Your Grace, that you mean to force me into your bed as you forced me into your coach? Will you not content yourself with ruining me in the eyes of the world?”
There was a flash of fire in his golden eyes, but he shrugged carelessly. “It is a matter of supreme indifference to me where you sleep.”
He continued down the hall past several more doors before stopping in front of one, opening it, and setting her bags inside. The room was so dark that she could see nothing. “Use this chamber if you wish. I’ll get a candle from my rooms.”
He strode off, returning a minute later with a candlestick.
“Now that you have me here, what do you plan to do with me?” Alyssa asked as she took the flickering taper from him.
“That will depend on the talk I shall have with Jeremy when he comes. I expect that will be tomorrow, although he may sulk for a day or two before he appears.”
“He will not be here tomorrow, and not because he is sulking,” she said with asperity. “It will be several days before he returns from Gretna Green.”
His face hardened angrily in the dancing light of the candle. “So you insist upon maintaining the silly fiction that he will still go there.” He turned abruptly and stalked back into his own apartments, shutting the door hard behind him.
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