In the Brief Eternal Silence

by Rebecca Melvin

  He did not live?

  No, Miss Murdock. He was not even born.

  It had been planned that we remain at Morningside until after the new year, but mid-week between Christmas and New Year's Eve, my father received a summons from the Queen. I never have been able to ascertain what it was about, as my father evidently destroyed all correspondence from the crown and kept no notes on what he was doing. All those secrets he held in his head died with him. I have often wondered how the last two decades of our history would have played out had he lived. What projects had he been working on that were to be left forever incomplete?

  My mother was not particularly unhappy about the change in plans. Despite being with child and all the annoyances that I am sure a woman goes through in that condition, she was feeling quite stifled at Morningside. So she refused my grandmother's offer to stay on and to allow my father to go on ahead alone. Instead, she made ready for the trip, which, as the summons had only been received late that afternoon, would have to be made during the night. She ordered that only the essentials be packed for us, and that the rest of the luggage could be brought up the following day at a more leisurely pace. I was dressed and ready, looking forward to the trip as I considered it an adventure. For I normally traveled with my grandmother, and every journey with her was as big as a caravan and as slowly moving. She has grown even worse over the years, by the by.

  However, I was no more than settled into the coach when I began to cough. It had been the cold night air, I suppose, and then the sudden closeness of the coach. And it was not just coughing, but great, loud barkings. I remember feeling my throat constricting just as quickly as you please, and wrenching out those barking coughs. It was the croup, my mother told me, and she was rather annoyed, I remember, for I hadn't had that malady since being a very young lad. There was no way she could expect me to travel in that condiion. I tried to argue, for as I had said, it appealed very much to me to be out on the road at night, traveling lightly and quickly with none of the constraints of my grandmother's great expeditions. It still does, to this day, appeal to me.

  At any rate, I was quickly hustled off back into the house. I no longer had a nanny, of course, but the housekeeper, Mrs. Herriot, tsked and sighed over me and hurried me up into bed, where she quickly heated and shoved in bed warmers below my feet and prepared a poultice for my throat. And all the while, I was perfectly miserable, because I knew that my time with my parents was once again at an end.

  Of course, I was right. My mother spoke to my grandmother, and it was arranged that I would remain on at Morningside until after the New Year and return to London with her. My mother would go on ahead with my father, where she would manage, in all probability, to keep herself entertained in Town while my father went on about his important business.

  But my father never finished that business, Miss Murdock, and my mother was never again entertained, for they were not above two miles from our home when they were set upon on that dark road and murdered. My father, my mother, and her unborn child.

  It was Tyler that found them, strangely enough, for one of the horses at last managed to break free of its harness and made straight back to the stables, wild-eyed and spooked by the smell of blood in its nostrils. Tyler recognized it immediately and he and my uncle set out to find what the trouble may be, assuming at first there must have been an accident. It was well into the following morning by then. What they found was no accident. Both coachmen were dead on the ground, having been, apparently, ordered at gunpoint from their stations.

  My father was still in the coach, huddled partially over my mother's form. They had killed him, and Tyler told me it looked as if they had then kicked him aside in order to, yes, kill my mother.

  He should not have told you such a thing! It is too horrible!

  But he did, Miss Murdock. For I have questioned him to the degree that every detail of that scene that he still sees in his mind, I see in mine.

  Suddenly the salon, which had faded away from her, reeled back in upon Miss Murdock as the Duke of St. James before her uttered these last words. She blinked several times, trying to orient herself.

  She was shaking, she realized, and when she spoke again, she could only choke, “I'm sorry.”

  The gold eyes razed her. “I did promise to satisfy your curiosity.”

  He pushed back his chair, got up abruptly, almost as though they had conversed of nothing of more consequence than the weather. He went to the sideboard and picked up a bottle of brandy. He hefted it in his hand several times, as if contemplating its exact weight before opening it, tilting it, and filling his glass. Then he turned to her. “As I said before, Miss Murdock, even this tragic story does not make what I do right. I would rather you go into this alliance with your eyes firmly on what you are to gain and upon nothing else. I would not wish you to get some misguided notion in your head of cooperating out of pity for me. I would much prefer you continue to hate me and argue with me than that.”

  “There is a large difference between pity and sympathy, milord,” she attempted, but as his eyes only brooded at her, she added, “But I assure you, I will not suddenly become compliant because I still cannot fathom how your marrying in this haphazard manner is to further whatever cause you have set for yourself.”

  “You can not realize my objective?” he asked. He took a long sip of brandy and considered her over his glass rim. “You think, perhaps, that my reputation as a skilled shot is merely some fluke of nature? You don't think that I spent more time practicing with a pistol than most people spend on their knees at prayer, even the most devout?”

  Miss Murdock blanched, feeling her stomach knot.

  St. James nodded. “I see you understand me now, Miss Murdock. Vengeance is the word you are thinking,” and he smiled.

  “But marriage,” she stuttered.

  And he put his glass down with an abrupt thump. “Enough, Miss Murdock. I deem it necessary, and that shall have to be enough for you for one day. Do you never get weary of picking at my mind? What do you think you will find if you pick long enough? For I can assure you, you will find nothing to your liking. If my best memory is punctuated at the end by the death of my parents, what do you think all my worst memories are punctuated with? No, Miss Murdock. Do not prize at me any further than you already have, and although I am to be your husband, you would do well to keep your distance.”

  “I hardly find that possible when you have every intention of, of—”

  “Making love to you, Miss Murdock?” he finished for her. “Well, that shall certainly be a challenge.”

  Whereas milord seemed to have had no qualms in traveling to Gretna Green with no proper chaperone, he seemed rather more concerned about doing the same on a journey to London. He summoned a messenger to their room, directed him to seek out Lord Tempton, Earl of Edison, at the local gentry's hunt that morning, and entrusted him with the message that the Duke of St. James would be in need of his and Mister Tempton's services after all.

  Then he sat back to wait, and as he did not take kindly to cooling his heels in any one place for any length of time, he made a steady inroad into the opened bottle of brandy and presently started another.

  Miss Murdock, not much happier to be stuck in the inn's salon, watching his lordship's drinking erode away the few, very few, commendable qualities she had been able to find in him, merely picked up the London newspaper that had been left with her earlier, took a seat away from St. James and near a window and began to pass the time by reading.

  The only noise in the room to disturb her was the occasional clink of bottle on glass.

  Some two hours had gone by, and as once again she heard him pouring, and the clinking was rather more pronounced and more jarring than it had been before, she turned in her seat and gave him an accusing glare.

  He met her brown eyes, the gold of his own ominous in their warning. “Do not start, Miss Murdock, for I am beyond the recall now, and I have been known to get surly on these occasions.”

&
nbsp; To which Miss Murdock with a mumble beneath her breath for once heeded him, for the expression of his face was too forbidding for her to doubt his words. She turned back to her newspaper, wondering however she was to deal with him on a long journey to London.

  Having been half-consciously waiting for relief in the form of the Tempton brothers, she caught sight of them immediately out of her window when they rode up to the yard some time later. She let the paper, which she had now perused several times in search of those articles she may have missed on her prior reading, drop in her lap as she watched them dismount. “They are here, milord,” she broke the heavy silence. When she got no response, Miss Murdock turned to him.

  His change of clothing, which had made him look so fresh a few hours ago, were now wrinkled and crumpled as he sprawled in his chair. He had loosened his cravat, the first few buttons on his shirt were undone, revealing the white column of his throat and a pale glimpse of upper chest. His hair had escaped the neat ponytail he had put it in before and now skewered about his dissipated face. His booted legs were stretched slothfully before him, and two empty bottles of liquor and a freshly opened bottle on the table beside him confirmed her fears that he had drank with silent, determined moodiness for the past hours.

  His eyes were slits in his pale face, his dark brows drawn into a knot above them, and even as she watched, he moved his hand from the table, balancing a goblet in his fingers and brought it to his mouth.

  Miss Murdock gave a sigh and moved toward him. She removed the glass from his hand, with some difficulty as he seemed reluctant to give it up, and set it with distaste on the table. She was forced to move it back further when he again reached for it. “I think you have had quite enough, milord,” she told him.

  He gave a soft curse. “What are you doing, Miss Murdock?”

  “Buttoning your shirt and your cravat, milord, if you can endeavor to hold still for a moment. The Temptons are here, and it will not do for them to see you as such.”

  He brought his hands to both of hers, pinning them to his chest, where she felt his heart thumping beneath her palms, and she raised her large eyes to his drink clouded ones. “I can manage, Miss Murdock,” he told her. “I wished to acquire a wife, not a nanny.”

  And Miss Murdock, despite feeling her face coloring, told him, “Then you should act as a man and not a child, milord.”

  He drew a deep breath, one that made her hands go up and then down with the movement of his chest. She became aware that she was leaning over him, that his boots were stretched out to either side of her skirts, and that he was making no sign of moving to sit up straighter nor to release her hands so that she may again stand erect. Instead, his eyelids drew up, like the hoods on a snake's eyes drawing back when something has roused it, and she found herself lost in the deep golden depths of them, aware that his nostrils were flaring and that her own chest were hurting as she held her breath.

  There was a soft tapping on the door, and then it was flung open with no further ceremony and Lord and Mister Tempton strode in, panting, as they had evidently made haste upon receiving their summons. Miss Murdock tore her eyes from St. James' stare at their entrance, her face flaming with embarrassment, and tried frantically for the release of her hands from his lordship's chest.

  He released them with a brief chuckle, which set her hackles up all the more, and with a little squeak, she straightened, turned in a flurry of skirts, and hid herself by going to the far corner of the room. She remained there under the pretense of searching for something in her reticule, which to her chagrin, she managed to spill in her fluster.

  “Up to your old tricks, again, I see, St. James,” she heard Bertie say as she dived to the floor and scrambled after her belongings. “Lucky we arrived when we did.”

  St. James buttoned his shirt, straightened his cravat. “I dare say it is,” he agreed in a lazy voice. “For Miss Murdock has rather more charms than I initially gave her credit for.”

  Ryan Tempton strode over to Miss Murdock who rose to her feet, snapping closed her reticule. “I say, Miss Murdock, are you all right?”

  “I am—I am fine, Mister Tempton,” she managed. “It was not at all what I am sure it looked to be. He is very drunk, you know, and I was merely attempting to button his shirt and redo his cravat so that he could look more presentable.” Somehow this explanation only seemed to make the situation worse, for she supposed that Mister Tempton's mind would quite naturally wonder why his lordship's cravat and shirt were undone to begin with.

  But Mister Tempton placed a gentle hand on her arm, and she looked up the tall length of him and into his concerned face. “I am certain that it was all innocent on your part, Miss Murdock, but I can not doubt that Lord St. James, being St. James, took it in another spirit altogether.”

  “Oh my!” she said, his words giving her a new and unpleasant perspective. “You mean to say that he may have thought that I was—I was initiating. . . ?”

  “I'm afraid that is very likely what he thought.”

  Miss Murdock, feeling quite horrified, said in a small voice, “Oh. I see. I must be more careful in the future.”

  “Do not blame yourself, Miss Murdock, for I am sure you could not have known! I am equally certain that had St. James not been so drunk he would not have presumed, well, what he presumed. In all likelihood, he will not remember it when he sobers, so you need not feel embarrassed or the need to explain to him.”

  “Yes. Of course, I am sure you are right, Mister Tempton. But I do admit I feel very foolish, indeed.”

  “You must realize, Miss Murdock, that St. James has not had much cause to associate with decent young ladies in his life.”

  “So I have come to understand,” she acknowledged.

  “I am glad that you shall not hold it against him, for he really is a dependable fellow, if perhaps at times a bit difficult. And I am glad that we have been summoned to chaperone you, for I must admit that I was feeling quite a bit of concern for you, not that St. James would offer to harm you,” he hurried to say, “but simply because of his lamentable reputation.”

  Miss Murdock smiled up at him. “And I am grateful that you and Lord Tempton could see your way clear to assist us, for I must admit, I was somewhat worried that this. . . arrangement milord has in mind shall be difficult enough without a lot of gossiping to accompany it.”

  Ryan asked her, “It is true, then, that St. James has plans to offer for you?”

  “In fact, Mister Tempton, he already has, much to my astonishment and, I confess, my dismay.” She paused for a moment, then continued on in an even lower voice, “I take it that you were there, when the duke and my father were discussing. . . my future?”

  Ryan made a sympathetic noise in his throat. “I am reluctant to admit that I was, Miss Murdock, only because it shows badly upon me that I did not do more to stop their shameful behavior. I advised milord quite strongly against it, and was quite scandalized when he made it known that he meant to carry out his plans immediately. I thought at the time that it could not be anything short of terrifying for you, but nothing I could say, nor Bertie even, would dissuade him. I am only grateful that he has indeed offered you marriage and has not toyed with you in any way.”

  “He has in fact been most adamant about marriage,” Miss Murdock responded. “And although I have become aware of some of his reasoning, I still cannot think that this shall alleviate his problems in any way, but shall in fact, add to them. But no, Mister Tempton,” she added, “you can at least rest easy in your mind that I was not terrified in the least, for it was all rather comical, as my father was passed out cold and the duke hardly in better shape. Watching him and his groom carry my father into my home in the middle of the night, with milord, of course, cursing roundly and abusing his groom in the most unsavory manner, was worth a lot of entertainment to me. And the poor duke was most shocked, I daresay, at my appearance, for I was in the most dilapidated sleeping costume, and when I went to make him breakfast and coffee, I sooted my c
heek and burned my hand. And all this time, we are arguing, and he is quite furious, both that I should be so uncooperative and at the fact, I am sure, that he had saddled himself with such a plain bite, when although he claims to have no care what his future wife looks like, I am sure he was hoping for an incomparable, for wouldn't any man?

  “So you see, Mister Tempton, it was not terrifying in the least, but all merely very funny and odd. And as I have convinced him to allow me a season in London instead of eloping off to Gretna Green, I can not find it in my heart to feel sorry for myself, for I am sure it is the grandest adventure I shall ever have. And I am not worried in the least, for after the duke has fully sobered and had a few days to think about it, I am sure he will cry off in a most undignified manner, and I shall return home with exciting stories to tell of my sojourn in London and my encounters with the wicked Duke of St. James.”