Games of Pleasure

by Julia Ross

  Ryder stared up at her for a moment, her slim figure silhouetted against the wash of clouds and blue sky. She shook as if she were being buffeted by a strong wind. He took the steps two at a time.

  “I shouldn’t have asked,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head and sat down on a chunk of stone, then wrapped her arms about both knees. Her profile was pure steel as she gazed out across the countryside. Filled with distress at his helplessness to change the past, or to save her from having to remember it, Ryder propped his hips on a broken merlon.

  “The next morning the earl barely allowed me out of his sight,” she said. “His mood was very black. I’d never seen him like it before. I didn’t dare to defy him openly. He was a man enraged, taking solace in a favorite possession, holding on to my arm with a death grip. To have tried to leave him then would have meant making a public scene in that grand inn in Exeter. I thought he’d never forgive me for that.”

  “So you boarded the yacht together?”

  “Yes. Before sailing to the Solent, we were to make a detour to spend a few days in Lyme Regis. I thought I would escape him more easily there.”

  “After dulling his suspicions?”

  “If you like. Yet before we reached Lyme, Willcott came aboard secretly in the middle of the night. I went up on deck to see the stars and discovered him there, drinking with Lord Hanley. I knew then that I should have walked out in Exeter, whatever the cost, but it was too late.”

  Ryder dropped down beside her. Almost blindly she reached out to seize his hand. Her pulse echoed the broken rhythms of his, as if they weathered a storm together.

  “Hanley was drunk?”

  “I don’t believe so. Yet Philip Willcott was, certainly. They’d already decided to go forward with their original bargain, whether I was willing or not.”

  Fear and pain for her ached in every muscle. “I wish I didn’t have to ask this, Miracle, but I must know what happened next.”

  “Ah, don’t worry! It’s not so very bad.” She squeezed his fingers and turned to smile at him. Her dark eyes were filled with courage and defiance at the world. “Probably nowhere near as bad as you’ve been fearing. Willcott tried to rape me, but he didn’t succeed.”

  “You fought him?”

  She released his fingers and rose to pace along the battlements. “Like a demon! He dragged me down to the cabin, but I was filled with cold fury and a blazing determination to outwit him, or at least to give as good as I got.”

  “And Hanley?”

  “Lounged in the doorway and watched. His eyes were as sharp as needles as Willcott tore away my dress, but he seemed otherwise turned to stone. I don’t think he was even particularly aroused by it.”

  “Aroused by it? For God’s sake!”

  Miracle spun about to face him. Revulsion marked every line of his face. Ryder was so fundamentally decent and honorable. Had he never—living next to the stars in his ancestral towers—known just how ugly the world could be? Yet now she had begun, she could no longer spare him—nor herself.

  “The earl must have had some reason of his own for wishing to so gratify Willcott,” she said. “Though it may be an alien thought to you, there are plenty of men who find the idea of witnessing rape exciting, even though they might shy away from it themselves.”

  He regained his icy control with an obvious effort. “You think that’s true of Hanley?”

  Memories crowded in. Swallowing her fear, she closed her eyes so that she could describe exactly what she recalled.

  “No, not really. Yet his expression was . . . It was as if he wore a steel mask—a complete indifference. I despised him more at that moment than I hated Willcott. I managed to tear away—I’d lost my shoes by then, and my hair had come down—but I snatched a shoe from the floor and struck Lord Hanley in the crotch. He doubled over, retching. That’s when Willcott began to hit me in the face. The earl simply turned and left the cabin.”

  No one will ever want you again. Whore! Whore! You let Hanley roger you, but turn up your nose at Philip Willcott?

  “Miracle!”

  The voice seemed to come from very far away, but it was only the faint impression of an anguished concern that she’d perhaps once imagined, but never really experienced. Far more frantic emotions surged, threatening to overwhelm her in darkness. She pressed both hands over her closed lids and let the words pour out.

  “Willcott bent me back over the table. He was leaning over me, biting my neck, but he had to use one hand to unfasten his trousers.” The fear and nausea began to swarm, buzzing behind her eyes. “I flailed out and my fingers closed on a knife handle. He fell to the floor. There was blood. Such a lot of blood!”

  “Miracle!”

  Firm hands caught her by the shoulders. She opened her eyes and the nightmare cleared. His dark lashes stark against his pale skin, Ryder stared down at her, his eyes desolate.

  “You almost fainted,” he said. “I’m sorry. I had no right to force you to tell me this.”

  “I’m all right.” She laughed unsteadily and reached for the strength of defiance. “Why shouldn’t you know? My mad knight errant, bent only on my salvation? Or have I given you enough information now to see me hanged for murder, after all?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE WORDS HUNG BETWEEN THEM. SHE WOULD GIVE ALMOST anything to have left them unsaid. But he did not reel away in disgust. He merely gazed at her steadily and helped her to sit down.

  “Nothing you say to me will ever be used to harm you,” he said gently. “You must know that.”

  Miracle smiled up into the storm-green gaze. “Ah, of course! Not even torture would make Sir Galahad break a confidence.”

  He strode away a few paces, saying nothing.

  She leaned her shoulder against a taller part of the stone wall, where a higher tower had crumbled away. It seemed an apt enough metaphor for the state of her defenses. Tall and forbidding, Ryder gazed out across the distant hills. The shadows of drifting clouds moved over the short turf like giant shoals of fish.

  “I’ve no idea how the knife got there,” she said, “but there was blood on my hand. A dark pool was spreading beneath Willcott’s body from a wound in his shoulder. I tore off my rings and stumbled out onto the deck. I wasn’t thinking . . . I wasn’t thinking very clearly. Lord Hanley was sprawled in the bow. He’d drunk himself into a stupor. No one paid any attention as I ran to the stern, climbed down into the dinghy, and cut the line. I threw the knife into the ocean and escaped.”

  “Into a boat with no oars?”

  “I discovered that when I was swept out to sea,” she said dryly. “And yes, I think at that moment I wanted to die.”

  A profound silence settled over the ruined keep. He turned and pulled a small flask from his pocket. His eyes seemed as gray as the stone outcroppings in the distance.

  “Here,” he said with a grave smile. “On loan from Mr. Faber. Brandy. Would it help?”

  The liquor burned in her throat. She coughed and made a face at him. “Thank you. And thank you for not offering a litany of hackneyed condolences over my outraged modesty. My primary emotion was fury.”

  “I’m stunningly relieved that it wasn’t worse. I had feared—”

  “That I was raped?”

  He took back the brandy flask and swallowed some himself, tipping back his head to reveal his strong throat.

  “Yes. Though now I know what really happened, it’s going to take a little time to think through all the implications.”

  “What implications? It’s a sordid enough tale, but a simple one: Willcott tried to force me, so I killed him.”

  Ryder sat down next to her. He dropped his head to gaze at the flagstones beneath his feet, his hands clasped together between his spread knees. “God! You had every right.”

  “Yet it’s a terrible thing to have done, Ryder, and there’s no court in the land that would agree that a harlot can be raped, so what right does she have to defend herself?”

&
nbsp; He dropped his forehead onto his closed fists for a moment. Miracle gazed longingly at the taut lines of his back, at the mahogany highlights in his dark hair. There was no sense at all in wishing for a different reality, yet—

  Ryder leaped to his feet and paced away. At the end of the battlements, where the wall had collapsed, he stopped and stared down into the gorge. “I’m glad that I didn’t know all the details before, or Hanley might no longer be alive. Yet none of this makes any sense.”

  He spun about and walked back with rapid, decisive strides. “Why the devil would Hanley make such a pact to begin with? Why—after displaying such extraordinary possessiveness—would an earl arrange for another man to ravish his mistress, then drink himself into oblivion? Why was there a knife ready to hand? And why the hell did the dinghy have no oars?”

  A numbing exhaustion had seeped into her bones. Miracle stood up and walked back to the head of the spiral stair.

  “I don’t know. I can’t think about it. We must go, if we’re to get to the Jolly Farmer in time not to be left behind by the others.”

  He caught up with her in three strides. “Hanley’s pursuit is far more dangerous than I’d realized, Miracle. To play Ophelia is too great a risk.”

  “But I can’t break my promise to the Fabers.”

  “Whatever money they’d lose by canceling another performance, I’ll double it.”

  All the uneven, painful emotions of the last hour surged in like a red tide, swamping her. “Not everything can be solved with money! There’s also a question of honor. I gave them my word!”

  “I understand that,” he said quietly. “It doesn’t mean that you must also give them your life.”

  Miracle ran down the stairs and away up the path. He caught up to stride along beside her.

  “Even if Hanley were in the audience—and he won’t be—he’d never imagine it was me,” she said. “There’s a whole neighborhood of working people who’ve waited all year for this. There’s a troupe of players needing to fulfill their art and express their talents. There’s the Fabers’ professional reputation, if they’re to maintain any future business. There’s a farmer who’s rearranged his entire schedule to accommodate this one annual event. How can money compensate for the loss of all that?”

  “It can’t, obviously.”

  “I won’t back out now, especially when I doubt there’s really very much danger in fulfilling my promise.”

  “Very well,” he said. “We’ll be as unassuming in Hulme Down as church mice. No one who matters will see us. But afterward, I insist—”

  “Afterward, you can do whatever you like.” She stopped and faced him, desperate to make him understand. “I can’t handle anymore just now, Ryder. Once I’ve collected my savings from my brother and taken ship for America, none of it will matter, will it?”

  The path had brought them to the top of a small ridge. It wound back down to a cluster of buildings along a wooded stream. The walkers from the troupe were already gathered there at the Jolly Farmer, waiting for the wagons.

  Ryder stood for a moment, gazing down at the trees and the sparkle of sunlit water, then he turned back to her and smiled.

  “Then let’s help the Fabers put on the best production of Hamlet in their entire careers,” he said.

  HULME Down was dominated by a small mill. Cottages clustered along the stream to the door of the church, then strayed along a muddy lane that led west to the farm that was to host the Fabers’ play. For most of that day the audience had been streaming toward the village in various primitive conveyances: wagons, carts, traps, and on foot.

  The barn hulked beside a large farmyard, not unlike the place where Ryder had warned off Jeb and Bruiser during their first encounter, except that this time every building bustled with pigs, sheep, and cattle. It was a threshing barn, temporarily empty, awaiting the harvest. The floor would serve as the pit, a high platform at one end as the stage.

  Miracle climbed from her wagon and helped with the costumes as the Faber brothers began to prepare for their play. Ryder carried castle walls, stacked wooden weapons, moved trunks, and saw to the horses with quiet efficiency, as if he understood at a glance what needed to be done and how to do it.

  She was alert to his every movement. The long strides. The easy strength and obvious intelligence. She was very painfully in love. It was an emotion she neither wanted nor understood, yet this terrible heightened awareness—this throbbing, dizzying excitement in the blood—accompanied her like a drumbeat.

  Ryder had said nothing more about Lord Hanley, or the incident on the yacht. Yet he had offered a wealth of tacit consideration, allowing her to come to terms with what he had so instantly discerned: It made no sense.

  In her blind desire to put it all behind her, in her blind fear of the consequences of what she had done, she had not allowed herself to really think about it before.

  But Ryder was right: Why had there been no oars in the dinghy? And what was Lord Hanley looking for?

  But what was she to do, a bird of paradise in love with a duke’s son, when her life was forfeit and every hint that he returned her feelings only meant that she would break his heart in the end?

  “Don’t believe we’ve ever set up so fast, sweetheart,” Mr. William Faber said, sitting down with a thump on an upturned barrel. “That cousin of yours is a clever chap. Perhaps even a bit too clever for the likes of us?”

  She looked up from her unfocused exploration of a trunk of costumes and tore her mind back to the problems at hand. “Why do you say that, Mr. Faber?”

  The actor gave her a shrewd glance. “He’s not throwing his weight about, now, is he? He’s not interfering, nor asking stupid questions. Yet I figure that young man could take over this whole company with a snap of his fingers and we’d never know what hit us.”

  “Then he’ll make a very good Fortinbras,” Miracle said with a smile. “The prince who offers salvation, in the end, to Denmark.”

  DARKNESS dropped over Hulme Down, collecting in the damp shadows of the trees and buildings. The yard and the fields surrounding the barn jammed with carts and wagons and horses. An enterprising couple were selling hot pies. Someone else broached a barrel of ale.

  An ever larger crowd of pedestrians, jostling and merry, arrived to swell the floodtide. Ryder walked here and there making casual suggestions that seemed to translate—as if by magic—into commands that reduced the chaos. He was deliberately inconspicuous, slipping through the throng like a shadow. Yet wagons and carts lined up to leave clear passageways to link road, stream, farmyard, and barn.

  Miracle watched him do it, steadfast and imperturbable. Another surge of longing suffused her bones.

  At last the audience packed into the dusty, echoing space inside and gawked up at the illusion of Elsinore, wavering behind a row of lamps.

  Horatio had turned up just in time, though his face was as bruised as a bad apple, which caused a general shout of mirth and several rude comments. Fortinbras was to escort Peggy and her new baby to rejoin the company the next day. It was generally agreed that the wounded man could play the Prince of Norway tomorrow, even with his arm in a sling, as long as he was no longer inclined to fight Hamlet’s friend.

  Ryder and Miracle would be needed for this one night only, then they could be on their way.

  It is almost time, she thought with a stab of pain. It is almost time—and then I shall never see him again.

  In his rich costume with its silver-painted breastplate and helmet, Ryder found a place in the makeshift wings, where he could wait for his first cue. He had done what he could to bring order from anarchy. The Fabers had been too overwhelmed setting up for the play to pay much attention to their surroundings. The farmer, Mr. Hodgkin—already counting his share of the night’s proceeds, no doubt—had been celebrating with a bottle of brandy.

  Ryder had collared him and bluntly stated his fears, but Mr. Hodgkin was oblivious to peril.

  Yet the danger was real. Not everyone was inside w
atching the play. Courting couples were stealing the chance to escape their parents. A gang of boys raced about among the farm buildings. There was a scattering of lanterns. Glowing pipes had flitted about in the darkness, like sparks in the soot at the back of a grate.

  Yet, unless Ryder abandoned his role as Fortinbras, he could do little more, except to trust to luck and hope that his earlier tour of the farm would bear fruit, if the worst happened.

  An ominous roll of thunder sounded from behind a screen at the rear of the makeshift stage. The crowd rustled into an expectant silence. Two soldiers tramped into the gleam of the lights. One took up his post by the painted castle walls. The other thumped his wooden pike on the boards.

  “Who’s there?”

  The play began.

  The audience groaned and laughed and clapped and cursed, raw emotion on every face. Both men and women shrieked at the ghost and moaned aloud when treachery was revealed. As if they could alter the course of the drama, they shouted out warnings to the characters. Ryder had never seen anything quite like it.

  Shakespeare’s words had become strangely bawdy and direct, as if peeled open by naïveté to reveal their essential power.

  Yet when Miracle drifted onto the stage as Ophelia, silence fell as if a blanket of darkness had been cast over the barn. Her hair lay unbound over her shoulders. A vaguely Grecian dress—white muslin, with a gilt cord bound beneath her breasts—draped lovingly over the curves of her body.

  Men sighed. Women began to weep quietly into their handkerchiefs. Sam seemed to blossom in her presence, until Hamlet became stunningly real. When he cursed Ophelia, farm workers leaped up to shout and shake their fists, as if the Prince of Denmark had spurned one of their own sisters.

  When Miracle walked on again later in the play, the white dress had disappeared beneath a fantasy of flowing rags. Strings of flowers wrapped around and around her body and up into her hair, piled now like a magpie’s nest on top of her head. Yet she was still achingly beautiful, as if light shimmered from a pure, bright soul to illuminate the shredded muslin with brilliance.