Christy English - [Shakespeare in Love 02]

by Love on a Midsummer Night

  She did not know what she would do if Hawthorne followed her. She prayed as she lay down to sleep that night that as soon as she disappeared from the capital, he would forget her. Surely, for once, the Fates would smile on her.

  In spite of her need to wake before dawn, she slept deep. She would have slept all night had not the sound of her husband’s bedroom door woke her.

  She had not heard the door between their rooms open in years, but Arabella remembered well the first hideous year of their marriage, those nights when she never knew when Gerald would come until she heard that door. He would lie on top of her, his skeletal hands on her body, lifting her nightgown. She did not shudder at the memory, but lay still between the soft sheets of her bed, listening.

  Hawthorne stood over her in the dim light of the lamp.

  Arabella tried not to show the fear that instantly flooded her. “Your Grace, I fear you have lost your way.”

  “No, Arabella. I have found it.”

  Hawthorne made his way through the shadows closer to her bed. He was dressed in evening clothes, but his cravat was askew and his black coat thrown open. Arabella wondered idly why he always dressed like an undertaker. It was then that she saw the glint of the knife in his hand.

  Her heart was pounding and her throat was dry with fear. She swallowed convulsively and forced herself to sit up, bringing the bedclothes with her to shield her body from his eyes. She thought frantically for what she might use to hold him off, what words might persuade him to lay that weapon down. Her death was like a shadow, a phantom in the room come to claim her. Her terror rose to choke her, or she would have screamed.

  Hawthorne stopped within a foot of the bed, laying his lamp down. He reached for her with the hand that did not hold the knife. She flinched, but his fingers only took up her honey-colored braid where it fell across her shoulder. He hefted the weight of her hair, fingering the end of it as if testing a bolt of fine silk. Arabella felt her nausea rise, bile coating her throat and mouth. She swallowed again, moving closer to her bedside table. Would any of the household staff help her if she screamed? She swallowed again, desperate to find her voice.

  He reached out with the knife then, and with one expert flick of his wrist cut away the top three buttons of her nightgown. She felt the cool night air on her throat and on the tops of her breasts. His eyes gleamed at the sight of her exposed flesh, as if she were a feast he were about to devour.

  She would not die here. She did not know how she would live, but she was damned if this man would be her doom. Death could come back another night, for she was going nowhere.

  “I would have you now,” Hawthorne said, “before I take you to Yorkshire. I find a year is too long to wait.”

  “Never is not long enough, my lord.”

  Arabella took up the first thing her fingertips touched on her bedside table, an unlit lamp recently filled with oil.

  As Hawthorne bent as if to kiss her, the knife still in his hand, Arabella raised the heavy lamp and brought it down on the back of his head.

  The porcelain base shattered against his skull, coating his head, her nightgown, and the bedclothes in a layer of flammable oil. He fell against her, and for one horrible moment she thought she had failed. But when he did not move, she pushed him off her, drawing her legs from beneath him, climbing over him to get off the bed.

  His knife fell from his fingers, but not before it sliced into the skin of her wrist. She gasped in pain, her blood staining the sheets, for the blade was razor sharp. Had he slit her throat, at least it would have been quick.

  She pushed this thought from her mind, slicing away a piece of the bedclothes and hastily, clumsily binding her wrist. She wrapped the bloody knife in another bit of linen before she turned back to the duke.

  For a moment, she hoped he was dead. But when she saw him breathing in spite of his bloody head wound, she knew it was for the best. Never leave an enemy alive behind you, some Persian had written. She felt the weight of the duke’s blade in her hand. Well, the long-dead Persian might be right, but she was no murderer. She could not kill a man, now or ever.

  She stood in the center of the room. No way now but forward. She had struck down one of the most powerful men in the kingdom, an intimate of the Prince Regent. No one would care that he had tried to rape her in the dark, or that he perhaps might have killed her after.

  Well, Angelique would care. She would be incensed, but at one word from the duke, her interests in the West Indies would be reduced to nothing, her livelihood cut off. In spite of what many thought, all Angelique’s wealth came from trade. Arabella would not repay ten years of loyalty by ruining the finances of the only friend she had ever had.

  She quickly dressed in a plain gown of black wool, drawing the long sleeve down to cover the wound on her wrist, her thoughts turning frantically. No time even to wash it, or bind it properly. She would deal with it later.

  She had belonged to her father, then her husband. No matter how many dukes came at her with a knife in the dark, she was free now, and she would stay free. She would never belong to a man again. But there was no way to survive completely alone.

  There was only one place she could go, only one man powerful enough who might take the trouble to hide her from Hawthorne until she could get away. No matter how she had betrayed him in the past, Pembroke would help her. She had to believe that. For if he turned her away, both his soul and her life were utterly lost.

  Three

  Pembroke left Titania pretending to sleep on his bed. His mistress had insatiable appetites, but she also had the courtesy to allow him to brood in peace.

  The Hellfire Club was meeting in Mayfair, and Pembroke was not in attendance. On any other day there was nothing he liked better than to join his more raucous friends to sample their chosen courtesans away from the prying eyes of the London ton. But after seeing Arabella, he could not face a crowd.

  Tonight the new Duke of Hawthorne was throwing an impromptu fete with the Club, a celebration of his elevation to the dukedom. He would drink and whore and enjoy himself, while rumors circulated throughout London, ruining Arabella’s life.

  Pembroke sat smoking his cheroot, trying without success to calm his temper. The lazy spirals of tobacco smoke circled his head, rising until they dissipated into the darkness. A fire burned in the grate. His favorite brandy sat by his elbow, poured by his butler, Codington, who followed him everywhere, from one house to another, from the country into town.

  Codington had done more to raise Pembroke when he was a child than his father ever had. Only Codington’s firm hand had kept Pembroke in any sort of acquaintance with the straight and narrow; only Codington’s compassion had tempered Pembroke’s fury as a boy. His father had beaten him, and Codington had dressed the wounds. Until the summer Pembroke turned eighteen, when he had run away to join the army.

  Pembroke could not think of that summer. He thought of that summer only when drink no longer blunted his wits, when the women no longer distracted him. As the ormolu clock on the mantel struck two, Pembroke took up his drink and downed it.

  Arabella. He had not seen her in years but remembered the exact color of her ice blue eyes. Those eyes were cold, aloof, as if she had never felt any emotion other than quiet calm. But years ago, Pembroke had held her in his arms. He had kissed her delicate lips until the roses came into her pale cheeks, until those eyes glowed like blue flame, warming him as no other fire ever had, nor ever would again.

  Pembroke cast his empty glass into the hearth where the fine crystal splintered into shards. He sighed and cursed himself. No doubt as soon as he went back to bed, Codington would have a maid down on her knees, cleaning up the mess he had made. One of the realities of being an earl was that other people were obligated to clean up the messes he left behind.

  A scratching at the door made Pembroke jump.

  “There is a lady to see you, my lord,” Codi
ngton announced. “She gives the name of the Duchess of Hawthorne.”

  Hope pierced him, and he felt his lust rise out of nowhere, as if her name had conjured it. He told himself not to be a fool, that she had left him without a backward glance and had betrayed him for a duchess’s coronet.

  But he wanted her anyway, in spite of that, because of it. With Arabella in his bed at last, he could finally conquer his demons, his old illusions of her. He could have her and move on.

  Codington bowed, and without another moment passing, she was there, the woman he had spent his adult life running away from, the memory of whom would never leave him, not even ten years later, not even when he slept.

  “Arabella.”

  He had no right to use her given name, but he could not seem to help it.

  “Lord Pembroke. You are kind to receive me without warning, so late at night.”

  She spoke as if he had not seen her that afternoon, as if he had not propositioned her in her own sitting room. Her voice was still like honey, its sweetness rich and resonant, the one thing about her that had not changed.

  She was smaller than he remembered. In spite of the layers of silk and black bombazine, she looked as if she might blow away with the next strong wind. Her face was covered by the thick crepe of her mourning veil.

  Codington withdrew, closing the door to the library with an emphatic click. Pembroke would have smiled at his butler’s censure, but he could not look away from Arabella.

  He wanted her, and now she had come. His heart began to race, his breath to come short. He felt suddenly like a boy of eighteen, an untried youth. He shook his head to clear it, but his heart kept pounding.

  She carried a heavy leather bag, a satchel too large for her to hold. She hefted it awkwardly, trying to find purchase, struggling to be graceful and failing. Pembroke fought to control his breathing as he crossed the room and took it from her. It was heavy in his hand and should have been completely unwieldy in hers. He laid the bag aside then stepped back, gesturing to an armchair by the fire.

  She did not sit but stood before him still in silence. Only then did she lift her veil. Only then did he see her eyes.

  Pembroke turned his back on her. To cover his shaking hands, he poured himself a brandy. He poured two glasses, one for her, and one for him. His voice sounded properly sardonic in his own ears when he finally broke the silence.

  “You honor me, Your Grace. So you’ve changed your mind? You’ve decided to take me up on my offer?”

  Arabella stared at him as if he were the interloper, as if he had intruded in her home in the small hours of the morning and not the other way around.

  “I have not, and you know it.”

  Pembroke tried to shore up his defenses against her. But her voice was a soft as he knew her body must be. He had wanted this woman all his life simply because she was the one woman he could not have. The one woman who did not want him.

  He felt the knife of her old betrayal slide into his heart, a smooth, unexpected caress of pain. His breath was gone as he stood in front of her, two useless glasses warming in his hands.

  He thought he saw pain in her eyes, a pain that mirrored his own. But in the next moment, that pain was gone, and he was left alone in his.

  “If you are not here to become my mistress, why do you trouble me?”

  “Hawthorne came to my house.”

  “Indeed. It is his house now.”

  She raised one hand and waved his words away. “No. He came at night. While I was sleeping.”

  Pembroke felt the floor beneath his feet tilt as if he stood on the deck of a ship. The room righted itself but not before his long-buried jealous fury rose to blind him. He thought he had killed that anger, but here it was again, rising to consume him. He could not bear the thought of another man touching her.

  “Hawthorne is your lover. I assume he is often there at night and stays on into the morning.”

  If it was possible, Arabella grew even paler. She must have become a consummate actress in the years since he had last seen her to affect such ladylike horror. But then he remembered. He had once thought she loved him. No doubt she had been playacting then, too.

  “He forced himself on me.”

  Pembroke shook with rage, with the sudden desire to take his cavalry sword and run the duke through. He breathed hard, fighting for control. Then he remembered that this woman was Hawthorne’s lover, come to draw him into their quarrel. Why she would foist herself on him after all these years did not bear examining. She had been a liar then, and no doubt she was a liar now. “Why should I believe a word you say?”

  Arabella met his eyes, and he saw that there were tears in hers. He cursed himself and turned away but not before his rage began to give way a little. No doubt she was a liar, and yet she still had the power to move him.

  She drew a package of linen from the pocket of her cloak. She unwound the ragged cloth to reveal a knife with a wicked blade. “The duke brought this with him,” she said.

  She raised her sleeve next. A wound had bled through the hasty bandage, coloring the white with dark blood. Pembroke was on his feet in an instant, taking her arm in his hand, forcing himself to touch with a tenderness that belied the anger coursing through him. He feared for the first time in many years that he would fall into a rage from which he could not find his way back out. With great difficulty, he released her and pulled on the bell to ring for Codington.

  Pembroke had fought many battles and had learned to control his anger so that it would not control him. A cool head in the midst of fury had saved his life more than once in Belgium, in Italy, in Spain. But now he stood in his own library, fighting his temper as if he were a boy again.

  Arabella looked frail standing before his fireplace, almost as if she might faint. No matter his own emotions, he was not a man who could watch a woman suffer and do nothing. He took his temper in hand, making certain that the black well of his rage was closed behind its wall of stone before he crossed the room to her and steeled himself, taking her arm gently.

  Arabella jumped at his touch, and he knew that she had taken no lover. There had been talk at White’s in the last few days of her wanton wildness, that a depth of fire was hidden beneath her widow’s weeds.

  Pembroke knew women well, and this was a woman who had been touched very little in the last ten years, and then not with tenderness or with passion. At least no touch had kindled passion in her. She was brittle, dried up, as if she might break between his hands.

  Pembroke felt his heart bleed at the loss of her pliant sweetness, a sweetness that had no doubt been killed by the callous indifference of her husband. He pushed his pity aside. Whatever her husband had been, however the old duke had treated her, she had chosen him.

  Arabella relaxed under his hand, and he felt as if he had been given a great gift: her trust. She moved obediently with him as he drew her toward the armchair next to the fire. Her small hands twisted together in their cotton gloves. He pressed her hands with both of his own, chafing them as if to warm them, gently so as not to disturb her bandage.

  Startled, she met his eyes again, and he thought he saw a glimmer of the girl he once had known peek out at him from behind the veil of the past. He knew that girl was an illusion, but still he looked for her. He needed to get away from this woman, or he would keep searching her face for traces of the girl who had once loved him, the girl who had never existed.

  Pembroke stepped back and handed her the glass of brandy he had placed at her elbow. He stood close by until she took the first sip. The brandy and the fire began to bring color back into her cheeks, so Pembroke withdrew to his own corner, where his brandy and cigarillo waited for him.

  Codington came in and Pembroke asked for bandages and warm water. The butler did not raise an eyebrow but left as silently as he had entered.

  “I can dress my wound myself,” Arabella s
aid. “I have no need of water.”

  “You have a great need of it,” he answered. “And soap. I’ve seen too many wounds turn putrid on the battle field not to treat that one.”

  No matter what happened between him and Arabella in the next few moments, he knew that if he ever laid eyes on the duke again, he would kill him.

  “How did you get away?”

  “I struck him over the head with a lamp.”

  Pembroke laughed, a loud guffaw that shattered the quiet of the room. In spite of the dire circumstances, Arabella smiled. Codington brought the soap and water then, along with fresh bandages. Pembroke nodded his dismissal, though the butler’s eyes lingered on her wound.

  Once they were alone again, Pembroke knelt before her, gently peeling away the bloody linen. The blood had dried and had begun to stick to the flesh beneath. Pembroke soaked the bandage with water until it fell away. Arabella flinched at first under his hands, but as he worked, as she saw that he would not hurt her, she sat still under his ministrations, as trusting as a child.

  Pembroke’s heart was throbbing along the line where she had broken it, but he bit down on his pain and dressed her wound. He forced himself to speak lightly, as if he felt nothing. “I can’t believe that little Arabella Swanson of Derbyshire brained the Duke of Hawthorne. But I admire your humor. I never would have thought you capable of making me laugh.”

  “I only tell the truth.”

  “And I am only the King of Lapland.”

  She stiffened, and he finished dressing her wound in silence. He rose to his feet then and crossed to his brandy, drinking the rest of it in one gulp. He was not sure he was strong enough to look at her again, so pale and vulnerable in his great armchair, but he knew that he must.

  As he turned back, he saw that she was on her feet as well. “Thank you for your help, my lord. But I should not have come.”