To Seduce a Stranger

by Susanna Craig

  Stone-faced, Mari shot a look at Edward before moving to follow the surly order.

  “She’s gone,” Jack mumbled, half slumped over the servants’ table. “Sykes was meant to take the coach back to Town this morning. I ’spect you’ll find she was on it.”

  “Gone? Town?” Unable to restrain himself, Edward grabbed Jack by the hair and lifted the man’s head high enough that their eyes met.

  Jack winced. “Hey, now. Easy. She gave me quite a knock already.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  One dark eye squinted closed, as if he struggled to remember. “Now that I think on it, she only gave me a shove. Must’ve hit my head on the wall when I fell.”

  “And what did you do to her to earn that shove?” Edward ground out.

  Jack only laughed.

  Letting the man’s head drop back onto the tabletop with a thud, Edward strode out of the kitchen and down the corridor. Though his feet, and his heart, wanted to race, he would not give in to the impulse. He would find her safe and sound in her room. He would.

  But his knock received no answer; the old butler’s room was empty. With quicker steps, he moved back through the kitchen and out the door. In the stable yard, he could see the grooves of carriage wheels and the rounded outlines left by the hooves of Sykes’s horses, though the mud was too soft to hold much of an impression. In the stable itself, Samson whickered softly at him. Garrick was nowhere to be seen.

  Back in the kitchen, Edward reached across the table and caught Jack by the cravat this time, yanking him to his feet. The bench tipped behind him and clattered to the floor. “Mind telling me what happened here this morning to drive her off?”

  Despite his position, Jack managed a leer. “Seems to me the real story is what happened last night. Did she get you to swive her before she ran off?”

  For answer, Edward dragged him away from the table and pinned him against the wall. Above his head, the servants’ call bells jingled quietly on their plank. “Have a care,” Edward warned as his grip tightened. He’d never yet hit a man, but Jack didn’t know that.

  Jack’s eyes rolled upward, showing their whites. “I just gave her a bit of a fright, I swear.”

  “A fright?” Edward hitched him higher. Now, only the toes of Jack’s boots scuffed impotently against the floor. “Why?”

  “T-told her I know who she is.”

  “And who is that?”

  “Charlotte Blakemore,” he rasped out. “Dowager Duchess of Langerton.”

  Shock made Edward relax his grip. A duchess?

  Gasping, Jack sank to the floor.

  The rest of the story came more easily, once he had caught his breath. “She disappeared from Bath a fortnight or so ago. Her husband left her a whacking great fortune, they say, but her stepson, the current duke, means to have his late father’s will voided—and the marriage, too, if it can be done.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Claims the old man had already gone round the twist before they were wed.”

  Mad? That was a serious allegation indeed.

  In his mind, Edward tried to reconcile what he knew of her—her cheap clothes, her knowledge of housekeeping matters, what she’d told him of her origins—with the notion of her as a duchess. Only her impossibly erect carriage seemed to fit the person Jack had identified.

  Of course, she might just as easily have told the same sad stories to some soft-in-the-head, elderly duke, won his pity, and then his fortune.

  Almost.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Edward saw Noir arch his back and pounce. The wad of paper with which he had been playing popped from between his paws. For a moment, the draft of the fire caught and held it, threatening to devour it before whirling it out into the room instead.

  Edward snatched the cat’s plaything out of the air. “What’s this?” he asked, righting the bench and sitting down. When he smoothed the paper against the tabletop, Charlotte’s worried eyes stared up at him from the tattered page, drawn by a hand with some skill, although the pencil lines were smudged. The Disappearing Duchess was scrawled above her head.

  “Proof,” said Jack, hoisting himself to his feet and joining Edward at the table.

  As he stared, snatches of print surrounding the sketch came into focus. Our newest duke . . . a suit... more than a few loose threads. When he came to the crease in the paper, he unfolded it and read on.

  Meanwhile, the Disappearing Duchess was last seen headed west in the company of a dark-haired stranger. No doubt she hopes he is possessed of a cure for her late husband’s “infirmities.”

  “Rumor has it the marriage was never consummated,” Jack explained. “When it came out she might lose everything if Langerton could prove she hadn’t been plucked, she scampered off—in search of some chap who’d do the deed the old man couldn’t, they say. The new duke put up a pretty penny to anyone who brought her back before she succeeded. And when I recognized her, well, I figured I could use that money as well as anybody. But it seems,” he added, casting shrewd eyes over Edward’s rumpled clothes and making a show of straightening his own collar, “I’m too late.”

  “Have a care,” Edward ground out. “You’re speaking of my—” He broke off before the word passed his lips; that particular lie was no longer required, it seemed.

  But the omission did not go unnoticed. “Your wife?” Jack gave a wry laugh.

  Edward made no answer. The details of the gossip column, and Jack’s tale, fit with what he knew. He had met Charlotte not far from Bath. She’d worn a wedding ring and claimed to be a widow. And last night, he’d taken a virgin to his bed.

  Mari stepped to the table, almost tripping over Noir. Muttering, she poured steaming liquid into an empty cup and handed it to Jack.

  “Bah, that’s bitter stuff,” he said, pulling a face at the first swallow of Mari’s coffee.

  Edward recalled Charlotte’s anguished account of feeling torn between two worlds: French desire and English sangfroid. He could see her coy smile. Hear her beguiling accent: I want . . . you.

  Well, he’d known almost from the moment they met that she was a storyteller.

  His thoughts were dragged back to the present when Jack slapped his palm on the table. “Woman, what are you about? Why are you staring at me like that? Are you trying to curse me?” His eyes darted from Mari to the black cat and back again. “Are you some kind of witch?”

  “Witch? Ah, no suh,” Mari insisted with a shake of her turbaned head, her normally flawless English turned suddenly into the singsong patois of the islands. “No speak de curse. Me no obeah woman.”

  Jack appeared to take little comfort in her reassurance. Beads of sweat sprang up on his forehead.

  Edward glanced back at Mari. “What have you done?”

  She looked at him for a long moment, as if weighing whether or not to reveal her secret. “Sure now, you remember hearin’ ’bout bad massahs what got struck sudden by de megrims or de cramp or de flux?”

  “Well . . . yes, of course.” Disease of every sort was rampant in the islands.

  “Slave women talk in de market, you know,” she said with a pointed look. “Give advice. Swap recipes. I knows how to make a cruel man suffer.”

  “What did you give him?”

  “Jus’ plain p’ison,” she said, nodding toward the half-empty cup. “Dat’s all.”

  Until that moment, Edward had never actually seen a man turn green; he had always imagined it nothing more than a fanciful expression. “P-poison? In the c-coffee?” Jack managed to stammer before he clutched at his stomach and collapsed forward onto the table.

  Edward grasped one of Jack’s shoulders and shook him, hard, but he could not be roused. Slowly, he raised horrified eyes to Mari.

  “Settle yourself, Mr. Edward,” she said, her voice her own again. “If I set out to poison a man, he’d never know until it was too late.” With calm, deliberate motions, she poured a cup of coffee for herself and took a sip. “For some men
, there’s nothing scarier than the sight of a woman who knows her own power—the more so, I suppose, if her skin is black. I saw that fear in his eyes. So I decided to play with him a bit, pretended to be what he imagined I am. I didn’t suspect he was weak enough to frighten himself into a faint.”

  Still surprised by Mari’s performance, Edward could not deny that her game seemed a fitting punishment for the way Jack had frightened Charlotte.

  Mari snatched up the paper with one hand. Her dark eyes took in the hasty sketch and the circled words. “Well, we all knew she was hiding something. Any fool could see she was scared.”

  “Or shrewd. God, Mari . . . I begin to wish I had never come home.”

  “Home? To England, you mean.” When he did not answer, she pressed further. “It wasn’t the promise of a job that brought you here, was it? You’re from this part of the country. Gloucestershire, Little Norbury . . .”

  “Ravenswood.” He could see no point in denying it to Mari. Frankly, he was surprised it had taken her this long to piece it together. “I was born here. My father was Lord Beckley.”

  Mari looked from him to Jack and back again, her face a perfect blank. If she was surprised, she seemed determined not to show it. “And now . . . ?”

  “I am.”

  Her gaze dropped to the picture, and she studied it for another moment before crumpling it and tossing it onto the floor for Noir, who pretended to ignore it, though the tip of his tail flicked. She jerked her chin toward Jack. “Don’t you listen to him.”

  “Even if he’s right?”

  “He can’t know the whole truth,” she insisted. “He doesn’t know what’s in her heart.”

  A scoffing laugh pushed past his lips. “Her heart? She lied to us, Mari. She made me think she cared. Cared for the fate of Ravenswood. Cared for me. But in the end, it was all just another one of her stories.”

  “It seems to me she wasn’t the only one telling stories. M’lord.”

  Edward opened his mouth to retort, but stopped when he realized Mari’s attention had been caught by something on the other side of the room. He turned and looked toward the still-open kitchen door. An old woman stood there, stoop-shouldered, her knobby fingers clutching a walking stick. When she lifted her head, he could see the scars on her face and one blind, milky eye.

  “May I help you, ma’am?” he asked, rising.

  She twisted her head awkwardly to fix him with her other eye, then drew in a sharp breath.

  Her exhalation brought with it one whispered word: “Neddy?”

  Chapter 17

  When the woman tried to step up into the kitchen, she tottered unsteadily on her feet. Garrick appeared in the doorway behind her, ready to help, but Edward was at her side first. Gently, he drew her arm through his, led her to the bench, and knelt to bring his face level with hers. Afraid even to blink, for fear that if his eyes dropped closed he would awake to find it had been a dream, he studied her face, looking past the mask of scars to see familiar features untouched by time.

  Surely his memory was playing tricks on him. His heart hammered in his chest.

  “M-mama?”

  Her soft blue eye fixed him in return. “And to think,” she murmured, “I worried all this time that I might not know you when you came home.”

  Though he longed to wrap his arms around her, she looked so fragile that he contented himself with lifting the hand that rested on the bench and pressing it first to his trembling lips, then to his cheek. He had no words to describe the sensation of his mother’s touch—after so many years, when he had thought never to feel it again.

  “Oh, Mama, Mama. I thought—I thought you were dead.”

  “I feared you were, as well. Oh, my darling, where have you been all this time?”

  He brushed aside the question. “It does not matter. I’m here with you now.”

  “He has been in the West Indies, ma’am,” Mari said, stepping forward.

  Surprise flared in his mother’s clear eye as she took in Mari’s appearance. “Oh.” Part exclamation, part question, the sound left her lips on a gasp.

  “Are you the one they call Tessie?” Mari asked, undaunted. Mama nodded.

  “You—you have—you are the one who has been living in the hermitage?” Edward sputtered. Markham had mentioned something about an old vagrant woman to him, but he had brushed the concern aside. At the time, other matters had seemed more pressing. My God. If he’d listened, he might have found his mother that much sooner. “Oh, Mama. That was no life for you. No life for anyone. Why didn’t you go to your sister, as you said you would?”

  “As I said—?”

  At last, he broke her gaze, embarrassed at the memory, at his childishness. “I was hiding—playing soldiers in your sitting room. Mrs. Henderson came. I overheard you tell her that you could leave Father when I went away to school. I was afraid of what might happen if you waited that long. So I . . . I ran away.”

  “Neddy.”

  The almost-forgotten gentleness of even her scold brought tears to his eyes, and he dropped his head to her lap to hide them from her. Leaning her walking stick against the edge of the bench, she laid her other hand on his head and began to smooth his hair with gnarled fingers.

  “Oh, Mama,” he whispered into her skirts. “Why did you stay?”

  “I did not have a choice.”

  It took all the strength he possessed, but he raised his head once more and forced himself to see the truth: her faded brown hair with its streak of white, how thin she was, the scars she bore. Suffering had made her old before her time. “What did he do to you?”

  Her head darted a refusal, but he did not break his gaze.

  “He convinced himself I knew where you had gone,” she said at last, sounding resigned. “Even if I really had known, though, nothing he said or did could have made me tell him. One day, after you had been gone about a fortnight, he—” She broke off, steeled herself, began again. “He sent for a physician from Stroud. I caught bits and pieces of their conversation. He told the man to say I had the smallpox. But I was never examined. I daresay money exchanged hands. Afterward, your father locked me in my room and dismissed the staff—for their safety, he told them. He wanted no witnesses to his cruelty. Word of the supposed infection spread like wildfire, and people fled. A few days later, I watched some men carry out a coffin. Full of rocks, I imagine. But who would dare to investigate and risk spreading the contagion? Or worse, risk angering your father? Mr. Henderson was gone, having taken his dear wife to safety, and poor Mr. Cummings must have been harried near to death by the chaos in the village.”

  “There is a gravestone in the churchyard,” Edward said, his voice as rough as the slab of granite that loomed in his mind.

  “I know. I have seen it.” She spoke the words softly, but firmly. “Your father left Ravenswood that afternoon. I was . . . badly injured. Very weak. Why he left me alive, I cannot say. I’m sure he meant for me to die in that room. But I suppose he did not like to think of himself as a murderer. Or perhaps he felt that putting me out of my misery would have been too great a kindness.”

  Edward, on the other hand, felt certain if his father were still alive he could have dispatched him with his bare hands, and without a twinge of conscience—and he was no longer sure whether that made him a monster, or a hero.

  “Eventually, I made it out of my prison, as you see, although I feared for a time that I might never find the strength. By the time I escaped, everything was . . . well, much as you see it. People had scattered. The house had been abandoned. I did not know if he would return. But I hoped with all my heart that you might,” she said, stroking his cheek with cool fingertips. “So I stayed. I made my way, somehow, to the old hermitage. And I have been living there ever since. The mad old woman everyone knew only as Tessie.”

  “Did no one help you?”

  She nodded. “Oh, certainly, now and again. On occasion, a man on the tramp happened by and chopped firewood in exchange for a meal or shelter.
Mostly, though, I helped myself. I took food and whatever else I could manage from this house, and I had been putting by bits of my pin money for years, just in case. Pennies here and there; never so much that your father would notice. In time, I grew bold enough to venture into the village to buy more supplies, but by then most of the familiar faces were gone. And if those who remained ever suspected who I was,” she added with an uncertain glance toward Garrick, “they never said a word.”

  “You should have gone to the magistrate, Mama,” he said. “You should have denounced what my father did.”

  Her expression shifted. For the first time, he could hear a note of anger in her voice. “Wives have no recourse under the law, Edward. That would have brought down his wrath, nothing more.”

  With a creak of boot leather, he rose and sat beside his mother on the bench, one arm around her stooped shoulders. “I should’ve been here to help you.”

  “You were a child, Edward.”

  “I have not been a child for many years, Mama.”

  “I can see that.” A smile creased her face. “My boy has become a man.”

  “Be proud of him,” Mari urged from over his shoulder. “He has been a part of making something terrible into something bearable.”

  “A very small part,” he protested.

  “You survived, Mr. Edward,” Mari insisted, folding her arms over her chest. “And you helped others do the same. Your mother has a right to know the sort of man her son has turned out to be. I’ll not let you make your work seem less than it was—not to her, and not to yourself.”

  Mama still watched her with wide eyes.

  “Thank you, Mari,” Edward said, brushing aside her praise. “But I still don’t understand how you knew who Tessie really was—did you suspect, somehow? Did you ask her to come here this morning?”

  When Mari shook her head in surprised denial, Garrick stepped forward and mumbled, “No, sir,” crumbs spraying from his lips as he spoke. He had been watching the reunion from the doorway, gnawing on a roll he had snatched from a nearby basket. “Mrs. Cary tol’ me t’ fetch her, right afore she left.”