by Laura Parker
“God’s bones! Speak up, you jackanapes!” The volume of the marquess’s voice shook his frame as it thundered forth. “The girl’s dead, that’s it? Well? ’Tis so?”
Kendal took a nervous step back. “I daren’t say, m’lord. Questions to the authorities fetched me the news that a coach overturned on the highway a few miles north of London yesterday morn. The Bow Street Runners say ’twas the work of highwaymen. They’ve stopped the regular stagecoach from Leeds before.”
Kendal watched the old man digest this piece of information and was annoyed to find that his employer’s hand had stopped shaking. He was in control again. Well, thought Kendal, he wasn’t finished yet. “One passenger was killed. The runner says the passenger was gentry by dress, and with a large ruby birthmark upon the back of his right hand.”
“’Twas Simmons,” the marquess said heavily. “Did you have the wits about you to demand to see the body?”
“Just so, m’lord,” Kendal replied, lowering his eyes so that the man would not see his flash of anger at the high-handed tone. “They’d buried it. The man’s lace and watch chain, even his shoes, were gone. His neck was broke when the coach went off the road. The coachman ran off, but they expect he’ll turn up in a day or two. Too bad about Mr. Simmons, though.”
The marquess snorted. He’d waste no thought on Simmons. The music master had been a simpering fool; it was one of the reasons he had hired him to squire Lady Cassandra about the halls of Briarcliffe. The chit’s depression had deepened over months as she fretted over Nicholas’s failure to return. If he hadn’t thought there’d come a time when he needed her he would not have cared. But a decline in the girl’s health might have left him with an invalid, so he had made inquiries and found Mr. Simmons to be a suitable male companion for his son’s wife.
The marquess directed a sharp look at his secretary. “’Tis your fault, Dermont. I hold you entirely responsible. Had you made a few sheep’s eyes at the silly cow, she’d not have gone off with that fop. God’s death! It galls a man to think that a simple-witted peagoose could get the best of—of you. Where were you the night they escaped?”
Kendal bowed his head even lower. “My—m’lord, ’twas your orders I was following two nights ago. Went to see the vicar about the leaks in the chapel roof. You’d a been the first to hear of it, had I sniffed a plot.” He raised his hands, palms up in apology. “I’d give anything to have stopped them. No one in the village would dare take so much as tuppence from Lady Briarcliffe without your word on it.”
“That’s so.” The marquess’s lip lifted in a contemptuous smirk as he eyed the nervous man before him. No one in his employ ever crossed him; the price was too great. Yet Lady Cassandra, that meek bit of fuzzy-headed womanhood, had dared to catch the Leeds coach!
Once more his eyes raked Dermont, their baneful stare like a splash of icy water. “We’ve had a traitor amongst us, Dermont. Do you understand me?”
“Aye, m’lord.” Kendal licked his suddenly dry lips. “’Twasn’t me,” he added softly.
A cackle of laughter erupted from the marquess’s bony chest. “You? Damme! ’Twould do my heart good to think you capable of it. You haven’t fathered a single brat in the scullery yet. Ha! You think I’m too old to hear, too tired to see you sneak up the backstairs after dark. You’ve been pleasuring yerself with Bess and Sally, so I know you’re a man—of sorts. If you’d any real fire in your breeches, you’d have scratched my daughter-in-law’s itch instead of letting her make cow eyes at that skinny-shanked music master. Damme! That’s an insult I’ll not let her forget!”
Kendal voiced with astonishment, “Yer lordship can’t think I’d … well, dishonor a member of his fam—”
“Rubbish!” The marquess drummed the chair arm again. “Had I been thirty years younger I’d have seen to it meself, and made the lady glad for it, besides. Were you a real flesh-and-blood man, you’d have had at her and damned this old cock to crow for his honor!”
The exertion of his heated speech left the marquess wheezing for breath and his head fell back against the chair back as his eyelids fluttered shut.
His meekness abandoned, Kendal ordered of the servant who lingered in the doorway, “Bring His Lordship brandy.”
The housekeeper stood a moment, one hand over her mouth, digesting the revelations of the evening. The marquess was a rare visitor to London, never once in the past two years. When he had arrived on the doorstep that morning, without notice, she and the household had been thrown into paroxysms. Now she knew why.
“Poor little lamb,” she murmured as she fled the salon in search of brandy. Until this night she had not known directly of the marquess’s daughter-in-law. It was rumored two years earlier that the marquess’s son had wed, but the lady had never been seen. And certainly Nicholas himself acted as if there were no such bride, not if the accounts in the London scandal sheets were of any account.
The marquess allowed a sip of brandy to be administered, then waved Kendal away. “Enough, Dermont. I’ve no desire to be torpid with brandy before I’ve heard the last.”
“But, m’lord, it’s all been said.”
The marquess gave the younger man a long look. “’Tis best not be all. If that’s all, then you may pack your bags and quit my sight.”
Kendal set the brandy glass on the mantel. For the moment his back was turned he thought hard about what his next words should be. Another day, perhaps two, and Lady Cassandra might be dead or certainly beyond the marquess’s saving. Newgate Prison was a notorious place. A young girl, unused to the ways of scoundrels and whores, she would be a perfect victim for the human vermin who inhabited the place. If she were not beaten to death for her belongings, she might be driven mad by those men who took enjoyment in rape.
The thought of being present when the marquess learned the fate of his stupid little daughter-in-law nearly made Kendal hold his tongue. He was not a mover nor a schemer, but he knew how to squeeze the most out of any opportunity. The marquess was old and ailing; this might be the trick to send him to hell.
Kendal bit his lip anxiously. He needed forty-eight hours more—but he dared not risk it. If the nobleman learned that he had kept information from him Kendal knew he would be turned out, the poor cousin and beneath contempt. No, there would be other, better opportunities.
“There’s something, m’lord. A young girl was found wandering the road later that same morning. A highway coach stopped and picked her up. When she couldn’t pay her fare, the coachman took her to the magistrate. She’s locked up in Newgate till inquiries can be made.”
The news had an electric effect on the old man. Color shot through his face and a wide grin parted his lips to reveal lumpy gums. “It’s Cassandra. It must be!”
“Dunno, m’lord.” Kendal shook his head slowly. “There are questions need asking. If it is Lady Briarcliffe we’d best be cautious. Don’t want word reaching the common ear.”
“Balderdash! You will go yourself, at once, to Newgate and drag the sly bitch out. Go now!” the marquess cried as he reached for the small statuette on the table by his chair and flung it at his secretary. “Don’t bother to return without her!”
When the door in the hallway slammed closed behind Kendal, the marquess slumped back in his chair. “To think I’ve housed a common strumpet these two years. Should have known it when Nicholas brought her to me.” The only virgin bride to be had in the land was how his son had described the girl.
The marquess nearly choked on his phlegm. He should have known better. The fast piece had no doubt opened her thighs to Nicholas before they wed. Fifteen years old and a slut even then.
“It’s no wonder. The whey-faced brat, who else would have her?”
And now, running off with a spindle-shanks like Simmons, how she must have burned to be ridden.
The marquess pounded his chair arm with a fist. “God’s death, but she’ll pay for this night! If Nicholas put her—”
He paused. H
is son had not shown himself at Briarcliffe since leaving his bride there the night after their exchange of marriage vows. It was simply that the slut was running true to form. Nicholas had picked a hoyden bride from the mire of West Country gentry as an insult and torment.
“Nicholas will rue the day he sought to cross his father,” the marquess vowed with an easing of his ire.
And the slut would be the bait in the trap he set for his son. Two years was a long time to wait for the method of laying that trap. But he could wait. He had nothing else to do.
Chapter Four
Derbyshire, England
December, 1754
Blasts of frigid air blew through the snowdrifts, splattering slush on the small leaded glass panes of the sprawling stone mansion called Briarcliffe. In the distance, the cottages that housed Briarcliffe’s tenants were nearly swamped by the deep swells of snow.
Cassandra sighed at the sight of the winter morn upon which the sun refused to shine and began tracing patterns on a frosty pane. Two months had passed since the marquess had found her in Newgate and brought her back to Briarcliffe. The shock of that ordeal had faded and now she was left with a sick empty feeling of hopelessness. The frigid landscape of northern Derbyshire reminded her how far away lay London—and her husband Nicholas. She was no closer to him now than before. Cassandra bit her lip. She was still the marquess’s prisoner.
Closing her eyes, Cassandra willed before her mind’s eye the perfect beauty of Nicholas’s face. The golden head with winged brows above eyes of new-leaf green, the image formed itself in loving detail. Even now, after two years’ absence, she could remember the thin, firm lips that made his mouth, the long, slim nose with its elegant nostrils. Their days together had numbered only four, and yet she knew all she needed to know. He was the parfit gentil knight. Le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche. Yet even as she strained for that image it faded and disappeared.
“Nicholas!” she cried, opening her eyes.
At that moment a whirlwind of snow and ice splattered the windows before her and she saw her own image reflected in the glass. A petite girl with great eyes filled with bitter anguish stared back at her. And she was not alone. Behind her shimmered another figure, the dark, eyepatched stranger of Newgate. He was smiling, a tender lover’s smile of desire.
Memory worked on memory, invoking images she thought she’d left behind in the grim shadows of Newgate. All of it came back to her, the sweet plunder of her body by a stranger, the shameless delight she had taken in his forbidden embraces, the embraces of Merlyn Ross. For a horrified instant she stared at the image in the frosty window; then it, too, faded.
Cassandra spun around, sweat beading up on her brow, to face the room. She was alone. “Please, please let it stop!” she moaned, shutting her eyes and willing away the nightmare. It was not the first time the shadow of that dark and haunting dream had invaded her thoughts, but never more clearly than today. In some mysterious magical way the man had willed himself into her thoughts, never to be forgotten. If Nicholas was Sir Galahad, then the sorcerer of her dream world was, indeed, a Merlyn.
Cassandra shook her head impatiently, warning off further thoughts of him. She had abandoned her pride to prevent a brutal rape and survived. The pleasure she had derived was her punishment, her guilt and shame. She had done a foolish, dangerous thing in running away, but she had done it for love of Nicholas, and she prayed that she could one day make him understand that. With his forgiveness, she could survive. “One can endure any thing if one must!” she said aloud to herself.
“One need not ‘endure’ if one is clever—or obedient.”
Cassandra lifted her head, eyes widening, to find the marquess was being carried into her sitting room in a litter chair. She had seen him but once since Newgate, and that was just after Kendal Dermont obtained her release. Then she had been too exhausted to tell whether he wished her dead or if it gave him a kind of macabre satisfaction to see her misery at having failed to escape him. Later, when she was stronger, he refused to see her. Once they returned to Briarcliffe, she was forbidden even the freedom of the hallways.
“You’re a stupid girl, Cassandra,” the marquess continued as he directed the two men bearing him to place him down in the middle of the room. “I’d have expected better of you. Of course … Oh, do come in, Dermont. Lady Cassandra will not bite.”
As the two servants withdrew, Cassandra’s attention turned to the secretary. They were related by marriage, but they were not friends. Dermont, who possessed a rough version of the Briarcliffe profile in which each subtle difference worked against him, was too much under the marquess’s thumb for her liking.
The marquess noted the untouched tray of food by the fireplace and his eyes came back with significant interest to his daughter-in-law. “You’ve no appetite, m’dear? Tsk! Tsk! Bad conscience, perhaps?”
“I’ve nothing to plague my mind,” Cassandra assured him acidly, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing that recently the sight of food was repugnant to her. Too late she remembered the sedan chair which meant that his rheumatism was in full flare. To ease his own discomfort he often chose to vent his spleen on some unlucky soul. With a sinking feeling she realized that this, perhaps, was the reason he had chosen to visit her after weeks of neglect.
The marquess stiffened, his gums working behind caved-in lips. “Dare use impudence to me, you, who’ve the propriety of a slut? Aye. You’ve the manners of a miss when it suits you, but tell me, did you win Music Master Simmons to your bed before or after you’d addled his simple wits to suit your scheme?”
Cassandra made no reply. She saw that she was, indeed, to be his whipping boy.
The marquess’s piercing gaze swept over the petite young woman dressed in a tight-waisted rose gown. He sniffed in disapproval at the unfashionable dressing of her heavy brown hair which had been tightly drawn back from her high, smooth forehead. The thought that she was his only son’s wife gave him a twinge of pain.
“Gad, but you’re plain! To think even Nicholas would stoop to this just to spite me.” He shook his head impatiently as he dipped into the jeweled snuffbox he had produced from his pocket. The pinch of doctored tobacco left a dusting of ashes on his nightgown front, but he did not seem to notice.
When he raised his head, his silver-lashed eyes regarded her unblinkingly. “The ancient laws are best, don’t you think? Comes to mind one for adultery: the branding of the palm with a hot poker.”
Shaken by the hatred that gleamed in his ice-water eyes, Cassandra found that her voice trembled as she said, “What I’ve suffered cannot be held against me.”
“Tripe!” the marquess replied. Curling his gnarled hand into a fist, he pounded the arm of his chair. “I’ll not be made a fool of beneath my own roof. So, you think you’re clever, do you? Did you think the physician I called in wouldn’t tell me the truth? Ah! You didn’t think of that? Stupid, wantonly stupid. You thought I’d accept your mewling protestations that Simmons never laid a hand on you. By God! Get me a stick, Dermont, a great thrashing stick to take to the girl!”
Surprisingly, the marquess’s distemper had a calming effect on Cassandra. Two years had taught her many bitter lessons, and a shrewd appreciation for her father-in-law’s moods. In many ways he was like her own father, she thought with a surge of anger. Like him, the marquess’s most violent tempers never lasted long. It was his calm moods she feared the most, when he was thinking, watching, calculating.
When he sat back panting for breath she said quietly, “You do not ask me why I left Briarcliffe, my lord, but I will answer. I wanted to go to London, to seek my husband. Mr. Simmons only sought to help me.” Cassandra paused, remembering the kind gentleman who was now dead. “If not for his generosity, he would not have died.”
Her speech amused the marquess. “So, at last, you’ve turned up a woman. You’re in heat for a man, and you’ve been on the hunt. Well, well, I did wonder.”
The
marquess looked upon his daughter-in-law with contempt. “So, you think I’ve kept you here against my son’s desire. Then hear me well. Nicholas picked you for his bride to spite me. Don’t fancy that passion had a part in it. You were his pawn, his broad jest, the plain gentry bride that fulfilled the word but not the spirit of his father’s demands.”
He leaned forward in his chair, lips drawn back from his toothless gums in a grin. The gray of his eyes seemed swallowed up by the pithy pupils as he strained forward. “I should know; the blood in Nicholas’s veins is mine.”
A flush stained Cassandra’s complexion as the caution that usually ruled her tongue evaporated. It was an argument of long standing between them, and nothing could stop the anger and hurt that came rushing out over her lips in a torrent of words. “You’ve no right to speak to me like that! I was fifteen when Nicholas married me, but I had the heart and soul of a woman. Had you not forced Nicholas from Briarcliffe in the middle of the night, he would have taken me with him. You despise me because Nicholas found me worthy of his love and because I—I will always love him!”
Her words tumbled to a halt as Cassandra realized the insulting things she’d said, but the marquess seemed not to have taken offense.
“Love?” he returned, genuinely surprised by her outburst. “What damned foolish talk is this? You speak of love. God’s death! Women haven’t the sense of hens.”
A cold smile edged into the nobleman’s expression. “You know nothing of love. As for Nicholas, he’s too like me to indulge in sentimentality. Lust, aye! Bought him his first whore when he was just thirteen. But he’s a streak of weakness in him, his own pleasures rule. He would gamble and drink my coffers dry if I let him. I warned him two years ago that the title was his by law but I’d see the money and estates handed over to his cousin Dermont if he didn’t settle down and marry.”