The Devil’s Due

by Boucher, Rita

  “On the count of three, I am going to leave go of you,” Duncan said, “I suggest that you recover yourself swiftly unless you wish to fall end first in a heap of goat offal. One . . . two . . .three.”

  At three he released her, keeping hold of her arms as she landed upright. “Now, Milady, what have you to say to your hideous shade of a husband?”

  The bitterness beneath his banter touched her. But despite the pangs of sympathy and conscience, Kate decided to take an offensive tack. With the truth barred, there was no reasonable defense that she could offer. “You are supposed to be dead,” Kate said, regarding him in consternation. “And even if you are not, it is a poor excuse for rousing us from our beds and scaring us half out of our wits.”

  “My beds, my house,” Duncan pointed out coldly. “As for your wits, milady, I shudder to think what a dance you might have led me if you were fully in possession of your faculties. As it is, you damned near killed me with that blunderbuss,” Duncan said, watching the play of emotion in those emerald eyes. “Then as a MacLean, it would be my ghostly duty to come haunting your nights. I vow, the thought almost makes me long to cast off my corporeal form.”

  “How do I know that you are Duncan MacLean?” Kate asked suspiciously.

  “I take it that you have not been in the portrait gallery in Charlie’s wing?” Duncan asked, silently awarding her a point in the game of verbal fencing. It was a weak attack, but at this point he had not expected any attempt at argumentative riposte.

  She shook her head. “Most of it is too dangerous to traverse.”

  “I thought not,” Duncan said, “else you would not ask that question. I am, unfortunately, cast in the wicked MacLean image. Moreover, I have already given you a sample of the savage charm that has made my clan justifiably famous with the fair sex. If that does not satisfy you, I have papers in my saddlebag which will more than prove my identity. Rejoice, oh widow MacLean, for thy bonny husband has returned to your rather delightful bosom.”

  Kate closed her eyes for a moment feeling the world whirling around her. They would have to leave, to run once more. All of Daisy’s meagre savings had been invested in livestock and they could not very well pack up the cow. There was precious little money, yet there was no choice.

  “Dinna play this game again, Kate,” she heard MacLean saying, “for I am losing my patience.”

  Kate’s eyes began to sting, she blinked, heartily ashamed of her weakness. She had never in her life been one to weep, despising women who turned into watering pots at the least excuse.

  Duncan’s expression hardened at the sight of her tears slipping from beneath closed lids. Eve had likely wept after the apple. But when the woman opened her eyes, he was almost shocked by the pain and despair swimming in those green depths and more startled still by her words.

  “We will be gone in the morning, milord,” Kate said, feeling utter defeat. There was no choice but to drive the best bargain that she could under the circumstances. “We would appreciate if you would let us stay the night. The livestock is ours, purchased with our own resources, however if you will give us a fair price, we will leave the animals for your use.”

  Daisy gasped. “But, where shall we go, milady?” she began. “How-”

  Kate cut her off with a warning glance. “The pretense is over, Daisy. I am ‘Lady MacLean’ no longer, so please give me no titles. We shall pack our things at once.”

  “And you think that I will simply allow you to go?” Duncan asked.

  “We have done you no harm,” Kate said, lifting her chin defiantly. “When we came here this place was unfit for a dog’s kennel. Bit by bit, we have made it a home of sorts. We will leave this place far better than we found it.”

  “Criminal trespass is a crime, I believe,” Duncan said, his voice harsh. His eyes lit on the bow in the corner. “So is poaching. I could bring you up before the magistrate.”

  Kate blanched, her eyes widening. “No, milord,” she whispered. “There is no need. We have stolen nothing. Let us go and you may keep the animals if you wish. Just allow us to leave.”

  His curiosity seemingly whetted, Duncan pushed his point. “Are you on the run from the law then, Madame?”

  “We have committed no crime,” Kate said, trying in vain to recoup her tactical error. It had been unconscionably foolish to allow him to know that she feared the authorities. “Other than criminal trespass and perhaps a bit of poaching.”

  Once more, Duncan raised her score in their verbal fencing match. She had recovered quickly, but not soon enough. It was time to press her. “Who are you?” he asked once more, taking her by the shoulders and looking her squarely in the face. “The truth now.”

  “I am Kate, milord,” she said. “Katherine Smith.”

  “I would have thought that you would use more imagination,” Duncan said, his lip curling wryly. “Surely you can do better than ‘Smith.’”

  “It was my husband’s misfortune, milord, to have a name as commonplace as grass,” Kate said. “We had been following the drum with him and when he was killed at Ciudad Rodrigo, we returned to England.”

  “What was his regiment?” Duncan barked.

  “The fifty-second, milord,” Kate answered immediately; naming another regiment that she knew had been present on that January day. So many men’s lives had been lost.

  “Rank?”

  “Sergeant-major, milord. Do you wish to hear just how he died as well? His legs were shot out from under him. I found him there, on the battlefield, barely alive and I held him until he died in my arms,” Kate said, her voice trembling. Despite the disaster of their marriage, she wished that she could actually have been with Marcus, comforted him in his final moments. Perhaps he might even have come to value her unusual upbringing had he allowed her to follow the drum, but Marcus had insisted that he would not be the butt of jokes about a warrior wife who could out-shoot and out-ride most of the officers in the regiment. Steele’s lady would return to England and stay in their Essex estate where she belonged.

  Where did fiction end and truth begin? Duncan wondered. He was certain that she was lying, but the honest emotion in her words was almost convincing. Whether or not the fifty-second had been there, he could not say, but it was likely. Still . . .“A touching story, Madame,” he said, grabbing her by the wrist. “Perhaps you can convince the magistrate of its veracity.”

  “No!” Kate begged. “Please let us go. I will do anything, milord.”

  “Anything?” Duncan asked with deceptive softness, his eyebrow rising in speculation. Just how far would she go?

  “Anything,” Kate confirmed, snatching her hand from his to stand like a slave on the block beneath his scrutiny.

  “I will no doubt regret this,” Duncan said, slowly. “But being a MacLean, I cannot resist a bargain. You claimed to be my wife and I find that the idea appeals. This hovel needs a woman’s hand.”

  “No,” Daisy said. “Don’t make a pact with the devil, milady.”

  “Shut your trap, woman,” Fred said, clamping his hand over the maid’s mouth. “Let ‘er make up ‘er own mind.”

  “What duties do you wish me to perform?” Kate asked, a cold dread clenching her insides as she grasped the implications of his proposal.

  “All those which a wife would rightly provide,” Duncan said, his dark hair waving over his patched eye. “Housekeeping, cooking . . .” he continued, allowing his words to trail off and suggest much more. From her expression it was clear that she understood what he left unspoken.

  “In return, I will have shelter and protection for me and mine for as long as I will stay?” Kate chose her words carefully.

  “Aye,” Duncan said, “but you did not allow me to mention the other wifely duty that I expect of you. Come here.”

  Kate took a deep breath and stepped into the circle of his arms. She had often wondered about Marcus’s friend, a man as unlike to her stolid, conventional spouse as pudding to porridge. When Marcus had written of MacLean’s death,
she had mourned the rakehell that she had never met, but she knew now that she had been lamenting a phantom, an image created from a fabric of gossip glued together by bits of imagination. This unsmiling face, hard and unforgiving as granite was not the stuff of idle dreams. This was harsh reality. She could not claim friendship and therefore could not expect mercy or respect. Not from this man. Tears would gain her nothing, and she blinked furiously, trying to stem the flow for the sake of her own pride. “As you wish, milord,” she said.

  Duncan watched those expressive glistening eyes in fascination as she struggled against tears. That failed battle for dignity touched him far more than any plea or protestation that she might make. Although he had set the terms of surrender, her quiet capitulation was unexpected. “You must be desperate indeed,” Duncan murmured, brushing the warm, wet trail on her cheek. “But why? Tell me the truth and I may set you free.”

  The kitchen door burst open, banging like a rifle shot as it caromed against the wall. The indoor barnyard burst into cacophonous chorus as a small fury careened toward Duncan. The child launched herself at his knees, nearly knocking him to the ground. Like a tiny wild beast she clawed and tore at the stranger who was holding her mother and making her cry. Duncan scooped her up from the floor ignoring the small fists that flailed ineffectively at his chest.

  “Yours, I presume?” he asked, turning his nose aside and blocking her hand to avoid a hit when she changed tactics. “I believe I may detect a certain resemblance in your pugilistic style.”

  Kate snatched the child from his arms, holding the shaking body close. “‘Tis all right, Anne, darling. He has not hurt me, and I will let no one hurt you,” she crooned in comfort. “No one will hurt you ever again.”

  Duncan watched his imposter wife brush back the girl’s golden curls, bits of the puzzle falling into place. The wild green eyes that stared at him in terror were the cut from the same jade as those of her mother. The lioness had been protecting her cub, it seemed. But why did she fear the law so much that she was willing to go to a stranger’s bed? The woman looked up at him at that moment, furious, daring him to contradict that pledge of safety and he knew that she would be capable of daring anything to protect her own. He felt a twinge of envy, wondering what it would feel like to be the recipient of such fierce devotion. “I will leave you to calm the child, Kate, and then we will talk,” he said. He nodded to Fred, signing for him to release the other woman from her bonds.

  No one will ever hurt you again, the words echoed uncomfortably in his brain. He was out into the kitchen before he realized that there had been a critical sound missing in the Pandemonium of the servant’s hall. The girl had been utterly silent, no shouts of “Mamma!” . . . no cries, only tears. No one will ever hurt you again. A new and utterly foreign emotion filled him- shame.

  . . .

  “She’s asleep at last,” Kate whispered, rising stealthily from her place beside Anne. The candle flickered by the bedside, the flame dancing in the drafts as Kate paced back and forth across the room, finally giving vent to her nervous energy. There were choices to be made now, and from what she could see, neither of the options had much to commend it. “Stay or go, Daisy. What is it to be?” she asked.

  “He was Lord Steele’s friend, you were tellin’ me when you showed me the letter that brought us here,” Daisy suggested, her voice hushed as she rhythmically smoothing back Anne’s guinea-bright curls. “Might be if he knew you are Lady Steele, he-” she began.

  “I cannot risk it,” Kate said, threading anxious fingers through her unruly hair. “All that I know of him is what Marcus mentioned in his letters. He is a fine officer, the man to have beside you in the fray. But off the field . . .”

  “‘Tis ‘mothers watch your daughters,” Daisy nodded. “Don’t need a letter to know that, even starveling and scarred. Has that way about him he does. I would wager there weren’t a woman within the sound of the drumbeat that didn’t know of the ‘Mad MacLean.’ But he’s a lord, milady, and a belted earl. Surely, it is his duty to help you?”

  “Or the Mad MacLean might just feel obliged to deliver us back into John’s hands. He is a man, after all. Why would he believe the word of a mere woman?” Kate said with barely suppressed venom, sitting gently upon the bed to avoid disturbing the child. “We cannot chance it, Daisy. If I did not think it too dangerous, I would steal away this very night. But the terrain is rough and we would certainly come to grief in the dark.”

  Cur whimpered softly, thrusting his furry head beneath Kate’s hand in a comforting canine gesture, before settling himself once more at Daisy’s feet.

  “But how far could we get?” Daisy asked the anguished question. “Barely even enough for a coach fare, do we have.”

  “We will get money somehow,” Kate said, her eyes hard as gemstones as she watched her sleeping daughter. Anne was still shaking, her breath coming in small hiccups, the remnants of hysteria. “I have always wanted to see America.”

  “America,” Daisy said in dismay. “A place of savages, it is. With Indians what takes your scalp right off your head.”

  “Nonetheless, it is a big country, a place where Anne and I could easily lose ourselves,” Kate said.

  “And what about me?” Daisy asked suspiciously.

  Kate clasped Daisy’s hand. “Go back to London. By the time John finds you and questions you we will be long gone, and you can misdirect him. Someday, I will pay you back your savings.”

  Daisy’s face reddened. “You’ll not be leavin’ me behind like so much baggage. And no more talk of payin’ me back, for if there’s any what owes, it’s me. My man died in India and left me alone, sickly from childbed and the shy side of sixteen, with no money or family to speak of. The Colonel and your ma took me in they did. I’d just lost my own babe and ‘twas I what suckled you. Do you think honestly that I’d leave you and the wee one?”

  Kate shook her head, swallowing to ease the constriction of her throat before she spoke. “No, I did not,” she acknowledged hoarsely. “But I had to give you the choice. It will be far more difficult to go undetected this time. We were lucky that night; John did not suspect that we would fly immediately with little more than the clothes on our back, I have little doubt that his minions are searching for us now.”

  “‘Tis a pity indeed that Lord MacLean came back,” Daisy said with a sigh. “Now there’s one what seems that the world might be better off without.”

  “He is wounded, Daisy,” Kate chided. “It seems to me his hurts go far deeper than the skin. And we did invade the gentleman’s home.”

  “Well he ain’t any kind of gentleman, if he don’t see that you’re a lady,” Daisy said with a sniff. “A slip on the shoulder he was offerin’ you and no mistake of that. ‘Tis a blessin’ the little one came when she did.”

  “No,” Kate said, her eyes lowering before Daisy’s reproachful look. “It was most unfortunate, for I would have accepted his offer otherwise.”

  Daisy’s mouth dropped open. “What would your Pa have said? And your husband? You . . .”

  “They would have rightly called me a ‘whore,’” Kate said, completing the sentence, her fists clenching by her sides. “I hope that my father will look down from his place in Heaven and know that his granddaughter is safe from harm. As for my husband, it was his foolish notions that gave control of our finances and our lives into John Vesey’s keeping. No doubt, Marcus thought that John would keep my hoydenish tendencies in tight rein. But that water has long rushed beneath the bridge. I will do what I must, Daisy, to keep Anne safe and if that entails walking the streets for passage money then I shall do so. If you cannot stomach that thought, then you had best go back to London.”

  Silent tears ran down the maidservant’s cheek as she clasped Kate’s hands. “Do it for you myself, but I could,” she said. “But there ain’t many what would want one such as me. I’ll stay with you, child, though it be breakin’ my heart.”

  “Oh, Daisy,” Kate whispered, clutching the wom
an’s hands. “We’ll weather this. For Anne.”

  “Aye,” Daisy said, her words imbued with solemnity of an oath. “For Anne.”

  . . .

  There were few people abroad before dawn in the fashionable Mayfair neighborhood. So, it was scarcely surprising that no one remarked the man slipping through the garden gate and into Steele House through an unlocked entry. He moved through the darkened rooms confidently, pausing for a moment to knock lightly upon the library door before entering silently.

  “What kept you?” John Vesey said, glaring angrily. “I expected you nearly an hour ago.”

  “I was waiting for the report from France,” the man replied, his demeanor composed despite his employer’s apparent rage. “My man had a rough time crossing French lines. We are at war, you know.”

  “Damn your cheek, Roberts,” Vesey said. “What does he say? Has he found them?”

  “It seems that they have vanished, sir,” Roberts replied.

  “What do you mean vanished?” John Vesey roared, striking his desk with a meaty fist.

  Roberts raised an eyebrow, sorely tempted to mention that raised voices and pounding were bound to attract attention, but then thought the better of it. Vesey was paying a premium price for his services and although he could not like the man, his gold was certainly unobjectionable. “They have not been seen since that day in Dover, sir. My men have questioned the captains of every packet that day and none can recall either of the two women or the child. I have sent men to the various ports, questioned nearly every smuggler from here to Cornwall, but there is no trace of them. I have the account of my peoples’ expenses.” Roberts concluded, handing him the bill