Phoebe’s hands finally came to rest upon his lapel. James could only smile as he pushed her away, thinking how modest and retiring a maiden she was. Clearly, she had been a good influence upon Helena, a thing which spoke well of his own true love’s breeding and character. He was indulgent as he spoke, steering her back into the hands of her betrothed.
“Please, have no fear, Miss Barlowe, I will keep quiet upon the matter until the banns are posted, and nuptials are held. I am indeed happy for you and only regret that I must leave in so much haste before we can celebrate the matter properly.”
“You do not understand!” Miss Barlowe wailed, her face suffused with color as to be near purple, her fists balled at her sides.
“Hush, Phoebe, let the man speak.” Barrington steered her toward the settee, pressing upon her shoulder until she sat down hard. She glared up at him, clearly unhappy with the manhandling.
Barrington ignored the look only chuckling indulgently as he patted her shoulder. “You must leave? In this storm?” Barrington glanced uneasily at the window, though it was near frosted over, and impossible for one to be able to see outside.
James nodded, feeling the urgency stealing over him again, that had led him to burst into the room in the first place. “I must. My…my old governess. She is dying, and I must hurry to her side. Lucy is very dear to me, and I must not lose time…”
“Lucy?” Barrington drew himself up, giving James a keen look. “Indeed. I understand though it is a shameful night to be out. How might I be of assistance?”
“The boy they sent barely made it on the back of our best horse. Now, both boy and beast must rest. I would that I might borrow an animal capable of taking me through the storm. I am sorry to be in such haste—” James drew to a flustered halt, unsure as to how he could make the man see precisely how important this was.
Thankfully, Barrington was a man of discernment for he seemed to understand. “Nonsense, good Duke. Clearly, you must go. A…governess…is to be respected.”
“Governess!” Miss Barlowe threw herself back upon the settee, sending cushions flying, and began to laugh, the sound high and hysterical. “By all means, go see to your precious Lucy. May she rot in every hell.”
“Phoebe!” Barrington stared at her, absolutely aghast.
“Well, what do I care, Your Grace.” She sneered the phrase. “If I am to be saddled with yon pathetic Duke for the rest of my days when it should have been him that I should have married….”
She thrust a thumb in the general direction of James who stared at her with a mixture of horror and revulsion. “But I thought…”
“You thought wrong. The note was meant for you, the Honorable Duke of Durham. Not York. How such a mix-up might have occurred…”
Barrington was also staring at her by now. His face grew hard and determined. “Go…have my man saddle my stallion. He should get you through, though it will be hard going. Campbell…” He paused here and looked at him sympathetically. “Do not let the prattling of a woman keep you from your path. She is clearly overwrought.”
Campbell. And just like that, they were equals. It likely had to do with the difficulty in courting the ladies of this family, who seemed to change their minds as often as the wind changed direction regarding whether or not they wished to be courted. Or by whom, apparently. James would have laughed at the absurdity of the situation had he not been so urgent to be on his way.
“I thank you, Barrington. If I might take my leave…” James bowed. Behind him the doors between the two rooms slammed open, sending a violent gust of cold air into the room, and revealing to him one rather frantic young lady, whose pale face belied her concern.
“You would leave, Your Grace, into a storm like this, for your servant?” Helena said, though there was no censure in her voice nor sneer, as there had been in Miss Barlowe’s. Only honest concern lay in the eyes that met his.
“I would, my Lady, for she is much more than a servant to me. Though, I think you understand that,” he said softly, looking beyond her to where Bridget stood in the shadows.
“I understand…just…the storm is severe.”
James stared into her eyes, pleading with her to understand. There were things he could not say, not out loud, and certainly not in this company, where Miss Barlowe had just declared her love for him and now was sitting sulking on the settee.
Helena met his gaze unflinchingly, strong and certain, as though she understood. He loved that about her — that she was not one to back down when a challenge arose, and that she had a quick empathy for those around her.
“Not unlike the storm that brought Lucy to your own door, I suspect,” James said softly, reminding her that, were it not for Lucy, they would not be standing there, trying to have an entire conversation with their eyes.
“Oh please,” Miss Barlowe muttered from the settee, covering her eyes with one hand as her head lolled back against the edge of the sofa. “Surely I cannot watch this. Both of you together are as tedious as trying to watch that play by Shakespeare. What is it? Romeo and Juliet? Though I might remind you that their story ends entirely in disaster. Are you so sure you would go out into the storm, Your Grace?”
“You have an odd sentiment for a lady who just expressed a desire to marry this particular Duke,” Barrington said, with a wry glance at the very person to whom he had apparently proposed to only a few minutes hence.
“May we all die here tonight. To perdition with the lot of us. The play has become a farce, and I no longer wish to have a part within it.” Miss Barlowe shook her head. “Helena, child, see me to my room. I seem to have come down with one of my sick headaches.”
Bridget made a noise behind them as if to protest, but Helena bent obediently to the task of lending an arm to her aunt, who leaned heavily upon her as she made her way to the door. She paused there though, despite her burden, and looked back at James with such a pained look in her eyes that he caught his breath.
“There were things I would have said to you,” Helena said softly. “Things I should have said to you all along. It was my note that caused all of this. I had intended for it to bring you here to speak to me.”
James blinked in surprise, aware that Barrington had likewise straightened suddenly, and shot a different sort of look altogether in Miss Barlowe’s general direction. “We will speak when I return then,” James said, with all the solemnity of this being a sacred vow.
“You are returning then?” There was a hint of shy wonder in Helena’s voice, and for a moment, James hoped that things were not so ruined between them after all, for she had fled the table so quickly. Here he had been attempting to court her for weeks now, and they were yet to finish a meal, or even a tea, together.
“I shall return.”
It would have to be enough. Miss Barlowe chose that moment to make a noise that might have been termed rude, signaling the conversation was clearly over.
Which left him to wonder what it was that Helena had wanted so badly to say that she would want to meet him in this drawing room by herself. It was a shame things had gotten so badly muddled.
Chapter 39
Never had James dared travel so far in such weather. The storm was a true blizzard, the worst of the season, if he were any judge of it, though the storm Lucy had been lost in was a near second at any rate.
James bent low over the neck of the Duke of York’s horse. Barrington had been right — the animal was superior to any he had ever ridden. But even so, the animal floundered in the drifts and nearly went down more than once. James, a fine rider in his own right, was hard pressed to not be thrown more than one. The fact that he wasn’t was more to the horse’s credit than to his.
Had he not needed every bit of concentration to keep the animal moving forward, James would have welcomed the respite to think through the developments of that night. As it was, he could only take with him the look in Helena’s eyes. Such worry, such concern could not possibly be mistaken, and could only mean one thing.
&n
bsp; She cares about me. She must, or she would not have looked at me the way she had.
The thought alone should have been enough to keep him warm as man and horse struggled onward. But James’s fingers froze despite the warm gloves he wore. The skin left exposed by the scarf that had slipped away from his face and was lost to the wind. burned with pain. More terrifying was when everything stopped hurting at all, signaling the onset of frostbite, about the time his own gate came into view.
Little did such things matter anymore. The sight of his own home, lights burning in nearly every window, told of the expectation of his return; his servants had never doubted him for a minute. Whether Lucy was still alive, James had no way of knowing. James’s heart was in his throat, he somehow managed to dismount from the horse, stopping only to pat and praise the animal, shouting over the wind to be heard.
The stallion stood with his ears back and head down seeming thankful to be done with the wild journey. One of James’s few remaining servants dashed from the door to take the reins.
“Lucy! Is she…?” James called when he saw the man approach.
“She still lives, Your Grace.”
The man clucked over the state of horse, clearly disliking how exhausted the animal appeared. James patted the stallion once more, ordering the man to make that the horse was given a hot mash and a warm blanket for the night. The horse had surely done his duty and deserved whatever kindness and rest he could get.
James, though, could not take time for his own needs though he knew he needed warm clothes and a bath as much as the horse required tending. That would come later, after he had time to see Lucy and assure himself that all of this was utter nonsense, an overreaction of the staff. Lucy would undoubtedly be well, the queen of the bedchamber, ordering the servants to her needs like she always did.
But the chamber to which he was shown was small and dark; a single candle flickered, the only light against the darkness. The inhabitant tossed restlessly in the bed, her hands clutching at the sheets, bunching the linen in white-knuckled fists.
“What is she doing here?” James asked in panic, seeing Lucy so old and frail, her skin nearly translucent in the dim light. “There are better chambers than this. She needs a warmer place, better suited for nursing!”
The servants might have protested. This was Lucy’s room after all, a fact he should have been aware of, but he was not. This surely was the smallest space in the entire house, a room so humble it would not have occurred to him that his vibrant Lucy lived there.
Instead the housekeeper made no comment but gathered several maids together to transport Lucy to the chamber next to James’s own. In moments, a warm fire was lit in the fireplace, chasing away the chill, as they piled extra blankets upon the bed to keep Lucy warm.
“Has the doctor been sent for?” James asked, though the very absence of that personage told him the answer well. The night was too difficult. The man would never make it through the storm.
James paced the room, staring periodically at the cook’s assistant, a dull-witted girl named Jane, whose job seemed to entail very little other than placing a fresh damp cloth upon the patient’s forehead, in a vain attempt to bring Lucy’s fever down. Finally, James made the girl leave while ordering out the rest of the servants, so that he might tend to his old governess himself.
Those in his employ must have thought him crazy. A Duke does not wait upon a servant. Should word get out, James would be considered a madman and beneath the contempt of all he would meet.
At the same time, there wasn’t a servant in his household that didn’t understand the importance of Lucy to all of them. To his surprise, there were half a dozen servants waiting in the hallway, most of them carrying their own special items — a soft blanket or warm broth — to offer to her.
The Duke took each offering, smiling thankfully for each. His butler brought him the items he needed most: a change of clothing, warm and dry. Someone else brought a bite to eat though James barely glanced at the tray when they placed it on the table next to him.
No, James was too preoccupied with sitting at Lucy’s bedside, holding her cold hand in his, as though he could somehow pray her back from the gates of death.
The servant who came in with an extra load of wood for the fire was able to give him the details of the fall. Lucy had been found unconscious and restless since. “She’s naught right in the head,” the man pronounced wisely, though he had not been the one to find her.
After the man left, James explored the back of Lucy’s head with his fingers, finding a lump there, and sinking back in his chair with a moan. An injury to the head was a near mystical thing. A mind wandering was not always wont to come back home again, and the very fact that she was fevered and unresponsive was not a good sign.
James did not need to be a doctor to know that.
He groaned and buried his own head in his hands, fighting his own sobs, not ready to let go of this woman who had raised him since he was an infant. He had not gotten along well with his mother, and so Lucy had become to him everything that his father’s wife had not been. Lucy had bought warmth, acceptance and love to a lonely child that had understood little of why he was so unwanted by his own flesh and blood.
James had time to think about that now. He remembered the longing he had always felt, the desire for his mother to love him. But while his own mother had been cold, he had never doubted Lucy’s affection. He had known from the time he was small that she cared. And so, it was, he had somehow managed to grow up being safe, in a home where it would have been easy for him to become cold and bitter.
It was not just James, though, that was so affected by the magic of Lucy. She always saw the best in everyone. Didn’t he know full well that the only reason more of his staff hadn’t left him in this financial disaster was because of her influence? It was her they were loyal to, not him.
“Lucy, you cannot leave us. We need you so much. I need you so much…” he murmured as he trapped her restless hand in his own.
The head upon the pillow turned at the sound of his voice, eyes opening to stare blearily first at him, and then to take in the room.
“Am I so near death then, that you feel the need to put me in a room that is not my own?”
James tried to smile, though the action caused the frostbite on his cheeks to sting, and the forced expression could not have looked anything like he’d intended. So, instead, he grimaced, raising a smile from her careworn face.
“I thought so,” she said softly, moving her head upon the pillow, wincing a little as she did so.
“I hardly think you shall die from a bump on the head,” James said, for indeed now that she was awake, he was heartened somewhat despite how grey her face seemed.
Her eyes, so bright, so terribly blue, fastened upon his face. “I have been ill for some time, Your Grace. When I went out in the storm to talk to that woman, I knew I had a limited amount of time left to me.”
James started, both amazed that she still had the presence of mind to twit him with his title, and at the words that followed. “No, you have been your usual self. Why at breakfast the other day you quite clearly were well enough to devour my entire meal!”
One hand waved weakly at him, her other hand restless against the coverlet. “It has always been my heart. Some days I am well, but others…I feel the pains and know. When I fell, the weakness was there. My mother and father both died this way. I wish you could have known them. I think they would have loved you, but you were always a good boy.”
Her parents? “I…I do not understand…”
Lucy’s smile was fond, even wistful. “No, you would not. I have debated this matter for a very long time, whether to tell you the truth or carry it to my grave. But in the end, I see how selfish this would be. You came here through the storm. Yes, I know that much at least. Though to have you away from that house…oh do not get me wrong, for Lady Barrington is a delight in so many ways. But there is danger within those walls…”
“D
anger…” James stared at her sadly, for the knock to her head had clearly addled her wits. “There is no danger, Lucy. I am safe…”
“Safe!” She knocked away the hand that held her own, feisty even now. “My mind is as sound as it ever was! Oh, dear boy, my head hurts but I know well enough what is going on. Phoebe Barlowe has her sights set upon you.”
James could not help but laugh, for by now he was exhausted, overwrought and a host of other things. “Such is undoubtedly true,” he said, leaning back heavily in the chair, and pressing one hand over his eyes, for he was close to tears despite his laughter. “Though how you know this, when you are laying here, dying, is entirely beyond me.”
“I hardly see how my dying is something to laugh over,” the old woman muttered, though when James looked at her, he saw the twitch to her lips before she also laughed. “I sense there is a story that you are not telling me.”
The Scandalous Deal of the Scarred Lady: A Historical Regency Romance Novel Page 21