“No.” She returned her empty brandy glass to the bedside table. “He wouldn’t. Not there.”
“But elsewhere?”
She saw no reason to deny it. She had the sense that they’d reached the end of the road, the two of them. The moment of reckoning. “Yes. On my arms and wrists.”
“And your neck?”
Her fingers fluttered to her throat. She had a visceral memory of how she’d felt when it happened. Despite all the indignities she’d suffered thus far, all the threats and abuse and betrayals, that act had terrified her as nothing else had before. “That was my Uncle Edward.”
“The Earl of Castleton.”
He knew who her uncle was then. Of course he did. It would have been one of the first things Mr. Glyde would have told him. “Since last September, yes. That’s when he inherited the title.” She paused, her heart thudding heavily. “What else did he tell you?”
Justin shook his head. “I want to hear it from you.”
He was regarding her with unwavering intensity. Helena had been on the receiving end of just such a look from the doctors her uncle had hired. It made her want to scream in frustration. It made her want to shout that she was not mad.
But it never worked to simply blurt it out. She must speak to him calmly. She must explain the circumstances without emotion.
She returned his gaze with what she hoped was equal solemnity. As she did so, some small part of her brain registered the absence of his coat and cravat. He was clad only in his shirtsleeves and a pair of black trousers. It was outrageously intimate.
“Until two years ago, my father was the Earl of Castleton,” she said. “When he died, my brother Giles ascended to the title.”
“The brother who perished at the siege of Jhansi.”
“Yes,” she said. And then, “No.”
Justin’s brows lifted slightly, but he said not a word.
She wasn’t helping her cause, she knew it. And her appearance couldn’t be helping much either. Her wet hair was matted and wild all about her. She must look like a veritable madwoman, even if she didn’t sound like one.
“The British army believes him dead. Another officer gave an eyewitness account. It was evidence enough for my uncle to succeed to the title. But the army never found Giles’ body. Without it—without some physical proof—I couldn’t accept that my brother had died. And that…” She took a breath to steady her voice. “That’s when this whole nightmare began.”
Helena attempted to explain it to Justin as clearly and succinctly as she could. It was an impossible feat. She couldn’t speak of such things in a dispassionate manner. Not about the loss of her brother. And certainly not about what came after.
“I took the news of Giles’s death very hard,” she said. “For weeks, I kept to my room. I wept unceasingly. When the solicitor came to Grosvenor Square with my brother’s will, I could scarcely bring myself to attend the reading. My uncle was there. He didn’t take any notice of me. Not at first. But when the terms of Giles’s will were revealed, he reacted…rather badly.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, the events of that day materializing as clear as crystal in her mind. The blinds had been half-drawn in her brother’s study. The footmen had arranged chairs in front of what had once been his desk. She’d been seated in one of them, a veiled mourning bonnet on her head and a black lace handkerchief clutched in her hand.
“The property belonging to the earldom is entailed,” she said. “The family seat in Hampshire, the hunting lodge in Wiltshire, and the townhouse in London all went to my uncle, along with a dozen other properties. But the money—the bulk of it, anyway—was my brother’s to do with as he liked.”
Comprehension flared in Justin’s gray eyes. “He left it to you.”
“All of it. Free from any encumbrance. I didn’t pay attention to the legal whys and wherefores. I was too distressed. It was then my uncle turned to me. He saw I was weeping behind my mourning veil. Weeping more than the occasion deserved, or so he said.”
“You were close to your brother.”
“He was my best friend. I loved him dearly. Perhaps I did grieve overmuch. In other circumstances it wouldn’t have mattered. But my mother behaved in just such a fashion after Giles was born. The excessive weeping and low spirits. It only worsened after I arrived. She fell into a melancholy from which she never recovered. My father… He had her put away.”
“Into an asylum,” Justin said bluntly.
“Yes. A private asylum in Highgate.” She lowered her gaze to her hands. “It was an awful place. They confined her to a room with nothing but an iron bedstead. She was subjected to treatments. I don’t know the extent of it. I was just a child. But my father made us visit her. And every time I saw her, she was worse. They made her worse. And I couldn’t—” Her voice broke.
Justin leaned toward the bed. “You don’t have to say any more.”
“I must. Else you won’t understand why—”
“I do understand.”
“Not everything.”
His expression was grim. “I expect I can guess the rest.”
She lifted her gaze back to his. “You believe I inherited my mother’s melancholia.” There was a note of accusation in her voice. “It’s what he’ll have told you.”
“He did say that,” Justin acknowledged.
“It’s not true. I have a sadness in me, but I’m not melancholic. I’m not suffering from hysteria. I merely feel things deeply. I feel them here.” She pressed a hand to her breast. “And when I love someone—and when they’re taken away from me—I can’t just forget them as though they’d never been.”
“Helena…”
“So I grieved for my brother. But when they couldn’t find his body, I began to doubt. And then I began to hope. And when my uncle demanded I sign my inheritance over to him, I refused to do it. No amount of threats or violence could persuade me. It’s Giles’s money, don’t you see? If there’s even a small chance he’s still alive…that he might come back one day…”
She couldn’t go on. If she did, she feared she might start sobbing. And that would only make her look more unbalanced than she already did.
“How does Mr. Glyde fit into all of this?” Justin asked.
She folded her arms around herself to stave off a shiver. “He works for my uncle. He was sent to find me on the first occasion I ran away.”
Justin stared at her. He said nothing for a long moment. “The first occasion,” he repeated at length. “Exactly how many occasions were there?”
“Several. I lost count.”
“They weren’t all related to matrimonial advertisements, I trust.”
Helena couldn’t tell if his question was in earnest. His deep voice had no inflection at all. “No. Your advertisement was the first I answered. Jenny found it in the Times.”
His gaze sharpened. “Jenny?”
“My companion. She came to live with us shortly before my father died. She’s a distant relation. A second cousin four or five times removed. I’ve known her most of my life.”
Companion was an inadequate word to describe Jenny. She’d been a friend. A confidante. The only person to help her when events with her uncle had taken such a dark and frightening turn.
“It was Jenny who posted the letters I wrote to you. She made the travel arrangements with Mr. Finchley. If not for her, I would never have managed to get out of London.”
“And the other times you ran away?” he asked.
Helena inwardly winced. He made her sound like some variety of desperate criminal. A lunatic bent on escape. Well. And perhaps she was.
“In the beginning, I wasn’t running. If I left the house at all it was to pay calls on gentlemen who had been friends of my father. I needed an advocate. I was sure someone would help me. But my uncle is the earl now. No one wished to go against him. N
ot on my behalf, anyway. My mother’s illness looms rather large.”
“Your uncle appears to have exploited that fact.”
“He has. Quite ruthlessly. And when no gentleman of my acquaintance was willing to come to my aid, he felt quite at liberty to begin soliciting treatment for me. Some of the treatments were administered at a private asylum called Lowbridge House. The doctors, they—” She inhaled a tremulous breath. “Well. It makes no difference what they did, except that, after they’d done it, I hadn’t very many plans left. I simply ran.”
“Where did you run to?” Justin asked. “Where exactly were you going?”
“Away,” she said. “Just…away.”
He frowned, seeming to contemplate some facet of the matter with greater than usual attention.
Helena sank farther back into the pillows. The full effect of the day’s events was catching up with her. Her limbs were heavy and her eyes threatened to drift shut at any moment.
Was it really only this morning that she and Justin had been married? That he’d kissed her so passionately in their room at the Stanhope Hotel? And now, here she was telling him about her mother and her uncle and Mr. Glyde. All after having fallen over the edge of a cliff and—quite possibly—fainted from the shock of it.
“So,” Justin said at last. “Marrying me was a last resort.”
She turned her head to look at him. “It was my very last hope, yes.”
“And when you arrived at the King’s Arms—when you saw me—it didn’t matter that I was burned. Or that I was a bastard. You needed a husband to give you the protection of his name. Any man would have done.”
He was leaning forward in his chair, his elbows resting on his knees. His hair was disheveled and his jaw shadowed with evening stubble. Helena had never seen him looking so somber. So vulnerable.
“But it wasn’t just any man at the King’s Arms,” she said softly. “It was you, Justin. It was you.”
Justin bowed his head, his throat contracting on a convulsive swallow. Helena’s words were as tender as a caress. For a brief moment, they managed to calm the rage that had boiled in his veins since he first beheld the bruises that covered her bare neck and arms.
Many of those black-and-blue marks had been in the shape of a man’s fingers.
It had been all Justin could do to keep from going after Mr. Glyde. From pulling the man from his carriage and beating him to a bloody pulp.
“Have you ever hurt a woman?” she’d asked him on the beach.
It had been little more than three days ago. He’d suspected then that someone had treated her harshly, but he could never have imagined the extent of it.
No wonder she’d been desperate. A lady of her quality would have had to be to consent to marry a man like him.
“I’m so very sorry, Justin,” she said. “I know I should have told you.”
He could only nod. His mouth had gone dry and there was a lump in his throat the approximate size of a boulder. He was feeling—
Bloody hell.
He was feeling. He didn’t know what. Anger, hurt, and the bitter ache of longing were all inextricably knotted in his chest. He couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Then again, he was not a man accustomed to examining his emotions.
And he had no wish to start doing so now.
He rose from his chair. “You should sleep. We can continue this discussion tomorrow.”
Helena’s eyes flickered with something like alarm. “Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving you to rest.”
She moved to sit up against the pillows. “Justin—”
His stopped where he stood. “What is it?”
“Please don’t go. Don’t leave me here by myself.”
He scanned her face in the lamplight. Her brow was drawn, her cheeks pale as alabaster. She was afraid. No, he realized. Not afraid. Hell and damnation. She was terrified. “Helena,” he said. “He’s not coming back.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, actually. The cliff road is washed out. And even if he somehow managed to get through, Paul and Jonesy would tear him apart before he ever reached the entrance to the Abbey.”
She was silent a moment. And then, “You said the dogs were gentle.”
“Ah. So I did.” He cleared his throat. “And they can be. Er…when the occasion calls for it.”
“Hmm.” She did not sound entirely convinced.
Justin speared his fingers through his hair. It was already standing half on end. He’d had no chance to bathe after carrying Helena into the house. His every attention had been on her. Only when she was warm, dry, and safely tucked up in bed had he taken time to change out of his own wet clothes.
“The point is,” he continued, “the dogs are more than capable of—”
“The dogs aren’t you.”
Not the most flattering compliment a lady ever gave to a man, but at this moment—and with this particular lady—it might as well have been a sonnet.
His mouth hitched briefly. “I smell enough like one. After rescuing you from the cliffs, I was obliged to haul up both Paul and Jonesy.”
“I don’t mind it.”
“Don’t you?” His smile faded faster than it had appeared.
He knew what he was going to do only a fraction of a second before he did it.
“Move over,” he said.
“What?” Helena touched a hand to the collar of her makeshift nightdress. It was a modest gesture, rendered somewhat comical by the fact that she was already wearing his shirt.
“Helena, today I traveled to and from Abbot’s Holcombe in a thunderstorm. I was married. I was visited by the magistrate. I rescued two dogs and one new wife from over the side of a cliff. If you wish me to remain, you’re going to have to move over.”
She looked at him for several seconds.
Several seconds during which his heart teetered on the brink of an abyss.
“Very well,” she said at last. She edged over slightly on the mattress. “Though I don’t see why it’s necessary for me to move. There’s plenty of room for you already.”
Justin’s heart resumed beating in a rather erratic fashion. More erratic still as he watched her pull back the blanket for him. “Yes, well…it was the abbot’s bed.”
“Was it? I didn’t realize Elizabethan abbots were quite so large.”
“This one was. Either that or very grand.”
He took a moment to turn down the oil lamps. A fire was still crackling in the hearth. It provided plenty of light for him to see his way back to the bed. He’d already removed his boots when he changed his clothes. There was nothing to do now but climb in beside her.
The mattress dipped beneath his weight as he lay down. They were so close that he could feel the warmth emanating from her body.
Devil take it. She was wearing absolutely nothing under that linen shirt of his.
He’d been concerned about her health when he’d removed her wet clothing. And then he’d been focused on the bruises, seething with anger at whoever had hurt her. But he wasn’t blind, for God’s sake. And though he lived in an abbey, he sure as hell wasn’t a monk.
She shifted onto her side to face him. The faint fragrance of jasmine tickled his nose.
“Better?” His voice had deepened to a husky undertone. He hardly recognized the sound of it.
“Yes,” she whispered back. Her long lashes were already fluttering closed. “I have so much more to tell you, Justin.”
“I know.”
“So much more to explain.”
“Rest now,” he said. “It will keep until tomorrow.”
It had been a harrowing day. She was exhausted and, very probably, still in shock. He’d seen the symptoms before. Frankly, he was amazed she’d managed to stay awake and coherent for as long as she had. He
would lie beside her for a short while and then—
“Will you stay with me?” she asked.
His chest tightened. It was a bad idea. Things were far from settled between them. Besides, he hadn’t shared a bed with another person since his days in the orphanage. Not to sleep, at any rate. It would do nothing but confuse the issue and—
“I think I can bear it,” he said.
She murmured something then as she drifted off. It sounded vaguely like another apology. Or possibly a few words of thanks. He didn’t know which was worse. He didn’t want her guilt and he had no use for her gratitude. What he wanted…what he needed…was something else altogether.
Justin woke well before sunrise. The fire had gone out in the hearth and the room was cold. Helena had huddled against him for warmth. Her cheek was on his chest, her arm draped over his midsection. His own arm had somehow managed to insinuate itself around her. His hand was resting, rather possessively, on the swell of her hip.
It should have felt presumptuous. She was a lady. The niece of an earl. The daughter of an earl and the sister of an earl, as well. When he’d cleaned the scrape on her knee last night, he was frankly amazed the blood he’d swabbed away hadn’t been blue.
As a boy, the closest thing to a title he’d ever encountered had been in the person of Sir Oswald. A mere baronet. The first time he’d seen him riding through the gates of the orphanage on a magnificent black hunter, Justin had been in awe. It was an emotion that hadn’t lasted long.
“Out of the way you motherless beggars!” Sir Oswald had bellowed.
Justin had been standing in the drive with Finchley, Archer, and Neville. Sir Oswald had swung his crop to disperse them. The leather tassel had cracked against Archer’s cheek. Justin had had to grab his friend by the arm and haul him out of the path of the horse.
Finchley, meanwhile, hadn’t moved an inch. He’d been the smallest and thinnest of them, but was then, as now, possessed of an unnatural steadiness of the nerves. He’d squinted at Sir Oswald’s retreating figure through the second-hand spectacles he wore perched on his nose. “Who’s that?”
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