Buch lesen: «Ruined By The Reckless Viscount»

Chapter One

London—1810

The door of the approaching carriage opened as it stopped beside her in a sudden and unexpected haste.

‘Get in now.’

‘I beg your pardon.’ Lady Florentia Hale-Burton could not quite believe what she had heard even as the stranger standing above her on the top step of the unliveried coach repeated it again more loudly.

‘I said get in now.’

The man frowned when she did not move and leaned forward so that his face was not far from her own. A beautiful face, like an angel, she thought, though his voice held no notes of the celestial at all.

‘Look, unlike your long-suffering paramour, I am not up to playing this silly game of yours, madam. If you don’t get in this minute I will drag you inside and be done with it. Do you understand?’

‘I will do no such thing, sir. Of course I will not.’ Finding her voice, Florentia looked about wildly for some help from her maid, Milly, but the girl had dropped back, her mouth wide open in alarm as she turned to run. It was like some dream, Flora thought, the horror of it appalling, like a nightmare where no matter how much you wanted to escape you could not. Fright held her simply rigid. The sky was grey and the day was windy. She could smell cut grass and hear birds calling from the park across the road. An ordinary Wednesday on a walk she had done a hundred times before and now this...

As the stranger stepped down from the carriage and took her arm she finally found resistance, swinging her heavy reticule at his face and connecting with a thump. The two books inside the bag were weighty tomes on the history of art, leather bound and substantial. The edge of one cut into the skin above his right eye and blood gushed down his cheek, though instead of looking furious, which might have been expected, he only began to laugh.

‘Hell,’ he said, ‘Thomas damned well owes me for this though he did warn me you might not come easily if he was not present. But enough now. We are beginning to attract some attention and if I am going to be of any help to you we have to leave immediately.’

Grabbing at her, he pulled her hard against his body and she bit into his hand. Swearing, he brought one arm down across her breast when she screamed as loud as she could manage. Then he simply clamped his fingers on the top of her right shoulder and all she knew was darkness.

* * *

James Waverley, Viscount Winterton, couldn’t believe he was doing this, kidnapping his cousin’s whore before Hyde Park and rendering her unconscious. But Tom had insisted, pleaded, cajoled and finally called in any favour James had ever promised. So he had.

‘She’s a feisty one, you will find,’ his second cousin had insisted, ‘and if I was in any position at all to go and get her myself I would, but...’ He’d looked down at his leg cast from the ankle to the thigh. ‘She needs to be out of London, Winter, needs to be safe from those who might hurt her.’ And because one of his own unruly horses was responsible for his cousin’s broken leg, James had consented.

‘What does she look like?’

‘Blonde and sensual. She will be wearing red, no doubt, as she always does and will be waiting on the corner of Mount Street opposite Hyde Park at five o’clock precisely.’

Lord help me, James thought. Tom hadn’t mentioned that she would be the type to scream her head off in fury or whack him with a heavy bag full of books.

She didn’t have the appearance of a whore either, with her demurely cut pink and red day dress and old-fashioned hat, but then what was the look of one? He’d never required the services of a lady of the night before, though he had seen them around Covent Garden and the Haymarket and many of them had appeared...quite ordinary. Perhaps Acacia Kensington was one of those girls, thrown into the game by dire circumstance and the need to survive.

She certainly had good teeth. The bite mark on his hand stung badly having cut the skin to leave it swollen and throbbing.

Laying her down on the seat opposite, he took off his jacket and placed it under her head as a pillow. She’d wake up soon and there would be all hell to pay, the journey north taking a good few hours to complete. With a frown he looked away.

Is this who he was now? A man who would hurt a woman? A man who might take the path of least resistance when quite plainly it was the wrong thing to do?

Swearing, he sat back and glanced out the window. A young maid was running along the pathway and shouting at the top of her lungs, another couple joining her. When the man raised his hand in a fist the first shudder of things not being quite as they ought to be went through him and he was glad when the carriage turned into the main road north, its speed increasing.

The blood from the cut above his right eye had begun to blur his vision and he swiped at it with the sleeve of his jacket, blotting the redness against dark linen.

Thomas could do his own courting next time, broken leg or not, he thought, and if the girl came to as angry as she had been he didn’t quite know what he would do next. Put her out, he imagined, and let her make her own way from London, or not. In truth he didn’t care any longer.

She had a damn expensive ring on the third finger of her right hand, the diamonds winking in the light. No false gold or cut glass either, the patina and shape of the piece telling him this was the real thing. Perhaps a paramour had gifted it to her. Tommy had the funds to procure such a bauble, should he have wished it, so maybe this was his doing. He was a man inclined to the grand gesture.

The anger that had been his constant companion threatened to choke him and he pushed back the familiar fury. Once he would have told his cousin exactly where to go with his hare-brained schemes of procuring women, but now...

The war had knocked the stuffing out of him and he had returned from Europe and the first Peninsular Campaign unsettled. He did not fit in here any more, having neither property nor much in the way of family, save a father who had taken more and more to the drink. He wanted to be away from the London set and its expectations, but most of all he needed to be away from the brutality of war. It had settled into him the aftermath of violence, making him jumpy and uncertain, the ghosts of memory entwined even in the ordinariness of his life here.

* * *

He swore again twenty moments later as sky-blue eyes opened and simply looked at him, the paleness of her cheeks alarming.

‘I think... I am going...to be...sick.’

And she was, all over his boots and on her dress, heaving into the space between them time after time and shaking dreadfully. Her eyes watered, her nose ran and the stench of a tossed-up lunch hung in the air as she simply began to cry. Not quietly either.

Banging his cane against the roof, James was glad as the conveyance drew to a halt, the countryside all around wide and green, the road empty before them and behind. He didn’t stop her hurried exit as he threw water he carried for the journey on to the carriage floor, drying what he could with great bunches of wild grasses pulled from the side of the road.

She was gone when he had finished, disappeared into a tract of bushes behind a stone fence. He caught the hue of her red gown at some distance dashing between the trees of a small grove.

Part of him wanted to simply leave her there and go on, but it was getting late and dusk would soon be upon the land. If she fell into a ditch or in with the company of someone who might really hurt her...

Cursing again, he bade Thomas’s driver to wait for him and went in after her.

* * *

Florentia ran from tree to tree, her breath ragged as the asthma she had had since childhood came upon her with this unexpected exertion.

She was crying and running and trying to draw in breath, sharp branches tearing at her gown and at the exposed skin on her arms and legs.

Would her kidnapper follow? Would he kill her? Would he chase her and trap her here in the woods and the oncoming darkness and so very far from London?

She tripped and went down hard, then got herself up again, the pathway more difficult to discover now, the sound of a stream further on and dogs.

Dogs? Her heart leapt in her throat. Big dogs? The horror of it kept her still, the sound of crashing feet drawing nearer as two enormous black and brown hounds padded out from a break in the undergrowth and came towards her, lips bared and teeth showing.

‘Keep very still.’ His voice. The man from the carriage. Raw. Brutal. Furious. He sounded as though he would like to kill her along with the canines though the hackles of each dog were raised along bony spines, ready to spring.

He’d stooped to pick up a few of the bigger stones around his feet and threw one hard and fast. A direct hit to the flanks had the lead dog crouching down and slinking backwards. Two long scars at the back of her abductor’s head were easily visible in the fading light. She wondered how anyone could have survived such wounds as that.

‘Get back, damn it.’ His words seemed to be having some effect as the second dog followed the other.

‘Walk slowly towards me.’ This was directed at her now. ‘Don’t run. They are hunting dogs trained to protect and defend. Any quick movement will have them upon you and my pistols are still in the carriage.’

‘You...would...shoot them?’

He laughed at that, a harsh and savage sound. ‘In an instant, were I armed and they were attacking. Now do as I say.’

She did because just at that moment the slobbering teeth of the hunting pair were infinitely more worrying than the possibility of this stranger hurting her. Again. She was pleased when he stood before her shielding her from the threat. ‘Now, walk backwards, keeping my body in a direct line with the dogs. Don’t make eye contact with them. Don’t trip. Look as if you are in charge until you get through the green shelter at the edge of the clearing and then turn and run for the carriage as fast as you can go and get straight in. Do you understand me?’

‘And...what...of...you?’

‘I will be fine.’

He picked up another of the big rocks with one hand and a dead branch from the ground as a weapon and planted it before him. One of the dogs growled loudly in response and the noise had her moving back past the shelter of the bushes and away. As she scampered through the scrub at the edge of the clearing she simply turned and ran for the carriage, screaming at the driver about the dogs and the danger and slamming the door shut behind her.

It was wet inside and smelt like hay, though the dress she wore bore the stronger stench of vomit. Taking a flask of water from a shelf at the back of the conveyance, she poured it across the skirts of her gown, the cold seeping through the red-sprigged muslin and making her shiver.

Her breathing was worse. She could barely take in air now and the panic that she knew would not aid her was building. Placing her head back against the seat, she closed her eyes. This sometimes helped, but she needed the expectorant and the anti-spasmodics that her mother procured from Dr Bracewell in Harley Street. She needed calm and peace and serenity.

Would she die here on the side of a country road and alone? Would her family even know what had happened to her? Would her body be left to the dogs to devour after strangers had stolen her jewellery and books and her dress?

Not to mention her virginity.

The dreadful terror of it all had her sweaty and clammy and she began to feel strange and distant from things. It was the air...she couldn’t get enough of it.

Finally, and with only the slightest whimper, she fell again into the gentler folds of darkness.

* * *

Hell, this whole journey was turning into a fiasco, James thought as he rejoined Thomas’s mistress in the carriage. She was on the floor now in a puddle of water, the cold liquid seeping into the red dress and darkening the fabric to scarlet. She was breathing strangely, too, the skin at her throat taut and hollow and a blue tinge around her lips.

Finding his blade, he leaned forward and slit the tight fabric of her gown from bodice to hem, peeling it away from her. Without hesitation he threw the stinking wet dress straight out of the window and tucked his jacket about her before lifting her to sit up on the seat opposite. An erect position would make breathing easier, he thought, for he’d seen a soldier once with the same ailment on the icy roads between Lugos and Betanzos, and the man had insisted his head should be above his lungs or otherwise he would perish.

Reaching over to a net shelf at the back of the carriage, he searched for the tin of peppermint grease he’d bought at an inn from a medicine man on the way down to London. His cousin was prone to a weakness of chest and the vendor had been so insistent on the healing properties of the treatment James had found coin and purchased it.

Now he fingered a large translucent blob into his palm and rubbed at the skin around the girl’s throat, though the fumes of the ointment were strong and his eyes began to water. Surely such potency must have some effect on allowing breath. He wished she would speak to him so that he could see how she fared, but she simply sat there, a tight and angry presence. He knew she was now conscious—years of hard soldiering had taught him that difference—but he did not wish to harry her with the malady of her condition and the skimpiness of her clothing so he left her to herself and willed the miles gone.

Her legs were badly scratched beneath the skirts, he’d seen that as he had lifted her and the shoes she wore were nothing more than thin leather and silk. A woman used to the boudoir and an inside life. Her hair in the fading light was the colour of honey and gold. He had imagined whores to be cheap and brassy somehow, an artificial enhancement on show for the customers they would be trying to attract. Acacia Kensington’s locks looked natural and unfussy.

* * *

Forty minutes later as the carriage slowed to rest the horses at an inn, her eyes opened. When she moved his jacket pulled away from her neck and her cheeks paled again as she registered her extreme lack of outer wear.

Such false theatrics irked him. ‘I am sure in your profession you must have some days in less than your petticoats, Miss Kensington.’

‘Miss...Kensington?’ Her voice sounded rusty, the fright evident in every single syllable for she trembled as she took in breath. ‘I think...you are indeed...mistaken.’

‘Acacia Kensington?’ He heard the horror in his tone. ‘You are Miss Acacia Kensington, the paramour of my cousin Thomas, are you not?’

She shook her head hard, the long blonde hair falling loose now in a swathe across her shoulders and down over her chest.

‘I am not, sir. I am... Lady Florentia Hale-B-Burton...youngest daughter...of the Earl of Albany.’ Each breath was raw with the effort of talking.

‘Hell.’ He could not believe it. ‘Hell,’ he repeated and like the tumblers in a safe all the clues fell into place. The servant running down the road before the park screaming. The ring. The priggish dress. Her voice.

He’d kidnapped the wrong woman, rendered her unconscious, stripped her almost naked and subjected her to the sort of danger and terror she’d probably never ever manage to recover from.

For the first time in his life he was almost speechless.

‘How old are you?’

‘Eighteen. This...was my...first...Season.’

Young. Unprotected. Defenceless.

‘Are you married?’

His eyes searched the fingers on her left hand and saw them bare.

‘I am...not, sir...but I soon...may be. I...have a...suitor...who...likes me and I am...sure that we...will...’

She didn’t finish for shouts filled the courtyard of the inn as another conveyance reeled wildly into view. Several men alighted and came towards them and as the door was snatched open all James felt was pain as a firearm exploded into his face, the smell of gunpowder one of his last and abiding memories.

* * *

He was dead.

Her father had killed him, the blood oozing from his neck and his mouth in a slow dribble of frothed red.

The sound of the shot had deafened her so that all she could see were people with open lips and corded throats and wildly gesticulating hands.

She felt him fall and she went with him, the green-eyed stranger who had taken her. She saw the spurt of his blood and the quick steps of the horses as they danced against the movement. She saw the rough broken face of her father above her, too.

Crying.

That single thing shocked her more than anything else had, his tears against her face as he tried to pull her up.

Everything smelt wrong.

The blood. The gunpowder. The fear of the horses. Her sweat. The last tinge of vomit in the air.

It smelt like the end. For him and for her. A quick and final punishment for something so terrible she could hardly contemplate just what might happen next.

He lay on the ground beneath her, her abductor, young and vulnerable, one arm twisted under himself, a bone sticking out through the linen shirt and blood blooming. She wanted to hold on to him, to feel the lack of pulse, to understand his death, to allow him absolution, but her father was dragging her away, away from the people who had gathered, away from the driver who was shouting and screaming, away from the light of a rising moon.

The smell of peppermint followed her, ingrained and absolute, the heat of it sitting atop her heart which was beating so very fast.

He had rubbed the ointment there. She remembered that. He had lifted her on to the seat and placed his jacket around her shoulders to cover her lack of clothing, to keep her hidden. He had removed her dress so that she might breathe, protecting her as he done against the threat of the dogs.

The wrong person.

He had said so himself.

The wrong punishment, too. She began to shake violently as her father discarded the jacket she’d clung to before calling to his driver and footman. Then the horses jolted forward as they left the country inn and raced for the safety of Mayfair and London.

A warm woollen blanket was tucked carefully about her and she heard the soft sound of her father praying. Outside it had begun to rain.

* * *

‘Is she ruined, John?’ Her mother’s voice. Tear filled and hesitant.

‘I don’t know, Esther. I swear I don’t.’

‘Did he...?’ Her mama’s voice came to a stop, the words too hard to say out loud.

‘I do not think so, but her petticoats were dishevelled and her dress was disposed of altogether.’

‘And the cuts all over her legs and arms?’

‘She fought him, I think. She fought him until the breathing sickness came and perhaps it saved her. Even a monster must have his limits of depravity.’

‘But he’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who was he?’

‘God knows. Florentia could hardly draw breath and so we left. I don’t want to send anyone back either to the inn to make enquiries in case...’

‘In case our name is recognised?’

‘Milly said the Urquharts saw Florentia in the park a moment before the abduction and that she had spoken to them. They are not people who would keep a secret easily. I doubt Milly is a girl of much discretion, either. But they did not see our daughter as I did. They did not see her so underdressed in the company of a stranger, her gown gone and her hair down. There might be some hope in that.’

Her mother’s sob was muffled and then there were whispered words of worry, the rustle of silk, the blown-out candle, the door shutting behind them and then silence.

She was in her room in Mayfair, back in her bed, the same bunch of tightly budded pink roses bought yesterday from the markets on the small table beside her. It was dark and late and a fire had been set in the hearth. For heat, she supposed, because all she could feel was a deathly cold. She wiggled her toes and her hands came beneath the sheets to run along the lines of her body. Everything was in place though she could feel the scratches incurred during her flight through the woods.

She breathed in, glad she could now gather more air than she had been able to in the carriage. Her neck throbbed and she swallowed. There was a thick bandage wrapped across her right thumb and tied off at her wrist.

He was dead. All that beauty dead and gone. She remembered the blood on the cobblestones and on her petticoats and in the lighter shades of his hair.

The beat of her heart sounded loud in a room with the quiet slice of moonlight on the bedcovers. A falling moon now, faded and low.

Was she ruined because of him? Ruined for ever?

She could not believe that she wouldn’t be. Her sister had not come to seek her out and extract the story. She imagined Maria had been told to stay away. Her maid, Milly, had gone too, on an extended holiday back to her family in Kent. To recover from the dreadful shock, her father had explained when he first saw her awake, but she could see so very much more in his eyes.

The howls of the dogs came to mind. Her abductor’s voice, too, raw but certain. She remembered his laughter as she’d hit him hard with her books. There was a dimple in his chin.

Where would he be buried? She’d looked back and seen the servant lift him from the ground, carefully, gently, none of the violence of her father, only protection and concern.

She was glad for it. She was. She was also glad that she was here safe and that there was nothing left between them save memory. His pale clear green eyes. The shaved shortness of his hair. The two parallel scars evident on his scalp. The smell of wool and unscented soap in his jacket. She shook away such thoughts. He had ruined her. He had taken her life and changed it into something different. He had taken her from the light and discharged her into shadow.

The deep lacerations on her arms from the trees in the glade stung and she could still smell the peppermint even after her long soak in a hot bath scented with oil of lavender.

The scent clung to her and she recalled his fingers upon her as he had rubbed it in. Gently. Without any threat whatsoever.

He was dead because of his own foolishness. He was gone to face the judgements of the Lord. A deserved punishment. A fitting end. And yet all she could feel was the dreadful waste.

A tap on the door had her turning and her sister was there in her nightgown, face pale.

‘Can I come in, Flora? Papa said you were sleeping and that you were not to be disturbed till the morning. But Milly has been sent home and she was so full of the horror of your abduction it began to seem as if you might never be back again. What a fright you have given us.’

Florentia found her sister’s deluge of words comforting.

‘Mama says that there is the chance we might have to leave London for a while and retire to Albany. Did he hurt you, the one who took you from Mount Street, I mean? It is being whispered that Papa shot him dead somewhere to the north?’

Flora’s stomach turned and she sat up quickly, thinking she might be sick, glad when the nausea settled back into a more far off place.

Warm fingers curled in close as Maria positioned herself next to her and took her hand, tracing the scratches upon each finger and being careful not to bump her thumb. ‘You are safe now and that man will never be able to hurt you again, Papa promised it would be so. At least we can leave London and go home for it’s exhausting here and difficult to fit in.’

The out-of-step sisters, Flora suddenly thought. She had overheard that remark at their first soirée. One of a group of the ton’s beautiful girls had said it and the others had laughed.

They were an oddness perhaps here in London, the two daughters of an impoverished earl who held no true knowledge of society and its expectations.

Heartbreak had honed them and sharpened the edges of trust. But she would not think about that now because she was perilously close to tears.

‘I heard Mama crying and Papa talking with her and she asked if we were cursed?’

‘What did Father say?’ Flora stilled at Maria’s words.

‘He said that only the weak-willed can be so stricken and that the true curse would have been to never find you. He also said while there is life there is hope.’

Life. Breath. Warmth. No hope for him though, the stranger with his blood running across the cobbles.

‘Papa also said that perhaps we should not have come to London in the first place, but Mama asked how are we to be married off otherwise. Father replied there was an unkindness here that he found disappointing and I think he’s right for people laugh at us sometimes. Perhaps we are not as fashionable as we should be or as interesting as the others are? Papa’s title is something that holds sway here, but I suppose they also realise there is not much more than that behind our name.’

Flora pulled herself together and spoke up. ‘We are who we are, Maria. We are enough.’

‘Enough,’ her sister repeated and brought her fingers up into a fist.

This was an old tradition between them, joining hands and making a chain. Pulling them together. Keeping them strong. Maria was only a year above her in age and they had always been close. But even as she tried to gather strength Florentia felt that something had been irrevocably broken inside her, wrenched apart and plundered. She wondered truly if she would ever recover from a sadness she could not quite understand.

* * *

Her father called her to his library the next morning and he looked as tired as she was, the night past having been a long and fitful one to get through.