Barbara Metzger (21 page)

Chapter Nine

Waters shouted for help. “Maitland’s down! To me, men!” No one came. He fired his pistol. No one came. There was so much traffic over the bridge and under the bridge, no one was going to hear him over the din. He couldn’t leave the viscount to go for aid; those young alley rats would have his lordship stripped and bare, if not sold to anatomy class, before Waters could say jack-rabbit. In fact, he made sure to reload his gun before unwinding the viscount’s neckcloth to use as another bandage.

Waters couldn’t drag the much heavier man as far as the main road, even if moving him wasn’t likely to finish the nobleman off. Besides, looking at the viscount’s absolute stillness and pallor, Waters misdoubted as there was time. He did the only thing possible: he sent Sheba home. “Go on, girl, go home. Get Mona. Her ladyship. Wheatley. Get Cook who’s been feeding you. Go on, Sheba. Home, girl.”

*

Senta thought she heard a dog barking. “Could that be Sheba?”

She was seated at the pianoforte, playing for Sir Parcival. He was positive that familiar music would jar
his memory better than anything they’d tried so far. He liked the hymns well enough, but kept urging Senta to play them faster, despite the lowering temperature that stiffened her fingers. The Irish ballads were his favorites. He could hear Senta play them through once, then be able to join her in the vocal parts. But none of them struck a chord, so to speak. Neither did the dog’s frantic yipping.

“Nah, that ain’t nothing but a hound d— Well, maybe it is old Sheba.”

It was, and a shaken Wheatley soon came to find Lady Maitland. “I’m afraid this means Private Waters is in difficulty, along with the viscount. I have sent for the carriage, a surgeon, blankets, hot bricks.”

Senta was already reaching for her ermine-lined cape. “Those gudgeons tried to find the blackmailer by themselves, didn’t they?” She didn’t wait for an answer, just headed for the door. “Do you know where they were?”

“Yes, they were meeting the blackmailer on a side street, just over the bridge.”

Sir Parcival got into the carriage with Senta. He was shaking his head. “Waters in trouble over the bridge? Troubled Waters over the bridge?”

“Oh, shut up, do,” Senta demanded, which had Mr. Calley, who was ducking his head to enter the coach, decide to ride up with the driver.

After a harrowing ride, with the heavy coach careening around turns and barreling through traffic, they crossed the bridge. The carriage couldn’t fit up the narrow side street where a mob had gathered. Waters had promised one of the street urchins a coin if he ran around gathering the viscount’s men, so they were all there, trying to decide the quickest and least jarring way to get his lordship out of this filthy alley.

Senta jumped out of the coach before the steps were down and ran toward the knot of men. Sir Parcival was right behind her, but he kept going. “Got to see if there’s a hotel down at the end of this Olney Street.”

“We don’t need a hotel! His head is broken! We need a hospital!” She was at her husband’s side, trying not to faint at the sight of all the blood. Mr. Calley was right there, with the extra footmen and enough blankets to make a workable litter. They got Lord Maitland back to the coach, his head cushioned on Senta’s lap so she could hold a towel to the wound. “So much blood,” she fretted, her tears dribbling on the poor man. She couldn’t wipe them away, for she was holding Lee with her other hand, to keep him from falling off the seat on the mad dash back to Portman Square. “How can he lose so much blood?”

Sir Parcival looked over at the unconscious peer. “Stop crying. He ain’t going to die.”

“Are you sure?” Senta asked eagerly, figuring maybe her haunt had a connection at the Pearly Gates after all.

“Of course I’m sure. I don’t do sad endings.”

“You don’t…? Never mind.”

Wheatley and a crew of servants were waiting when they finally reached Maitland House. So was the doctor, who wasn’t nearly as optimistic as Sir Parcival. “Such a blow to the head can mean anything, my dear,” he told Senta. “We won’t know if he’s left paralyzed or addled until he wakes up, if he wakes up. Then again, the fever might take him. I cleaned the wound as best I could, but all that filth…” He shrugged. “It’s in the Lord’s hands, my dear.”

And Senta’s. She wasn’t going to let Lord Maitland die on her, she just wasn’t. Not when he was beginning to care for her. Not when she couldn’t live without him.

She sat there with him through the evening, holding his cold hand, willing him to live, for her. Then, when his hand got warmer late at night, and finally hot toward morning, she bathed his brow and helped his man change the damp nightshirt and linens. Mona came and sat with her, then Private Waters and Calley, and still she sat, pouring out her love for him into ears that couldn’t hear.

The doctor came again and shook his head. He put on fresh bandages, left some powders, and patted Senta on the shoulder. “You must be brave, my dear.”

She was brave enough to tell the man good riddance. “For it’s a wonder any of your patients recover if you have them dead and buried before they’ve stopped breathing. Get out. And any of the others of you who don’t believe he’ll recover, get out. The rest of you can at least be praying.”

So they left her for the most part, except the servants in to fix the fire, to bring her meals on a tray, to carry fresh bedclothes. Mona and Waters did convince Senta to have a nap in the afternoon, while they kept watch. She woke in a panic, that Lee had died without ever knowing how much she loved him. She rushed through the connecting door to his bedchamber.

“There’s no change, my lady,” Private Waters told her. “I’m thinking that’s a good thing. His brain is resting, like. It’s the fever that has me worried. Can’t get none of the sawbones’s powders down him, more’s the pity.”

“Here, let me try.” The medicine just dripped out of the viscount’s mouth.

“Don’t want to go and drown him neither.”

So Senta dipped her clean handkerchief in the potion and dabbed at his parched lips, his dry mouth. She kept at it, dribbling bit by bit onto his tongue until the viscount finally swallowed. They all cheered.

“That’s the ticket, my lady, get as much into him as you can,” Private Waters advised, handing over a fresh hanky while Mona mixed up another glassful of the healing drug before leaving to feed her daughter.

Senta went back to work, wetting her cloth and squeezing droplets between his lips. “Swallow, my love.”

He did, but he also began moving his arms. “No, darling, lie still. It’s just Senta, just a hanky. This will help your burning, love.”

Sir Parcival got up from his seat in the corner. “Hanky? Hanky, burning love?”

While Private Waters’s back was turned, Senta hissed at Sir Parcival to get out, too, if his only contribution was more of his nonsense. “Can’t you do something? He’s got the fever!”

“I can see he’s got the fever, little sister, but I don’t know what you expect me to do about it. All I’m any good at is singing.”

“So sing, dash it all.”

So he did, all those hymns Senta had played on the pianoforte. Their composers mightn’t have recognized the old church music, and the viscount couldn’t hear them, but Sir Parcival’s strong voice made Senta feel better. She kept dripping the medicine into her wounded husband’s mouth and whispering words of love into his ear.

It may have been the prayers, or the powders, or even Senta’s impassioned pleas for him to recover. More likely it was the chill draft kicked up by a spirit’s singing. Either way, Lord Maitland’s fever broke and he fell into a sounder sleep.

He was going to recover, Senta rejoiced, if only he’d wake up!

Toward morning on the longest day of Senta’s life, Lord Maitland’s eyelids fluttered. “If only half of what you said to me was true,” he told his wife, who was lying beside him on the bed, “then I can’t die yet. Heaven wouldn’t be this sweet.”

Senta sat up and felt his hand, his forehead, his cheek. “You’re alive! And awake. Do you know me?”

Lee struggled to bring one of his hands to the side of her face. “No, precious Senta, I don’t think I ever knew you, but I swear to learn.”

Lord Maitland was mending, but slowly. He was weak and dizzy, with frequent headaches, no appetite, and an irascible temper at being kept in his bed. Alone.

Only Senta’s presence—reading the newspapers to him, playing chess or backgammon or cards, telling him about her childhood while she did her needlework by the window in his bedroom—made the hours bearable. Lee was coming to know Senta, and to appreciate her all the more. How could he have been such a gudgeon as to suspect her innocence?

Easily, since she was plotting behind his back.

A few days after the episode at the bridge, Senta brought up the topic of the attack on him. She closed the book she was reading aloud at the end of a chapter. “I have been thinking, Lee, about how we are going to find the man who did this to you. I mean, we cannot permit a cold-blooded killer to lurk about London. He wouldn’t have cared if you died.” She shivered at the very thought. “At the very least, he’s prepared to spread scurrilous gossip about your brother.”

The viscount patted her knee, where her chair was drawn next to his bed so they could share Sir Walter Scott’s latest offering. “Don’t worry, love, Calley’s brought in Bow Street, and we’ve offered rewards to all the denizens of that rabbit warren of an alley. Someone must have seen something. For the blunt, they’ll sell their own mothers.” He didn’t remove his hand, but slowly started to stroke her leg along her silken skirts.

“That’s all very well and good,” Senta stated, trying to keep her mind on the matter at hand, and not on his hand on her thigh. “But it is taking too long, with you in danger the whole time. I decided on another plan while you were unconscious.” His hand stopped its delicious course. Senta cleared her throat. “This time we are going to do it the easy way, all together.”

His brows raised, his hand back on his own all-too-uninteresting thigh, Lee asked, “Which is?”

“We are going to hold that Valentine’s Day ball I spoke about before.”

“Valentine’s Day is just two weeks off, isn’t it? You can’t get a ball together in such a short time.”

“We’ll be a trifle late, but no one will mind.”

“No one will come, Senta. It’s too early in the Season. The roads might be impassable.”

“They’ll come to see Maitland House reopened for the first time in decades. And they’ll come to see why the great Lord Maitland married his bride in such a hole-in-corner affair. I intend to wear a very revealing gown.”

Lee had the grace to blush. “I owe you an apology for that, for the whole thing. We should have had a proper wedding with all the tattlemongers in the front pew so no tongues would wag.”

“No, no. I had precisely the wedding I would have wished. But then there is that, ah, interrupted honeymoon. You must be aware of the gossip. The ball should put an end to it once and for all.”

He stared up at her, as if trying to read her soul. “You know that it will be nearly impossible to annul the marriage once we put on a show for all the tabbies.”

Senta was counting on it. “I know.”

There was a wealth of meaning in those words, and a world of promises. Unfortunately, Lee couldn’t think about the implications. He still had to talk Senta out of this skimble-skamble ball. “It’s too much work. You must be exhausted after staying up nursing me.”

“Most of the work is already done. Between Wheatley, Cook, and Mr. Calley, there’s hardly anything for me to do.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re not having a ball. It’s too damned dangerous.”

“As opposed to walking down a dark alley with a known criminal waiting at the other end?”

“Touché”. All right, treat me like the fool I was, but dash it, it’s too risky.”

Senta stood up and put the book on his nightstand. “That’s too bad, for the invitations went out this morning.” She very properly ignored the blasphemies coming from her husband at this pronouncement. When he
seemed in danger of repeating himself, Senta interrupted: “Besides, the danger is mostly to Mona, that she might be recognized as someone who could identify the miscreants, but she is anxious to do this. Mr. Calley had the list of those officers whose connections might be suspect. We invited them all. I am counting on you and your Bow Street officers to guard Mona ever so carefully.”

“Bloody hell.” The viscount’s fists were clenched at his sides.

Senta decided it was time to make a tactical retreat. “It’s time for you to rest now. I have to go see about the decorations.”

Luckily she could not hear Lee’s comments about the decorations and their ultimate destination, since she was heading out the door. She did, however, hear his plaintive: “But I counted on you to stay and bathe my fevered brow.”

Senta rushed back to his huge four-poster bed and put her hand to his forehead, which was cool and dry. Lee took her hand, turned it over, and placed a kiss on the palm. “Please stay, darling.”

Senta snatched her burning hand back. “I think it’s a different kind of fever you’re suffering, my lord.”

“Well, how can you blame a fellow?” he asked with a boyish grin. “If there is to be no annulment, when does the marriage start?”

“When you are recovered,” Senta answered primly, hoping her cheeks weren’t as red as they felt. “The doctor said you were to have no strenuous activity. Besides, you’ll need all your strength for the ball. Now, I really must go.”