Bewitching the Baron (9 page)

His eyes searched hers, and she could feel him approaching the possibility, and then backing away again before he spoke. “I admit there is a certain temptation to the idea of confessing all to a virtual stranger, but I see no reason to indulge it.”

She tried a different tack. “I suppose I would be correct in assuming that you do not intend to stay here, that you think you will return to London as soon as you are able, as soon as this . . . exile?” she raised her brows in question, then continued—“is finished.”

He gave a short laugh, but she could hear the discomfort in it. “I suppose that you claim to tell fortunes as well as read minds.”

Theresa slapped her hands on her knees and stood, seeing that he was not ready to tell her anything and was only growing more defensive. “Well, no matter.”

What she had wanted to know was if he could be counted upon to control the mood of the village, to protect Valerian from any harm that might be done her after she herself was gone. His past behavior, and the honor or dishonor of it, would be her best indication of how he would act in the future.

Valerian would be more vulnerable alone in Greyfriars than she was now, with Theresa standing guard. The two of them together, with old George Bradlaugh in the background, had been able to avoid any major trouble from the villagers and farmers. Valerian alone, with the questionable support of a baron whose interest in her was mainly lascivious and who might soon depart, was a different story.

She smiled wryly at him. “Whether I can see it or not, I still cannot control the future, much as I would like. I will trust that you will make the right decisions if ever called upon to do so.”

He frowned at her, clearly puzzled. “I am not at all certain of your meaning. Of what decisions do you speak, and of what future?”

But she would not answer, preferring to let him puzzle it out for himself, and hoping that in the process he might learn something of his own character. “As I told you yesterday, your uncle always had great hopes for the man you could become. I would like to think he was not mistaken.”

And on that note, she ended the conversation.

Chapter Six

Paul Carlyle stopped and bent to tug at his stocking. The blasted thing had slipped loose of its garter more times than he could count, twisting and sagging around his calf, in very real danger of dropping round his ankle in a puddle of wrinkled cloth. He wrangled it back in place, straightened, mopped his brow with his sodden kerchief, and stepped directly into a half-dried patty of cow manure.

Dark curses spilled from his mouth. The country. Who needed the country? Flies and dirt and filth, that is what the country was. He stomped over to the edge of the road and scrubbed his shoe in the grass.

It had been a mistake to walk instead of ride. On horseback, his head a safe eight or nine feet from the ground, he might have been able to maintain a few illusions about the bucolic scene around him. His imagination, however, had gotten the better of him, and he had pictured himself a country squire, taking a brisk walk down to the village for a cool tankard of ale at the inn, sharing jokes with his fellow man and sharing in the general spirit of bonhomie.

A trickle of sweat crept from under his wig, making a trail down the side of his damp forehead. Midges hovered in a cloud, attracted to his moist skin. He swatted at them, to no effect. His skin had the itchy feeling that insects had somehow found their way inside his clothing.

Of course, the whole miserable walk might not have been so bad if Nathaniel, Lord Gloomy Baron himself, had agreed to come along, but ever since that ghastly affair in London his friend had been changing. Gone was the exuberant rake, full of deviltry. In his place was an increasingly subdued man, burying himself in books and aimless solitary rides. The only time his eyes lit with interest was when anyone mentioned that witch.

Paul still could not believe he had let the woman pluck the stitches from his arse. When she had taken his hand, he had been too shocked to protest, and her soothing voice and the way she kept stroking his hand had cast some manner of spell on him, rendering him helpless. He had thought her an angel of mercy at the time, but now that he had his senses back he recalled that evil snarl she had given him at their first meeting.

Nathaniel ought to be careful. It seemed she was already casting an enchantment over him, and the devil only knew what the price would be.

The first home on the edge of town came into view, and Paul picked up his pace. A week and a half was too long to be cooped up with a morose friend and no outside entertainment. Old George Bradlaugh had had a well-stocked cellar, but half the fun of drinking was the company one kept. He needed friends! Laughter! Conversation! Or at least a barmaid to ogle.

The inn was not hard to find. It was much like every other inn in the country, right down to the nonsensical name, “The Drunken Raven.” He wondered if the witch’s hell-bird, or one of its ancestors, had had anything to do with that. The wooden sign above the door was of a black bird, beak wide in an insane caw, lurching drunkenly across a painted field. Paul sincerely hoped he would be in a similar state upon leaving.

He pushed open the door with the grating creak of rusted hinges, and stepped down into the dark interior. There was no one in the main room, the tables empty but for a dusting of crumbs and rings of sticky ale. He heard the clanking of dishes from a door behind the bar, and after a moment’s hesitation, went and stuck his head through to the kitchen area. A middle-aged woman, her hair tucked up inside a mobcap, was putting away heavy crockery bowls. He cleared his throat.

The woman started, bowls clattering in her hand. She turned quickly. “Sir! You startled me!”

“My apologies, mistress. Is the inn not open for business?”

“It is open. ’Tis only that the regulars have already been and gone. Low tide today, you see.”

“Ah.” He gave a knowing nod, having no idea what she was talking about. To ask a question, however, was to invite an explanation, and all he cared about at this moment was a tankard of ale.

“You looked parched, sir, if I may say so. What will you be having?”

He gave his order, and at her invitation went to settle in a dim, cool corner of the room. He did not relish drinking alone, but ale alone was better than no ale at all, and he would be damned if he would undertake the walk back to the hall without it.

The woman returned with his tankard, and set it before him with a thud that sloshed a few precious drops over the rim. “So. You must be Mr. Carlyle, from up at the hall?”

He took a grateful sip of the ale, regarding her from under his brows. Her round brown eyes gleamed with an avarice for gossip. He set down his tankard, and sucked the bit of foam off his upper lip. “One and the same.”

“I am Alice Torrance. My husband and I own the inn.” She gave him a little smile, and began to twist her apron in her hands, blinking at him in a gross pretense of coquetry. “Would you mind, sir, if I asked a question of you?”

Paul was about to evade the request, then thought better of it. Perhaps he could pump her for information about the healer, and save Nate from getting himself into trouble. He gestured to the chair opposite, and after a brief hesitation she dropped down into it, then leaned forward over the table, the ruffled edge of her mobcap quivering eagerly.

“There is a rumor flying about.” She looked at him meaningfully. “Concerning Baron Ravenall. Do you know whereof I speak?”

A dozen unsavory possibilities flashed through his mind, not least of which was what had happened so recently in London. “I am afraid not.”

She wet her lips, and cast a glance to the side, as if checking for eavesdroppers. She leaned a bit farther forward, her hands clasped before her on the table. “ ‘Tis being said that when the baron rode through the gates to the hall, one of the stone ravens spoke, telling him that he would never see London again.”

Paul’s eyes went as round as hers, and he had to bite his cheek to keep from laughing. That threat, those had been his own words. One of the footmen must have embroidered the tale and passed it on. “ ‘Tis God’s own truth that he heard those words,” Paul said, lowering his voice to match her sinister tone, and leaning forward until his nose was but inches from her own. “And I have been worried ever since about what it might mean.”

“Do not say you think it foretells his death!” Mrs. Torrance gasped, a wild excitement in her eyes. “We have only just lost the last baron. We cannot have this one dying as well!”

“Danger lurks in every shadow. . . .” Paul said darkly, enjoying this bit of mischief.

“Oh, aye, and here more than elsewhere.” Her eyes narrowed. “He may already be in harm’s way.”

Paul’s humor deadened at that, and he frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

Mrs. Torrance’s lips puckered in distaste. “I do not wish to spread tales, sir, but . . . the girl he has been asking about, Miss Bright. She is not as harmless as she sometimes seems.” She nodded slowly, as if agreeing with herself. “He would do well to be careful of her.”

“Causes trouble, does she? Perhaps . . . dabbles in the dark arts?”

Mrs. Torrance began to look nervous, and lowered her voice to a near whisper, although there was no one there to hear. “Nothing that you could swear to in a court of law. But one hears things.”

“Go on.”

She crouched down a bit in her seat. “There are some as say that bird of hers is a demon in disguise, sent by the devil himself. At night it takes a man’s shape and shares her bed with her, where they engage in all manner of perversions. And Mrs. Frowdy says as how she went into her barn and found a hedgehog suckling at her best cow’s teat, and she knew as how it was either Miss Bright or her aunt, come to collect the payment she had been late in giving.”

“Are you saying she and her aunt are witches?”

“Shhh!” Mrs. Torrance hushed him with both palms flapping the air. “I did not say that.” “But you said—” “Witch or no, she and her aunt have done favors for most of the people of this town, and I would not want to be the one accusing them. We have a business here that depends upon the good will of the village.”

“Especially as such an accusation of witchcraft is now illegal.”

She rapped the table with her knuckles, then pointed at his face. “The laws of the city are not necessarily those of the country. There are those of us who do not want the devil’s whores in our midst.”

She left him to his own musings after that, and he could not help but picture the wicked Valerian Bright cavorting naked in the woods, dancing madly round a bonfire, a pot of boiling blood sitting in the flames.

He was debating a second tankard when the door opened, and a pair of village men came sauntering in, the broken-wind stench of the mud still on them.

“Hey there, Alice, how about something to cool the throats of the fearless hunters?”

Mrs. Torrance appeared from in back and gave a snort. “Fearless hunters! And that will be the day. What, did a big clam take a jump at you? Bite you on the arse, did it?”

“Aye, and I wrestled it to the ground, almost losing my arm to its great chomping jaws.”

“Get on with you!” Mrs. Torrance cheerily replied, waving a towel at him.

Other villagers straggled in, and before long the inn was a babble of voices. Mr. Torrance appeared to tend the kegs, and Paul heard Mrs. Torrance calling angrily for some unfortunate Johnnie, who was apparently shirking his duties.

A roar went up in the already noisy crowd when a trio of young men stumbled through the door. There was a good deal of laughter, backslapping, and sheepish grinning. Paul sat with a half-smile on his face, wishing he knew what was so funny. Eventually he found someone to tell him.

“They were like flies after honey,” the man laughed, when he finished his long and undoubtedly embellished tale. “Only, Eddie got there first and laid one on her. The others were too slow. Aah! You should have seen Stinky when they hauled him out of that muck! Damned if I have ever seen the boy so scared.”

As the man speaking was Stinky’s father, Paul thought the fellow was showing remarkably good humor about his son’s unfortunate accident. The man also seemed to have no worries about Miss Bright’s sorcerous tendencies.

“All I cannot understand,” Stinky Sr. continued, “is what possessed the fools to go after Miss Bright in the first place.”

Paul thought of Nathaniel’s growing interest in the girl. Could his friend’s attraction be the result of the same witchcraft that had undoubtedly drawn the young men? “I wonder that myself.”

No one was home when Valerian returned to the house. She did not know that she would have wanted to talk about what had happened, but it would have been nice to have Aunt Theresa there, if only so she would not feel quite so alone.

She put the bucket of clams in the shed, where they would stay cool until the evening, and left her shoes in a corner. Some of the mud on her clothes had already dried and was crumbling off. She considered dunking herself in the stream—a basin of water and a cloth would not suffice with this much filth—but that sounded too miserably cold to do on such a depressing day.

She went into the quiet house and gathered clean clothes and soap into a basket, then left and crossed the meadow to an almost invisible break in the greenery. Mud scaled and sloughed off her feet and ankles as she walked through the woods, and her skin was a bare dusty grey by the time she began to climb a narrow, rocky path up into the hills.

Oscar fluttered down out of the sky, landing heavily on her shoulder. “Where have you been? Faithless bird.” She did not turn her head to look at him, an omission she quickly regretted when she felt something wet and slimy stuffed under her bodice shoulder.

“Ugh! Oscar!” She reached under the cloth on her shoulder, bumping Oscar aside, and pulled a jelly-like strip of clam out of her bodice. “Ehhh!” She flung the soggy clam onto the ground. Oscar leapt down to fetch it, then turned his head and eyed her accusingly.

“Do not look at me like that. It is no use caching your goodies on my person. They will not be there tomorrow when you try to retrieve them.” As if in understanding, Oscar hopped further into the brush, and emerged moments later without his molluscan treasure.