Captive (2 page)

“Which is her room?”

The innkeeper rubbed his hand across his chin. “Who might you be? Maybe the lady won’t be wantin’ to be seeing the likes of you.”

Denbigh could have offered the man money. That was obviously what the innkeeper was after in exchange for his information. Lion hadn’t the patience for subtleties. He grabbed a handful of the man’s linsey-woolsey shirt, lifted him to his toes, and demanded, “What room?”

“First one at the top of the stairs, milord,” the innkeeper bleated.

Lion took the stairs two at a time, raised his fist to pound on the door and hesitated, uncertain of what he would say—more afraid of what he might do—when she opened the door. He had not previously acknowledged his anger, but it simmered under the cool surface expected of a pink of the
ton
.

He wasn’t entirely sure whether, when he saw Alice standing before him, her guinea-gold curls stacked high atop her head to add inches to her petite stature, her dewy blue eyes glancing shyly up
at him from beneath long black lashes, his first inclination would be to kiss her—or to throttle her.

He should have waited for Percy.

He could not wait another moment.

He gave the door two soft raps, and it opened instantly, revealing the frantic features of Alice’s maid.

“Oh, thank the good lord you’ve come.” The young woman’s face was streaked with tears, her brown eyes dark with distress. She reached out as though to grab him, then seemed to realize who he was, and that she couldn’t very well drag a lord of the realm inside by his lapels. “Come, quickly,” she said, then backed away toward the bed, leaving him standing in the open doorway.

Lion stepped inside the tiny room, with its sloping ceiling and sparse, cheap furnishings, and closed the door behind him. He had endured quite enough of airing his dirty linen in public. Whatever he and Alice had to say to each other would be said without an audience.

It didn’t take more than one look to realize that Alice was in no condition to say anything to anyone. She was lying fully dressed atop the bed in what he could only guess from the elaborate layers of pale blue satin and French lace was her wedding dress. Her eyes were closed, her hands folded across her chest. Her face was nearly white, her lips as pale as death.

For a moment he thought she was dead. He crossed to her side with a feeling of horror that this could not possibly be happening. Then he saw the sheen of perspiration on her forehead and above her bowed lip. Not dead, thank God. But very close to it.

“What’s wrong with her?” he demanded.

“She’s taken too much,” the maid sobbed, wringing her hands. “I tried to stop her, but she swallowed it all.”

“All of what?”

“The laudanum, milord. An entire bottle.” The maid pointed to an empty glass bottle on the nightstand.

Lion picked it up and sniffed. The sickly sweet odor of laudanum assailed his nostrils. He hurled the bottle against the brick fireplace at the foot of the bed, where it shattered. “Damn her!”

The maid cowered against the wall, acting more like an accomplice, than an innocent witness.

“What is it you aren’t telling me?” he demanded.

“Nothing, milord! I know nothing.”

He was certain she knew more than she was saying, but he could not spare the time to question her further.

He lifted Alice by her shoulders and tried to get her to her feet. She was as limp as a child’s rag doll. “Come on, Alice. Wake up.” He slapped her
cheeks, but her eyes remained closed. As she slumped against him, nearly lifeless, he felt an uncontrollable rage.

Because he was afraid she was going to die.

Because he could not live his life without her.

He shook her hard to wake her up, but her head flopped on her shoulders. She made no sound. “Please, Alice,” he begged in her ear. “Please try to live.”

He turned to look for the maid and found her staring back at him in terror. “What is your name?” he asked.

“S-Sally, milord.”

“Go find a doctor, Sally.”

She stood frozen, apparently too frightened to move.

“Go!” he bellowed.

The young woman fled as though the hounds of hell were chasing her.

Lion slid an arm around Alice’s waist and pulled her upright and walked her—hauled her—around the room, trying to get her blood moving. Because she was unconscious, he was afraid to make her vomit up the drug, for fear she would choke to death. He did not know what else to do.

“I love you, Alice. I don’t understand what went wrong, but we can fix it together. Please don’t leave me.” He repeated the words endlessly, because they were all he could think to say.

He wasn’t sure when her spirit left her, but eventually her body lost its warmth. Finally, he had to acknowledge she was dead.

A sob broke free, and he choked back another that threatened to follow it.

He lifted her into his arms and laid her out on the bed, once again placing her arms across her chest. She looked as though she were sleeping peacefully. As he stared down at her, a knot grew in his throat, making it painful to swallow.

He was furious with her for wasting her life like this. Angry enough to kill her.

But she was already dead.

The door opened, and the maid appeared. “The doctor is on his way, milord.”

“He’s too late,” Lion rasped. “She’s dead.”

“Oh, no,” the maid cried, throwing herself across the lifeless body of her mistress. “Oh, milady, no! No!”

Lion leaned his head back against the wall of the dingy inn and let the woman weep the tears he had refused to shed.

Why had Alice killed herself? What had he done to disappoint her? If she had not loved him, why had she not said something to him? Why, Alice? Why?

That was the question that went round and round in his head. The worst of it was, he would never know why, because she had ended her life
without giving him a chance to ask. The answers he sought would go with her to the grave.

Unless she left a note
.

The idea came into his mind unbidden, and he tried to squelch it because he was afraid to let himself hope. But he had to know. He asked the maid, “Did she leave a note for me?”

“She wrote one, milord,” the maid said. “But then …” She broke into sobs. “But then …”

Denbigh grabbed Sally by the shoulders and shook her. “Where is it?”

“She burned it.”

Denbigh gave a cry of anguish and let her go. It was too much to bear. Not to know. Never to know. Glass crunched underfoot as he crossed to the fireplace and stared into the licking flames that had stolen the explanation for this tragedy.

The fire felt hot against his buckskins, but he stood rooted to the spot. He could not bear to turn and look at Alice’s body. He wanted to pretend for a little while longer that none of this was really happening.

Lion did not believe his eyes at first, when he spied the piece of half-burned parchment lying at the back of the grate. He knew there was very little possibility it was the letter Alice had written to him. If Alice had intended to burn the note, she would have made certain the fire consumed it. But the longer he stared at the remnant of charred paper,
the more irresistible became the urge to reach into the fireplace and pluck it out.

What if that fragment of paper actually is Alice’s note? What if it holds the answers to all my questions?

He reached out, unconscious of the fire searing his wrist as he plucked the scrap of paper from where it had fallen behind the grate. It crackled as he unfolded it, and ashes blackened his hands as portions of the burned parchment disintegrated.

His heart began thumping wildly as he recognized Alice’s handwriting.
“My dearest darling Lion,”
the letter began.

Tears stung his nose. He closed his eyes, afraid to read farther. How could she have started a letter with those words, if she had not loved him? If she had loved him, why had she taken her own life?

Behind his closed eyelids, a picture rose of Alice’s face the last time she had said those words to him. When he had left her at the front door of her parents’ London town house the previous evening, he had kissed her hand, and then, emboldened by the adoring look in her eyes, touched her lips with his.

She had lowered her eyelids and blushed at the intimacy she had allowed him and said in a voice so soft he had needed to bend down to hear her, “My dearest darling Lion, I do love you. Always remember that.”

He had wondered at the time why she had
added those last few words. It had not made much sense at the time. Now it did. She must have contemplated abandoning him at the altar even as she pledged her love. She must have been considering the drastic step she had taken even then.

But why?

He opened his eyes and forced himself to read on. He clenched his teeth to keep himself from crying out in anguish as her letter revealed the truth. Part of the note was gone. Some of her reasons he would never know. But he knew enough.

He knew too much.

He made an animal sound in his throat as he crushed the letter in his fist. It was no accident she had overdosed on laudanum. She had purposely killed herself.

He thrust his clenched fist toward the maid, who recoiled as though he had threatened her with a handful of snakes. “Do you know what this says?” he demanded.

The maid’s eyes went wide with fear at the violence in his voice. “I cannot read, milord.”

Lion stared at her a moment longer before he threw the crumpled parchment into the fire. “Tell Lord Burton when he arrives that I have returned to London.”

He turned on his booted heel and left the room, his tears dried in streaks upon his cheeks, his heart no longer a thing of flesh and blood, but cast forever in stone.

“Is that your sister I see riding neck-or-nothing over the fields like some hoyden?” Lady Frockman asked. “I thought you said she was crippled.”

“She is.” The Earl of Denbigh peered out the window of his town coach to identify the rider Lady Frockman had pointed out on a distant grassy hill. “Evidently Olivia has learned to ride again since last I saw her.”

“When was that?” Lady Frockman asked.

The earl frowned. “Six months, at least.” He would not be going home now if it were not for the series of indignant letters he had received from his neighbor, Mrs. Killington, the squire’s wife, begging him to come take charge of his new American ward, Lady Charlotte Edgerton. It seemed the chit refused to be bound by convention and was upsetting
the entire neighborhood with her outlandish activities.

He had come to Denbigh Castle to admonish his ward and ensure that any bizarre behavior she engaged in would cease. Not that he put much credence in the unbelievable tales Mrs. Killington’s letters had told. No seventeen-year-old girl could possibly have done all the things Mrs. Killington had accused her of doing—driving a cow up the steps into church, dressing up in a sheet like a ghost and scaring the squire half to death, inviting the crofters’ children to pick flowers in the earl’s rose garden, and, to add insult to injury, using the squire’s pumpkins for target practice with her bow and arrow.

He had decided that the best course of action was to marry the girl off as quickly as possible. Then she would become some other man’s problem.

“Who is that with your sister?” Lady Frockman asked.

“It appears to be a country gentleman,” the earl said in a cool voice.

Lady Frockman
tsk
ed. “And nary a chaperon in sight. Who knows what might happen to your sister under such unseemly circumstances?”

The earl arched a brow. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black, Claudia.”

Lady Frockman smiled in amusement. “But, Lion,
I
have no reputation to be ruined.”

“True,” the earl agreed. Claudia had been his mistress for the past four months, and it had been a satisfying relationship for both of them. It was a month longer than he had stayed with either of his two previous mistresses over the past year. Denbigh had employed the fair sex for only one use since his catastrophic wedding barely a year past. When a woman ceased to please him—or began to importune him—he parted company with her.

Although Lady Frockman was a widow and could expect to marry again, she had been careful not to press him for any future commitment, or to make demands of any sort, for that matter. She had been content with the expensive jewelry he lavished on her and the notoriety of being seen in his company.

Denbigh’s silvery gray eyes narrowed as he watched the two riders racing toward the house which, thanks to a long-ago generation of forebears who had added crenels along the top and turrets at each of the four corners, looked a great deal like a castle. The hollowed-out square, a three-story stone structure, featured a central courtyard with a magnificent rose garden.

Ivy climbed the walls, softening the harsh look of the place. But perched high on a cliff overlooking the sea, Denbigh Castle was always cold and drafty. When the wind whistled through the windows at
night, the old house sounded as though it were filled with ghostly spirits.

Denbigh’s gaze skipped from the house back to the riders. The young man riding with Olivia had excellent taste in horseflesh, Denbigh would grant him that. The gentleman’s black stallion was a powerful animal and fast as the wind. His sister’s Thoroughbred was having difficulty keeping up with the beast. Nevertheless, he intended to give the young buck a stern warning for daring to seek out the company of the Earl of Denbigh’s only sister without the earl’s consent.