Cottage by the Sea (51 page)

   Kit was gasping for breath, unable to shout any more threats. Garrett took a step forward and rested a restraining hand lightly on his cousin's arm.

   "Kit… Kit, listen to me, my man…"

   "Leave me be!" he whispered hoarsely. "I will not bury that sod. If you wish to, you can claim the body from the
Neptune
when it puts into port. As for me," he said, casting a haggard glance in Blythe's direction, "I shall be off this night to plead my cause before the courts. You are an adulteress!" he shouted, his voice rising to the rafters once again. He pointed at William, who had begun to cry and cling anxiously to Blythe's skirts. "That bastard child is all the proof I need to succeed in my petition. With Ennis dead, you and his evil get have no legal standing, since everyone who answers to me in these parts will bear legal witness to what I tell them to about your profligate ways! When you receive the bill of divorcement, you, your child, and your mother shall quit these premises forthwith!"

   "You're mad!" Blythe cried. "William and I shall never leave this place! 'Tis my home!"

   "Oh, yes, you
shall!
It is your home no longer."

   Everyone stood frozen in a horrified tableau as Kit's words rang out in the Hall. Then stunned silence followed in Kit's wake as he stormed out the front door and rode off toward Trevelyan House.

Before long the inhabitants of Barton Hall learned to their dismay that Kit Trevelyan remained true to his word. At first, during the long winter of 1793 and into the spring, Blythe heard nothing from, or about, Kit's machinations in London.

   Then, in early May 1794, a stranger appeared at the door with official notices of a judgment of adultery from the House of Lords—endorsed by the ecclesiastical court—and an order to remove Blythe, her mother, and her bastard son from Barton Hall by the end of the week.

   Why hadn't she shot Christopher Trevelyan when she'd had the gun aimed at his heart! Blythe thought with mounting panic.

   She gazed toward the Channel, smooth as a baby's skin this bright spring afternoon. Barton Hall had never looked so lovely. The gardens were at the height of their bloom, and the sun overhead cast a quality of golden light that made the lush green fields glow like polished emeralds.

   She would be destitute, she thought with a swift intake of breath. She reread the parchments embellished on their lower left corners with official red wax seals. She would be a subject of gossip and derision… a scarlet woman, forced to earn her bread with her unskilled hands, or worse, with her body on the narrow, filthy streets of Gorran Haven.

   Even Garrett Teague could do little to help her, living, as he did, in cramped quarters above his bookshop while looking after an ailing mother.

   A feeling of desperation seized her as she realized that William's guardian wasn't even here to offer counsel. Garrett had finally received word to go to Plymouth to retrieve the lead casket with Ennis's remains from the deck of the Royal Navy ship
Neptune.

   Blythe glanced around the long dining-room table where she was studying the parchments that had been delivered by Kit's new man of affairs. Silver platters lined the shelves of the Welsh dresser. On the wall opposite, several pieces of silver engraved with the Barton coat of arms stood on the mahogany sideboard. The polished metal gleamed in the shafts of sun that poured through the casement windows. She thought of the day five years earlier when she had stashed some of this family silver in her portmanteau, foolishly believing that Ennis Trevelyan would step forward as her savior and elope with her to Italy.

   It had been Garrett Teague, all along, who had loved her and had been willing to risk everything to escape with her to America.

   She picked up one of a pair of silver candlesticks and thought back to her hellish wedding night when she lay limp in Kit's arms and allowed him to think he could possess her. Grazing her thumb along the crest engraved with sheaves of wheat on its escutcheon, she concluded she couldn't fight the Trevelyans then, and she couldn't fight them now. She could merely plot an escape for herself and Garrett from this damnable country where only the eldest son succeeded, regardless of talent or wit. And she would make certain the cursed Trevelyans would never track her down.

   And, suddenly, Blythe Barton Trevelyan knew precisely what she must do.

"Mary Ann, you silly chit… calm yourself at once!" Blythe commanded the tearful maid who stood near bales and boxes of goods being loaded and unloaded from ships tied up at Plymouth's western quay. The
Argus lay at berth nex
t to the Royal Navy vessel
Neptune. The passenger ship wa
s being made ready to depart on the following Friday for Annapolis, Maryland, in the former Colonies. Blythe fully intended that she, Garrett, her lady's maid, and the baby would sail with her.

   There was good reason for the three-master to be berthed near the
Neptune.
Blythe had learned this morning that the eighty-four-gun frigate would escort the smaller ship beyond the French-infested Channel to the open sea. The madmen in France had declared war against England in February of

1793. Now, over a year later, word had reached Cornish shores in May that the leftist Danton had been executed in April and that the butcher, Robespierre, was all-powerful in Paris. An invasion could come at any time.

   "'Twas an awful mistake to come down here, mum," Mary Ann pronounced, gazing apprehensively at a swarm of rough stevedores bustling about the quay. "'Tis no place for decent women here on the wharves!"

   "We can't very well find Mr. Teague if we don't look for him, can we?" Blythe demanded curtly. "Meanwhile, see that you attend properly to Master William, and leave me to worry how we shall manage."

   Mary Ann had stubbornly refused to be left alone at the inn, and thus Blythe had been forced to stash the heavy portmanteau, filled with Barton family silver, under her bed. A few of the smaller items emblazoned with the family crests, along with six small but exquisite silver platters, were hidden under a pile of the baby's dirty rags, which Blythe had heaped in the corner of their bug-infested quarters. She kept the dueling pistol tucked beneath her cloak for protection, even though it was cumbersome to transport them in this fashion. So cumbersome, in fact that she had been forced to leave its twin, hidden in Painter's Cottage, in the drawer beside the bed.

   Fifteen-month-old William sat perched on the housemaid's hip, sucking on his middle finger while he surveyed the bustling quay like a contented pasha. William had his mother's dark hair and vivid coloring, along with Ennis's way of viewing the world calmly, as if he were surveying what in it might be of use or of pleasure to him.

   Blythe had unhappily discovered when she'd arrived in Plymouth that Garrett was no longer in residence at the Pope's Head Inn. However, she had learned from the surly innkeeper that the
Neptune
remained in port to be refitted for its next voyage. She had scratched a note to the captain and now was waiting at the bottom of the gangway for a reply. Within the hour a young man resplendent in a red lieutenant's uniform made his way over to them.

   "Mrs. Trevelyan?" he inquired. From the way he glanced at Mary Ann, Blythe knew that he was puzzled that a woman of such obvious means had no male servant attending her in such boisterous, disreputable environs.

   "Yes," she said eagerly. "Is Mr. Teague aboard? Seeing to arrangements concerning my deceased brother-in-law, I trust?"

   "No," the young officer said briskly, taking her measure. "He's already departed Plymouth."

   "When?" Blythe asked, her heart sinking.

   "Yesterday. He hired a small sloop to sail close to the shore and is transporting his cousin's heavy casket by sea. I believe he said the family plot is in Gorran Haven. Isn't that where your people are from? I fear you have come all this way to no purpose. However," he offered, casting a suggestive leer, "perhaps I could be of some assistance while my ship is in port?"

   Blythe was instantly aware that the officer suspected that she was merely some abandoned doxy of Garrett's, or a local tart he'd picked up while taking care of this sorry business in Plymouth. For her part, she was too distressed at hearing the news of Garrett's departure to bristle with indignation at his insulting behavior.

   "He's returning to Gorran Haven by boat?" Blythe echoed faintly. No wonder she and Garrett hadn't passed each other on the road to Plymouth—as she was sure they would have, if he'd already completed his task and had been heading home. It never occurred to her he wouldn't bring Ennis's body back by wagon.

   The bravado that had carried her this far suddenly evaporated. As she and Mary Ann made their return to the inn, her maid added to Blythe's misery by loudly voicing her reproach.

   "We've come all this way on a goose chase!" she said. "Mr. Ennis couldna have a care whether he's buried at St
.
Goran's or Neptune's grave!"

   Wordlessly they mounted the stairs to their dingy room at the back of the hostelry. Their quarters were in the least desirable location imaginable, and Blythe suspected that such rooms were routinely assigned to women who were unaccompanied by male protectors.

   The instant the two women entered their dismal chamber, Blythe realized that someone had rifled its contents. Her portmanteau sat on the bed, devoid of its valuable contents. The only item within the four walls that had been left undisturbed was the pile of William's dirty swaddling. The rags reeked malodorously, even from the threshold.

   "Jesu!" Blythe cried, hurrying inside. "Damn! Damn! Damn!"

   From the truculent attitude of the innkeeper, Blythe suspected that he or his minions had numbered among the thieves.

   "Pray, mum, let us return home straightaway!" Mary Ann wailed. "Plymouth is a horrid, foul place."

   Blythe surveyed the Barton family candlesticks and the paltry few pieces of engraved silverware and some jewelry she had inherited from her grandmother that she had retrieved from under William's filthy rags. They were all that remained of the booty she had taken in the dead of night from Barton Hall. Distraught, she wondered if such diminished treasure would provide enough capital to purchase passage for two adults and an infant to Annapolis and leave enough to launch Blythe and her son in a modest new life, far from Cornwall—and without the company of Garrett Teague.

   "We can't go home," she said dully.

   "W-what?" stammered Mary Ann.

   "They think I'm dead."

   "But, mum!" protested the maid. "What cause have they to think such a thing?"

   "There will be signs enough to give them reason to suppose
you
ran away and I took my own life," she said slowly. "If we return to Barton Hall, I truly believe that my husband… my
former
husband," she corrected herself carefully, "will kill me—or have us both hanged from a tree as thieves."

Ennis Trevelyan was laid to rest beside his father in a prominent location in St. Goran's churchyard on a gloomy May morning that could have passed for November.

   Garrett had heard the news about the disappearance of the mistress of Barton Hall as soon as he'd dropped anchor in Gorran Haven.

   "Vanished into thin air, she did," the harbormaster said wonderingly. "There's not a trace of her or the babe, though I heard that the best of the Barton silver's been pinched. Some folks think they were murdered, along with the housemaid," he said in a low voice, "and the bodies thrown into the sea. Some say as Trevelyan himself did it—or had it done!"

   "He's back, then, from London?" Garrett asked, reeling from the shocking tale.

   "Just returned," the harbormaster revealed. "I heard he's a-ranting and a-raving! Wanted to evict her in person, they say, and wants to know where the Barton silver's got to. A right crackbrain, he is these days, from all accounts. Touched in the 'ead. But, then," he added sagely, "that vixen of a wife drove him to it."

   Ennis's casket was buried without ceremony. The Reverend Randolph Kent stood soberly by as the gravediggers heaped the moist soil onto the lid of the coffin with dispatch.

   "Has anyone heard word of or seen Mrs. Trevelyan yet?" Garrett asked the cleric, not convinced that the harbormaster wasn't spinning a fanciful tale.

   "Not a trace," the vicar said softly. "I knew that marriage was against God's law. I blame myself for not standing up to that tyrant." He gestured at the massive Trevelyan family headstone. "There lies Collis Trevelyan, in his grave years now, and still the man's greed does the work of the devil!" He stared at Ennis's lead-lined coffin now mounded with fresh, moist soil. "There'll be more graves in this cursed plot of ground before this story ends," he pronounced.

   Garrett looked sharply at Reverend Kent. He'd heard talk that this man of the cloth was wont to employ some sort of murky mirror to look into the future. A "shewing stone," some gossip at the bookshop had told him in hushed tones.

   "Let us hope no more misery comes our way," Garrett replied, anxious to make his way to Barton Hall and investigate these matters for himself.

   Blythe Barton had a will of iron and a constitution stronger than the rocky cliffs on Dodman Point, he thought. Who knew better than he did what strong stuff she was made of? After all, he'd pulled little William from her bloody loins and watched her fight for her life with nothing but his hand to hold on to. It would take a force of nature to slay her, he told himself.