Deadly Peril (31 page)

“I was at the Castle for three weeks and Ernst remained withdrawn. There were days and nights when I did not see him at all. And then there was the odd day when he was the Ernst I knew from Friedeburg. Upon those occasions, he would throw lavish banquets and demand to be entertained. His retinue were expected to be lively and witty and forget their master’s morose episodes. They did their best to fall in with his wishes. No one denied the Margrave’s son what he wanted. I, too, did my best. Then, one night in the final week of my stay, everything changed…

“I woke in the middle of the night to find I was no longer under the coverlet, and that I was not alone. Someone was—touching me. It was not the sort of contact made in an effort to instantly wake the sleeper from slumber. It was far more—intimate. It was the sort of pleasurable caress employed by a lover to arouse… In my half waking state I saw in the orange glow of the fire a stranger in a night chemise, with fair hair that fell unrestrained to the mattress, kneeling on the bed beside me. There was something familiar about them but I could not recall where we had met before. But my brain was not really thinking at all—Selina!” he said abruptly in an altogether different voice, meeting her gaze. “You must remember, I was no saint in those days. A beautiful woman invites herself into my bed, who am I to turn her away? I have willingly participated in such nights with no questions asked. But this time… There was something decidedly—
odd
… And yet I permitted her to seduce me…” He gave a huff of embarrassment. “I didn’t care that I’d been tied to the bed. I thought it all part of the adventure—”

Selina shuddered. “Tied to the-the bed?
Adventure
? ‘Odd’ is an understatement! But I see from your blush,” she added perceptively, “that being tied up was the least odd thing about this particular—
encounter
.”

“Yes. You are correct,” he answered meekly, cleared his throat with a sip of tea and continued. “When I… When she… To be blunt: When I was spent I asked to be untied so I could return the-the favor. But she did not reply, and for the longest time lay still beside me, so long, in fact, that I fell back to sleep—”

Selina blinked. Sometimes—no, not sometimes,
often
—she found men unfathomable.

“You fell asleep? You
slept
, still tied up? Truly?”

Alec looked sheepish. “Yes. It was the middle of the night and I was tired.”

“Well, you would be, wouldn’t you?” Selina stated mordantly. “Having to lie there and allow a complete stranger to pleasure you would make any man tired!”

“I’m not making this up. It is what happened. But if you’d rather I didn’t tell—”

“Yes, I would rather you didn’t!” Selina retorted, back straight, hands in her lap cradling the tea cup. “What your twenty-three-year-old self got up to between the sheets, how many females you permitted to pleasure you, is none of my business. I only hope that you weren’t completely self-absorbed. Though…” She cocked her head at him and smiled knowingly. “You’ve always been wonderfully assiduous to my needs, so I presume you’ve been an attentive lover since the early stages of your bed-hopping adventures.”

“Selina, this—
encounter
—is not what you think it. It started out as a piece of pleasurable fun, but manifested into something truly repellant… I told you I felt I was being smothered by Prince Ernst’s friendship; that he was possessed of demons of which I was unaware; that his moods changed dramatically for the worse once inside Herzfeld Castle. All of that manifested itself that particular night when he and his sister, the Princess Joanna, came to my bedchamber—”

“Prince Ernst and his sister
both
visited your bedchamber?” When Alec nodded she huffed. “Why of a sudden does that not surprise me?”

“You have every right to think men barbarians who prey upon females for their own enjoyment, to do with them as they wish, regardless of their wishes, and often in spite of them, after your appalling experiences of the marriage bed married to J-L,” he said quietly. “But there are rare instances when it is the male who is preyed upon…”

Preyed upon
? She blanched.
He had been preyed upon
? Her immediate reaction was one of disbelief. She had never considered the reverse of her situation. And she knew better than any other that such sexual encounters had nothing to do with the giving and receiving of pleasure and everything to do with power, humiliation, and domination. Oh yes, when she thought of it in those terms, she could readily believe what he had just tried to confess but left unsaid. It broke her heart the love of her life, who was such a gentle man, who had only ever treated her and her carnal needs with the utmost reverence, had been so defiled, that she wanted to weep. But she did not cry. For his sake, she must not. She was sure if she did his confession would end there and then. She instinctively knew she had to allow him to confess all, for only then would he be able to put this episode to rest and be at peace.

So she allowed the silence between them to stretch before looking up into his eyes. What she saw reflected there made her repentant, and wish she had held her tongue and her petty jealousy. She swallowed, leaned forward and touched his knee.

“Forgive me,” she said gently. “I know you have good reason for telling me, not to goad me, or to make me feel gauche. This confession has taken a great deal of courage. So please, do tell me. I promise I will be more circumspect.”

He nodded, covered her hand with his, and continued.

“I admit to being a willing participant in the first encounter. But when I was awoken a second time, I not only found myself still tied to the bed, the woman who had seduced me was no longer there. A wholly different being had taken her place. And looking into the eyes of this-this creature, I knew I’d been tied up for any number of reasons but that pleasure was not one of them! Excuse me. I need fresh air.”

He strode up the back steps and wrenched open the door. A gust of icy air rushed in and filled the warm space behind the curtain, and he breathed deeply. Even after all these years, the memory of that night had the power to make him nauseated.

Selina felt the cold on her bare neck, and heard voices beyond, but she did not turn about or move from the camp bed. She remained tight-lipped with both hands still hard about her tea cup on its saucer in her lap. And then the door was closed on the cold and the activity beyond, and Alec came back into the room, but not to her. He stood by the window.

She could see he was oblivious to the activity beyond the glass, where the locals, bundled up in layers of clothing to ward off the cold, had left the warmth of their hearths to huddle in the doorways of their cottages to watch the procession of barges float by, accompanied by enough soldiers to do battle with a small army. Observing the everyday continue on outside the window helped calm her.

“You somehow blame yourself. That you must have given the Prince some indication that your friendship was something more than it was,” she heard herself say with a calmness that belied an inner turmoil in fighting to keep her feelings of outrage in check. “I blamed myself for being a bad wife. But what happened to you is not your fault, as it was not mine. You did not say it, but perhaps you should. You were raped, Alec. And that is nothing for which you should feel shame, but you do…”

He winced at the word, but he did not deny it. How could he? She had spoken the simple truth, yet he had been too ill at ease, too ashamed to say so. Not only because of a sense of emasculation, but because he had not wanted to belittle what she had suffered at the hands of a violent, sadistic husband. She had endured years of abuse. His was one such brutal encounter. And the physical pain upon that occasion, was as nothing to what was to come…

He put aside her teacup and saucer, took hold of her hands, and looked into her dark eyes.

“My darling, you are the only person in my life who could understand—will ever understand—the unspeakable predicament in which I found myself. I was the object of an unhealthy obsession, and this—
episode
—was the beginning of the end of my peace of mind. I knew I had to get out of the country. If I’d been less the arrogant, womanizing idiot, I’d have taken the first ship to set sail out of Herzfeld harbor. As it is, I did something you will think not only stupid, but arrogant in the extreme.”

Selina’s eyes opened wide and she caught her breath.

“How did you escape this horrid place? What did you do?”

“Escaping the Castle was easy. I simply rode out the next morning without taking my leave of Prince Ernst, and returned to Friedeburg. I had no idea what I could do, or what I wanted to do about such a vile episode. I just needed to put distance between me and that place, and those two. And I was utterly determined to expunge all recollection of that night from my memory. So I did the only thing at the time I thought would help…”

When he hesitated she anticipated any number of ways he might wipe away such a unspeakable experience, except the one he confessed to her. When he did, she sat bolt upright, stunned.

“I plunged headlong into a torrid affair with a high-ranking married lady of the court.”

“
Torrid
?”

“Yes. It was torrid and it was tawdry,” Alec stated bluntly. “And in a perverted way, it restored my manliness, which had been severely compromised, or so I thought, after the vileness perpetrated against me by Ernst and his sister. Whatever demons were driving me, I hoped the affair would be discovered by her husband and the court. And of course, meeting in a public space such as the palace gardens not only meant that discovery was highly likely, it added to the spice of the affair. But it also aided in my lover’s destruction, for which we both paid dearly.”

“Spice?” Selina’s head was throbbing with every revelation, but she managed to say with tongue firmly planted in cheek, “I trust that rutting this lady helped resurrect your manly self-esteem?”

So much for circumspection! But she had a right to her petulant sarcasm, given his unpardonable conduct. But he was too tired to explain that any unfettered young man of three-and-twenty, offered the opportunity to make love to a beautiful woman on a daily basis, would take it without a second thought; it was not his brain which was making the decisions. And in his case, he had a point to prove. Instead he said patiently,

“Darling, this was many years before I met and fell in love with you. I told you that as a young man I was an arrogant, womanizing idiot. And believe me, I paid the price for my stupidity and my unbridled lust, and so did she. Unbeknownst to us, our—um—
assignations
were being closely watched. The Margrave was duly informed of his wife’s adultery. Yes. I was—as you so indelicately but rightly put it—rutting the Countess Rosine, the much younger second wife of the Margrave Leopold.”

“Of all the females with whom you chose to restore your manliness you chose the Margrave’s
wife
?” Far from taking offense, Selina’s shoulders shook with laughter. She pressed her fingers to her mouth to stop herself from giggling, and when she could speak blurted out, “Dear God, you were an arrogant, womanizing idiot, weren’t you?”

He blushed scarlet.

“Lest you think me the only arrogant idiot to fornicate with the Margrave’s wife,” he continued bluntly, “the Countess Rosine had taken other lovers, and with her husband’s knowledge. It was not the affair which upset him, but its intensity and the total disregard for discretion, which was my fault entirely. Margrave Leopold did not want a public scandal, but that’s what he got when the enemies of the Countess decided to act while he was still away from court.

“Ernst returned from Herzfeld before his father returned from his hunting lodge. He was informed by the Court Chamberlain that the Countess Rosine’s behavior had overstepped the boundaries of moral decency and something had to be done. It was a very tactical move. The Court Chamberlain loathed the Countess Rosine, and so did Prince Ernst. They had been plotting to oust her for years. The public uncovering of our affair was their opportunity to rid themselves of what they considered the Countess’s undue influence on the Margrave. Ernst assembled his father’s trusted advisors, and a retinue of his own supporters, and with the Court Chamberlain went for a stroll in the gardens. No one but they knew the purpose of that walk out in the sunshine. So when this entourage stumbled upon us in the—er—act, their shock was very real.”

Selina could not help herself. “How could you both have been so witless? Was there no indication of what was to befall you? Did she not realize she had enemies, or did she not care? And you should have been more discreet, for her sake, if for no other!”

Alec’s voice was tight with shame. “Believe me, my love. They are all questions I posed to myself over and over while I was a prisoner in Castle Herzfeld’s dungeon. But most of all I asked myself how I could have been so unwittingly naïve to have involved myself in the family machinations of the House of Herzfeld. I knew Ernst was not fond of his stepmother, but had no idea he saw his half-brother Viktor as a threat to his inheritance. He was convinced the Countess was plotting to have him disinherited in favor of his younger brother. Later I remembered that during the course of our English conversations, he was keen on the personal histories of our Hanoverian Kings. He was particularly impressed how our first King George had his wife Sophia Dorothea of Celle banished and incarcerated for her supposed adultery, and that she was never permitted to see her children again, or become Queen of England.”

“What happened to her, and to you? Did the despicable Ernst succeed?”

Alec sighed. If he was not already beyond sleep from staying up all night, the burden of this confessional was sapping the last vestiges of any vigor left to him. Over-tiredness clipped his usually mellow voice.

“Yes. The very public nature in which the Countess’s adultery was revealed to the Court, that she had the temerity to take a foreigner as her lover, and a man much younger than the Margrave, brought even greater shame on the House of Herzfeld. For the honor of the family and to restore respect to the Margravate, Leopold had no alternative but to do as the Court Chamberlain and Ernst demanded. The Countess Rosine and her young son were banished to her family home, the
Schloss
Rosine, and were commanded, just like Sophia Dorothea of Celle, to there remain, for their natural lives. Her son, Viktor, was stripped of his titles, but not, thank God, his legitimacy, and he was at least permitted to stay with his mother. He was only eleven years old.”