Ever His Bride (2 page)

“I doubt there’s more than one, Miss
Mayfield.”

Felicity doubted it, too. Just as strongly as
she doubted that the sinfully wealthy Hunter Claybourne could
possibly have any connection to her at all.

“Come along, Miss Mayfield, “Cobson said,
clamping his efficient fingers around her elbow, and starting
toward the door. “The train to London Bridge Station’s due any
minute, and you’ve an engagement at the Queen’s Bench Prison.”

Felicity overran Cobson with her questions
all the way to London, but arrived at London Bridge Station no
wiser for her efforts, and completely unnerved by his silence. He
led her from the station into the rain-soaked, poorly lit streets
of Southwark.

“This is an enormous mistake, Mr. Cobson,”
Felicity said for the hundredth time since leaving Beacon Chase. “I
don’t know Mister Hunter Claybourne. He couldn’t possibly know
me.”

“A man like Mr. Claybourne don’t make
mistakes, Miss Mayfield.” Cobson reeled an overlong kerchief from
his coat pocket, and swabbed at his nose. “I been rounding up his
debtors for seven years, now. All I know is: those that do come his
way don’t remain debtors for long. He always gets his pound of
flesh. . . and then some.”

She fastened her thin shawl around her
shoulders, her stomach reeling as though she’d dined on live eels.
Hunter Claybourne? Railroads, shipping, foreign trade; no man was
better known or more feared in the financial affairs of the nation.
What the devil did he want with her? What possible debt could she
owe a man like him?

Cobson slung her portmanteau into a crowded
hackney cab and they wheeled away into the drizzling night, only to
be deposited in front of a clapboard house not a mile from the
station.

“Inside, Miss Mayfield.” Cobson took her
elbow and started toward the house.

The windows and the front door of the sagging
building were barred with iron. The rain had lessened to a fine
spray, giving the dirty clapboard a greasy look. A house of evil
intentions.

“What kind of place is this, Mr. Cobson? I’m
not taking another step unless you tell me!”

“Then let me welcome you to Cobson’s Rest,
Miss Mayfield. The missus and I run a respectable sponging
house.”

“A sponging house!” Prelude to debtor’s
prison, designed to intimidate and insult the debtor as he, or she,
struggled to arrange for repayment.

This was a travesty! And even if it weren’t,
she had no money to spare. Her thousand pounds were tucked away in
the Bank of England, a safeguard against starvation and utter
homelessness. But what if no one believed her against the lies of
the powerful Hunter Claybourne?

“You’ll stay here with us until your trial.
Unless, of course, you can raise money enough to pay off your debt.
Which I doubt.”

“I tell you, I am no one’s debtor!”

“Aren’t you now?” Cobson chuckled low in his
throat and pointed toward the end of the block. “That building way
down there’s the Queen’s Bench Prison. Unless you can come up with
the sum you owes to Master Claybourne, you’ll be livin’ there for a
very long time.”

The eels churned again. She’d spent most of
her life in the countryside, following her father from one railway
engineering project to the next. She didn’t know London very well,
but she’d heard tales of the Queen’s Bench, had read horrible
accounts of the Marshalsea and the Fleet before they were
closed.

“I owe Claybourne nothing. I don’t even know
him. You’ve wasted day’s effort finding me, Mr. Cobson. And when
this folly is done, I’ll want my fare back to the Knotted
Mazel.”

But Cobson was a never-shirking force, a
transportable jail and she had no choice but to do as he bid. Come
tomorrow he’d be sorry! So would this madman Claybourne.

She would weather this storm as she had
weathered others and allowed Cobson to lead her up to the sagging
stoop, where his three-part tap with the tarnished brass knocker
was answered seconds later by a more intricate pattern of taps. The
latch rattled, then the door opened to a candle flame and a soupy
voice that spilled from a fleshy female face that seemed to hover
just behind the watery circle of light.

“Ooo! She’s a little thing, Cobby.”

“May be. But she fights like one of
Wellington’s officers.”

“Quick, Cobby, bring ‘er inside a’fore she
blows away in the wind.”

Cobson’s ever-present fingers pulled Felicity
into the house. The air inside Cobson’s Rest was as dark and close
as its shadows: wood smoke and rancid food and mildewed upholstery
all sealed up together by windows long ago swollen shut in the damp
and barred to the light of day.

“He’s
here,
Cobby.” Mrs. Cobson’s
whisper was clouded by the reek of day-old onions. “Himself!”

“Claybourne?” Cobson looked agitated for the
first time all day. “Now? But it’s near midnight.”

“He come here just after dark,” Mrs. Cobson
hissed. “Brought the cold in with him, he did. I had to light the
fire.”

“Doesn’t usually come himself. What does he
want?”

Mrs. Cobson’s gaze led right to Felicity. “He
wants
her,
I think.”

She could only stare back at the woman,
unwilling to imagine the confrontation to come. Claybourne’s
reputation alone was enough to root her feet to the sagging floor.
But Cobson clamped onto her arm again and forcibly edged her into a
dreary parlor just off the cramped vestibule. A low fire glowed red
in the grate, the only light in the room, making monsters of
sideboard and sofa. Wind and rain stuttered against the clapboard
siding.

“A good eve to you, Mister Claybourne, sir,”
Cobson said, sliding his cap off his head. “I brought you your
debtor. Like I said I would.”

An enormous darkness moved across the hearth,
cooling Felicity’s face, reaching beyond the fragile windows to sap
the light from the stars.

“Leave us, Cobson.” The voice advanced like a
midnight fog overtaking a lighthouse.

She stepped backward, fearing that the sound
had substance and might crush her. Shadows hid the man’s face,
hinting at sharp ridges and strong planes.

“As you wish, sir,” Mrs. Cobson trilled as
she bustled into the room and lit the lamp on the sideboard. “Shall
I bring you a brandy, Mister—”

“Take your wife and leave us, Cobson.”

Like a pair of crabs dodging the tide, the
Cobsons ducked out of the parlor and slammed the door behind
them.

Felicity had been to the Zoological Gardens
in Regent’s Park; had seen the lions pacing the length of their
cages. Now felt that same restless power seething inside the dark
form in front of her. Yet Claybourne stood motionless, leaving his
flickering shadow to stalk the walls and the ceiling.

“I know you only by your name, Mr.
Claybourne,” she said in the void left by his unwieldy silence.
“And know for a certainty that I couldn’t possibly owe you so much
as a ha’penny. You have arrested the wrong woman.”

“And you have stolen from the wrong man, Miss
Mayfield.”

“Stolen?” She laughed then, still vastly
nervous but relieved by his blatant accusation. “I’ve never stolen
anything from anybody.”

Claybourne’s greatcoat fluttered, then folded
around him as he stepped away from the hearth. The simple act gave
the room back its glowering light, but none of its warmth. His
profile sharpened as he bent to retrieve a sheaf of papers from a
side table. She wished she could see more of him, the slant of his
mouth, or the depth of his eyes—something beyond the shadows.

He turned then, looked down at her from
across his papers. But his eyes only drew her into a deeper
darkness.

“Your uncle is Foley Mayfield.”

“My uncle?” She swallowed back a lump of
foreboding and sidled over to a spindly chair, gripped the rails of
its laddered back, prepared to wield it should Claybourne choose to
overtake her. “What does my uncle have to do with this?”

“Where is he now?” he asked evenly.

“My uncle is two days out of Portsmouth,
sailing for San Francisco and the gold fields.” Then she chided
herself for confessing the information. Dear Uncle Foley would be
helpless against such a powerfully coercive man. “What could you
want with—”

“You gave Foley Mayfield the legal authority
to sell the shares held by you as the sole owner of the
Drayhill-Starlington Railway.”

So that was it! The great financier had come
sniffing out an easy profit. “Mr. Claybourne, is this about the
shares my father left to me when he died?”

“Your uncle was acting as your agent under
your instruction in the matter of the railway?” Claybourne stepped
away from the side table and moved toward her.

She quickly countered his approach, feeling
every bit the trapped rabbit. She left the chair and caught her
foot on the sideboard, causing the prisms dangling from the lamp to
chatter.

“Did you give your uncle permission to sell
your shares?” His voice had grown darker, steadier.

“Of course, he had my permission. I signed a
promissory note indicating that I owned the shares and the railway
and that he could act as my agent.” She backed toward the hearth.
Claybourne was mad. And he knew entirely too much about her and her
family. “The papers are quite legal, Mr. Claybourne, drawn up by
Francis Biddle, a solicitor of good repute. The shares were
valuable, I’m told, but they’ve already been sold—”

“Yes, I know.”

“Then why—”

“Your uncle sold the shares to
me,
Miss Mayfield. I paid him thirty thousand pounds for the
privilege.”

The hearth light seemed to intensify and
Claybourne’s shadow threw itself against the water-stained ceiling.
The enormous shoulders she’d thought hunched were actually broad
and carelessly hooded by a half-cape. His hair was dark and
unfashionably long, and he was watching her.

“Well, then the shares now belong to you, Mr.
Claybourne. I don’t see what—”

“No, Miss Mayfield. The shares still belong
to
you.”
He started toward her, motion without perceptive
movement.

“Don’t be absurd, Mr. Claybourne. You gave
the money to my uncle: a great stack of it—piled into a satchel.”
She backed away from his towering height until the fire became too
warm at her back and she had to stop. “I saw the bank notes with my
own eyes, in his satchel, just before he sailed to San
Francisco.”

“I’m sure you did.” And now he was the whole
of her vision, bearing a lime-laced heat all his own, despite the
fog-born chill that had hidden itself among the folds of his cloak.
“How old are you, Miss Mayfield?”

“That’s no business of yours—”

But the horrible man reached out and wound
his huge hand around the ribbon at her neckline and pulled her
closer, till his breath heated her hairline and her brow. He was
blended spice and damp fog; his face was dark planes and brusque
angles.

“How old?” his demand lingering between
them.

“Twenty!” she whispered, then flinched as the
word brushed back against her mouth. “I’m twenty.”

He drew her closer still, until his teeth
near blinded her in the firelight. “Then you have committed a
felony, Miss Mayfield. Those shares aren’t yours to sell until you
are twenty-five.”

Now she knew the color of his eyes, as she
knew the color of cold malice. Her heart beat madly beneath the
heel of his hand, thumping out her fear, confessing her shame.

“This can’t be true—”

“Oh, it’s true, my dear little thief. And now
you will marry me, or I’ll see that you spend the next five years
in debtor’s prison.”

“M
arry you?”
Felicity wanted to cower and run from those glacial eyes but forced
a bravado she didn’t feel

“Marry a misbegotten heathen like you? I will
not!”

Claybourne straightened as if she’d slapped
him—which she would have done, if she thought that a mountain could
be moved.

“Will you not, Miss Mayfield?” His touch
frosted her skin as he drew his finger along the ridge of her jaw.
“This maiden’s blush of yours will soon pale to chalk inside the
damp walls of the Queen’s Bench. Dare you risk it?”

“You’ve got the facts wrong, Mr. Claybourne.
The shares and the railway were mine to sell whenever I wanted.
Now, let go of me.”

He glanced down at his fist, still balled
beneath her chin, and crushing her silk ribbons. His gaze slowed as
it returned to her face, lingering too long on her mouth before
finding its way to her eyes. Firelight imbedded gold in the faint
stubble that bristled his jawline. Yes, he looked quite mad.

Claybourne released her roughly and she
scooted away to the safety of the ladder-back chair, her heart and
her pulse doing some kind of spiraling dance together.

“Brava, my dear. You perform outraged
innocence with rare precision. As precisely as your uncle performed
his thick-headed simplicity. Well done.” Claybourne slammed his
palms together twice in mock applause.