Lord Lightning (27 page)

But Eliza said nothing.

Instead, her eyes broke contact with his and she looked away with something in her heart-shaped face that shocked him, something that looked to him like guilt. He felt a tug of pain. What did
she
have to be guilty about?

He took her hand again, but it felt cold and lifeless. The warmth had fled. She was pulling away from him, severing the connection—she, not he—was retreating.

He felt himself crash back to earth as the magic seeped away. She reached a hand down to where he had just spent himself and brought it back to her face. “I’m bleeding,” she said plaintively. He longed to embrace her and tell her it would be all right, but his fears were too strong. He was not sure it
would
be all right.

So he merely got up and searched through the pockets of his breeches for a handkerchief and handed it to her so that she could staunch the flow. “It’s normal to bleed like that the first time,” he said, wondering if it really was. He had never before bedded a virgin. “There won’t be pain the next time.”

At his words, her eyes slid away from his again and he realized with a pang that she did not want to think about a next time. A wall had sprung up between them. The openness and joy that he had
felt was replaced by cold terror. Then she turned back to him one last time and asked, “Is it normal to feel this sleepy, too?”

He told her it was. Then, unable to bear the bleakness in her gaze, he got up and dressed himself clumsily, preparing to return to his own room. Bidding her good night, softly, he kissed her one last time and received a sleepy kiss from those lips of hers that had just filled him with such ecstasy, learning as he drew away from her, that there was only one fear more terrible than the thought of what his uncontrollable fickleness might do to Eliza: the fear that
she
would be the one to leave him first.

W
hen Eliza awoke the next morning, her first thought was that the events of the previous evening had been a dream. Then she saw Edward’s handkerchief lying beside her on the bed still stained with the faint pink evidence of their lovemaking. She crumpled it and shoved it deep under the covers, realizing as she did so how futile the gesture was. There was no way of hiding from what she had done.

She felt no regret for having done it. It would be impossible to regret last night. She would treasure the memory of what they had shared for the rest of her life. But she was in peril now. Having tasted the pleasure of her lover’s touch, she could barely imagine how she was to leave him. Her animal nature, which had slumbered for so long, was fully awake. It cried out for him, urging her
to run down the stairway to his room and fling herself on him. It was so hungry for more.

But there could be no more. The power of what she had opened herself to was far stronger than she had expected. She understood now exactly why the woman Edward had abandoned had drowned herself. She understood now, as she never had before, what had caused her mother’s ruin. If she didn’t sever the bond that connected her with Edward now, while she still possessed a shred of her self-control, she would never be able to leave him. And if she stayed only disaster could follow.

Not because of what her father might do. She faced the fact squarely that she had deceived herself. She had used her fear of her father’s reappearance as an excuse to justify giving in to the impulse she could no longer resist, the longing to give herself to Edward. Her father’s machinations were not the disaster that loomed over her. She had dealt with him before and knew she could survive the worst he could do to her. No, the true disaster waited where it had always waited: in her own wanton heart and the ungovernable passion hiding there, which her aunt had tried so fruitlessly to protect her from.

She had given herself to a rake and she had done it on purpose. She had done it knowing that he didn’t want her love. She had done it after listening to him explain how he used women and discarded them, after letting him prove that the wounds he had suffered made it impossible for
him not to hurt the women who exposed their hearts to him. She had given herself to him anyway, convinced she was strong enough to change him. But that had been self-deception. He would not change. His resentment was too strong. Yet still she had fallen in love with him—just as her mother had fallen for her wastrel father.

Desperate to find some hidden cause for hope, she arose and fetched his horoscope, much smudged now from all her pawing over it. But there was nothing new there. The chart had not changed. The man had not changed. All that had changed was herself. She had finally lost control.

She flung his horoscope on the bed, wishing she had never seen it. She wished for once that its symbols didn’t speak to her so clearly or, that if they must, she could drown out what they had to say. But she could not. Mars still squared his Leo Sun. Saturn still opposed it. Her Edward had a huge capacity to love, but it was thwarted. So instead of expressing his Leo nature as love, he expressed it as playacting. He played role after role, burying the man who was Edward Neville beneath the glorious creation who was Lord Lightning, letting Edward peep out from time to time and show his human need for love only when it might give piquancy to the role.

She would not change him. She didn’t even want to. Though she loved what she had seen of Edward Neville, she couldn’t deny it was Lord Lightning she had fallen for first, Lord Lightning who had swept her up into his exciting life and
lent her some of his own magnificence so she could free herself from the role of faded spinster her aunt had insisted she take on and replace it, if only briefly, with that of his glorious vixen.

It was only now, when it was too late, that she was forced to remember
why
she had taken on that spinster’s role. She had been safe in her drab gray gown, safe from the urgings of her own impetuous heart. But her pride had been her downfall. She had been so proud of how she had detected the man, Edward, who hid behind the façade that was Lord Lightning, that she had allowed him to strip her of the role she, too, was playing—the role that was all that kept her true self in check. Now it had burst through, and she had become the person she had always known she was: impulsive, sensual, and doomed.

It would only be a matter of hours until he would send her away. She had felt him begin to withdraw in the aftermath of their lovemaking. When he saw her next in the cold light of morning, he would remind her how she had broken the compact they had made at the beginning of this ill-advised adventure and send her away.

She sighed. It was all so difficult. She had
meant
to leave him. She had made love with him knowing she
would
leave him. She had made love only
because
she must leave him. But now that she faced the necessity of actually leaving him, it was more than she could bear.

She got up and washed herself carefully using water from the cracked pitcher on the washstand,
wondering at the strange secretions that their bodies had produced together. Then she went through the trunk, laying aside the flamboyant garments in which she had clothed herself over the past week. She was done with them. She hunted through the contents of the trunk until she found her plain gray dress and with shaking fingers she put it on. She would never again feel safe in it, no, not when she knew the full power of what lay coiled within her and what her long-hidden inner nature really wanted. But she could no longer wear Violet’s tawdry gowns and play the parody role of mistress, now that she knew the real power of what it meant to be Edward’s lover.

She went through the rest of the things in the trunk, packing into her flowered satchel only the things she would need to survive. As much as she wished she did not have to, she must also keep the fifty pounds Edward had given her after that first night. She couldn’t afford to be melodramatic. It was all the money she had in the world, and she would need it to establish herself wherever she could find herself a home.

She debated what to do with the book he had given her, that tale of a woman like herself who thought she had grown too old for love. Had the heroine found love with the man she had scorned in her youth or did Miss Austen have some other tale to tell? It didn’t matter. Eliza had parted ways with her heroine last night. There were many ways Miss Austen might tell her story, but none, she was certain, would turn out like her own.

But though she knew she should leave the book behind, she couldn’t bring herself to do so. Edward had given it to her as a gift. It had been part of the playacting they had indulged in, but still, it would be her only concrete memento of what they had shared. So she took the book and tenderly placed it with her other books in the satchel. After another moment’s thought, she also took the gold and onyx paper knife he had given her with the book. It, too, had been a gift. Then she seated herself at the desk one last time to write him the note that would tell him she was leaving.

The words were hard to find. She didn’t want him to think his honesty on the beach had driven her away. Sharing his story with her had allowed him to begin to heal from the heavy burden he had carried for so long. She had no wish to destroy that. So she took her time, carefully composing a note that would do the least harm. When she had finished it, she looked around one last time at the small room where she had learned so much. Then she tiptoed to the landing of the back staircase the servants used. She waited until she could hear no voices or footsteps and descended, letting herself out of the back door.

When she reached the street Eliza regretted she had brought no umbrella with her. It was raining again and she had no idea where she would go, though she knew she must leave Brighton if she were to have any hope of avoiding seeing
Edward Neville again. Fortunately, she knew public coaches left the town center every hour for London where it would be easy to vanish into the anonymity of the metropolis.

She hastened along the sidewalk, feeling quite irrationally as if she were being pursued, but dismissed that thought as a trick of a mind that yearned for Edward to come after her and beg her to remain. But any idea that the pursuit existed only in her imagination was cut short as a voice called out, “Stop!” She heard the unmistakable sound of heavy footsteps behind her. A rough hand grasped her arm, and she smelled the sour smell of old tobacco and gin. A rough voice demanded, “Be ye the woman residing at the Hartwood residence calling herself Eliza Farrell?”

“I am,” she whispered.

“I have a writ for your arrest,” the man barked. “Don’t try no tricks, no running away. We had the house watched. My men are all around you.”

Eliza stared. Had her father got back into debt that quickly? “What am I accused of?”

“That’s for the magistrate to tell you. Now shut yer gob and don’t make me have to shut it for you. Will you be coming along without a struggle, or will I have to tie you up?”

Without waiting for a reply the man removed a thick piece of rope from his pocket and used it to bind up her hands with a speed that suggested much practice in the maneuver. He tossed her satchel to a younger man and then dragged her down the street behind him using the rope like a
leash until they came to a large gray house where an older man with an old-fashioned bagwig came to the door and after conferring with her captor, motioned for Eliza to come inside.

She was led to a small bare room at the back of the house that contained only a deal table and a couple of chairs she could not help but notice were nailed down to the floor. The man in the wig told her curtly to sit down, then both men left, locking the door behind them.

She sat for what seemed like hours, wondering what was to come next. Was she to go to prison for her father’s debts after all? Or was it something worse? Had he moved on to swindling? She thought of the letter he had sent her and his veiled threat to come to Edward for more money. Blackmail, too, was a crime.

Finally she heard a key turn in the lock and the man in the bagwig came in followed by another man who carried a small writing desk. The man in the wig introduced himself curtly as the chief magistrate of Brighton, but she realized with a shock she had met him before. He had been seated next to Lady Hartwood at her fatal dinner party.

“Is your name Eliza Farrell?” he demanded.

Eliza answered, “Yes.” The clerk’s pen scratched across the paper.

“And is that the name under which you were baptized?”

“Yes.” The pen scratched again.

“And in what parish was your birth registered and on what date?”

“St. Giles parish, London. I was born November 29th in the year 1788,” Eliza replied.

“And have you been residing in the house of Lady Hartwood since this Saturday past?”

“Yes.”

“And did you carry on there an irregular connection with her son, Edward Neville, Lord Hartwood, in defiance of Lady Hartwood’s demand that you leave her home?”

Eliza said nothing, but she could feel her face flushing. What could these questions possibly be leading up to?

“Answer me!” the man insisted. “Did you remain in the house of said Lady Hartwood pursuing carnal relations with her son in defiance of her demand that you should leave her home?”

Eliza whispered, “I did.”

“And is it true that you present yourself to the public as a fortune-teller, drawing up astrological horoscopes and claiming to foretell the future with them?”

“I am an astrologer. That is no crime!” Eliza protested.

“And did you take money from Lord Hartwood both for the granting of sexual favors to him and for the telling of his fortune?”

“I did not!” Eliza cried out. “But this is monstrous! What am I charged with? I have a right to know! It cannot possibly be illegal to be a man’s mistress.”

“It is not the time to discuss the charge. Our purpose now is only to establish the facts in the
matter, though I will inform you that it
is
against the law to tell fortunes for money in Brighton.”

“But, I did no such thing—”