Lord Lightning (29 page)

“Innocent?” The magistrate coughed discreetly. “I must advise you that there has been evidence introduced into the record which would contradict your assertions. And indeed, Hartwood—” the magistrate’s voice dropped conspiratorially, “With all respect, I myself attended the dinner at which you imposed the society of this Farrell person most inappropriately upon people of unblemished respectability. My mother has been Lady Hartwood’s confidant these twenty years. There can be no doubt as to the justness of her complaint, and with all respect, I must caution you that you do Miss Farrell’s case no good by applying to me in this way. I must take down your words as evidence, you see, and given that the prisoner is the subject of a charge of lewdness, which I must advise you involves Your Lordship materially, the showing of too much partiality by yourself may weigh heavily against her.”

So that was where he had seen the man. At his mother’s dinner party. Though it was with difficulty that Edward restrained himself from telling the magistrate what he thought of his laws and into which physical aperture he could shove them, he was not a complete fool, and the man’s words brought home to him the danger into which his unthinking impulsiveness had put Eliza.

“I take your point,” he said at last in a steely voice. “How much will it cost me to end this unpleasantness?”

The magistrate frowned. “There is no question of bail in a case where the charges are this serious.”

“I’m not talking about bail. I’ll pay you whatever it takes to end the matter. You would be well advised to heed me.
I
can afford to be generous, while my mother, whatever she might have told you, has no funds except for those I choose to give her.”

The magistrate stood up. “This interview must be at an end, Your Lordship. Strong emotion appears to have made you forget the respect due to my office.”

So bribery would not work. Edward cursed silently. Now he must undo the damage he’d caused by attempting it. He put on his most penitent face. “Your Honor, I was carried away by my passions. You must forgive me. I meant no insult to yourself or your office. But before I leave can you tell me, is there some way, at least, that I may visit with Miss Farrell and bring her some promise of help? Can you tell me where she might be imprisoned?”

The magistrate nodded. “You may visit with her, subject to the regulations that apply to the general public. You will find her at 27 Camelford Street, in the custody of Mr. Cuthbertson. She will remain there, maintained at her own expense, until the quarter sessions.” The magistrate stood up signaling that the interview was at an end.

***

Fortunately, Edward found Mr. Cuthbertson far less resistant to bribery than the magistrate. A sovereign was all it took to get him to remember a loophole to the regulation preventing the general public from consorting privately with a prisoner.

Having secured the money in his pocket, the man led Edward down a dingy corridor to a steep flight of stone steps that led to a basement room that had been set aside for the keeping of prisoners. He removed a heavy key from a ring on his belt and made a great show of opening the lock. Then he motioned Edward into the cell, and after locking the door behind him, informed him through a peephole in the door that he would be back to free him in half an hour.

Edward did not think it was possible for him to feel any worse about the peril in which his unthinking behavior had placed Eliza. But he was not prepared for the impact on his heart of the misery he saw flood into her eyes when she saw it was him.

“So you have come,” she said in a voice so dull he could barely recognize it as hers. “And you will apologize and tell me how terrible you feel and promise it will never happen again. Then you will leave, and I will still be here in gaol.”

“I will free you!” he protested.

“Yes. Of course,” she said, much too quietly. “You will free me, just as my father will buy me a coach and four when he has earned back all his losses at the gaming table.”

“Eliza,” he said, feeling his temper rise. “I’m
not your father. You were right about my mother, and I was wrong to ignore your warnings. But I will not leave you here! I will do whatever it takes to free you and when I have freed you I will make it up to you for what you have suffered. You have my word on it.”

Still speaking in that dangerously soft tone, Eliza ignored him. “I should have known better than to let myself fall prey to your fatal charm. You warned me, but I wouldn’t listen. It seems I am fated to love men who cannot see beyond their own obsessions. My father’s is high play, yours, another kind of playing. Was it not just a game to you, beguiling me while thinking up ways to annoy your mother as you pushed past every limit she set for you? You were enjoying yourself so much, thinking only of how she had wronged you, never caring that real people were involved, that real people could get hurt.”

Her words cut him to the heart. But he was not as bad as she thought. He stretched out one hand toward her. “Eliza,” he began, “I deserve every angry word you can heap on my head. I’ve been a fool and you are paying for my foolishness. But I will get you out of here. And when I do, please, Eliza, tell me you will forgive me.”

Eliza sat stiffly across from him, her head bowed. “Why should it matter to you what I think of you? You warned me that it would be dangerous to give my heart to you, but I ignored your warning. I am my own victim, not yours.”

The pain in her eyes tore through the last shreds
of his self-control. “I cannot bear to have you hate me, Eliza. Not after last night. I found the letter that you left for me this morning, and it horrified me to realize that because I had not the courage to speak up then, you’d been left believing you would be abandoned. I should have asked you to marry me as soon as you gave me the precious gift of yourself. I meant to, but I was a coward. I can only beg your forgiveness for that, too.”

He dropped to his knees, feeling the cold dampness of the stone floor seep through the silk of his breeches. “This isn’t how I’d hoped it would be when I made my proposal but I cannot bear to delay another moment. Eliza, I would consider myself the most fortunate of men if you would consent to be my wife.”

Eliza’s eyes opened wide and for a moment he thought he saw surprise flash through them. Then she cocked her head and laughed sourly.

“Marry you?” she said. “And ensure myself a lifetime of misery, instead of just a single episode of disaster? You must be mad.”

Edward said nothing, aghast at how much pain had been hiding behind Eliza’s own fearsome self-control.

“It is all a game to you, isn’t it?” she said bitterly. “Playing tricks on your mother, making me fall in love with you. And now you think you can fix everything just by assigning me a new role.”

Edward wanted to protest that she was wrong, but he was silenced by the heavy realization that every word she said was true.

“I, too, have been a fool,” Eliza said. “But I finally understand my own danger. After you’d awakened me to all the excitement I’d missed in life that evening at your town house, I pretended I could stay objective. I convinced myself I stayed with you so I could offer you help. But I was self-deluded. I fell in love with Lord Lightning. I let myself succumb to the charms of a practiced rake. My aunt tried to keep me sheltered and protect me from my own impetuous nature, but it was no use. I am too much my mother’s daughter. She married a charming man whose only flaw was that he couldn’t think past his own desires. She, too, thought she could change him.”

Her words stung, but he forced himself to silence, knowing he must not try to justify himself to her. The pent-up anger in her words was so familiar to him, so like his own. But perhaps all was not lost. Had she not just said that she loved him? It had frightened him yesterday to think Eliza might love a man as flawed as he knew himself to be. But now, with a sudden awakening he knew her love for him was all that stood between himself and total devastation.

Eliza’s dull voice went on relentlessly. “My father was a charming man when my mother first met him, just as you are now. She was far his inferior in rank. They might not have married except that, as my aunt told me, she behaved as imprudently with him as I have with you. She gave herself to him thinking she loved him and when she
discovered she was to bear me, she was forced to marry him or face society’s judgment upon her.”

Eliza stopped and took a ragged breath. “By the time I was born she had learned the extent of her mistake. My father was out gambling the night of my birth. He didn’t come home for three days, and, when he did, it was to tell her he had gambled away the last of her dowry. I don’t think her love for him long outlived my birth, but by then it was too late for her to free herself.” Eliza toyed nervously with the edge of her sleeve. “At least I am fortunate to find myself the full victim of your thoughtlessness before I was swayed by my passions to accept your offer. I’ve been reminded of what a lifetime with you would mean before I was condemned to live through it. I will not make the mistake my mother made.”

Edward wanted to protest that he was not so entirely lost in his own selfish desires as her dreadful father had been. But his protests died unspoken. He had been so obsessed with his own wounds he hadn’t noticed hers, though life had hurt her as badly as it had hurt him. Perhaps worse.

Why else would she have chosen to be a spinster despite her beauty and her lively nature? Why else had she maintained that schoolmistress’s air of cold emotional control? It had been that control of hers which had so attracted him—the thought that she could remain unaffected by the surging anger and pain that so often filled his own heart. It
had been her relentless control which had goaded him to use all his skills to penetrate her defenses.

As he had done, oh so successfully, last night.

He felt terror now as he became aware of how little he could trust himself. Did he really know where the games ended and where reality began? Last night, when he had seduced her, had he really meant to marry her? He remembered how his body had burned for her and how easy it had been to convince himself her seduction was necessary. And though he had justified taking her with the belief he must marry her, had he not ripped through the last of her defenses when he had kissed her by the sea,
before
he’d seen her father’s damning letter with its revelation of who she really was?

It
had
been a game to him, a novel game filled with tenderness and desire rather than coldness and disdain, but a game nonetheless, like the game he played with his mother, the game that kept him from feeling the anger that otherwise might overwhelm him. Playing Lord Lightning kept him safe, but at what cost?

As he saw how hard Eliza was fighting the tears threatening to overwhelm her, and the emotions she, too, had tried so hard to deny, something shifted within him. It was as if he could feel the chain break that had kept his own feelings safely bound. As his control snapped, he felt tears welling up within him, as he waited for the catastrophe that must follow as his feelings, finally liberated, overwhelmed him.

But it did not come. Pain surged up in him, and need, and raging anger so violent it must soon consume him, but as he stood in the center of the storm that was his own heart he was steadied by the beauty that radiated from Eliza. She stood so wholly exposed as she grappled with her own annihilating fear, and the fury within him retreated. It slunk off like some wounded animal, the broken chain clanking behind it as it dragged itself off to die. And as the anger ebbed, another emotion flooded into him.

Love.

As he watched Eliza’s dear freckled face flush as she contended with the release of her own long buried terror, he realized with painful clarity how much he loved her. How he loved her more than he loved himself. And he knew beyond question he was willing to make whatever sacrifice it took to heal her wounds the way she had tried to heal his. She deserved better than the man that he had been. But he was all she had. So there was nothing left to do but rescue her from the predicament that man had put her in.

“I have been all that you say I am,” he said, his head bowed. “My words can do nothing for you now, so I will spare you them. But know this: I am not like your father. I will free you from this imprisonment. I am not completely without influence, and I will not rest until you are free.”

Eliza nodded, but her eyes when they met his were dull with misery.

He bit his tongue and stopped himself from
pouring out words that would tell her of the love now filling his heart. That would only be more selfishness. It wasn’t what she needed. Instead he just stood silently before her, opening himself up to the fullness of what he felt for her. As he did, tears coursed down Eliza’s face, and she began to shake. He put his arms around her and drew her close, comforting her like a dearly beloved child, patting her on the back, and making feeble soothing sounds. As he held her, he felt once again that indescribable flow of energy that arose between them when they embraced.

This must be love,
he thought with wonder,
this joy that arises when I am close to her, even when there is no reason to feel joy, this hope that fills me when there is no reason to hope.

Eventually she calmed. She said nothing more but did not push him away, and simply clung to him, as if she, too, knew they were bound by something beyond words, until they heard the clatter of the gaoler’s key as it turned in the cell door.

She sprang back, and Edward was forced to leave her.

“Q
uite a tasty piece,” Mr. Cuthbertson remarked as he led Edward up the stairway away from Eliza’s prison cell. “Wouldn’t mind sampling a bit of what she’s been peddling meself.” He smacked his lips together in anticipation.

Edward resisted the temptation to kill the man where he stood. It would solve nothing. Instead he drew him aside and hissed, “There’s another five guineas waiting for you when she leaves here, but only if she leaves here untouched by you or any man.”