Ruby McBride (29 page)

‘Your
husband
?’
This declaration was greeted with hoots of laughter. The policeman nearly lost his helmet as he put back his head and roared, while the manager wiped tears of mirth from his eyes. ‘By heck, that’s a good one. that is. Best excuse I’ve heard in a long while to try and wriggle out of being sent to the Bridewell.’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘Trouble is, love, who’d this rich husband be who’s daft enough to spoil a no-good ruffian like you with such a fabulous gift?’

‘Me.’

All eyes swivelled to the door. The manager was so startled, he half rose out of his chair before falling back into it in stunned disbelief. ‘Barthram Stobbs?’

‘As I live and breathe.’

Ignoring the policemen completely, Bart walked over to Ruby and put his arm about her. ‘Up to mischief again, my love? I thought I had tamed that adventurous spirit of yours.’ Smoothing a hand over the nape of her neck, he commented drily. ‘You haven’t lost that pretty pendant I gave you, have you, my dear?’
 

He looked enquiringly across at the manager, now flushed with evident embarrassment, and his eyes lighted upon the pendant, its rose-red depths sparkling like fire on the grimy office desk.

‘Ah, there it is. What a relief.’ Bart picked it up, hooked it back around her neck and smiled at the now silent pair opposite. ‘Family heirloom. It was my dear mother’s, sadly now departed this life. Do I take it that there has been some mistake, and my wife is now free to leave?’

Nobody moved for a long breathless moment. Then the manager cleared his throat and, finally finding his voice, burbled on about how they had assumed the pendant was stolen because why else would three people be hiding in a lifeboat on board a ship bound for Canada? ‘It’s against the law to attempt to stow away.’

‘A youthful adventure, or misadventure, whichever way you look at it. Nothing more. Are you challenging the honesty of my wife?’ The arching of his brows only emphasised the cold anger in Bart’s face.

The manager was huffing and puffing in furious protest while the constable volunteered the information that reformatory lads and lasses generally reoffended, in his experience.

‘Indeed? I wasn’t aware that my wife had ever committed an offence, before today, that is. Being in the reformatory does not, in fact, brand her a criminal. You have some problem with the fact that she was an orphan, and poor? Destitution is not, or certainly should not be, against the law.’

The police constable blustered his way into silence but the managed ploughed on, determined on using the hapless trio as an example to anyone else who might consider attempting to board one of his ships illegally in the future. ‘Reformatory hooligans are nothing but trouble. These other two aren’t even in employment, so are clearly up to no good.’

‘Perhaps they are desperate to leave the country for that very reason, because they are unemployed. Have you never been desperate, with your back to the wall? Then you are a most fortunate man if you have not.’

The silence this time grew ominous. It was Bart who broke it. ‘Well, unless you have any other evidence against my wife, perhaps you wouldn’t mind releasing her, together with her ruthless accomplices? I can vouch for the fact there will be no further assault on your vessels, Canadian or otherwise.’

As the police constable reluctantly unlocked the handcuffs from the miscreants’ wrists, the manager continued to issue dire warnings of the fate awaiting anyone who ever stepped unauthorised on to his dock again.
 

Bart merely smiled, tucked Ruby’s arm safely into the crook of his own, and led her away. Kit and Pearl followed meekly behind.

Ruby had never known him to be so cold towards her. His reaction seemed deeper than anger, like a skein of steel about to snap. He’d taken her attempt to leave as a personal rejection. Grateful as she was for his intervention which had again saved her from jail, inwardly she grieved for the loss of her dream. There would be no adventure, no trip to Canada to search out her lost brother. In the time it took for Bart to march her back to their house on Quay Street, ungraciously offer her sister a bed for the night, and close the door in the face of her ‘new friend’, Ruby had come to see that she’d lost everything. Whatever show of tenderness there had been between them the other night, there would be no more. All she could think to do now was to hand over the pendant, and give it up forever. Even the feel of it against her skin scalded her with shame.

Bart accepted it without protest and slid the gem into his pocket.
 

Ruby blinked back tears which, for some reason, were threatening to fall. She cried not for the loss of the pendant but for something indefinable, and far more precious. She had never asked for love from this marriage, nor expected to feel any in herself, but his faith and belief in her she had taken for granted. Now, Ruby realised, all of that was gone.

His expression showed only scathing contempt. ‘Is that really what you wanted? And why Canada, for heaven’s sake? What did you hope to achieve by running off so far?’

‘A new start for Pearl. And to look for our Billy, of course.’

‘Have you any idea of the size of Canada? You have as much chance of finding your brother as you have of locating a flea on a dog’s back.’

‘We found Pearl, didn’t we? Or rather Kit did.’

‘We’ll come to your friend in a moment, though doesn’t it
strike you as rather odd that he should suddenly be able to locate her just before the ship sailed? A remarkable coincidence, do you not think?’

A matching anger was rising in her, soaring upwards from the depths of her misery in order to counteract a ridiculous sense of guilt that she had in some way disappointed him. She ripped off the slouch cap Kit had made her wear, letting her nut-brown curls tumble anyhow about her flushed face, glorying in the sudden spark of need that lit in his eyes at the sight of their wild beauty. ‘You’re bound to see only the worst in him.’

‘Because he is sleeping with my wife? Now I wonder why that should trouble me? You would do well to remember, Ruby McBride, that you
are
mine. Never doubt it.’

‘Damn you, Barthram Stobbs. Damn you to hell!’

They sat at table that evening in total silence, the only sound in the room that of the loud ticking of the clock on the mantelshelf. Upstairs, they could hear Pearl pacing the floor, alternately weeping and railing with fury. She had refused to share their supper; even so, Ruby half expected her to come tearing downstairs at any moment and blame her for everything going wrong, as she always had in the past. Pleased as she was to have Pearl here, safe and sound, she’d never quite forgotten how utterly self-obsessed her sister was.

Bart tore at his bread with white, even teeth; drank his soup with one elbow propped casually on the table, and throughout the meal never took his eyes from her face. His stare was unnerving and left Ruby simmering with a rage that she dare not express. When the silence became almost insurmountable, he finally spoke, his voice calm and strangely matter-of-fact.

‘Have you never wondered why it was I wished to marry you, Ruby McBride? Why I was so anxious to share my life with you? Have you never considered that it might possibly have been more than a fancy I felt for you, or that what I feel now might well be akin to jealousy?’

The pounding in his head which had tormented him ever since he’d found her with that ruffian seemed to intensify with each passing moment as he waited, in vain, for her response. Images of the pair of them together would, he knew, produce unendurable torture the instant his head touched the pillow. Yet what could he do to avoid it? He was as trapped as she claimed to be, with no hope of escape. Even now, though she craved physical intimacy between them as much as he did, he was no nearer to possessing her. Ruby McBride was very much her own woman and if it was his misfortune to love her, he must live with the consequences. Where was the point in denying it? Perhaps in admitting his vulnerability, he could in some way exorcise this need for her from his soul, reduce it to a physical necessity.

‘I was captivated by you, by your beauty, by your strength, and by your resolution to hang on to your individuality despite having spent years in an institution. That was no mean feat, Ruby, and it shone out of you like a beacon. I admire that courage in you still, that sense of fiery independence. This woman, I thought, is one who deserves a chance in life. She needs to be cherished.’

She laughed at that, tossing back her brown curls with haughty disdain. ‘You took advantage of my dire circumstances. I was still a young girl who’d never tasted freedom, and you robbed me of that chance. I don’t need cherishing, certainly not by someone who has kept me prisoner as an unwilling wife for years.’

‘The door is unlocked, Ruby. It has ever been so.’ He indicated the general direction with his crust of bread. ‘Where would you run to this time? To your lover?’

Ruby’s gaze was riveted upon his mouth as he chewed, as if reminding herself of every intimate detail of it. ‘He is
not
my lover! It’s true that I
do
love him, have always loved him, but we never. . .’

Bart stood up, pushing back his chair so violently that it fell backwards on to the stone-flagged floor with a crash. ‘Spare me the sordid details. I believe I’ve heard enough excuses for one night. Go and tell that sister of yours to stop that infernal din and then get to bed.’

‘I will do no such thing!’ The thought of making love with him on this night, the one she should have spent with her beloved, gloriously handsome Kit, albeit stowed away in a lifeboat, was more than she could bear.

Bart grasped her by the wrist and thrust her before him up the stairs, informed a startled Pearl to shut her noise, and in one fluid movement swung Ruby into their room and shut fast the door.

She turned upon him with the ferocity of a tiger. ‘Lay one finger on me and I’ll scratch yer bleedin’ eyes out!’

‘I think not, Ruby. You will undress and get into bed like a good, obedient little wife.’

‘I will not!’

He sighed deeply. ‘I do not believe you are in any position to argue.’

‘Because yet again I face possible arrest? Is that the only way you can keep a woman, Barthram Stobbs?’ Ruby saw the impact of her words made him reel, almost as if she had physically struck him, and felt a burst of shame at her own cruelty. What in heaven’s name had she become?

A heartbeat later he stepped forward, his face so contorted by ice-cold rage that for one dreadful moment she thought he might strip the clothes from her back and take her there and then on the rug, against her will. Instead, by some supreme effort, he managed to control himself and, stretching out a hand, traced the outline of her cheek with the tips of fingers that trembled. His latent fury seared into the heart of her, causing it to melt at his touch.

Ruby strove to maintain a denial of her need, to keep her eyes
wide open, her heart stony with defiance as he slowly removed the boyish waistcoat, unbuttoned the blue shirt and slid the braces that held up the seaman’s trousers from her slender shoulders. Yet in contradiction to her own wishes, her traitorously weak flesh responded to his touch. It was as if he had lit a fire in her, one that burned and smouldered and could only be doused by him. As she swayed, giddy with need and might well have fallen, he lifted her easily in his arms and dropped her on to the bed.

He took her then as he never had before, with a force that declared his supremacy, his dominance over her. He punished her perceived betrayal with the power of his body but when she cried out, it was with desire not defiance, with passion not agony. The sound was wrenched unwillingly from the depths of her soul for no matter how much she might deny him in the cold light of day, in the secret dark of the night, Ruby knew that she belonged to him entirely.

Over the following days and weeks the rain seemed never to stop. It swept the rubbish from the streets, filled the gutters and lashed the decks of the tug and barges, making them dangerously slippy under foot.

The weather suited Kit’s mood exactly, adding to his all-pervading sense of gloom. He could scarcely take in the cataclysmic effect Ruby McBride had had upon his life. Wherever he walked, whatever he did, he kept coming across that same police constable who had confronted them in the manager’s office. Kit was quite certain the man was keeping a beady eye on him, eager to prove him guilty of some offence or other. He popped up around every corner, tenaciously determined to find Kit up to no good so that he could throw him in jail and toss away the key. His constant presence cramped Kit’s style, for one step out of line and he’d be a goner.

Ruby McBride and that so-called-baron had ruined every
thing. Not only had he been deprived of the opportunity to enjoy her undoubted charms, and access to her husband’s wealth, now he had a copper permanently on his tail. He’d also lost Pearl and the convenient comforts she freely offered, not to mention a most useful source of income.