Song for Sophia (24 page)

Her breath caught as he made another stitch, and he seemed to feel the sickening resistance of the needle sympathetically in his own arm, then the ghostly sensation of it scraping across his chest by sheer force of memory. He knew the methodical nerve-drilling sensation well and it conjured too easily, far too clearly. He shoved the thought away, afraid of falling into a defensive trace.

Instead of commenting on the significance of her husband becoming her father’s creditor, she bit her lip then asked, “I counted two matters. What is the third?”

“I hoped you would miss that. I am embarrassed to confess a shortage of cash for the transactions. Lord Courtenay and his son are helping me liquidate assets to fund the, ah… project. And I am in a hurry about it.”

Lord Chauncey had gambled and lost the equivalent of half a dozen nobleman’s fortunes. It had become no small matter to appease his hawkish creditors, accounting for the accumulated interest many seemed to inflate simply because Wilhelm was rich and they knew he wanted the notes. What they didn’t know was that Wilhelm still worked to replenish his own fortune after Roderick had abjectly sunk it. Without the help of Andrew Tilmore, his good friend Lord Courtenay’s financial prodigy son, his would be a lost cause.

Sophia shook her head, and he nearly speared her in the ribs with the needle. “Hold still, love.”

“Sorry. My arm is on fire and I can barely feel it now.” Her words slurred, from weakness or the brandy he didn’t know. She was also beginning to shake, a bad sign.

He had seen soldiers bleed out on the battle field, trembling violently and complaining of an icy feeling everywhere except for the burn of their injuries. He needed to finish faster and bind her arm, but his blasted fingers slid down the needle, slick with blood, and he already worked as quickly as he could to roll the string into knots.

“You can own the note on my father’s underwear if you please, but he will still come after me.”

“I know.”

“In fact, with you as his creditor, he will want me back all the more. He doesn’t know I am barren, and more than anything he wants a grandson to break the entailment. He is counting on it, he needs the money. He will do anything … .” She gasped as though a realization had just flashed in her mind. “Oh
no
. After the disaster with Vorlay, he will know we married. He will want to kill you for revenge, thinking he has stolen your unborn child when he abducts me.”

He breathed slowly, fighting to keep his hands steady. Sophia didn’t know it, but the talk about her father drove him dangerously angry and riled. He had prided himself on his ability to carry out the gruesome task of disposing of human offal with cold detachment, but he already knew when the time came for him to reconcile with Chauncey, there would be a great deal of passion about it. He feared he would enjoy it, prolong it, and that would make him irrevocably into the damned creature he had resisted surrendering to these many years. It meant crossing the fine line an assassin walked between justice and murder.

He didn’t care, but Sophia would know. She would sense the darkness. She would feel it when he succumbed to the ghosts. They hovered near these days, kept at bay only by her presence. Without her, he was lost.

Nevertheless he sewed carefully, betraying none of his concern, listening as she spoke.

“Beyond that, it is a matter of vengeance now, not just money. I made a fool of him. He will never forgive it.” He heard hatred and bitter resolve in her voice though the tone sounded weak. There would come a day when she had no call for speaking in such an ugly tone. He vowed it.

“That will be his undoing.”

“Do not underestimate him, Wil. Chauncey is a treacherous, dangerous man.”

“So am I,” he shot back with a toothy smile, and she seemed to shudder.

“I don’t know how you got away with doing in Vorlay, but it won’t work that way with my father. What if you hang for it?” She swallowed over what sounded like emotion. A sign of affection?

“Three more stitches left,” came his answer. So much he couldn’t tell her. Even if he wanted to.

“I hate when you do that.”

He feigned ignorance. “Do what?” Before she could complain about his stonewalling their discussion, he interjected, “So now you tell me why I came home to find my wife bedraggled and bleeding to death.” His throat still tightened around the word
wife
. Put in the same sentence with Sophia, it made him a silly besotted fool.

“I let the girls go exploring with Fritz, because I was unaware you were hosting a caper on your property. When I heard him barking, I took the mare and followed — ”

“You rode the old mare? She is for pulling the cart. She has no saddle.”

“Did you think I stopped to look for the best Montegue livery?” She closed her eyes again, and the sight of her blue-tinged eyelids and lips in stillness frightened him. Too close to the images of death cataloged in his brain. “Are you going to let me tell it or not?” she jeered irritably.

“Proceed, by all means, my lady.” He finished the last stitch and bound her arm with linen strips, tighter than would be comfortable, but she simply could not afford to lose any more blood.

“The girls reported being accosted by a man whom I now assume was one of LeRoy’s henchmen. Fritz scared him off, but Madeline caught her hair in the gate. By the way, did you know your east gate was unlocked? When I climbed over, it came right open.”

“You climbed the gate?”

“No, I ripped my skirt like this in hopes of attracting fast men. Anyhow, I couldn’t free Madeline’s hair. I had to cut it off, with a letter opener. Fritz startled everyone, and in the jostle the blade slipped and I cut my arm. That is all.”

Wilhelm wetted a cloth to clean the blood from her arms, face, and collar, wrestling terrible visions of his nieces and Sophia suffering at the hands of that filthy East End mongrel. At least Fritz seemed to come through when it mattered; those dogs had proven a worthy investment. He drew a deep breath of relief once he washed the last of her blood from his hands.

Her words slurred, “So whom were you chasing?”

He had already told her. Confusion, another symptom of serious blood loss. He lifted Sophia and carried her up the stairs, remembering to grab her bottle of brandy. “LeRoy and two others. At first I thought it was the gypsies, but Philip — ”

He saw skirt flounces as his eavesdropping nieces fled back through a bedroom doorway.

“You saw us trying to draw them against the base of the hill. We caught Grover, the man whom I presume came through the gate and frightened the girls. Philip is delivering him to the constable in St. Agnes.” She looked too still; he wondered if she was fainting. “Sophia, how do you feel?”

“Strange … Weak and surreal.”

Wilhelm called for the housekeeper again and asked for salt and water, which she quickly brought. He measured and stirred the salt into a glass of water. “I am sorry, but you will need to drink this. The saline will replace some of the lost fluid.”

She obeyed and made a face. “You sure know how to charm a lady.”

He tucked the ends of the bandage under the wrappings. “Move your fingers. Do they have full sensation?”

“Yes, as normal. It is my brain which feels numb.”

He almost blurted,
Oh, how I adore you
. He could listen to her talk all day, always wondering what irreverent, outlandish tidbit would come out of her mouth next. “Now you just need to keep your arm raised a while.”

He sat next to her on the bed and wrangled the remnants of her dress off, followed by her stays and stockings, leaving her a lovely sight in only her lacy Parisian shift. The one with the peach lace that only reached part way down her thighs. Delightfully naughty.

He mentally slapped himself awake, trying to remember what he had meant to say next. Oh yes. “I owe you my gratitude, Sophia, for your bravery. I once thought you were the forces of nature embodied, and I was right — at least about your being some sort of
force
.” That made her laugh, a bewitching sound he never got enough of. “Thank you for taking care of my girls.” He stroked her forehead, brushing away wild strands of hair. “How is the pain?”

“Clamoring for attention.”

Wilhelm left her then returned with the bottle he had stashed at the bottom of his trunk and poured her a glass.

“Pomegranate?” she asked, heartened.

“I brought it for you, only I imagined a more pleasant circumstance for it.”

“I assure you I will feel entirely pleasant if I drink enough of it.”

After he refilled her glass more times than was ladylike, Sophia finally set it down and started taking the pins out of her hair. He guided her wrists to rest on the mattress. “I will get them; you rest. But don’t fall asleep, not yet.”

He gently loosened the curls and shook them out, chortling to himself at the assortment of flora and fauna he plucked from her hair, including a ladybug. Then he could not stop stroking the strands and lacing them through his fingers. He leaned to reach her hairbrush and combed the mass over her pillow. Thirty-nine inches of glossy sable curtain, fragrant like rain and soft as satin. His to touch whenever he pleased. Iridescent in blue and red, waving in graduated patterns from root to tip. It could have been minutes or hours until he next became cognizant of the passing time. Damned trances. And she seemed to take them in stride.

He feared he was coaxing them both asleep, so he sat straighter and read to her from the book on her desk — Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
. She could not be a romantic, his fire-breathing pragmatist? After a few hours, she had color back in her cheeks. She rested her temple against his heart, his arm draped loosely around her shoulders, and she leaned so far onto her side she was more accurately in his lap. Sweet torment.

“How do you feel?” he muttered, and she was oblivious to the strain in his voice.

“Much better,” she answered without moving her lips.

“You look much better. You may sleep now.” He kissed her hand then her forehead, testing the temperature of her skin. No fever, but she would feel weak for a few days.

“Hmm. How much I love you, Wil,” she mumbled.

His heart kicked and he warmed from head to toe. “You are drunk, Sophie.”

“Yesh.”

She slipped unconscious, leaving him to wonder if that was the alcohol or a secret part of her mind speaking. Seemed too wonderful to be true.

At least she should be too wary to pursue her crusade of luring him into bed play. She had no idea how badly he wanted to give in, how near to surrender she had driven him. Celibacy had become easy with time and distraction, but now he had tasted the forbidden fruit,
per se
. She seemed to resent his self-control, uncomprehending that the dual forces of his mental illness and decades of careful discipline worked in his favor. Not to mention that he was plainly a stubborn bastard, and he refused to bed her if it frightened her. Of course she was a sublime temptation. Especially like this, plaint and disheveled, tantalizing him with such a view of her olive-creamy skin.

Wilhelm needed a long jog uphill or a dip in a cold lake, but instead he stalked down the hall to check on the girls. They mobbed him before he reached their bedroom, flocking around him like pigeons fighting for peanuts.

He tried to disguise his shock at seeing Madeline’s ringlets reduced to a short mop of curls around her head. Sophia had warned him. “Calm yourselves.” He pried Elise’s hand from his biceps and pushed a hand to Mary’s shoulder to keep her from bouncing up and down. Madeline seemed content to lean against his side.

“Merciful saints, she isn’t …
morto
?” Mary breathed, immersed in drama as usual. The girl was a character right out of a Shakespearean tragedy.

“
Morta
?” he corrected her Italian conjugation. “No. Sophia is sleeping. She will recover. Please be considerate in the meanwhile. I hear you had an adventure, ladies.”

They all started talking at once, so he herded them into the nearest open room and sat them in seats near a tea tray. Perhaps food would slow their rambling. “I am sorry you were frightened by that bad man. Sorry, but I must know what he said to you.”

After two plates of pastries and three wet handkerchiefs, he assembled the dialog Grover had been sent to deliver from LeRoy, ultimately from Chauncey:
Sooner or later we will get her and cut down anyone in the way.

Elise came to whisper in his ear what she had heard that Mary and Madeline didn’t understand:
Is she kidnapped yet? We want the brat. Give her over or the girls get it with a chiv
. Cockney for asking if Sophia was with child, and threatening his nieces with slit throats.

He swallowed his rage and scoffed for their benefit, “What nonsense. Sounds to me like Fritz took one bite out of his hind end, and the man ran away terrified.” They were all about to burst into tears again before Wilhelm promised, “Philip went to toss the bad man in jail then will come here to look after you.”

He distracted them with an offer to read from the Lewis Carroll novel, and they all curled up on the rug. He read in character, throwing his voice to portray the characters, and Madeline giggled every time he spoke in a fluttery falsetto for Alice’s lines.

He turned over an idea growing in the corner of his mind, liking it the more he considered it. If the mob of bounty hunters were as stupid as he suspected, a classic game of cat-and-mouse might do the trick. Sophia would go for it. He suspected she would gladly play the cheese in the mousetrap. She had to be as frustrated and outraged as he, and they could not afford another attack like the one today. They had come out lucky, and the only thing Wilhelm distrusted more than luck was fate.

• • •

Sophia walked the footpath between St. Agnes and Rosecrest, alone, pretending not to be frightened out of her wits and ignoring the persistent ache low in her abdomen. Wilhelm was supposedly near, stalking along the trail out of sight, but she had neither seen him nor heard the slightest noise from him for at least a mile. Now she noticed every odd sound and wondered what could be making it — a forest was a noisy place.