Swept Away (3 page)

Most of the locals in the nearby town of Brixham were gentle when they referred to Florence Widdicombe as being eccentric. She was well into her seventies, a spinster with a vast personal fortune who, while she could not see the justification of paying an army of servants to upkeep a house that was falling apart around her ears, could also not justify collecting more than a token rent--and that mostly in liquid form--from the dozens of families who worked the rich vineyards and apple orchards attached to the estate. Annaleah’s father regularly sent envoys to his wife’s aging aunt insisting she come live with them in London. Unfailingly those envoys returned alone, their noses red from sampling her wines and ciders, their shins bruised from Florence’s tendency to apply her cane when she wanted someone’s attention.

Annaleah’s limbs felt bruised now as she ran up the stairs to the main floor. She was out of breath, nursing a stitch in her side, and still shedding a good deal of water with each step she took. A hasty glance at a well-wound clock told her it was just past nine as she hastened to the morning room, hoping against hope her aunt would be at breakfast.

This time, collapsing with relief against the oak door jamb, she was not disappointed.

“Auntie Lal....Auntie Lal...”

Florence Widdicombe looked up from the soft boiled egg she was stabbing with a wedge of toast. She was tiny as a wisp and looked as if a strong gust of wind would carry her into the next parish. She wore her fine gray hair in a nest of curls on the crown, usually covered by a delicate lace cap with the lappets trailing over her shoulders. She rarely wore any other color but black, and seldom any other expression than frown that suggested she could not quite remember what she had done five minutes ago.

“Good gracious, Anna dear, you look quite damp. I should have thought it far too early in the day to go wading in the ocean.”

“Auntie Lal...”

“Come, come. Have some hot chocolate, or try the sweet cider. Yes, do try the cider. The Wilbury brothers fetched a new barrel of it over this morning and I must say it is one of their best efforts.”

“Please, I do not want cider or chocolate.” She gasped and caught her breath. “I have found a man.”

Her aunt smiled and waved her piece of toast. “Your mother will be pleased to hear it, dear. I gather she was beginning to fret over your lack of interest in the opposite sex.”

“No. No, I mean...I have found the
body
of a man. Down on the beach. I thought he was dead at first, but he coughed up a great deal of water and now he seems to be breathing.”

The toast remained poised over the egg, a large glob of yellow yolk oozing back into the cup. “Oh dear. Is he one of ours? I do not know how many times I have told young Blisterbottom not to go oystering in the dark. He is barely larger than the bucket he carries, and in truth, I find the creatures he catches to be unpleasantly slimy and salty, reminiscent of....oh well, never mind. Suffice it to say, after all these years, I have never acquired the taste. Young Billy tries so hard to please me, however, I seem plagued to eat them by the plate loads anyway.”

“It is not Billy Bisterbom,” Annaleah said. “It is not anyone I recognized, in fact. But he
is
badly hurt. He has cuts and scrapes and a lump on his head the size of a turnip. He was in the water when I found him, nearly drowned, but I pushed him up into the sand and--hopefully--he lies there still and has not been dragged back down by the surf.”

“And no one has come to claim him? How ever did he get there?”

“I saw no one else on the beach. I think he must have fallen off a ship, for he is...he is missing most of his clothes.”

“Missing his clothing? How very insensible indeed. There are crabs in the cove, you know, and they are not too particular about what they pinch.” Florence finished the mouthful of toast and picked up a little silver bell. The tinkle it emitted sounded far too inadequate to bring forth a mouse, let alone a houseful of half-deaf old servants, but within a few seconds of the echo fading, the door to the breakfast room was pushed open and Mildred the cook waddled through.

She curtsied as best she could with four hundred pounds of excess flesh rolled around her girth, and smiled in Annaleah’s direction. “Mornin’, Miss. Will ye be takin’ yer breakfast now?”

“Mildred,” her aunt said. “It seems my niece has found a naked man on the beach. Probably some scoundrel from town who had one tot too many and fell off the rocks. Will you fetch Broom and send him down at once to determine if we know where the fellow belongs.”

The cook’s cheeks dimpled with another smile. “Naked, ye say?”

“
Hurt
,” Annaleah reiterated with an exasperated glance from the cook to her aunt. “He was nearly drowned when I found him, and could well be dead by now.”

“Yes, well, if he drank so much as to lose his clothing as well as his senses, he hardly deserves a kinder fate. Undoubtedly a prank has been pulled on him and we will discover the culprit hiding nearby. Mildred?”

“Yes m’lady. Right the way, m’lady.”

Another ponderous curtsy took the cook back out the door and it was all Annaleah could do not to follow. For some reason she did not believe the man she had found was a local drunkard, nor did she think, after having stared into those dark, soulless eyes, that anyone would be so foolhardy as to play a mere prank on him.

“You are leaking, dear.”

“Wh-what?”

“Your dress,” her aunt indicated the dark stains on her skirts. “It is making a frightful mess on the floor. If you must drip, at least step to the side and drip on the carpet where it will not be so hazardous to a misplaced footstep.”

Though the logic escaped her, for the carpet was from Persia, Anna did as she was told.

“Good heavens.” Her aunt raised a large, square quizzing glass, training a magnified eyeball on her niece with the intensity of a detective. “You are shivering!”

“I...had to wade into the water in order to drag him free.”

“Indeed.” The glass was laid aside. “While I applaud your charity, your mother will froth at the mouth if I send you home with a red nose and chilblains. Off you go now and change out of those wet things. By the time you are dry and presentable again, Broom will have fetched the rogue up from the beach and we can have a good look at him before we decide what needs to be done.”

CHAPTER 2

As Annaleah hurried up the stairs, she worked the buttons free on her spencer and had the short, fitted jacket removed and flung over an arm before she arrived at her room. She had no great expectations of finding Clarice, her personal maid, inside but she called her name anyway, already half out of the sodden gown as she did so.

The dress was ruined. Torn, full of sand and seawater, it was cast aside. Her undergarments were damp and stained as well; they joined the dress, shoes, and stockings in a crumpled pile in the corner of her dressing room. Naked, Anna quickly rubbed a towel across her feet and between her toes to dry them, then sat on a low velvet chair to don a clean chemise and stockings.

Clad in a sheer layer of silk, she searched through the dozens of dresses she had brought away from London. She had not known how long her banishment was to be and had come prepared to spend weeks if need be, waiting for her father and mother to realize that she was no longer a child, that her mind, once sent upon a course--especially this particular course-- was not likely to be turned about or swayed.

“No,” she had said flatly. “It was no yesterday, and it was no last week. It will be no tomorrow and next week and the week after that.”

“Annaleah Marissa Sophia Widdicombe Fairchilde--” her mother had recited all five names with her eyes closed. “Your father and I are only thinking of what is best for you.”

Percival Fairchilde, Earl of Witham had remained hidden behind a freshly ironed newspaper, the rustling of a corner the only indication he had noted his name.

“Best for me?” Annaleah queried. “In the matter of choosing a husband with whom I am expected to live out the rest of my days, do you not think I am at least partially capable of deciding what is best for me?”

“Not when that decision threatens to make us the laughingstock of London. You have had three proposals of marriage in the past year! One from a viscount, one from a marquis, and now for pity’s sake, an offer from a man who needs only to hear that his invalid uncle has gasped his last breath to be named the next Duke of Chelmsford!”

Annaleah had sighed and closed her eyes briefly, for they’d had this conversation a dozen times...in the last week alone. “The viscount was a drunk and a boor, you said so yourself. The marquis was at least forty years old and reeked of the garlic and onions he chewed constantly in hopes of living forty more.”

“I have no doubt you could have undermined those efforts by at least half, sister dear, with very little trouble taken on your part.”

Anna glared at her sister, Beatrice. She was older by three years, staunchly married with one young child wobbling against her skirts and another well on its way. Her husband Alfred, Lord Billington, was strutting, belching proof that Beatrice had wed for all the right reasons, and her high-pitched, sanctimonious whines of advice warned that she expected no less from her younger sibling.

“I would not marry Lord Barrimore,” Anna said evenly, “ if he was the last bachelor left in England.”

“He may well be,” her brother Anthony drawled from his chair by the fire. “Unless of course you have a yearning to reward one of the sturdy young bucks returning from the war. I should think there will be a few thousand soldiers who have not seen a member of the fairer sex in a year or more who would be willing and eager to forgo garlic and onions in order to win your favor. Whether or not you could survive on an income of ten shillings a month,” he shrugged. “Well, you never were the one to refuse a good challenge, what?”

Anna scowled. “You are hardly one to talk about surviving on a stipend, brother dearest. Ten shillings a
day
barely keeps you in handkerchiefs. A speck of dust on your sleeve and the jacket must be changed. A minute lack of starch in your cravat and all of Bond Street can hear you howling at the incompetence of the laundry. Moreover, you should be the last one standing to Lord Barrimore’s defence. Did you not say, just last week, that the man was an uncivilized barbarian?”

Anthony Fairchilde, viscount Ormont, arched a meticulously shaped eyebrow. “Tch. I said his
bootmaker
was an uncivilized barbarian, unable to apply a shine that lasted from the storefront to the coach.”

“Perhaps we are approaching this the wrong way,
maman
,” Beatrice interjected with a sigh. “Perhaps, instead of pointing out that Winston Perry, marquis of Barrimore is devastatingly handsome, stands on the cusp of inheriting a grand title and estates as old as the kingdom itself, and has every eligible beauty and her mother scheming and falling over themselves to catch his eye...perhaps we should be asking Annaleah where he fails in striving to meet her exactingly high standards?”

With mother and sister united to present a formidable front against her, Annaleah laced her fingers together in her lap. “He makes me uneasy.”

“Uneasy?” Her mother’s staunch resolve gave way to a hint of shrillness. “In what way does he make you uneasy?”

“Well...for one thing, he never laughs. Never. I am beginning to believe him incapable of even smiling with any genuine emotion. He is offensively rude to those he considers to be his inferiors, which includes nearly everyone below the level of the king and regent. He criticises the smallest word, the paltriest gesture, yet does not see a single fault in his own stiff-necked, self righteous demeanor. Why, just the other day he crowded a poor flower girl off the pavement and when she went ankle deep in mud, and spilled all her violets, he just stood there glaring at her as if she deserved to be fed poison on top of her humiliation.”

“And so it should be,” Lady Witham declared. “These costermaids have been
warned
not to block the walkways when gentlemen and ladies are on parade.”

“She was not blocking it, Mother. She was keeping to her own side of the boards. When I offered her five shillings by way of compensation--it was all I had on my person at the time or I should have given her more--the admirable Lord Barrimore looked like he wanted to put me in the mud beside her. I have strong suspicions, were I his wife and chattel, he would have done so without a wink of hesitation.”

“Come now, you judge Barrimore too harshly,” her brother yawned. “I’ve known the man for half a dozen years. He may, at worst, be judged a little dour, but in the clubs and in general company he is regarded to be an out and outer.”

“Why?” Anna asked dryly. “Because he is a four bottle man? Because he can drink all day and carouse all night and still boast enough stamina to tup his favorite mistress before morning?”

“Annaleah!” Her mother’s hand flew to her breast. “Wherever do you hear such things?”

“It is difficult
not
to hear them, Mother. The identity of his current mistress, how long it took him to cuckold her husband and how quickly he is likely to tire of her is one of the more lively topics of conversation during afternoon tea.”

“Do you not think, if he had a wife, it would tame his wandering eye?” Beatrice asked.

“If he had a wife--one he would not hesitate to push in the mud--I rather doubt his habits would change overnight. I shudder to think what a pitiable lump of suet the gossips would make of her.”

“There is simply no reasoning with you today, is there?” Lady Witham bemoaned. “You are determined to spoil my mood for the entire evening. And what are we to do about this?” She held up an engraved card and waved it emphatically in the air. “He has generously applied to send his landau around at eight tonight to escort us to Lady Worthingham’s assembly. His
new
landau, mind you. You know what this means, do you not?”

Anna sighed. “I expect it means he has recently taken delivery of a very large, ridiculously expensive carriage that he wishes to flaunt in public.”