The Devil Is a Marquess (Rescued from Ruin Book 4) (9 page)

He wondered idly if he was experiencing visions again. “If by ‘we’ you mean you and the untold number of rats that doubtless inhabit this wreckage, I wish you well.”

Dropping the baluster on the floor before dusting her hands together, she pursed her lips. “Rats? I do hope not. Rodents give me the shivers. No, I meant you and I and Esther and—”

“You and I haven’t so much as two quid between us.” His headache was growing worse by the second.

She waved a dismissal. “A thorough cleaning costs only time and effort.”

“One cannot
clean
broken plaster or a damaged roof into good repair.” He rubbed vainly at the bones above his eyes. “Why must I explain these things?”

“Chatham, go and find a bed.” She had that frowning concern on her face again. It was bloody annoying.

He wanted to kiss her until the concern disappeared. Then reach his hand beneath her skirts and demonstrate how misplaced was her pity. “Perhaps we should find a bed together, love.”

“Would you kindly cease your nonsense? Just … go lie down. We can discuss the house when you are feeling better.” And, with that final dismissal, she turned her back and left the entrance hall through a cased opening that had once held double doors.

Good God, she was aggravating. Like sand beneath his eyelids. Like thorns inside his boots. The brisk manner. The blunt speech. The mothering tone. Everything about her chafed until he wanted to grind his teeth. Or grab her by the shoulders. Or dig his fingers into those hips.

He eyed the stairs then rotated to peer out at the large circular drive. Hard, cracked dirt was dotted with weeds. At the center of the circle, a rat’s nest of neglected shrubbery plumed out of a dilapidated brick planter. Half of it was dead, the other half overgrown. The design had been his mother’s idea, back when she’d still believed her husband wanted her here.

Catherine had planned it as a surprise, he recalled.

“I want the shrubs to cascade like water,” she said as Benedict watched her from the nursery window. He had it open despite his governess’s commands because the third floor grew stifling in the summer. Resting his hands on the sill, he watched her, his beautiful mother. She wore her favorite color—pink—pointing and gesturing gracefully. She did all things gracefully.

To him, she was much like the mythical goddesses he’d read about, exotic and remote. She never touched him, of course. Never spoke to him unless his father was involved.

Cradling his wooden horse in his hand, he leaned over the sill, using his elbows to push for a better view of the workmen. She followed their movements, too, her gaze lingering oddly here and there upon their backs and shoulders.

He edged farther as one of the workmen—a strapping fellow with one long arm looped over a stack of wood on his shoulder—moved too close to the house for Benedict to see what he was doing. Suddenly, his hand was empty, and he watched his horse fall three stories to the dusty ground.

Gasping, he rushed downstairs, giving not a moment’s thought to his governess’s warning to remain inside the nursery. He’d carved the horse himself. He’d found the wood last spring near the river. He’d taken it home and used a knife he’d discovered in his father’s library to gouge and scrape and shape until the horse had become real. So, rather than obey his governess, he ran pell-mell over the limestone floors of the entrance hall, his shoes slipping on the polished stone. Then he sidled unnoticed out the half-open door.

From the ground, the workmen had looked enormous. His father was tall, too. His governess often said he would likely be tall because his father was. He wasn’t certain he believed her.

He spotted the horse lying in the dirt where the gravel had been scraped away and rushed to retrieve it. That’s when he heard it. The clop-clop-clop of real horses. He turned and saw his father, sitting tall and stern atop his mount, coming to a stop before Mother.

“Rutherford,” she breathed up at him. “You’ve returned early. What do you think?” She gestured gracefully. Everything she did was graceful. Everything.

His father did not smile. He did not even glance at the changes to the drive. Instead, he stared down at her for long minutes, his face like the stones of Chatwick Hall. “Who gave you leave to do any of this, Catherine?” Rutherford asked.

She placed her hand—one not much bigger than Benedict’s—upon his father’s leg. “I thought you would be pleased.”

His father tossed her arm away like a snake. “You have no bloody right,” he snapped. Then, he leaned down, drawing closer to her face, cupping her chin in his hand. “This is not your house.”

His mother recoiled as though he’d struck her. Without another word, his father rode through on his way to the stables, passing the place where Benedict stood. His turquoise eyes met Ben’s, but there was little recognition, as though Benedict were a ghost. Then, Rutherford disappeared past the corner of the east wing. Not even the echo of the horse’s hooves remained. And Mother disappeared inside one of the bedchambers with one of the workmen for several hours, the strapping one who had carried the stack of wood, he thought.

Several months later, Benedict had watched out of the rear window of a travel coach as Chatwick Hall had disappeared from view. Neither he nor his mother had been back since.

The memory was not a pleasant one, particularly now that he was older and better understood the nuances of his parents’ marriage.

Aching in every bone, exhausted and enervated at once, Chatham picked his way across the hall and tested the first few steps of the staircase. Although the treads were weak and spongy, they bore his weight with only a creak or two. As he reached the second story, he saw the wood-plank floors had fared no better than the limestone. The plaster was intact along the corridor walls, but it was stained by water and whatever else had infested this place over the past five years.

He kicked two balusters from his path and went in search of a room to sleep away his misery. What he discovered made him curse beneath his breath. Every bed, along with every piece of furniture, had either been sold or looted. Every bed except one―the massive, carved, canopied monstrosity in the master chamber, likely because it was too bloody heavy to haul away. He stood gazing at it, swaying on his feet as he contemplated the discomforts of sleeping in a carriage instead.

The dark-walnut posts were intricate with seafaring imagery―ocean waves, mermaids, kelp leaves. It was fanciful and ridiculous. Dual fireplaces flanking the long room were similar in design, only they were white marble, now chipped and stained. Three long windows along the west wall were stripped of their draperies, which had originally matched those on the bed―heavy, brocade velvet that currently hung in gray tatters from the canopy frame. He thought the fabric must have once been dark blue, but his recollections were hazy. He had not spent much time in this room as a child. It had been first his parents’ domain, and then his father’s chamber alone. What few memories he had were ugly and better left untouched.

“Please,” his mother begged, falling to her knees beside Benedict, hugging him against her body, pressing her cheek to his. The warmth was shocking to him, the feel of her arms around him. Her softness.

He froze. Mother never held him. Now, she was stroking his hair, sending sensations pinging along his scalp. Sometimes, his governess would ruffle his hair or pat his shoulder, but no one touched him, really. Especially not Mother.

She gazed up at his father, her eyes sheened with tears. “For the sake of our son, Rutherford, please. Do not do this.”

“You may take the chamber in the east wing,” Rutherford said. Cold shivers ran down Benedict’s back.

Mother sobbed, tears spilling onto soft, white cheeks. “It means nothing, I swear it. If you only loved me, I would not need to seek comfort elsewhere. You have never loved me. You do not even love your own child.”

Benedict watched his father’s long legs stride closer. “Release the boy, Catherine.”

She smelled like flowers. The purple ones in the kitchen garden, powdery and cool. She squeezed him tighter, making it hard to breathe. “I gave you your son, Rutherford. I did. Not her. She gave you nothing. Left you with nothing but this bed and your pain. And still, you deny me the slightest scrap of your affection.”

Rutherford laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “Yes, you gave me a son. Your duty is complete, as is mine. Now, obtain your affection wherever you prefer. The gardener. The stable boy. The footman. You have spent your last night in my bed. The east wing, Lady Rutherford. I shall see you at breakfast.”

His father left the room, the light gleaming on the polish of his boots. Mother’s arms fell slack against Benedict as she sobbed. She covered her face with both hands. A pain in Benedict’s heart and throat made him want to touch her. He reached for her hair, curled and soft and glowing nearly white. He stroked it, as his nursemaid had done when he was four. He’d liked that nursemaid very much. Rose, her name was.

Mother quieted and looked at him with wet, reddened eyes. Then, with two fingers, she pushed his hand away, got to her feet, and brushed her wide skirts. “Go find your governess.”

He stood for long seconds, gazing up at his beautiful mother, hoping she would take him in her arms again. They had been so warm.

“Go!” she snapped, wiping at her cheek and waggling her fingers in a shooing motion. “I have no need of such a useless boy.”

This was why he hadn’t wanted to return to Chatwick Hall. Too many miseries had soaked the walls, and now the vapors of their long-forgotten scent were being released.

With one shaking hand, he rubbed his eyes, banishing the memory. His father was dead, and he’d left his mother doing God-knew-what in London. That was where they should remain.

What he needed was sleep. He sighed then tested the two-layered mattress, which was covered in a large canvas sheet bearing a deep layer of dust.
Promising,
he thought, before peeling the canvas back and dragging it until it dropped with a
whoof
onto the floor. Blue indeed, the coverlet was still rich and undamaged. If rodents did not inhabit the innards of the mattress, he thought the musty smell might prove the worst of it. He grabbed one corner of the topmost featherbed and shook. As he did not hear a squeak, nor see insects scrambling, he decided to chance it. He needed sleep, by God. The light in the room was beginning to dance and waver.

As he lay down upon his father’s old bed and let the burning ache in his skin and muscles settle, the dank smell of mildew and dust assaulted his nose. But fatigue invaded with swift force, slamming into him so suddenly, he had no will to resist. The piercing light did not matter. The moldy smell did not matter. His trembling misery did not matter. Nothing mattered except sweet, dark oblivion and the tiny thread of satisfaction when he pictured Charlotte’s dismay.

The only bed in the house.

For the first time in weeks, Chatham fell asleep with a smile.

*~*~*

As the sun sank below the western horizon, Charlotte squinted through the windows of the drawing room and watched dust particles dance in the golden beams. She ached everywhere―her lower back, her shoulders, her arms and legs and hands―and it was splendid. After five days of confinement inside a coach, the residual pains of work and movement and progress delighted her industrious soul.

“Esther, we have done well this day. I can already see the gem this place will become.”

“Hmmph,” the maid replied.
Clunk
went her bucket onto the floor.
Plop
went her rag into the bucket. “Then ye have a different set of eyes, to be sure.”

Charlotte grinned and nodded, admiring the fleur-de-lis design of the carved marble around the expansive fireplace. True, it was blackened by smoke. And the massive space was empty of furniture. And two panes of the southernmost window were broken. But the color of the walls―deep, vibrant crimson―needed only a good dusting to be revived. She glanced up to the once-white ceiling, whose intricate moldings cast long, swirling shadows in the waning light.

“It is a magnificent room,” she sighed, rubbing the back of her wrist across her forehead. “A unique house, indeed.”

Esther harrumphed again and declared, “Light’s nigh gone. Best find our beds now if we’re to find ’em a’tall.”

“Indeed. Thank you for your tireless work today, Esther.”

The maid said nothing further, simply picking up her bucket and stomping out toward the kitchen. Charlotte glanced down at her pelisse. It was probably ruined, but she did not care. What was a little dust, after all?

Still smiling, she followed Esther down a set of stone steps to the lower-level kitchen. Of all the rooms that she and the maid had cleaned in the hours since their arrival at Chatwick Hall, the kitchen was the most distressing. Nothing was left. The crockery had all been stolen or shattered. The work table lay in two pieces, cracked down the center. Useless. However, the hearth was sound, and so they had gathered enough scraps of wood from the debris in the entrance hall and drawing room, and had built a fire so they could heat water. A small triumph, yes, but a triumph nonetheless.

Quickly, she ladled water from the steaming pot over the fire into a bucket fresh from the well. She then took a clean towel from the crates of supplies Mr. Booth had earlier purchased in the village, stacked in one corner of the larder.