The Harlot Bride (12 page)

“This is Lucy,” his master replied, not bothering to answer the real question in the man’s query.

“She’s a fine lookin’ girl.” The older man looked at her again, a new curiosity in his gaze. “But isn’t she sittin’ all a geegaw? Is there something wanting in her saddle? T’is dangerous to ride with a saddle wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the saddle, Simon, but I thank you for your concern. If she’s sitting strangely it’s because I gave her a very sound spanking this morning.”

Lucy couldn’t believe her ears! Simon’s face broke out into a grin, and he moved a little closer so he could peer up at her.

“Aye, now I see it. You’re all red–rimmed around the eyes. Had a good cry over his lordship’s knee, did ya, missy?” He turned back to look at Lord Tazewell. “I hope, sir, the job was done in proper Chiltenham style?”

“Of course, “Lord Tazewell said with a smile. And to Lucy’s eternal mortification, he shamed her in front of a man who was a complete stranger to her by speaking aloud about her punishment. “Lucy’s bare bottom was soundly spanked, and before I let her up, she was well nettled and buttoned. And when she finished her silly howling, she went nose–first into the corner with her naughty red bottom on full display.”

So unbearable was her shame that Lucy had to close her eyes.

Chapter 8

Lucy swooned in shock, and had to grab the saddle horn to keep herself from falling off the horse. Here she was, listening to two men discuss her punishment in lurid detail, without the slightest regard for her feelings! She was still too new to the area to know that the men of Chiltenham often discussed the discipline of their females in this easy, open manner.

“Well, ‘tis a fine thing to see a girl whose just learned a good lesson,” the older of the two commented gleefully, all but leering up at Lucy as she blushed and tried desperately not to cry. “Stinging salve up her naughty bottom hole, too! Why, I wish the Old Lord was still alive to see you, sir! Yur father’d be right proud of you, Milord!”

Lord Tazewell laughed pleasantly. “I finished her off with a bit of the birch, so she’d have some fresh stripes to feel as she rode with me on my morning rounds.”

The old man swung back to smile at Lucy. Her face had gone bright red, and she could barely hear for the pounding of her heart. She suddenly had an image, that came to her with a terrible jolt, that the horrid old man would at any second ask to see her welts, and she had not the slightest doubt that Lord Tazewell would order down off her horse and over his knee so he might pull up her skirts and oblige!

So very much without thinking, in her old habit of rash and impulsive action, Lucy kicked her horse hard while pulling its head around to one side, and with a violent start horse and girl were suddenly cantering away from the men and toward the woods at the western edge of the estate. She hadn’t meant to take Lord Tazewell’s horse, but he had thrown her the reins, and the startled grey stallion ran with them for several hundred yards until the reins slipped free and it heard the shouts of its master from behind. Lucy looked back, and saw the two men running to catch the horse as it slowed and turned.

An expert horsewoman from years of riding in India, Lucy correctly calculated she had would have no more than a two-minute lead by the time Lord Tazewell caught the horse and mounted, and she intended to make full use of it. She had no idea where she was heading, but she was determined to get as far away as possible from her husband and his horrid punishments.

Lucy Farquhar may have been good on a horse, but she on her mare was no match for Lord Tazewell on his far more powerful mount. By the time she was charging up the second rise he was very close behind. He would have caught her easily in the next minute had it not been for the unexpected sight that met their eyes as they came over the top of the hill.

As each rider flew over the rise, first Lucy and Lord Tazewell just half a minute later, they caught sight of angry billows of black smoke rising from a large wooden shed in the valley below. In between the columns of smoke one could spy licks of hot yellow flame. Men were running around the building in a frenzy of activity, everyone shouting and calling for buckets and bags.

Lucy wasn’t sure what the building was, but thought it was probably for storage of winter fodder. She knew enough about agriculture to know that it was critical to save that shed and its contents if the tenants were to have any chance of getting their animals through the long winter. She slowed her horse, her breath coming hard and fast from the exertion of the ride, and looked back at Lord Tazewell just as he caught sight of the fire. He was sitting forward hard in his saddle, trying to make out what was happening, his brow furrowed with concentration. Then suddenly he looked over to her, and their eyes met.

Lucy held her breath. It was obvious he was weighing his options, making unseen calculations at lightening speed. Whereas just a moment before Lucy had been hell bent on escape, seeing him there now before her, so manly and proud upon his horse, she half wanted him to choose her, at whatever cost, even though it would surely mean great suffering for the tenants to lose their fodder. And of course another spanking for her for running away. But in her heart she knew he would put duty first, and he did.

Edward Tazewell, Earl of Chiltenham, gave Lucy a hard look, and seemed about to call out something to her, but then he kicked his horse and sped away from her and down the hill. Lucy watched him go, furious at him for choosing the tenants over her but also exhilarated at this second chance at freedom. With an angry kick of her heels she spurred her horse down the hill in the opposite direction. She had seen a road leading into the woods, and she hoped it would take her far, far away from this hateful man and his hateful estate.

** ** **

Lucy did not receive the reception she expected in London. It was late evening by the time she turned wearily onto Pickford Street. She knew she was a sight from the way people stared at her, or crossed the street to avoid her, but she’d been traveling all day in the rudest of conditions and there was little she could do to mend her looks.

That morning, when Lord Tazewell had desisted in his chase of her to attend to the more urgent matter of the fire, Lucy had traveled through the wood and into the fields beyond, riding at breakneck speed for the better part of an hour until both she and the horse were exhausted. She stopped at a stream so the panting horse could drink, but was afraid to get down lest she be unable to get back into the saddle unaided. While the horse lapped thirstily from the stream, she felt in the pockets of her skirt and was astounded to find a one–pound note, folded and pinned and forgotten long ago. Surely this would be enough to get her back to London!

Greatly encouraged by this stroke of luck, Lucy urged the horse on again. Doing her best to avoid the houses and cottages, where people might recognize her horse as belonging to Gorham Hall, she pressed on until she reached a crossroads where two young boys were playing. She hailed them and inquired about the nearest railway station, which turned out to be in the next town, just two miles down the road to the left.

She dismounted before she got to the station, not wishing to arouse more suspicions that necessary, although the few witnesses looked askance at the spectacle of a lady trying to dismount from a horse on her own. She tied the mare’s reins to a post, and hurried away, careful not to look around lest someone try to stop her and question her.

Things didn’t go any easier at the station. The station master was naturally suspicious of a young woman traveling without baggage or escort, and refused to sell her a ticket. “Come back with your father or husband, and then we’ll see about that ticket,” he said, waving to the next customer in line. But Lucy stubbornly kept her place, babbling out some tale about a coach that broke down, although it was quite obvious he didn’t believe a word she was saying.

Just then, there came the sounds of a train approaching and people making ready on the platform, and the customers behind her were making nervous noises about getting their tickets in time to board. Realizing that desperate measures were required, Lucy indelicately made reference to needing to get to a sister in London “nearing her time.” The station master went quite white, and terrified that this untidy female was about to launch into lurid descriptions of childbirth in his station, he grabbed the note she had been waving and threw at her a third–class ticket and a few coins of change. Lucy ran from the window and down the platform just as the train started to board.

Lucy had never ridden in such a poor compartment, which was crowded with soot–coated miners, who eyed her rudely, and downtrodden women with sick and crying babies. It was hot and airless inside the crowded car, and nearly nine hours to London. Afraid to lose the half–seat she had claimed, Lucy was unable to get any food or drink except during one stop at midday when she had traded through the window a few coins for a bun and drink of stale water from a dirty tin ladle.

Now she was finally in London, but she hadn’t had enough money for a hansom cab, and she probably couldn’t have convinced one to take her in her disheveled state. So she had been forced to walk all the way from Victoria Station.

Lucy took stock of herself as she limped up the steps of her great-uncle’s home. Her face and hands were dirty. Her hair was beyond untidy. Her skirts were ripped and soiled, she had no hat or handbag and she’d lost part of the heel of one boot.

It was no wonder the maid looked so shocked when she opened the door.

“Oh! Miss Lucy! Is that truly you?” she cried with a start. Turning back into the house, the maid called out, “Mrs. Graham! Mrs. Graham! Come quick. It’s Miss Lucy and something terrible musta happened!”

Lucy was given hot tea with sugar, and then a bath and a simple meal, and put right to bed with caring and kindness. But the next morning, her uncle was firm. Lucy must return to Gorham Hall. He had already sent a message to Lord Tazewell informing him of Lucy whereabouts, and stating most clearly that he had no intention to shelter her from her husband.

“You have neither fortune nor family to fall back on,” her uncle said for the tenth time. “We’re too old to keep you, Lucy girl. You had no prospects before this marriage, and you will certainly find none now, not now that you’ve…”

The old man went red in the face, unable to continue. But Lucy knew what he was intimating. He meant that no man would have a woman with a reputation, particularly now that it was obvious, by the fact of her marriage, that she’d lain in another man’s bed.

Lucy hung her head, defeated. She had tried but been unable to tell her aunt and uncle the truth. It shamed her that she was a month married and still untouched. She had even been unable to speak to them even of the spankings, or the public humiliations she’d suffered, let alone the unmentionable things that had been done to her most intimate of intimate parts. No, it was quite impossible for Lucy to utter any of this to anyone.

In any case, the truth didn’t matter. No one would believe it possible that she had spent a month with that man yet remained a virgin. And what would they think of her if they knew? They would naturally conclude that there must be something terribly wrong with her. The last bit of fight drained out of Lucy, and she nodded dejectedly to her uncle, for once accepting and conceding that he knew best. Then she went to her room to wait.

** ** **

It was mid afternoon the next day when Lord Tazewell arrived to fetch Lucy back. When he alighted from his carriage, he had in his right hand a fresh rod made that morning of a dozen whippy branches of green birch. He carried it in plain sight, as clear a statement as any that this was a man who would brook no nonsense from any female, and least of all from his own wife. The neighbors were thus treated to the odd spectacle of an impeccably dressed earl marching up the steps of a London house with an implement of discipline in his hand.

Among them was a Mrs. Arbinger, the widow who lived at Number 19. As the next–door neighbor to the Grahams, Mrs. Arbinger was unusually well informed about Lucy’s scandalous past behavior, and had been one of the leading purveyors of gossip concerning the escapade that had ruined her. Naturally Mrs. Arbinger had been as affronted and displeased as the rest of London when the unworthy little strumpet had, against all reason, managed to marry exceedingly well. And with her habit of spying at the upstairs window, Mrs. Arbinger had been the very first to know when Lucy suddenly reappeared on her uncle’s doorstep, completely disheveled and without a chaperone of any of kind!

Now, seeing the earl on the same doorstep with a birch rod in his hand, Mrs. Arbinger turned triumphantly from the window.

“He’s here for her, Mabel!” she crowed to her sister. “And it appears the impudent little runaway is to be well birched before he even gets her home!” Her sister hurried to the window just in time to catch sight of the earl at the top of the steps, rapping on the door. Later, she and her sister would spread the titillating details of all they had seen and heard that afternoon, going so far as to imitate the desperate cries of the deserving young lady as her husband delivered a good long lesson across her backside.

Lucy, too, had witnessed Lord Tazewell’s arrival, having positioned herself at her bedroom window to watch for his carriage. Although Lucy’s aunt had fussed that perhaps he wasn’t coming, not after what Lucy had done, Lucy knew that Edward Tazewell was not a man who would allow his bride to run away from him. Of course he would come for her. And of course he would exact retribution for her attempt to escape.

But even so, the sight of the birching rod in his hand came as a shock to poor Lucy.

Yet never in her most fevered imaginings had she considered that he might discipline her in her uncle’s home. She couldn’t bear the thought of others learning how this man humbled her. She clung to the curtain, distraught and frightened, quite unable to face the thought of the humiliation, not to speak of the nearly unbearable pain she knew, from the taste of birch she had received the other day, it was possible to inflict with that cruel rod. And so she remained at the window, sick and trembling, as the door downstairs was opened to admit for the second time Lord Tazewell, the Earl of Chiltenham.