The Least Likely Bride (13 page)

The lad Billy had ventured to the open door and now gazed wide-eyed at the square hall with its oak floor and gleaming brass and pewter. A massive fireplace stood in one wall, the grate filled with a jug of fragrant stocks and marigolds instead of winter logs. A wide staircase
with an elaborately carved banister curved upward at the rear. Billy saw that the newel posts were carved into the shape of lions’ heads. His family’s entire farmhouse could fit into this one apartment, and yet there was no sign that this room, if such it could be called, served any useful domestic purpose. It was just wasted space. What it was to be rich, he thought with some disapproval mingled with envy.

He caught the eagle-eyed stare from the black-clad figure of the man who’d opened the door. Did the man think he was looking for something to steal? Billy put his thumb to his nose and grinned at the man’s thunderstruck expression.

“That’ll do, our Billy!” Mike turned sharply. He hadn’t seen the exchange but he knew his little brother. “We’ll be off now, miss.” He gave Olivia a nod, touched his forelock to Phoebe, and hastened away, sweeping Billy before him.

Phoebe turned to Olivia. For a moment concern took precedence over her desperate need to know what had happened. “You look exhausted,” she said.

“That’s hardly surprising.” Olivia offered a tired smile.

Phoebe spoke briskly to the butler. “Bisset, ask Mistress Bisset to prepare a sack posset and have it brought to Lady Olivia’s bedchamber. And then send someone to find Sergeant Crampton. He will need to know that Lady Olivia is returned safely.”

Bisset contented himself with a bow and turned to the kitchen regions, his step for once a little less measured. He was most anxious to get Mistress Bisset’s impression of this extraordinary business. Lady Olivia had looked like a scarecrow, half dressed it had seemed to the scandalized butler. And yet apart from looking rather heavy eyed, she showed no obvious ill effects from whatever had happened to her.

As Bisset departed, Phoebe took Olivia’s hand and almost dragged her abovestairs.

In Olivia’s bedchamber she closed the door and stood with her back to it, regarding her friend gravely. “Now, for God’s sake, Olivia, tell me what happened!”

Olivia sat on the bed and looked with a degree of surprise at her bare legs and stockingless feet. She’d forgotten in the flurry of return to this ordinary environment how disreputable she must look. “I was hurt. I fell off the c-cliff and for some time I didn’t know who I was. I hurt my head.” She touched the back of her head where there was still a residual tenderness. “Mike’s father found me and took me to his farm, and his wife nursed me until I remembered who I was … am.”

“Why don’t I believe you?” Phoebe demanded.

Olivia sighed. “Because it’s not all true.” She met her friend’s somewhat outraged gaze with an almost apologetic smile.

“I was trying it out on you,” Olivia continued. “It has to satisfy my father and Giles. You need to help me perfect the details.”

“
Were
you hurt?” First things first, Phoebe thought.

“Yes, that’s all true about falling off the cliff and losing consciousness and being ill. Except that I always knew who I was, just not what was happening. It was the drink … it made me c-confused …”

“Drink? A drug? Someone drugged you?” Horrified, Phoebe pressed her hands to her mouth.

“It was purely medicinal,” Olivia said slowly. “It made me very confused, though, and most of the time I didn’t know whether I was asleep or awake. But once he decided I didn’t need it anymore, he stopped giving it to me.”

“He? Who?”
Phoebe flung her hands in the air in utter frustration. “Olivia, would you
please
start from the
beginning before I go crazy.” She pushed herself away from the door and came over to the bed. She stood looking down at Olivia and felt a stab of fear, as strong as any she had felt during the dreadful days of Olivia’s disappearance. There was something badly wrong. It was as if the Olivia she knew had returned only in body. The spirit, the person, had been changed in some as yet indefinable way.

“What happened to you?”
It was an anguished whisper.

Olivia looked up. “I’m not entirely sure myself. I feel like a changeling.”

“You seem like one,” Phoebe returned. “And you aren’t answering me.”

“Do you believe in enchantment, Phoebe?”

“No, I believe in medicines and physic, birth and death, sunrise and sunset,” Phoebe said bluntly. “There’s no room there for enchantment, superstition … don’t you remember what happened to Meg?”

Meg, the healer, their friend from the years they had spent in Oxford, had been taken up for a witch after the death of a child she had physicked. The memory of that dreadful day was indelible for both Olivia and Phoebe.

“I’m not talking about witchcraft,” Olivia said. “But you do believe in … in passion, in … in … attraction, the mystery of attraction?”

Phoebe did not immediately reply. She sat on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. How could she not believe in those things? She herself had been conquered by love and lust, that devastating, unpredictable, mortifying pair. Against all reason, all logic, totally out of the blue, she had fallen in love and lust one winter morning with the marquis of Granville. And her life had been governed by them ever since.

“You met someone?” she asked, resigned now to hearing this story in a roundabout fashion. “Someone
who attracted you … someone who… ? Oh, Olivia, for pity’s sake, what are we talking about here? Just get to the point.”

“I’m trying,” Olivia said. For some reason she was finding it difficult to talk directly about Anthony. She had the feeling that anything she said would come out wrong, would either not do him justice or would make her seem like a passion-crazed loon. She wasn’t at all sure why she needed to do him justice, but … but it seemed that she did.

“I don’t know his surname. He wouldn’t give it to me.”

“Why not?” Phoebe asked sharply.

“Because he … well, he doesn’t live within the law,” Olivia replied. Then she shook her head dismissively. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll never see him again.”

“It most certainly
does
matter!” Phoebe exclaimed. “You haven’t told me anything that makes sense yet.”

Of the three of them—herself, Portia, and Olivia— Olivia had always seemed the one least likely to succumb to the sensual temptations of the human condition. Those temptations had felled Olivia’s two friends while Olivia herself had found all she sought in scholarship.

Until now, it would seem, Phoebe thought—always assuming she was somehow grasping the right end of the stick.

Olivia kicked off her sandals and flexed her bare feet. She couldn’t blame Phoebe for being irritable. She wasn’t making much sense to herself. The reason why she would never see Anthony again had nothing whatsoever to do with his illegal activities. But maybe that was the issue she could focus on to explain things to Phoebe.

“Rufus was an outlaw when he and Portia first met,” Phoebe pointed out. “That didn’t stop either of them.”

It was true that Rufus Decatur, Earl of Rothbury, hadn’t always been a pillar of respectability.

“Portia wasn’t my father’s daughter,” Olivia said quietly. Portia and her wastrel father had always lived outside the rigid confines of society. It wasn’t until his death that she had come under Lord Granville’s protection.

Phoebe took Olivia’s point but she brushed it aside, demanding, “Tell me the whole,
now
!”

Olivia told her everything, except what Brian had done to her … of what she had allowed him to do to her. That was a private shame, one never to be revealed.

“And so, after he’d finished his piracy, he sailed the ship back to its anchorage and had me brought home,” she ended with a little shrug.

Phoebe listened in frowning astonishment. Olivia had always been so vociferous, so certain that she would never yield to the wiles of man. And yet she’d fallen into this passion seemingly without a murmur of protest.

“Maybe the drugs affected you,” Phoebe suggested. “It can happen with some of the more powerful simples. Do you know what he gave you?”

Olivia shook her head. She found that she didn’t care for Phoebe’s explanation for her entrancement. It negated so much of what she had actually felt, and perversely she didn’t want that to happen. Even while she was trying to forget it, while she shrank in revulsion from what it had thrown in her face, she seemed still to want to keep some of the golden aura of that adventure.

There was a knock at the door, and Mistress Bisset entered with the posset. She set it on the table and regarded Olivia gravely. “Should we send for the physician, Lady Granville? Lady Olivia looks right peaky.”

“No, she had a bad bump on the head, but I can take care of it myself, thank you,” Phoebe replied.

The housekeeper hesitated, but Lady Granville’s skills as a herbalist were well known. Her ladyship might not be
adept at the running of a household, but no one denied her other talents.

“Very well, m’lady.”

“That will be all, then, Mistress Bisset,” Phoebe prompted when the lady still remained, her curiosity evident.

“Yes, madam.” The housekeeper curtsied and left.

Olivia couldn’t help a half smile. “A year ago you could never have routed Mistress Bisset like that. She never took any notice of you.”

“No,” Phoebe agreed, momentarily distracted from Olivia’s situation. “And she calls me Lady Granville now instead of just Lady Phoebe. I think I’ve acquired a deal of gravitas since the boys were born.”

That made Olivia laugh, for a moment banishing her melancholy. But it was a short moment. Then she said seriously, “My father mustn’t know anything of this, Phoebe.”

“Good God, no!” Phoebe exclaimed. “It wouldn’t do him any good at all!” She eyed Olivia seriously. “Do you want to see this man again?”

“No!” Olivia shook her head vigorously. “It was … it was almost a fantasy, a dream. It’s over, Phoebe, and I don’t want to think about it anymore. The most important thing now is to manage to keep it from my father.”

Phoebe hesitated. Something about the denial didn’t quite ring true. But Olivia was exhausted and mustn’t be pressed further. Phoebe handed her the sack posset. “You need to sleep, Olivia. We’ll talk more in the morning.”

“Yes.” Olivia returned Phoebe’s hug with sudden urgency. She wanted everything to be the way it used to be, and for a moment as they embraced she could almost imagine that it could be.

Phoebe went out and Olivia sat on the bed, sipping the sack posset. It was nursery comfort. She set the empty cup
down and stood up to undress herself. As she took off the ruined dress she felt the bulge in the pocket. She took out the pirate’s kerchief and almost without thinking pushed it beneath her pillow, then she fell into bed and sought oblivion.

G
ODFREY,
L
ORD
C
HANNING,
entered the taproom of the Anchor in the little village of Niton, just above Puck-aster Cove. He peered through the blue wreaths of pipe smoke at the taproom’s inhabitants and could see only locals nursing tankards, puffing pipes, for the most part in a silence that could have been morose, except that the island folk were not in general gregarious and spoke only when they had something they considered worth saying. This Friday evening it appeared that no one had anything of moment to impart.

Godfrey approached the bar counter. He leaned back against it on his elbows with the appearance of a man taking his ease and surveyed the room again. Was one of these taciturn villagers the man who would buy his culling? They all looked unlikely, not a man among them with the wherewithal to be a customer for Godfrey’s ill-gotten gains.

“Yes, sir?” The landlord spoke behind him and Godfrey jumped. He turned to front the bar counter.

George regarded him with a malicious eye. “What can I get ye, sir?”

“Who’s the man I’ve come to see?”

“Don’t know as yet,” the landlord said. “What can I get ye?”

“Porter.” Seemingly he had no choice but to play the man’s game.

The landlord reached for the leather flagon and filled a tankard. “Threepence.”

“Since when?” Godfrey demanded. “It’s always a penny three farthings.”

“Price ’as gone up, sir. Supplies is short,” the landlord said meaningfully.

“You don’t order porter from me,” Godfrey snapped.

The landlord shrugged indifferently. “Supplies is powerful short when it comes to cognac.”

With difficulty Godfrey controlled a surge of rage. The man’s insolence was intolerable and yet Godfrey knew he had no suitable comeback. “I’m waiting for the ship,” he said, burying his nose in his tankard.

“A bit overdue, is it, then?”

“You know damn well it is!” His knuckles whitened around the tankard. The man knew he was desperate, knew he could needle him all he wanted. But Godfrey could see a way out now, a permanent solution to his financial needs. And then, oh, and then the landlord of the Anchor and his ilk would watch their manners.

“Then per’aps I should be lookin’ to place me orders elsewhere, sir,” the landlord said. “But I’d need me earnest money back, o’ course.”

Godfrey ignored this. Deliberately he turned away again and resumed his examination of the taproom’s inhabitants. He was damned if he was going to ask for George’s help again.

“The one ye wants is sittin’ in the corner, by the ingle-nook.” George finally spoke into the studied silence. “Been waitin’ fer ye close on an hour, I’d say.”

Godfrey shrugged with apparent indifference. He knew he’d have to pay for the information; George would have his price. But if tonight’s business went well, the price would be easy to find. He looked closely at the man George had indicated and was immediately disappointed. A villainous-looking customer in the rough garb of a
fisherman with a lank, greasy mustache and a raddled countenance.

“Over there?” he demanded incredulously, finally stung into a response. The man didn’t look as if he had the price of his drink.

“Aye.”

“What’s his name? I’ll pay for his name.”

“ ’Tis not one he gives to all who asks,” the landlord replied.