The Ravencliff Bride (10 page)

There was no use spending her energy and her lungs before daybreak. No one was abroad to hear her. All she could do was wait, and hope that the sounds of servants moving around above would tell her that dawn had broken, before she called out for help again. It couldn’t be long, and she took one last look around, and snuffed out the candle.

Nicholas ate his breakfast alone in the morning. Sara didn’t appear, and she hadn’t sent her apologies. He was on his way up to her suite when Nell met him coming down from the second-floor landing.

“Oh, sir, I was just comin’ after ya,” she whined. “Somethin’s happened ta the mistress. I just know it!”

“Calm yourself, Nell,” he responded. “What do you mean, something’s happened to her?”

“She’s gone, sir. Her bed ain’t been slept in, and her shoes are on the floor up there. Where could she have gone off to barefooted in the dead o’ night?”

“Show me,” he said, bounding up the stairs ahead.

“That mangy old dog was in there, too,” the abigail said, hurrying after him. “She must’a give him somethin’ ta eat from her dinner tray. The empty serviette was on the floor, all streaked with grease, it was.”

Nicholas loosed a string of expletives under his breath, and burst into the tapestry suite, his breast heaving with rage. Rage was dangerous.
Anything
was dangerous here now, considering, and he took deep, slow breaths as he entered the bedchamber.

“When did you see her last, Nell?” he demanded.

“When I brought up her tray,” said the abigail. “I made up the fire, and drew the drapes while she was eatin’, then she said she didn’t want ta be disturbed—that she’d ready herself for bed, so I left her ta her business.”

“That would have been approximately what time?” he persisted.

“I dunno, seven . . . eight—about the time you sat down in the dinin’ hall.”

Nicholas snatched up Sara’s shoes from the floor, and examined them, his brow knit in a frown.

“That’s what’s got me worried, too,” Nell said. “She couldn’t have gotten far without them slippers. She’s got ta be somewhere in the house, but where? We’ve searched it top ta bottom, sir.”

“All right, Nell,” said Nicholas. “I want you to remain here in these rooms until I tell you otherwise . . . in case her ladyship returns. In that event, come and fetch me at once.” He exhibited the slippers. “I’ll take these,” he said, “in case I find her.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, straightening the rumpled bedding. “See here?” she said, brushing short black hairs tipped with silver off the tufted surface. “That dog was in here just like I said—right on her bed, he was.” She clicked her tongue. “He’s soiled the counterpane with grease here, too.”

“Yes, well, I shall take Nero to task,” Nicholas replied. “But for now leave the foyer door open. If the animal returns . . . follow him. If he was here last night, as you say, he might know where my lady has got to.”

“Yes, sir,” said Nell, “but, beggin’ your pardon, sir, Nero . . . he ain’t the kind o’ dog for a fine house like this, all scruffy and wild-lookin’ like he is—all skin and bones. He looks half-starved. That ain’t our fault, neither. Half the time, he don’t even eat what we set out for him. He’s scary, he is, always sneakin’ around in the shadows. I know it ain’t my place ta say it, but it’s not just me speakin’—it’s what all o’ us are sayin’ below stairs. Ya ought ta get rid o’ that animal.”

“Yes, well, that is the plan, Nell,” said Nicholas. “Hopefully, you shan’t have to worry about Nero much longer . . . but for now let us see if we can’t make him earn his keep, hmm?”

Try as she would, Sara couldn’t hear any sounds coming from above. It was so hard to gauge the time entombed there in the darkness. Surely it must be daylight by now. She had to try something—
anything
—to free herself from the cold, dank cubicle, or go mad dwelling on what might happen if she were never found.

How long would it take to die there? The atmosphere was
close already. How much longer did she have before there was no air left to breathe? It would be a slow, horrible death, and she climbed the steps and began screaming, meanwhile pounding on the wall that once was a door, with both her fists. She soon realized the futility of that. It wasn’t long before her tender skin was bruised and broken assailing the rough granite, and she groped her way back down the steps, snatched the tinderbox from the drawer in the chest, and began attacking the wall with that.

Again and again, she screamed at the top of her voice until it broke into hoarse whispers, then pounded the wall with the tinderbox until it slipped from her hands and fell to the floor below. Sara groaned in despair. She needed the tinder and flint inside the coffer to light the candle. How was she going to find it in the dark?

It all seemed so hopeless, and she sank down on the step with her head in her hands. After a moment, she caught her breath and ordered her thoughts. There had to be something she could do. Perhaps another look in the candlelight might show her something she’d overlooked before, and she groped her way down the steps and began searching the floor. When she finally found the tinderbox among the debris beside the stairs, her heart sank. It had broken open in the fall, and the flint and tinder were gone.

It was no use. Her throat was raw from screaming for help. Her head ached, the lump on her forehead was throbbing like a pulse beat, and her hands were cut and bleeding. Vertigo threatened her consciousness. How long had it been since she fell down those stairs? How long had she been unconscious afterward? If only the little cell weren’t so small. If only it weren’t so airtight. If only it weren’t so free of drafts, which crept through every crevice in the rest of the house. Somewhere, she had heard that thrashing about would use up oxygen faster in confined spaces. It could already be too late to apply that knowledge. Exertion had sapped her
strength. She could scarcely breathe, and she laid her face on the cold granite step, and shut her eyes.

“When I don’t want that damnable creature, he comes quick enough,” Nicholas railed, pacing the carpet in his dressing room. “Now, when it’s vital . . .”

“Don’t take on so, my lord,” said Mills, picking up Nicholas’s clothes as he shed them. “What do you think he can do that you cannot? You will find her, my lord.”

“How?” Nicholas flashed, tossing his waistcoat on the floor. He untied his neck cloth, and threw it down as well. “We’ve searched the house from top to bottom—every deuced chamber. Good God, I even went below and searched the strand. I need Nero! But I cannot control him, can I? No, he controls
me!
Why is it always like this? Why can I never remember all of it? She hasn’t been seen since the dinner hour
yesterday
, Mills. Nero hasn’t surfaced since, either. That’s more than twenty-four hours. If she’s hurt somewhere . . .”

“You and my lady . . . argued, did you not?” said the valet, catching Nicholas’s shirt before it hit the floor. “Have a care, my lord! That nearly went into the fire,” he cried, adding the shirt to his burden before resuming. “Could she have . . . left Ravencliff?”

“Without her shoes, Mills? I hardly think it likely. It’s a long, steep trek to the bottom of the lane, and the gate is always locked at dusk; you know that. Besides, it wasn’t all that serious an argument, and Nell said Sara was working on menus for Dr. Breeden’s visit when she was last seen. That hardly sounds like she was about to flee the place to me, though I cannot say I would blame her if she did. My God, I have to find her.”

“Do you want your tub, my lord?”

“No cold bath tonight,” Nicholas growled, flopping in the wing chair. He extended his foot. “Get me out of these damned boots.”

“Perhaps a hot tub, my lord?” Mills suggested, straddling the outstretched leg.

“No,” Nicholas snapped. Planting his other foot on Mills’s narrow behind, he pushed, and the valet pulled off the Hessian with a grunt. “The last thing I need to do is relax.”

“I’ll fetch your dressing gown, my lord,” the valet panted, having successfully removed the other boot. He tucked it under his arm with the rest.

“No,” said Nicholas, peeling off his pantaloons, and then his drawers. “Just lay it out on the bed.”

“My lord?” said the valet, slack-jawed, as Nicholas resumed his pacing, stark naked before the hearth.

“Just leave it out for me, and go to bed!” Nicholas snapped. He snatched up Sara’s Morocco leather slippers from the footstool beside the fire, and studied them like a hound on the scent as he strode back and forth.

“But, my lord, what if—”

“I know where to find you if I need you, Mills,” Nicholas interrupted. “Go to bed. At least one of us needs to get some sleep tonight.”

Sara woke, gasping for breath in the darkness. It was the sound of scratching that roused her.
Rats! Fleet Prison!
No, not the Fleet, that would have been heaven compared to this, her tomb in the bowels of Ravencliff Manor, where no one would find her but the rats. Adrenaline surged through her. Were they inside . . . or out? Had they tumbled down with her? Without the candle, there was no way to know, and she scrabbled up the stairs again and beat on the wall, screaming at the top of what was left of her voice.

The scratching stopped. Had she imagined it? There was no sound now, and she crawled back down the steps and collapsed on the cold, slimy floor. Time meant nothing then. She’d lost track of it. Totally. She was slipping away. Strange dreams bled into her consciousness until she could no longer part them from reality. Then, there came a grating sound that
echoed through her body, setting her teeth on edge, and a sudden blast of fresh air funneled in on a beam of light. It smelled of mildew and must, but, oh how blessed it was to breathe again! A hallucination; she was going mad. She had to be.

All at once strong arms lifted her, and powerful legs carried her out of the tomb. She leaned her hot face against a familiar burgundy satin dressing gown. It smelled clean, of the sea, of
him
, sensual and feral. The heart beneath it thudded against her ear in a trembling rhythm that was both soothing and frightening. Sara leaned into it, nuzzling the satin, and slept.

Nicholas was loath to put Sara down. He despaired of letting her go. Yet he knew what would be if ever he touched her as he wanted, so it had to remain impersonal between them. It had to be a businesslike arrangement. There was no other alternative.

How soft and malleable she was in his arms, how fragrant, despite her ordeal in the musty priest hole. He inhaled her scent until it filled his nostrils and his memory: rosemary and gillyflower, primeval scents of wood, of earth, with a sensual touch of the rose. He drank her in—nectar of the gods, so long denied him.

He laid her on the bed, and smoothed her sun-painted hair back from her brow. How soft it was, just as he knew it would be, as ethereal as morning cobwebs in the shaft of sunlight the dawn had flung across the counterpane. He couldn’t help but touch it, feel its silkiness between his fingers. Brushing it aside, he felt the lump on her brow, where a bruise was forming. Her hands were cut and swollen, and her fine, translucent skin was streaked with filth, spread over her face, her arms—her breast, scarcely covered by the
torn frock. His loins were on fire, pulsating with achy heat, his keen senses acutely attuned to the fever in his blood, heightened like those of an animal in the wild. The sexual stream flowing between them was palpable, and he wrapped the counterpane around her like a cocoon in a vain attempt to sever it, and surged to his feet when the effort failed.

“I want that bloody priest hole walled up before the sun sets!” he seethed, scarcely aware until that moment that Nell and Mills were standing close by. “Stop that whimpering, girl!” he snapped at the abigail. “Fetch the smelling salts! Have Mrs. Bromley come up here at once to assess this. There must be some nostrum or concoction she can brew with those damnable herbs of hers to minister to her ladyship until the doctor arrives tomorrow. I want you to get her into a warm tub as soon as she comes ’round, then put her back in this bed. She stays in it, too, until I say otherwise, should you have to tie her down. Is that clear?”

“Y-yes, sir,” Nell whined. Spinning on her heel, she fled the room, her black skirts dusting the woodwork.

“Come away, my lord,” the valet urged, laying a gentle hand on Nicholas’s rock-hard arm. “This . . . upsetment is not good for you.”

Nicholas’s light-headed laugh replied to that, and he shrugged the valet’s hand away and cinched his dressing gown sash ruthlessly.

“Come back to your rooms, my lord. I’ll prepare your bath. They will see to her. Then, when you’ve rested . . . when you’re calm again—”

“I will never be ‘calm again,’ Mills,” Nicholas said through clenched teeth, and diving past him, crashed through the door and disappeared in the shadows of the empty corridor.

It wasn’t a dream. He carried her up the slimy steps and out of the priest hole as though she weighed no more than a
handful of eiderdown. How strong he was, how tender his embrace, as if she were something fragile, subject to breakage, and yet he clasped her to him as though his very life depended upon it. She surrendered to the arms she’d fantasized holding her since she first set eyes on Nicholas Walraven, her husband who wasn’t a husband. He would be. If it was the last thing she did on earth . . . he would be.

“You’ve got that mangy old dog to thank that we found ya,” said Nell, sudsing the cobwebs and dust from her hair. The warm bathwater was heaven, silkened with oil of roses, and strewn with crushed rosemary. “Nobody set eyes on the creature for nigh on two days, then all at once this mornin’ he come tearin’ down them stairs sniffin’ the carpet right ta the hidey-hole door, and started diggin’ and scratchin’ and whinin’ and howlin’, makin’ enough of a din ta raise the dead, he was. Then he run off, and he must’ve woke the master, ’cause m’lord came on all out straight, barefooted—in his dressing gown, he was.”

“The scratching,” Sara said. It was the second time she’d mistaken the sound. “I heard the scratching. I thought it was rats.”

“Well, you’re outta there now, and not a minute too soon. You was scarcely breathin’, shut up in that room—no more than a closet—for thirty-six hours straight. You’re lucky ta be alive, my lady, and that’s a fact. He’s down there now the master is, with old Gibbs, the groundskeeper. They’re wallin’ up that priest hole, they are.”