On Bended Knee, page 13
part #6 of Wicked Worthingtons Series
Gemma slumped on the seat of the cart with her good hand cradling her arm to absorb the jostling of the cart. She knew that they would be watched until the group in the door could no longer hear the clopping of Bad Pony's hooves on the lane.
Chapter 14
THE WAR PONY GAVE Lysander no trouble at all on the drive back to the manor. The lanterns showed them the paler strip of road clear before them. The dale rang with silence. Even the birds had long gone to bed. There was no noise at all but the clop of Bad Pony's hooves on the packed soil and the creak and jostle of the cart. Lysander felt passable. Adequate. Something unfortunate had happened and he had been called upon, and instead of losing control, he had done well. Gemma had smiled at him in that wonderful way she had.
Mrs. Oakes. She was Mrs. Oakes and her smile had been naught but her own relief and pleasure at a job well done. Not for him.
Still, it was a notable occurrence. People, especially ladies, did not often look upon him and smile. He was well aware that his demeanor distressed people. He wasn't precisely sure what he was doing that was so alarming, although once Elektra had told him that he seemed to exist a mere instant away from darkness and destruction.
He hadn't been able to explain to her that the destruction she spoke of was still close behind him, breathing down his neck. It had followed him home from the Peninsula like a starving wolf followed a man in a winter forest.
It isn't me, he'd wanted to tell his sister. It isn't I they should fear, except that he had come to understand that somehow he had absorbed the beast and that he now took it with him everywhere. He rather suspected that the wolf must shine through him like the glowing coals of predator eyes in the darkness.
And yet this woman beside him had smiled at him, and patted his arm, and said, "Oh, that was well done, Mr. Worthington!"
And the Yorkshire man and his wife had smiled at him and thanked him and when they had driven away, the entire family except the injured boy had piled out onto their steps and waved them away. "Good night, Mrs. Oakes! Good night, Mr. Worthington!"
Just as if he were an actual person. It had been the strangest evening.
As if she was thinking the same thing at the same moment, Mrs. Oakes turned to him. "Your quiet manner serves you well here. Yorkshire folk work hard and have little patience for idle chatter. I know many a quiet man who is respected here."
Lysander turned to look at her. The bit of light from the lanterns shimmered on her porcelain skin. Even bundled up as she was with her scarf nearly covering her chin and her practical man's knitted hat pulled down over her ears, she glowed. She reminded him of a luminous alabaster angel in a midnight garden. She caught his intense gaze with her own and wrinkled her nose at him.
"I know I look a mess. You must be used to a much more fashionable sort of lady. New gowns every Season and a different bonnet for every outfit."
Lysander considered that for a moment. "Sisters. A lot of gowns. Mostly." He was thinking of Attie, who had grown into a gangling adolescent while he'd been at war and her inquisitive mischievousness had turned sulky and intense. He had never seen Attie in a dress without trousers beneath it nor had he ever seen her hair pinned up in a shining mass or even anything ornamental on her person whatsoever. "Not all of them."
Mrs. Oakes leaned forward and squinted at him as if trying to read the printed word on the page of his face. "How many sisters do you have?"
Lysander felt the intensity of her focus, but there was something reassuring about her that made him trust her. Her intense regard did not alarm him the same way as that of most strangers, or even the silent longing of his family's wistful gazes. "Three."
"How wonderful." She sighed wistfully. "I had no siblings. One should share. It does seem rather greedy of you to take all the siblings. Do you suppose you got mine?"
The accusation was so ludicrous that Lysander made a rather shocked noise in his throat. He was being teased? Him?
"You laughed." She narrowed her eyes at him. "That was a laugh. Yes, I've taken stock of the situation and I had decided to declare that a laugh."
Teasing. He knew it when he heard it. He did have all those siblings after all. But no one had teased him for years. They spoke so gently, so carefully, so earnestly, their words kind and their voices filled with compassion — and pain and need and loss until the weight of it closed his throat and silenced his voice.
Tonight he had not been a disappointment. He had not let anyone down. He had driven Mrs. Oakes and had helped set a little boy's leg so that the child would heal strong and active and fast on his feet. He had seen gratitude in the eyes of people around him and approval in Mrs. Oakes's peaceful cloudy sky eyes.
"You were —" I need a word. Think. What is the right word for Gemma Oakes? "Splendid."
He felt her jolt of surprise and he was aware that she'd turned her head to look at him again. This time he kept his gaze on Bad Pony's fuzzy flanks and the road ahead. When she let out a soft sigh, he felt it cross his cheek like a benediction.
"Thank you. That was a very nice thing to say to me, Mr. Worthington."
He wanted to say more. He wanted to tell her about the way that they had all looked at her. She hadn't seemed to notice it or to understand what she had done. A broken child would now grow straight and strong. She had changed lives tonight.
"You take care … of your people."
He looked at her shyly. She shook her head slightly and looked down at her hands. "I am not a lady. I'm merely the daughter of a librarian. The doctor married a bit below his station, I fear. I never quite understood why. But I try my best."
"You are their lady."
"I am no better than anyone in this dale."
Lysander's thoughts tripped on their own feet and tangled themselves on the ground. He wanted to tell her that she was wrong. And he wanted to tell her that she was right. Concepts of class and responsibility and labels and preconceptions, those were complicated things that required complicated words.
His uncooperative tongue frustrated him. For the first time he found himself longing to speak to someone. He wanted to tell her things.
When he'd read the sonnets tonight, he had given himself over to recitation of words he had heard all his life. The words had flowed from his tongue as if it had belonged to a different man.
He had not tried to read aloud since he returned. He had tried to read, for he had once enjoyed it greatly, but as much as he wished to concentrate, his memories would steal their way into his thoughts. Even the driest volume of Greek philosophy would trigger recollections of blood.
Reading aloud to Gemma Oakes had been as effortless as breathing. The words had come from behind his memories of battle, from so far back that they carried with them hints of the carefree joy of his youth.
He hadn't thought of his childhood in so long. When he turned to look behind him, he only saw the catastrophic defeat at Burgos Castle. He saw the muddy medical tents that leaked the rain until the floor ran with rivulets tinted red by dying men.
Bad Pony nodded his head and the reins jerked in Lysander's loosened fingers. He tightened his hands quickly and the pony settled once more into his plodding walk. The stalking wolf of memory tried to howl again, even here in this peaceful quiet, with the golden lantern-light shimmering upon the sweetly weary features of the woman beside him.
She was silent now. He saw that her eyes were closed and her head nodded in exhaustion. Her left hand cradled her bandaged wrist to her bosom. She was injured at his hand. She was astonishing. She was important. She was needed.
How could he make it right? How could he stay to help until Gemma healed, when his mother lay ill and his family remained spread far and wide?
AT YEW MANOR, MR. Worthington took on the task of bedding down Bad Pony while Mr. Bing helped Gemma carry her medical case back into the house. While he was setting it carefully on her worktable in the stillroom, Gemma positioned herself to barricade the only exit. She had something she wanted to discuss with dear Mr. Bing.
"Mr. Bing, I noticed that Mr. Worthington became rather muddy in the river."
Mr. Bing grunted and answered without turning his head. "Aye, t' fool lad went in after that useless dog of yours. Silly creature got herself into deep water."
"Yes, he mentioned that. What he didn't mention was the precise reason why he did not clean up in the nice warm privacy of the stable." She saw Mr. Bing's shoulder twitch slightly.
Mr. Bing lifted his chin and dusted his hands as if he had done something far more laborious than carry a medical case that she'd been toting by herself for years. Then he turned to look her straight in the eye. "Saw that, did you?"
Gemma became rather painfully aware that she was blushing. Drat. Here she was trying to take Mr. Bing to task when suddenly she was breathless with the memory of water running down Mr. Worthington's flat muscled abdomen. There was nothing she could do about the redness of her cheeks, so she narrowed her eyes at her sometimes-employee, sometimes-father figure, occasional pain-in-the-arse dear Mr. Bing. "I did see that. As I'm sure that you intended me to. May I ask why you felt it was necessary?"
Bing gave up gruff bark of laughter. "Missus, I know you want t' world to think you're made of steel and porcelain, but you forget how long I've known you. If you spend another year alone in this great, crumbling house, you're like to go battlefield mad yourself."
Gemma's jaw dropped. She would have protested, but Mr. Bing was not yet done.
"That fellow's a bit odd, I'll grant it. But he's all right underneath. He saved that worthless dog, didn't he? He gives more than he gets, just like you." Mr. Bing scratched his balding head. "You know I'm as loyal as could be to Dr. Oakes. But he's dead, ain't he? And you're not! I hate to see you wasting that big heart on medicine alone when you orta have a family of your own!"
Gemma had no words to challenge Mr. Bing's sudden outburst. The nerve! The unmitigated gall!
The truth.
Oh, it was a truth she did not want to acknowledge. Especially not before Mr. Bing, who was nearly old enough to be her father! And yet here he was, in his strange way, the closest thing she had to a friend.
He had purposely arranged that bit of theater at the rain barrel! As what, temptation?
Even so, when the hot flush of memory swept her she could do nothing but clench her eyes tight and turn half away from the pity and understanding in his eyes.
He brushed by her on his way out of the room and she stayed right where she was until she could no longer hear the clump of his boots in her house.
Drat the truth.
AS SHE MADE HER weary way to bed, Gemma spotted the book of sonnets on the kitchen table and took it with her.
The manor was incredibly silent this late at night and for the most part, Gemma enjoyed the peacefulness. She had always been a quiet person.
Perhaps that stemmed from being raised in a library. When she'd been very young, her mother had fallen sickly. Gemma's nurse had been enlisted to care for her mother and her absent-minded father had apparently forgot to ever secure another.
Her well-meaning but undemonstrative Papa had simply taken tiny Gemma to work with him. In the vast chambers of the Cambridge University Library, Gemma lived her earliest memories in a forest of bookshelves, as tall as giants and as impenetrable as walls.
She learned to play quietly beneath her papa's desk, for it was a serious breach of trust for the head librarian of the main library to allow his tiny daughter free rein in those hallowed halls, and she learned to love books.
When she turned fourteen her mother had been gone for seven years. Gemma scarcely remembered anything but a sweet, pale face upon a pillow and the touch of a thin, weak hand upon her cheek.
Gemma had begun assisting her father at the library in the off hours, replacing books and cataloguing. A young student found her in the section on poetry and self-righteously reported her presence to the university.
Gemma knew perfectly well that had been nothing but a nasty piece of revenge, for the young man in question had tried to force a kiss from her. Gemma had slapped him with all the power of her innocent shock and fear — and also the dense volume she'd forgotten she held in her hand.
Her father had nearly lost his position and Gemma had been banished from the place that meant more to her than her actual domicile. She'd been torn from the hushed luxury of the library to go home and keep an empty house for her father.
However, she brought home the book that saved her virtue. A volume of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Not long after that, a man came to visit the librarian and his daughter. He was a student unlike any they had seen before. For one thing, he was older than the other young men. At eight and twenty, Mr. Edmund Oakes had found his calling and decided to study medicine. His social standing did not require a career and he had no need of income, but he had a fine mind and a stalwart code of ethics. He had come to apologize to Gemma and her father for the poor behavior of his younger cousin, Galen, or as Gemma thought of him, "the student in the stacks."
Gemma liked him and her papa admired him very much. Edmund Oakes became a frequent guest and family friend. One day after her nineteenth birthday, Edmund noticed that Gemma wasn’t a child anymore and Gemma noticed him noticing her.
He was Dr. Oakes by then and a marriage seemed like a fine idea to all concerned. It was not until Gemma went to Edmund’s family home to meet her new in-laws that she realized how far beneath himself Edmund had wed. The Oakes were not so much cruel as unapologetically appalled and mystified by Edmund's choice. They seemed so certain of Gemma's inferiority that for the first time in her life, she began to doubt her worth.
When Edmund told his new bride that he planned to apply his knowledge of medicine to help the war effort, Gemma had leapt at the opportunity to go with him as his nurse and assistant — and leave the imperious Oakes family far behind them.
Gemma, alone in her claustrophobic little bedchamber in Yew Manor, set her candle on her nightstand and sat on the edge of her bed. She smoothed the rich, red leather cover of the volume of sonnets with tingling fingertips.
Who was Mr. Lysander Worthington really? What did she know of this stranger she wanted so badly to help?
And why did she feel compelled to?
Who better than you? You were there.
Yes, I was there.
By the time Gemma and Edmund had returned from the war, Edmund frail and recovering far too slowly from a fever, Gemma's father had died quietly in his sleep. The newly appointed head librarian had taken up residence in her father's house, which was owned by the University. Gemma was saddened by the loss but after so much horrible death all around her, she was grateful that her papa's end had been so painless.
And she wasn't really alone, for she'd had Edmund. Except, as she discovered in the following years, only a portion of her husband had returned from the war.
Gemma decided to select a random page, deciding with a rather depressed whimsy that it would hold the answers. The volume fell open to Sonnet 25.
"The painful warrior famousèd for worth,
After a thousand victories once foiled,
Is from the book of honor razèd quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled."
Well, goodness. How fitting. A valiant soldier had returned from a terrible war, only to be considered mad and dangerous. How do you know he is valiant? Perhaps he is a coward. Perhaps that is what he flees from.
Recalling the ridiculous battle with the ram, and his reckless disregard for his own safety as he flung her far from danger, Gemma found it hard to imagine Mr. Worthington bolting from a mere human adversary. She would wager her entire stillroom that he'd fought bravely and well against the enemy.
Gemma thought of Mr. Worthington's dark eyes. She remembered his sculpted chest gleaming in the sun. She closed her eyes and replayed his deep erudite voice speaking verses of passionate love to her. She allowed the image of him half-naked the sunlight to roll across her inner vision. The muscles that laced tightly around his narrow waist. The way his trousers clung to his athletic buttocks. His large hands sweeping the water from his skin. She imagined them on her skin instead and a deep ache pulsed within her.
She didn't realize that her hands trembled as they lightly rested upon the book in her lap.
"Then happy I am that I love and am beloved
Where I may not remove nor be removed."
Chapter 15
LONDON STILL SMELLS LIKE London. With the familiar scents of coal soot, carriage horse urine on the cobbled street and something gone bad at the butcher down the road, came so many memories.
Pollux Worthington stood at the base of the once-grand marble steps leading to the doorway of Worthington House. He'd been gone a long time. Despite that, the house seemed unchanged, though the façade appeared cleaner and more well-tended. Poll saw that removing the London soot and dirt had actually revealed the shabbiness all the more clearly.
It wasn't just a house. It was Worthington House, containing both haven and heartache for every Worthington — himself most especially.
It had been rather diabolical to have it be Miranda who summoned him from his sojourn with the traveling theatrical troupe. He likely would not have responded for anyone else, not even Iris herself. He suspected the machinations of his youngest sister, Attie. All things diabolical usually boiled down to fourteen-year-old Atalanta Worthington. Attie would stop at nothing to get her way, for she was the most Worthington of all the Worthingtons.
But Miranda never lied, or exaggerated, nor even embellished. Therefore, the situation must be every bit as dire as the letter had described.
Miranda. Beautiful, unattainable Miranda. I found her first. That fact always flashed across his consciousness whenever he thought of Miranda married to his twin brother Castor. He had found Miranda first.
Then Cas had come along and swept her away from him. In that moment, Poll had not only lost the finest woman he'd ever known but he'd lost his twin, his closest friend, his brother.
