On Bended Knee, page 7
part #6 of Wicked Worthingtons Series
Well, there was no such thing as witches, and that was that.
Tonight the stillroom was dim with the light of a single candle and there were no mysterious potions boiling away on the small stove in the corner using the pots that she wouldn't let him use for food — not saying that she made poisons exactly, or perhaps she did. He would have no way of knowing.
"It ain't goin' t' work, you know that, Missus."
She didn't look at him as she carefully reattached her small ring of keys to its elegant chatelaine on the hook at her waist.
"You can't bring home every stray and hope to fix 'em all," he insisted.
She ignored him. Instead, she picked up a broom and began to sweep a floor that didn't need sweeping. She was a stubborn one, his Mrs. Oakes. As strong as any Daleswoman, for all her refined Southern ways.
He wasn't going to change her mind, and there was no reason why he should, for he'd never been able to before. Bing gave a heavy, obvious sigh.
"This is the bloody House of Last Resort," he grumbled to himself as he left his mistress to her work.
GEMMA CONTINUED TO PUT on a show of puttering about amongst her herbs until she was certain Mr. Bing had gone to his room.
Then she slipped from the stillroom with her candle and made her way down the hall to her chamber. As she passed the base of the staircase, she cast a glance upward, but all was silent.
Her visitor was asleep.
All in all, Gemma was rather proud of her dignified exit from the stranger's sickroom earlier. She was fairly certain that Mr. Bing had not detected her profound attraction to the man.
Well, it was certainly understandable. Heavens, what a mouthwatering fellow! If he'd been very handsome when unconscious, he was absolutely devastating while awake!
Those eyes. Gemma walked slowly down the hall, trailing her fingertips lightly on the wall in the dimness. Had she ever seen brown eyes so dark they seemed black? And his fine, well-cut features held Gemma's interest even as they turned her thoughts to wandering. He looked fierce and dark, the very opposite of Edmund, who had been fair and blue-eyed and ruddy from the weather.
Fallen angel.
What a silly notion! Why had that thought popped into her mind?
In her bedchamber, Gemma did without the candle, nipping out the flame with quick fingers. She preferred the privacy of darkness for some very unusual thoughts. As she struggled one-handed with her gown and her underthings, she let her mind drift to the way the stranger's muscles moved under the borrowed nightshirt.
Gemma had never been immune to noticing a handsome man, for all that the people of Farby thought her aloof. It was only that taking a lover from the dale meant taking a husband or son, brother or cousin of at least a dozen other people who looked to her for help. People who took pride in their decorous and dignified Lady of the Dale.
In the dark privacy of her little room, however, Gemma allowed herself to imagine having a lover. Someone from far away. Someone who would stay and be only hers.
Someone dark and tall, with a shadowed gaze, who would not prattle of gambling or gossip. Someone who had seen the world, who had seen what Gemma had seen.
Her uninjured hand stroked down her neck and skimmed over her breasts and belly. She was too thin, she knew. Hard times had eaten away her curves and left behind some rather unbecoming muscle. She thought she was looking downright boyish these days.
But her breasts were still high and she had good teeth, so she supposed she hadn't entirely lost her looks.
Her hand trailed lower still and she was astonished to find herself damp and ready.
I blame his voice. Although his speech was brief, his voice was so deep that it seemed to rumble right through to her bones, vibrating in places that she'd long ago put away as useless to her.
Heavens, what a stunner.
She realized then that she had not gotten his name. And she really, really wanted to know.
Chapter 8
MEANWHILE, BACK IN LONDON…
IN WORTHINGTON HOUSE, IRIS'S room was only dimly lit by a small candle in a glass chimney on the side table. The draperies were shut tight, leaving nothing but shadows. It turned the sickroom mysterious and far, far too peaceful.
Iris was never peaceful. Attie stepped stealthily into the sickroom. Her father snored in the chair by the bed with his head tipped back. Archie hadn't bothered with a cravat and Attie looked away from the wrinkled vulnerability of his throat.
The ache that pounded inside her was deafening in the silence. Why couldn't the whole world hear it? Attie wanted to scream, to run, to break things and hit people until they understood the writhing snakes of terror and worry inside her.
For the first time in her life she wished she was older. Either that, or younger, as young as Aurora. It would be heaven not to know, not to worry, not to care.
Attie always thought of her mother as being rather tall and — as Archie put it so fondly — statuesque. But Iris barely made a hillock under the covers and Attie thought there was too much empty bed surrounding her.
Attie had never been the sort of child to tumble into her parents' bed, frightened by a nightmare or thunderstorm. Orion had explained that nightmares were simply her imagination and that thunderstorms were what happened when warm air collided with cold.
Still, she had seen her parents snuggled together with Archie snoring away, Iris's head tucked under his chin. Iris's hair should be streaming glinting silver over the pillow and she should carry a slight smile of delight on her lips as she slept. If dreams were imagination, then Iris must have the most astonishing dreams, for she lived every day in a world of her imagination.
Attie crept onto the large mattress stealthily as might a disobedient family pet.
But Archie was asleep and there was no one to shoo Attie from the sickroom or remind her that she was not a comforting sort of presence. It wasn't true, Attie thought rebelliously. Otherwise why was she the only one — well, almost the only one — who could keep Aurora soothed to let Miranda rest?
Attie crawled closer until her head shared her mother's pillow and she lay staring unblinking at Iris's profile. Iris smelled of lavender soap combined with the revolting laudanum-tinged cough concoction left by the physician who had seen her the day before. Attie rather thought she would throw the bottle across the room before she would take a drop of it, but the first time in her life she didn't have the answers. She had no way to help Iris get well.
It was just a cough. A silly little cough from being caught out in the rain. Of course Iris, being Iris, had stayed out of doors to enjoy the scents of the garden. She said she liked to feel the rain running down her cheeks, and the vibration of the thunder rumbling through her bones.
When she'd come inside, Miranda had rushed to fetch a blanket, calling for Philpot to brew a fresh pot of tea. And Archie had rubbed Iris's cold hands and teased her, calling her his goddess of the spring storms. And Iris had shooed them all away and dreamily rambled on to them how she had seen the mother bird sitting on her nest with her wings spread over hatchlings with her own head tucked down to avoid the downpour.
"When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang," Iris had quoted, her voice fragmented by her shivers. "Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." She'd turned a vague half-smile on Archie.
The next day Iris had been flushed and a bit tired. By that night she'd had a terrible ache in her head and the lung congestion had begun. "Just a silly cough."
Now Attie closed her eyes and whispered, "Sonnet 73." Iris cared about proper attribution and what the words were about, not just what they said. Attie clenched her eyelids shut tight and thought hard about how she loved her mad, dreamy mother, who was nothing like anyone else in the world, as she listened to the breath moving in and out of her mother's body. A thin sound, strained and tight, with a terrible liquid gurgle at the end.
It was just a silly cough.
LYSANDER STOOD IN A FIELD of smoking rain and thunder — both cannon fire and real thunder, for the barrage had not halted to wait for fair weather. He was wet to the bone, both hot and chilled at once. Rage and terror, in a sick roiling stew deep in his belly. He gripped a musket in his hands but his powder was wet, and he was out of shot. The bayonet was his only defense. Yet as he watched, it disintegrated before his eyes. The crimson blood upon it turned to brown, then to iron flakes that bubbled up and washed away in the rain. The downpour obscured everything, washing the world away, washing the blade right out of existence.
His hands empty now, he was defenseless against the enemy. He wasn't quite sure who the enemy was — was it the French, or the weather, or the muddy pit of Death itself that strove to suck him under?
Again and again, the collapsing siege tunnels closed in. Each time men died choking to death on mud. Lysander clawed his way out against the consuming maw of the blood-tinged mud, slipped, clawed, slipped again, until the dream allowed him to slither out upon solid ground. He was free.
That freedom didn't matter, for he didn't know where to go. He couldn't flee to the medical tents behind the line. Nothing but death awaited anyone who crossed into that canvas wrapped hell. He could not turn toward the enemy and scale the castle walls to attack them where they sat safe and shielded, and watched Death take their side in the conflict. It was some comfort that at least they were as wet as he.
He wanted to call lightning down upon those heights, strike after strike, his fury brought to life in jagged streaks of fire and destruction, but he was powerless.
Powerless. Useless. Helpless.
The thunder boomed louder and louder, and the cannon and the musket fire and the screams of the struck and the dying.
Lysander jerked awake to find himself kneeling on the floor in a darkened room, his mouth stretched open in a silent rictus of dread. He remained quite still at first, freezing himself in place. He knew if he didn't, the dream would carry him on, and things would be broken and people might be hurt. He held himself immobile by force of will, trying to catch the breath which burst from him in great gasping sobs and that he could not seem to get back.
He must stop. He could hear that he sounded insane. He mustn't allow himself to sound mad. He must breathe.
He couldn't tell himself the nightmare wasn't real because it was. He could tell himself, however, that it was past. That it was over. That it had ended and he had left it far behind him, even if that assurance felt like a lie.
Why must he carry it? Must he carry it forever?
He knew the answer to that. Of course he did. He knew why he deserved this burden, and why it must follow him.
No. Don't think about Theo. No.
Instead, he thought about his hands. His dry, if somewhat clammy, clean hands. No mud. No blood. They were fisted so tightly he was losing sensation in his fingers. With his full and total concentration, he willed his fists to slowly relax and for his fingers to open one by one.
He had no need of fists to defend himself here. His hands need hold no knife, no firearm, not even a bludgeon. He flattened his open hands downward and rested them on something cool and smooth.
He made himself focus on discovering what that was. It warmed beneath his touch more quickly than stone. Wood, yes. If he slid his fingertips a bit he could feel the grain and the seams between the boards. It was very clean, for no more than a speck of grit presented itself to his touch. Cool and clean, and solid and real.
The wood was a floor. Where was this floor?
Not Worthington house. Too uncluttered and bare. Nor some barracks tent. Not a battlefield pitch. Not a worn marble floor like the hospital. He spread his hands apart, stroking them along the floor seeking clues. His breath was slowing, his lungs laboring much less. When his hands shook slightly he pressed them firmly to floor until they stopped.
Now he remembered. He reached his hand to one side and yes, there was the bed. The clean sheets still smelled of spring line drying. The lumpy featherbed. The thick soft blanket that carried a faint scent of lanolin in its undyed wool.
He was in the clean, quiet room. In the lady doctor's house.
Had his nightmare woken her? He listened but no one seemed to be rushing to his aid. Perhaps he had not made as much noise as his dream suggested. A chill ran up his back and he realized his nightshirt was sticking to him, soaked with perspiration. Unable to bear the tacky chill, he pulled it from his body and left it in a pile on the floor as he stood. There was a very faint seam of light coming from a window. He made his way toward it, feeling carefully, but no furniture blocked his path in this empty, clean room.
He reached the window and parted the curtains. Yes, there was a bit of light, surprisingly. He thought it would be darker in the country, but although there were a few clouds in the night sky they did allow the gleam from a half-moon to stretch into the room. He waited for a long moment for his eyes to adjust.
He saw the outline of the bed and the bulk of the chair beyond it. There was a table there, he knew, but it was tucked in the shadow to one side of the window.
He remembered seeing his clothing hanging on pegs near the door. Turning, he looked long in that direction. Once his eyes adjusted, he walked to them easily, reaching for the mingled dark and light of his trousers and shirt.
His coat was not there but his feet kicked something on the floor. He reached down and found his boots. That was enough.
In trousers, boots, and his shirt untucked and open, for there were no studs to be found, he stood for a long moment in the empty room. He would not sleep again. There was no point in trying. The dream was too close, hovered too near, whispering to him in the back of his mind. He needed to think of something else. He needed to do something else.
He needed to walk. The view from the window drew him. The bucolic dale outside was only lightly brightened by the shy half-moon, but it would do. Outside would be better, where he could smell the grass and feel the breeze and know that it was not raining and there was no fire and no blood and no screaming.
To leave by making his way through a house he did not know seemed insurmountable, while just outside this window began the slanted roof of what looked like a portico of some kind. It would do. He climbed out, his mission giving him surety of hand and foot. His desperation to leave the dream behind gave him incentive to clamber down to the ground. He had to drop the last bit but he landed softly in the grass.
The scent hit him first.
Lysander had long repressed his sense of smell, for it seemed that everything in the world was tinged with the metallic stink of blood, from the coal soot and carthorse droppings of the London streets to the dusty bookshops he'd used to love to visit.
Now, with the drop from the roof pushing the breath from his lungs, he inhaled the full and heady scent of rose. He drew back from the power of it, but there was no escape. It was all around him. He'd dropped into a small grassy patch in the middle of a rose infestation the likes of which he'd never seen.
No tame city garden this! The canes towered and tangled in a wall that began in a fall down the side of the house and wound all about him. He blinked and hesitated. How to escape the entwined vigor of it? He could not climb them, for even a brief touch informed him that the arching staves that absolutely dripped with blooms also carried thorns with intent to bodily harm.
Helplessly, he peered up at the moon only to see the leafy canes silhouetted black against the light. The richness of the air was as heady as wine, and he felt near to drowning in it. It was mad. It was ridiculous. It was an aggressive wealth of overgrowth and extravagance, especially after the monastic cleanliness of his room.
Iris would adore this.
Lysander, however, did not appreciate the confinement, no matter how potently scented. The high walls nearly formed a tunnel, and the very thought made him break into a sweat once more. Thorns or no, he was leaving this floral prison and he was leaving it straightaway.
His eyes began to make some sense of the shadows — it was not a tunnel, he reminded himself grimly — and he saw a slightly grayer distinction in the darkness off to one side, heading away from the house. Careful exploration led him to a curve in the wall and a paler grassy path leading onward. The passage through the riotous blooms didn't appear to go anywhere at all, until he found another turn, and then another. A few more yards and he'd freed himself from the mad profusion to see nothing before him but the moonlight on a grassy hillside stretching onward into the night.
Away. He didn't care which direction. Away from the dream and the room that had held it, away from the bed where he'd dreamt it, away from anyone who might come running with candles and sympathy and tea and questions.
He simply walked straight until something made him turn. A brook, a stone wall, a slope too slick and steep. He stopped once, breathing hard, realizing that he had very nearly been running.
Slow down. Slow breaths. Be aware of where you are. Nothing is chasing you, you have nothing to fear.
He heard a slight sound behind him. Whirling, he lurched backward, his hands out as if to fend off an attack, his body crouched ready for a fight.
There was no one there. No one, except a dog, a shaggy multicolored thing. Lysander could see a gleam of its white teeth as its mouth hung open. It panted happily at him, and Lysander wondered how long it had been trailing in the wake of his mad rush. The animal seemed entirely pleased with him, as if Lysander had asked it along on a companionable ramble in the middle of the night.
There was no farm nearby but the house he just left. Did it belong to the lady doctor? Or the man?
In the dim moonlight, Lysander couldn't tell the dog's color but he could see gleaming dark eyes peering out from under shaggy brows and large feathery ears that looked very nearly bat-like in the dark.
