SWEPT AWAY
Marsha Canham
First published by Dell, November 1999
Copyright 1999 © Marsha Canham
Cover Copyright 2010 © Marsha Canham
ISBN 978-0-9866872-2-8
Published by Marsha Canham at Smashwords.com
All right reserved. No part of this may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Marsha Canham.
This Ebook version is dedicated to the memory of the real Auntie Lal.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
July 13, 1815
The man who had nearly succeeded in bringing the world to its knees sneezed and wiped his hand on the front of his coat. It was cold in front of the open window. The wind was brisk off the sea, laden with the dampness of a week’s worth of raging storms. Something even more ominous lurked out there in the darkness and mist. The riding lights of the British warship Bellerophon could be seen, if one knew where to look, hovering at the mouth of the estuary like a predator crouched in the shadows waiting for its prey.
Napoleon Bonaparte knew where to look. He had been tracking the movements of the warship since she had first been sighted taking up a position in the blockade nearly three hours ago. There was anger in his expression and not a little disdain as he thought of his own navy, never fully recovered after its crushing defeat at Trafalgar some years before.
For a man whose reputation had already assumed legendary proportions, Bonaparte was small in stature, his figure squat, his paunch an ignoble swell over the tight fitting white kerseymere breeches. His hair was fine as silk, reddish in color, his eyes gray and brooding and capable of instilling fear in all who met him. At the moment, dread of becoming the target of one of those piercing glances commanded respect in the half dozen men who stood tense and silent in the room behind him.
“Excellency, it is beginning to rain. You should come away from the window else you take a chill.”
“Do you know the English news sheets refer to me as ‘that Corsican Ogre’,” he mused, dismissing such petty concerns as weather. “They accuse me of treason and urge the Bourbon puppet to demand my execution. Me,” he said with a shake of his head. “Me, the man who saved France from drowning in her own blood and made of her one of the most powerful countries in the world. Now they call for my execution and would make it a public spectacle.”
He clasped his hands behind his back, visibly reining in his temper before he turned and addressed the solemn gathering of officers. “Who do you suppose would dare wield the blade? Louis Capet? He only dares to enter Paris behind the heavy guns of the allied armies. Weak, pompous, cowardly fool. Like his father before him, he can barely execute a bowel movement without assistance.”
“Louis would never dare issue such an order, Excellency,” said the former grand marshal of the French army, Henri-Gratien Bertrand. “He does not have the stomach for it. A cut finger and he pukes his guts on the floor.”
Bonaparte nodded smugly. “Then his brother, perhaps? Now there is a stout fellow, by any measure, with guts enough to unleash a private army of assassins on me. He must feel he is bound to succeed one of these days, must he not, Cipi?”
Franceschi Cipriani pursed his thin lips in an effort to contain a smile. There had been at least thirty failed attempts on Bonaparte’s life over the past decade alone, all of them made at the instigation of the persistent Comte d’Artois. The last devil-for-hire had tossed a bomb at the Emperor’s state carriage as it passed by and had blown the vehicle twenty feet in the air, horses and all. Unfortunately for the erstwhile assassin, the blast had also taken off his legs, but he had lived long enough to be informed that the carriage had been empty, and Napoleon fifty miles away at the time.
Of all the dour faced men crowded around the door, Cipriani was the only one who could afford to smile. He was neither a soldier nor a courtier. He was dressed in gentleman’s clothing now, but at the blink of an eye could appear in stinking rags with several days growth of beard concealing the lean, pointed jaw. A master spy and deadly assassin in his own right, it was Franceschi Cipriani who had discovered that the allies had been planning to remove Napoleon from Elba to an even more remote location, and it had been Cipriani who had made arrangements for his Emperor to escape the island and make his triumphant return to France.
For one hundred days Napoleon had marched boldly across France at the head of an army loyal to the core, eager for revenge. Following the debacle at Waterloo four weeks ago--a battle that could have, should have been won--he had been forced to ride by night down deserted streets and across windswept fields to the small port town of Rochefort, and from there, to seek refuge on the tiny island of Aix, in a grim stone cottage overlooking the mouth of the bay. With the armies of four countries fast on his heels, he had no where left to run, nothing but his anger and contempt to hide behind.
Some of that contempt was directed now at another member of the stone-faced group.
“You have remained remarkably quiet, my bold seahawk. Have you nothing to say?”
The man stood half in the shadows, one broad shoulder leaning against the wall. He was dressed in the elegant clothes of a gentleman, wearing a fine woolen jacket with high molded lapels, an embroidered silk waistcoat worth a year’s soldiering wages and a muslin cravat so white and precisely pleated he might have recently come from an evening at the opera. He was easily the tallest man present, a full hand’s width above Cipriani which made him tower a head and half a shoulder above the stocky Bonaparte. His features were in shadow, but his smile was as white as his stock as he responded to the emperor’s question.
“What would you have me say, Excellency? The Prussian army is a day behind you, the Swedes have the roads to the north blocked, the Spanish guard the south. They would want nothing better than to have you try to fight your way through, thereby removing the need for any puppet king to sign an order for execution.”
“Montholon and Las Cases--” Napoleon paused and tipped his briefly toward the two men standing beside Bertrand “--are convincing in their arguments that I should make for America. The colonials were our allies during their own war with England and would not be hasty to comply with any demands to surrender me.”
“I agree it would be a wise choice, Excellency, but you still have to get there first.” Dark eyes briefly reflected a glitter of candlelight. They were an intense brown, almost the same shade as the thick waves of black hair that curled over his collar. “The Bellerophon is a seventy-four gun ship-of-the-line, manned by the same fighting crew who created havoc at Trafalgar. Onshore, there are guards on every dock, soldiers in every village, patrols watching every mile of coastline. You could try dressing yourself in rags and hiding away in the bilge of some local fishing vessel, but I warrant even the poorest excuse for a boat is being thoroughly searched. Would you really want to be discovered buried under a pile of fish heads? I shudder to think what the wags who write the news sheets would dub you then.”
The errant curl that fell over Napoleon’s high forehead seemed suddenly darker against the whiteness of his skin as he blanched, offering proof that he had already imagined the ignominy and did not need to hear it put into words. “I have, until recently, worn the Imperial Crown of France, gentlemen. I have no intentions of replacing it with a fisherman’s cap now or ever.”
“But Sire--” one of his minor officers protested, “you cannot simply abide here and do nothing. The British foreign office has spies everywhere. By morning your presence in Aix will be the best known secret in Europe.”
“I am counting on it,” Napoleon said quietly. “And by morning, it will not matter. Lord Wessex will no longer need his legions of spies to inform him of my whereabouts, for he will know precisely where I am at all times. Be assured,” he added, “ there are plans underway to remedy the unfortunate situation we find ourselves in at the moment, but until they can be put into effect, I must once again appear to be the docile, defeated lamb quaking at the thought of slaughter. General Montholon, you will kindly send word to the brave compatriot who stands willing to run the blockade that his services will not be required. Colonel Bertrand, you have dispatched the missive to the captain of the Bellerophon advising him that I am prepared to surrender my sword into his hands?”
“It was delivered an hour ago.”
“It is fitting that tomorrow should be the fourteenth of July,” Napoleon continued. “The very day the Bastille fell to the citizens of France and thus set us on our glorious path to honor. And it will be honor, gentleman--fine English honor that saves us now, for I will convince this British captain that I come to him in peace to kneel at the mercy of the English people. Like Themistocles, the Greek general who was forced into political exile after he defeated the Persians, I seek asylum from my enemies and put myself under the protection of the laws which govern England’s own Prince Regent.”
“Do you really think they will believe you?” The Englishman asked.
“Why would they not? I have been fighting battles and waging wars in one form or another for thirty-five of my forty-six years. I doubt Wellington, with whom I share the same year of birth, has been at it half that length of time, yet he has already declared his desire to live quietly and anonymously in some small village in the English countryside. Whether he does or not, remains to be seen, but he seems determined to put forth the illusion of docility, does he not?”
“Is that what you are doing? Putting forth an illusion?”
It was not Bonaparte but Cipriani whose lips flattened in a slow, malevolent grin. “Surely you do not expect us to tell you all of our secrets, Captain? If we did, they would be poorly kept secrets indeed, would they not?”
Bertrand led the other officers in shifting back several less than subtle paces. It was no secret whatsoever that Cipriani did not trust the English mercenary despite having hired him and his ship to effect the emperor’s escape from Elba. Nor was it a surprise to anyone in the cabin that the Englishman returned the feelings of distrust and animosity tenfold. What astonished them was that both men were still alive. They could only surmise it was the hand of one man who kept them from slashing each other’s throats in the dead of night.
“This is neither the time nor place to see who can piss the farthest,” Bonaparte said. “In fact, all of you may leave me now. I need time alone to compose an appropriately contrite letter to the British captain. Cipi--did you manage to find anything resembling a palatable wine on this godforsaken islet?”
“Will a bottle of your favorite Vin de Constance do?”
Bonaparte dismissed the others with an impatient flick of his wrist. When they were gone, he extended his arm to take the heavy green bottle Cipriani had produced.
“You have never failed me, have you, my lifelong friend?” he mused, lapsing comfortably into the Corsican dialect they often shared when they were alone.
“And I never will,” Cipriani promised. “Let me kill the Englishman now. Tonight. We have no further use for him.”
“Ah, but perhaps we do. I am told the British admiralty has increased the reward for his capture. They want him brought to trial almost as much as they want me. How much of our true plans do you suspect he knows?”
“We have been careful to speak of it only amongst ourselves. In the letter your brother wrote, he did not mention any specific details, though I thought he was somewhat imprudent in mentioning certain people by name. It could--” Cipriani stopped. He was staring at the top of the table. “The letter. Did you move it, Excellency?”
The former Emperor of France turned and scanned the sheaves of documents, maps, dispatches that covered the wooden surface. “No. It must be there somewhere.”
Cipriani started sifting through the papers, scattering some carelessly on the floor, but his search proved futile. “It is gone.” He stopped again and looked up. “He was standing by the door when we all came in, but when I called your valet to fetch your surtout--” his eyes flicked back to the side of the table-- “he was standing here. He could have taken it. He must have taken it.”
“Oh, come now, Cipi. In a room full of my most trusted officers?”
Cipriani’s cold, hard gaze levelled on his master. “I warrant he could pluck the eyes out of snake and leave the serpent none the wiser.”
“Then you had best kill him,” Bonaparte agreed, his fist tightening around the neck of the bottle. By sheer dint of will he refrained from smashing it down and shattering the glass into a thousand pieces. “Kill him and get that letter back, for there can be no room for error now, Cipi. Not this close to our ultimate triumph!"
CHAPTER ONE
July 24, 1815
She thought he was dead. There was nothing to indicate any life in the half-naked body that was being gently nudged to and fro in the shallow water of the tidal pool. The cuts and scrapes that marred the broad slabs of muscle across his back and shoulders were a bloodless raw pink, the skin itself was yellowed as old tallow. He was dressed only in thin linen underdrawers which ended at the knee and were secured about the waist with a slackened drawstring. He might as well have been completely naked, however, for the linen had been rendered nearly transparent by the water and though her eyes did not linger overlong, she could plainly see the sculpted curves of his buttocks, the shallow dimples in the small of his back.
With a threatening whoosh, the surf swirled forward, clattering across the sand and shingle to surround the still form. The blue-gray lips opened with the fresh incursion of salt water and it was there, in the expelled rush, she saw the silvery foam of bubbles.
Annaleah Fairchilde gasped and jumped quickly back. Her gaze darted around the jumbled rocks on either side of the body as if she half expected to see a dozen more corpses scattered among the boulders, but the beach was deserted as always. A treacherous fog had blanketed the coastline through the night; the last of it was just burning off in the early morning sun, but she had not heard any alarms to signify a ship blown off course, nor any church bells tolling to call out the villagers to help with a shipwreck.
Yet the body must have come off a ship. Torbay had become an important seaport during the two decades of hostilities with France and the entrance lay just to the east beyond the jutting promontory of Berry Head. There were always vessels in these waters--along with periodic stories of a body washing ashore that had not been properly stitched into a weighted shroud.
But this one was alive.
She looked down again. Thick, wet strands of dark hair lay across his face, obscuring most of his features from view. His eyes were closed, the long black lashes spiked against his cheeks. His upper torso was broad and well-defined with muscle, his thighs lean and hard as those belonging to the men she had seen climbing nimbly up the tall masts of sailing ships. The one hand that lay palm up in the sand was square, the pads of the fingers white with waterlogged calluses; the other was clenched in a fist, the arm folded under his head. It was this meager bit of leverage that had probably saved him from drowning.
If it had saved him.
Annaleah glanced over her shoulder, the panic rising in her chest again, this time because she was alone on the beach. The cove was small and isolated, the beach less than a half mile in length and curved around water that was too shallow for anchorage, too turbulent beyond the breakers for fishermen to set their nets. The inlet itself was ringed by steep limestone cliffs, the cracks and crags populated by colonies of screaming gulls, most of which were in the air now, circling in white flashes above as if they too were waiting to see if this tempting morsel of fleshy driftwood would live or die.
Widdicombe House sat at the top of the cliffs, accessed by a steep path that had been worn into the face of the rock by a few thousand years of high winds and blowing sands. It was not a conceivable thought, even if Annaleah had been a man, that she could manipulate the dead weight of a body to the top on her own. She would have to go back for help, although she strongly doubted, in the time it would take her to reach the house and tell them what she had discovered, that the sailor would be there when she returned.
The tide was inching higher up the shingle even as she took another step back to avoid staining her shoes with salt water. Further out, beyond the jagged breakers, the surface of the sea was a calm, undulating sheet of liquid pewter beneath the hazed sky, but she knew that calm could be deceiving. Many a ship had made the mistake of sailing too close to shore and having their hulls cracked open when the currents pulled them into the rocks.
Knowing she had to make some kind of a decision, Annaleah wiped her hands on the folds of her muslin skirt and ventured close to the body again. She jumped as the icy water of the Channel scrabbled over her shoes, but there was nothing to be done for it. The hem of her dress was dragged backward and, as uncharitable a thought as it might be, she felt a momentary surge of resentment toward the unmoving body as well as the circumstances that had brought her here this day.
“Some time away with your Great Aunt Florence will do you good,” she muttered to herself, misquoting her mother’s words of a week ago. “The sheer calmness and boredom of the seaside should help sedate your own thoughts.”
Bracing herself, she reached down and gingerly curved her hands beneath the man’s shoulders, testing his weight. She was not a frail wisp of a creature by any measure, but he seemed gigantic by contrast, an utterly limp mass of bone and muscle. It took three grunted attempts and a near spill head-first into the encroaching waves before she discarded the notion of dragging him out of the sand by his arms. By then her feet were squeaking inside her soaked shoes and a good measure of her skirt was wet and dragging.
“Damnation, hell, and bother!” she said, citing three of her brother’s favorite oaths.
With one eye on the next wave scrolling over the breakers, she slogged around beside the body and tried pushing him, rolling him front over side over back until he was a few feet higher on the shore.
She stopped, her hands braced on her knees, to catch her breath, and noticed for the first time the ugly, blotched egg at the back of his skull. The skin was swollen almost to bursting, mottled blue and black, riddled with spidery red veins. It must have taken quite a blow to cause such a lump and Annaleah, feeling even more helpless than before, knelt gingerly beside him. Her hands hovered over the contusion several more seconds before she found enough nerve to lift the tangled mass of wet black hair off his neck. Assured the skin was not broken and his brain was not leaking out, she took an additional moment to study his profile but was no further enlightened. She did not recognize him, though that was hardly a surprise. In all of her nineteen years, she had visited Widdicombe House perhaps ten times, none of them made with the intentions of retaining any memories of the local fishermen and farmers who gawked openly at the well-heeled visitors from London.
It was Annaleah who gawked now, however. She had deliberately avoided acknowledging his state of near nudity and tried not to think of where her hands were placed each time she grasped his hip and shoulder to roll him. But now her gaze had wandered far below where any sense of modesty should have allowed. He was on his side facing her, and while his whole body had become sugared with a fine coating of sand, the linen of his drawers clung in a shockingly sheer layer to his lower anatomy. Her eyes, bluer than the sky above, widened and glazed appreciably at the shapes and contours molded by the wet cloth. She had heard whispers of such things, even seen a crude sketch drawn once in a parlor full of giggling females, but to actually see such a thing, to realize what an awkward burden a man carried between his legs...well, it was no wonder they often looked discomforted--sometimes even in pain.
A slap of cold water against her ankles served to break the spell and, with her skin hot and her breath dry in her throat, she pushed and rolled and heaved again until he was lying in the soft, powdery sand well above the scalloped tidewater mark. With a final shove, her hands skidded forward onto his chest and she fell forward, sprawling half across his body.
It had the same effect as falling over a rock and the air left her lungs with a loud whoomf. Conversely a similar breath left his mouth with a small fount of seawater, followed by a shallow gasp and a much larger rush as his body began to violently reject the notion of drowning. Annaleah grabbed his jaw and turned his head while he wretched and spewed salt water through his mouth and nose. His eyes remained closed and his body clenched tight around each spasm, but eventually the heaving stopped and he collapsed limp on the sand.
Able to draw unimpeded breaths again, a faint hint of color began to seep back into his skin. His lips remained blue, but the dreadful yellow cast began to fade, revealing the true shading of his bronzed skin. The sand had caked over much of his face and as Annaleah brushed some of it off his eyes, the long lashes shivered and opened a slit. For the briefest of moments she found herself staring into eyes so dark they looked like holes burned into the center of his head. For those same few seconds she held her breath, for there was so much anger and pain in their depths, she almost missed hearing the harsh croak of words that were forced through his lips.
“They have to know the truth.”
“Wh-what? What did you say?”
A hand, with fingers like iron bands and a grip that threatened to snap the fine bones in her wrist, reached up and grabbed her. “They have to know the truth. Before it is too late.”
“I...do not know what you mean, sir,” she stammered, shocked by the strength of his hand, shocked by the power of his eyes boring into hers. “What truth, sir? Who has to know?”
His lips moved again, but there was no breath left to give substance to the words. The pressure around her wrist eased enough that Annaleah was able to pry his fingers loose one at a time and free herself. By then, his eyes had shivered closed and his head had lolled to the side.
Thoroughly shaken now, Annaleah pushed to her feet. She glanced one last time at the rising level of the waves, then turned and began running across the soft sand toward the base of the cliff. Yards of wet muslin tangled around her ankles weighing her down, and her shoes squelched like sponges with every awkward step. At the bottom of the steep path she paused to brace herself, then climbed as quickly as she could, heedless of the brambles that tore the flimsy folds of her skirt.
At the top she paused again, her chest burning, her cheeks flushed red, and wondered that she had not noticed how truly far her great aunt’s house sat from the edge of the cliffs.
Once regal and elegant on its perch overlooking the sea, the same sands and winds that worried away at the rocks on the cliffs had eroded the crumbling brick facade of Widdicombe House. The windows were scarred and pitted, most them opaque on the seaward side. The steeply canted roof, with its rows of gables and forests of chimneys, showed patches of cracked and missing slates.
None of this impacted much on Annaleah at the moment as she hoisted her skirts and started running through the long, wind-swept waves of sea grass. She passed the gnarled skeleton of the tree where she had left her bonnet hung on a branch, and wondered if she should go first to the stables to see if old Willerkins was up and out yet tending to his prize beauties. He was nearing eighty, as ancient and weather-beaten as nearly everything and everyone else at Widdicombe House, so she dismissed his usefulness and stayed on the path to the house, hoping against hope the waterman--a comparatively young bulwark at the age of fifty--would be in the kitchen hunched over his morning meal.
All of the utility rooms, she discovered as she blew through the rear door, were empty. There was a crusted tureen of porridge on the kitchen table and a wooden trencher littered with crumbs to suggest someone had been there recently, but her breathless shouts drew no replies.
This came as no debilitating shock either, since her great aunt, Florence Widdicombe, retained only a handful of servants to tend to the upkeep of the entire household. Apart from Willerkins there was a housekeeper, cook, and maid of chambers; a footman, yard man, a waterman, and a boy to run errands and do light chores around the estate. On the less useful end of the employment scale, there was Throckmorton, the timekeeper, whose only task so far as Annaleah had been able to determine was to keep all the clocks in the house wound and to ring a small brass gong three times a day. There was also Ethel, the chicken-plucker, a woman who had so impressed her aunt at a fair some years back--she could kill, eviscerate, and pluck a chicken clean in under two minutes--that Florence had taken her home and employed her ever since for the exorbitant sum of three shillings a month.
Most of the locals in the nearby town of Brixham were gentle when they referred to Florence Widdicombe as being eccentric. She was well into her seventies, a spinster with a vast personal fortune who, while she could not see the justification of paying an army of servants to upkeep a house that was falling apart around her ears, could also not justify collecting more than a token rent--and that mostly in liquid form--from the dozens of families who worked the rich vineyards and apple orchards attached to the estate. Annaleah’s father regularly sent envoys to his wife’s aging aunt insisting she come live with them in London. Unfailingly those envoys returned alone, their noses red from sampling her wines and ciders, their shins bruised from Florence’s tendency to apply her cane when she wanted someone’s attention.
Annaleah’s limbs felt bruised now as she ran up the stairs to the main floor. She was out of breath, nursing a stitch in her side, and still shedding a good deal of water with each step she took. A hasty glance at a well-wound clock told her it was just past nine as she hastened to the morning room, hoping against hope her aunt would be at breakfast.
This time, collapsing with relief against the oak door jamb, she was not disappointed.
“Auntie Lal....Auntie Lal...”
Florence Widdicombe looked up from the soft boiled egg she was stabbing with a wedge of toast. She was tiny as a wisp and looked as if a strong gust of wind would carry her into the next parish. She wore her fine gray hair in a nest of curls on the crown, usually covered by a delicate lace cap with the lappets trailing over her shoulders. She rarely wore any other color but black, and seldom any other expression than frown that suggested she could not quite remember what she had done five minutes ago.
“Good gracious, Anna dear, you look quite damp. I should have thought it far too early in the day to go wading in the ocean.”
“Auntie Lal...”
“Come, come. Have some hot chocolate, or try the sweet cider. Yes, do try the cider. The Wilbury brothers fetched a new barrel of it over this morning and I must say it is one of their best efforts.”
“Please, I do not want cider or chocolate.” She gasped and caught her breath. “I have found a man.”
Her aunt smiled and waved her piece of toast. “Your mother will be pleased to hear it, dear. I gather she was beginning to fret over your lack of interest in the opposite sex.”
“No. No, I mean...I have found the body of a man. Down on the beach. I thought he was dead at first, but he coughed up a great deal of water and now he seems to be breathing.”
The toast remained poised over the egg, a large glob of yellow yolk oozing back into the cup. “Oh dear. Is he one of ours? I do not know how many times I have told young Blisterbottom not to go oystering in the dark. He is barely larger than the bucket he carries, and in truth, I find the creatures he catches to be unpleasantly slimy and salty, reminiscent of....oh well, never mind. Suffice it to say, after all these years, I have never acquired the taste. Young Billy tries so hard to please me, however, I seem plagued to eat them by the plate loads anyway.”
“It is not Billy Bisterbom,” Annaleah said. “It is not anyone I recognized, in fact. But he is badly hurt. He has cuts and scrapes and a lump on his head the size of a turnip. He was in the water when I found him, nearly drowned, but I pushed him up into the sand and--hopefully--he lies there still and has not been dragged back down by the surf.”
“And no one has come to claim him? How ever did he get there?”
“I saw no one else on the beach. I think he must have fallen off a ship, for he is...he is missing most of his clothes.”
“Missing his clothing? How very insensible indeed. There are crabs in the cove, you know, and they are not too particular about what they pinch.” Florence finished the mouthful of toast and picked up a little silver bell. The tinkle it emitted sounded far too inadequate to bring forth a mouse, let alone a houseful of half-deaf old servants, but within a few seconds of the echo fading, the door to the breakfast room was pushed open and Mildred the cook waddled through.
She curtsied as best she could with four hundred pounds of excess flesh rolled around her girth, and smiled in Annaleah’s direction. “Mornin’, Miss. Will ye be takin’ yer breakfast now?”
“Mildred,” her aunt said. “It seems my niece has found a naked man on the beach. Probably some scoundrel from town who had one tot too many and fell off the rocks. Will you fetch Broom and send him down at once to determine if we know where the fellow belongs.”
The cook’s cheeks dimpled with another smile. “Naked, ye say?”
“Hurt,” Annaleah reiterated with an exasperated glance from the cook to her aunt. “He was nearly drowned when I found him, and could well be dead by now.”
“Yes, well, if he drank so much as to lose his clothing as well as his senses, he hardly deserves a kinder fate. Undoubtedly a prank has been pulled on him and we will discover the culprit hiding nearby. Mildred?”
“Yes m’lady. Right the way, m’lady.”
Another ponderous curtsy took the cook back out the door and it was all Annaleah could do not to follow. For some reason she did not believe the man she had found was a local drunkard, nor did she think, after having stared into those dark, soulless eyes, that anyone would be so foolhardy as to play a mere prank on him.
“You are leaking, dear.”
“Wh-what?”
“Your dress,” her aunt indicated the dark stains on her skirts. “It is making a frightful mess on the floor. If you must drip, at least step to the side and drip on the carpet where it will not be so hazardous to a misplaced footstep.”
Though the logic escaped her, for the carpet was from Persia, Anna did as she was told.
“Good heavens.” Her aunt raised a large, square quizzing glass, training a magnified eyeball on her niece with the intensity of a detective. “You are shivering!”
“I...had to wade into the water in order to drag him free.”
“Indeed.” The glass was laid aside. “While I applaud your charity, your mother will froth at the mouth if I send you home with a red nose and chilblains. Off you go now and change out of those wet things. By the time you are dry and presentable again, Broom will have fetched the rogue up from the beach and we can have a good look at him before we decide what needs to be done.”
CHAPTER 2
As Annaleah hurried up the stairs, she worked the buttons free on her spencer and had the short, fitted jacket removed and flung over an arm before she arrived at her room. She had no great expectations of finding Clarice, her personal maid, inside but she called her name anyway, already half out of the sodden gown as she did so.
The dress was ruined. Torn, full of sand and seawater, it was cast aside. Her undergarments were damp and stained as well; they joined the dress, shoes, and stockings in a crumpled pile in the corner of her dressing room. Naked, Anna quickly rubbed a towel across her feet and between her toes to dry them, then sat on a low velvet chair to don a clean chemise and stockings.
Clad in a sheer layer of silk, she searched through the dozens of dresses she had brought away from London. She had not known how long her banishment was to be and had come prepared to spend weeks if need be, waiting for her father and mother to realize that she was no longer a child, that her mind, once sent upon a course--especially this particular course-- was not likely to be turned about or swayed.
“No,” she had said flatly. “It was no yesterday, and it was no last week. It will be no tomorrow and next week and the week after that.”
“Annaleah Marissa Sophia Widdicombe Fairchilde--” her mother had recited all five names with her eyes closed. “Your father and I are only thinking of what is best for you.”
Percival Fairchilde, Earl of Witham had remained hidden behind a freshly ironed newspaper, the rustling of a corner the only indication he had noted his name.
“Best for me?” Annaleah queried. “In the matter of choosing a husband with whom I am expected to live out the rest of my days, do you not think I am at least partially capable of deciding what is best for me?”
“Not when that decision threatens to make us the laughingstock of London. You have had three proposals of marriage in the past year! One from a viscount, one from a marquis, and now for pity’s sake, an offer from a man who needs only to hear that his invalid uncle has gasped his last breath to be named the next Duke of Chelmsford!”
Annaleah had sighed and closed her eyes briefly, for they’d had this conversation a dozen times...in the last week alone. “The viscount was a drunk and a boor, you said so yourself. The marquis was at least forty years old and reeked of the garlic and onions he chewed constantly in hopes of living forty more.”
“I have no doubt you could have undermined those efforts by at least half, sister dear, with very little trouble taken on your part.”
Anna glared at her sister, Beatrice. She was older by three years, staunchly married with one young child wobbling against her skirts and another well on its way. Her husband Alfred, Lord Billington, was strutting, belching proof that Beatrice had wed for all the right reasons, and her high-pitched, sanctimonious whines of advice warned that she expected no less from her younger sibling.
“I would not marry Lord Barrimore,” Anna said evenly, “ if he was the last bachelor left in England.”
“He may well be,” her brother Anthony drawled from his chair by the fire. “Unless of course you have a yearning to reward one of the sturdy young bucks returning from the war. I should think there will be a few thousand soldiers who have not seen a member of the fairer sex in a year or more who would be willing and eager to forgo garlic and onions in order to win your favor. Whether or not you could survive on an income of ten shillings a month,” he shrugged. “Well, you never were the one to refuse a good challenge, what?”
Anna scowled. “You are hardly one to talk about surviving on a stipend, brother dearest. Ten shillings a day barely keeps you in handkerchiefs. A speck of dust on your sleeve and the jacket must be changed. A minute lack of starch in your cravat and all of Bond Street can hear you howling at the incompetence of the laundry. Moreover, you should be the last one standing to Lord Barrimore’s defence. Did you not say, just last week, that the man was an uncivilized barbarian?”
Anthony Fairchilde, viscount Ormont, arched a meticulously shaped eyebrow. “Tch. I said his bootmaker was an uncivilized barbarian, unable to apply a shine that lasted from the storefront to the coach.”
“Perhaps we are approaching this the wrong way, maman,” Beatrice interjected with a sigh. “Perhaps, instead of pointing out that Winston Perry, marquis of Barrimore is devastatingly handsome, stands on the cusp of inheriting a grand title and estates as old as the kingdom itself, and has every eligible beauty and her mother scheming and falling over themselves to catch his eye...perhaps we should be asking Annaleah where he fails in striving to meet her exactingly high standards?”
With mother and sister united to present a formidable front against her, Annaleah laced her fingers together in her lap. “He makes me uneasy.”
“Uneasy?” Her mother’s staunch resolve gave way to a hint of shrillness. “In what way does he make you uneasy?”
“Well...for one thing, he never laughs. Never. I am beginning to believe him incapable of even smiling with any genuine emotion. He is offensively rude to those he considers to be his inferiors, which includes nearly everyone below the level of the king and regent. He criticises the smallest word, the paltriest gesture, yet does not see a single fault in his own stiff-necked, self righteous demeanor. Why, just the other day he crowded a poor flower girl off the pavement and when she went ankle deep in mud, and spilled all her violets, he just stood there glaring at her as if she deserved to be fed poison on top of her humiliation.”
“And so it should be,” Lady Witham declared. “These costermaids have been warned not to block the walkways when gentlemen and ladies are on parade.”
“She was not blocking it, Mother. She was keeping to her own side of the boards. When I offered her five shillings by way of compensation--it was all I had on my person at the time or I should have given her more--the admirable Lord Barrimore looked like he wanted to put me in the mud beside her. I have strong suspicions, were I his wife and chattel, he would have done so without a wink of hesitation.”
“Come now, you judge Barrimore too harshly,” her brother yawned. “I’ve known the man for half a dozen years. He may, at worst, be judged a little dour, but in the clubs and in general company he is regarded to be an out and outer.”
“Why?” Anna asked dryly. “Because he is a four bottle man? Because he can drink all day and carouse all night and still boast enough stamina to tup his favorite mistress before morning?”
“Annaleah!” Her mother’s hand flew to her breast. “Wherever do you hear such things?”
“It is difficult not to hear them, Mother. The identity of his current mistress, how long it took him to cuckold her husband and how quickly he is likely to tire of her is one of the more lively topics of conversation during afternoon tea.”
“Do you not think, if he had a wife, it would tame his wandering eye?” Beatrice asked.
“If he had a wife--one he would not hesitate to push in the mud--I rather doubt his habits would change overnight. I shudder to think what a pitiable lump of suet the gossips would make of her.”
“There is simply no reasoning with you today, is there?” Lady Witham bemoaned. “You are determined to spoil my mood for the entire evening. And what are we to do about this?” She held up an engraved card and waved it emphatically in the air. “He has generously applied to send his landau around at eight tonight to escort us to Lady Worthingham’s assembly. His new landau, mind you. You know what this means, do you not?”
Anna sighed. “I expect it means he has recently taken delivery of a very large, ridiculously expensive carriage that he wishes to flaunt in public.”
“It means he is making his intentions known, chit! He is expressing his admiration and his resolve! When you alight from his carriage tonight and he escorts you into Lady Worthingham’s assembly on his arm, all of London will know he has chosen you to be the future Duchess of Chelmsford!”
Annaleah dug the points of her nails into her palms. “In that case, all of London will be sadly lacking for news, for I have no intentions of going anywhere in Lord Barrimore’s new landau tonight...or any other night for that matter. Nor do I intend to be led around on his arm like a prize heifer purchased at auction.”
“I strongly suggest he would be considered more the prize,” Beatrice remarked through thinned lips.
“In a game I have no interest in playing or winning,” Anna countered. “It is all Mother’s doing anyway. She has been the one encouraging his attentions all along, not I.”
“Regardless of who has been encouraging whom, you are expected at Lady Worthingham’s assembly--”
“I am not going.”
“Not going? Not going?” The exclamation was piercing enough to cause her father to rustle the newspaper again with displeasure. “How can you possibly say you are not going? The regent himself is expected, and it would severely jeopardize the likelihood of our receiving a warm welcome at the masquerade ball he is holding at Carleton House a fortnight hence! You know full well Lady Worthingham has the Prince’s ear! One whisper from her and we shall be off the lists. One breath of scandal and--” her hand wafted to her brow and she wilted dramatically back in her chair, unable to even complete the thought.
Beatrice set aside her needlepoint and glared hollow-eyed at Annaleah as if she had just condemned them all to death. “You cannot be serious about not attending.”
“I assure you, I am.”
“Percival,” Lady Witham gasped. “Do something.”
Her husband’s response was to turn the page and sigh. “What would you have me do, Wife?”
“Tell your daughter to forsake this nonsense at once, of course. Tell her she must attend Lady Worthington’s assembly tonight, and she must do so with every ounce of grace and charm she possesses!”
Her father lowered the paper enough for an eyebrow to show over the top. “Annaleah?”
“If I am forced to attend, I shall swallow ipecac and henbane and contribute a good many ounces of charm and grace, all over Lord Barrimore’s fine new landau.”
Lady Witham wailed and threw her hands up in a gesture of dismay. “There! You see what I am forced to deal with? She is stubborn and headstrong, callous and unfeeling--”
“Mother, I am only trying--”
“Callous and unfeeling! I declare you are trying to send me to an early grave! Any girl in possession of half her sensibilities would see what a splendid opportunity this is. The Duchess of Chelmsford for pity’s sake! ‘Tis rumored he is worth twenty thousand a year before he even inherits the title, and God knows how much after! I will not have it, do you hear me! I will not have it! I will not go to my bed every night with my stomach bubbling like water spigots and my heart suffering such palpitations it is a wonder I can even close my eyes against the envisioned horrors of what might greet me upon arising the next morning! You have been allowed far too many liberties, Annaleah, and there brews the trouble. We have been far too lax with you! Percival!”
“Yes, my dear?”
“Call out the coach at once. She refuses to attend the assembly tonight? Fine. Then she will simply not be here to attend it. Beatrice, fetch Mrs. Bishop. Tell her she is to pack Annaleah’s trunks at once. She is leaving immediately for an indeterminate stay at the seaside.”
Anna’s bravado momentarily deserted her. “The seaside?”
“Your Great Aunt Florence is as old and mouldy as the house she lives in. Perhaps a few weeks in her company, where the most exciting thing you can hope to see is mortar crumbling from the bricks, will convince you that your life here in London is not as dreadful as you would make it out to be.”
Anna leaned forward in her chair. “I never said it was dreadful!”
Lady Witham bent forward an identical amount to glare across the room at her recalcitrant daughter. “Will you attend the assembly tonight?”
Annaleah tensed her jaw. “No.”
“Then you will attend upon your Great Aunt Florence until such time as you come to your senses.”
In desperation, Anna appealed to the raised newspaper. “Father?”
“Percival...” Her mother’s voice sounded like nails on a slate. “You know very well how hard I have worked to bring this engagement about, what a brilliant coup it would be, and if you say one word in her defence, I shall instruct Mrs. Bishop to pack your trunks as well. Or mine, no matter. Simply be assured that one of us will not be under this roof tonight.”
The Gazette came slowly down onto his lap. The familial blue eyes studied the firm jut to his wife’s chin for a moment before casting an annoyed glance in Annaleah’s direction.
“You say he makes you uneasy because he does not laugh? My dear girl, I have had very little to laugh about in nearly thirty years of marriage and it has not been such a taxing hardship. One simply goes about one’s own business and gets along. Now do as your mother says. Stop this nonsense and accept the fact that you are either going to marry Lord Baltimore--”
“Barrimore,” Anthony provided.
“Whatever. You are either going to marry him, live in considerable luxury on any one of his thirteen estates, and generally do whatever you want to do for the rest of your days without any more interference from any of us.....or you are going to spend the remainder of the afternoon packing your trunks to go to Brixham, where you will quickly find yourself wishing you were right back here helping your mother and sister plan your wedding day. Anthony--?” He waited until his son’s head swivelled in his direction. “Have you read this morning’s paper? Can you believe the House is still locked in debates over what should be done with that bounder Bonaparte? They granted leniency once by exiling him to a gentleman’s prison on Elba and look what came of it. A hundred days of war and tens of thousands of good English lives squandered at Waterloo, and for what? An honorable surrender with no penalty? I’ll wager my braces it is that idiot Casterleagh, our vaunted foreign minister, simpering loudest for clemency, for on the same page Wellington says, and I quote: ‘he is an outlaw beyond the pale of civil and social relations, the enemy of humankind.’ Damned fine words too! Hang the bastard, I say, and good riddance.”
Without waiting or, indeed, expecting an answer, he snapped the paper upright again and carried on reading the latest speculations on the where the English ship, Bellerophon, was going to land with the surrendered Corsican general.
Annaleah had barely paid attention to the diatribe. She was thinking furiously of what could be done to avoid her own exile to the wind-driven coast of Devonshire. But apart from surrendering her pride and her convictions to her mother’s demands, there was nothing to be done but stiffen her back and prepare to maintain her resolve. How long could they keep her in Brixham anyway? A week? A fortnight? Any longer than that would give rise to giddy rounds of whispers pertaining to much more damaging and ruinous reasons for whisking a daughter away in the middle of the night.
Remembering this, Annaleah's thoughts returned to the present as she finished drying her feet and glanced sidelong at the tall cheval mirror beside the bed. The thick, wind-blown waves of her hair surrounded her face in curls of deep mahogany brown. Her cheeks were flushed from her exertions and she knew if she had been at home in London, her mother would have ordered a compress of milk and cucumber water to blanch out the effects of sun and wind. She would have been equally horrified to learn of her daughter’s early morning walks along the beach without so much as a wide brimmed bonnet to guard against freckles. And the mere thought that a young lady of genteel breeding had seen, let alone touched a half naked sailor, would have required purges and leeches, at the very least, to drain away the shock.
Yet this was the same mother who insisted the dressmaker cut Annaleah’s necklines alarmingly low, that the gowns be made of silks and muslins so sheer the shape of her legs showed through. It was she who, after decrying the lack of shame in the beauties who rouged their nipples to betray a shadow beneath their bodices, insisted that her own daughter carry only the skimpiest of shawls to ward off the evening chills in order that every male eye might be drawn to the charming effect arctic air had on her breasts.
A shiver reminded Anna that she was all but naked now. Hastily, she pulled on a clean dress, one made of a more substantial weight of cotton that did not betray the slightest hint of skin-tightening beneath. Cut high in the waist it was a style that flattered her long, slender body, and of a color--soft mignonette green--that brought out the rich auburn highlights in her hair. A few strokes of the brush served to tame the dark tangle as much as her patience would allow, and, after slipping her feet into dry shoes, she hurried down the hall toward the stairs that would take her back to the second floor day rooms.
Her aunt was still in the breakfast room, her bony fingers diligently stalking the last smudges of bacon grease with a biscuit. She saw Annaleah and dabbed her mouth with a napkin, then reached for the gnarled stem of her walking cane.
“I have just been informed your naked man is in the kitchen,” she said. “He is still breathing and, according to Mildred, quite the forthright specimen. Shall we go and have a look?”
Anna offered a steadying hand as her aunt rose. Florence was wearing a high necked black bombazine gown that was at least twenty years out of style, with rows of black jet beads sewn around the cuffs and collar. She carried a black lace shawl draped over the crooks of her elbows, and wore heavy jeweled rings on nearly every finger, some so loose they were rarely turned the right way around and often became flying missiles during an animated conversation.
Annaleah recalled how terrified she had been of her great aunt Florence when she was a child. Now her movements were slow and measured, and her hands looked barely strong enough to hold her cane. The skin was paper thin and so pale the blue webbing of veins glowed through.
Florence had also stubbornly refused to marry the man her father had chosen for her and it made Anna wonder if that was not another of her mother’s less than subtle motives in sending her to Brixham: to see what could become of someone too proud and wilful for her own good.
“We’ll take the shorter way, shall we?” Florence said, waving her cane toward the serving doors.
The returning warmth of curiosity made Anna's steps impatient but apart from lifting her aunt and carrying her, she was forced to make a slow, cautious decent in her wake. On one of the landing turns, Florence paused and thumped the wall with the end of her cane, saying casually over her shoulder, “This was where I caught your mother eating an entire cherry pie when she was younger.” She gave a soft cackle of laughter and whacked the wall again for emphasis. “Fat as a bullfrog, she was. Always sneaking food from the pantry and blaming it on the servants.”
Startled, Anna stared at the wall, then at her aunt, who merely offered a wrinkly smile back. “She quite dislikes me, your mother does. You must have done something excruciatingly dreadful to have wound up here. She sent a letter, of course, but I find her sentences tiresome. For every one worthwhile word there are twenty nonsensical ones crouched about it, and I get genuinely fatigued attempting to decipher it all. In this particular instance, I could barely read past the opening salutation, for there appeared to be even more tripe than usual.”
It was the first time in the week Annaleah had been there, that her aunt had broached the subject of her banishment, and although it seemed odd to want to hold such a discussion in the intimacy of a stairwell, Anna found herself answering with a sigh.
“She wants me to marry.”
“All mothers want their daughters to marry. And all daughters usually want to marry.”
“You didn’t.”
The words were blurted out before Anna could stop them, but her aunt only sighed. “No, I did not. A very bold piece of impertinence at the time too, I can assure you, for it was generally presumed that all women were incapable of retaining any thought in their heads more important than which color of thread to apply to their embroidery.”
“Those presumptions have not changed much over the years,” Anna murmured.
“Nor, I suppose, has the maxim that the parents know far better than the child who they should and should not marry?”
“Mother has decided, yes.”
“And you do not agree with her decision? Well, no, of course you must not or you would not be here having to endure my silly questions.”
Her aunt’s wry chuckle echoed slightly as she turned and continued down the stairs. At the bottom, she pushed through the door to the kitchen and announced her arrival with a sharp thwack of the cane.
“Well, where is he? What manner of fish has my niece caught for us? Still alive you say? Good gracious heavens, and still spewing water on my floors? If there is rum in that mix, and I find out he has lost his clothes in a waterfront brothel, why--”