“I was.” He hesitated. The subject wasn’t one he ever wanted to visit again in this lifetime, but the expression on Miss Corning’s face was rapt. Had not Othello wooed his Desdemona thus? If telling her his bloody war tales would win her, he’d do it, no matter the pain to himself. Brown eyes stared up through a mask of blood.
Even if it tore his soul in two.
“I had no choice. I was enslaved.”
BEATRICE DREW IN her breath at the word enslaved. The carriage bumped around a corner, jostling her against the side, but she paid little mind, caught up as she was with the thought of proud Lord Hope in slavery. The very thought was an abomination.
“Is that where you got those?” She nodded at the bird tattoos.
He raised a hand to trace them. “Aye.”
“Tell me,” she said simply.
His hand dropped. “You’ve heard about the massacre at Spinner’s Falls.”
It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway. “There was an ambush. Most of the regiment were killed.”
He nodded, his face turned toward the window, though she somehow knew he saw nothing of what passed outside. “We were marching through the woods from Quebec to Fort Edward. The trail was narrow, and the men were forced to walk in single file. The regiment became strung out. Too damned strung out.”
She watched as a muscle ticked in his jaw. He didn’t like telling her this story, but he was doing it anyway.
He inhaled. “I was riding to tell our colonel that I thought we should stop and let the tail catch up to the head of the line when the Indians attacked.”
His lips set firmly, and for a moment she thought he wouldn’t go on, but then he looked at her, his black eyes desperate.
“We couldn’t form a line of defense. My men were being picked off before they could rally. The Indians shot from both sides of the trail, hidden in the trees. My men were screaming and falling, and then my colonel was pulled from his horse.”
He looked blindly at his hands. “They scalped him. My men were dying all about me, screaming and being scalped.” His fingers flexed into fists. “My horse caught a bullet and went down. I managed to jump free, but I was surrounded. I don’t remember what happened then—I think I was struck on the head—but when I became aware of my surroundings again, we were being marched to the Indian camp. The French had given us to their allies as war booty.”
“Dear God,” Beatrice breathed, feeling sick to her stomach. How terrible for Lord Hope to lose his men thusly. How impotent he must’ve felt.
He was gazing out the window again and made no indication that he’d heard her. “After we made the camp, I was separated from the others by the Indian who had captured me. His name was Sastaretsi. He stripped me naked, took my clothes away, and gave me only a thin, flea-infested blanket to cover myself with. Then Sastaretsi marched me through the woods for six weeks. By the time we’d made his village, I was walking in bare feet through grass crusted with frost.”
He paused, remembering that awful time, and Beatrice was silent, waiting.
“All that time,” he whispered. “All that time, I schemed on how to kill Sastaretsi. But my hands were bound so tightly in front of me that the flesh had swollen into the leather thongs. He’d pulled my fingernails from my hands so I could not use even their feeble strength to scratch my bonds loose. And at night he tied my bound hands to a stake driven deep in the ground. I was weakened from the cold and lack of nourishment. I think I might’ve died in that endless wood if we hadn’t happened upon a French trapper and his son. The man spoke some Wyandot and seemed to take pity on me, for he gave me an old shirt and a pair of leggings. Those leggings and shirt saved me.”
He was silent again, and this time Beatrice knew he didn’t mean to go on.
“But why?” she finally blurted. “Why did Sastaretsi do all this to you?”
He looked at her then, and his eyes were blank—flat as if he were dead. “Because he meant to burn me at the stake when we reached his village.”
Chapter Six
Now, a giant hourglass sits in the throne room of the Goblin King, its sands endlessly flowing until time itself shall stop. By this means, the goblins mark time in their sunless land deep beneath the earth. It happened that one year when Longsword went to plea for his freedom, the Goblin King was in a particularly good mood, having just that day defeated a great prince in battle.
The Goblin King glanced at his hourglass and then said to Longsword, “You’ve served me well for seven years, my slave. Because of this, I shall make you a bargain.”
Longsword bowed his head, for he knew well that a bargain with the Goblin King suits only the Goblin King.
“You may walk the earth above for one year,” the Goblin King said. “Mark you, one year only. At the end of that time, if you have found one Christian soul to voluntarily take your place in the land of the goblins, then you shall be free and I shall trouble you no more.”
“And if I do not?” Longsword asked.
The Goblin King grinned. “Then you shall serve me for all eternity. . . .”
—from Longsword
Lottie Graham sipped her wine, peering at her husband over the edge of the glass. Nathan was absorbed in thought tonight, his broad brow slightly knit, his blue eyes vague and unfocused.
She set down the wineglass precisely and said, “We received an invitation to a ball hosted by Miss Molyneux today.”
There was a pause that stretched so long that for a moment she thought he wouldn’t answer her at all.
Then Nate blinked. “Who?”
“Miss Cristelle Molyneux.” Lottie cut into the roast duck on her plate. “She’s Reynaud St. Aubyn’s aunt on his mother’s side. I think she plans to reintroduce him to society. In any case, the invitation was sent on scandalously short notice—she plans it for this Thursday.”
“Seems silly to plan it on so little notice,” Nate said. “Will anyone show, I wonder?”
“Oh, she’ll have no problem filling her ballroom.” Lottie speared a piece of duck, but then set it back on the plate. Her appetite seemed nonexistent tonight. “Everyone will be wanting to see the mysterious mad earl.”
Nate frowned. “He’s not an earl yet.”
“But surely it’s only a matter of time?” Lottie twirled her wineglass stem.
“Only a fool would think that.”
Lottie felt tears spring to her eyes. She looked down at her lap. “I’m sorry you think me a fool.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.” His voice was brisk, impatient.
There’d been a time back before they’d married when her slightest frown would cause him to offer profuse apologies. Once, he’d sent her an arrangement of flowers so big it’d taken two footmen to bring it into the house. All because he’d not been able to take her driving on a day it’d rained.
Now he thought her a fool.
“It’ll take a special parliamentary committee, I believe,” Nate was saying as she thought these gloomy things, “to decide if this man is indeed St. Aubyn, and if he is, who the proper Earl of Blanchard is. That, at least, is the opinion of many of the learned parliamentarians. There hasn’t been a case such as this one in living memory, and many are quite interested in the legal implications.”
“Are they?” Lottie murmured. She’d lost interest in the conversation while her husband had finally become engaged in it. Had her marriage always been thus? “In any case, I thought it would be nice to attend the ball. It’s bound to have all the best gossip of the year.”
She glanced up in time to catch the look of irritation that crossed his face.
“I know that keeping up with the latest scandal is vital to you, dearest,” he said. “But there are actually other things of import in the world, you know.”
There was a short, awful silence.
“First I’m a fool and now I’m interested only in gossip,” Lottie said very clearly, because she was holding back the tears with all her will. “I begin to wonder, sir, why you married me at all.”
“Now, Lottie, you know I didn’t mean it that way,” he replied, and didn’t even bother trying to hide the edge of exasperation in his voice.
“In what way did you mean it, Nathan?”
He shook his head, a reasonable man beset by a mad wife. “You’re overwrought.”
“I am not,” Lottie said, the tears beginning to overflow, “overwrought.”
He sighed, pushed his chair back from the table, and stood. “This conversation is pointless. I’ll leave you to yourself until you’ve once again regained your senses. Good night, madam.”
And he left. She sat there in the dining room, gasping and trembling and thoroughly humiliated.
It was the last straw.
“HE’S VERY HURT, Jeremy,” Beatrice said as she paced from Jeremy’s heavily draped window to his bed. “You have no idea. He told me just a fraction of what he’d experienced in the Colonies, and it was all I could do not to scream aloud. How could he survive such horrors? And yet he’s incredibly strong, incredibly determined. It’s as if he’s driven out of his soul whatever softness he may’ve once felt. He’s been fire-hardened.”
“He sounds very interesting,” Jeremy said.
Beatrice looked at him. “I’ve never met a gentleman like him in all my life.”
“What does Lord Hope look like now that he’s transformed himself?”
“He’s tall with very wide shoulders and wears a sort of aloof glare most of the time. He’s quite intimidating and rather savage-looking, actually.”
“But you said he’d cut his hair and donned a wig and other civilized accoutrements. He sounds quite normal to me,” Jeremy said from the bed. That was the best part about Jeremy—he always took an interest in one’s thoughts and troubles, no matter how trivial.
“He may wear the same sort of clothes as other gentlemen, but they fit him differently somehow.” Beatrice picked up a tall green bottle from Jeremy’s cache of medicines and peered at the dark liquid inside before returning it to its brethren. “And he’s still wearing that earring I told you about. The tattoos he can’t remove, but why do you think he hasn’t taken off the earring?”
“I haven’t the faintest,” Jeremy replied with evident delight. “I do wish I were able to meet him, though.”
Beatrice turned and glanced at him. Jeremy was sitting up in bed today. She’d plumped the pillows for him and helped him sit higher. His cheeks were still flushed, his eyes too bright, but she fancied he was a little better than the last time she’d seen him.
At least she hoped so.
“Perhaps I can bring him around someday,” she said.
He glanced away. “Don’t, Bea.”
She blinked. “Why ever not?”
His eyes met hers, and for a moment all amusement left his face. His extraordinary blue eyes were stern, almost cold, and she wondered in a flash of insight if this was what he’d looked like on the battlefield when he’d led his men.
Then his expression softened a little. “You know why.”
She grimaced because she did know why. “You’re too sensitive to your injury. Many men come home without an arm or a leg or even an eye, and one continues to see them at balls and events. No one singles them out except to say how brave they were.”
“That’s not what Frances said.” Jeremy’s eyes were old and sad.
She bit her lip. “Frances was a complete and utter ninny, and frankly I think you were saved years of insipid conversation over your morning tea when she called off your engagement.”
He laughed, thankfully, but it turned to a cough, and she had to hurry over and pour him a cup of water.