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Look in my face; my name is Might-Have-Been;
I am also called No-more, Too-Late, Farewell.
–Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The House of Life
No one hurried to follow hard on Belle Barlow’s heels. They allowed her a goodly amount of time to leave the vicinity of the police office and take her supporters with her.
Lawyer Sedgewick seemed especially unnerved by his first encounter with Mrs. Barlow. “Good Lord! What a dreadful woman.” He took off his barrister’s wig and fanned himself with it as if he felt faint. “I’ve heard some ripe tales about her. But really! I had no idea!”
Once the shaken barrister departed in his carriage, Ryder rounded fiercely on his rescuers. “A more stupid lot of lunatics than you three I never hope to meet,” he said by way of thanks. “How could you involve yourselves in this?”
“And how could we not stand your friend,” Clare asked simply, “after all you did for us?”
Ryder studied the three serious faces before him and then said—very humbly for Lord Nicholas Ryder—“I see now that you would feel duty bound to come. I beg your pardon, and I thank you for coming to speak for me.”
They were comrades now, the four of them, sharing the fellowship of those who had gone through great travail together. Which, Annis thought sadly, would make her inevitable parting from Nick that much harder to bear.
Now that the streets had been cleared of the mob, Sloane was finally able to bring up the carriage. Ryder pointed his cane up at the driver’s box and said ominously, “So it’s mutiny is it, sergeant?”
“Just as you say, my lord,” Sloane answered, looking not one whit concerned.
“God save me from my loyal friends,” Ryder groaned, once they were underway. “All of you have more courage than wit. How could you risk yourselves against that mob?”
Annis gave a shaky laugh. “Truly, we never felt in any danger. It was your beast’s blood they wanted to spill—a sentiment we’ve all shared on occasion.”
Ryder grinned appreciatively, and seeing him in a good humor, Annis begged him not to be too severe with Sloane.
“You can make yourself easy on that score,” Ryder replied, adding wryly, “How could I find it in my heart to be severe with so devoted a nursemaid? He took me under his wing when I was a green lieutenant and saved my life more times than I care to remember.”
Annis smiled. “And never got out of the habit, it seems.”
“Or so he is pleased to think,” Ryder said drily. “For my part, I never believed Belle Barlow would have the brass to pursue this all the way to the Lords. Although,” he paused thoughtfully, “after what I’ve seen of her today, I wouldn’t put anything past her.”
“And we might see more of her machinations still,” Jamie said in a worried voice. “Especially where Annis is concerned.”
Ryder nodded, looking somber. “If Belle Barlow spreads word of this, there will be those eager to listen.”
“Somehow,” Annis said slowly, “I do not believe she will. How would it profit her for me to be snubbed in the drawing rooms if she’s not there to witness it? No,” she went on with more certainty, although she could not have said why she was so certain, “I don’t think she will strike at us in the drawing room, for that is not her bailiwick. And soon I’ll be home in Devon, and there, she cannot touch me.”
“Perhaps,” Clare said with unexpected perspicacity, “Mrs. Barlow will be happy to let the matter drop because she is not blameless in the poor girl’s death.”
Annis looked up, her Sight coming swift and certain through the blood reek of the city. “She knows who murdered Belinda. More than that, she knowingly sold that poor girl to her death. I’m certain of it. Perhaps she meant to sell me instead and hope Jamie would get the blame. That’s the real reason she wanted me to remain in her keeping. Passing the ale was just a pretext.”
“And even if we hadn’t gone to her place,” Jamie said with dawning realization, “she still could have implicated me. She could have arranged for my signet ring to be left on the girl’s body.”
Annis’s heart rattled as visions of What Might Have Been flashed through her mind. No wonder her Sight had sensed the ill aura that surrounded Jamie. He was already entrapped by the Red Queen and didn’t even realize it.
Ryder said heavily, “We’ve no proof of any of this, but I’ll warrant there is something to it. When Vickery had me at the charnel house, trying to get me to confess, I overheard the other Runners talking. They suspect that some of Mrs. Barlow’s other girls may have come to a bad end, but I was in France when they went missing, something the magistrate surely knew.”
“Then why the devil,” Jamie asked, “didn’t he question her about the other girls?”
Ryder shook his head. “Nothing has ever been proven, for Madam Belle is a cunning lady with friends in high places. It’s also suspected that she was formerly a governess who did a child in her keeping some lasting harm with her ferrule.”
Annis felt a sudden hot writhing along her spine as she remembered the clever lie she had told Madam Duvall to explain her own scars. Perhaps she had lied more cleverly and insightfully than she knew. But what did it all mean? What unseen twist of fate had ensnared all four of them in the Red Queen’s toils? And what could be done about it?
All she could think to do at the moment was to cast a Spell to Quell Rumors the minute she got to her room. (Let no prating gossip of ill-fame/Rob us of our goodly name–)
“Annis.” Ryder’s voice had a snap of command in it, to bring her out of her reverie. “I want a word with you. Alone.”
Once they were back in the Camden House parlour, Clare and Jamie took themselves off like good little privates who had been given their marching orders. Ryder shut the parlour doors behind them and turned to face her.
“Annis, it’s time for us to end these courting games. If I played those games too hard this Season, I humbly beg your pardon, but believe me, you gave quite as good as you got. But I see now that you and I have been playing mighty fast and loose with our future.”
Annis felt trapped and giddy and torn. She knew what was coming.
He came closer to where she stood. “It’s amazing how important the future becomes when you’re standing in the shadow of the gallows with a mob howling for your blood. It clarifies the mind wonderfully.”
Annis sank weak-kneed into a wingback chair, her own mind not clarified in the least. Ryder came and stood in front of her. She declined to meet his eye. All she could do was stare down at the endearingly large pair of feet planted before her own on the carpet.
“Annis, I want to tell you something. The first time we met, back in Devon, before we were at each other’s throats, I wanted you. I’ve wanted other women, but you were different. I hoped to find you waiting for me when I came back from the war. You were the woman I wanted to come home to when the long battle was done. I still want to come home to you, and I want you to marry me.”
All her dreams and nightmares in a single sentence.
“I can’t marry you, Nick.”
This rocked him. She could tell even without looking up to meet his eye.
“Why not? The truth, if you please.”
Oh, but there were so many truths. That she had been warned against him by wax on water and her own maiden’s blood...That she would lose the land for which she had sacrificed so much and to which she was mystically tied...That a love decreed by fate was no true love...
Ryder’s voice broke into her chaotic thoughts. “Stand up and look me in the eye, and tell me why you won’t have me. You owe me that much.”
She stood up and looked him in the eye. Very well, a truth for Nick Ryder, a truth that he could understand.
“You have asked for the truth, and you shall have it.” The words wrenched themselves out of her. “My husband was a monster. I loathed his very touch. I have nightmares about it still, and I do not think I could...give myself to you the way a wife should.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said flatly.
She gave a hollow laugh. “No, I don’t suppose the handsome and rakish Lord Ryder would believe it. But there is more.” A kind of relief settled over her to have it out at last. “My husband was very handy with his whip. He used it on me, and I am marked for life. In point of fact, I am hideously scarred. You would find me quite revolting beneath the covers, and I could never live with that.”
His eyes were narrow with suspicion. “You forget, I’ve danced with you in all manner of ball gowns, and nothing did I see that was not creamy perfection.”
Her mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “Shall I tell you how it was done, then? You have seen floggings in the army, perhaps even ordered them yourself.”
His gaze flickered and she knew he had. No man could have been an officer for ten years and not resorted to the flogging triangle upon occasion.
“Then you know that before a man goes to the triangle, a leather band is tied around his waist to protect his kidneys. You wonder how I would know that, but my husband informed me of such things. For me, there was a leather yoke. The principle is the same, for it wouldn’t do to have me marked so I couldn’t be displayed in the latest finery. Prostitutes who cater to men of his tastes use such things. I would do the same. I was his wife. His property. My family was in his power. I must submit to the yoke and the whip and all the rest. And so I did. Can you conceive of the irony of it, the irony of us?” The bitterness in her voice surprised even her. “You, handsome and perfect, who have come through a great foreign war without a mark on you, and me, hideously marred in the very bedchamber where my own parents conceived me in love.”
Ryder stood before her, wordless, thunderstruck, like a boxer who had taken too many punishing blows.
Annis watched him dispassionately, thinking how hard it must be for him to formulate the proper expressions of sympathy. What on earth do you say to a woman who confesses that beneath her pretty frocks she resembles a badly behaved impressed seaman? And then she saw the thing she had been dreading. She saw pity in his eyes. After all, a woman is brought up from the cradle to be desirable to men, and when she is not, what else is there to feel for her but pity? She waited to see how he would speak his pity.
“Annis,” he said carefully, carefully, “I don’t wish to make light of what you have suffered. But is it not possible that you make too much of it?” He went on—not quite carefully enough as it turned out. “Think of Sefton and his Maria. They go on well enough despite—” He broke off when he saw her flinch. “I didn’t mean to compare—”
“Of course you did. And it’s an apt comparison—except for the fact that Lord Sefton has money and a title to compensate for being a hunchback. I have nothing to compensate for my disfigurement.”
“Good God, do you think I care for that?”
“You say that now, when you are flush with gratitude and thwarted desire. But I think that if I were foolish enough to marry you, you would quickly grow tired of a wife who was hempen instead of silken beneath the bedclothes.”
His eyes searched her face. “How can I convince you it doesn’t matter?”
“You can’t,” she said stonily. “I never wanted you to love me, for I don’t believe we should be together. But you had to overcome my every defense. You had to conquer. But now that you know the truth, I hope you will not be so cruel as to pursue me further.”
“I think,” he said slowly, “it is you who are cruel. But since you have been cruelly used yourself, I can’t fault you. Very well. I’ll depart the scene quietly and spare us both further pain, for I see that nothing I can say will change your mind.”
And then he was gone, just like that. Just like the guttering out of a heartsblood candle that had shown no loves, no passions, only the stretch of long empty years ahead.
She had the black knight in check at last, and she was desolate.