The Last Hellion

  Lydia was aware of the sheeting rain, of the blasting light, and of shuddering thunder, and voices, too, but only as something distant, in another world eons away.

  All the world she knew at this moment lay in a too-still form at the edge of the wreckage, and an eternity seemed to pass as she scrambled down into the track to him.

  She sank down on her knees, in the mud, where he lay facedown.

  Behold me prostrate before you.

  She remembered him kneeling before her in Covent Garden and the sound of his theatrically pleading voice and the glint of laughter in his rogue’s eyes belying his soulful expression.

  A terrible, mad laughter surged up inside her. But she was never hysterical.

  She pulled at his coat. “Get up, drat you. Oh, please.” She was not crying. It was the rain, filling her eyes, and the sting in her throat was the cold. It was so cold, and he was so heavy. She tore his coat trying to turn him onto his back, and then she could not let him lie there in the mud, and so she yanked him up by the lapels. “Wake up, you stupid, stubborn brute,” she cried. “Oh, wake up, please.”

  But he wouldn’t wake up and she couldn’t hold him up. All she could do was cradle his head and wipe the mud from his face and order and argue and beg and promise, anything.

  “Don’t you die on me, you beast,” she choked past the burning thing in her throat. “I’ve grown…attached to you. Oh, come. I never meant…Oh, I shall be wretched. How could you, Ainswood? This is not fair—not sporting of you. Come. You’ve won.” She shook him. “Do you hear me, you thickheaded cockscomb? You’ve won. I’ll do it. The ring. The parson. The whole curst business. Your duchess.” She shook him again. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Make up your mind. Now or never, Ainswood. This is your last chance. Wake up, damn you, and m-marry me.”

  She choked back a sob. “Or I’ll leave you as I found you.” She bowed her head, despairing. “Here. In the mud. In a ditch. I knew you’d come…to a b-bad end.”

  Vere was very bad. A hopeless case.

  He should have opened his eyes sentences ago, but he was afraid he’d wake up and find it was only a dream: his dragon-girl scolding him and grieving for him.

  But it wasn’t a dream, and she must be soaked to the skin, and he must be the greatest brute in Christendom to risk her falling ill on his worthless account.

  And so Vere reached up and brought her beautiful, stubborn face close to his. “Am I dead and are you an angel, or is it only you, Grenville?” he whispered.

  She started to pull back, but he was not so enfeebled—or noble—as to let her off without a kiss. He cupped the back of her head and held her down, and she yielded, as always, in an instant. Then he knew it was no dream.

  No dream ever tasted so plum-sweet as her soft, ripe mouth, and he savored it, lengthening and deepening the kiss, drinking her in while the storm broke about them.

  But this time when he released her—reluctantly, so very reluctantly that he should be canonized for self-restraint—the truth slipped past his guard and he said thickly, “I’d rather you, wicked girl, than all the seraphs in heaven. Will you have me, sweet? Do you mean it?”

  She let out a shaky sigh. “Yes. I mean it, plague take you. And I am not sweet. Get up, you great fraud.”

  It was not Bertie’s first accident. It was, however, the first time he hadn’t been driving when the smash-up occurred. Still, as he told Miss Price moments after Miss Grenville had hurried down to Ainswood, even the most skilled whip could not have prevented the accident. Taking fright at the lightning, the horse had reared up with enough force to break one of the tilbury’s shafts. The other one broke when the carriage overturned. The horse had bolted, dragging the remains of its draft gear with it.

  Bertie had leapt clear in the nick of time and only taken a tumble on the road. He would have rushed down to Ainswood’s side if Miss Grenville hadn’t already abandoned her cabriolet to do the same. Then Bertie’s first thought was “ladies first,” and he had hurried to aid Miss Price, left in charge of a clearly mettlesome gelding.

  As Bertie explained to her, if Ainswood was dead, no one could help him. If he wasn’t, assistance would likely be needed to haul him up from the track and take him to Liphook. Since the tilbury was in splinters and the cabriolet could not carry four, Bertie had dashed off in the vehicle with Miss Price to summon aid from the village.

  This had not taken long. The Anchor Inn was scarcely a mile from the accident scene, and it was filled to the rafters with Ainswood’s friends, all eagerly awaiting the race’s conclusion. Within minutes, somebody’s carriage was readied and on its way to the rescue.

  Bertie wasn’t sure whose carriage it turned out to be, because by that point he’d fallen into a profound state of distraction.

  The confusion had started en route to the inn, when Bertie spotted a signpost indicating the direction and distance of several villages in the general vicinity.

  “Oh, I say,” he said, blinking. “Blackmoor. That were the one.”

  Miss Price had been a little stiff until now, though considerably more thawed than when he’d last spoken to her, on Friday. Then, she’d stalked off angry about something or other which he was hanged if he had any idea what it was.

  When he’d taken charge of the cabriolet, she hadn’t seemed quite so vexed, yet she wasn’t altogether as talkative and friendly as usual during the short drive to the village.

  When he mentioned Blackmoor, however, she turned to him with the keen, studying look he was more used to. “You know the village?”

  He shook his head. “No. It were a picture. Charles Two, only not him, but his friend, and I dunno what he did to get the title, on account of them long, pale yellow curls made me wonder why a fellow’d want to look like a female. And so I weren’t listening with all ears at the moment, but he’s the one I wanted. Not the king at all, you see.”

  Miss Price stared at him for a moment. “Long, yellow curls,” she said. “A friend of King Charles II. A cavalier, then, most likely. You saw a picture of a courtier, a friend of the king.”

  “And he could’ve been Miss G’s brother,” Bertie said, as he halted the carriage at the inn’s entrance. “Only he couldn’t, bein’ dead some centuries. The first Earl of Blackmoor, which m’curst sister likes the best of all the men in the pictures, she says, on account of—By Jupiter, there he is, when I never thought he’d come on such short notice, and only pray he didn’t bring m’sister with him.”

  Miss Price turned her enormous brown gaze to the door of the Anchor Inn, where the Marquess of Dain stood wearing one of his famous deadly stares, which Bertie was well aware took some getting used to.

  Miss Price clearly wasn’t used to it because she gasped, “Oh, my goodness,” and fainted dead away. This was the point at which Bertie fell into an acute state of distraction.

  Chapter 12

  “Of course I shall stand up for you,” Tamsin said as she deftly pinned up Lydia’s hair. “I am perfectly well now. It was the excitement, coupled with hunger, that made me faint. But I am not in the least unwell. This is the most exciting day I’ve ever had, and I refuse to miss a minute of the conclusion.”

  The two women were in a bedchamber of the Anchor Inn.

  Lords Dain and Sellowby had arrived in a private drag as Lydia and Ainswood were starting the wet trek to Liphook. They had mentioned Tamsin’s swooning—in terror at the sight of Dain, was how Sellowby explained it—but Lydia had been in too much of a tumult then to fret about her companion.

  Her tumult hadn’t to do with Ainswood exclusively, though her softhearted—or softheaded—agreement to wed caused her no little turmoil. But Dain, too, had thrown her world into confusion.

  Though Lydia was supposed to be the mirror image of Lord Dain’s father, neither the present marquess nor Sellowby had shown the smallest glimmer of recognition during the short drive to the inn or in the moments after their entering it, when it was settled that the wedding would take place as soon as the br
ide- and groom-to-be had washed and changed into clean clothes. At the time, Lydia had been incapable of composing any coherent objection to the duke’s urgings for a prompt shackling.

  Even now, after a hot bath, tea, and pampering under Tamsin’s hands, Lydia still felt at sea. The sense of upheaval, of matters careening out of her control, was not agreeable.

  “I should have insisted on time to rest, at least,” she said. “But Ainswood…oh, he is so insistent and impatient and he makes such a bother of himself when one says no.”

  “It would have made little sense to put off the wedding, when he had everything ready,” said Tamsin. “Is it not amazing how organized he can be when strongly motivated?”

  “Smug and cocksure is more like it,” Lydia said. “Still, he had everything in hand, and his friends were already gathered, and so it seemed we might as well get it over with.”

  Tamsin stepped back to admire the tidy coiffure she’d created.

  A few soft, wavy gold tendrils framed Lydia’s face, and the knot she usually pinned any which way at the base of her neck was neatly gathered atop her head.

  “‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well/ It were done quickly,’” Tamsin smilingly quoted from Macbeth. “Lady Dain said that the longer a man is obliged to wait, the more likely he is to work himself into an irrational state. She said it happened to Lord Dain, and he was nearly impossible to deal with by the time they were married. The weeks of wedding preparations nearly drove her mad as well, she told me, though she isn’t the sort to be easily overset.”

  “Organizing that wedding must have been like preparing for Waterloo,” Lydia murmured. “It was very grand. The church was packed to bursting, and there were even more people at the wedding breakfast.”

  “And she has expensive tastes, according to His Lordship.”

  “Well, we shan’t be very grand.” Lydia studied her reflection in the glass. “Except for my hair. How elegant you’ve made me—from the neck up.”

  But that was only appearances, she thought. And now even she wasn’t sure who she really was.

  Fancy yourself a great lady, do you? Papa had asked so mockingly all those years ago. That’s all it had been, evidently: a fantasy on Mama’s part that she was a Ballister. Otherwise, surely, Lydia would have detected something—surprise, annoyance, even amusement—in Dain’s dark countenance. But all he’d done was look her over very briefly, reserving his attention for his erstwhile schoolmate Ainswood.

  Obviously, when Sellowby had made the comment, after Dain’s wedding, about spying a female who might have stepped out from the Athcourt portrait gallery, he’d merely discerned a vague resemblance from a distance, Lydia decided. Up close, the resemblance must have proved vague indeed, since this day he’d seemed no more struck by her features than Dain had been.

  Maybe that was it. Perhaps Mama had seen the previous Lord Dain at a procession or stepping out from his carriage. At a distance, she might have perceived a resemblance to Lydia, and subsequently built a long fictional story upon it. Lydia could hardly be surprised. Her own inspiration for The Rose of Thebes had come from a gossipy newspaper article describing Lady Dain’s betrothal ring, a large cabochon ruby surrounded by diamonds.

  “I don’t think the duke cares what your hair looks like,” Tamsin said, drawing Lydia back to the present. “I’m sure he would have wed you on the spot, as you were, your sopping hair in your mud-spattered face and your bonnet a wet lump dangling from your neck.”

  “He was hardly Beau Brummell himself,” Lydia said, rising from her chair at the dressing table. “In any event, he was wetter than I and bound to fall ill standing about in dripping clothes during the ceremony. I didn’t wish to spend my first days of marriage nursing him through a lung fever.” She turned to meet Tamsin’s gaze. “You must think me mad, or at least capricious.”

  “I think it was a mistake to call your feelings for him ‘a schoolgirl infatuation’ or ‘mating instinct’ or ‘the delirium of lust,’ as you’ve done.” Tamsin chuckled softly. “I had the feeling he might be beginning to grow on you—”

  “Like a fungus, you mean.”

  “It’s no use pretending you don’t care for him,” Tamsin went on. “I saw you leap from the carriage without a thought for the storm, that deranged gelding, or anything but the Duke of Ainswood.” She grinned. “It was ever so romantic.”

  “Romantic.” Lydia scowled. “I shall be ill.”

  “That’s bridal nerves.” Tamsin moved to the door. “I daresay he’s in a worse state than you are, and undergoing agonies. We had better let the minister put the pair of you out of your misery.”

  Lydia lifted her chin. “I am not subject to nervous fits, Miss Impertinence. I am not in any sort of misery. I am perfectly composed.” She stalked to the door. “In a short while I shall be the Duchess of Ainswood, and then”—she glared at Tamsin—“the rest of you peasants had better look out.”

  She swept from the room, a laughing Tamsin following.

  Thanks to Dain, Sellowby, and Trent, Vere was in a fair way to being driven distracted. None of them could hold his tongue for half a minute and let a fellow think.

  They were gathered in the small dining parlor reserved for the nuptials.

  “I’m telling you, it’s the oddest thing,” Trent was saying, “and how you can’t see it is beyond me only maybe it were on account she were the worse for the rain and mud and her own mother wouldn’t recognize her—”

  “Of course I recognized her,” said Sellowby. “I had seen her outside the church after Dain’s wedding. One could hardly fail to notice a handsome young woman of such statuesque proportions. She seemed a fair flower among the weedy clump of journalists. Not to mention that female scribblers are scarcely thick on the ground, and there could be only one Lady Grendel. Even at a distance, her appearance was striking.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Trent persisted. “The tall fellow with the golden curls I seen—”

  “I shouldn’t call it gold,” Dain interrupted. “I should say flaxen. And not a curl in sight.”

  “A pale gold,” Sellowby agreed. “Reminded me of—”

  “That fellow, the cavalier one which m’sister—”

  “The Comte d’Esmond,” Sellowby continued. “Not the same eyes, though. Hers are a lighter blue.”

  “And she can’t be French,” said Dain.

  “I didn’t say she were French, only that were the word they used for ’em which has something to do with horses, Miss Price says, bein’ cheval—”

  “The rumor I heard,” Dain went on, as though his brother-in-law weren’t there, “was that she was born in a Borneo swamp and reared up by crocodiles. I don’t suppose you know the facts about her background, do you, Ainswood? I am not certain Borneo has crocodiles.”

  “What the devil do I care about her background?” Vere snapped. “What I want to know is where the curst parson’s got to—and whether the bride means to come down to the wedding sometime in this century.”

  It had taken him but half an hour to bathe and dress, snarling at Jaynes the whole time. That had left His Grace another hour and a half to cool his heels waiting for his duchess-to-be, and fretting all the while that she’d taken ill and was quietly expiring of a putrid sore throat while his friends nattered on about the precise color of her hair and eyes and whether there were crocodiles in Borneo.

  “Maybe she’s having second thoughts,” Dain said with a mocking half-smile Vere was itching to punch off his arrogant countenance. “Maybe she agreed to wed you while in a state of shock, and has since come to her senses.”

  “I agreed to wed him out of pity,” came a cool feminine voice from the doorway. “And out of a sense of civic duty. We can’t allow him to run amok upon the public byways, breaking up carriages and alarming the horses.”

  The four men turned simultaneously toward the speaker.

  Vere’s dragoness stood in the doorway, garbed from neck to toe in black, and buttoned within an inch
of her life. When she entered, the bombazine rustled suggestive whispers.

  Miss Price trailed behind her, and the preacher brought up the rear.

  “I’d better find my wife,” Dain said, heading for the door. “And you are not to so much as think of starting without us. I must give the bride away.”

  Grenville’s eyebrows went up.

  “They drew straws,” Vere explained. “Trent is groomsman, and Sellowby is charged with guarding the door, to keep out the crowd of noisy drunkards.”

  The crowd had been herded into the large public dining room, where they entertained themselves by singing ribald songs and terrifying the hapless travelers who’d paused here for shelter from the storm.

  “Your friends were denied the entertainment of witnessing your spectacular race finish,” said his dragoness. “I cannot believe you mean to deprive them of this spectacle as well.”

  “I promise you, Grenville, they’re in no state to appreciate it,” he said. “Half of them couldn’t tell the bridegroom from a wine barrel at this point—and the majority would rather be near the wine barrel.”

  “It is a solemn occasion,” the minister added sternly. “The holy state of matrimony is not to be entered into lightly, nor—” He broke off as Grenville’s glacial blue gaze settled upon him. “That is. Well.” He tugged at his collar. “Perhaps we might take our places.”

  The nagging, frustratingly faint thought or memory or whatever it was teased Vere once more. But Dain and his wife entered in the next moment, and Lord Beelzebub took charge, as he was everlastingly wont to do, and ordered this one to stand here and that one there and someone to do this and another to do that.

  And in another moment, the ceremony began, and then all Vere could think about was the woman beside him, about to become his, absolutely…and forever.

  The bride and her attendants had withdrawn hours earlier, but it was midnight before Vere’s friends allowed him to escape from the post-wedding orgy, and this was only because someone—Carruthers or Tolliver—had a bevy of trollops delivered. At that point, Dain decided the married men were free to depart if they chose. Though Trent wasn’t a married man, he left with them, still trying to make Dain listen to some incomprehensible theory or story or whatever it was about Charles II and courtiers and cavaliers and Lucifer only knew what else.