At Your Pleasure

  Reason left her. She looked for a rock. She looked for something to bash their skulls.

  But the soil was smooth and stoneless. Hodderby’s people tended its gardens well.

  She looked up again. Adrian struck, quick as a snake—delivering a strange kick, a blow that swept round to catch David in the ribs and strike him off his feet. She burst to her feet, leaping forward toward David as he scrambled to recover—

  Turning his sword, Adrian smashed the hilt into David’s head.

  Her brother lay still.

  She collapsed into the dirt, grasping her brother’s skull. So much blood. So much. Her palm could not staunch it. He was dead—no! A pulse beat in his throat—but his eyes did not open. “Wake up!” This blood, it did not stop. No, no, no, no—

  A force seized her wrist and dragged her backward, her brother receding. Men encircled him, kneeling, blocking sight of his body. The men were not his friends; they handled him roughly. They must let him alone.

  The vise tightened brutally around her wrist as she staggered to her feet. The men were trying to lift him. “Do not touch him! Let him be! God curse you! Be gentle to him! Gently!”

  Rough hands turned her to a new view.

  The flames had spread. They crackled over the roof line. The light of hell now painted her husband’s face.

  He took a violent step toward her. “You fool! You could have been killed!”

  She stared at him. He screamed at her? He, who had nearly killed her brother? Had he killed her brother?

  She turned, but he caught her by the arm and hauled her back to him. “You will look me in the eye,” he said, and his voice was terrible, charged with rage.

  She jerked against him. “Let me go! I must go to him!”

  “You may go to him in hell!” he shouted. “What lunatic spirit rotted your brain? You would store gunpowder for him? You would let him keep it beneath your roof? You would trust him not to use it?”

  “Stop!” She clawed at his hand, which shook her so her teeth rattled. “Stop it!”

  “Would you let him put a pistol to your head for a target? Would you, Leonora? Tell me!”

  “Let me go!” she screamed.

  He did, so suddenly that she staggered. As he backed away, he spat, “Never preach to me again of your honor! Never pretend to me that you care for this place again! What honorable woman would store gunpowder beneath her roof—to her own peril, and to that of the innocents in her care—” He broke off, breathing heavily, and shoved his hand up his face, leaving a streak of blood, a crimson mask through which his green eyes glittered. “Never,” he bit out. “Damn you, Nora Colville. Never again speak to me of it.”

  Turning on his heel, he strode away.

  As she watched him retreat, the roar in her head pitched louder yet. Sobs: these were sobs breaking from her throat, as hoarse as an animal’s.

  All around her, the light of the fire danced, staining the bloodied ground.

  19

  The day was gray, a cool gray haze that muted the colors of the land. Mist slipped down the hillsides and blotted out the valleys. The land was changing as they rode southward, but the mist did not allow for particularities of perception.

  “My lord.”

  The road, straight and well laid, would have made for good time, if only the procession were not slowed by a woman and a prisoner. The thought goaded Adrian to urge his mount faster. Only three more days before he slept in Soho Square.

  “My lord!”

  The edge in Braddock’s voice did not fit his station. “Speak,” Adrian said. But there was no cause for it; he already knew what the message concerned.

  “She begs to meet with him.”

  Now she begged, did she? The first day she had demanded it. Yesterday she had asked. He could not compass the notion of her begging for aught.

  It grated on him.

  If he kept a cold remove from her now, it was not to force false shows of humility. From the first, he had known—although like a fool he had sometimes forgotten—that the steel at her core would not bend. That morning after her exhausted confessions about the child, even at the very moment when he had resolved to make her his wife, he had known that a marriage vow would not win her loyalty. All he could do was keep her safe.

  But what he had not foreseen was this weakness in himself, the fatal crack that her very presence seemed to widen. To save her, he had told himself as he married her, to protect her from her own foolishness. But to have her as his own, it transpired, was to alter himself. Like to drinking an intoxicant, exposure to her had corrupted his senses and his wit besides.

  His care for her would be her undoing as well as his own. He had put his blade to her bastard brother’s throat, but where once he would have pressed his point home, his hand had been stayed by thoughts of his wife. And where once he would have bloodied Colville to insensibility, instead he had lifted away his sword.

  If she was an intoxicant, then her effect was poisonous. Her brother’s wild scheme might have killed her, and the rest of them, too. Such feckless idiocy was better crushed in the bud than left to fester on the vine. Yet, concern for her had swayed him to mercy. It decimated the wisdom he’d amassed at high cost.

  At court, a man of no wisdom made an easy feast for enemies.

  He could not tolerate her effect any longer.

  At least now he knew what ailed him. He lacked immunity to her. He therefore would keep himself away—for both their sakes.

  The decision had brought him a cold measure of peace. He was done with complexity. David Colville rode in chains, bruised and bloodied; Adrian’s fists had not been able to make him talk, which was all the satisfaction Adrian required of him. He would be dead soon enough.

  Hodderby was half-gutted and closed, its servants dispersed; for a year or two, his wife would have to make do with Beddleston when in the north.

  What else? Nothing. By noon the day after the fire, the horses had been saddled, the bags packed, the party on the road. From Hodderby to London was a straight line in more ways than one.

  His wife rode halfway down the party, out of his sight.

  “My lord.” Braddock wore shadows beneath his eyes. “What shall I tell her?”

  Adrian shrugged. “How fares your shoulder?” Colville had not been content to knock Braddock senseless; he had scored the man’s flesh besides.

  “Well enough,” said Braddock. “Lady Rivenham and her tirewoman have been tending to it. What shall I tell her?”

  Despite his claim to the contrary, strain showed in his voice. This was not a hard pace that Adrian had set; yet, for a wounded man . . . or for a woman . . . it might go slower.

  He reined in his horse. “She begs?” he asked evenly.

  Braddock’s mouth twisted. “Aye, my lord, that was the word she did use.”

  “If you disapprove of aught, say it.”

  Braddock looked to his mount, placed a hand on her neck, felt down to the breast strap, which he tested with a tug.

  “She’s a woman,” he said. “Can’t expect her to defy her menfolk.”

  Ah. So Braddock had discovered a strain of chivalry—but a latent one, for it had not flavored his opinions the night that Hodderby had burned. As his wound had been dressed, he had condemned his master’s wife very explicitly. Adrian, steps away, had pretended to have deaf ears. To have heard the harsh words would have required him to punish Braddock for an opinion that seemed just, with the house burnt around them.

  “You do wrong to imagine Lady Rivenham a mere woman,” Adrian said now, flatly. “She is well capable of defiance, and any amount of cunning.”

  Braddock flashed him a look he did not like. It verged too closely on sympathy. “She is full of regrets, my lord. You cannot mistake her suffering, to look at her.”

  “I do not doubt it.”

  Braddock hesitated. “So . . . what answer shall I bring her?”

  “Let her speak to him.”

  He would not play the part of Lord Tow
e with his wife. His hand would not lie heavy on her save when circumstances required it. For now, she could ride where she wished. And if she wept to see her brother in chains . . . he would not allow it to make a difference to him.

  The road rose at a gentle slope, carrying the men ahead into full visibility. Nora saw her husband riding tall in his saddle, his ease apparent in the loose rhythm of his body moving with his mount.

  He never looked back.

  He had not looked back once since leaving Hodderby.

  At night, when they had found lodgings—once at an inn, twice in the open countryside—he had treated her courteously. His courtesy was polished and complete, wholly impenetrable. Already, she thought, he was his London self, wearing a courtier’s face, for at court, even rage was shown through a smile. That first day and night on the road, his distance had not stung her as sharply as her own conscience. Or perhaps her miseries had been so complexly entangled that she had not been able to parse them. There was David, whom Adrian had not put down gently, and who was bound for execution, with the gunpowder as the evidence that would convict him. There was Hodderby, terribly damaged, in part by her doing. Her exhaustion magnified these griefs until she felt as though she lived in a nightmare without end.

  Adrian had been right to scoff at her honor. If any remained to her, it was ragged and soiled.

  No wonder he treated her so coldly now.

  Last night, when he had settled her into the hostelry, in the best room it could offer, her anguish had finally overwhelmed her. “Tell me,” she had burst out. “Tell me how I might atone.”

  “It matters not,” he’d said in a very pleasant way, and then sketched her a bow and bid her good night before shutting the door, locking her inside with Grizel.

  She understood the true meaning of his reply. The intuition emerged from her bones like a breath of ice, chilling her through. It mattered not, for he had given up on something . . . and that something was her.

  A woman undivided might have flouted his remoteness and ridden up to his side to demand a reckoning. Having forced her hand to a marriage, now he gave up on it? An undivided woman would grab his jaw when he turned away, steer his face back to hers, and remind him of the bargain that he had forced upon her: to treat her as a wife. Yes, she had erred. Yes, her sin was great. But she was still his wife.

  Yet, how could she be that woman? One portion of her soul strained behind her, toward the brother whose health Braddock had assured her was fair, but who was being taken to his end. The other half strained forward, to the man on the hill who had betrayed her into wedding him, who had claimed to love her—but who no longer felt even the need to glance over his shoulder to see what he left behind.

  Braddock came riding up now, a smile on his face. “Good news,” he said. “You may treat with your brother.”

  She gathered up her reins. “For how long?”

  “Why, he did not say.” Braddock’s smile faded, as though he recognized the unlikely laxity of this oversight. He cleared his throat. “For as long you like, then, my lady.”

  She tried to smile. She should be grateful. David was bound to a place where he would never speak again.

  But her husband’s indifference could not hearten her. It sent a message to her, and not a kind one: Do as you like. It matters not to me.

  She pulled her horse around to follow Braddock down the line. Men looked away as she advanced, their mouths tightening with dislike. She raised her chin, accepting it as her due. They might have been killed by the gunpowder. It was a miracle, but not by her working, that no one had been in the old banquet hall when David had lit the powder fuse. She still wondered that Braddock treated her so kindly. Over these last three days, he seemed to have found a measure of pity for her, and she did not think herself too good for the condescension of common soldiers. Every one of her actions felt corrupt to her now.

  Her heart clutched as her brother came into sight. His head was bandaged, his eyes blackened; he slumped a little in the saddle. But—strangest of sights—he seemed in good cheer, his hand sketching an animated accompaniment to whatever conversation he traded with his unlikely companion, Lord John.

  His smile awoke some sleeping beast in her. What right had he to smile? How dare he smile? Did he not realize what he had done?

  Sighting her approach, Lord John touched his cap to her. “A happy reunion,” he said, drawing his horse away from cozy conference with her brother.

  “Not so happy,” she said sharply.

  The manufactured sympathy on his face did not suit him. “I will leave you,” he said, and put his heels into his horse, riding around and past.

  Braddock, too, pulled up short, providing her a space of privacy for which she sent him a grateful look as she rode up to David’s side.

  Her brother fixed her with a steady look from gray eyes very like her own—but darkened, perhaps, by an accusation. He had their mother’s coloring, as she did, but in his bones he took after their father. She had never resented the resemblance before today.

  “Lady sister,” he said, “you look more tired than I feel. How so?”

  “I suppose it is grief that wears me,” she said. “And regret, and shame. Better to ask yourself wherefore you can smile.”

  His square jaw worked as though he chewed over his next words. “Shame, indeed,” he said at length. “I have yet to come to an accounting of how you married the man who would see me dead. Even Lord John has no story for it. ”

  Astonishment briefly paralyzed her tongue. Rage resuscitated it. “I will teach you the cause of my shame,” she bit out, “for you own a full measure of it yourself! You put Hodderby to the flames! What demon possessed you? Where is your shame, David?”

  “This is war. There will be losses—”

  “The war is over! Over almost before it had begun. Preston has fallen; Scotland is put down. And whence the gain from your idiocy? What army was defeated when Hodderby burned?”

  “Enough!” he snapped. “Hodderby is my own! If I sowed the fields with salt, it would still be within my right!”

  Oh, but she recognized this clipped tone. Their father in France had been tutoring him in arrogance. “That you have any estate to your name is owed to me. I persuaded Towe to lobby for your inheritance. Did you think he was eager to argue for you? My administration kept Hodderby running when its profits had been squandered on weaponry. Or did you imagine it was easy to maintain an estate with empty coffers?” Her laugh scraped in her throat. “If I could live that history again, David, I would give you an education. Perhaps if I could undo my efforts, Hodderby would still stand whole!”

  He caught her arm. “Leo. What is this? I came back for you. How can you speak to me so? I set off the powder for you. Or was I to abandon you to his clutches? Tell me, how else was I to save you?”

  She wrenched free, and her startled horse shied beneath her. “How brotherly you are,” she said, reining her horse tight. “What consideration you show me! Did the same tender affection prompt you to promise my hand without my consent? How glad I was to learn the news from Cosmo!”

  He scowled. “You had said you would consider him—”

  “Consider! I did not say I consented!”

  “But you would have.” He pushed a hand over the dark stubble on his jaw, then lifted it away to show her his teeth. “But I reckon how it transpires. You grew hot for that whoreson, didn’t you?”

  “Hold your tongue,” she hissed.

  “Aye, he always knew how to get under your skirts. Twisted your brain and corrupted your allegiances, did he? By God, I should have known that dog would come sniffing again! To think he dared to aim so high—and you, Leo! Where is your honor? To go against your family—”

  “I aided you,” she said through her teeth, “in every way I could. I aided you beyond good sense and all reason. Consider, brother, what a reward I received for it: to watch Hodderby be ruined. You say I go against the family? Very well! I am glad to do it now. I am done with your cau
se, I tell you.”

  She reined her horse away, furious with him. But—bitterly she knew it—he was not the only one to blame here. If he had crossed a line, then she had made it possible for him to do so. She would never forgive herself the consequences.

  “You’re right.”

  The admission startled her. She turned back, eyeing him warily.

  He nudged his horse forward so they sat mounted knee to knee. Reaching for her hand, he squeezed it lightly.

  She looked at where he touched her, then pointedly lifted her gaze to his.

  He grimaced. “Leo . . .” Now he leaned forward, cajoling. “Forgive me, sis. I was wrong to question your loyalty. And my strategy, I admit, was . . . foolhardy. But, by God—I was panicked! How not? You see . . . I’d left something very precious at Hodderby.” He offered her a lopsided smile. “You may know her.”

  For one moment, his charm muted her turmoil. She recalled with a pang what it had ever meant to be his sister: to have his laughing attention, his support and encouragement, the warmth their father had never provided.

  “Oh, David.” Tears pricked her eyes. “You never should have come back. I did not require rescuing.”

  He shook his head. “Colvilles do not abandon their own.”

  “But I am a Ferrers now.”

  He winced. “I accept the blame for it. I should have been there to protect you. But I will atone, Leo. I will kill him for you.”

  Calm like ice descended on her. She withdrew her hand from his. “How easily you speak of killing.” In France, it seemed, their father had been teaching him stubbornness—and cultivating his natural immunity to female opinion, besides. “But you must accept facts. My husband will not let you slip. You are for trial now, and the Tower.” The very name of that place sickened her; it seemed, in her mouth, to be coated with blood.

  He nudged his horse closer yet, so its head came up against her mount’s flank. In her ear, he murmured, “And I tell you, Leo, I will surprise you.”

  She jerked back. “How do you mean?”