Anne Stuart (7 page)

Killoran managed a faint snort. “A flattering notion, beloved,” he said. “So what happened?”

“
She hit him with the fire poker, he went down in a bloody heap, and she stood there staring at him, frozen, for what must have been minutes. I kept waiting for someone to burst into the room, but nothing happened. Eventually she set the poker down and went about tidying herself. Even from that distance I could see her hands were shaking.”

“
Not everyone has your sangfroid, my dear.”

“
And then she leaned down, and was out of sight for a while. I don’t know whether she was finishing him off or trying to help him. After a bit she rose, repinned her hair, and left the room.”

“
And?”

“
And I waited for an hour, to see whether there’d be a hue and cry, but no one seemed to have realized what happened. No one entered the young man’s bedroom, and I assume his body wasn’t discovered. So I came here for lunch. You don’t mind, do you, darling? After all that excitement, I needed some companionship.”

“
You’ve probably missed all the fun. By the time you return, your murdering governess will have been hauled off to jail, the young man’s corpse removed, and the shutters to his room closed. Your entertainment is at an end. If I were you, I’d hurry back home in case it hasn’t quite concluded.”

“
Are you trying to get rid of me, Killoran?”

“
Yes.”

“
You prefer a treatise on the growing of corn to the delights I could offer you?” She dropped her voice to a husky note, and her slim hand rested on his thigh.

“
The delights you are so eager to offer are nothing that I haven’t already experienced in abundance. I doubt you could provide me with anything novel.”

“
Why are you so cruel to me, Killoran? Don’t you want me? I assure you, I would dedicate myself to pleasing you. I’m very... inventive.”

“
I’m certain you are, Babs. But the fact remains that your inventiveness is mental, not sensual. You have no desire for the men you bed, and no real desire for me. Therefore I have no intention of boring myself by tumbling a cold, lying, aristocratic slut. If you’re going to be a well-bred whore, Babs, you might at least be more convincing.”

She snatched her hand back. “You are a blackhearted bastard,” she said bitterly. “If I were that strapping, red-haired governess, I’d be tempted to kill you myself.”

He was about to abandon her, but he stilled for a moment. “Strapping, red-haired governess?” he echoed. “Now, that I find a great deal more interesting than spotty adolescent males. You forgot to mention that part.”

“
You have a streak of the voyeur in you as well, Killoran?” she mocked him. “Young Varienne didn’t manage to rip all her clothes off. I imagine she was taller than he, and strappingly built. Quite an armful—it was no wonder the young lad was overcome with lust. He was able to rip the front of her dress and yank down her hair. It was a fiery red color—very Irish. That was probably why she killed him. They say that fiery color eats into the brain and makes one mad.”

“
Had the governess been there a long time?”

“
How would I know?” Lady Barbara said crossly. “The domestic staff of an upstart family such as the Variennes is hardly of interest to me.”

“
Only their sex lives.”

She made a face at him. “As a matter of fact, I don’t believe she’d been there long. No more than a fortnight. They tend to go through servants rather quickly. The older boys are lustful and the mother’s a tyrant.”

“
A fortnight,” he echoed lazily.

“
Almost as long as your guest has been here. How much longer is he staying, Killoran?”

“
Don’t you care for Nathaniel, my dear? He’s a most devoted admirer of yours.”

“
I don’t care for devoted admirers,” she said flatly.

“
So I’ve noticed.” He rose abruptly, moving away from her clinging, scented presence. “I’ll escort you home, Babs.”

He’d managed to surprise her. “You’re coming to my house?” she said, wariness and triumph warring in her eyes. With absolutely no anticipation.

“
Yes.”

“
You’ve refused all my invitations, Killoran. Why have you suddenly changed your mind?”

He held out his hand, and she placed her smaller one in his pale, hard grip. “I have a pronounced weakness for red-haired murderesses.”

Emma sat in the stillness of her attic room, waiting. It was very cold up there, and she hadn’t gotten used to the chill during her two-week tenure at the house of the Variennes, any more than she’d grown accustomed to the pawings of Master Frederick.

Mrs. Varienne’s eagle eye and pinch-penny behavior were nothing new; compared with Cousin Miriam, she was almost the soul of amiability. And indeed, Master Frederick had seemed no more than a minor irritation, like an errant flea, to be brushed away with a polite laugh and careful avoidance.

But now he lay in a welter of blood on his bedroom floor, dead, and Emma knew herself for the murdering wretch that she was. One man’s death at her hands was a simple matter. It had been her life or Uncle Horace, and she hadn’t thought twice about it. But killing a second man within a month went beyond the level of what was acceptable in polite society. She was a monster, deserving of whatever harsh justice was meted out.

So she sat in her room, and waited.

It was growing dark, and the night air was chilly in the room. Mrs. Varienne didn’t hold with fires for the servants, and on the best of nights the most Emma could hope for was a call to join the family for dinner. That happened more often than not when the family was entertaining, and it hadn’t taken Emma long to understand the reason behind the intermittent affability.

The Variennes were wealthy and indisputably vulgar—they made her uncle Horace seem positively genteel. Whenever guests arrived, Miss Brown was brought downstairs and treated with the most astonishing toadying, and Emma realized she must resemble her aristocratic mother more than she had ever realized. There could be no other reason behind the Variennes’ desire to show her off to their various guests.

There was a price to pay for those warm, well-fed evenings. For each flattering occasion, Mrs. Varienne followed it up with an even greater degree of condescending hostility. And then there was Frederick.

Mrs. Withersedge had warned her. Indeed, Frederick’s younger brother, Theodore, had been far too busy bedding the scullery maid even to notice Emma’s presence in the house. But Frederick, who had a habit of spending far too much time immured in his room, had taken one look at Emma and begun to pursue her, much to his mama’s displeasure.

He had kissed her once, a great, wet, slobbery attempt that had convinced her she was not cut out to be either a doxy or a wife. He had pinched her buttocks and pawed at her breasts one evening when he knew she wouldn’t dare cry out, and she had done her best to keep herself away from him, locked in the nursery with little Amalia and young Master Edward, a budding roué of eleven who looked to surpass his elder brothers in lechery once he attained a few more years.

But Mrs. Varienne had called Emma into her bedroom for a morning diatribe. And on her way back up the stairs, the door to Master Frederick’s room had opened and he’d dragged her inside, his soft, cruel hand clamped over her mouth before she could scream.

He was stronger than she would have thought, stronger than Uncle Horace. She’d fought wildly, silently, only longing to get away. She’d grabbed the first thing her flailing hand could reach, and it wasn’t until she’d heard the sickening thud, and watched him collapse on the floor, that she realized what she’d done. Again.

She’d stared down at him in mounting horror. So very much blood from the wound on his spotty forehead, and he’d lain lifeless on the carpet, his eyes closed. Her body still felt bruised, mauled, by his hands.

Instinct had taken over. She’d caught those hands and dragged him out of the way, hiding his motionless body behind the bed. And then, she’d run up the flight of stairs to her small, cramped room on the third floor, locking the door and waiting.

But no one had come for her. The children had left on an outing to their grandmother’s home in the country. This was, perforce, to have been her day off. If she had any sense at all, she would make a run for it.

But two dead men in less than a month were her limit. She would sit, and wait, and take her punishment. There would be no decadent, elegant rescuer like the Earl of Killoran this time. This time she would die. And her cousin Miriam would likely be there, to read religious tracts of vengeance and then do a stately gavotte on her grave. Except that Miriam never danced.

In the distance she could hear the noise. The Variennes had no plans for entertaining that evening, so there could be only one reason for the sudden influx of people. They had come to arrest her. Frederick’s body had been discovered, and it was now simply a matter of time.

She rose, squaring her shoulders. She would sit here cowering no more, waiting for vengeance to come and drag her down, screaming and fighting.

The hallway was dark and warm, the heat rising through the four floors. She descended slowly, her mind in a fog, her hands clasped tightly beneath the heavy linsey-woolsey apron Mrs. Varienne insisted she wear when there were no guests to impress. She could hear the sound of a woman’s laughter, light, lilting, drifting upward, a voice she’d never heard before. It made no sense to her, but then, she was beyond the point of understanding.

She moved in a fog toward the main salon. Mrs. Varienne’s deep voice boomed outward, coy and arch, flirtatious. Another voice replied, too low for Emma to hear the words, but there was a strange, disorienting familiarity to the sound. It was a voice she’d heard in her dreams, in her nightmares, drawling, masculine, with a faint lilt.

She pushed open the door without knocking. Mrs. Varienne, seated on a brocade sofa like a fat black spider, looked up at her and glared. Beside her stood quite the most beautiful woman Emma had ever seen, a fairy-tale creature dressed in some diaphanous, gauzy creation.

She turned, and to her horror she looked into the face of Frederick Varienne, not dead at all. He appeared most aggrieved, and the thick white bandage on his forehead, set at a deliberately rakish angle, covered some of his worst spots.

The sight of the man she thought she’d killed should have been horror enough. But he was a mere bagatelle compared with the dark figure that moved out of the shadows into the bright candlelight.

Dressed in stark black and white trimmed with silver stood her rescuer from the Pear and Partridge. His thin mouth curved in a mocking smile, his green eyes glinting with amusement, he looked at her, and then his gaze slid knowingly to the bandage on Frederick’s forehead.

Emma opened her mouth to say something, anything. She had wits, strength, self-possession. She could carry off this impossible situation; she could say something cool and polite and then absent herself. She could move into the room as if nothing had happened, as if she hadn’t tried to kill the young heir to the household, as if she hadn’t been caught bloody-handed by the malicious rake who had suddenly reentered her life.

She could do all this with ease. She made a tiny, choking sound. And then slid to the floor in a dead faint.

Chapter 4

The room was dark, and much too warm. An unusual circumstance—ever since Emma had left the dubious safety of the DeWinters’ household, she’d been abominably cold.

She didn’t move. She could hear the faint hiss and pop of the fire at the far end of the room, the flames dancing up the darkened walls. She was in the back parlor, Mrs. Varienne’s private retreating room. And she wasn’t alone.

She’d fainted, she remembered that much, which was odd in itself. She’d never given in to a crise de nerfs. But Mrs. Varienne wasn’t a great one for either feeding her servants or keeping them warm, and the stresses of the day had taken their toll.

Emma sat up, a little too swiftly, and a fresh wave of dizziness washed over her. She hadn’t killed him. She hadn’t even damaged him badly. Frederick Varienne’s pale eyes had looked at her with acute dislike, but he hadn’t denounced her, hadn’t had her hauled away from the house on a charge of attempted murder. Perhaps he was simply going to overlook it.

She didn’t think so. Frederick
was a
bully, a young man prone to grudges as well as to spots. And she didn’t care to consider the price he might exact for keeping his mouth shut.

She would have to leave. Though exactly where she could go was another problem—she doubted the estimable Mrs. Withersedge would approve of the botch she’d made of her first position.

She lay back down again, closing her eyes. She didn’t want to go anywhere. She was tired, she was hungry, and she was humiliatingly close to tears, she who seldom cried. If only she could remember what had happened just before she’d toppled into her ignominious fate. And who in the less-than-friendly Varienne household would have seen to her comfort and brought her to this warm, quiet place to recover herself, who would have loosened her clothing and—

She sat up again, horror filling her as the memory came flooding back. “Oh, no,” she said out loud, quite distinctly.

And out of the darkness his voice, the low, cool drawl with the faint trace of a lilt, said, “Oh, yes.”

Emma slid her legs around, putting her feet on the thick French carpet. Her dress was tumbling down around her shoulders, and she knew whom to thank for that service. “You,” she said, not bothering to disguise the horror in her voice.

“
Me,” he agreed. “Come to your rescue once more, my sweet. You do seem to have a talent for running into trouble.”

She digested this seemingly innocent statement carefully, trying not to let panic swamp her. “I wasn’t aware that I was in trouble,” she said.