Secrets of Surrender (16 page)

He calmed the storm but it hovered, waiting.

“Rose, do you fully understand what he did? How many people he stole from?”

“Lord Hayden—”

“Lord Hayden kept untold misery from falling on the victims. How much do you think he laid out to do so?”

She felt like a schoolgirl groping for an answer to a cipher. “A good deal. Twenty thousand at least.”

Anger even colored his low, brief laugh. “Twenty thousand would not even make Rothwell blink. Consider the house in which your cousin still lives. What new jewels has she shown you? Even her new garments—see them in your head, and the choice of fabrics and embellishments.”

A knot lodged low in her stomach. She had never calculated the evidence, in part because she noticed enough to suspect she would hate the final sum.

“How much?” she whispered.

“When all came out and all was told, at least one hundred thousand. Probably much more.”

She gasped. Such a sum!

Kyle approached her. One small light of sympathy showed amidst the many hot ones in his eyes. “Your brother did not know Rothwell would repay even a single pound. Your brother assumed that the victims would just have to suffer. So would the depositors when the bank went under. He did not only steal from the rich, but from old women and vulnerable orphans and retainers who depended on those funds to survive.”

“I am sure he did not fully understand—he could not have deliberately—”

“
Of course
he understood. Fully. He most surely did it
deliberately.
” He again leashed the fury. He visibly collected himself. “Is it any wonder that I command you to break all relations with such a scoundrel?”

Her vision of Kyle blurred. She turned away and tried to hold in the sobs paining her as they sought release. One hundred thousand. Dear God. And Alexia and Hayden—

She wiped her eyes and found her breath. “You said that you knew people who lost funds because of it. Who were they?”

For an instant she thought he would not reply.

“My aunt and uncle.”

Shock slapped her again. Not friends, but family. “But they were made whole, weren’t they?”

“Yes, they were made whole. Is that what you keep saying to yourself, when you think about him? At least they were made whole? At least there was only one victim who paid dearly instead of dozens who lost everything? Is that your excuse for him?”

“I do not excuse him.”

“I think that you do. He is your brother and you want to find reasons to lessen his guilt. But he is not my brother, Rose.”

No, and there would be no excuses from Kyle. No sympathy or desire to save. If Tim had been caught, Kyle would have thought it just when he went to the gallows.

She had no words to argue with that. Nothing to offer except her love for a brother who once had been a much better person as a boy than he proved on becoming a man.

She thought that at least Kyle would understand, even if he did not approve. Only he remained implacable, unmoving, and determined to make her condemn Tim the way everyone else would.

“You must cease any contact,” he said again. “If you have letters, burn them. If you receive another, destroy it immediately.”

He strode from the library. He had not asked for her promise again. He had commanded, and she was supposed to obey.

Rose considered locking her dressing room door that night.

She never had before in this brief marriage. She did not mind that he came to her every night. She was his wife and it was his due, and he never left without ensuring that she experienced the holy freedom that pleasure could create.

This night was different. She was not sure she would respond to his touch. A brittle silence had fallen on the house after they argued. It still affected the air, and her.

A small part of Kyle that had remained a stranger was revealed to her tonight. His force of will had stunned her. She had sensed it in him, but seeing it, feeling it directed at her, frightened her a little.

She should have guessed just how much inner conviction he contained. In himself, and in his decisions. He could have never survived on the path he walked without it. Not many men traveled from a coal mining village to the drawing rooms of London in little more than a decade.

Not many men born in such a village would propose to Roselyn Longworth, no matter what the status of her family, finances, or reputation.

She stood in front of her door, gazing at the latch. Not for the first time with this man she suspected that she should not act capriciously. She did not think he would break down the door if she locked it. She did not even believe it would anger him.

Instead she guessed that one of two things would happen. They might have another conversation like today’s, where he explained what he would or would not accept in her behavior. Or, possibly, a chilling formality would enter her bed the next time he came to her, and maybe remain between them for a long while. It might even stay forever.

She turned away from the door and returned to her bed. She snuffed out the lamps as she did each night and darkness shrouded her.

Perhaps he would not come, even though with her flux and his time in Kent it had been some days now. Surely he felt the way their argument still rang through the house. He had retreated to his study and his work afterward, but maybe their words repeated in his head like they did in hers.

Her heart still pounded when she remembered the way he laid out Tim’s guilt. One hundred thousand pounds. She often dreamed of repaying Alexia and Hayden, but such a sum could never be repaid. Never. No wonder Alexia had so mercilessly discouraged that plan to join Tim in Italy.

Only now instead she was married to a man who would gladly hang Tim with his own hands, she suspected. She could not defend her brother. She could not say Kyle was wrong. But right and wrong and justice were not the bases by which a sister judges.

One hundred thousand. How could it almost be gone? Tim claimed he needed more, and she believed him.

The most subtle movement of air pulled her out of her thoughts. She opened her eyes to the dark. Kyle stood beside the bed, no more than a darker presence in a room without light.

He had come after all. That surprised her. So did her reaction. Her heart flipped with relief before her mind caught up with her instincts.

He appeared to be waiting for something, or making some decision. She could not imagine what. She shifted over on the bed, her body making the bed ropes sound against the boards.

His body made sounds too, and movements barely visible. Of the robe dropping. Of warmth lowering. Of limbs stretching and skin touching. She inhaled and all of him was in bed with her, that total presence that transformed the night.

He untied her nightdress and began sliding it down her shoulders and body. “Thank you for not locking your door.”

Had he heard her there, debating? How like him to speak of it, to not allow it to be a silent choice. She trusted they would not also speak of why she considered the choice in the first place.

His caress and kiss said they would not.

“And if I had locked it?” Already she did not much care what his answer might be. The luscious trembles of arousal had begun distracting her.

“I do not know. I had not yet decided when I tried the latch.”

She did not contemplate his answer, other than noting that the ambiguity contained some danger. Already the pleasure diverted her. Seduced her. That was dangerous too. The pleasure blunted clear thought and lured one to put the best light on everything, even during the day.

Kyle made sure she was pleased. With his confident, masterful caresses and kisses, he commanded her to the abandon that had become so familiar now, so captivating. The pleasure forced a kind of surrender, she realized. Loss of will and loss of self existed within it. She had never fully understood that before.

Soon she understood nothing, not even the argument. The blur of sensations obscured everything except the desire for him to lick her breasts and kiss her stomach and touch the flesh that ached to be filled by him.

He lifted her and set her down so she straddled his hips. He eased her hips forward and entered her so deeply that she moaned from the welcome sensation of completeness.

His palms brushed her nipples and she came alive where their bodies joined. Directly. Wonderfully. The excitement shot straight down and pooled around his fullness.

“Come here.”

He eased her body forward in the dark until she had to brace her weight on her arms. Her breasts hovered above him. His mouth replaced his hands. The pleasure increased in intensity so much that she gasped. The way he aroused her was too good, too compelling, too overwhelming to maintain even tenuous control.

She dissolved into madness, crying and moaning and moving so she felt him more, better, harder. He grabbed her hips and thrust hard and long toward his completion. Her entire being submitted to the way he took her.

She was still aroused when he finished. Despite the repeated waves of pleasure and release, her body still hungered. He seemed to know. He flipped her on her back and caressed again, this time on folds of sensitive and pulsing flesh.

She almost died. She clawed at him to escape the almost painful pleasure. She heard him as she had the first night, telling her to surrender to it.

The sweetest ecstasy waited this time. It crashed through her with violence first, then subsided in undulating eddies that astonished her entire body. She wondered at it, and held her breath to make it last forever.

It didn’t, of course, even if her stunned body took a long time to accept it would not.

The night’s prior events came back with the reemergence of her awareness of time and place. Perhaps they had retreated from his thoughts too, banished by delirium.

He did not stay long after she reclaimed her senses. In that brief aftermath so sated with peace, she sensed the shadow in him.

She suspected he had never forgotten that argument, not even at the moment of his release. He had come tonight in part because of their confrontation. He had made it clear that such things would not stand between them in this most basic part of marriage. He had also made very sure that she would not mind that too much.

That cold calculation did not change the truth of how he treated her, though. If he carried any anger into this bed he had not shown it. As always, he had been considerate and asked little of her except her own pleasure.

An insight came to her. A startling one. Who she was and who he was, the way they had met and the scandal and redemption, affected everything. Especially what occurred in this bed on the best and worst of nights.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

K
yle had not lied. The way north was cold in late January. As they crossed into Durham County the sky hung low with damp clouds.

The land became hilly farther north, and also increasingly bleak. They rolled through villages large and small. Rose came to recognize the ones where colliers lived. The residue from the nearby pits, carried out on the clothes and bodies of the workers, left its mark in ways big and small.

As they neared Teeslow, she grew nervous. Kyle had discouraged her coming, but relented when she pressed the matter. She wanted to see this home of his and meet his aunt and uncle, but there was the chance she would not be welcomed.

“Are there other relatives and family besides them?” she asked.

“Not living. They had two daughters, younger than I am. Both died of cholera when I was in Paris.”

“Did you always live with them?”

He did not mind the conversation, but he did not welcome it, either. “My father died in a mining accident when I was nine. My mother had passed away a few years before. Her brother took me in.”

Soon their carriage entered the village. Rose examined the few lanes and stores, the clusters of cottages. Coal dust marked the sills and jambs of some buildings, and the faces and garments of some residents.

They did not stop in the village, but continued down the road to another lane that aimed north. A nice stone house waited at its end. Two levels high, it looked similar to the smaller homes that could be found on southern estates, the ones in which a steward or tenant might live.

“It is not what I expected,” she said.

“You thought it would be a tiny cottage of five chambers at most? They lived for years in one, back in the village. I built this for them five years ago.”

He alighted from the carriage. “I will go in while you wait here. I am not expected, and you will be a complete surprise.”

He walked to the door, opened it, and disappeared. Rose watched the house. She saw a woman’s face briefly at a window. No doubt his aunt was peeking to see the complete surprise.

He was being very careful. When she met them, their faces would mask their thoughts much as his often did. If they disapproved of her, or thought her a bad match for their nephew, they would not reveal that in a moment of surprise.

Kyle returned and handed her down. A woman appeared in the doorway, smiling a welcome.

“Rose, this is my aunt, Prudence Miller.”

Prudence was ready with kind words and friendly expressions. “We are so pleased that you have come.”

A slender woman with dark hair and sparkling eyes, Prudence had reached her middle years with much of her beauty intact. Rose pictured her at twenty and thirty, pale-skinned and dark-eyed.

Since Prudence had greeted her alone, Rose assumed that Kyle’s uncle was at the mine. As soon as they brought her to the sitting room, she learned differently.

His uncle Harold sat in a chair near the fire, as dark-haired as his wife and almost as thin. Despite his haggard face, Rose could see a resemblance to Kyle in his vivid blue eyes and the hard planes of his countenance.

He examined her closely during introductions. She noted his pallor and the blanket covering his lap and legs. A spittoon stood at the ready on a low table near his right leg. Uncle Harold was a very sick man.

Welcoming her made him cough. He turned his head and spit into the spittoon. “You’ll be having to make a pie, Pru. Can’t have Kyle visit without his fill of pies.”

“We’ll have one with dinner,” she said. “Now you visit for a spell while I go above and air the chamber a bit.”

It appeared they would be staying here. Kyle went out and returned with the coachman and the baggage. The house had a carriage house and he sent the driver there.

He carried the baggage above himself, following his aunt up the stairs. Rose sat in a chair not far from Harold, who continued to examine her.

“You are a very beautiful woman, Mrs. Bradwell. I’m understanding this marriage a bit better now.”

“I am hoping that you will address me as Rose.”

He chuckled. “Well now, that will be a rare experience, addressing a lady like yourself with such familiarity.”

Did she imagine the disapproving note in his tone? Considering the circumstances of this marriage, the “lady like yourself” could have several meanings.

She did not think that scandal would have reached Teeslow, but perhaps it had. Or maybe Kyle had explained things in detail when he visited in December.

I’ve a chance to marry a lady because she ruined herself enough that she will never do better. I am stuck with her taint, but in a generation no one will much remember.

She groped to find friendly conversation. The need to do so disappeared when Harold began coughing. It racked his body something terrible. She got up to try to aid him, although she had no idea how. He held up a hand, stopping her. Eventually the coughs subsided and he again used the spittoon.

“I am not a well man, as you can see. T’is the miners’ disease. I thought I’d have another good ten years before it felled me like this.”

“I am sorry.”

He shrugged. “Can’t get the coal out without raising the dust.”

Kyle returned then, saving her from having to find a reply to that. “I must steal her from you, Uncle. The chamber has been made ready and Rose should rest and warm herself after the journey.”

Rose removed her carriage mantle and positioned herself close to the fire. “You uncle is very ill, isn’t he?”

“He is dying.”

She nodded, as if that had been obvious to her. “He said it was the miners’ disease. From the dust.”

“Many of them get sick in their lungs. It is expected, and they are a frugal lot as a result. The pay must provide later for the families they leave behind.”

“That is sad. You speak of it without passion, however.”

“It is the way the life is, Rose. It is as common for these men as the gout is among lords. A collier goes into the pit knowing how it might be, much as a sailor knows he might drown.”

He set about unpacking his baggage. He never brought Jordan here, for the same reasons he hesitated bringing Rose. There was nothing wrong with this house, but his aunt and uncle would not begin to know what to do with servants about.

He was glad that he knew that Rose could do for herself. If not, he would have insisted on staying at an inn, and the nearest one was not convenient to his purposes. His aunt also would have been hurt if this marriage so quickly changed their habits with one another.

Still…

“Will you be comfortable here? Tell me if you will not be.”

She gazed around the chamber, at its bed that lacked drapes and the curtains of which Aunt Pru was so proud. “It is far nicer than an inn. We will be sharing it?”

“Yes.”

She did not appear to mind that. She sat on the bed, then lay down. “I think that I will rest a short while. I never realized that being in a carriage for several days could tire one so much.”

When she woke, Kyle was gone. She ventured down the stairs in search of him.

Harold dozed in his chair by the sitting room fire. She followed sounds into the kitchen in the back of the house.

Prudence worked there, rolling out pastry dough. She smiled, and angled her head toward the hearth.

“There’s some warm cider in that pot on the stones, and a cup on the table, if you want.”

Rose helped herself, and looked out a back window at a little grove of young fruit trees, barren now in winter’s cold. A large garden flanked the western edge of it, waiting a spring planting.

“This is a very pleasant house,” she said. “The prospects from all the windows are lovely.”

“Kyle built it for us. Came back from France he did. Went to London to find his fortune, then he had this built. Harold did not want to take it, of course, but I could already see he was getting sick. You’ll see him goad Kyle a bit about his fine clothes and lordly ways, but he is proud to bursting with what his sister’s son has become.”

Rose ambled closer to watch Prudence work on the pastry. “I make pies too.”

“Do you now? I didn’t think ladies baked much.”

“Most don’t. I like to, though. I could help, if you like.”

Prudence moved some apples and a bowl to one side. “You can pare and slice them into this.”

Rose set to work. “Where is Kyle?”

“He walked down to the village. I expect he will visit with the vicar, then have a pint with the men at the tavern. He would have taken Harold in the carriage, but Harold was asleep. Tomorrow maybe. Harold misses his pints with the lads.”

Rose pictured Kyle, walking the half mile or so back into Teeslow. Walking back into his old life. Would he shed his coats as he went? Remove the layers of education and change he had accepted in order to find his fortune in London? Lapse back into the accent that marked Harold’s speech?

It would not be the Kyle she knew in that tavern. It would be the Kyle who remained a stranger to her.

“Is he good friends with the vicar?”

Prudence laughed. “Well, now, friends is not the word. The earl charged the vicar with teaching Kyle his letters and numbers and Latin and French. A hard taskmaster he was. Warmed his students’ bums with a rod on occasion. Kyle didn’t like that, but he knew the lessons might mean a different life so he kept going back.”

“The earl? Do you mean the Earl of Cottington? He was Kyle’s benefactor?”

“None other.”

He had never told her. Not outright. She just assumed the benefactor had been—someone. Not an earl. Not Cottington. Not Norbury’s father.

It explained so much. The partnership with those new estates. His presence at that dinner party.

“Why would the earl do that?”

Prudence fixed her attention on scraping sugar off a cone. “The earl came to know Kyle by accident. Saw at once what was in him. Saw he wasn’t no ordinary boy, but smart and brave. He knew my nephew would be wasted in the mine, even though as a boy he could already do the work of a man. So he told the vicar to teach him so he could go to schools and such when he grew.” She gathered the sugar into a cup. “A good and just man, the earl is. Such as they ever are.”

The little story made questions jump in Rose’s mind. Too many to ask Prudence without quizzing her as if she was in the dock.

She knew very little about her husband’s life. She was very curious, but she had never asked him for the information even though he was the most likely source of it.

She had never asked, but neither had he explained. She did not believe it was because Kyle was embarrassed about his past or even because he was not a man who spoke much about himself.

They both avoided all of that because talking about his past would mean talking about Norbury.

The shadow of that affair affected even their knowledge of each other.

“Goin’ to be trouble. No two ways about it,” Jon said. He gulped some ale for emphasis.

Kyle drank in agreement. Jonathan was a miner of about his own age. They had entered the pit about the same time when they were boys, and carried baskets up the ladder together.

Now Jon was a radical, which made him indiscreet with the fellow in fine coats who had lived here long ago.

The rest of the miners were friendly enough, even jovial. They had raised pints in salute when Kyle entered the tavern and peppered him with questions about London. They had been unwilling to talk about the real happenings in this town, however. A misspoken word might affect their livelihoods.

“Three times now the committee has gone to the owners and objected to reopening that tunnel and explained the danger,” Jon said. “Cheaper to lose a few men than to do what needs doing, though. We seen it before, and it will happen again.”

Kyle had certainly seen it before. His father’s bones still lay in that sealed off tunnel. It had been too dangerous to dig those men out. The first attempt had only caused another cave-in.

“Have you gone to Cottington?” he asked. “He sold most of it to others long ago, but he still has influence. The surrounding land is still his.”

“Two of us tried. He is so sick they won’t let anyone near him. Even you could not get in last time you were here. As for petitioning his heir…” Jon’s expression conveyed his opinion of that, and of the son in question.

Jon glanced over his shoulder. He ran his hand through his blond curls, then leaned across the table to speak in confidence. “We are organizing to speak and act as one. Not just here. We’ve had meetings with other groups in other towns, and them that work for other owners. If we all stand shoulder to shoulder and talk as one, we will be heard.”

“Be careful, Jon.”

“Careful, hell. The Combination Act is dead now, finally, and we’ve a right to join together. What can they do? Kill me? They can’t kill us all. They can’t put us all out. You talked about this yourself years back, before—” He looked away, then gulped more ale.

Before you went away and became one of them.

“When you stand shoulder to shoulder, every man must be in that line. Every man must be willing to go hungry. There’s always those who will break.”