A Valentine Wedding (34 page)

“I owe you a few minutes of my time,” Alasdair
said quietly. Without taking his eyes off Denis, he gestured to Jemmy.

Jemmy, in immediate comprehension, without a word handed him the long coachman’s whip.

Alasdair curled his fingers around the smooth wooden handle. Still without looking away from Denis, he instructed evenly, “Sam, take Emma to the chaise, and Jemmy, get the horses back in the traces. Give me five minutes with this scum and then both come back and help me secure them.”

“Right y’are.” Sam nodded cheerfully and set off with his burden back to the lane.

Jemmy looked a little doubtful. Lord Alasdair was still in bad shape, and he didn’t like the idea of leaving him with three men, even though they were all handicapped. But Lord Alasdair’s expression was such that the tiger could almost find it in him to feel sorry for the three men. With a short nod, he went off to round up the horses.

It seemed to take Emma a long time to realize that the nightmare was over. Sam carried her with as much ease as if she were a featherweight, his brawny arms cradling her with comforting strength. She was as cold now as she’d been hot before, shivers coursing through her, her teeth chattering.

“It’s the shock, lass,” Sam said as he lifted her into the chaise. “’As that effect on a body. I’ll fetch ye summat for it.”

He disappeared for a minute or two, during which she could hear Jemmy talking to the horses, calming them as he put them back in the traces. Emma thought she ought to get out and help him. But when she set her feet to the floor of the chaise, the pain was so intense she fell back with an involuntary cry. Vaguely she wondered what had happened to the
fourth man, the one called Luiz who had been driving the chaise.

Sam returned with a leather kit bag and flask. He unstoppered the flask and held it to her lips. “ ‘Ere, take a good swig o’ this.”

It was rough brandy that scorched her throat and jolted her belly. But the fumes alone seemed to bring her out of her strange trance. She sat up and shook her head as if to dispel the lingering tendrils of the nightmare.

She held her hands in her lap. They were a curious dead white and she couldn’t seem to make them move … not even her fingers. “They won’t work,” she said to Sam in a plaintive little voice.

He took each hand in turn and chafed it between his rough, callused palms. “They’ll come back in a minute, lass.”

Emma decided to believe him. Sam had transferred his attention to her feet. The burned flesh stung dreadfully, but the upper part of each foot was numb with cold.

Sam rummaged in his medicine bag and brought out a foul-smelling ointment that he slathered on the soles of her feet. It had an immediate soothing effect.

“I’ll be off to ’elp the master now. Sit tight ’ere, an’ we’ll be back in a minute or two.” He jumped from the chaise and bent to examine the figure of the coachman, lying motionless in the ditch where Sam had rolled him after hitting him over the head with a stout stick. “Eh,” Sam muttered. “Best take you along, fellow-me-lad.” He hoisted Luiz over his shoulder and carried him back to the field.

Alasdair was standing over Paul Denis, the lash of the long carriage whip trailing on the ground at his
side. Paul Denis lay on the ground in a fetal curl, barely conscious.

Sam dumped Luiz on the ground beside the other two men, who, no longer a pair of expressionless instruments of violence, stared fearfully at the avenging devil with the whip.

“Tie them up,” Alasdair instructed curtly. “Gag them, then put them in the trees, out of sight. I want them left here to be picked up later.”

Charles Lester would be very glad to get his hands on Paul Denis.

Sam and Jemmy went about their work with cheerful enthusiasm. Alasdair, once more back in his abused and pain-filled body, couldn’t help them. He turned and made his way to the chaise, every step an agony now.

He hauled himself into the chaise and fell back onto the seat opposite Emma, closing his eyes, his breathing shallow and ragged.

“Alasdair!” Emma leaned over and tried to take his hands. Then she gasped as the circulation began to return to her own hands and they came to agonizing life. “God in heaven!” She clasped them between her knees, pressing tightly in an effort to contain the pain.

Alasdair opened his eyes immediately. “What is it, sweet?”

“Just my hands. They’re starting to work again.” She offered him a tremulous smile, saying with a supreme effort at humor, “What a pathetic pair of casualties we are. I was trying to touch you but I can’t seem to manage it.”

“I want to hold you but I can’t seem to manage it,” he responded, trying to match her tone.

“That was one adventure I’d rather not have again, if I can possibly help it,” Emma said with another
valiant smile. As a child she had always been yearning for adventure, following Ned and Alasdair, dogging their footsteps because she was convinced they would have an adventure and she wouldn’t be there to share it.

An answering smile flickered over Alasdair’s set mouth as he caught the reference. “That, my sweet, was the kind of experience that gives adventures a bad name. Even Ned would agree.”

“Are you going to be all right?” Her smile vanished now. He looked dreadful. Gray and green and waxy, his eyes pain-filled hollows.

“I feel as if I’ve been trampled by a team of shire horses,” he confessed ruefully. “But Jemmy assures me it’s nothing worse than bruises and a couple of broken ribs.” He took a few shallow breaths, then said, “How are your feet?”

“Sam put something on them. I don’t feel them anymore.” She looked at him with a worried frown, then said, “Did you kill Denis?”

“Not quite,” he said in a flat voice. “I might have done so, except that there are a few people who are
really
going to want to talk to him.”

“Then I hope they talk to him in the way he talked to me,” Emma said savagely.

“We’re ready to go, sir.” Jemmy stuck his head through the open door. “We’ve tethered t’other ’osses to the carriage. We goin’ back to Stevenage, or on to London?”

“What of Maria?” Emma exclaimed suddenly. “She’ll be out of her head with worry. We have to go back to Stevenage.”

“No, we have to go straight to London,” Alasdair said. “I have to arrange for those animals to be collected before I do anything else. We’ll change horses
at Barnet and hire postilions and a coachman to take you and me on from there. Sam and Jemmy will ride back to Stevenage with a note for Maria. They can arrange for her immediate return to Mount Street.”

“Right y’are, sir.” Jemmy closed the door of the chaise and vaulted onto the back of one of the leaders. Sam flicked his whip and the team started forward along the narrow track.

“There’s brandy in that bag of Sam’s.” Emma indicated the kit bag on the seat beside Alasdair.

He found the flask and drank deeply, then leaned forward and held it to Emma’s mouth. “This is damnable!” he swore. “I need to hold you so badly, but I can’t move a muscle. And if it weren’t for my own godforsaken stupidity, none of this would have happened!”

“How was it your fault?”

“I should have taken more precautions at the inn,” he said bitterly, taking another swallow of brandy. “I should have had Sam or Jemmy posted outside the door … I should have moved your chamber at the last minute to throw them off the scent … I should have stayed awake…. Oh, the list is endless.”

Emma frowned. “You talk like someone who does this kind of thing all the time. First I discover that my brother is some kind of spy and … and …” She frowned, trying to remember what Denis had said. “A master encoder, that was it. And now it seems you’re a professional bodyguard or some such.”

Alasdair shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. I’m a hopeless amateur. I was dragged into this business because Ned’s masters at Horseguards thought that as an old friend and now your trustee, I’d be able to get close enough to you to find the document. In the best of all possible worlds, I would have searched
your rooms and discovered the poem without your being any the wiser.”

Emma was silent. She was too tired and drained to think clearly, but she didn’t like the feeling that for weeks she’d been discussed and manipulated by faceless men who knew nothing about her. And she didn’t like the idea that Alasdair had had more than one motive for involving himself in her life again.

“Why did you agree to do it?” she asked after a minute.

“For Ned,” he replied simply. “Ned died for the information in that poem. He wasn’t to have died in vain.”

Emma nodded. She could find no fault with that. And yet she was still dismayed at the realization that Alasdair had in some sort been spying on her. He hadn’t confided in her until his hand had been forced. He was still as secretive as ever.

She closed her eyes and tried not to think of anything at all. Her feet had begun to sting again, and she didn’t know why, instead of feeling joy and relief that the nightmare was over, she simply wanted to cry like a baby.

Alasdair gave his body up to the rocking motion of the chaise. Every jolt hurt him as if he were on the rack, but his guilt and self-directed anger were much the harder things to bear. He could feel Emma’s distress, but he didn’t know how to alleviate it. He lifted her feet onto his lap, cradling them in his palms. It was the only thing he could do … the only way he could touch her in his present state of disrepair.

Chapter Sixteen

Maria fairly hurled herself up the steps of the house on Mount Street. Harris opened the door for her and she almost tumbled into the hall, untying the ribbons of her bonnet.

“Where is Lady Emma? Has Dr. Baillie been sent for? Oh, my goodness, what a terrible thing. Cook must make some calves’ foot jelly at once. And some gruel … oh, my heart! My heart! The palpitations!” She ran up the stairs, discarded shawls, bonnet, reticule, and gloves falling around her as the words poured forth upon the stolid Harris, who followed her, picking up the scattered belongings.

“Dr. Baillie is with Lady Emma now, madam. Cook would have already prepared the jelly,” he assured her, a touch defensively, “but Lady Emma, as we all know, doesn’t care for calves’ foot jelly.”

“Oh, but she must … she must. Tell cook at
once.” Maria flew along the corridor to Emma’s chamber.

“Oh, dearest, dearest girl!” She burst in. “Alasdair’s note … I didn’t know what to make of it. An accident, he said. Oh, my heart!” She patted her chest with a trembling hand. “An accident in the middle of the night! What could you have been doing, my love? Oh, doctor, the case is not desperate, I trust.”

She flew to the bed and bent to kiss Emma before collapsing on the chaise longue, fanning herself with her hand.

“No, indeed not desperate, Mrs. Witherspoon,” the doctor reassured her. “Lady Emma has some burns on her feet. I have dressed them with salve.”

“Burns!” Maria’s round eyes opened like saucers. “On your feet! However could that have happened, my dearest love?”

“I fell asleep with my feet on the fender,” Emma said. “Very foolish of me.” She was sitting up on the bed, fully dressed except for stockings and shoes. “Pray calm yourself, Maria. This is no great matter.”

“Oh, why aren’t you in bed? You must be undressed and put between the sheets at once. Must she not, doctor?” Maria flew up from her perch. “I’ll fetch Tilda to you. And there must be calves’ foot jelly.”

“Maria, I loathe calves’ foot jelly,” Emma protested. It was Maria’s answer to all ills. “And I have no need to go to bed. It’s barely noon.”

But she spoke to empty air. Maria had run off, calling for Tilda.

“You’ll not want to go walking about on those feet for a day or two,” Baillie said, finishing his bandaging. “Fell asleep with your feet on the fender?” He raised a disbelieving eyebrow.

“Yes,” Emma said firmly. “Wasn’t it foolish of me?”

“Must have been a very heavy sleep,” Baillie said pointedly. “For you not to wake up with the pain.”

“I sleep very heavily, doctor.”

“Oh, is that so?” He began to repack his bag. “I’ve another patient to see. Very busy morning, this. Seems Lord Alasdair Chase had a bit of an accident too.”

“Oh, really,” Emma said with an air of shocked curiosity. “What an astomshing coincidence. It must have occurred after we returned to town. Was it a riding accident perhaps?”

“A driving accident, I understand. He overturned his curricle and the wheels ran over him. Very nasty, his man says.”

“How unfortunate.” Emma shook her head and tutted. “And Lord Alasdair is a veritable nonpareil, too.”

“I daresay even a nonpareil can misjudge his horses,” the doctor observed dryly. “Now, if you’ll take my advice, Lady Emma, you’ll swallow a dose of laudanum and get some rest.” He cast her a shrewdly assessing look. “You’ve had something of a shock, I’d say. Over and above the burns. Not looking too chipper at all.”

Emma was feeling far from chipper. Indeed the prospect of a period of unconsciousness was very appealing. But she was anxious about Alasdair and knew she wouldn’t be able to rest until she’d had a report from Jemmy about the doctor’s visit.

Maria came bustling in with a silver porringer. “Here’s some barley broth for you, my love. Very strengthening. And if you won’t take the jelly, I’ve instructed cook to make up a tisane to my own special recipe.”