Bewitching the Baron (39 page)

“Who else? The ungrateful strumpet. I found her bedded down with Beauchamp, and she did not even have the grace to blush! Said he had more to offer, and that I was a bore, besides. Said, and I give you her very words here, ‘You cannot have thought you had a claim to me.’ I save her from that godforsaken ditch of a village, take her to London—which she would never have seen otherwise, you can bet your boots on that—lodge her, provide for her, buy her clothes and jewels, and the first man who comes by with a bigger diamond in his cravat, she is gone.”

Nathaniel crooked a smile at his friend. “And what of Beauchamp?”

Paul blew out a breath and shrugged, a sparkle of amusement kindling in his eyes. “I thought he would have an apoplexy, lying there red in the face, sheet pulled up to his chin. Kept eyeing my sword, like I intended to use it over the likes of her. Although, I must say, there was a certain temptation to do so, if only for the novelty of playing the wronged party. I would have liked to see him climb out the window bare-assed, that is for certain. Would have made a bigger target than I ever did.”

“Maybe next time you will be more fortunate.”

“Next time. Now there is an unhappy thought.” Paul walked over to the desk, and sprawled in the chair where Nathaniel had sat most of the day. “First I am the wronged lover, and then what next? I can almost hear the clank of ball and chain. Marriage, to some convent-bred virgin that I shall have to guard day and night from the advances of unscrupulous young men. It will be God’s revenge upon me, to spend my old age a jealous miser of my wife’s body.”

Nathaniel crossed his arms and cocked an eyebrow. “Your disgust at that future is not entirely convincing.”

“I should rather be struck dead by lightning than married! At least ’tis a quicker death.” Paul’s eye lit on the leather-bound diary lying on the desk, open to a page of feminine handwriting. “Here now, what is this?”

Nathaniel unfolded his arms and walked to the desk to pick it up, turning idly through the pages. “Laetitia’s diary. Her father sent it to me this morning.”

Paul sat back, making the chair creak. “Blow me down. Why?”

Nathaniel shrugged, uncomfortable speaking of it while the contents of the pages were still fresh in his mind.
“I locked myself in my room all Today, and with father’s old razor I cut upon my arm until the self-loathing went away. I do not know why it calms me so to carve upon my flesh,”
she had written, a year before he had met her.
“Sometimes I look in the mirror and I see such an ugly, stupid, awkward girl that I wonder my own family can stand to be in my company. I am not fit to live.”
The entries had gone on like that, up to and through the time that he had known her.

The entry detailing their first meeting, brief as it had been and long forgotten by him, was unsettling to read even with the distance of time.
“He smiled at me! I do swear it, he smiled at me, and I could see he saw something he liked, however little. If only he were mine—I love him already. I love him! I shall kill myself if I cannot have him.”
And then, when he had broken a date with her,
“I cannot let him undress me the next time we make love. He will see the scabs and be disgusted. I did not mean to cut so many times, so deep, but I was unable to stop. I hate him! Even as I need him, I hate him. I do not know how he stands me. I am beneath contempt.”

At last he answered Paul, “I think it is Mr. Mowbray’s way of absolving me. Or forgiving me. Perhaps both. I have been writing to him for many months, trying to gain an audience with him, trying to find some means of making restitution, with never any answer. And then this morning a package arrived, containing this diary and a short letter.”

“What did the letter say?”

Nathaniel walked over to the fireplace, his thumb rubbing over the smooth leather of the diary’s cover. “Only that he had found the diary a short time ago, and that it had changed his perspective on his daughter, and on what had happened. He said he trusted that I would know what to do with the diary when I had read it.”

He looked down at the small book in his hands. Between its covers rested a young woman’s tortured world, filled with self-hatred, desperation, and death long before he himself had entered it. He had not behaved well with Laetitia, but he could no longer believe himself completely responsible for her demise. She had needed more than it was in anyone’s power to give.

“And?”

“And she has suffered enough. We all have.” He bent down, and gently tossed the diary into the fire.
“Requiescat in pace.”

Chapter Thirty-two

Valerian shoved the front door closed with her foot, glad to be out of the biting air, her arms sore from carrying her market basket. City living was making her soft.

“Miss Bright?” a scratchy voice called out from behind the closest door.

Valerian grimaced, then smoothed her features. “Yes, it is I.”

Her landlady poked her head out of her apartment. “Thought it might be. Cold out there, eh?”

“Quite.”

“Like to freeze the nipples off a—”

“Yes, I entirely agree,” Valerian interrupted, stepping backwards down the hall towards the stairs. Her landlady had an unholy love of talking, and at this moment Valerian was much more intrigued by the cooling meat pie in her basket than metaphors involving frostbitten nipples.

“Now wait a moment, do not be in such a hurry to be gone—”

“My dinner, it is half-chilled already,” Valerian pleaded, gesturing to her basket.

“There be a letter came for you.”

Valerian stopped. “Letter?”

“Did I not just hear myself say that very word?” The woman pointed to the rickety console shoved against the wall.

Valerian dropped her basket to the floor and dashed to the table, sorting through the mail until she found it. It was Charmaine’s handwriting. She had almost convinced herself that her cousin would not write back.

She slipped a finger under the flap, ready to break the seal, then remembered her landlady. She looked up. Her landlady was watching with bright eyes, looking for all the world like a hungry squirrel.

“Thank you,” Valerian said. “I should not have liked to have missed this.” She retrieved her basket and nodded once more to her landlady, then hurried up the stairs.

She restrained herself until she had greeted and fed Oscar, built up the fire, and set her kettle to boil, and then could resist no longer. She sat in her big chair, pulled up close to the fire, her stocking feet resting against the fender, and broke the seal.

February 10

Greyfriars

Dear Valerian,

It gave me great joy to receive your letter, however disturbing some of the contents may have been. I had feared that I would never hear from you again, and that I would have no one to blame for that but myself.

Much has happened here in the time since you left. Gwendolyn Miller ran off with that friend of the baron’s, Mr. Carlyle. Eddie O’Connor ran off to sea, it is said to escape the presence of females, who have given him nothing but trouble. John Torrance injured a finger, and when all was said and done, the surgeon in Yarborough had removed his entire left hand. He blames Alice for the loss, claiming that if she had not driven you away, he would still have his hand. I do not doubt that he is correct.

The day does not pass that someone does not ask if I have heard news of you, and when you are to return. This winter has been especially hard, with many falling ill, and not a few dying. The nearest doctor is, as I have said, in Yarborough, and after John Torrance’s accident, few would be willing to see him even if he came to their homes. Which, of course, he does not.

We must sound a fickle lot: We hate you one day, and love you the next. Your reputation has taken on a faint glow of sainthood in your absence. The terrors of disease are proving far stronger than those of spirits and spells. Hacking coughs and watery bowels are winning you favor where your attentions and care never did.

Since receiving your letter, I have thought long about the bonds of family. A year ago, I would have asked for the name of the man who fathered me. Today I will not. It is difficult for me to express what has changed, except to say that I see more clearly the value of those who share my life. This man, whoever he is, does not. He doubtless has his own family to care for anyway, and would not welcome a disruption of this sort. When all is said and done, family are those whom you love.

You have always been a clever girl, and I think you know what I am trying to say. The cottage has been rented out, but you could stay with Howard and me until the lease is up, and then it would be yours.

Come home, Valerian.

Your cousin,

Charmaine

Valerian dropped the letter to her lap.
Come home.
Back to Greyfriars, to Charmaine, and to the cottage. The world she thought lost to her forever was asking for her to come back. She felt a tightness in her throat, and sat staring into space as she tried to comprehend being wanted again.

And what of Nathaniel?

Charmaine had made no mention of him. But did the omission mean that he had returned to Raven Hall, or that he had not? Did Charmaine think any mention of him would frighten her, or draw her?

The very thought that she might see him again made her stomach knot. He could treat her like a mere acquaintance, or perhaps not acknowledge her at all. She knew she could not do the same, not when she still woke in the night from dreams of being held in his arms.

But to go home. . . . She looked around her rented rooms, at the touches she had added in an effort to make the place her own, to make it cozy and homey. They were comfortable rooms, but she knew they could never be home, not when friends and family were elsewhere.

Truly, it was not such a hard decision to make.

“Oscar!”

“. . . is a greedy guts. Rrrawww!”

“Pack your biscuits, darling. We have traveling to do!”

Chapter Thirty-three

“Grey skies over Greyfriars, Oscar,” Valerian said as she set down his cage on the muddy road. “Have you ever seen anything more lovely?”

“Biscuit!”

Valerian tucked up her old black skirts to keep them out of the mud, and squatted down to unfasten the door to the cage. She had hitched a ride with a tinker up until a mile back, and come the rest of the way from Yarborough on foot. Her silk dresses and other belongings were in her trunks at the Yarborough inn where she had stayed last night, waiting to be picked up. If, that is, she definitely decided to stay.

She lifted Oscar out on her wrist, and let him ruffle and stretch his wings. “Go on now, go see if Charmaine has laundry drying that you can pull into the mud,” she said, and gave him a boost up into the air.

“Rrrawww!” he cried, and flapped his way upwards. He circled her twice where she stood on the rutted road, then flew off towards the trailing chimney smoke of the village.

Valerian picked up the cage and continued on, then paused when she came to the millpond, grey-brown and edged with the yellow stalks of dead weeds. The millwheel turned with its regular thunk-splash sound, peaceful in the quiet of the day. She felt no lingering fear, despite what had happened here. It had all been washed away by her miraculous experience in the water’s cold depths.

She walked slowly on, strangely reassured by the sight of the millpond, so placid as it powered the wheel. It was a part of her internal landscape now, forever linked to her vision of her family, and that overwhelming sense of universal connection that had led, she was certain now, to the increase in her ability to heal. It was linked as well to her awakening in Nathaniel’s care.

She doubted he would ever again look at her with such caring as he had at that moment.

She pressed her lips tight together and locked away the thought. If she were to come back to Greyfriars to live, she would have to learn to think of their relationship as something in the past. Learn to think of neither it nor him at all, if she could.

Her lip trembled, and she clenched her jaw against it. She had done the right thing by refusing him, the right thing for both of them.

Charmaine’s home was only a few houses from the edge of town, and Valerian made her way quickly to it, nodding a greeting to the surprised woman feeding chickens next door. She pushed open the shop door, only to have it bump against something that yelped a protest on the other side. She craned around the door to see a young boy with a broom.

“Oh!” Valerian said. “Excuse me!” And then, realizing she had never seen him before, “Who are you?”

“Bertie, miss.” He looked none too pleased at her interruption of his task, a fierce little scowl on his face.

“Ah, Bertie.” As if that were explanation enough.

“Valerian?” came a tentative voice, and then Charmaine appeared in the doorway at the back of the shop. “It
is
you! Why did you not tell me you were coming?” Charmaine rushed halfway across the shop, then stopped, looking suddenly self-conscious.

Valerian closed the distance between them and gave her cousin an awkward hug. It was not something she could ever remember doing, but it felt like the right thing at this moment, and after a few stiff seconds Charmaine gave her a quick hug back, then pulled away.

“Here now, let me look at you,” Charmaine said, standing back and eyeing her up and down. “Why are you wearing that old thing? I thought you would have spruced up a bit, having been to London, and living in a city like York.”

Valerian shrugged. “I thought I would be more comfortable in this.” Thought, too, that it would be easier to slip into her old life. But perhaps wearing her old clothes had been a mistake. She was not the same person she had been when she left, and dressing as if nothing had changed could not change the fact that everything had.

“Aye, well, suit yourself. I see you have met Bertie,” Charmaine said, gesturing for the boy to come closer.

Valerian raised a brow in silent inquiry.

Charmaine’s narrow mouth twitched for a moment in what might have been the beginnings of a smile. “Howard’s apprentice. From the orphanage in Yarborough. He has been with us for almost two months now. Right, Bertie?” Charmaine said, nudging him on the shoulder.