Bound in Moonlight (23 page)

“I don't suppose
you
know what became of her,” Rexton muttered as he turned to leave. He'd taken three steps, when he nearly tripped over the animal as it darted in front of him. Bloody cats. Always underfoot.

There was something in its mouth—the leaf. Darius dropped it on the floor and mewed.

Rexton had seen cats bring a freshly killed mouse or bird to a favored human as presumed tribute, but this was the first time he'd seen one make a presentation of flora rather than fauna. The leaf looked to be from either a plane tree or a maple, bright green save for a little spot of red near the stem. Rather early, Rexton thought, for the leaves to start changing, even in a mountainous region like Auvergne.

Darius sniffed at the leaf again. And then he looked up at Rexton.

Rexton knelt and lifted the leaf. He rubbed his thumb over the little red spot.

It smeared. “Jesus Christ.”

The cat returned to the back door, looked at Rexton, and mewed.

Rexton stared at it in puzzlement and alarm.

It padded to the edge of the woods, turned, and mewed again.

He followed it.

Twelve

O
H, MY GOD. Oh, Jesus.”

Caroline struggled up from the darkness, straining to move, to open her eyes.

Something settled lightly upon her chest. She felt the tickle of hair, an ear pressing against her. “Thank God,” he breathed.

There came a ripping sound, tentative fingertips touching the knife wound on her side.

He cupped her head, stroked her face. “Caroline.”

She'd thought it was Rexton, but it couldn't have been; he wouldn't call her Caroline. Forcing her eyes open, she squinted at a dark form backlit by spangles of sunlight.

“What happened? Who did this to . . . ?”

Her eyelids drifted shut.

“Caroline,” he said in a hoarse, strained voice. “Stay with me. Was it Dunhurst? He has a cut. He said he fell holding his razor. Was it him?”

She tried to answer. Her mouth wouldn't work, but she found she could move her head enough to nod.

He muttered something she couldn't hear, and then he gathered her to him, and told her she was going to be all right, that everything was going to be all right, his voice fading away as she sank back into oblivion.

She whimpered as she was lifted. Everything hurt.

“I know,” he said. “I know. Soon you'll be in a nice soft bed . . .”

“She should be dead.”

Caroline opened her eyes and looked around. She was in
la Chambre Romain,
lying in the middle of the big, scarlet-and-gold draped bed.

“I don't understand, Dr. Coates.” It was Rexton's voice. “How is it possible for the wound to have started healing so quickly?”

Caroline turned her head toward his voice, her neck feeling strangely thin and weak. She lifted a hand from beneath the covers to touch it. The collar was gone. So were her wrist and ankle cuffs.

“It's a mystery, I'll grant you that,” replied the doctor, who was standing with Rexton and Mr. Riddell on the balcony, all three men leaning on the balustrade with their backs to Caroline. “But it's hardly the first . . . miracle, if you will, that I've encountered as a physician. Once, I delivered a baby boy who was born with a tumor on his spine. Such cancers are always fatal—there's nothing to be done. I told his mother this, but she prayed for his recovery anyway. One morning, the little boy woke up, and the tumor was gone, just as if it had never been there. He's fifteen years old now, a healthy and robust young man.”

“I don't believe in miracles,” Rexton said.

“Luckily for Miss Keating,” the doctor replied, “God doesn't let that stop him. She is very fortunate to have endured what she did and survived—albeit with a massive loss of blood. She will be too weak to travel for some time. And, er, I've no idea how long you intend on remaining here, my lord, but I feel compelled to advise you that the young lady is in no condition at present to participate in relations of an intimate—”

“What do you take me for?” Rexton asked.

Both men looked away.

Mr. Riddell punctured the awkward silence. “Archer tells me that Miss Keating is welcome to remain here until she is fully recovered. As to her contractual obligations, although her servitude has terminated prior to the official conclusion of Slave Week at midnight tonight, it was through no fault of her own. You do understand, Rexton, that you are still obligated to pay the entire purchase price of one hundred thousand guineas.”

“Of course.”

“If I may ask,” Riddell continued, “was there some . . . particular reason you left her in the stable last night? Did she do something to displease you?”

Rexton sighed. “I was in my cups.”

Liar,
thought Caroline. Yes, he'd been drunk, but that wasn't why he did it. He did it for the same reason he tied her up in the Nemeton yesterday afternoon and ravished her in the guise of the stableman. He did it to push her away so that he could deal with her as a
thing,
not as a person. It was why he was always covering her face with that hood, or a blindfold. It was why he'd made her perform acts he knew appalled her, so that she wouldn't complicate things by harboring any but negative feelings toward him.

It was a lesson she'd been slow to learn, but now, at last, she had taken it to heart. Mindful though she was of the unhappy circumstances that had driven Rexton to isolate himself from others, the fact remained that he had become a genuinely distant and unfeeling man. Every gesture of warmth or caring on her part, without exception, had been cruelly punished. He was no longer capable of forming a real attachment to another human being.

“You see?”
he'd said after he'd proven, in the Nemeton, what a monster he truly was.

She hadn't seen then, not really. She did now.

“Then you'll do it?” asked Lili, sitting on the edge of Caroline's bed later that afternoon.

The door opened. Lord Rexton, unshaven, uncombed, and still wearing the clothes he'd slept in, entered bearing a heavily laden tea tray.

“Yes,”Caroline said quietly.

“Good,” Lili whispered. “You won't be sorry.”

Rexton greeted Lili and set the tray on Caroline's nightstand. It held a pot of tea and a platter of biscuits and finger sandwiches. “I filched these from
le Salon Bleu
.”

“May I speak to you for a moment,my lord?” Lili asked.

He looked back and forth between the two women, his eyes wary. “Of course.”

Lili kissed Caroline on the cheek and promised to return later, and then she and Rexton retreated to the corridor. She closed the bedchamber door for privacy, but they stood so close to it that their voices were audible, if muffled.

“Perhaps,” Lili said, “it would be best, considering Caroline's condition and her need for rest, if you were to sleep elsewhere.”

“Did she ask for this? Caroline?”

After a moment's hesitation, Lili said, “Yes,my lord.”

It took him a while to answer. “Very well,” he said.

There came such a long period of silence after Lili said good-bye that Caroline assumed Rexton had left as well, until the door reopened.

He crossed to her bedside without looking directly at her. Filling a little plate, he said, “You must eat if you are to regain your strength.”

“I'm not hungry,” she said, “but I'll have some tea.”

“Just cream, right?” he asked as he poured.

“That's right,” she said, surprised that he knew.

He handed her the cup and saucer and lowered himself into the red leather chair. Scraping a hand over his beard-darkened jaw, he said, “Dunhurst is dead.”

She lowered the cup and looked at him.

“
I
didn't do it.”

Not for want of trying, though. During Lili's visit, she'd recounted how Rexton had confronted the breakfasting Lord Dunhurst after bringing Caroline back to the château this morning. He had hauled the marquess out of his chair and pummeled him savagely.
“If Inigo and Cutbridge hadn't held him back,”
Lili had said,
“he'd have killed the blackguard.”
Given how the two men reviled each other,Rexton had no doubt been grateful for the excuse to bloody his knuckles on Dunhurst's face.

Rexton said, “Seigneur des Ombres' Swiss Guards chained him up in the cellar with the intent of handing him over to the local authorities to be prosecuted for attempted murder. Archer told him they probably wouldn't hang him, but they might very well lock him up for the rest of his life, or most of it. He said he had no intention of rotting away in some obscure French prison, and apparently he meant it. They put him in leg irons chained to a big stone column. He demanded a chair to sit on, so they brought him one. When the guards left, he tore up his cravat to make a noose, put it around his neck, and climbed onto the chair to tie it to an iron ring embedded high in the column. Then he kicked the chair away.”

Caroline nodded dazedly. She took a sip of her tea, then replaced the cup on the tray and said, “I'm tired. I'd like to sleep.”

He said, “I was thinking perhaps . . .”He rubbed his hands on his trousers in a nervous gesture she wouldn't have expected from a man like him. “You and I became acquainted under rather singular circumstances, to be sure, but I thought perhaps . . .”He took a deep breath and said, “I would be very honored if you would consent to be my wife.”

She stared at him, trying to fathom his reason for doing this.

He said, “You could still teach, if you'd like. I . . . I could build you a school. I do realize things have been . . . Well, I mean, we've hardly had what one would call a normal . . .courtship, or anything like it. You were sold to me as a slave. It can't get much more abnormal than that. But over the course of the past—”

“Oh, my God,” she murmured. “Of course. Of course. If you were to marry me, it would save you having to pay the hundred thousand guineas. Well, I suppose you would still owe the ten thousand in commissions, but it would save you the rest.”

He stared at her.

“I know what marriage means to your class,” she told him. “It's a contractual arrangement. It has nothing to do with love, or even affection. You'll get your heir and your aura of respectability, without having to give up anything—the gin, the opium, the whores, the mistresses . . .”

“Christ,” he whispered, shaking his head.

“Ease your mind,my lord. You needn't bind yourself in unwanted matrimony to save the ninety thousand. I don't want it. It's yours to keep.”

“You can't be serious. You would go back to the squalor of St. Giles just to keep from taking my money?”

“I'm not going back to London. I'm going to Russia.”

He gaped at her as if she had said she were going to the moon.

“Lili has told me about a family with whom Seigneur des Ombres is friendly. They are related to the imperial family somehow. I believe the wife is a cousin of the Tsar. They have two young daughters, and they're looking for a governess. Lili has already discussed it with
le seigneur,
who is willing to vouch for me. She tells me the Russians are very keen on English governesses, so if that particular family doesn't offer me a position, another surely will.”

“You'd give up the money after everything you've gone through this past week to earn it?”

“It is precisely because of everything I've gone through that I'm giving it up. If I took it, it would be an eternal reminder of how I earned it, how I . . . how I demeaned myself, the things I let you . . .” She looked away, her eyes burning. “I wish to God I'd never come here. If I could give up seven years of my life to erase the past seven days, I wouldn't hesitate.”

“Caroline . . .”

“Don't call me that!” Sitting forward, she said, in a quavering voice, “Why would you call me that? Why now, after . . . ?
Why?
”

Her outburst seemed to leave him speechless. He raised his hands in a placating gesture and said, “You are quite right. I overstepped. But,Miss Keating . . . about the money, I beg you recon—”