Nell (21 page)

He turned to find her with an arrested expression on her face, looking over his shoulder. He flicked a glance back and realised that she had been caught by Julietta’s
portrait. Glad of the excuse of a change of subject, he shifted to one side.

‘Hetty is very like her, don’t you think?’

Nell started. She had been unaware of him for several moments, struck by the realisation that had come to her. Absently she agreed, coming forward to stand before the portrait. But it was not at Julietta Jarrow she was staring. Her eyes were instead fixed upon the painted necklace about her throat. It was gold and studded with emeralds. Here, without a doubt, was Hetty’s treasure! And Lord Jarrow had known the moment she told him.

‘Had she seen this necklace? Henrietta, I mean. She must have done. Perhaps her mama showed it to her. It could not be that she imagined what she told me from this portrait.’

His lip curled into his most bitter look, and Nell’s heart sank. His eyes had shifted to the portrait and he reached out, one finger tracing the green drops that hung from the heavily encrusted gold band.

‘She may have seen a necklace, but it was not the one in this portrait. That was stolen from me. The theft is thought to be the cause of my wife’s death.’

‘Thought to be?’

His voice hardened, and his brow grew black. ‘Lord Nobody seized the jewels from her throat, after he shot her.’

F
or a moment Nell could not speak. The immediate remembrance of Papa’s death must weaken her. But the words seared her heart. Could he speak so of the highwayman if he had himself pulled the trigger? Then why did he ride out at night, and yet not tell her the reason? It made no sense. Why should he pretend that a theft had taken place and speak of it in a manner that showed it still had power to hurt? He could not be guilty! It was only her desperate need to know him for innocent that made her doubt.

Lord Jarrow shifted away from the portrait to pace the parlour floor.

‘I had it in mind to sell the emeralds myself. They are ancient, an heirloom. Or were, should I say. I hesitated too long. I thought to use the proceeds to restore Padnall Place, but I had difficulty reconciling it with my conscience to do what no other Jarrow had done before me, despite any temptation they might have had through one misfortune after another.’

He halted, turning to look at Nell, grimness in his face. ‘It was sacrilege and I had my deserts.’

He might have been trying to prove his own guilt!
What, was she to think he had killed his wife for the emeralds? Absurd. And she could not bear his pain.

‘Merely for thinking of it? A harsh judgement, sir, if that is so.’

‘Life is harsh. You are young, and have not yet had time to find it so.’

Nell suffered a reversal of feeling, eyeing him now with some resentment. ‘If you have suffered, sir, you need not make the arrogant assumption that others have not!’

Arrested, Jarrow stared at her. Belatedly, he remembered her calling and the place from whence she had come to him. The Paddington Seminary was peopled by orphaned young ladies. Seized with remorse, he crossed quickly to her, catching at her hands and holding them fast.

‘Forgive me, Nell! You carry your own misfortunes so lightly, one is apt to forget they exist.’

Her smile seemed to him unbearably poignant. So much courage as she possessed! Had she not borne with fortitude all the fearful inadequacies and horrors that had been poured upon her hapless head in this dread place he was forced to call home? She had almost told him that she did not trust him, yet she did not recoil. He was moved to hope a little. There was a hint of the wry humour that characterised her as she replied.

‘Well, I can scarce claim to rival your problems, but I have had my share.’

‘And more—if only in taking up this post.’

She laughed out at that. ‘We have yet to discover how much of a misfortune that will prove, my lord.’ Her hands tugged a little and he released her. ‘As for my youth, I take leave to doubt that you have yet attained thirty yourself.’

Jarrow was obliged to smile. ‘Very nearly.’

‘Then you have the advantage of me by only seven years.’

‘Seven years of hell!’

The beat of Nell’s heart, already in disarray from the circumstance of his holding her hands, became positively flurried at the resurgence of bitterness in both face and voice. A feeling of desolation crept over her, at the damping of an unacknowledged hope. Had she secretly thought to redeem him from his parlous state? A man whose past actions she must continue to view with reservation. She was dismayed to find herself no less foolish in ambition than her friend Kitty. She sought for a change of subject, and could think only of probing the hidden meaning of his words.

‘You have hinted as much before.’

The familiar kick of guilt made Jarrow shift quickly away from her. His instinct was to keep it all buried. Why should he burden this girl with the sordid tale of his unlucky marriage? Yet had he not already done so with his moods and ill temper? If there was an added reason that spurred him, he did not give it room in his mind. He found himself standing by the table, and threw himself into a chair to one side.

‘It is not a pretty story.’

In the periphery of his vision, he saw her approach and take a seat across the table. Jarrow turned to look at her. The sun fell upon the halo of honey-gold hair, but he was the more taken at this moment with the intelligence that shone in her eyes. A rare quality in a woman. It was madness not to trust her, despite her doubts of him.

He shifted his chair so that he faced her, and leaned one elbow on the table. His eye went over her shoulder
to Julietta’s portrait. A stronger contrast would be difficult to find.

‘She was in every way your opposite,’ he said impulsively. ‘Dark and sultry in looks, with curves so voluptuous that I lost my head. My father was against the marriage, as well he might be. He knew more of the Beresfords than I.’

‘The taint of madness?’

It was spoken in a murmur, but Jarrow caught it. He nodded. ‘He tried to warn me, but I was obdurate. I married her in the teeth of his prohibition.’

Nell nodded sagely. ‘Parents invariably go the wrong way to work in such matters, so I have been told.’

He gave a shrug. ‘I doubt anything would have stopped me. Have you ever been infatuated? No, of course you have not. It is akin to madness, but it does not last. My eyes were opened soon enough, but by then it was too late. The deed was done.’

Nell found the unemotional flatness of his tone more revealing than if he had railed. It was plain that he had lived in torment from the moment of realising his mistake, and then having condemned himself, to discover little by little that his wife was suffering from a malady that could only deepen his torture. Almost she could forgive him if he had taken her life!

‘What happened, Eden?’

She was unaware that she had used his name again. As if it was the most natural thing in the world, she reached her open palm across the table. He looked at it, and then lightly brushed his hand across it, catching at the tips of her fingers. He held them so, his thumb lightly caressing them. There was affection in the gesture, and a riffle of warmth slid through Nell.

‘Julietta treated me with much evidence of devotion,
but it was a childish thing, insincere. She was like a child, wayward and exacting. Then came the flirtations. At first she behaved as if she enjoyed my jealousies; I felt that she taunted me with her laughter. Later I realised that it genuinely amused her to see me raging, and that she felt no vestige of remorse. I, on the other hand—’

He broke off, and it came to Nell that his regret encompassed not only his error of choice, but also his failure to change the creature he had married. A normal woman would have responded to his jealousy and abandoned her faithlessness. He had no need to tell her that Julietta’s conduct had gone beyond flirtation, for his evident agony bore out what Mrs Whyte had told her.

‘With my father’s death, I had to return here,’ Jarrow went on. ‘Julietta hated it. There was not yet enough in her behaviour to alert me to her mental state. Or the disease had not yet advanced so far as to be noticeable—except in the occasional tantrum. Besides, she was with child, and women are prone to megrims in pregnancy. When Henrietta was a few months old, I yielded to Julietta’s pleas to return to town.’ He released the fingers he was holding as the memories crowded in. ‘We spent two or three seasons there—I forget now, for the time rolled into one long era in my mind, with Julietta’s vagaries and Toly’s constant presence.’

‘You lived in his father’s house?’ Nell was recalling what Mrs Whyte had said about Mr Beresford’s influence on his sister.

‘For my sins. But my in-laws were rarely there, though Toly was. He was close to Julietta, and I imagined he might serve to steady her.’ His lips tightened. ‘I was mistaken, but let that pass. At length the situation became untenable. I could no longer ignore the signs that told me Julietta was unbalanced. Her conduct made us
both a laughing-stock, or an object of pity. Neither case was to be tolerated. I brought her home, and forced her to remain in this Godforsaken place.’

Nell had no words, either of comfort or compassion. She was the more moved by what he left unsaid than by the little he had told her. It was clear that he had expected to be forever locked in the castle, tied to a woman he could no longer love and who put him through every kind of hell from which her death had conveniently released him. The thought threw hollows into her chest.

‘It did not answer.’ Again, the flat note that gave all too much away. ‘Deprived of those outlets for her restlessness that London provided—albeit such actions as caused us both the gravest harm—Julietta became more and more unbalanced. We were treated day and night to the same shrieking tantrums in which Hetty indulges. She too began to walk the corridors in her sleep. I would find her stretched at her length somewhere, sleeping like the dead, with just that labouring breath of which you have spoken in the child.’

He passed a hand tiredly across his face. ‘If fate had not intervened in the person of Lord Nobody, I dare say she might have ended her days in some other fashion. By falling from the battlements, perhaps, where she was wont to walk. Or down that broken stairwell you mistakenly stepped into the other night. At all events, so I tell myself when the demon of memory proves too gruesome to be endured.’

Nell found her tongue, spurred by her own dread remembrance of the past. ‘You are talking of the accident?’

His eyes caught at hers, and held them. ‘Was it an accident?’

She clasped her hands tightly together to still their
sudden trembling. The moment she had dreaded had arrived. She had wanted this moment. Only now did she recognise that she had been avoiding it. To hear it would be to relive the worst moments of her life. Yet she must know!

‘What did happen that night, Eden? You were there, were you not?’

Jarrow nodded, the memory sharp and clear, etched into his mind from that moment, as if it had been caught by an artist’s brush and left standing on the wall of his memory.

‘I was riding behind the coach. Julietta had given me the slip, and cajoled Grig into taking her to a ball at Chadwell Heath. Detling would never have done so, but he was off that night. By the time I had discovered her absence, it was too late to stop her. I guessed at once where she had gone, for I had refused the invitation from Lady Guineaford only a few days earlier.’

‘You rode after her?’

‘To fetch her back, yes.’

He recalled the wild ride through the night, his heart in his mouth as his imagination tumbled over the havoc Julietta might have wrought among a public consisting of his immediate neighbours.

‘I did not show my face, but sent a servant for the hostess. She was a friend of my father’s and knew a little of our story. She persuaded Julietta to come into the vestibule and I took her away.’

‘She came without protest?’

Jarrow gave a grim laugh. ‘On the contrary. She threatened to undo us both with a screaming fit. I was obliged to put my hand across her mouth and carry her out to the coach. I took to horse, for I had no mind to
be treated to a barrage of abuse—and Julietta would not have hesitated to use her nails.’

‘And that was when you were held up by Lord Nobody?’

Nell saw his lip curl. ‘Or, as some hold—perhaps as you believe, Nell!—that was when I took on the persona of Lord Nobody and shot my wife in the head.’

The taunt washed over Nell, for the image of her father was stirring. She thrust it down. ‘Tell me, pray.’

‘There is little to tell. Grig saw the fellow and must have pulled on the reins, for the horses plunged badly. To his credit, he managed to control them. I could not see the man myself, but even as I rode around to find out what was amiss, he had come in to the other side of the coach. I heard Julietta cry out, and rode around from the front. He had pulled open the door and had the pistol trained upon the inside.’ He ran his fingers over his dark hair in a gesture of frustration. ‘I hardly remember what happened next. I know I tried to ride him down. He must have hit out at me with the pistol for I felt a blow and came off my horse. The pistol exploded. By the time I had got to my feet—my head was none too steady at the time—Lord Nobody was riding away. I found Julietta lying dead, and the jewels she had been wearing had been torn from her neck.’

Nell was trembling violently, but she managed the one word. ‘Torn?’

‘There was blood where the necklace had ripped her flesh, besides that which was running from the wound in her head.’

Nell could no longer control the sensations that were churning in her bosom. The horror of her childhood was there in full, but overlaid with the release of an even
greater pressure. He had not done it! Eden had not killed Julietta.

She slumped in her chair, throwing her hands to her temples. Distantly, she heard Lord Jarrow’s sharp intake of breath.

‘Hell and the devil, I should not have told you! Nell? Nell!’

She tried to reassure him with a faint wafture of one hand, but her teeth were chattering too much for speech. In a moment, she could feel him above her, and his hands caught at her shoulders. Then he was down beside her, trying to see her face.

‘Nell, look at me! Nell, for God’s sake!’

She made a supreme effort, dragging herself upright. One wavering hand caught his arm, and she pushed the words through a sandpaper throat.

‘I am…all right. It—it is not…’

He left her abruptly, and she heard his hasty footsteps crossing to the door. Another door slammed, and there was quiet for a space. Nell rested her arms on the table and laid her head upon them, willing herself to recover. Then Lord Jarrow was back again, urgency in his tone.

‘Drink this! Come, lift up your head.’

She had perforce to do as he wished, for his hand was forcing her head up. She felt the cool of glass at her lips.

‘It’s brandy. Take a little.’

The tone was peremptory, and obediently Nell sipped at the liquid. The taste was strong but pleasant. But as she swallowed, she felt as if her throat was on fire. She was urged to take another sip, and did so only because she had no will to resist. Presently the faintness left her, and the tremors died down. She was able to sit up at length, and gave the concerned features of her employer a reassuring smile.

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Don’t! I should beg yours for burdening you with my harrowing tale.’