Never Call It Love (3 page)

Now,
still looking down in the square, he reflected that perhaps after all, when he
returned to Ireland, he should marry Moira. A widow of twenty-seven, Moira—Lady
Moira Ashley—received rents from more than two hundred tenant farmers working
the land of the three estates she had inherited from her husband and from her
own family, the Rawlings. And lord only knew she was good-looking enough. Over
the generations, the Rawlings, like the Stanfords, had intermarried with the
native Irish. Moira's beauty was entirely Irish. Glossy hair so dark that, like
a blackbird's wing, it showed blue highlights. Eyes of such a dark blue that by
candlelight they looked black. Skin the shade of rich country cream. And there
was a boldness about her full-lipped face, and in the way her curving, almost
buxom body moved, that made any man want to take her to bed. According to
rumor, at least a few had, including the steward who managed her estates.

For
a minute or so one day the previous summer Patrick had thought that he was
about to take her to bed. After attending an auction of thoroughbred horses,
they had returned to Wetherly, the vast house of gray stone left to her by her
husband. In the salon, after a footman had brought sherry and Irish whiskey and
then left the room, Patrick had drawn her into his arms. As he kissed her yielding
mouth, her body had pressed close against his. But when his lips had sought her
swelling breasts, left almost naked by her low-cut gown, she had broken free of
him. "No, Patrick."

"Why
not?" Plainly she wanted him. Desire had expanded her pupils until her
eyes were almost black, and had brought a faint flush not only to her face, but
to her throat and bosom.

She
said, "You will have to marry me first."

Thwarted
and angry, he had said in a cold voice, "You do me too great an honor,
madam," and turned toward the door. When he reached it, though, he turned
back.

"Moira,
I'm sorry I said that. We have been friends and good neighbors for a long time.
I hope we always will be. But marriage is something that deserves long and
serious consideration."

"Besides,
you hope to marry some rich virgin, so that you will be reasonably sure that
your children are your own."

He
was silent. It had indeed occurred to him that with Lady Moira a man would
never be quite certain on that point.

"But
if you think you would have to worry about that with me," she said,
"you're wrong, Patrick. Married to you, I would be faithful."

He
had moved to her then, kissed her lightly, and said, "We will talk of it
another time. I must go now. Colin and I have some estate business to attend
to."

Now,
behind Patrick, Jeremiah Cobbin cleared his throat. Patrick turned and looked
at the mantel clock. Its hands pointed to three minutes of eight. "Perhaps
I had better send someone to see..."

Breaking
off, he turned back to the window. "They are here," he said with
relief. Another carriage had stopped directly behind the Cobbins' vehicle. The
driver got down from the box, opened the carriage door, and let down the steps.

Only
Maude Reardon descended. And it was obvious from the agitated manner in which she
spoke to the driver, and from the way she climbed the steps with unwonted
haste, that something was very wrong.

"Please
excuse me," he said to the Cobbins, and hurried out of the room and down
the stairs. He had the door open before the knocker sounded twice.

Maude
Reardon, bonnet awry, face deathly white,
cried, "Oh, Sir Patrick!"
Then, with a whimper: "Oh, dear holy Mary, mother of God."

He
grasped the plump shoulders. "Maude! What is it?"

"It's
Anne, sir. She's been taken to Guy's Hospital."

"She's
been hurt? How?" His voice sharpened. "Answer me!"

"I
don't rightly know, sir. She was found in the area-way of a house back there on
Kingman Street. They say she fell from an upstairs window, or was pushed. And,
oh, sir! The poor child had been stripped naked."

She
began to weep. Shock held him numb and silent for several seconds. Then he gave
her shoulders a shake and said, "Maude! Try to tell me what you
know."

Sobbing,
at times incoherent, she told him. The cart that had locked wheels with the
hired carriage. Anne's decision to go on by foot. The two drivers' long
struggle with their entangled vehicles, while other carriages waited behind
them.

Finally
other drivers had joined in the task, and after a while the carriage's wheel
had been lifted free—only to slide sidewise on its axle and break beneath the
vehicle's weight.

Left
stranded, Maude had promised a street urchin a copper if he would find another
public carriage for her. He had darted away down a cross street. Perhaps twenty
minutes had passed before he returned, perched on the driver's step of a
carriage. Maude had handed the boy his copper, and given the driver Sir
Patrick's address.

Farther
along Kingman Street, the carriage had slowed, then halted. Maude had poked her
head out of the window.

"There
was a carriage in front of the house up ahead, and a small crowd on the
sidewalk. Two men was carrying someone into the carriage, someone wrapped in a
blanket. Then I saw her red hair and I knew—oh, my God, sir—I knew it was our
little Anne."

Maude
had gotten out of the hired carriage just as the vehicle holding Anne had
driven away. Moving as fast as her asthma would allow, she joined the sidewalk
crowd.

"There
was one of Sir John Fielding's bailiffs there, the ones they call Bow Street
Runners. I guess someone had gone to fetch him after it... happened."

"Did
he talk to you?" Patrick forced the words through a throat that had grown
hard with pain and gathering fury.

"Yes,
sir. After I told him who I was, he took my name and address and told me what
he knew."

It
was a maid in the house opposite, the Bow Street Runner told her, who had been
a witness, probably the only witness. Retiring to her garret room after
fourteen hours of hard work, she had looked down from her window, to see
something odd going on in front of the area-way across the street. A group of
men, five or six of them, were there on the sidewalk. "The Runner told me
the maid said they was young gentlemen, to judge by the look of them." One
of them was carrying something or somebody.

Too
curious now to sleep, the housemaid had kept watch. She had seen a faint glow
for a minute or so through the front door's fanlight. After that, darkness and
silence. She had been about to go to bed when again she saw faint light, this
time beyond a long window in the upper story. Then had come the sound of
shattering glass, and a drawn-out, despairing scream, and the sight of a thin
white body hurtling down through the night.

The
housemaid had hurried down to tell her employers, who were still at supper. It
was they who told the Bow Street Runner their housemaid's story, and who
volunteered their carriage to take the girl to the hospital.

"He
said she seemed to be in a bad way, sir." Maude wept. "She may be
dying."

"Go
on upstairs. Wait for me."

He
turned around. They were standing on the stairs, faces shocked and outraged,
the respectable couple who would never be Anne's parents-in-law, the
nondescript young man who would never be her husband.

With
cold rage swelling his heart, he said, "You must excuse me." He went
down the steps and into the carriage Maude Reardon had left waiting.

Young
gentlemen, he thought, as the carriage moved forward. He knew of them, those
groups of wellborn youths who prowled London by night.

They
were aping the Hellfire Club, of course, that group of aristocratic debauchees
who met for their orgies well outside London, in the ancient ruins of St.
Mary's Abbey at Medmenham. There such profligates as Lord Sandwich and Sir
Peter Dashwood, robed and cowled and chanting obscene parodies of Christian
liturgy, celebrated the Black Mass and tried to summon up the devil. To a
religious skeptic like Patrick Stanford, their blasphemous antics would have
seemed merely absurd—except that part of their ritual required the raping of
virgins on the ancient altar. In the countryside around Medmenham, the wretched
and powerless poor whispered of torchlight flickering at night through the
abbey's ruins, and of chanting mingled with terrified screams, and of girls,
some as young as twelve, wandering dazed and bleeding along the roadsides in
the early morning.

Already
vicious, but too young to be welcomed by
the Hellfire Club, a number of
aristocratic youths had formed into gangs. They gave themselves the names of
American Indian tribes—the Mohawks, the Algonquians, the Saginaws. And at night
they moved through the ill-lit London streets, robbing the well-dressed,
assaulting the penniless, and raping any girl found alone and unprotected in
the darkness.

Patrick
Stanford was sure that it was such a group who had seized his ward.

Up
ahead, a small sidewalk crowd still lingered before one of a solid row of
houses. Despite his anxiety to get to Anne, he rapped with his stick on the
cab's trapdoor, signaling the driver to stop. A bulky man with the authoritative
air of a Bow Street Runner turned around. As if sensing that the carriage's
passenger belonged to the gentry, he moved briskly forward and raised a crooked
forefinger to his tricorne hat. "Good evening, sir."

"My
name is Sir Patrick Stanford. I already know something of what occurred here.
Do you have any idea who they were, the men who carried the girl into this
house?"

"No,
sir, except it appears they was housebreakers. There's a broken window into the
scullery, and the door is locked, so I guess that's how they got in, through
the window."

"And
the girl has been taken to Guy's Hospital?"

"Yes,
sir, in St. Thomas Street"

"One
more thing. Whose house is this?"

"It
belongs to a family named Montlow. The people across the way told me the place
has been empty since last winter. The ladies, Mrs. Montlow and her daughter,
are in the country, and the young gentleman, Mr. Montlow, is away at
Oxford."

Patrick
again looked at the house, recognizing it now. It was the house where once,
before he had decided against it, he had thought of calling on the girl with
the
chestnut hair, sun-warmed complexion, and clear gray eyes.

"Thank
you," he said.

Again
the Bow Street Runner touched his hat. Patrick rapped on the trapdoor for the
driver to proceed. As the carriage rattled forward over the cobblestones, he
wondered how she would feel, that girl with the sensitive, intelligent face,
when she learned of the brutal violence that had taken place in her house.

The
brother, "the young gentleman away at Oxford." Could it be that he
was one of...? But no. Surely he would have no need to break into his own
house.

Unless
the shattered window was a trick, designed to mislead the authorities....

He
hoped Elizabeth Montlow's brother was not one of those degenerates. But if he
were, he would pay for it. If the Prince of Wales himself were among those who
had taken Anne into that house, he would pay for it.

Thirty
minutes later, he moved beside a doctor through a series of lofty-ceilinged,
dimly lighted hospital wards. Occasionally a groan or a strangled snoring came
from one of the beds set in cubicles against the walls. Otherwise there was no
sound except the hollow tread of their footsteps. Now and then the doctor
raised his walking stick and sniffed at something, undoubtedly perfume, carried
inside its knob. Patrick did not have to wonder about the reason. With the
windows tightly closed against the "infectious" night air, the series
of rooms was redolent of sweat, excrement, and bitter medicines. Patrick,
though, was too filled with anxiety and rage to be more than dimly aware of the
foul air.

The
doctor, plump in his floor-length gown and flat velvet cap, conducted him
through another doorway. "This is the ward. I fear, Sir Patrick, that
there is little hope. We have not bled her. Bleeding is of no efficacy against
multiple fractures of the bones. No doubt, too, the spleen
has been
ruptured, releasing foul humors throughout the body...."

Pompous
ass, Patrick thought, and stopped listening. A few seconds later
they stopped
beside one of the cubicles.

Except
for the reddish-blond curls, she was unrecognizable.
One light-blue
eye was open, the other swollen shut in her puffed and lacerated face. Her
right arm, miraculously undamaged, lay outside the coarse sheet. With despair
he saw that already her arm had taken on the waxy look of death.

He
bent over her. "Anne. Anne, my dear child."

A
spark of expression lit that one open eye. "Patrick!" It was a bare
whisper, little more than a stirring of her swollen lips. But there was an
urgency in that one blue eye that made him bend closer.

"...
can say it... now. I love you."