Once a Rake (Drake's Rakes) (17 page)

She knew better. And yet she wanted nothing more than to slip down that secret tunnel like a girl sneaking out of school. She wanted to warm her hands on him like a hot fire, to soothe herself on his smile. To hear more of his story, his plans, his dreams, to savor the sense of a strong man.

For the first time in her life, Sarah knew what it meant to really want a man, deep in her belly where they said hunger lived. In her heart, which hadn’t found a steady rhythm since first meeting him. In the warm core of her soul, which none had touched before. Not her friends, not her parents, not her husband. She had never allowed them to, knowing too well the cost.

She was terrified, though, that this rough-hewn Scot had awakened something in her, a need for union, for belonging, for a life she had never allowed herself. She was terrified he would make her vulnerable.

She was terrified he already had.

Dear Lizzie,
she wanted to write.
I think I may have done something very foolish. I think I have tasted temptation. And oh, Lizzie. I think I like it very much.

“I thought you were going into town,” Artemesia spoke up suddenly behind her.

Sarah startled so badly she splattered ink on her letter. She wasn’t taking surprises well right now. “Yes, so I am. As soon as I finish a note to my friend.”

Artie plopped down on the other desk chair. “Take me with you. I need to purchase a new ribbon for my bonnet and mail a letter to Cecily Tate.” Suddenly dropping her head, as if to watch the tangle she was making of the lemon ribbon that tied her sprig muslin, she shrugged. “Please, Sarah.” She looked as uncomfortable as if she had reported for punishment.

Sarah touched the girl’s hand. “I would be delighted, Artie.”

Well, she thought. Delighted might be an exaggeration. Artie’s mood was still swinging in unpredictable directions, which made her a less than comfortable companion. At Sarah’s answer, Artie gave a jerky nod, her focus still on her writhing hands.

“Artie?”

The girl all but flinched. “Did you mean it?” she asked in a near whisper, as if the question were too frightening to be asked.

“Did I mean what, dear?”

That beautiful young face lifted and Sarah saw the raw pain of hope strain those soft brown eyes that looked so much like Boswell’s. “About school. Can I go back?”

Reaching over, Sarah took the girl’s hand. “I mean to try, Artie. It is all I can promise. Boswell and I made a vow to contain our spending for a few more years, until we could get out from under the worst of the mortgages. But I am hopeful.”

She and Boswell had done no such thing. She had told him during one of the rare times he had been willing to listen. It had been soon after that, he had taken the last of her dowry and bought his commission. But that was something Artie didn’t need to know.

Artie began nodding again, her head back down. “It’s just…I got a letter today,” the girl said, abruptly on her feet and pacing. “My friends are…they’re planning their debuts, and all I can think is that by the time I am free of this place, it will be too late, and I’ll be too old for a season! I’ll be too old for
anything
!” Big tears welled in her eyes and spilled over.

Sarah ached for the girl. Done with hesitation, she intercepted her and wrapped her arms around her.

To Sarah’s surprise, Artie nestled right in, sniffling against Sarah’s shoulder. “Do you realize,” the girl asked, “that Cecily is attending a house party near here for Princess Charlotte?” She pulled a scented, watermarked paper from her pocket and held it up. “All of my particular friends will be there. Cecily, and Letitia Weems, and Amelia Tulley. Cecily says that the guest list will include all the cream of society. It is to be given by the Duke of Dorchester. He isn’t married, Sarah, did you know that? He is undoubtedly looking for a wife, and he’ll probably choose someone vile like Penelope Susson simply because I won’t be there.”

“The Duke of Dorchester?” Sarah scoffed, brushing Artie’s golden yellow hair off her forehead. “You don’t want him. He’s far too old. Why, I believe he wears stays and puts his teeth in a glass.”

It was better than admitting to Artie that even if she had stayed at her boarding school, she never would have been invited to such an exclusive gathering, especially as any relation to Sarah.

Artie gurgled with laughter. “He’s a duke,” she said. “What does it matter what he does with his teeth?”

Sarah grinned. “Tell me that the first time he appears at dinner without them.”

He wasn’t too old, of course. Not by society standards. No more than thirty. Sarah still wouldn’t want Artie to waste herself on him, dukedom or not. The duke was a petty man, a poor brother, and worse landlord.

But if he was indeed having a house party at Ripton Hall, Sarah would have to make sure her letter to Lizzie got out quickly, otherwise it might be lost in preparations for a royal visit. It was the lot of a duke’s sister, after all, to help supervise and entertain.

Leaving Artie to her ribbon, she sat down to finish her missive.

Please do not let your brother frank the letter, Lizzie. I would rather he doesn’t know about this.
She would rather no one knew that Lizzie was involved at all.
When I see you again, I will explain why.

She was just slipping the letter into her apron when the door slammed open.

“I’m…s-s-sorry,” little Mary Sunday said with a lopsided curtsy, her hands wrapped in her stained apron. “Parker is chasing the pig round the yard.”

For a moment Sarah couldn’t even think how to react. Her ancient butler was chasing livestock? “Pardon?”

The painfully thin tweeny nodded her frizzy blond head. “He be pullin’ down the washing and layin’ on it, ma’am.”

“Parker?”

“The pig. Mizz Peg thinks them wool things you been lettin’ him sniff has give him a taste. She says, you don’t get him from her laundry, he’ll end up in her skillet.”

“Oh, good,” Artie giggled, jumping up. “It’s been ages since we’ve had gammon.”

Sarah ignored her and ran for the kitchen. She could hear Peg even before she pushed open the door into the yard, and Parker’s gasping protests as he tottered across the kitchen garden after Willoughby, who seemed to be trailing a clean blanket.

“Parker!” Sarah called after her panting butler. “Stop! Willoughby! Sit!”

Parker stopped. The pig sat. Right on the newly cleaned laundry Peg had just put up on the line. Before anyone could reach him, he proceeded to lie down and roll.

Sarah couldn’t help it. She started laughing. Peg was screeching, Parker was gasping for breath, a gloved hand to his mud-spattered chest, and Willoughby was grunting in ecstasy because he had captured a blanket.

“Get that pestilential pig out of my sight!” Peg screamed, setting the hens clucking and Heloise and Abelard, their goats, bleating in distress.

Sarah kept laughing, tears running down her cheeks. Oh, she thought, wouldn’t Ian love this. She couldn’t wait to share it with him.

She froze, her laughter abruptly dying. She felt as if she’d been doused with cold water. No, she thought. Not Ian.

“What do I do with these blankets, Miss Sarah?” Peg demanded. “They’re ruined. And we don’t have many more. I swear, this pig’s been eatin’ ’em behind my back!”

Parker was still gasping. “I couldn’t…stop him, my lady…I’m so…sorry . . .”

“Are we going into town or not?” Artie demanded by the kitchen door.

Sarah saw all the faces looking to her for direction: Artie and Peg and Parker and Mary Sunday, all looking for answers. For instruction. There was no one here to share her burdens. No one to share her joys. Except for that brief few years with her friends, there had never been. Not with her parents, not with Boswell, not with his family or neighbors. Damn Ian Ferguson for briefly making her forget that.

“It’s all right,” she said as if it didn’t matter. “Parker, go inside and lie down. Peg, we have other blankets. I shall take Willoughby. And Artie. If you want to go into town, hitch up Harvey.”

“What?” was Artie’s instinctive protest. “No. He bites. Besides, a lady doesn’t . . .”

“This one does,” Sarah answered without turning away from the pig. “Take a couple of Peg’s scones with you. You can either help, or you can stay. Decide.”

And then, before anyone could argue with her, she walked off toward the pens, yanking the pig behind her. When Peg, hands on hips, muttered, “Well, finally,” Sarah didn’t bother to find out what it was that was finally happening. Since she heard Artie stamp back into the house, she thought she knew, though.

It didn’t make her feel any better. She was suddenly remembering that twelve-year-old Sarah who dreamed of adventure and companionship. Of sharing it all with a heroic man. Instead she had gotten a man who had been forced into marriage and resented every minute of it. A homebody she had inadvertently harried from home.

Her life had been set from birth, and she should never forget it.

Especially with Ian Ferguson sleeping in her cellar.

Sarah usually enjoyed her trips to Lyme. That day she did not. She drove there with a treasonous letter in her pocket that would pull her dear Lizzie into the mess, and she spent the day both anxious to get back to Ian and dreading it, beset by the suspicion that he needed her.

She reached the cellars that night to find her worst fears realized. She found Ian confused and incoherent, the wound angry and weeping, with red streaks snaking up his side. He was restless, beset by chills and shakes. So she maneuvered him back to the nest he had made for himself from the blankets and covered him. She cooled him with spring water, reapplied the poultice, and urged barley water and willow bark tea on him.

As the hours passed, he grew inexorably worse. She stayed. His fever raged, and she bathed him. He grew delirious, and she held him. As if she were paying her penance for wanting to share something with him, she shared the private demons that escaped to torment him. All night she sat in that cold cellar with him as he fought one battle after another, sought lost comrades, crept through enemy territory toward safety. She lived in terror that he would be heard. His voice rose and fell, a haunting refrain of pain and loss.

“Andrews! Back! Get back, damn you! You’re too far!”

“Let me go! I have tae get ta them. They’re dead men else!”

This was a good man. He shouldn’t have to suffer so. And yet, relentlessly, as if locked too long and too ruthlessly behind that mad, manic grin, every phantom he had fought came to find him. And Sarah, her heart bleeding, was left to murmur, to bathe his face and hold his hand when the memory grew too sharp and the cost of his battles grew sharp-etched on his broad, bold face. He had seen too much. He had suffered more. And here in deepest night, within the earth where phantoms lived, he paid the price.

“Brace up, men! They’re comin’ again!”

For three days the fever waned in daylight and roared at night. Sarah sat by him hour after hour when she could and worried over him when she couldn’t. Outside the world went on. The weather grew sharper; the first crunch of ice crusted the mud. Willoughby claimed the ruined blanket, and Peg sulked. Sarah and Mr. Hicks reinforced the pen for the tenth or twelfth time, Lady Clarke nagged at her for news of the Egyptian Mummy watercolor, and Artemesia bewailed missing the house party of the century. Another fox disrupted Sarah’s henhouse, making off with two of her favorite layers, and Old George put up the hay, all the while trailed by his chattering four-year-old son and Sarah’s six hundred pound pig.

When he could, Old George also relieved her in the cellar. She was too tired to berate him for carrying on his smuggling so close to home.

“If you can smuggle brandy in here,” was all she said, “you can get a cot.”

The next time she returned to the cellars, Ian was tucked up on a camp bed with a feather pillow. It wasn’t George’s fault Ian was so tall his feet hung over the end.

Sarah entered the cave to find George standing next to the cot, a rag to his bleeding nose.

“Good heavens,” Sarah said, dropping her things. “What happened?”

“
Buaidh no Bàs!
” Ian thundered and came straight off the bed.

Sarah jumped back. “What does that mean?”

George ducked a wild swing. “I suspect it means ‘kill the Englishman.’”

“Here,” she said, stepping past George to Ian.

George tried to stop her. “No, m’lady. He’ll hurt ya.”

“No, George,” she said, kneeling by the cot. “He won’t.”

He didn’t. Not once. By the fourth day George sported more than one bruise and a new twist to his nose. Ian was a fighter. A berserker, his sister had once called him. If George tried to hold him down, he fought like a madman, and he packed a wallop. But the minute Sarah spoke, Ian stopped. Listened. Quieted down. It confounded George. It tortured Sarah to know that this man who fought with such tenacity and strength, who had been trained to war and fought it in his mind, would, even in the throes of delirium, know to treat a woman so gently.

She knew now what her wish for human contact would cost her. She knew that no matter what, every cry and shudder, every name called to in the night would follow her into her own sleep. If she ever slept again.

On the fourth day, Sarah was delayed in getting to the cellars. Another length of fence had gone down that day, letting sheep into the squire’s pastures and leaving one dead in the road. It was the fifth time in a month it had happened.