Pretty Poison (10 page)

“Nicholas,” she called out. “I’m going back!”

“Wait for me and I’ll walk you out.” His voice came from a good ways away and Emily sat down on a relatively dry fallen log to wait for him. She brushed her filthy wet hands against her skirts, eyeing the green slime that dripped down the barrel of her rifle.

She heard a rustling in the trees and, surprised he’d gotten to her so quickly, jumped to her feet. She slipped, her ankle sinking into a deep hole filled with blackish muck, and dropped her rifle in order to regain her balance.

The rustling grew louder just as she managed to pull her boot from the hole.

“Perfect timing,” she said with a laugh as she looked up, expecting to find Nicholas walking toward her.

Instead two huge beasts appeared from the underbrush. Emily’s first thought was that they were wolves. But wolves had surely been extinct in Buckinghamshire for hundreds of years. As they approached, their massive heads bent low, their slitted eyes fastened on her, she realized they were dogs. Wild dogs. Great big dogs with long bristly matted gray hair and pointed ears tucked low against their heads. Their lips were curled back, yellow fangs bared. They were long and lean, their ribs showing against their heaving sides. They slithered through the ground cover, crouched low, slowly making their way to her.

Blindly she reached down for her rifle, felt the wet butt against her fingers just as one of the beasts lunged. Emily scrabbled for a hold on the gun, groaned as it slipped through her shaking fingers. In one jerky motion she dove her hand into the dead leaves and mud, grasped her rifle barrel and took off running.

“Nicholas!” she screamed.

She looked back, horrified to see both of the wild dogs tearing across the clearing in pursuit. She whipped her head forward and frantically searched the forest ahead until she saw a sturdy looking branch hanging about seven feet up, parallel to the ground. She might make it, she thought as she heard the panting breaths of the dogs gaining on her. They would be on her in seconds.

The branch was just in front of her, five, maybe six steps away. She realized she would have to drop her rifle. She’d never pull herself up one handed. The branch was higher than she’d thought. She’d have to make her jump count, have to catch the branch as she dove in order to gain the momentum to swing herself up.

She tossed down her rifle and leaped through the air, both hands stretched out before her. Her hands grasped the wood hard, the bark digging into her palms. She loosened her hold enough to allow her hands to slide over the rough bark that bit into her flesh and swung through the air, her feet suspended more than a foot above the ground. Then she was flying forward and up. She saw blue sky peeking through the tops of the trees. She soared higher, her body arching as the last of her swinging momentum gave way. She hung suspended in the air for the merest moment, her hands burning, her shoulders screaming in agony. In the moment before her body began its inevitable descent, she twisted, kicked her legs in the air and hooked her right ankle over the branch inches from where it met the thick trunk. She felt a terrible wrenching in her right shoulder, heard a hollow pop, felt the bone dislocate from the socket.

Ignoring the pain, she wrapped her left arm fully around the branch, grabbed her right upper arm and hugged the tree just as a shot rang out from below. She looked down to see one of the beasts writhing on the ground and the other racing under her perch. Another shot reverberated through the air, echoing around in the thick woods, almost drowning out the keening cry as the second dog went down.

Emily rested her cheek against the rough bark and closed her eyes. Pinpricks of light danced across her closed lids, nausea roiled in her stomach, pain exploded from her shoulder, roaring outward down her arm and across her chest. She concentrated on breathing, on staying lucid. If she fainted, and she thought she might, she would tumble a good seven or eight feet down.

“Emily!” Nicholas roared as he raced toward the tree.

She opened one eye, saw him reel to a stop below her, his arms lifted as if he might drag her down from the branch.

“No,” she begged, her voice little more than a whisper. Her vision was dimming, going oddly blurry around the edges.

Nicholas was standing below her, his hands still in the air. He was saying something to her. She saw his lips moving but couldn’t hear the words over the roaring in her head.

“Catch me,” she whispered as she blinked down into fierce blue eyes.

Then she closed her eyes, relaxed her grip on her injured arm and released her hold on the branch. She let her weight carry her over until she was rolling, falling, tumbling through nothing for what seemed forever.

Nick watched in horror as Emily fainted eight feet above the ground on a thick branch in a dangerously overgrown forest. As if in slow motion, she rolled off the branch and fell. Right into his waiting arms.

He caught her, one arm locked on her back, the other tight around her thighs, and staggered back. His legs buckled and he fell onto his knees, Emily clutched tight against his chest.

She cried out, a long, high, keening sound reminiscent of the dying scream the second wild dog had emitted as his bullet had caught him in the throat. The agony in her cry brought tears to his eyes.

He pulled her close against him, buried his face in her neck. He felt her breath, broken and wheezing against his skin.

She groaned, long and low, and Nick realized he was holding her too hard, too close. She was in pain. Carefully, he lowered her to the ground, spread her motionless limbs, and ran his hands gently and carefully over her. He couldn’t find any breaks, any injury at all other than her torn and bleeding hands, until his fingers probed her left shoulder and she moaned, her eyelids flickering. She tried to shrug his fingers away and cried out with the slight movement.

Nick realized her shoulder was dislocated. He could either pick her up and carry her out of here, causing her untold pain, or he could leave her here while he rode to the house for help. Or he could pop her shoulder back into place.

There was no choice. He took a minute to reload his rifle, setting in within easy reaching distance, before ripping a length of Emily’s petticoats into a makeshift sling.

He leaned over her, his hands steady as he unbuttoned the fitted jacket of her riding habit and peeled the sides back. Her corset beneath was a frilly concoction of ruffles and silk laces, her shift gossamer thin cotton.

Nick sucked in a shocked breath as Emily’s torso was all but bared to him. Her breasts were lovely, full and round, the luscious pink tips peeking up over the ruffled edge of her corset. But what arrested him, what held him immobile beside her, his breath hitching in his chest, was the scar, about half an inch thick, that ran from her injured shoulder, over the swell of her breast, before dipping down into her cleavage where it ended in a perfect jagged circle.

“Jesus,” he whispered.

The scar was fairly fresh, perhaps a few months old, the skin pink and puckered. He ran his finger from where it began at her shoulder, along the top of her breast, to the circle about the size of his thumb.

Emily turned her head toward him and he snatched his hand back, suddenly aware of the impropriety of his touch. She didn’t awaken and for that he sent up a silent prayer. It would be best for them both if she remained insensible for what was to come.

With firm hands, Nick investigated her shoulder, hoping he could get it right the first time. Taking a deep breath, letting it out slowly, he grasped her upper arm in one hand and her shoulder in the other, wrenched them slightly apart and twisted them together.

“Noooooo,” Emily cried, her eyes popping open. She thrashed about on the ground, her corset laces unraveling and tangling in his fingers as he attempted to hold her down without further injuring her.

“Emily, lie still!” he barked.

Her eyes rolled back in her head as she fainted again, allowing him to complete his terrible ministrations.

Carefully Nick buttoned her jacket up over her chemise and flapping stays, bent her arm across her chest and secured it with the sling. He wrapped his coat around her and lifted her, her uninjured shoulder tucked against his chest, his arms wrapped around her back and her knees. She blinked up at him before closing her eyes again.

He was nearly out of the woods when he heard voices.

“Hullo!” he hollered and Emily’s eyes opened again. She blinked a few times before pinning him with a bright, ferocious gaze.

“Don’t let them,” she whispered.

Nick stopped and leaned down so that his ear was against her lips.

“Don’t let them give me laudanum,” she said, her voice low and raspy.

“All right,” he agreed as he lifted his head and started forward again.

“Promise me.”

He met her eyes again, saw desperation in their depths.

“I promise,” he whispered.

He alighted from the dark woods to see Charles Calvert riding down the hill where Nick had found Emily little more than an hour before. Thank God, he’d found her. If she had gone in after that buck alone… He couldn’t, wouldn’t, allow himself to think about what might have happened to her.

“Em!” Her father reined his horse to a stop and dropped to the ground.

Nick stood swaying before the man, his legs, arms, and back ready to give out. She was a tiny little thing, but they’d been deep in the forest.

Charles reached for her, saw the sling on her arm and halted the movement. He removed his coat and spread it out on the ground. “Lay her down.”

With her father’s help, he knelt and carefully placed her on the coat.

“Sit,” Charles ordered, giving Nick’s shoulder a gentle shove, forcing him onto his backside on the grass. “I’ll go for a wagon.” Then he was off again.

Nick looked at Emily, saw her shivering, and lay down beside her. He wrapped his arm around her waist, his leg over her thighs and she let out a soft sigh and went still.

Chapter Twelve

Emily awoke to a dull throbbing pain in her shoulder. She lifted her hand to investigate and cried out as the pain spiked, shooting down her arm like fire.

“Shhh,” Tilly crooned beside her. “You’ve had an accident.”

At her soft words, Emily remembered the two wild dogs chasing her across the clearing in the woods, remembered her desperate lunge onto the tree branch, remembered falling into Nicholas’s waiting arms.

“They didn’t give me laudanum,” she whispered. Her mind was clear, unencumbered by the blessed numbness that even now, months later, she craved. Oh, not always, not every day. But sometimes, especially late at night when she faced the mess she’d made of her life, she longed for the oblivion the poison promised.

The day before, after she’d learned of Nicholas’s capriciousness, when she’d retreated to her room in humiliation, she’d longed for an empty mind. That was what she craved. She knew some addicts craved the initial feelings of euphoria, the belief it instilled that one could do anything, say anything, be anything. No, she’d always waited patiently for that temporary elation to pass into nothingness. Pure absence of feeling, that was what she craved.

Tilly left the room and minutes later Da and Aunt Margaret entered.

“Em, you must stop scaring me this way,” her father grumbled as he sat beside her on the bed. “Land sakes, I’ve aged ten years in the last ten months.”

Emily laughed, winced as even that slight motion jarred her shoulder.

“How do you feel, dearest?” Margaret asked.

“Beaten and broken,” she answered.

“I could shoot you and Nicholas both for going into those woods,” she admonished.

“It was awfully overgrown,” Emily said.

“I warned the others to stay away, but apparently you and Nicholas were absent from the front steps when I was giving out instructions,” her aunt replied. “Those woods have not been cleared in years. Good Lord, perhaps a decade.”

“Where were you and that boy when you should have been listening to the rules of the hunt?” Charles demanded.

“Off holding hands in a corner somewhere, most likely,” Margaret offered with a laugh.

“Aunt Margaret,” Emily objected. “You mustn’t get ideas about Mr. Avery and me.”

“Mustn’t I?” she asked archly. “You were alone with the man in the forest. He’s seen your bosom, for heaven’s sake.”

“When did he see Em’s bosom?” her father roared.

Emily closed her eyes and let them continue the foolish discussion on their own.

“Honestly, Charlie, you can’t see three feet in front of your face without someone telling you to look,” Margaret replied. “How do you think he tended Emily’s shoulder? Through her garments?”

“Surely he didn’t need to strip her to pop the shoulder back in place!”

“I undressed the girl and believe you me, her stays were flapping in the wind.”

“Oh, no…no, no no,” Emily whispered.

“At least one of you has the sense to see what this means,” Margaret replied to Emily’s words.

Emily opened her eyes to see Margaret, hands on her hips, grinning at her father. Da was standing stock still, his mouth hanging open as he stared back at his sister.

“He’s seen my scar,” Emily said.

“That’s the least of your worries,” Margaret exclaimed happily.

“He’ll ask questions,” Emily cried in frustration.

“Nicholas Avery is a gentleman. He will not ask about what he saw. Not until after the wedding, that is.”

“There isn’t going to be a wedding,” Emily growled as she shifted, trying to sit up. She was not going to have this discussion lying flat on her back. “Please, Da, help me to sit up.”

Charles and Margaret leaned her forward and stuck a pile of pillows behind her back. With a sigh, Emily sank back against them.

“This is made from my petticoats!” Emily exclaimed when she looked down at the sling that held her arm against her chest. The sling with pretty Belgian lace and creamy satin ribbon. Then she could have bitten her tongue right in half.

“Your petticoats?” Da bellowed. “Just how long were you and that boy alone in the woods, Emily Ann?”

“Da, I was nearly torn limb from limb by wild dogs,” Emily cried.

That shut him up. Da fell into the chair beside the bed and buried his head in his hands.

Emily looked from her father’s hunched form to Aunt Margaret who looked back at her like a cat in the cream.

“You’ll have to marry the man.” Da’s soft word had Emily swinging her head around to look at him.

“Bloody hell,” she hissed as she wrenched her shoulder.

“If for no other reason than to keep you safe,” her father added.

“You promised, Da,” she whispered, shaken by his soft words. “You said that if I would only get well again, if I would fight to live, you would never force me to marry against my wishes.”

“That was before,” he replied sadly.

“Before what?” she demanded.

“Before I realized you have a black cloud hanging over you, Em.”

“Da, please,” she implored.

“Perhaps she smashed a Sheela-na-gig,” Margaret suggested.

“Where on earth would I find a Sheela-na-gig?” Emily asked in exasperation.

“She knows better than to defile a Celtic Goddess,” Da replied disdainfully. “Did you give away money on a Monday?”

“The only money I’m likely to give away is the fortune you’ll settle upon Nicholas if you force me to marry him,” she ground out between her teeth.

“Nicholas, is it?” Margaret crooned.

“Stop it!” Emily screamed. “Just stop it, both of you. I do not have a black cloud over me, I have not seen a single Sheela-na-gig since I arrived on this damned island, and I have not given away money on a Monday!”

“Now Em,” her father murmured. “There’s no need to take on so.”

“Nor have I walked under a ladder or stepped on a four leaf clover, and the only black cats I have crossed paths with are the two of you!”

Silence reined in the pretty bed chamber decorated in soft yellow and palest blue. Three pairs of nearly identical green eyes glared at one another. Emily would have liked to roll over and present them both with her back but even that childish show of defiance was denied her.

“It’s settled then,” Charles Calvert announced as he came to his feet.

“Nothing is settled,” Emily replied peevishly.

But her father ignored her words, leaned downed and kissed her on the forehead.

Then he walked out of the room. Just like that.

Emily looked at the door for long minutes after he closed it softly behind him.

“I’ll talk to him in the morning,” she muttered. “I’ll make him see reason.”

“You mean you’ll try to make him see things your way.”

Emily had forgotten all about her aunt, who had taken the seat her father had vacated.

“For once in Charlie’s life, he is seeing reason, Emily.”

“You just want me to marry Nicholas so that his father can get his hands on my dowry,” Emily accused.

“Perhaps,” Margaret allowed. “In the beginning that was certainly my only concern. I’d never met you, saw no reason you wouldn’t be happy to marry a fine man like Nicholas.”

“If he’s such a fine man, why don’t you marry him?” Emily cringed as the childish words left her mouth. “Or better yet, why don’t you marry Viscount Talbot and give him your fortune.”

“Not bloody likely,” Margaret replied disdainfully. “If you had any idea whatsoever what I had to endure at the hands of Lord Morris, you wouldn’t even suggest it.”

Emily looked away from the bitterness in her aunt’s eyes.

“The truth of the matter is that very little of Morris’s wealth was left to me. The bulk of it went to his children.”

Emily turned back to Margaret. “I’d forgotten he had grown children when he married you.”

“I only wish I could forget. But that is neither here nor there. The fact is that what little fortune I inherited has dwindled away to a pittance. I’ve already sold the small estate Morris left me in Lancastershire. If something doesn’t give soon, I’ll be forced to start selling off parcels of this land.”

“I had no idea,” Emily replied. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“And heap yet another burden onto your fragile shoulders?”

“Perhaps Da will give you some money.”

“Not on a Monday he won’t.”

Emily smiled at her aunt’s weak attempt at humor.

“I’m too old to find another wealthy gentleman to seduce into marriage. And I’d like to spend my remaining years with the man I love. Andy’s a scatterbrained bubble head, but he’s my scatterbrained bubble head.”

“Yes,” Emily agreed. She’d watched Margaret and the viscount, seen the secretive, sly smiles they bestowed on one another when they thought no one was looking.

“I had no intention of telling you any of this. I’d rather drink an entire bottle of laudanum and stab myself right through the heart, than use my diminished circumstances to guilt you into marrying where you do not wish.”

“But you’ll do it anyway,” Emily replied with a huff of laughter.

“That’s just it, Emily,” Margaret replied softly. “I don’t believe you would be marrying where you do not wish.”

“Why do you insist in thinking you know what is best for everyone?” Emily demanded warily. She was suddenly tired, so very tired of arguing and pleading. She was tempted to capitulate just to bring an end to the entire subject.

“You like Nicholas, I know you do,” Margaret replied, ignoring Emily’s words. “I am fairly certain you find him enticing. He’s a big strapping young man with a handsome face and wonderfully large hands.”

“Large hands?” Emily asked in confusion. It was true she found his giant, rugged hands mesmerizing to look upon and downright sinful when he put them on her, but surely his hands had nothing to do with his suitability as a husband.

“Trust me, you’ll thank me later for matching you to a man with large hands,” Margaret replied with a sly smile. “My point is that you like him, you enjoy his company. Contrary to what you believe, you really must marry.”

“Why?” Emily asked, truly curious about the answer. “I am a capable woman with a fortune at my disposal. I have a home at Emerald Isle. A family who loves me. Why can’t I simply remain unmarried? And don’t start with the children of my own nonsense. I’ve brothers and a sister, I’ll have plenty of nieces and nephews upon whom to shower love.”

“And what will happen later in life? When you are old and no longer quite so capable? When your siblings are grown and married with their own families? Do you really desire to be that dotty old woman who lives alone in an old mansion? The one whose great nieces and nephews come to visit once a year because it is their duty? The one who has never known the love of a good man?”

“I could know the love of a good man without marrying him.”

“You could, but would you be able to share him? With a wife? With his children? Because make no mistake, Em, good men want a family. They want sons to carry on after they are gone.”

“You shared Viscount Talbot with his wife, you’ve never married him,” she pointed out.

“It wasn’t by choice. He was already married when we met. And by the time Lady Talbot, God rest her batty soul, passed away, he was in financial straits and my measly fortune, had I decided to share it with him and his sons, would have been gone within a year. Perhaps less.”

Emily remained silent, contemplating her aunt’s sad story.

“By your silence, I am going to assume you are in agreement that you must marry.” Margaret held up her hand when Emily opened her mouth to speak. “Give over, Emily, you are an intelligent lady. You know you must marry. Why are you dead set against Nicholas Avery as a husband?”

“I’m not dead set against it,” Emily relented enough to admit. “Perhaps if we had time to come to know one another, to be sure.”

“Time is one luxury you do not have. If you will not marry Nicholas, he will marry another lady. And soon. He knows his duty to his family.”

That stopped Emily cold. She hadn’t contemplated what would happen to Nicholas if she refused to marry him. But of course, her aunt was right. He would accept her refusal, smile wryly at her, kiss her hand, and move on to the next heiress Margaret and Viscount Talbot brought forth.

“He might even marry the Nasty Baggage,” Margaret said.

“Not fair,” Emily said with a weary laugh.

“I’ll ask you again, Emily, and please consider telling me, for no other reason than that I truly cannot comprehend it. Why are you resistant to marrying Nicholas?”

Emily shrugged her shoulder and drew in a sharp breath at the movement. “I had thought to marry a man I could love.”

“Balderdash,” Margaret cried, jumping to her feet. “I am perfectly aware that you were betrothed to a nincompoop whom you did not love in the least. You insult my intelligence when you spout insipid platitudes and call them reasonable arguments!”

“Fine, I want to marry a man who might love me,” Emily cried. “Or at least respect me enough to remain faithful to me. I don’t want to raise my husband’s illegitimate children. I don’t want my husband to have any children but the ones I give him and I don’t want my husband to climb from my bed into any other woman’s!”

Margaret dropped back into the chair she’d vacated and stared at her niece.

“Peter Marshall may have been a nincompoop but he would have been faithful to me. He didn’t have a lusty bone in his body. And that was fine with me. We would have managed to come together often enough to produce a few children. And he never would have humiliated and shamed me with his mistresses.” Emily’s voice rose in near hysterics.

“You don’t believe Nicholas would remain faithful to you?”

“Why should I? You have only to look to his father to see the example that has been set for him. I’m sorry, Aunt Margaret, but it’s true. Look at the world he lives in.
Society
they call themselves.
Sodom
is more like it! Nobody in his world, in your world, goes into marriage expecting fidelity, or demanding it. He followed me into the stables thinking I was a servant’s daughter and kissed me. He is here, at your miniature marriage mart, expressly to find a wife and yet he followed a woman he believed to be unmarriageable into the stables and kissed her. Does any of that sound like Nicholas Avery is likely to cleave only unto me?”