Raven's Bride (25 page)

The knocking stopped. “Anna?” a soft voice called.

She thought she knew that voice, but surely she was mistaken. It sounded so much like Lord Ravensbourne…but he was long dead and buried. Her mind was playing tricks on her, making her think he was come back from the grave only because she had so wished for it to be true.

“Who’s there?” she called again, holding a candle up to the door as if it would help her see through the thick wooden planks of the door to the person waiting outside.

There was a short silence. “Have you forgotten me already?”

Anna felt her heart beating loudly in her chest, and a fearful hope bloomed in her breast. “Lord Ravensbourne?” she whispered. She did not dare open the door, in case the voice had deceived her and a stranger was standing out there.

“Yes, it’s me. Your cousin Tom.”

With one hand she reached shakily towards the latch. Still she could not believe the evidence of her own senses. “But you’re dead.”

“Not quite. But I may be soon, if you do not let me in.” He sounded weary unto the bone and unsure of his welcome.

With trembling hands, she undid the latch and swung the door inwards. Her ears had not tricked her. Lord Ravensbourne was standing on her threshold, his face pale in the moonlight, and one arm heavily bandaged and cradled in a sling, but alive. Blessedly, miraculously alive. Her throat was so choked with happiness and tears that she could not speak, but wordlessly invited him in.

He limped into the parlor and sat, with an audible groan, on the sofa. Anna shut and latched the door before hurrying after him.

His face was pinched and pale, and he looked thin and cold. How Anna wanted to kiss each worry line from his face, one after the other. “You have been ill?”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing. I was wounded.”

She sat down beside him on the sofa and took his hands in hers. They were as cold as spring water in January, and she chafed them between hers to warm them, raising them every so often to her lips to kiss them. How she wished she had wood for a fire, but she had run out of sticks she had gathered just yester morn, and had had no time to replenish her stocks. “We thought you were dead. Your uncle had a letter from a friend of his in Amsterdam. He said you had been killed in a duel.” She didn’t mention the cause of the duel. Seeing him in front of her, as enticing as ever, made her feel his betrayal of her love as if a knife were twisted in her heart.

Lord Ravensbourne gave a ghost of a smile. “Hardly a duel. I was jumped on in the street by a rascal of a sailor. The beggar did his best to kill me, but I was lucky. The thought of you made me nimble on my feet. I refused to die until I had made you my wife, as I had promised.”

The blood rushed from Anna’s head until she felt as though she would faint. It was her wedding day in the morn, and she was to marry Mr. Melcott.

“I was to have been married on the morrow,” she said with a shudder, as she held Lord Ravensbourne’s hands tightly in her own, fearing ever to let them go again. “To your uncle, Mr. Melcott.” As she spoke the words, she realized, with a sudden clarity, that she could not go through with the ceremony. She simply could not marry where she did not love. She thought she had reconciled herself to a life without love or joy, but she was wrong. Her desires had not been quenched, but had been hibernating, only to wake again with renewed vigor at the sight of the man she loved and had thought dead. Whether or not he still loved her did not make any difference to her decision—she would not be married on the morrow.

“Daventry told me as much.” His voice sounded as though he carried the weight of the world on his heart. “Did you not love me at all that you replaced me in your affections so swiftly?”

Anna felt as though her heart would break. “I loved you as much as ever I had, but we all thought you were dead,” she cried. “I mourned you with all my heart, but I was alive and you were dead, and I had to go on living as best I could. It was my mother’s dying wish that I marry to secure myself an establishment, and Mr. Melcott’s was the only offer I was presented with. I held out for as long as I could, but, in the end, I had little choice but to marry your uncle or to starve.”

“Starve? That’s a little melodramatic, surely?” His voice was dry and less than sympathetic.

Anna felt the injustice keenly. He had never known want as she had. “I have what I grow in the garden, but even that was lent me out of charity,” she said proudly. “The trustees of your estate demanded that Mother and I pay rent, and when we were unable to pay it, only Melcott’s kind interference prevented us from being thrown out into the streets. Charlotte brought me food over the winter, which kept Mother in comfort as she died and has kept my body and soul together ever since. But Charlotte is going away to London to be married.”

He took her hand in his and squeezed it tenderly. “Had you no savings?” he asked, his voice now gentle and concerned. “No money at all save what I had given you?”

“I did not even have that much,” Anna confessed. “I gave it all to Charlotte. She took it to London to get you a pardon with it.”

“She would have been better off leaving the money for you. At least the money would have been put to good use.”

“But it
was
put to good use. Charlotte
was
successful. And your pardon was worth every hunger pang I ever felt when she was away.”

“
A pardon?” Lord Ravensbourne felt the weight of a thousand deaths fly off his shoulders. “Charlotte received a pardon for me from the king?” He had wasted at least a day on the road back to Anna when Daventry insisted that he conceal himself. And who knows how many days he had wasted languishing in Holland, while all the time he was free to return to England and take up his rightful place again. “Why did you not write at once and tell me?”

“Charlotte left for London the night after you escaped from gaol. I had almost given up hope that she would be successful when she returned home again, the pardon in her hand.” She shuddered. “We had no direction for you, save that you were headed for the Netherlands, and Captain Daventry was nowhere to be found. We were going to send a messenger to find you first thing in the morning. That same night Mr. Melcott received his letter—the letter that told us you were dead.”

How convenient…and how cruel. He would not soon forgive or forget his uncle’s duplicity. “When was this?”

“Late in November.”

“I had written you at least a dozen letters by then and wrote you more afterwards. Did you not receive a one of them?”

Anna shook her head sadly. “No letters came for Charlotte or for me, though I walked up to the manor house every day to inquire of Mr. Melcott whether he had heard aught from you. I thought you had forgotten me.”

His anger at his uncle magnified a thousand-fold. “He told you there were no letters from me?”

“He did.”

“And you believed him?”

“Why should I not? He is a godly man, and your uncle, besides. Why would he lie to me?”

“So where is my pardon now?” He needed to make sure he was a free man, entitled to have his estates back again and to live in peace and prosperity before he claimed her as his bride again. He had no need to be selfish and claim her as his wife, bringing her into poverty and exile with him.

“Charlotte brought it back with her. She was reading it in front of the fire, and we were all celebrating with all our hearts, when Melcott walked into the room.” She stopped for a moment, as if to replay the scene again in her head. “I had it in my hand and was reading it over again when we heard you were dead. Mr. Melcott picked it out of my fingers and waved it around, to emphasize how useless it was now you were dead. I do not think he ever put it down again. He certainly didn’t return it to me, and I think not to Charlotte either. I think he might have tucked it into his waistcoat.”

That made matters more difficult. He would have to winkle the paper out of his treacherous uncle before he was arrested once more. “Even Uncle Melcott would not dare to destroy the king’s seal,” he mused aloud. “He would face death by torture if it were ever proven against him. Still, I cannot go and claim it. He would deny all knowledge of it, and I would be taken away and hanged as surely as if I had never received it.”

Anna gasped. “Surely he would not do such a wicked deed. He is your uncle, after all. Hiding away the pardon of a condemned man would make him as guilty as if he had put the noose around your neck himself.”

“I suspect he has been trying to do just that all along, one way or another.”

“I do not understand. He is your uncle. You left him everything in your will, and you made him Charlotte’s guardian until she married.”

He shook his head. Yet another sin to chalk up to his uncle’s account. “There was no such will.”

“But…”

“If I died without a wife or an heir, everything I owned was to go to Charlotte.”

Anna made a noise of distress. He put his arm around her and squeezed her tight. He had known of his uncle’s duplicity for some days, but the news would be coming as a shock to his naïve young cousin.

“Uncle Melcott knew I was still alive,” he continued. “He received at least one of my letters and knew my location well enough to send a common sailor to kill me. His attempt miscarried, but still he pretended I was dead in order to take over my estate, to wield power over Charlotte, and to force you into his arms.”

Anna shook her head. “He was kind to me, even when the trustees of the estate threatened to have my mother and I dispossessed and thrown out onto the streets if we did not pay the rent owing them.”

Was there no end to his uncle’s lies? “There were no such trustees. Foolishly, I had given him sole charge of my estate during my imprisonment, and he continued his duties when I went into exile.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean my uncle saw another way of driving you into his arms by leading you to the brink of disaster. Then he could pretend to ride in like a white knight and rescue you out of his perverted self-interest, which he called charity, and out of the so-called goodness of his black heart. A cunning plan indeed—one that cost him nothing and won him your gratitude.”

Anna thought back on the heartache she had suffered when her mother was dying, when she had thought they might both be reduced to starving in the hedgerows. How could Mr. Melcott have been so callous to a sick woman like her mother? The knowledge of his duplicity hit her with the force of a thunderstorm. “I had not thought anyone could be so wicked.”

“And you are to marry him in the morning?”

As if she could marry him now. The depth of his depravity was only beginning to sink into her soul. She caught his hands as if they were her lifeline. “I am so glad you returned. You have saved me from marrying a man who would have made me miserable for the remainder of my life. I will never marry him.”

Lord Ravensbourne reached out to take her in his arms. “He conspired to separate us and to drive you into his arms. He told you falsely that I was dead, and no doubt conspired to have me murdered to prove his words true. He has lied to you and cheated you. He is not worthy even to kiss the hem of your gown.”

A sudden thought struck Anna. Mr. Melcott had lied to her in so many ways. “He told me one other thing that I feared to believe.” She stopped, unwilling to let Lord Ravensbourne know that she had thought him a murderer.

“Go on.”

“He told me that…that he knew you were a murderer. He said he had seen you, with his own eyes, strike the fatal blow that killed the squire. That is why he refused to help you in any way—because you had broken one of God’s laws, he said, and deserved to suffer for it.”

Lord Ravensbourne’s eyes looked gravely at her—into her very soul—reading the fear and indecision that lurked there. “Fetch me a Bible.”

Anna hurried to do as she was asked, fetching the family Bible from its casement under the window.

Lord Ravensbourne placed his injured right hand on the Bible. “I solemnly swear,” he said gravely, “that I had naught to do with the squire’s foul and detestable murder, and that I am innocent of his death.”

He handed the Bible back to Anna, who put it away again with shaking fingers. “Though I am beginning to suspect my dear uncle could throw light on that particular deed as well,” he added.

Anna stood by the casement window. Lord Ravensbourne had come back to her, as he had sworn he would. He had taken an oath on the Bible itself that he was innocent of the murder for which he had been condemned. Never again she would doubt his word.

While Melcott, whom she had trusted because of his black coat and pious ways and his passing resemblance to her father, had deceived them both most grievously. What a fool she had been to let the outward show of a man deceive her into trusting his black heart and wicked ways.

A horrible thought struck her all of a sudden. “But your pardon?” She felt her knees grow weak and she sat down hurriedly on the ottoman before her legs gave way beneath her. “I let him take it from me. How shall you ever be free if he will not give it up to you?”

“You are an accomplished thief, I have heard,” Lord Ravensbourne said, with a grin. “If he will not give it up, I suggest we steal it from under his very nose.”

Anna felt a tendril of pride unfurl within her breast. “When I refuse to wed with him in the morn, he might become suspicious I have discovered his villainy. We will have to steal it tonight.”