Raven's Bride (5 page)

As for those pious hypocrites, the villagers who had helped Anna and her mother run away, they would be duly punished. This very afternoon.

The light drizzle turned to a downpour before Squire Grantley had ridden halfway to the village. By the time he reached Mistress Weaver’s cottage, he was wet through and steaming with anger.

He strode through her cottage door and flung his crop in the corner. “You have nothing more to tell me about the whereabouts of Mrs. Woodleigh and her daughter?” he asked.

Mistress Weaver, startled, dropped her cooking pot in the fire and whirled around to face him. “I’ve already told you all I know,” she said, and gave a small curtsey. “Mrs. Woodleigh told me that she was going to pay a visit to some relatives of hers.”

The squire laced his fingers together behind his back and paced up and down. “Their names?”

“I’ve already told your worship that I don’t know their names. Mrs. Woodleigh didn’t tell me their names.”

“I have an arrest warrant for Anna Woodleigh for malicious assault. Keeping her location a secret makes you an accessory to her crime.”

His hearing was sharp enough to catch Mistress Weaver’s muttered, “Crime? Fiddlesticks.”

“It is plain to me,” the squire said, his voice icy with fury, “that you know more than you are revealing. I will not tolerate such open flouting of the law.”

He stepped outside and beckoned to the grooms who had accompanied him. “Pull the roof off this cottage. Immediately.”

They hesitated. “But it’s rainin’, your honor,” one of them said.

“Pull off the roof. Now. Every shingle that is left on that roof in an hour’s time will be worth ten strokes of the whip on your miserable hides.”

He smiled to himself in satisfaction as Mistress Weaver, rain and tears streaming down her wrinkled face, watched helplessly as her pathetic possessions were trampled into the mud.

She deserved to be made a pauper.

Rafe was working in his millhouse when the squire rode up an hour later. He doffed his cap at the squire.

“Tie him to his millwheel,” Squire Grantley ordered.

With some muttering and mumbling, the grooms obeyed, looping loose shanks of rope about the miller’s bony wrists.

“Where are Anna and her mother?” he demanded of the old man.

“I dropped them in the market town, as I told your worship,” the miller replied truculently. “I don’t know where they went after that.”

Squire Grantley flicked his riding crop so the tip of it lashed the miller’s chest. The miller winced in pain, but didn’t cry out.

“What road did they take?” he demanded.

“I was unloading sacks of flour at the time. I didn’t see which way they went.”

The squire flicked his riding crop again. This time it cut through the miller’s threadbare shirt and raised a red weal on his skin. Tears sprang into the miller’s rheumy eyes.

“Where did they say they were going?”

“They didn’t say.” The miller’s voice was hoarse with pain.

Another flick of the squire’s wrist and another red welt on the miller’s chest.

“Who were they visiting?”

“I...don’t...know.”

Another flick. Another red weal.

“I am your master. You will answer me.”

Flick.

The miller’s eyes rolled up and his head slumped forward onto his chest.

Squire Grantley pulled him up by his hair, but the miller was in a swoon. He spat on the packed earth floor in disgust. He would get no more information out of the miller that day.

He turned towards the miller’s wife, who was wringing her hands and weeping in the doorway. “Let this be a lesson to your husband not to aid those who break the law,” he said.

He rode home in no better temper than he had started out. Despite the small measure of satisfaction he had gained from doling out due punishments to Mistress Weaver and the miller, he was no closer to finding his young runaway, Anna.

He had personally searched the market town for days, but had found no trace of the fugitives. He would widen his search now to the surrounding areas. Maybe they were hiding out in a small village, or on a farm nearby. If so, he would soon flush them out.

It was possible, he decided with a frown, that they had decided to make for Norwich, to the north. It was the only city of a decent size in this part of England. Maybe they were hoping to lose themselves in a crowd.

If they were indeed hoping so, they would find themselves sadly mistaken. He had watched young Anna grow up from a coltish girl to a woman of surpassing beauty. He had watched her and wished for her and waited for her for year upon year.

She belonged to him. He would not tolerate his prize being snatched out from under his nose.

He would find her, he vowed to himself, if it were the last thing he did.

And he would teach her such a lesson that she would never run from him again.

Chapter Three

Charlotte picked idly at a scrap of lace on her gown. “The dower house was refurbished from attic to cellar. You must have spent a fortune on getting it ready for Aunt Lydia and Cousin Anna.”

Ravensbourne raised his eyes from the ground at the sound of his sister’s voice. “What did you say?” he asked, flicking his whip and beheading a patch of daisies on the turf beside the path. His mind had been miles away from his sister. He had been thinking about his cousin. About the clarity of her beautiful amethyst eyes. About the enticing swellings of her breasts, hidden though they were under the plain black of her mourning gown. About the rest of her luscious, ripe body...

He had seen her unclothed once, and that sight was seared on his memory. Each curve, every hollow of her body was etched on his mind. He could not sleep at night for thinking of her, for imagining her in his bed beside him, responding to his every caress...

“I said,” Charlotte said, as she poked him in the side with her elbow. “That you are a miserly, old spoilsport to flinch at spending a few pounds to hold a fabulous ball for me this summer, when you must have spent at least two hundred pound on getting the dower house ready.”

Ravensbourne shrugged his shoulders and didn’t answer. Truth to tell, he had spent much more even than Charlotte had guessed. Two hundred pound would not even account for the half of it.

He had told himself, as he had given the orders for the new roof, for numerous repairs to the inside of the house, and for the new furniture, that he was just preserving his heritage. He ought not to let the fine old building go to rack and ruin for the want of a few pennies spent on it.

All the time, though, he knew that the money he spent on restoring it would have been far better put to use in improvements in his farming techniques, in buying extra livestock, or in settling more tenants on his lands to work the fields now lying fallow.

No, he had restored the house for Anna, so she would have a comfortable place to live which she could call her own, and where she could feel safe and secure. Most importantly, it was close enough to his own manor house to allow him to watch over her and keep her from harm.

Several times now she had asked him to recommend her as a governess to a quiet family, but he did not want to let her out of his sight.

He wanted Anna. He wanted her with a fierce ache that left him no room for any other emotion. He couldn’t think of anything else but her.

He had altered the dower house for her, and her only. It had been agony over the last few weeks sleeping under the same roof as she did. Each time he saw her, his manhood stirred and sprang to life with desire. Each time she looked up at him with her frightened half-smile, he had to fight an ever increasing need to take her into his arms and kiss her until she melted into him. The lightest touch of her hand on his arm, or the swish of her skirts against his thighs as he escorted her into dinner, made him desperate to plunge into her soft, sweet body, until she cried out under him with pleasure. He wanted her so badly his body hurt all over.

But Anna was terrified of him. Oh, she hid it well enough most of the time, but her fear was still there, lurking under the surface of her composure.

He didn’t know what had made her and her mother leave their last home so precipitously. Whatever it was had left Anna with dark circles around her eyes, as though she was afraid to sleep at night. Once, when he had startled her dozing in the window seat, she had screamed in fear and whirled around at him, the book she had been dreaming over raised in her hand ready to strike at him.

“If you married Georgina Perkins and her dowry—” Charlotte’s voice cut into his thoughts. “—you would be able to hold a ball every night for a year, and spend a thousand pound on the dower house if you wanted to. You could even buy that piece of pasture land over on the south border that you have been wanting,” she added slyly.

Ravensbourne shook his head. Charlotte belonged in Bedlam if she thought he would ever marry the Perkins girl, even with all her thousands. The mere thought of taking her pasty white skin and skinny hen’s legs to his bed was enough to give him a fit of the deliriums. “I have no wish to give a ball every night for a year, I bought that piece of land last week for a good price, and Miss Perkins has bright red hair and freckles.”

Charlotte turned her head on one side and pursed her lips. “Georgina has wonderful auburn hair and beautiful skin.”

“She is simple-minded.”

“Nonsense. She is simply sweet-natured and kind.”

“She bores me to tears.”

“You have only met her twice.”

“I have no wish to meet her a third time.”

Charlotte was silent for a few moments. “Anna has no dowry.”

“She does not need one,” Ravensbourne said abruptly. “She is beautiful enough that suitors will be standing in rows outside her door as soon as word gets out that she is here. She will have to fight off the men who come a-courting her.”

“They will come courting,” Charlotte said, a little sharply. “I have no doubt of that. But will they have marriage on their minds?”

Anna picked her way over the yard towards the horse market, her arm in her cousin’s, and holding her skirts above her ankle to keep clear of the mud. She had never been to a horse market before. There were so many beautiful animals to admire, so many people bustling about haggling over their purchases, such a smell of sweat and horse manure, and so much noise—the haggling of those looking for a bargain, the neighing of the animals, the shouts of the men selling hot sausages on sticks, the creaking of harnesses and the crack of ropes. She felt overwhelmed by the assault on her senses.

Lord Ravensbourne steered her to a quiet spot where she could take her bearings, in a corner where a pretty gray mare was tethered behind a makeshift barrier of rough-hewn logs. She dropped her cousin’s arm and seated herself on the barrier. The mare came up to her and nosed into Anna’s hand, looking for a carrot or a lump of sweet sugar.

She stroked the neck of the beautiful animal and blew softly into her ear. “You are a beauty,” she whispered, in a soft, soothing voice, not wanting to upset the delicate animal with a loud, rough noise. As pure bred as the mare was, she was bound to be high-strung and nervy. “A real beauty. You’ll make some lady a fine mount, I know you will.”

The mare snickered and nuzzled into Anna’s neck with her soft, warm nose.

“Yes, I know you’re adorable,” Anna said, as she pushed the mare’s nose away gently with the palm of her hand, “but I’m afraid you’re not for me, my love. Mother wants a quiet little donkey and a small cart, not a fine lady’s mount like you are.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lord Ravensbourne watching her as she petted the mare. His dark eyes sent an uncomfortable shiver of awareness along her spine.

Her cousin’s eyes were as black as sin and twice as full of temptation. They made her feel strangely uneasy, hot and cold at the same time. She had never had such a confusing and complicated reaction to a man before. Her feelings had always been so simple. A man was good and kind, like her father, or he was evil, like the squire.

At any rate, she was sure Lord Ravensbourne could not be completely a good man, or she would not feel so uncomfortable around him, as if she would be wise to flee his company while she still could.

He had been very kind to her and her mother, she reminded herself sharply, and she was a foolish girl to be troubled by what looked like hunger in his eyes. She ought to see deeper into his heart and judge him by his actions, not on the basis of a foolish fancy.

But the squire had seemed kind, too, in offering her the position of governess. And the squire, God rot his soul, had had the same look in his eyes before he had…

She shivered again, feeling cold, despite the sun beating down on the back of her neck.

Sometimes, in the dark of night, when the wind rattled her casement window, and the dower house creaked and groaned like an aged woman with the rheumatiks in her joints, she hoped in the black and bitter depths of her wicked heart that she had killed Squire Grantley.

The rest of the time, she was terrified she had killed him. She had not checked him for a pulse before she left. If she had been guilty of his murder, God would not let her sins remain unpunished. Sooner or later, whether or not the law of man ever caught up with her misdeed, divine retribution would fall on her.