The Pursuit of Pleasure (26 page)

He smiled but didn’t step away. “Mrs. Tupper said she feared you were being bitten to pieces. She’s had to boil your clothes in lye soap.”

“Mrs. Tupper? Then she knows you’re alive. She’ll be so relieved. When, how did she find you?”

“I can’t explain. I came because … because I had to and because Mrs. Tupper was certain you’d gone … well, she was very concerned for you. She said you were wasting away and had awful dark circles under your eyes.” He cradled her face in his hands and frowned into her eyes. “As though you’d gotten used to staring at death.”

“Mrs. Tupper said that? To you? When?”

“Lizzie, you must listen to me. I can’t explain everything. I’m sorry, but you must hang on. You must bear it for just a little while longer. We’re working to have you freed. We’re working very hard, so you must not despair. Do you understand?”

“No. You must tell me everything. What happened to you? Where have you been?”

“Love, I’m sorry. I can’t explain.”

Something was wrong. Something was awfully terribly wrong. Her fingers snatched at him to catch a fistful of his coat.

“What do you mean? How did you survive? How did you get here, how did you get in? Why in the world are you disguised? Especially like this? You don’t know, or you won’t tell me?”

“Lizzie, please.” He held her hands between his own and spoke quietly. “You must understand. You must bear it for a little while longer.”

Her heart went cold inside her chest, as if it had been torn and all the heat was leaking out of her.

“No! You can’t mean that. You can’t. I can’t bear it. I won’t. Not even for another hour. You can’t ask me to. You must take me out of here. You must.”

“Lizzie.” He held her hands steady, warming her suddenly clammy palms between his own. He spoke very quietly. Too quietly. His voice was unsteady. “You must stay.”

She wrenched her hands away. No. She wouldn’t listen. This was all very, very wrong. She had to move. She had to get out of here. Jamie had to take her out of here. She bolted towards the door.

He engulfed her in his arms, trying to hold her still. “Lizzie. Please.”

She couldn’t make sense of it all, but now she fought him, nearly clawing at him in her need to get out of the room. Get away from this awful, awful feeling. This newly unbearable pain.

“Please,” she begged, “you have to get me out. You’re alive. Tell them. Tell them and get me out!” She could hear the hysteria, the sharp wounded edge of her voice.

“I won’t let them touch you, Lizzie. I promise. I promise,” Jamie whispered into her ear, his voice harsh and raw. His arms were iron bands holding her tight, making her crave the comfort and warmth of his body even as she fought to get away.

“How can you promise that? You have to let me out. You can’t leave me here.” She was shouting now. That was it. She should make so much noise the turnkey would come, and he would see that Jamie was alive, and they would have to let her out. “Let me out.”

“I can’t. Jesus, Lizzie. I can’t.” His face, his eyes were nearly black with anguish. His voice was cracked with it.

“But how could I kill you when you’re here, alive and well? You’re not dead. You’re not dead.”

Footsteps sounded in the corridor, and then the jangling of keys could be heard on the other side of the door.

Jamie crushed her hard against his chest and whispered into her ear. “I can’t explain. And you can’t tell anyone you’ve seen me.”

“No. How can you ask me that? No!”

“Jesus, Lizzie, I can’t. I can’t. There’s too much at stake. You must be patient. You must trust me. Soon. I promise. I swear it.”

But nothing he said in such a tormented voice could reassure her.

“You can’t mean to leave me here. You can’t.” He was pulling back, trying to set her away. She held tight to his coat with desperate, clutching fingers. He was forced to pry them away and hold her hands together at the wrists.

“Lizzie, listen to me! Listen. It’s only for now. I promise. I promise. Guard!”

She twisted helplessly in his relentless grasp, her frantic strength ebbing away. “No, Jamie, no. Please, please don’t leave me. Please. I’m begging you. Don’t leave me.”

“I’m sorry, Lizzie.” He eased her down as her legs gave out, and she collapsed onto the cold stone floor. He pressed his lips to hers one last time. “Forgive me. I’m sorry. I’m so bloody sorry.”

And then the door opened, and he was gone.

“Jamie. Jamie!” She could only say his name and pound her fists into the floor. Over and over, until her throat was raw and her hands bled.

Marlowe’s hands were shaking by the time he made the gatehouse. He all but staggered out of the stone building and around the corner until he could lean his back against a wall and scrape some air back into his lungs. Thank God, he had told McAlden not to accompany him.

He, and he alone, had done that to Lizzie. She was utterly damaged, perhaps almost destroyed from being shut up in that place. He could not have caused her any more or less pain if he had taken a stick and beaten her.

How on earth had he allowed this to happen?

He never imagined, not in a million years, this would, or could, have come to pass. The stench, the filth, the waste. And Lizzie, in the midst of it. Damn his eyes. She was the wreck of herself, like a fallen building with only the outline of a few walls standing.

She would have been better off if he had not given in to his damned tormenting guilt and gone to see her. She might have carried on well enough without his bloody interference. But now he had destroyed every shred of trust she had ever had in him. He had chosen his country and career over his family, and Lizzie was paying the price, the very high cost of his duty. She would never forgive him.

And he never told her what he had gone in there to say.

That help was coming. Through the diligence of Lady Theodora and Mrs. Tupper, and the belated influence of the Admiralty, he had managed to secure the offices of a barrister of high repute. It helped to alleviate his crushing guilt at having done this to her, however inadvertently. It assuaged his conscience, but it did nothing to silence it.

And he had not told her he loved her. It had been there, on the tip of his tongue, but her obvious pain, her obvious feeling of betrayal, combined with his own overwhelming regret, had shut up his mouth. He had no right to love her, if this is what his love did to her.

He got himself under control, found a hack a few blocks away, and met McAlden in a little-used back lane he knew near his father’s church.

“Nice togs,” was all McAlden said, as he climbed aboard.

“Please, Hugh.” He felt too wretched to even joke.

“Oh, aye, sir,” he answered easily enough. “I got us a job. Unfortunately, things seemed to have livened up now, with her in gaol.”

“Bloody rotten bastards.”

“Well, now we’re in with them. We’re to sail to Guernsey on the morrow, pick up a little something or two, and sail back under cover of night.” McAlden shook his head. “It’ll be a queer feeling to pray our own navy won’t blast us out of the water as we sail by.”

“Be a devilish way to die, wouldn’t it?” Marlowe agreed with vicious humor. “Poor Lizzie’ll have to bury me twice.”

McAlden frowned. “Was it that bad?”

“Worse.” Marlowe scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I… I never thought I would have to choose between them. Between my wife and my mission. It’s all very well to think of orders, to say I can’t get you out, but you’ll be fine, and then leave. You didn’t see her.” Marlowe closed his eyes, but he couldn’t blot out the image of Lizzie in that wretched place. “She’s not a sailor or a soldier. She didn’t sign up for this. She wasn’t trained for this. But the only reason she’s locked up is because I haven’t finished this bloody godforsaken mission and blown these smuggling bastards out of the water yet. We can’t even find them properly!”

“Well, they’ve a network, haven’t they?”

“Such a network they can have my wife arrested and charged for murder, and I have to sit back and watch! And I have to leave her in a louse-ridden gaol, exposed to typhus fevers and God knows what other putrid diseases, so I can use her just as mercilessly until I can give the Admiralty and the Prime Minister what they want.”

McAlden stared grimly back. “Stands to reason. After all, they’ve already done murder itself, so what’s a trumped-up charge on a woman? Or had you forgotten they killed Frank?”

“No,” Marlowe growled. “I bloody well have not.” But all he could think of was Lizzie. And all he could do was regret.

By the time they had ridden back to the Redlap he was in a foul mood, which was not helped at all by Mrs. Tupper’s news.

“You saw her, then?” the housekeeper asked. “Did she promise to eat the food? I can’t like you taking a chance like that, going in there, but if she’ll eat the food, and get stronger, then it’ll have been worth it.”

“I hope so, Mrs. Tupper. I hope so. We’ll have her out.” His words were spoken with his typical captain-like confidence, but the words sounded hollow to his ears. Because Lizzie hadn’t believed him.

The thought of her was like shrapnel in his chest—an omnipresent pain.

“Well, thank God for that. But another problem has arisen. Someone else has arrived.”

“Who?’

“That cousin of yours, Mr. Wroxham, moved into the big house. Came this afternoon, valet and all, said he was to watch over the place for you. I felt I had to let him in as Mr. Tupper was out, over at the Dawson Farm, about the leaking roof tiles.”

“Damn his eyes. Bloody fucking idiot. We’ll kick his skinny arse out at first light.”

It had seemed simple enough in the beginning, to keep the house empty, damn it, but instead there seemed to be a continuous procession of potential tenants. First poor Lizzie and now bloody Wroxham. They’d be doing his cousin a favor by kicking him out. If he stayed who knew when he’d end up in gaol on a trumped-up charge of conspiring with Lizzie to murder his cousin.

“Mr. Tupper’s compliments, sir,” the housekeeper interrupted his thoughts. “But Tupper did say it’s not the first time Mr. Wroxham’s been to live in the house.”

“Tupper said that?”

“Ejected him once before. Right after you first left, moved right in like he owned the place, Tupper said. But he came back again twice: once to visit Mrs. Marlowe, and then again today.”

What possible use could his impecunious cousin have for squatting at Glass Cottage? Of course, it was entirely possible his pockets were completely to let and he had nowhere else to go. But surely he could have stayed at his parents’ house in town? They had a beautiful town house in the fashionable section of Dartmouth. Surely he would have been more comfortable there than in an empty remote seaside cottage?

It didn’t make much sense, and so it bore watching. Nearly everything at Glass Cottage bore careful watching.

“We’ll let him stay,” he decided. “But we’ll want to keep a very close eye on my cousin, shall we? Very close.”

“Aye, sir,” Mrs. Tupper responded. “I’ll see to it, sir.”

Marlowe rubbed his chest absently and went back to worrying about Lizzie.

C
HAPTER 16

L
izzie ate her food with a vengeance, stuffing her mouth with every last crumb, though it nearly made her sick. She did everything now with a vengeance. It seemed to have become her new reason for being. Morning, noon, and night, she had one and one thought only—revenge.

Anger snaked through her lungs and kept her breath tight and hard. She was such a fool. And she had thought
him
the foolish, trusting one. And all the while he had been a liar and a swindler. And somehow he had gotten her mixed up in murder and set her up to take the bloody four-foot fall for it all.

If she ever saw him again she’d kill him. Such wretched irony.

Bloody bastard.

But she wasn’t going to die. Because he wasn’t dead.

She pinched her eyes shut to stave off the headache that came every time she tried to sort it all out. It was so hard not to believe the evidence of her memory—the coffin, the funeral, the bloody letter from the Admiralty.

The Admiralty. Sir Edward Foster’s assertion that a trip to the Antipodes was unlikely in such a time of war came flooding back, ringing in her ear as if he were next to her repeatingthe words. Jamie had lied about that as well, no doubt. Bastard.

“Mrs. Marlowe?”

It was the turnkey with the local solicitor, Mr. Benchley.

Lizzie stood up and brushed off her skirts as best she could as the turnkey opened the lock to let her out. Mrs. Tupper still brought a freshly cleaned skirt and chemisette or gown every day, even though Lizzie had refused to see her, but the garment always grew soiled with the grime and damp of Dartmouth Gaol’s less than salubrious accommodations.

“Mrs. Marlowe,” Mr. Benchley began, indicating the tall, dignified man behind him. “I have brought to you my Lord Edwin deHavilland, Serjeant of King’s Bench, London. He will argue your case before the court at the Assizes.”

“My Lord.” Lizzie sloughed off the slattern and executed a gracious curtsey. This man was to save her life.

He didn’t speak to her, but to the air around himself, as if it would naturally leap to his bidding.

“I require a room with a table and chair, preferably two, and good light.”

And of course, both the turnkey and the warden were delighted to show so august a visitor a private chamber. It wasn’t often that a Serjeant of the King’s Bench in London came to Dartmouth Gaol. He must have deep pockets. Or perhaps, somehow, she still did.

“Now, then, Mrs. Marlowe. I am deHavilland, and I shall be arguing your case.” He consulted a leather folio in front of him. “Mr. Benchley has done a thorough job of acquainting me with the particulars, but I should like to speak to you directly. This is a capital case, Mrs. Marlowe, and while I shall, of course, argue that you are not guilty of this crime, I should very much like to be apprised of the truth. Did you kill your husband, or conspire with person or persons unknown to have him killed?”

She had not expected such bluntness.

“No.” The word was awkward and forced.