Authors: Vanessa Royall
No, it was a cologne.
“Royce?” she gasped, trying to sit up.
The door to the room swung open. Light from lanterns carried
by a gang of soldiers spilled into the room, illuminating Royce and Selena there upon the bed, their skin glowing red like fire.
“Oh, how splendid!” said Colonel Clay Oakley, chortling into his scented handkerchief. “Bind Campbell,” he ordered his minions.
There were half a dozen of them, all armed. Royce had no chance to resist.
Oakley approached the bed. Selena had hastily covered herself with a sheet, but he ripped it away.
“My beauty! I have you now, at long last. How tawdry that lust was your undoing. Lust, and a chatty hack driver. Such a disappointment, isn’t it?”
“You touch her—you even
breathe
on her—and I’ll kill you!” promised Royce.
“Club him,” Oakley said, with a shrug.
One of the soldiers brought the butt of his blunderbuss down on Royce’s head. He sagged unconscious to the floor.
Selena’s scream was cut off when Oakley wrapped a huge hand around her throat. “Save your breath,” he leered. “Your time has come to pass, and you will die screaming on the morrow.”
He flung her aside and stood over her, triumphant, implacable and icy cold.
“Take them to the Tower,” he ordered. “Chain them in the lowest level, in the same room. They shall watch each other die.”
The Tower, in which so many had perished, in which so many more had suffered and languished, was not a tower at all but a fortress. Originally built by William the Conqueror as a lookout point on the banks of the Thames, it had been expanded willy-nilly over the centuries, and had also, in due course, assumed the function of a prison.
“You should be honored by your incarceration in this monument to pain,” Oakley told Selena, gasping and wheezing. His affliction seemed to have worsened considerably since she’d first met him in New York.
“I demand a hearing,” Selena said, as she was hurried into the depths of the fortress. “I demand a trial.”
Oakley laughed a hacking, coughing laugh. “You and your lover are traitors and spies. Your only right is to suffer.”
Royce had to be carried into the cell, and regained consciousness
only as he was being chained to the wall. Selena had already been manacled to the stones. They were both naked, completely vulnerable. Oakley affixed a smoldering torch to a sconce on the wall.
“Pleasant dreams,” he said. “I shall see you in the morning.”
When he had gone with his men, the lovers looked at each other.
“Are you all right?” Selena asked.
Royce rattled the heavy chains. There was no way to free himself. “Certainly,” he grinned.
“Me too,” said Selena.
“I ought to have been more careful. We should have left London immediately.”
“Perhaps. But I would not have given up what we shared tonight for anything.”
“Nor I,” he said. “Anyway, you were obedient. You didn’t move at all.”
In spite of themselves, they laughed, which alerted a guard who soon peered in between the iron bars of the door.
“My man!” said Royce. “A thousand pounds sterling to you if you set us free.”
The man was mystified. “Are you mad, sir? I’d be killed if I so much as brought you a drink of water.”
“Wine will do then,” said Royce. “Or cake. That’s it. Cake. Cake-eating is quite the rage these days, I understand.”
Selena laughed.
“Don’t mock me,” said the guard, simultaneously bewildered and humiliated, although he did not understand why.
“Well, Selena,” Royce said, almost sadly, when the man had gone, “we have no say in the matter of where we are born, nor in where we die. But at least we’ll be together. It will be very bad, though.”
“I know,” she nodded. “But we
will
be together.”
Selena’s arms were bound to the stone wall at the wrists, which were higher than her head, so by morning the blood had run out of her fingers and she was numb. She was also very cold. She and Royce had comforted each other during the night, and the strange thing about it was that they did not even mention death. What good would that have done? There is a certain solace in the inevitable. Uncertainty produces far greater quantities of vexation.
Colonel Oakley appeared just before Selena’s feet had turned completely blue from the cold. He seemed almost boyishly cheerful and eager, and carried two flat, black cases which he set down on the floor. After putting a fresh torch in the sconce, he stood back and regarded his victims.
“Dawn,” he leered, the firelight flickering on his gleaming pate. “The moment of truth.”
“You wouldn’t know truth,” Royce grinned at him, “if it walked right up to you and yanked off that silly hairpiece on your upper lip.”
Oakley flared, but kept his anger in check, and took a long whiff of his silk handkerchief.
“You are a moronic grotesquerie,” Royce added.
The colonel gave his unsettling smile in return, bent and opened one of his two cases. To Selena’s astonishment, he pulled out a sketch pad and a piece of charcoal. “You will forgive me,” he panted, as he began to sketch them hanging there on the wall, “but I like to keep a record of my work.”
He studied them for a long moment, lost in contemplation, and then proceeded. His eye was good, his strokes quick and sure. Now and again, he paused to add an extra detail, smiling with pleasure as he did so.
“You are completely mad,” said Selena.
“Those with a devotion to beauty generally are,” he responded, unperturbed. “Turn your head slightly to the right, will you?”
Presently, Oakley was finished. He showed them his handiwork proudly. Everything was right: the gloom of the cell, the curves of Selena’s body and the musculature of Royce’s physique, even the ponderous, bleak weight of the chains could be seen in his sketch.
“When you are gone from this life,” Oakley said, “I shall draw quite another picture. I shall gaze upon it often in years to come. It will remind me how much pain you have caused me over the years, yet how—in the end—the balance of nature was restored when I evened things with you.”
“Stop your blithering, you faker,” said Royce. “Your talent is as common as a barmaid’s swill-rag.”
For an instant, Selena wished that Royce had not spoken thus. His words could only fuel Oakley’s rage. But when she saw the colonel’s face turn red, saw him fight for breath, she realized what Royce intended. Somehow, he meant to use Oakley’s physical affliction against him, to take away his concentration and his strength.
But the evil officer was clever too, and saw immediately what Royce sought to achieve. He breathed through silk again, then smiled.
“I do not provoke,” he said. “No, do not try me. Death can be quick, or death can linger. I am not, as you may think, a monster. Justice is my goal, not simply retribution, although, of course, the two are linked.”
“Certainly in your foul mind,” said Selena.
The grimace of a smile. “Think what you like.”
“I shall.”
“Think what you like of me, for now it is time to settle.”
Having said this, he bent and opened the second case, which contained several pliers, thumbscrews, daggers, and a small, supple whip.
He stared at the instruments intently, then looked up at his victims. “My, my, nothing I have here will produce a quick death. Pity, isn’t it. Now, which of you shall I begin with?”
“Start with yourself,” said Royce. “Put a clamp on your hind end and tighten it until your brains run out—”
Maddened, Oakley took up the whip and slashed out wildly, cutting Royce once, twice, thrice across the shoulders and chest.
Royce cried out.
Selena screamed.
Oakley turned to her. “Ah! It pains you to see your lover suffer, does it? I suspect it will pain him more to watch you in agony.”
Selena thought, as she watched the colonel pick up a brace of thumbscrews, that she heard a scurrying, a kind of commotion somewhere in the prison, but it was only a momentary notion. Her attention turned fully to the ugly little device that Oakley slipped over the small toe on her left foot.
“So cold,” he oozed, stroking her bare foot. “We shall warm it up. Did it ever occur to you?” he asked, deftly turning the screw. “Did it ever occur to you how a part of the body as small and inconsequential as this could cause so much”—he turned the screw once again—“pain?”
Selena screamed.
Royce struggled against his chains. “You bloody bastard—”
Then from the doorway of the cell, which was open, came a voice of cold and utter command.
“Colonel, on your feet! At attention! Now!”
Lord Sean Bloodwell stood there, with a cold, frightening fury Selena had never dreamed he possessed.
Oakley, in spite of his immense powers, was merely an officer. Sean Bloodwell was a lord of the realm. There was no question about who wielded the greater authority. A covey of officers appeared behind Sean then, and his orders were quick and sharp.
“Arrest the colonel and put him in chains. I shall deal with him later.
“Take that device from the lady’s foot. Unchain her and the man.
“Bring them clothing.
Now
, do you hear me!
“And food and drink.
“Fetch a physician, and be quick about it.”
But Oakley was loath to capitulate without protest.
“You are meddling in affairs of which you know nothing,” he whined, squaring his muscular bulk to face Sean. “These two are, and have been for some time, sworn enemies of the Empire. I am fully within my rights here.”
“Not anymore. Royce and Selena rescued the Princess Francesca from almost certain death in France. His Majesty has proclaimed a full pardon for both of them!”
That was how it happened. That was how Selena heard the news. Naked, and chained to a wall in the Tower, she was reborn in glory.
“I had a suspicion that something like this must have happened,” Sean continued, as Oakley was seized and manacled, as Royce and Selena were set free and wrapped in blankets. “And when I learned that our fine colonel had spoken both to the princess and to the cab driver, I set out on the trail myself. Had I been more effective as a sleuth, I might have gotten here earlier.”
“Sir, you arrived most propitiously,” said Royce, “and henceforth you may call my debt to you in any way, at any time.”
Selena saw the two men regarding one another. She had loved them both; both of them loved her. Had it not been for that tremendous and complicated bond, of which she herself was at the center, they might never have met. Certainly they would not have grown to appreciate in each other the presence of vast reserves of honor. Sean’s great gift was that he understood both his own nature and the nature of love. And he also understood Selena. He knew that her love would seek its own high, wild level, on a plane at which Royce Campbell also dwelt. His own character, gentler and more contemplative, would have been altered or destroyed were he to have forced Selena to remain with him. Love that is forced is love already dead. Sean knew that too.
“Selena,” he said, when they left the Tower and came out into glorious sunlight, “Francesca and Prince William are to be wed at Westminster a fortnight hence. You and Royce, of course, will be expected to attend. But I know that there is something else you desire, the return of Coldstream Castle. It depends entirely upon you. While the monarch can grant a pardon, he cannot, according to parliamentary laws, restore your family estate. You must make an appeal, in person, to the House of Lords. If you can convince those luminaries, of which I am one, that you have earned the right to get back your lands, they will so recommend to the King, and he will approve. But first you must convince the lords. How soon can you prepare yourself to do that?”
“I am ready right now,” Selena said.
London began to change. News of the forthcoming royal wedding served as a tonic to the capital city, which had been taut and bleak with continued tales of revolutionary depredations in France. Robespierre, it was accurately reported, had consolidated his control over political events, and each day new accounts of arrests and beheadings made their way across the English Channel. What better way to blot out such tidings than a wedding! Flags and pennants began to appear in the city, until the entire roadway from Buckingham to Westminster became a bright flutter of pageantry and festive banners.
Royce and Selena, due to their efforts on behalf of Princess Francesca, were offered apartments in the palace until the wedding was over. They demurred, wanting to retain what privacy they could, a task difficult enough in the light of new notoriety. Selena had also to prepare her plea to the House of Lords. Sometimes the thought of addressing those remote, bewigged, berobed dignitaries almost frightened her out of her wits, but the thought of Coldstream urged her on. Sometimes she sat in bed with paper and quill, Royce asleep beside her, pondering words. Other times she walked down to the banks of the slow-flowing Thames, brooding on history, life and time. Days went by, and all she had composed was one sentence:
My Lords, I stand before you, a daughter of Scotland
.
It seemed sufficient to her, sufficient to attain Coldstream, which was rightfully hers. Yet she understood that one sentence was unlikely to sway the most important men in the Empire, who remembered all too well the historic centuries-long animosity between England and Scotland.
But she could write no more.
“It is up to you,” she prodded herself. “It is up to you alone. You
must
find the words.”
She searched for them, but none were revealed to her.
Several days before the wedding, she and Royce received an invitation to the Bloodwell mansion in St. John’s Wood. They dressed, a carriage called at their hotel, and they went. Expecting some form of pre-nuptial gathering, Selena wore a stunning, ivory-hued gown, with a simple strand of pearls at her throat. Royce was resplendent in breeches and silk stockings, velvet jacket and gleaming white shirt. Yet no matter how he dressed, no matter how civilized -his attire, he always seemed, just beneath the surface, the feral, spirited, half-ironic, half-amused animal he was.