Authors: Lady Hellfire
“You want the third door from the left at the other end, Miss Grey.”
“Thank you,” Kate called after the woman.
There was no answer. Lady Juliana disappeared through another door, leaving Kate once more alone in the hall.
A castle full of snobs and lunatics, she thought. Ripsnitious. Wonderful. She pressed her palms to her temples and groaned. Poor Ophelia was dead, dear Lord, and she was cast in the midst of strangers. Poor, pretty Ophelia. Kate cursed as tears spilled over her cheeks once again.
She couldn’t bear to think that Ophelia had suffered.
Dear God, please make it true that she was asleep.
Ophelia might sometimes have been as annoying as a starving mosquito, but she’d had a good heart. It wasn’t her fault she’d been raised useless and trained to silliness. Poor Ophelia. Poor, poor Ophelia.
Kate quickly brushed the tears from her cheeks, irritated with herself. This whole day was one long frustration. When she’d first awakened she had asked for a tour of this damnable maze, but it hadn’t kept her from getting lost.
Castle Richfield sat on a hill in a patchwork plain of fields, streams, and clusters of trees. One side of it backed on a steep cliff overlooking a river. The night before, they’d ridden over a bridge that spanned that river, but only in daylight had she seen the truly massive proportions of the castle.
It was roughly rectangular in plan, and she’d counted at least six drum towers overlooking an enclosed courtyard larger than some California mining towns. Within that courtyard rose the oldest building in the castle, the keep. The drum towers were connected by great rampart walls, and, the housekeeper had said, over the centuries the de Granvilles had added room after room within the confines of those walls.
Which led to the problem that had baffled Kate. Too many wings, too many apartments. She needed a map to find her room. She walked through the doorway indicated by Lady Juliana and up a passage, only to stop in confusion at the foot of a staircase. A serving man with a tray passed by.
“Oh, miss. Tea?” He opened a door, revealing a salon of liveable proportions. Unfortunately, there were people in it. She started to back away, but …
“Miss Grey.”
Caught. Kate summoned a smile and entered the salon.
Fulke came to her, taking the hand she offered and kissing it.
“Time has passed quickly,” she said. “I didn’t know it was so late.”
“It’s only natural,” Fulke replied, leading her farther into the room. “Your mother, Lady Emeline, and Lady Juliana preferred tea in their rooms.” He stopped before a woman who appeared to be in her mid thirties and who was decked in one of those gowns that so annoyed Kate—all flounces held up by bouquets of flowers, edged with lace, poofed and padded, fussy and unmanageable. “My wife, Hannah, Miss Grey of San Francisco. Dear Lady Ophelia’s cousin.”
Kate had to lean forward to hear the woman’s greeting, so quietly did she speak. Hannah was the kind of woman Kate had often envied. She had skin that had never been touched by the rays of the sun and thus bore no blemishing freckles. As oval as a picture frame, her face boasted a cupid’s-bow mouth and those light blue eyes men wrote poems about. And most enviable of all, she didn’t have garish hair. It was a nice, ordinary light brown, like old beech wood. Kate shook Hannah’s hand and told herself not to commit the sin of jealousy.
“And Alexis of course,” Fulke continued.
Almost scowling, Kate nodded at the silent figure leaning against the white marble mantel. He probably posed there on purpose, she thought, so that she would notice the contrast between his hair and the snowy marble. She allowed Fulke to seat her while Hannah poured tea and offered tidbits of food.
By looking at Hannah, Kate could pretend not to see the marquess and yet watch him at the same time. As the door was opened by a servant, he knelt down and opened his arms. A blur of white and black spots rushed past Kate, and seventy pounds of English springer spaniel landed on
him. While Fulke muttered a reprimand and Hannah shrieked, he greeted the dog.
“Hello, Iago, old fellow.” Alexis laughed and shoved Iago’s face away from his own before the dog’s long tongue could bathe him.
The dog burrowed his head against Alexis’s pant leg. Alexis caught the wide shoulders. Iago tucked his head between his front legs and tumbled into a somersault. Jumping to his feet, he barked once and sat still.
“Tea, Iago.” The marquess handed the spaniel a hard biscuit.
The dog gulped down the biscuit and settled in front of the fireplace. Alexis sat beside Fulke on a settee opposite Hannah and Kate as the older man began speaking again.
“We were discussing,” he said to Kate, “Alexis’s last visit to court. My cousin was honored with a private audience because Her Majesty had heard of his sheltering wounded soldiers at the Dower House here. How did you find Her Majesty?”
“As moral and disapproving as ever,” Alexis said. “Victoria worships Prince Albert; he worships learning. And they’re both so painfully upright. I’m not with them ten minutes before I’m tempted to do something ruinous like ask the prince to a whorehouse.”
“Alexis.” Fulke scowled at the marquess, who grinned at him.
“Goodness doesn’t have to be boring,” Fulke said.
“But sin never is, dear cousin.”
Hannah chirped disapproval while Kate tried not to yawn. She resorted to starting to count the tiny bouquets on the flounces of Hannah’s gown. The marquess attracted her attention again, though, by rising and lifting her hand to his lips in apology for his ungentlemanly behavior. He continued to look at her as he resumed his seat, but she kept her gaze on her teacup.
Fulke spoke again. “And did Her Majesty have anything in particular to say to you?”
Alexis placed his own teacup on a side table and ran a finger across the rim of the saucer. “The regiment has been the making of me, according to the Queen. Suffering has ennobled me as my heritage could not. Our Victoria loves martyrs and showers them with favor. Oh, don’t bristle, Fulke. I told you I’m not political, and I’m not going to swim in governmental ink for the rest of my life. That’s your bit of work, not mine.”
The sound of Hannah’s breathy voice floated in the air.
“I think Fulke is conscious of your duty to Richfield. He wants you to stay home—for once.”
The marquess touched Hannah with the wisp of a glance before looking at Fulke. “I am home.”
“Hannah, my dear, we have a guest,” Fulke said with a gesture at Kate.
Waving her cup and saucer, Kate said, “Pay no attention to me.”
“You see,” Fulke continued to Kate, “I’ve been asked to run for election again, and my wife is concerned that Alexis isn’t well enough to manage on his own yet.”
Kate eyed the apparently healthy marquess and raised her brows. He lifted one corner of his mouth, met her gaze briefly, then transferred his own to Iago.
“Why keep everyone in suspense, revered guardian?” the marquess asked Fulke. “You wouldn’t want to miss the opportunity of telling the whole kingdom how to run its affairs, would you?”
Fulke turned red. “Service to queen and kingdom is hardly meddling.”
As far as Kate could tell, the marquess was the only one in the salon comfortable in the silence that followed. Evidently Hannah felt obliged to smooth over what she considered a breach of manners. Kate had learned that, to the English Lady, any departure from inane conversation
was a breach of manners. Hannah turned to the marquess. The curls of brown hair at the base of her neck fell over her shoulder. The fingers that held her teaspoon pressed into the silver so hard, they were almost blue.
“Your reputation as a hero is the talk of London, Alexis. General Abercrombie’s wife was telling me how wonderful you look in uniform, how dashing the cavalry looks on parade.”
Kate had learned a little since she was last in England, and she didn’t miss the sudden tension in the marquess’s body at the mention of the general’s wife. Hannah missed it, though. Kate could tell because the woman was too busy covering whatever real message she was trying to convey with a theatrical smile.
The marquess leaned back on the settee, lifted his cup to his lips, and met Hannah’s gaze over the rim. She blushed and looked down at her plate.
Alexis directed a cherub’s smile at Kate. “When one is commanding men, it’s so important to look sharp. Don’t you agree?”
“Don’t see how shiny buttons and a pretty uniform could do anything but help the Russians see you better.”
The marquess inclined his head in a salute to Kate.
Fulke raised his eyes in the direction of the God he so often consulted, sighed, and addressed his wife. “My dear, for an officer to command obedience from his men requires the ability to dominate through personal authority and military expertise.”
“Of course, Fulke.”
Kate’s already tried patience snapped under the burden of enduring all this family sniping. She hated veiled messages and crooked talk. She would have left earlier if she hadn’t been sure the marquess was waiting for her to retreat, but Hannah’s gushing flattery continued and Kate gave up.
Pleading exhaustion, she fled, leaving the three in the
salon to their so-called tea. To her it felt more like a Society version of the Battle of Balaclava. She wasn’t sure what was going on in this family, but it was as intricate as the layout of the castle. She headed up the stairs in search of her room, praying that she could get there without meeting Terrence and Lady Juliana again.
After tea, at the Dower House, half a mile from Castle Richfield, Alexis sought to escape his irritation with Miss Grey and his family. He was growing more and more impatient with Hannah’s verbal traps. She’d wanted him to know she knew about Abercrombie’s wife. He was lucky she and Fulke wouldn’t be staying much longer, for he hated being ripped to pieces between the two of them, a scrap of meat tugged at by two wild dogs. The only consolation was that their games took his mind off the war, for a while.
Alexis paused in the alcove that sheltered the front doors to the Dower House, gathering his courage to enter. The war, after all, was never far away. In the Crimea the army had been mauled not so much by the enemy as by its own inefficiency. Stranded in a primitive country, it had suffered from lack of food and medical supplies. Alexis and his fellow cavalry officers of the Heavy Brigade had tried to supply their men out of their own pockets, but there was little food or medicine to be bought. Cholera and dysentery rampaged. By winter, men would be walking in the snow barefoot. After Balaclava, the wounded lay for hours alongside the dead without medical aid, without water.
It was at Balaclava that Val and the Light Brigade were destroyed by a bungled order that sent the cavalry charging a battery of Russian guns. They rode one and a half miles down a valley under fire from the hills to either side. Alexis could still remember the consternation among his
comrades in the Heavy Brigade as they watched the suicidal charge.
Over six hundred men began the attack. Less than three hundred returned. In the confusion that followed the slaughter, Alexis searched for Val. He found his friend half buried under the body of a headless horse. His uniform was wet with blood and draped in the entrails of men and horses. He pulled Val from under the carcass and onto his own horse and rode for safety, only to get in the way of debris from an artillery blast himself. At least he’d been able to ride in spite of the holes in his shoulder and arm.
That was in October. Two months of horror followed. He had Val transferred to his own yacht along with as many men as it would hold, and turned the craft into a hospital. If he hadn’t been wounded himself, he’d still be there watching men die because of the stupidity of fools like Val’s commander, the Earl of Cardigan.
He’d been home since January, and Val had come with him since Val’s father was too old and uninterested to care for him. Not that Alexis would have allowed his friend to be under anyone else’s care. It was only in March that the doctors assured him that Val would live. Alexis’s happiness at the news soon turned to apprehension, for the atrocities Val had endured wounded his soul far more than his body.
Inside the Dower House Alexis walked past rows of beds containing injured men. It had all started with his yacht full of wounded. Most of the men couldn’t afford good medical treatment, not the kind that would get them well instead of kill them. After the Crimea, Alexis hadn’t trusted the government to take care of them, so he’d brought them home. His fellow officers had heard about the Dower House, and begged to send their own wounded.
Soon Alexis was hiring doctors and attendants, cooks and household staff. He wrote to Miss Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, and kept writing when her letters returned
precious, hardheaded advice. He needed an administrator, and he needed more room. The newest invalids were housed in the cellar.
Climbing down into that candle-lit room, Alexis stumbled over the bed of an infantryman. The man was unconscious, and a doctor was bending over him. As Alexis straightened up, he saw the physician pull a sheet over the man’s head and rise from his chair.
“Gone, my lord. We got him too late to do any good.”
“I only wish his last days had been spent in sunlight,” Alexis said.
“He wouldn’t have known. But we do need room.”
“I can add on to the house,” Alexis said. “But it will take so long, and the noise and mess would be unpleasant for the men. I need a bigger house. All these candles and lamps are dangerous. There was a fire last night.” He stopped, remembering Ophelia and her burned house. “Maitland House.”
“My lord?”
“I know where I can get a larger house. Excuse me, doctor.”
He cut short his visit and hastened back to the castle. As his carriage clattered over the permanently lowered drawbridge, he calculated what amount to offer Miss Grey for Maitland House. He might as well offer for the whole estate, if she owned all the land. He would get the Tower back too. Then he wouldn’t have a hole in his lands anymore, and he’d rid himself of mountain goats. He wished her solicitor hadn’t left. What was his name? Poggs? He could have talked to Poggs and arranged the sale efficiently. Instead he was going to have to explain the whole process to Miss Grey and hope she understood the complexities.