The Devil's Web (19 page)

“Why, Howard!” The earl stretched out a hand to his tenant and shook his heartily. “My congratulations. I am sure you have made a wise choice. Where is Miss Cameron?”

She was standing a short distance away, her arm drawn through James's, looking anxious and embarrassed. She seemed considerably more relieved after the earl had kissed her cheek and the countess had hugged her.

“I hope you will not think I have taken advantage of your hospitality,” she said.

“I have been scheming for all of a year to get Howard suitably married off,” Edmund said. “My tenants need wives, you know, if they are to have prosperous farms and comfortable homes and contented hearts. I could not have chosen better myself.”

Jean looked up at James, who was smiling reassuringly down at her, and shyly across at her betrothed. He hovered in the background while his mother and father felt constrained to hug her once more before taking their leave. She felt rather as if every bone in her body had been squeezed almost to breaking point when she emerged from Mr. Courtney's fond and fatherly embrace.

“Another daughter to love soon enough,” he said, chucking her under the chin. “And for you another papa as soon as ever you leave the altar, my dear. I am well blessed indeed. Well blessed.”

Alexandra was looking at her brother with a pale face, which showed clearly that she had lost all interest in any conversation going on around her. And he looked back, his smile fading.

J
AMES PURNELL AND DUNCAN CAMERON WERE standing side by side on the deck of the
Adeona
. They were both leaning on the rail, looking out across the river to the city of London. The ship would sail with the tide.

“I am glad I have had a look at it, even if only once,” Duncan said. “But I can't say I am sorry to be leaving. Give me a quieter life any day.”

“Yes,” James said. “I have never been overfond of London.”

“Yet my father has chosen to stay here for yet another winter,” Duncan said, shaking his head. “I don't think I could stay even for one.”

“You must admit he has good reason to change his mind,” James said. “It would be a very lonely feeling for Jean to wave the both of you good-bye when she is not even married yet.”

“You think she will be happy with Courtney?” his friend asked. “I must confess I think she could have done better for herself. She certainly has all the looks in our family, anyway.”

“The Courtneys are quite prosperous,” James said, “and very industrious. They are well respected. And there seems to be a great deal of family affection among them. I think she stands as good a chance for happiness as she would in any other marriage.”

“Well,” Duncan said, “it's her choice, I suppose. For myself, I have a hankering to get back to my woman and our son. I confess to having found English beauties insipid. Next spring I'll be on my way back with the brigades. You too, James?”

His friend shrugged. “I daresay,” he said. “One can do much worse with one's life.”

They lapsed into silence, the one allowing his thoughts to slip ahead of him to the country he was going to and ahead in time to the following spring when he could join a canoe brigade again and leave civilization behind him until he found the small trading post he would call home and the black-haired woman and the chubby black-eyed child he had left behind him well over a year before.

James could not think ahead. His thoughts were still firmly anchored in the island he was leaving. He watched idly the little boats on the river, each busy about its own business. And he saw his mother with a handkerchief pressed to her eyes and Alex pale and smiling and hugging him close. And his father, who had surprised him by coming outside to the carriage when he left and shaking hands with him, though his face was as if carved out of marble and his eyes cold.

He had not asked himself too closely what it had meant. He preferred to assume that there was after all love for him in his father, a love that could not or would not express itself in words. There was a small measure of peace—very small—in the assumption.

Madeline had been noticeably absent, though she had been standing at the front window of the long gallery. He had seen her there when he looked up, desperate for one more sight of her. She had not ducked back out of sight. And she had not smiled or made any acknowledgment of his half-raised hand.

One of the small boats appeared to be making its way toward the
Adeona
. James watched it without interest or curiosity.

He should have tried, perhaps, to make a friend of her. He had known as soon as he first set eyes on her again that he had not worked her from his system. He had known that his attraction to her was many times stronger than it had been before, because it had had four years in which to grow. He should have tried to make something of it.

Instead, he had allowed resentment and attraction to war inside him every time he had been in her presence. Resentment and fear.

Fear that he would love her too dearly and bring her to love him, and then find that he could not offer her a whole heart, a guiltless heart. Fear perhaps that if he acknowledged his love, it would be taken away from him as the first had been. Fear that she would be destroyed by his love as Dora had been.

He would not think of it. He was going away for good this time. He would never see her again.

“He looks familiar,” he said to Duncan, frowning and pointing to a man wrapped in a cloak and sitting in the middle of the little boat that was approaching. “Who is he?”

But the answer came to him before his friend could look and shake his head and declare that he had never seen the fellow in his life. He was one of the servants at Amberley Court.

His father! Something had happened to him. He could feel his heart pounding and the blood beating against his temples.

He was at the head of the ladder when the servant finally climbed on board. He looked questioningly at the man, who merely handed him a letter in silence.

“Is anything the matter, James?” Duncan Cameron asked a minute later.

“It's my father,” James said, staring down at the brief and hastily written note in his hand. “He has had a heart seizure.”

“Oh, man,” Duncan said, clapping his friend on the shoulder. “Bad, is it?”

“Amberley seems to think so,” James said. He gazed down at his letter for another minute before crumpling it in his hand and looking at Duncan with sudden decision. “Do you think you can see to having my trunks brought up here while I talk with the captain?”

Duncan clapped him on the shoulder again before disappearing below.

Less than half an hour later, James Purnell was sitting in the little boat beside the servant from Amberley, raising a hand in a final farewell to his friend, who stood at the rail of the
Adeona
again.

“A
LEX
.” The earl took her by the shoulders and spoke quietly into her ear. “You must come and rest, my love.”

She was sitting beside her father's bed, listening to his loud and labored breathing, watching his half-closed eyelids and his white, cold hands on the covers. Her mother was sitting behind her at the window, weeping, the dowager Lady Amberley at her side.

“What?” she said.

“You must come and rest,” the earl said again. “You have been sitting here for five hours.”

She rose obediently and allowed him to lead her from the room, one arm about her shoulders. “I think he is better,” she said. “His breathing is steadier.”

“You must rest,” he said, leading her to their bedchamber. “You have not slept, Alex.”

“Did you notice?” she asked, obeying the pressure of his hands and sitting on the edge of the bed while he stooped down to remove her slippers. “Do you think he is getting better, Edmund?”

He got to his feet, his task completed, and framed her face with his hands. “We will hope so, my love,” he said. “But we must keep in mind what Doctor Hanson has said.”

“He is wrong,” she said, bending her head forward as his hands began to remove the pins from her hair. “I know he is wrong, Edmund. Papa is a strong man. And he has recovered from a seizure before.”

He bent and kissed her lips before disappearing briefly into her dressing room to fetch a brush. He began to pull it through her hair. “Fifty strokes only,” he said, “and then you are going to lie down. And you are going to sleep. I will stay here until you do, and there will be stern words, I promise, if you are not asleep within ten minutes.”

“You will call me, Edmund, if anything … ?” She looked up at him frantically.

“I will call you,” he said.

“And if James comes?” She watched him take her brush back to the dressing room and waited like a child for him to fold back the bedcovers before lying back against the pillows. “He will come, Edmund, won't he? Your letter will have reached him in time? And he will come?”

He covered her up, kissed her again, and lay down beside her, on top of the covers, his hands clasped behind his head. “The letter may have been too late,” he said. “The ship may have sailed. We both know that, Alex. We should know for sure tomorrow. Peters should be back then. Go to sleep, love. You have only nine minutes left in which to avoid a severe scolding.”

She turned her head to look at him. “You have always said I need not be obedient to you,” she said.

“If women are allowed to change their minds,” he said, “then men are allowed to be horrible liars. Stay awake for eight and a half minutes longer, and you will see just how ferociously I can enforce wifely obedience.”

She closed her eyes and smiled fleetingly. “I would love to see it,” she said. “But I don't think I can stay awake long enough. Remind me to defy you some other time, Edmund.”

He had a reply ready, but he looked at her closely and did not make it. He lay where he was for ten more minutes before removing himself from the bed and the room.

M
ADELINE WAS STANDING
on the arched stone bridge across the river, leaning on the balustrade and staring down into the waters that flowed beneath. She had wandered a little way from the house, and drew in slow breaths of fresh air.

She had just seen Sir Perry on his way. An hour before it had been the rector, though Edmund had taken charge of his visit. And a little while before that Anna and Walter had ridden over when she and Sir Cedric were already entertaining Mr. Courtney and Mr. Morton.

The task of dealing with the almost constant flow of callers fell largely on their shoulders. Lady Beckworth and Alexandra, of course, were spending every waking moment in the sickroom, and Mama was there much of the time. Edmund had the estate business to see to, and he was trying to be both mother and father to the children.

She did not mind doing her small part. Besides, Sir Cedric was a pillar of strength and comfort, as he always had been during times of crisis. She could remember as far back as the time when her father died, curling up on his lap and crying her heart out because Mama had completely collapsed and Edmund had been walking about in a white-faced daze and Dominic had been swaggering around, refusing to show any emotion because he was twelve years old and a man.

Madeline smiled down unseeingly at the water below her. Just a week before she had been wondering what she would do with herself during these days between James's departure from Amberley and his setting sail, how she would keep thought and emotion at bay. None of her carefully laid plans had worked for the first five days.

The pain had been searing and fraught with panic and desperation. If she left now, she had thought a dozen times a day, without any delay whatsoever, taking time only to saddle a horse, perhaps she would be able to reach him in time, in time to …

But there her thoughts had always balked. In time to what? Beg him to stay? Beg to be taken with him? Beg that they try what he had murmured almost to himself at the fountain during the ball—try to become friends? How could they be friends with an ocean between them?

And then on the fifth day Lord Beckworth had collapsed in the drawing room after dinner, and since then the house and all their lives had been in turmoil.

And what now if he should come back? What if Edmund's letter had reached him in time and he had decided to come back rather than sail for Canada?

Madeline glanced up the eastern hillside, up the road that formed the main approach to the house. She realized that she had been doing so every few minutes since she had left the house. Yet even if he came, the earliest they could expect him was the next day.

And what if he came? She was unprepared for his coming. She did not know how she would cope with it.

And what if he did not come? She was unprepared for his not coming. She did not know how she would cope with that either.

There was a lone rider coming down the hillside. But it was not he. He could not be expected until the next day. It would be Mr. Watson or Miles Courtney or someone else. But she straightened up and watched the horseman, and intuition and an accelerated heartbeat told her who it was even before he was close enough for her to see him clearly.

She stayed where she was, turning as he rode closer so that her back was against the balustrade and her hands gripping its top behind her back. His face was pale and unshaven. His tired dark eyes bored into hers as he drew his horse to a halt on the bridge.

“He is still alive,” she said.

“Still?” His voice was harsh. “He was not expected to be, then?”

He was waiting for an answer, his eyes holding hers. She shook her head briefly. She thought he was about to say something else, but he did not. He loosened the reins and gave his horse the signal to proceed.

Edmund was waiting on the steps, she saw when she turned her head to look toward the house.

• • •

I
T WAS SOME LATE HOUR
of the night. James had no idea what time it was. Indeed, the last few days and nights had so run together in his mind that he was no longer able to say what day of the week it was. He had slept for five hours—at least Edmund had told him it was that long—after his arrival, after he had hugged his mother and Alex and had spent an hour standing by his father's bedside, gazing down at him.

He stood there again now—he had not sat down at all in this room. His mother was sitting at the window, her head nodded forward on her chest. Alex had gone to bed, on the combined insistence of himself and Edmund and her mother-in-law.