Not three months after the wedding, he had dismissed Amanda’s beloved governess, claiming that since his spinster sister was well educated enough to teach his own children, she would be adequate for Amanda. Amanda’s nursemaid went next. She was too old, he claimed. And what need for Amanda’s pony, in the city?
Then, when Sir Frederick realized that instead of his being elevated to his wife’s social position, the former Lady Alissa Carville was demoted to the fringes of the polite world that he inhabited, she became nothing but a burden to him. Amanda’s mother was a frail burden, moreover, too sickly for his baser needs. Worse, her widow’s annuity ended at her marriage, and the bulk of her wealth was in trust for Amanda.
Sir Frederick should have looked a little harder before he leaped, too. It was a bad bargain all around, with Amanda the loser. She lost her mother to despair, having to watch her pretty parent fade into a fearful shadow that disappeared altogether after five years of drunken tirades and ungoverned rages.
Amanda vowed not to make the same mistakes, and vowed to escape Sir Frederick as soon as she was out of mourning and her stepsister was older. That was three years ago. Sir Frederick had other ideas. Having himself declared her guardian, her stepfather rejected any number of suitors, claiming they were fortune hunters or philanderers, when he actually had no intention of parting with her dowry, her trust fund, or the interest they brought.
No matter that Mr. Charles Ashway was above reproach. Sir Frederick was going to turn away his offer for Amanda’s hand. Further, the baronet had shouted that fateful morning, he intended to refuse any other suitors she managed to bring up to scratch. By the time she reached five-and-twenty, he swore, he intended to see her fortune dissipated to a pittance.
“Bad investments, don’t you know.”
She would be a penniless spinster with no hope for a home or a family of her own. The servants, no, the whole neighborhood, could hear her opinion of that. They all saw the red mark on her cheek from where Sir Frederick had struck her, threatening worse if she went to the solicitor or the bank.
She went to Almack’s that night anyway, certain to find Mr. Ashway there. Surely such a worthy gentleman as Mr. Ashway would understand Amanda’s plight, would be willing to wed her in Gretna if need be, then fight in the courts for her inheritance.
Mr. Ashway turned his back on her.
She boldly placed her gloved hand on his sleeve. “But sir, we were to have this first dance, recall? We spoke of it yesterday.”
Mr. Ashway looked down at her hand, then toward his mother and sisters, who sat on the sidelines of the assembly rooms. He adjusted his neckcloth, then led her toward the room set aside for refreshments.
“I take it you have spoken to my stepfather?”
Mr. Ashway swallowed his lemonade and made a grimace, whether for the insipid drink or the distasteful Sir Frederick, Amanda did not know. “You must not pay heed to whatever my stepfather said. We can circumvent his control; I know we can.”
“The same way you circumvented the rules of polite society? I think not. After all, I have my sisters’ reputation to consider, and my family name.”
Amanda was confused. “What do you mean? What could he have said?”
Her onetime suitor put his glass back on the table. “He said he could not let a fellow gentleman marry soiled goods. Need I be more specific, madam?” He turned without offering her escort back into the ballroom, where Amanda’s stepsister and Sir Frederick’s sister, their chaperone, waited.
Amanda did not seek them out. She called for her wrap and went home in a hackney, too furious to think clearly beyond telling the doorman that she was ill. She had to let herself into the house, since the servants were not expecting them back until much later. She was not sure what she could do, yet she could not simply do nothing. Her good name was being destroyed, her dowry being siphoned off to her stepfather’s account. Soon she would have nothing left, and less hope.
A light gleamed under Sir Frederick’s library door, and she was so angry she went in to confront the fiend with this latest crime. If nothing else, she would make him see how blackening her reputation would reflect poorly on his seventeen-year-old daughter, Elaine, whom he had hopes of marrying off to a wealthy peer.
He was not in the library. The fool had left an uncovered candle burning, though. Amanda went to extinguish it, but she tripped over something that should not have been lying on the Aubusson carpet.
A gun? Had Sir Frederick become so dangerous then, or so drunk, that he was threatening the servants with loaded pistols? Suddenly realizing her own vulnerability, Amanda was glad he was not home after all. She picked the pistol up carefully in case it was loaded, to put it back in the drawer.
She screamed. What else could she do, finding Sir Frederick there behind the desk, with blood and gore and one sightless eye staring up at her? She screamed and Sir Frederick’s butler came, buttoning his coat, his wig askew.
“The master always said you were no good.”
Then she put down the gun.
Too late. Oh, so much too late.
The servants were shouting or crying. The Watch pushed them all aside. Elaine and her aunt rushed in. Elaine fainted, but Miss Hermione Hawley started shrieking and kept at it until the physician came, and the sheriff’s men.
They dragged her off, Amanda Carville, granddaughter of an earl, hands bound, in a wagon, to a dark-paneled, crowded chamber. The room was filled with poorly dressed people and the stink of unwashed bodies. A rough-handed guard shoved her forward, her wrists still bound, to face a bewigged gentleman who never looked up from his papers. She could barely comprehend his words when he spoke to her captors, so numb was she, seeing nothing but her stepfather’s face—what there was of it. She never got a chance to speak before her guard led her away. She did hold onto enough of her wits to hand the guard her earbobs, in exchange for his promise to get one message to the family’s solicitor, another to an address in Grosvenor Square.
“There will be a better reward for you if you keep your word. My godmother is wealthy and generous. She will untangle this mess.”
Amanda had no idea if the guard delivered her messages or simply kept her earrings. He left her in a tiny room, a closet, perhaps, without a candle or a crust of bread. The next morning a different, larger guard, this one with missing teeth, pulled her out, back onto a wagon with other manacled prisoners, all crying and shouting their innocence. Amanda was shoved into a fenced yard with scores of ragged women, women she would have tossed a coin to if she saw them on the street. They grabbed for the cape she still had on, her gold ring, the lace off her gown, her gloves, even her silk stockings.
“No,” she screamed, “I did not do anything.”
They laughed at her.
“ ’At’s what we all say,” one old hag told her through broken, blackened teeth as she snatched at the hairpins holding Amanda’s blond hair in its fashionable topknot. “You won’t be needin’ these where you’re goin’.”
Someone tossed her a scrap of wool. The blanket was tattered, filthy, and likely infested with vermin, but Amanda huddled under it, away from the coughing, wheezing women who were fighting over her belongings or trading them to the guards for bottles of gin or chunks of cheese. She spent a night and another day there, with no food and no one to listen to her protests or pleas.
On the third day she was hauled up from her corner and taken to a hearing in front of a high bench. Someone must have received her messages, she thought thankfully, for a dignified barrister stood beside her in elegant black robes. At last someone would listen to her.
“Thank you,” she began, only to be glared at and told to be silent.
“But I—”
Her own defense walked away from her. A gavel pounded and she was dragged off again. This time she was cuffed on the ear for demanding to be heard.
Dizzy, she was taken back to the prison, but pushed into a different room, a windowless cell with nothing but a straw pallet on the ground and one thin blanket.
“No, you do not understand—”
The matron slapped her. “It’s you what don’t understand, me fine lady. Someone paid for private lodgings, but you’re agoin’ to be tried for murder and then hanged afore the month is over, and that’s the end of it.” She smacked Amanda again for good measure, before shoving her so hard that Amanda fell to the damp, cold stone floor.
Amanda had no money, no friends, no influential connections. Sir Frederick had seen to that with his boorish behavior. The only reason she and Elaine still had vouchers to the exclusive assembly rooms was through the kindness of Amanda’s titled godmother. The only reason Sir Frederick permitted them to attend was for Elaine’s sake, so she could make a profitable match. Young Elaine could not help Amanda now, and heaven knew where Sir Frederick’s son Edwin was, or if he considered her a murderess. Her mother’s people were all deceased and her father’s uncaring family lived in Yorkshire, days away from London. Too late, Amanda recalled that her godmother was in Bath taking the waters. Surely the countess’s servants would send for her. Surely . . .
No one came the next day, or the next. Amanda was alone. No one was coming, because no one believed her innocent. She stopped counting the days by the bowls of gruel pushed through the slot at the bottom of her door; she stopped shouting when she heard keys jangle in the corridor. She stopped hoping when the cough came, and the fevers and chills.
But no, this could not be happening to her. She would not let it. She would simply . . . not let it.
When she was a girl, Amanda had discovered that if she curled up very small and stayed still as a mouse, sometimes no one would notice her. That’s what she had done when her father lay dying after the carriage accident, when everyone was rushing about, crying. She had learned to stay in the shadows when her mother wed Sir Frederick, not letting herself hear her mother’s weeping afterward, when there was nothing she could do. She got better at retreating into her own world after Lady Alissa’s death, not listening to Elaine’s aunt Hermione carping at her to stop daydreaming.
She could go anywhere in her mind—to a place no one could find her, no one could hurt her. So Amanda curled up there on the prison floor and dreamed of blue skies and picnics with her parents—while she waited to die.
“Oh, no, you don’t. No one cheats Jack Ketch in my gaol.” The warden kicked at her, and then two other prisoners held her while they poured gruel down her throat. She brought it back up, and they slapped her and punched her some more, but she did not feel the blows, did not see the tormentors; not where she was.
“What, ya think playin’ the queer nabs will save you? You ain’t seen no Bedlam then, have you? You’d be beg-gin’ for the noose, you would.”
They left her alone, and she crawled deeper into her own self, as far from this living hell as she could go while still living.
She did not even hear or take notice when the guards bid on who would have her first, when the warden had his day off. She only heard her father calling her back from the lake edge. “Come to Papa, poppet. Come now.”
She was halfway there.
Chapter Three
N
o,” Rex said. “I will not do it.” He had not bothered to sit down, showing his disdain for his father’s summons and his intention to be off as soon as the earl said his piece. Instead, he leaned against the mantel, taking the weight off his injured leg. His shirt was open at the collar, with no neckcloth. His breeches were ripped and stained, his too-long hair curling into his shadowed eyes. He needed a shave and he smelled worse than the dog at his feet.
Lord Royce wrinkled his nose, but did not criticize his son’s appearance. That Rex had appeared at all was boon enough. “Not even as a favor to a friend?”
Rex raised his glass of brandy. “It is your friend, your favor.”
“As a favor to me, then?”
“What, go to London where I am always half-blinded by the swirls of insincerity? Why, I doubt if there is one person in the entire city whose tongue isn’t warped with lying. If they are not dealing in falsehoods, they are spewing slander at each other.”
The earl could only nod. Being out in society made his own teeth ache with the cacophony of lies that constantly bombarded his senses.
“And now it will be worse,” Rex went on. “They will all offer regrets about my leg—when not one of the bastards means it. They’d rather I had not come home, a reminder that war is about gore and guts, not parade marches and pretty uniforms. Everyone will look at my imperfect face and pretend the scar is not there. And, recall, I was an embarrassment to the army, an unspoken blot on the corps. An officer who did not fight, a lord who did not act with honor. A spy. Do you think the whispers have not reached Town, that Daniel and I were monstrous savages, as far from gentlemen as one could fall?”
“You were wounded in the service of your country and commended any number of times. They will remember that!”
“They will remember that I tortured prisoners of war until they gave up their secrets, contrary to every code of decency. Or should I confess that I was merely listening for the truth?”
The earl sipped at his wine, looking away.
Rex lifted his own glass in a mock salute. “The way you did, Father?”
Lord Royce had not been able to defend himself against charges of corruption in the high court. What could he say? That he knew the prisoner in the dock was innocent—because the man had said so in the pure, chiming tones of truth? He’d be laughed off the bench. Instead he was accused of taking bribes. After all, what other reason could he have for freeing that poor thief instead of hanging him? All the evidence and witnesses pointed toward a guilty verdict, a successful prosecution by the Crown’s barrister, who happened to be an ambitious toad. Instead the felon had gone free—on a seeming whim. If Lord Royce were not accepting money, Sir Nigel had declared, then he was insane, irrational, unfit for the duties of the high court. Hearing the truth in a tone of voice? Humbug.