Ever His Bride Read online

  “Ooo! Another one of them missionary ladies, Giles?” The crackling voice came from behind her and ended in a croupy cough. “Taken a fancy to yer ugly mug, has she?”

  “Shut it, Harry!” Giles said, without a glance at the other boy. “And you, Mrs. Claybourne, had best leave while y’can. We’re an unsav’ry lot.” He shoved the shirt bundle back into her arms with too much malice for a boy of ten.

  “Please take them, Giles. I owe you.” She tried to press the bundle gently into his hands, but he crossed his arms over his tattered, too-short coat.

  “No, you don’t. I was paid fine,” he said. “I stole a silver teapot and three knives. Now leave, ma’am. This is no place for th’likes of you.”

  Giles had grown taller in the last day, and tougher. Not a trace remained of the frightened little boy. But she wasn’t going to let his blustering keep her from her mission.

  “Where do you live, Mr. Pepperpot?”

  “His name is Potter, lady.”

  Giles shook a fist at the other boy, then turned that same anger back on Felicity. “It don’t matter where I live.”

  “And your name is Potter, not Pepperpot?” Claybourne had been right, the boy had lied.

  “Go, Mrs. Claybourne. Leave here, and don’t come back.” He dismissed her with a jerk of his head toward his chums, and started away.

  “But the shirts, Giles.”

  He stopped short and returned. He took hold of her arm and started toward one of the shadowy passages. “This way, Mrs. Claybourne.”

  “I know the way out!” she said. But she followed him, easily committing the route to memory, resigned to today’s failure but already planning her next foray. There were missionaries and charity homes all around London. She would see that Giles was entered into one of them, where he would be fed wholesome meals, where he would sleep on a clean mattress under warm blankets. He would get more schooling, and maybe work for Claybourne one day. Now, there was an idea that would take some clever negotiations!

  “Do you have a family, Giles?”

  He growled and stopped short in the midst of a rivulet of filth. She could feel it oozing past her shoes but refused to move.

  “What are you trying to do to me, Mrs. Claybourne?” His face wasn’t quite so red, and his voice had smoothed out some. Pride. That was the boy’s obstacle.

  “I’m just trying to set things right between us.”

  “They’re as right as they ought t’ be.”

  “Because you were honest enough to bring me my writing materials, and I wanted to let you know that I care about what happens to you.”

  “I can’t afford ya t’ care, Mrs. Claybourne. I don’t know you, an’ I don’t want to. Y’come here tryin’ out yer charity on me, and now y’ have me chums thinkin’ I’m a pulin’ babe. Go back to Hampstead.”

  “But I want to help—”

  His fury returned. “Then dump yer charity on someone ‘at wants it!”

  He took her arm and drove her faster through the twisting passages, dodging heaps of garbage and people, this alley he must know blindfolded. Then she was thrust suddenly into the bright sunshine and traffic noise of Shoreditch Road.

  “And stay away!” Giles shouted. Then his eyes narrowed, and Felicity followed his scowl as a dark and too-familiar brougham drew up beside the broken-down curbing.

  Claybourne. And he was leaping at them from the driver’s seat.

  Felicity turned back to Giles to warn him, but he’d vanished into the mean protection of his warren. She planted herself in front of the passage opening and stared down her husband.

  “Too late, Mr. Claybourne, he’s gone.”

  Claybourne’s gaze settled hard on her, weighing her down with his livid revulsion. His jaw was etched in pale stone and sweat beaded at his temples, dampened his rigid collar. He glanced over her head into the dark passage and a disgusted shudder shook him. When he took hold of her wrist with biting fingers and dragged her to the curb, his bare hand was as cold and damp as a cave wall.

  “You have no right, Mr. Claybourne. I’m a grown woman. I can go where I please.”

  “Take her.” Claybourne propelled her roughly toward Branson, then dropped her wrist as if it would somehow contaminate him. He left them standing on the curb and threw open the cab door. The carriage rocked convulsively as he climbed inside and slammed the door shut behind him.

  If she hadn’t known better, if she hadn’t smelled his aftershave instead of whiskey, she’d have thought him drunk.

  “You’ll have to sit up front with me, Mrs. Claybourne,” Branson said, plainly uncomfortable as he handed her up onto the driver’s bench.

  “Fine.” She was more than ready to leave Shoreditch Road for the moment. Her shoes were sopping with filth, and her skirts caked in an unthinkably revolting muck. She had failed Giles and lost the bundle of shirts somewhere along the way, but next time she would come prepared for his rebuff, and with candles for the children of the Beggar’s Academy.

  “I’m coming back here, Branson.”

  “The master won’t like it, Mrs. Claybourne.”

  “Good. Because I don’t like him.”

  Hunter shuttered the carriage windows and pressed his head between his palms to contain the pounding. He would have this headache until sleep scrubbed it away, until he cleansed the stench from his nostrils and his lungs. He needed cool, unadulterated air, but he dared not open a window for the piercing sunlight and the stench.

  The stench. He thought he had escaped it.

  He rode in sweltering darkness the rest of the way home, roused from the reeling blackness by the carriage wheels grating against the gravel drive of Claybourne Manor. He was home.

  She met him as he descended the cab, this wife of his who now stunk of the gutter, who stood ramrod straight in her outrage against him.

  “I won’t be treated like a child, Mr. Claybourne!”

  His throat clogged and he couldn’t breathe for the smell of her. He fought off the blackness that throbbed against his temples.

  “Take her around back, Branson,” he managed through airless lungs. “To the plow shed.”

  “Do you plan to imprison me again, sir?”

  He wanted to throttle her, but he balled his hands and left the courtyard for the clean, cold air of the foyer, closing off his ears to his wife’s colorful tirade as it weakened to a single strand and then disappeared around the rear of the house.

  Bile rose in his throat as he threw open his chamber door. He ripped his coat lining as he wrenched out of the clinging wool. Sweat soaked through to its buttons.

  She had done this to him. She’d dragged him to that vile place with her insubordination. He’d warned her to leave the boy alone, not to get involved with his kind of corrupt filth. But disobeying his commands was what his wife seemed to do best.

  His hands shook as he tore off his damp shirt, scattering pearly buttons into the air as they fell victim to his fumbling struggle. He swabbed his face and chest with cold water from the pitcher.

  Damn the woman! He would make his demands crystal clear to her this time. She would remember this warning, this moment till the end of her days.

  Voices from below his window drew him to finger the curtains apart. Branson was leading Miss Mayfield along the overgrown path toward the plow shed hidden amongst the brambles in the ravine. She was giving the man an earful, shaking her fist at the house, slapping at his hands.

  Hunter’s head still pounded, but he’d passed through the worst of it. He couldn’t let this woman, this transient wife, unstructure his days. He dressed in clean trousers and shirt, grabbed a blanket, then made his way to the rear of the house.

  He could hear the rumble of his wife’s angry fists thrumming against wooden walls even as he made his way through the undergrowth.

  Branson was standing guard at the closed door and solemnly shook his head as Hunter approached. “She’s angry, sir.”

  “So am I,” he said flatly. The thumping from inside
the shed echoed the pounding of his headache with remarkable precision.

  “Frankly, sir,” Branson said with a sniff, looking down at the blanket Hunter carried, but unwilling to look him in the eye, “I’m not too happy myself. At the moment.”

  He had never seen Branson with his lower lip thrust out in such a sulk. The man had taken the wrong side in this war. “Don’t forget who pays your salary, Branson. Leave now. And keep the staff away until I return to the house.”

  Branson gave him a suspicious glare and seemed to consider asking why, but nodded stiffly then disappeared through the tangle of brush.

  “I can hear you out there Claybourne, you bastard!” She emphasized his name and the epithet with another thunk against the wall. “I can smell you!”

  Hunter gathered his anger into a manageable knot and yanked open the shed door. “I’m surprised you can smell anything but yourself!”

  Her fist was raised to strike the wall again. Instead, she leaned against the doorframe and slanted him a belligerent smile. “Ah, you’ve brought me a blanket, I see. Is this lovely shed to be my new chamber?”

  “You seem to favor the slums, Miss Mayfield. This is far better lodging than you’d find anywhere in Bethnal Green.”

  “As if you’d know or care!”

  The woman had grown fierce in her ignorant defense of London’s refuse. Filth sought its own kind— he’d learned that truth early in his life. It was time that his wife learned the lesson as well.

  Even in the soft afternoon breeze, the stench on her clothes nearly felled him, threatened to send him reeling again. Couldn’t she smell it? His stomach stood on end.

  “Come with me, Miss Mayfield.”

  “I’ll stay here in my new chamber, thank you. It’s more airy than that depressing crypt you call home.”

  His patience at an end, he grabbed her by the elbow and led her like a recalcitrant child into the leafy bracken, away from the house.

  “Where the devil are you taking me?” Felicity panicked and made a grab for a stand of willow. She missed, and clung for a moment to Claybourne’s shirt sleeve to keep from strangling herself. His broad strides never changed. “If you kill me out here in the woods, Mr. Claybourne, someone will miss me and come looking.”

  “Who, Miss Mayfield? The ever faithful Mr. Biddle? Now there’s a man to trust.”

  “Well, I certainly don’t trust you, Mr. Claybourne! Let me go.”

  He hurried her down an embankment, catching her arm when she slid, but otherwise keeping her at a stiff-arm’s distance as he trounced her through the nettles. He stopped abruptly at the edge of a wide stream.

  “Get in,” he said.

  “Get in where?”

  She was standing on the brink of a crystal pool that had been created from a natural dam of rock and fallen trees. On any other day this would be a rare place of sylvan contentment, with its canopy of maple and beech, but on this particular day, her unhinged husband was holding her by the scruff of the neck and was threatening her life.

  “What do you mean, Mr. Claybourne? You want me to get into the water?”

  “Get in and clean yourself up.” He let go of her but left no escape, except across the water.

  “Clean up? Do you mean bathe? In here?”

  “That’s what I mean. Now, into the water.”

  The man was truly mad! She laughed and stood her ground. “Sir, I have a perfectly good bathtub in my chamber. Warm water, a screen, a new lock—”

  “You’re not going back into my house until you’ve cleansed yourself of Bethnal Green.” Claybourne’s breath came and went in short bursts, out of proportion with the energy he’d expended in his uncaring strides. He swabbed sweat from his face with the blanket he had dragged along.

  “You can’t be serious, Mr. Claybourne.” Sure, the front of her dress was caked in muck and looked like she’d used it for a doormat, and she smelled like a cesspit. Where was the man’s sense of the absurd? “It’s just a little mud. I’ll launder it myself—”

  “Get in,” he repeated, growling as he took a sharp step toward her. “Now.”

  He was deranged. She had married a madman! Better to humor him and his blazing temper for the moment. She was an excellent swimmer; once in the water she could cross the pool, put the stream between them, and then add the rest of the county as well.

  “And don’t even consider running from me, Miss Mayfield. My hounds will find you.”

  Wonderful—a madman who read minds. Very well, wet or dry, she would find a way out of this. She bent to unlace her shoes.

  “Leave the shoes,” he said, dropping the blanket onto the mossy bank at his feet. He took another deliberate step in her direction, and Felicity stumbled a few yards into the stream until the icy water reached her knees.

  “There, Mr. Claybourne,” she said, swishing the hem of her skirt across the surface to lift out the worst of the grime. The water clouded as it eddied away from her. “Are you happy now?”

  He must not have been. He yanked off his coat, and stalked into the stream toward her.

  “What are you doing, sir? Don’t you come near me!” She backed away from the flaming determination in his eyes, but he kept coming. She was chest-deep in the middle of the stream when he put his hands on her shoulders, and shoved her down.

  Dear God, he was going to drown her! She grabbed a breath as she went under, clutched at the madman’s trouser legs and plucked at his hands, kicking out at him to get away. But then he grabbed a fistful of sleeve and yanked her to the surface.

  She came up splashing violently and sputtering. “Why not just use a washboard on me, Claybourne?”

  “Too bad I didn’t think of it, woman!” He caught her arms, and held her in front of him. His hair hung in midnight rivulets, and he was soaked to the skin. He looked like a village boy who’d gotten dressed up for Sunday, only to find the creek too inviting to resist.

  “Now, Miss Mayfield, you’ll take off your clothes.”

  “I’ll do nothing of the sort!” She stumbled backward a step, but he followed and caught her by the skirts.

  The current tugged at her, and Claybourne held her against him lest she float away. The water eddied around him and picked up his warmth, gliding past her legs and across her chest.

  “Your choice, madam. Remove your clothes or you’ll stand here until you fall unconscious from the cold. You’re filthy, and I won’t have you in my house.”

  “So each time I return from the slums, you’re going to try to drown me in the stream?”

  Heat poured off him in billowing sheets and she soaked up the warmth greedily. “There won’t be a next time!”

  She opened her mouth to contradict him but knew there was no point. She would fulfill her promise to the children of the Beggar’s Academy, with or without Claybourne’s consent.

  “Why did you come after me, Mr. Claybourne? What does it matter to you if I want to spend a few of my own pennies to help a child? To repay him for the shirt you tore, I might add.”

  “I came after you because you’re a fool, Miss Mayfield.”

  “I’m a fool? You’re the one who is standing over his wife, forcing her to bathe in a frigid stream. Can I get out now?”

  He released her. “Not until that dress and any other piece of clothing that touched the streets of Bethnal Green are lying right there.” He pointed to the bankside as he stalked out of the stream. “I’ll give you three minutes to cover yourself with that blanket.”

  His shirt was soaking wet and fascinatingly transparent against the well-carved back muscles beneath. She wondered how a man who spent his days holed up in an office like a mole could boast the brawn of a laborer. He turned back to her, and she found the same definition in his chest. Well-worked, well-formed muscle. Planes and angles that begged her hand.

  “Undress—now.”

  She’d been staring, boldly. Had her mouth been hanging open, too? “You’ll keep your back turned, Mr. Claybourne.”

  “For as l
ong as I hear movement.”

  Her legs were beginning to cramp; she needed to get out of the stream. She muttered and curse him as she worked her way out of the wet bodice and skirt, and the first of her two petticoats. Her camisole and the other petticoat were clean and unmarked by the mud, but now her drawers threatened to fall off with the weight of the water. She slogged her way out of the stream.

  Claybourne was staring at her when she raised her head.

  “How long have you been watching, Mr. Claybourne?”

  “Long enough.” He’d been chewing on a shoot of sedge grass and now spat it into the brush. He took hold of her shoulders and turned her in a circuit.

  “Do I pass inspection, sir?” She followed his gaze down the front of her and immediately wished she had taken up wearing a corset and stays. Her camisole might as well have been window glass, for all the details it exposed. She could plainly see color and puckering definition at the tips of her breasts. Claybourne must have noticed, too. His hands blazed hot against her arms, and his breathing had gone ragged. She ought to run or find fault with his staring, but that bewildering urge to rise up on her toes and kiss him rooted her to the spot. His scowl darkened, and then the blanket came around her, warm from a patch of sunlight.

  “This way,” he said, starting up the bankside.

  Feeling deserted and dismissed, she followed after him, hobbled by the blanket and the weight of her petticoat. When she didn’t follow quickly enough, he came back for her, lifting her easily into his arms.

  “I can walk, sir.”

  He didn’t reply, but kept his gaze transfixed on the trail in front of him, and finally on the unkempt garden path where the entire staff had gathered. He strode with her past Mrs. Sweeney and Ernest, into the kitchen, past Branson who was unpacking a crate of dishes, and up the stairs to her chamber. Someone had lit a fire in the grate.

  Claybourne stood her upright in front of the hearth like one of the Egyptian sarcophagi on display at the British Museum. Then he left the room without another word. She heard his chamber door slam across the hall.

  At least he hadn’t drowned her. Perhaps she wouldn’t be so lucky next time. She unwound herself from the blanket, removed her wet clothes then wrapped herself in her night-robe and made it to the window just in time to see him step up into his carriage.