Ever His Bride Read online

  She’s your wife.

  The voice came from some irresponsible part of him, one he thought he’d evicted long years ago. She was nothing more than shifting sand that dazzled him even as it fell through his fingers. Let her go.

  “Do you always sleep in your clothes, Mr. Claybourne?”

  “No.”

  “Then do you sleep in a nightshirt?”

  “Why?”

  “I think I should know such things when I’m supervising the laundry, on such occasions that I’m at home.”

  “Ah. Well …” he said, drawing his fingers lightly from her brow, down the bridge of her nose, to settle in the vale between her lips. “You won’t find my nightshirts in the laundry, or anywhere, madam.”

  “Then you …”

  He lifted his eyebrow, waiting for the question she would not finish.

  “Oh, my.” Felicity felt her cheeks grow warm, not out of embarrassment over his sleeping in the altogether, but because some facts had just been added to her imagination. Now she could quite easily imagine her husband standing naked without his shirttails. There was still a blurring about his midsection, but she’d seen and felt enough of his bare chest to know that an arrow of sleek dark hair purposely directed her attention downward toward some point of intense interest.

  And she was pretty sure what she’d find there. The British Museum abounded in statues of well-formed Greek gods and warriors. Paintings of men wearing nothing but… paint. She just couldn’t quite imagine such a sight made flesh. And the very thought of her husband having that sort of … apparatus down there, well… No wonder she could hardly breathe for the pounding of her heart.

  “Mr. Claybourne?” She touched her palm to his chest, a feverish place that drew a sound from between her husband’s teeth.

  “Yes, Mrs. Claybourne?” He lifted her hand to kiss it, but stopped to stare down at his gaping shirtfront.

  “You’ve unbuttoned me, woman!”

  She hadn’t remembered fingering any shirt buttons, only the softly curling hair against her fingertips and the warmth of his chest.

  “Sorry, Mr. Claybourne. I had been thinking about…” Strawberries. From the day before. But she couldn’t very well confess a thing like that. Her behavior might be wanton, might encourage him, but the man was her husband, after all. And she was beginning to suffer this idea with some gladness and a bit of anticipation. He wasn’t at all the sort of husband she’d have chosen for herself. He was still a hopeless mystery to her, needed uncrating, but he was becoming a joy.

  Her husband fumbled with the buttons at the front of his shirt, but she brushed aside his floundering fingers and went to work on them herself, then broke away from him and handed him his waistcoat.

  She’d always wondered what it would be like to take lodgings with a husband in one of the country inns she’d so often written about.

  There was much to recommend.

  “I didn’t mean to pry into your clothes, Mr. Claybourne.’’ She stopped and adjusted the image in her head. “I mean, I just thought that I ought to know more about you and your habits, your life.”

  “You know enough.”

  “I know that you’re a man of vast wealth; your parents are no longer living; and that you and I are married to each other at the moment. But that’s really all I know. You didn’t even tell me your age when I asked. Do tell me about yourself, Mr. Claybourne.”

  He went still for a moment, then righted his neckcloth with a yank. “I’m nearly thirty.”

  “Not eighty. I thought not. And your birthday?”

  Hunter steeled himself against the dread, fought to hold it at bay. His wife perched herself impudently on the edge of the bed as if this were a game of questions and his role was to answer her. “I was born in 1820. The ninth of October.”

  “Did you grow up in London?”

  He swallowed hard, stared out the window and frowned through the shimmering images of his childhood, wondering which London she meant.

  “Yes,” he said finally, hearing the word drop flatly between them. Perhaps she wouldn’t notice. She must not have; her smile never flickered.

  “Which part of London, Mr. Claybourne?”

  His fists were clenched at his side, distant from him, a foreign and convicting memory of a time he’d sought to forget. He had to unlock his jaw to answer.

  “I lived in a number of places.”

  “How exciting! And did your family also have a house in the country?”

  “No.” He spat the answer and she flinched. He’d frightened her. Good. Best. Fear would restore the boundaries, would remind her of the basis for this sham of a marriage. No more questions.

  “Did you attend Eton or Harrow?”

  “Good God, woman!”

  Felicity scrambled away from him, the cold, malevolent stranger who had threatened her at the Cobsons. His warm and supple mouth had become a rigid line. His gaze had hardened; the light that seemed to have brightened with every passing day had shuttered itself.

  “I attended neither school, Mrs. Claybourne, and let that be the end of it.” He reached the door but didn’t turn. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Mr. Claybourne. I may be gone by then. To Northumberland.”

  “Go wherever the hell you want.” He threw a fistful of coins onto the dressing table and slammed the door behind him.

  “Bastard!” Not a word she used often, but the man had all the charm and manners of a rock slide. Answering a few questions about his past wouldn’t hurt him. No more prying than the questions she often asked of perfect strangers sitting beside her on the train.

  But he wasn’t a stranger, he was her husband. And a puzzle. And she wanted to know his heart.

  Refusing to take the blame for his groundless anger, Felicity bathed and took her time dressing, then sauntered into the common room for her breakfast, expecting to see him, but he wasn’t there.

  Trying to get her bearings, she read over the notes she’d taken in the last few days, and found little to recommend to her readers. The description of the workhouse at Leicester, a forsaken child and a ghastly train wreck wouldn’t serve a book whose aim was to encourage travel. At least she could recommend the Brightwater Arms for its reasonable food and lodging, with the following caveat: never share a room with a madman. Even if she had married him.

  Nearly four days on the road and nothing to show for it but a broken heart. Mr. Dolan would be mightily disappointed. One bright spot in her trip to Blenwick – Giles! The apprentice school was nearby. She’d visit him this morning, bring him back here to the Brightwater for a hearty lunch, and then leave Blenwick today by post road to rejoin her original trip. Without her husband, and without the pile of coins he’d left her. She would have to sort out this marriage of hers when she returned to London.

  Unsettled but undaunted, she made her way into the kitchen.

  “Ah, Mrs. Claybourne. You look lovely this morning. I suppose you’ll be wanting an extra rasher of bacon?” The Brightwater cook was an artist compared to Mrs. Sweeney, and Felicity had lavished the woman with praise.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “But if you could point me toward the Blenwick School—”

  “Auch!” The cook’s face screwed into a grimace. “What would you be doing at that horrible place?”

  Apprehension wriggled its evil against Felicity’s heart. “Horrible? But it’s an apprentice school, isn’t it?”

  The woman’s mouth soured. “Call it what you like, but it’s a workhouse—for children.”

  Felicity blood went cold, her heart froze. No, she couldn’t have heard right.

  “It’s a foul place, Mrs. Claybourne—governed by a man named Rundull.”

  Giles in a workhouse? And here she’d been lounging about like a sightseer, sampling the wine and cheese and her husband’s delicious kisses!

  She cursed herself for being a naive fool. She should have known the police wouldn’t give a boy like Giles the chance t
o make an honest life for himself.

  “What’s the matter, dear?” the cook asked, coming around the table to place her age-softened hand on Felicity’s forehead. “You’ve gone quite pale. Would you like to sit down?”

  Felicity shook her head and backed away. “No, no, I’m fine. Where is the school? Is it nearby?”

  “South of town, across the Wear. But you don’t want to go there, Mrs. Claybourne. There isn’t anything you can do about—”

  Felicity didn’t stay to listen, left the kitchen in a fury, packed her portmanteau, and left the Brightwater Arms.

  She didn’t have a plan, but she would rescue Giles— even if she had to level the place to the ground.

  Fifteen minutes later, Felicity stood outside the Blenwick School for Apprentices, clutching the cold iron bars of the towering gates, wondering if Giles had been as frightened as she was of the forbidding redbrick walls and the pinprick windows that reflected darkly, even in the midst of the morning.

  The grounds were pinched and enclosed by an impregnable stone and iron fence, soiled in coal smut and mud. The Queen’s Bench Prison and Newgate all rolled into one dismal complex, and guarded by a man who appeared to be asleep against the guardhouse wall, but whose eye had opened a slit as her footfalls in the cinder road announced her.

  She had exactly six pounds in her purse, should have taken Claybourne’s money off the table. How the devil was she going to get Giles out of there?

  “Yer here fer the job?” The man’s voice blared like a steam horn warning ships off the rocks. His foul breath could have melted the iron bars as it clouded past them and broke against her face.

  She stepped backward, well out of his reach, but blessing him for one thing: the seed of her plan.

  “The job, yes. Could you tell me about it, please.”

  He scowled with only one of his eyes. “Tell you ‘bout a cook’s job? Hell, you’ll be cookin’.”

  “Yes, of course, it seems a basic sort of position; but I was wondering about … the facilities, the number of meals per day, the menu…

  She stopped because he was laughing—a rather good-natured kind of laugh, one more suited for a public house than this juvenile prison that reeked of vinegar, and rotting leather, and other smells she couldn’t identify.

  “Menu? Lady, this here’s a school for ‘prentices, not Windsor Castle.”

  “And where do I apply for this job?”

  He shut off his laughter like a spigot and peered at her though the bars. “Suit yerself, lady. Come on with me.”

  Metal scraped against stone as the gate parted just far enough to allow her inside. The guard passed behind her, then bolted the gate again. Now she was a prisoner in truth.

  She followed a pace behind him toward a low-slung building, an annex to the larger, darker one. The yard was pitted with puddles and littered with unsalvageable trash. A school yard should be grassy and clean. There should be courts for playing ball and jumping rope—that’s how she’d imagined Giles at his school. The Blenwick School for Apprentices was an outrage.

  “Who am I to see, sir?” She forced the civility back into her voice. This man seemed to harbor a modicum of caring beneath his frightening exterior.

  “Mr. Rundull.”

  “Is he a fair employer? A trustworthy man? I mean … if I’m to work for him …”

  The guard stopped to look at her quite earnestly. “Let me just say that you seem a nice sort of girl, so I’ll be prayin’, miss, that you don’t get the job.”

  “Have you worked for Mr. Rundull for very long, Mister … ?”

  “Everyone calls me Arthur. Was eight when I come here. Twenty years, it’s been.”

  He was only twenty-eight? The man’s eyes were as old as Mr. Biddle’s.

  “My back don’t work so good now; Rundull said that I owed him.”

  “Owed him?”

  “For feeding me all those years. Says I have to work for him for the rest of my life.”

  “He can’t do that, Arthur. Britain has laws against slavery.”

  “Don’t know about any laws, miss—I just know Rundull’s strap.”

  “Then you just take me to Mr. Rundull. He’s the one needs strapping.”

  Arthur’s eyes got very large, and she could finally see that they were the color of sooted brick. “If you go in talkin’ like that, miss, you’ll never get the job.”

  “I’ll take my chances, Arthur.”

  He muttered something and started off again. Felicity swallowed hard before she followed him, sobered by the fact that she was, in truth, destitute enough to be forced into such a position. Mr. Claybourne’s support was temporary.

  She slipped her wedding band off her finger and slid it into the pocket of her brown traveling skirt. It would only be in the way at the Blenwick School for Apprentices.

  Chapter 15

  Felicity studied every door and lock as she followed Arthur through a series of twisting passages, routes of escape, once she found Giles. She lingered at the grimy row of windows that looked from the connecting corridor into a huge workroom.

  “Don’t be standing around here,” Arthur whispered, tugging at her arm. “Rundull don’t like the staring.”

  She shook him off and searched for Giles among the rows of children who hunkered on the floor on either side of a long center aisle. Watery light fell from the upper-story windows across a sea of small, hunched shoulders and bowed heads. Gray on gray, ashen profiles, slate-colored uniforms. She couldn’t tell one child from another.

  Some worked with hammers against small anvil-like things, and others seemed to be sewing or picking.

  “What are they doing?” she whispered, consumed with the horror.

  “Makin’ shoe tops.”

  “Shoe tops?”

  “You know. For ladies shoes. Like those ones you got on.”

  She looked down at her pristine, fashionable traveling shoe–and blushed in shame. These were a second pair she always carried in her portmanteau, had tossed away the other pair that had been nearly destroyed in the chaos of the train disaster. Had her own shoes come from a place like this? She forced herself to lift her eyes to the workshop, but couldn’t see past the grimy glass for the pool of tears.

  “How can they sit like that all day?” Her voice shook as intensely as her hands did.

  “They do it, lady, or that fellow with the birch rod gives ’em a bleedin’ good rap.”

  She wiped a stream of hot tears from her cheeks. The man with the birch was on the move toward two little girls who seemed to be sharing a brief giggle, some childhood silliness. But they were too absorbed to see the man raising the rod high above his head.

  Felicity was about to strike her fist against the window to stop him when a shout from the end of the corridor startled her into inaction. She saw the first blow land on the little girl’s back and turned away like a coward.

  A man was stalking toward her in long, furious strides.

  “What the hell are you doing in here, Arthur? You should be …” Then the face twitched into a patently false, practiced smile, his eyes raking her from bonnet-less head to her shameful shoes. “Ah, we have a visitor, I see.”

  “The lady’s come for the job.”

  “Really? The cook’s job?” Rundull seemed roundly confused for a moment, then shook himself from some unreadable notion and cast Arthur a seething frown as he motioned for him to leave.

  Arthur’s departure left Felicity feeling exposed to a choking kind of evil.

  The man’s sparse mustache clung like a smudged washtub ring to the ridge of his lip, and dropped in sinister wings to his jaw line. If he were an actor in a melodrama, he couldn’t have made up his face with any better design for terror. His gaze stung Felicity, would surely paralyze a child.

  He set his teeth. “Come this way, Miss …”

  “Mayfield. Felicity Mayfield.”

  “Delighted,” he said, leading her along the corridor in a cloud of camphor, into an office nearly
as well appointed as Claybourne’s.

  “Please, please, do sit down, Miss Mayfield.” The voice that had barked at Arthur now took on the consistency of molasses, darkly smooth and annoyingly sticky.

  “I’ll stand, thank you.”

  “As you wish,” he said, motioning to the tray on his desk, and the steaming pot. “Tea?”

  “Not for me, sir.”

  He declined the same for himself and half sat against the desktop, one ankle crossing the other. A man in his mid-fifties, well fed, and not easily sated. He nodded slightly, crossed his arms, as he scrutinized her again, from her shoes to the very top of her head, lingering overlong at her chest.

  “Now, tell me, Miss Mayfield, where have you cooked before?”

  Felicity was so used to spinning stories of late, this one came easily. “Most recently, sir, for Claybourne Manor, in Hampstead.”

  He lifted his chin and looked at her over the ridge of his nose. “How long were you in service there?”

  What was another lie? After all—she was about to kidnap a child. “Two years, Mr. Rundull, as an undercook.”

  “And why did you leave?”

  She shook her head in pity. “The master’s finances dwindled, sir.” She could imagine Claybourne’s look of shock and disgust if he ever heard her speak of his finances as dwindling. “Invested in an unlimited venture—railroading, it was, in California and, so it was whispered below stairs, he lost everything.”

  “How inopportune.” Rundull fluttered his stout fingertips on his arm he studied her. “You seem to know a great deal about the master’s business. Were you his … confidant?”

  She blushed at the implication, at the palpable approval in Rundull’s voice, and his too obvious anticipation of such favors, should he deign to hire her on as cook. She widened her stance by a half-step.

  “Honest gossip among the staff, sir. Our livelihoods were at stake in the matter.” She swallowed past a desert-dry throat.

  “Yes, certainly. Well,” Rundull said, with a knowing smile and indicating the door with his outstretched hand, “come this way, Miss Mayfield, and I will show you the kitchen.”

  It wasn’t a kitchen; it was a filthy, blackened cave, leaned up against the back of the hallway. Traffic channels had been worn into the earthen floor. Rotting refuse of every kind filled the corners. She nearly gagged.