Ever His Bride (10 page)

“I’ll get her bags, Mr. Branson,” he said,
vaulting the rear carriage wheel to the luggage boot.

“I haven’t any bags, Mr. Ernest,” she said
over her shoulder as she followed Branson toward the gloomy
house.

How could this woebegone property belong to
Hunter Claybourne? The Claybourne Exchange outshone any other
building in the City. His office spoke of careful design and
limitless finances. His home looked utterly forsaken.

A wicked beast, enchanted servants, a hoary
old manor house; the tale had frightened her as a child, and now
she’d come to live it. Dear God, what had she gotten herself
into?

“Does Mr. Claybourne actually live here, Mr.
Branson?”

“He does, indeed,” Branson said as they
passed beneath the palladian entry and into the jail-dreary foyer.
“Comes home every night. Mrs. Sweeney!”

The shout echoed off the walls and tumbled up
the massive stone staircase that clung to the central tower. Where
the Claybourne Exchange overwhelmed the senses with marble and
brass, the bleak, gray stone of Claybourne’s home dampened and
dulled the heart of any hope. Just another kind of prison. Was
there a dungeon waiting in the cellar, one designed for
Claybourne’s more stubborn debtors?

Branson lost no time waiting for this Mrs.
Sweeney to show Felicity her new home. She ran to keep up with him,
managing a racing tour of the ground floor of the eastern wing—what
little she could see of it in the near-dark—trying to memorize all
the possible exits, just in case.

Opaque drapes hung heavily over the enormous
windows in the long gallery. Crates and boxes and barrels lined
every wall and clogged every corner. The few pieces of furniture on
display shone with elegance and taste, but there was so little of
it: a gilded settee keeping solitary watch by a cold hearth in the
drawing room, a chair and a small table in the dining room.
Everything looked so temporary.

“Has Mr. Claybourne just moved in?” She
trailed a finger along a low bank of packing crates. Her glove came
away caked in dust.

“No, no. The master’s lived here five years
now, and I imagine they’ll have to carry out his cold carcass when
he dies. He doesn’t fancy change.”

“I’ll agree with you there, Branson.” Rabidly
curious, in spite of the dim shadows and the unknown terrors of the
year to come, she stopped in the middle of the wide corridor to
examine the lid of a crate. A fine coating of dust dulled the
label. Erebus Glass Works, London. Deliver to Claybourne Manor,
Hampstead.

Erebus Glass. Only the best for the
master.

“But if Mr. Claybourne has lived here five
years, why is everything still boxed up?”

“You’ll have to ask the master, Mrs.
Claybourne.” Branson continued his long stride and she followed at
a run, drawn down another corridor by the smell of an unnameable
food.

“Here we are,” Branson said, breezing through
the butler’s pantry to the whitewashed kitchen at the back of the
house.

A tall, broad-shouldered woman hunkered over
a huge steaming pot, wielding her stirring stick, doing battle with
the contents for the sovereignty of the stove. Droplets of steam
clung to the ends of the steely hair bristling from under her ivory
cap. Mist clouded her spectacles.

“Mrs. Sweeney, didn’t you hear me
calling?”

The woman looked up and squinted. “Mr.
Branson! Is that you?” She stopped her struggles and pinched the
tiny lenses off her face.

“I’ve brought the master’s new missus.”

“What? Now you wait a hardy minute, Mr.
Branson.” Mrs. Sweeney scrubbed at her lenses with her apron hem,
then pinched the frail frames back onto the end of her nose.
“There, now I can hear. Speak it again, sir.” She laughed. “I
thought you said you’d brought the master’s new missus.”

“Mrs. Claybourne,” Branson said with a well-
practiced tone of irritation, “this is Mrs. Sweeney, the cook.”

“
Mrs.
Claybourne?” the woman yipped,
adding a snort.

“I’m very glad to meet you, Mrs. Sweeney.”
Felicity felt like a newly plucked chicken on the way to the stew
pot as Mrs. Sweeney walked a circuit around her.

“Too skinny,” she said finally, dismissing
the new mistress with a wave of her hand. “Won’t eat more than a
raisin a day, I warrant.”

Felicity followed the woman, her misgivings
dismissed for the moment and her mouth watering as she approached
the darkly bubbling concoction on the stove. The food didn’t look
at all edible, but at this point she was willing to try
anything.

“I’m a very good eater, Mrs. Sweeney! I
promise! In fact, I’d like a big bowl of this soup . . . or
whatever it is.”

“Would you now?” Mrs. Sweeney laughed, a very
girlish sound coming from a woman built of brick and timber. She
was missing all of her back teeth, the lack made prominent by her
wide grin.

“Yes, ma’am, it smells heavenly.”

Mrs. Sweeney stuck her long spoon into the
watery blackness and dragged out a length of wool sacking. “Dearie
me, Mr. Branson,” she said, “if the master’s new bride likes the
taste of my dye works, think how much she’ll like my stew!”

Branson joined Mrs. Sweeney in a hearty bout
of laughter.

Felicity felt foolish only for a moment; then
her stomach let out a howl, and she had to laugh, too. Claybourne’s
servants seemed as harmless and friendly as he was threatening. At
least her days here might be untroubled. The nights would be
another matter all together.

They refused to let her eat in the kitchen.
Branson set her at the dismal little table in the cavernous dining
room, proudly pulling aside the single chair and lighting the
single candle against the darkness, even though God’s bright
sunlight shone just outside the draped windows.

Ernest, apparently Claiborne’s footman and
valet, bobbed and chattered as he served her a bowl of hearty stew,
a chunk of bread with a pot of fresh butter and another of
strawberry preserves. The moment he was gone, she moved her chair
to the window, intending to enjoy her meal in the daylight. But
when she pushed aside the drapes, a thick hedge of arborvitae
obscured the view entirely, grown so close to the panes that the
brown and denuded interior of the bushes was laid bare. An
abandoned bird’s nest hung askew among the branches, a long-dried
yolk and delicate blue-green shell preserved among the twigs just
below it.

A deep melancholy settled over her. Oh, what
a terrible year to come. She closed the drape, then retreated to
the table and its feeble candlelight.

To busy herself through the afternoon, she
found paper and pencil in one of the crates from Dove and Sons
Stationers, then set to work trying to re-create the half-dozen
entries she had lost to Mr. Pepperpot’s light-fingeredness.

When Claybourne didn’t return by dinner time,
Felicity took that meal alone in the dining room as well. Stew
again, filling and wholesome, but not exactly the fine French
cuisine she’d imagined. Ernest stood over her table, seemed intent
upon speaking, drumming his fingertips against each other.

“Is there anything I can help you with,
Ernest?”

“Ah, well . . . yes. You see, the master
didn’t send us instructions as to what to do with you, Mrs.
Claybourne. And neither did Branson before he left. I mean as far
as . . . where you’re to—”

“Where I’m to sleep?”

“Precisely.” Ernest cleared his throat. “Did
the master, or Branson, by any chance, discuss the matter with you?
Will you be taking the master’s. . . suite—”

“Actually, Ernest, it had been my assumption,
and my hope, that Mr. Claybourne would be sleeping tonight in
Hampstead and that I would be sleeping in an altogether different
county, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

The poor man seemed shocked to the
marrow.

“What I mean is, put me wherever you wish,
Ernest, except in the master’s chamber. This house is the size of a
castle. Surely there must be a guest room to spare.”

“Plenty of rooms, Mrs. Claybourne. But just
enough beds for those of us who’ve been here awhile.”

“Oh, I see.” She glanced at the crates of
Wedgewood stacked near the pantry door and understood completely.
No one had ever been invited to Claybourne Manor. And it was clear
that the master preferred it that way.

“I’m awfully sorry, Mrs. Claybourne. You
could have my bed, but I share a room with the gamekeeper. He
snores. If I can do anything—”

“A bath and some nightwear, and then some
bedding will do for now. I’ll discuss the details with Mr.
Claybourne as soon as he comes home. Which is usually when,
Ernest?”

Ernest frowned and shook his head. “Late,
Mrs. Claybourne, ma’am. Branson has gone back to the City to fetch
him. Sometimes they don’t come home till well after midnight.”

“I’ll wait up right here.”

A
s Hunter had
watched his carriage cut into the traffic and wheel away that
afternoon, he knew that his wife wasn’t at all happy. But the fool
would have actually spent the night sleeping rough if he’d allowed
it. The scandal would have rocked the foundations of the Claybourne
Exchange. The woman hadn’t the sense God gave a lump of coal!
Allowing herself to be advised by an incompetent attorney, then
deserted by a scheming uncle, conned out of her worldly goods by a
filthy urchin . . .

And now married to you, Claybourne?

Yes, and after less than two hours of
marriage, he felt as if it had been a lifetime. How long was the
coming year to feel?

Lunch with Lord Spurling had proved ripe with
impending opportunity. The man had hinted at a nomination to a
committee of the Board of Trade as soon as an opening occurred.
Hudson’s fall would surely take two members with him, maybe more.
Hunter was not quite thirty; his reputation and record spotless.
Time was on his side. And so, it seemed, was Lord Meath.

The man had been unduly charmed by his wife.
He wouldn’t exactly call the troublesome Miss Mayfield an asset,
but like any other bit of flotsam that floated his way, he would
orchestrate her talents to their fullest potential. Yes, he could
see her on his arm in Meath’s parlor, clothed in satin, her wild
hair tamed somehow, and piled atop her head and shot with silk
ribbon, exposing that long neck of hers. A necklace of pearls would
flatter her throat and bring every eye in the room to the woman
he’d married. Another reason for envy. An even greater reason to
keep himself well apart from her.

He’d spent the early evening in his office,
analyzing the prospectus for a small company that was developing a
new, more economical steel-making process, then had taken a late
dinner with two members of the prime minister’s cabinet. It wasn’t
until his carriage arrived in the courtyard of Claybourne Manor
that he realized, with a mild shock, that his wife would be
somewhere inside.

“Delivered safely, Mr. Claybourne.”

Hunter glanced at Branson and wondered when
the man’s mustache had begun to go gray. “Of course,” he said,
stomping up the front steps of the manor and into the foyer. The
staircase was blue-dark and free of shadows, silent and immense.
And all of it was his.

“Where did you put her?”

“Put her?” Branson asked, his steps halting
abruptly.

Hunter turned. “Where did you put Miss
Mayfield?” he asked, wondering if Branson’s hearing had aged as
rapidly as his close-cropped temples.

“Sir,” Branson said, brimming his hat through
his fingers, “do you mean to say Mrs. Claybourne?”

“Yes, yes, Branson. Mrs. Claybourne. Where
did you put her?”

Branson frowned. “I don’t know, sir.”

“You don’t know?”

“That part hadn’t been settled when I
left.”

“Hmmm. See to it that you find out. I want to
be sure she hasn’t bolted.”

“She promised me she would stay. Was eating
like a blacksmith as I left. I warned Ernest to send word if he had
any trouble with her. I heard nothing, sir.”

“I’m pleased to hear it. Good night,
Branson.”

The day had been long and he craved the
solace of his chamber, where he could shut the door against the
everlasting tension. His footfalls rang against the stone walls as
he climbed the wide staircase to the upper floor.

He turned at the landing and glanced down the
western corridor. She would be there somewhere, behind one of those
doors, sleeping, dreaming of her uncle and his fool’s-gold fortune.
Her hair would be slumber-tossed against one of his pillows, her
defiant chin tucked beneath his counterpane.

Wife.
A damned odd circumstance. He
thought to check on her himself, but had no idea which room was
hers and decided he would speak with her come morning, to lay down
the rules.

All was as it should be in his chamber: the
fire lit and his brandy heating on the hob, his bed turned
down.