Ever His Bride (25 page)

“Mrs. Claybourne!” Her husband was looking
down on her, fiend-featured in the red-tinged shadows. “Damn your
eyes, woman! Here’s your sling; now put yourself into it. I’ve lost
three men to the heat.”

But she was already fitting an injured woman
into the blanket hoist. “We don’t need a panic down here, Mr.
Claybourne. Now, hoist away.”

He did as she’d asked, dragging the
frightened woman to the hole in a single movement.

Her husband had taken on the guise of an
avenging angel, a contrast so completely at odds with the craven
fiend of a few weeks ago. He dropped the sling at her feet and she
loaded another passenger.

“This was to be your car, Mrs. Claybourne,”
he said through his teeth, as he hauled the man out of the stifling
car. “You would have been one of the bruised and battered.”

She helped another man across the rubble.
“Are you saying, Mr. Claybourne, that you saved my life by bullying
me into riding with you?”

“Whatever my methods, damn it, they worked.
Now, hurry!”

“And if I had refused your invitation?”

He snorted. “Then I’d have torn my way into
this car with my bare hands, Mrs. Claybourne.”

She touched her thumb to the back of her
wedding band, a new and surprisingly weighty presence in her life.
She felt suddenly lighthearted, and very much in awe as she looked
up into his frowning face. “I think you have, already.”

Claybourne growled at her each time he lifted
another victim from the railcar, but the system was working and
only a few remained.

“Hurry, Claybourne!” The panicked shout had
come from somewhere outside, beyond her husband. “Another oil tank
has split. We can’t hold back the flames.”

“Out, wife!” Claybourne bellowed. “Get into
the sling! Now!”

“There are two more before me, Mr.
Claybourne. We can do it!” Felicity steered a young man along the
bank of upright benches, hoping that he hadn’t lost his sight for
good. Claybourne yanked the young man skyward, and nearly unseated
the last young woman in his hurry to haul her through the hole.

“Sit down now, Mrs. Claybourne!”

“Yes, I’m coming, Mr. Claybourne.” The heat
had grown tremendous, and she was light-headed enough to think she
saw flames eating through the rear of the car.

“Bloody hell, woman! Into the sling.”

“Yes sir.” As she was about to sit down, a
mound of clothing moved in the corner—and then it moaned. She’d
missed someone.

“Wait, Mr. Claybourne!”

“God damn it! Now!”

But she stumbled away from the sling, coughed
into the hem of her skirt as she untangled the woman from the pile
of debris and led her into the safety of the canvas sling.

Her eyes stung and her ears, too, as the car
began to fill with smoke and Mr. Claybourne’s constant bellowing.
She coughed in a fit and tried to see through the coming darkness,
but the world had become much too hot and much too close. And
sounded of wrenching metal that seemed to be hammering on her
skull.

“Felicity!”

As she heard her name called from some
brighter place, she wondered where the enormous, dark angel had
come from, and how he’d managed to find his way through the flames
and the smoke.

“Damn fool of a woman!” Hunter’s heart had
been crammed into his throat all the while he’d been tearing away
the last of the metal sheeting with a strength he hadn’t known he
possessed. Now he leaped into the smoke-filled railcar, and found
her just where he’d seen her fall. He yanked her into his arms,
wanting desperately to hold onto her.

“I’m all right, Mr. Claybourne!” She started
coughing and struggled against him. “Let go!”

“Be still, wife, or you’ll kill us both!” He
kissed her forehead even as he put her into the sling. He didn’t
want to think about how glad he’d been to hear her impatient little
voice, squawking at him through the smoke.

He watched her rise up, damning the smoke
that stung his lungs, cursing his wife for being the most
bullheaded creature ever put on this earth. When he was brought out
of the hole, he found her on the ground, bent over on her hands and
knees in the bushes, retching and coughing.

Hiding his immeasurable fear inside his
righteous anger, he left her to her misery, wiping the sting of
smoke from his eyes, and dismissing the tidal wave of relief that
blocked off his breathing.

The little fool would live. And he couldn’t
remember ever being so exceedingly happy in all his life.

Two hours later a steady whistle sounded in
the distance, but Hunter couldn’t muster the strength to join in
the cheer that went up as the others ran toward the rescue train
steaming in from Blenwick. The engine and a passenger car chugged
to a stop a hundred yards from the wreckage. An old locomotive and
a rattle-trap railcar, but they would do the job.

“About time,” he whispered, his throat
scraped raw with the smoke and his shouting. He’d barked enough
orders in the last few hours to last him a lifetime. They had only
listened to him because they thought he knew what he was doing. He
had discovered early in his life that people were sheep, constantly
searching for a shepherd, too timid or uncertain to claim the title
for themselves.

Hunter was grateful for his wife’s command
over the injured, for the way she had rallied after he’d rescued
her from the railcar. She had a flair for ordering people around,
and not even the bystanders had been left without a task.

God, he was tired.

“I say there, Mr. Claybourne!” The stout
Blenwick stationmaster wheezed as he approached, wheeling his arms
to stay upright amid the debris. “There you are, sir. A team from
Her Majesty's Railway Inspectorate has come by the post road from
Durham.”

“Already?”

“I wired them as soon as I heard. When I
mentioned your name, sir, they said they wanted to talk with you
about the accident.”

The inspectors would be vastly interested in
anything associated with George Hudson, especially an accident such
as this. Another brush with the Board of Trade could only enhance
his own position. Meath would doubtless be impressed to learn of
his involvement.

He glanced around for his wife, a reaction
that had become quite automatic and inordinately pleasing in the
last few hours—despite the fact that she looked, from head to toe,
like a sooted-up chimney sweep.

There she was now, herding a group of
children past the wreckage toward the rescuing railcar. She paused
at the door, and raised her hand to shield her eyes against the
first gilding rays of the sun. He was overly delighted that his
ring had made it through the long night, and still encircled her
finger. She smiled at him, and even from this distance, his
quixotic heart took a mad tumble against his chest.

“Damned woman,” he muttered.

“What’s that, sir?”

“Never mind. Show me to the inspectors.”

Felicity settled Andy and Betts safely into
the train, tucked them together in the same seat, covered their
skinny limbs with her battered shawl she’d found near their first
class railcar.

“Thank you, miss!” Andy stretched up to hug
her. “You’ve been ever so kind. Hasn’t she, Betts?”

“My most favoritest angel,” Betts said
through sleep-heavy eyes.

“And you children have been ever so helpful!”
She kissed both of the smudged foreheads. “And don’t forget to tell
your parents how brave you both were.”

Betts dipped her head at the compliment, and
shared a solemn countenance with her brother. “We won’t forget to
tell nobody about you, miss.”

The whistle blew, and she felt suddenly
guilty for leaving the children on their own. But their parents
were no doubt waiting at the station in Blenwick, terrified and
relieved that neither had received more than a scratch in the
accident. And she’d promised the injured passengers that she would
help collect their belongings and have them waiting at Blenwick
Station.

The train lurched forward in warning.

“Take care of each other,” she whispered,
hurriedly kissing them again before stepping out of the car onto
the landing. A belch of smoke rolled into her face.

“Jump, for God’s sake! Here!”

She looked down through the gritty cloud to
find her husband striding along the embankment, steaming like a
locomotive, keeping pace with the train, his arms extended as if he
were one of those Italian circus performers, waiting to catch her
as she flew through the air.

“Jump, damn it!”

She would have stepped off the barely moving
train in her usual manner, but he caught her around the waist,
whirled her out of the way of the car, and slung her under his arm
like a sack of potatoes—all in a single, fluid motion.

“Put me down, Mr. Claybourne. I can walk.”
She kicked her legs and tried to meet the ground with her foot. He
merely held her tighter and kept walking.

“What the hell do you think you were doing?”
he asked, his chin squared off, focused on the wreckage ahead of
them.

“I was bidding farewell to the injured,” she
said.

“You were trying to kill yourself.”

“Poppycock, Mr. Claybourne.”

He finally set her on her feet next to an
empty flatcar that had remained on the track, but leveled a
soot-blackened finger at her. “The train was in motion, Mrs.
Claybourne. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

She smiled because he was hovering like a
storm and thundering at her. “I used to jump from trains all the
time when I worked with Father. Jump, tuck, and roll—that’s the
trick. Oh, and it helps to be relaxed, and not to land in a briar
patch. I did that once. Was plucking thorns from my . . . well,
from everywhere for months.”

“Your father let you jump from moving
trains?”

“He taught me how.”

“The damn fool!”

“It was part of the job, Mr. Claybourne; part
of engineering a well-laid track, part of evaluating the final
product.”

“You’re married to me now. Don’t let me catch
you leaping from a moving train ever again.” With his sinewy, sooty
arm extended above his shoulder in a gesture worthy of a member of
parliament, he looked like an orator.

She had to smile. “You won’t catch me, Mr.
Claybourne. I assure you.”

She left him to his scowling and began the
weary task of gathering up scattered belongings and piling them at
the railhead. She sent a would-be scavenger scurrying with a
well-aimed rock to his backside.

“Thief!” she shouted after him, and doubled
her search for lost items and even found her portmanteau and
Claybourne’s as well.

She couldn’t help watching him and the
investigators as she collected the baggage. They were terribly
uncoordinated in their efforts. She stood at a spot below the grade
of the railroad bed and decided to point out a few things, just in
case.

“You missed this!” she shouted.

Her husband was the first to look up out of
the knot of men. A frown of incomprehension made him appear fierce
and very unlike the man who had kissed her so nicely in the
train.

“Never mind, Mrs. Claybourne,” he
shouted.

He returned his attention to the stout man
beside him. But his bellowing had caused a half-dozen pair of eyes
to focus on her, and then back onto him.

“You ought to see this,” she shouted.

Claybourne left the group and came toward
her, striding down the slight incline like an avalanche. “We’re
conducting an official investigation here—”

“I would hope so.” She pointed to the
slightly misaligned railroad blocks. “You can see the problem
there, Mr. Claybourne: this part of the curve takes too much of the
kinetic force. The blocks beneath have twisted almost imperceptibly
out of place over the years. The embankment should have been
strengthened when the bigger engines—”

He hauled her backward, fitting her against
his chest, and spoke behind her ear in that very low tone. “Stay
out of this, Mrs. Claybourne. These men are from the from Her
Majesty's Railway Inspectorate, each of them seconded to the Board
of Trade from the Corp of Royal Engineers. They know what they are
doing.”

Two of the sappers arrived in a hail of
sliding gravel. “Is this your wife, Mr. Claybourne?” the stouter
one asked.

“She is that, Sawyer. And fancies herself a
railway inspector, I’m afraid.”

“I was just showing Mr. Claybourne the
maladjusted track.”

“Yes, of course.” Sawyer nudged the other man
and studied her with grave suspicion.

She walked out of her husband’s arms and
prodded her foot along the section of rail that had sprung loose
from its moorings, and now stuck out perpendicular to the track.
“And this rail is only forty-two pounds to the yard, far too light
for the weight of the rolling stock. This should have been caught
when the track was laid.”

Sawyer lifted his spectacles to his forehead
and looked at her with an intensity matched only by the glare she
was certain her husband had fixed on the back of her head. “How is
it you know this, madam?”

“My father was a railway engineer: Phillip
Mayfield. You may have heard his name.”

Sawyer rocked back on his heels. “A fine
fellow, a fine engineer, indeed.” He beamed suddenly. “Then you
must be little Felicity! By gravy, you are! I haven’t seen you
since you were a kitten, and I was your father’s draftsman. Ah, but
since then, you’ve become quite a beauty, and I’ve lost most of my
hair.”

“John Sawyer! I do remember you.” A much
leaner man then, with a full head of curly red hair, and a fine
tenor voice. As she offered her hand, she caught Claybourne’s
scowl.

Sawyer graciously took her hand in his and
turned her toward the others. “All of you must remember Phillip
Mayfield. This is his daughter, Felicity Mayfield.”

Her husband’s eyes hardened. “Felicity
Claybourne
,” he muttered.