Merline Lovelace (17 page)

“I know you’ll understand if I don’t stand on ceremony with you, sir. I fear Lady Barbara may still be feeling the after effects of our long journey and is gallantly trying to hide her distress. May I beg leave to take her back to the hotel?”

“Of course, of course!”

Jumping up, Jackson himself pulled Barbara’s chair back for her. She rose, took two steps, and clamped both arms around her waist.

She couldn’t fight the wrenching pain this time. Caught in its vicious vise, she bent double. The painted canvas covering the floor blurred. She would have fallen flat on her face if not for Zach. His hands steadied her. His voice rumbled soothingly in her ear.

“It’s all right, darling. Retch if you need to.”

Perspiration stung her eyes. She was hot. So very hot.

“I…I just need air.”

Zach scooped her into his arms. She leaned into him, still in the grip of the awful agony. From a great distance she heard the president instruct Zach to carry her immediately to an upstairs bedchamber.

“I’ll send for my personal physician. In the meantime, Mrs. Camden, the head housekeeper, can assist you.”

By the time Zach laid her on a massive four-poster, the cramps were attacking Barbara with unrelenting brutality. His face was an indistinct blur. The canopy above him spun crazily. She wrapped her arms around her middle and kept trying to curl into a tight ball while he stripped off her outer garments and loosened her corset.

Vaguely, she heard someone else bustle in. Heard, too, a swift, indrawn hiss.

“That’s blood on her petticoats, sir.”

“I see it.”

At that point the anguish consumed Barbara. With an inarticulate sound, she gave herself up to it.

B
arbara drifted in that half state between slumber and wakefulness. Her mind foggy, her body limp, she tried to pinpoint the faint clicking sound that penetrated her sleepy haze.

It was sleet, she decided after a while. Hitting the windowpanes.

For a moment or two she imagined herself a child again, tucked warm and snug in her bed, while rain danced against the leaded panes of Whitestone Manor.

But Whitestone was gone. Sold to creditors after her father’s death on the dueling field. She had no home. Neither she nor Harry.

Harry.

Harry was in trouble. He needed her.

And Zach. Where was Zach?

Barbara tried to open her eyes. Her lids felt as
though they were glued together. She forced them up with a small grunt.

Something stirred at the sound. A pale blur drifted through the darkness and hovered at her side. She thought at first it was a ghost, some specter from the grave waiting to claim her. Dark eyes burned in a face shadowed in shades of gray. She cringed back against the pillows, but couldn’t escape.

An arm slid under her neck, raised her up a few inches. Something cool touched her lips. She tried to turn her head, heard a deep voice command her to drink.

The next time she woke, the shadows were gone. Thin slices of sunlight teased their way through drawn drapes and filled the room with weak, watery light.

Barbara stared at the gold tassels decorating red velvet drapes for long moments before dragging her gaze to the portrait hanging on a wall covered in crimson silk. A bewigged gentleman dressed in the style of twenty years ago stared back at her somberly. She didn’t recognize him or the velvet drapes, but she was sure those silver-backed brushes on the dressing table were hers. As was the valise sitting on the floor beside the table. She fretted about both until a more pressing concern gradually took precedence.

She tried to throw off her heavy covers, but they weighted her down. The best she could manage was
a restless stir. The movement was enough to summon a round, red-faced woman to her bedside.

“Well, then!” Her cheerful countenance matched her bracing tone. “You’re awake.”

“Who…?” She swiped her tongue along lips as dry as parchment. “Who are you?”

“Mrs. Camden. I’m head housekeeper here at the White House. I’ve been helping tend to you. You’ve been quite ill, m’dear. Quite ill indeed. Here, take a drink of this.”

Propping Barbara up with a stout arm, the housekeeper held a glass filled with a milky liquid to her lips. The concoction tasted of cool, refreshing mint, but the mere act of swallowing it brought tears to her eyes.

“I know, I know.” Clucking sympathetically, Mrs. Camden eased her patient back to the pillows. “Your throat aches something fierce. And no wonder. You retched for hours after Dr. Armbruster administered that purge to empty your stomach.”

Bits of it came back to Barbara now. The swirl of unfamiliar faces. The horrid, endless vomiting. The pain. Dear God above, the pain! The mere memory of it popped beads of sweat out on her temples.

“Shall I bathe your face?” her housekeeper asked. “You’ll feel more the thing, I promise you.”

There was a more pressing concern that needed tending to first. “Chamber…pot,” Barbara croaked.

“Yes, of course. Here, I’ll assist you.”

Her movements were as shaky and awkward as a new foal’s. When she flopped back onto the pillows, the room spun. Gulping, Barbara closed her eyes and prayed the awful sickness wouldn’t attack once again.

“You were fortunate Dr. Armbruster lives but two blocks away and arrived as quickly as he did.”

Bustling about, the housekeeper dipped a cloth in a china washbasin and wrung it out.

“You really should be more careful with cowbane, m’dear. A pinch or two to relieve cramps is fine when you have your monthlies, and you certainly wouldn’t be the first woman to use more to rid herself of an unwanted babe. But too much could kill you along with the babe.”

Barbara heard only one word. Her babe. The child she’d only begun to suspect she might be carrying. In an instinctive gesture as old as time, she wrapped protective arms across her stomach.

“It’s…gone?”

“No, m’dear.” Gently, Mrs. Camden drew the cool cloth over her patient’s face and neck. “You bled some, but didn’t pass it.”

Like a bird on the wing, Barbara soared from despair to blinding joy. She didn’t understand how the possibility she carried a child had come to consume her in such a short space of time. Or why she felt such relief that she hadn’t lost it. She’d sort through these whirlwind emotions later. For now, all that
mattered was that the child had remained lodged in her womb.

“It’s difficult, I know, you being unmarried and a lady at that,” the housekeeper said with another sympathetic cluck. “But such things happen. Take heart that waistlines are still high enough to hide a swollen belly for as long as you’ve a mind to.”

She dipped the cloth in the china bowl and wrung it out again.

“Not that you’d need to hide it. From the way Lieutenant Morgan insisted on helping tend to you, a blind man could see how the wind blows with him. He’ll do the right thing by you, m’dear. If that’s what you desire, of course.”

At the moment, Barbara didn’t know
what
she desired, except perhaps another swallow of that cool, soothing drink.

“Whatever you decide, though, don’t resort to cowbane again. It’s too dangerous.”

She wanted to protest she’d put only a pinch in her tea. A mere dusting of the dried, grayish-green leaves. Her throat ached too much to form the words.

“There.” The older woman surveyed her handiwork. “I’ll just brush your hair and help you into a clean nightdress, shall I, before Lieutenant Morgan returns. I insisted he go down and take some breakfast,” she added with a confiding smile. “Other than a quick trip to the hotel to fetch your things, he hasn’t left your side for more than a few minutes at a time.”

When Zach rapped on the door to the bedchamber, Barbara had downed the rest of the mint-flavored liquid and could speak in something more than a croak. With Mrs. Camden’s assistance, she struggled to a sitting position in the wide four-poster. The housekeeper propped another pillow behind her before hurrying over to admit the lieutenant.

Barbara’s first thought was that he looked as wretched as she felt. Red rimmed his eyes, and fatigue had carved deep furrows on either side of his mouth. He’d obviously shaved, but his uniform coat showed considerable wear and his stock was tied with something less than its usual precision.

He crossed the room to where she lay and took her hand. The warmth of his palm was infinitely comforting. His shuttered expression somewhat less so.

“How do you feel?”

“Disgustingly weak.”

“You’ll get your strength back fast enough,” Mrs. Camden predicted cheerfully. “I’ll go down to the kitchens, shall I, and have Cook prepare you a hearty stew.”

She left Zach standing beside the bed. Barbara gripped his hand, as if to draw from his strength.

“You gave us quite a scare,” he said slowly.

“So I’ve been told.”

“Thankfully, Dr. Armbruster guessed at once
you’d eaten something that violently disagreed with you and purged your stomach.”

His eyes were hooded as they searched her face.

“We didn’t know what that something was until I went back to the hotel and Hattie showed me the cowbane she’d procured for you.”

So that’s how Mrs. Camden knew of it. Barbara had wondered, but until this moment hadn’t put her thoughts together.

“Hattie said she warned you to be careful with it.”

“Yes, she did. It appears I sadly underestimated the herb’s effect. I’m…I’m mortified to have caused such a fuss.”

He withdrew his hand from hers. She missed its warmth instantly.

“Is that what bothers you, Barbara? You caused a fuss?”

“That, of course, and…”

She picked at the red coverlet, wondering how much he knew, how much he guessed. Mrs. Camden had assumed Barbara had taken the cowbane to abort an unwanted babe. Did Zach think the same? Agonizing over what to tell him, she let the moment for truth slide past.

Her silence heaped coals on the anger burning in Zach’s gut. Didn’t the woman realize how close she’d come to death?

He’d held her while she twisted and moaned, had forced her jaws open while Armbruster poured that
vile purge down her throat. During the torturous hours that followed, she’d drenched him with her sweat and near covered him in vomit.

Neither had bothered him. He was a soldier. A frontiersman. Dysentery and cholera and yellow fever regularly swept through the ranks. Zach had assisted the surgeons treating his troops in garrison and tended to their wounds himself on the march. More than once, he’d pushed protruding bones or spilled intestines back inside gaping wounds. He would have sworn nothing Barbara did could give him a disgust of her.

Then a tearful Hattie had handed him a half-empty paper twist and a folded oilskin packet.

That Barbara would risk her life to rid herself of his child he could understand, if not condone. That she could sit there, look him in the eye and allow more lies to pile up between them drove a sharpened stake right through his gut.

“I brought your valise from the hotel.”

Perplexed by his abrupt change of subject, she glanced at the tapestry-covered grip.

“So I see.”

“This was inside it.”

Reaching into the breast pocket of his uniform coat, Zach withdrew the oilskin packet and dropped it on the coverlet. He refused to feel so much as a flicker of remorse when Barbara’s cheeks lost the little color that had returned to them. Like a rabbit con
fronted by a hissing rattlesnake, she stared at the small square in frozen horror.

After several moments of stark silence, she lifted her gaze to his. “Did…? Did you read it?”

She saw the answer in his face.

“What a stupid question,” she said in a low, strangled voice. “Of course you did.”

“How did you come by that document?”

When she looked away, Zach’s fury slipped its tether. Curling his hand under her chin, he brought her face back to his.

“No more lies, Barbara! I want the truth, if you have it in you.”

Her face was paper white, her eyes wide. The spark of defiance that kindled in their turquoise depths killed any regret Zach felt at handling her so roughly.

“Where did you get that affidavit, woman?”

“Harry lifted it from a corpse.”

“Christ!”

He might have known. Harry. It always came back to Harry. Zach was close to hating the man.

“Did he kill for this bit of parchment?”

“No!”

The denial was instantaneous, the shock behind it convincing enough for Zach to ease his hold on her chin. Ruthlessly, he suppressed a twinge of conscience as she sank back against the pillows.

“He took it from a French émigré,” she said wearily, “imprisoned for indebtedness. The man was
chained next to Harry on the ship transporting them to Bermuda. The man took ill, became delirious and ranted about the…the half-breed savage who’d inherited the fortune that rightfully should have come to his family.”

Zach’s jaw clenched. He’d needed only a single reading of the bishop of Reims’ sworn statement to grasp its import. With a few strokes of his pen, the bishop had invalidated his mother’s first marriage and dispossessed her of her inheritance from Henri Chartier.

He said nothing, though. He wanted to hear the story from Barbara’s lips.

“Just before this émigré died,” she said in a voice that grew hoarser by the moment, “he whispered to my brother that he’d sewn a document into the lining of his coat. One that would prove his claim. Harry stole it that same night.”

That’s how it had happened. Harry
swore
that’s how it had happened. Barbara wouldn’t allow herself to doubt it.

“So your brother decided to claim this fortune and appointed you his emissary.”

It wasn’t a question, but she answered anyway.

“Yes.”

She should have felt relief that the truth was out at last. Instead, a great weight seemed to have settled on Barbara’s chest. She knew the crushing ache had much to do with the coldness in Zach’s eyes.

“Enlighten me on one point. You traveled to Fort Gibson armed with what you believed was the means to dispossess my mother. Why didn’t you use it?”

“I intended to.”

The admission sapped the little strength Barbara had regained. Dragging in a shaky breath, she struggled to continue. “When I learned you’d read the law, I guessed you would fight my claim in the courts.”

“You had the right of that!”

“I didn’t have time for a lengthy court battle. Harry’s situation is too desperate. I decided to play on your mother’s sympathies and take what I could get.”

She didn’t realize she’d given away the rest of her scheme until she saw awareness dawn on Zach’s face.

“You couldn’t take the time for a court battle,” he repeated. “I must assume, then, you never intended to return to London, either.”

“No.”

Feeling almost as miserable as she had at the president’s dining table, Barbara wanted only to finish this ordeal.

“I intended to cash your bank draft, leave you here in Washington and take ship for Bermuda. I thought… I still think…to bribe the guards and buy Harry’s release.”

“First, though, you had to rid yourself of the annoyance of a pregnancy.”

“No! I wasn’t…I didn’t…”

“Your lies won’t wash this time,” he snarled. “I saw the paper twist containing the powdered cowbane. It was half-empty.”

“But I used only a pinch! I swear, I…”

The anguished protest died in her throat. He didn’t believe her. She could see it in his eyes. Why should he? She’d fed him nothing but falsehoods since the first moment they’d met.

Bone-weary and too weak to shield herself against the scathing contempt in his face, she almost sobbed with relief when Mrs. Camden returned bearing a silver tray.

“I’ve brought you a nice bracing chicken stew.”

Her sharp glance went from Barbara to Zach and back again. If she noted the tension that coiled like a living thing between them, she made no mention of it.