A Flight of Fancy (13 page)

Lady Whittaker’s eyes narrowed and her lips compressed for a moment.

Cassandra took a step backward. “I, um, did see him for a few minutes this evening. He—he came to see me, but we were never alone, I assure—”

“You are soaked. We shall concern ourselves later as to why you’ve been out in the rain. You had best get out of those wet
clothes, child,” Lady Whittaker said. “We do not need you catching a chill when you have been so recently ill.”

“You do not need two invalids if—if—” Cassandra’s voice broke. She could not ask the question burning bile in her throat.

Lady Whittaker took Cassandra’s hand and drew her to the fireplace. “He is still alive. I know little more. The major sent a messenger. They are bringing him home—Geoffrey, that is, not the major, though I expect he will be coming too. Something at the mills, I expect, the awful Luddites destroying men’s livelihood, and now my son after—but that’s neither here nor there.” She picked up the poker and thrust it into the coals as though stabbing an enemy’s heart.

Her heart? The notion crossed Cassandra’s thoughts. After what Whittaker had endured as her fiancé, he didn’t deserve to be wounded for any reason. If he died, Cassandra would have her freedom without effort, but the cost was not worth the end result.

Lord, please do not answer my prayer this way.

“Honore, will you ring for some tea?” Lady Whittaker requested. “Gallons of it. And coffee. I must have coffee if I am to be up all the night.” She turned her attention back to Cassandra.

“I did not go out to meet him,” Cassandra said. “I would never behave so dishonorably as to meet a gentleman at night, I assure you. That I saw him was purely—”

“I wish you had gone to meet him.” Lady Whittaker’s tone held a sharp edge in her interruption. “He likely would be all right now if you had. Get yourself into your nightclothes and into bed. I will return later when I know more.” With a swish of her black twill skirt, she swept from the room. Not until the door had clicked shut behind her did a sob escape from her lips.

The soft cry may as well have been a gunshot wound to Cassandra’s conscience.

“But I am not responsible,” she said.

It did not help. Her throat closed too hard for so much as a sigh, let alone a sob, to escape.

Honore’s face glowed ghastly pale in the firelight. “Did you argue with him and make him do something awful that got him shot?”

“No. Yes. No, I simply told him again that there is no longer any future for us, and then we helped the balloon launch and—I wonder if they landed safely in the rain. I couldn’t stay to help. I’m sure the torches must have gone out because of the rain, and I was so cold. I am so cold. Will you help me with these hooks? I do not wish to call a maid.”

Honore began to unfasten Cassandra’s gown. “I cannot believe Whittaker was shot. We were enjoying ourselves so much at the Luvells’ party. They have four offspring between eighteen and twenty—two are twins—and do not mind in the least if we have a romp. I believe Major Crawford was a bit shocked at our pace of dancing, but he took it in good stride. He is so stiff most of the time, he’s as dull as a stick.”

“Who cares about romps and stiff Army majors when my friends were up in the balloon when the rain blew in, and—and Whittaker—” Cassandra hugged her arms so covered in gooseflesh she felt the bumps through her sleeves.

Honore paused. “I am a beast to prattle on so, but I wanted to distract you. You truly look ill.”

“I am going to be truly ill if I do not get dry.” Tears spilled from Cassandra’s eyes. “And being a watering pot won’t help that, will it?” She dashed at the drops. “I do not even love him anymore.”

“Lying is neither becoming nor Christian.” Honore finished
with the hooks and tugged on the shoulders of the gown. “You love him to distraction. I saw it in your face the last time you saw him.”

Cassandra yanked her arms out of the sleeves of her gown and began to untie the tapes holding up her petticoat. “I do not love him.”

Lust. The feelings were nothing more than pure desire creating impure actions.

“But that does not mean I want anything awful to happen to him.”

“How did you see him tonight?”

A knock prevented Cassandra from answering.

“Come to my room,” Honore called through the panels. She scampered into the other bedchamber, closing the doors to the sitting room between them.

Cassandra finished removing her damp clothes. Once she stood in her shift before the fire, heat reached her skin and the chills began to subside. She wrapped her dressing gown around her and perched on the edge of a chaise to remove her stockings, then, hearing the maid leaving Honore’s room, she stopped. Honore had screamed the first and only time she had seen Cassandra’s burns. They were more smooth, white flesh now rather than the angry red they had been then, but the skin was shiny and ridged. Inhuman.

Cassandra left on her stockings and located her slippers beneath the chaise. Lined with lamb’s wool and trimmed in swansdown like her dressing gown, they would have her toes thawed in minutes. The tea would help too. But what of Mr. Sorrells and Mr. Kent? They must be freezing up in that balloon, if they were still up there and not broken bodies crashed on the unforgiving ground.

Cassandra shook off the thought. She and Whittaker had believed themselves safe inside a carriage from Grosvenor to Cavendish Square. Life was dangerous. People had to take risks. Look at Whittaker, wounded.

Dying?

She bit the inside of her lower lip to keep it from trembling. She had rejected him. For his own good, of course. She didn’t want him to wed her out of obligation, out of guilt, out of his need for her dowry, which would make him feel more guilty.

If the mill had been destroyed, he would need that money even more.

Cassandra shook off the thoughts of her ability to help with a single word, and rose. She wanted that tea.

Honore had set it up in the sitting room between their bedchambers. The room was too large for such a cozy phrase, but it was made more intimate with the use of oriental screens whose faded yet still lovely silk-on-silk embroidered scenes of fantastic birds suggested some ancestor had brought them back from China in an earlier century. Cassandra and Honore marked out a seating area close to the fire. Whatever other economies Lady Whittaker practiced in her household management, she did not stint on coal. Perhaps because coal was inexpensive in Lancashire, with mines close at hand. Perhaps the Giles family owned a coal mine too. Or had at one time. Whittaker never mentioned it; the mills held his interest. He loved their mechanics, the potential for greater production and work.

“Cloth—fine cloth—could be afforded by more people,” he had once told her. “Stockings too, though I shouldn’t admit that to a lady, I suppose.”

Now Cassandra flopped inelegantly into a chair and held her
hands out to the blaze. “Did the maid tell you anything of his lordship’s condition?”

“His lordship?” Honore set a cup of steaming tea and milk in Cassandra’s hands. “You’re calling Whittaker
his lordship
like you are barely acquainted?”

“We are no longer betrothed. Now, please, any word?”

Honore fluttered down onto the adjacent chair with her usual grace and poise. “They’ve brought him in and taken him to his rooms on the other side of the house is all I know. The maid said everyone is at sixes and sevens over something he keeps muttering.”

“Muttering?” Cassandra straightened. “He’s awake then?”

“A bit, but rather out of his head.” Honore sipped at her tea and gazed past Cassandra, her bright blue eyes distant as though she were in deep thought.

Cassandra set her cup on the table before her and grasped her sister’s arm. “You know more. You talked to the maid for quite a while.”

“I did, but he’s out of his head, as I—” Honore broke off and sighed. “It is just servants’ gossip, Cassie.” She looked at Cassandra. “They’re saying he claims he was shot deliberately.”

11

Cassandra. Whittaker wanted to see Cassandra. It was the one coherent thought he possessed for what felt like ten years of his life but which was, in truth, no more than three days. He knew he lay in his own bed and that Mama barely left his side, and when she did, the housekeeper or a maid tucked herself away in a corner in the event he called for anyone. He did. Often. He called for Cassandra. She never arrived.

On the third day since a British soldier had shot him despite Whittaker’s protest that he was not one of the rioters, he woke with a clearer head, less throbbing in the rather minor wound in his arm, and a raging hunger for more than the broth and weak tea Mama had been spooning down him since two of his weavers had carried him to the Hall. But when he opened his mouth to ask for nourishment, what emerged was, “Cassandra?”

“Geoffrey.” Mama rushed to his bedside. Her eyes showed new creases at the corners and lines of red shot through the whites. Her skin was paler than ever, her gown wrinkled. But her smile glowed like the fire behind her. “My dear boy, you are awake.”

He managed a smile, though the stretching cracked his lips and hurt his head. “Yes, and hungry. But Cassandra? May I see her?”

“I will fetch you some porridge.”

He wanted ham and eggs.

He wanted to see Cassandra.

“Will you send in one of the footmen to help me make myself presentable and bring her to me?” he asked—pleaded, really.

Mama’s response was to close the door quietly behind her.

Perhaps the time was too early or too late. But the curtains had been drawn back from the window. A patch of pale blue sky shimmered through the glass. No clouds, so the sun shone, but not into his chamber, which meant the hour ranged sometime between dawn and noon. Perhaps she had gone out driving if the weather was fine. As much as he wanted to think it, he could not expect her to be hovering outside his door, anxious for word of his condition. More than once she had told him they were through, their betrothal and marriage wrong.

Yet after he kissed her the other night, she looked dazed, dreamy, nearly as happy as she had appeared while gazing up at the ascending balloon.

So he was competing for her affections with a balloon.

Whittaker raised his arm and raked his fingers through his hair. It felt lank and unkempt. Beard stubble itched along his jaw. No wonder Mama ignored his requests to see Cassandra. He did not look respectable enough to receive a male caller, let alone a female one. He supposed a proper young lady should not visit him in his bedchamber anyway. All the more reason to get up, wash, shave, dress.

Could a body dress with one arm in a sling?

“A flesh wound,” he recalled the apothecary saying. “He
should be all right if it doesn’t take an infection. The head is more serious.”

It was. The pistol ball that slammed into his arm and went straight through had knocked him off balance enough that he struck his head. Everything grew hazy after that, a muddle of voices and pain and someone kicking him in the side. He recalled not making a sound, playing at being dead, though he did not know why instinct told him to do so.

He tried to think of that now, but his brain refused to cooperate. His stomach growled, insisting on being filled. Even porridge sounded good. Mama would make it full of butter and sugar with a hint of cinnamon. She had always treated him special, whereas his brother—his half brother—

No, no, Mama would never be unfaithful, would never have broken her marriage vows. The very notion turned his hunger pang to a pain. The shooting had warned him he played too dangerous a game, yet to imperil Mama’s reputation seemed even riskier.

The door opened and Mama returned, one of the footmen in tow. “Your porridge will be here soon, and here is Gareth to help you look respectable, as several persons wish to speak to you as long as you can manage visitors.”

“Cass—”

“Major Crawford, of course, and I’ve sent for the apothecary to tell him you are in your right mind again.”

“Was I in my wrong mind?” Whittaker tried another smile. Easier this time.

Mama shook her head, flicking a glance toward the middle-aged footman. All of their footmen were middle-aged, or was it both of their footmen? Most houses went for young men, well set-up youths. Theirs were fine-looking men, just older for the
position and thus less costly. They did not have a butler in the country, just the housekeeper and several maids.

“I will return in a quarter hour or so,” Mama said, then left.

“Shall I shave you, milord?” Gareth asked.

Whittaker assented to that and more. Mama returned in half an hour, and though fatigued, Whittaker felt more himself—clean and smooth-faced, his hair unmatted, but still hanging over his ears and the collar of his dressing gown as though he were trying to create his own periwig from an earlier age. She bore a tray she laid across his knees, then stuck the spoon into the bowl of fragrant oatmeal porridge.

He took the handle from her. “I can feed myself, thank you.”

“But slowly. The apothecary said for you to eat slowly. He is here and will come in to see you as soon as you have finished your breakfast. If this agrees with you, you may have a coddled egg and some toast later.”

It agreed with him. Amazing what some solid food, even cooked grain, could do for a man’s well-being.

“No wonder the weavers riot.” He stared into his empty bowl. “They are not making enough money to feed themselves and their families.”

“But surely your weavers do.” Mama looked puzzled. “I know my brother was not always fair in his wages, he so wished to profit, and your father and brother left the estate—but I should not speak ill of the dead.”

“Truth is truth, Mama. Father and John left matters here in a shambles. But I will not correct their errors on the backs of my workers. My weavers were not amongst the rioters. At least none that I saw.”

“Then why attack your mills? Do they not understand that is ruining work, not making matters better?”

“Logic flees when mobs rule.” He tried to lift the tray from his lap but could not manage with one hand. “Now may I see this apothecary and get that beyond me so I may receive callers?” He made Mama look him in the eye. “I want to see Cassandra. Please? Just for a moment? I know it is improper, but surely with you here, and her sister may join her too. But—what is amiss?”