Elisabeth Fairchild (23 page)

The post coach delivered them to an inn not far from Wellclose Square. He summoned a hack. But even as the horses pulled into the courtyard, Dulcie set off on foot, head down, stride long.

Weariness weighing his arm, Roger waved the hack to follow and set out after her, arm throbbing, head throbbing, exhaustion dragging at his heels.

“I would walk,” she flung over her shoulder when he caught up to her. “Alone, if you please.”

“I would see you safely home.”

“Then keep your distance.”

He tripped on the pavement, gait unsteady. “Dulcie.”

“No,” she said. “Not a word, please. We have too long been in one another’s company. I must have a few moments, a solitary walk--” her voice broke, “in which to collect myself before I face my father.”

“I shall speak to him. Explain.” He forced himself to speak, think and stand steady as she rounded on him, skirt whirling.

She kept her voice low. “You will say nothing. You will not come in. He believes you invincible, and me in your company, protected. He trusted you to keep me safe, trusted me to behave with good sense. We have neither of us managed the task. I will face him alone. I will tell him that I am not cut out for this work.” Her hand rose to her throat. “We will not worry him with any more dangerous journeys.” For the first time in days she looked him in the eye, looked at and around him, in her odd way. “Good God!” Her hand flew to his forehead, her touch cool. “You are pale. Why did you not tell me you suffer so? Go! You should be in the hands of a physician, not arguing with me, here, on the street. That wound of yours leaks color. You need leeching, and I need to go home.”

He exhaled heavily, arm throbbing, bruised body as weary as his spirit in considering what a complete fiasco this trip had been.

“Go!” she pressed. “This is foolishness.”

She called up the hack and insisted he get inside. He had not the strength to argue, simply obeyed, sat himself against horsehair cushions and listened as she ordered the coachman to his address. He watched her walk away under grayed skies, hips swaying. When she reached the corner, head bent, kerchief to her nose, shoulders shaken by what could only be tears, he summoned the strength to call through the hatch, “By way of Wellclose Square, if you please.”

He could not leave her to face her father alone.

“That’s the opposite direction, sir.”

“I know.”

The hack caught up to her as she crossed the square. From the window Roger saw her safely reach her father’s house, cheeks tear-stained. She paused at the bottom of the steps to dash the moisture from her cheeks.

He gathered himself to step down from the coach, called to the coachman to stop, voice so weak it alarmed him.

Straightening her shoulders, jaw set, she mounted the steps and went in.

Roger tried again to call to the coachman, voice vanishing, the interior of the coach closing in on him. He remembered nothing more until Quinn and the coachman pulled him from the hack, wrenching his arm, waking him.

She had words ready, all worked out in her mind. She only hoped she might have a few moments to call for a bath, and fresh clothes. Hers smelled of Roger, of her desire for him.

No such luck. Her father must have seen her from his window. He came pounding down the stairs, crying her name, full of mingled joy and concern.

She fought back tears, fought to keep her expression calm.

“Dulcie, Dulcie, my dear!” He enfolded her in his arms, held her close as if he meant never to let go.

“Father, I am glad to be home.”

“I have been worried,” he crooned. “You are not injured? The papers are full of nothing but Manchester and Peterloo.”    

She pushed away, nodded wearily. “I am fine. Just tired. Ready for a bath.”

He did not want to let her go. “It must have been horrible. So many dead, so many injured. I feared . . .” A sob cracked his voice. “But here you are. Safe. Whole.” He held her at arm’s length. “And Mr. Ramsay?” He looked about as if expecting to see him. “He is safe, too?”

There sprang from her eye a single tear.

“Not dead?” Her father looked horrified.

She shook her head, words elusive, throat thick with emotion.

“Injured?”

She nodded, blurted flatly, “A cut. His arm.”

“Come, sit down, my dear. You must tell me all.” Her father’s loving voice usually soothed her bruised spirit. Today she found him too inquisitive, too prying.

She told him what he wanted to hear: of the trip up and back, of the visions, of her fainting spell, of the massacre she had safely witnessed from a window. She babbled, rushing to fill the space between them with words, and more words, afraid he would notice her omissions.

She did not tell him all, could not. For the first time in her life a rift of confidence opened between them. She could not tell him she had fallen in love. She could confide in no one that her heart was broken, her tears selfish. Guilt and loss prompted the uncontrollable nature of her weeping as much as she mourned the wounded and lost at St. Peter’s Field.

“Was Mr. Ramsay sufficiently quacked?”

“Cared for, yes.”

“Do you know I feared you might fall in love with him?”

He caught her off guard with the remark.

“Would that have been a bad thing?” She studied the hands that had touched the man they spoke of. Her light glowed differently. Would he recognize the change?

“Not bad so much as impractical. Did he teach you many things?” 

She agreed numbly. Too many things.

He waited for more. She had no more to give.

“I am exhausted. I long for nothing so much as a bath and my own comfortable bed.”

“But of course.” He rang for the maid. One arm about her shoulders he led her to the stairs. “You were not forced to sleep in the fields, were you? I read about the crowds. Not a room to be had, the papers said. I did worry every night whether you had so much as a pillow for your head.”

“We managed to secure a room.”

“A room?” He looked perplexed, his voice rising. “A room, singular?”

“We were fortunate indeed to find that.”

He grabbed her shoulder, turned her to look at him. His words echoed in the stairwell. “But this is scandalous. Ruinous. How many beds were there to be had in this room?”

She licked her lips. “Mr. Ramsay gave me the bed. He slept on the floor.”

“Did he?” he asked sarcastically. “And would you have me believe the man known to all of London as “Rogering” Ramsay never made attempt to remove himself from the floor?”

“Father!”

“Well? Would you? Tell me, girl, are you ruined?”

She hesitated only a fraction of a moment before she lied. “I am fine, father. As I told you before. Only tired.”

“Then why do you not look me in the eye to say as much?”

She lifted her gaze to his, wondering if guilt etched itself too clearly in her eyes. “I am fine, father. Exhausted, but fine.”

He stared at her, face going purple. “By God! He will pay!” Like a man possessed, he turned and clattered down the stairs. “He shall have you to wife, Dulcie, the blackguard!”

“No! Father, no!” she called after him, sinking defeated onto steps she no longer had strength to climb. The words she called out to him sank as weakly as did she. “You must not ask it of him.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Tudor Place

Roger grimaced as the leech pulled back his bandages, made a sour face and muttered, “You should have called me sooner.”

“I have only just arrived in town,” he said through gritted teeth, as the man drew from his bag a bottle.

From a distance he could hear a bell ringing furiously, a pounding of the doorknocker.

“For a man only just returned to town you would seem to be a popular fellow,” the leech commented dryly as he unstopped the bottle. “Three or four should do the trick.” He overturned the mouth of the bottle onto the most lividly swollen part of the wound. From the bottle’s mouth came the fat, wet, leeches. “Leave them . . .”

“Until they fall off. I know, I know,” Roger, impatient, watched with disgust the parasites latch onto his arm. “I am all too familiar with the habits of bloodsuckers.”

“Your man may move them about as the swelling goes down, so that they are always draining blood from the areas most enflamed.”

“Yes. Yes.”

A paper packet of powder the leech measured from a bottle. His head lifted as angry voices echoed from downstairs. The only distinguishable words were “Daughter” and “Ruined.”

“A teaspoon in water two times a day for the pain, Mr. Ramsay, and might I recommend that in future you avoid both irate fathers and participating in duels. They have been declared illegal, you know, and it is my duty to report any patients who might have sword wounds as a result of them.”

Roger laughed and waved the man away. “Think you this a sword wound, man? I would have you know it is nothing less than a cut from the grim reaper himself. Be off with you! I shall have to call you out if you continue to insult me.”

The door opened to gain the quack exit, opened again to allow Quinn access.

“Visitors?” Roger muttered, eyes closing as his head sank into the pillows, fatigue washing over him.

“One, sir. I told him you were in the hands of a physician, sir. That you were under the influence of laudanum, that it would be best if he insisted upon your marrying his daughter at some later date.”

“Mr. Selwyn?” Roger asked.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Selwyn.”

“Kind of you to send him away, Quinn,” Roger said wearily, wondering what he would say to Mr. Selwyn when they did meet. They would meet eventually. There was no avoiding it.

A week later, at noon, on the day Roger made his report to Sidmouth, dressed and bewigged as Mr. John Castle, arm bandaged but no longer in a sling, he ran afoul of Mr. Selwyn. They encountered one another in the Lobby of the House of Commons. Roger heard Selwyn’s voice before he saw him. It echoed from the rafters, turning heads.

“You there!” Selwyn shouted. “I know you, sir. You cannot hide from me! What do you mean to do, sir, to make things right with my daughter?”

Since the murder of Perceval Spenser security had become more vigilant. A guard eyed the old gent’s noisy progress with a frown. Roger approached Selwyn, the sooner to quiet him. Linking arms, he led him away from the center of the room. “You make a scene, sir, bandying her name about in public.”

Mr. Selwyn, face florid, spat out, “Marry her, sir. Nothing less will suit me.”

Roger cast a wary eye about the lobby. His future, his greatest secrets lay at the man’s mercy. They remained the center of attention. “And if I refuse?”

The old man raised his walking stick, used it to punctuate his sentences, punching the carved ivory knob briskly against Roger’s arm, the bad arm. “I will bandy your name about in public, sir. Your real name, your true identity.”

Roger grabbed the middle of the stick, grabbed, too, his throbbing arm, all of his attention now centered on Selwyn. “You would blackmail me, on the head of your king, to marry off your daughter, sir?”

Selwyn looked as if he were ready to pop a vein as he struggled to regain control of the walking stick, chest straining the buttons of his waistcoat. “How dare you accuse me of anything less than honorable intentions. As a gentleman, I trusted you.”

“Does she claim herself ruined, then?”

Selwyn ground his teeth, wrenched away the stick, breathing heavily, complexion crimson. “She claims she is fine, but she does not look me in the eye to say it, sir. Can you?” He brandished the stick again.

Roger assumed his most frigid demeanor. “I will not be forced into marriage against my will. Nor against my better judgment.”

“Then, sir, never set foot in my house again!” In Selwyn’s eyes, glowed the same mindless rage to be seen in the eyes of a mob. He wielded the stick with unexpected fury. Whack, the knob came squarely into contact with Roger’s shoulder. “Never attempt to speak with my daughter again!”

A second blow almost sent Roger to his knees, knocking his wig askew, threatening to reveal him to the world for who he really was. Selwyn’s eyes were glassy. “You have used her most shamefully!”

Roger wrenched the walking stick from the old man with one hand, straightened his wig with the other.

Selwyn’s eyes went wide. “What’s this?” He stepped back, mouth dropping open, attention fixed first on Roger’s cheek, then on the ivory knob blotched scarlet. “You bleed!”

He grabbed up Roger’s arm to study the sleeve, also darkly stained. A dribble of crimson dripped from his blood-stained hand.

“Dear God!” he gasped. “I never intended to . . .”

“To injure me?” Roger tidied himself fastidiously with a handkerchief, loosening his neckcloth that he might tie it about the pulsing ache in his arm. “Neither had I the slightest intention to do you or your daughter harm.”

“You will stay away from her?” Selwyn’s rage changed to pleading. “Good God, man,” he hissed, voice breaking, the look in his eyes piercingly vulnerable. “She is my only child.”

Beaten by the truth, aching with a sense of guilt, Roger promised, “I will stay away.”

Chapter Thirty

August 22, 1819

Lydia’s New Landau

Time passed, no more than a matter of days, and yet they seemed like weeks, without Ramsay. Not a word did she hear from him. No gossip--other than some laughable nonsense that he had been injured in a duel. Dulcie had no idea of her father’s encounter with Roger. She knew only that she missed him, and wished him back in her life, which seemed resoundingly dreary without him, unimaginably drab.

Melancholy too. The emotions stirred by the massacre in St. Peter’s Field died as reluctantly as the emotions stirred within her by Roger Ramsay’s touch. Her life’s perception had changed. London seemed changed. Her world turned uneasily.

Change hung like mulled wine in the air, stirred by the colors of autumn: gold, rust and burgundy. A harbinger of additional change, it rattled from the trees and whirled beneath the horse’s hooves, on the day she and Lydia set out, in Lydia’s new landau, for an afternoon in Queen’s Park along the promenade with Captain Stapleton.