Jennifer Horseman (15 page)

An acute consciousness that made her study him, measuring his every small move against what she knew of other men. She did not know many men; she supposed she could count them on one hand: her uncle, Mr. Wilson barely, Reverend Loman, Niles, and Samuels, barely, and Tomas. Garrett seemed so different from them as to be of another race entirely. It was not any one thing but everything: his strength and height, the ease of his command, the distinguished character to his features, the reach of his intelligence, and even his unparalleled, wholly original choice of a pet. Everything about Mm put him in a class all his own. She saw this in his every movement, as he fed bread crumbs to Polly, listening to Leif, his unfathomable gaze hardly leaving her throughout. Each movement seemed to reveal the magnitude of his character as well as a supreme ease with life. Little wonder that when no one else dared, he alone was able to stop her uncle, that it had not been difficult for him to do so. Truly the miracle was only that she had survived. . . . "Your uncle is dead and you are alive; two things to celebrate," he had told her, and she agreed now but—

But dear Tomas, oh how scared for me you must be. ... And Garrett, she wanted badly to ask, why does it matter to most men?

Apprehension filled her eyes as she thought of Tomas. The roll in her hand dropped to her plate and with effort she swallowed the last bite. "Tea, love?" Garrett saw she was through. "No?" He paused with his concern. "Do you feel better now?" She nodded slowly.

"Well enough to answer some questions? Would you rather rest awhile?"

She shook her head. "I'm fine now. Truly." Yet as she spoke, her voice seemed to come from a different place in the room. That she could talk to him at all after what had passed between them felt like yet another miracle, one she would have to get used to if she was to discover when he would take her back to Tomas. Tomas would marry her now; she had to believe this. He wouldn't care what had happened, so long as she was alive and well and her uncle dead. ...

Garrett stood across from her, leaning on a leg braced on the chair as he studied her with plain concern. He looked over at Leif, who nodded almost imperceptibly as his hand came over Juliet's again. There was a strange comfort in Leif s touch, though she was abruptly cautioned by the solemnity descending over the room like a storm cloud. Why? What goes here?

The questions started from a place that surprised her, all the way back to her life in Paris, what she knew of her parents and Madame Gaston, the Roveres. She answered honestly and shyly, though she offered only the facts. Little Vespa sat on her lap and she found herself remembering Garrett's unnatural compassion, those moments when he showed her such tenderness.

"So you've not heard from either of these people for seven years now?"

"No," she shook her head. "Sometimes I fear the worst, too, though I try to imagine other explanations for why they never sent word to me."

Garrett paused and only Leif understood the troubled look on his face. "I'll have my agents look into the matter and find out what has happened to them for you."

She looked up. "You would do that for me?"

The question seemed to surprise him before a warm tenderness came to his eyes. "I will do what I must to help you."

He paused then, pouring a glass of water into a gold-rimmed crystal goblet. He took a sip as he considered something. "The point, Juliet, is that you have no relations I could send you to—"

"Oh, but Tomas ... He will be my husband soon!"

Garrett held her eyes until they faltered. "Yes . . ., about this young man of yours. Juliet, I'd like you to answer some questions about what has happened to you. About Stod-dard's abuse."

"Oh . . . well, what could you want to know?"

"Everything, I'm afraid. How often did he put a whip to you?"

The blunt question shocked her. She couldn't guess the connection of these subjects but it frightened her. "Why? What difference could it make? Tis over now — "

"We will just say I am interested, love."

She saw he waited for her answer and she shook her head with a whisper, "I don't know—"

"You do know and I want to know. How often did this happen to you, Juliet?"

No other subject could be harder to talk about and she bit her lip with a pause, nervous again. Leif s hand tightened over hers and she looked to him. He nodded slightly, a gentle prod to answer. "I ... five ... or six times ..."

"In the whole of your time at his house?"

She stiffened visibly, staring without seeing now, and Garrett watched the small shake of her head, which corrected his guess. Five or six times a year ... He held the number in his mind, yet stopped from thinking of what it meant.

"I see how hard this is to speak about, but love, I need an idea of what you've been put through. Did he do this indiscriminately? For no reason?"

She felt hot and cold and clammy, unable to look at him, frightened by a subject no one other than Tomas knew the whole of. "His reasons were my indiscretions."

Pain filled her soft whisper of a voice. He was not just aware of it, he felt it. "And just what were those, love?"

She paused for a long minute, then shrugged slightly as she stared at the brass mug in front of her. "I ... well, it was hard to know what he would consider an indiscretion; I could never guess. Last time, 'twas for taking a book from his library. It was forbidden but . . . you see ... I didn't think he'd . . . miss it." Panic crept into the soft whisper she made of her voice. "The time before that, I startled Clarissa as I came upon her at the window, and he imagined I did so with malicious intent. . . . Once for singing a hymn in French, and before that, 'twas for a small vanity, a flower chain I put in my hair, one he said made me into a—" She stopped and swallowed, unable to repeat the word he called her mother. "I didn't know what he meant by it . . . and he always, he made me copy chapters of the Bible, one each day, and if ... if there were more than three errors — "

The glass in Garrett's hand suddenly shattered, the inexplicable explosion jolting her into an instant, stunned silence. Vespa leaped from her lap as Leif cursed softly under his breath. A shower of tiny glass fragments covered Garrett's hand, the table beneath. Yet he seemed to hardly notice. He simply brushed them off, swept the glass into a bowl, and tossed the whole thing into a wastebasket nearby. Still without looking at his hand, he accepted Leif s cloth to stop the small trickles of blood, and as he wrapped it he asked in a voice made cold with the control placed on it, "Juliet, was there no one you could appeal to to stop him?"

Juliet shook her head, her eyes shimmering with their emotion. "Garrett, I tried ... I tried. Everyone was afraid of him and no one at the house or in Bristol would dare. Once, when I was very frightened, I made an appeal to Reverend Loman . . . ." She stopped, pausing with a struggle that made her words slow, weighed by the memory of how desperate she had been for help. "And he was as frightened as I was. He only said I must bear God's will with Christian fortitude, that I must submit to my guardian's judgment or later suffer in ... hell."

An unnatural silence came into the room until Leif saw she would say no more. He took her hand and turned it over, staring at the scar there. "Tell him the rest, Juliet. Tell him how this reverend told Stoddard you had approached him and how you lit that candle as Stoddard made you wait for the punishment. Tell him how he used that candle to show you what this reverend's hell felt like until, until the pain and the terror made you faint."

Juliet snatched her hand back, staring at Leif with her shock. "No ..." she said in a frightened whisper, her heart going much too quickly, fueled, it seemed, by the emotions his telling wrenched from her. "You can't know that. ... I don't know how you can know that. . ..."

"I have seen it," Leif told her, the words wrapped in his own emotion. "I have the sight, lass, one I haven't ever had cause to regret until it let me see into the hell this man made of your life. I saw the dogs he sent when you tried to run away, how the beasts chased you up a tree and how he made you wait, more frightened than I can know. Always he made you wait until you were mad with not knowing what he would do to you. Always, the fear became the punishment. I saw him send a blunt pole over the finger crossed in prayer, breaking two of them, but then Garrett, he—"

"No, please—"

"I saw him wait until you could hear him. Twas then he said that you'd not run away like your mother, that when he caught you the next time, he'd kill you. And the only word in the whole of the language that could make you heed that warning was the word that crushed all hope; not // but when he caught you. And, Garrett," his voice filled with the pain of it, "you cannot know what longing is until you've seen her sitting at the window, staring at a faraway place on the horizon where she dreamed she would at last be safe."

Juliet stared at Leif with incomprehension. Somehow Leif had seen the picture of her life and he had painted it for Garrett, the backdrop, the whole picture shadowed by the longing, the terrible longing, to be safe again. Hell would be the eternity of that longing, of wanting something so desperately without the hope of ever having it. . . .

Hell would be the dark tunnel without the light shining at the end. He had seen this, somehow he had seen her life

Tonali circled Garrett's legs with soundless hisses, disturbed by the emotion filling the room as Garrett imagined a young girl whose only dreams had been made of the desperate longing to be safe, a despair he, too, knew as hell. As if fate itself could not bear the despair a day more, Juliet was set before him, for he could no more turn away from answering that longing than he could refuse his next breath.

"Juliet," he said gently, breaking the silence of their spell to solicit her eyes. "Juliet, is the reason you never told your young man because you were afraid for his life?"

She needed a long moment to understand the question, its implication, longer still to choose her answer. For it was not just an answer but also a confession—and a guilty one at that. "I did tell him. ... We are very close and we keep no secrets — "

"You can't mean you told him?"

"I know what you're thinking, Garrett, but, but you can't know what 'twas like. . . . You think 'twas wrong of me to tell him, or to risk seeing him, but, but I had no one else, and truly, I always thought that if my uncle found out 'twould be me to bear his wrath — "

"You what?!"

The demand of those two words felt like a hard slap to her face, startling her into silence.

"God's curse, Leif, I don't believe she is real."

"Control yourself, Garrett. She has been frightened enough."

Garrett checked his temper as he leaned over the table and braced his long arms on clenched fists, unmindful of the fear he put in her eyes. "Let me get this straight, love. Are you telling me this Tomas knew what was happening to you in that house?"

Pained confusion rose on her features. Garrett could not be this upset because she shared her trials with Tomas, she knew he could not. Leif even less—

"Answer me, Juliet. Did he know what Stoddard was doing to you?" He reached across the table to pick up her hand, "Did he know about this?"

She nodded slowly.

"And just what the hell did he do about it?"

Comprehension dawned slowly on her features. She met his eyes, but still hesitated, hesitated because she saw he did not understand and that she had to make him. "There was nothing he could do. You see, we were to be married when his father permitted it, at the end of his term at the university, and then he would take me away—"

"I am not interested in his grandiose plans, love. I want to know what he did when he saw how badly you were being hurt."

Leif cursed and she shot startled eyes to him, the rising force of their tempers making her desperate to redeem Tomas. "He wanted to help me! He did, but, but you see, he could not take me away, for his father wouldn't let him marry me until he finished his term at the university. We had to wait! How could he have stopped him?"

'The question, Juliet," Leif said before Garrett completely lost control, "is how could he have not stopped him?"

"That's not fair! You're making it seem horrible and it wasn't... it wasn't. Tomas. . . loves me and it hurt him as much as it hurt me—"

Garrett swore, "Like hell it did-"

"It did! It did," she repeated, her voice trembling with all her emotion. "He would even cry—"

"He would what?" Plain masculine scorn was manifest as Garrett swore, "Goddamn it, girl, a man does not weep when the woman he loves is being beaten!"

Fury brightened her eyes and she rose slowly to her feet. "How dare you pass judgment on him! How dare you! I suppose you would have stormed into my uncle's house and shot him dead where he stood, snatching me up as an afterthought—" She stopped too late, realizing Garrett had, in essence, done just that.

"You, love," he said, as some small amusement mixed with fury, "could never be an afterthought, but don't be daft, girl. Had you been mine from the start you can believe you would never have seen Stoddard's face, much less felt his hand; the situation would not have happened from the start. As it is, I can hardly believe the things I have heard from you, that you could stand there defending his despicable cowardice—"

"Tomas is not a coward! He's good and kind—"

"Not a coward? Jesus, I knew he was a coward when he tried to abandon you to me, only then I mistakenly assumed his intent was to get you help rather than to save his miserable little hide—"

"Stop it! Stop!" She put her hands over her ears. "I won't listen to you slander him, I won't! He's not a coward—"

"Juliet, listen," Leif began, harboring an erroneous assumption that a young girl's heart had anything to do with reason. "In truth, we wouldn't fault the lad for being a coward. Plenty of good men are cowards." This was said with a dismissing motion of his hand, cowardice to Leif being much the same as being blind or having a crippled leg. "What is unforgivable is that he let this happen. Can't you see it makes him as responsible as Stoddard?"