Joan Wolf (35 page)

Jem rubbed his hand up and down across his face. “For one thing,” he said, “Stephen wouldna have loosened his girth. And for another thing, there weren’t no puppy loose in them woods. I heard a noise all right when I was kneeling next to Stephen on the road, but the noise sounded to me suspicious like a bridle jingling as someone went away through the woods.”

My hand flew to my throat. “I knew it,” I breathed. “Oh God. Someone loosened Magpie’s girth while Stephen was in the woods looking for that puppy.”

“I’d bet on it,” Jem said. “In fact, I have a fearful notion that if I hadna come along just when I did, someone would’ve clapped Stephen on the head and finished the job altogether.”

Jem’s face suddenly went out of focus, and white spots danced in front of my eyes. I shook my head, blinked, then blinked again, trying to clear my vision. I felt an arm go around my shoulders, and I let it guide me to the oak Jacobean chair that had been provided for visitors whose lack of rank dictated they come in the back door. I sat gratefully and leaned forward to put my head down.

After a moment the blood came back into my head and my vision began to clear. I breathed deeply and slowly.

“Should I call for someone?” Jem asked me in a rough voice.

“No.” Once more I filled my lungs with air, exhaled, then filled them again. I looked up at Jem, who was standing next to me. “I’m all right. It was just the shock of hearing that my worst fears were true after all.”

“Jesus, Miss Annabelle,” Jem said in the same rough voice as before, “who could want to kill Stephen? He ain’t been back long enough to get anyone that angry at him!”

I straightened my shoulders. “I don’t know who it is, but I can tell you this, Jem. I am damn well going to find out.”

Jem’s voice when he answered held a note of reluctant admiration. “You will,” he said. “When you make up your mind, Miss Annabelle, you’re every bit as stubborn as Stephen.”

I sat back in the chair, not quite ready yet to trust my legs.

Jem said. “He shouldna be left alone, even in his own room in his own house. D’you want me to go and sit with him?”

“I told his valet not to leave him alone.”

“That fancy man?” Jem snorted in derision. “If you want, I can go home, change my clothes, and come back here to keep a watch in Stephen’s room.”

I looked up into his hard face and admitted to myself that I needed Jem as an ally. He had been right when he had said that his presence on the path this morning had probably saved Stephen’s life.

I realized further that the loosened girth meant the end of my cherished smuggling theory.

“You think it’s someone in this house, don’t you,” I said in a low voice.

“It looks that way, don’t it.”

I wet my too dry lips with my tongue. “But Jem...
why?”

“Find that out and you’ll find the villain,” he returned.

I didn’t want to find out. I didn’t want to find out that someone in my own family ...

I shut my eyes.

“D’you want me to come back?” Jem asked.

I opened my eyes. “Yes,” I said. He had half opened the door when I added, “Jem?” His head turned toward me again. “Bring some clothes and plan to stay for a while.”

He nodded once, decisively, and went out the door.

Chapter Twenty-four

Jem came back as he had promised and spent the afternoon sitting in Stephen’s room, arms folded, eyes trained unblinkingly on the doorway. I looked in at about five and told him I had ordered his supper to be sent to the room I had allotted to him down the hall and that I would sit with Stephen while he ate.

“I can eat in here, Miss Annabelle,” he protested.

I shook my head. “It’s going to be a long night.” Then, when he still seemed inclined to protest, I added softly, “I’d like to stay with him for a little while.”

“All right,” he said gruffly, and went.

The windows in Stephen’s room were open, and the fragrance of newly cut grass floated in on the late summer air. Stephen lay perfectly still, and I stood beside his bed and stared down at him intently, watching him breathe.

It seemed to me that his breath was coming much too quickly and tightly, and a rush of panic sent the blood pounding through my veins. What if he wasn’t sleeping normally at all? What if he couldn’t wake up? What if he never woke up?

“Stephen!”
I said urgently.
“Stephen, wake up!”

He didn’t move, but I thought I saw his lashes flutter slightly. I put my hand on his shoulder and shook him none too gently.
“You have to wake up!”

This time I was certain that his lashes fluttered. I called his name again and his eyes opened. He squinted up at me through what I knew must be a thunder of pain in his head. “Annabelle?”

He sounded groggy, but he was awake and he knew me.

I bent until my face was close to his. “I’m sorry I woke you, Stephen. Everything’s all right. Go back to sleep.”

His lashes closed. My knees felt shaky, and after a moment I went to sit in the chair that Jem had pulled close to the bed. It was an exceedingly uncomfortable chair, with a carved lion protruding from its heavy oak back, and I made a mental note to have a more comfortable chair brought into the room.

I sat up straight, so that my back wasn’t pressing against the hard bumps that were the lion, and let my mind contemplate the information that I had learned from Jem.

I thought with bitterness of how my mother had misinformed me about the length of Stephen’s exile. Five years, she had said. Five years or else he would face prosecution as a smuggler.

Stephen’s hand was lying palm up on the light blanket with which we had covered him, and I leaned forward and rested my lips against it. I turned my head so that my cheek was cradled by his warm palm and closed my eyes.

And once more I am seventeen years old and my mother had told me that I am pregnant.

* * * *

It was the day after Stephen’s ship had sailed, and I excused myself after a dinner I had hardly touched and went to my room. Mama presented herself at my door ten minutes later, and that was when she confronted me with the cataclysmic news of my probable condition.

I stared at her in absolute shock.

“Whose brat is it, Annabelle?” Mama demanded.

I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t speak at all.

“Is it Gerald’s?”

Dumbly I shook my head.

My mother’s mouth pinched together in a way that quite spoiled her beauty. “No, I suppose that would be too much to hope for,” she said bitterly. “It’s Stephen’s, isn’t it?”

I felt so cold that goose bumps had come up on my arms
and I hugged myself for warmth. “Y-yes,” I stuttered. “It is Stephen’s.”

Mama had moved me out of the nursery when I turned sixteen, and we were standing now in front of the fireplace in my new bedroom, which was located halfway down the passage on the second floor. Its placement had been extremely inconvenient for Stephen and me, as I was forced to go past half the bedroom doors on the floor before I could reach either of the staircases that would take me to the relative safety of the third-floor nursery and Stephen.

Mama’s eyes were as hard and as cold as emeralds. “We left you and Stephen alone for too many years, didn’t we, Annabelle?” she said. Her perfectly chiseled nostrils were white with anger. “Weston and I always assumed that the two of you were like brother and sister. And that is precisely what you wanted us to think, isn’t it?”

I wet my lips with my tongue. “Yes,” I said.

Mama’s hands were opening and closing, as if they itched to feel my neck between them. “When I looked at you across the dining room table tonight, and I saw that skin ...”

She broke off, incapable for the moment of articulating her fury. She looked wildly around, and her convulsive fingers closed around a small china shepherdess that was perched on a table close by. She picked up the delicate figure and hurled it against the brick of the chimney piece, smashing the fragile china into a hundred pieces.

I jumped.

“God,” my mother said, able to speak now that she had vented some of her temper by an act of violence. “How could you be so
stupid,
Annabelle? “

I lifted my chin and said bravely, “I love Stephen, Mama, and he loves me.”

“Oh yes,” my mother said sarcastically. “He loves you so much that he got himself involved with smugglers and men sailed off to Jamaica to save his skin.” She looked at me out of coldly calculating eyes. “Tell me, Annabelle, did he communicate with you before he left?”

I looked down at my feet so she couldn’t see the expression on my face.

“He didn’t.”

There was a curious note of satisfaction in my mother’s voice, and I looked up and said passionately, “You wouldn’t let him see me! You locked him in his room and wouldn’t let him talk to anyone!”

“That was the bargain Weston made with the authorities,” Mama said. “They didn’t want to take a chance that Stephen would communicate with his smuggling confederates.”

“As if
I
were a smuggling confederate!” I cried.

“Stephen could have communicated with you if he had wanted to,” my mother said scornfully. “If he was unable to see you in person, then he could have sent you a note.” There was a pause as she scanned my face. “He didn’t even do that, did he?”

I looked away.

My mother was ruthless in following up her advantage. “How do you defend that kind of behavior, Annabelle?”

How does one defend the indefensible?

I shook my head and didn’t reply.

There were two wing-back chairs placed on either side of the fireplace in my room, and Mama walked around the table with its missing figurine and sat in one of them. She gestured for me to take the other, which I did gratefully. Both my legs and my stomach were feeling noticeably unsteady.

Mama regarded me across the deep blue Turkish rug upon which the chairs reposed. She said disdainfully, “This is a very pretty situation, I must say. My daughter is pregnant and the father of her child has been shipped off to Jamaica because he was about to be arrested as a smuggler.”

“For how long must Stephen remain in Jamaica?” I asked in a voice that sounded
far
more vulnerable than I wanted it to.

Mama pushed a piece of broken china away from the chair with her foot. “God knows,” she said. “The authorities said
only that he would be arrested if he returned to England. I know that Weston feels that Stephen must remain in Jamaica for at least five years before we can hope to bring him home safely.”

“Five years!” Five years seems an eternity when one is seventeen.

“You will have to marry someone else,” my mother said.

I stared at her in horror. “I can’t do that!”

“Do you want your child to be a bastard?”

I pressed my hands to my temples, which had started to throb. “No, of course I don’t want that.”

My mother pressed on relentlessly. “Do you want us to put you on a ship for Jamaica? Can you face the thought of being seasick for two months, Annabelle? Of perhaps not surviving the journey at all? Does Stephen deserve such a sacrifice from you when he went off and left you without a word? “

I knew the answer to that last question without having to think about it at all, I dropped my hands, stiffened my back, and lifted my chin. “No, Mama,” I said. “He does not.”

“Then,” my mother said, “you must marry someone else.”

I moved my hands nervously on the tapestry arms of my chair. I chewed on my lower lip.

“Don’t do that!” Mama said. “There is nothing so off-putting to a man as chapped lips.”

I stared at her in frightened bewilderment. “What do you mean that I must marry someone else?” I said. “Who will marry me when they learn that I am carrying Stephen’s child?”

“There is no reason for your husband to ever know that the child you are carrying is not his,” my mother said.

My head was throbbing with pain. “You aren’t making any sense, Mama,” I said wearily.

Mama had made an impatient noise. “Sometimes, Annabelle, I think that you are too stupid to live! Now pay attention to me and I will tell you what you are going to do.”

Stephen’s hand was warm under my cheek. I turned my head and dropped another soft kiss into his palm.

I
should have followed you to Jamaica.

If Mama had not intervened, I thought, it would have been weeks, perhaps months, before I suspected that I was pregnant. By the time I did, it would have been too late for me to think of tricking anyone. I would have been forced to go to Stephen in Jamaica.

And all along she had known that Stephen’s exile was for only one year!

If I had resented her interference before I learned this news, you might imagine how I felt about her now.

I raised my head and looked down into Stephen’s sleeping face.

Why didn’t you talk to me before you left? I thought, not in anger, but in pain. We would have been saved so much anguish if only you had talked to me.

His face gave me no answer.

Fifteen minutes later Jem returned, and I went downstairs to my dressing room to change for dinner.

* * * *

Stephen slept for twenty-four hours straight. I was so afraid that he was dying that I woke him up every four or five hours just to make certain that he was able to be awakened and that he knew me.

Jem refused to relinquish his watchdog duty to Matthews for even a few hours, so I had a trundle bed set up in Stephen’s room so Jem could get some sleep.

Nell was visibly upset by Stephen’s injury and spent far too much time hovering around his room.

Aunt Fanny was upset by Nell’s distress and actually became quite sharp with her daughter in her attempt to keep Nell away from Stephen.

Nell became hostile toward her mother. The evening of the day after Stephen’s accident, after Stephen had finally awakened and was able to sit up and eat something, Giles said to me in a small, frightened voice, “Mama, I think that someone is really trying to kill Uncle Stephen.”

I was sitting in the big nursery rocker, reading a book to him. Giles was squashed in next to me, too big and too old to sit in my lap, yet young enough to still need the reassurance of feeling me close.