Laura Kinsale (38 page)

Zenia was silent, staring out the window. She longed for her father and Marianne and the comfortable close days in Bentinck Street. She wanted to do what was best for Elizabeth. She wanted peace and security; she wanted her daughter to grow up in perfect safety—and yet she thought of him, the despair in his voice.
I
don’t think I can do it.

He could not stay. With a wrench of her heart, Zenia knew that he could not, not without destroying himself— not without becoming what his mother was, all her feeling turned to ice. He would go, and when he did, he could take Elizabeth if she gave him the right.

When Zenia turned, Lady Belmaine was watching her with an unblinking attention. “You need not mention this to the earl or my son,” the countess said. “If you wish to speak of it further, we will be private together.”

For the first hour, Mrs. Lamb had kept a wary eye out the window while she finished her mending, watching Lord Winter play on the lawn just beyond the terrace with his daughter. She kept her opinions strictly to herself, of course, but it was with some approval that she saw the little girl exercising happily outside. It was just the sort of thing Miss Elizabeth needed, a little rough and tumble in the bright country air. Mrs. Lamb had made very certain she was dressed warmly, and Lord Winter, it was obvious, was rather under the weather and not inclined to take her far.

Still, the nurse thought uneasily of Lady Winter. She had had one particularly bad moment, when she had seen the earl himself walk out onto the terrace and speak with his son. But they appeared to part amicably. Mrs. Lamb breathed a sigh of relief and turned back to laying out the pattern for a smock.

She had meant to call them in for a luncheon, in spite of the picnic basket. Miss Elizabeth would certainly need a clean napkin, and her father was unlikely to wish to have anything to do with that. But when Mrs. Lamb was finished with pinning the pattern, and looked outside, the viscount had picked up Miss Elizabeth and headed far out onto the lawn along with the wicker.

Mrs. Lamb watched them for a moment, her fingers pressed over her mouth. She had no right to an opinion—no right beyond many more years of experience with children than Lady Winter could boast—but she was persuaded that Miss Elizabeth’s character required greater freedom if it was not to be distorted and crippled, like a vigorous seedling forced to grow in too small a space. She could understand a young widow’s intense attachment to her only child—but now that Lord Winter was returned—well, Mrs. Lamb had no business holding an opinion on Lady Winter’s marital affairs either, but it was difficult to be blind to the obvious tension between husband and wife. Mrs. Lamb disliked to see Miss Elizabeth become a pawn, but she very much feared that Lady Winter was inclined to assert her management over the child to a greater extent than was wise.

She would give the truant pair another hour, Mrs. Lamb decided, before demanding that they come inside to clean up and take a nap. She knelt again beside the fabric spread on the floor, taking up her scissors.

When the hour had passed, she checked again outside the window. Lord Winter and Miss Elizabeth had vanished from the lawn. Mrs. Lamb made a little cluck and went to fetch her greatcoat.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Arden took a worm from Beth as she was about to eat it and shoved a biscuit into her muddy hand instead. He could hear the distant shouts of their distraught jailers, but he ignored them. They had been calling since he and Beth had drained the carp pond—Beth having taken a great delight in pulling down the mud bank, wielding her own small shovel with enthusiastic futility as Arden dug deeply with his.

They were both exceedingly damp. Arden had misjudged when the bank would give way, and been standing in the middle of it as the brown water began to pour down through the weakened soil. Beth had thought his yelp of surprise a great show, and waded in herself, squealing and shrieking with excitement and cold. Shortly after that the urgent shouts from the direction of the house had begun. Arden, looking at the state of his trousers and Beth’s smock, had judged that a little time to dry off would be wise.

Perhaps he did not know the bounds and corners, but Arden knew every secret path and passage at Swanmere. He had carried Beth, the basket and shovels down to the low end of the lake, staying carefully under the brow of the hill as he dragged the rowboat from the bank into the water. Beth followed the basket into it, and they crossed the narrow end in three quick pulls on the oars. Hearing the hounds closing, Arden had grabbed her up, disentangling her wet clothes from the rusty painter eyebolt—not without the loss of her bonnet and a bow or two—seized the wicker and jumped ashore. The boat drifted off from the bank, but he did not stay to secure it. With Beth giggling in his arms as the evergreen branches brushed her face, he had mounted the little cliff, well concealed in a cascade of undergrowth.

They made their escape. The shouts had dimmed as he carried her deeper into the woods, where they had a sword fight with dead sticks, threw dry leaves in the air and put flat rocks on their heads. At his elm, he’d set Beth down and handed her the toy shovel, and together they had made a respectable start on restoring the tunnel.

At least, Arden had made a start. Beth had found worms and grubs and flinging dirt more to her taste.

She sat in a mound of dead leaves munching the biscuit. Arden was forced to admit that her appearance was not improved for drying out—she was much the same texture and color as her surroundings. There were some soft, square white cloths in the picnic basket, but with no clean water the application of one to her face only made her more disreputable.

For some time, there had been a growing frenzy in the remote shouting, male voices added to the feminine. “It’s going to be the devil to pay with us, I’m afraid,” he said, squatting in front of Beth and sharing his ham sandwich, which added a smear of mustard to the mix.

“Goo-at!” she said with her mouth full, reaching for more.

He gave her the rest of the sandwich and dug out his pocket watch. Half past four. The sun was getting low. Zenia and his mother would surely be back before another hour had passed, if they weren’t already.

“Are we scared?” he asked Beth.

She smiled at him around a slice of mustard-slathered, leaf-coated ham, her dark eyes full of mirth.

“Quaking in our bloody boots,” he said.

“Ma-ma.” Beth dropped the ham and crawled toward him. She lifted her arms to be picked up.

“Yes, I know it’s time to go.” He stood up with her, her muddy feet adding more dirty stripes to a waistcoat that was already squalid. “You needn’t rush me.” Then he wrinkled his nose, sniffing. “Good God. Perhaps you should at that.”

He stooped to lean the shovel against the tree and toss the remains of their meal into the basket. As he threw the muddy white cloth in, it occurred to him that it was a baby napkin.

“Ah, well,” he said, turning down the path that would circle the lake. “What are nurses for? Let’s go find Mrs. Lamb.”

“Ma-ma,” Beth said.

“If you prefer to have a living papa, I daresay we’d better hope we discover Mrs. Lamb first. But never fear, I know how to smuggle you in.”

She laid her head on his shoulder with a sigh. He walked through the woods. The shouts seemed to have gone mostly to ominous silence, although as he neared the lake, he could hear an odd, somber call now and then.

He stopped at his first view of the water. There were boats on it. Men and boats, nets—and a knot of people at the head.

With a sudden drop of his heart, he saw his father among them at the edge. They were dragging the lake.

For a moment he just stood there, staring. A nightmarish fear seized him—it was as if he had walked into his own past, seeing what he had only dreamed. His heart constricted in his chest.

Then with a start, a wrenching shift to a different reality, he recognized his mother and Zenia standing close together, the nurse and the maids huddled around them.

And the shock suddenly turned to realization. His breath came back; his jaw clenched hard.

“You precious jackasses,” he exclaimed through his teeth. “You don’t actually suppose I drowned her?”

He walked out into the open, standing where the woods stopped and the lawn fell down to the lake in a steep slope. No one looked up. No one noticed him. They were all intent on the men and the lake and the somber ooze of mud stirring up from the bottom.

He could not believe it. At first, he just felt amazement, a sort of nauseated wonder, watching the slow drag of the net through the water. It did not seem real.

One of the men bent, pulling something shapeless and pale from the water. Arden heard a strange, terrible sound, a faint high keening.

It was Zenia. It was the worst sound he had ever heard in his life; it froze his blood.

He wanted to shout to stop it. But he stood paralyzed while they spread the wet thing out across a gunwale—it was nothing, some rubbish, a piece of canvas—and yet the awful sound did not cease.

“Stop it,” he muttered. “Stop it, stop it. What are you doing?”

He could hear Zenia: her wordless keening—what they must have made her think he had done... he could hardly take in air for the ferocity of his reaction. Rage grew in him; blinded and deafened him to everything but that sound. They were making her think he had drowned Beth, letting her make that noise, letting her think he had drowned
Beth.

He stood on the hill in full view of them, with Beth snoring on his shoulder and the picnic basket at his side.

It was the nurse who finally saw him. She gave a shriek and pointed.

The horrible sound ceased, silenced as suddenly as everything else. For an instant they were all frozen, all but Zenia who came running, running in her full skirts, running so hard that she nearly fell when she came up the slope.

She began making the high, strange noise in her throat again, gasping as she reached for Beth. Arden let her go, watching Zenia crumple to her knees, holding her daughter so tightly that Beth squealed and began to cry.

He looked beyond, saw his father hurrying ahead of the rest up the slope—and the outrage inside him found a brilliant blood-tinged focus. “Get those goddamned nets out of the water!” he shouted savagely. “Get ‘em out of my sight!”

His father stopped. Arden saw him look at Zenia and Beth and the wicker basket.

Arden’s mouth curled in violent contempt. “Was it you who ordered this? Damn you to hell!”

For a long moment the earl looked up at him over ten yards of grassy slope. Then he turned his head, giving quiet orders. The men dispersed, heading for the lake, and Mrs. Lamb climbed up toward Zenia.

“Do you know how many hours you’ve been missing?” his father asked evenly, turning to look up at Arden again. ‘The boat was floating loose.” He looked ten years older than when Arden had seen him that morning. “With her bonnet in the water.”

“I don’t care if the goddamned boat was sunk with her christening robe in it!” Arden’s furious voice echoed back from the lake. Staring down at his father, he felt a darkness hover at the edge of his eyes, rage beyond his ability to utter in words. “How could you think this? How could you do this?”

“How could
you!”
Zenia’s frenzied accusation rose above Beth’s uncertain weeping. She scrambled to her feet. “How dare you say that! How dare you? Look at her! Look at you! She might have died!”