Lord of Scoundrels (24 page)

Beaumont had been right on that count, as he seemed to be on so many others.

But Beaumont didn’t have to be here now to point out that what Charity Graves badly needed was to be beaten within an inch of her life.

The inn, fortunately, was not a respectable one, and no one made a murmur when Vawtry stomped up after her to her room. As soon as he’d shut the door, he grabbed her shoulders and shook her.

“You lying, sneaking, troublemaking little strumpet!” he burst out. Then he broke away, fearing he
would
kill her, and certain that he did not badly need to be hanged for murdering a tart.

“Oh, my,” she said with a laugh. “I fear you’re not happy to see me, Rolly, my love.”

“Don’t call me that—and I’m not your love, you stupid cow. You’re going to get me killed. If Dain finds out I was with you in Ashburton, he’s sure to think I put you up to that scene.”

He flung himself into a chair. “Then he’ll take me apart, piece by piece. And ask questions later.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “And it’s no use hoping he won’t find out, because nothing ever goes right when it comes to him. I vow, it must be a curse. Twenty thousand pounds—slipped through my hands—I didn’t even know it was there—and now
this
. Because I didn’t know you were there—here—either. And the brat—his bastard. Who knew he had one? But now everyone does—thanks to you—including
her
—and if he doesn’t kill me, the bitch will shoot me.”

Charity approached. “Did you say ‘twenty thousand,’ lovey?” She sat on his lap and drew his arm around her and pressed his hand against her ample breast.

“Leave me alone,” he grumbled. “I’m not in the mood.”

Roland Vawtry’s mood was one of black despair.

He was mired in debt, with no way of getting out, ever, because he was Dame Fortune’s dependent, and she was capricious, as Beaumont had so wisely warned. She gave a priceless icon to a man who already had more than he could spend in three lifetimes. She took away from a man who had next to nothing, and left him with less than nothing. She could not even give him a tart without making that female the author of his demise.

Mr. Vawtry truly believed himself to be at the last stages of desperation. The modest stock of common sense and self-confidence he’d once possessed had been ruthlessly vandalized in a matter of days by a man whose primary delight in life was making other people miserable.

Vawtry was incapable of recognizing that his situation wasn’t half so catastrophic as it appeared, any more than he recognized Francis Beaumont as the insidious agent destroying his peace of mind.

His mind poisoned, Vawtry believed that his friendship with Dain was the source of his troubles. “‘He must have a long spoon that must eat with the devil,’” Beaumont had quoted, and Roland Vawtry had promptly realized that his spoon had been too short for dining with the likes of Dain, and that his own case was the same as Bertie Trent’s. Association with Beelzebub had ruined them both.

Now, Vawtry was not only ruined, but—thanks to Charity—in imminent danger of a violent death. He needed to think—or better yet, run for his life. He knew he couldn’t do either of those things properly while his lap was filled with a buxom trollop.

All the same, angry as he was with her, he felt disinclined to push her off. Her luxurious bosom was warm and soft, and she was stroking his hair back, just as though he had not nearly killed her minutes earlier. A woman’s touch—even that of a brazen whore—was very comforting.

Under the comforting touch, Vawtry’s mind softened toward her. After all, Dain had done Charity an ill turn as well. At least she’d had the courage to confront him.

Besides, she was pretty—very pretty—and exceedingly jolly company in bed. Vawtry squeezed her breast and kissed her.

“There now, you see how naughty you’ve been,” she said. “As though I wouldn’t look after you. Silly boy.” She ruffled his hair. “He won’t think anything like what you say. All I have to do is tell people how Mr. Vawtry paid me…” She considered. “Paid me twenty pounds to keep out of the way and not bother his very dear friend, Lord Dain. I’ll tell ’em how you said I wasn’t to spoil the honeymoon.”

How clever she was. Vawtry buried his face in her plump, pretty bosom.

“But I come—came—anyhow, because I’m a wicked, lying whore,” she continued. “And you was—were—that vexed with me, you beat me.” She kissed the top of his head. “That’s what I’ll say.”

“I wish I had twenty pounds,” he mumbled to her bodice. “I’d give it to you. I would. Oh, Charity, what am I to do?”

She, possessing an innate skill for her profession, showed him what to do, and he, having a knack for misconstruing the obvious, interpreted professional skill as feeling for him. Before many hours had passed, he’d confided all his troubles to her, and for hours after, while he lay asleep in her arms, Charity Graves lay awake planning how to make all her dreams come true.

H
alf an hour after he’d stormed into his bedroom and slammed the door, Dain stood upon the threshold of Jessica’s dressing room. He bent a frigid stare upon Bridget, who was taking the pins from Jessica’s hair. “Get out,” he said very quietly.

Bridget fled.

Jessica stayed were she was, upon the chair at her dressing table. Spine stiff, she lifted her hands and continued removing the pins. “I am not going to quarrel with you about this any longer,” she said. “It’s a waste of time. You refuse to listen to a word I say.”

“There’s nothing to listen to,” he ground out. “It’s none of your bloody business.”

That was how he’d responded during the drive home to her efforts to make him understand the problem…because one short scene with a female from his past had cancelled all the progress Jessica had made with him. They were back to where they’d been when she’d shot him.

“
You
are my business,” she said. “Let me put it to you simply.” She turned in her seat and met his gaze squarely. “You made the mess, Dain. You clean it up.”

He blinked once. Then his mouth curled into the horrid smile. “You are telling me it is my duty. May I remind you, madam, that you—that
no one
—tells me—”

“That boy is in trouble,” she said. “His mother will be the ruin of him. I have explained this to you every way I could, but you refuse to listen. You refuse to trust my instincts about this, of all matters, when you know I have brought up, virtually single-handed, ten boys. Which includes having to deal with dozens of their beastly friends as well. If there is one thing I understand, my lord, it is boys—good ones, horrid ones, and all the species in between.”

“What you can’t seem to understand is that I am not a little boy, to be ordered about and told my curst duty!”

She was wasting her breath. She turned back to the mirror, and took out the last of the pins.

“I am tired of this,” she said. “I am tired of your mistrust. I am tired of being accused of manipulating and patronizing and…bothering. I am tired of trying to deal with a consistently unreasonable man as though he were a reasonable one. I am tired of having every effort to reach you thrown back at me with insult.”

She took up her brush and began drawing it through her hair with slow, steady strokes. “You don’t want anything I have to offer, except physical pleasure. Everything else is a vexation. Very well, then. I shall cease vexing you. There will be no more attempts at that laughable thing, a rational adult discussion.”

He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Certainly not. There will be the icy silence instead. Or the reproachful silence. Or the sulking. The same pleasant manner, in short, to which you treated me the last ten miles to Athcourt.”

“If I was disagreeable, I beg your pardon,” she said composedly. “I shall not behave so again in future.”

He came up to the dressing table and set his right hand down upon it. “Look at me,” he said, “and tell me what that’s supposed to mean.”

She looked up into his rigidly set countenance. Emotion churned in the depths of his eyes, and her heart ached for him, more than ever. He wanted her love. She’d given it. Today she’d declared it, in no uncertain terms, and he had believed her. She had seen that in his eyes as well. He had let the love in and—though he hadn’t been sure what to do with it, and probably wouldn’t be sure for months, years maybe—he hadn’t tried to thrust it away.

Until Charity Graves made her spiteful entrance.

Jessica was not about to spend more weeks working on him, only to have her efforts flung in her face the next time someone or something set him off. He would have to stop viewing the present—and her especially—through the warped spectacles of the past. He would have to learn who his wife was and deal with that woman, not the general species, Female, he viewed with such bitter contempt. He would have to learn it all the hard way, because she had a more urgent problem to spend her energy upon at present.

Dain was a grown man, ostensibly able to look after himself and presumably capable of sorting matters out rationally…eventually.

His son’s situation, however, was far more perilous, for little boys were entirely at the mercy of others. Someone must act on Dominick’s behalf. It was all too clear that the someone must be Jessica. As usual.

“What it means is that you win,” she said. “It goes your way from now on, my lord. You want blind obedience. That is what you’ll get.”

He treated her to another mocking laugh. “I’ll believe that when I see it,” he said. Then he stalked out.

It took Dain a week to believe it, though he saw it and heard it every day and every night.

His wife agreed with everything he said, regardless how imbecilic. She would dispute nothing, regardless how much he goaded her. She was perfectly amiable, regardless how obnoxious he was.

If Dain had been in the least superstitious, he might have believed that another woman’s soul had entered Jessica’s beautiful body.

A week with this amiable, blindly obedient stranger left him acutely uncomfortable. After two weeks, he was wretched.

Yet he had nothing to complain about. Nothing, that is, that his pride would let him complain about.

He could not say she was plaguing him to death when she never so much as hinted at disagreement or displeasure.

He could not say she was cold and unresponsive in bed, when she behaved as willingly and lustily as she had from the start.

He could not complain that she was unkind, when any hundred outside observers would have unanimously agreed that her behavior was nothing short of angelic.

Only he—and she—knew he was being punished, and why.

It was all because of the unspeakable thing he’d made with Charity Graves.

It did not matter to Jessica that the thing was as foul inwardly as it was hideous outwardly, that there was not a scrap of good it could have inherited from its depraved monster of a sire and its vicious whore of a mother. It would not have mattered to Jessica if the thing had two heads and maggots crawling out of its ears—which, in Dain’s view, would make it no more repellent than it already was. It might have crawled on its belly and been covered with green slime and it would be all the same to Jessica: Dain had made it; therefore, Dain must take care of it.

It was the same way she’d viewed her brother’s case. It didn’t matter that Bertie was a through nincompoop. Dain had lured the fool in over his head; ergo, Dain must fish the fool out.

It was the same way she’d viewed her own case: Dain had ruined her; Dain must repair the damage.

And once again, just as in Paris, Jessica had devised his punishment with diabolical precision. This time, everything he’d insisted he didn’t want, she didn’t give. There was no plaguing, pestering, or disobedience. There was no uncomfortable sentiment, no pity…and no love—for never once, after hammering the words into his brain and heart in the burial ground in Devonport, did Jessica again say, “I love you.”

To his everlasting shame, he tried to make her say it. During lovemaking, Dain tried everything he could think of to make the words come. But no matter how tender he was, or passionately creative, no matter how much aching Italian lyricism he poured into her ears, she wouldn’t say them. She sighed, she moaned, she groaned. She cried out his name, and the Almighty’s, and even, at times, the Fallen One’s…but never the three sweet words his heart hungered for.

After three weeks, he was desperate. He would have settled for anything vaguely like affection: one “blockhead” or “clodpole”—a priceless vase hurled at his head—his shirts in shreds—a row, please God, just one.

The trouble was, he dared not goad her too far. If he rose to the truly heinous heights of which he was capable, he might provoke the row he craved; he might also drive her away. For good. He couldn’t risk it.

As it was, Dain knew her patience wouldn’t hold out indefinitely. Being the world’s most perfect wife to the world’s most impossible husband was a Herculean task. Even she could not keep at it forever. And when her patience snapped, she would leave. For good.

After a month, panic set in, as Dain perceived the first signs of strain in her flawless, angelically patient and amiable countenance. His own features bleakly composed, he sat at the breakfast table on a Sunday morning in mid-June, covertly nothing the fine taut lines that had appeared in her forehead and at the corners of her eyes. Her posture was taut as well, as stiff as the dutiful smile she wore during the gruesomely cheerful conversation about nothing in particular, and most certainly, about nothing that mattered to either of them.

I’m losing her
, he thought, and his hand came up, instinctively, to reach for her and draw her back. But he reached for the coffeepot instead. He filled his cup and stared helplessly at the dark liquid and saw his black future there, because it was not in him to give her what she wanted.

He could not accept the monstrosity she called his
son
.

Dain knew his behavior was irrational in her eyes. Even to himself he could not explain it, though he’d been trying all this last hellish week. But he couldn’t reason past the revulsion. Even now, panicked and heartsick, he could not reason past the bile rising inside, instantly, at the image in his mind’s eye: the dark, sullen face with its hideous beak…the malformed, freakish little body. It was all he could do to remain quietly in his chair, pretending to be a civilized adult, while inwardly the monster raged and howled, craving destruction.

“I had better make haste,” Jessica said, rising. “Otherwise I shall be late for church.”

He rose, too, the polite husband, and escorted her downstairs, and watched while Bridget helped Her Ladyship into shawl and bonnet.

He made the same joke he’d made every previous Sunday, about Lady Dain’s setting a good example for the community and Lord Dain’s considerateness in keeping away, so that the church roof didn’t collapse upon the pious souls of Athton.

And when Her Ladyship’s carriage set off, he stood as he had the four previous Sundays, at the top of the drive, watching until it had disappeared from view.

But this Sabbath, when he returned to the house, he did not go to his study as usual. This day, he entered Athcourt’s small chapel and sat on the hard bench where he’d shivered countless Sundays in his childhood while trying desperately to keep his mind on heavenly things and not upon the hunger gnawing at his belly.

This time, he felt as lost and helpless as that little boy had been, trying to understand why his Heavenly Father had made him wrong inside and out and wondering what prayer must be prayed, what penance must be paid, to make him right.

And this time, the grown man asked, with the same despair a little boy had asked, decades ago:
Why will You not help me?

While Lord Dain was struggling with his inner demons, his wife was preparing to snare one of flesh-and-blood. And, while Jessica had faith enough in Providence, she preferred to seek help from more accessible sources. Her assistant was Phelps, the coachman.

He was one of the very few staff members who’d been at Athcourt since the time of the previous marquess. Then, Phelps had been a lowly groom. That he’d been retained and promoted was proof of Dain’s regard for his abilities. That he was called “Phelps,” rather than the standard “John Coachman,” evidenced high regard for the man personally.

The regard was returned.

This did not mean that Phelps considered His Lordship infallible. What it meant, Jessica had learned, shortly after the contretemps at Devonport, was that Phelps understood the difference between doing what the master ordered and doing what was good for him.

The alliance between Jessica and the coachman had begun on the first Sunday she’d attended church in Athton. After she’d alit from the carriage, Phelps had asked permission to do his own kind of “meditatin’,” as he put it, at the Whistling Ghost public house.

“Certainly,” Jessica replied, adding with a rueful smile, “I only wish I could go with you.”

“Ess, I reckon,” he said in his broad Devon drawl. “That muddle yesterday with that fool woman’ll be all over Dartymoor by now. But Your Ladyship don’t mind a bit of gawkin’ ’n tongue waggin’, do you? Shot him, you did.” His leathery faced creased into a smile. “Well, then. You be teachin’ the rest of ’em, too, what you be made of.”

A few days later, when he drove her to the vicarage for tea, Phelps further clarified his position by sharing with Jessica what he’d heard at the Whistling Ghost about Charity Graves and the boy, Dominick, along with what he himself knew about the matter.

Thus, by this fifth Sunday, Jessica had a good idea of the kind of woman Charity Graves was, and more than ample confirmation that Dominick needed rescuing.

According to Phelps, the boy had been left in the care of the elderly Annie Geach, a midwife, while Charity wandered Dartmoor like a gypsy. Annie had died about a month before Dain had returned to England. Since then, Charity had been hovering in the Athton vicinity. Though she was rarely seen in the village itself, her son, left mostly on his own, was encountered all too often, and too often making trouble.

About a month and a half ago, a few well-meaning folks had attempted to settle him in school. Dominick refused to settle, wreaking havoc and mayhem during the three times he’d attended. He picked fights with the other children and played nasty tricks on master and pupils alike. He couldn’t be schooled into good behavior because he answered with laughter, taunts, and obscenities. He couldn’t be whipped into obedience either, because one had to catch him first, and he was diabolically quick.

In the last few weeks, his behavior had grown increasingly flagrant, the incidents more numerous. During one week, Dominick had, on Monday, torn Mrs. Knapp’s laundry from the line and trampled it in the mud; on Wednesday he’d dropped a dead mouse into Missy Lobb’s market basket; on Friday he’d thrown horse droppings at Mr. Pomeroy’s freshly painted stable doors.