One Night of Sin (18 page)

“You bastard! Don’t speak about my mother—” She shrieked when her renewed struggles only brought more pain.

He wrenched her scalp, pulling hard on her hair. “I’m afraid I am not like your English gentlemen, Rebecca. I’m not afraid to play rough. Did you know I have a harem back in Russia?” he asked mildly. “It’s very common among men of my class.”

She grimaced in disgust; his pale eyes gleamed.

“Yes, fourteen beautiful young serf girls of every coloring and temperament, about your age. I do miss them,” he added with a worldly sigh. “A man has needs. But of course, I could not bring them here. On English soil, the law would have them freed. Fortunately, I have you, thanks to Grandfather, and I shall train you by the same methods I used on them. It works, you know—my system—though it gets a little bloody now and then.”

She sobbed and furiously blinked back tears, unwilling to give him that victory over her.

“I always win in the end, Rebecca, so heed me well. If you wish to save yourself a great deal of misery, I suggest you make it your purpose in life to do exactly as I say. It is mine alone to decide what you may do at any hour of the day, where you may go, whom you may see, what you may eat, what you shall wear, how many goddamned times a day you blink. Get used to it,” he whispered in her ear, then roughly released his grip upon her hair and thrust her away from him.

She stumbled away in humiliated terror while Mikhail folded his massive arms serenely across his chest. “Go to your room for the rest of the day. I will send for you when I am ready to hear your apology. Right now, I am not in the mood.”

“Apology?” she gasped, still reeling.

“You struck me and insulted my men. You will explain to me why this was wrong when I call for you this evening. Understood? Now, go.” He turned away, dismissing her with an idle flick of his jeweled hand.

She was trembling all over, her mind a blank. Only one thought crystallized clearly in her mind: “Leave this place,” she uttered.

“You’re still here?” he asked in an ominous tone, turning around slowly. “Very stupid. Yet I’m impressed.”

Her temper snapped. “Leave my home!” she screamed, keeping the furniture between them. “And take your filthy barbarians with you!”

When he strode toward her, his robe flowing out behind him, she fled. She streaked past Lady Agnes’s portrait and went pounding up the stairs, her heart hammering.

Mikhail stayed at the bottom of the staircase. “I am the master of this house now!” he roared after her. “Either learn to obey me or get the hell out!”

That’s an easy choice.
Gaining the safety of her bedchamber, Becky slammed the door. For a moment she stood there trembling, listening to make sure he was not still pursuing her. Hearing nothing, she slumped against the door in a dazed and trembling state of shock at what had just passed. Her mind could not absorb that her legal guardian had struck her.

He intended much worse still to come.

Her hands were cold, her stomach in knots as she realized she could not stay here. Her own home—and yet she had no choice but to leave it. He had made his revolting desire plain enough. It was his house now. She would rather be evicted than humiliated, terrified. Raped.

At that moment, a muffled click from the door behind her nearly made her jump out of her skin. It was followed by Mikhail’s low sneering voice penetrating through the wooden seam between the lintel and the door: “I’ll be back at midnight to hear your apology. Then your
training
will begin. You’d better hope you please me,
loobeemaya,
or I’ll marry you off to the worst man I can find.”

Laughter.

Her throat closed, the curse she wanted to scream at him muted. She stared at the door. As she listened with pounding heart, his heavy footfalls receded down the corridor. He was gone.

Cautiously testing the door, she discovered that he had locked her in. Now she was his prisoner in earnest. . . .

Alec hoped his rage did not show too plainly on his face as Becky paused broodingly and finished cleaning his cut.
Training
? he thought, his temples pounding with wrath.
Training?

For his part, he could hardly wait to teach that blackguard a lesson the likes of which he would never forget.

She shrugged, veiling the cauldron of emotion in her eyes behind her lashes. “So I started packing.”

No wonder it was hard for her to trust him, Alec thought. He wouldn’t trust anybody, either, if he were in her place.

“How’s that feel?” she murmured, staring at her work.

He made a vague mumble in answer, more concerned with her tale, but he was glad to see that the bleeding had stopped. “Continue, please.”

She tore a fresh strip off her petticoat. “After Mikhail’s threats, I knew that I had to get to safety quickly, but I feared my cousin might retaliate against any of my neighbors who agreed to give me aid. Also, it would have been very easy for his men to seize me if I stayed nearby. So I resolved to retreat to the next town where I could take a room in a lodging house and hide until I had worked up a plan to get that monster out of my home and his Cossack brutes away from the village.”

“But you said he locked you in.”

“Yes. So he thought.” Carefully wrapping a strip of cotton around his biceps, she slipped him a wry smile. “The house is riddled with secret passageways that have been there since the days of Queen Elizabeth and Bloody Mary—there’s even a priest-hole behind the great hall’s hearth. Mrs. Whithorn herself thinks the secret passages are just an ancient rumor, and Mikhail certainly doesn’t know they exist, but I explored them often as a child.”

“Aha. Good girl.”

“In any case, since my cousin had threatened to tear the Hall down, I didn’t dare leave my most valuable possessions behind.”

“This ruby?”

“No, I had not yet learned of its existence. My father’s navy medals and Mama’s love-letters to him. They were stored in the attic. I knew I had to sneak up there and retrieve them before I could possibly leave. . . .”

It had been years since Becky had gone into the Hall’s secret corridors, but fortunately, she still remembered the whole procedure. Moving with brisk efficiency, she lit a small lantern and marched past the windows into the narrow dressing room adjoining her bedchamber.

At once, she crossed to her large oak wardrobe—empty now, since all her clothes were packed—and opened the doors. Reaching inside, she ran her hand along the right inner corner until her fingertips found the little latch in the back panel seam. With a wary glance behind her, she turned the latch and then pushed the wardrobe’s back panel forward. It creaked and opened into a yawning black hole in the wall, just large enough for an average-sized person to slip into.

Becky raised her lantern and did just that.

Thrusting her lamp and an exploratory foot through the dark hole first, she stepped down gingerly into the narrow space. Ducking her head as she entered, all was exactly as she remembered from childhood—the shivery darkness, the same clammy draft moving like a ghost down the pitch-black corridor. Before proceeding, she pulled the doors of the wardrobe shut behind her, then glanced left and right, got her bearings, and headed for the attic stairs.

Cobwebs tickled her face while many-legged crawling things fled before her lantern’s beam. She followed the passageway with silent steps, took a right turn, and continued until she came to the ladder leading to the upper levels of the house. Grasping the dust-coated rungs, she began to climb. She passed the openings that gave access to the third and fourth floors, mounting upward until she reached the fifth and topmost level of the house. Just when the sense of claustrophobia was beginning to oppress her, she emerged from the secret passageway through another disguised door hidden behind an ancient flag hung on the wall.

She came out into the hallway near the short wide stairs that led to the attic. As soon as she pried the attic door open, a wave of stale, musty air rushed out. She turned away, wrinkling her nose at the smell and coughed. Then she stuck her head through the door and peered in, lifting her lamp.
Please, no bats.
Nervously, she glanced around. If the creatures were there, she did not see any, not by her lantern’s glow nor by the wan daylight filtering in through the single dirt-clad window. Satisfied, she went in.

Up in the attic, time had stood still. Beneath its slanted ceilings and exposed beams stood towers of bins and trunks and boxes with a slim path cleared between them. Becky tiptoed down this path, her wonderstruck gaze traveling over the eccentric array of objects stowed here: a pair of old whicker panniers, abandoned toys, odd-shaped snowshoes.

Odd pieces of a rusty suit of armor were strewn across an old table, steely gauntlets and a fierce-looking helmet with a black horsehair tassel. There were moldy old court robes where a clan of mice proliferated, a broken chair, a rolled carpet leaning upright in the corner. Though anything of real value had been removed years ago for storage in her grandfather’s Berkshire mansion, the attic still held remnants of a few hundred years’ worth of world travels by various Talbot diplomats. Faded paintings. Exotic vases. A dusty model of the Coliseum.

Her roaming gaze stopped on the massive bombé dresser against the wall.
That’s what I want.
The huge Baroque piece stood taller than she did; its bowed belly easily contained two hundred tiny drawers. The question was, in which drawer had she put Papa’s medals? Mama’s love-letters would be with them, tied with a faded ribbon.

Setting her lantern down, she began searching the miniature drawers for her prized possessions. Each one held some odd, whimsical treasure: weird looking keys, old invitations to a Hunt Breakfast, a tiny book of illustrated Bible stories for children, a small whistle whittled out of wood, a thin forget-me-not bracelet made from someone’s braided lock of hair, a tiny silver bird figurine. One drawer she opened contained a thriving colony of strange insects. She shut it quickly, and soon thereafter found the items she had come for.

Simple curiosity made her open one last drawer that she had not explored, though her lantern oil was running low, which meant that she must hurry. Pulling it farther open, she peeked inside and found a very old-looking wooden box small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. She lifted it out of the drawer and, after blowing away a puff of dust, found a name carved in the fine wooden lid:
Agnes Mariah Talbot.

Why, that was Lady Agnes in the portrait at the foot of the great stairs! The ghost she had seen as a child. With her heart beating faster and gooseflesh rising on her arms, Becky opened her Tudor ancestor’s little trinket box.

Inside, it was lined with cream velvet. It had clearly been designed to hold something precious, but all it contained at present was an ancient-looking piece of paper folded in a square. Gingerly, she unfolded the two-hundred-year-old note.

A seal with faded colors at the top of the page marked it as some official sort of document. Dark, jagged handwriting flowed across the page, the language fraught with Shakespearean-style spellings that slowed down her efforts to decipher it; but she soon discovered that the paper explained the origins of the great ruby brooch that Lady Agnes wore in her portrait. Apparently, it had been a gift from a Ceylonese prince to one of the Talbot diplomats who had made a perilous journey to the East Indies some two hundred years ago in order to promote trading ties with the Spice Islands. Becky was startled to learn that the intrepid Lady Agnes herself had gone on this journey and had charmed the ruling despot from whose ruby mines the jewel had come; henceforth, the Rose of Indra was to be passed down through the female line of the Talbot family.

Which meant that it would now be hers.

For a moment she pondered this in awe, then could not help but feel a twinge of bitterness that such a treasure should have been lost. She had no other inheritance. Why, if she could get her hands on that ruby, it would surely be worth enough to buy Talbot Old Hall from Mikhail.

As she scanned the document, a postscript scrawled across the bottom of the page in a clearly different hand gave a tantalizing hint of what might have become of the Rose of Indra. The spellings were more modern and the words appeared to have been hastily penned:
The Roundheads are coming and soon shall besiege us. The Rose has been hid amongst the lilies.

So, she mused, some quick-thinking ancestor had managed to hide the jewel from Cromwell’s forces during the Civil War. No doubt it would have been confiscated, along with any other valuables that were found. In those days, the Talbots had sided with the Cavaliers.
The lilies?
She turned the oblique message over in her mind. If there had once been lilies planted at Talbot Old Hall, they had long since withered, but then her eyes widened.
No, no—of course!

The old gatehouse.

Over the years, the approach to the Hall had been changed; the gatehouse sat at the end of the overgrown place where the old driveway had once joined the country road. It was a squat stone outbuilding covered in ivy and crumbling with age, but atop its little mansard roof, as a nod to the first Talbot lords’ Norman origins, the fortified gatehouse was topped with a copper finial in the lily-shaped form of the fleur-de-lis.

Amongst the lilies . . .

Could the Rose of Indra still be hidden somewhere inside the gatehouse? How wonderful if it were true, she thought, her pulse racing with excitement, her eyes agleam at the intriguing possibility. If the jewel was still hidden somewhere in the gatehouse, and if, with all her good luck, she could find it, then maybe, just maybe, she could work through a trustworthy bank to buy the Hall and oust Mikhail from the premises forever.

It was a very long shot indeed, but right now it was the only hope she had, and if it worked, she could make everything better, not just for herself, but for all of Buckley-on-the-Heath. She had to try.

Tonight.

“Well, you obviously managed to find it,” Alec said after a long silence.