Patricia Rice (2 page)

Her gaze alighting on the rich maroon leather of a high-backed wing chair near the shelves she wished to reach, she set her determined little chin and advanced upon her goal like a soldier marching off to war. The lamp's flickering flame cast shadows over the deep wine of her short velvet gown but shimmered on the gold-threaded embroidery of the bodice. The gold threads could not match the angelic halo of white-gold curls creating a nimbus around her elfin features. Despite the rich threads and halo, there was very little angelic about Lady Alexandra at the moment. She knew she approached forbidden territory, and she moved with extreme caution, testing the chair for the squeak of its springs before climbing up on it.

Even the extra couple of feet gained by standing on the leather seat did not give her the height necessary to reach the shelf just tantalizingly out of her reach. Gareth had told her that the shelf contained the angel books.

He had even pulled down a volume and showed her the charming watercolors of golden angels in a blue sky. And then he had laughed and shoved the book back in its place—out of her reach. She hated her half brother with every fiber of her being, but she wouldn't let him defeat her. She might be ten years younger and small for her age, but she could do anything he could.

With cautious patience, she eased the chair around so the arm aligned with the bookcase. Then she scrambled back into the seat again and stepped up on the arm. The heavy old chair easily counterbalanced her slight weight. Standing on tiptoes, she curled her fingers around the first volume on the shelf.

The library door flew open with a thud that bounced off the paneled walls, echoing in the high-ceilinged room. The single lamp flame flickered, sending dancing shadows of her precariously perched figure across the shelves. Her fingers defiantly grasped the binding when the expected bellow ripped through the quiet library.

"Father, she's at it again, just as I said!"

There wasn't any use in running. She could drop the book, jump down, and look innocent, but it wouldn't matter. She really didn't even know why Gareth went to all the trouble of trapping her. He could tell their father anything and be believed. Grasping the book firmly, Alexandra pulled it off the shelf and hopped down into the chair seat. She stood firmly on the floor by the time her father had followed the sound of Gareth's voice and entered the room.

She clasped the volume to her chest, prepared to argue her position when she heard the sound of her mother's voice in the hall, and she cringed. Her mother shouldn't be here. She was supposed to visit the vicar. That meant the earl hadn't let her go after all. That meant...

She wouldn't think about what it meant. She wouldn't think about the whimpers and cries of pain coming from her parents' chambers on the nights her father decided her mother needed a lesson. It made her stomach hurt just thinking about it. And now he had Alexandra's disobedience to make him even more fierce with his justice.

She screwed up her inner courage, closed her eyes, and tried praying fervently to God as her mother had told her to do, but God just wasn't there. Her father was. His large boots stormed across the beautiful Turkish carpet. His big hands wrapped around her arms as he jerked her from her feet. She didn't even register the roar of his words over her head or the pain of his fingers pinching into her flesh. She prayed hard and fast, praying for a miracle.

"George, she doesn't mean anything by it!" her mother pleaded. "Gareth teases her into it. You know he does. I'll spank her and send her to bed and she'll only have bread and water tomorrow. I promise."

One large hand casually lashed backwards, shoving his wife away as the other hand held his daughter dangling from the floor. Crying, his wife grabbed her husband's arm and clung.

"George, please. It's all my fault. I've cosseted her too much. I won't do it anymore. Punish me, George. She's much too little to understand."

Alexandra cringed and wept inside at these words, but she knew for her to say anything would only aggravate her father's ire. And raising his ire would mean even stronger retribution for her mother. She held still and tried making herself very small.

"She is weak, just as you are weak. It takes a strong love to provide guidance." The words boomed over her head. "I'll not have your interference, Matilda."

With his free hand, the earl grasped his wife's slender hand, the one clutching his arm. In a single, simple twist from his powerful fingers, he produced a popping noise of damaged bones. Matilda's muffled cry of pain echoed through the thick air. The grip on his arm loosened as his victim grabbed her pain-wracked wrist.

"George, not tonight, please," Matilda whispered insistently, despite the pain. "You wished me to stay home so we could be together. I am here. Let Dora alone, and you can teach me to be strong. I'll have Carrie take Dora to her room."

Alexandra clenched her tiny hands into fists, squeezed her eyes shut, and prayed silently, ignoring the fiery pain in her shoulder.
Lord God, please do not punish my mother for my sins. I will never touch the angel books again. I promise, Lord God, just don't let him hurt my mother again. Please, God, I will try to be good. If it weren't a sin, I would drown myself in the river so she never be punished again. Please, by all that is holy, amen.

It sounded reverent and holy as the vicar, and if there truly was a God, surely He would hear and answer her prayers. But as Alexandra had already suspected, God didn't exist.

"Go to your room, woman. I'll be there directly."

His voice wasn't even a roar anymore. It was cold and commanding, and a shiver traveled down Alexandra's spine. She knew what that meant, and a tear squeezed beneath her eyelid despite all her efforts to force it back.

Her mother knew, too. She slipped quietly from the room. Further protest would only worsen the punishment for both of them.

Alexandra stoically followed at her father's heels as he grasped her arm and led her toward the wide circular stairway that was considered one of the architectural wonders of this far corner of England. She lived in a mansion far beyond the means of the fishermen and miners here in Cornwall. They had no social equals here. She had no playmates. The vicar and his wife were their only friends, and the vicar relied on Lord Beaumont for his living. If she couldn't call on God or her mother for help, she could call on no one.

That night Alexandra got off lightly—physically. A large man, with handsome black hair, flashing dark eyes, and a sensuous mouth, Beaumont had the respect of his peers and his lessers for not using his good looks to get what he wanted. He was considered a religious family man who treated his tenants sternly but fairly. He wouldn't use his greater strength to deliberately harm his only daughter. He merely made her stand in the corner on her toes with her nose pressed to an impossibly high spot on the wall, then sent her nursemaid to see that she stayed there. He paid the nursemaid well to follow his orders.

Physically, the punishment was almost endurable. Alexandra was light and agile and she had grown an inch or so since the last time he had used this punishment.

She didn't have to stand on the very edge of her toes to reach the mark. Weariness was her worst enemy, that, and the ache in her shoulder. The real punishment came later, as the house grew dark and silent, and the muffled sounds from the room below became pounding drums in her ears.

When her mother's piercing cry finally rang through the silence, Alexandra removed her nose from the spot and vomited the remains of her delicious duck dinner into the porcelain washbowl at her side. It wouldn't do to stain the expensive carpet and start the punishment all over again.

Later, in the early dawn hours when her mother entered the nursery and sent the maid away, Alexandra collapsed limply into her arms and listened with a child's dying hope to words she had heard a hundred times before.

"He doesn't really mean to hurt us, Dora. He's just much bigger and doesn't know his strength. He's so good, and he loves us so much, he just wants us to be good like him. We must try harder, Dora. Promise me, you'll try harder?"

* * *

April 1852

"Not a word, Dora. Don't say a word to anyone." Pulling her billowing cloak around her burgeoning stomach, Matilda caught her daughter's arm and hurried her up the gangplank to the hulking ship bobbing at the dock. Cosmetics could only partially disguise the vivid bruise on the side of her face.

Alexandra wanted to scratch at the coarse cotton irritating her skin, but one hand clung to her porcelain doll and the other clung to her mother, and she didn't dare release either.

She was frightened because her mother was frightened, but she was also curious, and she avidly drank in all the new and fascinating sights and sounds around her. Her father never let them come to the docks. He never let them off the estate. She had never seen Plymouth before. She had never seen the sea. She wanted to see it all at once, but she clung to her mother's hand instead. She knew without being told that her father would punish them harshly if he found them here. That's why they wore these coarse disguises.

"Wait here, Matilda, while I find your cabins and have the baggage transferred. You'll be safe with these nice people. They're Quakers. They won't harm you."

The man who had brought them to the docks was a stranger to Alexandra, but she liked his soft voice and pleasant smile. He seemed almost as worried and frightened as her mother though. Instinctively, she looked for good hiding places among the crates and barrels being loaded on deck.

"Michael is a good man. He'll take care of us," her mother whispered reassuringly for the third or fourth time as the stranger loped back down the plank. "He was my beau once, you know. I should have chosen him, but I loved your father more. I still love him. He just doesn't know his strength, Dora. We must look out for your baby brother or sister, mustn't we?" she said sadly. "Maybe your father will welcome us back when the baby is born. I don't know what I shall do without him."

Alexandra could think of lots of things she could do if her father weren't there to stop her. She could see the sea more often, ride ponies, read angel books, play with the tenant children. When she had the chance, she would ask Michael if she could do these things now. If he said yes, she wouldn't go back to her father, no matter how much her mother loved him. Every time her father said he loved her, he hurt her. Love was vastly overrated in Alexandra's opinion.

They moved closer to the railing, watching the crowd milling about on the dock below. Her mother clenched Alexandra's hand too tight, but she didn't complain. She anxiously watched the road for the crested carriage that would signal her father's arrival. She wished Michael would hurry back and set this ship sailing.

Her mother flinched as a crate fell loose from its rope and crashed to the deck with a noise like a gunshot. She pulled Alexandra closer in front of her and protectively wrapped her arm around her daughter's shoulders.

"He won't come," she whispered, as if reading Alexandra's thoughts. "He's in London. He'll never arrive in time. Say good-bye to England, darling. Michael is taking us to America."

Alexandra thought that idea required singing and dancing with joy, but her mother openly wept. Maybe her father was right. Her mother was a weak woman. Maybe this man Michael could be strong for all of them.

She felt a little queasy from the rolling of the ship and the hot sun on her head and the constant fear when the dreaded happened. With a terrible sense of the inevitable, Alexandra watched through sleepy eyes as her father's gleaming carriage clattered down the cobblestones with a scream of horses and cracking of whips. Behind her, her mother moaned a sob of despair.

Later, the scene came back as a sleep-induced nightmare, an unreality Alexandra never consciously remembered.

In her nightmares, she saw the stranger called Michael running for the ship. She saw her father, his black greatcoat flapping in the stiff breeze like giant bird's wings. She heard the sharp reports of more crates falling. Or perhaps they weren't crates. Red flowers erupted on Michael's clean white linen, and he fell backward to the accompaniment of disembodied screams.

Alexandra felt certain it was her mother screaming, but the noise resounded all around her, even from the gulls flying overhead. She tried squeezing between the crates and the rails, hiding herself from the screams, from the black wings and thunderous roars. She tried making herself small, invisible. Maybe if he didn't find her, it would all go away. She was the sinner. Let God cast her away.

No one stopped him. No one stood in the way of the great flapping wings and smoking pistol. No one dared interfere as a peer of the realm strode on deck demanding the return of his wife. Men hurried to clear his path. A wife belongs with her husband—Alexandra heard the voices whisper in her nightmare.
A wife belongs to her husband.

He didn't even see Alexandra crouched among the crates. With cold fury, the earl smashed the back of his powerful hand against his wife's jaw. She stumbled backward, tripping over Alexandra's crouched body, slamming into the railing. Splintering wood caused a rippling cry of alarm through the crowd.

In the next moment, Alexandra tumbled airborne, her mother flying free beside her, screaming "Dora!" in one long, terrified wail. God had come for them at last.

God's cold hand reached for her through the splash of icy waters over her head. Alexandra clung to her doll, determined to take this beloved friend with her to the new world.

* * *

The older man in the broad-brimmed hat and old-fashioned collarless coat didn't hesitate as two females flew overboard into the filth of the harbor. Flinging off coat and shoes, he leaped in after them, ignoring the wild cries of the handsome, overwrought earl on the deck.

Other men followed his example, leaping from dock and deck. A rowboat full of sailors went out. Men dived and swam and came up empty-handed. The earl paced and cursed and cried. He swore eternal rewards.