Ransom Redeemed (2 page)

Chapter Two

Six years later

London, 1850

She was coming for him again. He heard her bones creaking and clattering as she crawled along like a disjointed spider. His lips broke apart, fighting to get her name out, but a gust of wailing wind filled his mouth. He choked, suffocating, and then, at last,

"
Sally!"

Ransom jerked upright and cracked his knee on the side of the hipbath. Slowly he came back to reality.

It was a dream. Only a dream. Again.

At least three times a week for the past six years he'd endured a similar nightmare— the bloody, rotting image of Sally White, creeping across the moor, with her broken limbs and twisted neck, just to find him and wreak her vengeance.

That thick, sickly-sweet perfume she wore, although excessive, was not enough to mask the odor of putrid flesh.

His hand trembled as he wiped a damp palm swiftly across his equally moist brow. Beneath a sweat-saturated shirt, his heart pounded like a fist trying to punch its way out of his chest.

He leaned back against the chill metal— a welcome coolant for his hot, throbbing head— and cautiously lowered his gaze, taking inventory of his parts. Still wore his boots and breeches, surprisingly, although his shirt hung loose, as if he was in the process of undressing when he climbed into the dry tub and fell unconscious. An empty wine decanter and a large candelabra rested on the floor nearby. The candles were all burned down to the brass, wax tears frozen into lumpy stalactites, suspended with an eerie sort of grace from the charred wicks.

Ransom took a few deep breaths, letting his pulse fall to a calmer rhythm.

What he really needed was some toast, coffee, and headache powders. He'd feel better then, get on with his day and the art of evading Sally's ghost. Until the next time he could no longer avoid falling asleep.

Holding his head as still as he could, he climbed out of the tub and then halted in surprise as a soft snore from the room beyond told him he was not alone. Oh, lord, he was in no mood to face anybody yet this morning, and he couldn't, for the life of him, remember who he might have brought to his bedchamber last night during the party.

But he could hardly hide in the bathtub any longer, could he?

Christ, he was stiff! Must be getting too old for this.

With a lurching step, leaning slightly off kilter, because he suddenly felt too tall for the house, he made his way from the dressing room to face his day and whoever lay in his bed.

A ghostly, bluish-grey haze meandered through half-closed curtains and fumbled over the wreckage of his bedchamber. Apparently he'd enjoyed quite an evening. Or might have, if he hadn't ended up in the empty bath alone and almost fully dressed. The three naked women on his bed were clear evidence of a missed opportunity.

Ransom's lips began to bend in a wry smirk, until their progress was interrupted by a wide yawn as he sagged against the doorframe. Maintaining the infamous Deverell reputation was exhausting. Nobody, of course, would believe that he hadn't laid a finger on any of those women. They would take one look at the scene and assume he'd been living up to profligate expectations.

The nearest female was a gloriously rumpled redhead. Didn't recall her name, if he had ever known it, but she possessed the shape of a Rubens muse. On her left a slender brunette stretched out, face down, one arm curved around a pillow, while a harvest-gold blonde sprawled across the end of the bed.

He now had a vague memory of inviting them in and sloppily pouring wine into four glasses— an action delayed by hands running through his hair, pulling on the knot of his cravat, fingers wriggling into button holes, removing his waistcoat. Excited giggles and gasps blowing in his ear. He remembered suddenly needing to do... something, heading for the dressing room and bumping his shoulder into the doorframe so hard it spun him one hundred and eighty degrees.

But then ... nothing.

His pretty sirens must have grown bored waiting for his return from the dressing room, and finally drifted into sound sleep. Perhaps he should check that they too weren't dead. He could see the lurid newspaper story already.

Deverell's Son Found With Three More Dead Women
.

They'd hang him for sure this time.

But the contented rhythm of their snores assured him they still breathed. Thank goodness.

One shoulder propped against the doorframe, he pondered the debauchery those four walls must have witnessed. This was once his father's bedchamber, but True Deverell rarely came up to London now and had given the town house to Ransom with only the following proviso— "Don't wreck the place and don't tumble the maids. I pay the staff to keep the house clean and maintained, not to polish your newel post."

As if Ransom couldn't keep his hands off any attractive petticoat he saw. Well, he thought with a grim smile, his father probably knew him better than he knew himself, for almost everything Ransom did, True Deverell had done before him.

"Father, you're being a hypocrite," he would say.

To which his father replied, "I try to save you from the mistakes I made with women, but I see it's a fruitless, thankless task."

Yes, it was. He didn't understand why his father even made the effort at this late stage.

"So do as you will. Just don't shoot at me again the next time a female betrays you, boy. Because I might not be able to convince the Justice of the Peace that it was an accident another time."

His father always brought up that shooting sooner or later, and Ransom would reply, "Well, perhaps you shouldn't have bedded my fiancée." Of course, it hadn't quite happened that way, but he still went through the motions of accusing his father, and True, likewise, would repeat, yet again, his version of events.

"I did not invite that woman into my bed. She tried to seduce me and when my rejection wounded her pride, she told me she was engaged to you and had the gall to suggest I pay for her silence, otherwise she would tell you a pretty tale. She knew, it seems, that her word would hold more weight with you than mine. Since I refused to entertain this clumsy attempt at blackmail she ran to you with her filthy lie and you, being a hothead like your mother, instantly came after me with a dueling pistol. And very bad aim. Next time you shoot at a man, sober up first."

Ah, yes: Miss Flora Pridemore, failed blackmailer. At the age of only nineteen Ransom had made a lucky escape, and learned a very good lesson about the mercenary intentions of females.

"Pity you had to scrape my shoulder with a bullet before you came to your senses about that one," his father would add with a dour chuckle.

These days, Ransom managed his personal affairs with only three rules: avoid promises, remember to leave a window open for timely escape, and always keep one’s boots close by.

"Why do I constantly feel as if we're caught in the midst of a house fire?" a lover once whined to him.

But he always made it plain, from the beginning of an affair, that pleasure was his only pursuit and nothing was to be taken seriously. Ransom Deverell had no interest in marriage and there were, he was certain, rats scuttling around the east end of London that would make better fathers. He did not like children even when he was one. He was a man with something damaged inside, and he suspected it was so at birth.

Born of a loveless marriage and then blamed for every discomfort and discontent his parents suffered as if he directly caused it, Ransom grew up under a dark cloud of animosity. Left often to the "care" of detached, bureaucratic nannies, the first two things he'd ever learned were the art of self-preservation and how to make his own entertainment. When his sister was born even less attention came his way. Unless, of course, he was in trouble for some misdeed.

"You're a horrid child," Nanny Bond had hissed at him once, because he spat out some foul-tasting soup she'd tried to force down his throat. "God is watching you!"

At ten years of age, Ransom already had a smart tongue. "But He forgives. Isn't that the way it works? If God didn't forgive sinners there'd be no one in Heaven."

"He won't let you in, boy. There's a part missing from you and the Devil took it, so you're his creature," she'd assured him. "You have no conscience, and you'll go straight to Hell."

"Good," he'd replied stoically. "Because I've seen some of the high and mighty folk who go to church on a Sunday and call themselves Christians, and I'd rather not go where they're going, thank you very much."

That got him a beating about the ears.

Now he thought of the space where his conscience should be as an untenable moor. Nothing was allowed to dwell there long. If anything tried, he chased it off with his wild pursuit of pleasure — a bacchanalian force that, in his imagination, took the form of a large, ever-hungry falcon. From its perch in the stark branches of a dead tree on hardscrabble land, this bird swooped down on any pitiful, lost creature that wandered into its sharp-eyed view. Thus Ransom patrolled his mind during waking hours, fed his imaginary bird of prey with sinful delights at night and, by never being still, kept Sally White's ghost at bay. Or tried, for as long as he could.

Last night's party, like all others he held at the London house, had been a bright and noisy event that helped keep him awake and active well into the late hours. Ransom was a generous host who asked for nothing from his guests except to be entertained and kept awake. Nobody left until dawn had spread her petticoats across the sky, and sometimes they remained even longer. Like the trio of sirens on his bed.

So this was how he kept up the brazen image expected of True Deverell's eldest legitimate son and hell-raiser. He gave the "punters"— to use one of his father's gambling terms— what they anticipated, nothing more or less. He was firmly entrenched as the worst of men, the Determined Malefactor, as that old Oxford professor had once labeled him.

For most women, so he'd found, that description appeared to be a fascinating lure rather than a warning.

There was one young lady, however, who was not drawn in. And Ransom caught her eye now, as he sleepily surveyed the untidy room. Like the crack of a whip, her gaze, staring coolly down at him from an oil painting on the far wall, brought him sharply upright. He pushed himself away from the doorframe and brushed down his shirt sleeves.

"Yes, yes," he muttered, wincing up at her, "I know I must be a pitiful sight this morning. But if I lived in a painting and never actually collided with real people, I could stay as pristine and self-satisfied as you, Contessa."

A woman of mystery and eternal distance, she remained mildly scornful, of course. She did not need words to communicate her opinion of him and the various problems he got himself into.

When he first moved into the house, Ransom had found her portrait hanging downstairs in the hall, but he'd moved her to his bedchamber because there was something about her countenance that made him think she read all his secrets, all his sins. Such an intimate confidant ought to be kept in a less public area of the house, he'd quickly decided.

Occasionally his female guests complained that they felt her disapproving gaze even in the dark. He knew what they meant, but he never got around to moving her elsewhere.

He called her "La Contessa" because, although he knew nothing about her, she had a very noble mien. Her complexion was olive, the hair very dark, tightly framing an oval face, and she posed beside an arched window, through which some medieval town could be seen, a cluster of rounded bell towers and tall, narrow houses of bleached stone, with terracotta roofs jumbled against a coppery, almost sinister sky.

But Ransom's gaze always went to her hands, which were gloveless and held a long-stemmed thorny rose. The proximity of her small fingers to those vicious-looking thorns troubled him every time he looked at the picture.

"Think you're so clever, don't you?" he grumbled. "You look down on me for my mistakes, but clearly you don't even know the first thing about thorns." Had nobody warned her? Perhaps, by the time the portrait was completed, she had learned her lesson about pricks, he mused.

Her eyes
—pale and clear—
observed his antics with guarded amusement. Her mouth was softly curved in an almost-but-not-quite smirk.

Look at yourself, Deverell,
she seemed to chide softly
. For pity's sake, pull yourself together. Don't you know what today is?

No. Should I?

She seemed to think he should know. Something important was supposed to happen, but she would give no further clue. Her smug lips were sealed.

Catching sight of his scowling reflection in a mirrored wall panel, Ransom finally realized that his shirt was badly stained with red wine. Like a large bloodstain. He tore it off over his head and returned to his dressing room. There he splashed his face and chest with water from the washbasin, drew fingers hastily through his hair, and looked around for a clean shirt.

But his head hurt too much, his mouth was dry, and the need for sustenance was so overwhelming he felt certain he'd lose his stomach any minute if he didn't soon fill it with something. Driven by a new burst of urgent steam, he grabbed an evening jacket instead of a shirt. That was good enough for a quick visit to the kitchen, and while there he'd put a tray of food together for his companions too. They must need replenishment.