The Lily Brand (11 page)

Marry the Earl of Ravenhurst? Lillian felt all blood drain from her face. “I will not marry him,” she said, and agitation made her voice quiver. “I cannot marry him.” For how could she marry a man whose skin would be still blemished by the mark she had burnt into it?

“What?” Aunt Louisa eyed her with disbelief. “What nonsense you are talking, my dear!
Of course
you will marry him. We just have to make him.”

Nanette had gone still. “What is it,
chou-chou
? Why can’t you marry him?”

Lillian folded her hands in her lap and clutched her fingers together so they would not shake. She remembered the smell of scorched flesh, the way his body had jerked.

Her responsibility.

“Lillian?” her grandfather prompted.

Yet the only person she looked at, the only person who would understand, was Nanette. “He was at Château du Marais.”

The old woman turned pale, and shock widened her eyes.

Aunt Louisa only fluttered her hands as if to ward off a swarm of flies. “Piff-paff, of what significance shall that be? So he knows your stepmother. I cannot see how that would prevent you from marrying him.”

At that moment, there was a knock on the door and the butler came in to announce a visitor.

Aunt Louisa shook her head. “A visitor? At this time of the day?”

“It is the Viscount Perrin, my lady,” the butler said.

“The Viscount Perrin?” Immediately her face lit up. She straightened in her chair and made the newspaper disappear under the folds of her skirt. “What a nice surprise! He shall come in!”

Obligingly, the butler stepped aside to make room for a pale Alexander Markham, who hastened into the room. For once, his hair was not properly groomed, but in an unruly jumble. “Good morning, my ladies, my lord.” He bowed first in the one direction then in the other. “Excuse my intrusion. I… Could I…” His hands fidgeted with the buttons of his coat. He gulped, but then he squared his shoulders and looked the Marquis of Larkmoor straight in the eye. “My lord, may I request a private interview with your granddaughter?”

Aunt Louisa propelled out of her chair. “But
of course
!” A beaming smile appeared on her face. She grasped the offending newspaper, which was still lying on the chair, and waved the others to leave the room. “Papa. Nanette. Come, come! And you, chick…” She went over to pat Lillian’s cheek. “You will listen carefully to what the Viscount Perrin has to say to you. We will wait for you in the parlor.
Papa
!” Hurriedly, she ushered a bewildered Marquis of Larkmoor and Nanette out of the room.

The door was shut, their steps receded. For a moment, there was absolute silence.

Lillian had not moved during the whole exchange. She was reminded of the nights when she had sat in the box at the theater and watched the events on stage, a colorful kaleidoscope of the tragedies and comedies of life. She felt like that right now: a spectator.

Only, now she watched the Viscount Perrin pacing in her grandfather’s breakfast room. She raised her chin a notch. “To what do I owe this honor, my lord?”

“My lady.” Perrin stopped in front of her, his face filled with the familiar hectic blotches of red. “This morning I was shocked, truly shocked, to learn of my cousin’s scandalous behavior.” He held out his hand as if to halt her nonexistent protests. “I do not blame
you
, my lady. I had a most disturbing discussion with my cousin yesterday morning. And this greatly impressed upon me the Earl of Ravenhurst’s most worrying state of mind.” A nervous tick started at his left eye. “In a word, my lady, he is past all sanity.” As if in pain, he pressed his fist against his mouth.

Lillian observed him in silence. Vividly, she remembered the pain of his cousin’s hands on her body, the unholy fire in his cornflower-blue eyes. Wild with anger and shame. A man pushed past his endurance.

Her responsibility.

After a while Perrin continued: “I deeply regret that you had to become the unfortunate victim of… of this. I—” All at once, he rushed forward and dropped to his knees in front of Lillian’s chair. “My lady.” He took her hands. “Lady Lillian.” He blew a hot, damp kiss on each of them. “As you have been brought to this through the doings of a family member of mine, I feel it is my obligation to offer you”—he gulped—“the protection of my name and my hand in marriage.” He beamed at her and pressed her limp fingers. “What do you say?”

Lillian looked at him steadily. At the man who had offered her a way out at a great cost to himself. She cocked her head to the side. He probably did not even know the cost. “There will be a scandal,” she said. “Do you not mind?”

“Scandal?” He puffed out his chest. “It will wither away in the fire of my love.” He pressed two more kisses on her hands. “I love you, Lillian, dearest Lillian.”

A lily for Lillian.
The smell of scorched flesh. The body flinching, but helplessly bound. And the sight of the raw, burnt skin.

Her responsibility.

She gazed at Perrin, saw the hot look in his eyes, the feverish red on his pale cheeks. She remembered how she had once envisioned his body: pale, unblemished. Innocent. Much too innocent for her, though. It would be so easy to take what he offered. But how could she, now that the past had caught up with her? How could she, when his cousin was bearing her mark on his body? She would destroy Perrin’s innocence with the knowledge of evil she had gained at Château du Marais.

So Lillian smiled a bit and closed her fingers around his. “Thank you for your very generous offer. I assure you I feel deeply honored by it. But I cannot accept it. I am sorry.”

“But… but…” His mouth closed and opened as if he were a stranded fish.

Lillian gently drew her hands out of his grasp. “I am deeply sorry.”

Painful color surged up from underneath his cravat. He staggered back to his feet and busily brushed at his coat. “Well, if that is your decision…” He threw his head back. “Then I hope that you will not regret it one day.” His tone clearly said that she would regret it for the rest of her life. “Good day to you, madam. I wish you all the luck you can need.” With that, he marched off, and the door banged shut behind him.

Lillian closed her eyes and listened as his steps faded in the hall outside.

~*~

Troy heard her long before he saw her. The high-pitched, whingeing voice settled over his butler’s hoarse
basso continuo
. The volume swelled in a prolonged
crescendo
, the door opened, and Finney had just time enough to utter a croak and to flatten himself against the door before the Dowager Countess of Ravenhurst swept past him into the billiards room.

“I have heard most shocking news!” she announced to the world in general and to her grandson in particular.

Troy watched the last ball roll over the baize-covered slate, only to miss the hole in the corner and bounce off the cushion. He suppressed a sigh, straightened and made the formal bow as was expected of him. “Good morning, granddame.” He gave his butler a small nod. “That will be all, Finney. Thank you.” He turned his attention back to his grandmother, who regarded him with obvious displeasure.

“I will not wish you a good morning, Ravenhurst, because it is
not
a good morning.” She pierced him with a withering glance. “I demand to know this minute whether it is true.”

He laid his cue on the billiard board. “Whether what is true?”

Stalling was not one of the best tactics to employ with the dowager countess, and consequently, the lines around her mouth deepened even more. “Do not pretend to be a dimwit, Ravenhurst! Did you compromise Lillian Abberley, the girl your cousin plans to wed—yes or no?” Her thin nose quivered with indignation.

“If you put it like that…” Troy shrugged. “Yes.”

“
Yes?
You shamed the girl your cousin plans to make his viscountess, the Marquis of Larkmoor’s granddaughter, and all you give me is insolence?” She paused, but Troy knew better than to interrupt her. Instead, he mentally prepared himself for the thunderstorm to come.

“You behaved like the meanest blackguard, the basest scoundrel, you dishonored the family name, and this is all you can say? Oh no, Ravenhurst, this will not do! Do you want your poor father and grandfather to turn in their graves with humiliation at what their heir has done?” Bristling with anger, she approached him and poked her bony finger into his chest. “You will marry the chit, do you hear me?”

“Granddame—”

“I will have no grandson of mine put shame on the family name, oh no, not as long as there is breath in my lungs!”

“Granddame, I had reasons.”

“Reasons?” One white eyebrow rose. “To bring disaster upon your cousin’s happiness?”

Troy gritted his teeth until his jaw hurt. “He would have brought disaster upon himself had he married the girl, believe me.”

The girl who had branded him like an animal.

“You, Ravenhurst, are out of your mind!” The corners of the Dowager Countess’s mouth turned down in an expression of utter contempt. “You have been in London but four days. How can you even attempt to judge the character of Lady Lillian Abberley?”

“Lady Lillian Abberley?
Lady
Lillian Abberley? God!” Abruptly, Troy whirled and ran both hands through his hair. With his back to his grandmother he said, “Can you not trust me in this, granddame?”

Did he deserve this? Could she not show him a bit of common human sympathy? God, how he loathed this all! His hand splayed over his chest, where his shirt hid the darkened, burnt flesh.

His grandmother’s snort cut him like the lash of a whip. “You have put shame to our name, Ravenhurst.” Her icy voice was a bitter reminder of how much his grandmother had changed since his grandfather died. All warmth and love seemed to have turned into bitterness and spite, until the woman he had known and loved all his childhood was no more.

Wearily, Troy closed his eyes. “When I came home from France and you oversaw the doctor tending my wounds, did you not wonder at the marks on my back?” He turned around to look at the dowager countess. “Did you not wonder at the brand on my chest? Did you not ask yourself where they had come from?” He leaned down, his eyes never leaving her face.

A startled frown crossed her forehead. “Well… yes,” she admitted impatiently. “But I cannot see what that has to do with the situation at hand.”

Troy laughed. It was the kind of laugh he had come to learn during his years in the war, the laugh he had perfected during his time in a stinking French prison. “Because that is exactly where Lady Lillian has come from, too. So, you see, I could not let my foolish young cousin marry the woman.”

For a moment, his grandmother seemed confused. “Murgatroyd…” Her hands reached up as if to touch his shoulders. But then, she drew her hands back and stepped away. “Whatever the reason for your most unseemly behavior last night, it might have had a somewhat contrary effect to your wishes.” Her voice was cool and smooth again. “For your foolish young cousin, as you named him, plans to go off to Larkmoor’s this morning.” A thin brow rose as if in mockery. “To atone for your sins, I believe.”

With that, she left: a regal-looking old woman, who had just condemned her grandson to something worse than death.

Troy stared after her, not really seeing anything. He remembered the sounds of ripping material, the feeling of soft flesh under his hands. Most of all, he remembered the sight of blood on her lips.
Her
blood. And the triumph he had felt. To have dominated her. To have saved Alex from this woman.

He heard the front door close.

With a roar he banged his fist onto the billiard table, and the hard slate jarred his arm.

~*~

Of course, Aunt Louisa could not understand why Lillian had refused the viscount’s offer of marriage. Indeed, she was horrified. She paced around the room, clucking her tongue and muttering to herself, only to stop in her tracks from time to time and moan: “The girl will go to ruins!
To ruins,
I say!”

Nanette, by contrast, sat in the corner of the drawing room and busied herself with her needlework. She always did some sort of needlework. The scarves and frocks and wraps she knitted she gave to the people of the poorhouse, Lillian knew.
Everything needs balance,
the voice of the old woman whispered in her head.
One to do the healing in a place where another does all the wounding.
One to think of the people in need while society moved from amusement to amusement, their only worry which invitation to accept, which ball to attend, which dress to wear.

Lillian looked out the window to the street below, where fashionable ladies bloomed like flowers against the gray of the city. She yearned for the silence of an overgrown garden where nobody had tread but her. She remembered how she had sat in the grass by the lake and the summer breeze had caressed her cheek, while her thighs had still been smeared with—

Lillian flinched.

She clasped her hands together in her lap to stop their trembling. Aunt Louisa’s steps suddenly seemed to echo loudly in the room. Her sighs and moans rasped on Lillian’s nerves, and she felt the beginning of a headache like a white hot iron behind her eyes.

“Oh dear, oh dear!” Aunt Louisa lamented. “Whatever shall we do now? Papa will have to call him out, after all. Oh dear, oh dear! He will be killed and then what shall we do? That wretched, wretched man! Oh, how I would wish to strangle him, yes, I would! Put my hands around…”

The butler cleared his throat noisily. He stood in the open door and, judging from the volume of his throat clearing, he had been standing there for some time already. “My lady?”

“…his scrawny neck and—”

“My lady?”

Irritated, Aunt Louisa turned around. “Yes, what is it?”

By this time, the butler’s face had taken on a delicate shade of pink. “There is a visitor.”

“A visitor?” Aunt Louisa wrung her hands. “Who would want to visit us in our misery? Who?” All at once, her expression changed and she gave the butler a suspicious scowl. “It is Lady Jersey, isn’t it? She has come to gloat, I am sure of it! To cancel her invitation
in person
.”