The Many Sins of Cris De Feaux (Lords of Disgrace) (22 page)

‘The doctor, my lord.’ Both the men got to their feet, helped Tamsyn to hers. Gabriel swept her up in his arms, carried her across to the bench against the wall and set her down on it, keeping one hand on her arm as she tried to get up again.

‘Let the dog see the rabbit,’ he said mildly.

Someone had moved screens around Cris’s sprawled body. Beyond them she could hear the guests making their way down the stairs, Tess’s voice as she reassured them, thanked them for their understanding, wished them a good night. The doctor, lean and white-haired, knelt beside Cris, his hands running lightly over his body while Alex told him what had happened, how Cris had moved his hands and feet. She found she was praying under her breath, ‘Let him live, let him live, don’t let him be crippled.’

‘Ah, you’re with us,’ the doctor remarked and she realised Cris was conscious again. ‘We’ll have you off this floor soon, just tell me if this hurts...and can you move that? Good, and now, I’ll just try bending this.’

Cris’s muttered comments sounded profane, but Tamsyn was just happy he was conscious and able to swear. Tess came in, wrapped a shawl around her shoulders. ‘Come along, we’ll get you undressed and check you over.’

‘I can’t leave him.’

‘Yes, you can. Look, Dr Langridge is organising the footmen to put him on a tabletop and carry him to a bedchamber. He wouldn’t do that if there was any danger. And you can’t follow him in, they’ll be stripping him.’

‘I’ve—’

‘Yes, I know you have, but we don’t want the doctor being shocked, do we? Come on.’ Tess coaxed her to her feet, away from Cris, slowly up the stairs. ‘There’s a nice bedchamber just here.’

Tamsyn managed to get through the door and then, for only the second time in her life, she fainted.

Chapter Twenty-Two

‘C
ris?’ Tamsyn demanded as Tess slipped back into the bedchamber. Her ferocious lady’s maid, White, carried on easing her into a borrowed nightgown, positioning herself firmly so that Tamsyn could not get out of bed.

‘Battered, but there is nothing seriously wrong, I promise,’ Tess said before she even had the door closed. As Tamsyn sagged back against the pillows she added, ‘Twisted ankle and knee on the right, several broken ribs, a lump the size of a plum on the back of his head and apparently bruises in just about every place possible.’

‘I feel dreadful,’ Tamsyn confessed. ‘What the marble floor didn’t do, I must have, landing on him like a sack of potatoes.’ She tried to smile and hide the fact that she wanted to burst into tears of sheer relief after twenty minutes of imagining Cris with a broken spine or a fractured skull.

‘You aren’t
that
heavy,’ Tess said, laughing.

‘I’m not some dainty little debutante either.’ White moved away and she promptly threw back the covers. ‘I want to see him.’

‘You stay right there, ma’am.’ White tucked in the covers like a straitjacket. ‘The doctor said you were to rest and the marquess is not to be disturbed until at least tomorrow.’

‘Franklin.’ The memory of why all this had happened came back with an unpleasant lurch in her stomach. ‘They said he was dead or did I imagine it?’

‘He is. Perhaps it is for the best,’ Tess said, although she sounded dubious.

‘The scandal...and your lovely party ruined.’

‘We’re putting it around that he suffered a brainstorm and was experiencing delusions.’ Tess perched on the edge of the bed, ignoring White’s’s disapproving expression at such bad deportment. ‘It is early yet, but so far, from what I can hear, people are accepting that. Apparently he has been acting oddly recently—Alex said he was in the grip of a really frightening money lender and most of the gentlemen are quite prepared to believe that was enough to drive anyone insane.’

‘I must write to my aunts before they hear this in the newspapers.’

‘Just a note then. In fact, I will do it for you now and send it to catch the next post. I’ll reassure them everyone else is safe and make sure they know about the brainstorm story.’ She slid off the bed and took Tamsyn’s hand. ‘You rest and I’ll just go and tell Cris he can stop worrying about you. Try to sleep,’ she added as White blew out all the candles, leaving only the little oil lamp by the bed. ‘All is well.’

All is well.
Tamsyn lay, eyes wide open. When she closed them she could see Franklin’s face, contorted by fear and rage, see the marble floor far below her dangling feet, see Cris’s face, white and still.

The trial for the murder of poor Lieutenant Ritchie would go ahead with, she suspected, no mention of Franklin’s involvement. The aunts were safe and so was the estate and everyone on it. The worthy lawyer cousin and his family would move into Holt Hall, which could only be a good thing for that estate, and soon Franklin would be a fading memory, an unsatisfactory nobleman who had gone to the bad and suffered for it.

And she would go home, back to Barbary Combe House, back to her life at the edge of the sea, to remember two men. One who had married her as he might have adopted a stray kitten and whom she had loved as a friend, the other who had shown her gallantry and the glories of physical love and whom she loved with what she feared was everything she had in her heart and her soul.

* * *

Tamsyn drifted off to sleep at last and woke, stiff and sore and confused in a strange bed with the light seeping through the curtains on the wrong side of the room. Then she recalled where she was and the events of the night before came back to her like a hammer blow. Next door to her chamber she could hear doors opening and closing carefully, a murmur of voices, footsteps on the landing and then silence. Perhaps that was where Cris was.

She needed him, she needed to see him just one more time, touch him, reassure herself that he truly was not seriously injured, store a few more precious memories away. She got out of bed, clumsy and sore from the fall, and pulled on the wrapper Prescott had left for her. There were no slippers, but then, she was not supposed to be wandering around. The clock on the mantelshelf struck five with thin, silvery notes as she eased open the door and found the corridor outside deserted.

The door to the next room opened with well-oiled silence, but even so, the man on the bed turned his head towards her as she slipped inside. ‘Tamsyn.’

‘Don’t move.’ His hand when she took it was warm and his grip reassuringly strong. Tamsyn sat down on the chair beside the bed without letting go.

‘I didn’t know whether they were telling me the truth when they said you were unhurt,’ Cris said. He was lying completely flat with no pillows and there was a hump in the bed where some sort of framework had been put over his injured leg. ‘Tell me the truth. Were you injured?’

‘No, of course not.’ She managed to smile and adopt a rallying tone rather than throw herself on his battered body and just hug him as she wanted to. ‘How could I be injured when I had a large man between me and the floor? I could wish you were rather better padded with fat and not solid muscle, though. It was like hitting a horsehair sofa.’

Cris snorted with amusement and winced. ‘Do not, I beg you, make me laugh. Tamsyn, tell me truthfully, how do you feel about yesterday?’

She thought for a moment, then answered him honestly. ‘I am sorry for Franklin, that his own weakness and folly led him to such an end. Part of me is relieved, because he cannot threaten Aunt Izzy any longer, but I cannot be glad, not at the loss of a life, however wasted. Tess says the scandal can be contained, explained, but I hate bringing violence and death into her home, especially now.’

‘Now?’ Cris raised an interrogative eyebrow.

‘Now she is expecting a baby.’

He grinned. ‘Alex is almost tying himself in knots trying not to fuss over her, the lucky devil.’

‘You want children.’ Of course he did, she knew that. He needed an heir, but beyond that, she could tell he wanted to be a father, with all that entailed.

‘Naturally.’ Cris shrugged, a thoughtless, nonchalant gesture that made him gasp. ‘Have you any idea how much everything itches the moment you can’t reach to scratch it?’

She forced a smile for him. ‘When will the doctor let you get up?’

‘He’s calling again this afternoon to make certain my skull’s all right, then I can sit up, he says. The man’s seen too many head injuries during the war, it makes him over-cautious.’

‘I would rather he was. I thought...I thought for a moment that you...were dead, or had broken your back.’

‘Would you care very much?’ The austere, cool expression was back on his face and he was looking up at the underside of the bed canopy, not at her.

‘Of course I care! You saved my life, Cris. That was an incredibly brave thing to do, to risk. And I couldn’t have jumped for anyone else, there is no one else I would have trusted. How did you think of telling me to do what Jory did? It confused Franklin, stopped him guessing for a few vital seconds.’

‘I thought that would penetrate the noise, and the confusion, and reach you in a way that just shouting
Jump!
would not. If I thought at all. But I do not want your gratitude, Tamsyn.’

‘Why not?’ she asked softly. He seemed somehow angry and all she got for a reply was a shake of the head. ‘You are in pain and I am making you irritable. I’ll go, I just wanted to see for myself that you are alive and are going to get better.’ She released his hand and got to her feet.

‘I am not irritable,’ Cris snapped.

‘No?’

‘No. I am working out how to propose to you from this ludicrous position.’ He sounded completely exasperated.

‘
Propose?
But, Cris, why?’ Of all the unromantic offers of marriage she could imagine, being snapped at by a man flat on his back and in a foul temper must be top of the list. ‘We have discussed this.’

‘I love you.’

‘Just because—’ Her brain caught up with her ears. ‘No, you do not.’ How much more did this have to hurt?

‘I think I may know better than you how I feel.’ His eyes, blue and dark and unfathomable, watched her as he lay, unmoving.

‘You are being gallant again. The scandal does not matter, I am leaving today.’

‘Today?’
Cris came up off the bed, cursing with pain, and twisted to take her by the shoulders with both hands.

‘Lie down,
please
.’ She tried to push him back, but he yanked her against him, kissed her until she stopped struggling and began to kiss him back. It was the last time, she justified to herself with what was left of her powers of reasoning. When they finally broke apart she reached for the pillows and piled them behind him in the hope he would at least lie back.

She moved the chair safely out of range. ‘That is not love—that is desire. We know we feel it. What about the woman you were in love with before? Is this just the rebound from her?’

‘How did you know about Katerina?’ Cris was controlling his breathing with a visible effort.

‘I did not, you have just told me her name. I guessed there was someone. Your friends thought so, too.’

‘I believed I was in love with her. She was married and it was impossible. We exchanged one kiss—that was all. I think the very impossibility of it made me believe it was love. That first time I kissed you, in the sea, there was something that made me doubt my feelings for her and the more I thought about it, the more I realised it was not love I had felt.’

She should not ask him any more, because even if this was the truth, he was not for her. She was not for him.
But I am only human.
‘What makes you think what you feel for me is love?’ she asked, her voice steady, her body shaking with the effort of will that took.

‘The ache when I came to London and you were not here. The sense that something was missing, as if I had lost a limb, or a sense. And then last night, when I saw you fighting to be free from Franklin, when I saw you blazing with courage and determination and a refusal to give in and I thought I was going to lose you. Then I knew.’

‘I am not the wife for you, for a marquess. You know that.’

He loves me. I love him and I cannot, must not, marry him.

‘All my life I have thought I knew not whom I must marry, but what kind of woman. It was a certainty, like knowing that the land was entailed, or that I had a seat in the House of Lords. But I lay here last night, unable to sleep, and made myself listen to reason, to reality, to what I felt. I realised I could marry a yeoman’s daughter tomorrow and a few eyebrows might be raised. And they would be lowered again if she proved to be elegant and cultured and knew how to behave in society. And before you mention last night’s uproar, the scandal is Chelford’s. Only a small inner circle know how you are involved.’

‘Jory—’

‘Was a youthful love. A romance that happened a long way away from any of those raised eyebrows. Tamsyn, I do not have to marry for money, I do not have to marry for political alliances. I have only myself to please if I fall in love with a lady who can only enhance the family name, be a life’s partner to me, a wonderful mother to my children.’

Her control did break then, as though he had hit ice, sending cracks and fissures spreading out, taking pain with them. Of course he did not know what had happened on that clifftop that day, not all of it.

‘But I do not love you,’ she lied as she stood up, sending the chair to the floor behind her. He was white to the lips as he stared at her, his hands already clenching on the bedclothes as though he would throw them off, try to follow her as she backed across the room to the door.

‘I’ll always remember you, but I cannot...’

Cannot lie to you any more.

‘Goodbye, Cris.’

My love.

She was halfway across the room and he was half out of bed, the frame over his injured leg knocked away, one foot on the floor. Behind her the door banged open and Alex strode in.

‘What the devil is going on in here? There was an almighty crash, I thought you’d fallen out of bed.’

‘Tamsyn is trying to leave. Stop her.’

‘I must go home, Lord Weybourn. Please could you ask someone to secure me a post chaise to leave at ten? I must call at the dealer’s shop and retrieve the paintings and I can hardly take them on the stage.’

‘I’ll send you in one of my carriages,’ Alex said over his shoulder as he advanced on Cris. ‘Get back into bed, man, for heaven’s sake, or Tess will have my guts for harp strings.’

Tamsyn closed the door on them and ran. Tess and Gabriel would help her get away before she did something unforgivable and agreed to marry the man she loved.

* * *

It was good to be home. There was a peace to be found in the endlessly changing weather, the finality of land meeting ocean, the timeless rhythms of the farms and the fisheries.

A week after she’d returned home Tamsyn made herself walk to the clifftop where Jory had gone to his death. It was the first time since that afternoon and she knew now it was finally time to lay that ghost to rest. She sat down on a rock that pushed out of the rabbit-nibbled turf, its base fringed with purple thrift, and gazed out to sea. One day people would walk on these cliffs and look out at this view and they would know nothing of her, or her love or of tragedies long ago. That was strangely comforting.

The grass muffled footsteps and the man was almost on her before she heard him and turned. The tall figure was silhouetted against the bright sky and for a second her pulse stuttered and a wild hope ran through her, only to be crushed a moment later when Dr Tregarth stopped at her side.

‘Tamsyn. They told me you were home again.’ He sat down on the rock, took off his hat and let the wind ruffle through his hair. ‘It is good to see you again.’

‘And you. Is everything well in the village? The aunts knew of no problems to recount to me.’ He was such a comfortable presence at her side that she was almost tempted to lean against his shoulder.