Not the Dukes Darling by Hoyt, Elizabeth (8)

Freya froze as the well house was plunged into darkness, compounding her disorientation from the cloth that had been over her eyes.

There was a shout. She was shoved aside, and then there was a frantic pounding at the door.

Growling and pounding at the door.

She found herself ducking, her hands over her head as if she were afraid the next blow would land on her. The racket was terrific, making it hard to think.

Harlowe had caught her when she’d been pushed into the well house. She’d seen his face when he pulled the cloth from her head. The banging and growling—that must be Harlowe. He sounded like a wild beast driven out of his mind, bigger and stronger than she, and dangerous.

Her instinct was to cringe away.

What had happened to him? Was he hurt or somehow out of his mind? But he’d seemed perfectly fine—if angry—in that brief glimpse she’d had of his face.

Before they’d been shut in darkness.

Surely…?

She shook herself. It hardly mattered why he was like this. She had to stop him somehow.

She held out her hands blindly and walked toward the sound of chaos.

Her fingertips touched a broad shoulder, shaking as he slammed himself against the door. Dear God, he was going to do himself violence using his body as a battering ram.

“Harlowe.” She felt over his shoulder to his arm, tugging. “Harlowe!”

He didn’t seem to hear her. It was as if he were in a strange thoughtless state.

As if he’d been driven instantly and completely insane.

She fought down animal fear and reversed the progress of her hands, feeling up his arm to his face.

It was slippery with sweat, and a pang of sympathy went through her. Whatever this was, it was seizing him hard. She would’ve had to be soulless not to respond to such agony.

She curved her palms over his cheeks, embracing his face with her hands. “Harlowe. Please, Harlowe.”

She pushed at him, and at first she thought she could not move him. He was too big, too strong. But she was relentless, ducking under his arms and wriggling in between him and the door at the risk of being accidentally hit by his fists. His big body jerked and heaved as if he were in spasm, but she would not be shaken off. She wrapped her arms around him, pulling him as close as she could to herself.

The blows stopped.

In the sudden silence his heaving breath was loud.

She hugged him, feeling the heat radiating off him.

His panting slowed as he calmed a little.

Until he inhaled shakily.

“I need…,” he rasped. “I need to get out.”

His voice sounded as if he’d drunk lye.

“Yes,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm. Soothing. “Yes, we need to get out. But I don’t think pounding at the door will open it.”

His strong hands gripped her shoulders.

She could feel them trembling.

“No,” he said, his voice uneven. “No, you’re right.”

“Why don’t we sit for a bit?”

He took her suggestion quite literally, sinking suddenly to the floor and pulling her down with him. He kept his arms around her as if her presence—the feel of her—were the only thing keeping him sane. He maneuvered until his back was against the door, his knees bent, and she sat sideways between his legs.

Was his fit over?

She tried peering into his face, but it was too dark to see his expression clearly. “Are you better now?”

“Talk to me. Distract me from…” He stopped and coughed before continuing. “Why did you follow me?”

“Curiosity,” she said. “I saw you leaving the house by yourself and wanted to know where you were going. Who you were meeting. I saw you open the well house door, and then someone grabbed me from behind.” Freya swallowed, remembering her fear and surprised anger. “I couldn’t shout before they slapped a hand over my mouth and wound the neckcloth over my eyes. I was pushed in and the door slammed behind me.”

“You didn’t see your attacker?” His voice was sharper.

“No.” She shook her head, frustrated. “But it must have been a man. He was taller than me and stronger.”

“How did you know I was meeting anyone?” His voice was absent sounding and she somehow knew that he was only partially paying attention to their conversation.

The majority of his mind was concerned with beating back whatever ailed him. It was strange to witness such a capable, arrogant man be brought low. His big body surrounded her as if to shelter her, but she could still feel tremors rack him every now and again.

She kept her own voice carefully level. “I wasn’t sure you were meeting anyone. But Mr. Plimpton didn’t go out riding with the rest of the gentlemen, and I know that there’s some sort of business going on between you two.”

He grunted something close to a laugh. “You’re too curious. You always were. I remember you and Messalina spying on Julian, Ran, and me when we were boys home from school.”

The mention of Julian and Ran together sent a streak of anger through Freya, but she controlled it. Her anger and sorrow wouldn’t help now. And besides, as he’d reminded her more than once, that was in the past.

So she replied lightly, “You three seemed to always be doing something more interesting than we.” She twisted a little, trying to look up into his face, though she knew it was useless. “Why did you come into the well house?”

“You were right—I was meeting someone.” He snorted. “I received a note from Plimpton telling me to meet him here—or at least I thought it was from Plimpton. The note wasn’t signed.”

“Why were you meeting him?”

He sighed and lifted his hand to her cap, picking at the ties under her chin. “Plimpton’s blackmailing me. Or trying to. If I die in here, then he will have lost what money he thought to extort from me.”

“That won’t happen,” she said. “Someone will realize we’re missing and come looking. Quite soon, I should think. I’m sure Lady Holland has already missed me.”

She said it confidently enough, but she wasn’t sure of any such thing. She’d retired to her room earlier, pleading a headache so that she could think alone in peace. No one had seen her leave the house. She was supposed to meet with Messalina in her rooms tonight. Perhaps Messalina would raise an alarm when Freya didn’t appear. Or she simply might assume that Freya had reneged on their agreement to meet. After all, Freya had been stubbornly refusing to talk to Messalina for years.

If Messalina disregarded her absence, Freya wouldn’t be missed until the morning.

But Harlowe—the most important member of the house party—surely there would be a hue and cry looking for the duke.

She hoped so at any rate.

She glanced at the tiny square window to one side of the door. It couldn’t be much past seven of the clock, for there was a little light still. But they were in a woods. Sunlight didn’t hit the window directly.

And night would be falling soon.

Right now she had to keep Harlowe’s mind away from that realization. She had the feeling that complete darkness would only compound his problem. “What was Mr. Plimpton blackmailing you over?”

“Letters.” His chest heaved against her side. He didn’t seem to realize the intimate position they sat in. Or possibly he knew and didn’t care.

She’d move away if she were certain that he’d retain his composure.

At least that was what she told herself.

Harlowe coughed. “Plimpton has letters from Sophy. Ones that I don’t want publicized.”

Her brows shot up. What sort of letters? And what did they say?

She knew that his wife had died in India. Had there been some mystery involving her death? Could he have hurt his wife?

What did she really know about Harlowe?

He’d let Ran be beaten when they were both only eighteen.

He’d helped her in Wapping when they were strangers.

He loved his dog.

He was a terrible swordsman—well, at least against her.

And when he kissed her, his lips were both angry and desperate.

She sighed silently. She might not know intellectually, but her heart knew without question: he was not the type of man to hurt any woman, least of all his wife.

Mr. Plimpton she wasn’t so sure about. Blackmailers were a cowardly breed—and, when cornered, apt to do something stupid. She’d already overheard Harlowe threatening Mr. Plimpton. Had the man decided that the Duke of Harlowe was too big a bite to swallow?

Were they meant to die in here?

“How did these letters come into his possession?” she asked to distract both herself and Harlowe.

He grunted, and for a moment she thought he wouldn’t answer.

His breath began to come faster.

“Harlowe?” She took one of his hands and squeezed it between her own. How could such a strong man be brought so low by…nothing? Shadows and a confined space? “How did Mr. Plimpton get Sophy’s letters?”

“She wrote them to him,” he got out with an explosive breath. “They were…She…He seduced her.”

For a moment Freya was honestly shocked. Why would a woman betray a man like Harlowe, so big, so male? And for a little weasel such as Mr. Plimpton?

She blurted, “Why would she do that?”

He barked a laugh. “I would’ve thought you’d sympathize with her—you seem to hate me enough.”

She glanced up at him, trying to see his face in the muddy light. “Perhaps not quite enough for that.”

“Thank you,” he said so quietly she almost didn’t hear. Then he sighed. “As to your question of why, I can only answer that it was India. Bloody India. It was hot and strange and Sophy hated it and our exile from the start.”

“I’m sorry,” she said helplessly. “That must’ve been…” Horrible. Stuck in a foreign land with an unhappy wife. “Hard to endure.”

“That’s one way to put it. We were much too young to wed. Sophy was…” His voice trailed away and then started again. “We didn’t suit. Even had we been at home it wouldn’t have gone well, but in India…”

She cleared her throat. “You hated it, too?”

“No,” he immediately replied. “Hate is too strong a word. There were wonderful sights. Wonderful food and experiences. Wonderful people. But it wasn’t home. I love England.”

“Why did your father send you there, then?”

“The scandal.” He shifted, rearranging her so that she rested more comfortably, with her back against his chest. He gave no indication that he wanted to release her. His legs were to either side of her, and his left arm was wrapped loosely about her waist. She still held his right. “You may not have been aware of it because you were a child, but that night at Greycourt became a terrible scandal. The news that Ran, the heir to the Dukedom of Ayr, had tried to elope with Aurelia Greycourt was in London within days. People said that Ran murdered her, as you know. Julian and I were known to be somehow involved, and the gossip made us out to be wastrels bent on violence. My mother took to her bed and my father shouted at me until he lost his voice. They were both afraid that we would be ostracized from society.”

“But you’re a duke—”

“I wasn’t back then,” he said. “You must remember that. Nor was my father a duke. I inherited from a distant cousin. I didn’t even have the prospect of inheriting back then.”

Freya blinked. She’d never considered what had happened to Harlowe and Julian after that night.

She hadn’t really cared.

But now…

“Were Julian and his family disgraced as well? Was Messalina?”

“Julian was disgraced, yes, but…” He shrugged, the movement lifting her bodily up and down. “Not as much as me and my family, I think. I suspect that the Duke of Windemere had a hand in turning the worst of the gossip away from his family. In any case, I haven’t seen Julian since that night.”

She jerked upright, turning to him. The sun must be setting, for what little light there had been was fading fast. His face was shadowed. “Whyever not?”

“I was ashamed by what we’d done.” He pulled gently on her arm, making her relax against him again, arranging her to his satisfaction. “I don’t know how Julian felt, but he never attempted to contact me while I was in India. We’d let Ran be beaten.” He breathed in shakily. “It seemed as if everything from before that night—our friendship, our youth, our life—was gone.”

“But when you returned to England?”

“I did receive an invitation from him to tea, I believe. I thought by then that it was best that we not see each other again. He doesn’t move much in society—you must have noticed that,” he replied. “I didn’t call on him, and our paths haven’t crossed.”

“So you’re estranged?” she asked wonderingly. All this time she’d pictured Julian and Harlowe cozy together. Laughing as Ran suffered. But that was an image that had formed when she was twelve. They had all changed in the ensuing fifteen years.

And obviously she’d been wrong about some things.

Perhaps many things.

“Julian never wrote me while I was in India,” Harlowe said. “And I never wrote him. In my case it was shame. I don’t know what it was in his.”

Something else occurred to her. “I don’t understand. You married before you left for India?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know you’d been courting.” Once upon a time the knowledge would’ve crushed her. “Your marriage must’ve been rushed.”

The laugh Harlowe gave was more cough. “Rushed? The entire thing was arranged. There was a piece of land that her father wanted—land that my father held title to. In exchange for this land her parents were willing to overlook my scandal. I met Sophy twice before we married, both times in a room full of people. I think Father was of the opinion that only marriage, exile, and work could restore our name.”

She inhaled on the word exile. He’d used it before, but at the time she’d thought he meant he’d exiled himself. “You mean your father wouldn’t let you come back to England?”

She felt him shrug. “I don’t know. I never tried. Didn’t want to try. What was there for me in England? Scandal and a father who’d made it plain that I’d lost his favor forever. No, I determined to stay in India.”

“Despite Sophy’s hatred of it?” she asked slowly.

He sighed. “I would’ve sent Sophy home eventually. She wasn’t meant to be so far away from her family. But at first I hadn’t the money, and by the time I did, Plimpton had ensnared her. And then…”

He stopped. Simply stopped speaking.

She waited in the darkness, but nothing came from him.

Finally she stirred. “And then what?”

“And then she died,” he said, so quietly she almost didn’t catch the words.

“How did she die?” she asked carefully.

She heard the shuddering inhalation he took before speaking. “I was in service to the East India Company. We were in Calcutta,” he said, and she thought that there was something she should remember about that place. “At Fort William. Everyone in the company lived in the fort—it wasn’t safe for us outside its walls. Sophy loathed it. She spent days at a time in her room.”

Sophy seemed to have been a very delicate sort of lady. “Go on.”

“In the summer of ’56 the Nawab of Bengal took a dislike to the activities of the East India Company. Well…” He shrugged his shoulders again. “It was the fort itself that was the last straw. We found out later that he’d expressly told the people in charge not to expand the fort. Naturally they went and did it anyway, arrogant fools.” He laughed without humor. “Can you imagine it? If foreigners who didn’t even speak our language came and built a great whacking fort outside St James’s Palace? If George himself came out and said, “Stop that at once,” and instead of listening they built it even higher? We wouldn’t stand for it, good Englishmen that we are. But put us in another land with the prospect of piles of gold to be made and suddenly we’re in the right no matter what. Sometimes…” He stopped.

“What?”

He heaved a sigh. “It’s just that sometimes I wonder if they did it a-purpose—flagrantly ignored the nawab’s orders until he started a war. It ended in the East India Company’s favor, after all. The old nawab was defeated, and now they pull the strings of a puppet nawab.”

She smoothed one hand over his chest, feeling the silk of his waistcoat. That sounded positively evil. She hated to think that Englishmen might do something so calculating. “What happened that summer?”

“The nawab’s army besieged us, of course,” Harlowe said, his voice hoarse and weary. “The entire army against a small garrison. We were lucky not to be killed outright. The commander of our forces—what forces there were—when he saw it was a lost cause, ordered most of the soldiers to flee.”

“But why?” Freya asked in horror. She couldn’t imagine such a thing—English soldiers abandoning their station. Abandoning families. Harlowe had said that Sophy was there as well, and if she was, there must have been other women, and most probably children.

“Because,” he replied, reclaiming her attention, “he knew that the soldiers would be slaughtered if they stayed. In that, at least, I think he was right.”

“What did you do?” she whispered.

“Surrendered,” he said. “I and the rest of the remaining men and soldiers surrendered. Most had sent their families away, so it was mainly men. But some hadn’t or couldn’t. Sophy was scared out of her mind. She refused to go until I finally put her in a carriage myself a day before the siege began. But somehow she bribed the coachman. She returned just before the fort’s gates were closed and after that…”

“I’m sorry,” she said helplessly, unable to think of what else to say in the face of such catastrophe. “You must have done as well as you could.”

“I tried,” he replied, but his breathing was growing labored again.

“What happened when the fort was surrendered?” she asked.

And then, too late and horribly, she remembered what she’d heard about Calcutta.

Dear God, surely…

“We were put in the fort’s own jail cell,” he said, his voice emotionless as his chest heaved beneath her. “There were nearly seventy of us.”

She heard him swallow and she wanted to tell him to stop, that she didn’t need to know.

That she already knew.

But she’d asked him. To silence him now seemed a betrayal—as if she couldn’t bear the weight of knowing what had happened to him.

She wasn’t that weak.

“Tell me,” she whispered.

“The soldiers of the fort called it the Black Hole. It was the prison cell for the fort, meant for one or two men. I’d never seen the inside, never really thought about it. The Black Hole had a dirt floor, stone walls, one door, and one small window.” He inhaled before saying quietly, awfully, “And it was the size of this well house.”

Freya stopped breathing. Nearly seventy people in a space this big? How had they all fit in? She couldn’t see in the dark, but she had in her mind’s eye the size of the little well house. The interior space was perhaps fifteen feet by a little longer—maybe sixteen or seventeen feet. That was…

She simply couldn’t imagine.

“Harlowe,” she whispered, laying her head against his chest, hearing his heartbeat and glad for the sound. “How did you survive?”

“I don’t know,” he murmured. “Many didn’t. They put us in toward evening. There was space only to stand. And then night fell. It was hot—so damned hot—and we had no water. One of the men near the window implored the guard outside for a cup of water and, when a cup couldn’t be found, handed out a hat for the water to be poured in. But so many grabbed for the hat when it returned that all the water was lost before any tasted it.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “I remember now, reading an account of it.”

He sighed. “I’ve read the accounts as well. They’re written by agents of the East India Company. They blame the Calcuttans in an attempt to justify their own actions.”

She lay, listening to his heartbeat for a minute before she gathered the courage to ask, “What happened to Sophy?”

“I failed her,” he said. “I failed her and she died.”

He felt as if he were suffocating.

Christopher closed his eyes and tried to calm his breathing, but the dark and the walls were pressing in on him.

He shook his head and concentrated on the terrible tale he was relating to Freya. “People started to panic in that small, hot prison, almost at once, but it got worse and worse as the night wore on. Men shoved other men. Some wept in fear or horror. Some fell and were trampled. Sophy was against a wall. I’d tried to get her to the window, but no one would move to let us by.” He winced at the memory. The heat and the smell of packed, frightened bodies.

Because that was all they became in that hole: bodies. Sweating. Weeping. Pissing. Shitting. Just bodies, all the soul and mind that God had given them gone.

But he didn’t tell that to Freya. Some things should never be said aloud.

“I tried to guard her—to protect her with my body. I stood against her, facing outward, bracing myself as they pushed and pushed. She wept behind me. She was so frightened. Until the pressure of the bodies in front of me pushed me back against her.” He opened his eyes, remembering the weight against his chest. “Until she stopped weeping and made no sound.”

“Oh, Kester,” said the woman in his arms.

Freya was soft and small, but her spirit was made of iron.

He plucked off her cap, running his fingers through the hair beneath. He couldn’t see it, but he knew she burned with fire.

He bent his head and laid his cheek against hers, inhaling honeysuckle, the scent of his boyhood. If he closed his eyes perhaps he could pretend he was in the rolling hills of Scotland, the wind in his hair.

Pretending hadn’t worked in Calcutta.

It didn’t work now.

He drew in a breath and continued, “I couldn’t move until dawn. Until they opened the doors finally. Out of all who had gone into that hell, only three and twenty lived to see the sun rise. We were surrounded by corpses. And when I turned I found Sophy dead. Suffocated by the bodies. Suffocated by me.”

“No, no, no.” She shook her head against him, her voice urgent. “It wasn’t you who killed her.”

Her fierce defense of him warmed him somehow.

Still he replied, “If not me, then who?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t think it was anyone’s fault—not even the people who panicked. They didn’t want to be there. They didn’t want to lose their sense. The whole thing was awful, but you said yourself that you meant to protect Sophy.”

She was so certain, but how could she be? He’d let her brother be maimed, had been gone for years. Perhaps he’d grown into a monster, a murderer of women.

He shook his head now. “I don’t understand you.”

“What don’t you understand?” she asked, sliding her fingers through his. For some reason the feel of her small hand in his steadied him.

“Why do you believe me?” he asked helplessly. “You don’t know me—not anymore. And what you do know you hate.”

She was silent for a moment, her fingers drifting over the palm of his hand, tracing the base of his thumb, delving between his fingers, encircling his wrist with both her hands.

Finally she said, “The first time I saw you again after all those years, you offered help. Even though we’d invaded your carriage. Even though you didn’t recognize me. Even though you had no idea what I was doing with a maid and a baby. You saw us, you saw the men chasing us, and you made the decision to help. In my experience that is not usual.”

He felt her fingers drifting over the back of his hand, delicate and light, like the brush of muslin. “What were you doing?”

She huffed, perhaps in laughter. “I was helping the widow of an earl take her only child from her villainous brother-in-law.”

He opened his mouth to chide her for bamming him, and then closed it because he had the sudden overwhelming feeling that she wasn’t. “Freya?”

“Yes?”

“What have you been doing while I was in India?”

“That,” she said, “is a bit of a tale.”