Patrica Rice Read online

  “That child is either dead or dying of gin. There’s nothing either of us can do to save it. It never had a chance from the moment of its birth. Alcohol runs in its veins instead of blood.” Michael grabbed the tall fop’s walking stick and swung it at the beggar’s skirts when she pressed too close. She let out a wail and jabbered at the top of her lungs, her gesticulations nearly toppling the infant from her arms.

  A small crowd had already formed, eager for any kind of entertainment on a soggy night. More arrived to watch as the woman’s cries escalated. Michael grabbed Blanche’s arm and swung her around, shoving her toward the main street at the end of the alley. “Get out of here now!” He shoved the taller of her two companions in the same direction. “Get her out and don’t let her come back or I’ll break your head myself.”

  The fop grabbed Blanche’s arm and half dragged her away. The beggar chased after them, shouting, followed by the crowd behind her. Michael waited until Blanche’s back was turned before sticking his foot between the woman’s legs and tripping her. The woman wailed louder, nearly dropping the ragged bundle in her arms.

  Blanche instantly swung around, shaking off her captors.

  Caught up in the crowd surging around the spectacle, Michael couldn’t reach her in time. To his horror, he watched Blanche shove a purse at the woman, then grab the bundle of blankets as soon as the woman greedily stuck out her hand. Michael could do nothing more than heave a container of trash into the midst of the crowd to prevent them from chasing Blanche as she dashed down the alley, followed in close pursuit by her dandified escorts. A riot erupted behind them as the greedy denizens of the street fought over the bag of gold.

  Not taking time to utter the litany of curses he’d practiced, Michael dashed after them, leaping over obstacles in pursuit of Blanche and her stolen babe.

  Seeing her being helped into the hired carriage, Michael leapt up and grabbed the rear postilion, then scrambled over the wheel and caught the door before either of her escorts could join her. They couldn’t help Blanche and this babe. He planted his foot firmly in the center of the taller man’s chest, sending him sprawling backward across the cobblestones. The fat one merely shouted in dismay from the street as Michael slammed the door and ordered the driver to move.

  Gasping for breath, Michael frowned as Blanche worriedly rocked the infant in her arms. She showed no shock or surprise at his appearance, not even bothering to scold him for his actions. He couldn’t decide if it was because she cared so little for him or because she perfectly understood why he was here and what he had done.

  With resignation, he pried the lifeless bundle from Blanche’s arms and pulled the blanket back. The pain of that poor drawn face nearly crippled him, but heartlessly, he informed her, “The babe’s dead, Blanche. The woman simply wanted the coins for gin. She’s dead, and there’s nothing you can do to save her.”

  Reluctantly, Michael surrendered the infant when Blanche snatched it from his arms. He watched in sorrow as she peeled back the blankets and desperately sought some sign of life. Even in the dim carriage light, he could see her grief.

  He wanted to protect her from the horror of this world, but instead, he struck out with anger. “You could have got us all killed. If I ever see those addle-pated Bedlam lunatics again, I’ll slam their heads together and see if it makes one whole brain between them for not flinging you right back in the hackney and shoving off the instant they caught sight of you.”

  He could scarcely see the pale swell of her flesh above the purple gown in the gloom of the carriage, but he could see it quite well in his mind’s eye. He’d never been this angry in his life, so he had no idea how to handle it. He felt like tearing the carriage apart piece by little piece with his bare hands.

  Blanche’s reply indicated he’d surprised even her with his temper. “I’m tired of being treated like a helpless child. Fiona would have trusted a woman faster than any man, had you bothered to ask. And if you mean to behave like that odious brother of yours, you may get out now.”

  He ought to. He really ought to. She had finally driven him insane.

  Nine

  Having donned gentleman’s attire from the wardrobe where he’d stored it the last time he’d invaded the Duke of Anglesey’s London town home, Michael leaned against the cabinet and stared blindly at the unused bedchamber. The hasty patter of footsteps outside the door had long since died away. With luck, Neville’s servants had taken charge of the child’s corpse and returned the grief-stricken Blanche to bed. Even an angel with the wealth of aristocracy couldn’t buy life from death.

  Miracles and angels didn’t exist in the world as he knew it. He’d learned that the hard way, accepted reality, and overcome the disappointment. Life was much simpler that way.

  Blanche complicated all that. A goddess like Blanche ought to have a plump, smiling cherub of her own. She ought to be surrounded by loving family, singing lullabies to an armful of healthy children. Michael could see the picture more clearly than he could see the room around him.

  He’d seen it the night she’d sailed out that second story window with flames licking around her. She’d saved every servant in that old house, saved their few wretched possessions, and nearly lost her life in the process. Someone should have married her then, grabbed her up and cuddled her and made her smile and laugh again. Instead, they’d let her retreat to lick her wounds behind a barricade of riches.

  “Blanche, have you lost your mind?” Neville’s shouts of fury echoed down the corridor. “When Allendale told me what happened tonight, I thought he was nicked in the nob. When the devil did you get to town anyway? No one told me you were here.”

  Hands in pockets, Michael strolled down the corridor into the blue sitting room. The usually imperturbable young duke stood wild-haired and frantic in the center of the Axminster carpet, ranting at his lovely Madonna of a cousin who sat on the ice-blue couch, carefully sewing a piece of linen. Blanche didn’t look up. She said nothing to Neville’s ravings. She merely continued her self-appointed task.

  “Someone blew up the lady’s carriage today. You haven’t let any old friends out of the Tower, have you?” Michael asked, distracting the furious duke from his traumatized cousin.

  Neville swung around and grabbed Michael’s coat front. “I should have known you were involved in this! What do you mean by allowing her on that side of town?”

  Michael knew how to use his fists, not to mention his feet, teeth, and any other weapon that came to hand. He simply had an aversion to violence when common sense could solve the problem. But after the day he’d had today, he teetered on the brink of losing what little poise he possessed. He dug his fingers deep into the duke’s wrist and twisted until the other man’s grip broke.

  Watching calmly as the duke grabbed his injured wrist in pain, Michael stepped out of his reach. “I said, someone blew up the lady’s coach today. If you won’t do something about it, I will.”

  * * *

  “What the hell are you talking about?” And why the devil are you wearing my coat?”

  Neville glared at the wrinkled fabric of his expensively tailored frock coat as he signaled the butler. “Bring us some brandy. And find someone to haul that corpse out of the parlor.” He would need a brandy to fortify him for whatever tale the Irishman would relate now. He knew he didn’t want to hear it. He also knew he couldn’t avoid it, not with Blanche withdrawing into that silent stupor she’d lived in after the fire.

  Only the Irish had this flair for the dramatic, this damned empathy for every beaten dog in their path. The threatening dolt stood there in his black evening coat, looking like some caveman prepared to wrestle a tiger for his food. Neville had no particular desire to be that tiger.

  “If you throw the child on the streets, the lady will follow. I didn’t think you a stupid man, Your Grace,” Michael replied harshly.

  Neville noted that Michael didn’t look at Blanche. He’d suspected there was something between these two back when they’d been in
each other’s pockets for weeks on end. Satisfied that at least O’Toole had retained enough sense to realize he had no place in Blanche’s life, Neville took the brandy and gestured for his unwanted guest to do the same.

  “Coffee, if you don’t mind.” Michael absently corrected the duke’s order.

  Neville raised his eyebrows. Gentlemen drank brandy, but he’d already ascertained O’Toole was no gentleman even if he ordered the servants about as if he were. “What the hell is this talk about explosions?”

  “Someone planted gunpowder under your traveling coach and set a fuse to it,” Michael reported tonelessly. “I assumed it had to do with Lady Blanche, but someone may have just taken a dislike to your family crest. Laborers across the country are rioting over poor wages and the high cost of bread. Our war heroes beg in the streets. Our mines are killing women and children. You might say there’s some dissatisfaction with the aristocracy. The French didn’t invent revolution.”

  “Confound it, O’Toole! I didn’t ask for a lecture on political economics. I’m not the one with mines and factories. I barely scrape enough to buy cravats. If someone blew up the coach because of the crest, then they were after Blanche. She’s the one who owns the factories and mines, although it sounds a lot of faradiddle to me. Where would any poor factory worker find that much gunpowder?”

  He watched as the Irishman’s eyes narrowed. He’d seen O’Toole do this before and knew his formidable mind was as dangerous as his swift fists.

  “Excellent question, Your Grace, one I hadn’t time to ask myself. Poor men with gunpowder. That does not bode well at all. If I were you, I would have someone begin investigating the sales of gunpowder manufactories, starting with the ones closest to home.” Michael absently set his cup aside. “And since we’ll not pry the lady from the house until she is satisfied the infant is decently buried, I suggest extra guards patrol the perimeters. If the lady is owner of those factories, then we have reason to fear. Her men of business will not have told her of the conditions there.”

  Neville quelled a shiver of alarm. Vowing to look into the factories on his own, he answered in a low whisper Blanche couldn’t hear. “O’Toole, so help me, if you’re making this up for your own reasons, I’ll have you strung up by the ballocks.”

  Michael shot him a look of irritation. “If I wanted to be rid of you, I’d find a much more entertaining method than gunpowder. Question her groom if you doubt me. Then talk to a few of your stuffed shirts from the north and see if they haven’t heard of the protests and riots. This country is coming apart at the seams, and the lot of you sit in the Lords with your silly wigs and robes and pretend we’re living in Tudor times. Will you believe when they start building a guillotine in Hyde Park?”

  “Damn and blast it.” Neville glanced worriedly at the woman on the sofa. “If anything happens to her, I’m the one they’ll hang,” he replied.

  Michael gave a fleeting grin. “I know. You’d best find yourself a wealthy wife. The authorities are less likely to suspect you of Blanche’s murder once your debts are settled.”

  Neville scowled and stomped toward the door. “I will take care of that if you will see she finds a husband with more sense than she has, else she’s likely to take a notion to let her employees run the factories.”

  * * *

  As the duke departed, Michael wished he could go with him. The haunting sight of the lady tenderly sewing a garment for the dead child had him longing to run as far as he could in the opposite direction. At the same time, it nailed him to the floor.

  He scowled at his coffee. He had seen the poison of strong drink and never felt the need for it, but he wished he could summon the solace of alcoholic oblivion now.

  “Why would any woman treat her child so cruelly when there are so many women who would give everything they possessed to have her?” Blanche whispered in anguish once the duke left them alone.

  “Would they now?” Michael asked as he sauntered across the room to stand beside her. “Sure, and it seems to me there’s far too many children in this world as it is.”

  She sent him a scathing look. “And far too little wealth to take care of them. You needn’t hide your thoughts from me behind that mocking tone, Michael Lawrence O’Toole.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Far be it from me to argue with your ladyship.”

  “Of course! Never argue, never disagree, just disappear and do as you please. Why are you still here? I’ve defied your wishes. You should be vanishing out the back door.”

  Michael winced. He supposed he did tend to leave at the point when others disagreed with him. He preferred relying on himself. Why argue? Still, he disliked the picture she drew.

  “I pride myself on doing the unexpected,” he answered insouciantly. He wandered to her bookshelves. That was one thing he truly liked about Blanche’s many homes. Everywhere he turned, he saw books.

  He found a tome of Shakespeare’s poems and pulled it down. In general, he disliked poetry, but he’d discovered some fascinating plays on words in the works of the great bard. Sometimes, silence worked as well as disappearing when avoiding an argument.

  He took a chair to the side of the sofa, where Blanche could not see him but he could keep an eye on her.

  “Will you read aloud to me?” she asked.

  The plea jarred Michael back to reality. He’d known he had no business making himself at home. He would only end up torturing himself with what he could not have. But he couldn’t deny her this simple request.

  He opened the book and began reading blindly where his eye first fell:

  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

  And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

  Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,

  And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

  And every fair from fair sometime declines,

  By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

  But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

  Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

  Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

  When in eternal lines to time thou row’st;

  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

  As the meaning of the words sank in, Michael nearly wept at his choice, but then he heard a whimper from the sofa, and his head jerked up.

  Tears flooded Blanche’s cheeks as she rocked back and forth. For a moment, he madly thought the poem had affected her as much as it had him.

  But then he realized she poured out her grief and anguish on a lost child. The lady’s emotionless shell had finally broken.

  Ten

  Blanche wept for herself as much as for the child who would never know sunlight and butterflies. She cried from loneliness. She wept for what she could have given that lost child.

  Michael kneeled before her. She couldn’t stop rocking, couldn’t stop the tears flooding her face.

  “She would have suffered all her life should she have lived, Blanche,” he murmured. “God spared her the pain. Let her go, my love. Let her go.”

  The soft caress of his words overwhelmed her, and she didn’t know how to respond except with more tears. She’d missed her mother’s loving kisses, a father’s laughing hugs. She’d known nothing but orders and corrections from tutors and governesses, subservient bows from the army of employees surrounding her. Even her cousins treated her as if she were a porcelain figurine easily broken. Only Michael dared speak to her as if she were human, as if she were like everyone else. She cried harder as he rose to sit beside her and caressed her cheek, brushing away the tears.

  “Oh, God, don’t do that,” he whispered, wrapping his arms around her. “Don’t make me cry. I’m not man enough to cry, my love. I can’t bear it.”

  At that foolish plea, she brok
e down completely, burying her face against his shoulder,. Muscled arms surrounded her, and she let Michael’s wide chest carry the burden of her despair. “I’m all right. I’m sorry. It’s just been such a long day.” She sat up, wiping at her tears with the back of her hand until Michael handed her a handkerchief. She shivered at the touch of his finger wiping a wet streak from her cheek.

  “I know. You’ve been terrified ever since the carriage exploded. I should have found a better way of keeping you safe. I’m not very good at taking care of people, my lady.”

  She smacked his hand away. “Stop calling me that, or I shall take to calling you ‘my lord.’ The brother of a marquess is generally given that title. You ought to feel its weight.”

  He smiled at her sharp tone instead of being irritated as he ought. “Then what shall I call you? Should anyone hear me call you Blanche, they will think us entirely too familiar.”

  “You are just trying to distract me.” Gulping back a sob, she forced her chin up. She knew Michael’s ways too well. “It won’t work, you know. Pull the rope and see who it brings. There must be someone still up and about.”

  “I’ll have them bring a hot bath to your room.”

  He spoke with such command that Blanche didn’t bother arguing. She was too tired to object in any case. All her life, she’d had to give the orders, make the decisions. Let someone else take charge for a change. In the morning, she would take command again.

  * * *

  By morning, Blanche awakened with the realization that she’d given Michael ample opportunity to escape all over again. She pounded her pillow and cursed, then rang for a maid. She could tell by the shortness of the sunlight across the floor that the hour was late. Michael would be long gone. And she still had to make arrangements for the funeral of the poor infant who had no name.

  She found the little girl already laid out in a small coffin, her wasted body garbed in the white linen shroud, the tiny black curl on her forehead neatly arranged with a ribbon pinned to it. She almost broke down and wept again but fought the weakness. She’d forgotten herself last night in Michael’s arms, but she wouldn’t forget again.