Читать книгу A Most Unsuitable Groom - Kasey Michaels, Кейси Майклс, Kasey Michaels - Страница 8

SHE WAS LYING on a couch now, in a large, splendidly appointed room. How lovely, after so much time at sea and then in that terribly sprung coach, to be somewhere that didn’t move. “Thank you…thank you, sir. I’m fine now, really. Perhaps I’d…I’d simply over-reacted. The jarring of the coach, you understand. I must apologize. I’m not by nature a blatantly dramatic person and hadn’t planned quite so intense an entrance.” She then quickly placed her hands on her swollen belly in surprise as another pain gripped her. “Oh.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Spencer said, fairly skidding into the drawing room after flagging down Anguish in the hallway and sending him to fetch Odette. “She’s really giving birth?”

She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Oh, dear. I had hoped for at least some small modicum of intelligence from the man. For the child’s sake, you understand,” she said, looking at Ainsley. “I…I should introduce myself, shouldn’t I? My name is Mariah Rutledge. I, um, I met Spencer in America.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Miss Rutledge. I am Ainsley Becket.”

“Would someone be so kind as to go out to dismiss the coach and bring in my maid, Mr. Becket? Her name is Onatah. And she won’t scalp any of you, I promise, which is something I had to swear to those idiots whose coach I hired. If you’re nice to me she won’t, that is.”

Rian grinned at Spencer. “Onatah? Is that an Indian name, Spence? Did she bring a red Indian with her from America? Yes, of course she did. Oh, this is beyond splendid. Except for you, I imagine. Sorry,” he added quickly, losing his smile as Spencer all but growled at him. “You stay here. Let me go get her. Yes? Well, I’m off, in any event.”

Spencer advanced on the couch, to get a better look at the woman. No, he didn’t recognize her. Just the hair. Just that voice, a little low, faintly husky, the disdain in it flicking hard at his memory. “Miss…Rutledge, you said?”

She looked up at him, then returned her gaze to the older man, attempting to sort out the people in the room with her. His father? No, she saw no resemblance. “He truly doesn’t remember me, does he?” she asked, pushing herself up slightly against the pillows now that the pain had eased.

“I don’t think so, no,” Ainsley told her kindly. “He has no memory of anything between his last battle and being at sea, on his way back to us. Where, may I ask, did you two meet?”

“Actually, sir,” Mariah said, embarrassed but truthful, “we were never formally introduced.”

“I tried to bring her but she—Miss Rutledge? Here? Our Sainted Lady of the Swamp? Oh, now and isn’t this a fine kettle we’ve got boilin’ now.”

Spencer wheeled about to see Anguish standing just inside the door, his ruddy Irish complexion gone white. “You recognize her, Anguish? And where’s Odette?”

“I was just about to say, sir. She was all dressed, Lieutenant, and waitin’ on me, but still at her heathen altar, prayin’ and such, and won’t budge until she’s done. That’s what I came to tell you. It’s knowin’I was comin’ for her that chills my marrow,” Anguish said, his bug-eyed stare still riveted on Mariah Rutledge, who had wrapped her arms around her belly once more. “Is she…is she…oh, Lord God, she is! Crikey, and her woman’s here, too? Ah, the sight of that takes me back to where I don’t want to go no more, lessen it’s to visit my poor arm, because at least my arm I miss seein’.”

Anguish stepped back sprightly as the latest addition to this insane farce entered the room behind Rian, who was grinning like the village idiot, as if he’d just brought home a Christmas surprise. The woman was small, thin, bent—wizened, Spencer supposed—with wrinkled skin the color of mahogany and black bean eyes that would give small children and many grown men nightmares. She wore a dark gingham dress over moccasins, her thick grey hair twisted into a single braid falling halfway down her back, a patterned wool blanket clutched tight around her shoulders by one heavily veined hand.

“Iroquois,” Spencer said quietly, recognizing the design on the blanket. “Bloody Iroquois.”

Onatah paused a moment in her advance, just long enough to say something gruff and pithy to him, before she moved on toward the couch.

“What did she say?” Rian asked excitedly. “Did you understand her? Do you know the language? God, Spence, this is magnificent. I never dreamed I’d ever see a real red Indian. Tell me, what did she say?”

Spencer’s jaw was set tight at an angle as he shook his head. “I hate to disabuse you, brother mine, but I’m not that familiar with the dialect. I spoke mostly to Tecumseh, who knew our language better than half the men living on this island. However, and only for your amusement, I do think I’ve just been called the fornicating son of a three-legged cur.”

“Oh, well, that’s understandable. I suppose. Ah, and here comes more trouble. I really should go wake Jacko and the girls. I shouldn’t be having all the fun.”

Odette shuffled into the room in her aged carpet slippers and one of Courtland’s old greatcoats over a rusty black gown, her wiry silver hair also hanging down her back in a single braid, her skin ebony to Onatah’s mahogany and only half as wrinkled. She stopped, took in the scene—her attention centered on the Indian for several tense seconds—and then walked over to Spencer.

“I was wrong,” she said sadly. “The good loa didn’t steal your memory. The bad loa took it, so that you would not know you’re to have a son. I only saw that in my bowl tonight, as she drew closer, too late to warn you. I ask your forgiveness for my failing.”

And then, surprising Spencer even more, Odette lifted her hand and slapped him hard across the cheek, her unexpected strength knocking him back on his heels.

“And what was that for?” he asked, holding a hand to his stinging flesh.

“For thinking the boy isn’t yours,” she told him. “Now, come, help get this girl upstairs. Your son wishes to be born tonight.”

Mariah was speaking quietly to Onatah, who had placed a hand on her mistress’s stomach, waiting for the next contraction. “They’ll stop now that I’m not in that coach, won’t they, Onatah? It’s too soon.”

“Babies come when they come,” Onatah pronounced with all the gravity of Moses tripping back down the mountain with stone tablets in his hands.

A gnarled black hand joined Onatah’s on Mariah’s belly, and Mariah blinked up into the kindest eyes she’d ever seen. “Foolish child, to hide the pains from your nurse. You’ve had them all day, since you first rose this morning. There is time yet, but not much. We will allow no harm to come to you or to Spencer’s son. Now come. Rise up, walk with us. And better you do it now, between the pains.”

“Onatah?” Mariah asked, feeling suddenly very young again, and quite frightened.

“Old women know best,” Onatah said and, between the two of them, Mariah was on her feet once more, being led toward the hallway.

She had taken only a few steps when she could feel the pain begin in the small of her back once more, long, strong fingers advancing around her hips to grip tightly against her lower belly. She’d had the pains since that morning, but not like this, not so intense, so frequent or lasting so long. “Ohhh,” she said, her knees buckling slightly. The hallway looked miles away, the tall, winding staircase a mountain she could not possibly climb.

“The devil with this!” Spencer exploded, storming across the room to take hold of Mariah’s arm and pull her toward him, then scoop her up in his arms. He turned toward the hallway. “Where? What room?”

“Yours, of course,” Ainsley said smoothly, motioning with a sweep of his arm that Spencer should carry Mariah up the stairs.

“No,” Spencer said flatly. “Morgan’s chamber.”

Mariah moaned again, her eyes shut tight. “If I had a pistol, I’d shoot you,” she told Spencer quietly. “Just put me somewhere—and then go away.”

“Go away, is it? Should have said that sooner,” Anguish whispered to no one in particular, unfortunately not that quietly. “Would have saved us all a boatload of bother.”

Spencer’s last sight of Rian as he carried Mariah toward the stairs was of his brother sliding down the wall, clutching his stomach as he laughed uproariously at the Irishman’s assessment of his brother’s predicament.

Mariah kept her eyes closed as Spencer carried her up the stairs, holding her breath against the pain of the contraction and the added pain she felt each time he jostled her as he climbed the stairs, not opening them again until she felt herself being laid on cool sheets.

When his arms left her, when he stood back from the bed, she felt curiously abandoned.

“When?” he asked her, his dark eyes boring into her. “Where?”

“What does it matter?” she asked in return. “Believe me, it was considerably less than unforgettable. Go away.”

“Do as she says,” Odette told him as the Indian woman stepped between them to begin stripping Mariah out of her clothing. “Go downstairs and fall into a bottle. It’s what men do. Women know what to do here.”

“But—” Spencer knew when he was beaten. “All right. But she and I have to talk. I have to understand how this happened.”

Odette’s white teeth flashed bright against her dark face. “Boy, I think you already know how. Now go.”

Spencer stomped out into the hallway to see Jacko standing there in baggy brown trousers, his nightshirt hanging over his large, tight belly and dropping all the way to his bare knees. The man’s eyes were fairly dancing. “Rian came to tell me your news. Congratulations, papa.”

Spencer spoke without thinking, because a wise man never gave Jacko an opening he could slip his tongue through. “I don’t even remember her.”

“You bedded what Rian tells me is a fine-looking woman and you don’t remember? Ah, bucko, there’s all kinds of hell, aren’t there? But I think you’ve managed to conjure up a new one.”

“As long as I can amuse you, then it’s all right,” Spencer said, heading for the stairs only to be stopped by his sister Eleanor, who had come out into the hallway in her dressing gown. Had Rian run from chamber to chamber, ringing a bell and banging on every door, eager to tell everyone?

“Spencer,” Eleanor asked, “is there anything I can do to help?”

He thought about this for a moment as he looked at his sister. So small, so fragile and beautiful. Yet Eleanor and her Jack had almost single-handedly dismantled the Red Men Gang last year. If there was anyone whom he could count on to move mountains, it would be Eleanor. Calm, steadfast Elly.

“Odette’s in with her, Elly, and her own Indian nurse. But,” he said, a thought just then striking him, “you could answer a question for me, one Odette would box my ears for asking. How long, um…” He hesitated, waving one hand in front of him. “You know. How long from…beginning to end?”

Elly blinked, then smiled. “You’re asking me the length of a pregnancy, Spencer?”

He nodded, looking back at the door to Morgan’s bedchamber, to see Jacko stepping forward to hold open the door for two of the Becket Hall women, Edyth and Birdie, to enter with pots of steaming water and an armful of towels. This was happening. This was really happening.

“I would say approximately nine months, Spencer,” Elly told him. “So that would be…last September?”

Spencer shook his head. “No, that can’t be right. We didn’t meet the Americans at the swamp until the beginning of October. So that’s…that’s…” He began counting on his fingers, then looked at his sister before looking at the closed door, his stomach suddenly uneasy. “It’s too soon, isn’t it? If it’s mine.”

“If it’s yours? Spencer?”

He held up his hands to ward off the harder tone of Eleanor’s voice. “It’s mine. Odette says so. The woman says so. I’m the fornicating son of a three-legged cur. I just don’t remember. Why don’t I remember?”

“You had that knock on the head,” Jacko reminded him. “Your shoulder, your leg, the knock on the head, that fever that hung on for months according to Clovis. Damn, boy, I’d say the woman had her wicked way with you when you couldn’t fight her off. You lucky devil.”

“Jacko.”

One word, just one, from Eleanor and Jacko lost his smile and much of his swagger. “I was just saying…”

“Yes, and now that you have, you will forget you’ve said it, please,” Eleanor told him as if she were a governess scolding her young charge. “Now, you boys go downstairs to Papa, who had the good sense not to come up here, and I will go in with the ladies and offer my assistance if it is needed as I introduce myself to your young woman.”

“She’s not my—” Spencer gave it up as a bad job. “You’ll let us know what’s happening?”

“I will,” Eleanor said, her smile soft. “What’s her name, Spencer? I should most probably know that.”

“Rutledge. Mariah Rutledge. And she’s English. But that’s all I know. Damn it all to hell, Elly, that’s all I know.”

And that hair, that voice…

Spencer pressed his fingers against his temples, hoping for more memories to assert themselves. But there was nothing. He did not know this woman, remember this woman. “Go downstairs, everyone, before we wake Fanny and Callie. I’m…I’m going to go talk to Clovis.”

He walked briskly toward the servant stairs and climbed to the top floor of the large house to where Anguish and Clovis had been installed upon their arrival at Becket Hall.

Ainsley had given them the run of the house if they’d wanted it, in thanks for bringing Spencer back to Becket Hall, but neither man had felt comfortable with that sort of free and easy arrangement. After all, as Clovis pointed out, they were only doing their duty. Hiding them from an army they didn’t wish to return to was thanks enough for both of them.

Still, Becket Hall wasn’t like most English homes, made up of a strict hierarchy of master, master’s family, upper servants, lower servants. No, that wasn’t for Ainsley Becket.

He had run a taut ship but a fair one, and he ran a fair house. The servants were the crew, each lending a hand to whatever chore was necessary at the moment, and each still very much the individual…individuals who refused to see Ainsley as anyone less than their beloved Cap’n.

There was no butler or major domo at Becket Hall. Whoever heard the knocker and was close opened the door. When beds needed changing they were changed; when rugs needed beating they were beaten.

The only area of the house Ainsley considered to be off-limits to himself and most of the household was the kitchens where the cook, Bumble, reigned supreme by means of a sharp tongue and a sharper knife that had been waved threateningly a time or three over the years, and anyone who thought the man’s wooden leg had slowed him soon learned their mistake.

When Clovis and Anguish were moved in nobody blinked an eye. The Cap’n said they could stay, so stay they would and welcome aboard. Clovis had insisted upon acting as Spencer’s right hand and, since Anguish no longer had a right hand, he had offered his left to Bumble and now spent most of his day sitting on a high stool in the main kitchen, telling tall tales to make the females giggle behind their hands and sampling all of the day’s dishes. It was an arrangement that worked well all around.

Spencer knocked at Clovis’s door, because personal privacy was also very much a part of living at Becket Hall, and entered only when he heard a grunt from the other side of the thick wood.

He walked in to see Clovis sitting on the side of his bed, still completely dressed, an empty bottle in his hand.

“Sir!” Clovis said, quickly getting to his feet. “I’m wanted?”

“In several countries, no doubt,” Spencer returned with a wan smile, indicating with a wave of his hand that his friend should sit once more, and then joining him. “You’re still worrying about our decision to guard the freetraders?”

“That I am, Lieutenant, sir,” Clovis told him, then sighed. “You and Anguish see adventure, and I see only trouble. I think I’m old, and I don’t know which worries me more.”

“No, not old, just prudent. But I’m here on another matter. Clovis, do you recall a woman named Mariah Rutledge?”

Clovis shot to his feet once more. “You’re rememberin’, sir? Well, sir, that’s above all things grand.”

“No, I’m not remembering anything, more’s the pity. She’s here, Clovis, at Becket Hall. Miss Rutledge. And she’s giving birth to my child in my sister’s bedchamber. Odette says it’s a boy, so I imagine it is.”

The older man sat down once more with a thump that shook the bed. “I shouldn’t drink so deep. I thought you said—sir?”

“I know, Clovis. It’s a lot to swallow. I don’t remember Miss Rutledge. I damn sure don’t remember bedding the woman.”

Clovis wrinkled his brow, deep in thought. “Well, sir, we were all together for more’n three weeks. First in the swamp, then movin’ north. Forty-two of us, forty-one after little Willy died. Sad that, him being only three years old. You remember that, sir?”

Spencer shook his head. “No. Nothing. How did he die?”

“Caught a stray bullet during the worst of it, sir. We laid him atop you when we drug you along in the litter the Indian women made up. Until he died, that is. You suffered something terrible, sir, when we had to take his little body from you. I didn’t want to tell you. There are things best not remembered. Mr. Ainsley said as much himself when we told him. Either you’d remember or you wouldn’t.”

Spencer buried his head in his hands. War. What a stupid, senseless way of settling disputes. Governments shouldn’t rise or fall on how many people their soldiers could kill. “I don’t remember, Clovis. I don’t remember any of it. Tell me…at least tell me about Miss Rutledge.”

“Miss Rutledge, sir? Now there’s a woman. General Rutledge, Anguish called her. Standin’ up, takin’ charge, barkin’ out orders, everyone steppin’ -to just as if they knew it was right, that she was goin’ to save us all, lead us out of there. And I’ll say this for her. She did it, sir. A fine, rare woman. She was the first to begin strippin’ the dead for what we could use, sayin’ prayers over each one, thankin’ them for what she took. It was her what sang to our Anguish the whole of the time we was cuttin’ off his arm. Holdin’ his head in her lap, singin’ loud enough to shoo the birds from the trees. Don’t hear the saw workin’ down on the bone so much that way, you see, or hear Anguish cursin’ and screamin’.”

He shook his head. “I ain’t never seen the like, not from a woman. Walkin’ around in that scarlet jacket she took for her own, givin’ us all what-for, tellin’ us what to do. Our Lady of the Swamp, Anguish called her, too, when she couldn’t hear him. I think he half expected her to be growing wings at any minute—when he wasn’t thinking she should be sprouting horns. A hard taskmaster, Miss Rutledge. But she saved you, sir. Her and her Indian woman. She saved us all.”

Spencer wished he could remember, hated that he’d been a burden rather than a help. “So Miss Rutledge was in charge of me, Clovis? Not you?”

Clovis went red to his hairline. “I did…the personal things, sir. Bathing you and such like. Don’t fret about that. But nights, sir? There were only a few of us men and we had to stand guard on the camp, you understand. So Miss Rutledge would watch you then. Give you water for the fever, lend her body to heat you when the chills took you, shook you. The night…the night after Willy died, you were shakin’ bad, sir. Really bad. I was sure you were dyin’ on us then.”

“So she laid with me, sharing the heat from her body,” Spencer said, imagining the scene. The dark woods, the chill October night air, their two bodies close together in the middle of nowhere, hope fading, young Willy dead, their collective future looking bleak. Sometimes you just needed to hold on to someone, believe you were alive…

“I see.” He got to his feet. “Thank you, Clovis. You won’t speak of this to anyone.”

“No, sir, Lieutenant,” Clovis said, standing to attention. “Not a word to anyone. She’s a good woman, sir. Daughter of the quartermaster at Fort Malden, him cut down in the first volley. A world of hurt she had that day, but she never gave herself a moment to mourn, never gave us a moment to think on our dire straits. A true soldier’s daughter. Just movin’, keep movin’, and she got us safe out of there.”

“And then?” Spencer asked. “How did we become separated?”

Clovis lowered his head. “Well, sir, it’s like this, sir. Anguish didn’t want no more of the Army, and I could agree with him, seein’ as how General Proctor made a holy mess out of everythin’ he touched. We saw a boat, stole you out of the cabin they put you in that first night, and off we went, fast as we could.”

He looked up at Spencer pleadingly. “They were safe, sir, everyone was safe. But we wanted to be gone before everythin’ froze and we was stuck there all the winter long, and we couldn’t think to leave without you. But she found you, so that’s all right, isn’t it, sir? A baby you said, sir? Doesn’t that beat the Dutch for somethin’?”

“That it does, Clovis, thank you,” Spencer said as he walked out of the room, ducking his head under the low lintel, for the room was tucked into the eaves of the large house. His head stayed down as he walked the length of the hallway to the servant stairs, then slowly descended to the next floor. He paused for a moment, looking down that wider hallway toward his sister Morgan’s room.

The woman had saved his life. She’d saved many lives.

And he’d rewarded her by impregnating her, leaving her and then forgetting her.

She was here now, straining to bear his son, and he still didn’t remember her, couldn’t remember her.

“Bloody hell,” he swore, and turned his back, headed all the way down the servant stairs to the kitchens. He walked past a startled young cook’s helper he didn’t recognize and slammed out of the house and straight into the raging storm, the windblown rain plastering his thick black hair to his head and his shirt against his skin in mere moments.

He half walked, half staggered to the slippery sand and shingle beach. He didn’t stop until he was standing knee deep in the angry Channel, where he punched his tightly fisted hands high above his head, lifted his face to the wind and rain and screamed out his frustration at the lightning-streaked sky.