My Favorite Marquess. Alexandra BassettЧитать онлайн книгу.
lumbered up the hill faster than she could have ever thought possible, given her sore feet, fatigue, pounding temples, and tortured psyche. Home—she was almost home!
She was already trying to put the whole terrible episode behind her. Now that she knew she would reach the comfortable sanctuary of her new home, images of hurling herself off a cliff in shame already began to recede. After all, she did not know what had happened, so she felt reasonable in assuming nothing had. Yes, they had kissed—perhaps more—but whose fault had that been? Not hers, surely. There was no doubt in her pounding head that, in the unlikely event that something more dreadful than a mere kiss had taken place, the ruffian had forced himself on her.
She had confused memories of pleasurable sensations. But passions stoked in a moment of unintentional drunkenness surely could not be considered a blot on her character. She would not have chosen to be abducted, plied with liquor, and made love to by a smuggler. Far from it!
How often had her sisters accused her of being a snob? And there was, she had to admit, a bit of truth to the charge. But would a snob engage in such wanton behavior with an unwashed, uncouth criminal? Absolutely not!
“Kiss me, Brute.”
The memory of those words, spoken in a slurred voice that was at once unfamiliar and undeniably her own, stopped her in her tracks. Oh, heavens! She had asked him to kiss her. He hadn’t been lying about that.
But that didn’t mean that she had voluntarily drunk from that flask. That was the true culprit in her crime of passion. Demon rum.
Never again, she thought.
Violet pressed on again, and when she crested the hill she got her first glimpse of her new home. At least, she assumed it was hers. For, unfortunately, there were no other houses on the horizon.
She gawped for a moment, trying to restart her breathing mechanism. The sight was almost enough to send her running back down to the cave. Her head began to pound with renewed vigor.
This was Trembledown?
Although it was still dark, she could easily make out the place because all the windows had lights in them. Every one. It was startling, and oddly dispiriting. For while her heart should have been gladdened that Peabody and Hennie were holding a vigil through the night for her and had lit her path home, so to speak, the home they had lit might have been more favorably approached in total darkness.
Trembledown was like something out of a gothic novel…or a nightmare. Nothing about the edifice seemed at all secure. The house was set back from a cliff, but was still close enough to give the illusion of the house just waiting for a few centuries to work the landscape and wash it out to the sea. The building even tilted seaward—actually sagged to one side. Shutters, where they were not missing entirely, hung askew. Windows were boarded where glass had been broken. Rhododendron bushes, overgrown and leafless—probably dead—stood like skeleton sentries in front of the house. Around the perimeter was an old stone wall, moss covered and in various stages of collapse.
The name Trembledown was certainly perfect for the place—it looked as if one stiff storm could send it trembling into a pile of rubble.
Questions reeled through her mind, one after another. This was the place her in-laws had seen fit to buy her off with? (They must despise her more than she’d ever suspected!) More puzzling still…could this truly be the ancestral home the haughty Marquess of St. Just was dying to get his hands on? Was the man a lunatic? She herself had turned her back on a Season in London helping present Sophy so that she could try to bring some order to this disaster? She had staked her hopes for the future on this?
She stumbled down the thistle-strewn path that led to the door. There was no sweeping drive, no courtyard. Near the wall, a few crocuses, now past their prime, made a sad attempt at adornment. Violet couldn’t even make out a road leading nearby. The worn stone steps leading up to the door were slippery with moss. She almost fell.
Suddenly the door was thrown open, and there stood Peabody in his snowy white nightgown, robe, and cap. Though it was almost daylight, he held a candle in his hand and blinked at her as if she were crawling toward him out of pitch darkness.
“Oh, ma’am!” he exclaimed, rushing forward.
They fell on each other like long-lost friends, and it was all Violet could do to bite back tears. “Peabody!” she said, her voice quavering. It was so good to see him, words failed her. Gone was all thought of scolding him for tying her hands so tightly. Look how upset he was—and the frantic relief in his eyes to see her! Loyal, wonderful Peabody. Her champion. Her rock!
“I have been worried almost beyond reason!” he exclaimed. “Why, I—”
Suddenly, his words came to a dead stop, and the color drained out of his face.
“What is it?” she asked.
The improbable worry that leapt to her mind was that he could tell what had happened just by looking at her. She feared she had the Brute’s moll written all over her.
And yet, when he did speak, his words had nothing to do with the smuggler. “Is that your blue dress?” he asked.
As she looked down at it now, it seemed to have faded overnight to gray. Not to mention, it was ripped and smudged with black in several places. The skirt was still wet and had dragged in the dirt all the way home. The hem looked as if it had been trimmed in mud.
Her skin burned with mortification. “I had to spend the night hidden in a cave, on the rocks.”
He gasped. “With Robert the Brute?”
She hesitated only a moment before a lie slipped easily from her. “Hiding from him, Peabody.”
It sounded good, and she was about to embroider her story further when she realized that Peabody wasn’t listening to her anymore. In fact, in the next moment—just after his searching glance took in the spectacle of her completely ruined shoes—her champion and rock nearly fainted dead away.
“Henrietta, if you don’t stop crying I shall send you packing back to Yorkshire.”
Henrietta, who was perched on the edge of a badly stained brocade chair, sniffed in an effort to bring her emotions under control. Her nonstop snufflings were wearing on Violet’s nerves. In the cave Violet had thought that if she could just escape Robert the Brute, she would embrace the world and her companions in it in the true spirit of love and kinship. She had anticipated the milk of human kindness flowing through her veins. Her conversion to saintliness was entirely premature, obviously. The only thing circulating through her veins at the moment was irritation.
Was it any wonder? She was so tired! Tomorrow, no doubt, she would feel more kindly toward the world, after she had had a good night’s sleep in a real bed. If there was a real bed to be had in this ghastly house. What she had seen so far did not make her hopeful on that score.
The very couch she lay on was a good example of the problem. One leg of the mildewed piece of furniture was shorter than the other, so that every time she moved, it jarred both her and the scraggly cats that draped themselves on the cushions and across the back. She had shooed the cats away—they were three of a seemingly innumerable feral herd that had taken over the house—but the moment she had closed her eyes they were back. One, an orange long-haired beast with only one eye, stared at her menacingly.
The house, besides having been taken over by a pack of frightening felines, was a shambles. Walls, cracked and water stained, seemed to trap the cold air rather than any sort of warmth. Of course, warmth was hard to come by, since the chimney was clogged and smoke had filled the room when Peabody had attempted to light it. Dust and soot stood everywhere, except where four-legged creatures had left tracks—and that was to say nothing of the smell!
The caretaker, Barnabas, apparently had never laid rag to surface area. Nor swept. She was hard pressed to think what the old man had been doing all these years, save leeching a living off the Treachers. Not that she had a problem with that. Leeching a living off her, however, was another matter entirely.
Peabody