Almost Heaven by Judith McNaught
“It’s all a dirty lie, isn’t it?” she said with a calm that belied her rioting feelings.
“He destroyed my life,” Robert hissed, wrathfully looking at her as if she were the traitor. “And it’s not all a lie. He had me hauled aboard one of his ships, but I escaped in San Delora.”
Elizabeth drew a shaky breath. “And your back? How did that happen?”
“I had no money, damn you—nothing but the clothes on my back when I escaped. I sold myself as a bond servant to pay for passage to America,” he flung at her, “and that is how my master dealt with bond servants who sto—who didn’t work fast enough.”
“You said ‘stole’!” Elizabeth flung back at him in shaking fury. “Don’t lie to me—not again. What about the mines— the mines you talked about—black pits in the ground?”
“I worked in a mine for a few months,” he gritted, walking toward her with menacing steps.
Elizabeth snatched up her reticule and stepped back as he grabbed her shoulders in a vicious grip. “I’ve seen unspeakable things, done unspeakable things—and all because I tried to defend your honor while you were playing the slut for that son of a bitch.”
Elizabeth tried to twist free and couldn’t, and fear began spiraling through her.
“When I finally made it back here, I picked up a paper and read all about bow my little sister’s been doing the elegant at all the ton parties while I was rotting in a jungle picking sugar cane—”
“Your little sister,” Elizabeth cried in a shaking voice, “was selling everything we had to pay off your debts, damn you! You’d have landed in debtors’ gaol if you showed your face here before I stripped Havenhurst of everything!” Her voice broke, and she panicked. “Robert, please,” she choked, her tear-brightened eyes searching his hard face. “Please. You’re my brother. And part of what you say is true—I am the reason for much of what’s happened to you. Not Ian, me. He could have done much worse to you if he were truly cruel,” she argued. “He could have turned you over to the authorities. That’s what most men would have done, and you would have spent the rest of your life in a dungeon.”
His grip tightened, and his jaw was rigid; Elizabeth lost the battle against her tears, and even her battle to hate Robert for what he had planned to do to Ian. Drawing a suffocated breath, she laid her hand against his lean cheek while tears danced in her eyes. “Robert,” she said achingly, “I love you, and I think you love me. If you’re going to stop me from going to London, I’m afraid you’re going to have to kill me to do it.”
He shoved her backward, as if the touch of her skin suddenly burned his hands, and Elizabeth landed on the bed, still clutching her open reticule. Filled with sorrow for all he had been through, she watched him pace the room like a caged animal. Carefully she pulled all her money out and put it on the bed, then she separated some bills to hire the coach she would need. “Bobby,” she said quietly. She saw his shoulders stiffen at the use of his boyhood nickname. “Please come here.”
She could see the battle going on in his mind as he continued to pace, then abruptly turned and stalked over to the bed as she stood up. “There’s a small fortune here,” she continued in the same gentle, sad voice. “It’s yours. Use it to go anywhere you want.” She touched his sleeve with her left hand. “Bobby?” she whispered, searching his face. “It’s over. There’ll be no more vengeance. Take the money and leave on the first boat going anywhere.”
He opened his mouth, and she hastily shook her head. “Don’t tell me where, if that’s what you were going to do. There’ll be questions about you, and if I don’t know the answers, you’ll know you’re safe from me and Ian and even English law.” She saw him swallow repeatedly, his forlorn gaze on the money lying on the bed. “In six months,” she continued, as desperation lent an odd clarity to her thoughts, “I’ll deposit more money into any bank you tell me to use. Put an ad in the Times for Elizabeth—Duncan,” she fabricated hastily, “and I’ll deposit it in the name of whoever signs the ad.”
When he seemed unable to move, she clutched her reticule tighter. “Bobby, you have to decide now. There’s no time to lose.”
His throat worked as he struggled to ignore what she was saying, and after an endless minute he sighed harshly, and some of the tension drained from his face. “You always had,” he said in a resigned voice as his eyes roved over her features, “the softest heart.” Without another word he walked over to his valise, threw what few articles of clothing he possessed into it, then snatched the money from the bed.
Elizabeth blinked back a flood of tears. “Don’t forget,” she whispered hoarsely, “Elizabeth Duncan.”
He paused with his hand on the door latch and looked back at her. “This is enough.” For a long moment brother and sister looked at each other, knowing it would be the last time; then his lips quirked in an odd little smile of pain. “Good-bye,” he said. “Beth,” he added.
Not until she saw him striding swiftly past the window of their room, heading for the road that twisted down to the sea, did Elizabeth relax, and then she sagged onto the bed, boneless. She bowed her head, and tears slid down her cheeks, dropping onto the reticule that covered her hand; tears of sorrow mingled with tears of relief and fell from her lashes—but all the tears were for her brother, not for her.
Because inside the reticule was her pistol.
And from the moment she realized he might not agree to let her leave, she’d been pointing it at Robert.
35
Elizabeth made the four-day journey from Helmshead to London in two and a half days—a feat she managed to accomplish by the expedient, if dangerous and costly, method of paying exorbitant sums to coachmen who reluctantly agreed to drive at night, and by sleeping in the coach. The only pauses in her headlong journey were to change horses, change clothing, and gulp down an occasional meal. Wherever they stopped, everyone from post boys to barmaids talked about the trial of Ian Thornton, Marquess of Kensington.
As the miles rolled past, day receded into black night and gray dawn, then began the cycle again, and Elizabeth listened to the pounding hooves of the horses and the terrified pounding of her heart.
At ten o’clock in the morning, six days after Ian’s trial had begun, the dusty coach she’d been traveling in drew up before the Dowager Duchess of Hawthorne’s London town house, and Elizabeth hurtled out of it before the steps were down, tripping on her skirts when she hit the street, then stumbling up the steps and hammering on the door.
“What in heaven’s name—” the dowager began as she paused in the hall, distracted from her worried pacing by the thundering of the brass knocker.
The butler opened the door, and Elizabeth rushed past him. “Your Grace!” she panted. “I—”
“You!” the dowager said, staring woodenly at the disheveled, dusty woman who’d deserted her husband, caused a furor of pain and scandal, and now presented herself looking like a beautiful dust mop in the dowager’s front hall when it was all but too late. “Someone should take a strap to you,” she snapped.
“Ian will undoubtedly want to attend to that himself, but later. Now I need”—Elizabeth paused, trying to still her panic, to carry out her plan step by step—“I need to get into Westminster. I need your help, because they’ll not want to let a woman into the House of Lords.”
“The trial is in its sixth day, and I don’t mind telling you it is not going well.”
“Tell me later!” Elizabeth said in a commanding tone that would have done credit to the dowager herself. “Just think of someone with influence who will get me in there— someone you know. I’ll do the rest once I’m inside.”
Belatedly, the dowager comprehended that regardless of her unforgivable behavior, Elizabeth was now Ian Thornton’s best hope for acquittal, and she finally galvanized into action. “Faulkner!” she barked, turning to address what seemed to be the staircase.
“Your grace?” asked the dowager’s personal maid, who materialized on the balcony above.
?
“At once, your grace,” said Ramsey, already bowing himself out of the room.
She followed him out, still issuing orders. “On the off chance Kyleton has decided to be derelict in his duties and not attend the trial today, send a footman to his house, another to White’s, and another to the home of that actress he thinks no one knows be keeps in Blorind Street. You,” she said, bending an icy eye on Elizabeth, “come with me. You have much to explain, madam, and you can do it while Faulkner attends to your appearance.”
“I am not,” Elizabeth said in a burst of frustrated anger, “going to think of my appearance at a time like this.”
The duchess’s brows shot into her hairline. “Have you come to persuade them that your husband is innocent?”
“Well, of course I have. I—”
“Then don’t shame him more than you already have! You look like a refugee from a dustbin in Bedlam. You’ll be lucky if they don’t hang you for putting them to all this trouble!” She started up the staircase with Elizabeth following slowly behind, listening to her tirade with only half her mind. “Now, if your misbegotten brother would do us the honor of showing himself, your husband might not have to spend the night in a dungeon, which is exactly where Jordan thinks he’s going to land if the prosecutors have their way.”
Elizabeth stopped on the third step. “Will you please listen to me for a moment—” she began angrily.
“I’ll listen to you all the way to Westminster,” the dowager snapped back sarcastically. “I daresay all London will be eager to hear what you have to say for yourself in tomorrow’s paper!”
“For the love of God!” Elizabeth cried at her back, wondering madly to whom she could turn for speedier help. An hour was an eternity! “I have not come merely to show that I’m alive. I can prove that Robert is alive and that he came to no harm at Ian’s hands, and—”
The duchess lurched around and started down the staircase, her gaze searching Elizabeth’s face with a mixture of desperation and hope. “Faulkner!” she barked without turning, “bring whatever you need. You can attend Lady Thornton in the coach!”
* * *
Fifteen minutes after the duchess’s coachman pulled the horses to a teeth-jarring stop in front of Westminster, Lord Kyleton came bounding up to their coach with Ramsey trotting doggedly at his heels. “What on earth—” he began.
“Help us down,” the dowager said. “I’ll tell you what I can on the way inside. But first tell me how it’s going in there.”
“Not well. Badly—very badly for Kensington. The head prosecutor is in rare form. So far he’s managed to present a convincing argument that even though Lady Thornton is rumored to be alive, there’s no real proof that she is.”
He turned to help Elizabeth, whom he’d never met, down from the coach while continuing to summarize the prosecutors’ tactics to the duchess: “As an explanation for the rumors that Lady Thornton was seen at an inn and a posting house with an unknown man, the prosecutors are implying that Kensington hired a young couple to impersonate her and an alleged lover—an implication that sounds very plausible, since it was a long time before she was supposedly traced, and an equally long time before the jeweler came forward to give his statement Lastly,” he finished as they rushed past the vaulted entryway, “the prosecutors have also managed to make it sound very logical that if she is still alive, she is obviously in fear for her life, or she would have shown herself by now. It follows, according to them, that Lady Thornton must know firsthand what a ruthless monster her husband is. And if he is a ruthless monster, then it follows that he’d be fully capable of having her brother killed. The brother’s disappearance is the crime they believe they have enough evidence on to send him to the gallows.”
“Well, the first part of that is no longer a worry. Have you stopped the trial?” the duchess said.
“Stopped the trial!” he expostulated. “My dear duchess, it would take the prince or God to stop this trial.”
“They will have to settle for Lady Thornton,” the dowager snapped.
Lord Kyleton swung around, his gaze riveting on Elizabeth, and his expression went from shock to relief to biting contempt. He withdrew his gaze and quickly turned, his hand reaching for a heavy door beside which sentries stood at attention. “Stay here. I’ll get a note to Kensington’s barrister that he is to meet us out here. Don’t speak to a soul or reveal this woman’s identity until Peterson Delham comes out here. I suspect he’ll want to spring this as a surprise at the right moment.”
Elizabeth stood stock still, braced against the pain of his blistering look, aware of its cause: In the eyes of everyone who’d followed the stories in the newspapers, Elizabeth was either dead or an adulteress who’d deserted her husband for an unidentified lover. Since she was here in the flesh and not dead, Lord Kyleton obviously believed the latter. And Elizabeth knew that every man in the cavernous chamber on the other side of that door—including her husband—was going to think exactly the same thing of her until she proved them wrong.
The duchess had hardly spoken at all in the coach during their ride here; she’d listened closely to Elizabeth’s explanation, but she obviously wanted it proven in that chamber before she accepted it herself. That withholding of faith by the dowager, who’d believed in Elizabeth when scarcely anyone else had, hurt Elizabeth far more than Lord Kyleton’s condemning glance.
A few minutes later Lord Kyleton returned to the hallway. “Peterson Delham was handed my note a moment ago. We’ll see what happens next.”
“Did you tell him Lady Thornton is here?”
“No, your grace,” he said with strained patience. “In a trial, timing can mean everything. Delham must decide what he wants to do and when he wants to do it.”
Elizabeth felt like screaming with frustration at this new delay. Ian was on the other side of those doors, and she wanted to burst past them and let him see her so badly that it took a physical effort to stand rigidly still. She told herself that in a few minutes he would see her and hear what she had to say. Just a few more minutes before she could explain to him that it was Robert she’d been traveling with, not a lover. Once he understood that, he would surely forgive her—eventually—for the rest of the pain she’d caused him. Elizabeth didn’t care what the hundreds of lords in that chamber thought of her; she could endure their censure for as long as she lived, so long as Ian forgave her.
After what seemed like a lifetime, not a quarter-hour, the doors opened, and Peterson Delham, Ian’s barrister, strode into the hall. “What in God’s name do you want, Kyleton? I’ve got all I can do to keep this trial from becoming a massacre, and you drag me out here in the middle of the most damning testimony yet!”
Lord Kyleton looked uneasily at the few men strolling about the hall, then he cupped his hand near Peterson Delham’s ear and spoke rapidly. Delham’s gaze froze on Elizabeth’s face at the same instant his hand locked on Elizabeth’s arm, and he marched her forcibly across the hall toward a closed door. “We’ll talk in there,” he said tersely.
The room into which he hauled her contained a desk and six straight-back chairs; Delham went straight to the desk and flung himself into the chair behind it. Steepling his fingers, he gazed at Elizabeth over the tops of them, scrutinizing her every feature with eyes like blue daggers, and when he spoke his voice was like a blast of ice: “Lady Thornton, how very good of you to find the time to pay us a social
At that moment Elizabeth’s only thought was that if Ian’s barrister felt this way about her, how much more hatred she would face when she confronted Ian himself. “I—I can imagine what you must be thinking,” she began in a conciliatory manner.
He interrupted sarcastically, “Oh, I don’t think you can, madam. If you could, you’d be quite horrified at this moment.”
“I can explain everything,” Elizabeth burst out.
“Really?” he drawled blightingly. “A pity you didn’t try to do that six weeks ago!”
“I’m here to do it now,” Elizabeth cried, clinging to a slender thread of control.
“Begin at your leisure,” he drawled sarcastically. “There are only three hundred people across the hall awaiting your convenience.”
Panic and frustration made Elizabeth’s voice shake and her temper explode. “Now see here, sir, I have not traveled day and night so that I can stand here while you waste time insulting me! I came here the instant I read a paper and realized my husband is in trouble. I’ve come to prove I’m alive and unharmed, and that my brother is also alive!”
Instead of looking pleased or relieved he looked more snide than before. “Do tell, madam. I am on tenterhooks to hear the whole of it”
“Why are you doing this?” Elizabeth cried. “For the love of heaven, I’m on your side!”
“Thank God we don’t have more like you.”