Almost a Princess (15 page)

No harm in waiting outside the bank,
he decided, and advising the hackney driver to wait, he walked to the bank entrance.
No harm in going inside,
was his next thought. He knew Miss Mayberry wouldn’t take kindly to someone looking over her shoulder, so he would do no more than take a quick peek to assure himself that everything was just as it should be.

A quick peek, however, did not reassure him. There was no sign of Miss Mayberry. On applying to one of the bank clerks, he was told that she’d left a good five minutes before. He was alarmed when he left the bank but not panicked. Bond Street had the finest shops in England, and he’d yet to meet a female who could resist the lure of pretty things.

In quick succession, he entered the bootmaker’s, the milliner’s, the draper’s, and had his hand on the doorknob of the perfumery when he noticed something lying at the side of the road. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand. It was a lady’s reticule of embroidered pink velvet and it belonged to Miss Mayberry. Her pistol was still inside it.

He ran back to the hackney to get Lance. After tying a leash on Lance’s collar, he let him sniff the reticule. “Find her, boy,” he said. “Find her.”

Lord Francis Reeve was at his usual table in the front window of the King’s Arms in Vigo Street. He’d lost a good deal of money at the gaming tables the night before and was in a foul humor. He’d already complained to the waiter that the steak-and-kidney pudding he’d been served wasn’t fit for pigs, but since he’d eaten every morsel, the waiter refused to take the meal off his bill. A gentleman asked if he might share his table and he snarled him away.

As he munched on the last slice of toast and washed it down with coffee, he reflected on his future. Everything had been going well until Jane Mayberry poked her long nose into his affairs, and now the girl who was to save him from debtors’ prison had been taken up by Castleton’s set. Little Miss Emily Drake, he’d heard, was fast becoming the toast of the
ton.

It galled him. It damn near choked him. He hadn’t forgotten the indignities he’d suffered at Castleton’s hands, egged on by that prune-faced Mayberry woman. They’d made a grave mistake. He didn’t know how it could be done, but he’d promised himself that one day he would make them pay for it, and by damn he would!

He was staring idly out the window when the subject of his reflections came into view. For a moment, he thought he was imagining it. Jane Mayberry didn’t look a bit like the dowd who had accosted him in Highgate. She was wearing a rose colored coat with a bonnet to match. But nothing could disguise the set of those slender shoulders or the proud tilt of that chin. He wished he could smack it.

Maybe this was his chance to teach her a lesson. Vigo Street wasn’t exactly a busy thoroughfare. It was no more than a lane behind the grand mansions that lined Piccadilly. All he could see from the dining room window were high brick walls to protect the gardens from prying eyes. That could be to his advantage if Miss Mayberry were alone.

He got up, then sat down again when he saw that she wasn’t alone. She had turned to face someone who was running to catch up with her. Reeve’s gaze shifted to take in a good-looking man in his thirties whose garments were far more fashionable than his own. Obviously the stranger did not suffer from a lack of funds.

It happened so quickly that he was frozen with shock. One moment the stranger was talking pleasantly to Miss Mayberry, and the next moment he had shoved her to the ground. She pulled herself to her knees and got up, and the stranger felled her with a blow to the stomach.

Reeve looked around the dining room, but no one else seemed to have noticed the drama that was unfolding out front, and he certainly wasn’t going to raise the alarm. He turned back to watch the spectacle.

The stranger was helping Miss Mayberry to her feet. She could barely stand, barely hold her head up. It wasn’t surprising. She had just been felled by a man who outweighed her by four or five stone. He wished he were in the stranger’s shoes and wondered what his connection might be to Miss Mayberry. He meant to find out.

As before, it happened so quickly that he was frozen in shock. Seventy pounds of savage, snarling wolf—fangs bared, ears back—came out of nowhere and charged the stranger, forcing him back against the brick wall. Miss Mayberry said something, a command to the wolf, Reeve thought, but it didn’t have much effect. It stood there, hackles raised, fangs bared, ready to pounce if the man moved an inch or Miss Mayberry gave the word.

Miss Mayberry spoke again and the wolf changed into something that was closer to a dog. Only then did Reeve notice that its back was protected by a flannel coat. It left the man, and trotted over to her, rubbing against her legs, licking her face when she petted it.

Reeve swallowed, remembering that she’d warned him if he’d hurt her stableboy, she would have her dog tear his throat out. He’d thought she was exaggerating. Now he believed her.

The stranger saw his chance and took it. While the dog’s attention was distracted, he bolted for the front door of the King’s Arms. The wolf-dog broke away from Miss Mayberry and went after him. Reeve didn’t wait to see more. He hurried to the front door and opened it just as the stranger reached it and hurled himself inside.

She leaned against the wall as her stomach began to heave, but all that came up was a little bile. She couldn’t move without crying out, but pain or not, she knew she had to get away before Jack came back.

“Lance,” she called, and he was there, whining, nibbling at her gloved fingers.

Steadying herself with one hand against the wall, she began to retrace her steps. She hadn’t gone far when Harper turned the corner into Vigo Street. The sight of that solid body and unfriendly scowl brought more tears to her eyes. She’d never been happier to see anyone in her life.

His pistol was in one hand, her reticule in the other, and he was panting from running to keep up with Lance. Having ascertained that there was no immediate danger, he stuffed her reticule in his waistband and went to help her. “What in blazes happened?” he demanded, fear making him sound angry. “I let you out of my sight for a few minutes, and now look at you.”

He supported her with one arm around her shoulders. “I was attacked,” she said. “I’m not really up to talking. Please get me away from here, Harper.”

He could see that she couldn’t go far. He was in no condition to carry her and he couldn’t leave her in the state she was in to fetch the hackney. By a stroke of good fortune, however, the back gate into the Albany, where Lord Castleton had his rooms, was only a few steps away in Burlington Gardens, and the key to the gate was in his pocket.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked when he opened the gate.

“To Lord Castleton’s rooms. You can rest there till I fetch the hackney to take you home.”

“I thought the Albany was on Piccadilly.”

“This is the back way in.”

He questioned her about the attack again, but gave up when she answered him vaguely. He wasn’t suspicious. All he thought was that she would tell him everything when she was more herself. On one point, however, she was able to reassure him. The man who attacked her was not one of the men who had set fire to her barn.

When Harper shut the stout wooden gate and locked it, she felt that she had entered a fortress. The garden wall must have been about eight feet high. It was a good feeling, but she knew it wouldn’t last. Now that Jack had found her, he wouldn’t give up. He would soon come looking for her again. If there was one thing she did not doubt, it was that Jack Campbell would not give up.

Ruggles was there, pressing his master’s clothes, and she found his friendly face as comforting as Harper’s dour one. There was something about red hair and freckles that inspired trust. He looked so sane and ordinary.

After Harper left, Ruggles put a glass of brandy in her hand, but the first sip made her stomach heave, so she set it aside. He was full of questions, too, but she told him no more than she’d told Harper: that she was attacked by someone who must have seen her come out of the bank, and when she ran, he gave chase. It was a lame story, but unless he was willing to call her a liar he had to accept it, and until she had spoken to Case and Lady Sophy, that was all anyone was going to get out of her.

As Ruggles went off to make her a cup of tea in lieu of the brandy, she pressed her fingers to her temples. She had a searing headache. Her stomach was still heaving, and each breath seemed more difficult than the last. When Jack lashed out, he didn’t hold back his punches. She’d been lucky. He’d only hit her once. But he knew how to make a blow count. He’d punched her in the stomach, and she still couldn’t draw a deep breath.

Lance put his head in her lap and whined softly. That small sound of sympathy brought fresh tears to her eyes. “Don’t go all sappy on me,” she said, “or I’ll never manage to pull myself together. There, there, I’m all right. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d probably be on my way back to Scotland right now.” The thought made her shudder.

Harper had left her reticule on the table beside her chair. She reached for it and drew out a smallish, pearl-handled pistol, the smallest in what was fast becoming an arsenal. Because of its size, it was ideal for hiding in a lady’s reticule. Too bad she’d dropped the reticule. That was the thing about ladies’ clothes. There were no oversized pockets to stuff things in, as men had.

She leveled the pistol and pretended that Jack was coming at her again. There was no doubt about it. She possessed the killer instinct in full measure.

“Isn’t it funny,” she said sadly, “how things turn out?”

When she’d first met Jack, she’d been swept off her feet. At eighteen, she’d been impressed by his gentlemanly manners, his charm, his good looks. So had her father. James Campbell must have seemed like the answer to a prayer. He was distantly related to the Dukes of Argyll. His father was a baronet. He had a fine house in Edinburgh’s New Town. He loved Jane and she loved him.

So her father had given his blessing and they were married.

It soon became clear that her husband’s courtesy and charm were only skin deep and reserved for his friends and acquaintances, not for his wife. She had assumed that her marriage would be much like her parents’. There would be teasing, and debating, arguing, and laughter. Laughter especially. What a foolish idealist she’d been then.

Jack wanted something different. He wanted to dominate her; he wanted to possess her entirely.

In the beginning, she’d made allowances for his fits of jealousy and sudden bursts of temper. She was spoiled, he said, and she knew there was some truth in that, so she tried to become what he wanted her to be. She stopped making allowances for him the night he walked into her bedchamber and, without warning, knocked her to the floor with a backhanded blow. Her crime, he said, was contradicting him in front of his friends. They had been married for less than two months.

Things only got worse. The smallest offense on her part would incite him to fury. She wasn’t sure which she despised more, his violence or his protestations of love afterward and his pathetic attempts to make amends. For the two years she had stayed with him, she’d accumulated a coffer of expensive trinkets with which he’d tried to buy her forgiveness. When she left, she took the trinkets with her. To her way of thinking, she’d earned every one of them. Of course, there was no sentiment involved. In fact, she sold every piece before she left Edinburgh. She needed the money to start a new life somewhere else, somewhere far, far away from Jack Campbell.

She might have stayed with him longer if her father hadn’t died. That was a turning point. She wanted Jack to offer Mrs. Trent a place with them, but this he refused to do. He’d pinched her cheek, kissed her on the lips, and said words to the effect that they already had more servants than they knew what to do with, and Mrs. Trent should have retired a long time ago. She had a married daughter, didn’t she? Let her go to her.

That wasn’t the reason he wouldn’t offer Mrs. Trent a position. It was because he was insanely jealous. He knew how much Mrs. Trent meant to her. She was like family, but he didn’t want her to have any family or close friends. He wanted her all to himself.

She remembered thinking at the time, as she stared into his smiling face,
Stand up for yourself, you
sniveling little coward! Don’t let him browbeat you like this!
But in spite of his smile, she saw the watchful look in his eyes, and her nerve deserted her.

She made a sound that was not quite a sob. In retrospect, she didn’t know where she’d got the courage to leave him. By that time, she was frightened of her own shadow. She had no friends—Jack had seen to that—no family, no one to help her. But by damn, she’d done it, and she’d never looked back.

In London, she’d found a job as a teacher at St. Bede’s under her maiden name. She’d made friends. She’d loved working with the children. She was happy. After three years, she felt confident enough to write to her father’s solicitor in Edinburgh, asking if Jack had made any move to divorce her, and the solicitor passed her letter onto Jack’s solicitor, who straightway gave it to Jack.

This time, she had friends to turn to, and when Jack came storming in the front door of St. Bede’s, they delayed him and helped her slip out the back. These same friends, Letty and Miss Hepburn, arranged for her to go into hiding, and she eventually ended up in Scotland, in the little cottage her parents used to rent for holidays.

That’s where she found Lance, or he found her.

That was another turning point. They became inseparable. They were both runaways and that forged a bond between them, or so it seemed to her.

She’d made up her mind that Jack Campbell wasn’t going to steal her life. She couldn’t go back to St. Bede’s, not now that she had a dog, and she had no intention of giving up Lance. They’d start over, she and Sir Lancelot, and find a place where they would both be welcome. And so she’d stumbled upon Lady Octavia and the Ladies’ Library.

She’d made up her mind about something else. The next time Jack tracked her down, she would be ready for him. She wasn’t a fool. She wasn’t going to advertise her whereabouts or grow careless. But the next time, she would stand her ground.