An Angel for the Earl (20 page)
Kerry and the stallion slogged back home through the continuing downpour. Instead of heading straight for the stables and a hot bath, the earl directed Hellraker toward the south edge of the property, where Johnny and the men were working on the drainage ditch despite the rain.
“Pack it in,” Kerry yelled over the raging storm. “The men are all soaked through, and none of you will be any good to me if you all come down with inflammation of the lungs. Besides, this land has been flooded since Englishmen were painting themselves blue. One more storm won't make a ha'penny's difference.”
The workers cheered considerably when he told them to go on home, change into dry clothes, and have an afternoon holiday at his expense. He poured a handful of coins into work-roughened hands. “Go warm yourself with Ned's mulled ale at the pub if you wish. Just be ready to work even harder tomorrow.”
Johnny took a little more convincing to aim in the right direction.
“Don't let your foolish pride stand in the way, man,” Kerry shouted to be heard. “Pride won't keep you warm at nights, or sit by your fireside, or give you children.”
“But you want her!” Johnny protested.
“No, I only wanted a rich, well-bred, well-behaved, and beautiful bride. Felicia happened to fill the bill. That doesn't mean I want her, or need her. Not like you, who need her to be your other half. And she needs you, too. She loves you, man!”
Johnny kept arguing about misalliances and unequal matches until Kerry almost did plant him a facer. “It's pouring rain, damn you, and I swear mildew is forming inside my boots! Will you listen to yourself going on how you love her too much to ruin her life? Would you be happy with another woman?”
“No, of course not,” Johnny swore, hunched over in his oilskin.
“Then why the hell do you think any less of her love? Would you consign her to a life with a man she hardly knows, bearing his children, barely tolerating his touch? If you love her so much, why don't you want her happiness above all?”
“She won't be happy without a title.”
“Gammon, that's Lady Westcott speaking, not Felicia.” He tried to snap his fingers, but they were too wet to make a sound. “That,” he said anyway, “for Lady Westcott's ambitions. Her daughter's wishes should come first. Besides, titles are not as thick on the ground here in the country, and Lady Westcott says she wants Felicia nearby. Dash it, all they have to do is speak to Goldy Flint on your behalf. He's getting Prinny to hand out knighthoods as if they were ices from Gunther's.”
“What about the marquis, then?”
“Westcott's desperate for a trustworthy estate manager, someone he can leave in charge while he rids the countryside of anything that walks, runs, flies, or crawls. He was relieved, I swear to you, to see the back of me. Felicia is a fine girl, much too good for a ne'er-do-well like me, and he knew it. I'd have made her life a misery, Johnny, without even trying. You'll try every minute of your life to see to her care and comfort. That's the way it should be.”
Johnny finally rode off, grinning like a May Day fool instead of a sodden ex-soldier. “Kiss the bride for me,” Kerry shouted after him. “And stay the night if they'll put you up. The roads were already getting treacherous when I came through.”
* * *
The dowager had left a message with Cobb. She was going into Farley with Goldy to see the printer about wedding invitations. If she was not back that evening, he was not to worry, as Sir Goldy forecast the storm continuing. They might be forced to stay overnight at the inn there.
How nonsensical for them to set out under such conditions, Kerry thought, and how marvelously wicked. He raised his glass of hot spiced wine in salute. “Good for them!”
“Yes, I think it will be,” Lucy agreed. “And I believe Felicia and Johnny will be very well pleased with each other.”
“So that just leaves me and my mountain of mortgages. Any other heiresses I should cultivate? Other than the Prudlow girls, by George. I am not desperate enough for that.”
“Perhaps now is a good time to speak about the second earl?”
“Is it a sad story?”
“Of course it is. How do you think he came to be a ghost otherwise?”
Kerry sipped from his glass. “Then I don't want to hear it. Not tonight. Tonight is for celebrating.”
Lucinda was as relieved as the earl at his narrow escape from marriage to Felicia, so she did not press the topic. Not tonight.
Tonight, with the sound of the rain against the windows and the fire burning brightly, Lord Stanford taught Lucy how to play chess. He laughed uproariously at her efforts to move the pieces, before shifting the ivory men according to her instructions. Then she bested him at Concentration, for he couldn't concentrate on matching pairs at all, not when he was studying her instead of the cards.
Lucy was in near white tonight, with just a tinge of blush. Her gown seemed to be made of layer upon layer of some gossamer stuff that shimmered as she moved, showing baby roses strewn here and there. Another rosebud nestled in spun-gold curls clustered around her face, which was thinner now, more finely drawn. And her eyes that were once a siren's mermaid-green were now spring-soft and gold-flecked, with the innocence of a fawn. She was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, more beautiful even than the Lucy who'd first appeared to him like a figment of his richest, most sensual imagination. He stared and stared, trying to absorb every facet of her incredible loveliness.
He never knew that, later, Lucy watched him sleep, memorizing him in turn.
* * *
A huge crash woke the earl. That and his.bed shaking beneath him. The roof of the east wing had finally collapsed under the pressure of the incessant wall of water beating down on it. Kerry and Cobb took lanterns, but the passageways were too dangerous to investigate. Who knew when walls might cave in on them or floors give out? There was nothing to be done about it now, at any rate, and they could just as easily assess the damage in the morning, when the rain must eventually stop.
Unable to get back to sleep and already damp from his excursion to the disaster area, Kerry decided to check on the stable. With the head groom half deaf and the old coach driver half dead and the young grooms likely in the village with the workmen, there was no one left to calm the horses made nervous by the crash. The carriage horses were fast asleep, and the pony and mare were placidly chewing their hay, but Hellraker was kicking his stall's door and pounding against the side walls. The stallion's upset was not helped by the imbecilic pup's frenzied barking.
Those two were never going to settle, Kerry decided, so he may as well go check the pigs. He had no idea what he could do if the sows were agitated over the storm, but he saddled Hellraker, donned an oilskin coat, and took up a lantern.
The trails and paths were much worse, if they were passable at all. It was as if every brook and stream in all of Wiltshire were overflowing its banks, right onto the earl's land. The winter crop was a foot underwater, washed away. The major road was a quagmire, unsafe for man or beast, where it wasn't swept away altogether or blocked with fallen tree limbs. No one would be coming back from the village this night.
Hellraker cleared every obstacle, of course, and leapt muddy rivers as if they were puddles. But the dog got left behind, barking. “Go on home,” Kerry shouted. “I'm not fishing you out of any more watery graves.” But the dog kept barking and Hellraker balked at the next downed tree, almost sending Kerry flying over his head. “Hell and damnation!” he swore, but went back for the mongrel. He tucked Lucky under the oilskin coat and tightened the belt around him, because he had no free hand, what with the reins and the lantern. “Hang on!” he ordered, and sent the horse forward again.
He could hear the hogs long before he could see them, squealing like banshees even over the storm's din. Nervous, hell, the sows were frightened out of their wits, and rightfully so. Half their enclosures were underwater, and what dry ground was left was shrinking fast.
The earl was too stunned to curse. His collateral, his future, was about to float away. He didn't even know if pigs could swim, but he knew this wasn't the time to find out, not in a raging cyclone of a storm. The water had to be rechanneled away, back to the drainage ditch which, devil take it, was not complete. Or the pigs had to be gotten to higher ground. There was the barn where the fodder was kept, but it was a long, muddy field away. In the dark.
The earl wasn't a praying man. He didn't approve of those folks who petitioned the Almighty for help when it served their purposes, and ignored Him otherwise. So “Lucy!” he cried. “Where are you? I need a miracle!”
Miracles were about as common as hen's teeth that night. Lucy didn't come, and the situation was not improving for the earl's sitting there looking at it. He believed, in fact, that the water had visibly risen in the brief time since his arrival. Surely the pigs' caterwauling was louder as their feet got wetter.
Think, Kerry, think, he told himself. Then he told himself not to waste time on fruitless ventures, just do
something.
Anything. So he rode for the old barn until even Hellraker had trouble lifting his mighty hooves out of the swamp that used to be a productive field. Kerry got down and walked, pulling the horse along after him. Two lanterns hung by the barn's sagging door, so he lit both and surveyed his resources after releasing Lucky and tying Hellraker to the crossbeams. Windfall apples, a corn crib, shovels, bales of hay and straw. Everything he needed to keep his investment warm and fed could he but get the wretched beasts there. Then he noticed the unused lumber piled near the far wall.
He didn't have time to build a raft, by Jupiter, so he'd better build a bridge. Struggling with planks taller than himself, boards that took two men to maneuver, Kerry proceeded to lay them end to end through the field. They sank nicely into the mud, making a wet but firm surface, except they were not going far enough fast enough. Working frantically, the earl lashed some of the boards together and hitched the line to Hellraker's saddle, calling in his chits.
“You owe me,” he yelled at the affronted stallion, “for all the clothes you ruined.” At the next trip: “And this is for my broken nose.” The black snorted as he slowly picked his way along the laid planks, dragging yet another load behind him, his eyes rolling and ears well back. “And for making me a laughingstock in front of the neighbors,” urged the earl.
The last plank was in place, but nowhere near the pigs. Kerry raced back to the barn and grabbed the door off its hinges. In a fury to match the storm's, he used a shovel to pry apart the door's boards, then ran with them back to his makeshift catwalk. Pigwalk.
Almost there. The rear door, a loose-box partition, finally a scattered bale of straw with his oilskin coat thrown on top, and his pigs could hie their little trotters across the mud into the safe and dry barn. He stood gasping for breath, waiting for them to arrive. And waited some more. “Apples,” he called. “I've got nice apples for you.” Then he cursed. “What, you bastards want stuffed grapes? Or maybe a formal invitation?”
Yelling didn't work, coaxing had no effect whatsoever, and pushing simply succeeded in getting his face flicked with the least appetizing aspect of a hog. Picking up a piglet under each arm and running like a veritable Noah would take Noah's forty days and forty nights, if Kerry could catch the wet, frantic little shoats. And the sows just grunted unhappily. Visions of Tige Welford's trampled body raced through the earl's mind. What an ignominious ending for a peer of the realm, getting ground into the mud by a rasher of ham.
That was when Kerry made an important discovery. Not that the lack of knowledge had bothered him any, but he finally realized what the mongrel hound's other half must have been. One of the mutt's ancestors had to have been the finest sheepdog in all of Britain. If not sheep, then cows or even geese. Kerry didn't care, Lucky could herd pigs!
If every dog had its day, this was Lucky's night. The little dog was running behind the nearest sow, barking and snapping at her heels, getting her moving, keeping her on the wooden pathway. Her babies followed after. Soon there was a line of pigs from the pens to the barn marching single file to the orders of one small yipping cur. Kerry's contribution was in picking up the piglets that slipped off the track into the mire and setting them back on the planks. Between times he ran to the barn to spread more straw, hay, and apples, and settle disputes over which family group claimed which stall or corner of the barn. He was bitten, scratched, and stepped on before Lucky chased the last sow and her brood across the threshold. If there were any stragglers, Kerry could not see them in the darkness, but he'd saved his bacon! He could go home.
He left Lucky guarding his new charges, the dog being too exhausted to complain, and rode out with Hellraker along the planks. And that's when he made another important discovery: the planks were no longer sitting in mud, they were underwater. The floods were still rising, and getting closer and closer to the barn. “No!” Kerry shouted into the stormswept night before his lantern went out.
“No!” Kerry raged again when he finally reached the Abbey. The rain hadn't let up and no help had returned. Hermes knew how many porkers he'd already lost, but they'd all be gone by morning at this rate, if they weren't already chilled and sickening.
“It isn't fair!” he ranted, shaking his fist at Lucy, who sat desolate on the window seat in the library, staring at the sheets of rain. “I worked so hard, as hard as I ever could. And for what? I tried, Lucy, you know how dashed hard I tried to do things right, to be a âgood' man. Look what good it has done me!”
He tossed his wineglass into the hearth, only fractionally satisfied by the shattering crystal. “Where's the justice, Lucy? Where's the reward for good behavior? You were so busy looking for a code of conduct, an eternal truth. Well, I'll tell you how life really operates: by the law of the jungle, that's how. Dog eat dog. The strong prey on the weak. Winner takes all. And I lost, Lucy.”
“But you didn't, Kerry. You can't knowâ”
“Oh, I know I'm sounding like a petulant child sent early to bed when his older brother gets to stay up longer, but it's so deuced cruel to have come so close and see it all washed away. And do not, if you have any sympathy for me at all, tell me that nobody promised that life was fair.”
“Perhaps this is just a test, you know, like Job?”
“To see how much punishment I can take before I throw in my hand? What's next, locusts? Or was it boils? No matter, I fail. I fold. I quit. As soon as the rain stops, I'll be on my way back to London and my life of indolence. There's a lot to be said for pleasure-seeking, Lucy. You should try it sometime. Parties and plays, races and drunken revels. Elegant clothes that don't get ruined the minute you step out the door. And women. Oh, yes, women. Females I can pay in pound notes and pearls, not with my title and freedom.”
“You cannot mean that, Kerry. You were much happier here, with a sense of purpose and accomplishment.”
This time he threw his fist at the fireplace, and derived little more satisfaction at the pain. “I mean it, Lucy. All I've accomplished is to give people a false sense of hope. You, too. So after I leave, you can go to your friends and
you
can be the one to complain of the injustice, that they linked your fate with a hopeless libertine. You never had a chance, poor innocent, and for that I am sorry, but I'm getting out of here.”
* * *
He left, but not for London. He went back out into the storm as soon as he had dry clothes and hot coffee. Wishing the pony cart stood a chance of getting through, the earl had to be content with loading more lanterns, a pistol, and some sacks on Hellraker's still-damp back. He may as well fetch home breakfast before he left, Kerry told himself. And he couldn't leave Lucky out there after the dog's valiant efforts, especially when he knew the mutt couldn't swim.
The ride took even longer this time, the stallion being almost spent. Hellraker still didn't like getting his feet wet though, so they got there, and the old barn was still standing.
And they were not alone. Everyone was there, the laboring footmen, the young grooms, his tenants new and old, Johnny and some men in Westcott's livery, Ned from the pub and Charlie the blacksmith. Even the vicar was filling grain sacks with dirt and handing them down the line to be placed around the old barn's foundation. Some of the men were lifting Kerry's gangplank and carrying the lumber to shore up the drainage ditch; others were busy with shovels, excavating new riverbeds for the water to fill.
Over Lucky's joyful greeting, Kerry swore he heard harp music, slightly out of tune.
* * *
And lilacs. The sound of harps and the smell of lilacs. And a wet, cold nose in his ear.
“Get off the bed, damn you.” The earl pushed Lucky away. “Just because I said you could sleep upstairs where it was warm didn't mean my bed, you boneheaded mutt. You weren't that much of a hero!”
Lucky wagged his tail and bounded off. Kerry opened his eyes. The sun was in them; Derek must have been in earlier to open the curtains. And put flowers in his room? Not even Derek would go so far. Besides, lilacs in November? He raised his head.
Lucy was at the foot of his bed, bathed in the sun's glow so that he had to squint to get a good look at her. She was all in white, adding to the glare, and she was trailing flowers. She was smiling like the cat in the cream pot, dimples and all.
“All right, so I stayed,” he grumbled. “Don't get your hopes up. I may still leave when the roads dry out.”
She shook her head and smiled fondly. “No, I am the one who is leaving. I came to say good-bye.”
Kerry sat up, then pulled the covers over his bare chest when he saw her look away. “What do you mean, leaving? You can't go yet. Whyâ”
“But my time is up, my lord. You knew I was only here for a short time.”
“But your job is not done yet! I have no heir, no wife waiting to be fruitful and multiply the Somerfield brood.”
“You'll find the perfect girl in time. I've seen how you love children, and how Diccon and the little French cousins idolized you. You'll be a fine father.”
“No, I'll have a relapse without you here as my conscience. I'llâ¦I'll get foxed and seduce both the Prudlow granddaughters.”
Lucinda laughed. “You'd have to be very castaway indeed.”
“I'll return to London on the instant, I swear,” he tried in desperation.
“No, you love the land and people here now. You'll stay and see them bloom under your care. Then you'll return to London when it's time to take your seat to speak out against poverty and climbing boys and cast-off veterans.”
Kerry ran his hands through his uncombed curls. “Lucy, you can't go yet! I'm no paragon of virtue. Goddamn it, I'm not,” he shouted as proof.
“No, you are not,” she agreed with a little laugh, “but you do have a good heart that will see you through anything. You don't need me anymore.”
“Then stay because I want you, not because I need you. Please.”
“I would stay if I could, you must know that, Kerry, but I have no choice.”
Kerry tried to dredge up more convincing arguments, but he knew he was wasting his time. That glow around her didn't come from the sun; it was still raining. And Lucy's radiant smile wasn't because he was half naked in bed, or because he saved the pigs. “Oh, Lucy,” he sighed.
“It's better that I go now anyway,” she said, trying to cheer him. “You know I couldn't have borne the time when the piglets had to go to market.”
He did manage a smile at that, the slightest lifting of his lips. “Whatever shall I do without you?”
“You might try talking to the second earl. He really has a fascinating tale about when the east wing was built.”
“To hell with the east wing and the second earl! They're both rubble by now.”
“Kerry, don't be angry. You'll forget in time.”
“Never!” he swore.
“Then remember the best times, that's what I shall do. How you taught me to waltz, and gave me my first curricle ride, and how handsome you looked riding Hellraker the first time.”
“With my nose broken? That was a good time? I always said you had some devilish queer notions.”
She laughed. “Then what are your best times?”
The earl thought a moment before saying: “Your smile when we waltzed, and your delight when you were up in the curricle, and how beautiful you looked when I first met you.” He could not speak past the lump in his throat. He paused, swallowed. “But mostly how you look today. Perfect.”
“Because of you and your goodness. You wanted so badly to show me the pleasures of life, and you succeeded. I would have no happy memories to treasure without you.”
“Dash it, Lucy, I only wanted to corrupt you, at first. And if you're so happy, why are there tears on your cheeks?”
“Why are there tears on yours?” she answered softly.
He fumbled for a handkerchief on the bedstand and impatiently brushed at his eyes. “Soot from the chimney. We never did get the thing properly cleaned.”
She sniffled. “Me, too.”
“Oh, God, Lucy, I cannot bear to say good-bye. You are like a part of me, the best part of me.”
“I know. You are the song that sings in my heart.”
He gave a watery chuckle. “Off-key.” Then he reached out, trying to touch her. She stretched her hand out toward him.
“Perhaps we'll meet again,” she whispered.
“Do you think so?”
“I'll pray that it be. Farewell, my dearest. I will always love you.” Their fingers almost met. Almost.