Dark Fires (2 page)

2

I will not be afraid.
I am not afraid.

It was a refrain that Jane kept repeating, with a kind of desperate determination, the closer they got to Dragmore. She sat stiffly glued to the seat of the hansom they had rented at the rail depot in Lessing. Her hands, gloved in fragile white lace, twisted miserably in her lap. Her blue eyes barely focused on the rolling meadows, the treetops framing them vividly against the dismal August sky. A fine English mist covered the countryside. She did not see the beauty of the Sussex landscape. She could only feel the tight, tense beating of her heart.

Oh, whatever had possessed her to do something so stupid as dress up in dead Charlotte Mackinney’s clothes and haunt the school bully, Timothy Smith? The whole plan, inspired by her vivid imagination and her desire to scare the pants off the boy, who deserved at least one good setdown for all his cruel, bullying ways, had backfired, and soundly. Charlotte Mackinney was Tim’s aunt and dead one month. Jane
had
scared the daylights out of Timmy, floating into his room at night like that, lingering, beckoning, just like a ghost—after all, she was an actress. She relished the part. She played it to the hilt. Timmy had been whiter than her own fair complexion, as white as the whites of his eyes. He’d been frozen stiff. Jane had so gotten into the role, drifting around the doorway of his bedroom, that she hadn’t heard anyone coming down the corridor. She had nearly jumped out of her skin and Charlotte Mackinney’s dress when a woman behind her exclaimed, “What’s this!”

It was pitch black in Timmy’s bedroom, except for the glow of the full moon, and near pitch in the hall. Jane found herself face to face with Timmy’s mother—Charlotte’s sister. Abigail Smith saw Charlotte’s dress and flaming hair and fell dead in a faint at her feet. Jane managed to stifle a scream. She picked up her hem and ran. In her haste she went smack into the door jamb, stubbing her toe smartly. She cried out in pain. That was the beginning of the end.

“You ain’t no ghost!” Timothy shouted.

Jane threw him a look. Timothy was beet red, whether from embarrassment or fury Jane didn’t know. But he was a mean fifteen-year-old bully, six feet tall and twice her weight, and Jane suspected she was in dire straits. She ran.

Timothy caught her.

Now Jane blinked back a sudden tear. Everything had gone so well until Abigail Smith had come along and fainted. Damn damn damn her impulsive, reckless behavior! If only Abigail had picked another time to go to bed, if only she, Jane, had enjoyed her performance less and quit sooner, while she was ahead, if only she hadn’t thought of the stupid idea anyway … If, if if!

They called him the Lord of Darkness.

Jane shuddered. She told herself not to be silly, to stop thinking like a moron. He was no devil. He was just a man. She was not afraid.

She shot her aunt a despairing glance. She knew there would be no sympathy from that stiff-backed widow. Matilda sat ramrod straight, eyes turned out of the carriage to the countryside. Jane had to try.

“Aunt Matilda, are you sure you won’t reconsider?” Her voice broke. She couldn’t control it.

Matilda turned her plump, unsmiling face to her niece. “We are almost there. Don’t you dare pull any of your ill-mannered, thoughtless stunts, Jane. I’m warning you. You had it easy when Fred was alive, that you did—twisted him around your finger, you did, with those big blue eyes. An’ these past six months you’ve run free, you did, with me grievin’ an’ all, God bless his departed soul. But the earl ain’t a foolish country parson. He won’t put up with any pranks from you.” Matilda shook her finger. “No stunts, you hear!”

Jane turned her pale, gamin face away, biting her full lower lip. Matilda had never liked her, never cared. Her uncle, Fred, who had died last winter of a heart attack—he had liked her, a little, anyway. Maybe it was for the best. She would go crazy living with the stern, no-nonsense Matilda. She had never seen the woman smile, not once.

She had considered running away. After all, she was seventeen, soon to be eighteen. But Matilda’s decision to pack her off to Dragmore had come so suddenly, she hadn’t the chance to formulate any plans. Yet she could still do it. A surge of warmth filled her heart, and Jane thought about her friends—her real family—left behind four years ago in London. The King’s Acting Company of the Royal Lyceum Theatre.

If only Robert had never made her leave.

Her mother had been Sandra Barclay, the famous actress. Jane had grown up in theaters across the country. As an infant a nurse had rocked her in her mother’s dressing room. Jane had fallen to sleep soothed by the sounds of the standing ovations her mother received on stage. As a toddler she had seen her beautiful blond mother sweeping into the chamber clad in elaborate costumes, glittering and sequined, then sweeping out again, in a different dress, to the roar of applause and whistles and shouts. As a young child she had watched, wide-eyed, her mother on the stage, gesturing, crying, laughing, even dying—only to stand up again and receive one thunderous ovation after the other. Roses were strewn at her feet. Again and again.

“Your mommy is wonderful, isn’t she?” her father would say, hugging her and letting her ride his shoulder. Jane, beaming, agreed. “Almost as wonderful as my little angel,” he would say, stroking her fine platinum hair. “My blue-eyed angel.”

Jane would laugh and pull his hair. Then her mother would appear, impossibly beautiful, radiant in the aftermath of her performance. Jane called out. Sandra, seeing her, instantly softened, and took her from her father’s arms, hugging her fiercely. “Darling! Darling! Mommy is so thrilled! Did you enjoy the show?” And her mother nuzzled her soft cheek.

She was Sandra Barclay, considered one of the finest actresses of her time, renowned throughout London. He was Lord Weston, the Duke of Clarendon’s third son, the Viscount Stanton. To this day Jane had such wonderful, vivid memories of the three of them together, always in one theater or another, until her father died when she was six.

It was a terrible time. Her mother would see no one and Jane did not recognize the pale, gaunt woman who turned away from her. Her uncle, who was not really her uncle but the manager of the troupe, explained carefully to Jane that Daddy had gone to heaven. Jane knew about heaven, so now she demanded, “Tell him to come back!”

“I can’t, Jane,” Robert Gordon said softly. “But he is in heaven with God, and he is happy.”

“Has Daddy died?”

Robert hesitated, surprised, then stroked her hair. “Yes, angel. But don’t be afraid. One day you will see him again.”

Jane clutched his shirt. “I want to see him now!” she cried imperiously. “Tell him to wake up!”

“I can’t,” Robert said, agonized.

“Yes, you can,” she said, sobbing, desperate. “Mommy dies all the time, but she always wakes up to come home!”

At first Robert didn’t understand. Then he realized that she was thinking of her mother’s dramatic performances. “Honey, this time is different. Your mother only plays at going to heaven. Your daddy really has.”

Jane could not understand. She didn’t believe Robert. Her daddy would come back. She tried to tell her mother this, but Sandra only wept. Wept with her daughter in her arms, hugging her fiercely, as if Jane could ease her pain. And then one day Jane knew the truth. He wasn’t coming back—not ever.

Her mother came out of mourning after a year to take her place in the theater again. Her own personal tragedy had made her better than ever, the critics said. Her performances were haunting. No one who saw Sandra Barclay on the stage could ever forget her.

Sandra refused to send Jane away to school, but hired a tutor instead. Jane learned to read and write mostly in her mother’s dressing room, or sitting in the huge, empty auditorium, or, sometimes, from the study of her mother’s London town house in Chelsea. When Jane was ten her mother became very ill, and three months later she passed away. The doctors never had an explanation.

At ten Jane had been too old and too worldly not to understand exactly what had happened. This was no act. Her mother had died and was never coming back. Robert and her mother’s friends—actors, actresses, musicians, stagehands —would not leave her alone to grieve. Their grief was shared, and Jane found comfort from everybody. Robert soon gave her her first role as an actress to distract her. She played a little boy in the production of
The Physician.
She only had five lines, but—stepping out on the stage as someone else, becoming someone else, playing someone else for a thousand people—it was the most exciting event of her life.

And afterward, when she came to take her bow with the rest of the cast, the applause was thunderous. Jane, holding hands with an actress and actor, bowed again and again to the standing ovation. Her face was wreathed in smiles. Her heart was expanding to impossible dimensions.

Someone shouted, “It’s the Angel’s daughter! It’s Sandra’s girl!”

And the actress pushed her forward. “Take your own bow, Jane, they want you,” she cried. Jane found herself alone on the stage, bowing. The crowd went crazy for the little blue-eyed blonde.

“Angel, Angel!” they screamed, applauding wildly. She soon became London’s darling of the stage. They called her “Sandra’s Angel.”

“Jane, stop your daydreaming—we’re here!”

Jane jerked out of her sentimental memories at the sound of Matilda’s intrusive voice. She had tears in her eyes, both from joy and pain, and she brushed them away. She found herself staring at the dark-gray stones of the neo-Gothic manor looming before them. She had expected something dark and gloomy and menacing. She wasn’t disappointed. All that was missing was overgrown ivy—the creeping pink roses and the carefully tended lawns were incongruous to the dark, dismal castle. As her gaze traveled along the immense, turreted outline of Dragmore, she came to the south wing, jagged and blackened and gutted grotesquely from a fire. Apparently it had been left that way for years. An irreverent testimony to the past—or was it some sort of macabre reminder? Jane shivered, her heart lodging in her throat, as they entered the circular drive going round in front of the house. And then she saw him, standing in the ancient stone arch of the barbican, his body partly turned to them, tall and powerful and darkly forbidding. In that moment, as he stared at them, he appeared to be the resurrected ghost of one of his ancestors, an indomitable pagan lord from another time and place.

The Lord of Darkness.

Oh, how the title suited him.

They said he had killed his wife.

3

It had to be she and he wasn’t pleased.

The earl was in the process of entering the manor. He paused at the sound of the carriage approaching, clearly discernible despite the frantic barking of the hounds. Vast irritation filled him, and he abruptly crossed the courtyard and stalked into the house, past the butler. “Show them in,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Which room shall I show them to, my lord?” Thomas asked politely. He was in his fifties, white-haired, balding, his face always bland. The earl thought that he could run around in a loincloth and moccasins with full Comanche warpaint and the old man wouldn’t bat an eye. Nick actually, secretly, liked him.

“How the hell would I know? You can take them to the stables for all I care.” The earl strode across the marbled foyer, oblivious to the fact that he was tracking mud and manure through. He began bounding up the curved mahogany stairs.

“Shall I serve them tea and crumpets?” Thomas called after him politely.

“Serve them spitted catfish heads,” he said with a growl.

“Yes, sir,” Thomas said.

The earl paused on the first landing, his hand turning white on the banister. His cold glance locked with Thomas’s bland one. He almost smiled. At least Thomas knew when to take him literally, unlike his wife’s man. That imbecile had actually served the closest thing he could find to catfish once upon a time, when the earl had been forced to host friends of Patricia’s in her absence. It was hard to say who had been more shocked, his guests or Nick, at the sight of the spitted, grilled fishheads served with the tea. Nick had actually laughed once he recovered. His wife, Patricia, had not found the episode the least bit amusing.

The earl stomped into the master suite. There was no valet there awaiting him; he did not have one. That had caused another, albeit minor, scandal, not that the earl cared. Until his wife’s death four years past he had suffered with a valet, which he found ridiculous. He was a grown man and he was capable of dressing himself. The lack of privacy bothered him as much as the inanity of it, and after the trial he had dismissed the valet immediately. He would have discharged two-thirds of the household staff as well, except that he worried about turning them out of their jobs. The earl was well aware that most agricultural laborers, when unemployed, moved to the towns, where there were jobs aplenty in the factories. He did not have the heart to consign these people, whom he knew, to such a cold, dismal fate. Born and raised on a west Texas ranch, for Nick such an existence was hell on earth.

His shirt was wet with sweat, and the earl removed it, flinging it to the floor. He had been working with the laborers building a new stone wall in one of the south meadows. He had enjoyed the task—gathering the rocks from the fields and adding them to the growing wall. Unlike some of his neighbors, whose acreage was going from corn to grass without grazing livestock, the earl was increasing the use of land on all fronts. The new meadow would be turned to hay to feed his increasing herds. He was aware that agriculture was in a precarious state—he sensed the beginning of its decline. He knew he must be careful, yet Dragmore, under his efficient policies, was thriving. Nick understood that to compete with the vastly cheaper American agriculture, he would have to increase Dragmore’s efficiency. It was a challenge, a task he threw his entire heart into, one that kept him going from dawn until dusk.

They were waiting.

The earl grimly buttoned a fresh shirt. He could not put it off. They were waiting. Not for the first time, he regretted the day he had ever married Patricia Weston.

She heard him coming.

Jane took a breath. The wait had been unbearable. And very rude too. She had seen him turn his back on their carriage as they entered the drive. He hadn’t even remained to greet them as a host should. Now they had sat in the yellow parlor for a good half hour, and there was still no noble presence. Jane had scanned her environs out of sheer boredom and the need to occupy herself. She had instantly noted that the parlor appeared to not have been used in a long time—or cleaned, for that matter. While everything was in perfect order, there was a thick coat of dust everywhere, and cobwebs hung in the corners of the ceiling above the heavy brocade drapes. The walls were covered in faded, aging, quite garish gold damask. Cherubs and nymphs and God only knew what else flew above them, painted on the ceiling amid blue sky and puffy clouds. The room was the epitome of bad taste. Matilda was unperturbed, sipping her tea and eating three crumpets in rapid succession. Jane had tasted the tea—foul stuff. She preferred coffee as her mother had. As for the pastries—she would never be able to get one down.

She stared at the door, hearing the soft footfall, and then it swung open. Her gaze locked with his.

Her heart stopped, jolted by his presence, then began to beat anew.

Before she had just gotten a glimpse of blue-black hair and broad shoulders. Now she was ensnared by frosty silver eyes without the least bit of warmth in them. His presence was vast, threatening. So dark. He filled the doorway. He was bronzed the color of teakwood. It made his pale eyes startling, even eerie, in the harsh, high planes of his face. And he was big. Taller than Timothy, and filled out, broad of shoulder, his hips small but strong. Jane saw, shocked, that he wore only a linen shirt casually tucked into his breeches, no vest, no jacket, no tie, and it wasn’t even buttoned all the way. She could see the flat plane of his chest, a sprinkling of black hair. His breeches were pale, tight doeskin, covering large, powerful thighs and stained with dirt and grass. His boots were muddy. He was obviously the one who had tracked the filth into the house.

He was uncouth. He was a barbarian. He was everything they said. He was so dark, she understood now where he had gotten his name. And he was staring back at her.

This realization, that he was staring back as rudely as she had been staring, made her blush hotly, and she abruptly dropped her gaze to her lap. But she could still feel his, cold, menacing— yet somehow hot too.

“I am Jane’s aunt by marriage,” Matilda was saying. “I trust you received our letter?”

“I did.”

“I’m so sorry if I’ve given you a jolt, but with my dear husband passing on, I just can’t keep Jane, and you—”

“I have no time for a ward.”

His words were hard and curt, and Jane gasped in surprise. Their gazes met again. Color flooded her. His cold eyes slipped from her face to her waist, but so rapidly she thought she must have imagined it. He turned back to Matilda. “I am sorry,” he said. It was a dismissal.

Matilda stood, growing red, but not intimidated. “I cannot handle her alone. I am an old woman. She is a trying handful, she is impulsive, reckless, always in mischief. I am returning to the parsonage. Without Jane.”

“How much do you want?”

Matilda grew redder. “I didn’t come for money! But we cared for her for almost four years, since she was fourteen. If you have the charity to pass something on, I can use it. But I cannot handle Jane,” Matilda cried with obvious conviction. “If you don’t take her I will toss her out onto the streets!”

Silence greeted this. Both pairs of eyes turned to Jane. Jane was too hurt by Matilda’s words to be enthused with the prospect of escaping both unwanted guardians, for if neither one wanted her, this was her chance. “It’s all right,” she bravely said, attempting a fragile smile. “I will go to London. I have friends there.”

“Friends! Bah!” Matilda spat. “That theater trash your mother was a part of!”

The earl wasn’t listening to Matilda. He was staring at Jane. She had the voice of an angel. He liked this situation less and less with every passing moment. He hadn’t expected this—beauty and innocence and those big blue eyes. And—she was a child. To send her to London alone would be to doom her to a life of prostitution. The factories if she was lucky. He cursed aloud. “Damn Patricia.”

Matilda gasped. Jane’s big eyes went bigger, like saucers. He looked at Matilda. He did not care what these two thought—he had long since ceased to care what anyone thought of him. Not since the trial had he given a damn about gossip. “Are you certain there are no other Westons?” But even as he spoke, he knew that, with his wife’s death, there was no one else on the Weston side to take the girl in. “What about her mother’s family?”

“There is no one but you and me,” Matilda said firmly. And then, angrily, she proceeded to tell him about Jane’s last escapade. The earl’s expression did not change, but he stared again at Jane. “Abigail Smith almost had a heart attack,” Matilda finished triumphantly. “How can I control the likes of her? I’m an old woman!”

He did not think the offense serious; in fact, had he not been so angry about the entire situation, he might have been momentarily amused. Grimly he said, “I am not equipped for this. I know nothing about raising a girl.”

“You have a son,” Matilda pointed out, smiling now, sensing victory. “He has a governess. Jane will fit right in. And, my lord, in your position you can find her a husband, quickly if you wish. Then Jane will be settled and everyone’s conscience will be relieved.”

Nick stared at Jane. She was seventeen, she was beautiful, she was a Weston. He knew very few details, other than that she was the old duke’s granddaughter. But these bare facts were enough. He could find her a husband easily. And his life would return to normal.

“Very well,” he said. “She can stay. And I will find her a husband immediately.”

“I don’t want to get married!” Jane cried.

Both heads whipped toward her. Matilda was furious, the earl surprised. His surprise faded to what appeared to be amusement, while Matilda became threatening. “What you want is of no concern,” she hissed. “Be quiet!”

Jane opened her mouth to protest—and met the earl’s intense gray stare. She swallowed her denials. She knew, in that instant, that what she wanted did not matter in the least. The earl would have his way—with them all.