Moonlight Masquerade (3 page)

Nellis Denham had just then been
concentrating on whether or not her niece’s small chest was still
moving and giving serious consideration to taking the small hand
mirror from her reticule to place it at Christine’s mouth—just to
be sure she was breathing—but at the sound of the earl’s voice she
swung fully about, and saw her unwilling host for the first
time.

What she saw immediately drove all thoughts
of berating the man for his ill manners straight from her mind. Her
prominent eyes widened until they showed white all around their
hazel centers as her gaze took in the strange sight in front of
her.

The man was tall, exceedingly tall, and
quite thin, or at least he seemed thin beneath the enveloping black
cloak that swirled about his knees as he came to a halt more than
ten feet away from her. He was clothed all in black, with only the
snowy white of one shirt cuff, his perfectly tied cravat, and the
flesh tone of his right hand to serve as contrast. The hand was
raised, holding onto the tip of the hood like a villager tugging at
his forelock.

His appearance was a shock, there was no
disguising it, but Nellis Denham was made of extremely strong
stuff. Lifting her chin a fraction, she returned defiantly,
“Indeed, yes, my lord, I did. In fact, I demanded it! I have a
question for you. How dare you deny us shelter?”

“Quite easily, madam,” Hawkhurst replied,
about to turn away. “I did not ask you here.”

“You would let my niece die?” Nellis
challenged, stepping away from the coachman, who was still holding
the unconscious girl, and giving the earl a clear vision of his
third unwanted guest.

Christine Denham’s body resembled that of a
child’s rag doll, lying limp and helpless in the arms of the
strapping coachman, her legs dangling over one broad forearm, her
hands curled limply in her lap, her head, covered by her cloak,
resting against his broad chest.

“A child?” Hawkhurst questioned, for the
coachman was very big and Christine appeared to be very small. He
turned to Lazarus, his voice ringed with anger. “You didn’t tell me
it was a child.”

Nellis quickly grasped at the straw the earl
had inadvertently handed her. “The only child of my dear, departed
brother, and the one joy of my life,” she pleaded hastily. “Please,
my lord, you cannot send us back out into the storm. You cannot let
her die!”

Lazarus opened his mouth, about to say
something, then appeared to think better of it and merely nodded
before leading the way to the stairs. “If you’ll follow me, please,
ma’am,” he said, not daring to look at his master, “I’ll show you
to your rooms.”

Hawkhurst watched the small party ascend the
staircase, then returned to his study, removing the silk cloak with
his right hand and flinging it to the floor. He walked over to the
hearth to stand staring down into the fire. “A child,” he said
aloud, closing his eyes. “What in bloody hell am I going to do with
a child?”

I
t was dark in the
second-best bedchamber Hawk’s Roost had to offer, dark except for
the soft yellow circles of light cast by the flickering fire and
one small bedside candle. The woman Lazarus had identified as one
Miss Nellis Denham was slumped in an overstuffed chair in the
corner, her lady-like snores assuring him that she had at last
succumbed to her fatigue.

Hawkhurst approached the bed on silent feet.
It was a large bed, over a hundred years old, its users forced to
gain its comfort by way of a set of wooden stairs. The person
occupying the bed, however, was small. Very small, and very
still.

The earl moved closer to the head of the bed
to look down on his unwanted visitor, the niece, Christine Denham.
He inhaled sharply, disbelievingly, angrily. He had been tricked!
This was no child!

Her ebony hair, spreading outward from a
slight widow’s peak, was splayed across the pillows; long, thick,
and lustrous. It contrasted sharply with the pallor of her small,
heart-shaped face. Accentuating her paleness were her black
winglike brows and the thick, sooty lashes that shadowed her
cheeks.

There was a hint of blue tingeing her closed
eyelids, not caused by bruising, but a result of her fair, nearly
transparent skin. Her face was made up of gentle curves, her small,
straight nose and soft, pouting lips balanced by a short but strong
chin that boasted both a slight point at its tip and a shallow
cleft.

His gaze traveled downward, past the slim
neck to the high closing of her modest nightgown, an ancient piece
unearthed from only the good Lord knew where. There wasn’t much of
her, her toes lifting the blanket little more than five feet below
the tip of her head, but the slight outline was definitely not that
of a child. And her hands, lying at her sides atop the blanket,
were beautifully formed, with long, tapering fingers and short-cut
oval nails.

Christine Denham was a woman of quality, a
very beautiful woman. It had been so long, an eternity, since he
had been in the presence of a refined woman. His first thought was
one of escape, fearing that she should wake and find him here, all
but drooling over her. But she was unaware of him, unconscious.
What was the harm of lingering a few moments more?

After several minutes spent staring at the
still form he forgot himself sufficiently to lean closer, the
better to see her in the dim candlelight. She appeared to be
asleep, with no sign of injury anywhere, but the earl already knew
that she had sustained a sharp blow to the back of her head as the
rented traveling coach she had been riding in had overturned on the
side of a hill.

She’d been unconscious now for over two
hours, a circumstance that had caused Lazarus to come to his master
and voice his concern. It was to satisfy his servant’s uneasiness
that the earl had agreed to come to the bedchamber at all.

Snow clogged the road to the village so
there was no medical help available, not that the earl put much
stock in doctors, but now he wished there were some way to summon a
physician. His unexpected guest looked so fragile, so completely
vulnerable, and Hawkhurst couldn’t remember the last time he had
felt so helpless, so useless.

No, that wasn’t true. He could remember such
a time, and did, closing his eyes against the pain he knew would
follow his thoughts. But this time he didn’t allow himself the
luxury of melancholy. This time perhaps it wasn’t too late to help.
The girl was still alive, and while there was life there was
hope.

Involuntarily, almost without thought, he
reached out his right hand and took hold of hers. Her hand was
limp, and very cold, and he squeezed it tightly, willing his own
considerable strength into her small body. Concentrating his gaze
on her beautiful pale face, he spoke softly, murmuring comforting
sounds that he hoped would somehow ease her dreams.

He told her all about his childhood in
nearby Surrey, and the little hidden glen he had chosen as his
favorite thinking place. He spoke of gently rolling hills, and
fragrant summer flowers—a place where a person could go when in
trouble and always count on coming away feeling refreshed, renewed.
Strengthened. He bade her to travel in her mind to that pleasant
glen, and allow the beauty of the place to soothe her weary
body.

How long he stood there he did not know. He
was oblivious to the passage of time, uncaring of his own physical
discomfort, the slow throbbing that began in his left shoulder and
spread down his arm. He was accustomed to spending his nights
awake, preferring the cloak of darkness to the cloak he was forced
to wear in the daylight.

Finally, as the fire began to die in the
grate, Christine moved slightly in the bed, her hand closing
tightly about his even as he made to move away, to disappear as
silently as he had come. Her smooth brow furrowed as returning
consciousness brought pain to her, and then her eyes fluttered
open.

They were blue eyes, even more beautiful
than he had imagined they would be, large, and clear and
reminiscent of the sky on a cloudless summers’ day. They stared
sightlessly at the ceiling for a moment before shifting to the
right to see the man who stood hovering over the side of the high
bed, his uncovered face only a few feet above hers.

She blinked once, then blinked again, her
eyes widening in disbelief, filling with sudden horror.

And then she screamed. Over and over again,
she screamed.

Vincent Nathaniel Mayhew—Earl of Hawkhurst,
and once the subject of maidens’ dreams, not their
nightmares—raised his right hand to cover the left side of his face
and fled ignominiously from the room, Christine Denham’s screams
following him.

“A
unt Nellis, would
you be so kind as to stop that interminable pacing? Besides wearing
out the carpet, you’re quite giving me the headache.”

“Christine! You talked to me!” Aunt Nellis
whirled about to face the bed. “You know who I am. You’re really
awake this time, aren’t you? Oh, you are, you are! Thank God! Would
you like a drink of water? A cup of hot, sweet tea with milk and
some toast? Of course you would. You’ve had nothing but a little
broth since the accident.”

Christine raised a hand to her pounding
head. “Please, Aunt, I beg you, contain yourself, for at the moment
I don’t consider my condition to be one of overwhelming joy to me.
I’m not thirsty, or at least I’m not as thirsty as I am curious.
What happened? Where are we? Was there an accident with the
coach?”

Aunt Nellis hastened over to the bed,
latching onto her niece’s hand as if it were the single remaining
piece of flotsam in a storm-tossed sea. “You don’t remember? Of
course there was an accident with the coach. I knew we should never
have left that inn after luncheon. Stupid driver! We could all have
been killed. You do remember that I told you so, don’t you,
Christine?”

“And you were so right, Aunt Nellis,”
Christine admitted, touching her fingertips to the bump on the back
of her head and wincing. Under her breath, she added, “Everyone is
right at least once, I suppose.”

Her aunt went on, not hearing her. “Oh, it
was just the most dreadful thing that ever happened. We rolled over
and over and I tried to hold onto you but you just bounced about
the coach the same way Mavis did that day she stumbled down the
whole of the kitchen stairs—you remember that day, don’t you?”

“I remember Mavis handing in her notice and
going off to work as second barmaid at the Four Crowns,” Christine
interjected wryly, pushing herself up against the pillows in an
effort to make herself more comfortable. “She said, if I recall
correctly, that if she were to be tumbled onto her back she’d just
as soon be paid for the trip.”

“Christine! For shame!” Aunt Nellis
exclaimed, her frayed nerves making it impossible for her to remain
still for more than one minute. She began pacing the carpet once
more, continuing her story. “You’ve got a nasty bump on the back of
your head, which is why you don’t remember anything.”

Christine smiled wryly. “I’d noticed. But
how are you, Aunt? You appear to have come through our ordeal quite
unscathed.”

Aunt Nellis waved the question away, intent
on finishing her tale. “Don’t you worry your poor head about me, my
dear child. I was unharmed except for a few bruises—although how
either of us got out of that coach alive I vow I shall never
understand—and the coachman carried you here through the storm. It
took forever to get here, and we were so cold. He was really quite
brave and strong,” she ended reflectively, still rather sad that
the man had taken his horses and departed for the village on foot
early that morning without even saying good-bye to her. But then,
he did have his coach to consider. Someone had to arrange to have
it hauled out of that ditch.