The Wild Wellingham Brothers: High Seas To High Society / One Unashamed Night / One Illicit Night / The Dissolute Duke
With absolutely no trace of hesitation Emerald whipped her knife from the soft folds of her boot and sent it rifling through space, the small thud as it connected with the newcomer’s head almost ludicrous in proportion to the damage.
Two gawping faces confronted her as she turned, but she had no time for questions. Stripping the second knife from a hidden pocket, she cut the band of her heavy skirt and stepped from it. The thinner petticoat beneath would at least afford her a bit of freedom.
‘Get into the forest. Miriam, make sure you don’t come out unless you hear me calling. I’ll cover your tracks.’ Taking a branch from the nearest tree beneath the line of overhang so that it would not be seen, she pushed her aunt in the direction she wanted them to go before erasing the trail of their footsteps. It was all that she could do. Now she must find Asher and help him—if Toro had done as she asked and gone on, Asher would be alone in his battle with the McIlverrays.
‘Lord help him,’ she whispered under her breath as she circled back, the sum of years of tutelage having her automatically masking sound and her eyes keenly following the track that the single retainer had taken.
Asher felt the sharp sting of sweat obscure his vision and blinked to clear the blurriness. There were a number of men just behind him; as they came into a river valley, one gestured to the right. His heart sank. God knew how many he couldn’t see, but, if he let them past, Emma and Taris and Lucy were less then a quarter of a mile back. And helpless. He’d checked Emma’s pulse before he’d left her and his fingers had brushed across the gash at her temple. It was deep and his brother and Azziz were completely unconscious. His only help gone.
It was up to him.
Everybody was dependent on him.
Laying his pistol on the grass, he discarded his hat and filled it with damp leaves before jamming it through the sharp point of an oak sapling he’d cut. The shape and form of a head. It was just a little ruse, but it might work.
No. It had to work, he corrected himself as he jammed the stick into the earth and circled to the right. He still had time, for the group were talking to one another and laughing.
Easy prey.
He just had to take them off one by one until there was a manageable number. With four flints in his pocket and another two in the barrel he couldn’t afford to waste ammunition on a miss. Fitting a polished river stone into his hand his eyes focused.
Closer. Closer. Steady. The stone arced across the sky noiselessly and the chosen man fell hard. One down. He could not think about who else lurked in the deeper woods. The horses stopped and the more urgent sound of voices reached him on the wind. He could see that they scanned the valley for movement; turning, he lobbed another stone into the air to land in a rush of noise on the broad leaves of a sturdy bush.
It was enough. The hat from this distance gave an illusion of movement and the remaining men rushed forward. When he sighted them again, it was from slightly behind.
Perfect.
He brought the gun from his pocket and fired. Another man fell. And then another. Reloading, he sat to wait it out. Three more men left, though a scream of anger echoed through the trees, bringing with it the worrying sound of others.
More of the enemy materialised from the forest and he drew his sword, discarding the pistol in favour of blade as he backed up the embankment with careful steps and on to a ledge of thick brush. If they wanted to take him, he wouldn’t make it easy. Here the horses could not follow and with him on foot the odds became more even.
Six men.
He had taken more.
Time slowed and focused. An easy balance and quiet waiting.
‘Come on, come on,’ he whispered and hoped he could kill a good number of them before they got to him.
Emerald saw him from above first, and even through her sheer terror and from this distance she recognised the style of his swordsmanship. My God, she thought as she scrambled down the incline, no wonder he killed my father, no wonder he cut a swathe through the men on the Mariposa like no others before him.
His was not an English style of fighting, but a foreign one. A style learnt not in the polite fencing salons of London, but in the world’s godforsaken places, where fair play shattered in the face of sheer and brutal force.
She could barely look away. Already he had downed two men, but the others were circling closer and one held a gun.
They hadn’t shot him! Hope blossomed. They wanted him alive as a pathway to the treasure. She shouted as a slice of steel creased the folds of the fabric on his jacket and red blood oozed through.
Asher heard the cry from one side and the flash of white petticoats had him turning.
Emma? With a sword in hand and a dirty bandana wrapped around the bright gilt of her curls? Memory turned, and against the dull grey sky he suddenly remembered what she must always have known.
‘You!’ He could barely believe it.
The girl from the Mariposa. Emma Seaton? He blinked twice just to make sure the image was real. And the turquoise eyes that looked back at him were dark in anguish.
A slash of steel to his right centered his focus and he waited to see whether she would raise her sword against him too. God. Could he kill her? For the first time in all his life he was afraid.
‘You’ll be wanting the map no doubt, Emerald.’ The man nearest to him spoke, gesturing to those beside him to cease for the moment.
Emerald? Asher glanced sideways. Emerald? What sort of a name was that? Fragmented shards of memory clicked into place.
Emerald!
Emerald Sandford?
‘The Duke has Beau’s map hidden at Falder, Karl. If you kill him, you’ll lose it.’ Her voice was hard, distant, indifferent, as if the taking of his life was a meagre thing against the possession of what they both sought. In the pale light of a rapidly approaching dusk, the blood at her temple ran dark red, and the pallor of her skin made her look immeasurably older than the twenty-one years he knew her to have.
‘You lie.’ The older man opposite took up his sword and brought it down, fast. Quick reactions saved the blade from eating into her leg as she parried.
‘If I had the map, do you think I’d still be here in England?’
With little effort she pushed his blade back and stood like one without a care in the world.
Like father, like daughter.
How easily they ruined lives. How little they thought of the consequence.
Pure untrammelled rage ripped through Asher.
Melanie. His brother. The aching remains of his right hand and the years they had stolen. Lunging forward, he scattered the circle, another man crumpling under the wicked sharpness of steel and all hell broke loose. In the moment of chaos he felt the small tickling whisper of a voice as Emma edged around behind him.
‘Hate me later. I can help you now.’
With a well-timed quickness she plunged her blade through the closest renegade and turned to meet the next one and she fought as if a sword had been born in her hand. He frowned at the thought. Lord, it probably had been. The quick report of a gun close up made him stiffen, the smell of powder acrid in the air. In one movement he pulled his knife from his boot and hurled it before the man could reload, pleased when the blade easily found its target.
He kept her at his back, their paired position creating a circle of safety, the thrust and counter-thrust of the two men left easily beaten back. He heard the rasping of her breath and the quick noise of steel against steel. And then a lightly worded curse. She was tiring. He could see it in the way she held her blade. Parrying no longer, but defending. Why?
Gritting his teeth, he finished the fight. Quickly.
When silence again filtered through the clearing, Emerald found in her the strength to look up. And wished that she had not. Asher was furious and the clamp of his hand hurt the top of her arm. She swayed and would have fallen had he not steadied her. The sting in her side left her breathless and she didn’t dare to look down to see the damage. Not yet. Not now.
He was sweating and in the last yellow light of the fading day the fury in his eyes glittered. ‘You are the damn pirate’s daughter? Beau Sandford’s daughter? It was you on the ship…?’
‘You have remembered?’
‘Damned right I have.’
‘I tried to make it up to you. Here and in London. In the bedroom. It was the only way I knew how.’
Even words were hard to say. Beneath the fabric of her jacket she felt the steady drip of blood. She looked down surreptitiously to make certain the white of her petticoat was not stained with red. If she could just be alone, she could remedy it. With the last surge of energy she pulled her arm away.
‘My God.’ Censure coated his curse. ‘You saw our bedding as some sort of a sacrifice?’
‘A payment. For my father. For me. We wronged you.’
‘Wronged me? Lord, Emerald.’ He rolled the name again around on his tongue. ‘Emerald. Is that what I should call you now?’
‘Some people call me Emmie.’
‘But never Emma?’ She shook her head as he waited.
‘So everything was a lie?’ The swollen flesh at the top of his lip creased into a humourless smile, and she refrained in the face of his anger to tell him the whole of it.
A lie?
To lie in the moonlight together and watch the way the light played off the hardened angle of his body. To feel his lips against her own, melding all that had once been into what now was.
Just a lie?
If he felt even a fiftieth of what she did for him, he could never have asked the question. Tears sprung to her eyes.
‘Everything.’
One word and it was finished. She almost welcomed it when he turned away, for she could not see the hatred in his beautiful velvet eyes.
Laying her arm hard against her side, she followed him through the forest, pausing at this tree and that one to recatch her breath. He did not wait for her, did not look around to see her progress and for that small anger she was glad. Everything ached and the dizzy rush of blood in her ears was becoming louder. Lord, if the bullet had pierced her stomach…She shook her head, refusing to think about it, and was pleased when she saw Azziz standing against the upturned bulk of the carriage, his fingers rubbing the knot of a gash on the back of his head. Taris stood beside him, looking dazed.
‘Where’s Lucy and Miriam?’ Asher’s voice was hard as he looked around the clearing, and Emerald replied as Azziz stayed silent.
‘In the woods. I told them to hide there.’ She half-turned so that the right side of her body was hidden from him.
‘Which way?’
‘Over there.’ It hurt to even lift her arm and point, the dragging red-hot pain worsened by movement. Let him go and find the others. Let him go soon before she was sick, before the whirling lightness overtook everything.
When he didn’t move, she looked up.
‘God.’ he said roughly. ‘My God,’ he repeated and stormed towards her. ‘What the hell has happened to you?’
His hand was warm against the cold of her own and she curled her fingers into his and held on. Anger she could deal with. Pity undid her. She felt the hot run of tears on her cheeks and hid her head against his jacket.
‘Lord, Emma.’ He used her old name, a small mistake as he pulled back her coat and his fingers were gentle against the wound, even as the roiling blackness claimed her and she fell into his arms.
Chapter Thirteen
Someone held her down. Hard. Hurting.
‘Keep still, Emma!’
Emma! Emma?
Not her name. Nearly her name? Asher’s face flew in and out of focus, the dark edges of a room behind, white candles burning on a desk.
Fragments. Memory. Her father mopping the blood from her brow and her mother in a corner. The same candles pushing back midnight.
‘I need some more whisky…’ The slurred voice of a drunk.
Her mother.
Evangeline.
Little angel.
Murderer.
In the blink of an eye she remembered everything that she had shut out as a six-year-old and, bringing the pillow across her ears, she began to shake. Hard liquor and the sound of screaming. The smell of whisky as a bottle broke. Shards of glass and the boozy face of Mother, close. Too close. Dangerous.
‘Mama!’ Her voice across the years. Young. Afraid. Unbelieving. She needed to get away. Out of the room. Into the dark of the trees around St Clair. Safety.
‘Emerald.’ Another voice. Softer. Huskier. Underlined with calm.
Asher was back. Against the shadows, his face impossibly handsome and the smell of drink receding against a different reality.
Falder. They were home.
‘Home?’ she whispered and watched as uncertainty kindled.
‘Azziz and Taris?’
‘Azziz is in the room next to this one, nursing three broken ribs and a sizeable lump on the back of his head. Taris escaped remarkably unhurt.’
‘How long?’ Full sentences were beyond her.
‘You’ve been here for a week. But you have had the fever. It broke this morning.’
‘Feel…strange.’
‘It’s the laudanum to take away pain from the wound in your side.’ He stood up and stretched. The dark rings under his eyes were easily seen.
‘Stay…please.’ Suddenly she was afraid. Her mother crouched in the shadows with her madness and beyond that her father beckoned, tears streaming down his cheeks.
‘James.’ Curly-headed James. She had seen his lifeless body buried in the fertile ground beneath the oak tree at St Clair before her father had calmly read the sermon and sent his wife away. Far from home. Far from them. Far from the grave of a son she had killed.
Emerald swallowed, trying to arrest the moisture that she could feel behind her eyes. Her childhood. The bones of secrets and lies. The product of falsity and hatred. Tears leaked out and fell down her cheeks, warm against a cooling skin.
She had lost them all. And now she was loosing Asher.
‘I always loved you…since the Mariposa… I thought…I think…you are the most beautiful man I have ever seen.’ She took the last of her pride and buried it. At least he would know. Her voice broke and she could not carry on.
Not just repayment, then.
When he said nothing, she turned over and shut him out. Shut them all out.
Just her.
She hated the way her chin wobbled as the strength that she always kept hold of broke into shattering sobs, but she could stop nothing.
It was over. Her life here was over and she could not even begin to imagine what she was going to do next.
The clock on the mantel marked the passing of silence as Asher watched her from above, her scar-traced hands linked across the pillow. Ruined hands like his own.
They had both been ruined by circumstance.
The thought knocked the breath from him. He had spent five days listening to her rambling memories of childhood. Memories no one should have, memories fractured by madness and drink and death and dissolved into…what?
Blowing out the candles, he sat in the dark and when her breathing shallowed out he was glad. Looking down at the nightgown her aunt had carefully dressed her in, he noticed things he had not seen before.
The frail thinness of her bones and the way her hair curled beneath the fragile lobes of her ears.
God. Emerald Sandford. He should be furious. More than furious. His mind went back five years to the sea battle off the Turks Island Passage and he remembered other things. The soft feel of her lips against the nub of his thumb, the laughing turquoise eyes, the warmth of the day and the cold of the sea. He frowned. He had drawn back from the fight the moment he knew her to be a girl, and as he had dropped his guard she had retaliated with the hard edge of her sword and flipped him over the side.
Down into the cold of an angry sea where he had caught hold of the barrel she had thrown in after him, the roar of her father’s anger loud on the air. Closing his eyes, he remembered other things. The circling sharks and a blood-red boiling sea. Thirty sailors on his ship and ten had survived.
Ten. He swore. Six by the time they had reached the coast and then only himself after a year in the pirates’ compound.
Emerald Sandford.
Lord. His eyes ran across her full bottom lip and he laced his fingers together to stop himself from touching.
He wanted to shake her and he wanted to climb in beside her and hold her against the demons of her past. But he couldn’t.
‘I love you.’ How many times had she said it? Would say it? The hollow shaft of memory held him bound by doubt.
As he let himself out of the room, he hated both her fragility and his intransigence.
She had lied, had continued to lie, her motivation based solely on the greed of treasure. Swearing, he walked down the hallway and out on to the balcony, relieved to feel the air on his face. Fresh. Clear. Cold. How long did it take for the sharp prick of vengeance to fade into a lesser ache? A quieter loss?
For ever, he decided, and felt a bone-deep shiver of guilt.
Emerald regained full consciousness just before the morning and lay very still, not wanting to waken the servant who sat dozing in a chair to one side of the bed.
Everything ached, but the mist that had consumed her was lessened.
They knew now. Knew who she was, knew who she had been. Asher. His mother. Taris. Lucinda. Her eyes fell to her hands. Gloveless. Exposed. Like she was. The scars red against the white of the sheet. She didn’t even curl them up to hide them but turned her head to the window and watched the first pink blush of dawn on the high clouds outside.
Thus far she was safe. They had not taken her to Newgate. Or sent her to the poorhouse. No, she was still at Falder. In her room.
A portrait of Asher graced the far wall, his eyes watching with velvet gravity and their unexpected dance of gold. Behind him the house was caught in the last rays of a summer sun, the ocean sparkling to his left.
Falder.
As much as she might have liked to, she didn’t belong here—she was a dangerous interloper from another world. A harsher world where the price of a life was measured in less than honour and where integrity and tradition were words other people used. I love you. She had said it again last night and wished that she hadn’t even as the door opened and he walked in.
He had been riding. His clothes were splattered with dust and when he shut the door behind the departing servant she smiled. His manners were far better than her own. Another difference.
‘I think we should talk.’
She nodded and looked directly at him. Beneath the façade of politeness she glimpsed a steely anger, held in check.
‘You are Emerald Sandford, are you not?’
She nodded.
‘Beau Sandford’s daughter?’
Again she nodded.
‘Who was it that taught you to fight?’
‘My father. Azziz. Toro. Anyone with a bit of time to waste between watches on the Mariposa.’
‘It was you on the boat, then? The girl who hit me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘If you had stayed aboard, my father would have killed you. There were fifty men from the Mariposa and less than a dozen still fighting from the Caroline.’ She stopped and looked away. ‘He always killed those who were left and I thought, since you had given me a chance, that I should return the favour.’
‘The favour?’ Anger resonated around the room. ‘The favour? Better to have lopped my head off then and there than the slow death you sentenced me to.’
‘I did not know—’
He didn’t let her finish.
‘You are a pirate, Emerald.’ The name came from his lips as if he did not even like the sound of it. ‘You have killed people for your own gain.’
The horror in his words was palpable and, turning her head, she faced him, squarely. The past was the past and she could not change it. ‘Believe what you will of me. I came here only for the map.’ Her words were flat and she hated the sound of defeat in them, but she had no more to fight with.
‘And that is all you want from me? Nothing else?’
Question quivered between them.
I want you to love me. I want you to take me in your arms and hold me safe. For ever.
She almost said it, but at the last second pinched the underside of her left arm to stop herself. When she looked down the red crescent left by her nail on the skin was easily noticeable.
‘The map,’ she repeated with more conviction this time, ‘is all that I want from you.’
He nodded and stood, hands in the pocket of his coat and feet apart, as a sailor might have stood on the deck in a storm. Distant. Lonely. Distracted. ‘I have instructed everyone here to keep the secret of your identity. For the moment you are safe. But when you feel better, I would rather that you did not venture outside this room without somebody at your side.’
‘Because you feel I might be a risk to your family?’ A hollow ache pierced her as he looked up and the blank indifference in his eyes broke her heart.
‘I will provide passage to Jamaica for you when you want it. On my ship out of Thornfield.’
She could only nod this time, the thick sadness in her throat rendering speech difficult.
‘And if you should need money—’
She stopped him. ‘No. Just the map.’
As he turned for the door, the dizzy whorl of relief hit her. Another moment and she would have caught at his hand and begged him for even the scraps of love.
Like. Friendship. Esteem.
Even they might have been enough.
Outside Asher laid his head back against the oak door and took in his breath. Lord, Beau Sandford’s daughter. What the hell was he to do with her? She had countered the McIlverray threat with a bravery that had stunned him and had slept with him as a repayment for the hurt done to his family. His teeth ground together as he thought of the hurt he had done to her family.
An equal revenge?
For the first time in days, anger loosened its hold. Perhaps all was not lost. Perhaps in the last threshold of truth something could be salvaged. He imagined Emma…no, Emerald, in satin and silk dancing, candlelight in her hair and the hint of laughter on her lips.
Laughter.
When had she had that in her life? When had she had frivolity or joy or easiness? Not with her mother or Beau. Not since coming to England either, that much was sure.
His eyes flickered to his right hand and he flexed it. Today he felt no movement or sensation in his ghost fingers, another passing reminder of change. Five years since the Mariposa had overcome his ship. He did a quick calculation. She must have been, what…all of sixteen, perhaps? Younger than Lucinda and expected to fight a man? More than one man? The scars on her hand and face and thigh told him that.
By God, if Sandford was here right now he would kill him again just for the hurt he had done his daughter—she had never stood a chance against the greedy underbelly of that world.
And yet somewhere in the darkness of her upbringing she had discovered and fostered integrity and responsibility. Servants and an aunt she would not abandon and a handful of others to whom she felt allegiance. And when she had seen him at risk she had jumped in to the rescue without a thought for her own well-being.
If it was only the map she truly wanted, why would she do that? Better to let McIlverray do his worst and head by herself for Falder and the map.
I love you.
Perhaps she had truly meant it. Not just atonement, but something deeper. More lasting. True. He flattened his fingers out against the wall at his back and tried to take stock of the whole situation, tried to stop the heavy throb in his loins from clouding reason.
Emerald sat up in bed and ate the lunch that had been provided for her. She had not seen Asher since yesterday and Miriam had heard that he was in London on business. She hoped he was safe.