Fallen Angel

His smile was unexpected as he took the gun and she felt her heart lurch with choking excitement. Instinctively she drew back from him. She must never let anyone close. She knew that. She had always known it.

‘I’ll keep them at bay until you are safe,’ he returned, jamming in the next flintlock and resighting the gun. She noticed the crested gold ring on his little finger and the threads of the same colour in his hair and then she ran, lifting the skirts of her hunting habit and fleeing across the forest into the safety of the fields, glad of the dogs at her side. The sound of gunshots echoed through the glade behind her: three, four, five and then silence. Biting at her lip, she imagined him falling, gold-green eyes sightless and still, and she was winded by the feeling of loss and worry.

‘Please, God, let him live, let him be safe.’ The words became a litany tumbling in her breath as she hurried down the paths to Airelies Manor and threw open the door, her heart pounding loudly in her ears as she leaned back against it. Mrs Fenton came from the kitchens to investigate the noise and, amazed at Brenna’s appearance, was at her side in a moment.

‘What on earth is wrong, love?’ she burst out, wiping flour-powdered hands on her large apron.

‘There’s some highwaymen in the woods. Lock the doors and windows and get the guns from the study. If the gentleman they’re trying to rob gets shot, they’ll be up at Airelies next. I think they saw me!’

Rose Fenton jammed the brass bolts home, locking the floor catches for further protection. ‘My God, Brenna. We’re alone here save for Albert and young Stephen. We can’t possibly shoot anyone.’

‘I just have,’ the younger woman answered, horrified anew as the housekeeper began to cross herself, uttering holy incantations to a forgiving God.

‘You killed someone?’

‘Shot his knee off, I think. At least it should slow him down a bit.’ She stopped herself from mentioning the other man. The gentleman would be safe, she told herself. He seemed strong and fit and the gun in his hand had been reloaded with expertise. She tried to recall the crest she had seen on his ring, a lion rampant across two drawn daggers. Strength and danger. She smiled at the way the image suited him so exactly, the colour returning to her cheeks as she ran to each front window, pushing the locks into place. The feel of her uncle’s gun in her hand heartened her further, as did the silence in the valley. Should she go back to help him? She dismissed the thought summarily. Her reappearance would more likely compromise his safety than help him. But still she could not relax as she strode up and down the front hall, eyes glued to the scene outside for any sense of movement.

No more shots had rent the quietness of evening, although they had heard the shouts of men from the village a short time ago. Mrs Fenton’s white face brought her back to the moment and she struggled to hide her own worry from the elderly housekeeper.

‘Whoever is dead or alive seems unlikely to bother us now,’ she said quietly and consulted the clock at the end of the hallway. ‘But, to be sure, we will pack in the morning and return to London. And I will ask Albert to send Stephen down to Worsley for any word of the incident.’

Just as she had finished speaking, however, a conveyance turned into the drive, stopping at the front of the house. The door was thrown open and Brenna’s heart leapt in shock as she fleetingly saw the man who’d been bound to the tree step out, her gun held firmly in his hand. Without further thought she turned to the housekeeper.

‘Tell him I have gone. Tell him, thank you for my gun and tell him…’ she called over her shoulder as she ran up the stairs ‘…tell him I don’t wish to see him again.’ She disappeared into a top bedroom just as the door knocker sounded.

Smoothing out her apron, Rose Fenton took a deep breath before opening the door with a less than enthusiastic smile, to be confronted by the most handsome gentleman she had ever had the pleasure of meeting, even despite his numerous bruises. He had hair the colour of burnt copper and gold-green eyes. The dark burnous cloak he wore was torn across the shoulder, the gold appliqué fraying badly.

‘May I help you, sir?’ she enquired breathlessly, her eyes on Brenna’s gun, which he suddenly handed to her, bowing in apology, a smile on his lips.

‘I have it from the inn at Worsley that a Miss Brenna Stanhope is in residence here and I think this may be hers. I can’t be certain.’

The housekeeper cut his words short. ‘Yes, sir. Miss Brenna told me what happened and she bade me to thank you.’

‘She’s here, then?’ His glance perused the empty spaces inside. ‘Might I speak with her for a moment?’

Rose Fenton blocked off his view by moving in front of him. ‘No, sir, she’s…she has just gone…’ The lie came picked from thin air and with little plausibility.

‘Back to London?’ he queried uncertainly.

‘No, not for now. She’s gone south.’

The man leant against the wall outside, a slight frown sifting across his features. ‘She doesn’t want to see me, let me give her my thanks?’

‘No, sir’.

‘Could I leave her a letter?’

‘No, sir. She just wants to forget the whole incident. It’s finished with and she’d rather just have it at that.’

‘I see,’ said the other, straightening and moving back from the overhanging portico. ‘Could you make sure she knows I have come and please do convey my warmest thanks.’

‘I will, sir,’ Mrs Fenton answered, frowning as the man looked up to a window on the first floor. The movement of a figure flitting back quickly from view behind heavy velvet curtains was easily caught.

‘You have other guests here?’ he enquired carefully, watching as she answered.

‘No, sir.’

Rose Fenton breathed a sigh of relief as she closed the door.

Upstairs, Brenna witnessed his departure, a sense of disquiet permeating her whole being.

He had seen her.

He had even found out her name and where she lived. Could the information harm her? Could the interest she had heard in his voice translate into a menace? Or a damning curiosity?

With a deepening frown, she observed the carriage winding its way from Airelies and out into the darkness of the main road north.

Chapter Two

Nicholas Pencarrow, Duke of Westbourne, Knight of the Realm and owner of half a dozen of England’s finest estates, leaned back in his leather chair, feet up on his desk, reading with bemused interest a letter from his lawyer.

‘After much searching we can find out very little about Brenna Stanhope. There is certainly no mention of the girl until she was sixteen, making a name for herself on the piano in select gatherings organised by a Sir Michael De Lancey, her uncle. Miss Stanhope appeared briefly in society five years ago as a débutante in one season only in London. Further enquiries have turned up the name of the Beaumont Street Orphanage. It seems Sir Michael and his niece run the establishment together, Miss Stanhope teaching at the school…’

Nicholas frowned. An orphanage? The idea intrigued him as did everything else he had discovered about the elusive Miss Stanhope. Flicking through the remainder of the letter, Nicholas determined it to contain brief mention of Michael De Lancey’s reduced family circumstances and little else. ‘Damn it,’ he cursed under his breath. Why was she so secretive? His mind ran back to the woman he had seen in the woods, hair the colour of ebony, eyes of violet and a body rounded and feminine. ‘Brenna Stanhope…’ he whispered her name softly into the empty corners of the room, remembering the timbre of her voice, the dimples in her cheeks and the feeling of her warm breath against his bare chest.

And when he had touched her…

A noise from outside pulled him from his thoughts and he rose even as the door opened to admit Lady Letitia Carruthers, all blond ringlets and flashing blue eyes, her fashionable pink redingote day dress shaped to a waist so thin his hands could easily span it. ‘Nicholas darling,’ she said breathlessly, throwing herself headlong into his arms before perching on a nearby couch and artfully arranging her skirts around her. ‘I am exhausted, and this ball you are going to throw will be the culmination of hours of hard work. Even Christopher in his heyday did not contemplate such opulence.’

Smiling at the reference to her long-dead husband, Nicholas poured two generous brandies, one of which he placed in her outstretched hand. ‘Your taste is always exquisite, Letty, and I appreciate the time and effort you have invested in the occasion.’ Crossing to his desk, he extracted a black velvet jewellery box, and laid it before her. ‘This is for you by way of gratitude.’

Letty squealed, throwing open the lid with a hurried delight. ‘Rubies, Nicholas,’ she whispered, ‘and such beautiful ones.’ With infinite care she drew the chain of gold and red from its soft bed and, unbuttoning her bodice, presented her back to him. ‘Will you fasten them?’

Nodding, he moved behind her, assailed instantly by the expensive perfume that enveloped her in a cloud wherever she went, his hands competent at her back while she waited for him to finish.

‘Nicholas, you do know I love you, don’t you?’

He turned, caught by the seriousness in her voice, swallowing at her admission and feeling guilty, as he did each time she had said it, for he knew, in truth, that he could not say back what it was she longed to hear from him. A tight smile played around his mouth as he perceived her disappointment. Why did women always want what he could never give them? Why could he not relish the commitment to relationships other men made without recourse to a safer distance? He knew the answer even as he voiced the question.

Johanna. His mother.

His father had married for love and look where that had got him. Widowed at twenty-six with two young boys and a heart as broken as he was, Gerald had finally drunk himself into the oblivion he functioned best in.

At eight Nicholas had tried his hardest to comfort both his father and five-year-old brother Charles, but without Johanna the family centre was gone, dissolved into a strange mix of long silences and unfathomable anger, the remnants of a family who had loved too much and lost everything because of it. And when, thirteen years later, Gerald’s liver had finally succumbed to the abuse of a decade and he had died, predicting that his sons would follow the same path as he had, Nicholas had vowed that this prophesy would never come to pass and had spent his life either in the arms of experienced widows or hardened show girls, neither pushing for the state of matrimony that he was determined to escape.

Bending down, Nicholas collected some papers lying in a bundle at the top of his desk. Aye, to him survival marched hand in hand with distance, mere affection containing no real power to hurt. And if sometimes he recognised the flaws in his reasonings, he was also quick to remember the lonely years of his childhood. Never again would he let himself be so vulnerable.

Breaking the awkward silence of the moment with the merely mundane, he turned back to her and said, ‘I’ll see you out then.’ His words came harshly across Letitia’s admission and he was pleased when she followed his directive without argument and walked before him, the clutter of servants in the corridor precluding any other more personal talk.