Page 43 of The Lost Lord
Richard stalked over to Lizzie with enough menace to make her take a step backward. He was a hair’s breadth from tossing her into the sea. “Leave Miriam alone. I expect you to apologize to Miriam and spend the rest of the voyage atoning for your rashness.”
“Me? Rash?” Lizzie’s arched eyebrow. Richard held his ground.
How could a woman who weighed eight stone soaking wet intimidate him? A nobleman, if not an earl. A man, not that he felt like one.
Humiliation, his familiar shadow, sat on his shoulders like the very devil. It was followed by a wash of anger Richard could hardly control. His words came out clipped and terse. “Yes, Lizzie, you.Rash.I see you for what you are. You treat people lower than the barnacles clinging to the hull of this ship.”
“My husband adores me,” Lizzie mocked.
Richard guffawed humorlessly. “Then why aren’t you with him? Your husband is the only man who wants you.”
He needed this to be a final break, whatever it cost him, however low he needed to sink. A man who’d killed his own father had no honor to preserve. Lizzie slapped him twice. The first time, he deflected the blow, but the second time he hadn’t seen coming, and she had hit him hard enough to hurt her own hand.
“I own you,” she hissed as she shook her fingers. “You are mine, Richard Northcote. I make the rules. Not you.”
Unable to think of a single other thing to say, Richard had stomped away. He hadn’t had a single apart from the morning of their wedding. The champagne had scarcely touched his lips. Perhaps, if he had not been trying to drown his shame at losing Briarcliff and his father, he might have extricated himself from Lizzie before he’d become enmeshed in this awful situation. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been aware of her worst traits. He simply hadn’t cared.
He definitely cared now. The look on Miriam’s face was going to haunt him for the rest of his existence. Richard kicked at a barrel lashed to the deck. He had not felt this friendless since he’d washed up on the streets of Boston. This was worse, by far, and there was no Howard to pick up his half-dead carcass this time.
He made his way toward the bow. Richard stared at the moon bright and high in the night sky. Soon it would be dawn. The night watch might not notice if he chucked himself overboard. Even if they did, the ship would plow him under in its wake, drowning him before his body bobbed up at the stern. Or sank, to be eaten by monsters of depths unknown. He might bob in ocean water, but he had never learned to swim like his brother Edward had.
No one would stop him. Only his honor as a man, what remained of it. No one would argue that what scraps of gentlemanliness Richard still clutched were threadbare indeed.
Yet there was the future child’s safety to consider. Lizzie was, if not half-mad, far from stable. Richard finally understood why New York’s high society rarely called her to account for her misbehavior. Lizzie used her peculiar gift for cunning and angelic appearance to search out the most vulnerable chinks in people’s armor.
The metal teeth of the key to Miriam’s bedroom at Cliffside bit into his palm. Richard had moved the key to his pocket, replacing it with a new one to her cabin door. He had a strong sense that a midnight visit would no longer be welcome.
She had wanted an adventure. Hell, if he hadn’t delivered one. Just not the one Miriam had sought.
Bells clanged as the watch changed. The sun sank below the horizon in a blaze of sunset pink and orange. Wind ruffled his hair. Richard traced the key’s rough shape idly with his thumb. Temptation to end this farce of a life called him as tempting as a siren’s superficially dulcet voice. There was no pity in moon’s cold visage.
He was going to make it up Miriam Walsh if it cost him every last ounce of his pride.
She’d taken an enormous risk on him, and he had betrayed her in the deepest possible way. It didn’t matter if it took him the rest of his life, Richard was going to wash away the expression of hurt and betrayal that he and he alone had brought to her wide gray eyes.
Then, he’d have earned the right to die.
* * *
Fifteen long dayspassed before they sighted land. The Miriam ticked them off in her palm-sized diary, placing a thick black X over the number printed in the corners of each page. Each deep bold line marked a longer distance from her home and took her deeper into the unknown.
“Why don’t we land?” she asked the captain at dinner that evening. Richard took his meal in his room under the ostensible excuse of a weak stomach, as he’d done every night since Lizzie’s appearance. Lizzie had not been invited to dine with the captain even once. Mrs. Kent surmised she had chosen a lower class of passage. Odd. Lizzie could certainly afford better.
“We’ve cargo to go straight to London. I could put in at Portsmouth, but you’d spend extra coin to travel over land.”
With impatience, Miriam watched the land glide past, counting the hours until she could get off this ship and onto another to make the same journey in reverse.
Miriam had wanted adventure, but not the one she was living.
She’d believed that getting out from under her father’s thumb and experiencing the world would be fun, exhilarating, and exciting. Reality had proven to be quite different. Ever since leaving New York her adventure had been by turns monotonous, frightening, and humiliating. Her heart ached with missing her father. She cursed her naïveté.
“We’re making good time,” the Captain observed. “In all my years of sailing I’ve never seen such a streak of fine weather. We must have set a record with this crossing. Four weeks and six days.”
Miriam bit into her dry chicken and raised her eyebrows in a gesture that could be interest, or approval, or what it actually was—impatience.
Richard had been nowhere to be seen since the argument that had cracked Miriam’s heart in two. If he emerged from his cramped cabin at all, Richard timed his forays with precision to avoid her. The sting of disappointment at his absence each day confused her. She shouldn’t want to see him. Shedidn’twant to see him. And yet each day she scanned the deck half in fear of running into him and half yearning for a glimpse of the broad span of his shoulders. Then, self-loathing would curdle in her stomach.
Why did her chest ache hollowly whenever she thought of Richard’s touch?
