Page 40 of The Mad Baron's Bride
“The madhouse was little better than a prison. Eustace was not going to pay to keep me at one of those places that are like a country home. I was a criminal, to all eyes. He said I must have murdered my babe as well, since I could produce no child.”
“Where did they put you?”
“An asylum in Gloucester. Fortunately, I was not one of those locked in a cage for people to come look at, like in Bedlam. I was not an entertaining madwoman, and my crime was too horrid to be believed. I was kept hidden.”
The sides of her mouth pursed, as if she tasted raw gooseberries. He knew that sensation.
“How did you escape?”
“An accomplice, a gardener I befriended. He smuggled me a tool to loosen the bars on my window. It took a long time. ThenI threw myself out the window into a hay wagon, and he drove me away. I bribed the warden to say I had died of typhus and my body burned to stop the spread of the disease. I traded my shoes for a boat to Bristol and from there walked barefoot to Bath and found an angel in the form of a school mistress named Miss Gregoire, and she gave me my life back.”
“As Mrs. Wroth.” Jack stared out the window. The urge to touch her was strong. He wanted to slide his palm around the nape of her proud neck, sink his fingers into her hair, rub his thumb over her satin cheek. Tell her how astonishing it was that she had survived.
Soothe a possible murderess for what she suffered because of her crime?
“Why that name?”
Her lips turned up, at least on one side, and Jack saw the smile, detached, amused, that had so captivated him in the Upper Assembly Rooms the first time he saw her.
“You have not heard of Lady Mary Wroth? That is indeed a shame. She was a true courtier of the Renaissance, poet, patroness, a marvelous dancer. I read a fabulous poem she composed, though I could only ever get my hands on part of it.”
“Why her, though?”
“She endured tragedy and survived. Her firstborn son died young. She struggled most of her life with the debts her husband left. She had a passionate affair with her cousin, in fact bore him two children, though he was never faithful. She was forced to retire from court because the wife of James I, Queen Anne, was jealous of Lady Mary’s sophistication and beauty. She has always impressed me as a woman who lived life on her own terms. Who left her mark.”
“And escaped the shadow of her husband.” Few women did.
Anne-Marie hadn’t. Jack tried to picture Anne-Marie climbing out of a window or walking barefoot for miles to find alife of freedom. She’d walked, but only as far as some neighbor’s house, possibly right up his bedroom, and then she’d thrown herself off a cliff when the man was done wanting her. It was the only way she could escape Jack.
But Anne-Marie had not been in full possession of her faculties, Jack was sure of that. Leda was.
And if she were indeedcompos mentis,as her sister had claimed, she could be hauled before a judge and held accountable for her crimes.
No wonder she was running away to Norfolk.
She looked him squarely in the eye. Once again it was as if she read his thoughts, or read him accurately enough to guess what his thoughts were.
“This is the woman you are bringing to Norfolk, to your home,” she said. “If you wish to abandon me in Swindon, I will understand.”
The coach jolted in and out of another set of ruts. Jack’s dinner swirled in his belly, threatening to make its reappearance.
He was bringing this woman, a woman who claimed to have blacked out in a feverish moment and come to her senses with a knife in her hand and her husband’s stabbed body in the house, to his home, to his daughter.
He studied her face, the arch of her cheekbones, the curve of her brow. Her eyes were violet shadows in the growing darkness.
The thought of leaving her, going on without her, hurt much worse.
When Anne-Marie betrayed him, then betrayed her children, Jack had vowed he would never again let another person throw him into such turmoil. He’d gathered up his acrimony and recriminations and agony and regret and stuffed his feelings into a great traveling trunk in his mind, where they were allowed to reek endlessly, a slow, quiet poison that infected his life.He’d accepted that he was a man who would not be bound to a woman, who would not have the kind of warm, interested affection his parents had shared, nor the wild doting that his sister felt for her architect. He’d accepted that he would remain untouched, likely for his whole life, and become the bitter, misanthropic recluse that, by all accounts, the previous Baron Brancaster had been.
Yet here was this woman calling herself Leda Wroth who had stepped into his life and in the span of mere days—hours, really—made him feel that perhaps there were things he could not live without. That there was a difference between existing, which he had been doing, and relishing life in its full, rich plentitude, with a pleasant companion at his side.
With the hope of other pleasures he had only dreamed about.
He’d watched her with Ives while the boy showed Leda each one of his snake stones, heard how she subtly drew out the boy’s interests and a picture of his life. He’d heard her patiently answer the boy’s questions about Bath, about the life Ives had been raised to expect when he took over the great house that ought to belong to him. Jack saw that she wanted to prepare him for a great future yet also wanted to keep Ives safe and shielded in his rural refuge. She was crafting a life for him built on a lie, but he could also see she didn’t intend to force the boy to her will.
It was a strange plot, for certain, but no more sordid than others he’d heard about. Or had experienced in his own life.
He was absolutely certain she would not hurt Muriel. Nay, the more he was with her, the more Jack longed for Leda and his daughter to meet. For Muriel to see that a woman could be intelligent, educated, graceful, self-possessed. Clever as well as beautiful. From Leda, Muriel could learn that a gentlewoman of maturity was wise as well as kind, capable of humor and discernment. Leda could show Muriel that a woman could bemotherly, calm, steady, loyal, interested in those around her. A pillar of good sense, a pillar of light. Leda was all of these things.
