Page 76 of The Mad Baron's Bride
Leda whirled and gaped at the man who dismounted the horse. She didn’t recognize the animal; he must have hired it somewhere. He pulled down the waistcoat riding up over his large belly, then looked around for a place to tie the horse. Seeing none, he simply dropped the reins and turned toward her.
The word escaped her in a gasp of shock. “Eustace.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He had changed. He’d been nearly thirty when she married his uncle, yet a selfish boy weary of living on his uncle’s sufferance, wheedling for a raise in his allowance, for a piece of the property to sustain him. Leda had heard the rows rising from her husband’s library when Eustace’s debts and scandals grew costly.
There were whispers about him, too, worse than Bertram, who was ever dabbing his wick in places it wasn’t wanted. There’d been a woman in Eustace’s village, a woman known for bartering her body to keep her children fed, found strangled early one morning behind the pub. There’d been a girl, a younger sister of a woman Eustace was courting for marriage, who’d been bundled away swiftly to a faraway school.
There was a little scullery maid, freshly hired, who had come to Leda with a bruised wrist the morning after Eustace ended a visit and said, not meeting Leda’s eyes, her mum was ill and she was needed at home, directly, to see to the babies. Leda, still naïve then, had let her go, but had felt the urge after to look up the girl and help her household, except no one could say exactly where she lived, where she had come from, or where she had gone.
Eustace, a colder, older Leda now knew, was a worse monster than Bertram had been: the cast and mold of his uncle, but without the thin veneer of respectability, that slim leash of caring what his neighbors thought, of pretending he could demand their respect. Eustace did not care for anything but his own desires.
He breathed heavily as he regarded her. He had gained two stone in weight in the years since she’d seen him, had gone from stocky to portly. His cheeks flushed as his eyes moved over her, lingering on her bosom. He licked his lips.
“Hello, Auntie. You’ve been a difficult woman to find.”
The opening of the nearest tunnel was some distance from her, an open maw gaping in the shaved white sides of the cliff. Grasses and weeds grew up the sides of the bank, just as shrubs and small trees had begun filling the basin, nature creeping over the scars left by man. There was one lane into the pit, and Eustace stood in the center of it, trapping her as if she were a vixen at bay.
Leda hugged her arms across her chest. “You were never supposed to find me. They were to say that I died.”
He held a riding crop and tapped it lightly against one bulging thigh. His boots were crusted with sand, the tails of his coat damp with mud. Ithadbeen him on the beach that morning. She hadn’t been seeing apparitions, not Nanette, and not him. She was sane as the morning.
“And yet here you are. In the living flesh,” he said. She shivered at the way he examined her, his eyes dark and beady, cold yet covetous. Tap, tap went the whip.
“You little fool,” he added. “Living buried in Bath all this time? I was going to rescue you from the madhouse, you know. Only needed a bit of time past to make it seem respectable. My mourning over. You recovering your wits. I would have made you a very pleasant offer.”
He lumbered closer, and Leda sidled away. He smelled like must and old sweat and spoiled mutton.
She must not anger him. He was big, and he was angry, a giant badger to her field mouse. “How very generous of you. I hope you are well-settled now. Married? Any children?” The thought of any woman having to submit to Eustace revolted her, but she had felt the same of Bertram and survived.
He huffed, the sound not of amusement. “Imagine my surprise, after all this time, when I went to a wedding in Cheltenham and heard all about the friend who had advised the bride to take her groom. A handsome woman named Leda, with a crown of dark hair and violet eyes. An interesting description, I thought. How many women have I known with violet eyes? And I wondered, has my dear aunt arisen from her pauper’s grave?”
Leda gulped down the lump in her throat. “You came to Bath looking for me.”
He loomed. “Where is the boy, Leda?”
Her throat closed. There would be no swallowing anything. “Ives—the boy died. I killed him, remember?”
“Then why would your cook and that feral bitch of a housemaid run away? She wouldn’t let me touch her, though my uncle enjoyed her now and again.”
Bertram had “enjoyed” many women. Leda doubted they had enjoyed him.
“They ran because I was mad, and a killer.” If she reminded him of her crimes, he would back away. He would leave.
He would not demand anything. And he would not send her back to the asylum. The mouth of the tunnel was nearly at her back. She would never enter a place like that madhouse again. She would bury herself in this hill first.
Eustace snorted. The sound might have been a laugh; his second chin shook. There was no way to dart around him, and ifshe tried, she would not get to the horse in time. He had a longer reach, with his whip. She could only retreat.
“You’d best come with me,” he said softly.
Cold brushed the back of her neck, the continuous wind, bearing the chalky damp of the hill. “I don’t see why.”
“They won’t take you back. Not that old beldame in Bath. Not after I told her about you.”
“What did you say?”
“No more than the truth.” He sneered. “But why go back to her when you’ve made yourself a nice nest here. A baron to keep you, mad as he might be. I suppose you think it a good trade.”
