Page 71 of The Mad Baron's Bride
He rolled onto his back, rubbing a hand over her shoulder, and she let him revel in his triumph while she discreetly dabbed between her legs with her shift. She would wash the stain out herself, later, so the maids didn’t know what she’d done.
What had she done? Jack drew her into the crook of his arm, holding her there, and she understood he wanted her to stay with him as he drifted off to sleep. How strange, to share a bed with someone again. She hadn’t been this close to another person since her sister left home to be married.
A bundle of feelings she couldn’t name curled and tightened inside, like a wrack of seaweed tumbled up on shore. Jack breathed in peaceful slumber, and she breathed with him, battling the despair that crept around the edges of her bone-deep bliss, sending out shoots of doubt.
How could she leave him, after this?
Yet how could she stay, if she were destined to hurt him?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Leda’s boots sank into the soggy brown sand of the beach. Each step tugged at her sole, leaving the shape of her foot imprinted on the shore, dotted with small impressions from the hobnails. Jack’s father had been a shoemaker; he could tell her if she were ruining her favorite boots—her only boots. But she couldn’t decline a walk along the beach, especially since the girls had invited her.
They fanned out ahead of her, Ellinore bending to peer along the rocky shingle, Muriel following the waves as they sucked themselves back into the sea with the receding tide, leaving small streams and rivers among the humped rocks crowned with seaweed. To her left the cliffs reared far above her head, a layered caked with green at the rim, the rugged stripe of white chalk, the brick red carrstone buttressed below.
So high those cliffs. So far a tumble, especially for a small woman. Leda wondered that Muriel could come here. That she did not see her mother’s ghost wandering the rocks crumbling the base of the cliffs, or sitting atop a shorn boulder, weeping.
“Have you seen the ghost in the nursery?” Leda asked this in the most conversational tone she could affect as she neared Ellinore.
The girl straightened quickly, clenching her fist around what she’d found, and stabbed a look in Muriel’s direction. Leda turned just in time to catch the frantic shake of Muriel’s head.
Ellinore looked out to sea, the ribbon ends of her bonnet flapping beneath her chin. The air carried the morning chill, and the wind snuck around Leda’s ankles beneath her petticoat, smacked her skirts against her knees.
“I donow what you mean, mum.”
“You are the one who told me there are ghosts here.”
The girl’s neck went stiff, chin up, shoulders braced, and Leda remembered she was grieving. She’d lost her mother years ago when she left to marry—she’d known Anne-Marie was her mother, thanks to the way gossip worked in small towns, no matter what her grandparents had tried to keep from her.
And now she knew that her father was dead as well. There was no one to come for her. No parent waiting in the wings to reveal they were a king or lost princess, who would come to sweep Ellinore away from the drab of her life. She had this now: Jack, Holme Hall, Muriel for a companion, and a future she could not see on the horizon.
“I was only meaning to scare you, mum.”
“I saw her. Last night. She was dancing,” Leda said.
Ellinore turned, her back a sharp blade. “A girl, you say.”
She hadn’t said that. Leda turned to Muriel, struck by a new thought that hadn’t made it through her nightmare of the previous evening, and the way Jack had completely claimed her attention after.
Grace had already been in the nursery when Leda woke in Jack’s bed—she’d woken to the sound of the girls’ voices—and the water in his wash basin, the fresh towel on the rack, said that May had been in the master’s room, too. There was no way Leda could hide what she had done. She could only sneak through the mistress’s dressing room to her own chamber, where the bedhad been neatly made and water waited in the basin, still holding a trace of warmth.
The servants knew, then. Did the girls?
“Have you seen a girl up there?” Leda asked Muriel. Perhaps she wasn’t an apparition. Perhaps the girls had snuck someone up to the nursery the same way Leda had slunk into Jack’s room. Who was she—a local girl? A servant’s child? Did Jack know?
“Do you see apparitions often, Miss Leda?”
Muriel’s insolent jab was deliberate, another post hole for the fence the girl would not let her cross.
“I do not fear ghosts, Miss Burnham. Only the living. Does your father know you’ve had someone up there?”
Muriel faced away from her, too. Everyone was turning away from her.
“He knows.”
Twin fangs of anger and hurt sank into Leda. Perhaps jealousy, too. They were all conspiring to keep something from her—she, the woman who invited confidences, the woman others begged to solve their most delicate problems, the woman who had a reputation through Bath and beyond for fixing things. Not breaking things, as Jack had first accused her. Mending. Putting people on their proper path. She had always been the one people turned to, and now these girls were shutting her out.
The birds skittered before Leda as she walked, their feet small sticks in the sand. Others wheeled overhead, calling to their own, their wings dark lace against the gray sky. A golden gleam caught her eye and she bent to see what had bubbled up beside a small rock. A leather pocket, small enough to fit in her hands, with strings curling fancifully from its corners.
