Chapter 57
Chapter Fifty-Seven
‘Please, Freddy. I must rest.’ Isabel clutched at the man’s arm as she tripped over another puddled rut, sending her to her knees.
He had marched her through the unrelenting rain, dragging her unmercifully across the mire and the mud until she was soaked through to the skin.
Her stout boots were sodden and heavy, and her feet felt like blocks of ice.
They had encountered no one and had seen only distant dwellings.
In this wild, desolate place, Isabel felt her hope fading.
Freddy turned and looked down at her. Water dripped from a lock of his rain-darkened hair on to his nose. He looked as exhausted as she felt. He jerked on the cord, dragging her back to her feet.
‘I can see the village,’ he said.
Isabel raised her head, her teeth chattering with the cold, her thoughts immediately turning to warm food, a fire and dry clothes.
‘Is there an inn?’
Freddy looked down at her. ‘An inn? By now, Isabel, I’ll have half the county on my heels. No, first we have to find the fisherman the boy told me of.’
‘For pity’s sake, Freddy!’
‘I’ll find somewhere dry first,’ he conceded.
Towing his reluctant charge, Freddy skirted the village. It was a poor place without a church or an inn that Isabel could see, the rough dwellings gathered around a tidal creek that ran out into the Wash. Behind the village, a few meagre agricultural lots provided the sustenance for the villagers.
About half a dozen fishing boats were anchored in the estuary, the angle of list indicating that they rested on the mud flats. They would wait until the tide rose and carried them out to sea.
That thought sparked hope in her heart again. They would not be sailing until the tide had turned. That gave her rescuers a little more time to find them.
Freddy led her down to the dunes and she saw what had attracted his attention: a hut, no more than a few bent boughs covered with whatever debris could be found.
It looked like the sort of thing children would build.
He pushed aside the leather skin that served as a door.
A rough hearth in the middle of the floor set with an old cooking pot and a kettle, a low stool, a few cracked plates,you and a bed of sorts laid over rough planking gave the simple dwelling a rustic humanity.
Freddy thrust her down on the bed and pulled a stinking—and no doubt vermin-infested—blanket around her shoulders. Despite its odour of rotting fish and sweat, Isabel huddled into its warmth
‘Can we light a fire?’ she suggested, through chattering teeth.
‘Don’t be a fool! I don’t want to attract attention.’
‘But somebody lives here,’ she protested
Freddy kicked at the roughly made hearth. ‘There’s been no one here for days.’ He looked around the hovel. ‘Lie down on the bed.’
Isabel stared up at him, her heart hammering in her chest. He surely didn’t intend—?
Freddy’s lip curled. ‘Don’t look at me like that. Believe me, I’ve no interest in what’s beneath your skirts. I’m just going to secure you while I find the man I’m looking for. I would hate for you to go running off.’
Rope of varying kinds seemed to be in plentiful supply, and he bound her ankles. To make doubly sure, he ran a rope from her wrists to her ankles and gagged her with a strip of cloth torn from her petticoat. When he was done, he covered her with the verminous blanket.
Trussed like a Christmas goose, Isabel could do no more than watch helplessly as the leather flap fell across the door.
She forced herself to close her eyes and try to sleep, but the cramps in her bound wrists kept her wakeful.
She wondered about the time. The dank weather made it almost impossible to judge.
It could still be an hour or so until full tide—still time for a search party to catch up with them.
Whoever came, it would not be Sebastian. For the first time she allowed herself to think of him, his terrible death: burned alive in the stables. Her eyes filled with tears, and she sniffed, wishing she could blow her nose.
Eventually, she must have dozed, only waking when someone shook her shoulder. She woke with a start, hope fading when she looked up into Freddy’s cold blue eyes. He sat down beside her and began to undo the ropes that bound her.
‘We’ve about an hour,’ he said as he worked. ‘I’ve paid the man well. He’ll have his boat standing off the beach at six.’
As he untied her wrists, she flexed her fingers, tentatively rotating her sore wrist. It did not appear to be swollen or badly injured, but it still hurt.
He thrust a hunk of bread at her, and she tore into it hungrily. As she ate, his fingers stroked the back of her neck. Her skin crawled but she couldn’t risk aggravating him.
‘It will be all right, Isabel. I’ll take care of you, just like I always took care of Fanny. Everything I did was for her.’ His tone had become light and musing.
She turned her face to look at him. ‘What was it you did for Fanny?’
His fingers dropped from her neck. ‘Everything. They wanted to send us to the workhouse but I took Fanny and ran away to London to make my fortune. We were rescued by a man.’ He gave a twisted, humourless smile. ‘He ran a house for other gentlemen. I don’t suppose you know of such places.’
‘A molly house?’
Freddy turned to look at her and she could see shock in his eyes. At first, Isabel thought his surprise might be caused by the fact she knew about molly houses, but his lip curled back in a sneer.
‘What do you take me for? This house catered for the needs of gentlemen, not the common rabble.’
‘And you... you provided services to these gentlemen?’
He looked away. ‘I was only sixteen and I had Fanny to think of. They put her to work in the kitchen. She was only a little thing and I don’t think she ever had any idea what went on upstairs.’
For the first time, Isabel felt a flicker of sympathy for Freddy. A desperate boy with a pretty face must have been easy prey for a procurer.
‘The money was good, and it had some perks. I learned to cheat at cards, and I learned how to be a gentleman. All useful skills.’
‘That’s where you met Anthony?’ The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place.
In a small, tight voice, she asked, ‘Was he ...? Was he your lover?’
Freddy looked down at his hands as if inspecting his fingernails. ‘He frequented my house, but he had his favourite and it wasn’t me. Then he stopped coming, and I didn’t think anything more about him ’til I went to a soiree with one of my clients and saw him with you.’
Isabel drew away from him. ‘Me?’
‘You wouldn’t remember. Those were the days when you were trying to be a good wife, laughing, and being the lady. Were you in love with Anthony?’
Isabel turned her mind back to those early years of their marriage.
She had tried to be the wife she thought Lord Somerton wanted.
The gall rose in her throat. She had no inkling of this secret life; his predilection for men.
He had never been an enthusiastic lover but how would she have known any better?
‘Did you not wonder what he did on those trips to London after you retired to the country?’
There had been the stories that had filtered back to her of his womanising. Had that, too, been a charade played out for public benefit?
Freddy stretched out his legs.
‘He drifted back to us,’ he said with a smile.
‘Anthony wanted to resume the friendship with my friend. He wrote some lovely letters but the poor boy was dying of consumption and gave them to me for safekeeping. You should see the letters, Isabel. Your darling husband laid his heart on the page. When my friend died, I made it my business to help poor Anthony in his grief. We became very close and of course I had his letters.’
So that was it. Letters. Were the letters that Freddy had in his possession enough to hang her husband for sodomy?
‘Then he wanted it all to end.’ Freddy’s face screwed up like a small child deprived of a treat.
‘I wasn’t going to let him go that easily, so Fanny and I came to live at Brantstone.’ He smirked. ‘Anthony was not pleased but he came to accept the situation.’
‘You were blackmailing him with the letters?’
Freddy smiled. ‘They would have hanged him. He was very explicit.’
‘Were you and he,’ Isabel swallowed, ‘lovers under my roof?’
Freddy’s lips twitched.
‘No. Believe me when I say it was not my natural inclination and now I was free of the house I could pursue my own interests. It all went wrong when he found where I had hidden the letters and destroyed them. He was going to throw Fan and me out onto the street, and when I threatened to tell you, he said he’d already confessed everything.
He said there’d been too many lies. He wanted to start all over again but it was too late. ’
Her blood ran cold and she forced the next words out through tight lips.
‘Is that why you killed him?’
‘I didn’t intend for him to die. It was supposed to be a warning.’ Freddy sighed. ‘And then that upstart Alder came along. He was never going to cooperate, so he had to die.’ Freddie yawned and stretched. ‘Move over. I think I will rest for a short while.’
Freddy rose to his feet and, grabbing Isabel’s wrists, bound them together in front of her, tying the end of the rope to his own wrist. If she moved he would know.
He lay down on the narrow pallet beside her. His close proximity, the stink of his body, and the smell of long dead fish that clung to the shack began to overwhelm her. Her stomach heaved and the bile rose in her throat. She took a deep breath, forcing herself to breathe through the nausea.
‘We’ve wasted enough time, Isabel. There’ll be plenty of time to talk when we are on a ship for the continent. A whole lifetime to get to know each other properly. Where do you want to go first? I’ve always wanted to see Italy,’ Freddy mused with his eyes shut.
Isabel lay rigid beside him. She held her breath. If she let him sleep, he might miss the tide. She screwed her eyes tight shut and prayed.