Chapter 14 #2
The earl saw it and smiled. “Let me see.” He began to count on his strong, spatulate fingers.
“One, you left your home without permission. Two, you dressed in indecent clothing. Three, you wandered about England and even gathered some money.” He raised his brows at Chastity.
“Would you care to tell me how? No? No matter. Four, you have led your sister astray and put her and her child in danger. Five, you have been impudent and obstructive to me. Six, you are unrepentant. Kneel on the ground.”
“No, damn you!” Chastity cast around for any kind of weapon, but there was nothing. Nothing.
“Seven, you use foul language. Lindle.”
The secretary moved forward, amiably implacable. This time, no matter how hopeless, Chastity would not submit. There was no trace anymore of the paternal in this. It was driven solely by revenge and spite.
She fought, even managing to bite Lindle, but he overpowered her, wrenching her hands painfully behind her back. He tucked her head backward under his arm. His armlock on her almost choked her, but she kicked. Nothing was in reach of her boots.
He hauled her skirts up and she felt the chill air on her legs and buttocks. She let out a piercing shriek that was mostly rage. They couldn’t do this to her again. They couldn’t!
Lindle tightened his arm, choking her silent. The cane whistled and fire leaped across her thighs.
“You must learn, you she-devil!” snarled her father, and lashed her again. “You must learn! No one defies me! No one!”
A third blow bit into her thighs and she let out a strangled cry.
“Good God, Father. What are you doing?” Fort cried, bursting into the room.
Chastity was released. She crumpled to the ground, fighting for breath.
“Discipline,” snapped the earl. “Do you too deny my right?”
Fort was white with shock. “No, of course not. But this is hardly proper, or appropriate.”
The earl’s color rose high, and he was close to losing control.
Chastity prayed that Fort would finally see him for what he was.
But Walgrave won the struggle with himself.
“You may be right, my boy,” he said ruefully.
“Yet the girl stretches my tolerance with her defiance and her selfishness. She still will not assist us to find her sister.”
Fort came over and gently raised Chastity. “You must,” he said. “Frazer has left his command. He gave some story of a family emergency, but I doubt it.”
“I knew it,” snarled the earl. “Damn you . . . !”
Chastity saw Fort’s eyes widen at the sight of her clothes, and she didn’t try to hide the indecency of them. “If he’s gone to Verity, Fort,” she said, “she’ll be safe.”
Fort turned to the furious earl. “I suppose that’s true, Father. Frazer will see to her welfare.”
The earl’s color deepened to purple. “Has my whole family run mad? Am I to stand by while my elder daughter elopes with an officer within weeks of her widowing, and do nothing? Why, after this trollop—” He jabbed Chastity sharply in the breast with his cane so that she cried out.
“—has dragged our name in the dirt, who knows what will be said? Doubtless that Verity killed her first husband to be free to wed her lover. Even the child’s paternity will be in doubt. ” He was spitting by the end.
A horrified Fort had pulled Chastity to his side for protection, but now she broke free. Her father hovered on the brink of revealing his true nature, and she would push him over. “No,” she shouted. “You may have ruined me, you loathsome hypocrite, but I won’t let you destroy Verity!”
The earl slashed at her face with his cane, but she blocked it with her arm. A scarlet weal sprang up.
“Stop it!” Fort shouted, and seized the cane. He snapped it and hurled the pieces aside.
“Lindle!” howled the earl. “Knock the traitor out!”
Still smiling, the burly secretary closed on Fort. The earl, now spitting with rage, urged him on. Chastity, for the moment, was ignored. She could do nothing for Fort, and she doubted his danger was as great as hers. She took her chance and fled, grabbing the wig as she went.
“Stop her!” bellowed the earl. But Chastity, wings on her heels, was already down the stairs and out into the close. One of the earl’s men stood there, but he wasn’t a big man. She caught him by surprise and knocked him over.
She sprinted down the narrow deserted street, her short skirts now an advantage. It was dark, though, and she went flying over a cask someone had left by their doorstep.
She picked herself up, gasping and trembling, and forced herself to slow a little.
Behind her, voices called, but the pursuit was not yet well-organized.
She thought of trying for help at some house but dismissed the idea.
In her present garb, no respectable person would let her through the door and besides, almost anyone in England would turn his errant daughter over to the Earl of Walgrave.
She pushed her red nipples back into her bodice and plunged down a dark alley, then turned swiftly into another, then another, her only intent to lose any pursuer. She had no idea where to go, or where to seek help.
Would Fort be in any condition to assist her?
If only Cyn were around. She caught back a sob. It seemed another life, those few sweet days in his company.
Down a narrow street she flew, grazing her elbow on a wall. Past a gaping night-soil-man. Into another dark alley, gasping for every breath. Was she running in circles?
Suddenly, the alley disgorged her by the side of the Thames, on the docks.
Small vessels bobbed at anchor, and nearby a song drifted out from a tavern.
For a moment that cheerful sound comforted her, but then she remembered about a brothel down near the river.
She shuddered and shrank into the shadow of a bend in a wall, knowing this was no place for her to be.
She took a moment to catch her breath and tried to throw off the panic that tangled her mind. It was no good; it had all been too much. She hurt. She was terrified of worse to come. She was a hunted thing now, seeking only a hole to hide in. She stretched her senses for any sound of pursuit.
What should she do? She’d been desperate to escape her father, but now she was alone at night, penniless and close to naked in a strange town. In the roughest quarter of a strange town and looking as she did, she had no hope of help.
She realized she was clutching the wig and pulled it on. It would make her look a little less peculiar.
It was tempting to stay here, cowering in the shadows, but she had to move. She’d be safer in a better part of town. Perhaps she could hide in a garden or a shed until daylight. What then, she did not know.
Voices approached and she froze, pressing back against the wooden wall behind her.
Four men strolled by, complaining in a thick burr of the price of tobacco.
When they went into the tavern, the volume of the singing abruptly rose, then fell.
When they were gone she sagged with relief and tentatively crept out of the shadows.
A flickering lantern outside the tavern shed a little light, and she could see that the area was deserted—of people, at least. Two fat rats scurried past that feeble light.
Chastity fought back a whimper and sidled down the building until she came to another alley, a mere dark gap, leading into shadows.
She entered its maw. Her boots slid on the slimy ground and the stink made her want to vomit.
Doubtless the other alleys had been the same, but she’d been too panicked to notice.
She thanked heaven she couldn’t see what this narrow passageway was like, but feared what she would step into next. She remembered the alley in Shaftesbury and the dead cat. This alley smelt as if it held any number of them.
It held a live one. She stepped on it and it scratched her knee and fled, yowling.
Dear heaven, she thought with a whimper, was there an inch of her that was not cut or bruised?
She put a hand out to touch the chill stone of a wall at her right, doubtless the wall to a back yard.
She ran her hand along it as she staggered forward, for it gave assurance of reality in the dark.
In front of her all was pitch-black. Only above, if she looked up, was a narrow band of gray—the cloudy sky.
She began to think she would never see light again. She heard a strange noise and realized it was her own gasping whimpers. She gulped them down.
Then she glimpsed light ahead. It was only a faint golden glimmer, but she stumbled toward it as if it were the gate of heaven. The alley broke into a slightly wider lane, leaned over by old narrow houses, mostly dark. One had a guttering flambeau by the door and it was that she had seen.
It was as if sanity had returned to an insane world.
There was nowhere to hide here, though. No breaks between the houses, no steps. She raced toward a wider street, desperate to get away from the river and into concealment.
Voices ahead!
She froze, looking right and left, but it was hopeless. She shrank back against a wall, praying that this not be her pursuers, that these men not come her way . . .
But then they appeared, a linkboy lighting the way for two scarlet-coated officers—one rotund, one slender. The officers were jovially drunk, but steady on their feet.
Chastity edged toward a door, hoping it would look as if it were her home, and that they would pass her by. Faint hope. They stopped. The thin one raised a quizzing-glass and smiled. With a shared leer, they sauntered toward her.
“Well, good evening, my pretty,” the fat one said cheerfully.
Chastity could only do what a lady would do if rudely accosted. She stared past his shoulder. Her chin was gripped by hard fingers which forced her to face the thin man. He was not ill-looking, but his expression was hateful. “Lost your manners, hussy?” he sneered.