27. Catherine
On the day of the ball at the Martin’s home, I wasn’t feeling well and my stomach gave another lurch to see a letter from home.
I now dreaded each letter from home. If St. Erth found them, he would snatch them from my hands, laugh at every proof of his revenge over them, and then tear them up in a fury when they begged me to escape him.
In my last letter, I had tried to warn them that St. Erth was not the kind of man who let his wife escape him, and I trembled to see what they had replied.
If you cannot obey these simple instructions, my father wrote, after a lengthy description of how my mother’s finery and dresses had all been repossessed, we will cut you off from the family. You will no longer be welcomed in our home and I will do everything I can to ensure that you end your days as a common dock whore.
My stomach fairly plunged at this, and I had to clutch the table for support. St. Erth’s friends were leaving for London tomorrow and he was out hunting ptarmigan with them. I quickly shredded the letter into pieces and threw it on the fire. I didn’t want him to see the threats and dire warnings that I would end up as a dock whore.
Why, the only way that could ever happen was if the Viscount himself was dead!
The next day, we took the bigger carriage to a ball that the Martin family was giving, and Lord Sheringham and Mr. Westruther were forced by necessity to ride with us. Lord Sheringham was a pale, goggly-eyed man, and Mr. Westruther a notorious dark-haired rake.
“Do you like dancing?” Lord Sheringham asked, in a natural but mistaken attempt to make conversation.
I opened my mouth to reply but the Viscount cut across, “You will not be dancing with my wife.”
Lord Sheringham jumped nervously.
“Of course—of course not, my dear sir. . .”
“It will look very peculiar for no one else to dance with her,” Mr. Westruther put it, but my husband bared his teeth at them both.
“I don’t care.”
Anxious to prevent a fight, I asked, “What do you think of the country?”
“Not—not too fond of it,” Lord Sheringham said uneasily, his eyes darting to St. Erth’s stormy face.
“I like the country,” I said, aware that I was beginning to babble. “But I think I would like the seaside even better. I’ve always loved to read about the sea. Have either of you gentlemen ever been?”
“We should all take a trip,” Mr. Westruther began, but again my husband interrupted him.
“No.”
The rest of the ride was accomplished in uneasy silence, St. Erth’s hand gripping my thigh with vice-like clamps.
The Martins were a wealthy and comfortably vulgar local family, and Mama and Papa would never have allowed me to visit a home like theirs in London, but I did not care. I met all of the extended and vulgar Martin family, a dizzying blur of friendly faces. For once, it was actually enjoyable to go to a ball where I didn’t have to feel pressure to act perfectly. There wasn’t the heavy weight of crushing expectations and the need to behave like a perfect lady to attract a suitor.
Because St. Erth would be catching me and fucking me no matter what I did at the ball.
Of course, it would have been even more enjoyable if my husband had allowed any other man to dance with me.
But he did not.
I danced with him only, his strong hand tight on my waist.
I played the piano. With my husband bending over me, whispering words in my ear that made my cheeks flush in case anyone could overhear them.
Poor Mr. Elton attempted to ask me to dance, and St. Erth suddenly gripped him painfully by the collar, his fingers tightening around the shorter man’s throat.
“I do not permit anyone else to touch my wife,” he bit out as I pulled at his arm, attempting to make him loosen his hold on the vicar.
“My lord, it is customary at a ball,” Mr. Elton tried, but St. Erth interrupted him.
“I don’t care what is customary. I only care that no other man puts his hands on my wife.”
Just then, a messenger came for the Viscount, and my husband flicked his eyes around the room before agreeing to go out.
The other gentlemen all looked too nervous to ask me to dance for fear of what St. Erth would do.
All except the Martins’ distance relation Mr. Pemberfield.
Mr. Pemberfield was quite a tall man, with slicked-back dark hair and a pugnacious face. If it wasn’t for the fact that he was in faultless pink pantaloons, I would have assumed he was a prize fighter with his battered face.
He asked me to dance not once, but twice.
For a moment, I had the very unwelcome wish that my husband was there. I wanted to get away from Mr. Pemberfield but I didn’t know how to without making a scene.
There was nothing outwardly offensive about Mr. Pemberfield asking me to dance, but I still felt uneasy. There was something in how his arm squeezed around my waist that felt creepy.
Still, he was nothing but courteous, chatting fairly easily to me about the weather, my gown, and a new team of horses he was contemplating buying. His conversation was perfectly mannerly, if not interesting.
I began to feel nervous about what St. Erth would do when he came back.
Then the dancing was so raucous, the dozens of pairs of feet trodding the boards so energetically, that no one noticed Mr. Pemberfield sweep me out the open door and into the gardens.
“It is so warm in there,” he said, “I expect you need a bit of fresh air.”
“I do not, sir,” I said indignantly. “Let me go back inside.”
Then Mr. Pemberfield bent me painfully over and puckered his lips up to kiss me. They looked slimy and slick in the moonlight and I ducked, his kiss landing with an uncomfortable squelch on my cheek.
I was stunned with the audacity.
“You’ll be sorry when I tell my husband what you’ve done,” I said heatedly, clenching my fists together.
He only smiled at me. His teeth were mere stumps, many of them missing, and I recoiled.
“I’m looking forward to it,” he said.
“My husband will be very angry,” I warned Mr. Pemberfield, trying to get away from him, but he laughed unpleasantly.
“Maybe your husband doesn’t mind passing you around like a common dock trollop,” he said. “He only married you out of revenge.”
I felt the tears start to my eyes in my rage.
It was true.
He had married me only out of revenge. Everything else was probably just one of his tricks.
Then I heard St. Erth’s voice.
“Don’t listen to him, Kitten.”
Then my husband was there, and with one swift motion, he grabbed Mr. Pemberfield by the hair and drove his face into the nearby marble fountain.
I staggered as this forced Mr. Pemberfield to let me go.
“Who sent you?” St. Erth asked through his gritted teeth.
The other man’s battered face split open into a grin. He reached into his pink coat pockets for a glove, then he attempted to slap St. Erth across the face with it.
“Sir, you have been challenged to a duel.”
My husband’s face didn’t change, but he laughed contemptuously, easily dodging Mr. Pemberfield.
“Give you a chance to take pot shots at my back while I’m turned around? Not motherfucking likely. Tell me who sent you.”
Mr. Pemberfield looked a little nonplussed at this, like things were not going to plan, but he rallied quickly, aiming his ham-like fist at St. Erth’s face.
“As a gentleman, you are bound to meet me on the field of honor for a duel,” he snarled.
My husband smiled and in the moonlight he was darkly beautiful and wholly savage.
“I’m not a gentleman,” he said.
Then I heard a sharp crack as he easily sidestepped Mr. Pemberfield’s fist and swung his own in a sharp, efficient motion.
I heard the other man’s ribs break with a splinter.
“Who sent you?” St. Erth asked, and I felt my blood run dry at the tone in his voice. Cold, emotionless, deadly.
When Mr. Pemberfield didn’t respond immediately, St. Erth hit him across the face again, and I heard the dull, heavy sound of my husband’s fist hitting the soft flesh of the other man’s face and knocking him to the ground.
The big bruiser moaned and stirred, and I convulsively clutched my purse tighter.
“I’ll make it worth your while,” St. Erth said, his voice silky and smooth. “I’ll double your pay and you can work for me at the same time.”
“Sir Philip Wendover paid me,” the man said, looking up at St. Erth and feeling his split lip.
Papa!
“Do you have any proof?” my husband asked harshly, and Mr. Pemberfield reached into his pocket and handed a tattered letter over, his blood smearing it.
St. Erth took it and read it, his eyes scanning the contents quickly. He then folded the letter and put it in his pocket.
“I have no loyalty,” the other man ground out as St. Erth bent down to squat at his level. “I’ll go wherever I get paid.”
“I can see that,” St. Erth said dryly, and I saw his arm reach back and suddenly something flashed in the light of the moon.
I opened my mouth but no sound came out of my dry throat.
Then St. Erth struck with his knife like the vicious serpent he was, and Mr. Pemberfield looked up, his big face covered with shock.
“Your death was assured when you touched my wife,” the Viscount said, and his voice was like the grave.
The other man slumped forward and my husband cocked his head unemotionally as Mr. Pemberfield expired with a gurgle beside the Martins’ fountain. Then he stood to his full height and turned to look at me.
My arms were trembling uncontrollably.
“Don’t worry,” St. Erth said. “He’s dead.”
But it wasn’t this clumsy crude assailant that made me afraid. It was my own husband.
What would he do to Papa?
Could Papa really have done this? Tried to kill my own husband?
I felt anger spark through my veins. They had forced me to marry the Viscount because of their own greed and now they regretted it!
Well, it was too godsdamn late.
What else was a lie?
St. Erth was now scanning the area where the carriages were and I heard him make a low series of notes, a whistle, and in a few moments Gilly appeared.
“Go get Liversedge,” St. Erth ordered. “He’s probably smoking with the others by the carriage-house.”
“Your relatives are nothing but trouble,” he said as Gilly scuttled off.
“Surely, even Papa—“ I said, then stopped, dropping my eyes.
There was no use pretending.
St. Erth still looked dissatisfied, and he kicked the dead body of Mr. Pemberfield with his toe.
For a moment the breath caught in my chest.
Was he mad at me because my father had hired this assailant to pick a fight with him?
Would he make me go back to my parents’ home?
But suddenly St. Erth knelt down and flicked out his knife. Then he drew the wickedly sharp blade down Mr. Pemberfield’s body, splitting his chest open so that his entrails all spilled out on the ground.
I gasped and my husband raised his eyes up to me. They were glinting, shining in the moonlight with a dark rage.
“I killed him too quickly. I’m sorry, Kitten. I should have known the messenger was just a distraction.”
My throat felt dry and scratchy.
“It’s fine,” I croaked.
“No dignity in death for him,” St. Erth said, hacking viciously away at the corpse.
When Liversedge and Gilly arrived, St. Erth stood to his full height, towering over both of them, bloody splatters all up and down his formerly snowy cravat.
“My lord, why did you have to split him open like that?” Liversedge wheezed. “That’s going to make it the very devil to clean up.”
“Quit complaining,” St. Erth said. “I pay you, and very handsomely too. Don’t make me throw you both back where I found you.”
“You’d throw back your own second cousins?” Liversedge complained.
“Alleged second cousins,” St. Erth said, pointing at the ground. “And you missed an entrail.”
Grumbling, Liversedge took one end of the corpse, and Gilly took the other and they rolled the late Mr. Pemberfield into another tarp.
“What about you, m’lord?” Liversedge asked. “How are you going to go back into the ball with all that blood all over you?”
“Don’t worry,” said St. Erth. “It’s not very far and the night is warm. We’ll walk.”
I turned obediently and followed my bloody husband down the lane and across the dark fields.
“Are they really your second cousins?” I asked tremulously.
“Yes,” said the Viscount, turning to look at me. “I come from a long line of tramps, pickpockets, and washer-women who ran illegal gambling operations, Kitten.”
“Your mother sounds lovely,” I said indignantly, thinking regretfully of my own uncaring Mama. “I wish I could have met her.”
I was surprised when he turned around to look at me, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight.
“I love you, Kitten,” he said abruptly.
“Oh,” I said again, dropping my eyes in confusion.
“And what do you say to that?” he asked coldly, grabbing my chin to force me to look at him.
“I-I don’t know,” I said.
What did I think?
Why I hated him, didn’t I?
When I did not respond further, my husband’s mouth set in an angry frown.
“You are required to love me, Catherine. And that’s an order.”
Suddenly St. Erth picked me up and flipped me over onto the nearby sturdy wooden fence that kept our neighbors’ hogs from roaming the countryside.
I squawked in surprise as I landed on my stomach on the hard wood, and my husband tipped me forward like he was going to send me headfirst into the pigsty.
The pigs began to shuffle eagerly closer, and I screamed, windmilling my arms and trying to squirm back, but his strong arms held me fast.
“They look hungry, don’t they, Kitten?” he said with unconcern.
“Stop it!” I begged. “Let me up!”
But he only tipped me further forward until I was hovering only inches from their backs and horribly snuffling noses.
“Pigs are nasty creatures,” St. Erth said reflectively. “Did you know they’ll eat anything? Even disobedient saucy wives?”
I shrieked again, trying to arch my back away from their huge bodies and curious mouths and one of them grabbed my lace, yanking it down. For one foolish second, I tried to grab for it, and my hands brushed sharp teeth, and I screamed, wriggling madly in his arms.
He tipped me so far down my head was now amongst them, and when one of them snatched my bonnet, chewing on it with horrible growling snorts, the Viscount asked again, “Do you love me?”
“You forced me to marry you!” I whimpered, and he shook me then.
“I did,” he said in a voice like chipped stone. “There is nothing I would not do to own you.”
The bonnet had completely disappeared down the hog’s mouth and the animal’s nose began snuffling back toward me.
“All right, all right,” I moaned resentfully. “I will love you.”
Then he flipped me back over the side and pressed me into the fence posts.
“Be sure that you do,” St. Erth said complacently, and he twisted my long dress up in his hands and fucked me against the fence, hard and fast this time, the front of my ball gown shredding against the splintery wood. I gripped on as hard as I could to keep my head from going through the boards, my husband’s cock pounding into my cunt.