Free The Speckled Monster by Jennifer Lee Carrell Page B

the next chamber, Lady Mary sat up sleepless with her brother. Near midnight, he excused himself; a minute or two later, the door reopened, but the man it admitted was not her brother. It was Wortley, wrapped in preposterous black.
    Her anxiety splintered into giggles. “I used to yearn for a bandit king,” she said, drawing him to a looking glass, “but I never dreamed he would turn out to be you. If any robbery is committed tonight, you will be taken up for it.”
    â€œWe have no time for games,” he said, grabbing her hand and drawing her through the dimly lit hall and down the stairs. The courtyard was empty but for one mare placidly munching its bit amid torches that were sputtering out.
    â€œWhere is the coach?” she whispered.
    He made no answer, but mounted the horse, reaching back for Mary.
    She took a step back.
    â€œCome,” he said, motioning impatiently. “There is a parson ready to marry us less than fifteen minutes away. We will be back before anyone suspects we are missing.”
    In the flickering dark, she seemed to grow half a foot. “What do you mistake me for, Mr. Wortley?” she hissed. “A dairymaid? I am not going anywhere until you provide decent conveyence.”
    He stared at her for an instant, and then dismounted and stalked back toward the inn.
    â€œWhere are you going?”
    â€œTo ask your brother if I may borrow the only coach in the house,” he said tersely.
    She slipped in front of him. “You cannot be serious.”
    â€œDo you have another proposal?” he asked coldly.
    â€œInvolving my brother will force him either to cover his tracks by using me very ill when we return—to the point of beating me black and blue, you understand—or to live in my father’s disgrace forever. What sort of return for his kindness would that be?”
    â€œYour father will reconcile himself to us, once the thing is done.”
    â€œThe thing?” Anger soared inside her. “You do not know him as I do. If you take me, you must take me with nothing but the clothes on my back.” She turned on her heel and headed back into the inn. “Adieu. I am entirely yours, if you please.”
    She saw him no more that night. The next day, her father’s coach delivered her to West Dean. A week after that, on the twenty-seventh of August, she went for a walk in the garden with Will; he came back to the house alone, saying that she had wished to walk on.
    She never returned. Instead, she slipped through a gate and stepped into a coach manned by no fewer than six footmen. As Wortley wished, they drove to Salisbury in silence, lest they bicker on the way to the altar. He stared straight ahead with a grim look on his face; Lady Mary watched her former life recede out the window and wept.
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    The moment Lady Frances heard that Mary was missing, she stoked the fire and began piling it with her sister’s journals and bundles of carefully kept letters. Lady Mary was beyond help, but Lady Frances meant to protect herself, Will, and everyone who had ever been an accomplice in the affair. As Lady Mary had predicted, Dorchester’s fury was boundless. He cut her off entirely, refusing so much as to hear her name spoken in his presence.
    Lady Mary took pains to display unconcern. As soon as possible, she sent Frances a chatty letter from Wortley’s home outside York. I thought to find Limbo, she gushed, but I have entered Paradise .
    That position, however, was a front almost from the start. For several years, Wortley had been outraged by his failure to possess her; in possession, he could not bear to be near her. It did not help that he had discovered, after the wedding, that Paradise had been his rival right up until that last flight. In disgust, he turned about-face and ran the other direction, keeping as much distance as possible between them by moving between his London bachelor’s quarters over a shop off the Strand,