Swept Away Page 2

  Knowing she had to make some kind of a decision, Annaleah wiped her hands on the folds of her muslin skirt and ventured close to the body again. She jumped as the icy water of the Channel scrabbled over her shoes, but there was nothing to be done for it. The hem of her dress was dragged backward and, as uncharitable a thought as it might be, she felt a momentary surge of resentment toward the unmoving body as well as the circumstances that had brought her here this day.

  “Some time away with your Great Aunt Florence will do you good,” she muttered to herself, misquoting her mother’s words of a week ago. “The sheer calmness and boredom of the seaside should help sedate your own thoughts.”

  Bracing herself, she reached down and gingerly curved her hands beneath the man’s shoulders, testing his weight. She was not a frail wisp of a creature by any measure, but he seemed gigantic by contrast, an utterly limp mass of bone and muscle. It took three grunted attempts and a near spill head-first into the encroaching waves before she discarded the notion of dragging him out of the sand by his arms. By then her feet were squeaking inside her soaked shoes and a good measure of her skirt was wet and dragging.

  “Damnation, hell, and bother!” she said, citing three of her brother’s favorite oaths.

  With one eye on the next wave scrolling over the breakers, she slogged around beside the body and tried pushing him, rolling him front over side over back until he was a few feet higher on the shore.

  She stopped, her hands braced on her knees, to catch her breath, and noticed for the first time the ugly, blotched egg at the back of his skull. The skin was swollen almost to bursting, mottled blue and black, riddled with spidery red veins. It must have taken quite a blow to cause such a lump and Annaleah, feeling even more helpless than before, knelt gingerly beside him. Her hands hovered over the contusion several more seconds before she found enough nerve to lift the tangled mass of wet black hair off his neck. Assured the skin was not broken and his brain was not leaking out, she took an additional moment to study his profile but was no further enlightened. She did not recognize him, though that was hardly a surprise. In all of her nineteen years, she had visited Widdicombe House perhaps ten times, none of them made with the intentions of retaining any memories of the local fishermen and farmers who gawked openly at the well-heeled visitors from London.

  It was Annaleah who gawked now, however. She had deliberately avoided acknowledging his state of near nudity and tried not to think of where her hands were placed each time she grasped his hip and shoulder to roll him. But now her gaze had wandered far below where any sense of modesty should have allowed. He was on his side facing her, and while his whole body had become sugared with a fine coating of sand, the linen of his drawers clung in a shockingly sheer layer to his lower anatomy. Her eyes, bluer than the sky above, widened and glazed appreciably at the shapes and contours molded by the wet cloth. She had heard whispers of such things, even seen a crude sketch drawn once in a parlor full of giggling females, but to actually see such a thing, to realize what an awkward burden a man carried between his legs...well, it was no wonder they often looked discomforted--sometimes even in pain.

  A slap of cold water against her ankles served to break the spell and, with her skin hot and her breath dry in her throat, she pushed and rolled and heaved again until he was lying in the soft, powdery sand well above the scalloped tidewater mark. With a final shove, her hands skidded forward onto his chest and she fell forward, sprawling half across his body.

  It had the same effect as falling over a rock and the air left her lungs with a loud whoomf. Conversely a similar breath left his mouth with a small fount of seawater, followed by a shallow gasp and a much larger rush as his body began to violently reject the notion of drowning. Annaleah grabbed his jaw and turned his head while he wretched and spewed salt water through his mouth and nose. His eyes remained closed and his body clenched tight around each spasm, but eventually the heaving stopped and he collapsed limp on the sand.

  Able to draw unimpeded breaths again, a faint hint of color began to seep back into his skin. His lips remained blue, but the dreadful yellow cast began to fade, revealing the true shading of his bronzed skin. The sand had caked over much of his face and as Annaleah brushed some of it off his eyes, the long lashes shivered and opened a slit. For the briefest of moments she found herself staring into eyes so dark they looked like holes burned into the center of his head. For those same few seconds she held her breath, for there was so much anger and pain in their depths, she almost missed hearing the harsh croak of words that were forced through his lips.

  “They have to know the truth.”

  “Wh-what? What did you say?”

  A hand, with fingers like iron bands and a grip that threatened to snap the fine bones in her wrist, reached up and grabbed her. “They have to know the truth. Before it is too late.”

  “I...do not know what you mean, sir,” she stammered, shocked by the strength of his hand, shocked by the power of his eyes boring into hers. “What truth, sir? Who has to know?”

  His lips moved again, but there was no breath left to give substance to the words. The pressure around her wrist eased enough that Annaleah was able to pry his fingers loose one at a time and free herself. By then, his eyes had shivered closed and his head had lolled to the side.

  Thoroughly shaken now, Annaleah pushed to her feet. She glanced one last time at the rising level of the waves, then turned and began running across the soft sand toward the base of the cliff. Yards of wet muslin tangled around her ankles weighing her down, and her shoes squelched like sponges with every awkward step. At the bottom of the steep path she paused to brace herself, then climbed as quickly as she could, heedless of the brambles that tore the flimsy folds of her skirt.

  At the top she paused again, her chest burning, her cheeks flushed red, and wondered that she had not noticed how truly far her great aunt’s house sat from the edge of the cliffs.

  Once regal and elegant on its perch overlooking the sea, the same sands and winds that worried away at the rocks on the cliffs had eroded the crumbling brick facade of Widdicombe House. The windows were scarred and pitted, most them opaque on the seaward side. The steeply canted roof, with its rows of gables and forests of chimneys, showed patches of cracked and missing slates.

  None of this impacted much on Annaleah at the moment as she hoisted her skirts and started running through the long, wind-swept waves of sea grass. She passed the gnarled skeleton of the tree where she had left her bonnet hung on a branch, and wondered if she should go first to the stables to see if old Willerkins was up and out yet tending to his prize beauties. He was nearing eighty, as ancient and weather-beaten as nearly everything and everyone else at Widdicombe House, so she dismissed his usefulness and stayed on the path to the house, hoping against hope the waterman--a comparatively young bulwark at the age of fifty--would be in the kitchen hunched over his morning meal.

  All of the utility rooms, she discovered as she blew through the rear door, were empty. There was a crusted tureen of porridge on the kitchen table and a wooden trencher littered with crumbs to suggest someone had been there recently, but her breathless shouts drew no replies.

  This came as no debilitating shock either, since her great aunt, Florence Widdicombe, retained only a handful of servants to tend to the upkeep of the entire household. Apart from Willerkins there was a housekeeper, cook, and maid of chambers; a footman, yard man, a waterman, and a boy to run errands and do light chores around the estate. On the less useful end of the employment scale, there was Throckmorton, the timekeeper, whose only task so far as Annaleah had been able to determine was to keep all the clocks in the house wound and to ring a small brass gong three times a day. There was also Ethel, the chicken-plucker, a woman who had so impressed her aunt at a fair some years back--she could kill, eviscerate, and pluck a chicken clean in under two minutes--that Florence had taken her home and employed her ever since for the exorbitant sum of three shillings a month.

  Most o
f the locals in the nearby town of Brixham were gentle when they referred to Florence Widdicombe as being eccentric. She was well into her seventies, a spinster with a vast personal fortune who, while she could not see the justification of paying an army of servants to upkeep a house that was falling apart around her ears, could also not justify collecting more than a token rent--and that mostly in liquid form--from the dozens of families who worked the rich vineyards and apple orchards attached to the estate. Annaleah’s father regularly sent envoys to his wife’s aging aunt insisting she come live with them in London. Unfailingly those envoys returned alone, their noses red from sampling her wines and ciders, their shins bruised from Florence’s tendency to apply her cane when she wanted someone’s attention.

  Annaleah’s limbs felt bruised now as she ran up the stairs to the main floor. She was out of breath, nursing a stitch in her side, and still shedding a good deal of water with each step she took. A hasty glance at a well-wound clock told her it was just past nine as she hastened to the morning room, hoping against hope her aunt would be at breakfast.

  This time, collapsing with relief against the oak door jamb, she was not disappointed.

  “Auntie Lal....Auntie Lal...”

  Florence Widdicombe looked up from the soft boiled egg she was stabbing with a wedge of toast. She was tiny as a wisp and looked as if a strong gust of wind would carry her into the next parish. She wore her fine gray hair in a nest of curls on the crown, usually covered by a delicate lace cap with the lappets trailing over her shoulders. She rarely wore any other color but black, and seldom any other expression than frown that suggested she could not quite remember what she had done five minutes ago.

  “Good gracious, Anna dear, you look quite damp. I should have thought it far too early in the day to go wading in the ocean.”

  “Auntie Lal...”

  “Come, come. Have some hot chocolate, or try the sweet cider. Yes, do try the cider. The Wilbury brothers fetched a new barrel of it over this morning and I must say it is one of their best efforts.”

  “Please, I do not want cider or chocolate.” She gasped and caught her breath. “I have found a man.”

  Her aunt smiled and waved her piece of toast. “Your mother will be pleased to hear it, dear. I gather she was beginning to fret over your lack of interest in the opposite sex.”

  “No. No, I mean...I have found the body of a man. Down on the beach. I thought he was dead at first, but he coughed up a great deal of water and now he seems to be breathing.”

  The toast remained poised over the egg, a large glob of yellow yolk oozing back into the cup. “Oh dear. Is he one of ours? I do not know how many times I have told young Blisterbottom not to go oystering in the dark. He is barely larger than the bucket he carries, and in truth, I find the creatures he catches to be unpleasantly slimy and salty, reminiscent of....oh well, never mind. Suffice it to say, after all these years, I have never acquired the taste. Young Billy tries so hard to please me, however, I seem plagued to eat them by the plate loads anyway.”

  “It is not Billy Bisterbom,” Annaleah said. “It is not anyone I recognized, in fact. But he is badly hurt. He has cuts and scrapes and a lump on his head the size of a turnip. He was in the water when I found him, nearly drowned, but I pushed him up into the sand and--hopefully--he lies there still and has not been dragged back down by the surf.”

  “And no one has come to claim him? How ever did he get there?”

  “I saw no one else on the beach. I think he must have fallen off a ship, for he is...he is missing most of his clothes.”

  “Missing his clothing? How very insensible indeed. There are crabs in the cove, you know, and they are not too particular about what they pinch.” Florence finished the mouthful of toast and picked up a little silver bell. The tinkle it emitted sounded far too inadequate to bring forth a mouse, let alone a houseful of half-deaf old servants, but within a few seconds of the echo fading, the door to the breakfast room was pushed open and Mildred the cook waddled through.

  She curtsied as best she could with four hundred pounds of excess flesh rolled around her girth, and smiled in Annaleah’s direction. “Mornin’, Miss. Will ye be takin’ yer breakfast now?”

  “Mildred,” her aunt said. “It seems my niece has found a naked man on the beach. Probably some scoundrel from town who had one tot too many and fell off the rocks. Will you fetch Broom and send him down at once to determine if we know where the fellow belongs.”

  The cook’s cheeks dimpled with another smile. “Naked, ye say?”

  “Hurt,” Annaleah reiterated with an exasperated glance from the cook to her aunt. “He was nearly drowned when I found him, and could well be dead by now.”

  “Yes, well, if he drank so much as to lose his clothing as well as his senses, he hardly deserves a kinder fate. Undoubtedly a prank has been pulled on him and we will discover the culprit hiding nearby. Mildred?”

  “Yes m’lady. Right the way, m’lady.”

  Another ponderous curtsy took the cook back out the door and it was all Annaleah could do not to follow. For some reason she did not believe the man she had found was a local drunkard, nor did she think, after having stared into those dark, soulless eyes, that anyone would be so foolhardy as to play a mere prank on him.

  “You are leaking, dear.”

  “Wh-what?”

  “Your dress,” her aunt indicated the dark stains on her skirts. “It is making a frightful mess on the floor. If you must drip, at least step to the side and drip on the carpet where it will not be so hazardous to a misplaced footstep.”

  Though the logic escaped her, for the carpet was from Persia, Anna did as she was told.

  “Good heavens.” Her aunt raised a large, square quizzing glass, training a magnified eyeball on her niece with the intensity of a detective. “You are shivering!”

  “I...had to wade into the water in order to drag him free.”

  “Indeed.” The glass was laid aside. “While I applaud your charity, your mother will froth at the mouth if I send you home with a red nose and chilblains. Off you go now and change out of those wet things. By the time you are dry and presentable again, Broom will have fetched the rogue up from the beach and we can have a good look at him before we decide what needs to be done.”

  CHAPTER 2

  As Annaleah hurried up the stairs, she worked the buttons free on her spencer and had the short, fitted jacket removed and flung over an arm before she arrived at her room. She had no great expectations of finding Clarice, her personal maid, inside but she called her name anyway, already half out of the sodden gown as she did so.

  The dress was ruined. Torn, full of sand and seawater, it was cast aside. Her undergarments were damp and stained as well; they joined the dress, shoes, and stockings in a crumpled pile in the corner of her dressing room. Naked, Anna quickly rubbed a towel across her feet and between her toes to dry them, then sat on a low velvet chair to don a clean chemise and stockings.

  Clad in a sheer layer of silk, she searched through the dozens of dresses she had brought away from London. She had not known how long her banishment was to be and had come prepared to spend weeks if need be, waiting for her father and mother to realize that she was no longer a child, that her mind, once sent upon a course--especially this particular course-- was not likely to be turned about or swayed.

  “No,” she had said flatly. “It was no yesterday, and it was no last week. It will be no tomorrow and next week and the week after that.”

  “Annaleah Marissa Sophia Widdicombe Fairchilde--” her mother had recited all five names with her eyes closed. “Your father and I are only thinking of what is best for you.”

  Percival Fairchilde, Earl of Witham had remained hidden behind a freshly ironed newspaper, the rustling of a corner the only indication he had noted his name.

  “Best for me?” Annaleah queried. “In the matter of choosing a husband with whom I am expected to live out the rest of my days, do you not think I am at least partially cap
able of deciding what is best for me?”

  “Not when that decision threatens to make us the laughingstock of London. You have had three proposals of marriage in the past year! One from a viscount, one from a marquis, and now for pity’s sake, an offer from a man who needs only to hear that his invalid uncle has gasped his last breath to be named the next Duke of Chelmsford!”

  Annaleah had sighed and closed her eyes briefly, for they’d had this conversation a dozen times...in the last week alone. “The viscount was a drunk and a boor, you said so yourself. The marquis was at least forty years old and reeked of the garlic and onions he chewed constantly in hopes of living forty more.”

  “I have no doubt you could have undermined those efforts by at least half, sister dear, with very little trouble taken on your part.”

  Anna glared at her sister, Beatrice. She was older by three years, staunchly married with one young child wobbling against her skirts and another well on its way. Her husband Alfred, Lord Billington, was strutting, belching proof that Beatrice had wed for all the right reasons, and her high-pitched, sanctimonious whines of advice warned that she expected no less from her younger sibling.

  “I would not marry Lord Barrimore,” Anna said evenly, “ if he was the last bachelor left in England.”

  “He may well be,” her brother Anthony drawled from his chair by the fire. “Unless of course you have a yearning to reward one of the sturdy young bucks returning from the war. I should think there will be a few thousand soldiers who have not seen a member of the fairer sex in a year or more who would be willing and eager to forgo garlic and onions in order to win your favor. Whether or not you could survive on an income of ten shillings a month,” he shrugged. “Well, you never were the one to refuse a good challenge, what?”

  Anna scowled. “You are hardly one to talk about surviving on a stipend, brother dearest. Ten shillings a day barely keeps you in handkerchiefs. A speck of dust on your sleeve and the jacket must be changed. A minute lack of starch in your cravat and all of Bond Street can hear you howling at the incompetence of the laundry. Moreover, you should be the last one standing to Lord Barrimore’s defence. Did you not say, just last week, that the man was an uncivilized barbarian?”