The Earl's Captive

Chapter Two

Chapter Two“Here they come,” said Lucy, as John Masters' coach swept down the lane, pulled by a pair of matching bays. Masters was a wealthy grain merchant and Helen, as she stepped from the carriage, was, if not perfectly suited to her middle-aged husband, at least perfectly dressed.

The two little boys followed, identically dressed in blue jerkins and knickerbockers, their brown hair combed and twisted neatly into shape.

Binns, the maid, announced them breathlessly at the door, “Mr and Mrs Masters and the two Master Masters,” then flushed, as if realizing that what she'd said had sounded most peculiar.

“Thank you, Binns,” said Ann, rising to her feet. “We'll take tea in the drawing-room. And bring some apple cider for the children – watered, if you please.”

Ann was remembering one disastrous previous occasion when the maid before last had failed to water down the cider, resulting in two very dizzy small boys being sick all over the chaise longue.

“Yes, ma'am,” said Binns, dropping a brief, awkward curtsey and hastening out of the room as fasts as her lumpish legs could carry her.

“My dear,” breathed Ann, embracing Helen, who was taller than she was, and grazing her cheek on an amber brooch pinned to the shoulder of her daughter's short cape of the most fashionable shade of lavender blue.

Lucy felt her hackles rise as the portly figure of John Masters confronted her and she felt his hot gaze travel up and down her body. The crude sexuality of the man disgusted her. She was always having to dodge his groping hands and try not to blush at his suggestive remarks. She, who had never kissed a man except in polite greeting, could not conceive of her sister in the arms of this fat, ugly, lecherous old man, doing all the things you had to do in order to get with child.

Lucy's s****l knowledge was scanty but basic. Living in the country and working with horses as she did, she could hardly have avoided noticing the way they acted at certain times of the year. Her father always forbade her to leave the house when a stallion was put to one of his mares. What he didn't know, however, was that Lucy's bedroom was not the stronghold it appeared to be. An athletic person of either s*x could, with a modicum of nimbleness, lower a leg from the windowsill, find a toehold in the crumbling, ivy-clad stone and from there, scramble sideways into the old oak tree, from whence it was a short and easy climb to the ground.

So, on more than one occasion, Lucy had heard the excited whinnying and snorting of the stallion and seen the mare, hump-backed and docile. Seen, too, the way in which her father and a helper aided the stallion by guiding that huge, terrifying, yet fascinating limb, thick as a man's leg, into the mare. Watching the frenzied couplings, Lucy had felt hot, breathless, faintly disgusted, yet tingling with strange sensations, much as she felt whenever a handsome man looked at her the way her brother-in-law did.

“I won't ask the usual question,” John Masters said, by way of greeting.

Lucy was surprised by this change in his usual tactics. Motioning her to sit in one of the two high-backed chairs that stood on either side of the marble fireplace, empty and screened now as it was a warm September afternoon, he stood in front of her, swaying to and fro, his fat legs crammed obscenely into his tight, shiny black boots.

“There's no need, is there?” he added, giving her a sly, conspiratorial wink with one corner of a weak, grey, piggy eye.

Lucy sat bolt upright. She took a deep breath, feeling how her tight stays constrained her lungs. “What on earth do you mean, brother John?” she demanded. Her words, spoken too loudly, cut across the currents of other people's conversations and stopped them dead. Helen, her mother, her father, even little Toby and Alexander from the privacy of their den beneath a table, were all staring at her, aware of the first rumblings of an emotional storm.

Lucy gulped and toyed with a bow on her cream silk dress. She wished she hadn't opened her mouth. Probably John had only been making a joke. He could not really be privy to some information concerning her future, about which she knew nothing.

Her brother-in-law's boots creaked as he shifted position uncomfortably. “Nothing. Um … that is…” He shifted his gaze to Lucy's father and she intercepted his glance.

So there was a plan afoot. Of course, she could have taken his remark to mean that there was no need to ask her if she were engaged yet because she obviously wasn't. But John Masters was a creature of habit, a mortal blessed with not one iota of imagination. He would only have made such a comment, and accompanied it with such a look and a wink, if he knew something which she didn't. After his There's no need, is there?, there had been a silent, unvoiced, Because it's all been settled.

They were all waiting, her mother brushing crumbs off her lap, her father working his toe into the rug, Helen pretending to straighten her necklace. A muffled giggle from one of the twins broke Lucy's tense trance and gave her back her voice. She directed the full, undiluted power of her iciest blue gaze on her father, who returned it equally coldly.

“Father, if any plans for my future have been made, I think I have a right to know what they are.”

“Very well, Lucy, but before you fly into one of your famous tempers –” Tempers? You're the last person on earth who can accuse anyone else of having a bad temper, thought Lucy furiously, wishing she were strong enough to pick her father up bodily and shake the truth out of him – “remember I am your father and head of this household, and as such, my decisions are not to be argued with. You're nineteen years old now, my girl. Nineteen!”

He looked triumphantly at everyone in turn and, backed up by their encouraging nods, turned to face Lucy again. “I can't wait for you to choose a suitor for yourself. I don't hold with such liberated notions. Allow a girl to pick for herself and she'll choose some ragamuffin with a roving eye and no'but two brass farthings to rub together.”

“Aye,” interjected John Masters approvingly.

His wife glared at him, but Lucy's gaze rested unwaveringly on her father, daring him to be a traitor and bestow her very own birthright of freedom and choice on some man she did not wish to know, and would detest if he were the King himself. Father, she willed, trying to project her thoughts behind his eyes and into the farthest recesses of his misguided brain, Father, I will not be married off. You can't do it. You will not do it. Her jaw was clenched in a spasm of steely purpose as she poured her whole being into her gaze.

But Martin Swift was untouched by his daughter's silent message. “Your mother and I love you and wish to do our very best for you. If you agree to marry the man I have in mind, not only will you live in comfort with a good man, but you will hold a very honorable position in the community, far higher than your mother or I could ever have hoped for.

“I had no idea that my daughter had caught the eye of such an august man as the Reverend Pritt. To be the wife of a man of God, Lucy! When I informed your sister and her husband in the hallway – well, I couldn't keep such a compliment to the family to myself, could I? – they were so pleased for you that …”

His voice seemed to be fading into the far distance, like the echo of a stone dropped into a dry well. At the same time, a mist formed in front of Lucy's eyes. She tried to pass her hand in front of her face, on which she could feel a cold, clammy perspiration forming, but her arm was like a lead weight and remained, unmoving, in her lap. Then a great lassitude overcame her and she felt her surroundings dissolve and her chair whirl like a spinning top.