The Earl's Captive

Chapter Three

Chapter ThreeLucy had never fainted before. She came to and found her mother hovering anxiously over her while her sister bathed her forehead in cool water from a basin held by Binns, the young maid.

“Don't you worry 'bout her, ma'am. She be herself right soon enough,” said Binns reassuringly. Lucy could have embraced her for her honest country forthrightness, but Binns, for all her commonsense, could not smooth the worried furrows from her mother's brow.

“My dear, are you all right? It is very hot today. You're not catching a fever, I hope?”

Helen's small, square hand in its cuff of pale blue lace touched Lucy's forehead, then her temples, and finally pulled down the lower lids of her eyes, making Lucy jerk back and blink in alarm. “The boys had a summer sickness some weeks ago,” Helen explained. “They went quite, quite pale under the lids. But there's nothing wrong with you.”

“I wish there was,” moaned Lucy fervently. “I'd sooner waste away and die than be married to that old … goat!”

* * *

Ann Swift drew a deep breath and chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. How she wished her younger daughter was as docile as Helen had been. She had gone to the altar with John Masters without a murmur and, indeed, the marriage seemed to be working. Helen had her boys and a good allowance and a husband who didn't beat her, even if he did sometimes respond rather over-enthusiastically to attractive members of the opposite s*x.

At least this philandering tendency kept him from eternally bothering Helen with his attentions. He had done his duty, fathered twin heirs, and now Helen was free to attend to her duties of lady of the house and follower of fashion, something that pleased her far more than her husband's twice-monthly drunken fumblings in her bedroom. Even love-matches couldn't be relied upon to be perfect, as Ann knew to her cost. Yet, for Lucy, that is exactly what she would have wished – the perfect love-match for her beautiful, unruly, headstrong younger daughter.

* * *

“I won't do it,” announced Lucy, mutinously, waving away Binns's proffered glass of water. “I refuse to allow myself to be incarcerated in that damp prison of a rectory with that revolting, ugly, nasty-minded old man. 'Man of God' indeed! I would never take a young, sensitive child to hear one of our dear vicar's sermons. To hear him ranting about the terrible punishments God has in store for us all if we dare to defy His will or take His holy name in vain, makes me think that worshipping the Devil would be the easier option.”

“Leave the room, Binns. See how Cook is faring with the roast pork,” ordered Ann, terrified lest Lucy's blasphemies be prattled about all over the village.

But Lucy wasn't done. “Reverend Pritt has a very twisted idea of what God is really like. I think something very terrible must have happened to him in his life to make him turn his good Lord into the kind of enemy he would have us believe God is, someone who isn't kind and just and forgiving at all, but is a cruel tyrant – rather like Father.”

Helen clutched her sister's arm in the hope of distracting her from her subject, as it was obviously upsetting their mother, who was standing by the window, fanning herself agitatedly. But Lucy was not so easily deterred.

“I am sorry, Mother,” she continued, a softer note creeping into her voice. Lucy loved her mother dearly and the last thing she wanted to do was upset her, but, on the subject of her own life, with her whole future at stake, she felt she had to express her feelings, even if it meant coming out with a few home truths.

“I know you love Father, in spite of his vile temper and the anguish he's caused all of us. I am his dutiful daughter and have always done my best to obey him, but this is one thing that all the beatings on earth could not persuade me to do. He can beat me until I'm dead if he likes, but nobody will force me to share my life and, even worse, my bed, with that gospel-twisting, repellent old cadaver, Nathaniel Pritt!”

“Oh Lucy, see sense,” put in Helen, stroking her sister's curly hair as if calming one of her toddlers. “He must be sixty if he's a day. One night with you and he'll probably drop dead of an apoplexy. I bet you he's never touched a woman in his life!”

“And he's certainly not going to touch me!” Lucy exclaimed, brushing aside her sister's hand and swinging her legs off the couch. Her head swam a little as she put her feet to the ground and stood up, but she ignored her lingering weakness. Appalled by the way both her mother and sister were calmly complying with Martin's wishes, Lucy turned to them, appeal in her eyes.

“Can't you see, either of you? Can't you understand?” She fixed her gaze on her sister. “I'm of the same blood as you, we're kin – who could be closer? Yet you seem to be made of totally different stuff. Why are you so meek? Why is it that you don't mind having to share a house and your body with an old, fat man whom you don't love?”

She was pleased to notice Helen's eyes blaze for an instant as the barb of truth stung home. Turning to her mother, Lucy continued, in impassioned tones, “I know you can't stand up to Father. I know that, if you had done, either you'd be dead by now, or he would have turned you out. But you're both trapped. Trapped!”

Her voice was rising on a note of hysteria. The whole room, with its pictures, hangings, heavy, cumbersome furniture and dark-coloured floor-coverings, seemed to be exuding waves of hostile oppression. She paced the drawing-room carpet agitatedly. She had to make them see. What was wrong with them? Nobody, not even her father, had the right to do this to another human being, to order their life right down to whom they should marry and when.

She thought of Reverend Pritt, clutching his lectern and rocking back and forth while his congregation's ears were dinned with threats of being visited by plagues even unto the third and fourth generation, his gaunt face grey with stubble, his yellowed teeth spraying the unfortunates in the front pew with holy saliva. She imagined herself spread like a n***d sacrifice on a white-sheeted bed surrounded by the mouldering walls and ragged tapestries of the vicarage, with the knobbly, grey, corpse-like body of Nathaniel Pritt kneeling over her, his fetid breath fanning her face, his obscene, maggot-like fingers about to touch her own warm, living flesh.

“No!” she screamed. “No! Mother, Helen, you've got to help me! Tell him it's impossible. I don't care that he's the vicar, I don't care about his position in society, I don't want to share it. I'd sooner marry an ostler, a highwayman, anybody! But I won't marry that… that …”

Words came to her mind, words she'd heard her father and the grooms use. However, before she could say anything more, the door burst open and in strode her father, glowering like a thundercloud.

“Martin!” cried Ann, rushing towards him and catching his elbow in an attempt to halt a physical attack on his errant daughter.

“Woman, leave me be!” snarled her husband, his face suffused with scarlet anger. He shook off her restraining hand so violently that Ann lost her balance and fell, dashing her head against the ornately carved leg of a side table.

“Mother – oh, Mother!” wailed Helen, rushing to Ann in a crackle of starched petticoats and kneeling over her prostrate form. “You've killed her, Father!”