The Devil's Mistress by David Barclay (summer reads txt) 📗

this racket.” Her inflection carried not a question but a command, one that resonated through the room.

Thomas stood up and steadied himself. The girl stopped screaming.

Isabella, whose tear-stained cheeks were red with energy, wiped her face and tried a small curtsy. “Madam Huxley.”

“Hello, dear.” Then, turning her gaze upon her son, “Thomas, you’ve made a mess of yourself again. Look at your breeches.”

Thomas looked down, and his face flushed. His lower half was stained with wine.

“Go to your room at once and change. I have ordered Fredrick to set the table below.”

Her son pointed to the ground. “I told him he was to bring the food up he—”

“Enough. These foolish games of yours are going to scare your beloved right out of the marriage bed.” She smiled at Isabella, a bird of prey gazing upon a mouse. “As long as you are beneath my roof, Thomas, you will comport yourself as my son. Now go find new clothes and meet us downstairs.”

Thomas sighed dramatically but left the room without a word. At the door, he paused just long enough to give his mother a kiss.

Marianne returned her attention to the room. “Winifred, do clean yourself up and be prepared to help with the second course.”

The girl took a river of pain and buried it somewhere deep. “As you say, madam.”

Isabella wiped her last remaining tear. “Shall I go downstairs?”

“No. You shall come with me to my study until the table is set.”

And with that, Lady Marianne swept from the room. No command of hers needed repeating.

Chapter 9

“I didn’t meet Thomas’s father until the day before our wedding. Did you know that?”

The two of them were in the third-floor library, seated upon chairs which were made—to Isabella’s great relief—of hardwood instead of flesh. The room was twice as large as the Ashford study, but the books in this room looked more ornamental than functional, as if their purpose was to display the accumulation of wealth more than the accumulation of knowledge. Its master’s desk was likewise a giant, gaudy thing made of exquisite ash wood, almost too large to be functional. A portrait of the hook-nosed Brendon Huxley hung on the wall behind it, though Marianne seemed to have no trouble at all operating in its shadow.

“No, madam,” Isabella said.

“I was born in the east of England, in Cambridge,” Marianne continued, as if they had just come from tea time. “My father was a seaman. A wealthy one at that, though I was the youngest of six children, and he wished to marry me young. Brendon’s father was a millwright, and just a young apprentice at that. But he saw a great fortune in the New World. A fortune we would cultivate, and nourish, and one day pass to our children. To our grandchildren.” She enunciated this last bit with great care. “We met, we married, and the very next day, I was on a ship to Virginia with my new husband and a trunk of possessions smaller than this desk. All I’ve ever wanted was to grow this family, but man plans, and God laughs, as the old saying goes.”

A jug of amber liquid and several glasses stood atop an old sideboard, and abruptly, Marianne crossed the room and poured herself a drink. She did not offer one to Isabella. “We had three children, Brendon and I. My youngest, Hannah, died of fever shortly after she was born. My eldest was named Paul. Two years ago, Brendon took him fifty miles west to trade with the Cherokee, along with several other men from town. Their bodies were found two weeks later.” She drank deeply. “They had been—what is the expression?—scalped. Whatever trade they intended was not to be had.”

Isabella had never heard the history before. It made the matter of the Collins boy especially sensitive. “I’m sorry, madam.”

Marianne returned to the desk. “There is a reason Thomas survived, dear. He may not be the gentlest man in the colonies, but he is a survivor. He is clever, and cunning, and ruthless when he has to be. There will come a time when you will be glad to have such a man, a man who will tolerate no slight to his family. It is better you see him as he is now, rather than after you have lain with him in the marriage bed. What a shock that would be.” She laughed, a sound that was somehow amused and sad at the same time. She drained the rest of her glass. “Let us go to dinner, you and I, and we shall put this business behind us.”

Something was burning inside Isabella’s chest. The fire which had caused her so many sleepless nights, the fire which had driven her deep into the forest. She realized with no little horror that now was the moment it was to be born. “I do not think I shall be joining you, madam.”

Marianne sighed. “If you’re worried about the girl, do not be. All men stray from time to time, dear. It is far better with a slave than someone of consequence. We women have ways of dealing with a slave. Thomas, being the boy that he is, was merely attempting to resolve it as a boy does. Rest assured it will all be settled before next week.”

“I will not marry Thomas,” Isabella said quietly.

Somewhere in a distant corner of the house, a longcase clock announced the arrival of midday. The last chime died, and there were several seconds of dreadful silence.

Then Marianne tilted her head as if she had not heard correctly. “What was that, dear?”

“I will never marry your son,” Isabella repeated.

The woman smiled, and her smile was somehow more daunting and terrible than any storm of temper Isabella could have expected. “I do not think that is for you to decide. Your father and I have worked very hard to join our families. It is destined to be.”

Isabella rose to her feet, and while her entire body quaked, she