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CHAPTER EIGHT

T he candle on the table beside his bed guttered in its holder, and Hew trimmed the wick. Sleep meant to taunt him from afar tonight, like fairy lights over the marsh, so he might as well read over his scribbled list of contacts.

He’d call upon each, make inquiries as to whether they saw the need for enlarging the militia, and whether they’d help stand the cost. Collect names of dependable men he could enlist. They need not all be able-bodied, but he wanted experience.

Men who were motivated to protect their homes.

Men who had reason to distrust Napoleon and the French.

Only the most generous would call Hew himself able-bodied. He shifted against the bolster of pillows, tilting the sheet of parchment toward the light.

He knew, logically, that the hand-woven silk brocade of his pillow was as soft as the shore of the River Ebbw those happy hours he’d spent wading as a boy, hunting for shrimps and eel or casting for brown trout.

Yet he couldn’t feel the delicate sensation of silk against his skin, only knew the temporary cessation of pain, now that he could strip off his shirt.

He never thought he’d be grateful for the weeks of starvation, but they’d shrunk him enough that he could get his coats on and off himself, and the pressure of fine fabric against his skin didn’t feel like being trapped in an iron maiden.

Eventually the marks would heal. They must. In the meantime, he had a glass of brandy on the table next to the candle.

He’d declined the offer from Mrs. Harries, the housekeeper, to send up laudanum.

He’d resort to it when the pain became blinding, if it kept him from becoming a beast, but he’d seen, often and up close, the results when a man dosed too freely with opiates.

Hew needed to stay in control. In all things.

A gust of rain lashed through the open windows, tossing up the draperies like a harlot’s skirts.

The darkness outside was complete, the moon swallowed by clouds, and the boiling shadows resembled no earthly forms. The sleepy area he’d grown up in was changing before his eyes.

The new canal he’d helped finance ferried out the bowels of the mountains, exposing to light the ores and coal that had been laid there in the first days of creation.

Coal fired the forges that turned the ore into iron and smelted the silver from the lead to make fine and useful things, like the ammunition Hew shot at English enemies.

New men trudged through Newport every day heading to the mines for work, men who’d left hungry families or bleak futures in Scotland or the Welsh valleys or the isle across the Irish Sea.

Hew had only had scraps of information from Daron about the recent attempt by some Irish rogue to kidnap the previous and new Viscountesses Penrydd, a dangerous debacle in which Anne had been involved somehow.

Anne, frightened, helpless, nearly hurt by a ruthless man—his thoughts sheared away.

He had to help make the area safe. The forces of peace, a lock-up behind the pub and a magistrate who doubled as MP, weren’t enough to stand against men like this Black Hound who had infiltrated the area.

The Hound was gone, thanks to Penrydd—so Beddoe said—but the men he’d employed were turned loose, all of them accustomed to criminal trades.

And there was that squat and greedy French general, humiliated at Acre, who had returned to Egypt, but for how long?

England and the Second Coalition were massing their armies to defend the German territories on the Continent and clip the expansion efforts of the French Directory.

Napoleon wouldn’t miss the chance to grow his country’s power.

The British Army might decide to deploy the Monmouthshire Militia to the southeast coast, where fortifications were underway to prevent an invasion from across the Channel.

And who would be left to defend Newport and its vulnerable and increasingly lucrative trade?

French generals had turned their eyes before to the coastline of Wales, rocky and picturesque, where the smugglers already knew how easy it was to land ships unobserved. Hew would be making the same survey in their position, despite the defeat at Fishguard two years before.

That knowledge had driven him here, back to Rogerstone, back to Greenfield. He wasn’t discharged, but he couldn’t remain on active duty while his major laid his accusations before their superiors. So Hew had a new task, to survey defenses around Newport and manufacture a plan.

While his mother tried to enfold him once more within the confines of the narrow life he had fought to escape.

The prodigal son returned to stand witness as the fingers of industry curled into his pastoral childhood home.

And to see what had become of his family with his father dead, his mother increasingly bitter and haughty, his brother leading a life of dissipation.

And his brother’s intended bride, a woman like none other Hew had beheld, being treated as if she were an unwanted piece of furniture instead of a goddess alighted on earth.

A boom of thunder rattled the windowpanes, and Hew pulled the coverlet over his knees.

He couldn’t make heads nor tails of Anne Sutton.

She looked like a fragile nymph, with her narrow shoulders and slender limbs and the bosom of a classical goddess.

He’d found her tearing apart flowers in the St. Sefin’s church as though she were a vengeful Fury.

When his mother fainted in his arms, she’d been one of the few to keep her wits about her, sensibly going for the smelling salts.

During the ride home in the carriage, he’d been subjected to the scent of her: wild rose and orange blossoms. She’d sprung up in the garden like the resident nymph as he explored his once-familiar home, trying to get his bearings.

And at dinner, she’d borne the insults and derision of his worthless brother with a magnificent, regal rage. Oh, she’d contained it—every line of her body showed her breeding and restraint. But there was no veil over her eyes, and those bright blue orbs betrayed everything.

Hew shifted position, trying to shake off the sensations that rose at the memory. Thou must not covet thy brother’s wife. Must not .

The knock at the door penetrated, finally, his fogging thoughts. Not the hesitant scratch of a servant—and where were all the maids that ought to be about a house this size, anyhow? It was a thump both hesitant and determined, if such were possible.

Hew reached for his nightshirt and pulled it over his head, wincing as the fine fabric caught on the welts along his back.

One would think the nerve endings there had been deadened.

He wished it. But no sense terrifying his visitor, probably the housekeeper come to bring water for his washstand, or his mother to fret about the window he’d thrown open to the storm and the clash of sultry heat with cool rain.

“Enter.”

The portal opened to reveal a figure in white standing on the threshold, like an angel come to conduct him to heaven.

Hew blinked to clear his head. He was sleeping. Or mad.

“You mustn’t be here.” His voice rasped, barely able to form words. Just like in dreams, especially the ones where he was tied again to the ladder, the fire falling on his back, the cleansing and consuming pain.

She stepped inside and closed the door behind her with a firm click. Her eyes flared, as if she were startled at the conventional sound. She raked that wide-eyed gaze around the room, looking anywhere but at him.

There wasn’t much to look at. The dark paneling on the walls.

The desk with his papers and the chair where Hew sat to pry off his boots.

The empty fireplace with its painted screen, the tall double wardrobe, the nightstand where his candle danced as it caught a gust of air from the open window, where the draperies rustled and whispered like gossips at a ball.

The hangings on the bed swayed, the medallions with their birds and foliage fluttering across the thick brocade, the canopy crowning the four-posted frame as if he were a king or an emperor.

Hew stared back, jolted by the blaze of blue in her eyes as her gaze lighted at last on him.

“You’re alone,” she whispered.

“Which is why you should not be here.”

He ought to rise to face her, but his breeches were on the other side of the room, damn it.

She was draped in a dressing gown, loose and ruffled, and still wore her hair in its arrangement of pinned-up curls.

One or two had fallen loose to dangle over her shoulders. Silk slippers encased her tiny feet.

“Anne,” he said hoarsely. “You must leave. You can’t be found here. You’d be ruined.”

She pressed the door behind her as if to ensure it shut tightly. “That is why I came.”

Sense departed his head, simply lifted and swirled like a scattering flock of birds.

She wore her shawl clutched about her shoulders, but the white fabric of her gown, thin and delicate, did nothing to conceal the shape of her, that lovely bosom and those long legs.

She was built like a roe deer, all sleek limbs, huge eyes, and liquid grace. She stepped away from the door.

“You cannot?—”

Words parted company with the rest of his sense as she pulled the shawl from her shoulders. She held up one slender arm and let the patterned silk fall onto his chair.

She stood in naught but the flimsy robe, and God above, it hid nothing.

“Don’t remove your shoes,” he said roughly as she did just that. “You’ll take a draught.”

“You might warm me,” she said.