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CHAPTER FOUR

“ W ell, clearly I’m not dead,” Hewitt Vaughn said. “And was at no time that I can recall. Though I did believe I’d been cast down to hell a few times.”

He spoke to Anne, it seemed, though he knelt on the floor and held his mother’s inert body upright.

When everyone else had panicked, Hewitt, like Evans, had acted, and that was likely the only reason her ladyship hadn’t split her head like a melon on the flagged stone floor.

A wave of sound surged around them, like high tide coming in, yet for a moment Anne had the strangest sense that she and he stood alone together in the eye of a storm.

Calvin Vaughn bleated something in his brother’s ear. He sounded exactly like a sheep that had been cut from its flock and stranded alone on the hillside.

“Get hold of yourself, man,” Hewitt snapped, “and do something to revive her.” Their mother was no slight woman, and a wince crossed his face as her torso sagged against his.

“Her vinaigrette.” Anne glided forward. It wasn’t like her to run to the assistance of those in distress—she tended to run away from, not toward, danger—but she felt pulled to his side as if a toy on a string.

Or a lure meant to draw its prey toward the jaws of a predator.

Now that was silly. He was only a man, despite the fuss being made over him. Anne knelt across from him, her skirts folding beneath her.

“It’s a small silver box. She carries it on her chatelaine.”

“Would you?” Hewitt gestured toward his mother’s ruffled form.

Anne had admired the gown earlier. Making no attempt to look like a maidenly sylph, which was the current ideal, Lady Vaughn had instead chosen a lavish morning gown of yellow-dotted muslin, with ruffles at the hem of the full skirt and crossed bodice.

Anne ran her fingers around her ladyship’s waist and found the small chain and the carved silver case that held her smelling salts.

“Here.” Anne wrinkled her nose at the overwhelming scent, ammonia dissolved in her ladyship’s perfume, a heavy attar of roses. Cautiously, she waved the tiny casket before the older woman’s face.

“Closer.” Hewitt clampled his larger hand around her wrist and pulled. Anne squeaked and nearly dropped the vinaigrette.

He was strong. He’d stripped off his gloves while speaking with her in the church, and his bare flesh seared heat into the silk barely shielding her skin from his.

The smelling salts awakened Anne’s own senses.

Above the sharp ammonia and roses, she smelled him , leather and a trace of smoke, woodsy and deep.

His shoulders were so broad—his coat must be padded.

His hair was the color of the bark on the blackthorn that grew around his house, but there was a hint of gray above his ears.

That must be a trick of the light. Hewitt Vaughn was young, not yet thirty.

And his eyes were blue. Not the pale spring blue of Anne’s eyes, but a deep, infinite blue, like the waters of Llyn Tegid when the clouds rolled back in deepest summer.

Those eyes bespelled her, conjuring up a cascade of memories.

Family excursions to that lake, eating bread and cheese amid the cottongrass and watching butterflies land on the plum preserves.

Listening to the call of the curlew and watching the spotted wings of the hen harrier glide through the air above them, its sharp eye seeking dinner.

Anne searched the bogs for asphodel and cloudberry while her father and Daron cast nets for the gwyniad , a delicious whitefish that could only be found in that lake.

Those days when she was young and the princess of her world, cherished, coddled, given all she desired.

Daron terrified her with stories of the afanc , part dragon, part crocodile, that crouched in the fathomless depths and surfaced to snap unsuspecting humans, preferring, Daron claimed, young maidens like Anne.

Hewitt Vaughn gave her the same impression. All calm and inviting scenery without. Something dark and dangerous lurking within.

Lady Vaughn stirred and moaned. Her eyes fluttered open, hands clasping and unclasping as if reaching for knowledge. “Can it be? Hewitt! They told me you were dead.”

“Not dead, Mother,” he replied.

Gwen stepped to the rim of the circle that surrounded them. “I have hartshorn—never mind. Well done, Anne bach .”

One of Hewitt’s straight eyebrows winged upwards. “Anne?”

“Sutton,” Anne managed, more clumsy than usual as she snapped the silver vinaigrette case shut.

His eyes clouded, turning gray like the lake when a storm gathered. “Ah,” he said. “The Suttons.”

He said this as he might have said the plague.

“Hewitt Vaughn, in the flesh.” Penrydd joined his bride and surveyed the newcomer with interest. “Survived Acre, then?”

“After a fashion.” Hewitt dipped his hands beneath his mother’s arms and shrugged, asking for aid. Penrydd and Evans both reached down a hand to lift her ladyship. Calvin Vaughn goggled at his brother as if he were indeed the afanc who had crawled from dark waters, dripping slime.

Evans left Penrydd to deal with her ladyship and reached out his arm to raise Hewitt.

“You’re home now, soldier,” Evans said. “It’s over.”

Hewitt looked into the other man’s eyes, gripping his arm as if in a vise. His gaze flicked to the empty sleeve pinned against Evans’s coat, the crutch under his armpit.

“It will never be over,” Hewitt said quietly. A cold shiver wormed down Anne’s spine.

“Captain Vaughn.” The Earl of St. Vincent pushed forward.

“Admiral, sir.” Hewitt snapped to attention and made his salute.

“I thought you were supposed to be in chains,” St. Vincent said.

“I was, sir. But the colonel brought me home with the rest.”

At the mention of prison, the other men stepped back. Almost as if Hewitt, now, were the one with the plague.

“No,” Lady Vaughn moaned. “Oh, no.”

Everyone fell back save for Anne, who stood alone beside the returned stranger. She’d thought him a war hero, a prodigal son. But it seemed Hewitt Vaughn was in worse trouble than she was.

So this was Anne Sutton. Hew tried not to stare like a schoolboy as the Vaughn carriage jostled its way back to Greenfield.

The Sutton name nudged up memories. Sir Lambert Vaughn, in the days he was a servant on the fringes of the royal household, had done business throughout Wales and the west of England, and had cronies everywhere.

Sutton had been one he mentioned often. Hew tried to recall the source of the Suttons wealth—lead mines?

Coal? His father claimed the girl was comely and would have a staggering dowry.

Told his mother they should secure her for Hew.

There was a baker’s dozen of heiresses Hew’s parents wanted for him, and he’d botched all their plans by earning his commission in the Royal Artillery and leaving to fight the French. It was a loud declaration that he meant to be his own man.

“So after I left for war,” Hew said, “they staked you out for Calvin.”

The passionate fire in her remarkable blue eyes as she decimated boughs of myrtle in the church of St. Sefin’s had burned out.

The delicate glow he’d seen when she administered the vinaigrette to his mother was gone.

Her gaze, as she turned it from the window of the carriage to his face, was flat, cold, and hard as blue glass.

“My parents and yours came to the agreement,” she said. “I had little input in the matter.”

The scorn in her voice scraped his skin. What had he done? Besides return, seemingly from the dead, to give his mother apoplexy.

And fail, in the crucial moment, to plead his case before the Lord Admiral St. Vincent, the man he’d infiltrated a wedding to see.

Standing face to face, it was clear the earl believed the story that had been given out about Hew’s imprisonment.

And with his mother so fragile, under the eye of every one of her friends, he couldn’t bear to trot out the accusations that had been leveled against him.

They would know soon enough. And so would she. That curiosity on her face, lovely, sharp, and knowing, would turn to contempt.

His brother rode alongside the coach, along with Daron Sutton, on horses they’d borrowed from the King’s Head in Newport. The angry gestures accompanying their low mutters sent a warning prickle down Hew’s spine.

He’d learned to heed that warning. It had saved his life on more than one occasion.

Hew shook his head. His mind buzzed like angry bees: so much information, so much newness, coming at him all at once.

St. Sefin’s, a dilapidated ruin when he left, housed a community of people.

Penrydd, a name he’d heard around the borders of his childhood, an estate he’d assumed a vacant ruin much like Rogerstone Castle, had a robust new lord to fill the viscountcy.

A naval man, but such things could be forgiven.

There was a new viscountess, and this Anne, doing her best not to bounce on the hard seat of the coach as it rolled along the track toward Bassaleg, had some association with her. That explained why a woman with her delicate, cultivated beauty had appeared in a provincial village like Newport.

Yet Newport had doubled in size since he left, with more ships than he’d ever seen floating in the Usk or drawn up on the sands, loading and unloading cargo.

There was scaffolding around the old wooden bridge that signaled a coming replacement.

There were opportunities here, if a man had not ruined his future.

What was not here: his father. That gap loomed larger than anything, but no one had yet dared to bring him up. It was as if they all feared the mention of Sir Lambert might conjure him, roaring up from the pits of hell like a demon he was, or had been, to his eldest son.

Not to Calvin. Calvin, the younger, their father’s favorite, had known a different set of parents than had Hew. Calvin knew his way around this world that had sprung into being while Hew was away, while Hew felt as if he’d landed on a shore as foreign as the Levant.