A home? She almost laughed. She hadn’t a true home in years. Not since her sisters had left.
“Doesn’t take much to imagine what trade a beauty like you will find,” he went on. “But once that beauty fades? ’Tis hardly fittin’ to say what’s to come of you.”
“Oh, stop!” Miranda snapped. “You paint a very grim picture, indeed. And one that’s hung over my head for years.”
“Bloody hell!” The pudding crashed to the floor in a mess of brown scum and broken crockery. “You owe me, Miranda!” Rage colored him red as he pointed at her. “If it weren’t for that fire, I’d have half my fortune! By God, you destroyed my bloody warehouse!”
“Years I have paid penance for my mistake!” she shouted. “Still, it is not enough. Well, I am done with it.” Her hand slashed the air as if the motion could somehow sever their conversation. “You cannot make me do this!”
Father’s thin lip curled into a sneer. “Aye, I cannot,” he agreed with sudden calmness. “The agreement states you must go willingly, or it is void.” He took a step closer, pressing up against the wooden table, and pointed with a trembling finger. “But I’ll tell you this: Should you refuse, you’ll no longer live here.”
Her throat closed, red-hot pain forming a large lump there. The lack of a home was one thing. The lack of proper shelter was another beast entirely. “You cannot seriously…” She swallowed.
The yellowed whites of his eyes flashed in the lamplight. “I’m done with you. I would not have kept you as long as I have if I weren’t waiting for this moment. So you’ve had a disappointment with Martin. I’m glad for it! I was a fool to even consider it. Some promises are too dangerous…” He swallowed audibly. “Your bags are packed, either way,” he snapped.
So it had come to this. Miranda’s lower lip quivered before she bit down hard. There was little love lost between them. But he was her father, and he was prepared to toss her to the wolves. Pain radiated across her chest, seeping into her bones.
Father’s eyes were flat. Dead. She knew that look. His decision was made. Even so, she could not but try.
“I cannot believe you would—”
“You will marry Lord Archer!” he shouted out, his temper breaking like glass. “Devil take it, the man is one of the richest nobles in the kingdom. I cannot believe your stupidity for even refusing. Of all the bleeding stubborn—”
“But why?” A wretched sob escaped before she could swallow it down. Hateful that she should be weak before him.
He stopped short and blinked at her. “Why what?”
“Why does he want me?” She wiped a hand over her mouth. “I am nobody. I’ve never heard of the man before today. How can he know me?”
Father’s expression froze for a long moment before he broke into an incredulous laugh. “I may be a failed man, Miranda Rose. But I have one jewel left in my coffers.” He came round the table, his expression almost fond. She backed away from him, bumping up against the worktable. Father stopped but the satisfaction in his smile remained.
“Lord Archer has wealth, power, and land. A man such as that need not look to nobility for a bride. Overbreeding has left their rank chinless and small-eyed. You, my dear, are a diamond in a sea of cut glass.” A familiar gleam lit Father’s eyes, the glint of a transaction well played. “The finest feather for his cap.”
For a moment, she saw red. “I will go to Poppy or Daisy.”
A terrible silence fell between them, and her father’s confident expression withered. He went pale as cream. “They won’t want you. Never have.”
“They’ve offered before.” Her sisters had pleaded with her, in truth. And she had refused out of a misplaced sense of obligation toward Father. Penance, really, because she had been the one to start him on the road to ruin. How gratifying to know that she had finally reached her limit on guilt. But she didn’t want her sisters’ pity, nor to be their burden. The very idea made her insides pitch.
Father raised his hands in disgust. “He has paid handsomely for the right to you, Miranda. If you plan to forfeit the agreement, then I am leaving.” He straightened his tattered waistcoat and smoothed his disheveled hair. “I suggest you do the same. Believe me when I say that Lord Archer does not take kindly to being cheated.”
“Oh, I believe you.” Something told her his being cheated by Father had put her into this mess in the first place.
They stared at each other for a long minute, her finger tapping an idle rhythm against the counter while her father waited in stony silence. She ought to hate this Lord Archer for buying her like a commodity. Save he’d only done the same as nearly every gentleman in England did. Marriage was a business. Any sensible girl knew this. It was only when they had come down in the world that she’d started to hope she might marry for love.
The stew bubbled brown and thick in the pot next to her, making her stomach growl. She missed having steady meals, a life free of theft and guilt. A wash of shame hit her so suddenly that she sucked in a pained breath. Lord Archer had entered into an agreement in good faith. Only to become another man her father would cheat, and she’d be a part of it.
No more. She would not become like Father. She could live a life of honor and walk with her head held up from now on.
Faced with the choice of living on the streets or doing the honorable thing, her decision was rather easy. Unfortunately, that did not stop her stomach from turning over as she forced the words from her mouth.
“All right.” The vision of the silly shop matron in a swoon flashed in her mind, and a moment of pure terror wracked her body. She swallowed hard. “All right. I will do it.”
He gaped at her, unbelieving. When she simply stared back, a smile pulled at his mouth. “Very good.” Satisfied, Father grabbed a thick slice of bread off the counter. “On the morrow, then.”
Her head snapped back. “What!”
He half-turned, his mouth already full. “He insists upon marrying you tomorrow,” he said around the bread. “Everything has been arranged. Lord Archer has already acquired a special license so there is no impediment or need to wait.”
The fire beneath the burners flared high for an instant. Her life had been bought, sold, and arranged quite neatly. Bloody men.
Her father tore off another hunk with his teeth and turned to go.
“Stop!” Miranda reached deep into her pocket and pulled out her spoils. “Take it!” The pearl choker slammed to the table. “And treasure it well, for it is the last thing I shall ever steal for you. We are more than even now, Father. After this, we are finished.”
Chapter Two
Getting married was a happy dream that had filled Miranda’s girlhood thoughts and promptly left as she grew older. She well knew the face that looked back from the mirror each morning. She was not foolish enough to pretend that she was without beauty. Vanity may be a sin but so was lying. She was fair of face and form, though she knew many a girl who looked better.
However, as a woman without fortune or title, she received few offers of marriage. The most consistent offers came in the form of teasing shouts from market vendors when she walked to Covent Garden each Saturday morning. How then, she thought as Daisy pinned white roses in her hair the following morning, had it come to this?
Perhaps it was a dream. The woman in the mirror didn’t look at all like her. She was too pale. Her pink gown, one of many provided by Lord Archer’s money, ruffled and frothed around her like a confectionary. Miranda turned away with disdain. It was the image of an innocent and a maiden. She was neither. And yet he had come for her. Why?
She did not believe Father’s nonsense about him wanting her for her beauty. There were plenty of pretty daughters of utterly bankrupt, thus desperate, nobles for a wealthy man to chose from. What, then, did he want? What has the world come to when men such as he are permitted to roam the streets… Perspiration bloomed along her upper lip. And yet Lord Archer did not know precisely what he was acquiring when he took Miranda as his bride, did he?
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bsp; To create fire by mere thought. It was the stuff of myth. She had discovered the talent quite by accident. And had burned through her share of disasters. Father and Mother had forbidden anyone to ever speak of it and, more to the point, for Miranda to ever use her talent again. Poppy had simply disappeared in the library to search for an explanation; she never found one. Only Daisy had been impressed, though quite put out that she did not possess a similar unearthly talent. As for herself, the question always remained: Was she a monster? Both beauty and beast rolled into one unstable force? Despite her desire to know, there was the greater fear of putting the question to anyone and seeing them turn away as Martin had. So she kept it inside. She would not tell her husband to be, no. But she took comfort in the notion that she was not without defenses.
Poppy and Daisy’s mutual disregard for Father kept them at a distance as Father hovered by her elbow, guarding all possible attempts to escape. Their chatter was no more than a din, Father’s hand upon her arm a ghost, as they made their way to the small family chapel by the river.
Reverend Spradling met them at the door. The brackets around his fleshy mouth cut deep as his eyes slid from Miranda to Father. “Lord Archer is…” He tilted his head and pulled at the cassock hugging his bulging neck. “He is waiting in the vestry.”
“Grand,” said Father with an inane smile.
“He wants to talk to Miss Ellis in private,” the reverend interrupted as Father tried to walk through the doorway. “I told him it was inappropriate but he was most insistent.”
The two men turned to Miranda. So now her opinion mattered, did it? She might have laughed, only she feared it would come out as a sob.
“Very well.” She gathered her skirts. Her fingers had turned to ice long before, and the ruffles slid from her grasp. She took a firmer hold. “I won’t be but a moment.”
Slowly, she walked toward the vestry door looming before her. She would finally face the man who would be her husband, the man who sent brutes to hospital and caused women to swoon with terror.
He stood erect as a soldier at the far end of the little stone room. Women, she thought, letting her gaze sweep over him, could be utterly ridiculous.
She closed the door and waited for him to speak.
“You came.” He could not fully stamp out the surprise in his deep voice.
“Yes.”
He was tall and very large, though there wasn’t a spare ounce of fat discernible over his entire form. The largeness of appearance came from the breadth of his shoulders, the muscles that his charcoal gray morning suit—no matter how finely tailored—could not completely hide and the long length of his strong legs encased in gray woolen trousers. It was not the elegant, thin frame of a refined man, but the brute and efficient form of a dockworker. In short, Lord Archer possessed the sort of virile body that would catch many a lady’s eye and hold it—were it not for one unavoidable fact.
She lifted her eyes to his face, or where it ought to be. Carved with a Mona Lisa smile upon its lips, a black hard mask like one might wear at Carnival stared back. Beneath the mask, his entire head was covered in tight black silk, offering not a bit of skin to view. The perversity of his costume unnerved, but she was hardly willing to swoon.
“I thought it best,” he said after letting her study him, “that you enter into this union with full understanding.” Black-gloved fingers ran over the silver handle of the walking stick he held. “As you are to be my wife, it would be foolish of me to try to keep my appearance from you.”
He spoke with such equanimity that she could only gaze in amazement. A memory flickered before her eyes like a flame caught in a draft, a vision of a different man, in a different place. A man who also hid in shadows, whose gloriously strong body had haunted her dreams for months afterward, made her want things she hadn’t the name for back then, things that made her skin heat on many a cold night. It had shamed her, the way she had coveted the dark stranger. But it could not have been Lord Archer. The stranger had a voice like shadows, rasping and weak, not like Lord Archer’s strong, deep rumble.
“Look sharp, Miss Ellis!” The walking stick slammed on the stone floor with a crack, and she jumped. “Do you still intend to proceed?” he asked with more calm.
She stepped forward, and the man went rigid. “Who are you? An actor of some sort?” Her temper swelled like fire to air. “Is this some joke Father has concocted to bedevil me, because let me tell you—”
“I am Lord Benjamin Archer,” he said with such acidity that she halted. His eyes flashed from behind the mask. “And it is no joke I play.” The hand on the walking stick tightened. “Though there are days I wish it to be just that.”
“Why do you wear that mask?”
“Asks the woman whose beauty might as well be a mask.”
“Pardon me?”
The immobile black mask simply stared back, floating like a terrible effigy over broad shoulders.
“What is beauty or ugliness but a false front that prompts man to make assumptions rather than delving deeper. Look at you.” His hand gestured toward her face. “Not a flaw or distortion of line to mar that perfect beauty. I have seen your face before, miss. Michelangelo sculpted it from cold marble three hundred years ago, his divine hand creating what men would adore.” He took a step closer. “Tell me, Miss Ellis, do you not use that beauty as a shield, keeping the world at bay so that no one will know your true nature?”
“Bastard,” she spat when she could find her voice. She had been beaten once or twice, forced to steal and lie, but no one had left her so utterly raw.
“I am that as well. Better you know it now.”
She gathered up her train, but the heavy masses of slippery fabric evaded her grip. “I came of my own free will but will not abide by cruel remarks made at my expense,” she said, finally collecting herself. “Good-bye, Lord Archer.”
He moved, but stopped himself as though he feared coming too close. A small gurgle died in his throat. “What will it take?”
The tightly controlled urgency in his voice made her turn back.
“If you find my character and appearance so very distasteful,” she said through her teeth, “then why ask for my hand?”
His dark head jerked a fraction. “I am the last of my family line,” he said with less confidence. “Though I have love for Queen and Country, I do not desire to see my ancestral lands swallowed up by the crown. I need a wife.”
The idea that she would procreate with the man hadn’t entered her mind. It seemed unimaginable.
“Why not court one of your nobles?” she asked through dry lips.
He lifted his chin a fraction. “There are not many fathers who would give their marketable daughters up to a man such as me.”
It irked her that his words made her chest tighten in regret.
Lord Archer tilted his head and assessed her with all the warmth of a man eyeing horseflesh for purchase. “Your appearance may matter little to me but when the time comes for my heir to enter into society, your stunning looks will help a great deal to facilitate him.”
She could not fault the sensibility of his plan. Even so…
“Why do you wear that mask?” she asked again.
The mask stared back.
“Are you ill? Have you some sort of sensitivity to light upon your skin?” she prompted.
“Sensitivity to light,” he uttered and then gave a short laugh of derision. He lifted his head. “I am deformed.” That the confession hurt his pride did not escape her. “It was an accident. Long ago.”
She nodded stupidly.
“I realize my appearance is far from ideal to an attractive young lady in search of a husband. On the other hand, I can provide a lifestyle of wealth and comfort…” He trailed off as though pained by his own speech and then shifted his weight. “Well, Miss Ellis? What say you? This is between us now. Whatever your decision, your father may keep what little funds he hasn’t managed to squander without fear of retribution from me.”
&
nbsp; “And if I say no? What will you do? Is there another girl you might ask?” She shouldn’t care really, but her basic curiosity could not be quelled.
He flinched, a tiny movement, but on him it seemed as obvious as if he’d been struck by a blow.
“No. It has to be you.” He sucked in a sharp breath and straightened like a soldier. “To speak plainly, there is no other option left to me. As to what will I do should you say no, I will continue to live alone. In short, I need you. Your help, that is. Should you grant it, Miss Ellis, you shall want for nothing.”
The man in the black mask seemed to stand alone, apart from everything. Miranda knew loneliness when she saw it. Her mind drifted over another memory, one hard repressed. One of herself standing in the very same corner of the vestry, watching as Martin cut their engagement and walked away. And it had hurt. God, it had hurt. So much so that the idea of doing it to another made her queasy.
Lord Archer had shown his weakness, given her a chance to cut their agreement. He’d given her power over him. The man was clearly intelligent enough to have done so with purpose. A chance at equality was unexpected.
Still, none of that might have mattered. Foolish was the woman who gave away her freedom out of sympathy. No, it was not sympathy or the hope of power that prompted a decision; she felt something when in the presence of this strange man, a tingling thrill that played over her belly, the sense of rapid forward motion though her body stood still. It was a feeling long dormant, one gleaned from taking a sword in hand, swaggering through dark alleys when all proper girls were in their beds. It was adventure. Lord Archer, with his black countenance and rich voice, offered a sense of adventure, a dare. She could do nothing short of picking up that gauntlet, or regret it for the rest of her days. Perhaps, then, she could help them both. The idea of helping rather than destroying filled her with a certain lightness of heart.
Miranda collected the blasted train that threatened to trip her and straightened. “We have kept my father and sisters waiting long enough, Lord Archer.” She paused at the door to wait for him. “Shall we go?”