Nicola Cornick - Unmasked

She dug her nails into the palms of her hands and tried desperately to calm her shaking. Breathe deeply. Distract yourself.

She thought about what she might do now that Nick Falconer was here. She could run away. She could start all over again. She had done it before. But if she did that, Rashleigh would have won again and she would not let that happen. She was too strong to let that happen.

The feeling of panic was passing now, the tightness in her chest easing, her breath coming more easily. She pressed her forehead against her knees and felt the cool silk of her skirts against her hot cheek. Suddenly she felt bone-weary. It had been a very long day.

There was a step on the terrace beside her and a swish of silk and Mari straightened up hastily, pushing her tumbled hair back from her face. Her turban—she hated it anyway, the ridiculous thing—lay discarded on the terrace beside her. She made a grab for it but then realized that the newcomer was only Hester so she relaxed again.

Hester sat on the balustrade beside her and passed her a glass of cold champagne. It felt smooth against Mari’s rough throat.

“Are you all right, Mari?” Hester’s voice was troubled. “What happened? I saw you leave the ballroom.”

“I am very well.” Mari gulped some more champagne. “Lord Henry annoyed me. I hate his importunities.”

“He molested you again.” Hester sounded disgusted. “I am so sorry, Mari. He is a blackguard to do so, especially when he knows you are an unprotected female. What can we do? Shall I get John Teague to call him out, or…I know—Glory can call him out!”

“No,” Mari said, feeling a little better. Hester’s suggestion had almost made her laugh. “I know John would do that for your sake, Hes, and I am sure it could only add to the luster of Glory’s reputation for her to fight a duel, but there is no need. It only upset me because it reminded me of Rashleigh. Most of the time I can shut out such thoughts but sometimes…” She shook her head. “Anyway, I stabbed Lord Henry with my fan and I think I bruised him.”

“Good,” Hester said, with satisfaction. “A pity you did not crack his ribs.” She swung her legs beneath her silken skirts but within a moment the movement had stilled. Her voice changed, became serious. “I have been asking some questions, Mari. About Major Falconer, I mean. He is a widower, heir to a Scottish Marquisate.”

“Lady Faye will be delighted,” Mari said dryly.

“I imagine so. But the rest is not so delightful,” Hester said. “He is Rashleigh’s cousin on his mother’s side, Mari, and when Rashleigh died without issue, he inherited everything that was not entailed.”

Mari almost dropped her champagne glass. Nick Falconer was Rashleigh’s cousin? Suddenly it felt illicit to have been attracted to him, shameful and wrong. Even if he were not cut from the same cloth as Rashleigh, they were related, tied by blood. And if he had inherited all of Rashleigh’s property then he might well have inherited her along with Rashleigh’s other possessions. She had run away but she had never been freed. She had been Rashleigh’s chattel, body and soul. She felt sick.

“Oh,” she whispered. She cleared her throat. “I did not know.” She put her glass down very carefully. “I knew it could be no coincidence that he was here! That must be why he was in the Hen and Vulture that night, Hes. He had gone to meet Rashleigh. Perhaps—” Her anxiety was rising again and she fought hard to control it. “Perhaps Rashleigh told his cousin about me,” she said. She looked at Hester and rubbed a hand across her brow, her head aching intolerably. Suddenly the past pressed frighteningly close. “Do you think that is why he has come here? Does he know I am his property? Does he intend to take up the blackmail where Rashleigh left off?”

Hester slid off the balustrade and came to sit beside her, passing a warm arm comfortingly around her shoulders. “Do not even think it, Mari!” she said sternly. “I am sure it is nothing of the sort. Rashleigh may have threatened to expose your past and reveal your links to the Glory Girls but I am sure he told no one else of his evil plans. That sort of scoundrel always keeps his secrets.”

“I hope that you are right,” Mari said, with a shudder. “It is true that whilst I was with him I never met any other member of his family and he never spoke of them so I imagine he cannot have been close to his cousin. But Major Falconer must know that the Earls of Rashleigh once owned serfs in Russia.”

Hester’s arm tightened. “What if he does know it? That is all in the past.”

“No, it is not,” Mari said, shivering. “You know that legally I was never given my freedom. I am still a serf.”

For one long, terrifying moment the memories crowded in and she was back in the study of the house in St. Petersburg, where she had lived for the first seventeen years of her life. Rashleigh’s father had taken her from her parents when she was a child and had educated her on a whim, instructing her in all the arts that an English lady would learn. He was an eccentric, an academic and a collector, and Mari had come to realize that in an odd sort of way she was part of his collection. He had wanted to see if he could take the child of Russian serfs and transform her into something approaching a lady.

But when his son had inherited her, he had had other ideas of the role of his father’s seventeen-year-old protégée. In her mind’s eye Mari could still see Robert Rashleigh strutting into the house and plundering it whilst his father’s body was not yet cold upstairs. He had lolled back in his father’s chair, appraising her with his insolent gaze.

How piquant of my father to try out such a foolish notion as to educate you and give you ideas above your station, girl! But never mind, all serfs are bred to be no more than bed warmers and soon you can take up your duties on your back.

He had leaned forward and pinned her with his icy-blue gaze.

You see, I have a proposition for you, my dear. An offer you cannot refuse. You and your family are serfs. You belong to me body and soul. So I am offering you a proposal—a rather piquant one, I think you’ll agree. If you give me your body to do with as I wish I will give your family their freedom, their souls, if you like…

She had accepted his proposition.

Of course she had, for how could she have refused, knowing that her family’s very freedom was at stake? She had had no real choice. She was trapped. So she had traded herself, her virginity, her innocence, her very life, for their freedom from slavery. She had become the Earl of Rashleigh’s mistress.

The only remarkable thing about it was that Rashleigh had kept his word, giving money for her sisters’ education, buying her father a small plot of land near Svartorsk and giving him grain and animals enough for him to forge a living from the soil. But then Mari had come to realize that it pleased Robert Rashleigh to be magnanimous sometimes, so that amidst the cruelty and avarice, he occasionally displayed a careless generosity that would surprise her. At first she had taken it as a sign of hope—that there was good in him after all. Later she came to realize that he did it precisely for that reason—to make people think there was hope in order to take a perverse pleasure in proving them utterly wrong. He had freed her family on whim because he wanted to prove he had the power to do so, the power of life and death, the power over freedom or slavery. And then he had set out to exact thorough and devastating payment from her, subjugating her body to his will.

With a shudder she pushed the memory back into the furthest recesses of her mind.

“Don’t think like that, Mari,” Hester said now, recalling her to the present. “You are not a possession. You belong to nobody but yourself. Legally—” she waved a hand around vaguely, with the kind of aristocratic disregard for convention that always made Mari laugh “—there may be some boring argument that someone could make against you, I suppose, but that will never happen.” She paused. “I think it is most likely that if Major Falconer does have a purpose in coming to Peacock Oak, it must be to solve his cousin’s murder.”