Kent's Orphans: The Prisoner Part 24

Genevieve choked back a sob as she swiftly unraveled the bloodstained rag from Haydon's bruised mouth. He is alive, she told herself, fighting the tears blurring her vision. Beaten and b.l.o.o.d.y, but alive. Now all they had to do was get him out of there.

"For Christ's sake, Genevieve," Haydon swore, his voice a harsh rasp as he tossed the ragged lengths of his bonds aside, "what the h.e.l.l are you doing here?"

"Well, lad, she had her heart set on comin' to fetch ye, an' there was no way we were goin' to stand by an' let her do it alone," Oliver cheerfully explained. "Now, if ye dinna mind, I think we'd best take care of Harry and George so we can all go-"

"I'll kill ye!" roared George, his enormous frame blocking the bedroom doorway. His expression contorted with savage rage, he withdrew a gleaming dagger from his belt. "I'll kill all of ye!" He raised his dagger and barreled toward them.

Charlotte appeared suddenly and thrust her crutch between his ankles, causing him to crash to the floor. Quick as a whip, Jamie darted inside and dumped a blinding blizzard of flour from his satchel onto George's head. The enormous brute howled in fury and turned on Jamie, his eyes two glowering black nuggets beneath a terrifying chalk mask.

"Ye're dead now, ye p.i.s.sin' little piece of-"

Eunice sailed into the chamber wielding her rolling pin and briskly cracked it against his powdery head, putting an end to both his threats and his foul language.

A floury cloud billowed into the air as George toppled nose first into the floor. Jack was on him in an instant, pinning him down with his knee as he roughly secured his hands and feet with the very same manacles and rope that had been used to bind Haydon.

"Right-just one more to attend to and we can all go home." Oliver rubbed his gnarled hands together with antic.i.p.ation, looking as if he was enjoying himself immensely.

In the other room Grace and Simon were running circles around Harry, who might have been better able to foil their dizzying attack if not for the vast quant.i.ty of ale swashing through his veins. Doreen stood at the ready with her flatiron, poised to bash Harry on the head the moment the opportunity presented itself.

"Take that, foul knave!" shouted Simon, prodding and thrusting at Harry with the bra.s.s poker he was wielding as a sword.

"And that, and that!" cried Grace, handily whacking him in the a.r.s.e with a bra.s.s warming pan.

Provoked beyond endurance, Harry let out an infuriated bellow and wrenched the instruments of his torture from the pesky children's grasp.

"I'll teach ye a lesson ye'll nae soon forget, ye sodding little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!" he raged, charging toward them.

"Harry, quick-save your bairn!" Genevieve pitched her ragged bundle at him.

His expression teetering somewhere between astonishment and panic, Harry instantly dropped the poker and warming pan in favor of catching the flying bairn.

"I got him!" he bellowed, triumphant.

Confusion washed across his face as he looked down at the disheveled blankets cozily swaddling a plump, ten-pound sack of oatmeal. "What the h.e.l.l-"

Haydon's fist smashed into his jaw, cracking his teeth together in a sickening crunch. Harry regarded him in a daze, still protectively clutching the swaddled oatmeal. Haydon struck him once more, and Harry fell back like a tossed caber, the oatmeal still warm and secure within his beefy arms.

"Right-that about does it, then," said Oliver, nodding with satisfaction. "These lads will sleep 'til morn."

"Mind ye remember to take yer things with ye, children," instructed Doreen as she put her trusty iron back in her bag. "There's no sense in losin' a perfectly good warmin' pan."

"Where's the cat?" asked Charlotte, looking about the littered room.

Jamie pointed toward the door, where the traumatized little beast was surrept.i.tiously trying to make its escape from the mayhem. "He's over there."

"Come back, kitty," called Annabelle, scampering toward it.

The cat meowed in protest and streaked into the corridor.

"No, kitty-come back!" Annabelle flung the door wide to chase after it.

And crashed directly into Vincent.

The sight of Ewan lying in a scrawny heap in the corridor had alerted the earl of Bothwell that all was not going according to his plan. And so he grabbed Annabelle and pressed his pistol firmly against her head, pragmatically deciding he might need some sort of leverage in dealing with Haydon.

"Let me go!" she shrieked, kicking him hard in the shin with her worn boot.

"Be still," Vincent hissed, wincing with pain, "or I'll blast a hole through that pretty little head of yours!" He wrenched her arm behind her back, forcing her to comply. Once she was satisfactorily subjugated, he raked his infuriated gaze over the stunned a.s.semblage before him.

"Good evening, Haydon," he drawled, his voice coldly formal as he forced Annabelle back inside and closed the door. "I must confess, I had not expected to find you entertaining quite so many guests. I would have preferred to settle this matter between us without an audience."

Haydon regarded Vincent with an air of carefully constructed calm. He gave no hint of his concern for Annabelle's welfare, or for any of the others within the crowded chamber. To do so would only enhance the perverse pleasure Vincent was currently enjoying and place them all in even greater danger. Haydon had seen that chillingly satisfied look before, on the day he had pleaded with Vincent to grant him custody of Emmaline.

He had erroneously believed that Vincent had exacted his revenge upon him by tormenting Emmaline until she couldn't bear to live. He had thought that must have been enough for him-the horrendously lonely death of the child whom Haydon had wanted so desperately to help, and the subsequent disintegration of Haydon's life into the ashes of alcohol, guilt, and shame. Vincent knew about his appalling financial losses, and his reputation for drunkenness and brawling had become legendary. But in that frozen, hideous moment, it was clear that for the man whose wife Haydon had so selfishly bedded and gotten with child, Haydon's suffering had been wholly insufficient.

Only his death could a.s.suage the humiliation and betrayal that Vincent had been forced to endure.

"h.e.l.lo, Vincent," Haydon said pleasantly. "I must say, I didn't expect to find you traipsing about in a sordid place like this. How have you been?"

"The ever urbane marquess of Redmond." Vincent's tone was laden with bitter contempt. "No matter how unpalatable the situation, you always had a proclivity for being unfailingly polite. Even when you were ramming yourself between my wife's thighs all night beneath my own roof, you were excessively courteous and droll with me over breakfast the following morning. I suppose that made the game all the more amusing for you, didn't it."

Haydon said nothing. He had no desire to further antagonize Vincent. Moreover, there really was no adequate excuse for his contemptible behavior.

"I believe I would prefer it if all of you would toss whatever weapons you might be holding onto the floor," Vincent instructed, raking his gaze over the others.

His brow lifted as Eunice's rolling pin, Doreen's flatiron, Simon's poker, and Grace's warming pan clattered heavily to the floor. Oliver hesitated a moment, then reluctantly dropped a knife he had tucked inside his belt.

Vincent regarded Haydon and Jack expectantly.

"I'm afraid I don't have anything." Haydon raised his empty hands.

Vincent shifted his attention to Jack, who had deftly slipped his dirk up his sleeve. "Me neither." He regarded Vincent with barely contained loathing.

Vincent's eyes narrowed. "You're lying."

Jack glared at him. "No, I'm not."

"I believe you are," Vincent a.s.serted calmly. "And unless you produce your weapon within the next five seconds, I shall be forced to blast a hole into your pretty little friend here."

A tiny, frightened whimper escaped Annabelle's throat.

Realizing he had no choice, Jack reluctantly allowed the dirk he had been hiding to slip through his fingers and clatter to the floor.

A triumphant smile lifted the corners of Vincent's mouth. "Very good."

"Let her go, Vincent." Haydon's voice was low and remarkably mild. "This is between us."

"You really have been most tiresome, you know," Vincent informed him, not relinquishing his hold on Annabelle. "I thought when I arranged for your little investment excursion here that these idiots I had hired would kill you and that would be the end of it. Instead you managed to slay one and scare these other imbeciles away. I must say, I found that rather vexing."

"Forgive me for disappointing you," Haydon apologized dryly. "I had no idea you had gone to so much trouble."

"After you were sentenced to be hanged, it ceased to matter. I decided that having you dangle at the end of a rope on the scaffold was infinitely better than having your chest swiftly split in some dark alley. There was also the added enjoyment of the scandal your trial created, and the ugly stain you had brought upon the Redmond name. It was a most appropriate ending to what has been, by my accounting, a perfectly worthless life."

Haydon did not argue.

"Unfortunately, however, you had to go and interfere." Vincent cast an irritated look at Genevieve. "Of course, you cannot be blamed entirely for your feminine weakness, Miss MacPhail. I understand you have a bizarre penchant for helping worthless criminals, as is evidenced by the sc.u.m with which you have elected to surround yourself." His lip curled with faint disgust as he swept his gaze over the unkempt children and elders crowding the room. "Moreover, the marquess here does have, what my s.l.u.t of a wife took great pains to describe to me as, exceptional abilities when it comes to rutting-as I'm sure you have discovered."

Eunice gasped in horror.

"Keep yer filthy tongue to yerself afore I rip it from yer mouth!" Oliver's voice was quivering with fury and his ancient hands had knotted into fists.

"Did yer ma nae teach ye not to speak so in front of children?" demanded Doreen, looking as if she wanted to slap him. "I've a mind to wash yer mouth with a good chunk of lye soap!"

"Forgive me." Vincent tipped his head in mannerly apology, amused by the elderly trio's scandalized reaction. "I had forgotten that there were children present. They are such mysterious, fragile creatures, aren't they, Haydon?" He adjusted his hold on Annabelle while he studied the anxious faces of Jamie, Grace, Charlotte, and Simon. Jack was glaring at him with poisonous loathing. "Although these children, I suspect, are not nearly as fragile as little Emmaline was."

Despite his resolve not to antagonize him, Haydon found he could not keep silent. "You would know best about that, Vincent. After all, you tormented her to death."

"Shut your mouth, you G.o.dd.a.m.n b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Vincent snarled. "You, who crawled between my wife's legs night after night in a drunken haze of l.u.s.t, with no thought whatsoever to the fact that a child might result from your sordid couplings! A child who was nothing more to you than spilled seed, and whom you pa.s.sed off as my own while you sn.i.g.g.e.red behind my back about how clever you were! You haven't the right to speak her name, do you hear?"

His eyes were burning with rage. But there was something more there, buried deeper, masked within the swirling depths of fury and loathing. Haydon was far too consumed with his own wrath and his fear for Annabelle and the others to see it. But Genevieve recognized it instantly. All the years of ministering to the lost and broken souls of her children, each of whom had been so cruelly wounded before coming into her gentle care, enabled her to see beneath the suffocating layers of Vincent's hatred for Haydon. However much she despised him for threatening Annabelle and wanting to kill Haydon, she could not help but be moved by the raw pain she saw twisting deep within the shadows of his gaze.

This, she realized with piercing clarity, was a man who was drowning in agony.

"Do you dare think that you are better than me, Redmond?" Vincent continued savagely. "That your actions are above reproach? Or have you deluded yourself into believing that you are somehow the hero in all of this, and that you actually loved Emmaline because you accidentally planted her in my wife's womb?"

"I loved her enough to want to save her from you, Vincent," Haydon retaliated, finding it increasingly difficult to maintain his calm facade. "I loved her enough to be willing to acknowledge her as my own, and to care for her and support her for the rest of her life. But you refused me-not because you gave a d.a.m.n about Emmaline, but because you despised her very existence, and wanted to punish her for the fact that she was mine and not yours."

"She was never yours!" Vincent's voice was hoa.r.s.e, like the cry of an injured animal. "She belonged to me!"

"And that's why you treated her so cruelly, isn't it, Vincent?" demanded Haydon. "You wanted to show the world that she was your possession, to revere or destroy as you wished. And that's exactly what you did, you G.o.dd.a.m.n heartless b.a.s.t.a.r.d. You tortured her by denying her even the simplest acts of kindness and care, until finally she couldn't bear your cruelties a moment longer. You murdered her, Vincent, as surely as if you had thrown her into that pond and held her head down while she thrashed about gasping for air-"

"That's enough, Haydon."

Genevieve's voice was sharp, cutting through his tirade with the efficacy of a razor. Haydon stopped and looked at her in surprise. But Genevieve's attention was riveted on Vincent, who had tightened his grip on Annabelle as if he needed her for support, his pistol still positioned precariously at her head.

"Forgive me, Lord Bothwell," Genevieve began, her tone infinitely gentle. "I don't believe Lord Redmond understands. You did love Emmaline very much, didn't you?"

A mantle of deafening silence fell over the room as Vincent stared at Genevieve in bewilderment.

"I can see it," she persisted quietly. "And I can feel it. You loved her terribly, and when she died, you didn't think you could bear it."

The room was frozen as everyone waited for Vincent's response.

"She was...everything," he finally managed, the words breaking from his mouth like painful, shattered fragments.

"That's a b.l.o.o.d.y lie," countered Haydon. "If you loved her, then you never would have spurned her the way you did."

"It was terrible for you to discover that she wasn't your own child, wasn't it?" Genevieve continued softly, her gaze locked upon Vincent as if he were the only other person in the room.

Vincent didn't reply.

"And in your anger and your pain, you couldn't bring yourself to be near her, could you?"

His mouth tightened.

"And so you tried to cut her from your heart."

He stared at her in silence, fighting the demons clawing at his soul. And then a helpless, pained sound, part laugh and part sob, escaped his throat. "My wife laughed when she told me. She said I was a fool, and that she and Redmond would spend the rest of their lives laughing at me, because I had not been able to see that the child I had so willingly claimed as my own for five years was not really mine at all."

"That doesn't make you a fool, Lord Bothwell," Genevieve told him adamantly. "You loved her. She was your daughter."

He shook his head. "I wasn't her father."

"Not in blood, perhaps. But blood is not what forges the strongest bonds of love, nor is it what makes a family. Just ask any of my children."

He looked about helplessly at the children's faces before him.

"Emmaline could not be held accountable for the circ.u.mstances of her creation, any more than any of us can," Genevieve continued. "It was wrong for you to punish her for something in which she was a victim, just as you were. But I don't believe you intended to drive her to such sorrow. I believe you found your love for her too painful to endure, and so you erected a wall and tried to push her to the other side. And she couldn't bear it."

"I didn't understand how delicate she was," he confessed, his eyes shadowed with regret. He loosened his hold on Annabelle slightly, as if he suddenly feared that she, too, might be more delicate than he had imagined. "I thought she would simply turn away from me and focus her attention on other things. I convinced myself that was best, because I feared that one day she would learn the truth. I thought it would be easier for her to bear if she hadn't spent her whole life clinging to my hand. But instead I destroyed her." He turned his gaze to Haydon. "And so did you, Redmond. You carelessly created her with a woman who was incapable of having any tender feelings toward her own child, which is why it was inevitable that I would someday learn that you had sired her. Ca.s.sandra cared nothing for how that piece of information would affect Emmaline. Instead of loving her and wanting to protect her, she was jealous of her own daughter's relationship with me. She wanted to punish me, and on some despicable, incomprehensible level, she wanted to punish Emmaline as well-I suppose because she was a constant reminder of you. And I was too blind with fury to see it." His voice was ragged with emotion as he finished, "You should have b.l.o.o.d.y well grabbed her and taken her with you that day. Had you done so, my beautiful little daughter would still be alive."

Haydon stared at him helplessly, feeling as if he had suddenly been set adrift. He had hated Vincent with a sickening intensity for two long years. He had nurtured that hatred freely, for it had helped to mitigate the crushing weight of his own responsibility in Emmaline's pitiful existence and tragic death. But as he looked at Vincent in that moment and saw how broken and haunted he was, he found he could no longer summon the loathing he had once felt toward him. He could not despise a man who was so filled with anguish over the death of his only child. Vincent was lashing out at Haydon because he believed Haydon was the architect of his suffering.

And he was right.

"I'm sorry, Vincent," he began, the words rough with remorse. "I failed her, and I am deeply ashamed for that. But Emmaline is gone, and there is nothing left but her memory. Let us not mar it with any more hatred and misery and death. Let us bring this matter to an end." He took a slow step forward and held out his hand. "Give me your gun, Vincent."

Vincent regarded him helplessly, looking trapped. "You will kill me."

"No," Haydon a.s.sured him solemnly. "I won't."

"But I tried to kill you-"

"And you failed."

"Then you will turn me over to the authorities so that I will suffer the same indignities you were forced to suffer-"

"No. I won't."

Vincent stared at him, bewildered.

"It is over, Vincent," Haydon told him adamantly. "Let Emmaline rest. Release Annabelle and give me your gun. She is only a child herself, Vincent. I know you do not really want to frighten her."

Vincent looked down at Annabelle in surprise, as if he had forgotten that he still held her. Her enormous blue eyes were wide with fear, and her face was pale against the soft spill of lamplight in the room. He lowered his pistol.

"Emmaline," he murmured, gently laying his hand against the silky blonde length of Annabelle's hair. "Forgive me." He leaned forward and pressed a tender kiss upon her forehead.

Then he straightened, raised his pistol to his temple and squeezed the trigger.