Valentine (v-4) by Jane Feather

Author:Jane Feather [Feather, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: love_history

Chapter Fifteen

Sylvester fell into a laudanum-induced sleep toward midnight and awoke just before dawn filled with the sense of well-being approaching euphoria that always followed the agony.

It didn't take long for the euphoria to dissipate as he lay in the semidarkness remembering what had triggered the attack – a mercifully short attack for once, but it couldn't have come at a more inopportune moment.

He threw aside the bedclothes and stood up, stretching before going to the window, flinging it wide, inhaling the salt-sea fragrances on the light breeze blowing from the cliff top. He stared into the misty, pale light and heard in his head Theo's voice, despairing in its confusion and rage, hurling those dreadful accusations at him.

He glanced toward the connecting door to his wife's bedchamber. Presumably she was still asleep. In other circumstances he would have been tempted to go in and wake her in the way he knew she loved, with the long, slow strokes of passion that would bring the sleepy whimpers of delight to her lips, and her eyes would eventually open, deep, limpid pools brimming with sensuality, her mouth curving with amused pleasure.

But not this morning.

Deciding he'd take advantage of the dawn peace to gather his thoughts and marshal his arguments, he dressed rapidly and went downstairs, where he took a shotgun and a game bag from the gun room and let himself out of the house.

Webster's Pond lay beyond the orchard, through a band of thick undergrowth and massed blackberry bushes. The air smelled of sea and the damp grass beneath the tangled undergrowth. Spiky tendrils from the bushes caught at his buff coat and slashed across his buckskin britches. The sun was veiled in the dawn mist, a suffused reddish glow on the horizon, and the morning was alive with the exuberant calls of the dawn chorus and the indignant chatter of squirrels as he penetrated the undergrowth, disturbing their preserve.

He was following a narrow ribbon where the undergrowth was trampled into something resembling a path, but it clearly hadn't been used that recently, and the whole feel of the place was of somewhere rarely visited by man. The sport certainly should be excellent.

He caught a glimmer of the pond through the bushes as he pushed aside a tangle of thorny branches with the butt of his gun. It was a large body of water, more of a lake than a pond, thick reeds massed at the edge, lily pads floating serenely across the flat brown surface.

Sylvester took a step forward onto the narrow bank, and something hit him in the middle of the back, sending him crashing to the ground.

"What the hell!" Winded, he stared up at his assailant, more angry than alarmed. A young man stood over him.. a young man with the empty sleeve of his jacket pinned across his chest, and a gun on his other shoulder.

"I beg your pardon," Edward said. "But you were about to put your foot into this vile thing." He gestured to the oval jagged-toothed trap concealed in the underbrush.

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