No matter how much Cassie willed them, the words would not come. She was too distracted to write tonight, not when her cheeks still scalded with shame and her heart was heavy with bitter regret. She had hoped she had finally found a friend in Letty and did not dare put a name to what she had imagined between herself and Captain Galahad. But alas, like all of her brief and transient attachments, her interlude with the Warriner family was dead and buried. Unlike her, she doubted they would be holding a wake to lament its passing.
She closed her journal and carefully hid it under her mattress, sitting down on the bed afterwards and simply staring at nothing. Even by his usual standards, her father had been scathing. He had not even given the poor Earl a chance to defend himself against all of the slander laid at his family’s door and that was unforgivable. She had almost said as much to her father as they made the depressing walk back to the village. Almost, because the moment she had asked where he had acquired all of his salacious evidence against the family, he had pinned her with his penetrating stare and shaken his head in outrage.
‘Do not dare to side with those heathens over me, Cassandra. Where my information comes from is no concern of yours. “Honour thy father”, Cassandra!’
As always, he omitted the end of that particular biblical quote. ‘And thy mother.’ Her name was never brought up unless it was to compare Cassie’s unfortunate wayward tendencies with the legendary wanton wickedness of her father’s absent wife. The wife who scandalously took a lover and then shamelessly ran away with him when Cassie was but a babe. She had no memory of the woman apart from those planted in her head by her father. Memories which should haunt her, but threw up more questions than answers. Answers she would never get, from questions she did not dare ask. However, she envied her mother the escape, understood it and yearned for her own one day. In fact, it really could not come soon enough.
‘I was not siding with them, Papa, merely questioning the validity of the charges made against them. They did seem to me to be very pleasant.’
Her father pinned her with another outraged stare, as if she had gone quite mad and needed to be incarcerated in a lunatic asylum. ‘Have you learned nothing from my teachings, Cassandra? Appearances can be deceptive!’ Then, as he often did, he looked up towards the heavens to seek forgiveness for the silliness of his only daughter. ‘Help her, oh, Lord, to develop the fortitude and character you granted to me rather than the weakness cursed upon her by her mother.’
As she supposed it was meant to, this swiftly put a stop to any further impertinent questions. If she pushed too far, he would lock her in her bedchamber again for days on end, forced to pray and endure hour upon hour of his sermons behind the closed door while the inherited badness was exorcised from her soul. It was an ever-present threat; over the years those interminable hours in cloying solitary confinement had made her fear locked doors and crave a constant link to the fresh air of outside. Even in a blizzard, her bedchamber window remained steadfastly open. Just in case. ‘Honour they father, Cassandra.’
Cassie watched the satisfaction in his cold eyes as he spied her fear. ‘I always do, Papa.’ A lie that would probably doom her to an eternity in hell. She obeyed him, sort of, and hated him at the same time. There was no honour in that.
They had walked the rest of the way in complete silence. Despite the utter humiliation, she admired James Warriner’s loyalty towards his family. He had stepped in to defend his brother without a moment’s hesitation and then he had not thought twice about manhandling her father out of the house. Cassie had never seen her papa so flummoxed before or so effectively silenced.
The Bible quotations he threw back were also to be commended. If her father would listen to her, which of course he never ever did, she was sorely tempted to tell him a man who could correctly quote chapter and verse from the Good Book, without the need to first check the Good Book for reference, was hardly ungodly. Captain Warriner knew chapter and verse and wielded them with the same deathly precision her father did. Yet to better effect.
Then the Captain had practically lifted her father off the floor with those impressive strong arms of his, forcing her papa to do a funny little tiptoe dance as he was removed swiftly from the Warriners’ drawing room. Cassie would have enjoyed that particular part of the awful memory had she not been completely mortified by everything which occurred beforehand. She would have laughed at the ridiculousness of the spectacle. Perhaps she would be able to find the wherewithal to laugh if she ever managed to escape.
It was funny, but in her mind her father had always been such a towering, terrifying man. A man to brook no argument. Up against her dashing, serious pirate he was little more than a weed stood next to a mighty oak. Solid. Strong. Dependable. And oh-so-handsome Captain Warriner made her want to swoon. Perhaps, as her father was wont to point out, she was her mother’s daughter after all if she was so easily impressed and overwhelmed by the sight of a gorgeous man. A gorgeous man who probably wanted to wring her by the neck now. So far, she had inconvenienced him, squashed him, forced him to lie on her behalf and allowed him to be grossly, unforgivably insulted in the comfort of his own home.
* * *
Now, to compound her misery and right the wrong which he had perceived had been done to him, her father intended to vilify the poor family further from the pulpit. Cassie had already endured an hour of it over dinner, scathing, hateful words which blackened the Warriner name and cast fresh aspersions about their characters, and that was only the first draft of his sermon. There would be more fire and brimstone by Sunday. No mercy would be shown. Cassie’s only hope was that the family did not attend the service. She had not noticed them sat in the pews in the fortnight she had been in Retford, although that was hardly a surprise when she rarely paid attention in church at the best of times if her father was preaching the sermon. However, she had a feeling she would have seen Jamie. The sight of his fine shoulders in his Sunday best combined with his dashing good looks would have brought her out of even the deepest of daydreams. And those penetrating, soulful eyes... But there was nothing to be done about it now. Those eyes, quite rightly, would only regard her with wariness in future.
With a sigh, she blew out the candle on her nightstand and swung her legs into bed. She doubted she would sleep, but as Orange Blossom and the Great Apple Debacle had come to a shuddering halt in her mind at least she would be comfortable while she stared listlessly up at the ceiling.
* * *
As bad ideas went, this one ranked as one of the worst Jamie had ever come up with. It made no difference how well trained he was in covert reconnaissance, lurking in the bushes outside a lady’s open window at midnight was not really something any decent gentleman should do under any circumstances. As a Warriner, with the absolute worst of reputations, the repercussions for both himself and poor Miss Reeves did not bear thinking about. Nobody would believe he was there out of necessity because his conscience needed to know that she was safe and well. In fact, he had needed to know so badly he had even braved the darkness to find out, skulking in the bushes for the right opportunity to present itself.
But he had lurked for the better part of an hour already, waiting for her awful father to finally leave his study and head to bed, and now that he was sure the man must be fast asleep, regardless of the impropriety, he simply had to see her. Properly see her, to speak to her, rather than the fleeting glimpses he had seen of her moving about her bedchamber from his hiding place in the foliage.
At least she was still awake. The dim light of her candle did little to illuminate the darkness, but it was some light. There was also a full moon which offered a little more and a reassuring sprinkling of twinkling stars to alleviate the paralysing fear which came from total blackness. In view of the clandestine manner of his visit he had had to leave his lantern hidden down the lane with Satan, which