Reluctantly, he said, “Because she’s a wife.”
Frances refused to believe that the law would not help a woman simply because she was a man’s wife.
“Surely there must be something you can do for her?”
“Tomorrow I’m going to file a writ for habeas corpus.”
Frances knew the pain that the law caused, but she did not know the law. “I don’t understand.”
“Every English citizen—man and woman—is obliged to appear in court when summoned,” James explained, lips and breath a warm caress. “If the Queen’s Bench will approve the writ, Mrs. Clarring’s husband will have to bring her to court, and the judges will then determine if he has the right to detain her.”
Frances listened to James’s body as well as his words. “You don’t think they’ll approve it.”
“A judge’s decision is a public affaire.” James’s voice was neutral, what Frances had learned was his barrister’s voice. “They may be persuaded by certain things.”
“Like what?”
“If a furor were created, they might not wish to vote against popular opinion.”
Anger at the law that James loved whipped through Frances. “A woman forcibly taken off the street and imprisoned isn’t a cause for a furor?”
“If it were brought to the public eye,” James calmly returned, “yes.”
“The newspapers,” Frances assayed, anger arrested.
“Yes, but we have to move quickly.” Heat penetrated tangled hair and burned her scalp. “For example, if we should create a disturbance outside Mr. Clarring’s house, it would quickly draw attention from a variety of newspapers.”
Frances thought of the women who marched for suffrage. “Like a demonstration, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“How many people would be needed to garner the necessary amount of attention?”
“However many could be gathered.”
“Is this what you and Mr. Lodoun discussed?”
“It’s one of the things we discussed.”
Always there would be secrets between them: He was a man, but he would always be a barrister.
How much more difficult it would be for Rose Clarring and Jack Lodoun, he both a barrister and a member of Parliament.
“I could do that, James.” Frances wanted to help the woman who had lost so much because of her. Heart skipping a beat, she twisted free of banding arms and sheets, springs squealing, mattress dipping. “I could talk to the members of the club. Surely they will want to help.”
“Many have lost their positions, Frances.” Brandy-scented breath caressed her lips. James was a familiar shadow, hazel eyes a slash of black. “Their lives aren’t the same.”
Because of her.
“This isn’t about me, James; it’s about Mrs. Clarring.”
“They may not agree to see you.”
“But I have to try.”
Gentle fingers pushed heavy hair off her forehead. “I don’t want you to be hurt anymore, Frances.”
“I have you to comfort me.” Frances slid her right hand in between a soft pillow and warm flesh; James lifted his head to give her access. She looped her arms around his neck. “Mrs. Clarring doesn’t deserve to be incarcerated.”
“No, she doesn’t.” The body that had spooned her was now all hard angles. “A demonstration might even convince Mr. Clarring to let her go.”
He did not sound hopeful.
“James.”
James grasped her hips and pulled her closer, his nestling sex so achingly intimate it brought fresh tears to her eyes. “What?”
Frances pressed her forehead to his lips. “Only a desperate man, surely, would abduct his wife.”
His lips burned her skin. “Yes.”
“What if, by us drawing public attention to Mrs. Clarring’s plight, he hurts her?”
“There is no guarantee, Frances, that he won’t hurt her, no matter what course of action we take.”
Or do not take.
The unspoken words hung on humid air.
Every day, Frances thought, James must chose between action and inaction, liberation and imprisonment. Life and death.
“Why isn’t Mr. Lodoun lodging the writ?” she asked, throat tight.
“Because the investigation would reveal that he’s Mrs. Clarring’s lover.”
“You were my lover,” Frances reasoned, the heat of his lips and his sex and the vulnerability of women squeezing her chest.
“It wasn’t in Lodoun’s best interests to reveal that information; had he done so, the judge would have dismissed your trial.”
And Frances would have been turned over to the custody of her son. Just as Rose Clarring could be turned over to her husband.
A prisoner for the rest of her life.
“Will not an investigation—regardless of who is her barrister—reveal that Mrs. Clarring and Mr. Lodoun are lovers?”
“If so, we will just have to work that much harder.”
There was no certainty inside James’s voice.
But he always won, Frances thought. But he had not won in her dream.
“What will they do,” Frances asked, “after you liberate her?”
Rose Clarring would still be married to another man.
“What you and I did”—hard fingers dug into the softness of her hips—“after you were liberated.”
Frances tightened her arms. “Is love enough, James?”
“More binding than gold, Frances.”
Happiness should not be painful.
Raising her head, she kissed the corner of his mouth, stubbly with a morning beard. “Where is Mr. Lodoun?”
James turned his face into hers and kissed the indentation between her nostril and cheek, his lips soft, the surrounding skin a prickling abrasion. “Procuring an affidavit.”
Cold, stark images flashed behind her lids.
Jack Lodoun clutching a burgundy leather satchel, eyes glittering like purple ice. Jack Lodoun dripping water, eyes jet-black with loss.
“Come into our home, James,” Frances urged.
Where there was no pain.
Body shifting . . . bed dipping . . . James reached for the nightstand.
“I prepared myself earlier,” Frances said.
With the lubrication that her body no longer produced.
Had Jack Lodoun not knocked on their door, she would now be filled with James and sound asleep in his arms.
Unaware that a woman had been imprisoned, simply because she was a woman.
James loved Frances until their two sexes became one. Frances held James until their bodies became two, one man and one woman.
She must soon let him go, but not yet.
Threading her fingers through his sweat-dampened hair, she asked: “What did Mr. Lodoun do when you told him about your wife’s death?”
James tasted her lashes. “He cried.”
The tears James had once said barristers did not cry, but which James had cried after the trial when he had filled her body so full she had overflowed with his love.
“Silently,” she whispered.
Like a cleansing summer rain.
But not all summer gales were gentle: Rain destroyed as well as replenished.
James’s muscles tensed underneath her fingers, readying to leave her so that he could prepare for a court session he did not believe he would win. “Yes.”
Chapter 34
“If this isn’t a matter of life or death, I’ll—” A sexagenarian man—white nightshirt tucked into black trousers; head covered by a blue nightcap—appeared through the opening door; he stopped short upon glimpsing Jack’s face. A thin lip curled in recognition. “The master and mistress are not at home.”
Clearly he had read the papers.
“If they love their daughter”—Jack stuck his foot into the closing door; he had long ago lost the ability to be hurt by the emotions of men—“they are at home.”
“Come back in the morning”—the door blocked the butler; his voice snaked through the crack—“and I’ll ask if they’ll see you.”
Four waterlogged bongs permeated the rain.
The sun had risen fifteen minutes earlier. But the rain blocked the sun.
“Their daughter has been abducted,” Jack said brutally. “If they love Rose, they will see me now.”
The door swung wide, sucking in rain and cold. “How would the likes of you know about Mrs. Clarring?”
The way to the parents lay through the butler.
“Because I am the man who made Rose Clarring an adulteress,” he said bluntly.
The butler—Jack judged him to be in his early sixties; his eyes were sharp and clear—assessed Jack for long seconds before stepping aside. “Come in.”
Jack stepped over the threshold.
“Stay on the mat,” the butler tersely instructed, as if Jack were an errant five-year-old boy instead of a forty-four-year-old man who was a member of Parliament. “I won’t have you mucking up my floors.”
Jack did not underestimate the power of a butler: He stayed on the mat.
The house that Rose had grown up in was not rich, but it was prosperous.
A gaslit chandelier sputtered overhead; teardrop shadows splotched the oak floor.
Back ramrod straight, the butler hurried up graceful oak stairs and disappeared into blackness.
A muffled knock climbed down the steps; it was chased by muted voices.
A man in his late fifties and a woman in her early fifties hurried down the stairs, flapping shades of gray turning into brown velvet and pink silk night robes.
Bare feet padded across the oak floor.
Rose had inherited the color of her mother’s hair, Jack thought, chest tightening. But she had inherited her father’s eyes.
Cornflower blue blazed with fear that erupted into anger at sight of Jack. “What the devil do you mean knocking up my household in the middle of the night?”
“Sam, hush.” Pale blue eyes snagged Jack’s gaze. “You told Giles that our daughter has been abducted. That’s impossible, sir: I dropped her off in front of her house at four.”
Twelve hours earlier.
“Three men apprehended her before she made it to her door,” Jack said.
“If you saw men taking my daughter,” Susan Davis said forth-rightly, “why didn’t you stop them?”
“I didn’t see it,” Jack said. “Her housekeeper did.”
“My daughter isn’t a rich woman, Mr. Lodoun.” Masculine censure pummeled Jack. “Who would abduct her?”
Jack held Susan Davis’s gaze. “Her husband.”
“How would the housekeeper know”—pale blue eyes searched Jack’s gaze—“if it was Jonathon?”
There were no pictures of Jonathon Clarring inside Rose’s home, her gaze said. Nor had Jonathon Clarring’s likeness appeared in the papers.
“I saw Rose in his house,” Jack said flatly.
“And why shouldn’t she be in his house?” Samuel Davis challenged. “It’s her home.”
Shadow flickered inside Susan Davis’s eyes.
“Where did you see her, Mr. Lodoun?” she asked quietly.
“She was standing in a window. On the second floor.” Jack forcibly blocked the vision of Rose. “Looking down at me.”
“And you just assumed he abducted her?” Samuel Davis jibed. “Is that the only evidence you have?”
“Mr. Davis, I am assuming nothing: The housekeeper witnessed your daughter’s abduction,” Jack countered. “When I knocked, no one would answer the door.”
“It’s four in the morning: What do you expect?”
“It was nine in the evening.”
“Rose is Jonathon’s wife,” Samuel Davis returned. “Why would he abduct her?”
“Because he is her husband,” Susan Davis replied, her eyes filling with a woman’s knowledge rather than knowledge of the law. “And because he can. Can’t he, Mr. Lodoun?”
Jack would not lie.
“Yes,” he said bluntly.
Women had few rights; wives even fewer.
Pain took away the blue in her eyes. “My daughter knew this was a possibility when she left him, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
The price of passion.
“Were you having an affaire with her before the trial?” Susan Davis asked.
Before Rose had left Jonathon Clarring.
“No.”
“Did you seduce her?”
“Of course he seduced her,” Samuel Davis said contemptuously. “How else would Rose have anything to do with this man?”
Jack ignored the father and focused on the mother.
He thought of Rose’s needs that had drawn her to him. He thought of his needs that had drawn him to Rose.
“She’s my lover, Mrs. Davis,” Jack said.
And he ached to hold her.
“Yes,” Susan Davis said after long seconds, “I see.”
“As do I,” Samuel Davis remarked; he draped a brown velvet- covered arm across Susan Davis’s pink silk-clad shoulders. “Come along, Susan. We’ll look in on them later today: Everything will be fine.”
“Sam, please,” Susan Davis said to her husband. To Jack, she asked, “Why are you here, Mr. Lodoun?”
“You and Rose went shopping.”
“We went to Whiteley’s,” she confirmed.
They had been together from eleven in the morning until four in the evening, the housekeeper had said.
“You must have talked about many things,” Jack said neutrally.
The man who was her husband. The man who was her lover.
“Yes.”
Susan Davis did not volunteer the topics they had discussed, guarding well her daughter’s confidence.
“In a few hours James Whitcox”—the anger with which Jack had lived for three years fluttered inside his stomach—“is going to petition the Queen’s Bench for a writ of habeas corpus. In order to do so, he must present proof that Rose would not voluntarily return to the home she shared with Jonathon Clarring. Will you sign an affidavit, Mrs. Davis, that Rose would not of her own free will return to her husband?”
“Absolutely not,” shot down Jack’s spine. Samuel Davis reiterated: “I absolutely forbid it. There’s no need to ‘liberate’ our daughter. Jonathon is our son-in-law; he’s not going to hurt Rose.”
Light and shadow flickered inside Susan Davis’s eyes.
“Do you know that for a fact, Mr. Davis?” Jack challenged, deliberately fueling Susan Davis’s doubt. “That your son-in-law is not going to harm your daughter?”
“A man cannot abduct his wife,” Samuel Davis returned. “They are one in the eyes of God. Jonathon vowed to love and cherish Rose. Susan, this man made our little girl an adulteress. I know what you said earlier, but you’re wrong. This man cannot make Rose happy. He’s jealous because she’s chosen Jonathon over him. Let it be.”
Susan Davis closed her eyes.
“You are the last person, Mrs. Davis,” Jack pressed, “who talked to your daughter.”
“This is for Rose and Jonathon to work out, Susan,” Samuel Davis adjured.