Colonel Magnus Brightwall peered into the cage in which his wife was being held. His eyes seemed bright as windows in the gloom.
He found her at once.
Alexandra’s breathing had gone shallow. She was sorely tempted to duck, but she refused to allow her gaze to drop from his. Damned if she would ever appear abject before him. Even as her heart pummeled away inside her.
She vividly recalled her very first sight of him almost five years ago, standing amid his luggage in the foyer of her family home. In the blazing light of noon his shadow had fallen nearly entirely across the circular marble expanse, like a giant compass needle.
He turned to the warden. “I assume she told you she was my wife.”
By rights, one would expect such an imposingman’s voice to boom like a cannon. But it was an elegant, smoky-edged bass. The first words he had ever said to her wereA pleasure, Miss Bellamy, just after her father had introduced them.
Never had the word “pleasure” sounded so profound.
The warden’s Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed.
“It’s... it’s... just that so many of them claim to be your wife, Colonel Brightwall, we took it quite for granted she was lying. They all lie. About everything.”
“Coorrr, look at thesizeof ’im!” Agnes whispered gleefully. “Ye’re justfullof surprises, Alexandra.Brightwallthe Beast hisself.”
Alexandra stared at him. Her mind was static. She felt as though she’d never learned how to form words. Her heart was now beating so hard the blood rang in her ears.
“Let her out.” Brightwall’s voice was calm.
The warden cleared his throat. “Colonel Brightwall. As a man all too familiar with bureaucracies, surely you understand we have a formal process. I fear we cannot just allow an inmate to stroll out of the...”
His ability to speak apparently evaporated when Brightwall fixed upon him an expression of scathing amazement.
“The process is this, sir.” He said it almost tenderly. It was the tone one might use to administer last rites. “You unlock the cell. I depart with my wife. Her name is forever struck from your rolls,thereby also eliminating the record of the appallingly grave error made in incarcerating her. Do you require further clarification?”
“Brrr. Has anyone else’s nips gone hard?” Agnes murmured.
The warden shook himself out of the trance of Brightwall’s icy gaze and pivoted. The keys frantically jingled in his now-trembling hand. He stabbed at the keyhole and missed for a few torturous seconds.
Finally it fitted in.
The fateful clunk was heard as the cell door unlocked.
Everyone exhaled.
Alexandra surreptitiously pressed clammy palms against her skirt and stood from her spot on the floor. Black spots scudded in front of her eyes and she nearly swayed. She took a last long, deep breath of fetid prison air, gathering courage for another kind of ordeal. She knew she would never forget the smell.
The warden stepped aside so she could exit and then at once slammed the cell door and turned the key.
And for the first time in five years, she tipped her head back to take in the dizzying view that was her husband.
He’d always seemed to her hacked from granite in stark, almost brutal, lines: a jaw made of severe, hard angles, a bold nose, battlement cheekbones, legs like pillars, a shoulder span nearly twice the width of her. A few tiny pinprick scars were scattered in the hollow of his cheeks. Another thin, white scar bisected a thick, dark eyebrow. He had survived both illness and combat.
When she’d first met him, she’d been unable to decide whether he was ugly or magnificent.
But even in the gloom of Newgate, he looked indestructible.
I do think we’ll suit, Alexandra, he’d said gently, the day he’d proposed.
Two months after they’d met.
He had brushed his lips across her knuckles.
She was fairly certain he was seething now. It was difficult to tell. He excelled at cool inscrutability.