Night in Eden by Candice Proctor Read Free Book Online Page B

back, eluding the next blow. "This is not amusing, Bryony. Stop it."
    "Amusing!" Bryony gripped the wood with both hands now. "Is it not amusing that I sit at home, trying to comfort your heartbroken little girl and growing big with your child, while you're out gambling away what's left of our money and satisfying your needs with the villagers' wives?"
    She let loose with another swing. He sidestepped it nimbly. "Enough, Bryony."
    "Enough, Oliver?" She swung again. "Enough?"
    She was aiming for his shoulder. But when he tried to duck the blow, somehow his head got in the way. The stick caught him just above the ear with a sickening clunk. He reeled back, dizzy. It was only then that Bryony realized how dangerously close they'd come to the edge of the cliff.
    "Oliver!" she screamed, throwing away the stick and reaching out to grab him. But he jerked away, unwilling to let her touch him.
    And toppled backward into space, toward the crashing waves and dark, treacherous rocks far below.
     
    "You are fortunate the authorities have decided to try you on the lesser charge of manslaughter," said Felix Fraser, brushing absently at some grains of snuff on his bulging waistcoat. "If they were to find you guilty of murdering your husband, they would burn you alive."
    Beneath his watchful gaze, the woman seated on the hard-backed chair before him maintained an unflinching, awful composure. But she couldn't hide the terror that flickered in the depths of her dark brown eyes.
    They were in the small, stone-walled room the prison reserved for the use of lawyers and their clients. It was relatively clean, and the fire burning on the open hearth was enough to chase away the worst of the cold and damp. But nothing could keep out the stench of the prison around them. The air was foul with the smell of filth and rot and despair.
    After three months in this hellhole, Bryony Wentworth looked more like a Billingsgate doxy than the niece of Sir Edward Peyton of Peyton Hall. Her dark hair was dull and unkempt, her dress stained and ragged and pulling tightly over a stomach swelled big with child. From behind her skirts peeped another child, a big-eyed girl with dirty blond hair and a finger that never left her solemn little mouth. It was something Felix could never approve of, this business of throwing a woman's children into prison with her. But the child looked healthier than her mother, and Felix suspected the woman was going without food herself to feed her daughter.
    "The penalty for manslaughter is only hanging," Felix said, wishing the little girl would stop staring at him like that. "Because of your... ah... delicate condition, the Crown will need to put off the execution until after the baby is born, which means that the sentence will likely be transmuted to an order for transportation."
    "Transportation?"
    "Aye. To Botany Bay. It might be for fourteen years, but seven is more likely."
    For a moment she looked relieved. But then a new fear must have struck her. "They—they will let me take Madeline, won't they?" she asked, clutching the little girl to her tightly, as if someone had already appeared to snatch the child from her arms.
    "We can apply." Felix debated with himself, then decided it would be best not to raise the woman's hopes.
    "Although I must warn you that they do not often allow it."
    "But you're talking as if I've already been convicted."
    Felix shrugged. "Not much doubt of that. There is this female who was a witness..." He frowned and picked up a paper from the litter he had spread out on the battered old table before him. "Flory Dickens, that's her name. And then there's the men from the village who spent the night looking for your husband. Why you went and announced what you'd done is more than I will ever understand." He gathered the papers together and thrust them into his worn leather satchel. "Still, I suppose if people were not foolish, I would be out of business."
    "Oliver was always a strong swimmer," she said