Page 1 of Liaison with the Champagne Count
Prologue
February 5th, 1852
Emma Greyville-Luce was acutely aware she’d survived the night due—quite literally—to the turn of a card. Thanks to whist and a whim, she was sitting in the comfort of Mrs Parnaby’s parlour, clutching a warm teacup, a blanket draped about her shoulders, ushering in the chilly February morningalive, something several others, including her husband, could not lay claim to. Garrett was dead. Keir was dead. Adam was dead. All three lost to the flood. She should be dead, too.
Her mind whirred nonstop with those two realisations coupled with the horror of the last seven hours and the narrowness of her escape. By the slimmest of margins, she’d evaded the raging torrent that had been the River Holme sweeping down Water Street, angry and rapacious at one o’clock that morning.
One choice made differently and she, Antonia, and Fleur would have been swept away with their husbands, but Emma never could say no to a hand of whist. Thank goodness she hadn’t started declining tonight. It would have been easy enough to turn down Mrs Parnaby’s invitation to play after supper and take her leave with Garrett. She very nearly had. After all, in seven years of marriage, she’d spent very few nights without him and he’d been ready for bed, citing the need for an early evening because of a morning meeting with the clothiers to discuss a joint venture. That venture was what had brought Garrett and his two friends to Holmfirth. But tonight, Emma had not done as she ought. She’d stayed behind at Mrs Parnaby’s and begged Antonia and Fleur to stay with her to make up the foursome needed for whist.
Lady Luck had smiled broadly on her. Emma had just claimed the last trick needed for the rubber when the warning had gone up the street:‘The embankment’s breached! The river’s in Water Street!’
Fear had seared through her at the words. Water Street: where they’d rented cottages for the duration of their stay. Water Street: where Garrett, Adam, and Keir had returned to seek their beds hours ago.
The women had raced to Mrs Parnaby’s lace-curtained windows and peered futilely into the night. Even at the advantage of their slight elevation, they could see nothing in the dark. But what they couldn’t see, they couldhear. One might have mistaken the water for the howling of wind. It was the most malevolent sound Emma had ever heard; a churning, rushing, swirling, crunching foe she could not see filled the night, everywhere and nowhere all at once.
‘We’ll be safe here,’ Mrs Parnaby had said. ‘We’re back far enough from the river and away from the centre of town.’ Their hostess had meant to be consoling but, in those panic-filled moments, Emma had not wanted to be safe. She’d wanted to be with Garrett. She’d run for the door, determined to throw herself into the night, to make her way back to Water Street, to Garrett, the river of terror ravaging Holmfirth be damned. It had taken both Antonia and Fleur to pull her from her folly.
‘It is too late to warn them,’ Fleur had reasoned with characteristically blunt logic, her own face ashen.
‘They are strong men, they can take care of themselves,’ Antonia had offered with her unequivocal optimism.
‘We’ll go help once the water has settled and there’s less chance of us being another set of people in need of rescue ourselves.’ Mrs Parnaby had been all bustling practicality, and Emma had needed to settle for that.
It was the longest night of Emma’s life, filled with an uncustomary sense of helplessness for a woman used to being in charge. The morning brought no joy, only a renewal of the fear that had dogged Emma in the hours until dawn. The four women were able to pick their way through the wreckage to the Rose and Crown inn in hopes of lending a hand and hearing news. Emma gasped at the sight of a dead cow mired in the muck and turned her head away, but there was no escape from the devastation.
Morning light hid nothing, disguised nothing. Daylight only served to emphasise how futile any effort to go out sooner would have been. Waters had receded, leaving sucking mud and mangled machinery behind, murderous clues as to just how malevolent the angry waters had been and how strong. The waters that had broken the Bilberry Reservoir and overpowered the embankment had been forceful enough to demolish the mills that lined the river, feeding its fury by devouring machinery and vast quantities of soil.
At the Rose and Crown, the women put themselves to work, serving hot drinks and porridge to those who’d been brought in, wet, exhausted, and as hungry for news of family and loved ones as they were for porridge after a long night of fear, even as new fears began to add to their worries. Many were homeless, many had escaped with only the clothes on their backs. The places they’d worked—the mills—were destroyed. There were no jobs to go back to, no income to collect.
She was lucky, Emma repeated to herself as she served porridge. Other than the things she’d brought with her for the visit, her belongings were safe and dry far south of here in her home in Surrey, Oakwood Manor. Her home was safe. Her belongings were safe. She could leave here. She and Garrett could go home, could leave all of this heartache and devastation as soon as he walked through the door of the Rose and Crown.
Her gaze darted to the door yet again, her mind willing him to walk in as if she could conjure him out of thin air; the dark beard threaded with silver, the broad, bluff build of him draped in his greatcoat, the dark eyes that could melt an honest woman with desire and manage a dishonest man with a stare. She caught Antonia’s gaze on her and they exchanged encouraging smiles, trying to lift one another up. Emma told herself no news was good news, especially when the news they were hearing wasn’t.
There’d been tales of neighbours watching whole families swept away in the violent current. Near Hollowgate, Aner Bailey had watched his wife and two children carried away while he clung to a timber, he himself pushed downstream to the Turnpike Road. Joseph Hellawell on Scarfold had been rescued from a beam on the top story of his home but his entire family had been trapped below in the bedroom and drowned.
As the morning wore on, hope receded with the waters. Eyewitness accounts were coming in and a clearer understanding of what had happened last night was taking shape. The whole Holme valley had suffered enormous loss. Bodies were being recovered in places miles from Holmfirth in the towns of Mirfield, Armitage Fold, and Honley. Fleur was exceedingly anxious, Emma noted. The colour had not returned to her face and her hand strayed repeatedly to the flat of her belly when she thought no one was looking. Was Fleur expecting? Her husband, Adam, was Garrett’s age, in his upper fifties. For him, it would be a late-in-life child. Emma sent up a prayer,God, let the men be all right.She’d uttered those words already times beyond count. For a woman who counted everything, that was worrisome.
George Dyson, the coroner, arrived shortly after ten, asking for a word in private. The man looked tired, and she could only imagine the horror he’d seen. These were his neighbours, lifelong friends that were being pulled from the depths of mill races and ponds. Emma gestured nervously for Antonia and Fleur to join her in the Rose and Crown’s small private parlour.
She was aware of Antonia gripping her hand as George Dyson cleared his throat, the sound a universal portent of impending bad news. She braced herself, her inner voice whispering,Be strong, Fleur and Antonia will need you.
But no amount of bracing could protect her against the devastation of the coroner’s words. ‘Lady Luce, Mrs Popplewell, Mrs Griffiths, I wish I had better news. I will be blunt. Water Street didn’t stand a chance. The river hit it from the front and the side, absolutely obliterating the buildings.’ He paused and swallowed hard. ‘James Metterick’s family, and the Earnshaws, are all gone, their homes destroyed.’ Homes that had been next to theirs, Emma thought. The Mettericks and the Earnshaws were the clothiers Garrett was supposed to meet with. Lead began to settle in her stomach and yet there was still a sliver of hope.
‘But I heard James Metterick survived,’ Emma protested against the news. She’d clung to that piece of news all morning since the moment it had been reported. Metterick was bruised and battered but he was alive. He’d been at his Water Street residence, and he’d survived. Surely, it was possible Garrett had as well...
George Dyson shook his head, his tone gentle. ‘We believe the bodies of your husband and his friends have been recovered, Lady Luce. Your husband was found in the Victoria Mill along with others. Iamsorry.’ Emma felt her knees buckle. Mrs Parnaby was there with a chair, helping her to sit and murmuring consolation. But her world was a discordant blur. Somewhere amid her own disbelief and grief she heard Antonia wail, saw her friend sink to her knees. There was a burst of outrage from Fleur followed by plate shattering against the wall. Emma managed to rise, managed to get to Antonia on the floor, and then the three of them were in each other’s arms, supporting and comforting one another amid their own grief. How was this possible? Garrett, Keir and Adam, all three of them gone? It was impossible, a bad dream from which she’d awake any moment. Only she didn’t.
The bad dream continued. The next hours were surreal. There’d been a need to have them officially identify the bodies and perhaps she’d needed to do it, to have the closure of seeing Garrett one last time, horrible as it was. The bloated, drowned body wasn’t her vibrant husband; that man had long since departed the corpse she identified.
George Dyson stood beside her outside the makeshift morgue. ‘If it is any consolation, Lady Luce, I don’t believe there was much suffering. It would have been fast. The looks frozen on people’s faces have been those of confusion and disbelief. They died before they understood what hit them.’
He was trying to be kind, but she was in no mood for it. Some of her usual fire, her usual determination seeped through the numbness that had sustained her since the news. ‘Did my husbandlookconfused?’ Emma snapped. He’d looked fierce, as if he’d battled the river with everything in him. ‘My husband is—’Is. She couldn’t use that word any more.
She swallowed back the thickness that settled in her throat, threatening to destroy whatever aplomb she had left. ‘My husband was a fighter, the most determined man I’ve ever known.’ Garrett had fought for every success he’d had, climbed his way up an impossible social ladder to earn a baronetcy, and he’d fought for her: Emma Greyville, the gin heiress of England, when his family of grown children from his first marriage had argued vehemently that a newly minted baronet with a fortune could do better than the daughter of a gin magnate. He should aim higher; they’d said to her face when Garrett had announced their engagement. He’d stared down his sons and their wives with a laugh. ‘Higher than love? Whatever would that be?’
She’d remember those words always. They were carefully tucked away beside her other memories; how he’d looked upon her with that love on their wedding day, how he’d taken her to France for their honeymoon and shown her the vineyard in Champagne he’d bought her as a wedding gift. The best weeks of her life had been spent at that vineyard. It was their place, their retreat from the world. What she wouldn’t give to be there again with Garrett beside her, walking the rows of grapes, sampling vintages.
Tears threatened. She turned from George Dyson and found Fleur and Antonia waiting for her, their own ordeals etched on their faces. They embraced each other once again, holding each other up. ‘What do we do now?’ Antonia whispered, her face tear-streaked, her earlier optimism gone, replaced with pale despair.
