Finding Bess Read online

  Now, as she stared at the stranger in the mirror, she found herself linking Paul’s face to the statement. And wondering if he, too, had seen his marriage in such disreputable terms. Could this be the reason for the sudden shift of temperament? Did he see her as the foundation, the brood bitch, for a new dynasty within the Cornwall empire? Certainly his faintly disapproving, almost condescending acceptance of the promotion suggested ... something.

  And as his I-control-things-here-bitch flashed through her mind, to join that part of her earlier thought in a picture of sudden, vivid obscenity, she bent over the sink and released the roiling contents of her pained, convulsing tummy.

  Had Paul been cracking up right from the start? But how could she not have noticed? No, she thought, scrubbing her face and teeth. It must be pressures of work, something to do with his new responsibilities. She would speak to her father; he could intervene. Dover Warren Cornwall could fix anything.

  Which was why her first words to her returning husband had been, “Paul, darling, don’t let this upset you so much. I’ll speak to Father. Surely he can fix things ... make some changes.”

  “Changes?”

  And the light voice she had so often thought soft screeched in her ears, the cadence that of a spoiled child having a tantrum. Then she could hardly hear at all as open-handed slaps drove her head from side to side and back again. Much less could she focus on the letter he wrenched from an inner suit jacket pocket and thrust in her face.

  “Do you think he’s going to change this?” the voice raged in a tinny whine, and through the tears she caught words like “accounting review” and “audit”.

  “Well, bitch?”

  But she couldn’t answer, only stare through tear-smudged, puffy eyes at the madman who faced her, his eyes ablaze with anger and rage. No, worse than that, with blatant hatred and contempt. Evil ... evil and more. Obscene.

  “And he can’t fix this, either,” the deathwind voice screeched as one clenched fist followed the other into the rounded softness of her already painful stomach.

  His blows bent her double, stole her breath, then smashed her upright again so the process could begin again. And with the progress of the beating, Paul's language became stronger, more hostile, more filled with hatred.

  When his rage could no longer keep her upright, Bess collapsed to the carpet, her face branded with slap marks on both sides, her eyes blinded by tears, her stomach a well of roiling, heaving pain. Then the final degradation had begun. She felt herself being hauled to her hands and knees, was only vaguely aware of her long, loose skirt being thrown above her back, her panties being torn from her body as if made of paper. But she was too, too aware of the violation that followed, a violation punctuated, as her beating had been, by curses, by hatred.

  And by her own self-loathing, a deep sensation of having been treated as filth, of having been turned to filth, of being filth. And it went on until she thought he, and it, would never, ever, stop.

  Even when he finally left her, kicking out in a final gesture of his contempt for her, screaming for the millionth time his disgust that she had dared to spawn a female child instead of the son he demanded, Bess couldn’t have moved if she’d tried. She remained crouched there on the home-office carpet, a spent, discarded brood-bitch in her own mind as well as his, barely noticing that Paul had marched to the desk and yanked a gun from a drawer.

  It was only when he raged, “I should use this on you,” that she peered upward to catch a blurred image of him standing before her, the weapon aimed at the air between them.

  “But at least I’ve had some satisfaction out of you,” he continued, his shoe crushing her panties. “Even if you always were the lousiest wife in the world.”

  He didn't mean wife, he meant something much more graphic, and the words washed over her, adding another layer of filth. Her eyes widened, or tried to, at what he said next.

  “But your old man won’t get his satisfaction,” Paul snarled, pressing the gun's muzzle against his forehead. “He’ll have to live with your brat in my name, but he won’t have me to take the rap for the rest. I’ll see him in...”

  The muzzle blast drowned his final words even as it drove Bess that decisive step toward merciful oblivion, one from which she emerged in the sterility of a private hospital room – no longer a mother-to-be, no longer a wife, no longer a woman, and barely still a person.

  Two years, two months and seventeen days ago; a thousand lifetimes ago. Shaking her uncombed hair, she stared at the blank computer screen as the pain and nausea magically left her middle.

  The pain gone, but a vestige of the other remaining, a vestige she had never managed to erase from her feeling of self. Six months of serious counseling, regular visits to a skilled therapist ... but always that vestige remained with her, a part of her. Filth. Sometimes the feeling was so strong she could taste it, smell it... Enough! If the therapy had done nothing else, it had taught her that dwelling on the past only led into an increasingly rapid downhill spiral of mood that could put her back in the hospital.

  Far better to expend the energy on something positive. She had half a book to write and a deadline to meet for a short story. She had a shower and a warm computer waiting, a maiden pleading to be rescued from certain ravishment. And she really ought to shave her legs, she thought, smiling at the absurdity of that last thought.

  But when she emerged from the shower, her mane of auburn hair now a sleek stream of color that would all too soon begin springing back to its natural unruliness, the only thing she could think of was that damn book cover and poem and what, if anything, she might do about it.

  To do nothing was unthinkable. To fall into Geoffrey’s trap was far, far worse. It was only too obvious that he had decided the time had come for them to have some serious changes in their relationship. He couldn’t realize, of course, how totally impossible that was. And he mustn’t!

  Bess sat staring at the computer screen, which stared back accusingly, mocking her, almost daring her to reach out and hit the start switch.

  Suddenly infuriated by her computer's smartass stance, she punched the on button, stabbing at it fiercely with one unvarnished nail. And when the start-up nonsense was over, she thumbed the trackball until she could, yet again, click on Geoffrey’s website.

  Ignoring the book cover, she read the poem. Then read it again, all the while feeling the surge of adrenaline building inside her, feeling the anger and now consciously feeding it. How dare he invade her privacy like this? There would be dozens, perhaps hundreds of people – other authors, her peers, damn it! – who could read between the lines and know without question which Bess Geoffrey had aimed his poisoned cursor at. The inclusion of her “bodice-ripper” cover was a punctuation mark, an exclamation point. Overkill!

  The majority of her colleagues knew her as Bess. She even used Bess in her email address, a get-back aimed at her father. While her mother had named her for a favorite aunt (and the Noyes poem), her father told everyone she was named for the Queen of England, and he'd never called her anything other than Elizabeth. The pen name had been her editor's suggestion; Carson for her mother's maiden name, Elizabeth because it was more syllabic.

  Then there was Geoffrey and Bess's mutual fascination with The Highwayman, well known because they'd discussed it on a couple of authors’ links, hoping to find kindred spirits.

  She felt the galloping refrain of the poem’s cadence begin to fill her skull and pulse through her consciousness like some voodoo drum. Her nervous fingers spread lines of “a”s and “s”s and “z”s across the screen, causing her to vent curses at the damned machine as she then had to remove them before she could begin. And all the while, the refrain from his poem – no, her poem – throbbed with the intensity of a migraine behind her eyes.

  Until...

  Bess, the landlord’s daughter

  The landlord’s ...

  And she stalled, her mind suddenly blank. What was turquoise ... blue or green? It could have been pu
rple, for all the good the question did her, and the next thing she knew she was running to the bathroom and staring myopically into the mirror, her confused mind trying to find the proper color for what she saw.

  Her eyes, she decided, were the eyes of a deranged stranger, a stranger with shimmering auburn hair that streamed like a fiery curtain down past her shoulders. A stranger whose flushed cheeks were those of one of her heroines, about to reach the ecstasy of climax in the arms of a hero that looked too much like Geoffrey Barrett.

  Bess shook her head. Blue, green... what difference did it make? She turned away from herself, from the vision of herself, now dressed in scruffy, faded jeans and a worse T-shirt, then strode back into the office with fire in her eyes.

  Bess, the landlord’s daughter

  The landlord’s green-eyed daughter

  Stood straight and still at the window; the musket by her side

  Geoffrey Barrett’s a bit dim

  Hopelessly lost in his own whim

  Bess has nothing for such as him; slink back to your cave and hide.

  All of which took her what seemed like the entire day to work her way through, changing words, searching for the right cadence, the proper mix of scorn and contempt that would make him end this nonsense once and for all. She didn’t want a new, or different relationship with him; what they had was just fine, thank you very much. Ten thousand miles between them and never the need to meet as physical beings was about all she could handle just now.

  Just now. She found herself repeating those final two words like some foreign mantra, some alien sound combination that had driven the lyrics of The Highwayman – and her own attempt with it – out of her mind entirely.

  Just now...

  Bess shook her head violently, curls going everywhere. What on earth was she thinking? There was no “just now” about it. She had nothing to offer any relationship, any man. Except sorrow for them both, perhaps.

  “No!” She spat out the word like something that tasted bad.

  And manipulated the trackball to where her heroine waited so patiently for rescue. This, at least, she could handle. For some reason – one analyst had described it as unconscious therapy – Bess had no problem dealing with suicide, murder, rape, torture and degradation in her novels, which were actually infamous for the strength of her heroines in recovering from the trauma they suffered.

  Easy stuff, that. Easy enough to let a fictional character be captured by outlaws or savages, stripped, humiliated, forced to endure sexual torments that no woman should have to think about, much less endure. And then let that same woman find a brave, honest, handsome hero who could take her away from the inner demons, banish them, slay them, and then ride off into the sunset, heroine on his saddle, to a life happy ever after...

  But not herself! The violation, the shame of what she had endured at Paul’s hands was like a stigmata on her soul, and no amount of cleansing could ever make her fit for any man. The lousiest “wife” in the world, he’d called her. And meant it. Forget that he must have been quite insane at the time, perhaps even forget – although she knew she never, ever, could – the bestial way in which he'd used her at the end. The fact remained that Paul had been a man of some considerable expertise in sexual matters. He had to have been. He was thirty-five to her twenty-three when they married; he’d been all over the world in his work, would have had many women. Even if his remark had been meant only to hurt – and she was certain of that – it had held a ring of truth she couldn’t deny. Even though for her he was the first, it wasn’t as if she had gone into the marriage knowing nothing. She had known plenty, and the proof was, if nowhere else, in her novels.

  In one, she had even managed to contrive her heroine being forced into sexual congress while on the saddle of an outlaw’s horse. It hadn’t been rape, exactly. Surely difficult in such a position, but it could be done. Bess was positive in her own mind – and comments from readers had confirmed it – that both parties enjoyed themselves immensely.

  Writing brought her a good living, it was perhaps as therapeutic as the analyst had suggested, and despite all the blood and guts and rapine, it was inestimably, thoroughly, unarguably safe.

  When she'd fled to Colorado after her own ordeal and hospital treatment, her father had done his best to persuade her against it. New York, he had said, was the only place in the country worth living in. “Nothing in Colorado but horses and cows and mountains,” he'd said. And finally, faced with her determination and unable to budge her, he had relented with the prophetic, “You’ll be back before you know it; mark my words.”

  Well, she’d marked them all right. And now knew she would never go back to New York. Or, given a choice, to any other mega-city where everyone was a stranger at best and at the very least a potential threat.

  To be fair – and Bess had always considered herself a reasonably fair person – her father knew only about Paul’s suicide. The awful prelude to it was something only she knew. Shame had prevented her from revealing it, even to the high-powered bloc of analysts her father had brought in to help in her recovery.

  Damn! Enough of this wallowing in self-pity. She knew it didn’t work, seldom indulged because of that. Better to let something positive drive her emotions, and Geoffrey Barrett, bless his rotten sense of timing, had done just that.

  Once her own poetic contribution was finished, not exactly to her total satisfaction but there had to be limits to these things, she was on the phone to the delightfully gay young man who was her computer expert, website designer, and dear, safe friend.

  “This is Bess,” she said upon reaching his voice mail. Mouse – and if he had a proper name, Bess had never heard it – had a total disregard for conventional ways of doing things; if you wanted him, it was the voice mail or nothing, and it was impossible to tell if he was even there, because he used technology so well that he could be anywhere at all, despite calling back within ninety seconds.

  They exchanged the usual pleasantries, asked each other how their love lives were going. Bess lied, and, she thought, did it very well too; whether Mouse lied, she was never quite sure. Eventually, they got to the point.

  “Mouse, how difficult would it be for you to hack into somebody’s website and deposit something there? Without it being realized until it was too late, and without getting caught, of course.”

  “Hacking in is easy as pie, darling. Getting out is only marginally more difficult. Why? One of your many lovers hassling you? Turn him over to me, and when the mouse that roars gets through with him, he will bother you nevermore.”

  “Something like that. If I send you a little poem and the website address, would you be willing to try? I’d pay, of course.”

  “Not me, you wouldn’t. Not ever in matters d’amour. After all, darling, if the great lovers of the world don’t stand up for each other, then who’s going to? You just send over what I’ll need and leave it all in my furry little paws, although I will expect a detailed explanation sooner or later about what’s going on. Fair?”

  “Fair,” Bess agreed. But it wasn’t, and she knew it.

  So she fired up the computer, called up Geoffrey’s website, stared at the book cover, read the seemingly innocent poem, then allowed her indignation to build again, let it feed her emotions, fuel her fear and her anger.

  And, within a few minutes, felt much, much better.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Maybe he'd overdone it with the book cover, Geoffrey Barrett thought. He had pictured Bess laughing at his crafty modification. But, in retrospect, it had been a stupid idea. “A guy-thing,” his friend Ida would say, and she'd be spot-on.

  The dulcet tones of Loreena McKennitt floated like bubbles through the air of Geoffrey's office. Her Celtic music usually provided a delightful background, especially when he worked at his computer, but on this late Tasmanian evening he was only marginally aware of it.

  He was sitting, staring at his own website on the screen before him, long fingers stroking his strong chin, his pale
eyes alight with a mixture of excitement and annoyance. Shaking his head to try and clear it after an eighteen-hour day, he looked absently out the window beside him, gazing into the darkness as if it could tell him something.

  But when he looked back again, the poem was still there, a contemptuous reply to the one he’d sweated blood to create only days before. So engrossed was he that for once McKennitt’s version of The Highwayman played all the way through without drawing his usual grunt of annoyance whenever her emphasis on some words didn’t match his own. He even missed the part where a section of the poem had been deleted from the otherwise poignant song.

  It wasn’t until his CD player stopped of its own accord that he twisted his mobile mouth in a tight grin, then shot a glare at the computer screen, a glare that would have had a living miscreant shaking in terror.

  And when he finally spoke, talking as much to himself as to the invisible, distant creator of the second poem, it was in a voice reminiscent of gravel inside a tin can.

  “Gotcha!” he said vehemently. But the laugh that followed was at total variance with the fierceness of the face from which it came. It was a rich, vibrant laugh, a laugh so filled with good humor, so genuinely happy, that any onlooker would have been hard put not to join in.

  Tipping his chair back as far it would go, he folded his arms across his chest, then reached out and idly clicked up the picture of Bess. Months ago he had downloaded the picture from her website so he could bring it up from his own computer menu. Folding his arms again, he just sat and stared ... and stared.

  His eyes hardly moved, but his mind, by comparison, seemed impossible to stop. It was, he decided for about the thousandth time, ridiculous in the extreme to find himself falling in love with a woman he knew only from electronic communications and a single picture.

  “And that’s putting it mildly,” he muttered. “Ridiculous is the tamest of words. Let’s try idiotic, insane. I haven’t only got wallabies loose in the top paddock; they’re full grown ‘roos and there are thousands of the buggers, all hopping in different directions.”