“You’ll get yours, bitch,” Wilson growled, so only she might hear. The quake to his voice and the widening of his eyes belied his faith in those words.
“Perhaps I will, but as I’m the bitch with the gun, I won’t be getting it from you.” With a confidence ready to flee over the distant cliffs at any moment, Rhiannon lowered the Manton, showed him her back, and walked away. “Your lease is terminated, Robert Wilson,” she tossed over her shoulder. “John, Jack, escort this vermin off the estate. If he steps onto any Pendeen-held property, he’s to be shot on sight.”
Two tall, broad footmen dressed in simple black and white livery strode past Rhiannon. She turned when she reached Josiah’s side and watched as they hooked Wilson beneath the arms and dragged him kicking and cursing to the empty hay wagon at the edge of the farmyard. They had him trussed and thrown into the wagon bed in a thrice. With a brief bow to Rhiannon, John and Jack hopped onto the back next to their prisoner. A short whistle from the wizened gnome of a driver set the team of draft horses in the traces into motion.
“I don’t like it, Your Grace.” Josiah stared after the wagon, his hand combing the wiry curls of his silver-grey beard.
“Which part?” Rhiannon handed the Manton off to one of the grooms and stepped into the hands of another as he helped her mount Selene. None too soon, either. Her legs, weak and wavy as water, had threatened to give way from the moment she’d fired that first shot. From atop her mare, the earth solidified beneath her. “The part where I threatened to shoot him or the part where he called me a bitch?”
“He what?” Josiah snatched the Manton from the groom and started after the wagon.
“Oh, for pity’s sake.” Rhiannon urged her mare forward and plucked the gun from her mines manager’s hands. “He’s not the first man to call me a bitch. I daresay, he won’t be the last.”
Her father’s faithful steward and friend, Josiah Thomas, had known her from infancy. He’d watched over her the nearly thirty-one years of her life, especially since her father’s death. He was protective of the girl she’d been. He was ferociously so of the duchess she’d become. Looking out for him settled her nerves and allowed her a moment to gather her wits. A moment she sorely needed.
“You’re a lady,” the young groom observed as he came to check the security of her boot in the stirrup. “The Duchess of Pendeen. He has no right to call you anything at all, ‘cept Your Grace.”
“Even this lad knows what’s proper,” Josiah grumbled as he alternated his gaze between the Manton in the crook of her arm and the wagon disappearing up the road.
“Yes, well,” Rhiannon adjusted her skirts over the pommel of her sidesaddle and took up the reins the groom handed her. “I didn’t threaten to shoot the lad’s tarrywags off, did I?”
The young groom grinned. “No, Your Grace. And I thank you.”
She handed him the Manton. “Reload it and bring it along. And don’t let Mr. Thomas near it, lest he decide to reopen season on some portion of Robert Wilson’s anatomy.”
At Josiah’s signal, another groom stepped in and began to inspect the girth and bridle on Rhiannon’s horse. The lad checked and rechecked every strap and buckle. After several minutes of such nonsense, Rhiannon had had enough.
“That will do, Davy. In spite of Mr. Thomas’s nanny tendencies, I am perfectly capable of sitting a horse.”
“Not even you can sit a horse when the tack has been cut,” Josiah declared as he waved Davy away and took over the inspection himself.
“It wasn’t cut. It was an accident, a simple accident.” Rhiannon told herself so every day. She had to.
“As you say, Your Grace.” Josiah spat, jammed his hat on his head, and crossed the yard to mount his horse.
She urged her horse toward Mrs. Wilson and her children.
“Should have killed him.” Young Bob stared at his mother’s injuries. He twisted a threadbare cap in his hands. “I wish you had.” His voice fell to a husky whisper and his eyes shone with unshed tears. “I wish I had.”
“If I had, I’d have to make an appointment with the magistrate, a dull old stick of a man who would natter at me for hours. If you had, you’d have to make an appointment with the rope. Quicker and far less dull, but still a bother.” She met his gaze and held it. “Your father isn’t worth all that trouble. Don’t you agree?”
He dragged his sleeve across his eyes. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“Meg,” she addressed the pale woman who gazed up the now empty road as if to make certain the source of her torment was truly gone. “You make a list of what you need in the way of repairs and supplies. I’ll have them sent down from Gorffwys Ddraig.” Rhiannon studied the half dozen children peering past their mother and elder brother. “And some food.”
“We’ve no money to pay for it, Your Grace.” Meg pushed the greying blonde hair away from her eyes. “Had no money for nigh on these six months.”
Rhiannon patted Selene’s neck to settle the mare’s nervous dancing in place. “We’ll settle it after the harvest.” A wordless communication passed between them. The woman was no older than herself, though she looked at least ten years her senior. Dressed in over-mended clothes, wearing the marks of her husband’s brutality, Meg Wilson still had her pride. The Duchess of Pendeen knew all too well, sometimes pride alone kept a woman going when life took everything else away. When men took everything else away.
“Come up to Gorffwys Ddraig tomorrow, lad.” Josiah drew his horse to a halt next to the wiry child so rudely thrust into manhood. “We’ll make a plan to right this farm and see you through the winter.”
Young Bob tugged his forelock and nodded.
In a dusty clatter of hooves and jingling tack, Rhiannon and her men put the Wilson farm behind them. They’d reached the main road and ridden over halfway across Pendeen’s vast holdings before anyone spoke again.
“Did those lamps from Mr. Davy’s arrive?” Rhiannon refused to dwell on the events of the past hour. It didn’t do to chew the same meat twice. She’d had a problem. She’d dispatched it to her satisfaction. Time to move on to the next. And there was always a next. In fact, there was one very big next. She’d had no luck in sweeping it from her mind, either.
“They did.” Josiah urged his gelding to keep pace with Selene. The towering gorse hedges on either side of the road blocked the sudden gusts that pushed in from the sea. The sky portended a coming storm, still far enough off for them to make it to Gorffwys Ddraig so long as they didn’t dawdle. “The miners don’t fancy them.”
“I don’t fancy digging men out after another explosion. I’ve studied his design. It’s sound. He sent the lamps to be tested and that’s what we’re going to do.” The walls of gorse subsided into walls of stone, walls low enough to reveal the hills on either side of the road dotted with grazing sheep. Spring lambs, nearly half-grown now, leapt and butted each other amongst the rocks and grass of the pastures. Rhiannon smiled at their play.
“Sent them at no charge?”
“Of course.”
Josiah snorted. “You are your father’s daughter.”
Rhiannon laughed. She and her father had their troubles when he was alive, but she’d truly mourned his death. At least, he had stayed. Even when she’d wished him gone, he’d stayed. The passage of time made it easier to remember his good qualities, and as for the bad… Well, dead loved ones didn’t make mistakes. Neither did absent ones. When they stayed absent. Now was not the time to revisit that particular mistake.
“He’ll be trouble, Your Grace.”
Rhiannon started. “Who, Josiah?”
“Wilson. He’ll not let his banishment stand. He’ll be back.”
“Perhaps.” Rhiannon suppressed a sigh of relief. She coaxed her mare into a trot as they turned into the open gates at the head of the drive to Pendeen’s sprawling ancestral pile. The rampant Pendeen dragons, poised in carved defiance on either side of the main gates, appeared nearly alive in the dappled sunlight. The trees in full leaf on either si
de blocked the light fading in the wake of the coming rain. It made for a long, cool ride—one fraught with memory, of dreams and nightmares. Yet, even with the things she’d rather forget, she loved this place, her home. The land, the village, the tenant farms, the mines and fields and pastures. The people. And the magnificent house coming into view as they topped the hill. She loved it all because it was hers. It was what she had made it and no man could take that from her. Not even the one man she’d hoped would at least try. If wishes were horses…
“No perhaps to it, Your Grace. Vermin like him tends to creep back in when you least expect it.” Josiah reined in his horse beside hers. The horses behind them stopped, as well.
She always paused here, at the crest of the drive, to drink in the sight of the ornate finial-topped turrets and ranks of lancet windows set into the bowed arches across the façade of Gorffwys Ddraig, Dragon’s Rest, the home of the Dukes of Pendeen for over six hundred years. Manicured lawns rolled down to meet lush gardens set before the house in a studied chaos that gave the appearance of barely trained wilderness. A wall of yew trees, planted by the de Waryn family’s Norman ancestors, stood at the edge of a ha-ha, blocking Gorffwys Ddraig from view until the last minute. The house itself, crafted of stone in hues of dun yellow and marbled white, sprawled across the shallow valley in an eerie array of castellated walls, covered walkways, and expansive parapets.
As a child, Rhiannon was frightened by the monstrous combination of medieval castle and gothic cathedral that was Gorffwys Ddraig. The one time she’d sought to explore it alone she’d become hopelessly lost. That night had not ended well. For anyone. At fourteen still very much a child, she’d become the mistress of the de Waryn family seat, and for the last seventeen years she’d had nothing but time to learn the house’s many secrets. She’d claimed every part of it, swept away the darkness and replaced it with light. Nos defendere nostra was the de Waryn family motto. We defend our own. She lived her life by it, even if no other de Waryn chose to do so.
“We’ve never had trouble ridding ourselves of vermin before, Josiah. I don’t intend to start now.” Rhiannon pressed her heel to Selene’s side and shifted her weight back in the sidesaddle as they started down the drive. They cleared the shade of the trees and turned toward the cobblestoned carriageway that led to the covered front portico.
“Even if it comes in a regiment of carriages?”
“What are you…” Rhiannon had been so caught up in the web of remembrance woven into the very walls of Gorffwys Ddraig, she had not seen the four crested carriages and baggage wagon lined up before the front doors of the house. Until it was too late.
He’d done it.
He’d actually done the one thing he’d vowed never in his life to do.
Damn him.
“Give me the gun, Dickie.” She thrust her hand back toward the groom to whom she’d handed over the Manton.
He’d no sooner placed it in her hand than Josiah made a grab for it. “Shooting Wilson is one thing, Your Grace. Shooting a peer of the realm is something else entirely.”
“Depends on the peer.” She tugged the fowling piece free and whistled Selene into a canter down the carriageway. Rhiannon ignored the startled shouts and clattering hooves that set Josiah and the others in pursuit. Footmen in two different sets of livery scattered out of the portico to avoid being run down. Fortunately, Tall William, one of her footmen, came down the steps in time to catch her as she slid from her sidesaddle. “Where is he?”
“Your Grace?” The footman frowned in confusion as he handed Selene off to a waiting stable boy. Swarming around them, under the direction of a sparrow of a man dressed in immaculate black, servants in blue and gold livery carted trunks and boxes from the carriages and wagon into the house. Josiah and the rest of her men rode under the portico, adding to the noise and chaos.
“Think before you go in there, Your Grace,” Josiah warned as he swung off his gelding and pushed through the crowd of horses and servants.
Rhiannon snorted and marched through the open double doors. She’d done nothing but think since the night he’d fled Cornwall like a thief in the night. Their wedding night.
“I beg your pardon, Your Grace.” Vaughn, who had been the butler at Pendeen long before the old duke’s death, hurried across the entrance hall. “I didn’t know what to do with…” His voice dropped even as he jerked his head in the direction of the first-floor landing, “Him.”
“Good afternoon, Your Grace,” said the very last man she ever expected to return to Cornwall. He deigned to offer her a brief inclination of his head.
With her hand on her hip and the Manton in the crook of her other arm, Rhiannon tilted her head up toward the sound of that voice. That voice. The tall man in the black Hessians, buff-colored buckskin breeches, and dark blue hunting jacket was unknown to her—save for the green eyes, the cleft in his chin, the dark mahogany hair still prone to curl at his nape, and that deep, starless night of a damned voice. She cleared her features of all expression and narrowed her eyes, all in aid of quieting the eruption of emotion roiling through her.
“What are you doing here, Dymi?” She bit back a curse at the husky catch in her throat.
A touch of condescending amusement crossed the sharp edges of his face. He rested his hand on the marble balustrade. “You wouldn’t come to London for duke season, so I’ve brought duke season to you.” His lips curled in a stoic half-smile. “You’re welcome.”
Chapter Three
With the abrupt force of cold water over a drunkard’s head, silence, blessed silence, descended over the roiling cacophony of the entrance hall. Endymion repressed the sigh of relief his body fought so violently to release. A Duke of Pendeen did not experience relief, and he certainly never displayed relief in public.
He let the quiet fill him, a skill he’d learned under his grandfather’s tutelage. In his determination to enter the house as if he’d never been away, he’d not noticed the massive medieval entrance hall. Until now. It had been changed. Or, at least, he believed it had. He had a vague idea of animal heads—dead eyes of stags, boar, wolves—staring at him from walls grey with smoke and ash above dingy oak paneling. The hunting trophies were gone. The walls had been whitewashed, the woodwork polished to a rich glow.
“Get out, whore, and take your bastards with you. There will never be a place for your sort here.”
The low, insistent clang of memories just out of reach had plagued him from the moment he’d crossed the river into Cornwall. Like the buzzing of bees angered by his intrusion where he had no business, the faint insistent hum of events he could not recall had crawled along his skin and filled his head nigh on to madness. His arrival at the Pendeen family seat had only made the howling specter of his amorphous nightmares worse.
He dug his thumbnail into his palm. The past had no place in the present. He’d made no attempt to retrieve those months before he’d been dragged away from this place and its haunting, faceless fears. Still, that voice, a voice he knew but didn’t know, reached out of the mist, ever seeking to claim him. Until he fixed his gaze on her, the single person in the stupefied multitude standing below him who refused to look away.
His own servants were trained to work quietly and efficiently so as not to intrude on Endymion’s ordered life. The servants in Cornwall had no such compunction. Apparently, the arrival of a duke gave cause for a great deal of shouting, a great deal of running about, and the sort of chaos he’d only endured at a ball when a young lady fainted dead away at Endymion’s request for a dance. A request he’d only made because the hostess, an elderly countess with a particularly shrill voice, had insisted. The ensuing riot had sped his departure from the ball, considerably shortening his scheduled one-hour attendance. He had no such departure planned here.
Voil’s damned pungent cologne announced his approach long before his sudden arrival on the first-floor landing, thereby spoiling Voil’s attempt to startle Endymion. “Two questions, Your Grace.”
“I will not brook complaints now, Voil. You would come, invited or not.” In spite of the momentary cessation of noise, Endymion flexed his hands against the steady thrum of clamoring ghosts.
“I suspect these next weeks shall be far more entertaining than anything happening in London,” Voil said softly, even as he nudged Endymion’s back with his elbow. “What the devil did you say?”
“Say?” Endymion said absently. He kept his gaze on the one person who dared look him in the eye in defiance and barely leashed fury. The person on whom he’d focused to calm the pounding in his head. And it worked. His hands relaxed. His shoulders, strung like a bow, settled beneath his coat.
“What did you say to them?”
“I don’t recall.” He did. She’d asked him a question. His response had infuriated her. And dammit, he saw at once the one thing he’d never given a moment’s thought to during the long journey from London. The gangly, barely fourteen-year-old girl he’d been forced to marry had grown into a duchess. His vision of the girl was blurry, at best. Rhiannon Harvey de Waryn, however, stood as the clearest image in an entire county of faded, swirling people and places.
“You don’t recall?” Voil asked in mock horror. “I take it the lady at whom you are staring like a lovesick schoolboy is your long-lost wife?”
“She was never lost,” Endymion murmured as he started down the stairs. As if by prior design, Babcock snapped his fingers at the footmen they’d brought from London, who immediately returned to the task of unloading the luggage and carrying it to the duke’s suite on the second floor. The Cornwall staff jumped into motion as well, with far more chatter and far less organization.
“Your pardon. Merely misplaced for seventeen years,” Voil replied. “You never mentioned she was beautiful. And armed.”
“Stay here,” Endymion ordered as they reached the bottom of the stairs.
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