“Short-sighted of me. Almost as short-sighted as bringing my wife to confront the man whose manhood she threatened to shoot off.” He motioned her into the chair next to the wall. One by one, Endymion scanned the faces of the room’s occupants and then dropped into the chair between his wife and the taproom. “Is he here?”
“Not yet. What did you discuss with my coachman?”
“I ordered him to watch for trouble, warn us if trouble arrives, and to drive the coach around to the back of the inn to meet us.” He signaled the young tavern maid who wound her way through the maze of tables toward them.
“I don’t suppose he told you he’d already had those exact instructions from me?” she asked, peering at him from beneath her hood like some mischievous fey creature.
“No, he did not.” He didn’t know which irked him more—his wife’s cheek or her coachman’s. Her coachman. Would he ever win over Rhiannon? For if he did not, the estate at Pendeen would never truly be his.
She covered his hand with hers. “They have answered to me for seventeen years, Dymi.”
“And they allow you to run about Cornwall willy nilly with no thought to your safety?”
“It is not their place to allow or disallow me. They have kept me safe these seventeen years.”
“When they can find you. How are they to see to your welfare when they don’t know where you are half the time?” He clenched his fist under the table and cursed himself for a fool. Every word gave her the opportunity to hurt him.
“What can I do for you, guv’?” the maid asked when she finally reached their table.
“Two of your finest ales, if you please.” Endymion flipped a gold crown onto the maid’s tray. When she did not move, he glanced up to find her staring at him.
“You are—” The maid shut her mouth with a sharp click of her teeth. Endymion glanced down to find Rhiannon had leaned across him to wrap her hand around the young woman’s wrist.
“Hello, Hannah,” his wife said softly. “We need your silence, if it isn’t too much trouble.”
“Is he who I think he is?” the tavern maid asked.
“He is, and he is not here.”
Endymion had never heard such a cryptic conversation in his life. A cold breeze swept in from the front of the tavern as a group of men pushed their way into the taproom.
The young woman, with hair black as night and eyes as blue as a summer sky, moved to block Endymion’s view of the door. “Then you’d best take him up the stairs and down the back because the men who just came in have come in here every night for seventeen years.”
Endymion erupted from his chair. Rhiannon grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the rickety stairs behind them. He turned on her, rage savaging every inch of his being.
“Not tonight, Dymi,” she insisted. “Not like this.”
“Go,” the maid, Hannah, urged. “They have not seen you yet. Go.”
He stood in the shadows and studied the faces of the four men dressed in ratty, old militia jackets. He did not recognize them, but something about them stoked a fire in him he suspected had burned for a very long time.
“We were meant to wait and see who meets Robert Wilson,” Endymion said even as he allowed Rhiannon to pull him away.
“He’s here all the time these past weeks,” Hannah said as she took a quick peek over her shoulder. “I’ll send word to Tall William. Go!”
Silent as a wraith, his wife led him up one flight of stairs and then another. As she started down the sloped floor of the second-floor corridor, Endymion stopped in his tracks. A narrow staircase rose to the third floor. The steps and bannister, hand-hewn and unfinished, pricked at his memory. He’d been here before, so much so he did not doubt he could close his eyes and ascend those steps as surely as he might those in his London townhouse.
Rhiannon came to him. She took his hand and tried to lead him away. Her face, white and strained, sent icy flares of warning through his body. And still he followed the lure of familiarity, no matter how laced with horror it seemed. He did not release her hand and she had no course but to follow him. At the top of those stairs, a narrow walkway led to what appeared to be another staircase leading down to the back of the inn. He had to bow his head to tread the walkway. To his left, Endymion saw exactly what he expected—a single door that led to the single room beneath the low-beamed ceiling.
“Dymi, don’t,” Rhiannon pleaded even as she peered behind them as if in anticipation of footsteps following. “You don’t want to do this.”
He heard her, she sounded far away, but he heard her. He raised the door latch and stepped into the chamber, Rhiannon’s hand still clutched tightly in his. The lingering stench of damp and disuse permeated the room. He released her hand, strode to the window and threw open the shutters, flooding the room with the light of the rising moon. In spite of the disuse, the floors and walls, the corners and furnishings sported very little dust and no cobwebs. To the right stood an old four-poster bed, the mattress sagging beneath a holland cover. To the left, three cots stacked one atop the other rested against a bare white-washed wall.
There’d been other furnishings—a threadbare rug, a rocking chair, a table and stools. All gone, save in his memory. He let go of Rhiannon’s hand and paced the confines of the room, in search of what he knew not. His breath, perhaps. He’d lost the ability to draw air into his lungs. Warmth? Bone-numbing cold washed over him in pounding waves.
“This is where she brought us,” he said, each word pulled from the dark place where his previous life had been placed for safekeeping. “After my father died.”
“Yes,” Rhiannon replied from just inside the door.
“And this is where she died.” Even as he said it, Endymion saw only darkness in his mind. Why could he not remember?
“Yes.”
He turned back to the window, pushed it open and leaned out into the night.
Rhiannon drew in a breath behind him, half gasp and half something more visceral. The window offered a view of the ribbon of road leading away from the inn, over the hill, and across the moors to the sea. The road blazed across his mind. He’d ridden it on horseback a thousand times. And then one night…
The storm he’d heard in the distance moved closer. Lightning split the sky. The ensuing thunder cracked like gunfire. He started. Again, it sounded. And again. A musket. Not thunder, a musket. One shot, fired into the night. A warning. He and his brothers had incurred the wrath of the magistrate and the militia. The soldiers had lain in wait, but the musket shot had warned Endymion and his brothers, and they’d ridden away. They’d ridden away as their mother lay dying in this very room.
Endymion breathed deeply. He braced his hands against the window frame. His lungs burned. His head pulsed with the echoes of that single musket shot over and over again. His heart raced in time to the rumble of hoofbeats on the road. Above it all, the death wail of a woman lanced through him. The wail of a ghost, the ghost of The Mermaid’s Tale, the ghost that had kept him from ever returning to Cornwall.
He dug his fingers into the wood of the window frame. No! He was the Duke of Pendeen. He was the master of his emotions, in control of every aspect of his life. Nothing and no one had the power to break him.
“Dymi.” Her arms crept around him. The warmth of her body pressed his back. She clasped her hands over his heart. He covered her hands with his as she rocked him ever so slightly back and forth. “I don’t know why I brought you here.”
“I needed to remember,” he rasped. “They murdered her because of us.”
“No, Dymi, it was not your fault. It was never your fault.”
“We rode as highwaymen—Hector, Achilles, and I—robbing my grandfather’s friends. The militia came after us, but they murdered her. They murdered her because of us.” The words came out in painful gasps. His throat tightened. His eyes burned.
“No.” She slipped around him and held his face between her hands. “She would never want you to believe that. Your mother loved you.
More than you will ever know.”
“Why didn’t I remember? My mother was murdered, and I didn’t remember.” He rested his forehead against hers. It helped. God forgive him, but it helped to lean against the slight woman Fate had joined him to all those years ago.
“You did remember, Dymi,” she said and leaned up to kiss him. “Somewhere inside, you knew. They didn’t want you to remember—your grandfather, your uncle. But I was here. I always remembered. I remember it all. I kept it for you until you were ready.” He hugged her to him. Her tears dampened his waistcoat and shirt.
He tilted her face up and wiped her tears with his thumbs. “What a ramshackle husband you are saddled with, Your Grace. Broken into pieces, one foot in London and one foot in the past.” He gazed into her eyes, anchored himself there. “You were mine to protect, Rhiannon, and I have done a bad job of it in every way.”
“And you were always mine, Endymion. No matter how broken, you were always mine to pick up and put back together. Whatever has passed between us, I have not forgotten that.” She rested her palm against his cheek.
He drew in a deep breath and then another. “Those men had something to do with it, Rhee. I cannot let it pass.” He started around her. She wrapped both hands around his forearm.
“Not tonight. Your mother was born in this village, but most people do not remember you. You start something tonight and they will kill you. No one in Zennor will say a word about it.”
“I am the Duke of Pendeen and those men murdered my mother,” he snapped.
She rolled her eyes and grabbed his hand. They crept out onto the walkway. “The men in that taproom care not one whit who you are, Dymi. Their ancestors ate their own dead, for God’s sake. They’ll kill you and toss you into the sea without a second thought. This way.” She picked her way carefully down the back staircase.
“Bloodthirsty lot,” he muttered. “They’ll kill me, but what of you?”
“We’ll never know. If they take you, I have every intention of using the commotion to make my escape.” They reached and slipped out the inn’s back door. “There you are, John,” she greeted the coachman. “To Gorffwys Ddraig, if you please. As quickly as you can.”
Endymion had no sooner tossed her into the coach and hefted himself in beside her than the conveyance rolled slowly from behind the tavern and turned quietly onto the road. Once they’d lost sight of the tavern, John sprung the horses and they raced toward home.
Home.
Endymion had not called any part of Cornwall home in a very long time. The raw remembrances he’d just experienced did not bode well for it ever being where he wanted to remain. He’d lost so much to this place. Yet, seated next to him, his hand clasped between hers, his wife had never lived anywhere else. She’d kept his family’s estate, his grandfather’s legacy, and Endymion’s lost memories all these years. How much of the turmoil roiling inside him was the shadow of his mother’s death and how much was the thought of returning to London and leaving Rhiannon here?
“Rhiannon, I—”
The coach jolted, slid and tilted. Endymion wrapped himself around Rhiannon as they slammed into the padded side. Two shots sounded over the frightened neighs of the horses. The coach stopped dead in the road.
Rhiannon, eyes wide, pushed out of his embrace and reached for the door handle.
“Stay here,” Endymion ordered as he pushed her away from the door. He snatched a pistol from beneath the seat across from them and flung the door open.
“Look out, Your Grace,” John shouted from the driver’s bench where a man held a pistol to his head. The man, one of the ragged militia men from the inn, cuffed the coachman with the butt of his pistol.
Two more of the men approached Endymion from the front and rear of the coach.
“Drop the pistol, Your Grace,” the man next to John ordered. “Don’t make my friends take it from you.”
Endymion heard a hammer being pulled back behind him. Thank God, his wife never listened to him. He turned toward the man on the coach, aimed, and shot him between the eyes. Rhiannon leaned out of the coach and shot the man who approached from the rear. In the confusion, Endymion rushed the man who approached from the front, but failed to reach him before the man got a shot off. Once he knocked the man off his feet, Endymion pounded him senseless in a few punches.
“Your Grace!” John cried.
Endymion turned to find Rhiannon sprawled in the road. He stumbled to her side and rolled her over into his arms. He ran his hands over her and when he reached her face he encountered a wetness that appeared black when he held his hand up in the moonlight.
Blood.
“Rhiannon,” he barked as he shook her. “Rhee, wake up.” A living, breathing monster of fear clawed at the edges of his control. For her, he had to remain calm, when all he wanted to do was roar against the death and treachery that threatened to take the last, the only, the most treasured thing left to him in Cornwall.
The coachman thrust a handkerchief at him.
“Hand her to me,” a voice spoke out of the darkness. A tall, rangy horse stepped onto the road as if from nowhere. The rider, dressed in black, wearing a tri-cornered hat with a white plume, reached a hand down to Endymion.
The clatter of hoofbeats coming from the direction of Zennor sounded in the distance.
“I suggest you and your coachman unhitch the horses and we all ride for Gorffwys Ddraig before the rest of those hired ruffians catch us.” The man urged his horse forward until horse and rider entered the bright light of the full moon.
Endymion wiped blood from Rhiannon’s face. He glanced up at the man leaning down from his horse, hand outstretched. He shook his head, checked his wife’s even breathing, and stared up at the man once more.
It…could not be.
“Achilles?”
“Hello, Dymi. Now hand your wife up here, and let’s ride, shall we?”
Chapter Thirteen
She’d fallen out of the horse chestnut tree. Again. Rhiannon’s head throbbed like the very devil. This time she’d fallen on the front of her head rather than the back. She reached up to find a small pad tied to her forehead by a strip of linen around her entire head. She managed to open one eye and immediately closed it against the glare of her bedchamber suffused in light. Voices, male voices, rumbled a few feet away.
Papa?
No, these were young men. In her bedchamber. Eyes still clenched tightly shut, she ran her hands over the counterpane. It was rich and thick and not at all like the one on her bed at home. And there were entirely too many pillows on this bed. A scent caught her attention. She pulled one of the larger pillows to her face and inhaled.
Endymion.
She wasn’t a little girl in the country home her father had bought from an impoverished lord. She was the Duchess of Pendeen in the duchess’s bedchamber. In the duchess’s bed, which she’d shared with Endymion against her every sensible instinct. Then they’d driven to…
Zennor.
The Mermaid’s Tale and the room where Eliza Bryant de Waryn had died.
Men with guns.
“I don’t understand any of this. Least of all, how my wife may be the only person who knows what happened that night. You let me believe you were dead for seventeen years, and she knew.” Endymion was pacing and ranting. Even with her eyes closed she recognized his infuriated footsteps. “How am I to have any hope of sorting this out if you won’t tell me?”
“She has only known these last ten years. As for the rest…what happened that night is not my story to tell.”
Achilles.
Rhiannon did not know how or why Endymion’s brother came to be at Gorffwys Ddraig, but she knew what it meant. It was time. Time to destroy the burgeoning bond between her and her distrustful husband. Time to end any hope of a real marriage with the boy she’d married, the man she now loved even more than she ever thought possible.
“Dammit, I am tired of the secrets, and the lies, and every man in Cornwall attempting to kill m
y wife,” Endymion roared. “I need to know the truth.”
“You need to stop swearing at your brother,” Rhiannon said as she opened her eyes and gingerly, in broken stages, pushed herself into a sitting position on the pillows mounded against the headboard. Her head pounded with every beat of her heart and it took a moment for her blurred vision to clear. “And not every man in Cornwall is trying to kill me. Yet.”
Achilles chuckled and touched two fingers to his head in silent salute.
Endymion took a step toward the bed and then stopped. He clasped his hands behind his back and pinned her with a stoic, unreadable gaze. “You should have stayed in the coach. You are fortunate the shot only grazed you. Dr. Douglas has ordered you to remain in bed for at least a week.”
“No wonder she wouldn’t come to you in London,” Achilles said as he settled onto the arm of one of the fireside chairs. “Does he always sound so much like our father’s arse of a father?”
“Not always,” Rhiannon replied. Her entire life might be about to crumble around her, but Endymion had his brother back. She’d try to hold on to that much, at least.
“Leave us,” Endymion ordered. “I want to speak with my wife.”
“You want to browbeat her into answering all of your questions whether she knows the truth or not. You had ten years to ask our grandfather those questions. Why didn’t you?”
“He can stay, Dymi. Let him stay, and I will tell you what you want to know.”
“Very well.” Endymion stood, unbending, as if questioning a disobedient servant.
“Sit down,” she said, her voice weary and thin to her own ears. “My head hurts and I will not do this with you looming over me, forcing me to crane my neck. Your grandfather tried it with me the night you and I were married. It didn’t work then either.”
His mouth quirked the tiniest bit. He dragged the chair opposite his brother to her bedside and subsided into it, his arms braced on the chair’s arms in what looked to be a completely uncomfortable pose. “Achilles says you were at the ruins the night we were captured. I thought I remembered your voice, but I wasn’t certain. Why didn’t you tell me that when we—”
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