by Lynn Kerstan
This time, he’d approached the cottage from the back and was drawing near the window of her bedchamber. She hurried into the room and was raising the window when he arrived.
The look of astonishment on his face delighted her. With a degree of pleasure she carefully aligned his knives, handles pointed in his direction, on the windowsill. “You needn’t have come for these,” she said. “I would have sent them back with Mr. Singh.”
“They are not why I am here.”
Despite the cold, he had stripped down to shirtsleeves and waistcoat. Heat pulsed from him . . . or perhaps she was the one overheated. He had that effect on her, had done so from the first. She noticed what she had failed to mark before, that when he was close to her, the vibration she’d felt beforehand vanished, as if it had done its job and was no longer necessary.
“Why, then?” she said. “Or am I supposed to guess?”
“Varden was right. I should not have interrupted you. Insulted him in your presence. I came to apologize.”
“Have you apologized to him?”
“When hell freezes over.”
There wasn’t enough light to read his expression or his eyes. It seemed important to her, what he was thinking, although it ought not to be. “Your offense, if there was one, has nothing to do with me. Do you wish to come inside?”
The heat radiating from him increased, as if she’d said something provocative. “I’d better not. Let me say this quickly, while I still have hold of a rare decent impulse. What I said about Varden was true, and I don’t mean to take it back. So long as he continues to trust the wrong people, he’ll continue to get into trouble. Maybe he’ll come to his senses, although I’m not counting on it. The point is, he made a bad mistake and has already paid a heavy price for it. You mustn’t judge him by that one incident.”
“How could I? I haven’t the slightest idea what occurred.”
“I’m saying this wrong.” He raked his fingers through his overlong hair. “When Varden came after me in India, neither of us had hold of what we were dealing with. We met only once, under unfortunate circumstances. I thought he intended . . . Dammit. There’s no explaining what happened that night. You’ve seen his hand. That’s how it ended. I was responsible.”
“But you didn’t begin it.” Why was she sure of that?
“That would depend on where it began. I’m not here to make excuses for myself. For whatever I do, I accept the consequences and don’t question the fairness of them. Varden, I have learned since returning to England, is not . . . well, not what I had assumed him to be. He is, in fact, precisely the sort of man you ought to be keeping company with. If he sheds his unsavory associates, he might almost be good enough for you.”
She was astounded. And a little hurt. “You came here to give him a recommendation?”
“Put that way, it sounds absurd. I thought I might have ruined something for you, that’s all. I wanted to put it right again.”
“There is nothing between us. Nothing whatever. We’d only just met, were taking a stroll to escape the crowds and the attention.”
He leaned forward, his hands planted on the sill, and the light from the front room caught his eyes. “Do you imagine,” he said intently, “that I do not recognize when another man desires a woman? I expected him to hate me for what I did to his hand, but that was a poor second to why he really wanted to kill me in that passageway. It was because I belittled him in your presence, because he thought you might reject him on account of what I said.”
“I make my own judgments, sir.”
“Yes. I should have realized that before coming here and making an ass of myself. I was thinking no more clearly than Varden.”
“And I was simply another thing to fight about.”
He appeared to consider that for a time. “You might have been. Another woman would have been. But this was different.”
“I cannot see how. It is common, I believe, among many species of animals, for males to fight mindlessly for the right to mate with a female who happens to be within reach. There is nothing personal about it. Any female will do.”
“Perhaps you are correct, Miss Holcombe, although I have never before had the slightest inclination to do battle for a bedmate. This much is true. If fighting Varden were all it required to possess you, I would slice him up and feed him to the pigs.”
She looked into his fevered eyes and knew he meant every word of what he said. He gazed back at her, stripped of deception, the passion in him leashed by sheer will.
And then, as if he had never been there, he was gone.
Of a sudden she felt the icy air streaming into the room. Outside, where he had stood hot as a brazier, there was only cold and emptiness.
This cannot be, she told herself. She seemed always to be telling herself to dismiss him from her thoughts. He was a distraction, a temporary obstacle. A temptation.
She had not a moment to spare for temptation. Soon Hari Singh would bring her father, and she would feed him, and lie to him about her evening, and settle him to sleep. Tomorrow was for her father as well, and for Mr. Callendar, and for what she expected to be devastating news. No sleep for her, although her bones were melting. She had to prepare herself. Make plans.
But she lingered at the window, shivering. The winter night called to her, and the fearful thing that was about to happen. If only she knew what it was, and what she was supposed to do. What was the use of prowling the back alleyway, walking the pavement of Berkeley Square as if she had a reason to be there at strange hours of the night, or skulking in the park, hoping to spy an unmistakable silhouette at a window? More than a dozen times she had answered the call, gone to the square, and found nothing.
No knocker on the door meant the duke wasn’t there. But if he didn’t want company, he might leave off the knocker, and for her to see him enter or leave the house would be most unlikely. Except that she was drawn there, and knew she was meant to be there.
Or fancied it. She thought, sometimes, that she was clinging to reason with her fingernails.
Chapter 16
If not for the heavy weight of what she had learned the day before, and all that it implied, Mira might have enjoyed her drive with Lord Varden. The brisk air refreshed her, and the change of scenery, and the sunshine. Her father had selected the ensemble for her very first outing with a gentleman, a soft wool dress of bishop’s blue that matched the cloak Lady Jessica had given her, and her frivolous bonnet had drawn a smile and a compliment from the earl.
From the moment he arrived at the cottage, she understood he had set himself to put her at ease. He spent several minutes with her father, keeping his conversation light and impersonal. He’d a lovely, bemused sense of humor that very much appealed to her, especially when he described how it had been to grow up the lone male and youngest resident in a household of females that included two grandmothers, his formidable mother, three sisters, and assorted aunts.
There were few riders and carriages in Hyde Park, but everyone they passed appeared to be acquainted with Lord Varden. To her relief, he politely acknowledged them while ignoring their attempts to wave him over for conversation. Instead, he treated her to a bit of gossip about each one, always fascinating but in no way malicious. A kind man, Lord Varden, not to mention intelligent, amusing, and remarkably picturesque.
She wondered if he pursued her, for unmistakably he was pursuing her, because she presented a challenge to him. As he steered the curricle out of the park and into the late-afternoon London traffic, she began to prepare herself for the awkward moments to come. Already the light was fading, and it would be nearly dark by the time they returned to Palazzo Neri. Then, she supposed, he would ask her for another engagement, and she would decline. Those would be almost the only words she spoke to him all afternoon.
Sure enough, when they turned onto Paradise Row, he slowed the horses to a walk
. “I have very much enjoyed our drive, Miss Holcombe. Will you think me too bold if I ask you to dine with me this evening? Well, not with me alone. My eldest sister is getting ready to fire off her twin daughters, which involves a campaign only a little less complex than the invasion of a small country, so they have come to London for a bit of reconnaissance. We would all be pleased to have your company.”
She was surprised by a longing to escape, if only for a few hours, her obligations and the tightening bands of dread. To listen to young girls chatter about their first London Season—
But she could not. “You are most kind, sir,” she said, finding a smile for him. “I am required to be home tonight with my father.”
Color rose on his face. “Now you will be quite sure I am too bold, and if I have offended you, I apologize. But while you were donning your cloak and bonnet, I asked Mr. Holcombe’s permission to escort you to dinner.”
“Which he gleefully granted, I am sure. And did you then ask Mr. Singh to watch out for him until my late return?”
“Ah. I have offended you. It all transpired in just that way, but I confess to taking encouragement from your father’s enthusiasm.”
“To speak frankly, sir, he is in a great hurry to marry me off. Any gentleman who chances by is apt to be caught up in the whirlpool, and if he passes my father’s critical inspection, there is no help for him. But the consequences are no more than a little awkwardness, such as we are experiencing now. I am not at all offended, Lord Varden. In other circumstances, I expect I should be flattered.”
“That sounds ominously like a dismissal.” He hesitated. “Might I inquire if another man has captured your interest?”
A dark, saturnine face at her window. Long fingers scraping through black hair as he studied the chessboard. No! She wrenched her attention to the man seated beside her, searching for words to give him a fair answer, if not a truthful one. “My father is extremely ill,” she said eventually. “There are many things I must attend to. I cannot be distracted.”
“But you could allow me to help you.”
“Yes. Perhaps there will be such an occasion. I shall think on it. For now, though, I must ask you to leave me on the path I have taken.”
He nodded, smiling with gentle regret, too much the gentleman to press his suit. “As you wish, Miss Holcombe. But I refuse to withdraw my friendship, which you may call upon at any time, for any reason. Now here we are, too soon back at the Palazzo.”
He was about to pass the reins to a footman when she put a hand on his forearm. “Sir, you must not leave your horses to stand. The servant will help me alight, and you can be on your way.”
His arm tensed. She had insulted him, she knew, but a growing sense of foreboding had taken possession of her. She was in the wrong place. She had to—
“Ma’am?” The young footman was holding out his hand.
Once on the pavement, she turned back to Lord Varden, who doffed his hat and gave her a kind smile. “Don’t forget, Miss Holcombe, a friend may be called upon at any time. Please give my regards to your father.”
She smiled back, but her thoughts had flown to the hackney coach coming up the street behind him. There could be no harm. It was early yet, barely four o’clock, and thanks to Lord Varden, her father wasn’t expecting her. Mr. Singh would see to his needs.
And she had to go. Compared to this summons, the others had been merely rehearsals. It was now she must be there.
At her gesture, the coach pulled over and the helpful footman lowered the stairs. She gave the flamboyantly red-bearded driver her direction and looked after Lord Varden, whose curricle was still visible at the end of the street. Then she was inside, the door closed behind her, and on her way to Berkeley Square.
What she was to do there, she could not imagine. She had scarcely been able to string two thoughts together since yesterday afternoon, when Mr. Callendar examined her father. Afterward he spoke to her in private, giving her the news she’d half expected. Although her father’s spirits remained high and his mind lively, the decline of his health had begun to accelerate. By the doctor’s estimate, he would not survive beyond a few months.
So soon. She knew he was having difficulty drawing breath, and she had already seen the awareness in his eyes. The effort he always made to disguise it from her.
If only she could take him to Seacrest, let him spend his last days tasting the salt air, looking out over the water, sleeping at night in the home where he had spent nearly all the sixty-five years of his life.
But Seacrest had been closed down, and besides, neither of them would be safe there. Nor anywhere, she supposed, remembering the linen closet and the duke, blood dripping from his murderous hand.
When I return, the vise will close.
For so long she had been driven by one compulsion—kill him before he could do more harm to anyone. It was her last thought at night, her first when she awoke. She had sworn to do it. Resigned herself to the consequences, the worst of them being her father’s suffering when she was taken away to prison and trial. She would spare him that if she could. He had so little time now. Perhaps she would be permitted to spend it with him in peace.
Last night, after the doctor left, she’d resolved that she would not seek out the duke, as she had intended, nor make an opportunity to slay him. Not until her father was gone. She had only to decide if it was better to remain at the Palazzo or find a place to hide, somewhere that would not endanger anyone else. That ruled out Mr. Callendar’s hospital in Tunbridge Wells, despite his plea that she bring her father there for his last weeks. And the pair of them were too conspicuous to be concealed, like the Duchess of Tallant, in the Rookeries.
Finally, as the sky began to lighten, she had come to a reluctant decision. She would ask Michael Keynes for help. He was to play chess with her father after lunch, and she spent the rest of the morning rehearsing her speech and scraping up the courage to deliver it. But it was Hari Singh who came, with news that Mr. Keynes had business to attend to. She had been too proud to ask when he would return, and he’d not done so before Lord Varden arrived to take her driving.
Now here she was in a hackney, answering a mysterious call to a place she had been summoned before, only to have nothing happen. Those times, though, she’d been dressed in her widow’s weeds and it was late at night, with no one there to pay her any mind. In her blue cloak and fashionable bonnet, walking alone, she was sure to draw notice.
So be it. She didn’t mean to stay long, and when the coach pulled up at the end of Berkeley Street, she asked the driver to wait while she delivered a message to a friend. Then she set out briskly, aiming herself for the far end of the square. Not far ahead, to her right and behind a low wrought-iron fence, stood Tallant House.
The square was dark, save for the streetlamps and the light streaming from windows. In the center, a vine-covered fence encircled an oblong park studded with trees, most of them bare of leaves, some hedges and bushes, the remains of flower displays, and a few benches. She had spent the better part of one evening seated on one of those benches, directly across from Tallant House but concealed by the shrubbery, wondering how to get herself into the house unseen. Later she had walked around the back, examined the high wall that enclosed the garden, and decided she could not scale it while wearing a dress.
So much time spent plotting and planning, to the point she had begun to doubt she would ever bring herself to actually do something. Even the notion of waiting until after her father’s death had filled her with an unwelcome sense of relief, as if she’d been handed the perfect excuse to postpone a difficult task.
Really, she had to stop thinking herself silly. Debating herself into knots. A scholar’s daughter made a damnably ineffective avenger.
She kept her head bowed and her cloak drawn tight around her as she proceeded along the pavement. A few vehicles and horses came into t
he square, and several pedestrians jostled past her in their hurry to get home. Only when she drew even with Tallant House did she lift her head, turning her gaze to the door. A pair of lanterns hung to the right and left of it, illuminating the elaborate brass knocker. The duke was in residence.
Heart galloping in her chest, she lowered her head again and continued quickly on, making a left turn at the corner and coming around the other side of the park.
He was there. She had her knife.
But in residence did not mean he was, at the moment, in the house. And he knew she carried a knife. Even if she knocked on his door and was admitted to his presence, direct confrontation could not possibly succeed. The first thing he’d do was take away her weapon. Add it to his collection of her weapons.
But if she was not here to kill him, why had she been summoned?
She turned, pretending confusion, pretending to be looking for a particular house at the narrow end of Berkeley Square. And saw, at the other end, someone climbing into the carriage that was supposed to be waiting for her. Saw the carriage come up as far as Bruton Street and turn, leaving her stranded. It seemed to her an omen, an injunction to remain where she was.
Omens. Forebodings. Portents. She’d never been the least bit fanciful before these past few weeks. Not once had a premonition warned her of trouble in advance. There had been no change in the atmosphere, no hum that wasn’t a sound, when certain persons came into her vicinity. As for being summoned to a place again and again for no apparent reason, the experience was entirely new to her.
What was she to make of it all? And where was the gift of prescience when she had truly needed it? Why hadn’t she received a warning before the greatest disaster of her life sprang upon her? Of a sudden odd things were occurring, and she’d no idea what they meant or what to do about them.
Or perhaps they were only the product of an overstrained mind and exhausted body. She hadn’t been at her best for so long that she’d almost forgotten what it was like. She used to be clever and resourceful, even a little bit brave.
