Lord of Scoundrels

by Loretta Chase

  At two o’clock that afternoon, Dain stood with his wife at the top of a rise overlooking the moors.

  She had asked him to take her to the Haytor Rocks after luncheon. Her pallor and the lines of fatigue about her eyes and mouth had told him she was not up to the climb—or the climate, for even in mid-June, the moors could be bone-numbingly cold and wet. Along Devon’s south coast, subtropical flowers and trees flourished as though in a hothouse. Dartmoor was another matter altogether. It made its own weather, and what went on in the highlands had little to do even with the conditions in a valley not two miles away.

  Dain had kept his concern to himself, though. If Jessica wanted to climb one of the peaks of the great ridge bounding the moors, she had a good reason. If he hoped to mend the damage between them, he must show some evidence of trusting her judgment.

  She had said, hadn’t she, that she was tired of his mistrust…among a great many other things.

  And so he held his tongue now as well, instead of telling her she’d be warmer in the shelter of the immense rock than on the edge of the ridge, facing the arctic blasts.

  The brutal wind had sprung up when they’d reached the massive granite outcropping that crowned the hill. The clouds were churning into a sinister grey mass, promising a Dartmoor storm—while a few miles west, at Athcourt, the sun was no doubt shining brightly at this moment.

  “I thought it would be like the Yorkshire moors,” she said. Her gaze swept the rock-strewn landscape below them. “But it seems altogether different. Rockier. More…volcanic.”

  “Dartmoor is basically a heap of granite,” he said. “According to my tutor, it is part of a broken chain extending to the Scilly Islands. A good part of it utterly defies cultivation, as the flora, I was told, amply demonstrates. Not much else besides gorse and heather is stubborn enough to obtain a roothold. The only plush patches of greenery—” He pointed to a lush green spot in the distance. “There, for instance. Looks like an oasis in a very rocky desert, doesn’t it? But at its best, it’s a bit of marsh. At the worst, it’s quicksand. That’s only a small patch. A few miles northwestward is the Grimspound Bog, just one of many that have swallowed sheep, cows, and men whole.”

  “Tell me how you’d feel, Dain,” she said, never taking her eyes from the rugged vista stretching out below them, “if you’d learned a child had been left to wander these moors, unattended, for days, even weeks.”

  A dark, sullen child’s face rose in his mind’s eye.

  A chill sweat broke out over his flesh and an immense weight filled his insides, as though he’d just swallowed lead.

  “Christ, Jess.”

  She turned and looked up at him. Under the wide bonnet brim, her eyes were as dark as the lowering clouds overhead. “You know what child I mean, don’t you?”

  He couldn’t keep himself upright under the weight within. His limbs were trembling. He forced himself to move away, to the mountainous rock. He set his clenched fist against the blessedly ungiving granite and pressed his throbbing forehead to his fist.

  She came to him. “I misunderstood,” she said. “I thought your hostility was toward the boy’s mother. Consequently, I was sure you’d understand soon enough that the child was more important than an old grudge. Other men seem to deal easily enough with their by-blows, even boast of them. I thought you were merely being obstinate. But that, obviously, is not the case. This seems to be a problem of cosmic proportions.”

  “Yes.” He swallowed a gulp of stinging air. “I know, but I can’t think it out. My brain…seizes up. Paralyzed.” He forced out a short laugh. “Ridiculous.”

  “I had no idea,” she said. “But at least you are telling me now. That is progress. Unfortunately, it is not very helpful. I am in a bit of a predicament, Dain. I am prepared to act, of course, but I could not possibly do so without informing you of the situation.”

  The clouds were spitting chill drops of rain, which the gusting wind spattered against his neck. He lifted his head and turned to her. “We’d better get back into the carriage, before you take a fatal ague.”

  “I am dressed very warmly,” she said. “I know what to expect from the weather.”

  “We can discuss this at home,” he said. “Before a warm fire. I should like to get there before the heavens open up and drench us.”

  “No!” she burst out, stamping her foot. “We’re not discussing anything! I am going to tell you, and you are going to listen! And I don’t give a damn if you contract a lung fever and whooping cough besides. If that little boy can bear the moors—on his own—wearing rags and boots full of holes, with nothing in his belly but what he can steal to put there, then you can bloody well bear it!”

  Again the face flashed in his mind.

  Revulsion, sour and thick, was rising inside him. Dain made himself drag in more air, in long, labored breaths.

  Yes, he bloody well could bear it. He had told her weeks ago to stop treating him like a child. He had wanted her to stop behaving like an amiable automaton. He’d received his wishes, and he knew now he could and would endure anything, as long as she didn’t leave him.

  “I’m listening,” he said. He leaned against the rock.

  She studied him with troubled eyes. “I am not trying to torture you, Dain, and if I had a clue what your problem was, I would try to help. But that obviously wants a good deal of time, and there isn’t time. At present, your son is more desperately in need of help than you are.”

  He made himself focus on the words, and push the sickening image to the back of his mind. “I understand. On the moors, you said. On his own. Not acceptable. Quite.”

  “And so you must understand that when I heard of it, I was obliged to act. Since you made it clear you didn’t want to hear anything about him, I was obliged to act behind your back.”

  “I understand. You had no choice.”

  “And I should not distress you now, if I were not obliged to do something that you might never forgive.”

  He swallowed nausea and pride in one gulp. “Jess, the only unforgivable thing you can do is leave me,” he said. “Se mi lasci mi uccido. If you leave me, I’ll kill myself.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I should never leave you. Really, Dain, I cannot think where you get such addled ideas.”

  Then, as though this explained and settled everything, she promptly returned to the main subject, and told him what had happened that day: how she’d stalked the beast to its lair—in Dain’s own park, no less, where the little friend had broken into the summerhouse, and had been more or less living there for the last week at least.

  Dain’s sickness swiftly subsided, and the unendurable weight with it, swept away on a tide of shocked disbelief. The Demon Seed he’d planted in Charity Graves had been terrorizing his own village, skulking about his own park—and Dain had heard not so much as a whisper about it.

  Speechless, he could only gape at his wife while she briskly related her capture of the boy, and went on to describe the encounter with the gutter-snipe’s mother.

  Meanwhile, the atmosphere about them had darkened ominously. The spitting rain had built to a steady drizzle. Under it, the spray of feathers and ribbons adorning her bonnet had sagged and collapsed, to cling soggily to the brim. But Jessica was as oblivious to the state of her bonnet as she was to the fiercely gusting wind, the fine beating rain, and the black mass rolling above their heads.

  She had reached the crisis point in her tale, and that was all that troubled her at present. A crease had appeared between her gracefully arched eyebrows and her gaze had dropped to her tightly folded hands.

  “Charity wants the icon in exchange for the boy,” she said. “Otherwise, if I try to take him, she threatened to scream blue murder—because that would bring you into it, and she knows you’ll send him—and her—away. But that I cannot permit, and I brought you here to tell you so. I will find a way to keep him out of your sight, if you insist. I will not, however, let him go away with his irresponsible mother to
London, where he will fall into the hands of cutpurses, perverts, and murderers.”

  “The icon?” he said, scarcely heeding the rest. “The bitch wants my Madonna—a Stroganov—for that hideous little—”

  “Dominick is not hideous,” Jessica said sharply. “True, he has behaved monstrously, but he received no discipline at home in the first place and he has been much provoked in the second. He was blissfully unaware he was a bastard, or what that meant, just as he did not grasp the meaning of his mother’s trade—until he went to school, where the village children enlightened him in the cruelest possible way. What he is, is frightened and confused, and painfully aware that he is not like other children—and no one wants him.” She paused. “Except me. If I had pretended I didn’t want him, his mother might not have demanded so much. But I could not pretend, and add to the child’s misery.”

  “Plague take the black whoreson!” he shouted, pulling away from the rock. “That bitch will not have my icon!”

  “Then you will have to take the child away from her yourself,” said Jessica. “I do not know where she is hiding, but I strongly doubt she can be found in less than twenty-four hours. Which means that someone must be at the Postbridge coach stop early tomorrow morning. If the someone is not me, with the icon, it must be you.”

  He opened his mouth for a roar of outrage, then shut it and counted to ten instead.

  “You are proposing,” he said levelly, “that I toddle down to Postbridge at the crack of dawn…and patiently await Charity Graves’ entrance…and there, before a crowd of bog-trotters, negotiate with her?”

  “Certainly not,” said Jessica. “You need not negotiate. He’s your son. All you have to do is take him, and there will be nothing she can do about it. She could not claim she was being tricked—as she easily might if anyone but you attempts it.”

  “Take him—just like that? In front of everybody?”

  She peered up at him from under her soggy bonnet. “I do not see what is so shocking. I am merely suggesting you behave in your customary style. You stomp in and take over and tell Charity to go to blazes. And to hell with what everyone else thinks.”

  He clung doggedly to the fraying threads of his control. “Jessica, I am not an idiot,” he said. “I see what you are about. You are…managing me. The idea of mowing Charity Graves down is supposed to be irresistibly appealing. Also, perfectly logical, since I have no intention of giving up my icon. Which I don’t.”

  “I’m aware of that,” she said. “Which is why I could not possibly steal it. I cannot believe the woman actually thought I would. But she is completely amoral, and I daresay the word ‘betrayal’ means nothing to her.”

  “Yet you mean to take the icon if I do not do as you ask,” he said.

  “I must. But I could not do so without telling you.”

  He tilted her chin up with his knuckle and, bending his head, gave her a hard stare.

  “Did it never occur to you, Mistress Logic, that I wouldn’t let you take it?”

  “It occurred to me that you might try to stop me,” she said.

  With a sigh he released her chin and turned his gaze upon the mountainous mass of granite. “And I should have about the same success, I collect, as I would in trying to persuade this rock to trot over to Dorset.”

  Dain heard a low rumble in the distance, as though the heavens themselves agreed that the situation was hopeless.

  He felt as bewildered and angry and helpless as he had in Paris, when another storm had been rolling toward him.

  He could not even think about the loathsome thing he’d made with Charity Graves without becoming physically ill. How in Lucifer’s name was he to go to it and look at it and talk to it and touch it and take the thing into his keeping?

  The Haytor storm followed them back to Athcourt. It pounded on the roof and beat at the windows and flashed demonic bolts that lit the house with blazing white light.

  Those who heard His Lordship raging through the house might have easily believed that he was truly Beelzebub, whose wrath had stirred the very elements themselves.

  But then, Jessica thought, Dain did not handle his emotional problems well. He had only three methods for dealing with “bother”: knock it down, frighten it away, or buy it off. When the methods didn’t work, he was at a loss. And so he had a tan-trum.

  He raged at the servants because they weren’t quick enough in assisting his wife out of her wet outer garments, and then let everything drip on the marble floor of the vestibule—as though sodden garments weren’t bound to drip or muddy boots leave dirty footprints.

  He was in fits because their baths had not been drawn and weren’t steaming and ready the instant they reached their apartments—as though anyone had any idea of the precise moment lord and lady would return. He bellowed because his boots were ruined—as though he hadn’t two dozen pairs at least.

  Jessica heard his outraged voice rumbling through several walls while she took her bath and changed and wondered whether poor, abused Andrews would give notice at last.

  But Dain’s own bath must have calmed him down a degree or two, for by the time he stalked into her chambers, the deafening outraged elephant roar had dropped to a growl, and the thunderous expression had softened to a surly glower.

  He entered with his crippled arm in a sling. “Adjustments,” he said after Bridget had wisely fled without waiting to be chased out. “Marriage requires bloody adjustments. You want a sling, Jess, you get a sling.”

  “It does not spoil the line of your coat,” she said, surveying him with a critical eye. “It looks rather dashing, actually.” She didn’t add that it also looked as though he were planning to go out, for he was dressed for riding.

  “Don’t humor me,” he said. Then he stalked into her sitting room, took the portrait of his mother from the easel, and carried it out—and kept on walking out the door.

  She followed him down the passage, down the south stairs, and into the dining room.

  “You want Mama in the dining room,” he said. “Mama hangs in the dining room.”

  He set the painting against a chair and pulled the bell rope. A footman instantly appeared.

  “Tell Rodstock I want the bloody landscape down and the portrait in its place,” Dain said. “And tell him I want it done now.”

  The footman instantly vanished.

  Dain walked out of the dining room and across the short hall to his study.

  Jessica hurried after him.

  “The portrait will look very handsome over the mantel,” she said. “I found a lovely set of drapes in the North Tower. I’ll have them cleaned and hung in the dining room. They’ll complement the portrait better than what’s there.”

  He had moved to his desk, but he didn’t sit down. He stood before it, half-turned from her. His jaw was set, his eyes hooded.

  “I was eight years old,” he said tightly. “I sat there.” He nodded at the chair in front of the desk. “My father sat there.” He indicated his own usual place. “He told me my mother was Jezebel, that the dogs would eat her. He told me she was on her way to Hell. That was all the explanation he gave me of her departure.”

  Jessica felt the blood draining from her face. She, too, had to turn away while she summoned her composure. That wasn’t easy.

  She had guessed that his father had been harsh, unforgiving. She had never imagined that he—that any father—could be so brutally cruel…to a little boy…bewildered, frightened, grieving for his lost mother.

  “Your father was angry and humiliated, no doubt,” she made herself say evenly. “But if he’d truly cared for her, he would have gone after her, instead of venting his spleen on you.”

  “If you run away,” Dain said fiercely, “I shall hunt you down. I shall follow you to the ends of the earth.”

  If she could manage not to topple over in shock when he had threatened to kill himself on her account, she could manage it now, she told herself.

  “Yes, I know that,” she said. “But your fath
er was a miserable, bitter old man who married the wrong woman, and you are not. Obviously she was high-strung—and that’s where you get it from—and he made her wretched. But I am not in the least high-strung, and I would never permit you to make me wretched.”

  “Just as you will not permit that bedamned female to take her Satan’s spawn to wicked London.”

  Jessica nodded.

  He leaned back against the desk and directed a glare at the carpet. “It does not occur to you, perhaps, that the child may not wish to leave its—his—mother. That such an event may…” He trailed off, his hand beating against the edge of the desk as he sought the words.

  He didn’t have to finish. She knew he referred to his own case: that his mother’s desertion had devastated him…and he hadn’t altogether recovered yet.

  “I know it will be traumatic,” Jessica said. “I asked his mother to try to prepare him. I suggested she explain that where she was going was much too dangerous for a little boy and it was better to leave him where he would be safe, and where she was sure he’d be provided for.”

  He shot her one quick look. Then his gaze dropped again to the carpet.

  “I wish it were true,” Jessica said. “If she truly loved him, she would never subject him to such a risk. She would put his welfare first—as your own mother did,” she dared to add. “She did not drag a little boy off on a dangerous sea voyage, with no assurance she could provide for him—if, that is, he managed to survive the journey. But her case was tragic, and one must grieve for her. Charity Graves…Ah, well, in some ways she is a child herself.”

  “My mother is a tragic heroine and Charity Graves a child,” Dain said. He pushed away from the edge of the desk and moved behind it, not to the chair but to the window. He looked out.

  The storm was abating, Jessica noticed.

  “Charity wants pretty clothes and trinkets and the attention of all males in the vicinity,” she said. “With her looks and brains—and charm, for she has that, I admit—she might have been a famous London courtesan by now, but she is too lazy, too much a creature of the moment.”