His brother adjusted his steps, easily matching Graham’s. “He wants what is best for you. He always has. You cannot fault him for that, Sheldon.”
“Actually, I can,” he said with a go-to-hell grin. And he did fault his father. The expectations he’d placed had always been too great, and Graham was never one who’d be able to meet them. Not with his many deficiencies.
Graham reached the end of the corridor and stopped. His brother skidded to a stop beside him, and the hopeful glimmer in his eyes suggested he thought Graham might turn back, make peace, and remain on for the interminable week-long festivities. Instead, Graham took his brother by the shoulder and lightly squeezed. “If you’re worried about the duke’s wishes being appeased, then you can wed Lady Emilia.”
Heath sputtered. “Don’t be ridiculous.” He bucked Graham’s grip from his shoulder. “Furthermore, this isn’t about Lady Emilia’s marital state.”
Graham folded his arms. “The hell it isn’t.”
His cheeks flushed. “Well, mayhap a small part of it has to do with Mother’s wish that the girl could be settled. But this goes beyond that. He’s getting on in years and wants to know that his remaining sons—” Heath’s features contorted.
And despite his bid not to give a single damn about what his brother or father had to say, pain lanced through him. It was, however, fleeting. “If you think His Grace gives two goddamns about me, then you’re a damned fool.” His father had never cared. Graham had long been the disappointment. One who very rarely served a purpose.
“You’re wrong,” Heath called after him, and this time, his elder brother allowed Graham to continue on, uninterrupted.
Until he reached the foyer.
His mother had positioned herself at the doorway, with the same height and carriage as the late Boney himself and, by the glint in her eyes, no less determined. “I believe this is a new record for you, Sheldon Graham Malin Whitworth.”
Several servants came forward with Graham’s belongings. With a word of thanks, he accepted his cloak from one of the footmen. Tossing the article around his shoulders, he adjusted the clasp. “Mother,” he murmured, with a bow for the graciously aging woman. “Using all four of my names? That never bodes well.”
She held a finger up, commanding the room with nothing more than that slightest of gestures. Just like that, the servants dispersed, fading into the shadows and quitting the rooms. Her hair still a pale blonde and her skin not marred by even so much as a wrinkle, she bore the same youthful aura she had as a mother chasing about her three wayward boys.
And she said nothing. The silence, however, struck a place of guilt deeper than any insult or word she could have leveled.
“I have to go.”
“You just arrived, Sheldon,” she said, her voice faintly imploring. Sailing over, rustling her satin skirts as she glided to a stop before him, she stared expectantly back. “You always leave, but never this quickly.” She did not attempt to make excuses for her husband. She’d always been a better mother than Graham had ever deserved.
“This time it is different.” And it was. He couldn’t say more than that. Wouldn’t say more.
“Is it because of Lady Emilia?”
“It has nothing to do with Lady Emilia,” he said simply, from a place of truth.
Her doubt was reflected in her eyes.
Always look a person squarely in the eyes for the answers you seek. A person’s gaze is a window into what they see or feel.
It was a lesson that he wished he hadn’t remembered at this moment, because then he wouldn’t see the disappointment in her eyes, too. She was the one person who’d given him far more credit than he’d deserved. “I have to leave,” he said again, adjusting the clasp at his throat.
She reached up and moved his hands out of the way to complete the task for him, much the way she had when he’d been a small boy. “Are you in trouble?”
Oddly, no. He winked. “Not this time.”
Mother pinched his cheek.
Graham winced. “I’m not,” he muttered. Or, at least not the trouble they expected him to find himself in. The urgency to quit this hall that had filled him when the note had been placed in his hand intensified.
His mother proved as resilient as always. She placed herself between him and the door. “Promise you’ll return for the holidays.”
Lie without compunction.
“I promise,” he said automatically, that lesson pulling the promise from him.
She sighed and slid out of his path. “I’m not sure if I believe you.”
Graham turned to go, and this time, he stopped himself. Leaning down, he bussed his mother on the cheek. “To the moon and back,” he said, repeating the vow of love she had made each night when she’d put him and his brothers to bed.
Her lower lip quivered. “And back again.”
A short while later, Graham left.
*
Sixteen hours later
As Graham dismounted and looped the reins of his mount around a nearby tree, he surveyed the heavily wooded grounds.
A tall figure stepped out from behind a barren oak tree, its trunk and limbs gnarled from age and weather. “You made good time,” the gentleman noted as Graham approached, his words a statement more than praise. “I feared you would be delayed with the slight snow.”
“I’m here,” he said evenly, adding nothing more for his superior. Though recently returned to the Brethren from his previous retirement, Lord Edward Helling, with his ink-black hair and unwrinkled face, might have been a man twenty years younger and new to the organization himself.
“I have your first assignment,” his superior said, handing over a file.
And there it was.
At last.
Graham’s fingers fairly twitched with the need to yank that coveted folio from the older man’s fingers. With unhurried movements, Graham accepted the file, flipped it open, and read.
~Location
Luton
High Town, England
~Duration
Fortnight
~Role…
Stable master—
Graham stopped and blinked slowly. He reread the words, but the detail there remained the same. “What is this?” he demanded.
“Your assignment.” Lord Edward gave him a long look that contained a warning—that Graham promptly ignored.
“You know what I meant,” he snapped. “A damned stable master.” This was what he’d waited for? “After months spent training in the damned English countryside and then additional months spent being mentored in London, this”—he held the file aloft—“is what I’m asked to do?”
Lord Edward rubbed his gloved palms together quickly. “You’ve a reputation for being skilled with horses, having trained with them as a young man.”
He growled, “I hardly think that makes me a damned expert. I cared for the horses in my father’s stables.”
“And mucked stalls and groomed and fed those horses. Why, you even took part in the birthings of five foals.” A smile ghosted his superior’s lips. “Yes, we know all.”
Graham studied the file once more, reading the details, and as he did, the greatest of ironies was not lost on him. With this, his first assignment, the task he’d so loved that his father had berated him for enjoying, and eventually had forbidden him from doing, should now see Graham trapped in a bloody thankless post.
“Every assignment is important,” Helling murmured.
He ignored that empty assurance. Frustration broiled in his gut. “I’m to be a servant, then, for…” He searched for that important detail on the first page. “A widow?” Graham laughed, the expression coated in cynicism. “Oh, this is rich.” He’d countless dealings and experience with widows, always sexual in nature. There’d been servant role-playing, but with the widows as naughty maids.
“Because you’ve a reputation for bedding widows?” Lord Edward put forward. “If I may point out at this time, your… reputation was one of the reasons
you were initially overlooked by the Brethren. Furthermore, it is not simply the young woman you are reporting on. There’s a boy, too.”
Oh, bloody, bloody hell. His assignment had gone from a joke to a farce. “A boy,” he said flatly.
“A ten-year-old. Frederick Donaldson. He lives with his mother, Martha Donaldson. She is known as Marti to her family.”
“Charming.” He didn’t give a bloody damn if the woman went by the name of Virgin Mary. Graham’s first damned assignment would be to play stable master in a small country cottage removed from all society? “So I’m clear…” As if the inked words hadn’t spelled it out in very specific black letters. “I’m to spend fourteen days as a servant and report back on the woman—”
“And her son,” Lord Edward interrupted with a nod. “Precisely. This is an assignment that was abandoned by the recent leadership. I’ve taken the liberty of reinstating it.”
For the first time since the folder had been placed in his fingers, Graham felt his interest stir. The lesson, of course, was that people of all ages and genders were capable of treachery. “Is she a threat to the Crown?”
“Not at all.” The immediacy of the response confirmed the older man’s confidence.
Reining in his annoyance, Graham flipped to the next page. “Well, it must have been determined that this woman and her child offer something of value to the Crown.”
“Actually, no. On the contrary. The lady and her son offer nothing of specific value to the Brethren.”
Martha Donaldson was neither a threat, nor of any meaningful value to the Brethren, and yet, she was important enough that the moment he’d come out of retirement, Edward Helling had reopened her file. “I… see.” This… Martina… Martha… He searched the page again for her damned name. Martha Donaldson was Lord Edward’s mistress, then. Perhaps the boy, Frederick, was his bastard son.
His superior narrowed his eyes. “Careful,” he said warningly, having followed the unspoken supposition. “A former member feels a sense of responsibility to the young woman and asked that I have an agent assigned to her.”
“Why?” Being a member of the Brethren did not mean a man blindly accepted an assignment without questioning the ins and outs of every possible angle.
“Not quite two years ago, the Brethren agreed to see the woman was cared for. With the transition at the Home Office, the previous command deemed any oversight of Miss Donaldson supercilious. She’d fallen by the wayside. Until I… came upon the young woman’s file.” Out of retirement for an interim post, Lord Edward was also responsible for Graham’s hiring after the previous members had rejected him. “We’re trying to make contact with her once more and secure any information about her and her son’s current state of affairs.”
“What of the dead husband?” he asked, perusing his folder once more. “Who was he?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It always matters,” Graham shot back, one of many mantras of the Brethren.
The branches stirred overhead. That rustling let a shaft of moonlight through and briefly illuminated his superior’s face. An unanticipated approval glinted in the other man’s gaze. “In this case, it does not. It isn’t your need to know. The details surrounding her marriage are irrelevant,” Lord Edward said bluntly. “This isn’t a case that needs solving. She represents no threat, and there is no one at risk because of her. She is simply a woman a certain member of the Brethren is concerned after.”
Graham leveled a probing stare on the other man. Lord Edward might be Graham’s superior, and Graham new to his role, but he was astute enough to gather a key detail: The other man… nay, the organization was withholding details about Martha Donaldson for reasons Graham didn’t know and that they likely wouldn’t tell him. His suspicions deepened and put forward another probing question. “Is there reason to suspect she’s in any danger, then?”
“We do not believe so.” Another gust of wind whipped through the copse, sending their cloaks snapping loudly in the breeze. “It is our hope you locate the woman and confirm she and her son are well.”
“And that requires a whole fortnight?” Graham pressed. They’d have him play nursemaid for some widow and her son for fourteen damned days?
“The organization wants assurances about her well-being. You aren’t going to have that in a day or even two,” he said with a finality that indicated that argument was at an end. “After you’re finished, you’ll have another assignment. In the meantime, while you are there, remain unobtrusive. Make yourself as invisible as possible.”
A near impossible feat for a stranger to—Graham consulted the pages again—High Town, a tiny town on the northeastern crest of Luton.
“It’s your role to determine how to make yourself invisible.” The other man had correctly followed his ponderings. “Uninteresting people, regardless of how long they visit a place, lose notice quickly.”
Graham shook his head. He’d awaited his first assignment, and this was the role he’d been given. That of a minion put to work on a nothing case because some former member had called in a favor. He gritted his teeth. Oh, the amusement his father would have had with all of this.
Lord Edward rubbed his gloved palms together quickly. “I trust there are no problems, Whitworth.”
“No,” Graham replied automatically, which wasn’t a lie… There were any number of problems he had with the assignment. This assignment was no different than the years he’d served in the navy, a duke’s youngest son coddled by the men in command and kept from any truly purposeful work.
The other man slapped his shoulder. “I was you once.”
“You were never me,” he said curtly.
The faintest smile ghosted Lord Edward’s lips. “I was. New to the role, frustrated over the speed with which I was put into the field. Resenting the slowness of the process.” He held Graham’s stare. “Being the second son and, for that ordering of my birthright, always falling behind another.”
Yes, mayhap there was something they shared, then. For surely it was the way of all lords to have little use, appreciation, or regard for those youngest sons.
“There will be other assignments, Whitworth,” the other man said. “I promise you that.” He turned to go, but then stopped. “Oh, and Whitworth? I was ordered to give you one more instruction about your assignment.”
Graham stared back expectantly.
“Do not go seducing the young woman.”
Another spy for the Brethren might have been insulted by that directive. With Graham’s well-established reputation as a rogue, however, Helling’s was a fair order. “You’ve no worries there,” he drawled. The women he kept company had reputations as scandalous as his own. Wicked ladies with inventive skills in bed and morally bankrupt, like Graham himself. Not decent, young women tucked away in the English countryside.
Lord Edward touched a fingertip to his nose and then pointed in Graham’s direction. “Let us hope not.”
This time, with that veiled warning hanging in the copse, his superior left, and Graham was saddled with his first assignment.
Chapter 2
High Town
Luton, England
In terms of survival, women had few options available to them.
Two, if one wished to be truly precise.
One might marry.
Or one might whore oneself.
Martha, however, was determined to never suffer either fate. Never again, that was.
Having finished the morning chores, Martha stood at her easel. Just as she’d been for the hour since she’d sent her son, Frederick, off to tend the livestock. All her muscles screamed in protest, and still she worked through the pain. Desperately needed funds awaited her and Frederick when she completed the commissioned piece.
Art, which had long been cathartic and joyous, had now taken on new purpose and meaning: work.
It was a foreign concept that something that brought such joy should now carry with it an element of pressure. For it was one thing t
o find solace on the blank canvas that was now a luxury to purchase, and it was an altogether different thing to know other people had expectations of that artwork and visions of what they wished from her craft. Shoving the self-doubts to the furthest corners of her mind, Martha settled into the long familiar comfort of her sketches. She let her fingers fly over the page, capturing the stills with the worn-down nub of charcoal. A curl slipped from her perfunctory chignon that had long since protested its constraints and joined the other loose curls falling around her shoulders.
Martha paused and assessed the landscape upon the page. For a moment, panic set in. It knocked around inside her chest, robbing her of her earlier focus. There was too much to be done. It was the never-ending artwork that would never be completed. A piece that she’d been forced to start and stop and then restart again.
Martha briefly closed her eyes. There should only be gratitude that she possessed a skill that allowed her to earn desperately needed funds to care for her son, because the pittances the commissioned pieces earned were a gift. How many other women would have already lifted their skirts or accepted the first formal offer of marriage?
She opened her eyes and stared blankly at the High Town countryside.
But then, there were no offers of marriage. There were few offers of… anything respectable. Such was the fate of a woman who’d committed bigamy and whose father had murdered the man who’d made her a bigamist.
It didn’t matter that Martha hadn’t known the truth of her husband’s circumstances. It hadn’t mattered that Viscount Waters had offered her marriage on a lie. For the world, guilt lay only with a woman. They were all Eve, responsible for every sin and derided and mocked for it.
And in a way, she was guilty. For she had allowed herself to be swayed into that match, had believed there would be a life of respectability, away from High Town.
The Rogue Who Rescued Her Page 2
