by Juliana Gray
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Oh, damn,” Roland said, “I believe the knife just slipped. I’m so dreadfully clumsy.”
“Sir . . .” Markham squeaked. His body pressed slight and rigid against Roland’s chest, no movement whatever. A tiny drop of blood welled up against the tip of the knife.
“What soft, pale skin he’s got,” Roland went on amiably. “Does he scar easily, do you think? I once knew a man like that. Every little nick left a mark. I expect his mistress could scarcely bear to look at him.”
“Bastard,” growled Somerton. His face had calmed into wary readiness, eyes trained on Roland’s, fingers flexing at his sides.
“You’re a reasonable man, Somerton. You know how much she means to me. How little this fellow here”—he gave Markham a friendly jiggle, causing Somerton’s breath to draw in sharply—“means to me. Is your silly vengeance really worth poor Markham’s young life? So much promise, such a handsome new seedling torn from its roots, such a perfect stain blotted out . . . no, hold a moment, I’ve got that wrong . . . such a . . .”
“Stop.” The earl’s voice was dry, hoarse, fierce. The fear had returned to his eyes and to the slant of his brows. The force of it surprised even Roland.
“Oh, I’ve no wish to slit his throat,” Roland said. “But I’ve no wish to have my own slit, either, or to see the woman I love suffer one more jot by your hand. So I suggest you make haste, my good man, up that staircase. I’ll follow along with our friend, at a discreet distance, until we reach the room where you’ve got—let me see if I’ve understood this properly—an innocent woman and her helpless son imprisoned.”
Somerton’s lips parted. He stood there a long moment, perfectly steady, as if the mind behind his masklike face weren’t engaged in the battle of its life. He glanced briefly, almost pleadingly, at Markham’s face, and then back up to Roland. “You’re a damned bloody bastard, Penhallow,” he said at last.
“No more than you,” said Roland kindly. “Lead on, then.”
Somerton turned and trod to the stairs, taking each step as if it led to the scaffold. Roland followed him with Markham in tow, keeping a good ten stairs below the earl, keeping his eyes fixed on Somerton’s broad shoulders for any sign of unexpected movement. The shoulders always betrayed a man first.
But no muscle so much as twitched along the vast expanse of tweed jacket, as they climbed to the first-floor landing and the second. Somerton walked to the end of a wide hallway and came to rest in front of a door.
“It’s locked, of course?” Roland inquired.
Somerton nodded and produced a key.
“Unlock it,” said Roland.
Somerton raised his hand like an automaton and then shook his head. “No. Release Markham first, and I’ll give you the key.”
“Oh, rubbish.” Roland laughed and shook his head. “I’ve been at this game for seven bloody years. I know better than that. Unlock the door and produce my fiancée—unharmed, I hardly need add—and you’ll have your precious secretary back.”
“No. Release him first.”
Roland pressed the knife against Markham’s throat, causing a yelp of distress from the secretary.
Somerton stepped forward. “Damn you! You’ll pay for that!”
“Hardly,” Roland said. “A drop or two of blood is easily removed with a good soak of cold water. Cold, mind you. Anything warmer and it’s set for life.”
Somerton’s face had gone as pale as a parsnip. “Release him now, Penhallow. You have what you want.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“For all I know, you’ll kill him . . .”
Roland rolled his eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said, and stepped forward, raised his booted foot, and crashed the door down.
“What the bloody . . .”
Before Somerton could react, Roland flung Markham before him into the room and jumped after him over the broken door.
He dragged Markham back onto his feet, back against his own chest, and cast wildly about the room.
A rocking chair, a ball, a stack of toys in the corner. A settee, a few chairs, a table with a lamp. A faint hint of lavender in the air, mingling with the spicy scent of cypress drifting from the open window.
But no Lilibet. And no Philip.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Palazzo Angelini might have been designed by Palladio, Lilibet thought grimly, but the garden was pure Machiavelli.
At least Philip was enjoying himself.
“This is a jolly splendid maze,” he said cheerfully, running back to her after looking around the next corner. “Can we plant one at our castle? I’ll bet Uncle Roland could lay out a cracking big maze.”
She tucked a tendril of hair behind her ear. She’d left her hat back in Philip’s room—who thought of hats when shimmying down a length of rope to the balcony below?—and the sun beat down against her uncovered head, causing perspiration to trickle along her temples and down the front of her dress. She could only hope the dark color of her hair would blend in with her surroundings better than a pale straw hat and make her less visible from the villa behind them.
Though she doubted Somerton himself could find them in this maze.
“The thing to do with mazes,” Philip said importantly, “is to turn right at every corner.” He trotted along at her side, apparently untouched by heat or exhaustion or confusion.
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Dead sure. It was in a book, I think. Uncle Roland read it to me, so it must be right. Look at that bird!”
She gripped his hand. “Stay with me, darling. We can’t get lost.” She rounded the next corner, and a new set of tall dark green walls loomed up around them, exactly the same as before. Her heart gave a desperate stab. Who knew if they were heading the right direction? The ground was flat, the hedges high. Dashing across the stone terrace to the lawn, she’d seen the red-tile roof of the Duomo just peeking up above the trees to her left; now, in the middle of the maze, it had slipped away from view. Were they making progress? Were they backtracking? The sun made a hot white light in the pale sky; too high yet to find her direction.
She hurried forward with Philip’s hand firm and damp in her own. She’d thought herself rather ingenious, unwinding the long length of rope from a spool on one of Philip’s toys. Slender rope, designed for playtime, but strong: secured to the heavy settee, it had borne her weight down to the first-floor balcony, and then Philip’s little body as she waited anxiously for him at the bottom, arms outstretched to receive him. She’d flown through terrace and lawn with a surge of elation at her easy escape from Somerton’s clutches—how astonished, how mortified he’d be, when he found them gone—and now here she was, stumbling through the shrubbery without the faintest idea where she was headed.
Keep turning right, Philip had said.
She was trusting their lives to his five-year-old memory.
A wall of green leaves reared up before her: blind alley. “Come along,” she said, almost jerking Philip backward and then to the right, to the right again, blind alley, right turn, the air still and hot around her body, the smell of leaves and cypress heavy in her nose, the sunbaked dirt like pavement beneath her feet. She turned right again, wheeling them both around the corner, and with breathtaking suddenness a vast green lawn opened before her, descending in a gentle slope to a crumbling stone terrace overlooking the sluggish mud brown waters of the Arno.
* * *
Roland’s shocked arm released Markham, who slid to the ground with an inglorious thump. He spun around to face Somerton. “Where the devil are they? Speak up, man! What the devil sort of trick is this?”
But he could see, already, that it was no trick. The last drop of blood had drained from Somerton’s face, and his eyes were wide with astonishment. The earl strode to the window, picked up the
length of rope stretching from the leg of the settee, and leaned his broad shoulders out the window. “It appears,” he said, straightening, sounding unnaturally calm, “they’ve outmaneuvered us both.”
“Outmaneuvered you, you mean,” Roland said. “Both of us, indeed. I refuse to accept any blame for this. What the devil were you thinking, keeping a length of rope in the room? Why not the proverbial series of bedsheets to knot together, for God’s sake? They might have been killed!”
Somerton rolled his eyes. “There’s a balcony below. They were in no danger at all.”
Markham stood up and dusted his sleeves. “Shall I go to the garden and fetch them?” he asked.
“The devil you will!” Roland said, starting for the door. “I’ll find them myself, by God, and end this damned charade.”
“Though not, of course, if I find them first.”
Roland stopped and spun around just in time to catch the top of the earl’s head as it disappeared below the window, dragging the settee with a pane-rattling crash against the wall.
“Bloody hell,” Roland shouted, and ran for the door.
He flew down the stairs, not caring whether or not Markham were following him, his legs moving in a blur. Fear gave him agility; at the next landing, he launched himself over the banister to land midway down the next flight, and leapt down the remaining stairs two at a time.
At the last step he nearly tripped, and staggered into the entrance hall with his feet just under him. He rounded the corner of the staircase and ran to the row of French doors at the back of the hall, rattled the knobs, found one that opened with a groan of old hinges, and lurched through and onto the terrace.
A wide, shallow lawn stood before him, followed by a formal garden exploding with June blooms, crisscrossed by an elegant symmetry of graveled pathways. No sign of Somerton nor Markham. Had they already passed through? Were they headed in another direction?
He hesitated an instant, raising his arm to shield his contracting pupils from the white glare of the sun. Where would Lilibet have gone? To the road, or through the gardens and down to the river?
She’d want to stay hidden, he knew intuitively. They’d be spotted straightaway on the road. Along the riverside, away from the bustle of traffic, they had a much better chance of making their way back into town unnoticed.
Decision made, he bolted across the terrace and down the lawn to the garden, weaving his way around the burgeoning beds, gravel crunching and splaying beneath the hard soles of his riding boots. The ground before him was marred with footsteps: Lilibet and Philip? Somerton and Markham? Both?
He reached the back of the garden and a tall hedge stood before him; to the right, he thought he saw a gap in the dense thicket of leaves. He ran toward it, ducked through, and cursed.
A maze. A bloody maze. Just like the ones back home, in every damned stately home worth its salt; just like the one in the formal gardens of his brother’s magnificent old pile in Cumberland.
Clever way to keep the riffraff from the river away from the house, of course. He couldn’t blame its ancient owner.
He just wanted to rattle the man’s throat.
He knew his way around a maze, of course. The trick was simple: Keep your right hand out, brushing the leaves, and follow it along. Sooner or later you’d emerge at the end.
Preferably sooner, of course, than later.
He took off at a trot, right hand outstretched, skipping the obvious blind alleys. Around he went, feeling by instinct as he drew closer to the center of the maze, then outward again. The heat of the day began to soak through his jacket, prickling against his skin. He’d lost his hat somewhere—the entrance hall, probably, when Somerton had laid him on the floor—and the sun seemed to penetrate all the layers of hair and scalp to bathe his brain in suffocating warmth. He took off his jacket, slung it over his shoulder with his left index finger, and strode on around the next right-hand corner.
As if by signal, some eleven thousand or so nearby birds began to clamor all at once, hard and shrill, and he burst from the maze to another lawn, another terrace, the Arno a strip of dull brown silk beyond; and Somerton, dragging a kicking Philip in one arm and a pleading Lilibet in the other, looking as if he’d much rather drown them both in the river behind him.
* * *
Lilibet saw Roland’s hair first, returning the light of the sun like a halo, or a golden helmet. Like Apollo, except corporeal and frightfully late.
Joy, fear, relief, exaltation: The rush of emotions stopped her breath in her chest. Somerton’s arm wrapped around her shoulders like a band of steel; she fought to crane her neck, to see Roland better, to reassure herself that he was really there.
“Oh, look!” she exclaimed in triumph. “Roland’s here!”
Somerton’s body went slack for an instant, and she swung her fist with all her might into the general region of his kidneys. Philip dropped like a stone into the grass.
“Run, Philip!” she shouted. “Run for the maze!”
“Uncle Roland!” the boy called, and pelted up the slope, arms outstretched. Roland knelt and took him full force, wrapping his long arms around the boy, bending his head to Philip’s ear. Lilibet’s eyes stung with tears. All at once the pieces fell into place, the world adjusted itself on its axis, the doubts and qualms dissolved into a sense of almost painful rightness.
“You see!” she hissed at Somerton. “You see how he is with him! He loves him!” She couldn’t help it, couldn’t help wanting to taunt her husband, to force the bitter cup to his lips and make him drink. At the moment, she had nothing in her heart for the Earl of Somerton except anger and vengeance.
She started forward, but Somerton, recovering from the blow, reached out and snared her. “Vicious little thing, aren’t you,” he said, his voice still raw with physical pain, and yet oddly calm. As if the sight before his eyes didn’t bother him at all.
“Let me go!” she panted. “Can’t you see it’s hopeless? Can’t you see you won’t win?”
“He shan’t have you,” Somerton said in her ear. “By God, he shan’t.”
“Then kill me! Kill him! Kill us all! What the devil do you mean by all this? Do you think to save your pride with revenge?” She took in a short breath, and another, her lungs unable to catch themselves in the fear and panic overwhelming her. “It won’t work. It never works. Revenge is hollow; don’t you know that, by now?”
He gave her a shake and didn’t reply.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” she whispered. “You haven’t a clue what to do with us. You can’t bring yourself to let us go, but you can’t bring yourself to end it all. You’re a coward, Somerton. A bully and a coward.”
A look of fury crossed his face. He raised one arm, and she closed her eyes, expecting the blow to land on her cheek, her head, her jaw.
But nothing happened.
His arm remained stiff underneath her, holding her firmly. She opened her eyes and saw that he was staring into the distance, down the side of the river, his thick black eyebrows raised high with disbelief.
Hands grasped her—warm, tender hands, Roland’s hands, she knew without asking. She gave herself up to them, and Somerton’s arm relinquished her without a fight.
“Lilibet,” came Roland’s familiar voice in her ear, low and full with emotion, and she turned herself into his hot, sun-drenched chest with a sob. “You’re all right, darling?”
“Yes,” she managed to whisper.
He pulled her away, out of Somerton’s reach, and held her in place. His body rang with tension against hers, taut and ready, smelling of soap and horses and perspiration. He felt like a hunting dog, poised for the kill.
“Philip?” she heard herself say, in a voice too thin and high to possibly belong to her.
“Hush. At the top of the lawn.” His arms loosened; his lips pressed agai
nst the top of her head, against her temple. “Go to him, darling. Now.”
“But . . .” She lifted her head, confused.
“Now. Run.” He wasn’t looking at her at all; he was gazing with narrow eyes in the same direction as Somerton had, down along the side of the river.
She turned and looked.
A man was walking down the riverside path, stepping just now onto the flagstones of the terrace, tall and straight-backed and steely, his hair liberally peppered with gray and his body clothed in English tweed.
Behind his broad figure, Lilibet could just glimpse the familiar slight shape of her husband’s secretary, Mr. Markham, before he disappeared into the brush.
* * *
Somerton’s voice cut through the heavy air like a saber. “What the devil are you doing here, Olympia?”
“Your grandfather!” exclaimed Lilibet, against Roland’s chest.
“Go now, sweetheart,” he hissed in her ear. He loosened his arms and gave her a little push. “Go to Philip.”
His grandfather’s familiar voice rang out from the edge of the terrace. “I might ask the same of you, Somerton. Good God, what a cock-up you’ve made of things.”
“Things? What things?” demanded Roland. He stepped forward and crossed his arms. What had Beadle said? That Somerton had sent a cable to the Duke of Olympia after arriving in Florence? And his connection to the Castel sant’Agata: What was that about? He understood his grandfather well enough to know with certainty that these scraps of information didn’t constitute a mere coincidence.
The duke came to a stop and leaned on a gold-knobbed walking stick, his eyes flashing back and forth between Roland and Somerton. It was a pose, of course; Roland knew he needed no assistance to stand upright. His grandfather had the strength of an ox.
“What things, Grandfather?” Roland demanded again.
The duke’s gaze shifted to him. “Perhaps our good friend the earl would care to explain. Eh, Somerton? What of it?”
