by Thea Devine
He waited for Jainee.
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He thought he had no questions, that he would just tell her that she had to go.
But he found, sitting by the firelight, that he had a dozen or more questions, that he did not understand the how of it, and where Jainee fit into the story. Not entirely, not completely. And he thought if he knew any more, he might kill her himself.
She entered the library at a moment when his gaze was focused on the flames in the fireplace, and he was not watching for her.
"My lord," she murmured, and he looked up, startled, and then motioned her to the seat opposite which had been moved from the place where Dunstan had fallen.
She didn't even know where to begin. Apologies seemed superfluous and she knew there was no way she could make amends.
"You know everything, my lord," she began tentatively, unsure whether she should even try to explain. The tortured expression on his face told her not to try. Her words made no dent in his anguish.
The silence between them lengthened, broken only by the crackle of the flames as another log fell into the ashes.
"When," he said finally when he could make himself speak, "when did you know?"
She swallowed and took a deep breath. "When he came to Lady Waynflete's house for the first time, I knew." And he threatened to kill me, she wanted to cry, but that was the most unbelievable thing of all, that this smooth and oily man had even threatened her and then gone on his social rounds and treated her like an equal.
The words hit him like blows. "For so long."
"How could I tell you?"
"We made a bargain."
"It did not include turning over your uncle and branding him a liar, a cheat and a traitor. You would never have believed me," Jainee said desperately. "You never would have believed it."
He didn't know—he just didn't know. If she had told him: "he's my father, he is the man you seek"—he didn't know. The
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point was, she had known.
He didn't know what to do about her, either.
"Who is the boy that Dunstan kept talking about?"
"The boy," she murmured, hugging a thread of hope. "The boy is my half brother—the illegitimate only son of Napoleon of France.
"My mother was killed because Napoleon wanted him and Dunstan had abducted him away. Don't you see? You must see, my lord —it is a chain of circumstances with Dunstan at the lead, maneuvering everything. We were all his pawns, all. You could not have deduced it. No one else had, not even those with whom he had worked. Not even his closest friends. How so the nephew he had only latterly come to know? Think, my lord, think. He tried to dissuade you from this marriage. He became so much more attentive to Lady Waynflete when he became aware I was living at her house. Who could have known his motives and machinations."
"You did," Nicholas said starkly. "Only you."
"Yes, the guttersnipe from the gaming house. My credibility exceeded my debt, my lord? I think not. You would have thought it some kind of ruse, pure and simple. And beyond that, he had threatened me did I tell you. You heard: he tried to kill me. Even in London. Small fragile accidents that might all be my fault. He said it, everything. Why can you not understand?"
"I heard."
"He loved your mother, you know."
"I heard him." He couldn't bear it. For want of a love, a kingdom lost......
"I swore I would find the boy," she said suddenly into the silence. "I swore to my mother on her deathbed."
"And so—another lie?"
"An omission, my lord. Only my father knew where the boy was."
"And he did not tell you?"
Jainee sighed. "No. What do you wish me to do, Nicholas?" And this cry for clemency came from her heart.
"I don't know," he said, and he could find no emotion within 446
him to reach for her. The silence lengthened until she could do nothing else but leave the room and leave him to his thoughts.
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He would never forgive her, she thought, as she lay awake long into the night, aware that Nicholas had chosen to take his rest someplace upstairs and away from her.
It all came down to that: she had known and she had not told him. Whether it would have sounded plausible, whether he would have believed her, that didn't matter. Only that she had known.
He could not see the case for the facts. He could not look at circumstances or motivations or the untenable position in which Dunstan had placed her. He would not credit Dunstan's threats or the actions he had taken against her.
What he saw was she had made him look like a fool.
She had sought to protect them all.
She supposed, in hindsight, she had not given a single thought to the outcome. How long could Dunstan have borne up under the strain of knowing that she was in London and could have instigated a scandal that would ruin him? And when his subtle threats started, and her sense that she was being followed and watched, how long would it have been before he had taken some comprehensive action?
The danger had only become real to her after she had come to Southam Manor, not before. Perhaps she had thought she was safe in the fickle crowd of Dunstan's society friends.
Or else she had been just plain naive. The threat had always been there, from the moment she identified Dunstan as her father. She had just thought herself invincible, untouchable, and the thing would remain unresolved.
But the accidents when he had finally got her alone at Southam Manor . . . too clever . . . nothing that would not seem in the normal course of events, and everything laid to a moment's carelessness on her part.
Except for the glass, the ink, the pin prick, the treacherous fall . . . and her thought that someone in that house was against
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her—someone else wanted her out of the way.
But now Dunstan had died, she should feel safe, but instead she felt uneasy as if there was something she had missed, something she had overlooked.
The other accidents—they had to have been her own fault, through her own carelessness, except that she was never negligent, nor was she clumsy. But perhaps she was thinking too much upon the incidents. They were such inconclusive, inexplicable little mishaps.
Nothing to worry about—except that they were coupled with the larger more direct and lethal attacks of her father.
She felt so disquieted. Dunstan’s death had shaken her up more than she had ever expected. She felt a flat emotionless sense of loss of something forever irretrievable, she felt an incalculable sadness for Lucretia who had loved him so futilely, and she felt a faint glowing feeling of pride that she and her mother had been able to live without him.
But for the boy, there would have been no quest for her father; there would have been nothing of the chain of events that had led her to this moment and the ultimate end to his one act of greed.
If he had not stolen the boy . . .
She might still be in France, squirreling away money so that she and Therese could make ends meet. There would have been no Nicholas, no outrageous wagering, no Lady Southam. It made her head spin to think what there would not have been.
The boy . . .
He was the only component of the story which had no explanation. He was the mystery, the cipher, the cause. Everything had happened because of the boy.
And if she gave up the search for him, then everything that had resulted would have been for naught.
But he had been a baby when Dunstan had come, and seven or eight years old now. How would she know the boy? She had no clues, except the unexpected visit of Dunstan to Southam Manor in 1802, nothing more. The boy could be anywhere—here at first and then perhaps her father had removed him to London
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where he could better oversee his upbringing.
Or the boy could still be here—within walking distance, or shouting distance of the Manor. Within a mile or two or three. Or living with some family in Hungerford Village. Or ... a futile chore to
investigate all the possibilities?
She had to do something.
She had lost Nicholas. Perhaps she could find the boy.
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Nicholas had gone on a round of visiting his tenants, with whom he had had no contact for these ten years.
But he had left instructions to restrict Jainee to the house.
Immediately, she wanted to disobey him and carry through a host of unformulated plans that included scouring the countryside to see if anyone had gotten wind of a child in some unusual circumstance.
But that also would alert anyone who might be hiding him, and she thought that Nicholas' limiting her to the house would have the positive effect of making her think and plan carefully exactly how she was going to approach this quest.
"Monsieur was quite put out this morning," Marie commented as she arranged Jainee's hair after Mrs. Blue had delivered the news of her confinement to the house with her morning chocolate. "Up all night and stamping about. His uncle's death has deranged him, and he will take it out on you."
"He is merely shocked by the turn of events," Jainee said calmly. "All will soon be back to rights."
"Monsieur is angry with you for hiding the truth, madame. He will not change the course overnight."
"I don't expect him to."
"He might confine you here forever," Marie said and there was a note in her voice that made Jainee look at her.
"Does this trouble you?"
"I have said, I do not like the country. Always I have been in the great cities and with the courts of the great rulers. Here I am restless, madame, and if I may say—bored. I ask you to consider whether you might return me either to the
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court of Murat in Italy or back to France."
"How is this? You have not aired your discontent but once, Marie, and now it is a month and you still feel the same?"
"I do not wish to remain here," Marie said.
"But we won't be in the country forever."
"I want to go back to France, madame. I ask only that you consider my wishes in the near future."
"Yes," Jainee said; what could she say? Marie was her last link with France and with the life there. Marie was efficient and had been so properly grateful to have been sent with her—and now she was bored. But then what did she have to do but mend her dresses, do some ironing and —what else? As her maid, she was not responsible for anything else. A girl from the town, skilled with a needle, could do as much, including hook up her dresses and arrange her hair. "Yes, I will certainly think about what would be best to do. Perhaps a trip into town in a day or two would alleviate the monotony."
"My gratitude, madame," Marie murmured, and left her alone with her chocolate.
And now the first consideration of the plan: she must talk again with Mrs. Blue.
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"There was nothing unusual, my lady," Mrs. Blue said when Jainee invited her back to the salon to tell her some more about the time of Dunstan's visit in aught one or two. "He had come many times but not on a regular basis when my Lord and my Lady were alive, less when they took in Mr. Nicholas, but certainly as much as any kin who lived away and was in diplomatic service. We knew that. Didn't think anything of it when he came by and said he was back from a mission and passing this way. Seemed natural to me, it did."
"Did he stay over?"
"There was barely a bed to offer him, what with the roof leaking and all. We lived in the main part of the house back then because there was nowhere else, and we couldn't bear to leave the place to maunder away to the rats and the rain. Yes, my lady,
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he did, he stayed —in Lord Henry's bed, just for the night."
Wanting to feel what it would be like to be master of the Southam fortune, Jainee thought trenchantly. There was no end to her father's resentment over that deal of the cards.
"And had he said where he had come from?"
"Oh now, my lady, I couldn't remember if he did. It was that long ago, and the only reason I remember even so much is that he reported back to Mr. Nicholas and immediately, workmen were ordered to begin to repair the place. So it was fortune smiling on us that he came."
And fortune smiling on him that no one had noticed the coincidence—but no one would have known there was even a reason to question Dunstan's presence in Berwickshire in aught one or aught two.
And so he had come, she thought, from any direction and he could have left the boy anyplace. But he must have had some place. He could not have planned so carefully to abduct him and then just hand him off to any peasant woman willing to take him.
There had to be someone, if indeed Southam had been his destination on his return from France.
Someone , . . and she had to deduce somehow who that someone might be.
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When Nicholas entered Southam Manor two days later, Jainee barreled into him with no sign of remorse or sorrow or anything. "My lord, you cannot keep me confined in this place for another day. I must go to town tomorrow, and if you do not remove this stricture on my movements, I shall have to sneak away."
"Well, Diana," he said coolly. "You are ever goddess-like. You play with people's lives, you wreak destruction and then you just go on your way as if nothing had happened."
She quieted instantly, feeling the pure pain of futility knife through her. "No my lord; it is merely that your keeping me inactive does nothing to resolve the fact that I kept from you an important piece of information—which you would not have
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believed anyway. And since there is no way to determine whether you are right or I am, I see no reason for you to imprison me here when I might accomplish something if I were allowed to move about freely."
"Indeed? And what might you possibly accomplish here, Diana? There are no foolish fops to adore you, no parties for you to attend to shine like a jewel. No neighbors to visit. No charities in which you wish to involve yourself. What could there possibly be in town that would be so urgent that you must take yourself away from Southam Manor?"
Oh, the question—here was the test of her, of everything. No truths with omissions. No lies. No stories. And yet, how could she confess her tenuous thinking about the boy. He would reject it altogether.
But he had rejected her already. She had nothing but her search for the boy to hold onto, almost as if it would prove the truth of what she had told him did she find him.
She took a deep breath. "I search for the boy."
He had not expected that. She might have said she wished to leave him —but he would never countenance that. She might have said she wished for a change in the monotony of her days, and he might have believed that.
But never this. "The boy must be dead."
"I think not."
"It doesn't matter."
"I want to know," she said desperately.
"And why, Diana? So you can go carousing around the countryside making yourself conspicuous as usual. Do you think some brazen cow-handed country bumpkin will rescue you from me? I would kill him first and you would not get five miles beyond the village limits. There is no rhyme or reason to this, no matter what Dunstan said. If he took the boy and brought him to England. He might well have left him in France. He seems to have left a string of women wherever he damned went, and the person who should be the last to believe his lies, is the first to want to uphold them."
"I want to find the boy, nothing more. I believe he is here be-
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cause Dunstan was here in '02, and probably after he returned from France. Why would he not bring him here if he wished to use him as a pawn to coerce the emperor? If he kept him in France, he would not have access to him, because he could not be sure the peace would last longer than five minutes. And look at what happened: war broke out again the following year. The boy must be here or Dunstan would have been desperate. You must let me search for him."
"You will not leave Southam Manor," he said roughly, and she
saw he refused to consider this possibility as well. She hated his stubbornness and his blind eyes. She could not wait until his sight cleared. She could not sit still long enough.
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Mr. Finley was dubious, but he also still felt a little guilty about that one little accident that was so perplexing. And yes, he knew that my Lord did not wish my Lady to be gadding about the countryside, but he also wanted to prove that his dolly-mare was as gentle as a lamb because the Lady had not volunteered to step foot into the cart since the mishap.
And here she was this early in the morning, desiring to take the cart and the mare, and very pretty about it too, she was, and he was torn between wanting to obey his Lord and impress his Lady.
In the end, because she promised not to go further than the boundaries of Southam Manor, he agreed to hitch up the mare and show her again the trick to handling the reins.
As he watched her go off, he was reassured as well that she had taken her maid with her. There was nothing to it: my Lady merely wished an early morning drive and so he would tell Mr. Nicholas — simple as that.
But it was not simple for Jainee. The cart, which had two wheels only, wobbled and turned every which way and she was sure she would overturn the thing at any moment. Moreover, Marie sat disapprovingly beside her, never saying a word. Which was just as well: she needed every ounce of concentration to keep the mare in check. It also took some doing to find the main
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road. Only after they turned into it and found a sign for Hungerford did Marie venture to comment. "You have not said why you rush to go into Hungerford, my lady; surely not solely on my account?"
"I will not let that man dictate what I can do or cannot do," Jainee said through gritted teeth, every ounce of her strength and wit focused on keeping that gentle mare on some kind of even course. "I cannot sit in that house a moment longer and not do something. My father is dead; my lord has abandoned me. The story is ended but for the question of the boy."
