“I realize I might look fearsome,” he said, lightly touching his face. “But I mean you no harm, lass. All I ask is a drink and something to eat, and I’ll be on my way.”
“I could have saved myself,” she said fiercely. “I didna need your help.” To demonstrate her self-sufficiency, she swung the sword and decapitated a nearby scarecrow.
Alex scowled at the demonstration—ladies had no business wielding swords—and yelped when the scab on his lip broke open. “I dinna care if you needed my help or not,” he croaked. “All I want is …”
Alex felt himself wavering on his feet, the brief spurt of energy having deserted him once the emergency was past. “All I want is something to drink and …”
An ancient woman appeared in his line of vision.
“Bring him inside, child,” the old woman said. “Canna ye see the man needs yer help?”
“What makes him any different from Ian?” the young woman demanded.
“He didna help Ian,” the crone said. “He helped you. Take a good look, Kitty. How tall yer young man is, how brawny. Ye canna deny his courage, facing down Ian and a sword with naught but his fists. Beneath all those bruises, I think ye’ve found yer bodyguard.”
Chapter 4
Mr. Cedric Ambleside paced the library floor at Blackthorne Hall in agitation. “So the duke’s body has not been found?”
The three louts he had recruited from the London docks bobbed their heads like corks in the sea.
“Yes it was found, or no it was not?” Mr. Ambleside demanded.
“Ain’t seen ’ide nor ’air of ’im,” the big one said.
“Not since we threw ’im in,” the small one added.
“But you can confirm to the authorities that the duke went into the sea and did not come out?” Mr. Ambleside said.
“That we can,” the toothless one replied.
Mr. Ambleside stopped his pacing and stared at the three sailors. “Get rid of those clothes. Burn them.”
“But these is the duke’s—”
“Precisely,” Mr. Ambleside said. “If I can recognize them, so can someone else. Burn them.”
“But—”
He grabbed a pair of lapels sewn by Weston and pulled the man wearing the finely tailored jacket—now somewhat water-damaged—onto his toes. “You fool. How could you be wearing the duke’s clothes unless you had found his body?”
The toothless man gulped.
Mr. Ambleside let the man go with a shake of his head, then crossed to a highly polished Sheraton desk, opened the drawer, and took out a purse. “Here is what I promised you.” He threw the purse of coins to the closest sailor, but the other two both grabbed for it, and a free-for-all resulted on the Turkish carpet.
Mr. Ambleside rolled his eyes. That was what came of dealing with the lower elements. One could not trust them not to kill each other as easily as whatever mark one gave them. Mr. Ambleside laid to with his cane on the shoulders of the nearest man, who quickly abandoned the pile.
He applied the same remedy to the other two and they quickly separated. Once they were standing before him again he said, “Get rid of those clothes before you tell your story to the magistrate. Then take yourselves back to the gutters of London from whence you came. If I see you again after today, I will hire someone to do for you what I hired you to do for the duke.”
“Throw us into the sea?” one asked stupidly.
“Kill you, sir,” Mr. Ambleside replied, lest there be any doubt of his intent. “Farewell, gentlemen.”
Three heads bobbed again as they made their exit from the room. Mr. Ambleside could hear them arguing over the purse by the time they reached the echoing stone hall.
A figure rose from one of the two gold silk-covered wing chairs facing the fireplace. Clay Bannister, Earl of Carlisle, had been invisible to the three louts, and Mr. Ambleside realized, when he perceived the nobleman’s ashen face, that perhaps it had not been wise to confirm the manner of the duke’s demise in his presence.
“What have you done, Mr. Ambleside?” the Englishman demanded. “What have you done?”
“Merely what had to be done, my lord,” Mr. Ambleside replied.
“You had Blackthorne killed?”
“I did.”
“But … but … that’s murder!”
“Not at all,” Mr. Ambleside said, seeing the danger in such language and wishing to avert any consequences that might arise from the earl’s regret. “The duke’s ship went down during a storm at sea, and he was drowned.”
The earl’s dark brown eyes reminded him of a mortally wounded deer. Stupid boy. The earl had no notion of what was necessary in this world to survive. That was always a problem with the Quality. No sense of perspective.
Clay Bannister had become the Earl of Carlisle one year before at the age of one and twenty. Before dying, his elder brother, Charles, had gambled away the family fortune and indulged in enough debauchery to ruin the family’s reputation in the neighborhood. Mr. Ambleside had visited the new earl to welcome him on the duke’s behalf and to take the young man’s measure.
“May I congratulate you on your new circumstances, my lord,” he had said when the earl invited him to sit in the drawing room at Carlisle Castle. He had shifted subtly to avoid a dip where a hole in the brocade seat of the chair had allowed the horsehair stuffing to escape. “Please let me know if I may be of any help to you.”
“No one can help,” the earl had said bitterly. “Unless you have a fortune you would like to give away.”
“I am afraid not, my lord,” Mr. Ambleside replied sympathetically. “I knew Carlisle Castle in your father’s day. It was quite magnificent.”
“Yes. It was.” The young earl turned away, but not before Mr. Ambleside saw the despair in his dark eyes.
The earl clutched a handful of the rotting velvet drapes and stared through a broken, leaded-glass window at a weed-choked lawn. “It seems I have inherited nothing but debt to add to my own. My brother sold all the land that was not entailed—everything but the castle itself—to the Duke of Blackthorne to finance his excesses. I had no idea …”
The earl’s voice faded, and Mr. Ambleside saw him swallow hard. “It is my hope one day to buy it all back.”
“Buy it back, my lord?”
“The land,” Carlisle said. “I will have to buy back the Carlisle land my brother sold to Blackthorne. Do you think the duke might be willing to sell to me on credit?”
With those words Mr. Ambleside had realized how truly naive the young man was. Credit? For an impoverished earl with no assets but an entailed castle? Hardly likely. Mr. Ambleside recognized an opportunity when he saw one, and the angry, embittered, and indebted young man was ripe for the plucking.
“I am afraid the duke is not likely to relinquish the land under any circumstances,” Mr. Ambleside said.
“I know I could have managed the estate and made a profit. If only there were an estate to manage.”
“Perhaps I might make a suggestion, my lord.”
The earl’s sharp eyes had focused intently, disconcertingly, on him as Mr. Ambleside set forth a plan by which Carlisle might regain the land he had lost and Blackthorne Hall as well. Of course the scheme had not been entirely honest. Honesty had not gotten Mr. Ambleside what he was entitled to in this life. Cunning and deceit had been much more useful in achieving his ends.
And there he had hit a snag.
It seemed the young man had not yet sufficiently sunk to depths that would allow him to entirely abandon his honor—a quality which Mr. Ambleside knew from personal experience the current earl’s elder brother had not possessed in any great quantity.
“I will not stoop to thievery,” Carlisle said flatly.
“It is not precisely—”
“It is stealing,” Carlisle interrupted.
Mr. Ambleside had kept himself purposefully still, tamping down the temper that threatened to erupt and spoil everything. What did the earl call years of unpaid bills to his tailo
r and his bootmaker and the tradesmen who supplied him with all manner of goods? He knew how the Quality lived their lives. Bills—except gambling IOUs—were seldom discharged in a timely manner, if at all. If that was not thievery, what did one call it?
Yet, in the Englishman’s eyes, by the rules of his class, he had lived honestly, even nobly. Mr. Ambleside revised his course and continued.
“Very well. I will simply rent the Carlisle land your brother sold to the duke back to you.”
“I cannot afford it.”
“The rent can be deferred, my lord, until you have profits with which to pay it. I can even write in an option to purchase back the Carlisle land, and perhaps whatever Blackthorne land is unentailed, upon the duke’s death.”
Mr. Ambleside watched hope light up the young man’s eyes.
“You can do that?” the earl asked.
“I have absolute authority to manage the estate as I see fit. When you consider how cheaply the duke bought the land from your brother Charles, you might even say he owes you such an accommodation.”
Mr. Ambleside watched the young man chew on his lower lip as he thought over that bit of fraudulent reasoning. He had discovered during his years of larceny that any evil could be justified if one came up with a logical enough reason for it.
He had not explained to the young man that in order to make the land available to him he would be raising the rents and forcing the current tenants off the land. And that he planned to make sure Blackthorne died of something other than old age. He was not sure he could trust the earl to see the felicity of such an arrangement. Since he could not trust the earl’s sense of fair play not to interfere, he said nothing about such consequences.
Mr. Ambleside had watched the earl’s eyes narrow suspiciously and realized the young man might not be quite so reckless and imprudent as he had believed or hoped.
“Why would you be willing to help me? What is it you hope to gain from such a plan?” Carlisle asked.
Mr. Ambleside gave him a slightly colored view of the facts. “I have a debt of my own to settle with the duke. If I decide to rent the land to you, and Blackthorne should later disagree with the terms, that is a matter strictly between His Grace and myself. You are not involved.”
“Why not approach the duke directly with your complaint?”
Foolish youth. Carlisle still believed honesty was the best policy. “Blackthorne is a rich and powerful man,” Mr. Ambleside explained. “He could destroy me as easily as a ship is dashed to splinters against the cliffs. No, my lord. I prefer to wreak my vengeance without bringing the full weight of His Grace’s influence down upon my head. If helping you should cause Blackthorne to suffer in even a small way, be certain you are absolved of all guilt in the matter.”
The dear, gullible boy had believed him.
“Never fear, Mr. Ambleside,” the young earl said, his face wreathed in a relieved and happy smile. “I will make sure the land provides a profit. Blackthorne will receive payment after the first harvest—with interest. And if I am as successful as I hope to be, I will be in a position, when the time comes, to repurchase the land.”
So Mr. Ambleside and the desperate Earl of Carlisle had drawn up papers renting the Carlisle land owned by the duke to Clay Bannister. Of course, Mr. Ambleside had gone a bit further than the young earl had anticipated or intended and given him an option to buy every stitch of Blackthorne land that was not entailed—which happened to include, unbeknownst to the earl, the land on which Blackthorne Hall itself was built.
Mr. Ambleside was trembling inside the day that Carlisle signed the paper setting down their agreement. He had been making plans for so many years, had even made sure the entailment that had previously existed in regard to Blackthorne Hall was not renewed upon the former duke’s death. Neither Blackthorne nor his English solicitor had been apprised the land and the castle could be sold. He had cunningly arranged to steal everything Blackthorne owned in Scotland.
“Blackthorne is dead,” Mr. Ambleside said calmly, coolly, as he stood facing the earl in the duke’s library. “You are the one holding an option to buy his estate in Scotland upon his death. You are the one with the most to gain from his murder.”
“I had no part in what happened! You lied to me. You deceived me.”
Mr. Ambleside shrugged. “I’m afraid it was necessary. There is no turning back now. We will proceed as we began. You have an ironclad contract to purchase the duke’s land upon his death. You will exercise it with monies I will provide to you.”
“I will not!”
Mr. Ambleside stared iuto the earl’s defiant eyes and said, “I do not intend to see my fortunes flounder because you have turned craven.”
“Are you calling me a coward, sir?”
Ambleside realized, when he saw the young man’s jaw muscles jerk, that he might have gone a hair too far. The Earl of Carlisle was lean and fit and reputed to be quite a swordsman.
“Stand down, my lord,” he said. “I am not impugning your courage, merely your fortitude in the face of what may, perhaps, become a nasty investigation.”
“Investigation?” the earl said in a strangled voice. “You think the magistrate—”
“I fully expect, since the duke’s body has not been recovered, that someone will be sent to find it.”
“What if they find the duke trussed and tied as those fools said they left him? Foul play will be suspected.”
“I am certain the scavengers in the sea will solve that problem for us by devouring His Grace,” Mr. Ambleside said. “I shall, of course, set my own spies to searching for any remains that may drift up on shore.”
“I can no longer be a part of this, Mr. Ambleside. I cannot follow through with the purchase of the land—not even what was mine. I cannot bear the thought that I may have been responsible in even a small way for the death—”
“You will live with whatever guilt you feel,” Mr. Ambleside said. “Or you will die for it.”
“What are you saying?”
“That you are the one who wanted your lands back and plotted with me to get them.”
“I signed an agreement to rent land,” the earl protested. “I never intended murder!”
“Pardon me, my lord. You and I both know that, but if any suspicion were to fall on me for the duke’s death, I should have to tell the magistrate everything, including the fact that you more than once wished the duke to Hades, and that I only helped you to send him there.”
Carlisle gripped the nearest wing chair with a trembling hand. “That is monstrous, sir.”
“On the contrary,” Mr. Ambleside said. “It is merely a matter of self-preservation. Now, perhaps you would like to discuss the next step in our plan.”
The earl’s face was all sharp angles. A straight nose, and a square chin—and the shadows in the room and the loathing and shame in his eyes—made him look, to Ambleside’s surprise, quite dangerous.
“The devil take you, sir!” the Englishman snarled. “The duke is dead. The house should be in deep mourning. How can you even consider—”
“Excuse me for interrupting again, my lord,” Mr. Ambleside said. It really was unfair that a morally upright child like Clay Bannister should become an earl when there were men, such as himself, so much better suited to the role who were overlooked simply because they had been born on the wrong side of the blanket.
“Time is of the essence,” Mr. Ambleside said. “Lady Katherine MacKinnon has challenged the duke’s right to the land in court and might very well find a friendly ear. Blackthorne Hall might be given back to her even though you have a legal right to buy it from the duke.
“The sooner you are able to win the lady’s hand in marriage, the more comfortable I will be with the situation. Once we know the land will stay in the family, so to speak, you are free to lend your voice to hers in acquiring the land from the courts. An exchange of monies might not even be necessary. Would that soothe your wounded pride?”
“I cannot imagine playing
suitor at a time like this,” the earl protested.
“If you cannot win her hand, and she wins her battle in court, the duke’s death has been for naught,” Mr. Ambleside said in the sternest tones.
He knew from the tortured expression on the young man’s face, he was likely contemplating the lady he had left behind in London when his fortunes had been changed by the sudden death of his brother, an accident Mr. Ambleside had also arranged when Charles was of no further use to him. Carlisle had bemoaned the loss of his one true love more than once while foxed.
“Lady Marjorie is engaged to another,” Mr. Ambleside reminded the young man. “Marriage to Lady Katherine restores all you have lost.”
“Except the woman I love,” the earl said bitterly.
Mr. Ambleside was easily old enough to be the young man’s father, and he sometimes played the role for effect. He had learned that manipulating people simply involved saying the right things to achieve the response one wanted.
“What is done is done,” he said, crossing and putting a comforting hand on the earl’s shoulder. “The duke is dead. Your lady is lost. Lady Katherine is your destiny now.” He felt the young man shudder and hurried to say, “Gossip says the foolish female has agreed to marry any man in her clan who can win her heart. If you do not proceed with your courtship immediately, you may find the land stolen from your grasp by some poor Scots farmer.”
Mr. Ambleside thought again how unfair life was. It was sheer misfortune that he was a Blackthorne bastard rather than the legitimate firstborn son. Though gossip had long since revealed the secret of his birth to the neighborhood, no Blackthorne had ever publicly acknowledged his relationship to the family.
His mother had been an upstairs maid in the household of Alistair Wharton’s grandfather, an innocent when His Grace had taken her to his bed after a drunken party on the eve of his wedding.
His mother had been let go from her position, of course, but in payment for her silence, the duke had given her a cottage and quarterly allowance, and had promised, if the child were a boy, to educate him at the best schools in England. His mother had told him again and again how lucky he was, that if it had not been for the duke’s generosity, he might have grown up to be a shepherd or a farmer or a footman.
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