While they dismounted and handed their horses to the grooms, one of the younger ladies, a confident matron with dark hair, swept up to Gareth and Emily. “Welcome—I’m Leonora, Tristan’s wife.” Smiling delightedly, she shook hands with Gareth, then squeezed Emily’s fingers. “We’re very glad to see you, not least because those two”—she tipped her head to Jack and Tristan—“have been on tenterhooks for the last week, awaiting your arrival.”
“Indeed.” The second matron, taller and rather stately with dark mahogany hair and an openly commanding manner, joined them and offered her hand. “I’m Clarice, Jack’s wife. I gather you’ve had adventures untold—you must come in and tell us all about them.”
Those words proved prophetic. Before Emily could do more than give her name and touch fingers, she and Gareth were swept up by a wave of older ladies, led by Tristan’s great-aunts, Lady Hermione Wemyss and Lady Hortense Wemyss, carried into the big house and deposited in a large, long family parlor that was clearly the older ladies’ domain.
“I’m afraid”—Leonora angled her head close to Emily’s as they settled side by side on one of the many chaises—“that it’s best—easiest, certainly—to humor them. They mean well. If any of their questions disturb you, just look to me or Clarice, and we’ll rescue you.” She glanced at Gareth and smiled. “You, too, Major—feel free to call on us for aid.”
Gareth met her eye, inclined his head. “Please call me Gareth.”
Once all the ladies had subsided, he sat in the armchair next to the chaise. Emily looked around. “Jack and Tristan?”
“Have escaped.” Clarice smiled from an armchair opposite.
“We don’t need them.” Lady Hortense dismissed her great-nephew and his friend with an arrogant wave. Her eyes, old but bright, fixed on Emily and Gareth. “It’s you two we want to know about—and we’re a great deal too old to waste time being delicate. So, how did you come to be in India in the first place?”
The old ladies were dogged, determined, and quite shockingly direct, but there was no doubt of their sincere interest, or of their shrewdness. There were fourteen in all, an Ethelreda, a Millie, and a Flora among them. All had questions, and with so many minds focused on the task, each and every little detail was winkled from them, and examined and commented upon.
Which should have put them out, put their backs up, but instead the kindness and understanding the old ladies exuded made their interrogation feel more like a confession and absolution.
Almost an exorcism.
Emily found herself responding to their inquisition with increasing freedom. She suspected Gareth, too, revealed more than he’d expected to—possibly more than he was comfortable with in response to their encouraging probing. Certainly, when after half an hour Jack and Tristan looked in, using the diversion of the tea trolley for cover, Gareth seized the chance to escape.
Clarice caught Emily’s eye, and arched a brow.
Emily smiled, all but imperceptibly shook her head. Accepting a cup of real English tea and a plate with real scones, plum jam, and fresh cream, she relaxed on the chaise, and turned to answer Ethelreda’s next question.
The day closed in outside the parlor windows. The curtains were drawn, the fire built up, and eventually the questions died.
“Well,” Hermione declared, “you and your major have certainly lived through thick and thin, up hill and dale. So when will we be hearing wedding bells?”
“Aunt!” Leonora attempted to frown down her outrageous relative-by-marriage.
Who pooh-poohed and waved her objection aside. “Plain as a pikestaff which way they’re headed—and see?” She waved at Emily. “She’s not denying it, is she?” Hermione leaned closer and peered. “Indeed, she’s not even blushing.”
Emily realized she wasn’t. In fact, she couldn’t help but smile. She glanced at Leonora. “It’s quite all right.” She looked back at Hermione and the other old ladies, all eagerly waiting. “We haven’t yet set a date. We’re still discussing all the little things I expect people do.”
“Good gel!” Hortense nodded approvingly. “Get the basics agreed to before you set your hand in his.”
A loud bo-oo-oo-ong rolled through the house.
“Time to dress for dinner,” Leonora announced.
The old ladies sat up, gathering their trailing shawls and handkerchiefs, grasping the heads of their numerous canes and pulling themselves out of their chairs.
Leonora rose beside Emily. “Just in time,” she murmured, “or they would be giving you advice on how to manage your wedding night.”
Clarice chuckled as she joined them. “I’m rather curious as to what they might say.”
So was Emily.
The three of them followed the older ladies up the stairs, lending a hand when needed. When they reached the first floor, and their elders had stumped off to their rooms, Clarice following, distantly supervising, Leonora conducted Emily to a lovely room overlooking the park to one side of the manor. Dorcas was already there, laying out one of Emily’s few evening gowns, and—bliss—a bath stood by the fireplace, steam wreathing above its sides.
Leonora glanced at Emily’s rapt expression and laughed. “Take your time—we won’t be starting dinner without you.” She met Emily’s eyes. “And if there’s anything you need, anything at all, please ask.”
Emily heard the subtle message, saw confirmation in Leonora’s very blue eyes of the sincerity and universality of her words, and felt a connection she’d never felt with any but her sisters stir. “Thank you.” She smiled, and stated equally sincerely, “I will.”
Leonora’s smile blazed. She squeezed her hand. “Good. Now I’ll leave you to it.”
Dinner with the fourteen old ladies and the other two couples proved a warm and relaxing affair. Emily could feel her tension—so consistent and persistent over the last weeks that she’d forgotten it was there—evaporating.
Despite being less used to such rousing—not to say ribald—female-dominated discussions, or the warmth and clear support that flowed so freely through the room, Gareth, too, found himself lowering his guard—he had to remind himself the cultists were still in the country, that they had to assume their pursuers might still find them.
When he realized that the ladies didn’t intend to leave the three gentlemen to the port and brandy, instead joining them in partaking of those liquers, he grasped a moment to quietly mention to Tristan the need to set watches through the night.
Lady Hermione, seated between them, overheard. “Oh, you don’t need to trouble yourself—or your people—with that. We would be happy to stand the watch.”
Before Gareth could blink, the other ladies had taken up the cause. Seconds later they were dividing up the hours of the night.
Stunned, he looked at Tristan, who grinned. “Don’t worry—they’ll do it, and woe betide any cultist who tries to sneak in.”
Lady Hortense, seated opposite, saw his reluctance. “Trentham’s right—we don’t sleep much anyway, not at our age, and we’ll have Henrietta and Clitheroe to back us up, and raise the alarm if need be.”
Gareth’s gaze slid to Clitheroe, the aging butler.
Clitheroe bowed to Lady Hortense. “As you say, my lady.”
“Henrietta,” Jack called down the table, “is Leonora’s wolfhound. She’s already been introduced to your people, but you haven’t yet met her.”
“She has the run of the house at night,” Leonora put in. “She’s very protective.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” Tristan said, “she’ll savage anyone who tries to break in.”
Later, after the company had adjourned to the drawing room, Henrietta was called in and introduced to Gareth and Emily. At that point, Gareth dropped all objection to the older ladies’ arrangements. When he sat, Henrietta’s shaggy head, and her highly impressive jaws, were level with his head.
Later, when he climbed the stairs with Tristan and Jack, having ensured the ground floor was secure and that Ethelreda, Edit
h, and Flora, taking first watch, were happily ensconced by the fire in the central hall—with Henrietta a shaggy rug at their feet—Gareth admitted, “It’s been so long since I’ve felt our party is not under threat…it takes a little getting used to.”
Jack humphed. “It took over a year before I stopped checking everyone in every room I entered—such is the legacy of having been a spy.”
Tristan nodded. “At least a year. Some part of you thinks you have to still be watching. It takes time for that to fade.”
“Especially with ladies about.” Jack grinned. With a jaunty salute, he headed down one corridor.
Parting from Tristan with a smile, Gareth went through the gallery and on to his room. Emily’s room was the next one along and, very helpfully, there was a connecting door.
Ten minutes later, wearing only his robe, he tried the door, discovered it unlocked, and padded through to find her already abed, but not asleep. She’d left the windows uncurtained; shadows dappled the room and moonbeams danced as the wind stirred bare branches outside.
Laying aside his robe, he slipped between the covers, heard the giggle she stifled as, as usual, the bed dipped and she rolled toward him. He caught her, drew her close, settled her within his arms. “What were you thinking about?” Lying here in the dark.
She nestled her head on his shoulder. “This house—the household, all the old ladies. It’s so very English, and so comfortable. Now I’m home again, it’s as if I have to relearn—remind myself—what it is I most like, what I most value about things here, in this land.”
“Oh?”
There was enough wariness in the syllable to make Emily struggle up on one elbow to look into his face. “I was thinking about houses and households, and combinations of people. About families and atmosphere and comfort.”
“I see.” Through the dimness he tried to study her eyes. “So you’re not revising what it is you like about gentlemen?”
“No.” She smiled. “Although…” Lowering her lips until they almost met his, she murmured, “Perhaps I should revisit all the things about you that I like—just to make sure they’re still up to the mark now we’re here.”
His chest quaked beneath her as he laughed. Still smiling, she kissed him.
And set about compiling a thorough inventory, one that fully satisfied her, and him.
In the private parlor of a small inn two miles away, Roderick Ferrar stopped cursing, and took a large mouthful of the French brandy the innkeeper had managed to unearth. Swallowing, he looked at the amber liquid left in the glass. “This is the only good news we’ve had today.”
Roderick slumped back in one of the two chairs drawn up at the round table in the center of the room.
Lounging in the other chair, Daniel Thurgood shrugged. “It could have been worse. We might not know Hamilton’s exact whereabouts, but we do know he’s gone to ground in this area, and, as Alex pointed out, it’s likely the couriers are making for somewhere in Norfolk. Our watchers on the roads between here and there will pick up Hamilton and his party as soon as they move. We’ve more than enough men to leave a sizable group ready to close in behind them the instant they cross the Thames.”
Daniel watched Roderick frown into his glass, and waited.
The three of them—he, Roderick and Alex—all scions of the noble house of Shrewton, all children of the current earl, had found one another some years ago. Their shared paternity led them to like, value, lust after the same things—primarily money and power. Power over others, power that could be wielded as cruelly as they wished, as their whims dictated.
When Roderick had taken a position in Bombay, Daniel and Alex had followed him, and the three of them had found the opportunities the subcontintent presented very much to their taste.
They’d created the Black Cobra cult, and had lived in luxurious and vicious splendor.
Until a stray letter, written in the Black Cobra’s name and signed with the Black Cobra’s distinctive mark, and by unlucky circumstance sealed by Roderick with the family seal ring that reposed immovably on his little finger, had fallen into the hands of a group of officers sent to identify and expose the Black Cobra.
Those four officers and their friends now knew Roderick was the Black Cobra. What they didn’t know—what no one outside the cult’s inner circles knew—was that Roderick was only one of three. But to preserve the power the Black Cobra had amassed, Daniel and Alex needed Roderick.
Unfortunately, they’d heard of the letter and the threat it might pose too late to stop the four officers leaving Bombay for England. To successfully arraign Roderick, favorite son of the Earl of Shrewton, canny aristocratic politician and indispensable ally of Prinny himself, nothing less than the original letter with its telltale seal would do.
One of the four officers was carrying the threat. The other three were decoys. But which was which, and who in England had accepted the challenge of receiving the letter and taking it before the courts and the Lords, was what the Black Cobra didn’t know.
So they’d set cultists and assassins on the four officers’ trails, and come home to England, scrambling to assemble a formidable force of fanatical followers. Fate had smiled, the winds had blown fair, and they’d managed to get ahead of the four officers, and now they and their forces lay in wait to pick each off, one after the other as they arrived in England, until the threat of exposure was no more.
Colonel Derek Delborough, the senior of the four officers, had landed in Southampton four days ago. An immediate assassination attempt had, by ill luck, been foiled, and the colonel had reached London. He hadn’t, however, passed on his letter, but still had it—copy or original—in his possession. They’d managed to install a thief within the colonel’s party. By hook or by crook, the colonel’s letter would soon be theirs.
With the colonel’s letter, at least, all but taken care of, Daniel and Roderick had ridden for Dover as soon as the news that Hamilton had landed had reached them. Their original plan had been to stop Hamilton from crossing the Channel, but clearly the senior man in charge of his pursuit had failed.
But by the time Daniel and Roderick had reached Dover, Hamilton’s party had split up and left. The senior cultist in Dover had set trackers on the trail of each of the three groups, but all four trackers had disappeared. Luckily, Indians with black head scarves were a notable sight on country roads in England. It hadn’t been hard to trace the trackers, but the three trails mysteriously ended not all that far from the inn he and Roderick now graced.
Roderick was turning his glass in his hands, broodingly staring at the brandy. “If we sit and wait for Hamilton to show his face, we might be sitting here for days. That might be what they want—us to focus on him, and miss the other two as they come in.”
“Very likely.” Daniel drained his own glass. “We have enough men down here, stationed all along the roads, to be certain that we’ll hear as soon as Hamilton breaks cover and heads north—or anywhere else, for that matter. If we leave now, we can ride through the night and catch up with Alex. See whether Creighton has found us a new base in Bury.”
That morning, through Larkins, Roderick’s gentlemen’s gentleman and right-hand man, they’d learned that Delborough was heading into Cambridgeshire, close to the Norfolk houses where many of the most wealthy and powerful spent Christmas. Alex, the shrewdest tactician of the three of them, had decreed they should move their base from Shrewton House in London to somewhere better placed to intercept the couriers.
Creighton, Daniel’s man, had suggested hunting for a place in Bury St. Edmunds. Alex had agreed. While Roderick and Daniel had ridden south to deal with Hamilton, Creighton had gone to Bury, and Alex had stayed in London to organize their move.
Roderick drained his glass. “I need to check on Larkins, too—I want to be there when his little thief hands over Delborough’s letter.” Roderick caught Daniel’s eye. “Given we’ve heard nothing of the other two yet, then Delborough is where the action is.”
Rising,
Daniel went to the window. Drawing aside the curtain, he looked out. “There’s snow coming. If we stay here, tomorrow we might not be able to leave—and Alex’s messengers might not be able to reach us.”
Chair scraping, Roderick stood. “Time to go.”
Dropping the curtain, Daniel nodded. “Hamilton won’t risk traveling through a snowstorm. That gives us time to go north, deal with Delborough first, then be in position when Hamilton heads north. Let him come to us, onto a field where we’ll have more men to deal with him. That will leave us in prime position to deal with Monteith and Carstairs, too, when they arrive.” He met Roderick’s gaze, nodded. “Let’s go.”
Five minutes later, they were on the road, riding hard for London.
Eighteen
16th December, 1822
Morning
My bedchamber at Mallingham Manor
Dear Diary,
Fate has been kind. Today is shaping up to be a perfect opportunity to examine the ins and outs of what might well be the perfect sort of marriage for Gareth and me.
It took mere minutes of conversation with Leonora and Clarice to realize that they have similar views of life, and gentlemen, as I do. And from what I observed last night, their marriages, at least on the surface, appear to hold all the elements, and offer all the comforts, that I would wish of mine. Consequently, I plan to devote today to learning all I can from them.
Apropos of my aim, it has snowed heavily. We could not continue on, even had that been our plan, and we will all be spending today indoors.
In my case, subtly inquiring.
E.
By late afternoon, when she, Leonora, and Clarice slipped into the smaller parlor and, laughing, collapsed on the sofas, Emily had learned all she wished and more.
“Your children are delightful.” Lifting her head, she beamed at Clarice and Leonora. “Even the tiny ones are perfect.”
Leonora smiled fondly. “You’ll get no argument from us, but we’re biased, of course. Still, I’m glad they behaved.”
The Elusive Bride Page 34
