“If you want me as a wife, you’ll get everything I am.” She stood, dropping the blanket and snatching up her wrapper. “If we were to marry, I’d take you despite your pride and your perfectionism, not because of it.” She donned the robe in a graceful motion and belted it firmly.
Ramsay didn’t even get the proper chance to mourn the loss of her skin as she continued to set fire to the hopes he’d planted for them, leaving them in ashes. “I’m not perfect, Ramsay. I do indulge in the pleasures life has to offer, and I don’t intend to stop. Life is for living. To enjoy. I’ll not tie my fate to yours if you’re only going to smother me with expectations. I’ll not have it.”
Ramsay stood and stalked forward. He captured her lips with his and kissed her with wild, desperate abandon. He poured all of his need, his will, his desire, and his feeling into her mouth. Hoping it would reach her heart. Wishing she would soften.
When she broke the kiss and turned away, they were both breathing heavily. Her lips were bruised and his felt swollen, along with another part of his anatomy begging for him to give in so he could be inside her again.
“Will ye not yield, Cecelia?” he whispered urgently. “Even for a chance at this?”
She whirled around, all semblance of gentility and kindness wiped away by a stronger emotion than he’d ever seen. Pain, the same pain he’d spied gazing back at him from the mirror.
The kind of pain that eventually turned into rage.
“Why is it I who must yield to your ambitions?” she demanded, slicing her hand through the air. “Because I am a woman? Do you realize how many men have requested me to yield because of my sex? The vicar who raised me. Who imprisoned me because he believed I was at fault for the indiscretions of others.” She paced again, making large, passionate gestures, each word of her refusal a shard of glass embedded in his heart.
“Every professor I ever had asked me to yield my seat, my marks, my chosen passion to a man. Every male student who was forced to sit next to me, or humbled himself to ask me for help in private because my mind was superior to his, only to depose me publicly for being fat, tall, bespectacled, or, worse, unmarried—no, unmarriable.” She said the word with a disgust that pounded the nail into their coffin.
“Because I wore a dress, my existence as an intellectual has been an insult to everyone. They’ve all asked me to be other than I am. Men seem to think that because they must give me their seats on the train, I must yield to them my very identity. Or my choices. My body or, in this case, my entire life.” She marched up to him, looking like Boudicca the warrior queen, proud and angry and determined. “I have not, and I will not, and it is wrong of you to ask,” she said with absolute finality. “Can you not love me, even if I do not yield?”
Ramsay felt himself turning hard. Cold. Building walls against the barrage of her words so he didn’t have to hear them, to wonder if they made sense.
“We have not yet spoken of love,” he said in a voice that would have been inaudible if her nose wasn’t almost touching his.
She stumbled backward, clutching her heart.
He’d driven the knife home.
“I see.” She bent down, gathered her nightgown and turned to take the path back to the house.
“Cecelia.” Ramsay was not a man who chased a woman, but he did it for her. He did his best to explain. That he knew best. That she could not ask him to return to nothing. “I am who I am every bit as much as ye are. Who am I if not the Lord Chief Justice of the High Court? What achievements could ye take pride in? What do I have to offer ye if not my position? My reputation? My principles and my pride?”
Her steps faltered, and her chin touched her shoulder. “Those are excellent questions,” she said stiffly. “You’ll have to find the answers yourself before we discuss this again.”
As she walked away with her back straight Ramsay already knew the answers.
Nothing. He had nothing to give her because he’d been born nothing. Hollow.
Empty.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Will you not play with me, Cecelia?”
Phoebe’s voice was generally dear and sweet, but it reached an octave the next afternoon that penetrated Cecelia’s tearful headache and tried her apparently finite reserves of patience.
“I’m sorry, darling, but it’s imperative that I finish this.” Perhaps if she’d slept rather than sobbed, she might feel differently, but alas, she endeavored to solve this situation with ever more haste so she could run away—no, not away, but back. Back to London.
To her life.
She could not stay here with Ramsay. Not after last night. Not after how many times she thought about abandoning everything, her ideals, her needs, her responsibilities, and her pride to fall back into his arms.
“But you finished that book yesterday,” Phoebe said with a plaintive whine. “Why have you started it over?”
Because she had to have missed something. She stared down at the coding text index, scanning the first page for any hint of a clue that might show her where to start so she didn’t have to read the whole blasted thing again.
“Can you not rest? Just for a bit?” Phoebe pressed, laying her doll over the open page. “I’ll let you be Fanny de Beaufort, even though she’s more beautiful than Frances Bacon.”
All the cogs and wheels of Cecelia’s thoughts ground to a halt as the girl’s compassionate offer plucked something out of her brain. She leaved through the index back to A through D.
B. Bacon. The Baconian cipher.
And not too far beneath … Beaufort!
Cecelia flipped to the corresponding chapter. The Beaufort cipher was a polyalphabetic grid where one must have the key word to unencrypt language.
Holy God. The hint had been the dolls’ names all along.
Cecelia slid off her chair and knelt in front of Phoebe, caressing the doll. “Darling, did Henrietta ever tell you why she named Frances and Fanny?” she asked. “Did she ever mention a key?”
Phoebe shook her head.
No, she wouldn’t, would she? Henrietta had been too canny and careful to leave anything so important to the memory of a child.
“Please give me a little while longer,” she begged Phoebe. “And then I shall be finished, and we can play.”
“All right,” the girl said agreeably. “Might I stay here on the bed if I’m quiet?”
“Of course.”
The girl was not quiet in the least, but Cecelia focused the best she could, tapping her pen against her lip, trying to think of a word. Of any word Henrietta might have used as the key.
The key is in the color we both hold dear.
She bolted straight, remembering the letter. Of course! Henrietta was the Scarlet Lady, and Cecelia was a Red Rogue. Hortense, Henrietta, and Cecelia were natural redheads. Not to mention Francesca and, to a lesser extent, Alexandra. That had to be it!
She attempted to use the letters red first, but it was too short. And scarlet didn’t work, either; nor did ruby, vermillion, or burgundy.
However, as soon as she established the word crimson into the Beaufort grid and used it against the integers, entire words began to form.
Elated, Cecelia sat back and stared at the first completed sentence.
The Crimson Council.
Beneath the bold letters was a list of names she carefully uncovered, and a few were so incredibly familiar, she gaped down for a lost expanse of time.
Sir Hubert, the Lord Chancellor, obviously.
The Duke of Redmayne? Though a line had been slashed through his name, and Cecelia presumed that was done once the previous Redmayne had hung himself. This she surmised because she recognized a few other notable names crossed out who were also deceased.
And then, Luther Kenway, Earl of Devlin.
Hadn’t Kenway’s garden been the one in which the young girl, Katerina Milovic, had been found?
“Oh dear,” she breathed, realizing she was on the precipice of several truths she didn’t want to know.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “But would you go and fetch Lord Ramsay and Jean-Yves for me? I’ve learned something they’ll want to know about.”
“Did you solve the puzzle?” She jumped up and down, and her enthusiasm restored all of Cecelia’s goodwill toward her.
“I think I have.”
“Oh wonderful, I’ll tell everyone!” She scampered out into the main house, which was empty as Ramsay and Jean-Yves were both out of doors.
Cecelia turned page after page, realizing that Henrietta had devoted entire sections to a certain person. To pass the time, she quickly decoded each name at the top of a page, gasping at the contents. Everyone was in here.
Everyone. The royal family. The upper crust of aristocracy. Titans of industry and politics.
Cecelia was still writing things down when Ramsay burst into the room. Even though their hearts were at an impasse, her body didn’t seem to understand.
Once their eyes met and held, little electrified sensations danced across her flesh and quivered in her belly. Her sex bloomed and released a soft rush of readiness even as her heart plummeted.
His eyes had regained their glacial frost. She could no longer decipher their depths.
He’d effectively shut her out.
“What did ye find?” he asked, striding to tower behind her and peer down at the notepaper she used to scribe the messages from the codex.
“The Crimson Council.” she said. “I’ve found what Henrietta knew about them.”
He scowled down at the paper, seeing Redmayne’s name on it. “I’ve heard of it spoken in whispers, but everyone considers it tripe. A conspiracy conjured by madmen and rabble-rousers. I’d never lent credence to the rumors.”
“What rumors?” Jean-Yves had shuffled in behind him and he joined Ramsay at the elbow, peeking down at her notes.
“It’s been said a society of men who consider themselves loyal to Britannia beyond her monarchy, her Parliament, and her politics conspire in secret to puppet-master the empire’s rise.” Ramsay crossed his arms. “A week ago, I’d have said it was bollocks. Now…” He eyed the codex. “How fast can ye unencrypt this book?”
“I could teach you how,” Cecelia said. “With the two of you helping, it shouldn’t be but a day.”
“Right, let us move this to the kitchen, then.”
Cecelia, Ramsay, and Jean-Yves worked tirelessly on the papers. They wrote down things they never wanted to know. Not just scandalous secrets and hefty debts, but discoveries of every crime from theft to murder to, in a few cases, high treason.
The Crimson Council, according to Henrietta’s findings, had been established some several centuries past to manipulate the outcome of the War of the Roses. It had since groomed many a man to join, but seemed to be less active in politics by modern standards, and more a fraternal order dedicated to money, prestige, and power. The members had done despicable things … including hiring a procurer of young foreign girls for the pleasure of sick, wealthy men.
Henrietta kept a blackmail tally in the codex, but it seemed that she’d often avoided the members of the Crimson Council. She never mentioned being part of these procurements of young girls, but it seemed she believed she was being framed for these crimes.
But by whom? Cecelia wondered, doing her best not to be distracted by Ramsay’s scent. By his nearness and his distance.
Anyone in this codex could have murdered her aunt and made her death seem like natural causes.
Cecelia turned the page and began to work on a new page … With each letter she spelled out, another boulder of dread weighted her stomach, until she felt as though she might be sick.
CASSIUS GERARD RAMSAY?
The question mark had been traced many times, as though Henrietta had reason to puzzle over him.
“You’re pale, mon bijou,” Jean-Yves noted from across the table. “Should we stop to eat?”
Ramsay leaned in from next to her, the hair on his arm almost touching her.
Cecelia stared at the name, attuned to the sound of his breath, to the warmth of his body close, but not touching. She didn’t want to decipher any more. She didn’t want to uncover his secrets.
She didn’t want to hate him.
“What does it say?” His voice was low. Terse and harsh.
“There’s not much here,” she said, pointing to a total of three lines of script. “Perhaps you were telling the truth when you said you had no secrets.”
“What did she write about me, Cecelia?”
Cecelia swallowed, unable to look up. Clenching her pen tightly enough to turn her fingers white, she began the process of using the key. He verbally read each word she revealed.
NO ENTRY TO OFFICE OR DOCUMENTS.
NO EVIDENCE OF CLANDESTINE MEETINGS WITH LC OR OTHER CC MEMBERS.
“We can assume LC means Lord Chancellor, and CC is Crimson Council, yes?” Cecelia babbled.
“Aye, what else?” he asked impatiently.
Cecelia returned to the cipher.
NO LONGER TRUSTS MATILDA.
“Matilda?” Cecelia echoed. “That is the woman Henrietta sent to—”
“Matilda was my mother’s name,” Phoebe joined the conversation from over by the fireplace where she’d been whispering to Frances and Fanny.
They all might have been a tableau of statues frozen in stark astonishment. Even the motes of dust seemed to hang still in the air, afraid to move.
To make it real.
Nigh on eight years, Ramsay had said, since he’d had a woman.
The woman Henrietta sent to spy on him.
Matilda. Phoebe’s mother who died in childbirth.
Phoebe had barely turned seven years old.
Cecelia wanted it to be true, and then she didn’t. She watched the little girl with new eyes. Phoebe wasn’t the right color to belong to the golden giant beside her. Her hair was honey, not flaxen gold. Her eyes hazel rather than blue. She was so little for her age.
And yet. She’d a dimple in her chin that might claim to match Ramsay’s. And strong, broad, handsome features.
“Mon Dieu,” Jean Yves whispered.
Cecelia glanced over to Ramsay who’d yet to move. To speak.
To even breathe.
He stared at the girl, who had risen to her feet and rubbed at a tiny stain on her pink pinafore.
Phoebe blushed, self-consciously aware she was the subject of rather intent conjecture.
Though his features didn’t so much as twitch, his eyes glittered with myriad things.
“Ramsay?” Cecelia ventured.
His hand lifted to silence her. “When is yer birthday, lass?” He whispered the question to Phoebe, but it carried through the house like a cannon blast.
“The fourteenth of June,” she answered brightly. “Next year, I’m going to ask Cecelia for a parasol, that is if I don’t get one for Christmas.”
Ramsay’s chest deflated drastically, as if he’d been kicked in the ribs by a rather powerful ghost.
Cecelia looked down at the codex, blinking a well of tears away as they blurred the last coded sentence. She needn’t bother with it. It didn’t take a genius or even a mathematician to figure out his secret.
Ramsay had fathered a bastard.
The Scot said nothing. He stood so quickly his chair toppled over, strode to the door, and slammed it shut behind him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was a blessed, blessed thing that Ramsay had something to butcher.
Every time he cleaved into the deer as he dressed and prepared it, he had to wonder whose bones he’d rather be breaking. Who most deserved the crux of his rage? The Lord Chancellor? Matilda? Henrietta?
Himself?
Once the meat was prepared, Ramsay bathed and swam alone, knowing no one would come looking for him.
A father.
His rage had no place to land. All his tormentors were not ghosts.
And if he was honest, he’d n
o one to blame but himself.
Ramsay remembered back to the day he’d found Matilda’s dark head bent over his desk after she had picked the lock to his home office. He’d railed at the beauty like a harbinger of wrath and righteousness. Had condemned her for all manner of things.
Even after she confessed that Henrietta had sent her. She’d asked him for his mercy, his forgiveness. But he’d allowed his pain at her betrayal to flare into fury. He’d looked at his lover, the woman he’d considered marriage for, and he’d thrown her out into the gutter. He’d told her she belonged there. Had vowed to her the next time he saw her, it would be in shackles. That he’d love nothing so much as to see her rot in a prison for a treacherous slag.
And, in the end, she’d reaped the greatest revenge. She’d given birth to his daughter, and let his enemy raise her.
This was his nightmare.
Every time he’d kicked the door to Henrietta’s establishment in, he’d put little Phoebe at risk. He’d been too blinded by his own self-importance, his distrust of women, and the vendetta he excused with ambitious ideals, to much care how his actions might affect those in his warpath.
If he’d have taken Henrietta down earlier, he’d have impoverished his own daughter.
And Cecelia.
Not to mention the employees of the gambling hell and the students beneath.
So why didn’t the old hag tell him? Why didn’t she come to him with this secret and do her level best to blackmail him out of his vast fortunes as was her wont?
Instead, she raised up his daughter.
Ramsay stood in the lake and heaved great swaths of water with his arms in a very uncharacteristic fit of temper. He roared to the sky and created waves of his ire.
He’d have to tell Phoebe who he was.
A pang of anxiety paralyzed him as the last of the sun dipped below the trees. In the silence, he could hear Cecelia’s and Phoebe’s voices filtering through the thin forest as they ventured near to pick berries from the overgrown forest. Even at this distance, the false brightness in Cecelia’s interaction plucked at him.
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