The Renegade Wife

by Warfield, Caroline

  “He should have been shot.” It galled him that the man who violated him still lived, but he knew the man lived in abject misery thanks to Will. He would have to be satisfied with that.

  Catherine turned to continue on. “You may see Artie, if you are here a few days. The headmaster gives those boys too much freedom. Once he hears you’re here, he’ll be on our doorstep.”

  “I suppose Emma has a governess.”

  “Chadbourn had no truck with governesses. She is at Mrs. Rowlandson’s school in Cheltenham.”

  “Learning the feminine arts?”

  “Oh, how little you know your brother-in-law. The school is one of Andrew and Georgiana Mallet’s projects. The girls learn Latin and Greek, history, and science along with their dancing and watercolor,” Catherine told him. Pride reverberated in her voice.

  “Brilliant! But does she like it?”

  “She loves it. Emma is much too bright to have patience with embroidery and fashion plates. Boredom would lead her into folly.”

  They reached the nursery floor, and Catherine pushed open the door to a large, airy room at the back of the house. Windows lined the far wall, and light flooded in. Shelves beneath the window held a jumbled assortment of toys and juvenile treasures: tin soldiers, balls, a cricket bat, rocks, and seashells, paint boxes with a cup of brushes, dolls, and a large assortment of wooden blocks. More blocks trailed across the floor, and two small replicas of curricles sat on them as if driving along a road. Racing curricles as I live and breathe, Rand thought with a smile.

  Bookshelves lined one side of the room, and a petite girl sat cross-legged on the floor, so engrossed in one of the books that she didn’t notice that the adults entered the room. A large bin in one corner held spinning hoops, hobbyhorses, and a kite. The other corner sheltered a large birdcage with a disgruntled-looking parrot.

  Three boys knelt in front of the windows building a road of blocks for their curricle race. Drew saw them as soon as they entered and scrambled to his feet. “Rand!” he shouted and ran to him.

  “Did you work it out with all those dukes and generals? Are you going to rescue our ladies?” he demanded. Drew’s impatience to rescue “our ladies” matched Rand’s, but Rand could see that the boy’s relief to have someone else shoulder the burden far outweighed his impatience. He put an arm around Drew’s shoulder and bent to reassure him.

  “We have a plan, yes.”

  “Will you ride in with swords drawn?” Drew’s eyes glittered. Behind him, the other two boys approached, wide-eyed at the mention of swords, and huddled close to listen.

  “Manners first,” Catherine reminded.

  Rand straightened up. “Yes. Manners. Introduce me to your friends.”

  “You know me, Uncle Randy, don’t you?” Tobias said with a laugh. “At least I hope so. I’ve grown.” He certainly had. He almost reached Rand’s shoulder. He would be tall and lean like his father.

  “You’ve grown like the timber we see in Canada, straight and tall. How can you even remember me, bantling?”

  “You’re the best uncle! You always carried me on your shoulders. Can’t do that now, can he, Jonny?”

  Jonny. Rand stared at a face with the unmistakable Wheatly family resemblance. Charles’s son. Julia’s son. He could have been mine.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir,” the younger boy said, smiling back with sad eyes too big for his tiny face. Dark smudges lay under those eyes against blue-tinged pallor. He must be what, six? A year younger than Drew. He appeared to be even younger, much too small for his age.

  A poke from Catherine reminded Rand of his own manners. “I’m pleased to make yours too, Jonathan.” The boy smiled at the use of his full name. “Or do I call you Eversham?” As Charles’s heir, he would be Viscount Eversham.

  “No, sir,” he replied solemnly. “To family, I’m just Jonny.”

  “Would you like to race with us, Uncle Randy? Jonny brought two cunning models over, and we plan to see how well they travel.”

  “Set it up, and I’ll join you for a bit. First I need to speak with your mother.” Tobias led the boys back to their project. Drew glanced back once, but Rand smiled his encouragement, and the lad followed his new friends.

  “Why didn’t you tell me he was here?” Rand demanded after he pulled Catherine aside.

  “Jonny? He’s often here. He and Tobias share a tutor. You would know that if—”

  “I hadn’t stayed away so long. I hear your refrain. I’m here now, but you might give me time to gain my footing.”

  “You had six years, more than enough time to nurse your hurt. You’re not the only one who suffered.” She pinned him with a look. When he could stand it no longer, he turned to watch the littlest boy.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Jonny was born with a weak heart. On good days, he’s as you see him. On other days . . .”

  Rand watched the boy arrange blocks in a long curve, one his older cousin Tobias clearly admired.

  “He looks frail,” he said, still not facing her.

  “He is. Physicians have told Charles not to expect him to live to adulthood.”

  “Do th—does Charles have other sons?”

  “No other children.” Rand thought Catherine might say more, things he didn’t want to hear.

  “He must need an heir!” he blurted out and immediately regretted it.

  “The title will fall to his grandfather’s younger son and his descendants after Charles.”

  Rand furrowed his brow. “Younger son? You mean Papa? That makes the heir Fred.” He ran an agitated hand over the back of his neck. “I never thought, but I supposed I should have known.”

  “You, if Fred gets himself killed in India,” his sister went on. “We can only hope your brother develops some sense of family responsibility first.”

  They watched the boys in silence for several moments, while Rand digested the idea that his brother might yet be the duke.

  “She must be a remarkable woman,” Catherine said at last.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “This Meggy, Drew’s mother. You came here, bruised and battered, because of her. She must be special. We feared we would never see you again.”

  “She is,” Rand replied. “And you are correct. I never planned to return.” He turned to face her then. “But I will do what I have to do—even work with Charles—if I can make Meggy and her daughter safe.”

  His sister’s smile made him wobbly on his feet until she enfolded him in an embrace as secure as it was gentle.

  “Welcome home, little brother. I’ve missed you.”

  Chapter 23

  Rand endured three days of Catherine’s cosseting, Cook’s energetic effort to fatten him up, and the adulation of nieces and nephews. Artie came, as Catherine predicted, to pepper his uncle with questions about North America, steal treats from the kitchen, and show off his adolescent sophistication. The latter didn’t last once Tobias and Mary dragged him to the nursery to visit the parrot and to play hunt-the-slipper and jackstraws with Jonny. They dragooned Drew, who seemed to have been grafted into family, into coming along.

  Will tried to rescue Rand from the overabundance of family affection by pulling him into his study for an accounting of their shared business enterprises. He heartily approved of Brinkman and Wandelaer.

  “They’re shaving four days off shipment on average. Time, they tell me, is money,” Will said, leaning back in his comfortable old desk chair with the arms worn smooth. He heaved the contented sigh of a man whose universe spins on a steady axis, as it did—aside for the occasional troubled brother-in-law.

  “B&W are good, but there is a limit to what we can ship through New York. Fur trade continues to dwindle, and we won’t be able to use them for the timber,” Rand replie
d.

  “Those log floats you describe astound me. Are you sure our land holdings are close enough to the river systems?” He rooted around in a basket on the desk and pulled out a rolled-up map of Upper Canada.

  Rand took a pencil and sketched in his recent acquisitions. “We’ll have to build wagon roads as we go,” he said, showing logical routes and tapping the map with the pencil. “Land close to the rivers will be timbered out soon enough, especially of the premium trees. As long as squared logs are what we transport, a lot will be left behind. I have been meaning to work out a proposal for a sawmill able to produce sawn lumber in large quantities, to diversify our operation. He ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “Not now, though. Not until this business with Meggy is settled. You won’t brush it aside this time, Will.”

  The earl looked as if he had been slapped. Rand knew he had been unfair, but he didn’t care.

  “The business at Harrow still hurts? I failed you then,” Will said, leaning forward. “I trusted Fred to protect you and Charles. I thought—”

  “You thought we would form some sort of cohort like you and your friends did, but Fred went off with the older boys, and Charles and I—” Rand dropped his head back and huffed in frustration. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “But it does. You should have come to us for help a month ago, but you didn’t trust me. You waited an entire month to come here! Know this: when I realized what happened to you, it almost killed me. I vowed then never to let you down again.”

  Rand shook his head as if to bat the topic away. “Meggy matters now. Nothing else.”

  The earl’s compassionate face left Rand downcast. Family sympathy threatened to drown him.

  “Have you and Charles worked things out?” the earl asked.

  “You mean our plan for rescuing Meggy? Yes.” He damned well better not ask if we have worked out anything else. The chasm between us won’t go away.

  The earl didn’t respond, and so Rand went on, “Yes, well enough. It may serve.”

  Charles had returned the day after the strategy meeting as promised, and the two of them hammered out a rudimentary plan for Portsmouth. Their planning, as awkward as it was brief, centered on transportation, timing, and—to Rand’s irritation—clothing.

  “If you’re going to pass as an aristocrat, dear cousin, you need to visit your tailor.”

  Dear cousin, my arse. The wounds of betrayal lay deep. Rand wasn’t mollified, but he accepted the need to play a role and submitted to the tailor who miraculously produced the vital parts of a gentleman’s wardrobe in two days, fueled no doubt by the earl’s money. Catherine seconded Charles’s opinions and called in a barber.

  A day later, groomed and trimmed, in a new traveling coat and his comfortable old boots, he sat next to Drew in a window seat in the first floor parlor and tried to say goodbye.

  “When you find them, you will bring them here, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” Rand replied, although he wasn’t sure that was true. Where they would hide Meggy and her children was one of many details that hadn’t been worked out.

  “Are you sure you don’t need me?” Drew asked.

  Rand shook his head. “I’ll manage. I have the map you drew. I can find their quarters.” Though from what you told me, “quarters” is too grand a name.

  Drew appeared less disappointed than Rand might have expected. Cricket in the park with Tobias had been promised. “Pratt says you’re going with a real duke,” he said.

  “Yes, and our plan is to overpower them with our magnificence into telling us what we want and handing your mother and sister into our care.”

  Drew snorted at that. “You need me to help. I heard what they said.”

  “According to the duke, your report was most helpful.” Rand had fretted when Sudbury and Charles sat with Drew and pulled every detail of what he heard out of him. He needn’t have. Drew proved to be keenly observant and proud to have a part in foiling criminals.

  “No. You will stay here and look after Private Pratt,” Rand went on.

  Drew’s eyebrows shot up. “How?”

  “Remind him to lay low. The duke plans”—Rand almost choked on the words; he swallowed a lump in his throat, a wad of poisonous resentment—“to reinstate Pratt at full pay when this is done, but he has to stay out of sight until our mission is over.”

  Deserters had no recourse, yet Charles found an ingenious way around the military code of discipline. No one would flog a man on a mission, one of the Secretary of State for War’s own agents, and so they would declare him once the ranking members of the conspiracy were arrested. Of course his life won’t be worth spit once that gets around. Luckily Pratt thinks life in the far West of North America, with a stake funded by the earl, will suit him well, and Damned Charles comes out of this looking like a hero.

  “The baggage is loaded,” Catherine interrupted from the doorway, “and Charles is in the carriage.”

  Rand gave Drew a last hug goodbye. “Upstairs with you. The tutor has plans for you.”

  Drew groaned but did as he was told.

  “Has my horse been saddled and brought round?”

  Catherine nodded. “Do you plan to ride all the way?”

  “Of course. I’m used to it.”

  She opened her mouth to speak but closed it again.

  “Don’t meddle, Catherine.”

  “You have to speak with him sometime.”

  “Certainly. About Meggy’s rescue. We can do that over dinner.”

  He gave his sister a kiss on her cheek. “Don’t worry for me, sister. I’ll find Meggy, and I’ll make Blair pay.”

  “That last part is what worries me,” she retorted.

  “Don’t. My erstwhile cousin and I will manage it.”

  Rand’s borrowed horse gentled when he paused at the top of the rise and stood in the stirrups to survey the Forest of Bere. The once great royal forest, denuded of its giant oaks, remained a pleasant diversion from tedium for travelers between London and Portsmouth. If it sheltered highwaymen as well, Rand saw no sign. Given the amount of military traffic on the Portsmouth Road, he rather doubted it did.

  The road itself, broad and well maintained, enabled them to make good time. Left to himself, Rand would push straight on to Portsmouth. He was not, he remembered with resentment, left to himself. Charles argued they should arrive in full ducal glory in daytime, not creep in at night.

  The sound of an approaching vehicle made him turn in the saddle. The duke’s chariot approached at a good clip. He had to admit the equipage was not just elegant, but also well sprung, well oiled, and fast. Rand supposed the magnificent team of four must be tiring and wondered if they, too, should enter Portsmouth in glory. With a disgusted shake of the head, he urged his flagging horse to a trot and continued on his way.

  They reached the village of Horndeam at first dark. Rand stalked across the inn yard just as Charles’s coachman pulled the chariot to a stop. When the groom leapt down and opened the door, Charles stepped out, peered around, and strode to the door. His lace looked pristine, his jacket unwrinkled. Travelers milling about parted of their own volition. How does he do that?

  Rand stared at him for a long moment before springing forward to follow. The innkeeper speaking with Charles saw Rand’s approach and appended “—and for your brother—” to whatever he had been saying. Charles didn’t correct him.

  As they were shown upstairs, Rand considered the innkeeper’s error understandable. The family resemblance was strong, a gift from their shared grandfather. The lines of cheek, chin, and nose tended to be harsher on Rand’s lean face, but the same lines shaped Charles’s, though in a somewhat softened manner. Rand had always been a bit taller, and he now had a few inches on his cousin. Sun had darkened Rand’s skin, but he knew that the color would be the
same if they stripped. The duke’s hair, always darker than Rand’s, appeared more so now, the auburn several shades darker. The resemblance, which had so delighted them when they discovered one another as boys, remained. The delight disappeared long before.

  Charles entered the small sitting room ahead of him and tossed his gloves on the table. Rand stood with his saddlebags in his hand. Two doors stood slightly ajar on either side of the room. “Which one is mine?” he asked.

  “Whichever you like. Sit. Rest. Let Henri see to fresh sheets and the baggage.” Charles pulled a captain’s chair up to the table and sat, stretching out legs encased in flawless trousers. Rand felt shabby in his travel dirt by comparison.

  He passed through the door to the right and lay his saddlebags on the bed. Henri, Charles’s valet, bustled in with an arm full of sheets and scowled. “Allow me, Mr. Wheatly,” he said in a tone that brooked no defiance.

  Routed by a servant, he thought in disgust, but he did what he was told. He made use of the washbasin in the corner before returning to the sitting room, still looking like a sparrow to Charles’s peacock, but too filled with righteous dislike for his cousin to care about something so superficial.

  The sight of a young man with a tray cheered him considerably, particularly because the bottles on it appeared to be a good vintage. He sank into a chair, closed his eyes, and allowed fatigue to surface.

  “Shall we go over details?” Charles asked, leaning forward to pour.

  It took them an hour and the first bottle to hammer out a detailed plan. Charles would arrive at headquarters unannounced, dropping his cabinet post and the authority of the commanding generals of Horse Guards on the hapless locals. He would overwhelm them with questions about quartermaster activity, refer to his cousin’s business expertise, and publicly ask him to have a peek at the ledgers. The staff would scurry about and suggest they leave it for the next day. That day or the next, Rand would scout out Meggy’s location.