“It will do you good, Kate,” Philo murmured.
The sweet liquid trailed fire down my throat, clearing my dizzied senses. I cried out as Thorn chafed my waxen fingers. He turned them over, revealing the raw, abraded skin.
“Oh, my poor darling,” he crooned, as he pressed them to his warm cheek. “I thought you would be in New York by now; instead, you were here all the time, lost in the snow, with only a dog to see you safely home.” He unbuttoned my coat and asked Harry to fetch Mary Rose from the kitchen. “Tell her to bring a bowl of warm water and a washrag,” he called after him.
“Cora,” he began sternly, as he knelt by my side to remove my sodden boots, “I thought you told me—”
“They keep popping up, you see,” Cora interrupted in a conversational tone. She had turned to face my chair— was there no escaping the madness in her eyes?
Thorn looked nonplussed. He had no idea yet what he was dealing with. “Cora?”
“Johnny took me to the fair, to the shooting gallery. He said it would be fun; I could win straw flowers for my bonnet. He showed me how to notch the gun against my shoulder”—she raised an imaginary rifle—“and aim”— one eye closed in a squint— “and shoot the little tin soldiers revolving on the big wheel. They were just like Johnny, only dressed in gray instead of Union blue,” she explained earnestly, “and when I hit them they were supposed to clang down and I would win my prize. But no matter how hard I tried, they kept popping up and popping up….”
“I told Johnny it wasn’t fair,” she said indignantly. “He said my little pings didn’t count; I had to hit them square. ‘It’s only a game, little goose,’ he said with that smile of his ... oh, how I miss Johnny’s smile. ...”
The cousins exchanged alarmed looks. Philo stepped forward and held out his hand. “Come along, Cora. There’s been enough excitement for one day. Wouldn’t you like to rest before dinner?”
Cora frowned and backed away. “It wasn’t a game, though. Johnny promised me a home—did I tell you that, Kate? So did Charles Quintus, but they kept popping up to take it away from me: Roxelana and Louise and Lance and Thornton. ...”
She turned to me with a sly smile. “I lied to you a little about Thorn, but it wasn’t as big a lie as yours. Oh no! Not as big as yours!”
She started toward me, her upraised fingers contorted into claws.
Thorn swept me tight against his chest. “For God’s sake—somebody restrain her!”
Philo and Lance sprang forward, one on either side of her, and seized her arms.
She struggled fiercely for a moment; then, breathing hard, inclined her head in mute surrender. She allowed herself to be led across the room, but resisted her captors briefly at the doorway.
“It wasn’t my fault, you know.” She stood erect, and her words, pronounced more with regret than self-pity, were addressed to us all, including Harry and Mary Rose who had entered only a moment before.
“I went to Charles Quintus and told him of his whore’s betrayal, and he was grateful, as well he should have been. ‘Thank you, Cora, no one cares anymore but you.’ Those were his very words. And he promised that whatever happened to Hawkscliffe, my little house would always be mine. ‘Always,’ he said. But I should have known,” she added in a hushed tone of self-recrimination. “After twenty-four years of C.Q.’s selfishness, I really should have known.
“He grew to miss her, you see—no one else could warm his bed as well as she. He accused me of jealous meddling:
He said I envied Roxelana’s beauty and coveted her place in his life. He said I was the traitor, not she, and he told me to leave Hawkscliffe. He told me to clear out and never come back!”
Poor Cora. Her neediness, by its very urgency, had in the end clogged and blocked its satisfaction, but how, I wondered, could she have been expected to see that? Instead, the injustice of her mentor’s dismissal had eaten away at her like acid, drop by soul-destroying drop, until there was nothing left but a thin veneer of sanity.
“I couldn’t leave then and there, could I? There were the servants to think of, and belongings to pack. He hadn’t been well, you see. All those years of self-indulgence: the liquor consumed, the quantities of rich food. I told him he’d pay for it some day, didn’t I, Mary Rose?”
Mary Rose, who had been a mere child at the time, nodded a frightened assent. Better to fib than provoke fury.
“I was in the courtyard, clipping some lavender for a keepsake and roses for the house—a last service, don’t you know,” she added with a deprecating little moue. “The roses were glorious that summer despite the dryness. I had cut no more than a dozen stems when I heard an odd, muffled sort of cry from the studio. I ignored it, of course: what had I to do with him any longer?”
Cora paused, her neat sparrow’s head cocked reflectively to one side. “He came reeling out upon the flagstones, arms revolving like paddlewheels, making this funny, choking noise. Then he fell, just like the little tin soldiers. How Johnny would have laughed! But it didn’t keep Roxelana from coming back, and after her came Louise, and after Louise, Kate. They just kept popping up and popping up….”
She searched Philo’s appalled face as if seeking his forgiveness for her failure to complete her self-assigned task, then bowed her head, indicating her willingness to leave. Harry, who had taken Lance’s place, looked as if he wished he were anywhere else: old friends had no business turning into lunatics.
“But what of my uncle, Cora?” Thorn blurted, asking the question in all our minds. “Didn’t you send for a doctor?”
Cora raised her eyebrows. “But there was no need, you see. By stepping carefully around him, I was able to fill my basket—did I mention how unusually fragrant the damask roses were that year? By the time I found enough suitable vases and made my arrangements, minding the thorns as I always do, by the time I had done all that, well,” she shrugged, “he was dead, of course.”
Cora smiled proudly, like an obedient child who has delivered her assigned recitation flawlessly. This time no one delayed her leave taking.
“Oh, Miss Kate, your poor head!” Mary Rose said as she joined Thorn at my side. She gently sponged my temple with a washrag. “I’m afraid the water’s cooled off, sir,” she added with an apologetic look at Thorn. “What with the excitement and all.”
“She tried to kill me,” I heard myself saying. “She said you were the one to be afraid of, and she led me to the quarry and she pushed me in. I tried to climb out, but Pasha—”
“Hush, my darling, hush now.” I could feel tears prick my eyes and spill down my cheeks. “Hush,” Thorn continued murmuring as he tenderly brushed away my tears with his lips.
But I couldn’t hush. “Pasha frightened me and I lost my grip and I fell back down, but I couldn’t stay there, could I? Not down there with Roxelana’s bones.” I shuddered at the memory of the long, dark strands of hair clinging damply to my fingers. “My poor uncle was spared that, at least.” The words tumbled out; there was no stopping their disjointed flow. “And after me there was Lance.” I clutched Thorn’s arm. “I couldn’t let her hurt Lance, could I?”
“Have we any sleeping powders, Mary Rose?”
“I have some right here,” Philo replied upon re-entering the room. “Agnes is helping Harry with Cora,” he explained in answer to the question in Thorn’s eyes.
“They’ve put her in that spare room between Mary Rose and Agnes. The strong sleeping draught I gave her should keep her calm until morning.”
“But Thorn,” I said urgently up into his face. His eyes were as warm and green as summer. “Roxelana—”
“That too, can wait till morning. For now, it’s up to bed with you. Mary Rose, will you please warm some milk to mix the powders in?”
Once again he swept me up into his arms. He carried me down the hall and up the stairs, his slow, steady pace lulling me to the edge of sleep, where reality and dreams, vying for the same space, drift one into the other. By the time Mary Rose arrived with the glass o
f milk. Thorn had already undressed me and tucked the satin-covered down coverlet into a cozy nest around me.
“I’ve seen a woman’s body before,” I heard him say to Mary Rose,as he coaxed me to drink.
“I’ve no doubt of it, sir!” was her flustered reply, and the deep chuckle that followed was the last sound I heard before sleep overtook me.
I woke in fright during the night from a dream that crumbled into meaningless fragments as I opened my eyes. All that remained was the terrifying sense of falling, as if from a great height.
My head ached; my knee throbbed, but the warmth that pervaded me from head to toe tilled me with joyful wonder, although at first I could not imagine why. I sat up and looked curiously around me. These walls were not stone, and the dim light I perceived was not the cold, gray light of a snowy afternoon, but the warm pink of roses.
Cedarwood and roses. The warmth had coaxed forth the potpourri’s heady scent. As for the light….
I looked towards the richly upholstered chaise. The rose-painted lamp shed its mellow glow upon a figure sprawled in sleep. Thorn’s long legs trailed off the end of the small settee; his dark, shaggy head, propped by one of the pillows from my bed, had slid awkwardly to one side ensuring, I realized with tender distress, a stiff neck by morning. Then, reassured by Thorn’s stalwart presence, I slid gratefully back into sleep.
When I next awoke, sunlight dappled the gauzy bed curtain and the walls beyond. I turned my head to find Mary Rose’s anxious blue eyes inches from my own. We both blinked.
“Oh, Miss Kate! You were sleeping as if... I was beginning to wonder if you would ever….”
Poor Mary Rose. She seemed unable to avoid an image of death. “Good morning, “I said,
“But that’s just it, Miss Kate. It’s after noon, and Mr. Thorn wondered if you were hungry.”
Hungry? Famished was more like it. Except for a dim memory of something warm and milky and gritty, I hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours.
“Tell Mr. Thorn I could eat the proverbial horse.”
“Tell him yourself,” Thorn said, entering the room with a tray well supplied with breakfast treats and, joy of joys, a steaming pot of tea. “Agnes said to tell you she baked these flaky twists especially for you—something nutty, I believe—”
“Pecan, sir,” Mary Rose supplied.
“Just so. Pecan swirled with maple syrup, still warm, of course. And look here, Kate, a whole orange! Nothing like being on the right side of the cook.”
Mary Rose giggled, bobbed a curtsy, and left, closing the door discreetly behind her.
“Do you think I might have a good-morning kiss before—”
He was too late. I had defiantly popped a bit of pecan twist into my mouth, and a few buttery flakes of it were subsequently snared from my lips by Thorn’s warm greeting.
“I still don’t understand, Thorn,” I said a few thoroughly kissed moments later. “I know now it wasn’t villainy that brought you back early to Hawkscliffe yesterday, but what did? What could have been more important than the hearing at the courthouse?”
Thorn rose from his perch on the bed. He walked to the window and stood with his hands clasped loosely behind his back. He was dressed casually in country fashion today; the rough tweeds and polished, well-worn boots suited his tall, spare, muscular figure and dark good looks. He turned to me, and fingered his chin, then threw his arms wide.
“Conscience, Kate. Guilt. Regret. All that and more. You were so brave at the station. This little bit of a thing facing down three—four, counting Harry—insensitive nincompoops. As if we all didn’t know you well enough by then to be sure you were telling the truth.”
“I knew the truth would be hard to accept, Thorn,” I said quietly, trying to make it easier for this proud man.
“Hard, yes, but not impossible.” He ran one handover his dark curls. “You see, Kate, it isn’t easy for a man to admit a woman might have more integrity than he. Especially this man. Louise, and then Roxelana— But that’s beside the point,” he exclaimed, breaking off his own explanation. “There are no excuses for the shabby way I treated you. None.
“I watched as you pulled yourself up into the carriage. You looked so frail, so forlorn, so ... abandoned, yet so purely lovely. I knew right then that life without you was not worth living, but I had to put my own life in order before I could think of persuading you to share yours. It was time to tell a few truths of my own: to you, of course— that’s why I rode alone up to Hawkscliffe, intending to intercept you—but for starters, to Lance.”
“To Lance?”
“Lance is my son, Kate. That’s why Louise came to my room. She threatened to expose me as an unprincipled seducer. My friends and clients could accept an illegitimate child, but a son as a result of my seduction of my aunt? It smacks of incest, you see.”
“Your seduction of Louise? Good heavens, Thorn, you couldn’t have been more than eighteen—certainly she was the aggressor! And how could there be incest with no blood tie between you?”
“After so many years, Kate, who would bother to work out the arithmetic, much less the relationship? No, no, I can accept dislike, but sniggering contempt? It was much easier to heap contempt upon you.”
“But what about Philo’s claim on the estate?”
Thorn shrugged. “I told you I had no valid excuses. I knew Philo coveted Hawkscliffe, but I couldn’t see that he would suffer much if it went to Lance instead.”
What about Ralph’s suffering? I wondered, thinking of Philo’s plan for his sick friend. But Thorn didn’t know about Philo and Ralph, I realized; nor did I know how sympathetic he would be if he did.
“Philo and I have never been close,” he added. “Besides, there was always the chance Roxelana would turn up, wasn’t there? Until she was declared dead, the question of who would actually be declared the principle heir remained safely academic. Poor Philo. The prize one truth gave him back has been taken away again with another.”
“Did I tell you it was Harry who told me Roxelana returned after Charles Quintus’s death? It seems they were lovers. He thought she was coming back to him and that as her sister, I might be interested to know that.”
“Good old Harry,” Thorn muttered. “He has the sensitivity of a warthog.”
I smiled ruefully. “It never occurred to Harry that the timing of her return had any significance. She came back, he said, and then he overheard her arguing with someone—it could have been you or Philo or Cora, he said. He neither knew or cared what happened after that”
“W hornets you stirred up, Kate! You know only too well the way Cora chose to soothe her stings. As for me, Lance and I have established a cordial, it somewhat tentative, relationship, and Philo has bowed to the inevitable.”
“My bag!” I exclaimed. “All my papers are in my bag, Thorn. Cora hid it, and unless I can find it, Philo need not bow to anything at all.”
Thorn hit his forehead with his palm. “Damn me for a fool! It all seemed such a fait accompli I forgot to tell you: Philo found your bag pried open next to the furnace. Apparently last evening’s little post-dinner sherry party interrupted Cora’s plan to stoke the furnace’s appetite.” He crossed to the wardrobe. “It’s in here, somewhere.”
“Philo found my bag open? My uncle’s journals are in it. You’d think he might have—“
“I don’t think it ever crossed his mind, Kate.”
“Thank God for Cora’s serving of the sherry,” I said, thinking how close my bag had come to being destroyed by her. Then, as what Thorn had told me made connection with other bits and pieces, I came to a startling conclusion. I looked up at him. “Lance’s sherry wasn’t poisoned, was it? I thought when I saw that smile of quiet triumph on Cora’s face as she presented the glass to him…” I broke off with a shudder.
Thorn sat down again beside me and hugged me close. “No, it wasn’t. Cora knew by then that I had acknowledged Lance as my son, so Philo was the clear victor. That smile you saw was probably in celeb
ration of your removal from the field, not Lance’s.”
“What will happen to her, Thorn?”
Thorn refilled my cup with tea before answering. “It already has, Kate. She’s dead.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “What? How could that have happened?”
“The snow stopped by daybreak. We all thought it best to remove Cora from Hawkscliffe for proper treatment as soon as possible. Harry hitched that nervy little chestnut to the cutter—he said the pony wouldn’t go in snow—and Cora seemed calm enough. She was still a bit groggy from the powders she was given last night and Agnes told me she gave her two more packets with her morning tea, just in case.
“I guess the cold must have revived her. Just as they rounded that curve above the pond, Cora grabbed for the reins. The mare shied and sidestepped up the slope, all but turning the cutter over. Harry was thrown out, and the sudden, unbalancing removal of his weight sent the horse in a panicky plunge straight into the pond, cutter and Cora and all. The mare is none the worse for her icy dunking; Cora, however, drowned.”
“I can’t say I’m sorry,” I said after a brief silence.
“Nor I, my love,” he murmured against my cheek. “Nor I.” He turned my hand over, exposing the bruised and tender flesh. The quick pulse springing from his fingers throbbed like a whisper against my listening palm.
“Lance and I went down to Hendryk with Harry to summon the police,” Thorn continued soberly. “As far as they’re concerned, her death was an accident, pure and simple. We saw no point in ... complicating the situation.”
Misadventure, that’s what they’ll call it, I mused. Just like Louise, only this time it’s the truth.
“Cora’s accident is the reason why Philo went into the cellar,” Thorn said. “Since Philo was the only one left to deal with the furnace, I told him he was responsible for keeping the house warm enough for you. By now I expect he is wondering how many sacrifices he should be expected to make for you, but he rallied like the gentleman he is.”
The Lost Heiress of Hawkscliffe Page 24
