The box sat on the small writing table, splayed open, exhaling tobacco. As soon as she touched it guilt poured through her, for heaven’s sake, as surely as if she were a little girl again, sneaking into Lyon’s bedchamber to root out her brother’s secrets.
Ha, Lyon. I may save your life this time.
She snatched it crouched swiftly near the fire.
Which is when one of her knees cracked like a pistol shot.
Holy—!
She squeezed her eyes closed. Went very still. Seconds later the fire, like a co-conspirator, obligingly popped just as loudly, and threw up a shower of sparks to boot.
Mercifully, the man in the next room continued snoring.
She settled the box into the hammock made by her crossed legs and night rail and ran her fingers over the bottom of it, pressing precisely, searchingly, firmly, like a physician seeking the source of an ailment. The passing minutes stretched her nerves tight as pianoforte strings, until she feared any stray breeze would pluck a minuet from them. Finally, her thumbs worried, pressed, a place near the bottom right corner. And the bottom of the box rotated completely, and the contents thumped into her lap.
She fished the first thing out, as it was a book, and the corner of it dug into her thigh. She plucked it up; the must of age fluttered up from its pages. A quick fan through it revealed they were covered in a sprawling, arrogant hand. It was a journal of some kind. She quickly turned it over to read the cover, leaned nearer the fire.
The ground dropped out from beneath her.
And she kept falling, and falling, but each time she read the words they were precisely the same.
Property of Captain Moreheart, commander of The Steadfast.
Bloody hell.
Proof. Proof that the person who possessed this had indeed sunk The Steadfast.
She quickly fished the second thing out of her lap. But she already knew what it was. She’d found it in this box the first and last day she’d pried into it. And here was the definitive proof that Lyon was Le Chat.
It was Violet who’d discovered what he’d kept in that false bottom when he was a boy. It was the first secret she’d ever bothered to keep, too, because it made her oldest brother seem that much more romantic and heroic, and even at a young age she knew what their father would have done to Lyon had he learned it. She wondered now about how different the lives of so many would be if she hadn’t kept that secret.
She held the miniature of Olivia Eversea, the woman who had sent Lyon away, the woman who, indirectly, was the reason Violet was sitting here in the dark while a sated earl she loved more than her next breath snored in the next room. It was like every miniature portrait in that it didn’t capture the essence of its subject. A person Violet had known since she could remember, whom she’d seen in church every Sunday apart from the few times a fever had kept her away, a person inextricable now from Redmond family history. Olivia Eversea’s face was faintly heart-shaped; there was a wicked innocence, something of the imp, in her chin and the cant of her eyes, which here had been rendered whatever blue the artist had to hand. The color, Violet knew, was not quite right. Her soft dark hair was piled a little too haphazardly for Violet’s elegant tastes, but then everything about the Everseas had always been a bit too haphazard for her tastes. Her neck was long and fair, and around it was a locket; she’d been painted in a green, low-necked dress.
The Everseas admittedly weren’t an ugly clan.
Violet was tempted to hurl Olivia’s miniature into the fire along with the book and that box.
But now that she knew about love, and how unlikely and inappropriate and inconvenient and consuming and cripplingly serious and operatically ridiculous it could be, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Olivia was Lyon’s folly and downfall. Just as the earl was hers. As much as she hated to admit it, throwing Olivia into the fire would be like throwing Lyon’s heart into the fire.
She knew a quick righteous fury, imagining her brother Lyon Redmond, the family heir, forced to flee so quickly he’d jettisoned the thing she knew was most precious to him.
Unless it no longer was.
Or unless he’d purposely left it.
But why, and why?
And suddenly she was almost certain he’d left it for her to find. She gave the book a little shake, and a sheet of foolscap slipped out of it.
Somehow I’m not surprised it’s you who found me, even though Miles is the family explorer. Father will kill you, of course, when you go home. For you will go home. And when you begin reading Captain Moreheart’s journal, you’ll understand why I’m doing what I’m doing, and for whom I’m doing it. You’ll also, when you reach the end of it, know why I can’t go home—not yet—and why I suspect you’ll go home and won’t tell anyone you’ve seen me, or what you’ve read here. But I will leave that up to you. I leave the fate of the journal up to you, too.
Do you know what she said to me? You haven’t any real courage, Lyon. You’d never stand for anything. You’re your father’s invention, and you’ll have your father’s money. How can I love you when you don’t know who you are?
I know a little bit more about who I am now. But it’s not whom I expected to be. I entrust her image to you.
Much love to you.
So she quickly began to read through the journal. A few pages confirmed her darkest fear: The Drejeck Group was indeed participating in the lucrative, illegal, horrific Triangle Trade—trafficking in human beings.
And Captain Moreheart had more than once captained one of the ships. There were logs of slaves bought and sold.
But it wasn’t until she saw a name on the last page of that journal, a single name in a list of investors, that she understood why Lyon, who had likely set out to do something heroic, now needed to protect the reasons he was doing what he was doing until he’d finished off the Drejeck group altogether.
And why he couldn’t just leave what he’d discovered up to the authorities.
Oh God.
She felt jittery from the incompatible combination of exhaustion and nervous excitement and the fitful firings of her brain as it tried to assemble facts. She needed to think, but emotions slammed her in waves, one after the other, fury and love and fear, and there never seemed enough space between them to clear her head. She dropped her face into her palms hard, an almost-slap, and breathed in hard. Think like a man, she told herself.
She remembered again what Asher said about being shot, about how there was a moment of blessed numbness, of surprise, really, before the agony set in.
Steady breathing came from the room next to her. For a disorienting moment her breathing swayed in time with his, and it was as though she breathed for him and he breathed for her.
She huddled next to the fire with her arms wrapped around her knees, surprised, to realize how strong she really was. She could thank the earl for it. She remained that way until her stiff, cold toes and fingers told her the fire had burned low enough to cease giving off heat. She straightened her spine, and took a deep breath, and pushed her hair away from her eyes.
She felt a surge of fury with herself when her fingers came away damp. Damn, damn, damn. She could think like a man, she could act like a man, but she was a woman after all, and women wept.
And then got on with what they needed to do.
She quietly opened up the writing desk, found the quill and a pot of ink that hadn’t clotted, and wrote two notes.
One said:
Forgive me. But I know you understand why I did it.
The other said:
He knows you’ll be in the Plaza de Mina tomorrow.
P.S. I love him, Lyon. Did you ever think such a thing would happen?
Love, your sister Violet
She sprinkled sand over both.
The first she left where it was, on the writing desk.
The second she folded in half and kept gripped in her hand as she quickly slipped into her day dress, leaving the laces undone. Speed was of the essence. She seized her
shoes and her portmanteau. She knew she couldn’t linger, couldn’t silently kiss him or gaze one last longing time at his sleeping form, because he had that knack for knowing when she was watching him. She had no doubts she’d wake him up with a yearning gaze, despite the fact that their lovemaking had clubbed him into a stupor.
And so she hardened her heart in the hopes she could prevent it from breaking before she could accomplish what she needed to do, and she tiptoed out the door to the sound of the man she loved sleeping peacefully.
Chapter 26
Flint awoke before dawn, and even before his eyes opened he knew she was gone.
Gone, gone.
He didn’t hear breathing. He couldn’t feel her presence. He quickly sliced a hand over to her side of the bed; it was too cool for her to have rolled out simply because she’d wakened early.
He shot out of bed and strode, nude, into the next room. The fire was dead, the room lit by the gray light of dawn, and the plundered rosewood box lay splayed on the floor.
He knelt, gingerly, as if over a body. Then gently lifted it up.
So it had a false bottom. Why hadn’t he thought of that?
And she’d watched him surgically go at the thing last night with a hairpin. She must have known the entire time about the bottom.
What had she found inside?
He held that box, and suddenly knew his entire plan was farcical.
He’d thought to assemble a life from pieces. He thought of the things he’d kept in his cabin on the ship. A painting. A chessboard. Trophies of the regard of other people. And all of it seemed foolish to him now, mere paste imitations when held up to the light of real love, like Violet’s love for her brother. And his love for her.
His whole life would now be a paste imitation of life without her.
Violet was the only person with whom he’d ever truly belonged.
Devastation held him motionless.
Next he found the foolscap message.
Forgive her? He was temped to crunch it in his fist and hurl it across the room.
He smoothed it tenderly over and over, irrationally. It may have been the last thing she touched.
He’d all but handed her the opportunity to betray him: He’d told her about the crew searching in the Plaza de Mina. She was no fool. She’d found something in that box, and the ever-startlingly resourceful Violet would have found a way to warn her brother that Flint and crew would be coming for him. In a sense, he suspected he wanted to see what she would do with the opportunity to betray him.
He had no right to use the word betrayed.
He wandered like one punched in the head into the bedroom, the battered box in one hand. He sat down hard for a moment on the edge of the bed. Distantly, among the emotions that swamped him, he found one he wanted to court: fury.
He held it focused in the beam of his mind, coaxing it into full flame, until it drove him to his feet and got him into his clothes. Still stuffing his shirt into his trousers, pushing hair back with one hand, he strode furiously down the halls hammering on the inn doors to wake his men.
She might have chosen to do what she thought was right.
But it didn’t mean she’d succeeded yet.
Flint’s crew had been thorough in both their pleasure seeking and in their questioning in and around the Plaza de Mina, and they learned that when in Cádiz Mr. Hardesty could often be found in Los Tres Pescaderos, a pub of sorts on the Plaza de Mina.
The Three Fish was a graceless, shadowy, low-ceilinged room built of brick and propped up on thick splintering wood pillars he needed to dodge as he entered. Smoke—cigar, cooking, pipe—commingled, obscuring faces. Everywhere men were slumped over drinks or sprawling in easy conversation. It was a splendid place for sub rosa meetings.
But when he saw, even through the smoke, deep in the shadows near the bar, the line of a particular spine, the elegant curves of a profile. Flint’s heart leaped into his throat. In seconds he was almost airborne with joy.
And then the smoke migrated away, clearing like clouds.
He’d been wrong.
He turned to Lavay. “Wait for me outside. I’ll call if I need you.”
Lavay hesitated, then gave a curt nod.
He’d unlocked his pistol before he’d arrived. Heart a dull hammer in his ears, he casually wended through the crowd of unsuspecting strangers to the straight-backed man sitting at the shadowy table.
His Redmond profile turned away from him.
He stood until Lyon Redmond, not the least surprised, looked up at him and lifted eyebrows in welcome. He’d been expected.
Handsome devil, indeed, as Musgrove had accused. He had his sister’s blue eyes, vivid even in the dark. The aristocratic angles in the face were an echo of hers, too, only his were hard and masculine and stubbled.
“Good day, Captain Flint. Are you going to attempt to arrest me? Or shoot me? Something more dramatic?” He sounded as though he were proffering a menu of options.
Flint stared down at his grail.
And Lyon languidly stretched out a leg and pushed the chair across from him away from the table. Inviting him to sit.
Flint sat. He pulled the chair close into the table, close enough to hide the pistol he slid from his coat to lie in his lap. He swept a hand in the air to signal the barmaid over. She’d perhaps adapted to her environment like the creatures who live in caves, for she saw him straight away. She sauntered over, skirt swinging like a bell over her hips that might as well have been on hinges. She had flare.
“Dark, por favor.”
Lyon was motionless. He didn’t even his drum his fingers. He didn’t appear particularly tense.
The two men said nothing at all until she brought the ale to him and he’d taken his first long sip.
“I thought Violet would try to warn you I was coming,” Flint began.
This amused Lyon. “Try? You ought to know her better by now. She succeeded in warning me. I had a note from her this morning. Succinct and revealing. She’s resourceful, my sister. She paid someone on the docks to row the message out to The Olivia, and one of my men made sure I received it. They always know where to find me.”
Flint wasn’t surprised. She’d talked her way aboard his ship, after all.
“But…then why are—”
“—am I here? I’m here because of the postscript she wrote on her message, Captain Flint. I decided I needed to see you for myself. And as for Violet, she is even now on a packet back to England. I arranged for her passage. She’ll be home in two days, lest she take it into her head to foment more mischief.”
Flint nearly reflexively stood. She was gone, and he knew where!
Then stopped himself when he realized what he was doing.
He saw Redmond tense, almost infinitesimally, and knew the man was likely every bit as armed as he was. That he likely cradled an unlocked gun in the hand resting in his lap.
He forced himself to remain seated. He was here to collect Lyon.
“You ought to know that ten armed sailors are waiting outside to take you the moment I say the word, Redmond.”
“Hardesty,” he corrected with cool politeness. “If you would. In this place, anyhow. You do have Mathias? The boy? Is he safe?”
“He’s with us. He was impressed by the Portuguese pirate who boarded my ship. We kept him on. He proved useful.”
“Abrega. I hear he’s been claiming to be me.” Ironic curve of a smile.
Flint could hardly bear to look at Lyon, and yet it was impossible to tear his eyes away. He looked so bloody much like his sister it was a torment.
“Abrega won’t make that claim anymore.”
“Ah.” Lyon’s brows twitched up appreciatively. He understood it was an oblique way of saying Abrega was dead.
They were quiet again.
Flint regarded his quarry curiously. “Why did you do it?”
Lyon stared at him for a long time with a half smile. And then he jerked to attention.
“Oh! My
apologies. You expected I’d actually answer that question. To confess all. And yet I’d heard you were clever.”
He toasted his stalker, lifted his tankard of ale to his lips and sipped, turning casually in his chair.
“Here is the thing, Captain Flint,” he began almost apologetically. “I waited for you, rather than racing ahead of you yet again. For a reason. But if you choose to attempt to take me, I will not go without a fight. And I assure you that one of us, if not both of us, will be dead thereafter. No matter what.”
The two men sat across from each other in silence. On the surface of things, they appeared to be two friends, two acquaintances, two exceptionally well-made gentlemen sharing a conversation.
Beneath the table, two pistols were unlocked, balanced on knees, gripped in white-knuckled hands.
“So be it,” Flint said easily.
“So do you love my sister?”
Flint made a small sound. Shock or pain; he couldn’t control it.
And at this Lyon Redmond swiveled in his chair and sat bolt upright. “You do love her.”
He sounded startled at the realization. And so much like a sibling for an instant Asher was both amused and envious of the long, deep history, the taken-for-granted love between Redmonds.
He heard Lyon Redmond inhale; he heard a creak as he leaned back in his chair. He glanced up, and his profile—that stubborn chin, the straight nose—was so reminiscent of Violet that Asher felt stabbed clean through. He breathed in deeply, took in only old and new smoke. Tried to find anger and resolve. To buoy himself against the sensation that he’d been shot in the hull and would sink and sink.
Flint remained stubbornly quiet on the topic.
“May I ask you something, Captain Flint?”
Flint nodded warily.
“Why do you love her?” He sounded again so much like a sibling that Flint almost laughed, even as he bristled.
“What do you mean?”
“I love her. I have to love her. She’s my sister. And I do. But I love her in spite of herself, bless her heart. I know she’s willful, capricious, and I fear far too spoiled to be a proper wife to any man, and like as not it’s the fault of my parents and my brothers. She’s funny and insightful and desperately clever, though God knows she’s never applied her intelligence to anything in particular. I would kill for her, and I would kill any man who hurts her. I have had, shall we say, reason to question her judgment in the past, if not her tenacity. She’s my blood. I want to know why you love her.”
I Kissed an Earl Page 32
