The Secret Pearl

by Mary Balogh

  “It was not reason but the devil who counseled you so, Isabella,” Daniel’s quiet voice said from behind her, and she realized that she had spoken all her memories out loud.

  “Oh, Isabella,” Miriam said, her voice full of distress. “How you have suffered. And what a villain Lord Brocklehurst is. I always thought him guilty only of being a tyrant. He is the one who deserves to hang. No, Daniel, I mean it. Every word of it. And then he put the jewels in Isabella’s trunk just in case the murder charge was not quite enough.”

  The Reverend Booth offered his arm and they returned to the salon. Fleur wished he were not quite so proper in his behavior. She needed badly to be held in his arms, to rest her head on his shoulder. But it was a pointless thought anyway. Even if he did not believe her guilty of murder and theft, there was that other thing now to set her forever apart from him.

  There was no point in loving Daniel any longer.

  She told them everything, omitting only the way she had met the Duke of Ridgeway and the real reason for Peter Houghton’s being at Miss Fleming’s employment agency.

  “So I came home,” she said when she had come to the end of her story. “I suppose Matthew will be here tomorrow, or perhaps even later tonight. I suppose I will be in prison somewhere by this time tomorrow.”

  “Nonsense,” Miriam said briskly. “But you must come to the rectory for tonight, Isabella. You will be safer there.”

  Fleur shook her head. “No,” she said. “I am staying here. But I will come tomorrow morning. I want to see Hobson’s grave. I must see it. Was his funeral well-attended, Daniel?”

  “It was not held here,” he said. “His body was sent away to the town where he was born.”

  Fleur frowned. “But where?” she said. “Oh, I must find out. I must see his grave. I don’t think I will quite be able to accept the reality of it all until I do. I did not mean him harm, you know. I was terrified, and I suppose I wanted to hurt him so that I could get away. But I never wanted him dead.” She closed her eyes. “Can you find out where he was taken, Daniel?”

  “I don’t know how,” he said. “I think it best if you stay away from there anyway, Isabella. If he has family members there and they see you and find out who you are, they will suffer greatly.”

  She looked down at the hands in her lap.

  Miriam patted them briskly. “Enough for tonight,” she said. “You must be exhausted, poor Isabella. And if you will not come to the rectory, then we will come back here as soon as possible in the morning to help you face Lord Brocklehurst when he arrives.”

  The Reverend Booth got to his feet. “That sounds like the best plan,” he said, “if you are sure you will not come with us. Sleep well, and try not to worry. I will speak myself in court if I must, and give you a good character.” He lifted one of her hands to his lips. “Good night, Isabella.”

  “Good night, Daniel,” she said.

  Miriam kissed her and hugged her.

  For the first night in a long while, Fleur slept soundly, undisturbed by either dreams or nightmares.

  THE DUKE OF RIDGEWAY put up at the village inn for the night. He could have journeyed on to Heron House, but it would have been close to midnight by the time he arrived there, and he decided to wait until the morning. She was in no great danger. He knew he was ahead of Lord Brocklehurst, even if that gentleman had decided to return to his home.

  Besides, he did not think that Brocklehurst would try anything too foolish as far as Fleur Hamilton was concerned. Fleur Bradshaw. Isabella Fleur Bradshaw.

  Fleur.

  It was almost the middle of the next morning when his carriage took him along the winding, wooded driveway to the neat Palladian mansion that was Heron House. It was flanked by an orangery and greenhouses at the one side, stables at the other. There were colorful formal gardens set out before it. The sun was trying to break through the clouds as the carriage drew to a stop before the marble steps leading to the main doors.

  “Miss Bradshaw, if you please,” he told the butler, handing him his hat and cane.

  “Miss Bradshaw is in London with Lady Brocklehurst, I’m afraid, sir,” the butler said, inclining his head.

  “Miss Isabella Bradshaw,” his grace said.

  “And who may I say is calling?” the man asked.

  “You may not,” the duke said curtly. “Show me to the room where she is, please.”

  Something in the duke’s manner caused the man to turn and lead the way to his left along a tiled hallway to a room at the front of the house. She must have heard his approach, then, the duke thought. She must have seen his arrival.

  He walked past the butler into a square room that was obviously a morning room. Sunlight was slanting through its long windows. The clouds must have parted finally, he thought irrelevantly.

  She was standing in front of a chair from which she must have just risen, across the room from the door. She stood very straight, her chin high, her hands clasped loosely before her. She was wearing a pretty sprigged-muslin dress. Her hair was styled in soft curls and ringlets.

  She looked more beautiful than he had ever seen her, his grace thought, even as his eyes took in the pallor of her face, the firm set of her jaw.

  And then her expression changed and the tension almost visibly disappeared from her face and body.

  “I thought you were Matthew,” she said. “I thought that was Matthew’s carriage. I thought he had come.”

  He took one step toward her, thinking that she was about to faint. But instead she moaned and hurtled across the room and straight into the arms he reached out for her.

  “Oh, I thought you were Matthew,” she said as his arms closed about her softness and his nostrils were filled with the sweet fragrance of her hair. “I thought you were Matthew.”

  “No,” he murmured against her ear. “It’s just me, love. He is not going to hurt you anymore. No one is going to hurt you anymore.”

  She looked up at him, her eyes dazed, and her fingertips touched the scar along his cheek. “I thought I would never see you again,” she whispered.

  He swallowed as he watched her eyes fill with tears.

  “I am here,” he said. “Can you not feel my arms about you? I have you safe, love.”

  And he lowered his head and opened his mouth over hers.

  And heard her moan again.

  IT HAD BEEN A FRUSTRATING MORNING. FLEUR had woken up with renewed energy and hope after a good night’s sleep. The rain had stopped, although the sun was still covered with clouds. And she remembered the visit of the evening before and smiled at the knowledge that she still had friends.

  But there must be so little time, she told herself as she went downstairs for an early breakfast. Matthew would surely be home at any time. He must guess that she would have returned to Heron House rather than to London. Or would he? Perhaps it would seem to him that she had fled again, hoping never to be found. London would be the obvious destination if that were the case. Perhaps he would pursue her there.

  Unless he had the sense to call at the stagecoach office, of course, to find out where her ticket had taken her.

  Annie was gone. That was an annoyance. There were all sorts of questions concerning the jewels that she would have liked to ask her former maid. But there was no time to brood on regrets.

  “Chapman,” she asked the butler at breakfast, “where was Hobson’s body taken for burial?” She flushed at the necessity of speaking so openly on a topic that must have the servants’ quarters abuzz.

  “I don’t rightly know, Miss Isabella,” he said.

  “Then will you send me someone who does,” she said.

  “I’m not sure that anyone knows,” he said.

  Chapman had never been the most garrulous of souls.

  “Someone must have taken him there,” she said. “And perhaps someone went to attend the funeral. One of his friends? Lord Brocklehurst himself?”

  “His lordship, yes, miss,” he said. “Flynn drove the carriage. He is with hi
s lordship now.”

  “The body would have gone separately,” she said. “By wagon, I suppose. Who drove that?”

  “Yardley, miss,” the butler said.

  “Then send Yardley to me, if you please,” Fleur said.

  “He is gone, Miss Isabella,” he said. “Into Yorkshire, I believe it was. He took a new position there.”

  “I see,” she said. “I suppose if I were to ask to speak with the person who laid out Hobson’s body and placed it in the coffin, that person would also be gone.”

  “Yardley did those things, miss,” he said, “with his lordship. His lordship was quite broken up over what had happened.”

  Fleur set her napkin on the table. She had lost her appetite.

  In the stables it was the same story. No one knew where Hobson had been taken for burial. Yardley had taken him. And Flynn had taken his lordship the following day. No one remembered Hobson’s ever saying where he came from.

  Finally she went back to the house and into the morning room, which had always been her favorite. Cousin Caroline had never liked it because the direct sunlight gave her the headache, she claimed. And Amelia was rarely up in the mornings. So it had always seemed like her own room, Fleur thought, wandering to the window and looking out at the neat squares of flowers and low clipped hedges of the formal gardens.

  There seemed to be nothing she could find out. What was more frustrating, she did not know what there was to find out.

  She knew almost the whole of it. She had killed Hobson—accidentally. Matthew had had his body taken back to his own home for burial. Matthew had also planted Cousin Caroline’s jewels in her trunk and made sure that someone else discovered them there. Even if she could talk with Annie, there was really nothing she could do to prove that she had not put them there herself.

  Perhaps she was foolish after all not to have fled to London when she had had the chance. The servants had a way of looking at her as if they rather expected to glance down and find that she was swinging an ax from one hand. When Matthew came, it would all begin. Or rather, it would all come to an end. And despite Daniel’s and Miriam’s protestations of the night before, she doubted that anyone or anything could save her. She was quite unable to prove her innocence.

  But, no. She could not do any more running. She was where she had to be.

  The quiet resignation of the thought did not last more than a moment. A carriage had appeared through the trees of the driveway in the distance—a carriage approaching the house.

  Her hands turned cold suddenly and she could feel her heart pounding painfully against her ribs and in her ears. Her face turned cold. There was a dull buzzing in her ears.

  She turned from the window and sat down on the edge of a chair, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her back straight. She concentrated on not fainting.

  And she concentrated on calming herself. She had five minutes at the longest. He must find her quite calm. He must not find her cringing and pleading.

  And she must not—even if he were still prepared to offer it—accept any sort of proposal from him. She must not. Please, God, she prayed silently, give me the strength not to lose my integrity or myself. Please, God.

  She did not get up again or look out of the window even when the sounds of horses and carriage wheels drew close. She straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin, and concentrated on breathing slowly and deeply.

  She rose to her feet when the door opened and he stepped past Chapman and into the room.

  It took her a few moments to realize that he was not Matthew. At first her eyes would not relay the message to her brain. And then she felt all the breath shudder out of her.

  “I thought you were Matthew,” she said. “I thought that was Matthew’s carriage. I thought he had come.”

  But he was not Matthew. He was everything that Matthew was not. He was safety and comfort and warmth. He was home. He was everything in the world that was hope and sunshine. He took a step toward her and opened his arms to her, and she was in those arms without ever knowing how the distance between them had closed.

  “Oh, I thought you were Matthew,” she said, feeling his arms close warmly about her, feeling the powerful muscles of his thighs against hers, the broad firmness of his chest against her breasts. Smelling that cologne fragrance that was peculiarly his. “I thought you were Matthew.”

  His breath was warm against her ear. “No,” he said. “It’s just me, love.”

  She touched his shoulders, felt strength and firmness there as he murmured comforting words. And she looked up into the dark, harsh face that she had thought never to see again, that she had been trying not to think of at all. She reached up a hand to touch his scar, so familiar to her eyes.

  “I thought I would never see you again,” she said. The wonder of it was there to her sight, in her fingertips, in her body, in her nostrils. The wonder of it. Not yet in her brain. Only in her senses. And deeper than her senses. His face blurred before her eyes.

  “I am here,” he said.

  She watched his mouth as he spoke, listened to the deep tone of his voice, looked up into his dark eyes, and closed her own.

  And she was suddenly safe and beyond safety. Enveloped in warmth and strength. She opened her mouth for more of it. And felt an ache of longing spiral down into her throat and into her breasts and stab down into her womb and between her thighs.

  She kept her eyes closed and threw back her head as his mouth moved from hers and trailed warm kisses along her throat. He held back her shoulders with strong hands.

  “You are safe, my love,” he said against her ear. “No one is ever going to hurt you again.”

  My love. My love. He was the Duke of Ridgeway. At Heron House. He had come after her all the way from Willoughby Hall.

  She pushed away from him, turned her back on him, crossed the room to one of the windows. There was a silence.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice came from across the room. He had not come up behind her, as she had half-expected. “I did not mean for that to happen.”

  “What did you mean to happen?” she asked. “What are you doing here? I did not steal anything from your house except perhaps the clothes I bought in London with your money. You may have them if you wish.”

  “Fleur,” he said quietly.

  “My name is Isabella,” she said. “Isabella Bradshaw. Only my parents ever called me the other. You are not my father.”

  “Why did you run away?” he asked. “Did you not trust me?”

  “No,” she said, turning to look at him. He was her customer of the Bull and Horn Inn, she told herself deliberately. She looked down to his hands, which she had always so feared. “Why should I have trusted you? And I did not run away. I stopped running. I came home. This is where I was born, you know. In this very house. This is where I belong.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I see you in your own proper milieu at last. You are waiting for your cousin to come home? You are waiting for the worst?”

  “That is not your concern,” she said. “Why did you come? I will not go back with you.”

  “No,” he said. “I will not take you back, Fleur. You do not belong in my daughter’s schoolroom and I will not take you into any of my homes ever again.”

  She turned away to a side table and began to rearrange the flowers in a bowl that stood there. She quelled the quite unreasonable twinge of hurt.

  “Or try to establish you in any other home, if that is your fear,” he said. “I came to set you free, Fleur.”

  “I have never been in thrall to you,” she said. “For all the money you have given me, I have rendered suitable services. The clothes you may take with you when you leave. I do not need to be set free. I have never been bound to you.”

  He took a step toward her, but there was another tap on the door, and she froze as it opened.

  “The Reverend and Miss Booth are here to speak with you, Miss Isabella,” the butler said, his eyes going briefly to the duke.

  “Show
them in, please,” she said, feeling a great surging of relief. And she hurried across the room to hug Miriam and to smile at Daniel.

  The duke had strolled across to stand at the window she had earlier vacated.

  “Miriam, Daniel,” she said, “may I present his grace, the Duke of Ridgeway? My friends Miriam Booth and the Reverend Daniel Booth, your grace.”

  The men both bowed. Miriam curtsied. They all exchanged curious glances.

  “His grace has come to assure himself that I arrived home safely,” Fleur said. “Now that he has done so, he is about to leave.”

  “He is about to do no such thing,” his grace said, clasping his hands behind him. “There was no grand reunion a moment ago. Do I take it that the three of you have met before, since Miss Bradshaw’s return?”

  “We were here last evening,” the Reverend Booth said, stepping forward. “Miss Bradshaw is among those who care for her again, your grace. We will look after her. You need have no further concern about her.”

  The duke inclined his head. “You will be pleased for her sake, then,” he said, “to know that Lord Brocklehurst will be making a public statement within the next few days to the effect that the death of his valet was accidental, with no question of murder at all, and that the whole alarm over the misplacement of certain jewels was a false alarm. There was, in fact, no theft at all.”

  Fleur’s hands were in the tight clasp of her smiling friend.

  “If the statement is not made,” the duke continued, “though I believe there is no realistic chance that it will not be, then there will be a trial in which Miss Bradshaw will most certainly be acquitted and numerous serious grounds for bringing Lord Brocklehurst himself to trial will arise.”

  Miriam’s arms were about Fleur, and she was laughing. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew the whole thing was quite ridiculous. Isabella, my dear, you are like a block of ice.”

  “I hope you are not raising Miss Bradshaw’s hopes without good cause, your grace,” the Reverend Booth said.

  “I would not do anything so cruel,” the duke said. Fleur looked at him. “I had a long talk with Brocklehurst and got enough of the truth out of him that he will not wish to pursue the course he was taking, I believe. And there was a witness to our talk, whose presence he was unaware of through most of it.”