by The Treasure
“Forgive me, Emmie.”
He stepped onto the landing and closed the door. Afraid to hear her calling him, he raced out of Hartwell Keep and rode back to the house at a gallop. He left his horse in the stables and was almost to his apartments, but suddenly stopped and retraced his steps. Moments later he was taking the Gallery Tower stairs two at a time. He reached Courtland’s study only to find it empty. Rushing upstairs, he hurtled into a small library, slammed the door behind him, and fell against it.
Courtland glanced up from a book he was reading at a table. He saw Valin, and his mouth dropped open.
“I’ve ruined everything,” Valin said. He groaned and lowered his head to his hands.
The younger man slapped his book closed and stood. “Damn, Valin, what’s wrong? You look like you’ve been in a fight.”
Answering with another groan, Valin stalked over to a window where he proceeded to pound the stone embrasure. Courtland joined him, but Valin flung himself away and strode around the library picking up books and slamming them down, fiddling with pens and paper, glaring at a desk and an inkwell. Courtland watched him for a while, but only spoke when Valin subsided into a chair at the library table.
“If you’re coherent now, how about telling me what’s got you ranting like a Bedlamite. Has Acton done something terrible?”
Valin crossed his legs at the ankles and scowled at his boots. He was supposed to be the strong older brother, but he needed to talk to someone, and Courtland was a good listener, when he could be persuaded to turn his attention from his work.
“You must promise never to reveal what I’m going to tell you.”
Courtland approached him, nodding. “Of course, old man.”
Valin began with his discovery that Miss Emily de Winter was an imposter.
“And just now—” The words clogged his throat, and Valin clenched his jaw. “Let’s just say I’ve committed myself irrevocably to Emmie.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said!” Valin paused and cleared his throat. “I mean that I’ve committed myself in a way that does not admit going back.”
“Unless you signed some kind of agreement,” Courtland began.
Valin growled, “I said irrevocable.”
His brother met his gaze, and comprehension dawned. “I see.”
“And I never intended to marry her. At least, well, I didn’t think about it.”
“Are you sure, Valin? I’ve never seen you so baffled by a woman, and I know I’ve never heard you talk about one more. You’ve been quite the old Valin lately.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been like you were before the fire.” Courtland hesitated, then spoke gently. “You used to smile, old man. After the fire, the only smiles I saw were counterfeit. You know, the kind one uses in polite society. But now the real ones are back.”
“Just because she may have done something to restore my temperament doesn’t mean I should marry her.”
“And you’re not buried in work all the time.”
“I don’t work all the time.”
“You do,” Courtland said. “Even your forays into Society are work. For you. But since Miss de Winter arrived, you’ve actually enjoyed yourself. I think matching wits with her has changed you, old fellow.”
Valin looked away. “There are some things that can’t be changed, no matter how I wish I could.”
“That’s what’s wrong!”
Eyeing his brother, Valin lifted his brows.
“You’re afraid of what will happen if she hears those absurd old rumors.”
They’d never talked about the fire so openly. Courtland had been a boy when it happened, and Valin hadn’t wanted to burden him with the truth. But somehow he’d learned it anyway. Valin smiled faintly at his brother.
“You really believe those rumors are absurd?”
“Of course,” Courtland replied.
Valin refrained from protest. The urge to unburden himself was almost irresistible, but his confusion about Emmie overshadowed everything.
“There’s something else,” he said quietly. “In an—an agitated moment, I called her ‘love,’ and she must have taken it literally, otherwise she never would have …”
Courtland was gaping at him. “You said that?”
“Only once. Don’t leer at me, damn you. This whole situation is infernally confusing.”
“Why?”
Valin threw up his hands and uttered a wordless sound of exasperation. They fell silent for a moment as Valin tried to make sense of his chaotic feelings.
“Courtland,” he whispered. “I don’t even know who she is.”
His brother knelt beside him and placed a hand on his arm. “Don’t you think that’s what has broken through that barricade of fury you’ve set up against the world?”
Valin gawked at his little brother.
“Come on, old fellow. We live in a tiny, inbred little world, a few hundred families at most. And Miss Emily de Winter descends upon you with her exotic manner of dressing and speaking, and then you find out she’s an adventuress, that you don’t know who she is. You’re fascinated with this lady scoundrel not because she’s a lady, but because she isn’t.”
“A damned stupid whim upon which to base a marriage!”
Courtland rose and walked back to the library table where he picked up the book he’d been reading. “You’re shouting, old boy.”
“How is that relevant?” Valin demanded.
“You might as well accustom yourself to the idea,” Courtland said as if Valin hadn’t spoken. “She’s in your blood. You might say you’re infected with her.”
Valin bolted out of his chair. “Oh, what do you know of it? You spend your days with your nose buried in achievements and restoring old bed—er—in restoring old keeps.” He pointed at his younger brother, who had started to grin at him. “What are you smirking at?”
“You. You’re a bear with its leg in a trap.”
Drawing himself up into a stiff posture, Valin looked down his nose at Courtland. “One would think you’d try to help me escape this predicament, or at least offer sympathy.”
Courtland’s book dropped to the table as he uttered a loud guffaw. He hurried around the table when Valin cursed and stalked out of the room. He caught up with Valin on the landing and clapped his brother on the shoulders.
“Sorry, old fellow.” Courtland was trying to stifle a grin. “I do sympathize with your plight. Perhaps it would help if you actually knew to whom you’ve promised your hand in marriage.” Unable to hold off his mirth, Courtland fell against the wall laughing.
“Cheeky sod,” Valin muttered. He glared at Courtland, then grew thoughtful.
“But perhaps you’ve hit upon the solution after all.”
Struggling into the skirt of her riding habit, Emmie kicked her corset aside. She’d been unable to tie it without help. Her tears obscured the garment as she began to cry again.
“Oh, bloody damnation.” She knelt on the floor and picked up the corset, using it as a handkerchief.“Stop it, Emily Fox. Crying is useless and weak.”
She stood, still wiping her cheeks with the end of the corset. Her gaze fell on the bed, the sheets, the drops of blood. Moaning, Emmie turned her back on the evidence of her folly and sat down on the clothes chest beside the window.
A life spent in the rookeries meant that she’d become familiar with the details of intimacy in a way no lady ever would. In fact, she’d been thirteen when a well-meaning dollymop from Whitechapel had revealed the mystery. But knowing and experiencing were not the same. Experience had been far more gratifying. Until Valin had bolted as if fleeing the plague, the sneaking varmint. She dropped the corset beside the chest.
How could he be so amazingly beguiling, so seductive one moment and so anxious to vanish the next? He was sorry he’d done it. That was why. He regretted making love to her even though he’d found it as amazing as she had.
Why had she abandoned
all principle, all her carefully guarded honor? She had been content to remain untouched and alone before Valin North. Indeed, she’d been too busy providing for her siblings, her band of nefarious friends, and herself to worry about the absence of love in her life. Before she’d come upon the marquess, romance had been some vague notion encountered in the books Mama had given her. Characters in a Shakespearean play involved themselves in romance, not young women from the rookeries who were of illegitimate birth. In any case, one couldn’t count on men. She was disgusted with herself for succumbing to one. Look what it got her—left alone in the middle of a big ugly bed.
“Serves you right for trusting a man,” she muttered to herself.
Leaning back, she rested against the stone wall and closed her eyes. She wanted to run away, to escape this boiling cauldron of unfamiliar emotions—longing, humiliation, pain—all mixed together.
Longing, humiliation, pain. And love. Understanding broke over her, an icy downpour on a hot summer day. Love was the only explanation for her mad conduct. Suspended in the midst of a swarm of emotions, Emmie faced the truth. A hidden, needy part of her had latched upon Valin’s careless reference to love, trusted in it, and fed its own longing.
“Well, there it is,” she whispered. “You’re a gullible fool in love with a man who’s run away from you.”
Anguish overwhelmed her. She wanted to hide. She wanted to curl up in some dark place far away and whimper.
More tears slid down her cheeks. Emmie wiped them with her hands as she sat up and straightened her spine. She couldn’t run away, no matter how miserable she felt. She couldn’t abandon her best chance of securing a proper future for her little ones. Besides, if she left Valin would alert the authorities. She’d have to go into hiding. If she did that she couldn’t support herself for long without delving into the funds she’d saved for Flash and the others. That she would not do.
Scooping up the corset, Emmie rose and placed it on the chest. Her mouth set in a line as thin as a hatpin, she went to the bed and stripped the bottom sheet from it. After restoring the covers to their former neat condition, she folded the stained sheet and stuck it in one of the voluminous hidden pockets in her petticoat. She’d get Betsy to burn it. The corset vanished into another pocket.
A glance around the room showed her she hadn’t forgotten anything. Emmie picked up her riding hat, stuffed it on her head. She’d stay even though she’d made the same stupid mistake her mother had made, falling in love with a ruthless nobleman.
“The sooner you find the gold, the sooner you can get away from him.”
She had to stop tormenting herself wondering why Valin had bolted, why he suddenly regretted their lovemaking. Sighing, Emmie admitted to herself for the first time that she knew why. He didn’t want to become involved with a lady adventuress. Emmie didn’t blame him. What well-bred man wanted someone like her for a wife? Before Valin, she’d been resigned to this fact. Before Valin. Her thoughts were circling around the same miseries.
“Don’t,” she muttered. “Don’t think about it. Get on with searching for the blasted gold.”
Leaving the chamber with the giant bed, trying to ignore the pain in her heart, Emmie proceeded to explore Hartwell Keep. She had brought a copy of the foreign phrases with her. It was concealed in her hatband. Emmie removed the paper and read it again.
The Latin phrase “Three joined in one,” the last on the list, must refer to the keep, and she had decided that the others must have been intended to be read in reverse order. The third phrase was a command, “Stop, traveler,” which obviously was meant to warn the reader to remain at the keep when searching for the gold. The second, “Thus one goes to the stars,” had to mean that she must go to the top of the keep. The gold must be hidden somewhere on the top floor of one of the towers. The first phrase, “Here I am, here I remain,” could refer to the actual hiding place of the gold. Emmie mounted the tower stairs that led past the chamber she and Valin had been in and climbed to the top floor.
Over two hours’ search of both towers and the arcades that connected them proved fruitless. Emmie searched both towers a second time from cellar to roof. No gold.
A black gloom settled over her, due more to her having nothing to distract her from the loss of Valin than to not finding the gold. Weary in spirit and body, Emmie left the roof of the west tower and descended the winding stairs. She braced one hand on the wall as she negotiated the twisting, worn steps. From the top of the stairs all she could see was a dark turn.
“Pestilential tower,” she grumbled. “Why did they have to make the bloody stairs wind around like a corkscrew, damned twisted …” Emmie stopped and contemplated the next turn. “Damned winding … spiral!”
She hurried down the rest of the stairs to the ground floor where she inspected the outside turn of the stair. The flight was a curve of stone that formed a little alcove.
“Under the spiral. Goodness gracious mercy.”
Tapping her foot on the flagstones, she continued. “But not here. In Agincourt Hall. It was there all along. Henry Beaufort, you were a clever old devil after all.”
Feeling her spirits lift a trifle, Emmie left Hartwell Keep and was soon riding out of the wood on the Agincourt grounds. She walked her horse across the Palladian bridge that spanned the ornamental lake. Voices carried across the water to her. On the artificial island, with its little Greek temple and wispy trees scattered across a grass-covered landscape, she could see the other guests.
The ladies’ skirts billowed in the breeze, soft muslin and organdy with yards of lace and delicate straw bonnets tied with taffeta bows. The olive green, brown, and black of the gentlemen’s frock coats contrasted with the pastels worn by the ladies. She could hear the clink of sterling silver on china and see black-clad servants moving among the diners. A gentleman bowed to a lady and offered a crystal wineglass. Two women with lacy parasols strolled by the water’s edge. A maid offered a pristine white napkin to a lady in a gown of pale blue with white ribbons.
Emmie dismounted, entranced by the elegance and peace of the scene. Then, without warning, she began to feel separated from it in a way that had nothing to do with distance. She could never belong to that setting, really become one of those tranquil and refined ladies. Muslin, organdy, chivalrous gentlemen, pristine white napkins, and china—these didn’t belong to her world. Valin knew that.
“And he couldn’t tell me,” she whispered to the mare standing quietly beside her. “Perhaps that’s why he left.”
Feeling aged and hopeless, Emmie mounted again and rode to the stables. Once she entered Agincourt Hall she forced herself to think of her search for the gold. She would test her explanation of the foreign phrases at once, in the Gallery Tower. It was the one in which Beaufort had put the chimneypiece. She still thought it was the mostly likely choice for a hiding place. But first she must bathe and change.
An hour later, Emmie had burned the blood-spattered sheet in her rooms. After fending off Betsy’s prying questions, she set out for the Gallery Tower. On the way her thoughts turned to Valin. The gloom that resulted caused her to take a wrong turn, and she ended up in one of the rooms designed by Robert Adam. Frescoes of garlands and classical urns, columns and pilasters in white plaster greeted Emmie. It was the Blue Room, so called because the walls had been painted pale blue to contrast with the white of Adam’s designs.
Emmie had taken only one step into the Blue Room when she noticed Lord Acton bending over a table. His back was to her as he picked up an octagonal inkwell and slipped it in his pocket. Emmie knew the inkwell was valuable because Aunt Ottoline had told her it once belonged to Louis XIV. Of red jasper with gilt trim and a gold fleur-de-lis set on top as a handle, it was a noticeable piece that Emmie would never have filched. She would have left then, but Lord Acton turned and saw her.
“Ah, Miss de Winter. Have you been standing there long?”
“I just came in.”
“Good, good.” Acton rubbed his hands together
and smiled at her. “I’d like to have a little talk with you, if you could spare me a few minutes.”
Emmie nodded warily. During their short acquaintance she’d developed a distaste for Acton. He was lazy, and considered the luxuries his position in Society brought him insufficient for the honor he did the world by his mere presence in it. He had Valin’s gray eyes, without the light of intelligence that enlivened his brother’s, and his hair was warm blond like his mother’s. Although his build was as hard and muscled as a blacksmith’s, Emmie was sure he’d run to corpulence in a few years, for Acton drank too much, ate too much, and smoked cigars whenever he couldn’t indulge in the other two vices.
“Won’t you sit down, Miss de Winter?”
Emmie took the chair Acton offered, her skirts spreading so wide they hid most of it. Acton seated himself beside her.
“Ordinarily I wouldn’t embark upon such a conversation with a lady, but since you’ve become engaged to my brother in so surprising a manner, I feel I must.”
“Indeed.”
Acton glanced at the open door and lowered his voice. “I feel it my Christian duty to tell you something I know my brother won’t. It’s about the death of our father and stepmother.”
“That happened long ago,” Emmie said. “How can it signify today?”
With many expressions of regret at having to reveal such ugly truths, Acton poured forth a venomous account of the events at the old lodge.
“So you see,” Acton said with an expression of grief and regret, “I had to warn you. Everyone is certain Valin tried to seduce my stepmother. Father interrupted them, and in the ensuing fight …”
Emmie toyed with the lace on the undersleeve of her bodice. “So what you’re saying is that a boy of—seventeen, was it?—managed to overpower a man in his prime and a woman as well.”
“Perhaps.” Acton sighed dramatically. “Whatever the details, it’s evident that Valin went there with dishonorable intentions and thus was the cause of both the quarrel and the fire.”
