by Mary Balogh
Mr. Wenzel, Imogen was interested to note, after showing her all due concern up at the house, was walking arm in arm with Meredith, a little apart from everyone else.
And then, almost as though the move had been orchestrated, both Elizabeth and Tilly moved away to talk with other members of the group, everyone else moved back a little so that the circle about Imogen became larger, and she found herself walking beside Percy. He did not offer his arm, and she clasped her hands firmly behind her back. They seemed suddenly isolated in a little cocoon of near privacy.
“I miss you,” he said softly.
She ached for him as she lifted her face to the blue sky and watched a couple of seagulls chase each other overhead.
“Dicky was not ever going to come home, was he?” she said. “It must be a hugely lucrative business. Mr. Ratchett, if it is indeed he, must be enormously wealthy as well as powerful. Please find him, Percy, and destroy his power and release all the people who do his bidding out of fear.”
“I will,” he promised, though they both knew his chances of fulfilling that promise were slim at best.
“Imogen,” he said, “save every waltz at the ball for me. Please?”
She turned her head and looked at him briefly. It was almost her undoing.
“I cannot do that,” she said. “Perhaps not even one. All these people—all of them—believe us to be lovers, and the dreadful thing is that they are right. Or were right. I have been justly punished. You will be leaving here after the ball, when all your guests leave?”
“Probably,” he said, “even if only temporarily. I want to take you to safety. I want to take you to London.”
“I will be going to Penderris next week,” she reminded him. “I will be there for three weeks. I would guess that George will try to persuade me to stay longer and that each of the others will try to persuade me to go with him. They are good friends.”
“And I am your lover,” he said. “Go there first, if you will, but then come to London with me and marry me. I rather fancy a grand ton wedding at St. George’s on Hanover Square. Don’t you? And I never thought I would hear myself say that. Come with me and marry me, Imogen, and let me keep you safe for the rest of your life.”
Unhappiness assailed her like a great ball of lead in her stomach, weighing her down, freezing her so that she no longer saw the blue sky and the sun. The two gulls, playing a moment ago, were now crying mournfully.
“I cannot marry you, Percy,” she said.
“You do not love me?” he asked.
She closed her eyes briefly as he stopped to pat Hector on the head and then squinted up at the cliff top.
“I am very fond of you,” she said.
He spoke the same shocking word he had uttered when he saw her letter. This time he apologized.
“But I would rather you hated me,” he added. “There is passion in hatred. There is hope in it.”
“You do not need to marry me,” she said. “I have friends.”
“Damn your friends,” he said, and apologized again. “I suppose you are talking about those Survivor fellows rather than your neighbors here. I am beginning to dislike them intensely, you know, Imogen. Does any of them love you? There are a billion degrees of love, I know. But you know what I mean. Does any of them love you? The way I love you.”
Her mouth was dry. Her knees felt weak. The struggle to stop herself from weeping made her throat feel raw with aching.
“To use your own word,” she said, “we had sex together, Percy, and it was good. It ought not to have happened, but it did and it was good. It is over now, though. I am fond of you. I always will be. But it is over.”
“You do not know how you tempt me,” he said, “to unleash upon you the full arsenal of colorful vocabulary I normally reserve for male ears only and that only on rare occasions.”
“Yes,” she said sadly. “I believe I do know. But you will return to London and you will soon forget me.”
“Well,” he said, “that calls for the least offensive and most unsatisfactory item in that arsenal. Damn! Double damn! And don’t expect an apology. Ah, I am sorry, my love. I truly am. I asked, you replied, and like a gentleman I should have started conversing politely about the weather. Forgive me?”
“Always,” she said.
“I will ask again,” he told her, “perhaps on the night of the ball. It would be a fittingly romantic setting, would you not agree, and we could make the announcement to our gathered guests. I believe you, you see, when you say that you are fond of me. However, I do not believe you have spoken the full truth and nothing but the truth. I shall ask again, but I shall try not to pester you. Which is precisely what I am doing now. Do you trust this weather? Or will we be made to suffer for it with storms and vicious cold for the rest of the spring? I never trust weather. It gives with one hand and then delivers a knockout blow with the other fist. If, of course, we pretend not to be enjoying the sunshine and warmth one little bit, then perhaps we can trick the weather fairy into giving us more of the same just to keep us miserable. Do you think? Are you a good actor? It is a dreadfully tiresome day, is it not? The sunshine forces one to squint.”
And, incredibly, she ended up laughing. He went on and on, all on the topic of the weather, getting more absurd by the minute.
And he was laughing too.
It cut like a knife, the sound of their laughter and the feel of it bubbling up inside her. It hurt that he loved her, that he believed she loved him.
23
In less than a month, Percy thought several times over the next few days, he had made a thorough mess of his own life and countless other people’s. And there had been no satisfactory conclusion to anything and very probably would not be.
Sir Matthew Quentin thought he was mad. He had not exactly said so, it was true. Indeed, he had even commended Percy for having the courage to speak out when no one else had for years past. But he still thought Percy was mad. And Quentin might have been a friend—well, still might, in fact. Percy liked him.
The customs officer was merely frustrated, but that, Percy concluded, was probably his natural state. Chasing down smugglers when they were shrouded by a conspiracy of silence was not the most enviable of jobs.
Everyone in the house and neighborhood had been stirred up, but to no purpose. It all seemed pointless, except that perhaps the whole organization might fall apart if the leaders had been shaken badly enough. Might was the key word, though. Perhaps Ratchett was not the kingpin or Mawgan his right-hand man. And even if they were, they may well be setting up somewhere else without having lost any of their control over their followers.
Perhaps Imogen was still in danger. And perhaps Percy’s actions so far had merely made them more bent upon revenge. They knew very well that the worst thing they could do to him was to harm Imogen.
Devil take it, but he was desperate to get her away from here, preferably to London, where he knew a lot of people and perhaps she did too, where a gang of Cornish smugglers was unlikely to pursue her. And he was desperate to marry her so that he could keep her secure within his own home, surrounded by his own handpicked servants, and safe within his own arms both day and night.
He had thought she might agree. He really had. Oh, she had said she would never marry again, it was true, and he knew that a great deal more damage had been done her by the events of the past eight or nine years than she had admitted to him. He knew there was a gap in her story, and that knowing what was in that gap would explain everything. But . . . could she never let it go? He had thought—damn it all, he had known—that their affair had been more than sex to her, more than just sensual gratification. He had had affairs before. He knew the difference between those and this.
And goddammit all to hell, he had told her he loved her, prize ass that he was. He had not known he was going to say it—that was the trouble with him. He had not even known he
meant it until the words were out. He had realized he was in love with her, but that was just a euphoric sort of emotion relying heavily upon sex. He had not fully realized he loved her until he told her. And there was the trouble with language again. Whose idea had it been to invent a single word—love—to cover a thousand and two meanings?
She had refused him, and—the unkindest cut of all, to quote somebody or other—she had told him she was fond of him. It was almost enough to make a man want to blow his brains out from both directions at once.
Would she ever be safe here again?
And would he ever be able to live here again even if she was? If she would not marry him, he was going to have to stay away. This was her home.
But, hell and damnation, it was his too. The funny thing was that though he had grown up at Castleford House and had had a happy boyhood there, he never thought of it now as home. It was his father’s home, and his mother’s, even if he was the owner. Hardford Hall—perish the thought!—felt like home. It felt like his own.
And he had messed everything up. If all this had been a horse-jumping course, he would have left every single fence in tatters behind him.
These thoughts and emotions rattled about his brain while he divided his time between his social obligations and meetings and interviews. With only two days left before his belated birthday ball, his mother and the aunts became almost feverish with anxiety lest they had forgotten something essential, like sending out the invitations. At the same time, the house, which had appeared clean and tidy to him from the moment he had first stepped over the threshold and looked around him for cobwebs, took on a shine and a gleam that almost forced one to wear an eye shade. It was not only the ballroom that was being overhauled and cleaned from stem to stern, it seemed.
Cousin Lavinia took to the pianoforte bench in the drawing room several times a day to play various dance tunes while the young cousins—and a few of the older ones too—practiced the steps. Cyril, whom Percy had sometimes accused of having two left feet, undertook to teach the steps of the waltz. That was an exercise that resulted in some progress and one spectacular crash to the floor when young Gregory got his feet hopelessly entangled with Eva’s—or when she got hers entangled with his, depending upon which of them was telling the tale. No bones were broken.
Two days before the ball, there was finally progress in another area too. Someone broke the silence. Paul Knorr, who had taken up residence in the steward’s office and disposed of most if not all of the dust and found homes for all but the current account books inside cupboards, sent Crutchley to the drawing room to request that his lordship come to see him.
“The room looks twice its size,” Percy said when he got there. “Finally I will enjoy spending time here myself. I suppose that was deliberate, though—making the room look like a place one did not want to be.”
“Bains,” Knorr said to him after getting to his feet, “the stable hand with the bad legs, spoke with Mimms a little while ago, my lord.”
“And?” Percy gestured for his steward to sit down again, and drew up a chair for himself on the other side of the desk.
“It was a very brief exchange,” Knorr said. “He would not have wanted to be seen talking to your personal groom. He asked Mimms to give you a message—from Annie Prewett, the deaf-mute housemaid.”
Percy leaned forward in his chair and raised his eyebrows. “A message from a deaf-mute?”
“I understand from Mimms,” Knorr said, “that Bains has known her since they were children and has always been close to her. Somehow they learned to communicate. She helped nurse him after his legs were broken. They are still friends, perhaps even more than that.”
“And?” Percy stared at him.
“She was cleaning Mawgan’s house, one of her regular duties, apparently, when Ratchett came there soon after your meeting,” Knorr said. “They made plans to run off to Meirion and to go into hiding.”
“They planned it in her hearing?” Percy was frowning.
“In her hearing, my lord?” Knorr half smiled. “But she cannot hear, can she? Or talk. I think most people assume she is an imbecile, if they notice her at all. She is a bit invisible, actually, I would say.”
“Why Meirion?” Percy was still frowning.
“Bains told Mimms to tell you there is a roofer there,” Knorr said. “I believe he did repairs to the dower house roof a short while ago, though I can see no mention of the expense in the books. He is married to a sister of Henry Mawgan, James Mawgan’s late father. And Mawgan sometimes stays with his uncle on his days off because he is stepping out with a girl from the village—or that is the reason he gives, anyway.”
“Tidmouth?” Percy stared at him. And pieces somehow fell into place. Imogen away at her brother’s house for several weeks over Christmas. Tidmouth delaying the repair work even though she had given the necessary instructions before she left and the job was likely to be a lucrative one. Continuing to delay after her return even though she was a titled lady and one might have expected that he would fall all over himself in his eagerness to serve her. Had the cellar of the dower house been used again for the storage of contraband during those months, as being far more safe and convenient than the main house? Percy did not imagine a few locks and seals would have posed much problem, especially with the roof open to the elements and anyone who cared to climb through it.
He brought his hand down flat on the desk.
“I know the man’s shop, with his home above it,” he said. “Is that where they are hiding out, Paul? I want them. I want this ring smashed. It is no longer enough simply to drive them off my land. They will continue to terrorize everyone upon it and be a threat to Lady Barclay’s safety for as long as they are allowed to settle in somewhere else and treat what has happened here as a mere minor setback.”
“I took the liberty,” Knorr said, “of sending Mimms to summon Sir Matthew Quentin, my lord, and the customs officer if he is still at the inn.”
“Thank you,” Percy said. “I do believe you are going to be worth your weight in gold, Paul.”
“You had better not say that again,” Knorr said. “I may demand a hefty raise.”
Sir Matthew came within the hour, bringing the customs officer with him. And five hours after that a raid was made on the Tidmouth shop and house in Meirion. Both Ratchett and Mawgan were there. Both protested their innocence. Ratchett claimed to have made the decision to retire. Mawgan claimed to have resigned as a result of his insulting treatment at the hands of his lordship and the understeward. They had come for a short stay at a relative’s home, they both said. And that might have been the end of the matter if a large number of dusty books had not been discovered inside two locked trunks in a far corner of Tidmouth’s attic beneath piles of discarded junk of the sort that tends to fill attics everywhere.
Both men were taken into custody, as was Tidmouth, loudly protesting his innocence.
It was the following morning when Mawgan broke under the combined questioning of Sir Matthew and the customs officer while Percy stood in one corner of Quentin’s study and listened. He could be charged with murder in connection with the drowning death of the late Henry Cooper, Viscount Barclay’s valet, Sir Matthew informed Mawgan. Mawgan might be willing to take his chances on there not being enough evidence for a conviction, but he ought to be warned that the other two men who had been in the boat with his father and him and the valet had been identified and found. Their evidence would convict him—unless he could place absolute trust in their remaining silent. The choice was his—risk all on a murder trial with the certainty that he would hang if he was convicted, or be tried upon the lesser charge of smuggling if he admitted to the murder and told the whole story surrounding it, including his actions in Portugal.
Mawgan had blanched at the mention of hanging.
It seemed that he had indeed been sent to Portugal to make sure Lord Barclay never
came home. He had waited patiently for the war to dispose of his lordship, which it had stubbornly refused to do for more than a year. Then, when they were in the hills one day, he was out looking for firewood—he really was, he swore to it—when he was surprised by a group of French soldiers, who were scouting behind enemy lines. They realized he was English, but before they could do anything to him he told them he could lead them to a far more valuable prize in the form of a British reconnaissance officer out of uniform and on his way to perform a top-secret mission behind French lines, his head full of secrets, his wife with him. He would lead them to the pair if they would let him go. They did, on a very loose rein, and he took them to Lord and Lady Barclay and then made his escape to raise the alarm.
“I had no choice,” he said sullenly. “It was me or them, and why should it be me? I had put in more than a year of my time out there in that hell. I did not kill him for all that. You cannot put that murder on me.”
Percy spoke up though he was there on sufferance, he knew, not being any sort of officer of the law himself.
“You might be advised to speak the whole truth, Mawgan,” he said, “considering the high stakes for which you play.”
They all turned surprised faces his way.
“You want us to believe,” Percy said, “that foraging alone for firewood in hills that were potentially dangerous, you allowed yourself to be taken by surprise? And that your captors let you go free to lead them on what might well have been a wild goose chase?”
“May I remind you, Mawgan,” Sir Matthew said, “of the possible consequences to you of being tried for the murder of Henry Cooper.”
“I saw them,” Mawgan blurted out after a short silence. “But they were going the wrong way. It was the only real chance I had had in more than a year, short of killing him myself. I took off my shirt and tied it to my musket and held it up and showed myself. It was a breezy day.”
“You did have your musket with you, then?” Sir Matthew asked.
