To Catch a Flame

by Kimberly Cates

  "Grandmother," Charles interrupted, "what happened to me happened because of my own foolishness. If it were not for Uncle Griffin, I would be dead."

  "Dead? But don't you see, Charles, he wants you dead! Wants you dead so he can inherit Darkling Moor, inherit the dukedom! He's a worthless profligate! A reprehensible scoundrel, not fit to wipe the mud from a respectable man's boots."

  "Grandmother," Charles started to protest, but Griffin waved a hand to silence him.

  "I couldn't agree with you more, Grandmama," Griffin said. "I have been guilty of every sin you accused me of and more."

  The old lady almost gagged, her face freezing into icy fury. "I'll not have you mocking me, sirrah! Not have you jeering at decent, upstanding—"

  "You mistake me, madam. I am serious." Griffin glanced up at the portrait of his father, and the wastrel duke's lively eyes beamed heedlessly down from the canvas. "It is true there is a bit too much of my father's wild blood in my veins, but I am resolved to try to tame it."

  "You... you are resolved to what?"

  "Become respectable. A source of pride to my family. To my wife, " Griffin added softly, the word precious, infinitely sweet.

  He was so caught in the sudden emotions that were washing through him that he did not see the dowager duchess storming toward him until she was an arm's length away.

  Judith Stone's face was livid, her hand trembling on the gold head of her cane. She lashed it upward, jabbing its end at Griffin's chest. "No, no you don't, my fine blackguard! You'll not dupe anyone with this show of piousness! All of England shall see through your ruse."

  "I am certain they would, if it were a ruse. But you see, I am quite sincere. Committed to this course."

  "Committed to Bedlam would be more fitting! Ever since you arrived here—"

  "Ever since he arrived here," Charles interrupted firmly, "Uncle Griffin has been treated abominably. By both of us." Charles's voice held an edge of steel Griffin had never heard before.

  Judith's chin dropped perceptibly, and her eyes widened.

  "Look what he has done since he has charged in here! He's made our lives miserable, carrying on with his doxy beneath this very roof, ordering you and me about as if we were his slaves! No court in the world would expect you to suffer beneath his heel as you have the past month! After what happened the other night they would rip him from the guardianship in an instant."

  Charles stood behind the desk, and Griffin was struck by how tall the boy now seemed. "You will cease this unseemly display at once, Grandmother," he said quietly.

  "I'm well used to it, Charles," Griffin intervened. "And, I must admit, a measure of it has been well deserved. It doesn't matter."

  "I believe it does." Charles looked at Griffin with a heartening steadiness then turned again to face the dowager duchess. "My lord uncle will always be welcome in my home. The most esteemed of visitors. If you cannot keep a civil tongue in your head when he is my guest, Grandmother, you will kindly keep to your rooms."

  "Keep to my rooms! How dare you—"

  "Because I am the duke," his grace of Ravensmoor said quietly, meeting her eyes.

  For the second time in her life Judith Stone was rendered speechless.

  * * *

  The sun was waning, candles flickering in the windows of Darkling Moor, when Griffin reined his winded horse down the carriage circle. Charles had gone back to his bed hours earlier, but only after Griffin had promised to discharge a dozen duties that were preying on Charles's mind. It had been exhausting and exhilarating, watching Charles come to terms with his inheritance.

  The only cloud had been the expression on Judith Stone's face as she had stormed from the room. Griffin sighed, wondering if the old woman was even now barred in her chambers as if she were under siege, seething with outrage and scorn and hate.

  Griffin urged Brutus into a trot as he rounded the bend. The trees parted to reveal the entryway to the estate, a blaze of lanterns. Griffin's hands froze on the reins, his lips parting in a curse as his gaze fixed on the sight before him.

  The dowager duchess's traveling coach stood tricked out in full regalia, an army of servants swarming about it like frenzied honeybees, storing away what Griffin knew must be Judith Stone's treasures.

  Cursing under his breath Griffin spurred his mount, dashing up the drive.

  Within moments he had thrown the reins to a footman and charged up the steps into the entryway beyond.

  Judith Stone, dowager duchess of Ravensmoor, sat enthroned in a gilt chair in the green drawing room, directing the loading of her belongings with the aura of an exiled queen.

  "Grandmother, for God's sake," Griffin said, stalking to where the woman sat. "What the devil are you doing?"

  "I am retiring to the dower house." Her face was as unyielding as the cliffs of Cornwall. "I find it far preferable to being locked in my rooms."

  "No one is going to lock you in your rooms. I am certain Charles did not mean—"

  "He most certainly did! Every word of it! Did you see his eyes? The way he scowled at me? How dare the stripling brat pretend to rule Ravensmoor? Rule me—me! I who was once the duchess—"

  "As Charles is now the duke," Griffin said. "He is trying his best to fill his father's place. To save Ravensmoor. But for all his determination, he is still very young. He'll need us both in the months ahead. If he is to right Ravensmoor's fortunes"—he hesitated for a heartbeat—"he'll need you."

  The dowager duchess sprang to her feet, her face suffused with anger. "I don't want your pity. I don't want your charity. You, with your rakehell ways and your gaming and your women. You're not worthy to be Charles's most trusted advisor! You'll be a blight upon the dukedom."

  "I know in the past I've been a disappointment—an embarrassment to you and"—Griffin winced inwardly—"to William as well. But I meant what I said in the study this morning. I intend to change, Grandmama. You see, I've finally... finally found something I love enough to change for. Finally found someone whose happiness, whose respect means more to me than all the wild scrapes and adventures—"

  "That harlot you intend to marry? For her you will become the soul of propriety?"

  "I intend to do right by her," Griffin said. "As soon as her grandmother returns I shall proffer my suit to her. Until then I vow I'll do nothing to shame Isabeau."

  "Shame her further, you mean! You have already paraded her in a sheet like a common harlot, invaded her room during a bath! You have dressed her and bedded her—aye, sirrah, I know it—like some Fleet Street doxy."

  Griffin met his grandmother's gaze levelly. "I would change that if I could, but I cannot. All I can do is love her, Grandmama. And that I do. More than my life."

  Those words silenced the old woman for a moment, and Griffin felt a stirring of hope that he might finally, miraculously reach this woman he'd fought with, hated, defied.

  "I love Isabeau," he said. "And I love this land. That is something we share, Grandmother. One thing we share. Love for Darkling Moor."

  "What do you know of love? Loyalty? I would have hurled myself into Hades rather than ruin these fields. Would have allowed them to flay me alive rather than bring scandal down upon the Ravensmoor name. While you—"

  "While I would have done the same to have you look upon me with approval just once. God knows I never even hoped for love."

  "Love you? A worthless profligate like that wastrel father of yours? Rivington would have brought Ravensmoor to glory had he lived, aye, and William... I could have molded him into a duke as well if his heart not been muddied up with misplaced affections. But from the first day I saw you I knew that you would cast away every plaything you possessed to save a worthless beggar lad from harm. That you would bring shame down upon our family if by so doing you could spare a goose girl pain. For that sin I will never forgive you."

  Griffin stared into that regal face and thanked God that his grandmother had loathed him. That she had failed to shape him into a man that was as cold and heartless as
one of William's marble statues. A man that Judith Stone could care for.

  For though she'd given him pain, he'd also known laughter and love. He'd known the tenderness of a child's kiss and shared sorrow and joy. Things Judith Stone had brushed aside with one sharp wave of her bony hand.

  Griffin looked into her eyes, and it was as if in that instant he could see everything Judith Stone had lost.

  "I am sorry for you, Grandmother. Truly sorry."

  "You would be so! If I were you, I would despise someone who had so ill-used me! I would plot anything, everything to wreak vengeance upon him! But this much I promise you, Griffin. I won't give you the pleasure of watching me suffer here while you pretend to be lord of the manor with that foolish Charles's blessing. I shall away to the dower house to live out my days in peace."

  "In peace, Grandmama, or in loneliness? Don't cut yourself off from this house that you love, from these lands, to spite me. In two years time my work here will be finished. I have complete faith that Charles will be a credit to the dukedom, and I... I will be returning to the colonies. To my life, my world, that I built with my own hands. Stay, Grandmother. Here, where you belong."

  "I will not. It would have been insufferable enough watching that popinjay stripling posturing as duke, ordering me about as if—as if he had the right! But to suffer watching you turn respectable—" The duchess fairly trembled with revulsion. "It would give me such a putrid stomach, I should not survive the winter!"

  With that the dowager duchess swept from the room, carrying away with her one last possession.

  The legacy of bitterness that had tainted Griffin's life.

  Chapter 23

  Salty winds swept in from the ocean, scented with the tang of adventure and freedom. Isabeau stood perched on the coachman's box, trying to distract herself with the teeming confusion of sailors and passengers, cargoes and dreams. She wanted to bury the gnawing sensation of uncertainty that had tormented her since the nightmarish evening at Gethsemane Abbey.

  But even the snapping of canvas and the lusty calls of the gulls could not soothe her restlessness or the niggling sense of hurt and rejection that bedeviled her.

  She glared at Griffin, who stood garbed in blue velvet, making arrangements with the captain in most lordly fashion. His mouth was firm with no hint of his reckless smile. His eyes were infuriatingly serious, lines carving between his brows.

  He looked like a blasted undertaker, she thought, discharging his duties with such solemnity. And ever since he'd escorted her into the coach with Molly and Charles and a grinning Jack Ramsey he'd scarce deigned to talk to her about any except the most innocuous of subjects.

  She had wanted to say be damned to them all, had wanted to grasp Griffin's staid neckcloth in her fist and shake the bloody bounder until he told her what the devil was plaguing him. But there had been something quelling in Griffin's face, and something fragile in Molly's eyes, that had made Beau crush her impulses for once in her life.

  She grimaced, fighting down the frustration. The man looked as if half of England had sunk into the sea, not grateful that they had gotten out of that blasted coil with their hides intact.

  Beau shifted her gaze to Molly. She stood silhouetted against the side of the ducal coach, her slender fingers tucked in the crook of Charles's arm. Molly's cornflower-blue eyes stole shy glances at the tall young man who was so attentive beside her. Charles looked as if he'd found an angel. The girl had all but deafened Beau that morning with chatter about the young duke, how he had been waiting at Molly's bedside when she had awakened.

  According to Molly, no Sir Galahad could have begged her forgiveness more humbly, more sweetly. In Beau's current state of ill temper she had been sorely tempted to remind Molly that just the night before the girl had been willing to lay her life down for Jack Ramsey.

  But even as reprehensibly irritable as Beau had been, she'd found herself unwilling to dampen the spark of life and happiness in Molly's still-pale face and in the sweet, secret smile that played about her lips.

  And Beau's single pleasure had been imagining the dowager duchess's reaction to Molly as Charles's bride.

  She looked away from her friend, the glow in Molly's eyes reminding her painfully of her own misery.

  Instead, she watched Jack, who stood a dozen paces away, his eyes staring out across the wild sea, alight with the prospect of what might well prove his grandest adventure of all.

  Isabeau gritted her teeth as she remembered how Griffin and Jack had earnestly plotted what was to be done with Griffin's fields in the colonies. Griff had said more to the man he had once purported to hate than he'd said to her in the past day and a half.

  There had been an almost wistful look on Griffin's face when he had described the wild lands, as if he had only recently realized how much he missed them, realized that they were his home, not the glittering ballrooms and grand assemblages he had been born to.

  Beau worried her lower lip, wondering if he was wishing that he were the one sailing off on the huge ship, back to a life she'd never touched.

  Furious with herself for mooning about like some lovesick milksop, Beau rose up on her tiptoes, determinedly fixing her attention on a grand lady wearing a most astonishing hat. The woman was shooing three strapping sons with mammoth bundles clutched in their spindly arms up the gangplank. "Blood and thunder, I almost wish I was sailing, too!" Beau gritted, shoving a wayward tendril of flame-hued hair back beneath her bonnet. "Indians and night raids would be far preferable to enduring fits of the sulks and solemns!"

  Molly glanced up at her nervously, shivering as she drew closer to Charles. "That wilderness sounds positively dreadful! You'd be scalped within a fortnight, Beau, I know it!"

  "I don't think even Isabeau could get herself scalped at Marrislea," Griff said, walking back to the coach. "There have been no attacks or raids of any kind since I first won the plantation dicing, and the countryside is civilized."

  "Bah!" Beau cast Griff a taunting glance. "I'm certain I could roust something up with a bit of effort."

  She had hoped he'd smile. He'd been so somber since the night they had battled the marquess of Valmont. She'd also hoped to goad him into gazing at her with that heated expression that turned her blood to fire, but he only regarded her with eyes as cool and aloof as those of a marble carving.

  "Believe me, milady, soon you'll be stirring up enough tumult to satisfy even you," he said, flicking a bit of dust from a disgustingly plain waistcoat. "Not even the Jacobite rebellion shook the foundations of the haute ton to the depths that you will when you are presented by your grandmother."

  "Well, that should provide some satisfaction," Beau snapped, leaping from her perch with a satisfying thump. "Though if Jack is set upon by pirates or colonial insurrectionists, I shall be most put out."

  "Ho, there, Impertinence," Jack Ramsey's hearty voice interrupted her, the highwayman wheeling from his perusal of the confusion of the docks to swoop Beau up in a hard embrace. "I've been saddled with your mischief since you were a babe. It is his lordship's turn to keep you from getting your neck in a noose from now on. It is my advice, sir, that you populate your estates with armies of heirs. You'll need 'em, for no doubt Beau'll be losing them in the woods, or dropping 'em, or such."

  Griffin's mouth compressed with such a steely lack of humor that Beau wanted to scream.

  "I will not do any such thing!" Beau blustered, masking her hurt beneath a wave of indignance. But her face burned at the images Jack Ramsey had conjured—babes with Griffin's eyes, Griffin's mouth, tiny hands as perfectly shaped and long-fingered as their father's.

  Yet even her vivid imagination failed her as she attempted to picture herself as her own mother had been, sweet- smiling, soft-voiced, gentle-handed in healing childish woes. She glanced at Griffin. A furrow marred his brow. She wondered what the devil she'd have to do to break through his abominable wall of silence.

  "I'll not bloody lose my own babes," she insisted. "I might misplace 'em f
or a little—"

  But it was Molly who rose, as ever, to her defense, leaving Charles's side long enough to loop one arm about Isabeau's waist. "At least they'll never be fearful of their own shadows, or shy, and—and they'll probably ride and shoot better than any other 'ristocrat babes in England."

  "Such a comforting thought for my lord," Ramsey observed, chortling with delight. "Lord Griffin Stone's daughters in their satin petticoats holding their suitors at bay with German silver pistols."

  Even Molly giggled at that, and Charles dissolved into laughter, but Griffin's eyes only narrowed with patent annoyance as they flicked about the crowd bustling around them.

  "The upbringing of my heirs is not a subject I care to discuss in front of the whole of London, Mr. Ramsey."

  "It seems the production of your heirs isn't a subject you care to act on of late either, your worship," Beau muttered under her breath. Griffin's eyes snapped to meet hers, a sudden flare lighting them then vanishing so quickly that she was certain she'd imagined it.

  Damn it to hell, what was the matter with the man? Beau fumed inwardly. She knew he'd been hounded by a hundred duties, a hundred difficulties since they'd ridden in from Gethsemane, and she'd tried to be patient, though the Lord knew it wasn't in her nature. But she had been—well, frightened, blast it, in Malcolm Alistair's hell, afraid of losing Griffin and a life infinitely more precious than ever before because he was in it.

  She had waited for him, wanted him in her bed. She wanted him buried so deeply inside her he could drive back the shadows from that horrible night. But he hadn't touched her, hadn't even kissed her since they'd left Gethsemane Abbey.

  Why?

  Sweet thunder in heaven, he couldn't be addle-witted enough to be angry about the things she'd said to him at Blowsy Nell's, could he? Even a thick-skulled, stubborn oaf of a man like he, she thought, should know that she hadn't meant a word of it. She'd been distraught with fear for Jack, and for the love she and Griffin had forged.