The Countess Confessions

by Jillian Hunter

  Lucy turned, colliding against Emily in breathless horror. “Is it possible,” she whispered as she looked up to follow Emily’s gaze, “for two people to imagine the same thing at once?”

  “Only if they’re a pair of idiots like us. You swore that nobody ever visited the tower. You swore it was safe.”

  “Perhaps it’s your maid,” Lucy said. “She might have gotten worried that you’d lost your way and couldn’t find the tower in the dark, where you’d hidden your clothes. She knew it would be late and you’d be anxious that no one recognize you in your gypsy costume.”

  The answer made sense, but Emily did not believe it for a moment. “Iris would never light a candle to draw attention to our hiding place. I still say there’s something wrong.”

  Lucy’s forehead creased in lines of strain. “What if my father is committing adultery behind Diana’s back? What if he’s hosting a gambling party at which he could lose huge sums?”

  Emily reached back to grasp Lucy’s hand. “Did you see that?”

  “See what?” Lucy asked, putting her arm protectively around Emily’s waist.

  “I counted five tiny red balls of light.”

  “Rats?” Lucy guessed, shuddering.

  “I was thinking more of cigars.”

  “That leaves out Iris,” Lucy whispered. “But you’re right. There does appear to be some sort of meeting taking place. Why on earth would anyone choose such a lonely place?”

  “For the same reason I did,” Emily retorted. “So they could plan in private and not be caught.”

  “How are you going to fetch your clothes without any of them seeing you? The trapdoor is right under the table. You can’t expect to pop up like a jack-in-the-box, race across the floor without a ‘pardon me,’ and not be seen.”

  Emily pondered this problem. “I could climb the ivy at the back where it’s tough and hasn’t been trimmed.”

  “Except that there isn’t a window at the back of the tower.”

  “Then I’ll have to crawl over the wall and wait until whoever is there leaves. I hope Iris found a safe place to hide. Maybe she’s waiting for me in the woods or in the stairwell.”

  “I think I’d be more afraid of your father than I would of a group of strangers,” Lucy said, biting the knuckle of her glove. “After all, my father must have offered to let them meet here.”

  “And I’d be willing to wager that one of them sells black sheep,” Emily said, thinking of the Scottish merchant who had flustered her in the tent. Could he be part of this mysterious group of gentlemen? “Aberdeen is a long way to come to meet in a darkened tower. Whatever they’re up to can’t be any good. I wonder if they are spies.”

  “But we’re at peace with France.”

  “What could a man possibly spy on from a secluded tower this late at night?” Emily murmured.

  “Perhaps they’re a bird-watching society,” Lucy said dubiously

  “And which birds would they be watching in the dark? Owls? You can’t believe that any sensible gentleman would travel to Hatherwood to catch a glimpse of an ordinary barn owl.”

  “Maybe they’re smugglers,” Lucy said. “There are plenty of waterways leading in and out of the village. Do you think they might be smuggling stolen sheep?”

  “That would be rather awkward, wouldn’t it? I imagine we’d have heard a bleat or two by now.”

  “Well, I don’t see any lurid shadows engaged in decadent acts or hear cries of help from women held there against their will,” Lucy said.

  “It’s most likely some manner of business meeting,” Emily said after a moment.

  “Which could have been held in any of several rooms inside the manor proper,” Lucy pointed out.

  “Unless your stepmama said that this was to be a party for entertainment only, and business must be conducted away from the other guests.”

  “That’s probably what it is,” Lucy said in relief. “She and Papa have been quarreling a lot lately over the associates he’s brought home. Diana said they seem rather intense and not always polite.”

  Emily frowned. She wished her father would find a business interest to fill his hours instead of drinking himself to death. If he’d had an occupation, their family might have traveled and broadened their circle of friends. “I’m going to take my chances on the trapdoor,” she said decisively. “At least I might find Iris. And who knows? She might already have my clothes and be waiting for us to meet Michael in the woods.”

  Lucy looked back at the manor. “I’ll hold your father off as long as I can. You’d best make it home before he does.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be washed and reading a book like a perfectly bored young lady when he sees me again. He’ll never dream I left the house. And tomorrow, well, when I wake up I’ll have a cry, but I won’t mope forever.”

  “It was worth a try,” Lucy said, backing away in hesitation. “We could—”

  “No. We can’t. But thank you. Camden wasn’t meant to be mine. And maybe that’s for the best. If he knew what I’d done tonight, he would never talk to me again. Deceit is not the best way to spark a love match.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Go, Lucy. I’ll be fine. Even if I can’t fetch my clothes, I have to get Iris. This was so much easier when it was light. It’s only the dark that gives the tower that haunted look.”

  “If the tower is haunted, it would only be my mother,” Lucy said, sighing. “And she would never hurt you.”

  • • •

  The mansion had been built on the grounds of a grand but dilapidated Jacobean estate that the first Lady Fletcher had inherited but despised. When she married Lord Fletcher, he had rebuilt it to please his delicate wife, whose dark moods had seemed to be aggravated by the original architecture.

  She had demanded an elegant tower instead of the bulky pepperpots that dominated the back roof of the estate.

  Years earlier Lady Fletcher had spent most of her days in the east tower, mourning the loss of Lucy’s younger brother, who had been killed by a constable during a street riot over the rising price of food. The magistrate insisted it had been an accident. Lady Fletcher refused to believe that and sank into a melancholy.

  Even during their earliest years of friendship, Lucy had managed to explain it all in a simple, if distressful, way.

  “Mama will kill herself if Papa won’t build her a tower of her own.”

  “Why?” Emily had asked, wondering if the answer would help her to understand the reason her own mother had died prematurely, certainly not of a suicide, but of a languishing spirit. “Why would a tower make her happy?”

  In the end the tower had not made Lord Fletcher’s first wife happy, and as the years passed, Emily grew to realize that grief over losing both his wife and son had turned him bitter inside.

  Emily felt a newfound pang of empathy for him. She had lost her belief in true love, too.

  Chapter 7

  She squeezed under the drapery of ivy and pried open the iron-barred door to the stairwell, hoping the faint squeak it gave did not carry. She heard the rumble of unfamiliar male voices from the room above. The aroma of tobacco drifted through the trapdoor into the dankness of the space below. So much for Lucy’s rats. She remembered to avoid the cobwebbed tangle of old leaves and crumbled mortar on the lowest step. Then something shuffled against the stone. She braced herself.

  In disbelief she looked up and recognized the two figures on the steps above her. One was the Scottish merchant who had impertinently kissed her while the wind rose outside her foolish tent. Now, as if to rub salt in the wound he had inflicted, he was holding her maid, Iris, in his arms—

  No. He was holding one hand over Iris’s mouth to silence her; his other arm anchored tightly around her torso. “This is your mistress?” he whispered in Iris’s ear. “Michael’s sister?”

  Iris nodded, her green eyes filled with glassy tears.

  Emily could have committed murder in that moment. “Let her go, please.”


  “Be quiet,” he hissed at Emily. “If those men up there suspect you have heard one word of their conversation, you will not leave this tower alive.”

  The truth that glittered in his eyes stilled her even as she wondered who this handsome fraud thought he was to terrify her maid and hiss dire warnings about her death in Emily’s face. After kissing her, no less.

  She opened her mouth. “I—”

  He slid down the steps, one hand still holding Iris immobile, the other sliding up Emily’s shoulder to her chin. He pressed his cheek to hers. Her heart beat so hard in her throat that she would have cried out if she thought it would help. He gave her no choice but to relinquish her control to his.

  This wasn’t the same man who had charmed and provoked her such a short time ago. “I beg of you,” he whispered, “do not scream.”

  Footsteps punctuated the ensuing silence.

  “The greatest challenge,” a man said from the tower room above, “is to murder Deptford and make it look like an accident. The more witnesses, the better.”

  Emily could not make out the reply to this statement. Her captor’s body pinned her to the stairwell wall. She held her breath and let her shoulders slump, closing her eyes until darkness beckoned.

  “What is the matter?” the Scotsman whispered urgently.

  “I’m trying to faint,” she whispered back.

  “How the devil do you do that?”

  “Close your eyes very tightly. Hold your breath until you know you are about to die. Then submit to a darkness so complete that no one can find you.”

  He swore softly, considerate soul that he was. “Are you prone to fainting spells? Do you have a medical ailment?”

  “I have never swooned in my life.”

  “Don’t start now, darling.” He placed his fingers to the erratic pulse in her throat. “Breathe. Be still. Listen to me. It is so important that you trust me now. Michael trusts me. Do not panic.”

  Of course she would not panic. Had she gone hysterical when he’d kissed her? Imminent death was no reason to lose one’s head.

  She glanced at Iris, who nodded in complicity, as if anything he’d said made the least bit of sense. Michael. He knew her brother’s name. That meant something.

  His low voice caressed her cheek. “If any of the men in the tower realize you have been here, they will not hesitate to kill you.”

  “But I—”

  “Quiet. It is enough that you might have overheard their plans. I want you to leave this estate, and after that you must not return or be spotted in the vicinity for at least a month. Is it possible to make your people understand that they must not send the two of you out again?”

  It was more than a possibility. It was an absolute. Her father was the only person Emily and her maid would have to plead understanding from tonight. Clearly Sir Angus assumed she belonged to the band of gypsies who had left the area a fortnight ago. Michael had not given her identity away.

  “Listen to me carefully.” His voice heightened Emily’s anxiety even as she clung to his every word. “I am going upstairs to the meeting. Let four minutes pass. No more. No less. Promise me you will keep count.”

  Emily nodded again, too numb to offer another response.

  He frowned at Iris, who was stuffing strands of her light hair back under her cap. “You, Goldilocks, did you hear what I just said? No, don’t answer. I’ll tap my foot twice against the trapdoor. That will be your signal that it is safe to flee. Now, ladies, if you will excuse me, I must leave your company. I strongly suggest that you forget this night ever happened.”

  Emily, her face lifted, took Iris’s hand and drew her down the steps. “How do we know you aren’t their ringleader?”

  He shrugged. “There is no time for either of us to demand letters of character. You read my fate earlier. Now I shall determine yours.”

  Emily dabbed a tear from Iris’s cheek with her knuckle. “There’s only one flaw in your plan,” she whispered.

  Exasperation flared in his eyes. “What?”

  “I left a red satin ball gown in the corner of the tower, and my companion’s clothes are folded underneath it.”

  He stared past her. “I assume the dress is stolen or is part of some other scheme of yours to deceive. You did not leave anything with the gown that would identify you?”

  Emily felt truly light-headed then. “Only a letter.” To Camden, confessing her affections. “With my signature on it.”

  “My God. Now I am to hide women’s clothing for the good of— Well, so be it.”

  “How will we know if something goes wrong with your plan?” Emily whispered. “What if one of those men catches you with a lady’s ball gown and thinks you’re up to no good?”

  A beguiling smile ghosted his face, only to be followed by an answer that elicited gasps from both Emily and her maid. “You will hear a gunshot. Correction: you will hear several gunshots.”

  “And what are we supposed to do then?” Emily asked in an unsteady whisper.

  “Run as fast as you can for cover. Stay in the shadows, if possible, until you find your brother, a footman, anyone. Do whatever you would have done had you never met me.”

  Chapter 8

  Damien would have burst into laughter at the challenging look in the young gypsy’s eyes if he did not understand the remorseless instincts of the seven men—three former army officers, a farmer, two noblemen, and a journalist with a brilliant mind and a black heart—assembled in the tower chamber. Each man either held a grudge against the Crown or had deluded himself into believing that anarchy and upheaval served some greater good. Personally Damien thought all but three of them to be irrevocably deranged. Damien did not for a moment believe that their grievances justified the killing of innocents in the street.

  He pushed open the trapdoor with one arm and waved his other arm over his head in a prearranged signal to indicate that the arsenal aimed at his forehead should not be put to use. “It is Sir Angus,” one of the conspirators muttered, “and high time, too. Where the devil have you been?”

  All but one of the various firearms disappeared inside greatcoats and evening jackets. The pen in the journalist’s hand remained poised above the table. Damien climbed into the tower with a sheepish grin, allowing the trapdoor to thud with a clatter that made several men seated around the oaken table cringe at his apparent disregard for secrecy. He could almost hear the women underneath the room cursing at the thunderous noise.

  Still, to have exhibited tender manners at this point would have only awakened suspicion. The clatter, he suspected, would give the gypsy woman and her companion a chance to breathe and stretch their muscles.

  These men did not even trust their own mothers. As a relative newcomer to their conspiracy, “Sir Angus” must measure his every step.

  “My apologies, gentlemen. The damned thing slipped.”

  “Where the hell have you been?” demanded the farmer, in his white hat and high-topped boots.

  Damien stroked his mustache. His lips itched under the annoying accessory. He wondered if he’d rubbed any of that caustic potion on his mouth without thinking.

  “Waylaid by a maid?” guessed the impoverished and clearly inebriated Lord Brewster of Shropshire.

  Damien pulled a chair from the table to the corner, where a glimmer of crimson satin peeked out from beneath a moth-eaten blanket. A letter. A gypsy who made reference to Macbeth and wrote letters? His instincts argued again that she was more than she appeared to be.

  “Your silence condemns you,” Lord Ardbury said with disdain. “Could you not control yourself when everything we have planned is at stake?”

  “There’s more to it than that,” Damien said, his demeanor deliberately unapologetic. “One of us should take measure of our surroundings in the event of discovery.”

  The former army major at the table grunted. “It was a sacrifice, I assume, to sleep with a woman on our behalf? I hope you didn’t strain your back too much for all the actual riding you’ll need
to do soon.”

  “Did I admit that I slept with anyone?”

  “Sit down, Sir Angus,” the journalist said, glancing up from the map he had drawn of contingent forces across England where a slew of riots were to occur.

  Anarchists.

  Damien had intended to return to London to reunite with his family; instead, the moment he set foot on British soil he had been asked by a high-ranking family member in the Home Office to become involved in a countrywide conspiracy.

  “I prefer to stand with my eye to the window,” he said. “I remind you that we are purportedly enjoying a country house party. A guest could wander this way at any time.”

  Lord Ardbury nodded in reluctant agreement. “Lord Fletcher was to make sure that did not happen. Where is the man, anyway? Did he indicate to you at the party that he might wish to become one of us?”

  “He gave me the impression that he has no idea of our true intentions,” Damien said. “And, in my opinion, he is not reliable enough to even consider.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “From what I learned tonight, he isn’t the one who held a grudge against the government. It was his first wife, and she wanted revenge for her son’s death. He built this tower to ease her grief. I don’t believe he has the spine to help us.”

  Chapter 9

  Emily nudged Iris from her reverie, whispering. “It’s been four minutes, and I heard two taps. Are you ready?”

  Iris gave a firm nod, and they turned together to descend to the door, Emily praying it wouldn’t creak and betray their presence.

  “It’s stuck,” Iris whispered, pushing her shoulder against the iron-barred oak. She shook her head, frantic, as Emily lowered her basket to join in the effort.

  It had to open. For several moments Emily struggled against the panic she had promised to fight, terrified of the airless confinement, of being caught by the radicals in the tower. God help the devil who had braved their revenge to warn her. He had entrusted an unknown woman with knowledge that would endanger many lives if she did not keep his secret. And she had trusted him, neither one of them having much choice in the matter.