Rose sank into the chair. The window framed her like a Holbein portrait. ―Why France?‖
Her quiet tone pulled at him and he looked at her to find her eyes on his face, searching.
―The French are always fighting with the British. They need gunpowder. As for the other wares, Parisians pay a premium to support their vices.‖
―What did you do with the goods?‖
―I kept the gunpowder. One never knows when it will come in handy. The opium went overboard, into the sea. As for the rest, you would have to ask Tucker. He used it to keep much of the good folk around Castleton and Carlisle from starving last winter.‖
Almost self-consciously, she looked at her hands clenched in her lap. ―You are good friends with Friar Tucker.‖
―We were. Until you.‖
She smoothed her skirts, an action he noted she did often when uncertain. ―My father was bound to have found me eventually,‖ she said. ―There is no sense in holding a grudge with one another . because of me.‖
―I think I can manage the friar.‖
It was his increasing feelings for Rose with which he found difficulty reconciling himself. He had returned late last night exhausted only to pass her room on the way to his and stop. She and Mary were inside and Ruark had stood outside listening as Rose laughed at something his housekeeper had said. Jason told him that Lady Roselyn had behaved ever the gracious lady while recovering from her serious injury, sharing tea and sewing with his staff. Today he had planned to conduct a search of her quarters because he did not trust her complicity—no doubt she had knives, forks, and scissors stashed in every corner of her chambers—but last night it had taken all of his control not to open the door and go inside because, Lord . he wanted to look at her. Now he wanted only not to hurt her.
She said nothing for a moment but the whitening of her knuckles revealed her tension.
―Did people die? On that East Indiaman, I mean.‖
He could lie, but decided she‘d been lied to enough in her life. ―The ship was destroyed somewhere off the coast of the Azores. Rumor was it vanished during a blow. A storm. No one would have doubted the story had some of the East Indiaman‘s cargo not begun showing up two weeks later in various ports in Tripoli and Antwerp. And finally Rotterdam.‖
Her eyes were wide, refusing to believe the horror of the worst. ―But is it not possible the ship did go down in a storm?‖
Pulled by the braided piece of silver warming his finger, Ruark leaned his head against the backboard and studied the ring. It seemed to absorb not only the sunlight but also the darkest edges of his thoughts, as if to bring them into the light and into his focus. And for a brief moment, he felt exposed and vulnerable to his sins.
―You can believe what you wish, Rose.‖ He curled his fingers into his palm as if that would make him less culpable for his own choices in life. ―But that cargo was taken off that Indiaman before the storm.‖
―You are so sure . because you were there?‖ She looked at him closely. ―You were there,‖ she whispered, ―Why? Because you were following my father or the East Indiaman?‖
―We had been shadowing the East Indiaman for days. The letters of marque I carry gives me authority to aide and protect British economic interests. Before the ship passed the Cape, everyone within a thousand miles knew the real value of that Indiaman‘s cargo. There had been other attacks on our vessels so we followed. Then a squall caught us while we were under full press of canvas and snapped our mainmast.
―When we finally caught up to the Indiaman two days later, there was nothing left of the ship but the burned-out debris to tell the tale. After plucking four survivors from shark-infested waters, we learned that a British naval vessel had been responsible for destroying the Indiaman, which carried a crew upward of two hundred souls. We learned that a large amount of cargo had been transferred from the British naval vessel to another ship. I followed it to the Dutch port of Rotterdam, where we both put in for refitting. Later, I impounded the cargo in the open sea.‖ He looked down at his hands. ―The captain knew who I was when I boarded. He told us where the cargo had come from, then he hanged himself. Out of fear of retribution from me or Hereford, I will never know.‖
―Surely you could have told the admiralty.‖
―On that dead captain‘s word?‖
What Ruark did not tell her, what he could not tell her was that the ship he had boarded, the ship that had accepted the stolen cargo, belonged to Roxburghe Shipping. His own family‘s fleet of trading vessels. He could not accuse Hereford without implicating his own family and casting the name of traitor to the Kerr name. He might despise his father, but he would not destroy Jamie or Julia. He did not know if his father was involved. He could find no proof.
―Without evidence, I had nothing. But I could bloody make Hereford‘s life hell on the sea. He never got hold of another ship after that.‖
Now his father was dead and Jamie gone.
Her eyes swept to and fro from the floor to the wall. ―And now in the past year my father retired from the admiralty to take his place as the English warden, your father is dead and your brother is a hostage.‖ She shook her head as if mulling over these same observations and then coming to the correct conclusions. ―What was the value of that cargo?‖
A fortune by even royal standards. Yet, he was compelled to tell her the truth. Why not?
He had spared no detail yet. ―Ninety thousand pounds.‖
Rose‘s disbelief came at him. ―That is what my father wants from you in exchange for your brother. Payment for what you took from him.‖ She came abruptly to her feet, tension in every line of her body. ―This has been your fight from the start? It is you personally he wants to destroy. Check and checkmate.‖
She spun away, folding her arms across her chest. ―Have your actions been any different from my father‘s?‖ she cried, her voice distressed by emotion. ―Are you not alike?‖
He dragged the sheet off the bed as he stood and walked over to her. His mouth tight.
Ruark had told himself a thousand times he was not to blame for Hereford‘s actions. That he was nothing like Hereford.
But his own silence condemned him.
He had brought this upon himself. He could not pretend to shortsightedness, because in the back of his mind he had been perfectly aware of the consequences of his actions and had not cared—until his father died and Duncan played right into Hereford‘s hands and took good Kerr men across the border, maybe to die as well. Now suddenly Jamie‘s life was at stake.
And Rose had become the anchor around his neck threatening to drag him deeper into murky depths. Yet, it was not her worth in gold that caused him to inspect more closely his feelings, and why her presence in his life was bloody fooking with his internal moral compass.
He leaned his hand against the glass, so close to her he could smell the sunlight on her hair. ―You tell me, Rose.‖ Ruark spoke softly but his words cut deep. ―Am I like your father?
Are we the same?‖
―I think . ‖ She furiously scrubbed the heel of her hand across each cheek and turned bright eyes on him. She touched his face. ―I think a man who can help Castleton and others survive a winter with smuggled goods at great peril to his own life, and someone whom Friar Tucker has clearly respected, cannot be malevolent,‖ she said, with such conviction it stopped his heart. ―Now I understand. Without me, you do not have enough with which to bargain for your brother‘s life.‖
She blinked back tears, but it was not hate he saw in her eyes, and he was shocked that one look could undo him so completely. Then she said something else he did not expect. ―Thank you for being honest with me.‖
She turned and walked out of the room, leaving him with his palm pressed against the warm glass of the window, looking outside upon a rare sunny day and suddenly feeling much older than his thirty years.
Chapter 10
“Your solicitor arrived last night from Hawick,‖ Mary said from the doorway of Ruark‘s
bathing chamber.
He stood at the water basin, swishing soap from a razor as he raised his gaze and locked with Mary‘s in the glass. She stood behind him, her hands on her ample hips, her lips pursed in a straight line. Water dripped from his wet hair onto his bare shoulders. He wore a clean pair of leather breeches but little else and those he had dragged on after Rose left his chambers.
Ruark had gone to Hawick last week for many reasons, one being to assess Stonehaven‘s accounting books. Ruark needed to know his father‘s business transactions these past years. If there was a connection between his father‘s death and Hereford, it would be found in the accounting books, many of which were missing from Stonehaven, but which he had hoped his father‘s solicitor had copies. Most importantly, banking transactions were always duplicated. If he could find proof, anything to connect Hereford to his father‘s death, there may be another way to end this standoff with Hereford.
―Where is he?‖
―I took the liberty of informing him you take your breakfast in the dining room at eight and that he may await your presence there.‖
Ruark finished wiping the soap off his face. ―Thank you, Mary. I will be down directly.‖
Mary remained in the doorway. Ruark finally turned, waiting for her to speak her mind.
―I know the lass is no‘ the first woman to be used as a means to an end . and she be the warden‘s daughter—‖
―Do I need this dressing-down, Mary?‖
Recognizing that the tenor of the reprimand coincided with his mood warned her that even for her there were limitations to his patience. ―Lady Roselyn has refused to see the modiste,‖ Mary said before taking her leave. ―I was just to see her and told her I have arranged one to visit tomorrow. After much searchin‘, I learned of a modiste living in Hawick and made provisions to bring her here. I would use that French highbrow Lady Roxburghe brings over from Paris three times a year. But I did no‘ think we have—‖
―Why did Lady Roselyn decline the offer for a modiste?‖
―She informed me that she was convent raised and would no‘ face her father being anything more than who she was, her father be damned. She asked me to thank you for your consideration, the gist of her comment bein‘ along the same sentiment. She does not need your charity.‖
Christ.
Ruark intended to see that when it was time to face her father, she would do so as exactly who she is: the daughter of an earl, not some impoverished supplicant beneath that man‘s regard.
Fifteen minutes later, he was trooping down the hall, adjusting the lace on his wrist. He dismissed Jason to attend to his breakfast as he passed the lad, then he was standing before her door. He reached for the knob, paused, then he decided to knock rather than barge inside. For a moment, considering this, he braced his palms on the door frame.
The door opened. Her eyes widened, and it was as if he‘d stepped into bright morning sunlight. ―My lord.‖
He had been wholly unprepared for her effect on him, only because she had not left his thoughts, and he already considered his mind and senses finely attuned to her. He was wrong. She stood in a bright patch of the sunlight filtering through the high window from her bathing chambers. Her plaited copper hair crowned her head in a wreath of red-gold glory. She had changed her clothes and now wore homespun, but the simplicity of the dress merely refined the complexity of the tall woman beneath. The common accented the uncommon.
After what they had already shared between them, Ruark was surprised anything could make Rose blush, but she did as she found his eyes on her, and suddenly he was remembering the journey they had shared in the glade. There wasn‘t a part of her he had not touched. A part of her that he did not want to touch again.
―Sunlight becomes you,‖ he said.
―I was just thinking about you,‖ she said not unkindly, reaching around to drag up something behind the door. ―This is for you, my lord.‖
She gave him a knapsack made from a patchwork of wool and muslin. Curious at the clinking and odd weight of the thing he peered inside to find it filled with silverware, napkin rings, and a chalice as she informed him, ―I have no more need of such as I have every intention of going to my father when ‘tis time.‖
―Is that right?‖
―I have not made the decision lightly. But you were right when you told me that night at the river that there was nowhere I could go that my father would not find me. So I have decided to make this simple for all of us.‖
―If there is another way?‖
―After what you have told me, I know there is not.‖
Her words banished the softness that had momentarily incapacitated him. Though he grudgingly admired her courage, he did not intend to hand her over to Hereford.
―I do not need your protection, my lord.‖
The steel in her words told him she did not want his protection. His first instinct was to parry her steel with his own. But he did not. He had forgotten his purpose for coming to her room but as Mary rounded the corner, he had not forgotten his solicitor was awaiting him.
―Our chaperone has arrived,‖ he said, then leaned a hand against the doorway until his face was near hers. ―You wish to meet your father on your terms? Give Mary one of your dresses to take to the modiste for measurements. Let her make you something . simple.‖
―Simple?‖
Hell, he probably knew more about lady‘s garments than Rose did. ―Something provincial. Silk. Velvet. Emerald in color,‖ he said. The color of her eyes. He would have added, with all the proper undergarments and accoutrements, but he would choose to leave those details to Mary‘s discretion. ―You wear simple very well,‖ Ruark said. ―You want to meet your father as you are? Never go into the wolf‘s den looking like a sheep, my love.‖
“Even with your infusion of gold, you still do not have enough to pay the ransom, my lord.‖
Ruark stood at the window across the table from his father‘s solicitor, who was tucked quite eagerly into a meal of bannocks spread with molasses. Ruark had been distracted for the last half hour, staring outside at the parkland, half reading Mr. McCurdy‘s pile of papers, half woolgathering before he‘d forced his thoughts back to the task at hand unprepared for the news just delivered to him. What Ruark found on Stonehaven‘s balance sheets stunned him.
―You are telling me, Stonehaven‘s coffers are nearly empty?‖
―Except for what you put there, my lord. You could sell the last of the Roxburghe fleet of ships. The Black Dragon itself would be of interest—‖
― ‘Twill be a bloody cold day in hell before anyone gets his hands on the Black Dragon,‖
Ruark said. ―What has happened here in thirteen years?‖
The lines of strain tightened around McCurdy‘s mouth. ―This place has fallen on rough times. His lordship lost a fortune when other investments failed this past year. The crops and rents haven‘t produced enough to pay the debts. Then the village fiscal embezzled the rest, though we‘ll never know for sure where that went.‖
―Where is he?‖
―Dead, my lord. Six weeks before your father died. He tried to leave here during a snowstorm. Duncan caught up to him, only to find him dead, frozen solid beneath his horse and no gold to be found. Thieves most likely got it all. He left a wife, three sons, and a wee lass behind.‖
Ruark didn‘t know the details behind the fiscal‘s death last winter, except the eldest son, Rufus, was one of the hostages taken with Jamie.
―Your father got himself involved with some shady dealings, my lord.‖ McCurdy then remarked that in his opinion all power politics was apt to be dirty business as evidenced by the current situation involving his brother and the young woman held hostage at Stonehaven.
Ruark turned back to the window, his mind sifting through Stonehaven‘s financial problems to something more subtle. ―Have you been able to find any information on Elena Kirkland Lancaster, Lord Hereford‘s dead wife, or on Kirkland Park, her ancestral home?‖
He ha
d not expected McCurdy to know anything given the time constraints from when Ruark had asked, and was surprised when McCurdy replied, ―I didn‘t find much about the wife, but her ancestral home and the entire area around Redesdale sits on land that was once part of a larger crown charter of the barony granted to Lady Hereford‘s great-grandfather by Charles the First. The patent, the deed of settlement, has since expired.‖
―Then none of Kirkland Park is tied up in entail.‖
―The grandfather was a smart old codger, though. He put the family‘s wealth in trust just after Lady Elena gave birth to her daughter. All of the funds are vested in consuls, an annuity that pays its six percent to the estate yearly.‖
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