by Julia Ross
With my most heartfelt affection and in anticipation that I may soon help to welcome your first child into this sorry world, I am,
Ever yours very truly,
Devoran
He rang for a footman and sent off his letter, then he ringed the day on the yacht and wrote “Knight’s Cottage” across the next eight months, ending when Rachel had fled Hampstead to throw herself on his mercy.
The lamp burned down as he read the dozen letters that covered those months. The fantastic tales about being employed by one Harvey Penland, gentleman. The imaginary children, given names and individual personalities, the descriptions so clear that he could visualize each one.
All of it false.
Rather than call for a servant to refill the lamp, Guy stood and lit candles.
He left blank the few missing days at the end of January, after Rachel had left the cottage and before she had turned up on the doorstep of his townhouse.
Then came the rest of February and March.
Guy stared at the empty boxes on his calendar, then he wrote “GD—The Chimneys” across the nine weeks during which Rachel had claimed to Sarah that she had met Daedalus and then become afraid of him, though she had in fact been living safely in Hampstead with him.
She had written only three letters in all of that time. Guy picked up the first, which the maid must have handed to the Norfolk stable lad to post for her. It would seem that the lovely Rachel Mansard had been able to inspire devotion in impressionable males everywhere she went.
Walking back and forth in front of the fireplace, Guy flipped open the letter and scanned the first few lines—more nonsense about Penland’s imaginary brood—until he found the relevant passages: Rachel’s account of meeting the man Sarah was calling Daedalus, the maze-maker, the villain.
Thank you for your generosity, once again, dear Sarah. But you’ll never guess why I’m so happy lately, my dear, so I’ll tell you: I’ve met the most entrancing gentleman. He’s a close friend of the family and often visits….
His gut drew tight as if he were strapping on a sword, as if he were about to enter a maze to meet monsters.
He skimmed over Rachel’s florid descriptions: I never saw such lovely eyes on a man…so very tall a lady might even find him a little forbidding…the most compelling…
Nothing identified the man as Guy Devoran, but neither did a single word contradict that idea. Guy forced himself to read it through again. It was hideously disconcerting to know that Rachel had secretly written to Sarah about him, all the while disguising the real nature of their relationship.
His blood churned with something that felt a great deal like rage.
The next letter had been written five weeks later, and there it was again. Buried amongst the fictional news of her life as a governess, Rachel had written another glowing account of her handsome new follower, Mr. Penland’s nameless friend.
This was even worse than the last.
We’re now able to meet quite often, my dear Sarah, sometimes more than once in a day. So I have very little time left to write, yet I know you will understand and forgive me. His attentions are so flattering that my affections are quite seriously engaged. Indeed, I fear that I may be falling in love.
Guy dropped the paper as if it had thrust out a wavering, forked tongue.
However he tried to interpret these letters, anger uncurled in his gut. He may have thought briefly that he was in love with Rachel. He had never thought for a moment that she loved him in return. How dare she claim otherwise to her cousin?
He leaned back to stare blindly at the ceiling.
He had rented the house with the top-hatted chimneys only because Rachel insisted they live secretly in Hampstead. Obviously that had been so that she could keep using Harvey Penland as her go-between with Sarah. But could it also be that she wanted to be close to an earlier admirer, someone she had indeed met at Knight’s Cottage?
Ryder’s presence was almost as strong in this room as if he were truly still here: I hate to have to ask this, Guy, but could she have been seeing someone else at the same time?
Yet he couldn’t doubt the sworn testimony of his servants, and he and Rachel had barely been apart for those nine weeks. Days and nights in the bedroom with the oriel window. Meals shared in the pretty dining room that overlooked the garden. Quiet interludes in the library, when Rachel read novels while Guy took care of the ongoing business of his life.
He had returned to his townhouse on only a few occasions in all that time and had always come back to the house with the chimneys the same day. Rachel had never known ahead of time when he might leave for a few hours, or how quickly he would return.
How could she possibly have entertained another lover?
Yet she had successfully smuggled out her letters to Sarah, and secretly received her cousin’s replies. Could she also have been corresponding with another man?
The legs of his chair hit the floor with a crash as he leaned forward to take up the pen. He drew a circle around April 15, the Wednesday before Good Friday—the day he had left to spend Easter with his family at Birchbrook—then another around April 28, the day he had returned to Hampstead to find Rachel gone.
Guy wrung his fingers through his hair and stood up.
How could any man allege that he valued honor, when he had allowed himself to become besotted with a female who flitted through her days in a dream of perjury? Perhaps his dragging pain was caused not by a damaged heart, but only by an enraged, wounded pride?
Yet either way Rachel had sown thistles of self-doubt in whatever claim he’d ever had to the name of a gentleman.
Now, with Sarah Callaway, he was only compounding it.
Guy strode across to Ryder’s cabinet and poured himself a brandy. He stared at the fragrant liquor for a moment, then swallowed it in one gulp.
Rachel may have used him, but she had never been afraid of him. He was not Daedalus.
So when had her fear of this unknown man really begun?
He set down the empty glass and walked back to the desk.
The next letter was nothing but a hurried scrawl, apparently written in a terrible panic, after—Rachel claimed—the Penland family had gone to Devon for Easter. Broken phrases and sentences were strung together with dashes, as if she had lost the heart to form paragraphs.
I misjudged everything, Sarah! He’s a brute and a tyrant—I’m terrified of him and the truth is that I have been for weeks—I’d so longed for his admiration, but now I see that I may have wished to ally myself with a monster! How very fortunate that Mr. Penland decided to remove here to Dartmoor for the holidays—
Guy studied the outer surface. The letter was battered and stained, as if someone had spilled ale that had smeared the critical postmark. He rummaged around in a drawer for a magnifying glass, but the name of the originating post office was illegible. Yet the mileage stamp and charge amount, scrawled above Sarah’s name and the address of Miss Farcey’s school for young ladies in Bath, were both in keeping with the assumption that the letter had been sent from Plymouth.
Could Rachel really have gone to Dartmoor when she left his Hampstead house? If so, why?
She most certainly had not remained anywhere in the immediate vicinity.
Guy read the letter through again. Disquiet deepened into anguish when he noticed another pattern of smudges across the last few lines. Had Rachel wept as she had written it and had her tears smeared the wet ink—or had that same carelessness that had obliterated the postmark also seeped moisture through the paper?
And why all this sudden vitriol about a man she had claimed to love with such passion?
Ignoring his distress, Guy paced as he reread the previous two missives, concentrating only on Rachel’s exact allegations.
At last he folded the letters and gazed down at the empty grate, his mind racing, then he dropped back into Ryder’s chair and drew a circle with a question mark around the two weeks from Easter till the beginning of May—Dartmoor?
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In her next frantic note Rachel announced that she had decided she must flee her employer’s house in Hampstead from fear of her persecutor. After that, all the rest of the letters were postmarked in London, sent from the post office nearest to Goatstall Lane.
Guy read them one after another, each filled with more panic than the last, until in the end she had sent the frantic demand that had brought Sarah racing up from Bath, resulting in their confrontation in the bookstore.
He ringed that Thursday over and over in black ink. He already felt as if he had known Sarah Callaway all his life. Yet if she ever discovered that he had been Rachel’s lover in February and March, she was bound to think that he was Daedalus.
Rachel had made sure of it.
The candles guttered as he pushed away from the table and began to stalk about the room.
Perhaps he had inadvertently broken Rachel’s heart, done something unfathomable that had made her flit the minute he left her alone? Yet why the devil, if that were the case, would she deliberately send Sarah to seek him out?
None of it made sense.
Guy folded all the letters carefully, stacked them, and tied them up in a neat bundle. Then he picked up his calendar and held one corner in a candle flame. The paper flared briefly and ash drifted to the floor like dead, blackened leaves.
Only one fact seemed undeniable: Just as Sarah had claimed, whatever mad fictions Rachel had created before then, at some point after Easter she had become genuinely terrified.
Daedalus was real.
A steady rain drizzled down the windows the next day. Sarah paced nervously, unable to concentrate. Orchids hung in sprays or kept secret vigil in the shadows. The fountain was turned off. The birds were gone.
Yet the little hothouse jungle dripped and breathed and whispered, conjuring mysteries impossible to imagine.
She had eaten breakfast alone, attended Sunday Communion alone, eaten a light luncheon alone. And now she paced alone in this alien hothouse, as if she had stepped into a fantasy.
The blooms of a pale epidendrum clustered like a hatching of tiny butterflies. A bird’s beak oncidium—Oncidium ornithorhynchum—bloomed like a shy violet, though its starburst-yellow heart seemed soaked in honey. The petals of the fragrant cattleya that Guy Devoran had studied the night of the ball had decayed into a moist clump that smelled slightly rancid.
Sarah had seen some of them illustrated in prints. Others were unknown to her, recent arrivals from the far reaches of the world. Yet whether fleshy or delicate, none of the orchids was innocent.
She sat down on an iron chair. The stone ribs in the roof overhead arched beneath an upturned silver bowl of rain.
Boots crunched on the tanbark.
Her heart exploded into life, flashing heat up her neck, as Mr. Devoran strode around a group of orange trees.
He saw her and stopped dead. Dark hair stuck to his forehead. His coat was soaked. Mud splashes outlined maps and harbors on his boots and wet buckskins.
Fire blazed for a moment in his dark gaze, then disappeared as if an iron door had clanged shut over the burning heart of a coal furnace.
He threw aside his riding crop, tugged off leather gloves, then reached into an inside pocket and dropped Rachel’s letters onto the table at Sarah’s elbow.
“You read them?” she asked.
“Thank you, yes, but good afternoon, Mrs. Callaway.” His voice held delicate mockery. “I trust you slept well?”
Hot embarrassment melted her bones. She stood up and curtsied, but then she laughed.
“I’m so sorry. Yes, I thank you, sir. I slept very well. Actually, no, I didn’t. But not for want of every comfort.”
He smiled with a genuine, gentle mirth. “Then Holy Communion in the Blackdown’s private chapel wasn’t comfort enough?”
She sat down again and arranged her skirts. “I’m afraid not. And now I fear that I face damnation for the sin of curiosity, unless you agree to assuage it. You’ve been out?”
He dodged a large yellow-and-white blossom, the petals as lush as a satin wedding gown, the throat an explosion of sensuous invitation, and propped his hip on the corner of the table, his arms crossed.
“Yes, and I must apologize that I’ve not yet changed and stand before a lady in all my dirt. I didn’t know you were in here.”
“Did you discover something new?”
“No.” This time it was Oberon’s smile, the smile that hid all of Nature’s secrets, the smile that might summon birds from the skies and force trees shockingly into leaf. “Nothing that justifies my sharing it.”
Sarah looked away into the hidden hearts of some tiny pink-brown orchids. Long petals curled about one another in wild loops.
“Then pray tell me what you thought of Rachel’s letters.”
“I think that your cousin’s a little mad,” he said.
“Then you still don’t believe that she ever met the man we’re calling Daedalus?”
“On the contrary. I’m convinced that she’s genuinely afraid of him. However, I don’t accept that she first met him in January or February.”
“But she said—”
He pushed away from the table. “No, she claimed to have met some nameless gentleman then and thought that she was falling in love. Yet though she gave the impression when she wrote to you after Easter that her fear of Daedalus had been growing steadily for several months, there’s no trace of it in the two letters before that. If her correspondence had stopped at the beginning of April, any unbiased reader would think that she was expecting a proposal any day.”
“Yes, I know, but I don’t think that changes anything. She wrote hardly any letters in February and March anyway, so it’s not surprising that she didn’t reveal all of that until later. Unless you imagine that Rachel had two importunate suitors. In which case, why did she mention only one?”
“I’ve no idea,” he said. “But I’ve sent a man to Norfolk to inquire after Harvey Penland.”
“Just as someone on Lord Grail’s staff must have been intercepting my letters after she left there—in which case, that person knows where she really was for those missing five months, doesn’t he? Or she, I suppose?”
“No, it was undoubtedly a man,” he said. “This person had access to Grail’s franking privileges, which limits the possibilities. I intend to go there next. I’ve also written to Jack.”
“Lord Jonathan? Why?”
He stalked up and down for a moment, then dropped into the chair on the other side of the iron table. Masculine undertones of horse and leather and fresh, damp linen assailed her nostrils. Heat ran in runnels beneath her skirts.
“To ask him whether your cousin’s hands really were those of a scullery maid.”
She stared at the precise lines of his fingers, the square, blunt nails and clean bones. “You think he would have noticed?”
“I’m certain of it. I’m also certain that we’ll have his answer by return.”
She made herself look up, though the flash of his dark eyes might burn her. “And after that?”
“Dartmoor.”
“Then you think Rachel truly did go there in April?”
“Almost certainly.” He leaped to his feet and began to pace again. “You might have noticed if that postmark had been wrong. She couldn’t have known it would get smudged. And whether or not we agree about when she met Daedalus, she expressed very little panic before Easter and a great deal of it afterwards. Though the six children didn’t exist, there’s no reason to suppose that she was lying about having traveled to Devon.”
“At least we know that she was still living at the cottage until then. Would the curate have noticed when she left Hampstead?”
Mr. Devoran gazed up at the flow of white rain on the glass, as if he stood at the edge of a precipice where one blind step might plunge him to his death.
“He didn’t mention it.”
“But why would Rachel go to Dartmoor? We don’t know anyone in Devon.”
“Whe
n I go there,” he said, “I may find out.”
Dark hair was curling on his collar as it dried. The fabric of his coat stretched damply over lithe, sculpted shoulders beneath the tall, rolled collar. The skirts, still creased from riding, flared down over long, muscled legs.
Treacherous heat danced and flared in her heart.
“Then I should like to come, too,” Sarah said, “if it could be arranged with propriety.”
His hesitation this time was longer, as if he fought some hidden temptation or secret reproach.
“No,” he said at last. “I don’t think so.”
“I cannot insist, of course,” she said. “I have not the means to travel there by myself, but—”
He spun about. “Pray forgive my curiosity, ma’am, but why were you sending money to your cousin?”
The hot pulse in her blood moved deeper, resounding in heavy, secret reverberations.
“How did you—? Oh, the letters, of course!”
“You believed her to be working as a governess. Surely her salary was no less than yours?”
A different kind of embarrassment flooded her cheeks. “Yes, but Rachel required so many extra little things to make her life bearable.”
“And you do not?”
“I live at the school, where Miss Farcey provides everything I need.”
“Whereas Rachel was sometimes invited to dine with the family, and often mingled with the guests?”
“Whatever the truth of that, I knew she needed to dress appropriately and maintain decent standards, and her employment was never all that secure—”
“So she begged you for whatever funds you could spare and you were happy to help, even though it meant you had to forgo any holidays.”
“Several charity girls live with us year-round. It’s no hardship to remain in Bath with them for the summers.”
He broke off an orchid, then snapped the stem over and over, until he held nothing but petals.
“And what of your future, ma’am? You’ve set aside nothing for yourself? Instead, you sent your handful of extra guineas to your cousin every payday, so she could purchase a new silk dress, or an ivory fan, or the very best shoes.”
