by Julia Ross
The air in the room swallowed her in crystal clear liquid, as the rose had been swallowed, drowning as it slipped into the water jug. No, flowers didn’t have feelings, did they? Flowers were numb, just like this.
Guy was trying to justify all of his falsehoods. He thought she would fall for his explanations and apologies.
He insisted that I marry him and he wouldn’t take no for an answer…he intends to persecute me…I dare not imagine what he might do if he found me here alone….
Rachel had written all of that about the man she had met in January, then fled in terror just before Easter.
As if it were the contaminated gift of Deianira to Hercules, Sarah tugged off Guy’s shirt and dropped it to the floor, then gathered the shreds of her silk robe about her naked body.
“No,” she said. “Far better at deception than any actor, Mr. Devoran, because you were Daedalus all along and you never hesitated to lead me straight into your maze.”
He was still standing in the doorway, beautiful, damned, when she stumbled from the room.
THE door closed behind her. Rage and despair darkened his vision for a moment, as if thunderheads blackened the day.
Guy thrust himself to his feet, gathered his discarded clothes—even his jacket from the garden bench where he’d tossed it—and carefully dressed himself. He tied his cravat using the mirror over the fireplace. A hollow-eyed demon stared back at him, dark hair tossed about his head as if by a gale.
He smoothed it with his fingers, then unbuckled his spurs and set them on the mantel.
Once again in the guise of a gentleman, he stalked up to the chaise and flung himself back on the ivory cushions to stare up at the ceiling.
He could not have planned it better had he wanted to inflict on Sarah the worst wounds possible. He should have told her everything at the beginning. She’d have been upset to know about Rachel’s dishonor, but she’d have been immediately inoculated against any feelings for him.
Now he had broken her heart and left his own shattered into fragments.
He should have known that Sarah would not be able to let him hunt for Rachel alone. In her place, he’d have done exactly the same. Her courage and determination were part of what he loved about her, further confirmation of his certainty that this love was absolutely real.
So he was facing the most bitter irony of his life. He had finally found the one woman—the one!—only to destroy any hope of winning her.
There was no other solution left except to go forward, of course. Alone now, if need be.
Guy sprang to his feet, but his eye was caught by something in the pitcher on the table. He scooped out a white rose and shook the moisture off the petals.
He was not Daedalus, but somebody was. He had nothing else left to give Sarah, except to solve the mystery and restore her wayward cousin. He forced his tired mind back over every shred of evidence they had all gathered: he and Sarah, Jack and Ryder.
As soon as he could escape Buckleigh without raising suspicion, he had ridden to Withycombe without bothering to stop for sleep. He had arrived to find Anne just beginning her labor. She had immediately encouraged the men to talk.
“It’ll help to take my mind off these pesky pains,” she had said gaily, “until we can all greet our squalling new arrival.”
Jack had met his wife’s eyes, then turned to his cousin as casually—on the surface—as if they were about to stroll in the garden on a warm summer’s day.
“The information I sent you was useful, Guy?”
“Vital! I’m on my way to Cooper Street now. But how exactly did Rachel manage Grail Hall?”
“The earl’s in the habit of signing a whole set of blank sheets, which he leaves with his secretary. Any of the servants could have gained access to them, but our culprit was one of the younger footmen, who’d also learned to forge a passable copy of his master’s handwriting. The poor lad was in love with her.”
“It was the blond hair and innocent blue eyes,” Guy had replied with deliberate flippancy. “Deadly to any English male.”
Anne had laughed, then gasped and doubled over. She and Jack had immediately retreated into her bedroom where the midwife was waiting. For the rest of the night Guy had kept vigil, his soul on fire, until their baby arrived safely early the next morning—this morning, less than six hours ago!
So he had brought the news to Wyldshay. Otherwise, he’d have gone straight from Withycombe to pursue Jack’s information, instead of making this fatal diversion.
Guy balanced the rose carefully on the edge of the jug.
The coward’s way out would be to slip away to do so now.
Instead, he lay back on the chaise and waited. Morning stretched into afternoon. Long shadows began to flow across the courtyard from the trellis.
He ordered a little food and wine, and even slept in snatches, because it would be merely self-indulgent to punish himself with further exhaustion.
The day had almost died away when Sarah walked back into the room.
Neat red plaits wound about her head. Dark green skirts swirled as she stalked with exquisite dignity across the carpet to close the French doors.
Guy stood and waited for her to sit, but she paced the room, touching objects at random.
Her face was blotched by tears, her eyelids and nostrils rimmed in red. Pain spiraled and stabbed. In spite of his vaunted concern for her, he had only made her weep.
Yet she turned to face him at last with the stark courage of angels.
“I apologize for accusing you of being Daedalus, Mr. Devoran,” she said. “That’s absurd, of course. Even though you hid the truth about your relationship with Rachel, I can understand why you felt you must do so, and I don’t believe that you would ever have threatened or attacked her.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Your cousin was certainly never afraid of me.”
Dying sunbeams shone through the glass to cast a red halo about her head. “But she was in love with you?”
“No! Never!”
“Yet you were in love with her?”
“No. Infatuated for a short time, that’s all.”
The tawny eyes burned with bitter amusement. “I don’t suppose you needed to look much past her appearance,” she said with remarkable, dry clarity. “Rachel’s always been beautiful enough to send men into a kind of madness.”
“There was that, of course,” he said. “Though not—now I look back—very much else. Your cousin claimed my help. I tried to give it. We ended up in bed. Yet Rachel lied to me always, and she walked out when she no longer thought she needed me. Damaging as such an admission might be to my composure, the obvious conclusion is that she was only using me all along.”
Sarah sat down in a chair, so Guy dropped back onto the chaise where they had almost made love. Part of him fiercely regretted that he had stopped, instead of proving with his overwhelming passion how much he loved her.
But then she would never have forgiven him.
The rose dropped a few white petals onto the table. Sarah picked them up and studied them as if secret writing might be inscribed on each velvet surface.
“This also explains why she couldn’t tell me the truth, either,” she said. “Yet when she wrote me all those letters about how she dwelled so thrillingly on the memory of first meeting you, you believe she was lying about that, too?”
“Yes, I’m absolutely sure of it.”
“So you think she met her persecutor long before she met you? You said as much to me before, didn’t you? I just didn’t know then how you could be so certain. Now I do.”
“I couldn’t tell you, Sarah,” he said. “I didn’t want you to know. It can’t have been easy to face this truth about your cousin. It’s obvious that you’ve always thought of her as she was as a child.”
She shook her head, still staring at the petals in her palm. “So why did she leave you?”
“I don’t know. I go to Birchbrook every Easter. I couldn’t take my mistress to meet my father
and sister, so I left Rachel alone in the house with the chimneys. She wept when I left. Yet when I came back she was gone.”
Sarah picked up the rose, and the remaining petals scattered. She was still pale. Her eyes still looked sore. Though he knew his judgment was no longer objective, she was the loveliest woman he had ever seen.
“Did she leave you a note?” she asked.
He leaped to his feet and stalked away. “I burned it, returned to London, and vowed never to think of her again.”
“Oh, God!” The rose fell as she buried her face in both hands. “It was that pitiless?”
“If you like.”
Sarah sat in silence for several minutes, before she walked across to the French doors. The long summer twilight had softened the colors outside, as if a thin gray veil were slowly being drawn over the courtyard and trellises.
“Something profound must have happened to make Rachel do that. Something we’ve not even conceived of, so terrible that she couldn’t confide in anyone, not even me. Yet what I cannot understand—if she left you so cruelly—is why, when she turned to me for help last month, it was only to make me enlist you.”
“I don’t know, but I cannot regret it, Sarah. Otherwise, you and I might never have met.”
She spun to face him as if she were lost in a cold, dark place, where everything was ice.
“Please don’t assume, sir, that I also count that as a blessing!”
A terrible anger stirred in his soul. In his entire life, in so many dangerous ventures, he had almost never known failure—until now, when in what really counted he had failed absolutely.
“Pray forgive my presumption, ma’am,” he said. “I thought you wished for the truth!”
Bright color swept up her neck to flood her cheeks. “You think I can still believe that you know what that word means, sir?”
He stalked up to her. “I know exactly what it means, Sarah. It means we must face the fact that we’ve both fallen into a trap of Rachel’s making. I’m not accustomed to feeling like a fly at the center of any woman’s web, and neither, I assume, are you. Should we simply rail at each other and have done? Or is there any way forward from here?”
“How dare you!” Rimmed in red, her eyes blazed, the tiger staring from the burning forest. “How dare you suggest that I would ever give up now! For all I know, the spider in this web is you.”
“Dammit, Sarah! Rachel didn’t hesitate to come to my townhouse last winter like a drowned kitten. She knew exactly where I lived and could easily have come there again this June. Yet instead, like the Norns, she’s been busy spinning our fate by dragging you into her problems, as well.”
“But I thought you were away? You’d only just returned to town for the duchess’s ball when I found you in the bookstore.”
“What difference does that make? Yes, what with Ambrose’s arrival, then Jack’s bringing Anne back from India, I was constantly on the road back and forth from Dorset for most of May and June. Yet there were many obvious ways to contact me, and Rachel chose to use none of them. Instead, she sent you that letter full of melodramatic hints and predictions of disaster. We’ve both been used—by Rachel and by each other.”
She stared up at him for a moment, before she stalked to the door.
“I’m not a simpleton, sir. I only argue that Rachel must have had good cause for everything she did, even for allowing you to seduce her, and especially for leaving you once you had.”
“Sarah!” he said. “I’m sorry! What the hell else can I say?”
She stopped with her fingers on the handle. A little shiver passed over her shoulders.
“I’m sorry, too,” she said.
“What do you want me to do?”
The green skirts swirled as she turned to lean back against the closed door. To his astonishment, she lifted her head and laughed, though her eyes swam with bitter tears.
“I want to find Rachel. I want to discover the truth. Whatever I might feel about what I know now, I can’t continue this quest alone. Ironic, isn’t it? For you won’t give up, either, will you?”
He strode to the fireplace. “As a matter of honor, I feel an obligation to Rachel, but—”
“But because you’re in love with her, you’ve been prepared all along to damn your tattered claim on honor, and move heaven and earth to find her.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
“Then why won’t you abandon this quest now?”
Guy braced both hands against the mantel and stared down at the cold grate. “I can’t.”
“Why not? Because you still have feelings for Rachel?”
“God, no!” He spun about. “Because of the way I feel about you.”
“Ah, yes!” Her braids gleamed like amber as she pointed to the sofa with one forefinger. “That wretched moment of lust. What does a gentleman of conscience do about that?”
“You want the truth?”
“From this moment on, sir, I demand that you never lie to me again, not even by omission.”
“I love you,” he said. “I want you. I want to marry you.”
The color fled her face as if a tide retreated, abandoning its wrack of brown flecks on her skin. She almost staggered, but she gripped the back of a chair with both hands.
“That’s impossible,” she said. “How can you say that?”
“Because it’s the truth. I don’t expect you to accept me—”
“Never!”
“You may despise me all you wish, but if I thought for one moment that you’d consent to be my wife, I’d beg for your hand in marriage right now.”
“Stop it!” she said. “This is madness! What can your declarations of love ever mean, when you’ve made them so many times before? Even to Miracle…and to Rachel…and to thousands of other women in between?”
“Not thousands.”
Her eyes flashed. “Hundreds, then! Dozens!”
“For God’s sake! Not even dozens! But that’s hardly the question at issue.”
“If you may state the stark truth, sir, then so may I! Rachel ever loved you or not, no woman would ever leave you for less than life-or-death reasons. How dare you pretend the false modesty not to know that! That’s the crux of this whole mystery, though I don’t care one whit whether my beautiful cousin broke your wretched heart!”
Sarah wrenched open the door. Her shoes rapped away down the hallway, leaving Guy standing alone in the room.
AS if dried up by weeping, her soul was a husk. Sarah lit candles and tried to force herself to think. A plain oval face, ruined by freckles and tears, stared back at her from the mirror in the guest bedroom.
He could not love her. He could not. She had no idea why he’d said it, but he could not love her. This mad, handsome, devastating cousin to the fabulous St. Georges had broken his heart only over Rachel, as any man would.
And perhaps there was some comfort and composure to be found in that. For if Rachel had succumbed in her turn, then been ashamed and tried to hide the truth, who could blame her?
Certainly not her widowed cousin, whose contentment in her own virtuous state Guy Devoran had shown to be a sham.
VITAL, unrelenting, he was drinking coffee and perusing a newspaper. Sarah studied his dark good looks for a moment before she walked into the breakfast room the next morning.
Her heart was a knot, as hard and shriveled as a peach pit.
Guy looked up, folded the newspaper, stood up, and bowed.
Though she had no appetite at all, Sarah helped herself to food from the sideboard, then sat down and allowed him to fill her coffee cup for her. His eyes were very dark, a deep, watchful gaze.
“I thought you might have already left Wyldshay,” she said.
“You’d rather I had?”
She stirred a lump of sugar into her cup. “My loyalty is only to my cousin, sir. If that means that I must continue to risk your company, then so be it.”
“I’m honored by your forbearance, ma’am.”
&nb
sp; Sarah cut toast and buttered it. “Very well! I still don’t think that Rachel can have transformed so dramatically. It’s like her to be careless and unthinking; it’s not like her to be deliberately cruel. So the only question that matters is: What happened to change that?”
He pushed away from the table to gaze out of the window. Another lovely summer day, undermined, as if by a river, by their disaster.
“No,” he said. “The only question that matters is how the devil you and I can go on together from here.”
“Warily?”
He spun about to meet her gaze, then laughed. “Because we’re still caught together in this maze—though perhaps it’s been more like sharing a boat on a trackless ocean.”
Sarah took a few deep breaths. When he laughed, her heart turned over. When he seemed hurt, or watchful, or angry, her treacherous pulse still resounded to his moods and his presence. Yet an abyss of pain yawned beneath all of that awareness.
She pushed her plate away, leaving her food untouched. “Either way, sir, there’s no other option. Though it might be accurate to say that I, at least, have been feeling a little demented. Nevertheless—though with the utmost caution—I’m forced to insist that we agree to join forces again.”
“Neither of us has much choice in that,” he said.
“Yes, because Rachel’s true nature lies at the heart of our problem, and we each have our different perspectives to offer. In spite of your…intimacy with her, I’m her cousin. We grew up together. Whatever the evidence might suggest, I refuse to believe that she’s really wicked, or even entirely frivolous.”
“Even though she pretended to you that she was working as a governess when she was in fact at Knight’s Cottage, or living in Hampstead with me? And before that, when she claimed to still be working for Grail, even though she’d left his house that Christmas?”
“Even then. We’ll never learn the truth unless we uncover all of that past history.”
“Are you prepared to face whatever that might be?”
Sarah stood up. Her heart pounded as she reached into her pocket for Rachel’s last letter.
“Yes, I am. And if we’re truly to go on together, we must share everything that we know. So you’d better see this.”
