by Julia Quinn
“Shouldn’t Lucy be here?” Hermione asked.
Richard resumed his glaring. “Where is my sister?”
“Upstairs,” Gregory said curtly. That narrowed it down to only thirty-odd rooms.
“Upstairs where?” Richard ground out.
Gregory ignored the question. It really wasn’t the best time to reveal that she was presently tied to a water closet.
He turned back to Haselby, who was still seated, one leg crossed casually over the other. He was examining his fingernails.
Gregory felt ready to climb the walls. How could the bloody man sit there so calmly? This was the single most critical conversation either of them would ever have, and all he could do was inspect his manicure?
“Will you release her?” Gregory ground out.
Haselby looked up at him and blinked. “I said I would.”
“But will you reveal her secrets?”
At that, Haselby’s entire demeanor changed. His body seemed to tighten, and his eyes grew deadly sharp. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, each word crisp and precise.
“Nor do I,” Richard added, stepping close.
Gregory turned briefly in his direction. “She is being blackmailed.”
“Not,” Haselby said sharply, “by me.”
“My apologies,” Gregory said quietly. Blackmail was an ugly thing. “I did not mean to imply.”
“I always wondered why she agreed to marry me,” Haselby said softly.
“It was arranged by her uncle,” Hermione put in. Then, when everyone turned to her in mild surprise, she added, “Well, you know Lucy. She’s not the sort to rebel. She likes order.”
“All the same,” Haselby said, “she did have a rather dramatic opportunity to get out of it.” He paused, cocking his head to the side. “It’s my father, isn’t it?”
Gregory’s chin jerked in a single, grim nod.
“That is not surprising. He is rather eager to have me married. Well, then—” Haselby brought his hands together, twining his fingers and squeezing them down. “What shall we do? Call his bluff, I imagine.”
Gregory shook his head. “We can’t.”
“Oh, come now. It can’t be that bad. What on earth could Lady Lucinda have done?”
“We really should get her,” Hermione said again. And then, when the three men turned to her again, she added, “How would you like your fate to be discussed in your absence?”
Richard stepped in front of Gregory. “Tell me,” he said.
Gregory did not pretend to misunderstand. “It is bad.”
“Tell me.”
“It is your father,” Gregory said in a quiet voice. And he proceeded to relate what Lucy had told to him.
“She did it for us,” Hermione whispered once Gregory was done. She turned to her husband, clutching his hand. “She did it to save us. Oh, Lucy.”
But Richard just shook his head. “It’s not true,” he said.
Gregory tried to keep the pity out of his eyes as he said, “There is proof.”
“Oh, really? What sort of proof?”
“Lucy says there is written proof.”
“Has she seen it?” Richard demanded. “Would she even know how to tell if something were faked?”
Gregory took a long breath. He could not blame Lucy’s brother for his reaction. He supposed he would be the same, were such a thing to come to light about his own father.
“Lucy doesn’t know,” Richard continued, still shaking his head. “She was too young. Father wouldn’t have done such a thing. It is inconceivable.”
“You were young as well,” Gregory said gently.
“I was old enough to know my own father,” Richard snapped, “and he was not a traitor. Someone has deceived Lucy.”
Gregory turned to Haselby. “Your father?”
“Is not that clever,” Haselby finished. “He would cheerfully commit blackmail, but he would do it with the truth, not a lie. He is intelligent, but he is not creative.”
Richard stepped forward. “But my uncle is.”
Gregory turned to him with urgency. “Do you think he has lied to Lucy?”
“He certainly said the one thing to her that would guarantee that she would not back out of the marriage,” Richard said bitterly.
“But why does he need her to marry Lord Haselby?” Hermione asked.
They all looked to the man in question.
“I have no idea,” he said.
“He must have secrets of his own,” Gregory said.
Richard shook his head. “Not debts.”
“He’s not getting any money in the settlement,” Haselby remarked.
Everyone turned to look at him.
“I may have let my father choose my bride,” he said with a shrug, “but I wasn’t about to marry without reading the contracts.”
“Secrets, then,” Gregory said.
“Perhaps in concert with Lord Davenport,” Hermione added. She turned to Haselby. “So sorry.”
He waved off her apology. “Think nothing of it.”
“What should we do now?” Richard asked.
“Get Lucy,” Hermione immediately answered.
Gregory nodded briskly. “She is right.”
“No,” said Haselby, rising to his feet. “We need my father.”
“Your father?” Richard bit off. “He’s hardly sympathetic to our cause.”
“Perhaps, and I’m the first to say he’s intolerable for more than three minutes at a time, but he will have answers. And for all of his venom, he is mostly harmless.”
“Mostly?” Hermione echoed.
Haselby appeared to consider that. “Mostly.”
“We need to act,” Gregory said. “Now. Haselby, you and Fennsworth will locate your father and interrogate him. Find out the truth. Lady Fennsworth and I will retrieve Lucy and bring her back here, where Lady Fennsworth will remain with her.” He turned to Richard. “I apologize for the arrangements, but I must have your wife with me to safeguard Lucy’s reputation should someone discover us. She’s been gone nearly an hour now. Someone is bound to notice.”
Richard gave him a curt nod, but it was clear he was not happy with the situation. Still, he had no choice. His honor demanded that he be the one to question Lord Davenport.
“Good,” Gregory said. “Then we are agreed. I will meet the two of you back in…”
He paused. Aside from Lucy’s room and the upstairs washroom, he had no knowledge of the layout of the house.
“Meet us in the library,” Richard instructed. “It is on the ground floor, facing east.” He took a step toward the door, then turned back and said to Gregory, “Wait here. I will return in a moment.”
Gregory was eager to be off, but Richard’s grave expression had been enough to convince him to remain in place. Sure enough, when Lucy’s brother returned, barely a minute later, he carried with him two guns.
He held one out to Gregory.
Good God.
“You may need this,” Richard said.
“Heaven help us if I do,” Gregory said under his breath.
“Beg pardon?”
Gregory shook his head.
“Godspeed, then.” Richard nodded at Haselby, and the two of them departed, moving swiftly down the hall.
Gregory beckoned to Hermione. “Let us go,” he said, leading her in the opposite direction. “And do try not to judge me when you see where I am leading you.”
He heard her chuckle as they ascended the stairs. “Why,” she said, “do I suspect that, if anything, I shall judge you very clever indeed?”
“I did not trust her to remain in place,” Gregory confessed, taking the steps two at a time. When they reached the top, he turned to face her. “It was heavy-handed, but there was nothing else I could do. All I needed was a bit of time.”
Hermione nodded. “Where are we going?”
“To the nanny’s washroom,” he confessed. “I tied her to the water closet.”
“You ti
ed her to the—Oh my, I cannot wait to see this.”
But when they opened the door to the small washroom, Lucy was gone.
And every indication was that she had not left willingly.
Twenty-five
In which we learn what happened, a mere ten minutes earlier.
Had it been an hour? Surely it had been an hour.
Lucy took a deep breath and tried to calm her racing nerves. Why hadn’t anyone thought to install a clock in the washroom? Shouldn’t someone have realized that eventually someone would find herself tied to the water closet and might wish to know the hour?
Really, it was just a matter of time.
Lucy drummed the fingers of her right hand against the floor. Quickly, quickly, index to pinky, index to pinky. Her left hand was tied so that the pads of her fingers faced up, so she flexed, then bent, then flexed, then bent, then—
“Eeeeeuuuuuhhh!”
Lucy groaned with frustration.
Groaned? Grunted.
Groanted.
It should have been a word.
Surely it had been an hour. It must have been an hour.
And then…
Footsteps.
Lucy jerked to attention, glaring at the door. She was furious. And hopeful. And terrified. And nervous. And—
Good God, she wasn’t meant to possess this many simultaneous emotions. One at a time was all she could manage. Maybe two.
The knob turned and the door jerked backward, and—
Jerked? Lucy had about one second to sense the wrongness of this. Gregory wouldn’t jerk the door open. He would have—
“Uncle Robert?”
“You,” he said, his voice low and furious.
“I—”
“You little whore,” he bit off.
Lucy flinched. She knew he held no great affection for her, but still, it hurt.
“You don’t understand,” she blurted out, because she had no idea what she should say, and she refused—she absolutely refused to say, “I’m sorry.”
She was done with apologizing. Done.
“Oh, really?” he spat out, crouching down to her level. “Just what don’t I understand? The part about your fleeing your wedding?”
“I didn’t flee,” she shot back. “I was abducted! Or didn’t you notice that I am tied to the water closet?”
His eyes narrowed menacingly. And Lucy began to feel scared.
She shrank back, her breath growing shallow. She had long feared her uncle—the ice of his temper, the cold, flat stare of his disdain.
But she had never felt frightened.
“Where is he?” her uncle demanded.
Lucy did not pretend to misunderstand. “I don’t know.”
“Tell me!”
“I don’t know!” she protested. “Do you think he would have tied me up if he trusted me?”
Her uncle stood and cursed. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“What do you mean?” Lucy asked carefully. She wasn’t sure what was going on, and she wasn’t sure just whose wife she would be, at the end of the proverbial day, but she was fairly certain that she ought to stall for time.
And reveal nothing. Nothing of import.
“This! You!” her uncle spat out. “Why would he abduct you and leave you here, in Fennsworth House?”
“Well,” Lucy said slowly. “I don’t think he could have got me out without someone seeing.”
“He couldn’t have got into the party without someone seeing, either.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“How,” her uncle demanded, leaning down and putting his face far too close to hers, “did he grab you without your consent?”
Lucy let out a short puff of a breath. The truth was easy. And innocuous. “I went to my room to lie down,” she said. “He was waiting for me there.”
“He knew which room was yours?”
She swallowed. “Apparently.”
Her uncle stared at her for an uncomfortably long moment. “People have begun to notice your absence,” he muttered.
Lucy said nothing.
“It can’t be helped, though.”
She blinked. What was he talking about?
He shook his head. “It’s the only way.”
“I—I beg your pardon?” And then she realized—he wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to himself.
“Uncle Robert?” she whispered.
But he was already slicing through her bindings.
Slicing? Slicing? Why did he have a knife?
“Let’s go,” he grunted.
“Back to the party?”
He let out a grim chuckle. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Panic began to rise in her chest. “Where are you taking me?”
He yanked her to her feet, one of his arms wrapped viselike around her. “To your husband.”
She managed to twist just far enough to look at his face. “My—Lord Haselby?”
“Have you another husband?”
“But isn’t he at the party?”
“Stop asking so many questions.”
She looked frantically about. “But where are you taking me?”
“You are not going to ruin this for me,” he hissed. “Do you understand?”
“No,” she pleaded. Because she didn’t. She no longer understood anything.
He yanked her hard against him. “I want you to listen to me, because I will say this only once.”
She nodded. She wasn’t facing him, but she knew he could feel her head move against his chest.
“This marriage will go forward,” he said, his voice deadly and low. “And I will personally see to it that it is consummated tonight.”
“What?”
“Don’t argue with me.”
“But—” She dug her heels in as he started to drag her to the door.
“For God’s sake, don’t fight me,” he muttered. “It’s nothing that you wouldn’t have had to do, anyway. The only difference is that you will have an audience.”
“An audience?”
“Indelicate, but I will have my proof.”
She began to struggle in earnest, managing to free one arm long enough to swing wildly through the air. He quickly restrained her, but his momentary shift in posture allowed her to kick him hard in the shins.
“God damn it,” he muttered, wrenching her close. “Cease!”
She kicked out again, knocking over an empty chamber pot.
“Stop it!” He jammed something against her ribs. “Now!”
Lucy stilled instantly. “Is that a knife?” she whispered.
“Remember this,” he said, his words hot and ugly against her ear. “I cannot kill you, but I can cause you great pain.”
She swallowed a sob. “I am your niece.”
“I don’t care.”
She swallowed and asked, her voice quiet, “Did you ever?”
He nudged her toward the door. “Care?”
She nodded.
For a moment there was silence, and Lucy was left with no means to interpret it. She could not see her uncle’s face, could sense no change in his stance. She could do nothing but stare at the door, at his hand as he reached for the knob.
And then he said, “No.”
She had her answer, then.
“You were a duty,” he clarified. “One I fulfilled, and one I am pleased to discharge. Now come with me, and don’t say a word.”
Lucy nodded. His knife was pressing ever harder against her ribs and already she had heard a soft crunching sound as it poked through the stiff fabric of her bodice.
She let him move her along the corridor and down the stairs. Gregory was here, she kept telling herself. He was here, and he would find her. Fennsworth House was large, but it was not massive. There were only so many places her uncle could stash her.
And there were hundreds of guests on the ground floor.
And Lord Haselby—surely he would not consent to such a scheme.
The
re were at least a dozen reasons her uncle would not succeed in this.
A dozen. Twelve. Maybe more. And she needed only one—just one to foil his plot.
But this was of little comfort when he stopped and yanked a blindfold over her eyes.
And even less when he threw her into a room and tied her up.
“I will be back,” he bit off, leaving her on her bottom in a corner, bound hand and foot.
She heard his footsteps move across the room, and then it burst from her lips—a single word, the only word that mattered—
“Why?”
His footsteps stopped.
“Why, Uncle Robert?”
This couldn’t be just about the family honor. Hadn’t she already proved herself on that score? Shouldn’t he trust her for that?
“Why?” she asked again, praying he had a conscience. Surely he couldn’t have looked after her and Richard for so many years without some sense of right and wrong.
“You know why,” he finally said, but she knew that he was lying. He had waited far too long before answering.
“Go, then,” she said bitterly. There was no point in stalling him. It would be far better if Gregory found her alone.
But he didn’t move. And even through her blindfold she could feel his suspicion.
“What are you waiting for?” she cried out.
“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. And then she heard him turn.
His footsteps drew closer.
Slowly.
Slowly…
And then—
“Where is she?” Hermione gasped.
Gregory strode into the small room, his eyes taking in everything—the cut bindings, the overturned chamber pot. “Someone took her,” he said grimly.
“Her uncle?”
“Or Davenport. They are the only two with reason to—” He shook his head. “No, they cannot do her harm. They need the marriage to be legal and binding. And long-standing. Davenport wants an heir off Lucy.”
Hermione nodded.
Gregory turned to her. “You know the house. Where could she be?”
Hermione was shaking her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. If it’s her uncle—”
“Assume it’s her uncle,” Gregory ordered. He wasn’t sure that Davenport was agile enough to abduct Lucy, and besides that, if what Haselby had said about his father was true, then Robert Abernathy was the man with secrets.
