Chapter 16
Abeam of morning light slanted across the room, chasing away the last fragments of Edward’s dream. In it, he had been fifteen or sixteen again, listening with half an ear to Tempest practicing her conjugations, the rest of him lost in some book her father had lent him.
“To love. Aimer.” A giggle, which he had ignored. “J’aime. Il, elle, on aime. Nous aimons. Vous . . . vous aimerez?” She rattled through the forms quickly, with little regard to accuracy or accent.
“Vous aimez,” he had corrected automatically.
“No, no. You misunderstood. I was asking. Do you think you will ever fall in love, Edward?”
The question had succeeded in capturing his full attention. Snapping shut his book, he had dropped to one knee beside the chair across which she had carelessly draped herself, caught up her slight, girlish hand, and said, with exaggerated passion, “Mais oui, ma chérie. Je t’aime.”
And, as he had hoped, she had squealed in protest, jumped up, and left him to his reading.
A dirty trick, of course. One of many they had played on one another, growing up together as they had. It would be years before the thought of anything more than brotherly love would cross his mind in regards to Tempest Holderin, and when it had, she had rebuffed his overtures just as thoroughly as she had that day.
Je t’aime. I love you. The words every young man with a passable command of French dreamed a beautiful woman would someday speak to him.
But why had that particular memory come back to him this morning?
As he brushed his hair away from his face and rubbed the heel of one hand against his eyes, he remembered. Charlotte.
He shifted on the lumpy mattress, half turned, expecting to find her still curled beside him. But the other half of the bed was cool and empty. Bright light flooded the room. It must be an hour or more past dawn. For the first time since returning to England, he had slept like the dead. She must have woken early, grown restless, gone out.
Not back to the manor? Hurrying to his feet, he found his scattered clothes and tugged them on. Surely she knew better than that.
When he could see no sign of Charlotte around the Rookery or walking in the nearby wood, he made his way to the manor house, entering through the kitchen, expecting to find it unoccupied. Instead, Mari was within, lighting a fire. A lithe black cat—Noir, had Charlotte called it?—was playing at her feet, swatting a balled-up piece of paper.
It was on the tip of his tongue to scold Mari for returning, but this was not the time. “Have you seen Charlotte?”
“This morning?” Mari turned away from the hearth, a curious slant to her head. “Yes. I met her just leaving the Rookery, and we walked back here together. She’s in her room, resting, I believe.” Something like a smile played around her lips. “She looked . . . tired.”
Before he could muster a reply, Jack stumbled into the room, looking—and smelling—the worse for a night of drinking. He rubbed a hand over the back of his head as he sat down heavily on one of the benches and grunted, “Coffee.”
Stone-faced, Mari shot a look at Edward before moving to follow the surly order.
“She’s gone,” Jack mumbled, half slumped over the servants’ table. “Sykes was meant to take the coach back to Town this morning. I ’spect you’ll find she was on it.”
“Gone? Town?” Unable to restrain himself, Edward grabbed Jack by the hair and lifted the man’s head high enough that their eyes met.
Jack winced. “Hey, now. Easy. She gave me quite a knock already.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
One dark eye squinted closed, as if he struggled to remember. “Now that I think on it, she only gave me a shove. Must’ve hit my head on the wall when I fell.”
“And what did you do to her to earn that shove?” Edward ground out.
Jack only laughed.
Letting the man’s head drop back onto the tabletop with a thud, Edward strode out of the kitchen and down the corridor. Though his feet, and his heart, wanted to race, he would not give in to the impulse. He would find her safe and sound in her room. He would.
But his knock received no answer; the old butler’s room was empty. With quicker steps, he moved back through the kitchen and out the door. In the stable yard, he could see the grooves of carriage wheels and the rounded outlines left by the hooves of Sykes’s horses, though the mud was too soft to hold much of an impression. In the stable itself, Samson whickered softly at him. Garrick was nowhere to be seen.
Back in the kitchen, Edward reached across the table and caught Jack by the cravat this time, yanking him to his feet. The bench tipped behind him and clattered to the floor. “Mind telling me what happened here this morning to drive her off?”
Despite his position, Jack managed a leer. “Seems to me the real story is what happened last night. Did she get you to swive her before she ran off?”
For answer, Edward dragged him away from the table and pinned him against the wall. Above his head, the servants’ call bells jingled quietly on their plank. “Have a care,” Edward warned as his grip tightened. He’d never yet hit a man, but Jack didn’t know that.
Jack’s eyes rolled upward, showing their whites. “I just gave her a bit of a fright, I swear.”
“A fright?” Edward hitched him higher. Now, only the toes of Jack’s boots scuffed impotently against the floor. “Why?”
“T-told her I know who she is.”
“And who is that?”
“Charlotte Blakemore,” he rasped out. “Dowager Duchess of Langerton.”
Shock made Edward relax his grip. A duchess?
Gasping, Jack sank to the floor.
The rest of the story came more easily, once he had caught his breath. “She disappeared from Bath a fortnight or so ago. Her husband left her a whacking great fortune, they say, but her stepson, the current duke, means to have his late father’s will voided—and the marriage, too, if it can be done.”
“On what grounds?”
“Claims the old man had already gone round the twist before they were wed.”
Mad? That was a serious allegation indeed.
In his mind, Edward tried to reconcile what he knew of her—her cheap clothes, her knowledge of housekeeping matters, what she’d told him of her origins—with the notion of her as a duchess. Only her impossibly erect carriage seemed to fit the person Jack had identified.
Of course, she might just as easily have told the same sad stories to some soft-in-the-head, elderly duke, won his pity, and then his fortune.
Almost.
Out of the corner of his eye, Edward saw Noir arch his back and pounce. The wad of paper with which he had been playing popped from between his paws. For a moment, the draft of the fire caught and held it, threatening to devour it before whirling it out into the room instead.
Edward snatched the cat’s plaything out of the air. “What’s this?” he asked, righting the bench and sitting down. When he smoothed the paper against the tabletop, Charlotte’s worried eyes stared up at him from the tattered page, drawn by a hand with some skill, although the pencil lines were smudged. The Disappearing Duchess was scrawled above her head.
“Proof,” said Jack, hoisting himself to his feet and joining Edward at the table.
As he stared, snatches of print surrounding the sketch came into focus. Our newest duke . . . a suit... more than a few loose threads. When he came to the crease in the paper, he unfolded it and read on.
Meanwhile, the Disappearing Duchess was last seen headed west in the company of a dark-haired stranger. No doubt she hopes he is possessed of a cure for her late husband’s “infirmities.”
“Rumor has it the marriage was never consummated,” Jack explained. “When it came out she might lose everything if Langerton could prove she hadn’t been plucked, she scampered off—in search of some chap who’d do the deed the old man couldn’t, they say. The new duke put up a pretty penny to anyone who brought her back before she succeeded. And when I recognized her, well, I figured I could use that money as well as anybody. But it seems,” he added, casting shrewd eyes over Edward’s rumpled clothes and making a show of straightening his own collar, “I’m too late.”
“Have a care,” Edward ground out. “You’re speaking of my—” He broke off before the word passed his lips; that particular lie was no longer required, it seemed.
But the omission did not go unnoticed. “Your wife?” Jack gave a wry laugh.
Edward made no answer. The details of the gossip column, and Jack’s tale, fit with what he knew. He had met Charlotte not far from Bath. She’d worn a wedding ring and claimed to be a widow. And last night, he’d taken a virgin to his bed.
Mari stepped to the table, almost tripping over Noir. Muttering, she poured steaming liquid into an empty cup and handed it to Jack.
“Bah, that’s bitter stuff,” he said, pulling a face at the first swallow of Mari’s coffee.
Edward recalled Charlotte’s anguished account of feeling torn between two worlds: French desire and English sangfroid. He could see her coy smile. Hear her beguiling accent: I want . . . you.
Well, he’d known almost from the moment they met that she was a storyteller.
His thoughts were dragged back to the present when Jack slapped his palm on the table. “Woman, what are you about? Why are you staring at me like that? Are you trying to curse me?” His eyes darted from Mari to the black cat and back again. “Are you some kind of witch?”
“Witch? Ah, no suh,” Mari insisted with a shake of her turbaned head, her normally flawless English turned suddenly into the singsong patois of the islands. “No speak de curse. Me no obeah woman.”
Jack appeared to take little comfort in her reassurance. Beads of sweat sprang up on his forehead.
Edward glanced back at Mari. “What have you done?”
She looked at him for a long moment, as if weighing whether or not to reveal her secret. “Sure now, you remember hearin’ ’bout bad massahs what got struck sudden by de megrims or de cramp or de flux?”
“Well . . . yes, of course.” Disease of every sort was rampant in the islands.
“Slave women talk in de market, you know,” she said with a pointed look. “Give advice. Swap recipes. I knows how to make a cruel man suffer.”
“What did you give him?”
“Jus’ plain p’ison,” she said, nodding toward the half-empty cup. “Dat’s all.”
Until that moment, Edward had never actually seen a man turn green; he had always imagined it nothing more than a fanciful expression. “P-poison? In the c-coffee?” Jack managed to stammer before he clutched at his stomach and collapsed forward onto the table.
Edward grasped one of Jack’s shoulders and shook him, hard, but he could not be roused. Slowly, he raised horrified eyes to Mari.
“Settle yourself, Mr. Edward,” she said, her voice her own again. “If I set out to poison a man, he’d never know until it was too late.” With calm, deliberate motions, she poured a cup of coffee for herself and took a sip. “For some men, there’s nothing scarier than the sight of a woman who knows her own power—the more so, I suppose, if her skin is black. I saw that fear in his eyes. So I decided to play with him a bit, pretended to be what he imagined I am. I didn’t suspect he was weak enough to frighten himself into a faint.”
Still surprised by Mari’s performance, Edward could not deny that her game seemed a fitting punishment for the way Jack had frightened Charlotte.
Mari snatched up the paper with one hand. Her dark eyes took in the hasty sketch and the circled words. “Well, we all knew she was hiding something. Any fool could see she was scared.”
“Or shrewd. God, Mari . . . I begin to wish I had never come home.”
“Home? To England, you mean.” When he did not answer, she pressed further. “It wasn’t the promise of a job that brought you here, was it? You’re from this part of the country. Gloucestershire, Little Norbury . . .”
“Ravenswood.” He could see no point in denying it to Mari. Frankly, he was surprised it had taken her this long to piece it together. “I was born here. My father was Lord Beckley.”
Mari looked from him to Jack and back again, her face a perfect blank. If she was surprised, she seemed determined not to show it. “And now . . . ?”
“I am.”
Her gaze dropped to the picture, and she studied it for another moment before crumpling it and tossing it onto the floor for Noir, who pretended to ignore it, though the tip of his tail flicked. She jerked her chin toward Jack. “Don’t you listen to him.”
“Even if he’s right?”
“He can’t know the whole truth,” she insisted. “He doesn’t know what’s in her heart.”
A scoffing laugh pushed past his lips. “Her heart? She lied to us, Mari. She made me think she cared. Cared for the fate of Ravenswood. Cared for me. But in the end, it was all just another one of her stories.”
“It seems to me she wasn’t the only one telling stories. M’lord.”
Edward opened his mouth to retort, but stopped when he realized Mari’s attention had been caught by something on the other side of the room. He turned and looked toward the still-open kitchen door. An old woman stood there, stoop-shouldered, her knobby fingers clutching a walking stick. When she lifted her head, he could see the scars on her face and one blind, milky eye.
“May I help you, ma’am?” he asked, rising.
She twisted her head awkwardly to fix him with her other eye, then drew in a sharp breath.
Her exhalation brought with it one whispered word: “Neddy?”