Gareth
Gareth pulled once more against the irons binding his wrists.
“Agh,” he groaned. His shoulder was bruised. And very possibly Chiverton had also broken his rib. Thank goodness that man was wealthy enough to afford boots of soft leather. Had he been wearing heavy miner’s shoes, it would have been much worse. So that was lucky.
He had no idea how long he’d been chained to this post deep under the Cornish coast. It must be over two days now he’d gone without food or water. Every blink was like wiping sand across his eyes. Every swallow like sawdust. If Chiverton was going to kill him, why did he make such slow work of it?
Of course, he’d prefer to live, mostly for his mother’s sake, but his patience with this tethering had ended several hours back. Some water wouldn’t be unwelcome either.
Shouting came from somewhere in the tunnels. A woman’s voice, from the sound of it, though it was hard to tell because everything echoed, distorted as it bounced its way down the rocky corridors.
A shame he didn’t have a hammer and pick or he could look for tin instead of wasting his time slumped against an oak beam. Or copper. Both would fetch a good price.
A single lantern burned above him, hanging on a nail. It was enough to let him see a flash of pale muslin.
“You are a pig!”
Gareth’s head jerked up.
Elaine. No. By St. Just, no.
She landed hard on the ground beside him, her hair spilling around her. Her eyes red and filled with a fury he’d never seen in her before.
Chiverton stood over them while his lackey roped her to the post beside Gareth. Chiverton’s store of iron cuffs must have run dry.
“I’m sorry, my love,” Chiverton said, “but I don’t think I can trust you out there. I’ll keep you here where you’ll be safe.” He bent forward and cupped her chin. “How about one more kiss before I go?”
He leaned closer.
Gareth jerked against his chains. Blast these fetters. “You didn’t offer me a kiss,” he rasped, trying to get Chiverton off Elaine. “My pride is deeply injured.”
It worked. Chiverton turned on Gareth. “What pride could you possibly have? You are the son of a tin man—a red-mucked laborer without even the sense to accept a lucrative proposal when it is laid at your feet.”
Gareth had learned—while Chiverton was beating him with his soft leather boot—that Chiverton had extended an invitation to Gareth’s father to join the smuggling ring. Apparently, his father had declined. Chiverton had not taken the rejection lightly, and it had cost Gareth’s father his life. Now Gareth was following in his father’s footsteps.
“It’s your fault she’s here,” Chiverton said. “Should have kept your red-dirt hands off my strongbox. Then, instead of mingling with the worms in your grave, you’d be attending our wedding.” He laughed.
Gareth would have spat on him if he’d had any moisture left to give. It wasn’t Elaine’s fault he’d taken the letter, so why punish her for it? Unless the letter somehow implicated her. Even so, he was the only one to have seen it. She was no threat.
Chiverton leaned forward and tucked the note into Gareth’s waistcoat pocket, patting it a few times as if tucking a beloved child in bed.
Gareth looked at Chiverton, then over at Elaine. How the devil did she get the letter?
“I’m sorry, Gareth,” she said. “I didn’t know.”
“At last, you get what you’ve been wanting all along, Mr. Kemp. To be with Elaine for the rest of your life.” He drew a pistol from his breeches and aimed it at Gareth.
“No!” Elaine screamed at the same moment a shot thundered through the cave.
Gareth clamped his jaws together to keep from yelling. His leg stung like the devil, and a trickle of blood seeped out, making a dark stain on his thigh.
“A little assurance that you won’t try anything foolish.”
“Or what? You’ll shoot me?” His voice sounded like gravel.
Chiverton laughed again, then strode away.
“I hate you,” Elaine cried after him. “I hate you with the hatred of a thousand hateful fiends. You are the ugliest, most worthless, most dishonorable man in the world, and I hate you.”
Chiverton saluted her without turning his head. Then he was gone around a bend in the cavern, his lackey trotting along behind him.
Elaine turned to Gareth. “Are you hurt?”
They didn’t have time enough left for him to enumerate. Besides, she meant only the shot. “I’m fine,” he said. “It barely grazed me.”
Her eyes hardened. “I hate him.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Because you sounded a little uncertain.”
She pursed her lips at him. A look he’d received many a time from her. Nice to know that amidst threats to her body and soul, she hadn’t lost her impertinence.
A bruise of black and purple encircled her neck just above her collarbone. He was going to kill that man.
“Your neck,” he said.
“Oh.” She swallowed gingerly. “I’ll live.”
Whether or not she lived had yet to be determined. They had not seen the last of Chiverton. Would that he had never met the man. That was what he got for playing the Good Samaritan. He should have left him and his ridiculous high flyer to rot in the hedgerow.
Now he’d gotten Elaine involved. No. That was not right. She’d gotten herself involved when she’d consented to marry the imbecile. Gareth was merely responsible for putting her neck on the chopping block.
“I’m sorry, Elaine,” he said with his dry and raspy voice. “Chiverton is right. This is all my fault.”
She shook her head, and her whole body slumped as if her strength had leaked out now that Chiverton was gone and she had no one to yell at. She could yell at him. Heaven knew he deserved it.
“How could any of this be your fault, Gareth? I am a blind fool. A blind and stupid fool. He didn’t care for me at all. All he wanted was Havencross because,” her voice took on a haughty air, mimicking Chiverton, “it is so well situated for smuggling.” She leaned her head back, thumping it on the thick oak beam holding up the wooden supports of the rock ceiling.
“So I gathered.”
“I should have known.” Her voice shook. “The moment the rumors started in London, I knew that no respectable man would connect himself to me. To my disgraced family. When he asked for my hand, I should have known. I trusted him, I gave him my heart, and he was a deceiver all along.”
“Did you, Elaine? Did you give him your heart?” From what he’d seen of their association, there hadn’t been much exchanging of hearts. He’d seen civility, cordiality, affection even, but nothing like the giving of a heart to the keeping of another.
She shrugged her shoulders and turned away.
He glanced down at the letter tucked into his waistcoat. “What I don’t understand is the letter. How did it fall back into his hands?”
She looked over at him, her face still beautiful despite the long, drawn look. “Your mother found it. And when you didn’t come home, she gave it to me to help find you. She knew I could read French. And like the fool I am, I asked Lord Chiverton’s help to decipher it. Because I didn’t want there to be secrets between us. No secrets. No lies.” She practically spat the words out. “See? Do you see how stupid I am?” A few tears pooled in the corners of her eyes. She tried to wipe them on her shoulder, but with her hands bound she could not reach.
Gareth tugged again on his irons, not caring about the burn in his arms nor the trickle of blood leaking from his leg. None of that caused as much pain as watching Elaine suffer and him utterly useless to help.
“The letter contained hints about a smuggler’s drop, but I didn’t know what they all meant. So I asked him.” She glanced over at Gareth. “The worst of it is I think Lord Chiverton is also responsible for the death of John.”
“From five years ago? That doesn’t seem likely.” Chiverton could not have been operating in these parts that long. Certainly not long enough to be behind John’s death. Though it was most certainly Chiverton who was responsible for his father’s death. Whether by his own hands or the hands of another, he’d given the order.
“I think it might be.” She looked so forlorn. “Gareth, we found a smuggler’s brand on one of John’s bones. The same mark was also on Chiverton’s letter.”
“Mark? What mark?” He’d not seen it. Chiverton had taken smuggling in a new direction if he was murdering people and then branding their bones. It was the pirates who committed heinous acts like that. Chiverton would do better to take on piracy. Seemed more his style.
“A chough carrying a lantern. It was on a rib bone. And on his letter, though it was . . . very . . . faint.”
Her eyes had locked onto the letter protruding from his waistcoat pocket as if he had a powder keg strapped to his chest. He bent his head forward to see what had captivated her attention. He moaned with the pain, his ribs burning. From his angle and with his hands bound behind him, he couldn’t get a full view.
“What it is?”
She smiled. “It’s nothing.”
She’d always been a terrible liar. “Elaine. When has deceiving me ever worked for you?”
She pursed her lips again. “I was surprised that Lord Chiverton left the letter with you, that’s all. I thought he would keep it. What is a spout, do you think?”
“Nice try.” She’d not divert him so easily. He pressed his chin to his chest and studied the letter again. There was something off about it. It was bigger and darker, as if yellowed by time. “This is not the same note I found in Chiverton’s phaeton.”
Something flashed in her eyes. “Really,” she said, her voice pitched a few octaves higher than normal. “I want to know what a spout is. In the smuggler’s note, it mentioned three spouts mark the spot. That’s the only part I couldn’t figure out.”
He leaned his head back, resting it on the beam. He was still losing blood, and the effects were taking their toll. He couldn’t pass out though. Not until he saw Elaine safely out of this mess.
“A spout is a smuggler’s lantern fashioned so that no light can be seen from the side, but only from straight on. A guide for the ship still at sea.” He sighed. “Now, what do you know about this letter in my pocket?”
She looked away. “Nothing. How should I know anything about Lord Chiverton and his dealings?”
He didn’t have the strength to press further. Chiverton’s shot was doing more damage than he’d thought.
“Gareth? What’s wrong?” She looked down at his leg. “You said it was just a graze.”
“I’m fine.” He gave her his most charming smile.
“I daresay you’re not very good at lying either.” She pulled against her bindings, leaning as far as she could to see his leg.
He twisted, grunting as the musket ball lit every nerve on fire. He managed to turn his thigh just enough that she could see the red stain leeching away his life.
She gasped. “Gareth, you’re bleeding.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed. I suppose I should have known that would happen after your lover shot me.” Immediately he regretted his words. He didn’t want to spend his last hours of life bitter at her. “I’m sorry.” He cautiously lowered his leg so it rested on the floor. “I didn’t mean that.” He would give anything if Elaine could make it out of here. But unless he could stop the bleeding, he wouldn’t be around long enough to help.
Elaine was silent for a long time. Too long.
“Elowen?”
“Gareth,” she said in small voice. “I have something I need to tell you. Something I’ve never told anyone.” But she didn’t continue. She gazed off at the wall of black rock shimmering with seeping moisture.
He closed his eyes, waiting, his energy draining.
“It is my fault John was killed,” she said at last, so softly he barely heard it.
What a ridiculous thing to say. “But—”
“Shh. Please. Just listen.”
He nodded. He would have made the motion of locking his lips except for the inconvenience of having his hands fettered.
“I sent John on an errand. He didn’t want to go, but I begged and pleaded, and he finally consented. It was late—long past dark and a storm about. He rode off on his horse, even though the errand was not so far. He thought if he hurried on horseback he could beat the weather.”
“But he never came home,” Gareth finished.
He remembered only too well how John Cardinham’s horse had been found wandering the fields of Havencross with no rider. The search had ensued with every person Mr. Cardinham could get his hands on out day and night looking for his son. Finally, they had to assume him dead. A few weeks later, the Cardinhams packed their trunks and fled to London, never to be seen again—until they fled back home. Quite a bit of fleeing for one family.
Coming only days after Elaine rejected him, it had been one of the lowest points in his life, to lose both his closest friends.
“It’s not your fault,” he said.
“Hush,” she chastised him again. “How is it you cannot simply listen?”
“Sorry.”
“I know Lord Chiverton had something to do with John’s death because the errand I sent him on was to deliver a letter. The letter that is now stuffed into your waistcoat pocket.”
He looked down again. “What is in this letter that could possibly warrant John’s death?”
Elaine shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing at all. He must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He must not have kept his eyes down.”
“So he was killed and tucked away in the cave as a warning to all. A claim about who this coast belonged to.”
If Gareth got out of here, he would do whatever it took to rid his home of these pests. Better to do without tea and French brandy and lace from Valenciennes than to live with marauders crawling the coastline.
“Who was the letter for?”
Elaine glanced away. “No one. It doesn’t matter now. We should focus on how to escape.”
He let it go. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and he didn’t have the energy to press. It was absurd for her to blame herself. No one had given his father a letter, and the same thing had happened to him. The only people responsible were the smugglers. Chiverton and whoever else he had working for him.
He leaned his head back. “I would love to escape. I’ve been trying for two days, and all it’s got me is bloody wrists and a ball in my leg.”
She tugged on her bindings. “I’ve almost . . .” She grunted and pulled until she cried out in pain. Then her eyes roved the cavern, though almost naught was visible in the dim light of the lantern.
When she looked back at him, there was real panic in her eyes. “I think he means to kill us.”
Gareth had already come to this conclusion when Chiverton had beaten him in this very cavern. “You’ll be fine,” he lied. “He wouldn’t dare kill a gentleman’s daughter from the most prominent family in the area. He just doesn’t want you sounding the alarm.”
She watched him carefully. He stared right back at her, hoping he could convince her, but she was right when she’d also pointed out that they knew each other too well.
He could barely stay awake. All his strength was leaking out onto the rocky floor. If not for Elaine, he would have succumbed to unconsciousness already. How easy to close his eyes and drift away.
He snapped his eyes open.
“Once they unload the goods and melt back into the countryside,” he paused to catch his breath, “you and Chiverton can come to an agreement, and he’ll set you free.”
“I’m never—” She let out a groan, straining against her bindings, and her hands broke free.