Asher Wellingham came to Haversham House early the next morning and hard on the heels of a note he had sent. And he came alone.
The drawing room where Miriam and Emerald sat to receive him had been hastily tidied and what little furniture they had in the house had been brought down to fill out the spaces left from an auction they had held almost two months prior in York. Quietly. Secretly. The recompense they had gathered from the exercise had reflected the clandestine nature of the adventure. Still, money could be translated into food and beggars could not be choosers. At least they still had the silver tea service, placed now on a side table.
This morning Emerald wore her second-best gown of light blue velvet with lace trimming around the neckline and an extra petticoat sewn into the base of the wide double skirt for length. On her head she wore a matching mobcap, the scratchy lace making a red rash on the soft underside of her throat. If she had had her potions from home, she might have been able to ease the itchiness. The names on the bottles in the London apothecaries were indecipherable.
Indecipherable!
Everything here seemed that way. Medicines. Places. The weather. People. The Duke of Carisbrook.
‘Ladies.’ This morning his voice was underlaid with both tiredness and purpose. ‘I have come to you this morning on a rather delicate manner.’ He cleared his throat and Emerald caught a hint in his eyes of what she could only determine as uncertainty, though the impression was fleeting before the more familiar and implacable urbanity returned. ‘I was wondering whether it would be possible to speak with the young man who resides here with you.’
‘Young man?’ Miriam’s response wavered slightly.
‘The young man who helped my sister yesterday evening. My servant followed him when he did not stay to be thanked, and it was to this house that he returned. This morning at around the hour of five after sending his carriage on.’
Miriam looked so flabbergasted that Emerald felt bound to break across her silence. ‘Perhaps he means Liam, Aunt Miriam?’ she prompted and hoped that her aunt might take the hint, though as blankness and silence lengthened she realised she would have to brazen this out by herself. ‘Yes, it must be Liam that you speak of. My cousin. He was here for two days only and left this morning for the country, but I shall tell him that you came to relay your thanks. Now,’ she added as if the whole subject was decidedly passé and she wanted no more discussion, ‘would you like tea?’
The Duke’s returning glance was so cold that Emerald felt her heart tremble, and his voice when he spoke was fine edged with anger.
‘My sister said Mr Kingston had an unusual accent, Lady Emma. Would this accent be the same one as your own?’
‘It is, your Grace.’ She did not elaborate, but as he swiped his hair back off his face she saw that the two last fingers on his right hand were missing and the stumps where they once had been were criss-crossed in scar tissue.
He has become a ruthless warrior because of the actions of my family.
She made herself stop. She could not feel sorry for a man who had stalked her father and run him through with the sharp edge of his sword. More than once, it was said. And more than what was warranted.
Warranted?
Therein lay the rub. She had heard the story of Asher Wellingham’s hatred for her father from every camp except his own. And if life had taught her anything it was the fact that things were seldom black and white. Aye, grey came in many shades. Her father’s dreams. Her mother’s disappearance. Her own childhood lost between the scramble for easy gold and the rum-soaked taverns of Kingston Town.
Lord, she had to be careful. She had to appear exactly who it was she purported to be or else he would know her. Expose her. Consign Ruby to the care of the nuns in the Hill Street Convent for ever. Ruby. Her heart twisted as she remembered the last sight of her little half-sister being bundled away by the dour and formidable Sister Margaret. How long had it been now? Over a hundred days. The time of passage to England and the weeks waiting for Carisbrook to appear. Without the map she could provide neither home nor sustenance, the squalor of the Kingston Town port streets no place for a fey and frightened child of eight.
Accordingly she schooled impatience and, catching the rough gist of her aunt’s conversation, observed the man opposite carefully.
This morning he was dressed in fawn trousers and a brown jacket, the cravat matching his white shirt loosely tied in a casual style she had not seen before. With one long leg crossed over the other, he gave the impression of a man well used to power and unquestioned authority and his confidence was contagious after years of living with a father who had little of either.
Damn it, but she must not think like this either. Beau’s choices had been foisted on him by his own self-doubt and excessive introspection. If at times he had made decisions that were suspect, he had still tried through it all to provide a home for her and Ruby. A home Asher Wellingham had shattered when he returned to the Caribbean bent on revenge.
Revenge.
His revenge and now her revenge? And what difference lay between them as the thin veneer of right and wrong tumbled under the greater pressure of need? She shook her head and poured the tea. When he stood to take the cup from her, their fingers accidentally met, and everything slowed.
Time.
Breath.
Fear.
The beat of her heart narrowed as she felt the warmth of his skin. Reaching out, she grabbed the arm of the sofa. To stop herself falling. Into him. For ever.
Whatever was wrong with her? She was acting like the simpering misses so prevalent in London and she did not even recognise these constant, damning blushes that seemed to consume her from head to toe. Her resolve firmed.
‘Excuse me,’ she said when she saw his pupils widen. ‘The accident at the ball yesterday has left me rather poorly…’ Leaving the explanation in mid-air she noticed that he had placed his cup on the side table as if making ready to catch her again.
Poorly?
When in her life had she ever used such a word? In the fading light of day she suddenly saw herself as he would see her. Vulnerable. Delicate. Feminine. She almost had to repress a smile. So easy to make men believe exactly what you would want them to. So simple to become a person of such little account. Lifting a fan from the table next to her, she was pleased for the cooling breeze it engendered and used the moment to take stock.
Asher Wellingham was older and harder now and the icy brittleness that coated his eyes was disconcerting. Here, in the blandness of a London drawing room, she could feel a barely concealed danger, a thread of the warrior only lightly clothed beneath his well-pressed jacket and pantaloons. Untamed. Ready to pounce should she put a foot wrong. Oh, God, she blanched, she had already put a foot wrong, last night in her haste to get home, and she was worried by the way he watched her now.
How could he not know me?
She almost smiled at the whisper of the words as she took a sip of sugary tea, the quick infusion of sweetness bolstering her confidence further. With the practice of one well used to schooling her expression into the shape of something she wasn’t, she placed her hand across her mouth and stifled a yawn. Effortlessly.
Asher watched Emma Seaton with an ever-growing feeling of speculation. He could not understand this woman at all. Nothing about her quite made sense. She still wore the same gloves she had had on last night, which was odd given that they were stained. And this morning, although the scar above her eyebrow was still unhidden, a nasty bruise on her cheekbone had been smothered in thick beige face paint in an attempt to conceal it. From whom?
‘You have hurt yourself?’
‘I fell against the side of a door. Miriam treated it for me just an hour ago and I hoped it was not too…too noticeable.’ Her hand hovered across the mark and he was touched by the movement. She wore the oldest clothes he had ever seen a woman dare to at any social occasion and her hair today was as badly tended as it had been yesterday. Yet she was embarrassed by the bruise upon her face? Nothing about Emma Seaton made sense.
Nothing.
She always wore gloves. She had the same accent as the mysterious and absent Mr Kingston. And she was frightened and decidedly delicate.
Looking around him, other things jarred. The furniture was as badly down at heel as her clothing, yet in the shelf by the window sat well over a hundred books, leather bound and expensive. Kingslake. Wordsworth. Byron and Plato. English was the predominant translation, though many were embellished with the script of the Arabian world. Who the hell here would read those? Defoe stood in company with John Locke, non-conformist authors who chided the establishment with an underlying hint of something darker.
Could the books be Liam Kingston’s? He was about to question the Countess on the matter when the doorbell rang and his sister and her maid swept in.
‘I am so awfully sorry to just drop in on you like this, Lady Haversham, but I had to come. I am Lady Lucinda Wellingham, and I was informed that Mr Kingston returned home here last night. After he helped me?’ The final enquiry was murmured somewhat breathlessly. ‘It’s just that I would so like to thank him, you see?’
Asher crossed the room to stand by his sister. ‘Liam Kingston has departed, Lucinda. Back to…?’ His voice was filled with question.
‘His home.’ Miriam’s hesitation shrieked volumes.
‘But he will return?’ Lucy could barely contain her interest.
‘I do not think so. No.’ Emerald had regained her wits now that Lucy Wellingham’s face held not even the slightest hint of recognition. ‘He is married, you see, and his wife is from America. From Boston. She wants to move back there as soon as she has had her fourth child.’
Lucinda paled noticeably. ‘Married with four children?’ She gawped. ‘But he hardly looked old enough.’
‘Oh, people are always saying that to him. Are they not, Aunt?’ Desperation lent her voice credence and she was pleased to see Miriam nod vigorously. ‘Perhaps in the dark you did not see him properly.’
The Duke of Carisbrook’s face was inscrutable, though his sister insisted on some recompense. ‘We are going to Falder next week, Asher. Could we not invite the Countess and her niece? As a means of saying thank you.’
Emerald’s heartbeat accelerated at the question.
‘Indeed.’ His reply could hardly have held less of a welcome, but, seeing the glimmer of opportunity, she seized upon it.
‘We would be delighted to visit your home, Lady Lucinda. Why, I could hardly think of anywhere I should rather go.’
A way into Falder. A first unexpected providence. And although Emerald wished that he could have shown more enthusiasm for the promise of their company, she was not daunted. One night. That was all it would take.
‘And your cousin, Liam Kingston, would be most welcome,’ Lucinda added, ‘for I should deem it an honour to thank him for his assistance in person.’ She gripped her brother’s arm in entreaty and Asher Wellingham inclined his head in response.
‘Bring him along by all means, Lady Emma, for a man who can dispose so summarily of the Earl of Westleigh and deliver my sister home without recompense is to be much admired.’
The thought did cross Emerald’s mind that his voice had an odd edge of question to it but she couldn’t be certain, for he did not look at her again before gathering his sister’s hand into his own and politely bidding them goodbye.
As they heard his carriage pull away, Miriam began to smile. ‘I would say that went very well, would you not, my dear? Aye, very well indeed.’
Emerald crossed to the window and looked out.
Very well?
She wondered if her aunt needed new glasses and smiled at the thought before gingerly touching her own throbbing cheekbone.
‘What do you know about the Countess of Haversham, Jack?’ Asher leaned back in a chair in his library and drew on his cigar. He’d barely managed an hour of sleep last night but, with his body mellow with brandy, the peace here was pleasant. For just a moment the familiar anger that haunted him was quieter.
‘Her husband, Matthew, died from heart failure five years back and it was said that his gambling debts were substantial.’
‘So the Countess sold off the furniture to pay her creditors?’
‘She what?’
‘Sold off the furniture. I was at the Haversham town house in Park Street this morning and there were three chairs and a table in one room and little else in any of the others.’
Jack leant forward, intrigued. ‘That explains the gowns they wear then. And the niece’s hairstyle. Home-done, I would wager, and by her very own hand, though there was something Tony Formison told me yesterday that did not ring true. He said that Lady Emma had not come down from the country at all, but had arrived a few months ago aboard one of his father’s ships with two black servants and a number of very heavy-looking chests.’
Asher began to laugh. The books he had seen in the drawing room? They were hers? ‘Formison was on the docks when she arrived?’
‘Aye, and he said that he could have sworn her hair was longer.’
‘Longer?’
‘To her waist according to Tony, and looking nothing like it appears to now.’ He stood and retrieved his hat from the table beside him, bending to look at the label on the bottle as he did so. ‘It’s late and long past the time that I should have been home, but you always have such fine brandy, Asher. Where’s this one from?’
‘From the Charente in France.’
‘A boon from your last trip?’
Asher nodded. ‘I’ll have some sent to you, but in return I want you to find out from Formison exactly where the boat that brought Emma Seaton to London came in from. Which port and which month.’
Jack’s eyebrows shot up.
‘Ask discreetly and in the name of precaution, for I don’t want problems resulting from this information.’
‘Problems for Emma Seaton or problems for yourself? I thought you seemed rather taken by her at my ball.’
‘You misinterpret things, Jack. I put my arms out and caught her as she threw herself against me. Hard, I might add, and with none of the wiles that I am more used to. Before she had even hit the floor she had her eyes open; there was a calculation there that might be construed as unnerving.’
Jack began to laugh. ‘You’re saying she may have done it on purpose?’
‘I doubt I’ll ever know, though a betting man would have to say that the odds were more than even.’ The humour faded quickly from his eyes as he continued. ‘Besides, I am too old to fall for the tricks of a green and simpering country miss.’
‘You’re thirty-one and hardly over the hill and Lady Emma is…different from the others…less readable. If you are not interested in her, then I sure as hell am.’
‘No!’ Asher was as surprised by the emotion in the word as Jack was, and to hide it he collected the remains of the brandy and corked the top. ‘For the road,’ he muttered as he handed the bottle to him, swearing quietly as the door shut behind his departing friend.
Emma Seaton.
Who exactly was she? For the first time in a very long while a sense of interest welled to banish the ennui that had overcome him after Melanie’s death.
Melanie.
His wife.
He fingered the ring that he wore on his little finger, the sapphires wrought in gold the exact shade of eyes he would never see again. Her wedding ring. His glance automatically went to the missing digits of his other hand. With good came bad.
He frowned and remembered his return to England after a good fourteen months of captivity. Any innocence he might have been left with had been easily stripped away. He was different. Harder. He could see it reflected in the face of his brother and in the eyes of his mother and aunt. Even his impetuous sister was afraid, sometimes, of him.
Running his hand through his hair, he frowned. Brandy made him introspective. And Emma Seaton touched him in places that he had long thought of as dead.
It was the look in her eyes, he decided, and the husky timbre of her voice when she forgot the higher whine. She gave the impression of a frail and fragile woman, yet when she had fallen against him at the ball he had felt an athletic and toned strength. The sort of strength that only came with exercise or hard work.
He was certain that the mishap had been deliberate and he tried to remember who else had been standing beside him. Lance Armitage and Jack’s father John Derrick, older men with years of responsibility and solid morality behind them. Nay, it was him she had targeted and now he had asked her to Falder.
On cue?
No, that could not possibly be. He was seeing problems where none existed. The woman was scared of her own shadow, for God’s sake, and unusually clumsy. She was also threadbare poor. A wilder thought surfaced. Was she after the Carisbrook fortune? A gold digger with a new and novel way of bagging her quarry? He remembered the countless women who had tried to snare him since Melanie’s death.
Lord, he thought and lifted a candlestick from the mantelpiece before opening the door and striking out for the music room. Melanie’s piano stood in a raft of moonlight, the black and white keys strangely juxtaposed between shadows. Leaning against the mahogany, he pressed a single note and it sounded out against the silence, a mellow echo of vibration lost in darkness.
Like he was lost, he thought suddenly, before dismissing the notion altogether. He was the head of the Carisbrook family and everybody depended on him. If he faltered…? No, he could not even think of the notion of faltering. Carefully he replaced the lid of the piano across the keys. Dust had collected upon the hinges and had bedded into the intricate inlaid walnut that spelled out his wife’s initials.
Ash unto ash, dust unto dust.
Tomorrow he would inform his housekeeper to instruct the staff to clean the music room again. It had been too long since he had forbidden its use to anyone save himself. And his wife would have abhorred the fact that her prized piano had sat unplayed for all these years.
Still, he could not quite leave the room, an essence of something elusive on the very edges of his logic.
Something to do with Emma Seaton. Her turquoise eyes. The scar. The sound of laughter against the sea.
The sea?
Was he going mad? He crossed to the window. Outside the night was still. Dark. Cold. And the cloud that covered the moon made his leg ache, shattered bone healed badly into fragments.
Fragments.
They were all that was left of him sometimes, a shaky mosaic of loss and regret.
‘God,’ he whispered into the night. ‘I am becoming as maudlin as my mother.’ Blowing out the candle, he resolved to find some solace in his library. At least till the dawn when he could sleep.
Azziz returned to the house in Park Street just before midnight, and Emerald hoped that this time he had been careful to scour the neighbouring roads to make certain he was unobserved.
‘I have heard word on the docks that McIlverray is on his way to London, Emmie.’
‘Then he knows about the cane—why else would he come?’ She frowned; this news put a whole different perspective on everything. Karl McIlverray, her father’s first mate, was as corrupt as he was clever and had a band of loyal men who followed him blindly. Any intelligence circulating the docks of Kingston Town usually ended up in his ears and Karl McIlverray had been with her father long enough to put two and two together. He would know exactly what was inside the cane.
Damn, it was getting more and more complicated and she wished for the thousandth time that her father had kept the treasure in the vault of a bank or in a safe where it could have been more easily accessed.
Time. It was slipping away from her.
How long before he arrives?’
‘A week or even ten days—the storms out in the Atlantic might slow them down, if we are lucky. I’ll leave a man in place to make certain we see them before they see us.’
‘And you?’
‘Toro and I will come to Falder. We can camp somewhere close and keep an eye on things.’
Emerald was not certain as to the merits of the plan for they would be easily seen in the English countryside around the house. But if McIlverray came, she would need to be able to summon help, and quickly. She imagined the aristocratic Carisbrook family coming face to face with any of them and her heart pounded. And if someone innocent got hurt because of her…! She could not finish.
She had to be in and out of Falder quickly and on a boat back to Jamaica, making sure in the interim that Karl McIlverray had word of her movements. Another more worrying thought occurred to her.
‘What if the cane is back here in London?’
Azziz frowned. ‘It wasn’t in the house a month ago when Toro and I searched it.’
‘But he may have brought it with him this time. The limp still troubles him.’
‘Have you seen him use a cane at all in public?’
‘No.’ She began to smile. ‘And I do not think that he would. Each time I have been in his company he is careful that others may not notice the ailment. A cane would only draw their attention to what he seeks to hide.’
Privacy. Sanctuary. She sensed these things were important to the enigmatic Duke of Carisbrook and her spirits lifted.
‘Miriam and I are due to leave for Falder soon and I can search the house easily under the cover of night.’
‘The Duke of Carisbrook does not strike me as a man who could be easily fooled.’
‘How does he strike you then?’
‘Tough. Dangerous. Ruthless. A man who would have little time for lies.’
‘Then I must be out of Falder before he knows them as such.’
‘Do not underestimate him, Emmie.’
‘You are beginning to sound like Miriam.’ She smiled and laid her hand on his arm, her fingers tightening as she remembered all the other times in her life she had depended on Azziz. If she lost him too…? If anything went terribly wrong…? As she tried to banish fear she was consumed by sadness. When was the last time that she had taken a breath in joy and let all of it out again?
She could barely remember.
Her father’s death, Miriam’s agedness, and a debt that was increasing with each and every passing day. She could go neither backwards nor forwards and the options of anything else were fast shrinking. What happened to people who ran out of money in London? She shook her head in fright.
The poorhouse took them.
The place of liars and cheats.
A liar. It was who she had become. If she could find the map, she could fashion a home. Not a grand one, but a for-ever place. A place to stay and grow and be. A place like St Clair. She closed her eyes against the pure thread of desperation that snaked itself around her heart, because she knew that the old house was gone, up in flames, the living embodiment of the McIlverray hatred for her father. And grounded perhaps on a sense of justice, for Beau had promised Karl McIlverray far more than he had ever delivered.
She let out her breath. Beau had promised everyone more than he had ever delivered and she needed to make it right.
Right?
If she hadn’t been so worried, she might have smiled at the thought. Right? Wrong? Good? Bad? She remembered Beau’s interpretation of law and doubted that Asher Wellingham’s would be even remotely similar. Enormous wealth and righteous morals were easy when you were not staring down the barrel of a gun and saying what you thought the bearer would most like to hear.
Lies and deception.
It was all that she was left with as truth withered under the harsher face of reality.
Azziz pulled his blade from the leather sheath at his shin and wiped it with an oiled rag from his pocket. The movement caught her attention.
The sheer danger of it all was no longer as exhilarating as it had once been. Now, instead of seeing the adventure in everything she saw the pitfalls, and an encounter with McIlverray worried her a lot more than she allowed Azziz to see that it did.
Was she growing old?
Twenty-one…twenty-two in six months. Sometimes now she caught herself looking across at other women her age as they walked the streets with husbands and children at their side.
She tried to remember what her own mother had looked like, tried to remember the touch of her hand or the cadence of her voice and came up with nothing.
Nothing. The emptiness of memory caught at her with a surprising melancholy. To distract herself, she began to speak of the entertainment for the following night.
‘There is a party at the Bishop of Kingseat’s that I am indebted to attend. Lady Flora has been generous in her friendship…’ She faltered.
‘Will Carisbrook be there?’
‘I think so.’
‘Miriam said he seemed interested in you. If he should find out even a little—’
‘I know,’ she interrupted Azziz before he went further and was glad when he left the room for the kitchens on the ground floor to find his supper.