She hesitated. “I do not wish to be the cause of a breech between you and Captain Whitby.”
He tried to wave her concern away with a flick of his hand, but as the gesture managed to send his own empty cup spinning in its saucer, it failed to convey a convincing dismissal. Settling his palm over the cup, he stopped its motion with an alarming crunch of china against china. “I hardly know, Miss Pilkington, how to explain the case without giving offense. You will naturally assume that jealousy lies at the root of my displeasure, but I find I must beg your pardon and say that it has played no part.”
Her eyes widened. “Do you mean to say that you did not want—?”
“In the matter of your father’s expectations, and perhaps your own,” he said, choosing his words with care, “I find that what I would have done and what I wished to do were not perfectly aligned.”
“Oh,” she said, and this time her eyes sparkled. “Oh, I see.” Amusement played around her lips. “One’s inclination is not always at the service of one’s better judgment, is it?”
He cut his gaze away—answer enough, he supposed. “Does your father know?”
Hurriedly, nervously, she shook her head, then drew in a firm breath that lifted her shoulders. “But it does not matter. I am of age. And according to the arrangements set down at my parents’ betrothal, half of what Mama brought to her marriage will be settled upon me at mine, whether he likes my choice or not.”
“Whitby is a fortunate fellow,” he said, not thinking particularly of the money. He only hoped his oldest friend would prove worthy of such good fortune. Once, he would have had no doubt.
To paper over what might have been an awkward silence, he rose and filled a plate from the sideboard. When he returned to the table, Caroline set aside her coffee. “If you did not come to ask…” With one fingertip, she drew a line across the table linens, connecting the two of them. “What was the matter you wished to discuss?”
“It is time, I believe, to make clear to my friends that I do not intend to resign my commission.” With studied calm, he paused to take a bite of eggs, as if such an announcement were an ordinary one for a man in his position to make and easy enough for those around him to understand. “I will return to my regiment in the new year.”
He had managed to keep his voice firm, although in truth, neither staying nor going was the simple choice it had once been. But if everyone at Hawesdale imagined his military connections unbroken, the better chance the villain would be tempted by the promise of valuable information.
Before Caroline could react to his shocking revelation, he heard the bustle of another guest entering the breakfast room. Rising, he bowed to Lady Lydgate. “Good morning, ma’am. Allow me to ring for fresh coffee.”
“Never mind that,” she insisted with a dismissive flutter of her beringed hand. “I came to find out if it’s true.”
“If what is true, ma’am?” Caroline asked.
“My maid told me that it’s being whispered about the servants’ hall that Miss Burke is a…” She paused to glance theatrically from one corner of the room to another, as if she feared being overheard, then dropped her voice to an exaggerated whisper. “A spy.”
Mr. Remington was a fast worker, he’d say that much for the man.
“Preposterous.” Caroline’s brows dove downward and she looked to him to contradict the rumor.
Amateur theatricals had never been among his favored pastimes, and for a moment he doubted his ability to play his part. But Caroline’s worried expression, combined with Lady Lydgate’s voracious curiosity, left him little choice. The first bit was easy enough, he found, passing so near the neighborhood of the truth. “I’m afraid it is true, Miss Pilkington. Captain Whitby first suspected it and conveyed his suspicions to me. I went to her chamber in search of proof, and…well, you know how close to disaster I came.”
“But if she caught you at it, why offer her marriage?” Lady Lydgate exclaimed. “Why not expose her?”
“Very likely because he had not yet found the necessary evidence, ma’am,” Caroline interjected, “and did not want her to guess the real reason for his intrusion.”
By God, it was as if someone had handed her a script. Tristan managed to nod.
“And have you got what you wanted from the girl now?” the other lady demanded.
He set his teeth into the soft flesh of his inner cheek to fight down the grin that seemed determined to rise to his lips. “Not quite. It is my hope—” He pretended to break off, as if he feared he’d said too much.
True to form, Lady Lydgate was ready to coax the details from him. “Have you some plan to catch her?”
It was his turn to send a surreptitious glance around the room and lower his voice. “I’ve been expecting an important packet from my colonel, and I have hopes that with this change in the weather, it will be delivered today. Rather tempting bait to leave lying around tonight in…say, the library, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Official military correspondence?” Caroline’s eyes were wide with surprise, her lips creased with disapproval. “I should think you would not wish to risk—”
He heaved a reluctant sigh. “I know what you are about to say, Miss Pilkington. But I cannot expect to catch someone as clever as Miss Burke—oh, she is clever, have no doubt about that—with anything less valuable. Now,” he added, looking from one to the other with his sternest expression, “I must ask you not to say one word more of this.” Such a request would ensure that Lady Lydgate, at least, would retail the rumor far and wide. When his gaze fell on that woman, however, he found that she had anticipated him. She squeaked. “Ma’am? You have not already…?” He raked his eyes over her face, studying for signs of guilt.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she insisted. “Although…it’s just possible Sir Thomas might have overheard what Higgs said to me while she was dressing my hair. And, well…I did mention it to the earl when we passed in the corridor just now… And come to think of it, Mrs. Newsome was leaving her chamber as Lord Beresford and I were speaking, and she does seem to take a rather untoward interest in our conversations, so I suppose she could have overheard…”
Excellent. That was very nearly every guest accounted for, except Caroline’s parents. Unfortunately, he did not take her for a gossip.
“Well,” he said, unbending slightly toward Lady Lydgate, though not so much that she would doubt his sincerity, “I suppose it won’t do any harm, so long as that’s as far as the story goes.”
“The essential matter, I gather,” Caroline put in, looking thoughtful, “is that Miss Burke hears of the delivery of the letter without learning what you suspect.”
“Precisely. And that should be an easy matter to convey. Over dinner, perhaps.” A step in the corridor drew his notice before he could say more. He looked up to discover Whitby entering the breakfast room with Tristan’s stepmother on his arm.
David’s handsome face, carved in a deep smile as he laughed down at some amusing remark Guin had made, froze. Gradually, it melted into wariness as he watched Tristan, apparently expecting a confrontation. But over what? Whitby’s treatment of Erica? His proposal to the woman Tristan was supposed to marry? Or the possibility that he was in fact the spy?
Tristan nodded coolly and tried not to think about how many plots the two of them had hatched together, or what Whitby might say when Lady Lydgate spilled the “secret,” as she undoubtedly would. Nodding to them both, he said, “I wish you good morning. Regrettably, I cannot stay.” A flicker of concern crossed Guin’s face, but he pretended not to notice.
In the corridor, he paused only long enough to hear Lady Lydgate say to Caroline in a carrying voice, “I for one suspected something from the first. Don’t you, of all people, recall her behavior that first evening?” Caroline made some inaudible response, to which Lady Lydgate replied, “Pishposh, my dear girl. You heard what he said. It’s hardly sprea
ding gossip. Why, I daresay the tale might even serve to amuse your poor sick mother.”
And Caroline, who must at that moment be desperate for something to divert either or both of her parents’ attention, said with a bit more firmness, “Perhaps you’re right.”
He pulled his watch from his waistcoat pocket and flicked the catch with his thumb. Half past ten. By the dinner hour, every person under Hawesdale’s roof would surely know of the expected packet and the plan to use it to catch a spy. He snapped the watch shut again and set off to send Mr. Davies a note.
He was not quite to the study when he saw Armitage bearing down on him from the opposite direction, accompanied by the man himself.
“We’ll met again, Mr. Davies,” Tristan said as Armitage bowed and excused himself, his mission accomplished. “I was just on the point of sending you a message—”
“To enquire about the state of the farms?” Davies finished for him as Tristan showed him into the study. “Dreadful, Your Grace. Dreadful. ’Tis glad I am that you’re here now.” The strength of his Scottish burr grew with his agitation. “’Twill make it easier to learn your wishes about repairs and the like, and quicker to get the work done.”
Earlier, as he’d stood looking out the sitting room window, Tristan had imagined the devastation that must lie just beyond his view. Now, he thought of how blithely he’d once dismissed the importance of his role as duke in making things right again. He nodded, half expecting his man of business to berate him soundly for his ignorance, his arrogance. Whatever happened tonight, he understood at last how much he was needed here too. He had a decision to make—a decision that had once seemed simple, but which grew more difficult with every passing hour.
Thankfully, Davies was not the sort of man prone to waste time in recriminations. “But I’m forgetting what brought me,” he said as he reached into his coat and withdrew a stack of folded parchment. “No word yet on Lady Ashborough’s return. But the mail coach came through Endmoor late last night. I wanted to get these to you as soon as possible, in case there might be important business in’t.” He held out the handful of letters.
Tristan took them without any particular interest in their contents. Until he saw a familiar hand on the outer sheet of the one uppermost. He blinked to clear his vision and looked again to be sure.
The letter had been sent by Colonel Zebediah Scott.
Chapter 18
Having been left alone by Remington as he went about his gossip-mongering, Erica had spent the rest of the morning in a dream-addled sleep that did little to make up for the night before or to prepare for the night ahead. Again and again, she saw Whitby’s leering face accuse her; now, however, he was joined by the whole leering company, pointing and laughing and saying they had always suspected the worst, while Tristan stood to the side, arms crossed over his chest, and declared in her defense that such a shatterbrained creature could never be a spy.
In the afternoon, she made up her mind to visit the conservatory. Why should she squander an opportunity to study and sketch, merely because of what else had transpired beneath its glass roof, the competing memories of Whitby’s words and Tristan’s kisses? Clutching her journal and a freshly sharpened pencil, she pushed herself across the threshold. It was just a room.
Under the sun’s brilliant rays, the glasshouse fairly steamed. Absent the clatter of rain, she would have been willing to swear she could hear the sounds of growing and blooming and ripening, an erotic symphony that filled her ears and her mind with the groaning, aching pleasures of the night before. Groping in the pocket of her sturdy work apron, she found the cotton wool, stuffed it in her ears, and worked until the pages of her journal were limp.
At last, when the sun was low on the horizon and the trickle of sweat down her spine had left her chilled, Remington came into the room, bearing a folded, unsealed note.
Swiping the back of one dirty hand over her damp forehead, she reached with the other to take it from him. The trap is set. When you come to dinner, it read in a bold, dark hand—Tristan’s hand, behave as if nothing has changed.
She refolded the note, tucked it between the pages of her journal. Could she do it? Go into a crowd of strangers? Ignore the judgment in their eyes? She’d done it often enough, it was true, but she was no actress. What had she been thinking when she agreed to play this part? She looked into Remington’s face. “What if I fail?”
“You won’t, Miss Erica.” His voice sounded far away, muffled by the cotton wool. “You can’t. Otherwise, the real culprit may suspect what’s afoot.”
With a sigh, she plucked the cotton from her ears, then reached behind her back and tugged loose the apron strings, slipped the garment over her shoulders, and laid it carefully on the bench. Finally she rose, gathered her journal, and nodded once. She had promised herself she would be brave. She would do this for him.
* * * *
In some ways, the dinner itself was worse that all her lurid, distorted nightmares, for no amount of fidgeting or pressing her fingertips to her eyelids or pinching her thigh through the layers of her skirts could dispel it or give her a moment’s peace. For the most part, the other guests moved and spoke and ate as if she were utterly invisible—a prospect that, while pleasing in theory for one who generally felt awkward in company, turned out to be miserable in practice. Tristan held himself aloof, neither polite nor impolite. No one seemed to remark his behavior to her either way. The matter of their midnight escapade had, it seemed, been pushed aside by the greater thrill of a spy in their midst, although no one spoke of it.
Except, that was, Lady Lydgate. “Did you hear the news?” she asked Captain Whitby in an overloud voice. “The Duke of Raynham received a confidential missive from his colonel just this day and repaired to the library to pore over it for hours.” A glance over her shoulder at the last, to confirm Erica was in earshot. “I wonder what news it contained.” Erica pointedly looked the other way before the woman was tempted to say more.
Only the duchess behaved with kindness toward her. More than her usual kindness, in fact. So much so that Erica caught herself wondering whether she too was only playing a part. When they approached the table, she discovered the duchess had gone so far as to have the seating irregularly arranged. Erica sat down at her right hand.
“Are you feeling quite well, Miss Burke?” the duchess inquired over soup.
“Yes, Your Grace. Perfectly well.”
While the fish was being served, she said, “I worry that you spend too much time in the heat of the conservatory.”
“Undoubtedly, Your Grace. I have a regrettable tendency to lose track of time.”
“You need a good night’s rest,” she declared later as she drove her spoon into a mound of frothy syllabub, her brow creased with concern. “The house will, I hope, be perfectly quiet tonight. No storms, no…disturbances. Nothing at all to draw you from your bed.”
“No, Your Grace.”
“Allow me to send my maid to you. She prepares a sleep tonic that has always worked without fail.”
Oh, dear. The duchess, disinclined to think ill of anyone, seemed determined to do everything in her power to put Erica beyond the power of suspicion, even if it required drugging her into a stupor. Next she would suggest setting a guard outside Erica’s chamber door to ensure an unbroken night’s rest, and if she did that, the whole plan would be ruined, for everyone must believe she was free to roam.
With very little hope of aid, given that Tristan had hardly looked her way all evening, she sent a desperate glance twenty feet down the table.
He gave no sign of having seen her silent plea.
“Or perhaps a—” the duchess began. But before she could complete the suggestion, Tristan laid his palm flat against the table and gave a nod in his stepmother’s direction. Immediately, she rose and laid aside her napkin. “Shall we leave the gentlemen to their port, ladies?”
Ami
d the scrape of chairs, the rustle of silk, and the murmur of conversation as the women rose as one to withdraw, Erica longed to slip from the room. But to do so would disrupt all their careful plans. So she waited, sipped tea, pretended not to hear Lady Lydgate’s speculations.
After some time, the gentlemen joined them. All but Tristan. “The butler came bearing an urgent missive from Mr. Davies and he left,” Mr. Newsome explained in answer to the duchess’ query.
At first, Erica’s heart fluttered in alarm. An emergency? Something to do with her sister? But of course it must be a ruse, a further attempt to assure the spy in their midst that Tristan had left his papers—and the house itself—unguarded.
No one suggested cards or forfeits tonight. While the evening was yet young, they retired to their separate chambers, curious glances darted among the company. “Good night,” Erica said firmly as she closed her door.
But before many moments had passed, she opened it again. In the corridor all was silent. No one watched as she made her way to the library.
Every pair of draperies but one had been tightly drawn, and the sliver of light that passed between those, red with the setting sun, only made the rest of the room darker in comparison. Dark, and silent as the grave she discovered as she stepped across the thick carpet toward the desk. Papers had been scattered across its otherwise empty top with apparent carelessness. A circle of wax on the edge of one sheet marked it as a letter, a long letter. Three sheets, at least, and no doubt a masterful imitation of what it pretended to be: confidential correspondence between Major Laurens and his colonel. Without a candle, she could not hope to make out a word. She walked on.
Three sides of the library were lined with bookshelves, surrounding the doorway and running up both sides of the twin fireplaces that stood at either end of the long room. Near the middle of the room stood the desk, neither facing the wall of windows nor turned away from it, as if the one who had positioned it had feared the tempting view but not enough to shut it out entirely.
The Duke's Suspicion (Rogues and Rebels) Page 22