The Slide Into Ruin

by Bronwyn Stuart

  Ethan nodded, a very large smile stretching his mouth. “I told you I could do it.”

  “Gravy indeed.” She forced a chuckle. “But remember not a word, to anyone. And please do have a care for Gabriella and Grace’s reputations.”

  “Why? What will their rep—reptations do for us anyhow?”

  “They will be able to marry lovely men and have families of their own when they are older but no man will offer for them if they are living under the roof of a ship’s captain with no chaperone about.”

  Grace interjected, “I won’t marry any man who would not trust me enough to know what we do under desperate measures is not always of our own volition. My word that my reputation is intact will have to be enough.”

  “You needn’t worry about it at all,” Eliza assured her. “Darius was merely scaring us. We won’t be shooting anyone. Nathanial is going to give me the pistol and I will lock it away in Father’s desk so it can’t hurt anyone.”

  “No,” Nathanial said quietly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He was right about one thing. You should not have been out there with those men. I should be protecting you. Not the other way around.”

  “I was perfectly safe. What would they have done? I had the rifle.”

  “And it had no bullets!” Nathanial cried, his usual boyish calm cracking to make way for a temper Eliza had barely ever witnessed. “We could have a cannon out on the drive but with no balls, it is just a cannon and wouldn’t scare a weasel. What if the earl and his son do return and we still have no funds and no sick father upstairs? We don’t even have an upstairs anymore!”

  Ethan began to sob on the settee. Grace did her best to comfort him while Gabriella stood between her shouting siblings. “Arguing will not do any difference here. Eliza was right. We could not go with him today.”

  Eliza just didn’t know what else to say. She’d thought they were all in it together. Partners with a secret so huge it might destroy them all if not handled carefully. She knew they should have gone with Darius, of course she knew. They needed help, but she had to discern how much information he had in hand before she delivered their fate to a stranger. She was saved an answer when there came a loud knock from the front door.

  The very last thing they needed were more surprises or visitors.

  “I’ll get—”

  Nathanial cut her off. “No. I will answer the door. You take the children and get out of sight.” He raised the pistol before his body, drew a deep breath and then walked out into the corridor.

  Eliza ushered the three children back into the hidden tunnel behind the hearth and closed the timbers quietly, Ethan too frightened to argue about demons or darkness.

  She peeked out into the corridor next to the great stairs, leading only to a ruined landing, and gasped. Darius’s men had returned but not empty-handed. They lugged in three huge pine trees and set them on the black and white tiled floor, snow still clinging to the branches and leaving dirty puddles as it melted.

  The heavily bearded one spoke as he pulled his woollen coat closer around his ears. “Lock this door and don’t be opening it again, you hear? And hold that pistol at the ready, no good to you pointed at the ground. I’ll be back later with supper but I’ll use the window in your sleeping quarters.” He looked past Nathanial to make eye contact with Eliza. “Any time you change your mind and want to sleep without the fear, you just let us know. Send the boy through the forest to the house and we’ll come back for you.”

  Her eyes burned and the lump in her throat was welcome. Eliza nodded but didn’t trust herself to speak. She was too afraid she would crumble and fold and beg them to take her siblings to safety.

  Perhaps Darius’s scare tactics were working after all.

  *

  Two days later, Darius and Marcus found themselves all fancied up and perched uncomfortably on little bench seats outside of a solicitor’s office in London on a dank and dark afternoon. Thank God the Duke of Penfold’s previous valet still lived in the village bordering both his new home and the Penfold estate. It had taken only a few coins to get the disgruntled former employee to give Darius the direction he needed.

  He had asked himself a thousand times on the hard ride to the capital why he pursued this line of inquiry but the duke’s letter changed everything. Now that Eliza and her family were to play such an integral part in his plans, he had to know exactly what and with whom he dealt.

  When Deklin Montrose, his employer and friend, asked him to return to England and retrieve funds owed him by three gentlemen of great worth and importance, Darius had been keen for the challenge. When he’d discovered one of the ‘gentlemen’ was his father, he’d jumped at the chance for a little revenge on the side, a chance to make his sire miserable if only for a short time. He hadn’t expected to be given the house of his childhood in return for one man’s debt. He certainly hadn’t expected the third man to be dead and offering so much more than mere money for his.

  The letter the young Ethan had saved for him held more complications than he could have imagined and he was glad the boy hadn’t revealed it to his siblings earlier. The Duke of Penfold had certainly laid a great deal of groundwork down before putting that bullet in his head.

  Inside the still-sealed envelope was a special licence to marry and a letter stating that in return for his portion of the debt owed Montrose Shipping, Deklin was to take the duke’s daughter’s hand in marriage and the dowry that would come with her would settle almost everything between them. What had started out as a sound investment for three men with serious penchants for gambling had turned into a nightmare too hard to handle for all parties involved. The envelope also held the suicide note that would absolve Eliza and her brothers and sisters, all held together with the ducal seal pressed into wax next to Penfold’s shaky signature.

  Darius had sworn long and loud when he’d read Penfold’s last words. He was in so far over his head and felt as though he was drowning in the messy complications. When he’d shared the information with his three closest confidants, they’d sworn alongside him.

  Marcus had come up with the most logical of their first steps, always the serious thinker amongst them, seeing the bigger picture rather than the most urgent. “You need to find out if this dowry exists,” he’d stated.

  “Montrose isn’t going to marry the chit,” Darius had declared with frustration. The sinking feeling lowered in his stomach as heavy as three hot cannon balls. Never a gambling man himself, he’d laid it all on the line before setting sail. Though he owed his sire nothing, he owed his friend too much. He’d (not very wisely) paid the debts owed to Deklin in advance. Out of his own pockets. If anything happened to him on the voyage or after, Deklin wouldn’t be out of purse.

  Darius was wealthy in his own right, both in earned gold and ill-gotten goods, but he’d paid the three titled men’s ways at a heavy dent to his personal wealth and then set sail. So, the debt was no longer owed to Montrose, it now belonged to Darius. Which meant, so did Eliza Penfold. In a way.

  She could not possibly have a clue about this turn of events and he wondered how she would take the news. He’d certainly never envisaged purchasing a bride but under the current set of circumstances he could see no other way around it. If he let the Penfolds go about on their own and she somehow found the money to pay her father’s debt to Wickham, then Darius’s own revenge plans for his sire fell to dust. If she didn’t give them the money, then Wickham and Harold might very well be forced to even more desperate measures. Either way the children were in danger and Darius would not let them starve, or worse.

  There was also his ship and his men to think about. The Persecutor had sustained heavy damages on the crossing from Boston. There was very little money for repairs and while he sailed for Montrose, he’d given his word: no piracy. At all.

  It had taken only an hour for Darius to come to a definitive first step. “I will need to speak to Eliza and find out about this dowry of hers.”

&n
bsp; “She’s not just going to tell you something like that,” Wes said. His first reasonable input all day. “She might even wonder why you’re asking. Not a dumb one, that girl. You know, it could help to have an English wife, see you and Montrose through those doors that keep shutting in your Yankee faces.”

  Darius kicked himself that he hadn’t thought of it like that. His friend was right about the doors, but despite Darius’s mixed accent, he wasn’t a Yankee. Not yet. He still had a claim to being English. Not that it mattered with his reputation.

  Damn it. “All right, so I will ride to London and see the duke’s solicitor. If we can get our hands on a copy of the will, then we will be able to sort the truth from the rot regarding the Penfolds and make our decisions from there.” Then he would be free to deal with his father and brother.

  Darius smiled a cunning smile. He wasn’t usually one for devious tricks but his father had to be stopped. He could not be left to keep terrorising innocents. Wickham had made it well known to Darius before he was even ten years old that he was a bastard and would never amount to anything. After beating him to within an inch of unconsciousness, he’d warned Darius that if he ever returned to London, he would bandy about the full story of his conception. That Darius’s mother had thrown herself at the earl and begged him to take her over and over and then killed herself in a fit of rage over unrequited love after the babe had been born.

  If he’d been stronger then he’d have fought back but he’d been as defenceless as a child. He wasn’t now.

  Deviousness was the only trait Darius saw in himself handed him by his father and he was willing to use it as a weapon in this battle. Eliza Penfold was an obstacle to the steps in his plans but the ultimate goal still stood fast.

  “Mr… ah… Mr Darius?” a young clerk called from across a cluttered desk, beckoning him to rise and come forward.

  He cleared the soot and dust from his throat. How he hated London. “It’s just Darius. One name.”

  The clerk nodded and yanked on his necktie with one finger to his neckline, appearing to be about to impart bad news and knowing Darius would be unhappy to hear it. “My employer, that is Mr Westrill, has been called out on urgent business and must reschedule his meeting with you. How does next week suit?”

  “It suits me not at all,” Darius said with a shake of his head. Even though he had men watching the Penfold ruins it did not mean he wanted to tarry.

  “May I ask what the nature of your business is with Mr Westrill? He was quite perplexed as to your request.”

  Darius didn’t miss the gleam in the young man’s eye but was it a gleam for gold or a gleam for gossip? “I am serving as the new man of business to the Duke of Penfold. He’s asked me to fetch his will so he can have a new one drawn up. Silly old bounder can’t remember who gets what in the last version.”

  “Do you have a letter from the duke?”

  “Do I need one?” Darius leaned over the desk, all menace as his gloved hands rested on the messy, ink-stained surface. “Or are you disbelieving of my reasons for being here?”

  The clerk’s voice pitched high as he leaned back in his chair to create a space between himself and imminent danger. “Not at all, sir, but you will have to wait for Mr Westrill to return so you can speak to him about that.”

  “Does he not keep his records in the office?” Marcus asked as he closed the main door to the outer office after checking the hall was empty. It was just the three of them now.

  The clerk gulped and jumped up from his seat. “Now see here… You can’t… You can’t just…”

  “Can’t just what?” Darius reached into his coat pocket and withdrew his purse with a shake of coins for good measure. “How much would it cost me to see that record?”

  The clerk drew himself up, standing tall and offended, and answered, “This is highly improper. What you are proposing is illegal and…and immoral.”

  “We’re not committing any crimes,” Darius pointed out. “Merely expediting proceedings to save time. The duke and his daughter need us back at the estate immediately.”

  “Is there something wrong with the duke?”

  “Not today but who knows what the future holds?”

  The clerk relaxed as he eyed both Darius and Marcus up and down, his nervous demeanour falling away just as fast as it had appeared. “How much?”

  “Five pounds to see the record, fifty to let it walk out of this office.”

  “And if I say no?” His bravado may have been an act but Darius let him have this one ounce of his pride.

  “I’ll have my man take it by force but it won’t be pretty. He does like to make a mess.”

  With a hasty nod and a sideways glance for Marcus, the clerk took a ring of keys from his pocket and beckoned for the two men to follow him into another office. “I’ll lose more than my position if this gets out,” he muttered.

  “If you tell anyone we were here, I’ll kill you and save you the embarrassment.”

  The clerk stopped rifling through a cabinet and turned back with genuine fear in his eyes. He saw that Darius was indeed serious and searched for the paperwork with renewed purpose. Marcus shook his head. Darius shrugged. He knew he might not emerge from this act of revenge with clean hands and would do what was necessary. He would be happy to stop at issuing threats. Of course, he also knew the clerk wouldn’t stay silent forever. They only needed a few weeks.

  When the young man turned and gave him a thick envelope, Darius ripped it open and began to scan the pages.

  “You should leave now,” the clerk warned them. “We won’t be alone for long.”

  “Has anyone except Mr Westrill viewed this?” Darius asked.

  “Perhaps a spouse or executor? A guardian? I couldn’t know.”

  “Thank you.” Darius dropped the entire purse into the man’s hands. He’d known his bribe was lucrative and wouldn’t be turned down because it wasn’t enough. The clerk probably couldn’t make that much money in five years. Maybe ten. It wasn’t worth a working man’s pride to starve.

  Darius and Marcus wasted no time as they hailed a hack and gave the direction of an out-of-the-way lodging house where they’d rented rooms for a few nights. The rain bucketed down, which gave a good excuse to pull coat collars higher and pull hat brims lower.

  “What does it say?” Marcus asked once they were under way, shaking water droplets from his sleeves.

  Darius was still scanning the documents and swore viciously. “It says the Duke of Penfold is a horse’s ass.”

  “Was,” Marcus corrected him. “He was a horse’s ass.”

  “He hasn’t updated this bloody thing since ’06. He’s named his neighbour, the Earl of Wickham, as the children’s guardian but hasn’t specified the man by name. That makes the current earl their legal guardian. Shit.” It was worse than he thought. Penfold had organised everything else except for this one thing. It meant he had to marry Eliza by the special licence before the death of the duke was discovered and the will read or Wickham would have complete control.

  “Bad luck, that is.”

  “It gets worse,” Darius muttered as he kept scanning the words as they blurred before his eyes. “Seems Eliza is to be settled with a rather large dowry, untouchable by the Duke of Penfold or his sons. A portion for Eliza and two more for the other two girls upon their marriages. Monies that came with their mother from her own dowry.”

  “Lucky lass.”

  “Not if Wickham finds out. He only has to trap Eliza with Harold and the two will be forced into marriage after all and they get the dowry to use on loose women and bad cards.”

  “Then your problems are half over. Wickham can pay you from the dowry and we can repair our ship.”

  “We won’t see a farthing of it, make no mistake. He’d gamble it all away and then as the Penfolds’ guardian, he will have power over the estate. It won’t be difficult to embezzle funds or arrange marriages for the other girls to pay some of his debts and then repay the others at a later date w
hen they are old enough to speak their vows, perhaps before.”

  “Repay them with what?” Marcus laughed. “Even if he can cover his debts now, he’ll never stop. That man has the disease and he has it bad.”

  They’d seen it in America, how a man can get a fever for the cards and the win but then when he starts to lose… Well, it always ends nasty. His sire spent all his waking time in his clubs and hells. His wife had likely expired from loneliness by all accounts from the servants. She didn’t last more than a year after Harold’s birth, never being of robust health even before her confinement. She’d been nothing more than a trophy and swollen dowry for the heir to the earldom.

  Her money had lasted him well enough though and when Darius’s grandfather died, Wickham turned to the estate funds. One would think Harold would have put a stop to it but the son liked the turn of the cards perhaps more than his father.

  Pound by pound, property by property, the two idiot men had lost nearly everything. It was amazing how badly both his brother and his sire played. It took intelligence, cunning and a little recklessness to gamble and win. Harold and Wickham had only recklessness in their repertoires. Darius was grateful for their blind stupidity.

  Now the wolves were at his sire’s door and Wickham had managed to beat them off so far but it was only a short matter of time before they got in and ripped him to pieces. Darius had to get to Eliza first. It was his last option. Wickham had no reason to think the duke was anywhere but ill and would likely find a way to bring the man to heel through his children if he became desperate enough.

  “We have to get back and convince that fool girl she needs us. If she finds a way to pay off Wickham, then we’ll have to start again and it takes too much time. I hate this situation and I hate England. I want to be gone from here as soon as possible.”

  “You could just kill him and be done with it.”