“Ask her,” Achilles suggested.
“Ask her what?” The turrets come into view above the wall of yew trees across the front of the house. A strange quickening settled in Endymion’s chest. He’d loved the house as a child. The joy of his childhood at Gorffwys Ddraig had ended the day his grandfather’s brother had driven them out those doors into a world of poverty and shame. His grandfather had saved him from that poverty. The late duke had given Endymion a life he’d often dreamed of in the nursery of this very place. Rhiannon loved this place as he had all those years ago. She’d kept it for him, treasured it when he could not. Why?
“Why,” Achilles said as they stopped at the top of the hill. “Ask her why she did what she did, why she has kept all of these secrets for a family never really her own.”
“She did it to make herself a duchess. What other reason could there be?”
“I did not want you to know I was alive because I feared our grandfather had made you his creature,” Achilles confessed. “Apparently, I was right.”
“I don’t understand,” Endymion said, a queer sort of notion skulking in the back of his mind.
“You’ve been here three weeks,” Achilles’s exasperation fairly bled from his tone. “Have you spent any of that time actually talking to your wife?”
“He’s been wooing her,” Voil, monumentally unhelpful, offered. “He took her on a picnic.”
“A picnic.” Achilles shook his head. “One picnic? Did our grandfather geld you?”
“Wait until you read the letter he wrote ordering Her Grace to London in order to breed an heir. The first letter, might I add, he had written to her in seventeen years.”
Voil and Achilles were enjoying this conversation entirely too much. But Achilles’s question drew his mind from the dangerous man stalking Rhiannon, the indignation and hurt he felt at her betrayal, and everything else that had been crowding his thoughts since he’d walked into the room at the top of the stair in The Mermaid’s Tale.
What would make a woman do the things she had done—the bad and the good?
“What the devil?” Voil snapped.
Voil and Achilles dismounted and ran toward a figure lying next to one of the rampant dragon statues that flanked the drive. Endymion slid from his horse and joined them at the fallen man’s side.
“William,” Endymion shouted as he shook the fallen man’s shoulder. “Tall William. What happened?”
The footman stirred, opened his eyes and winced as he lifted a hand to the back of his head. “Your Grace.” He struggled to push up on his elbows. His eyes widened. “He’s here, Your Grace. He knew about the tunnels. He’s here.”
As one, Endymion and Achilles looked to the far side of the statue where one of the stones that comprised its base had been removed to reveal a ladder.
“Stay with him, Voil,” Endymion ordered as Achilles started down the ladder.
Rhiannon.
***
“When he ordered you to stay in bed, I never actually believed you’d obey,” Bea said as she removed the uneaten tray of food from Rhiannon’s bed.
“Isn’t this what ladies do when nursing a broken heart? Lie in bed and go into decline?”
Bea snorted. “Ladies do who don’t know the meaning of the word love and cannot exert themselves to thump some sense into the man they love. We don’t breed women like that in Cornwall.” She placed the tray outside the corridor door and gathered up the clothes she’d stripped off Rhiannon after Endymion had carried her into the bedchamber shouting for Bea to find a physician. Bea had related the tale with much rolling of eyes and hand gestures, but Rhiannon didn’t make much of it. He had not known the truth then. He did now.
Bea gave her a look of mock disapproval and went into the dressing room to see to the clothes in her arms.
Rhiannon sighed, flung the covers back, and scooted to the edge of the bed. With a few sweeps of her feet, she found her slippers and shoved her feet into them. She shrugged into her robe and glanced back at the bed. She’d fallen asleep clutching Endymion’s pillow in her arms. What a fool she’d been to think one night with him would be enough. The love she’d labeled a girlish crush had not died, nor had it failed. Instead, it had become something far worse. Living these weeks with him, watching him remember the agony and tragedy that had been his life, her love for him had grown. In spite of his grandfather, he’d become a good man—stiff, arrogant, confused, and somewhat broken, but a good man. The man she’d always known he would be. Her fourteen-year-old self had seen those qualities in him and had wanted that man for her own. Even if she had to gather the broken pieces of that man and put him together again.
She walked to the window and pushed aside the drapes. He’d left before dawn, or so she’d been told. How long would he persist before he gave up the hunt and returned to London? And when he left? Who would put the pieces of her broken heart together again? She had to decide how much of herself she was willing to risk to win Endymion’s love. No tricks. No leverage. No Papa. No plotting old duke. All she had was her love for Dymi and her determination.
A latch clicked behind her. The accompanying creak of the opening door grated on her ears, made sensitive by her head wound. “Bea, remind me to tell Vaughn to have that door oiled. It’s disgraceful.”
“No more disgraceful than a filthy coal miner’s daughter passing herself off as a duchess.”
Rhiannon resisted an urge to grip the drapes. Her blood ran as ice in her veins, but she refused to cower or show fear.
“Captain Randolph,” she said as she turned to face him. “What can I do for you this morning?”
“I think we both know why I am here, girl. They should have allowed me to end you long ago, but you served a purpose. Until now.” Dressed in clothes far more expensive and finely tailored than any estate steward might afford, he prowled her bedchamber very like the rat she’d always considered him. She’d never liked him, but could not put into words her aversion to his presence on the estate.
“And who might they be, Captain? If I am to be murdered by a hired lackey, I’d like to know who pulls your strings.” Rhiannon sidled away from the window toward her bedside table. She spied a panel along the far wall where an inset door she’d never seen before stood ajar.
“I’m no lackey, you jumped up bitch. I am the only person with the stomach to do what needs be done. Did you tell your husband how his mother died? Does he know what she did?”
“He doesn’t know. Which begs the question, how do you know? Were you there, Captain, when the mother of the future Duke of Pendeen died?”
“I took a great deal of pleasure in ending that whore and two of her bastards. Pity I missed the oldest, but we’ll get him eventually.”
Whore…her bastards… She recognized that voice. After all these years, her enmity for the steward she’d been forced to accept became clear.
“Eliza de Waryn was no whore and her sons are no bastards. Who sent you, Captain?”
“All evidence of her marriage to the late duke’s youngest son is missing. Your husband will be declared a bastard.”
“Missing?” Rhiannon maneuvered herself around the bedside table. She allowed the sleeve of her robe to fall over her hand and thrust it behind her back to try and open the drawer. A candlestick teetered and thumped to the floor. The slightest of board creaks from beyond the heretofore unseen door threatened to draw the captain’s attention. She stepped closer to him and kicked the fallen candlestick toward the far side of the room. “The evidence is not missing. It is safely tucked away where neither you nor your masters will ever find it.”
The color leached from his florid face. “Where is it, you Yorkshire whore?”
“Ah! You told them it was gone, but you didn’t know who took it, did you? Just as you told them His Grace’s brothers were killed trying to escape and you had their bodies thrown into the sea. What will you tell them when they discover those boys survived?”
“Liar! Damn you!” He raised his pistol.
“Rhiannon! Down!” Endymion erupted from the hidden door and launched himself at Captain Randolph.
She dropped to her knees and pulled her pistol from behind her back. The captain’s pistol went off, with the shot whizzing past her head to dig into the headboard. Endymion wrestled the pistol from him and tossed it aside. The captain caught Endymion beneath the chin with a powerful punch, rolled away, and pulled a second pistol from his waistband. He rose to his knees and aimed at Endymion. The blast and smoke of three pistols firing at once deafened and blinded her.
“Dymi,” she cried. Dear God, not now. Not like this. She dropped her smoking pistol and crawled to his side. “Dymi, answer me. Are you hurt? Dymi!”
Flat on his back, he gripped her arms and shook her. “What were you doing, taunting him like that? He could have killed you. Do you have any sense at all?” He dragged her into his arms and buried his face in her hair.
“I don’t know if she has any sense,” Achilles drawled as he kicked the captain’s dead body over, “but she is a better shot than either one of us. Right between the eyes, Your Grace. Nicely done. The throat, Miss Smith. Another handy shot.”
Rhiannon and Endymion turned to see the white-faced lady’s maid, smoking pistol in hand. “Your shot pierced his heart, Mr. de Waryn. I’d say we all had a hand in it.”
“Indeed,” Achilles replied as he crossed the room and pried the weapon from Beatrice’s hand.
Endymion shoved to his feet and helped Rhiannon stand. The pound of running feet and clamor of shouts approached the bedchamber door. Turpin’s sharp barks added to the din.
“He was one of them, Dymi.” Rhiannon gripped the lapels of his coat. “His voice. I recognized his voice. After all these years, I knew. He was one of the men in the library plotting to kill your family. You were right, Achilles.”
“Yet you did everything you could to infuriate him. Evidence of my parents’ marriage? Really, Rhiannon?” Endymion was dirty, disheveled, sweaty, and very much alive. The pompous toad.
“We should announce all is well, Miss Smith,” Achilles suggested, “before the entire household breaks in here, guns blazing.”
“An excellent idea,” Bea murmured as they slipped out Rhiannon’s bedchamber door.
“Rhiannon, I cannot—”
She pressed her fingers to Endymion’s lips. “May we have this argument in a room without a corpse bleeding all over my Aubusson?”
He glanced at the captain’s body, grabbed her hand and dragged her through the dressing room into his bedchamber. Turpin, who had been let into the ducal bedchamber amid the chaos, cavorted about them, punctuating his joy with barks and swipes of his tongue.
“Your dog is no guard dog if he is only allowed to guard the kitchens, Your Grace,” Rhiannon said in an attempt to calm the temper she saw rising in his eyes.
“What need have I for a guard dog when I have a wife who is determined to place herself in danger at every turn?” He strode to the Chippendale commode across the room and poured a brandy, which he downed in a single gulp.
“Dymi, I am not responsible for the danger that has followed us since the night your mother died. The men I heard that night are. Your grandfather is. Had he accepted your father’s choice of bride, had he looked after all of you once your father died, none of this would have happened.”
“Had you come to London when I sent for you, what happened last night and today would not have happened. You cannot continue to live your life in this fashion. Keeping a viper employed to discover who his employers might be. Going into the mines to test head lamps. Threatening to shoot a farmer instead of allowing the bailiff or magistrate to remove him. Your Mr. Thomas caught Wilson attempting to bribe some smugglers into taking him to Scotland. He confessed to causing the accident at the mines.”
“Young Bob was right. I should have shot him when I had the chance.”
Endymion grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her toward the fireside chair.
“Dymi, stop it. What are you doing?” He was beginning to frighten her.
He ran his hands through his hair, walked away, then returned.
“I don’t know how much of this my grandfather was responsible for, but he never lied to me or betrayed me. He raised me to be a man of sense and responsibility. The sort of man who would never put others in danger or risk my life to prove my independence.”
“What independence, Dymi?” Her heart clenched, and her earlier determination to fight for his love crumbled. “He’s been dead for seven years and you still aren’t free.”
“Free? I am bound to the dukedom, to its people, to my position, and to a wife I never chose, but for whom I am responsible. I will never be free.”
The truth, at last. He saw her as a responsibility. An unwanted one, at that. He’d always see her as such. As much as she loved him, she refused to live with a man who thought so little of her.
“I can free you of at least part of that burden, Your Grace.” She stood and pushed her way past him. “As the mystery of the threat against me is solved and I no longer have to worry about a thieving, murderous steward, I wish you and Lord Voil a safe journey to London. I will manage this part of the dukedom and free you to do whatever it is you find more important and less onerous. Don’t give a thought to those of us who prefer to dwell in the unsophisticated, unscheduled wilds of Cornwall.”
She reached the door and turned. He gripped her elbow and snatched her into his arms
His eyes wild and his voice hoarse, he demanded, “How much can a man lose before he has nothing left of himself?” He kissed her, a fierce taking of her mouth, her breath, and, she feared, her very soul. She answered him with a fierceness and passion of her own. Taking and taking the last of his love she would ever taste. It was too much. There were no more pieces of her heart to break. She pushed him away.
“There are many ways to lose, Dymi. Just as there are many ways to allow someone to take things away. I won’t allow you to take anything else from me.” She snatched the bandage from her head, dropped it on the floor and walked out of his chamber into the now-empty corridor, save for Bea and Achilles.
“Where shall we go, Your Grace?” Bea asked as she looped her arm through Rhiannon’s.
“Somewhere a lady might take to her bed and go into decline for a day or two.” Rhiannon blinked back the tears that refused to stay behind her aching eyes.
“The green bedchamber is made up,” Bea suggested.
As they passed him, Achilles caught Rhiannon’s hand and squeezed.
“He didn’t come back for me, Achilles,” Rhiannon told him as she allowed Bea to lead her away. “He came back to convince himself he was right to leave.”
Chapter Fifteen
She was avoiding him. Again. For two days, she’d taken her meals in the chamber she’d chosen after the death of Captain Randolph, and only left that chamber when she was assured he had left the house. Then she secreted herself in her study and tended to the business of the estate. Business he had Babcock check over every night.
Now, he had no choice but to confront her and present his plans for her in person. He descended the stairs to the entrance hall and spotted Voil and Achilles deep in conversation. They each handed a flustered Vaughn a small leather pouch that clinked in the butler’s hands.
They were at it again. Betting on his inability to persuade his wife to—
“Your Grace,” Vaughn announced as he slipped the pouches into his pocket, “Her Grace is in the rose garden awaiting you.”
“Thank you, Vaughn. If either of you two follow me, I will order Cook to keep that basket of pasties she baked for our journey, Voil,” Endymion said as he walked out the front door.
He reached the terraces and paused on the top of the stairs that led down several levels of blooming flower gardens, ending at the rose garden that rolled out to the edge of the ha-ha. Rhiannon sat on a bench amidst the rows upon rows of rose bushes. She sat very primly, gazing down the length of the garden with
perfect posture, dressed in green with her hair done up in the latest style from London. She wore no bonnet, but her hands were covered in some sort of lacy gloves.
He’d lain awake most of the night. He’d had no choice. The memories, the secrets revealed, and the events of the past few days played through his thoughts over and over. He’d arrived at few conclusions. It appeared, over the last seventeen years, everyone had controlled his life save himself. Captain Randolph had taken his family. Rhiannon had taken his hand in marriage. His grandfather had taken his freedom and given him order, an education, and a way to survive, but at a cost he’d never imagined.
As if she sensed his presence, Rhiannon turned and gazed up at him. His heart slowed. He forced himself to stroll casually down the steps when every instinct begged him to run. To gather her in his arms and take her to a place where there were no dukedoms or secrets or pasts full of lies and ghosts. That world did not exist. But he wanted her in his world, even if he had no idea why, or how that could be achieved.
“I am here, Your Grace, as commanded,” she said when he came to stand before her. “What are my orders?”
“I would not have to issue commands if you were not so intent on hiding from me.”
“We have lived separately for seventeen years. We have lived in the same house for nearly a month. Who is hiding from whom?” She turned her attention to her hands.
“I am not hiding. I am, that is, Voil and I are… I have a great deal of business to conduct in Town. Rather, it is my intention to return to London this afternoon.” What was it about her that turned him into a stammering idiot?
“I am aware, Your Grace. I wish you a safe—”
“I have decided you will accompany me.” He clasped his hands behind his back and fixed his attention on a curl determined to fly free of her coiffure.
“I see,” she replied, her voice uncharacteristically quiet and sweet. “For what purpose?”
“I am not convinced you are out of danger. I prefer to have you in London until I am certain the danger is past. I think the running of the estate has taken a great deal of your time and effort. You are the Duchess of Pendeen. You deserve an easier, less strenuous life. I will leave Babcock to put things in order here and to hire a qualified and fair steward to run the estate. You will—”
Seduction Regency Style Page 51