by Ella Edon
“Found it!” he said urgently. “It’s here. Look at it. Is this your handwriting?” He brushed hair out of his eyes where it had flopped over in his haste to get there.
Luke took it, and with characteristic slowness, he read over the note. He shook his head when he’d finished reading it, his face set in a disturbed expression.
“No,” he said. “It isn’t my writing, nor my signature.”
“But then…” Cutler felt like somebody had hit him. It was suddenly hard to breathe. “Who did?”
Luke lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “Would you like to consult Mr. Prestwick?” He passed the letter back to him carefully. “He’s my friend at the Mint, I mentioned earlier.”
“No,” Cutler said, trying to think. “At least, not yet. I have an idea of who it might be.”
“You think it is this villain you mentioned?” Luke asked. “You consider that he’s still here in the South and sought to draw you here?”
“No,” Cutler said quickly, though in truth, he hadn’t considered the possibility that his uncle might have returned south to wait for him. “I mean to say, my first thought was that he meant me to go south, while he remained up north, where Raymonde is.”
“You think he means to harm her?” Luke asked.
“I think he means to harm me,” Cutler said slowly. He knew Luke might think him arrogant to assume such single-minded hatred for himself, but he knew his uncle, and he had to consider that he’d always meant to do him harm. “I think he would do anything to bring about my downfall, and, ultimately, my death. I am all that stands between him and his wealth.”
Luke frowned. “Tell me about him,” he said slowly.
Cutler told him. He hesitated as he discussed the story of his past, for it was still too painful to revisit his father’s death. His throat closed up and he would not have been able to say it, except for the fact that he had talked of it with Raymonde, and so the words were easier to find.
While he talked, Luke listened, and, when he finished, he nodded.
“You have suffered a great deal,” he said softly. “And I think your estimation is correct. Your uncle is dangerous. We should proceed carefully, but I think we should involve the authorities.”
Cutler took a slow breath. “I do not,” he said.
He was surprised by how much courage it took for him to confront Luke, even on so small a matter. He looked nervously at the pale-haired man, waiting for him to retort sharply.
Luke raised a brow. “Why are you so hesitant?” he asked.
Cutler shook his head. “When my father and Lady Edmore were…when they died under such unusual circumstances…the authorities were disinterested. They took no notice of a small boy who had nothing save a strong conviction that his father had died unnaturally. They wrote down the cause of death as an episode of apoplexy and moved on.”
Luke nodded. “You think they will ignore your fears.”
“Yes.”
Cutler watched Luke’s face, waiting censure or disbelief; for his mouth to turn down with amusement. Instead, Luke nodded slowly. “I agree.”
“You do?” Cutler was surprised. Luke smiled, but the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. He looked sterner than Cutler had ever seen him. It wasn’t hard to imagine him as the Earl of Westmore right now.
“Yes.” Luke nodded. “Given that the officers of the law closest to your uncle’s lands could easily be threatened or bribed by him, I think it’s likely we’ll receive no help from them.”
“What should we do, then?” Cutler asked. For the first time he could remember, he felt totally helpless. It wasn’t a nice feeling.
Luke lifted a shoulder. “We should take the matter into our own hands.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Taking Time
Raymonde looked out of the window. The garden was out there, and the sun shone from behind the clouds and rendered the sky pale blue. She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes.
“There isn’t a point,” she whispered.
Her heart almost broke admitting it, but there was no point in trying to escape through there. She had been in here for three days, and she had already looked out of the window and tried to plan her escape countless times, but it was fruitless. The window led to a sheer drop down a wall and there was no way she could risk it without breaking a leg or worse.
Besides, she thought, even had she been able to climb down, the window was bisected by strong bars. She had tried to move them, but they were firmly set in place and no amount of shaking or thumping would remove them.
I don’t know how I can get out of here.
She stayed where she was, leaning back on the wall. There was no hope of escape for her, but every part of her longed to get back to the house with an enormous intensity.
“Cutler will go back,” she whispered under her breath. “But he shouldn’t.”
That was her worst fear right now – that Cutler would return to his home. She had no idea why she had been brought here, or where indeed this was, but she had an idea that it was nothing to do with her, only to do with her importance to him. All that she knew was that she had to return home soon. She had to try to get word to Cutler to stay at Westmore House.
I wish somebody would tell me what’s going on.
She had seen nobody in the past three days – only a youth whose name she didn’t ask, who brought the food and left without speaking. She had tried to question him, but he only shrugged and made a pantomime of not being able to answer. It was frustrating and useless, and she’d given up.
She went over to the window again, but, as before, she could see no way down. The lawn looked frighteningly far away and the path was a tiny thing, like a thick ribbon of gray.
As she opened the window again, she heard footsteps outside.
“No…” Her heart almost stopped as the sound of footfall stopped outside the door. The handle turned, and she bit her lip to stop herself from crying out with fear. This was a heavy, booted footfall, not the youth’s almost-silent steps. There was something frightening about it, as if some part of her remembered it, and before he’d put his head in around the door, she already knew who it was. And she knew it was the last person she ever wished to meet.
“Good morning,” the man from her nightmares said. “You haven’t been trying to climb out, have you?” He indicated the window, though she’d slammed it shut before he entered.
“N… no,” she stammered. She had not seen him since he’d brought her here, and the lack of having seen him had not made him any less terrifying in her eyes. If anything, the fear she felt for him had grown in his absence and the time she’d had to think about him. She had remembered him almost exactly: the gaunt cheeks, the gray eyes.
“Good.” He raised an eyebrow, a mild expression crossing his face. “It’s a sheer drop and you’d surely break your neck, and that would be of little use to either of us.”
She swallowed hard. His gaze was focused on her, but it seemed to look through her. There was a strange detached expression on his face. He spoke as if her death would be of little consequence to anything, and that was frightening in itself.
“Who are you?” she asked. She had begun to draw her own conclusions. He looked so like Cutler that she thought he must be the uncle he had spoken of.
“If I told you that, I would have no choice, but to kill you,” he said mildly. “I think you might rather remain ignorant and remain alive?”
She nodded, raw terror possessing her. Her heart thudded in her chest, her stays suddenly felt tight enough to suffocate her. He could kill her easily; the possibility had just never occurred to her that he would. He spoke of it like it was a thing of little difficulty: a passing inconvenience, really.
“I would rather live,” she whispered.
“Good.” He smiled, a brief flash of a cold smile. “I will keep you here for as long as is necessary. It would work in both our favor were you to stay quiet. There is nobody here who
would answer to your cries for help, but I think you would do best to save your strength and remain silent.”
“Yes,” Raymonde agreed.
He nodded. “As it is, you seem to be remarkably well-behaved. It suggests a certain lack of initiative, I think.” He raised a brow, looking down his nose at her.
Raymonde felt as if he had slapped her. Overwhelmingly, the man reminded her of her brother, Osburne. Not in looks, for he was gaunt-cheeked, with deep-set gray eyes and a hard mouth, where Osburne was piercingly dark-eyed and smoothly handsome. It was the same supercilious manner, the same sort of snide remarks…they could be him. Habit made her look at her feet, feeling ashamed, as if he were Osburne.
“Very well,” he said with some amusement. “I will return later to ensure you are properly fed. I do not intend for you to come to any harm here – merely to wait to lure my quarry hither.”
“Quarry?” She found her voice suddenly. Did he mean Cutler? Was that why he had brought her here? She felt her whole body grow cold.
“My quarry is none of your business,” he said tightly, “and I suggest that you follow the policy that the more you know, the more endangered your life becomes. Hold your tongue and keep yourself alive.” He smiled as if the statement was designed to help her, not to benefit him.
“Yes,” she managed to say, as it seemed he expected some sort of comment. She waited for him to leave.
He stayed where he was, and his eyes lingered on her in a way that made her skin crawl. He stayed there for a heart-stopping moment, then shrugged, turned around and walked out of the door.
As he shut the door, he paused. “You will be freed, if you are sensible,” he said. “Remember to keep quiet and that the less you know, the better.”
Raymonde said nothing. That silence seemed to annoy him, for she saw his brows lower in irritation. Then he was gone, shutting the door with a click. She felt her back against the wall. She felt relieved, as the key turned, and the door was secured.
“One thing about being locked in,” she whispered to herself, “is that he can’t get in without me hearing him.”
That thought struck her as amusing, and she leaned back on the wall, sliding down into a sitting position, and laughed loudly. Tears ran down her cheeks, and she dabbed them aside, knowing that her laugh held something of hysteria in it.
“Raymonde,” she whispered to herself as she dabbed her cheeks with the handkerchief, “try to remain sensible.”
She could feel herself teetering on the edge of a bout of uncontrolled tears. She was, if she let herself think for a second, desperately afraid. She wanted more than anything to escape, but she had no idea whatsoever as to how to do it.
She looked down at her handkerchief. It was the same as the one she had given to Cutler – sewn with the same embroidery, trimmed with the same braid. She felt her heart clench with pain.
Cutler’s face seemed to appear in front of her, each detail etched with clarity. She could see the thin lines beside his eyes, the slightly hooked nose, those brown eyes that shone with deprecating humor. She wished she could reach out and stroke his cheek; to feel the soft warmth of his skin under her hands.
She recalled how he had told her of his uncle, and of his fear and pain as a small, confused boy. He had told her of the unresolved pain he still carried within him of finding himself suddenly and mysteriously without love and safety. He had told her that and he had cried in front of her. He had been vulnerable, but it was strong for him to admit that, not weak. She had been strong for him then, too. She was strong now.
She felt the shroud of shame and pain that her captor had wrapped her in suddenly falling from her mind, almost like a physical thing.
“I need to get out of this room.”
She stood, taking stock of her surroundings, as if for the first time. It felt as if courage was growing in her each second. Her hope was back.
The room was some sort of attic, she thought, though it had been used as a parlor at some time. It housed a chaise and a big table, and a set of shelves, that once held books or ornaments. There was a fireplace, but no fire burned in the grate. It had burned the past three days and she had exhausted all the wood, keeping it burning. Raymonde ran her hands down her arms, feeling cold at the thought of how bad it would be in there if someone didn’t bring fresh wood.
“Never mind,” she told herself firmly. “By then, I’ll have planned something.”
She looked around at the room again. There were curtains over the windows, and should nobody bring any extra form of bedding, she would take those down and sleep beneath their warmth. The table was heavy, but when she leaned on it, she found she could push it across the floor a little. It moved with a harsh squeak.
“There,” she grunted, pushing it towards the door. She would use it to block the entrance, so that at night, she could sleep in relative peace, unafraid of Cutler’s uncle sneaking in.
She left it where it was, a distance of two feet from the door. That would make it easy to put it in place at night. After it was moved, she found her eye drawn to the dirt on the floor where it had been – evidently, nobody had dusted in here for a few years, too. She sniffed, feeling the tickling in her nose that presaged a sneeze.
She coughed and lifted a pillow off the chaise – there were two, so she chose the less-appealing one – using it to brush the dirt out of the way and to the corner of the room.
While she was brushing the floor, she noticed something: The floorboards were different colors. There were some dark ones and some light ones, the dark ones forming a square of perhaps two feet by two. She frowned at it.
A trapdoor?
It didn’t seem possible that there was such an obvious exit. She tried to move one of the darker boards, but it was stuck fast. She shook her head, understanding what had happened.
There had been a trapdoor there, and it had been boarded up. The darker boards were newer, and they were fastened over where the hole once was. She went over to the fire and grabbed a poker, trying to ram it into the space between the boards. It barely went between, and even had it done, there seemed no way to use it to lever them.
“Damn.”
She blushed, though there had been nobody anywhere near to hear her swearing.
She leaned back against the chaise-lounge, feeling disheartened. As yet, there was no visible escape route, though she had tried so hard. She shut her eyes, thinking for a moment.
I wish I knew Cutler was safe.
She bit her lip, feeling the need to cry again.
She had no idea how late it was, but the sky was darkening fast. The youth had not come that afternoon with lunch. Being weak and light-headed was not going to help solve anything. She recalled Cutler’s uncle intended to visit later. That gave her an idea.
She would rush him, mayhap holding the poker, and try to shove her way past. Then she would have to run down the stairs, screaming for help. She would be relying on there being somebody nearby who could at least stop him from killing her or let her out.
“Wait until the third time he visits,” she cautioned herself. She didn’t even know if he had a weapon or not. It would be safer by far to wait and try to gather information.
That is, if he intends coming back here more than once.
She swallowed hard. He had, she recalled, mentioned keeping her here until he’d lured Cutler here. As far as she knew, Cutler was still in Westmore, which would mean he would take a few days to arrive back, and likely more to locate her here.
She closed her eyes, feeling relieved. When she opened them again, she noticed that dusk was falling outside. It must be almost seven of the clock. She stood, stretching, and decided to tidy up the room to her liking. She had a thin coverlet of linen and the curtains to keep her warm, but she shivered at night from the cold, despite the fire.
She beat the dust off the chaise-lounge, thumped the pillow against the wall to dislodge the dirt, and then stood on the table to start unhooking the curtains. They were velvet and wo
uld keep her warm. She was just finishing when she heard somebody at the door. Her head whipped around in alarm and she jumped down, throwing the curtain onto the chaise as the door opened.
“My Lady, where…Oh!”
Her captor looked around the room, and she almost wanted to laugh as his eyes traveled to the space on the curtain-rail and then to her newly-appointed blanket. She saw how he carefully schooled his face to a neutral expression.
“Your standards for accommodation have slipped considerably, since coming North,” he said mildly.
She raised a brow. If he was like Osburne, she absolutely knew how to treat him. “I needed to keep warm,” she said mildly. “It’s getting dark outside.”