Violet v-5

by Jane Feather

  His color deepened, and his breath whistled through his teeth, but his voice when he spoke was as neutral as before. “So just where does St. Simon come into all this?”

  “He doesn't,” she said. “He knows nothing about it.”

  “I see.” Cedric stroked his chin. “I suppose you have proof of your identity?”

  “I'm no fool, sir.”

  “No… no more was your mother.” He laughed suddenly, sounding genuinely entertained. “Fancy that. Trust Celia to come back and haunt me. Curiously enough, I miss her.”

  ''I'm sure she would have been touched to hear it,” Tamsyn said dryly.

  He laughed again. “Sharp tongue, just like hers.” He turned back to the decanter and again refilled his glass. “So what do you want?”

  “Well, I had in mind the Penhallan diamonds,” Tamsyn said pensively. “They were Cecile's and by rights should come to me.”

  “What's she talking about?” Charles demanded.

  “Hold your tongue, you idiot!” Cedric surveyed her over his glass. “So she continued to call herself Cecile. Dear God, she was stubborn.”

  Apparently he wasn't going to challenge her claim.

  Tamsyn was puzzled by the amicability of an encounter that should have been bristling with hostility. “You don't dispute the diamonds are mine by right?”

  Cedric shook his head. “No, most certainly they're yours if you can prove you're Celia's daughter.”

  “I have the locket. And signed papers.”

  He shrugged. “I'm sure you have ample documentation. Enough to ruin me, of course, if the story of your mother's disappearance was made public.”

  “Precisely.” It still didn't feel right, but she couldn't put her finger on what was making her uneasy. She knew she had a cast-iron claim, so why should it feel wrong that Cedric would acknowledge it? He was an intelligent man, not given to wasting energy on futile causes. “Actually,” she said, “I don't really need the diamonds, I have plenty of my own. Cecile made rather a good marriage, you see.”

  Cedric threw back his head and guffawed. “Did she, indeed?”

  “Yes, but I doubt it would have met with your approval.”

  “So you don't need the diamonds, but you want them?”

  “As you said, they're mine by right. Either you make reparation to my mother's memory, or I shall send a story to the Gazette that will have the entire country humming.”

  “You can't let her get away with this!” Charles lurched forward, some of the sense of what was being said finally penetrating his buzzing brain. “It's blackmail!”

  “Oh, well-done, sir,” Cedric applauded. “Such perspicacity! You'll take a glass of champagne with me, niece, to seal our bargain.”

  It was statement rather than request, and Tamsyn's eyes narrowed. “I don't believe so, Lord Penhallan.”

  “Oh, come now, let us at least strive for civility,” he chided. “Your mother was always gracious in victory. She never failed to carry off a situation with finesse.”

  He was right, Tamsyn thought with a stab of pain.

  Cecile would have won her victory and taken a glass of wine with her brother. She'd have slipped the diamonds into her pocket, shaken his hand, and left him with a smile.

  She inclined her head in graceful acceptance. “Then, if you'll excuse me a moment, niece, I shall fetch up a bottle of something very special. Your cousins, I'm sure, will do their best to entertain you.”

  “Yes, I've tasted your ideas of entertainment once before,” Tamsyn said coolly to her cousins as their uncle left the room. Gabriel could have them later, for now she would exercise a little revenge of her own. She put one leg up on a chair and slid the knife out of its sheath, then did the same with the other. Thoughtfully, she turned back to the twins; she held the knives by their points between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, just as her father had taught her.

  Their eyes widened as they saw her face and saw what Cornichet had seen when she'd come for his epaulets. Then both knives came spinning, arcing through the air, and the twins howled as much in shock as in pain as the two points neatly buried themselves in their right boots, piercing the leather as if it were butter to lodge between two toes. Charles and David stared down in disbelief at the quivering knife handles, shock rendering them momentarily mute.

  “you're fortunate I'm in a forgiving mood,” Tamsyn said blandly. “I doubt you'll find too great a wound when you remove your boots.” And they still had Gabriel to deal with, but she'd spare them that knowledge.

  “Good God!” Cedric exclaimed from the doorway, taking in the scene. His nephews were struggling for speech like two gobbling turkeys, their eyes darting in disbelief from the shivering knife handles in their boots to the coldly smiling woman who had thrown them.

  “I owed them a favor,” Tamsyn said as the two men bent like automatons to pull the knives loose.

  Cedric raised his eyebrows. “Of course, I'd forgotten that you'd already made their acquaintance.”

  “Yes, I had that pleasure some weeks ago,” Tamsyn said. She moved swiftly and twitched the knives from the twins' slack grasp. She examined the points. “Not much blood at all, really. The baron would have been proud of me.”

  “The baron?” Cedric sounded fascinated.

  “My father,” she said, wiping the knife tips on her cloak before returning them to their sheaths.

  “I should really like to hear more,” Cedric murmured. “But, unfortunately, there won't be time.” Turning his back, he eased the cork off the champagne bottle. It came out with a restrained pop, and there was a fIzzy hiss as he filed four glasses.

  “I trust you don't object to drinking with your cousins?” He turned back and handed her a glass. “They're an unworthy pair, I know, but unfortunately one can't choose one's relatives.”

  “Perhaps not, but I'm afraid I do object to drinking with cowardly scum.” Tamsyn took the glass, but her eyes, like violet ice, challenged Cedric.

  “Then we won't do so,” Cedric agreed equably, leaving the two glasses on the tray. He raised his own, his expression still faintly amused. “To Celia.”

  “To Cecile.” Tamsyn sipped the wine, imagining Cecile doing the same. Cedric drained his glass and she followed suit.

  “So if we could conclude our business, uncle, I'll bid you farewell.” She smiled as she put the glass on the table, but something strange was happening to her face. Her mouth wouldn't obey her brain. The edges of the room were blurring, a gray haze swimming toward her. Cedric's face danced in the mist before her eyes, suddenly larger than life; his mouth was opening and closing. He was saying something but she could hear nothing.

  Imbecile! Overconfident, too clever by half! Cedric had invoked the one person who could get through her guard. Cecile. And she'd fallen for it in her haste and her arrogance, and her certainty of the rightness of her cause.

  Gabriel! But the words were stuck in her brain… Cedric bent over the crumpled form. He found the locket around her neck and opened it. For a long moment he examined the two portraits; then he closed it and let it drop back between her breasts. He removed the pistol from her waistband and the knives from their sheaths, observing, “A young woman who clearly comes prepared.”

  He stood up, murmuring with a degree of regret, “A pity, my dear… but blackmail was a bad idea. You and your mother knew how to go too far.” He looked across at his dumbfounded nephews, his lip curled contemptuously. “She was worth four of you. Now, get rid of her.”

  “I b-beg pardon, sir. What… what should we do with her?”

  “Cretins!” It was a bark of angry derision. “What do you think you should do with her? Get rid of her! Remove her! Take her out to sea and drop her overboard! Just make damn sure she's not alive to tell this tale or any other.” He threw his large bulk into an armchair and watched morosely as Charles bent over the inert figure.

  “And do it before she comes to,” he said abruptly, seeing the way Charles's hands moved over Tamsyn's body. “Don
't you think to start playing with her. She's a damn sight too clever for the pair of you… If she comes to, she'll run rings around you.”

  Charles flushed darkly, but he picked up the limp figure. “Should we take the Mary lane, sir?”

  “We could row out and drop her off Gribbon Head,”

  David suggested, one eyelid twitching with the shocks and anxieties of the last half-hour. “With the crab pots.”

  “She'll make a tasty morsel for the crabs.” Charles laughed, and his eyes were full of greedy malevolence as he looked down at her pale face. “Don't worry, sir, we'll make sure she doesn't come back here again.”

  “Do it right,” Cedric said wearily. “That's all I ask.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “WHERE DID SHE SAY SHE WAS GOING?” GABRIEL STARED AT Josefa, slow anger beginning to burn in his eyes. The woman stood her ground, although her lip quivered a little.

  “She didn't say. Just that she was going riding and she'd be back by five o'clock.”

  Gabriel glanced up at the clock on the stable wall. It was past six. “How did she seem to you? What kind of mood was she in?”

  Josefa frowned, considering this while Gabriel tapped his foot with growing impatience on the cobbles. “You know how she is before an engagement,” Josefa said finally. “Her eyes were bright, she wasn't thinking of anything but what she was doing. You know how she is,” she repeated.

  “Oh, yes, I know,” Gabriel said grimly. “I'm a fool! I knew she wouldn't have given up on the Penhallan.” He spun on his heel and bellowed in a voice to shake mountains, “Saddle my horse again.”

  “But where is she?” Josefa quavered.

  “Causing trouble,” Gabriel said softly, his eyes sharply focused. “Alone. And those filthy swine are there… Hurry up, lad!” he snapped at the groom struggling with the girths of his horse. Impatiently, he pushed him aside. “I'll do it.” His large hands were surprisingly deft on the straps, and then he leaped into the saddle and galloped out of the stable yard.

  The horse pounded the lanes between the high hedges, sensing his rider's urgency. Gabriel rode low in the saddle, his fury at Tamsyn for deceiving him mingling with dread. She wasn't back when she'd said she would be; therefore, something had happened to her. She was clever and a good fighter and she didn't in general make mistakes, but this issue was an emotional one. To make matters worse, she was worried that the colonel would discover her secrets, so she was acting in haste, and Gabriel didn't trust her to keep a clear head. One slip, one piece of carelessness, was all it would take to destroy one woman up against the three Penhallans.

  His horse swung around a corner and then shied into the hedge as it came almost eyeball to eyeball with a massive black that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

  Gabriel hauled back on the reins. “Madre de Dios, Colonel, where did you spring from?”

  Julian didn't answer. The expression on Gabriel's face sent a shiver of apprehension down his spine. “Where the hell are you going in such a hurry, Gabriel? And where's Tamsyn?”

  Gabriel had no time to consider whether it would be in Tamsyn's interests to reveal her secrets to this man. He could do with another pair of hands, and the colonel’s were the hands he would have chosen if he'd had the choice. “Lanjerrick, in answer to both questions, Colonel, and you'd best come along. I don't know what we're going to find.”

  “God's grace, but I thought as much!” Julian's skin was clammy, and a cold premonition curled in his belly. “She found out the Penhallans were her family.”

  “She's always known it,” Gabriel said shortly, setting his horse to the gallop again.

  The cold, hard ball of premonition grew as he turned Soult in the narrow lane and caught up with Gabriel.

  “What do you mean?” Julian rode neck and neck with Gabriel. “Since when has she known it?”

  “She's always known she's kin to the Penhallan.” Julian absorbed this in silence, the rhythmic pounding of Soult's hooves on the rutted lane sounding in his blood. Why wasn't he surprised? “She knew before we left Spain?” He seemed to need clarification, although the picture was forming with hideous clarity.

  “Aye. She's set on revenge for what they did to her mother.”

  “What kind of revenge?” he asked dully as the pieces fell into place and the true extent of her deceit and manipulation took clear shape. And the true extent of his own gullibility. So desperate to believe in her essential honesty, in an innocent purpose behind her need for his protection and the shelter of his roof. But there was no essential honesty, only a cold and calculating seduction with a black core of lies. Lies she'd been telling from the moment she'd laid eyes on him.

  “She was going to ruin Cedric for what he did to her mother… expose him in public. But then she decided she couldn't expose him without your finding out, Colonel, so I'm guessing she's just gone for the Penhallan diamonds. A much simpler revenge… and the bairn would have it that they were her mother's by rights and therefore now hers.” Gabriel shook his head. “She's diamonds aplenty, of course, but she has a powerful sense of justice… always has had.”

  “And a powerful sense of justice is reason for theft?” “Och, she's not out to steal them, man. She'll persuade the Penhallan to give them to her. She holds some powerful secrets against him.”

  “Oh, I see. Blackmail,” St. Simon said in the same flat tone.

  “In a manner of speaking. But she believes she's only doing what the baron would have done himself if he'd lived long enough.”

  “Such a wonderful parental example,” Julian said with bitter sarcasm. “So you're telling me she's gone to Lanjerrick to blackmail Cedric Penhallan into giving her the family diamonds? Does she think Cedric's simply going to hand them over for the asking?” He laughed in scorn.

  Gabriel's mouth tightened. “The man's capable of murder, and she knows it. She'll be prepared. But she should never have gone alone!” He drew a harsh, ragged breath. “If those gutter sweepings are there, she'll be one against three of them. They've put their hands on her once-good God, man, you've known them for what they are! You know what they're capable of doing to her?”

  So she'd heard that story too. Was there anything she hadn't discovered? Was there ever a moment since they'd first met when she hadn't been plotting and planning, using him? In London, when she'd been lying beneath him, entrancing him with her love play and her soft, lascivious movements, and the luminous glow in her eyes, and the power of her passion… at every moment she'd been pursuing her own lawless, deceitful course. And he'd believed in the truth of her emotions. God help him, he was beginning to find it hard to ignore his own.

  Was she intending to leave him once she'd completed her little blackmail? But no, of course not. She needed him to get her back to Spain. She needed him, the blind dupe, to arrange passage for them all. She needed his escort so she could travel with all the safety and trappings of a guest of the British army. And when she was safely home again… why, then she would leave him. She would no longer need him. Had she intended to steal out into the night like the lying thief that she was? Leaving him without a word of explanation?

  Abruptly a flash of fear pushed through his corrosive anger. He thought of the twins, of what they would do to her if she could be rendered helpless. And Gabriel said they had put their hands on her once already.

  “What do you mean, they've put their hands on her already?”

  Gabriel told him the story. “But they're mine, Colonel. Don't you forget that.”

  “I have my own scores to settle,” Julian said harshly.

  “First with the Penhallans… and then with Tamsyn.”

  Gabriel glanced sideways at him in the pale light of the crescent moon. The colonel's face was tight and angry, but there was sorrow behind the anger… the sorrow of a man finally giving up a fight, finally facing unpalatable facts. And it filled Gabriel with deep foreboding. But he could think of nothing to say to repair the damage. Tamsyn said she loved the man, but she'd created
this situation, and only she could put it right. Once she was out of whatever danger she'd walked into.

  “I'll be going first with the Penhallan,” Gabriel declared, dropping low over his horse's neck, spurring the animal to increase his speed as they approached the out- skirts of Lanjerrick land. “But I'll happily share the pleasure with you, Colonel.”

  “We'll go across the cliff top.” Julian turned his horse aside, through a break in the hedge. “I've no mind to approach through the front door on this errand.”

  Gabriel followed, and they galloped across the flat turf of the cliff toward the gray house, looming unkempt and unlit out of the darkness.

  “Just a minute!” Julian hauled back on the reins.

  “There's a light down in the cove. Who would be taking a boat out at this time of night? It's too dark for crabbing. “

  They drew rein at the head of the cliff and looked downward. A lantern flickered and wavered on the beach below; the surf crashed and boiled against a rocky outcrop at one side of the cove, before tumbling in a line of foam along the shore.

  “We struck gold, Colonel,” Gabriel murmured, swinging off his horse. “I think that's the scum down there.”

  “I believe you're right.” Julian too dismounted, and they tethered their mounts to a scraggly thorn bush, bent out of shape by exposure to the blasts of the sea wind. He was filled now with a calm, cold determination. He wanted Tamsyn in his hands, and he would unleash the full force of his bitter hurt… his deep contempt for her lying, cheating, blackmailing soul. But perhaps she wasn't down there on the beach. It was always possible she had carried off her coup and was on her way back to Tregarthan with the Penhallan diamonds tucked in her shirt.

  But somehow he knew that wasn't the case. Gesturing to Gabriel, he inched over the cliff top and found the narrow ribbon of path snaking down to the beach through the scree and scrub. It was hidden from the beach by a cliff overhang at the very bottom, and when they reached the overhang, they dropped soundlessly onto the sand, ducking behind a rock to observe the scene.