Before the Scandal

by Suzanne Enoch

  “Beth might be watching.” He stepped back as Warner walked over to collect the butter chestnut from his stall.

  “Then what—”

  “Wait five minutes after I leave, and meet me in the glade just southwest of the bridge. The one with the lightning-struck oak. Do you know where that is?”

  “I know. Don’t be doin’ anything foolish without me.”

  “I’ll hold off on being foolish until you join me.”

  “Fair ’nough.”

  A moment later Warner led over Saffron. “Master Phineas?” the groom intoned.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Gordon says this highwayman business is to help Lord Quence and Miss Beth. Is that so?”

  God, he hoped so. “Yes, that is my intention.”

  The groom nodded. “Then keep your head down, sir. You can trust me and young Tom here.”

  “Thank you, Warner.” With a nudge of his heels he sent Saffron through the double doors and out into the stable yard.

  On the chance that Beth or William might be watching him ride off, he headed in the direction of Lewes until he was beyond view of the house. Only then did he turn south and east toward the River Ouse. He dismounted beside the old shattered oak tree and led Saffron into a thicket that held a patch of good grazing. Once he’d tied off the yellow gelding where no one would stumble over him accidently, he donned his highwayman attire.

  He heard a low, two-toned whistle. Whistling back, he slipped out of the thicket to join Gordon in the glade. “Let’s begin at Beaumont’s,” he said, swinging up on Ajax. “We can take a look around Donnelly on our way back.”

  “Aye. Any idea what ye want t’do if we come across ten or so wolfhounds partial to sheep?”

  “Shooting them comes to mind.”

  “I don’ think The Frenchman’d care about dogs.”

  No, he wouldn’t. Not unless they were chasing him. And it could link the highwayman to Quence, which he couldn’t afford. “Then if we find them tonight I’ll make plans to discover them again tomorrow as Phin Bromley. And I’ll have the constabulary with me.”

  It wouldn’t be the most satisfying way to deal with the trouble, but it was the way William would want it resolved. And therefore, however aggravating he found the idea of allowing someone else to determine the outcome of this malicious destruction, he would do so. To a point.

  Once they’d crossed the bridge, they left the road, cutting through the pastures and meadows and scattered stands of trees belonging to Quence’s neighbors. No flooding here. No fires, no slaughtered sheep or poisoned feed—just peaceful, sleeping flocks and the occasional sheepdog or deer or startled pheasant. That alone should have been enough to convince William that Quence Park was being targeted. His brother, however, seemed to believe either that his fellow landowners were as honest as he was, or that he had to expect a certain amount of ill luck. After all, ill luck had found William ten years ago, and it hadn’t left him since.

  “What d’ye think, Colonel?” Gordon asked from a little behind and to his right. “Start at th’ stables?”

  “We’ll take a look, but I doubt anyone would keep sheep-killing dogs where all the servants would know about them. East Sussex owes its prosperity to sheep, after all.”

  “Aye. Yer sayin’ those dog’s’d be difficult to keep secret.”

  “Exactly.” Kicking out of the stirrups, he jumped down from Ajax. “But I’m a cautious fellow, and we will therefore check the stables and all of the outbuildings here and at Donnelly and anywhere else I can think of until we find them.”

  “This could be a very long night.”

  Phineas ignored the comment. “Let’s get moving. And remember to be French.”

  Lights still showed in a few of Beaumont’s upstairs rooms, and though the stables were quiet he was unwilling to wager that all of the grooms and stableboys were asleep. Motioning Gordon to stay outside and keep watch, he pulled open one of the tall doors and slipped inside. Sixteen or so horses, but no dogs. Nor any sign that dogs had ever been housed in the stables. Beaumont didn’t have a kennel—not at the main house, anyway.

  He made his way back outside. “Nothing. Let’s try the outbuildings.”

  Gordon, his eyes nothing more than glittering slits behind his black mask, nodded. “Divide’n conquer?”

  “It’ll go more quickly that way. I’ll take the west side.”

  They searched the gardener’s shed, the small hothouse, the grain barn, the outlying cottages, and the small estate manager’s cottage. Growing frustration tightened Phineas’s muscles as they continued to find nothing.

  An hour after they’d begun, he caught sight of a figure on horseback heading away from the manor along the private path that wound around the small lake and up the hillside. Though the Beaumont and Quence estates and families had never been friendly, he did recall some stories of the present lord going on drunken binges at his family’s small hunting lodge during his youth.

  “Damn,” he muttered, striding for Ajax. A hunting lodge could mean a kennel. He gave the two-toned whistle to summon Gordon, but, not wanting to risk losing his prey in the dark, he mounted and rode off after the horseman.

  They wound through the trees, turning away from the lake and into the rolling hills. Phineas stayed back as far as he dared, listening both for the rider in front of him and for any sign that Gordon was following behind.

  A light flared up ahead, and he pulled up sharply. At the same moment he heard the muffled sound of dogs barking. Large dogs. Sending Ajax forward at a walk now, he approached the light through the trees.

  The small cottage was long and low and dark. The light emanated from a lantern hung on the back of a railed wagon. The vehicle was stopped alongside a large kennel, and several men removed hounds to lift them up into the bed of the wagon. Bloody hell. By tomorrow the dogs would be gone.

  He pulled out a pistol. No one could be allowed to remove the only evidence he had. Phineas gathered the reins in his left hand.

  Something slammed into his left shoulder from behind. A heartbeat later he heard the shot, thin-sounding amid the trees.

  Trying to keep from pitching forward out of the saddle, Phineas fired back in the general direction from which the shot had come. The reins dropped from his hand, pain belatedly tearing into him. Shoving his spent pistol back into his pocket, he grabbed the reins again with his good hand and kicked Ajax hard. In a second they were muscling up the hillside.

  A muzzle flashed below him, and then another. “Come on, Frenchman!” Smythe’s voice, shaking with barely suppressed excitement, came from the direction of the woods. “Rob us now! Vite, vite!” Voices laughed, also excited at the prospect of blood. “Find him!”

  Hoping Gordon had heard the commotion and gotten away, Phineas sent Ajax straight west at a gallop. Shot and in near-total darkness, if he hadn’t spent most of the past ten years of his life in the saddle, he never would have been able to do it. Thankfully he doubted that Smythe and his cohorts could match either him or Ajax.

  For a moment he thought they might set the hounds after him, and he intentionally rode through the middle of one of Beaumont’s flocks, scattering it. Once a dog had killed sheep, it would go after them again at every opportunity.

  Cutting back toward the lake, he listened, but couldn’t make out anything aside from the half dozen men and horses pounding after him. No dogs, then. They came to a fairly level stretch, and he took the reins into his teeth so he could dig the second pistol out of his left pocket. Abruptly the black veered sideways. A figure loomed out of the darkness directly in front of them.

  “Don’t move,” Phineas hissed, lifting the pistol.

  “Colonel!” Gordon’s voice rasped back at him.

  Phineas didn’t take the time to ask what the devil the sergeant was still doing there. “Come on,” he grunted instead, tucking the pistol into his right pocket and grabbing the reins again.

  “Ye’ve been hit,” Gordon said abruptly, his voice tense.
>
  “A graze,” he grunted.

  Another pistol fired, and a ball whistled past his ear. Their aim was improving, or his luck was failing entirely. Every thud of Ajax’s hooves against the ground jolted his shoulder, and sticky warmth crawled down his back.

  The sergeant turned in the saddle to look behind them. “Six,” he panted, facing forward again. “How’d they know we were comin’?”

  “They didn’t. Not specifically. The dogs are up at the lodge. Smythe’s moving them.”

  “Then—”

  “Bad people expect bad things to happen.”

  “What does that say aboot us?”

  Phineas smiled grimly. “We can debate that later.”

  They plunged across a stream. Pain screamed through his shoulder as they pounded up the far bank. He swayed, gripping the pommel to keep from falling out of the saddle.

  “Colonel.” Gordon edged closer, putting out an arm to steady him.

  This was not good. They’d crossed onto Donnelly land, and were only about half a mile from the manor house. On any other night, he and Ajax could have ridden circles around their pursuers. Now, though, he was fast running out of time. “Gordon, take Ajax and lead these fools away from Quence. I’ll meet you back home.”

  “And how is that?”

  “It’s only a mile or so to Saffron. I can walk it, but I don’t think I can ride it. Not at this pace.”

  “Then we stand’n fight.”

  Phineas shook his head, tossing the end of the reins to the sergeant. “I want proof before I begin killing people. Wait for me in my bedchamber.”

  He kicked out of the stirrups and jumped. The ground was damp, but it still stole his breath as he slammed into it knees first and rolled. With difficulty he came up onto his feet, and ran at right angles to the path Gordon took as the sergeant veered away from him.

  Crouching against the fallen trunk of an elm, cradling his shoulder, Phineas held still as the riders passed by, close enough that if it had been daylight they would have seen him in an instant. He stayed where he was until the pursuit passed out of earshot. Then he stood, staggering a little and putting out his free hand for balance. If he couldn’t stop the damned bleeding, he wasn’t going to make it back to his blasted yellow horse.

  Phineas looked over his shoulder. Just at the top of the rise he could make out the darker bulk of Donnelly House against the night sky. Not precisely friendly territory, but much closer than his horse and another mile home beyond that.

  Lord Charles Smythe was an enemy. Whether he could prove it or not after tonight was another matter, but he knew it to be true. He could and did suspect further involvement, but he still found himself short of facts. If he approached Donnelly, who’d been so helpful to his brother, would the viscount help him, or finish what Smythe had begun?

  There was, though, another course of action, something that wouldn’t involve a direct confrontation before he was ready for one. There was one person in that household whom he could trust. He hoped.

  Alyse awoke abruptly. After her heated, half-coherent dream about doing the wash and about Phineas and a very large bathtub, the air of the attic felt still and cold. She turned onto her side, pulling the blanket up to her chin.

  Then she heard it again, the slow lowering of the door handle. Her heart skittering, she sat bolt upright. Him. Oh, this was too much. However mysterious and charming The Frenchman might be, this could not continue. She and Phin might not have any kind of understanding, but he was the man she wanted in her life.

  Slowly the door swung open. Shaking, Alyse climbed to her feet. She would simply tell him to go away, and no one need know he’d ever been in the house. She hoped her French was proficient enough to explain that. As she watched, the tall figure in his tricorne hat and turned-up greatcoat stole into the room—and then stumbled to his knees.

  Good heavens. “What—what are you doing?” she hissed.

  He lifted his head, his shadowed eyes glittering. “Shot,” he whispered.

  Oh, no. “You’ve been shot?”

  When he nodded, all of the protests she’d been ready to utter fled. No one could be allowed to catch him. Not like this. She hurried around him to the door, closing and latching it again.

  Moving back to her bedstand, she lit the lamp there. The Frenchman stayed where he was, crouched forward on his knees and one hand, the other arm braced closely against his chest. Alyse wiped her palms against her thighs, abruptly aware that she was dressed only in a thin nightrail. Quickly she grabbed her dressing gown off the foot of the bed and pulled it on over her shoulders.

  “Let me see where you’re hurt,” she whispered, setting the lamp down on the bare wood floor in front of him and tentatively kneeling beside it.

  “You should know something first,” he murmured, no trace of French in his very familiar voice.

  Her heart stopped. Phin? All the blood drained from her face. “You?”

  He lifted his head. Even with the hat and mask on, in the flickering lamplight she could tell. With shaking hands Alyse reached and pulled the coverings from his head. The light illuminated dark brown hair, damp with sweat and laced with dirt and bits of grass, and definitely, unmistakably, belonging to Phin Bromley.

  “Apologies,” he said quietly, reaching up his right hand to turn down his greatcoat collar. “I didn’t—”

  Alyse slapped him. Hard. “Get out of here,” she hissed. “You liar! You thief! How could you? You stole from me! You kissed me!”

  She lifted her hand to hit him again, but he caught her wrist. “Let me expl—”

  “No!” She jerked free of his grip and shot to her feet. “I am not going to listen to you any longer. Get out!” Alyse shoved his shoulders, pushing him backward toward the door.

  Phineas flinched away from her, gasping, and went down flat on his back. How much of it might be real pain and how much might be him trying to gain her sympathy she had no idea. Neither did she care. He’d pointed a pistol, if not directly at her then certainly at her cousin. He’d stolen from her, and then listened with apparent compassion and sympathy when she’d told him about it later. And he’d tricked her into a kiss. Oh, and then she’d practically admitted to him that the mysterious Frenchman intrigued her. He’d played with her, apparently for his own amusement.

  She reared back her foot and kicked him. “Liar,” she repeated, and did it again.

  Faster than she could blink, Phineas caught her bare ankle in midstrike, twisted onto his stomach, and pulled her down hard onto the floor beside him. “Stop that,” he grunted. “It hurts.”

  “Good. Why should I stop?”

  “Because I’ve been shot, damn it.” He hauled her closer, looking down at her face from inches away. “I need you to help me stop the bleeding.”

  She pushed aside the niggling worry that he might actually be badly injured. “What if I refuse?”

  “Then you’ll have to explain my being in your bedchamber in the middle of the night. And…” He dragged her beneath him. “And I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that you knew what I was up to all along.”

  Alyse looked up at his lean, serious face with the rakish scar across his right eyebrow and gaped. “You wouldn’t.”

  “Only if you leave me no choice. Now. Are you going to help me?”

  “I suppose I have no choice.”

  “No, you don’t. Help me sit, and unbutton my coat.”

  For a long moment she glared at him, before she pulled away again and sat up herself. “Very well. But you and I are no longer friends.”

  Wrapping her arms around his good one, she pulled. With a grunt he brought his legs back under himself and sat. As she looked at his face more closely she realized that he was pale, except for the red mark on his cheek where she’d slapped him. With an exaggerated humph, she scooted closer and began unbuttoning his heavy, coarse greatcoat.

  There was something…unsettling about undressing him, even if it was just his outer coat, and even if she was furious wit
h him. “Where are you shot?” she asked grudgingly, having to move nearly into his arms to reach the last buttons.

  “The back of my left shoulder,” he rasped, leaning his forehead against her neck as she pushed the coat off his arms and down to the floor.

  She swallowed. “Why did you come here?”

  “I was being chased, and I didn’t think I’d make it home.” He glanced up at her face. “And because of you.”

  “Oh, please.” Raising up on her knees, Alyse looked over his shoulder to see his back. Dark blood stained through his jacket, spreading from a hole just at the edge of his shoulder blade. “Oh, my goodness.”

  “You need to stop it from bleeding before I pass out, in which case I won’t be able to leave here. Take off my jacket. Carefully.”

  At least she didn’t have to unbutton it first. Sliding her hands along his collarbones, she first pulled his right arm free, then gingerly lifted it down his left. As she glanced down at his face, she was disconcerted to realize both that her breasts were directly at his eye level, and that he was gazing at them. Her chest tightened. “Who shot you, anyway?”

  “I can’t tell you that if we’re not friends. My waistcoat.”

  Goodness. That meant moving even closer to him, balancing herself between his bent knees as he leaned back on his good hand to give her access to his clothes. “It would serve you right if you bled to death, you know.”

  “No doubt. If I do, push me out your window so no one will know I was up here.”

  “You’ll fall into the rosebushes.”

  He made an almost-amused sound. “I won’t mind, as I’ll be dead.”

  She felt flushed and embarrassed and confused, as though her mind wasn’t working entirely correctly. “I was worried for the roses.”

  “Ah.”

  Once she had his waistcoat off, she sank back. “I suppose you want me to remove your shirt and cravat now?”

  Hazel eyes met hers. “I can manage them, if you’ll fetch some water and some clean cloths.”

  For the briefest of seconds she was disappointed. It was rather like tearing the paper from a present and then having to leave it in its box. She had no intention of letting him know that, though. Alyse stood, walking over to her dressing table for the basin and pitcher of water there. “If you can manage your shirt, why have me do the other bits?”