Silk and Shadows
Page 41
Weldon lay on the bed, his face bruised and bleeding, his expression dazed, as if unable to accept that his diabolical luck had run out. When the door opened, he sat up and glared at the intruders, but his malice was a pale shadow of his old manner.
"If it isn't my favorite little whore," he said nastily. "Did you come back because you missed me?"
Jenny's eyes narrowed to angry slits. "I came back to see you broken. Someday soon, I'll spit on your grave."
Slade put an arm around her taut shoulders. "I'm going to give you more mercy than you deserve, Weldon," he said coolly. "You're doomed. If you stand trial, the scandal will follow your daughter for the rest of her life. But if you die tonight, your crimes need never become public knowledge. Eliza won't have to know how vile her father was. Since Peregrine intends to save the railway, your daughter will even be a rich woman someday from the stock she'll inherit."
Weldon's bitter gaze sharpened. "That would also make things easier for you," he sneered. "Well, I'm not going to take the coward's way out. Who knows what might happen in court?"
Slade shrugged indifferently. "If you want to delude yourself that a miracle will save you, go right ahead. Your daughter will suffer, but not a tithe as much as the rest of your victims have." The lawyer set the loaded pistol on the dresser and withdrew with Jenny, locking the door behind them.
Weldon stared at the door, then got up and limped over to pick up the pistol. Caressing the warm wood and cool steel, he turned the weapon over and over in his hands while he considered what Slade had said.
Eliza was the best thing in his life, the only pure female he had ever known. He thought of the expression in her eyes when he had found her tonight. She adored him, as a daughter should, and she would be devastated by her father's public vilification.
As a female, Eliza would never be able to understand the irresistible allure of the dark side of life. She would come to hate the memory of her father, her innocent love destroyed by all the people who would say he had been wicked.
If Weldon killed himself, he would deny Peregrine the pleasure of seeing him suffer. Quickly, before he could change his mind, Weldon put the pistol barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger.
Downstairs, Jenny shivered and drew closer to Slade at the sound of the shot. "Why did you let him do that?"
"It's better this way, Jenny. No more innocents suffer, there will be no trouble for Peregrine or his lady, no chance that your reputation will be damaged." Slade's ice-gray eyes gleamed with chilly satisfaction. Jenny's tormentor was dead. A good lawyer could do murder without ever touching a weapon.
His expression warmed. "Since you're going to be my wife, your reputation is my business. You are going to marry me, aren't you, Jenny?"
"Yes, Benjamin," she replied as warmth blossomed deep inside of her. She stood on her toes and gave him a kiss of aching promise.
With her lover at her side, Jenny left the house of death forever.
* * *
Insisting that he was perfectly well, Kuram chose to ride the horse so Peregrine was alone with Sara inside the carriage. Wrapped in her cloak, his wife sat in the far corner of the vehicle, not touching him.
The darkness was thick with tension. Peregrine knew that he should speak, but was painfully unsure where to begin.
It was a relief when Sara's soft voice broke the silence. "Why didn't you kill him?"
Knowing how important his answer was, he hesitated before speaking. "After you left Sulgrave, I did a great deal of thinking and realized that vengeance could not alter or heal the past. Today, if I had stayed in a white heat of rage for just a minute longer, I would have killed Weldon, but the sight of you broke my anger. After that, I could not do it."
"Are you saying that you gave up your revenge because of me?" she exclaimed, incredulous.
Obliquely he replied, "After you and I had that argument, I realized that you were talking not only about right and wrong, but about choosing whether to live a life rooted in hate or one rooted in love. For too many years, the center of my life was hatred, Sara. Then I met you, and slowly, without my conscious awareness, the center shifted."
He paused, searching for the right words to convey his meaning. "If destroying Weldon meant losing you, the price was too high, for I would be condemning myself to a living death." Then, wryly, he added, "Before we married, I said that I trusted you to always be good. Fortunately I didn't know then how difficult it can be to live with someone who is always good, or I would have been afraid to try."
"I sound like a dreadful prig," she said with a shaky laugh. A streetlight outside momentarily illuminated her pure profile.
"You are not at all priggish about matters that count." Briefly there was a smile in his voice, but he was deadly serious when he continued, "Yin and yang mean many things. Light and dark, good and evil, even love and hate. Together, opposites make a whole. You are my heart, Sara, and your light balances my darkness. Will you come home?"
Instantly she flowed across the carriage and into his arms. "Of course I will!" she said joyously, her breath feather-soft against his throat. "When you told the driver to go to Haddonfield House, I was afraid that you didn't want me back."
With a gust of laughter, he said, "I was trying to do the gentlemanly thing, though it went against my nature." The knot of tension in his chest miraculously dissolved as he pulled her onto his lap and drew her close. "Whenever you wondered why I married you, I always said that I did it because I wanted to, and I never looked any deeper." He stroked a gentle hand through Sara's silky hair, which had come unpinned during her struggle with Weldon. "After you left, I realized that my words were a coward's way of saying that I love you."
"I didn't believe you would ever say that." Tenderly Sara lifted her hand to his cheek and caressed the chiseled plane with her fingertips. "You've changed so much. When I first met you, you were like some exotic, alien creature, forever wild and incomprehensible. It seemed impossible that you could ever love me as I love you."
"I started changing as soon as I met you, though I didn't realize it at first. When I did, I can't say that I enjoyed the sensation. But the formative years of my life were spent here, and the longer I stay, the more I feel like an Englishman. This is my heritage, and I no longer want to deny it." His tone became teasing. "In fact, I have succumbed to the most banal of ambitions: to become an English country gentleman and live quietly with my wife and raise children and horses."
"There is nothing banal about happiness," Sara retorted. "If life as a country gentleman is a common ambition, that is because it is a good life. But you will never be banal. There has never been a man like you, and there never will be again. In spite of the way you deny it, you are a good man."
"As long as you think I'm good enough," Mikahl said, amused. After reaching into an inner coat pocket, he said, "Give me your left hand."
When she complied, he slid her wedding ring onto her third finger. Then he raised her hand to his lips, and kissed it with lingering reverence. "I want to be with you always, Sara," he said softly. "To make love with you, laugh with you, be silent with you. And most of all, I want to be the man that I am only when I am with you."
"And I want to be the woman that I am only with you." Sara's fingers tightened around the ring. "If you are willing, I would like to have a wedding ring made for you. One that matches mine."
"I would like that." After a thoughtful pause, he said, "Since I intend to stay in England, perhaps I should become Michael Connery again. We can tell people that I decided to Anglicize my name for the sake of simplicity. Will you mind being Sara Connery?"
Intuitively she knew that he was not only suggesting a name change, he was accepting his past—all of it, the bad and the good. That acceptance had come from healing. Finally, after too many years, the wounded boy was whole and had become a man.
In the half-light of the carriage, Sara looked into the vivid depths of his eyes. "I love you," she whispered as she lifted her face to his. "I'll always love you, whet
her you are Peregrine, Michael, or Mikahl."
Their lips touched, at first lightly, then in fierce declaration as they pledged their souls without words.
Pledge and promise turned quickly to passion and the trip across London passed in a haze of touch and love and laughter. On reaching Mayfair, Mikahl gave orders to continue to their home rather than to Haddonfield House.
When they arrived at their destination, he climbed out and let down the steps, then caught Sara around the waist and effortlessly whisked her from the carriage.
"Before I take you upstairs and make love to you," he said as he set her feet on the ground, "perhaps you should say good-bye to Peregrine, for I am a wanderer no more."
"So my hawk has become a dove?" Hair tumbled and eyes dreamy with desire, Sara caught his face between her hands. "Welcome home, wanderer, welcome home."
The End
Page forward for a note from Mary Jo Putney
followed by an excerpt from
SILK AND SECRETS
The Silk Series
Book Two
Author's Note
Kafiristan, also sometimes called Dardistan, lies in what is now eastern Afghanistan. The Hindu Kush is one of the most remote areas on earth, and Kafiristan was not officially charted until George Scott Robertson visited in 1889.
The country took its name from the Arabic "qafir," meaning "unbeliever." (Arab slavers applied the same word to the tribes of East Africa, and "kaffir" became a derogatory term for black Africans.)
As indicated in Silk and Shadows, the natives of Kafiristan claimed Alexander the Great as an ancestor. Some of their customs seemed more European than Asiatic, and they welcomed the first Europeans as long-lost kinfolk. (The Russians believed that the Kafirs were a Slavic tribe.)
A romanticized version of the country was the goal of the adventurers in the movie The Man Who Would Be King, which was based on a story by Rudyard Kipling. In 1895, Amir Abdur Rahman, the ruler of Afghanistan, conquered Kafiristan and forcibly converted the inhabitants to Islam.
Since then the region has been known as Nuristan, "the country of light."
Page forward for an exciting excerpt from
Silk and Secrets
The Silk Trilogy
Book Two
Excerpt from
Silk and Secrets
The Silk Trilogy
Book Two
by
Mary Jo Putney
Prologue
Autumn 1840
Night was falling rapidly and a slim crescent moon hung low in the cloudless indigo sky. In the village the muezzin called the faithful to prayers and the haunting notes twined with the tantalizing aroma of baking bread and the more acrid scent of smoke. It was a homey, peaceful scene such as the woman had observed countless times before, yet as she paused by the window, she experienced a curious moment of dislocation, an inability to accept the strange fate that had led her to this alien land.
Usually she kept herself so busy that there was no time to think of the past, but now a wave of piercing sorrow swept through her. She missed the wild green hills of her childhood, and though she had made new friends and would soon dine with a surrogate family that she loved, she missed her own blood kin and the friends who were now forever lost to her.
Most of all, she missed the man who had been more than a friend. She wondered if he ever thought of her, and if he did, whether it was with hatred, anger, or cool indifference. For his sake, she hoped it was indifference.
It would be easier if she felt nothing, yet she could not regret the pain that was still, even after so many years, a silent undercurrent to her daily life. Pain was the last vestige of love and she was not yet willing to forget love; she doubted that she would ever be.
Her life could, and should, have been so different. She had had so much, more than most women ever dreamed of. If only she had been wiser, or at least less impulsive. If only she had not succumbed to despair. If only...
Realizing that her mind was sliding into a familiar, futile litany of regrets, she took a deep breath and forced herself to think of the responsibilities that gave her life meaning. The first lesson of survival that she had learned was that nothing could change the past.
For just a moment she touched the pendant that hung suspended around her neck, under her robe. Then she turned her back on the empty window and the darkening sky. She had made her bed and now she must lie in it. Alone.
Chapter 1
London October 1840
Lord Ross Carlisle sipped his brandy, thinking with amusement that watching two lovebirds bill and coo was enough to drive a man to the far corners of the earth, which was exactly where Ross was about to go. It did not make it easier that the happy lovers were his best friends. Perhaps that made it harder.
His gaze drifted over the comfortable lamplit drawing room where they were enjoying an after-dinner drink; brandy for the two men, lemonade for Lady Sara, who was in the early stages of pregnancy and had lost her taste for alcohol. The three of them had spent many similar evenings together, and Ross would greatly miss the conversation and companionship.
Finally remembering his obligations, Ross's host broke away from the silent communion he had been sharing with his wife and lifted the decanter. "Care for some more brandy, Ross?"
"A little, please. Not too much, or I'll have no head for traveling in the morning."
Mikahl Connery poured a small measure of amber spirits into both of their crystal goblets. Lifting his goblet, he said, "May you have an exciting and productive journey."
His wife, Lady Sara Connery, raised her glass and added, "And after all the excitement, may you have a safe return home."
"I will cheerfully drink to both of those goals." Ross gave Sara a fond glance, thinking how well marriage suited her. She was his cousin and the two of them shared the unusual combination of brown eyes and burnished gold hair, but Sara had a quiet inner serenity that Ross had never known. For many years the only peace he had found had been in travel, in challenging himself in ways that engaged all his mind and strength. "Don't fret while I'm gone, Sara. The Levant is less hazardous than many of the other places I've been. Certainly it's safer than the wild mountains where I met your alarming husband."
Mikahl drank the toast, then set his glass down. "Perhaps it's time to give up your restless wandering and settle down, Ross," he said, lazy humor in his intensely green eyes. He laid a large hand over Sara's. "A wife is far more exciting than a desert or a ruined city."
Ross smiled. "There is no zealot greater than a convert. When you came to England a year and a half ago, you would have laughed at the idea of marriage."
"But I am so much wiser now." Mikahl put an arm around his wife's shoulders and drew her closer. "Of course, there is only one Sara, but somewhere in England you should be able to find a satisfactory bride."
Perhaps it was the brandy, or perhaps it was pure mischief on Ross's part. "Doubtless you're right," he replied, "but such a paragon would be of no value to me. Didn't I ever mention that I already have a wife?" With immense satisfaction Ross saw that for once he had managed to surprise his friend.
"You know damned well that you never told me any such thing," Mikahl said, his black brows drawing together. Not quite believing, he looked questioningly at his wife.
Sara nodded confirmation. "It's quite true, my dear. In fact, I was maid of honor at the wedding." Transferring her grave regard to her cousin, she added, "A dozen years ago."
"Fascinating." Mikahl's gaze became unfocused for a moment, as if reviewing the past from a different perspective. Then, since he was totally lacking in polite British restraint, he said with vivid interest, "You've certainly done a good job of hiding the woman. What is the story, or shouldn't I ask?"
"You shouldn't ask," Sara said, aiming a stern wifely glance at her husband.
Ross smiled faintly. "You needn't scowl at Mikahl like that, Sara. It's not a secret, merely very old news." Feeling the need for more brandy, he poured hi
mself another glass. "I was just down from Cambridge when I met Juliet Cameron. She was a schoolfriend of Sara's, a tall red-headed vixen quite unlike any other female I'd ever met. As the daughter of a Scottish diplomat, Juliet had spent much of her youth in exotic places like Persia and Tripoli, and since I was a budding orientalist, I found her quite irresistible. We married in a blinding haze of mutual lust. Everyone said that it would never work, and for once, everyone was right."
Ross's casual tone must have been unconvincing, for Mikahl narrowed his eyes with an uncomfortable degree of perception. However, he asked only, "Where is your Juliet now?"
"She is no longer my Juliet, and I haven't the remotest idea where she is." Ross downed his brandy in one swallow. "After six months of marriage, she ran away, leaving a note saying that she had no desire to see either me or England again. According to her lawyer, she is prospering, but I have no idea where or how. Knowing Juliet, she probably set up as a pasha in the Sahara and has the world's only male harem." He stood. "It's getting late. Time for me to go home if I want to be off before dawn tomorrow."
Sara rose and crossed the room to enfold him in a heartfelt embrace. "I'll miss you, Ross," she said softly. "Be careful."
"I'm always careful." Ross kissed her forehead, then turned to his friend.
He had intended to shake hands, but Mikahl, once more un-English, gave him a quick, powerful hug. "And if being careful isn't enough, be dangerous. You're rather good at that, for an English gentleman."
Ross smiled and clapped the other man on the shoulder. "I've had good teachers."
They were all laughing as Ross left. He always preferred leaving with laughter rather than tears.
Silk and Secrets
The Silk Trilogy