Tempest

by Sandra Dubay

  "They won't," Dyanna told her confidently. "Luncheon is over. They are used to my spending my afternoons in my rooms reading. No one is likely to come up until suppertime. By then, we'll be well away and they will have no way of finding us."

  Satisfied, Charlotte fell into step behind Dyanna as they marched resolutely along Piccadilly to where a maroon-and-black traveling coach awaited them, concealed around the corner in Half Moon Street.

  "Dyanna, darling!" Geoffrey crooned as he sprang from the coach, a vision in baby blue and lemon. "You are just on time, though it seems I've been waiting here for hours!"

  He bundled them into the carriage and then, seating himself beside Dyanna, ordered the coachman to set off.

  "It is all arranged," he told Dyanna happily.

  "All?" she repeated, suddenly seeing how foppish, how dandified he seemed next tobut no, she must not think of Justin, not now.

  "The wedding! I have sent a messenger ahead to Patterton Park."

  "Patterton Park?"

  "My country home. I have notified the clergyman whose living I provide that he is to wait upon our arrival. We will be married as soon after we arrive as possible, and then spend our honeymoon at Patterton."

  Dyanna flushed and turned her face toward the window. The thought of doing with Geoffrey the things she had done at Barkleigh House with Justin aroused feelings in her she could not afford to explore, given her circumstances.

  "Is it wise, I wonder, to go to your country estate? After all, should anyone come looking for us, they would almost certainly look there first."

  "It does not matter. By the time they could follow us there, the deed will be done. You will be my wife. They will be powerless to come between us." Geoffrey's beaming face clouded a little. "Beside which, my mother has declared she must be present."

  "Your . . . mother?" Dyanna glanced at Charlotte and surprised a look of unease on the maid's face. Was the Dowager Lady Culpepper such a dragoness, then?

  "Yes. She resides at Patterton Park."

  "So, we are to spend our honeymoon with your mother?"

  "Well . . . yes. But it is a very large house."

  Sighing, fighting back feelings of panic and misgivings, Dyanna concentrated on the scenery passing outside the window and tried not to think of the possible folly of her actions.

  Even as Geoffrey's coach passed out of London and entered the country, the coaches bearing Justin and Caro toward Devonshire drew into a coaching house and stopped before the vine-covered entrance.

  "How perfectly lovely," Caro sighed, strolling toward a tumbling brook that passed behind the inn. Ducks waddled on the bank and a pair of swans glided gracefully beneath a charming Jacobean footbridge spanning the stream. "Oh, Justin, do let's stop here for the night."

  Receiving no reply, she went to him and touched his sleeve.

  "Justin?" she repeated.

  The faraway, troubled look in his eyes gave way to attention. "I'm sorry, Caro. What did you say?"

  "I said we should stop here for the night. It's so very lovely here. So peaceful."

  He squinted at the sun, still high in the sky. "It's a little early to speak of stopping for the night, isn't it?"

  Caro affected a much-practiced, much-admired pout that turned real when she noticed he had once more turned his attention to the faraway distance and away from her. They had been together so little since Justin had taken to his travels on the sea. She had thought this trip would bring a renewal of the closeness they had shared during their childhoods in Devonshire.

  "Caro," he said softly, sending her hopes soaring. "I think"

  "Yes, Justin?"

  "I think I should go back." He frowned, troubled by nagging, nameless doubts.

  "Back? Back where?" she demanded harshly, all her feminine wiles abandoned.

  "Back to London. You go on ahead. You have Tilden to keep you company and enough postilions to ensure your safety. I have the strangest feeling that something is wrong at home."

  "Wrong with Dyanna?" she asked.

  "Perhaps." Turning away, he went to Bertran and directed him to see that Caro's baggage was removed from his coach and placed in her own.

  "If everything is as it should be with Dyanna," he told Caro, who had come to stand beside him, "I'll catch up with you."

  Before Caro could speak, Justin and Bertran had climbed into his coach, and the gleaming black vehicle had turned and was heading back to London in a cloud of choking dust.

  Chater Eighteen

  The first thing Justin noticed when he entered DeVille House upon arriving back in London just after nightfall was the almost preternatural silence of the great house on Piccadilly.

  ''Milord," Ipswich said, when at last he made an appearance in the entrance hall. "We did not expect you back. Cook has not prepared . . " He exchanged an apprehensive glance with Bertran as his sentence trailed off into nothingness.

  "Cook has not prepared what?" Justin demanded.

  "Supper, milord. Excepting, of course, for the staff."

  "Miss Dyanna wasn't hungry? She isn't ill, is she?"

  "No, milord. She isn't ill."

  "Then why didn't she want supper?"

  "Because she . . . that is to say . . ."

  "Out with it, man!" Justin roared. "Because she what?"

  After the tiniest of pauses, the butler went on in a rush, "Because she is not here, milord."

  "Not here! Where the hell is she, Ipswich! I gave no one leave to let her go out!"

  From the pocket of his coat, the butler produced Dyanna's note. "This was found in her room, milord, when one of the maidservants went up to call her to dinner." From his other pocket, he produced a packet of Geoffrey's letters tied with a frayed satin ribbon. "These were found in her dressing table." By way of explanation he added; "I was looking for some evidence of where she might be found, milord."

  "And do these provide evidence, Ipswich?" Justin asked coldly.

  "I believe they do, milord," the butler answered quietly.

  Without another word, Justin turned and disappeared into his study. As the door closed behind him, Ipswich gestured for Bertran to follow him to the butler's pantry, where he would explain the contents of the letters and the belowstairs speculations as to what might be in Dyanna's note.

  In his study, Justin sank into a chair. The packet of letters he tossed onto his desk. Dyanna's note he turned over in his hands. A part of him knew with dreadful certainty what it contained. Another part, perhaps more trusting, if less practical, hoped against hope that he was wrong.

  At last, knowing it was foolish to delay the inevitable, he broke the seal and unfolded the crisp, heavy paper. Dyanna's flowing, ornate handwriting decorated the page. She wrote:

  "My Lord DeVille;

  By the time you read this note, I shall be Lady Dyanna Culpepper. After many long days and sleepless nights, I have come to the decision that this is the wisest and, in truth, the only course open to me. I am, as your ward, under your power until my twenty-first birthday or my marriage. But I cannot bear the prospect of three years and two months more of captivity, albeit in that most beautiful and luxurious of prisonsDeVille House.

  Lord Geoffrey Culpepper vows that he loves me; you are aware of the long and close association of our two families. I believe we will suit well enough and pray we will find some measure of contentment together.

  I pray you, my Lord, wish me well in my new life. I feel certain that once your initial surprise and, perhaps, anger, has

  passed, you will be relieved to find yourself freed of what I feel certain has been an onerous situation for you.

  I remain, yours respectfully,

  Dyanna McBride

  The letter shook in Justin's hand as he laid it on the gleaming desk top. Eloped! She had eloped with that foppish idiot, Geoffrey Culpepper. But how? They must have been laying their plans for months, he thoughthow else could it have been arranged on such short notice? How else could they have been so ready to act the moment an o
pportunity presented itself?

  His eyes fell on the packet of letters Ipswich told him had been found in Dyanna's dressing table. Reluctantly, he drew one from the top of the stack. Unfolding it, he read:

  "My own darling Dyanna;

  Too many days have passed since last we were together. My eyes long to behold you, my fingers ache to touch you . . ."

  Scowling, Justin stuffed the letter back into the stack. That the others were like it he had no doubt. He had no wish to read moreno desire to see the images they painted in his all too fertile imagination. They must have been conspiring together from the very beginning. From the first she must have given Culpepper reason to believe she would marry him. What else had she given him? Her heart? Her love? Herself?

  Anger and jealousy raged inside Justin, but as he gazed at the evidence of Dyanna's perfidy, those emotions faded before a heavy, aching sadness that filled his heart. Against all better judgment, in spite of the way he'd forced himself to keep his distance from Dyanna, to treat her, and train himself to think of her, as a child, he knew he was falling in love with her.

  Love. It was not an emotion he'd had a great deal of experience with. He'd managed to avoid entanglements of the heart, preferring the easy freedom of light-hearted affairs with women no more interested in bonds and emotional ties than he was.

  But now . . . Once he'd seen Dyanna, perhaps from the moment he had first held her that night at the Angel Inn, she'd been the only women in his heart, his mind. The only woman he desiredsaving, of course, Marie LeBrecque. That night at the Barkleighs' Ball preyed on his mind, though he could not say why; the woman had been alluring in some way he did not understand. He'd wanted her as soon as he saw her, and it had saddened him to awaken in that shadowy bedchamber at Barkleigh House and find her gone. There was something about their lovemaking that nagged at the edges of his conscience. For all

  that she was supposed to be a widow, Madame LeBrecque had been somehow innocent, tentative, though passion had overcome her initial reticence. Still, there was something about her, an impression only, for it had been too dark in the room to see clearly what he thought must surely be the face and form of an angel, that reminded him of

  He shook his head ruefully and permitted a small, self-mocking smile to curve his lips. Even when he had, after so many weeks of self-imposed celibacy, taken a woman to bed, it had to be a woman who, for some unfathomable reason, reminded him of Dyanna. He might have known. He looked at the letters lying on the table before him and cursed himself for a fool. He should have known. When at last love had caught himoutwitted him in his efforts to elude itit had to be with a willful little hoyden who had already given her heart to another.

  "So be it," he muttered. With a sweep of one hand, he brushed the letters and Dyanna's note into a drawer. "I wish them the joy of each other. Though what joy she could find in the arms of that jackanapes is beyond me!"

  Leaving the study, Justin bellowed for Bertran and, when the valet answered his master's summons, set him to the drawing of a bath and the laying out of Justin's evening clothes. He would go out and relax, perhaps gamble or dance or flirt, and forget that ungrateful chit whose aqua eyes and silvery hair danced all too clearly in his mind's traitorous eye.

  Although he left DeVille House intending to go to one or another of the dinners, balls, or salons to which he had invitations, Justin ordered his driver to take him instead to Brooks's Club in St. James's Street. It was there that Charles James Fox waylaid him.

  "Justin DeVille! Well met, my lord. I'd heard you'd left London for the wilds of Devon."

  "A change of plans, sir," Justin replied, not particularly interested in the gossip of the brilliant, slovenly Mr. Fox.

  "Ah. And how fares that beautiful ward of yours?" He kissed the tips of his fingers. "A goddess, my lord. I envy you her guardianship."

  "She is well enough," Justin replied guardedly.

  "What will you do with her? Once her mourning is over, of course."

  Justin fought to contain his impatience. He had come to Brook's to try to forget Dyanna, if only for an evening, and here was Fox wanting to discuss her.

  "I expect I'll marry her off," he said casually. He was unwilling to so much as hint that anything was amiss between his ward and himself. "Perhaps she'll wed Summersleigh's

  heiryoung Culpepper. The families have been friends for generations, you know."

  "Culpepper! Lord Geoffrey?" Fox laughed. "Hardly likely, my lord. I should think Culpepper's wife would take a dim view of that."

  Justin was shocked out of his bored impatience. "His wife! But I thought he was . . . I never heard that he . . ."

  Fox nodded, not surprised by Justin's astonishment. "It is supposed to be a secret. Young Culpepper believes, and rightly so in my opinion, that the old marquess, his grandfather, would disinherit him if he found out."

  "Who is she? His wife?"

  "She was an actresson the boards with Perdita Robinson, in fact. Her name is Octavia FitzGeorge. One hears she gives herself grand airs and demands that her servants address her as 'milady,' for all that Geoffrey will not acknowledge her publicly as his wife. He keeps her in a house in Great Queen Street. He keeps her in great style, so they say, but they are always in debt. Only the prospect of Culpepper's becoming Marquess of Summersleigh keeps the duns away. Between us two, my lord, Culpepper is a reckless gambler and not above playing upon the advantage, if you follow me. It is bound to end badly, I fear, but he is desperate for money and cannot risk the old Marquess's questions by going to him for it. So, what is he to do?"

  "What indeed?" Justin asked aloud, his

  calm exterior belying the outraged fury building inside him. What is Geoffrey to do for money but dupe a young heiress into elopingconvince her to enter into what is, for him, a bigamous union. And all in the interest of getting his hands on Dyanna's fortune.

  "My lord?" Fox prompted when Justin had remained silent too long.

  "I beg your pardon?" Justin said, suddenly recalling his surroundings.

  "I asked, my lord, if you would care to go to the faro tables and try your luck."

  "Thank you, Fox, but no. I have just recollected an important appointment. Good eveningand thank you."

  "For what?" Mr. Fox wondered aloud, but by then Justin was no more than a retreating shadow.

  Chater Nineteen

  The house in Great Queen Street to which Justin was directed was not grand or impressive, but it was elegant, and in the houses nearby dwelt, among others, the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

  Descending from his carriage, Justin mounted the steps to the front door and rang the bell. He waited some time, then knocked again. At last, after what seemed an eternity, his persistence was rewarded.

  "What do you want?" a rough, masculine voice asked through the partially opened door.

  "I wish to see your mistress," Justin told him. "It is a matter of some importance."

  '''Er ladyship ain't in," the man snarled. "An' if yer tryin' to collect fer"

  "I am not a bill collector," Justin asserted coldly. "Tell your mistress I am here with important news about Lord Culpepper."

  "'Is lordship? He ain't dead, is 'e?"

  "No, he is not dead. Now tell your mistress Lord DeVille is here. I don't relish being left to dawdle on doorsteps!"

  "Lord De" Wide-eyed, the man pulled open the door, allowing Justin to step into a small, sparsely furnished entrance hall. "Yer pardon, milord! It's onlythat is, we ain't used to the gentry callin'. I thought . . . I'll get 'er ladyship."

  Justin had to smile as the man scurried away. If the butler was any indication of the servants Geoffrey had provided for his 'wife', he hadn't been extravagant. In fact, it looked as though he'd recruited them from the taproom of the nearest inn.

  "My lord?"

  Justin turned as a door opened behind him. A woman stood there. She was little more than a girl, reallysmall, generously rounded, with a spattering of freckles across a tip-tilted nose and wide,
dark eyes framed in thick lashes the same strawberry blond as the piled-up curls atop her head.

  "Madame," Justin said. He had come prepared to be stern and forbidding, but he found himself softening toward this gentle, young creature who had clearly been taken in by Geoffrey's grandiose promises. "Forgive my calling upon you this way."

  "Not at all, my lord. Won't you come in? I am sorry GeoffLord Culpepperis not here at present. If it is he you have come to see"

  "Actually, it is you I have come to see, madam. My business concerns Lord Culpepper."

  Leading him into a salon whose sparse, worn furnishings belied Charles Fox's tales of the splendor in which Lord and 'Lady' Culpepper lived, Octavia FitzGeorge stopped in her tracks and fixed Justin with a frightened stare.

  "Does he owe you money, my lord? I'm afraid I have none here to"

  "Calm yourself, madam," Justin soothed her, declining an offer of comfits with a wave of his hand. "I am not here to dun you. If you will but tell me where it is Geoffrey Culpepper has gone, I will be on my way."

  The haunted, anxious look was back. "Gone, my lord?"

  Justin smiled. "I know you areor werean actress, madam. But I beg you not to feign innocence. Surely you know where it was Lord Culpepper was going when he left London earlier today?"

  "My lord, I do not think I should . . ."

  His impatience getting the better of him,

  Justin rose to tower over the diminutive Octavia. "You must understand, my dear, that this man does not deserve your protection. Though I will mention no names to you, I happen to knowand have proofthat this so-called husband of yours is at this moment eloping with a young woman of means."

  The rosy blush of Octavia's round cheeks faded to a cold, dead white. "It's . . . it's not possible! He is married to me!"

  "Are you certain? How do you know you are legally married?"

  "He procured a special license."

  "Did you see it?"

  "No, but he said he had it. There was a priest."

  "How do you know it was a priest? How do you know it was not merely some crony of Culpepper's dressed to look like a priest?"