Abby resisted the urge to lay her head on Axel’s shoulder. She’d been aware of Gregory’s true nature for a handful of weeks, while Sir Dewey had been in Gregory’s confidence for years.
“Tell us about the night Stoneleigh tried to kill you,” Axel said.
Chapter Twenty-One
Oh, what relief Abby felt, when Axel recast the facts for Sir Dewey into the posture of a life saved rather than a life taken. No longer the night of the murder, but the night Gregory had tried to take another victim’s life and failed.
“Gregory sent Ambers with a note earlier in the day,” Sir Dewey said, “summoning me for a late-night chat, which was not unusual. I’d been trying to tempt him into some time away, but he did not oblige me. His manner was gloating and secretive, and he hinted that soon, all of our racketing about would be unnecessary. I had noticed that Mrs. Stoneleigh was increasingly ill, and when I asked Gregory if he feared for his wife’s well-being, he laughed.
“That laugh,” Sir Dewey went on, “wasn’t maniacal or forced. Gregory’s laughter was friendly, sad, regretful… that laugh said he was utterly lost, beyond decency. He’d been cleaning his pistols when I arrived, and instinct told me to remove them from his grasp. I put one out of the colonel’s reach on the sideboard, as if making a place to set Stoneleigh’s brandy down among the items on his desk. I never supposed the gun was loaded, and even touching it made me uneasy.”
“Stoneleigh doubtless noted your disquiet,” Axel said.
“He taunted me, of course. Asked when I’d get over my cowardice, asked if the knighthood weighed on my conscience when I couldn’t even trust myself to shoot a damned pheasant. I can’t, by the way. Hadn’t killed another living creature since I came home, until Gregory drew his pistol on me.”
“Do you doubt that Gregory was planning to kill you?” Abby asked. “He had loaded two guns, Sir Dewey. Four shots is more than enough to end any life.”
“I know when I turned from the sideboard, to tell the colonel to shut his damned mouth, he was holding one of those guns on me, smiling a genial, condescending smile, his nightcap at his elbow, his wife asleep upstairs, possibly losing ground day by day to either neglect or worse at his hands.
“I hated him then,” Sir Dewey said. “I hated him with everything in me, and I do not apologize for that. He was confident I would not defend myself in any fashion.”
“Stoneleigh ridiculed you,” Axel said. “He made implied threats on his spouse’s life, and he held a gun on you when you were unarmed. Then what happened?”
Sir Dewey’s countenance grew thoughtful at Axel’s summation. “Stoneleigh leveled the gun at me, told me I’d become a nuisance, and commended me to the company of the angels, where his wife would soon join me. He regretted that a knight of the realm who struggled with terrible memories was about to become aggressively violent—meaning myself, of course—and to require the same mercy as a rabid dog would.”
“With no one to gainsay him,” Axel said, “Stoneleigh’s claim to have fired in self defense would likely have stood. You would be dead, and Mrs. Stoneleigh still very much in harm’s way.”
Sir Dewey remained silent for a moment, perhaps absorbing the absolution in Axel’s words.
Abby remained silent as well, though this recitation relieved the last of the fears she’d carried with her from Candlewick. She was safe in her own home. The remaining challenge was to fashion her future according to the dictates of her own heart.
“I do not recall picking up the gun I’d set on the sideboard,” Sir Dewey said. “I recall the kick of the recoil in my grasp. I was out the French doors in the next instant, running through the darkness like the hounds of hell were after me, the gun still in my hand. Had there been a cliff at the edge of Stoneleigh’s property, I would have run straight off it. I don’t expect anybody to understand, but in an odd way, Stoneleigh gave me a parting gift, for I learned that night that I do not want die—not with Stoneleigh’s bullet in my heart, and not with a noose about my neck either.”
“There is a precipice,” Axel said. “Please consider carefully whether you leap off of it after all the effort you’ve put forth to regain safety. Stoneleigh tormented you with guilt for years, used you as his personal nursemaid, put you into proximity with guns and drugs knowing your aversion to both, and ultimately sought to kill you. Your crime, if any, is a misguided excess of honor. I suggest you forgive yourself for it.”
Oh, what a brilliant lecture. Abby nearly applauded, but that would have meant turning loose of Axel’s hand.
“And yet,” Sir Dewey said, setting the cat down and rising, “I will apologize to Mrs. Stoneleigh. I allowed her to suffer groundless fears, when I should have come forward and trusted to the king’s justice. Had I been a better friend to her, she might be in more robust health. Had I been more willing to see the evidence of my own eyes, her husband’s poor treatment of her might have ended… I’m rambling. I’m sorry. I wish I’d killed him sooner. I should apologize for that, but I’m… Forgive me.”
Sir Dewey was a dignified figure, a portrait of weary honor by the crackling fire, and yet Abigail had a sense he had not yet found… peace. Years and years of struggling, and part of him was yet held captive by savages.
“I wish the colonel had suffered the fate you did,” Abby said. “In India. I wish those demented, vile, ingenious guards with their loaded guns had captured Gregory instead of you. Justice would have been better served all around.”
The man knighted for bravery went entirely still, not simply motionless. He stared into the fire for a long moment, while the flames crackled and the clock ticked. Axel raised Abby’s hand and kissed her knuckles, though he too remained quiet, as if waiting for a promising scholar to mentally thrash his way to a correct answer.
“Yes,” Sir Dewey said, smacking the mantel with his fist. “Yes, exactly. That is… that is brilliant, Mrs. Stoneleigh. I thank you.”
“I quite agree,” Axel said, standing and drawing Abby to her feet. “Such a fate for Stoneleigh has a pleasing symmetry, and we can comfort ourselves with the possibility that in the hereafter, he’s enduring exactly such torment. Sir Dewey, we will take our leave of you. I have a report to write and an investigation to conclude. In future, I hope you’ll call at Candlewick, even if Mrs. Stoneleigh no longer bides there.”
How kind Axel was, and how bewildered Sir Dewey appeared.
“Call often,” Abby said. “I owe you much. Hospitality is the least I can offer in return.”
Sir Dewey saw them out, looking all the while as if he were translating parting civilities from an obscure foreign language.
“I’ll bid you both good night,” he said, “and thank you for the compliment of your continuing regard.”
He bowed them on their way, and Abby went into the cold, night air with a sense of enormous relief.
“He’d make a decent magistrate,” Axel said, escorting Abby down the steps and into the waiting coach. “The poor wretch is ready to collapse with relief though. As am I.”
While Abby was ready to collapse with… love? Frustration? She kissed Axel’s cheek.
“You handled that beautifully. I doubt Sir Dewey has told another soul that awful tale, not the whole of it. Confession is good for the soul, and he’ll make a brilliant magistrate.” He’d make somebody a lovely husband too, the right somebody.
Axel handed Abby into the coach, took the place beside her, wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and rested his chin against her temple.
An “all’s right with the world” feeling settled around her heart. All was not right, though. The daft man holding her thought his sole calling was to fill the world with perfect roses.
“Sir Dewey might come to enjoy the magistrate’s job,” Axel said, as the horses trotted on. “How my brother held the position for years is beyond me. Damned lot of haring about and wrestling with riddles. Now, I suspect there was only the one safe, though I still haven’t brought you an explanation for all of Stoneleigh�
�s wealth.”
Axel had brought her the truth, and Abby purely loved being close to him. She kissed him again, in gratitude and relief, and simply because she could.
“Abigail.” For a man who prided himself on his lectures, he could put a wealth of forbearance and affection in the mere utterance of a name.
“Axel Belmont, come home with me and take me to bed. In the morning, we’ll have much to discuss, but for now, I want your arms around me and the feel of you near me as I fall asleep.”
She feared he’d resist, and blather on about propriety, a widow’s good name, the late hour… Instead, he went uncomplaining to his fate, almost as if the thought of returning to Candlewick without her held no appeal.
When they’d made the journey to Stoneleigh Manor, and he’d escorted her to her bedroom, the disrobing was relaxed and unhurried, the climbing into bed the most mundane, profound comfort imaginable.
Axel took Abby in his arms, spooned himself around her, and then she was dreaming of gleaming spires, and of a gallant botanist, who galloped through golden snow to toss perfect roses at her balcony.
When she awoke in the morning, she was alone in the bed and had no evidence that she’d passed the entire night in Axel’s tender embrace.
Clemson’s epistle delicately suggested that a deanship for Axel was a strong possibility, provided the contents of Candlewick’s botanical library were entrusted to academic hands—preferably Clemson’s.
A few months ago, Axel would have been packing up his treasured books, thanking his lucky stars, and marveling at what a few letters from a deceased empress could do for a fellow’s academic aspirations.
Now, he simply missed Abigail. He’d written his report, though the gaps in it bothered him—was there a second safe? If so, what was in it? How had Stoneleigh amassed all that wealth—lucky investments? Chance wagers? Inherited wealth of which he’d kept Abigail in ignorance?
In the space of a week, pondering these questions had given Axel the ability to nearly stop time. The library clock had moved only twenty minutes past the hour of ten in the evening since he’d sat down to deal with correspondence that had been piling up for days.
Twenty-two minutes past the hour saw him sorting through letters, though only one caught his attention, from Nicholas, who’d taken up residence in London in anticipation of the Season.
If Nick had found a bride already…
Axel sat for a moment in a library into which he no longer bothered bringing cut roses. He’s sent a bouquet to Abigail days ago, after Sir Dewey’s difficult disclosures had been shared.
Axel had risen from a night of rest in Abigail’s arms, grateful that she was safe, but even more determined that her future remain her own to command. Since then, he’d had one note from her, thanking him for the flowers. She’d sent back all but two of the footmen, though every male on Axel’s staff was in a decline due to Hennessey’s departure.
“I am in a decline,” Axel informed the pile of correspondence.
He tended his roses, he made notes for his herbal, he dutifully corresponded with his sons, and had taken his nephews out for a meal. He’d even gone to services hoping to see Abigail, but she was trading on her bereavement—or out of charity with Weekes—and eschewing church.
Perhaps she’d been resting… or avoiding a man whose ambitions she’d greatly admired.
“Dratted ambition. May a blight, a smut, and black spot plague all academic ambitions.”
Though why shouldn’t Abigail admire Axel’s ambitions? He’d fed, watered, and tended them as if they were the last roses in his possession, though now, he’d give anything to be the blossom Abigail chose to take up to her bedroom at night.
“I’m growing daft.” Also lonely. Axel slit open Nick’s letter.
Greetings, Professor,
The accompanying parcel includes a sample of the goods Gregory Stoneleigh was importing for distribution to various establishments in London, some of those establishments quite disreputable. One understands why the estimable Sir Dewey would eschew such trade. You will please dissuade my Abigail from marrying such an honorable prig, by the way. If I’m to lose her to anybody, it had better be you.
Those responsible for handling Stoneleigh’s goods have become curiously unavailable for interviewing, and Gervaise Stoneleigh has no intention of continuing his late father’s commercial enterprise.
When you’ve realized that Oxford celibacy will be a curse compared to what you could have with Abigail, please do bring your new wife to visit the capital. My flirting skills grow apace, though I have only dear Buttercup’s company upon which to practice them. She, alas, is difficult to impress, but at least she has no designs on my freedom.
I remain, as ever, your very dearest,
Wee Nick
“Nicholas, I love you like a brother, but you are fool.” A fine opening statement for a long overdue lecture.
Axel uncapped the ink sitting on the standish, took out a sheet of paper, and trimmed the quill pen, for Nick’s note wanted answering.
Nick feared that any wife he chose would kidnap his every hour, commandeer his every moment, and begrudge him a quiet morning on horseback. As Matthew had pointed out, the right female, a sensible woman with a good heart and her own affairs to tend to, would never—
A queerish feeling settled over Axel. Not foreboding, and not the warm shivers, either. More of a dawning awareness, like prescience. An image came to his mind, of himself, pacing back and forth before the mounting block, insisting to a mulish Hennessey that Abigail Stoneleigh be given control over every detail over her life, every moment of her day.
“I am an idiot,” Axel announced to the room at large. “Abigail did not need anybody to vindicate her right to fashion a life of her own choosing. Abigail has a fine, if recently acquired, sense of her own preferences. I am the one who must work at both divining and expressing my needs and desires.”
Insight tumbled upon insight, as Axel recalled himself as the younger Belmont son, largely overlooked in the midst of his mother’s drama. He’d sought the quiet of the woods, where he’d wandered for hours, ostensibly collecting botanical specimens while he’d in truth searched for a sense of self-possession.
Then he’d been the youthful husband, nonplussed by his wife’s demanding personality. Then he’d become a widowed father with two boys to raise and every eligible woman in the shire determined to supervise him in that undertaking.
“I needed better thorns where the ladies were concerned,” he said, setting the quill down. “I needed better judgment… I needed…” All manner of metaphors came to mind, but they all pointed to the same conclusion—one Matthew had tried to drive home.
Abigail saw the real man and supported his dreams.
“I need Abigail.”
This admission lifted a great weight from Axel’s heart, and replaced it with a hope. His need for her was adult, measured, reasonable, and only slightly tinged with desperation. He would not fall to pieces without Abigail—she hadn’t fallen to pieces with him, clearly—but he’d be less than entirely happy without her.
Now there was an opening statement upon which a learned and smitten fellow might build the most important lecture he ever presented. Axel crossed to the sideboard, thinking to fortify himself with a tot of courage, when he noticed the parcel Nick had sent up from London.
Crafting a diatribe that would be part marriage proposal, part explanation, and part apology would require many drafts, and Nick’s parcel was a loose end, like botanical specimens yet to be catalogued and preserved.
Brown paper and plain twine wrapped about a box about two feet square.
“Best have a look.”
Axel used the penknife to slit the twine, tossed the twine into the fire, and did likewise with the paper. The box held a lovely peacock blue silk shawl, a pair of worked brass candlesticks, a fan bearing a painting of a crouching tiger, several unremarkable books of naughty sketches, and a sandalwood box.
That smaller
box appeared at first to be filled with chopped straw, more fodder for the fire, until a length of cool, green jade fell into Axel’s hand.
“Hilarious, Nicholas. Disreputable establishments, indeed.”
The jade was shaped to emulate the erect phallus, its surface scored with a pattern of leaves, lotus blossoms, and vines. Axel set the box on the sideboard and brought the jade to the desk.
The carving was intricate, raising the piece to the level of erotic art. And yet, to a botanist’s eye, something was… off. The pattern was stylized, of course, but the weight… Jade was heavy, and this…
Axel took up a quizzing glass, peering at the looping, curving design, until he could make out one line scored more heavily than the others. That single carved line disrupted an otherwise consistent pattern of opposite, alternating leaves, and suggested…
A stout twist opened the jade into top and bottom, and a heap of fine white powder poured onto Axel’s desk blotter. He touched a finger to the powder, then to the tip of his tongue.
Bitterness came first, followed by a cool sensation that turned hot, then numb.
“God in heaven.”
The clock struck the half hour as Axel yanked the bell-pull.
“Have Ivan saddled,” he informed the footman who showed up with two buttons undone on his jacket. “And tell Wheeler to please hurry.”
Somewhere in Abigail’s house, Stoneleigh had very likely secreted a king’s ransom in opium. He’d not only been addicted to the stuff, he’d been trafficking in it, and the man who’d abetted the colonel’s smuggling was still in Abigail’s employment.
Colonel Brandon was not the stuff of a restless widow’s dreams. Mr. Darcy hadn’t been worth a second read, and Mrs. Radcliffe lacked… credibility. If only Abby had thought to ask for the loan of some of Axel’s herbals and treatises, she might be whiling away her evening tormenting herself in earnest.
It Happened One Night: Six Scandalous Novels Page 32