“Why?”
“Because it’s one thing for you to be roaming a Gypsy encampment during the day alone with me, but quite another to do so at night. If any of the fair folk making purchases recognizes you, your reputation will be ruined.”
“That seems unlikely, since—”
“Just do as I say for once in your life, damn you!” He spurred his horse toward where the other mounts were being held.
“And he thinks he couldn’t make a good land agent,” she grumbled.
As proud and domineering as the aristocrats he mocked, he would probably get along rather well with Papa, if the two of them could just get past their prejudices to see it. They both thought that she needed a keeper; that alone would bond them for life.
That was one good thing about Jeremy. He didn’t try ordering her about. They were friends and equals, thank goodness, which would make him a good husband.
Well, except for his eagerness to seek out brothels and gaming hells. And his lack of enthusiasm about running the estate. And his condescending attitude toward the English.
She gritted her teeth. Men. They were the most exasperating creatures on God’s green earth. And they thought women were a nuisance? Nothing beat the sheer arrogance of a man.
♦ ♦ ♦
TRISTAN WAS GRATEFUL there was little opportunity to converse as they wandered the booths. He’d said enough already, damn it. What had he been thinking, blathering on about wanting to be a land agent? Now she’d think he was angling for a position at her estate. Because, of course, he’d managed to put that thought in her head, too, along with everything else.
You always do that . . . Say provoking things to cover up the fact that you inadvertently allowed me a glimpse of the real you.
She sounded just like Dom. Neither of them seemed to realize that the “real” him, if there was such a thing, was a man with no real home, no real country, no real place in the world. He had family and friends, yes. But one by one, they were finding spouses and feathering their nests and reminding him that his future was to be spent alone—always alone.
Once, he’d thought that was what he wanted. Now . . .
Zoe grabbed his arm. “That’s the symbol for the Corrie family, isn’t it?”
He followed the direction of her gaze. It was indeed. He strolled up to the booth but didn’t recognize the man running it. Fortunately, a few moments’ conversation in Romany gained him the direction of Milosh’s booth.
As they neared it, he murmured, “That’s him there, the man arranging those stirrups and horseshoes on a table. Milosh was always good at blacksmithing.”
Milosh seemed to have changed very little. He might be a bit thicker in the waist than before, but he seemed to be as energetic as he’d always been, rearranging his stock to best advantage, pacing his booth, and scanning the crowd.
Ah, he’d spotted them.
“Good evening, sir, madam!” Milosh crooned. “We have every sort of useful thing for a horse, if you care to take a look, and we . . .” He trailed off as the light from his lamp fell full on Tristan’s face.
“Good to see you, Milosh,” Tristan said softly.
“Tristan?” Milosh said. “Tristan Bonnaud? ”
“In the flesh.”
Bursting into laughter, Milosh grabbed him in a hug and practically squeezed the life out of him before drawing back to hold him at arm’s length and look him over. “You look well for a man who fell off the face of the earth,” he said in Romany.
“So do you,” Tristan said in English.
Taking his cue, Milosh shifted to English, too. “How many years has it been? Eleven?”
“Thirteen.”
“Ah, yes. I had only been married a year the last time I saw you.” He jerked his thumb to the back of the booth, where a woman and a strapping lad were unpacking some bundles. “My son is almost thirteen now. And I have three more like him. They’re the ones watching the horses at the entrance.”
“Damn,” Tristan said. “I wish I’d known.”
A crafty smile crossed Milosh’s face. “I will tell them to watch out for you, given your fondness for . . . liberating horses from their evil owners, shall we say?”
“No, we shall not. I am free of that charge now, and I would thank you not to remind people of it.”
Milosh nodded toward where Zoe stood back, with her hood half hiding her face, and switched to Romany. “People like her, you mean?”
“She knows everything,” Tristan said in English.
“Ah, then she must be your wife.” As Tristan hesitated, wondering if he should lie, Milosh strode up to Zoe and held out his hand. “Milosh Corrie at your service, madam. I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Zoe shook his hand. “I’ve heard a great deal about you from Tristan.”
“None of it good, I expect.” Milosh gestured to the back of the booth. “Come, you must meet my wife and son.”
With a hesitant smile, Zoe pushed the hood off her head. “I would be honored.”
Milosh stiffened. Before Tristan could even wonder at that, the horse trader spoke in a voice of wonder and shock.
“Drina?” he said to Zoe. “Drina!” Then he turned to Tristan. “How on earth did you find my sister?”
15
ZOE’S HEAD SPUN. His sister! Drina was Milosh’s sister?
No, how could that be? She scanned the man furtively, looking for some signs of resemblance to herself, but could find nothing in his leathery skin and bearded face that gave her any certainty.
Unlike most of the Gypsies she’d seen that day, he was huge—not just tall, like Tristan, but barrel-chested and thick-waisted. He wore a heavily embroidered waistcoat beneath his threadbare black coat, and around his neck was tied a red and yellow neckerchief.
Well, he did dress with dash. But so did Jeremy, and he might not be of her blood at all.
Still, there’d been no mistaking the recognition in Milosh’s eyes when he’d seen her face. And Rathmoor Park wasn’t but two hours’ ride from Winborough. Also, Tristan had said that the Corries were wont to winter in York.
Corrie. She swallowed hard. Her real name was Corrie, assuming this was all true. “So . . . so Drina was your sister?”
At the sound of her voice, Milosh blinked. Then dismay paled his swarthy cheeks. “No . . . I mean, yes, my sister. But you can’t be her. You’re too young. She’d be nearly forty by now. So who . . . how . . .”
Tristan stepped in. “Zoe is my client. She hired me to find her mother, whom she says was named Drina.”
Zoe couldn’t help noticing that Tristan refrained from giving her full name and title. Thank goodness he was thinking on his feet. She couldn’t think at all. She had an uncle. An uncle.
Placing a steadying hand on her arm, Tristan stared at Milosh. “I take it you don’t know where your sister is?”
“No, I haven’t seen her in over twenty years.” Milosh scanned Zoe hungrily, as if trying to parse every feature, the way she’d just done with him. “How old are you, girl?”
“Twenty-one.”
A light sparked in his eyes. “You’re my niece, then? Drina’s daughter?”
“If it’s the same Drina . . .”
“You’re the very image of her, chai. The likeness is uncanny, and the age is right. You have to be her daughter!”
Scowling, Milosh’s wife approached him, and they began to argue in Romany. Zoe kept hearing the word marhime over and over.
With her heart in her throat, Zoe turned to Tristan. “What are they saying?”
“Apparently Drina was banished from the Corrie clan because she consorted with a gadjo.”
“Papa?” she asked shakily.
“I don’t know. I suppose so. I can’t grasp everything they’re saying, but it appears that Milosh’s wife is protesting that Drina was declared to be marhime, or ‘unclean,’ for reasons of promiscuity with a gadjo. She says that means you are marhime as well. That Milosh should send you packing.”
Unclean. Zoe’s belly roiled. That sounded almost worse than bastard.
He cast her a concerned glance. “Are you all right?”
She wrapped her arms about her waist. “Oh, certainly, I’m fine. Wonderful. Couldn’t be better.” She heard the rising note of hysteria in her voice, but couldn’t help it. “Not only is it possible that Papa forsook his vows to Mama to be with the woman who is my mother, but now I hear that my mother was banished for it.” She fought for breath, fought to gain her bearings in this new world. “No wonder she sold me.”
Tears stung her eyes. Had the beating her natural mother received been connected to her banishment? Was that why she’d abandoned her own child? Or had Drina simply felt incapable of raising the baby who’d brought her so much grief?
As tears spilled down her cheeks, Tristan slung one arm about her shoulders. “I’m sorry, princess.”
She shook her head. “I wanted to know the truth. And you did . . . warn me that it might be painful.”
The Corries’ argument ended as abruptly as it had begun when Milosh growled something that sent his wife marching mutinously to the back of the booth.
As he faced them and caught sight of Tristan’s arm about Zoe’s shoulders, he scowled.
Tristan instantly dropped his arm. “I don’t understand, Milosh. I didn’t even know you had a sister.”
Milosh kept sneaking glances at her, as if to confirm the evidence of his eyes. “By the time you and I became friends, Drina had already been banished for a couple of years. She was only with my family that first summer we camped at Rathmoor Park, when you and I were mere lads. She was eighteen and promised in marriage to another Rom, so she was kept away from boys, especially gadjo boys.”
“But you never mentioned her, never even spoke her name,” Tristan said incredulously.
“I wasn’t allowed. She was marhime! When one is banished, one no longer exists. Did you not learn that in all your years as my friend?”
Tristan shook his head. “I didn’t realize it was so . . . final.”
“Well, it is.” Milosh glanced back at his sulking wife, then lowered his voice. “But I could never entirely accept the decision of the kris. I always hoped she might return to us one day, that I might have the chance to fight for an end to her banishment.”
He looked at Zoe. “You said you have been looking for her. When did she vanish? Did she raise you alone? Or did she find another protector, or even a husband, after she left Hucker?”
“H-Hucker?” The ground dropped from beneath Zoe’s feet. “George’s Hucker?”
Tristan had gone rigid beside her. “What does John Hucker have to do with this?”
Milosh turned instantly wary. “You didn’t know.”
“Know what?” Tristan clipped out.
“I thought that’s why you came here to find me—because you’d learned something about Hucker.” Worry spread over Milosh’s face as he saw their reaction to his comment. “Hucker is the one who seduced my sister. And given Zoe’s age, he had to be the one who got Drina with child.”
Got . . . Drina . . . with . . . child. Hucker, the horrible man who’d helped to rip everything from Tristan and Lisette and Dom. The horrible man who bullied women and children.
The horrible man who was her father. Her monstrous, abominable . . .
Her vision swam, narrowing to a tunnel filled with Milosh’s startled expression. As her blood roared in her ears, she pitched forward, and someone caught her. Through a fog she heard voices calling and making demands. Then everything went black.
When she came to, she was half reclining on a pile of cushions and Tristan was holding a cup of strong spirits to her lips and urging her to drink. She took a swallow, gasped at the fierce burn, then took another.
“Better?” Tristan asked.
With a nod, she struggled to sit up.
“Perhaps you should lie there a moment longer,” he said uneasily.
“I’m fine. Really, I am.” But she remained seated, not sure she could trust her legs yet.
Wordlessly, he pressed the cup of liquor into her hands. She was grateful for it, if only to keep her hands from trembling.
She glanced around and realized she was in the back of the booth. It was warmer, probably because someone had pulled a flap down at the front to close the booth up. Milosh’s wife had disappeared with their son, and now it was just the three of them.
Milosh—her uncle, for pity’s sake!—sat cross-legged on the frozen ground and Tristan on a stool beside the cushions. Both of them regarded her with a concern that would have warmed her heart under other circumstances. Ones where she was not the daughter of a villain.
Her head spun again, and she took another sip of what she suspected was brandy. It warmed her, settled her a little. Only a little.
Milosh gazed warily at Tristan. “If you did not come here because you heard about Hucker, then why did you come?”
Tristan shrugged. “You were my friend and a Yorkshire Rom. Zoe hired me to find her parents, and it made sense that I should start with you.”
That wasn’t the whole truth, but she figured the whole truth was rather pointless now.
“So my sister has gone missing, then?” Milosh asked Zoe.
“She’s been missing since my birth,” Zoe whispered. “I was adopted by . . . an English couple. My adoptive mother, who’s dead now, told her sister that Papa bought me from a woman named Drina.”
Milosh spat an oath. “That’s a lie. Drina would never have been so unconscionable as to sell a child of her blood. She might have behaved foolishly by sharing Hucker’s bed, but that . . .” He shook his head.
Tristan stared balefully at his friend. “And you’re sure it was Hucker and not some other fellow who got Drina with child? Because we considered the possibility that the culprit was actually Zoe’s adoptive father, who might have made Drina his mistress.”
Hope sprang in her heart. She would vastly prefer that Papa be her true father, infidelity or no, rather than that . . . that awful beast Hucker. Especially after hearing what he’d done to Lisette and Tristan and Dom. “Yes, perhaps your sister took up with my father, whom she met . . .”
Where could they have met? As she had told Tristan, it was unlikely that Drina and Papa would have crossed paths in Highthorpe, given the villagers’ dislike of Gypsies.
“I’m sorry, chai,” Milosh said matter-of-factly, “but Hucker is definitely your father. Your grandfather caught Drina in the arse’s bed. And after she was cast out, she went to live in an abandoned hunting cottage at Rathmoor Park, where she and Hucker would meet. I did not know she was with child when we left the estate to winter in York, but I’m not surprised to hear that she was.”
“And I never knew anything about this?” Tristan exclaimed.
“They kept their union secret because of George.”
“George!” Tristan said in a hollow voice. “When was this again?”
“Do you remember the summer when George finished Eton and your father wanted to travel to Italy, so he put George in charge of the estate?”
Tristan’s face grew gray. “I remember. George was a petty tyrant, stalking around giving orders.”
Milosh nodded. “He would have cast my people off the land if your father had not given explicit instructions that we were to be allowed to stay. Even so, the situation with Drina and Hucker put a bad taste in our rom baro’s mouth, so he made the decision for us to go on to York. The last time I saw Drina, she said that Hucker meant to marry her.”
His voice hardened. “But the next summer when we camped there again and I went looking for her, Hucker said she had left him.” Milosh scowled. “I knew that was a lie. She was in love with him. And if I’d realized that she’d borne a child by him, I would have known for certain she hadn’t left him by choice.”
Tristan got a faraway look in his eyes. “So that’s why, when I stole the horse, you warned me about Hucker’s lies. It had nothing to do with George at all. It was
Hucker you didn’t trust.”
“I don’t trust either of them, and I daresay you don’t, either,” Milosh said. “But yes, it was mostly Hucker I was thinking of. I knew Drina would never have left the man unless he forced her to.”
“That’s why she was found beaten on the road my parents traveled!” Zoe blurted out. “Once she bore me, Hucker must have made her leave, and she was heading to York in hopes that your family would take her back.”
A thunderous expression spread over Milosh’s features. “Beaten? That arse beat my sister?” He rose from the ground, his eyes gone dreadfully cold. “I will murder him. I will string him up by his cowardly neck, and I will—”
“You’ll do no such thing.” Tristan jumped to his feet. “If you go accusing Hucker after twenty-one years gone, he’ll want to know how you learned about what happened to Drina. He’ll be suspicious of why you’re only coming after him now, when you already knew that she left.”
“I’ll tell him that Drina told me,” Milosh said sullenly.
“Then he’ll expect you to produce her. He’ll want to know where she’s been. He’ll start asking questions about his child, damn it, and when you can’t answer, he’ll start trying to find out who you’ve been talking to.”
Tristan’s eyes blazed at Milosh. “I’ve been asking all over the Romany camps about Drina, with Zoe at my side. All it would take is one person connecting Drina and Zoe to me . . . No, he mustn’t know about Zoe. He can’t. He would go right to George with it, and you know what that would mean for her.”
Zoe’s heart thundered in her ears. Oh, Lord, a man like Hucker . . . If he ever learned who she was, that she wasn’t the true heir to the title and the estate, he would blackmail Papa, blackmail her . . .
“Tristan’s right—you can’t tell him about me.” She struggled to her feet. “You mustn’t.”
Milosh crossed his arms over his chest. “I can’t ignore my sister’s beating, either! Where is she? What happened to her?”
How the Scoundrel Seduces Page 18