Folly's Reward

by Jean R. Ewing

  “So it’s yon black laird again? Lady Dunraven does nae want to see ye! Ye can gang awa’ again, back whence ye came!”

  Lord Belham grinned. “Miss Drake is with me. You remember her, pray? She has a report for the dowager countess on the state of little Lord Dunraven’s health. Surely Lady Dunraven will open the gates to her own grandson’s governess?”

  Prudence climbed out of the carriage and waved up at the wizened face.

  “It is me, Geordie! Pray open the gates!”

  The retainer peered at her, his eyes shaded against the sun. Then he shrugged, his face disappeared, and a few moments later the great gates creaked open. The carriage lumbered through into the echoing stone courtyard, and the travelers heard the great gates of Dunraven Castle thud shut behind them.

  They passed silently under an archway and through narrow passageways into the solid, grim heart of the keep.

  Dressed entirely in black, the dowager countess stood in front of her huge fireplace. In the dim light filtering through the arrow-slit windows, her white hair glimmered with an oddly pure intensity, but her face was rigid.

  She looked at each of them with clear disdain.

  “Do you offer us no welcome, Countess?” Lord Belham asked. “May I present Lady Acton and Lord Lenwood? Miss Drake you know, of course.”

  Lady Dunraven glowered at the marquess. “I did not expect to see you at my hearth again, sir. You are not welcome here. I would to God I had directed my servants to set the dogs on you.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Lady Acton said.

  She crossed the room and took a seat.

  Prudence watched her remove her bonnet, so that a thin shaft of sunlight highlighted her black hair. Harry’s mother was still elegant, still cool, still beautiful. With the sun behind her, she looked no more than five-and-twenty.

  “Are we to have melodrama?” Lady Acton asked. “I did not expect you to have changed in all these years, Lady Dunraven, but I hoped you had at least found peace with yourself. If you cannot feel any genuine pleasure at our arrival, surely you can at least offer a modicum of courtesy to visitors?”

  Lady Dunraven glared at her. “You dare to talk to me of civility or decorum, Lady Acton? You seem happy enough to travel without shame with your old lover. Or are you lovers still?”

  The marquess walked up to stand calmly beside Lady Acton. His features were a perfect mask, but his voice cut with deadly incisiveness.

  “Don’t bother to slander Lady Acton with your poisonous invective, Lady Dunraven. She and I have not been private together for over twenty years, since before you came back to live out your widowhood in Scotland. Have you spent all that time alone here, tormenting yourself with lurid fancies? Is that why you drove away your own son?”

  “How dare you!” Lady Dunraven said. “Have you no shame?”

  “Shame? After he lost his young wife, you tortured your son with recriminations, until he abandoned his home and came to me in London. No wonder, when he was dying of consumption, he appointed me his child’s legal guardian. Yet you stole that little boy from my care, only to send him away into the world with no more protection than this naive young woman. Who the devil are you to talk about shame?”

  “So what’s this?” Lady Dunraven swept out one arm to point at Prudence. “The child’s governess arrives without the child. Have you murdered Bobby already, Belham? Do you bring me proof of the deed and demand your inheritance?”

  With an unconscious courtesy Richard moved closer to Prudence. She felt his steady strength with heartfelt gratitude. What on earth was going on?

  Richard’s quick, intelligent glance flickered once from his mother to Lord Belham. The vertical line was etched deeply between his brows.

  “The boy is perfectly safe, Lady Dunraven,” Richard said. “Bobby is in England at my home, Acton Mead, and receiving the best of care. My wife is with him. We thought another journey so soon too much for such a young child.”

  The dowager laughed with open scorn. “And who are you, sir? Some upstart rogue, no doubt, who conspires the ruin of Dunraven and the destruction of my house!”

  “Oh, no, your ladyship,” a subtle voice said from the doorway. “The gentleman you are maligning with such thoroughness is my brother. Hello, Richard! Your servant, Lord Belham.”

  Harry stepped into the room and leaned his back against the door. His dark hair fell in disheveled disarray over his forehead. He ran both hands carelessly back over it, and suppressed a wince. With clear reluctance, the harebell eyes glanced past Prudence to gaze straight at Lady Acton. They were filled with pain and a deadly, blank recoil.

  “And Mother? How very amiable to see you, also! So what the devil brings you all running after me, like a gaggle of fluffy little goslings clacking after the hen wife? Any breadcrumbs you get from me will stick in the craw like stones, I assure you.”

  Chapter 13

  Richard helped Prudence to a chair. Harry dropped onto a long wooden settle and spread his arms carelessly along the back. No one else moved.

  Prudence stared at her knees, forcing herself not to faint, or weep, or otherwise disgrace herself. Meaningless snatches of prayer raced through her mind. Oh, dear God! What has happened now?

  Her head snapped up as Richard stalked back across the room to stand threateningly over Harry.

  “You will be pleased to apologize, sir, to our mother.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Harry said. “Are we to have histrionics? And if I will not, noble brother, you will make me?”

  “I don’t believe that should be necessary, sir. You will kindly remember your manners and speak to our mother with a civil tongue, that is all.”

  “And to my father?” With deliberate insolence Harry stared straight at Lord Belham. “Do I owe civility to the unprincipled rake who took our mother to his bed and sired her a bastard for a second son?”

  Richard slapped him hard across the face.

  Lady Acton leapt to her feet. “Richard!”

  Harry’s head cracked back to strike the solid edge of the settle. He broke into feral, uncontrolled laughter.

  “By God, if anyone else wants to hit me over the head, I wish they would do it now and get it over with. Stay out of this, Richard! It’s none of your damned business.”

  “If you do not take back your outrageous insult to our mother, Harry, I shall call you out and damn the consequences.”

  “Richard!” Lady Acton ran up to her eldest son and caught him by the sleeve. “Do not be so absurd!”

  The dowager countess laughed in open triumph. “Yes, because Harry’s a crack shot, and Richard would die. Then if your daughter-in-law’s coming baby is female, or if she loses the child from the shock of hearing of her husband’s untimely death, Harry would be the next earl, unless—”

  “Oh, dear,” Lady Acton interjected. “By all means, let us have all the melodrama at once!”

  “Unless I tell the world what I have already told him,” Lady Dunraven announced. “Harry is a bastard, isn’t he, Lady Acton? And his father is the man you couldn’t wait to take to your bed when you were scarce sixteen years old. When you couldn’t have him in marriage, you had him four years later in adulterous lust. Harry’s father is not your husband, the Earl of Acton, he’s my charming nephew, my husband’s sister’s son: none other than Lord Belham. Now, isn’t that a delicious situation!”

  There was a dreadful, echoing silence. Prudence longed to go to Harry. She wanted to hold him, to kiss him, to do anything to ease the agony she saw in his white features. Instead, she sat on her wooden chair, as if doomed to live out her days in its callous embrace.

  “I don’t believe it,” Richard said. His features seemed somehow blurred, attenuated by shock.

  “Neither did I, at first, but unfortunately there’s proof.” Harry reached into his pocket and brought out a sheet of paper. He handed it to Richard. “Lady Dunraven gave me this just before you arrived. Read it aloud, if you please! Everyone here knows what it contains, excep
t you and Miss Drake.”

  Richard glanced at the yellowed sheet. “This is part of a letter?” He turned to Lord Belham. “Sir, the signature is yours.”

  Lord Belham stood as if turned to stone. His voice seemed to come from a great distance, but he smiled.

  “Read my damnation aloud, Lenwood, for God’s sake! Lady Dunraven chooses to orchestrate a farce and plans to win, whether we admit the truth or not. So why hide anything from this company?”

  Richard’s black eyes met his mother’s. Lady Acton nodded and dropped back to her seat. She seemed unmoved, but a small frown of anxiety marred her forehead. He glanced back at his brother.

  “Very well, Harry,” Richard said, his face like granite, and began to read.

  “‘It is with very great regret, sir, that I am obliged to inform you that your accusations are correct. The countess’s son is indeed my child, the fruit of an adulterous liaison between us. Nevertheless, the earl is not to know. Henry will be raised as his legitimate offspring. In spite of your revulsion, sir, for my behavior in this instance, I do most earnestly beg that you will divulge this truth to no one, for the sake of the child. His mother’s shame is hers to bear, while my own is yours to punish as you see fit—’”

  Harry interrupted. “Enough, Richard! What a dreadful irony to think that Lord Acton preferred me, a bastard, to you, his own son! All those damned lessons, all that proud bombast about my achievements, all that intense pressure to fulfill his expectations, wasted on another man’s get.” He stared insolently up at Lord Belham. “Do you deny that this letter was written by you, sir? The first page is missing, but your name is at the end. Please don’t tell me that it’s a forgery.”

  “The signature is mine,” the marquess said. He was very calm. “Written to my own father. Though it does not mean what you think, I would have given my right hand not to have had this come out, even now. Such things are best left buried forever, for what the hell can be achieved now, except hurt to innocent parties?”

  Lady Acton rose abruptly from her seat and walked over to the ancient arrow-slit window.

  “These windows are designed for warfare, not for light,” she said into the appalled silence. She spun about and fixed her second son with her black gaze. “But you were wrong about everyone here knowing about this letter and its contents, Harry. I did not. And–”

  A knock sounded at the door. Prudence turned to look at the innocent oak planks, as if the sound were the knell of doom.

  Lady Dunraven laughed. “Come!”

  The door opened and a face peered in.

  “Well, Lady Dunraven,” the newcomer said. “As you ordered, here I am. Now Mr. Harry Acton’s family have run him to earth, perhaps they might want to meet the villain that nabbed him?”

  It was the man with the eye-patch.

  For a moment there was perfect silence.

  A stranger. A man who knew nothing of old scandals or family secrets. A man obviously from another world—as far removed from the beau monde as the Orient.

  Richard recovered first. The color drained from his face, but he left Harry and strode over to the man with fists clenched.

  “Damn you for a black-hearted brute, sir! Am I to take it that you were responsible for kidnapping my brother after having him beaten?”

  “This man intended me no harm, Richard,” Harry said with deadly certainty. “There was just a little trouble controlling the enthusiasm of the hired accomplices. Thanks to him, it was only one blow, and I asked for it. I was indulging in my unfortunate tendency of being abominably irritating. Besides, our villain knows you. I was sickened with glowing accounts of your martial exploits all the way from the Chilterns to Argyle.”

  Richard hesitated as he gazed into the man’s face.

  The man with the eye-patch grinned and saluted. “Captain Acton, ain’t it? Lord Lenwood, as Harry tells me you’re rightly called now. I knew you in the Peninsula, my lord, though you wouldn’t know me.” He touched the eye-patch. “Lost this at Badajoz. That was a rum do, wasn’t it, my lord? I knew Mr. Acton was your brother all along. Assure you I’d never have let him get hurt, if I could have stopped it.”

  “By God, Sergeant Keen!” Richard relaxed visibly, as once again the calm control slipped over his features. “I remember you for a brave man. Badajoz took finer lives than either of ours. I’m sorry about your wound. You were sent home afterward, of course. But you were a good soldier. Why the hell have you now taken to a life of crime?”

  Sergeant Keen was instantly offended. “Wasn’t any crime, my lord, to track down Mr. Acton to bring him to Dunraven. He’d contracted in France to fetch a paper for Lady Dunraven, and was just being helped to keep his word as a gentleman. You wouldn’t want your brother forsworn, now, would you?”

  “Sergeant Keen did not know that I had lost my memory, Richard,” Harry said. “He thought I was just being awkward.”

  “You were bringing your message here, Harry?” Lady Acton asked.

  Prudence watched with astonishment as the countess moved gracefully back across the room, as if this were merely a social gathering.

  Dear Lord! Were they all so expert at concealing their emotions—at revealing no weakness before the lower orders? But what about me? I am no more a member of the peerage than Sergeant Keen.

  The countess sat down and began to laugh. “Oh, dear heavens preserve us! Very well, let us have this little mystery out, at least. What was in the paper?”

  “A formula for a fulminate mixture, and a plan for a new firing mechanism,” Harry said. As controlled now as Richard, he spoke of it with casual nonchalance. “I obtained it in France from a master gunsmith.”

  “So that’s where you went after Madame Relet’s little fire,” Richard said.

  Harry glanced at his brother. “The man turned up as if by magic, when I was looking for any excuse not to come home. I worked with him on some experiments with the new percussion systems. If we could only contain the charge in a reliable cap that would fire when hit by a hammer, we could do away with flint, and priming pan, and all the attendant drawbacks of our flintlock pistols.”

  “Imagine!” Lord Belham said dryly. “A weapon that never misfired or flashed in the pan, and would be reliable in any weather or any conditions.”

  “Exactly,” Harry said. “The gunsmith in France thought he had the perfect mixture at last. He had been in correspondence with Lady Dunraven about it. He would have been committing treason, perhaps, when we were still at war with France, but we were at peace when he gave me the formula to bring to Scotland. Napoleon was imprisoned, and the Bourbons solidly on the throne. So there was nothing terribly heroic about it.”

  “You did not know, of course, of any family connection to Lady Dunraven,” Lady Acton said.

  Harry glanced at his mother. “I knew only that Dunraven Castle was a long way from Acton Mead.”

  Lady Acton stared directly at the dowager countess. “No doubt you chose my son as a messenger quite deliberately. What a perfect chance to strike back at me! How could he have known of any link between us? This French gunsmith must have made such a convenient agent, knowing Harry’s fame as a dead shot and his natural interest in firearms. But you are surely not going to tell me that you have spent all these years experimenting with guns, Lady Dunraven?”

  The dowager countess laughed again.

  “That is exactly what I have been doing. The patent for the first truly reliable percussion cap will be worth a fortune. And when I had word that your son was in France and looking for some exploit on which to waste his talents, I seized my chance. Unfortunately, Harry is as untrustworthy as the rest of your clan. When he failed to arrive as promised, I sent Sergeant Keen after him.”

  “I came from France in a small private boat,” Harry said. “It went down in a storm.”

  The dead-calm control was still there. Prudence found it almost more frightening than his earlier display of passion.

  “And the formula?” Richard asked.

&nb
sp; Harry looked back at his brother. “When I remembered that I was supposed to be carrying it, the paper was already gone. So Sergeant Keen tracked me up and down England to no avail. This entire adventure has been an exercise in folly.”

  “But the formula was not lost, Harry.” Lady Acton folded her fan. She gazed at Harry with an odd longing. “Miss Drake found it and sent it to London. Lord Belham has it.”

  Prudence could not watch Harry’s face. This was surely the last nail to hammer down any vestige of feeling he might have had for her. She had not trusted him enough to show him what she had found in his coat, and had unwittingly betrayed him to his enemy, instead.

  Worse, that enemy had now been revealed to be his real father.

  She closed her eyes. This revelation about Harry’s birth made her totally irrelevant, didn’t it? It was an enormity that could never be forgiven. Lady Acton had lied to her during their journey, but how much worse if for four-and-twenty years she had lied to her son?

  It was too overwhelming, too much to take in, and far too much to think about clearly.

  She only knew that she ached for Harry, and for herself, and for every stupid misunderstanding and mistake they had ever shared.

  Lady Acton turned to the marquess. “For heaven’s sake, Belham, put us out of our misery. Is the flintlock firearm about to be made obsolete? Has Harry single-handedly put the future into our hands?”

  Lord Belham glanced at her, remote, cool. Yet the air thrummed between them.

  “It will be obsolete in ten years, Lady Acton. There is no question about that. Some of us in government are encouraging every experiment designed toward that aim. But it will not be made so by Harry’s secret French missive.”

  “Don’t tell me that even that was a wild goose chase,” Harry said.

  Belham’s dark gaze swept across the room to Harry. “I had wished to impart such an embarrassing fact to you in private, sir, but it seems we are all destined to wash our dirty linen in the market square today. The paper Miss Drake sent to London did indeed contain plans for a new pistol design and formula, but not one that will work to the purpose. It has been tried and has failed. I’m sorry. Here, you may have it, if you wish.”