Guilty Series

by Laura Lee Guhrke

  Another thought struck her, one that made her stomach lurch. “Did Isabel witness this-um-interlude?”

  “We did not have our clothes off yet, if that is what you mean!”

  “Spare me the details, please.” In her mind’s eye, she could see him with some scantily clad blond, his hands roaming over her body in the very same ways he had touched her. Grace suddenly felt pain, like a bruise deep inside. “If you do not feel the need to defend your actions, then why are you so upset?”

  “Why?” His voice rose. “Should I not be upset? I got Isabel out of there as quickly as I could, of course, but needless to say, she was devastated by the entire incident. She cried all the way home. She told me—” He stopped.

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She said—” He paused to take a deep breath, then he said quietly, “She told me that I was just like all the other men her mother knew.”

  “Dear God.” Grace felt sick. She pressed a hand to her mouth. “Her mother was a courtesan.”

  “Yes.” He looked away. “I remember her now. A French girl with brown eyes and brown hair. I wanted exclusivity, but I had not come into my inheritance yet, and though I was touring, I wasn’t making enough at that time to keep her. We parted company after a week or so.”

  Grace did not want to hear any more. She rose from the bench. “So, now you know how your daughter spent her first eight years. It is up to you how she spends the rest of her life. What are you going to do now?”

  “Be a real father. What else can I do?” He stood up and faced her. “We will leave London as soon as I can make the arrangements and the servants can pack. We’re going to Nightingale’s Gate, my estate in Devonshire. Isabel wants a pony and an apple orchard and a father, and by God, she’s going to have them.”

  Chapter 15

  When Dylan made up his mind, there was no diverting him. An express was sent to Devonshire to alert the skeleton household staff that the master was coming down and the Broadwood Grand had better be tuned before he arrived. Half the London servants were sent on ahead to complete the staff, while the servants remaining in London got everything packed, and Grace and Molly tried to keep Isabel from coming out of her skin from the excitement of really going to the country.

  Within a week, the three of them were in Dylan’s landau with him, heading west along the South Devonshire coast. They traveled past Seaton toward the small fishing village of Cullen-quay and Dylan’s property, Nightingale’s Gate.

  “But what does it look like?” Isabel demanded for the hundredth time. She stood up in the open carriage and flung her arms out in a sweeping gesture that encompassed the countryside around her—the hedgerows and rolling hills to the north and the sea coast to the south. “Does it look like this?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I know we’re getting close. We must be by now. When shall we arrive?”

  “Soon.”

  “Papa!” Isabel threw herself at him and pounded his shoulder playfully with her fist. “Why won’t you tell me?”

  Dylan grinned. “Because you keep asking me.”

  Grace and Molly both laughed, but Isabel gave a huff of exasperation. She resumed her seat beside Grace and was silent for a few minutes. But then, with the incredible persistence that only children can manage, she tried again. “It really has apple orchards?”

  “Yes. Apples, pears, plums.”

  “That’s all right, then. Why is it called Nightingale’s Gate? Are there really nightingales?”

  “Yes.”

  “Papa!” she said when he did not elaborate. “Will you not tell me anything?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t have to,” he answered and pointed over his shoulder toward a wooded headland that rose on the other side of the small, shallow bay directly ahead. “There it is.”

  Isabel jumped up again with a cry and moved to kneel on the carriage seat beside her father, her tummy pressed against the back, leaning as far forward as she could in the open carriage.

  Grace also leaned forward for a view, leaning around her pupil to look toward the head land, where a large brick house was nestled high up the cliff amid the trees. “It is beautifully situated. What a prospect it has of the sea.”

  “Bless me,” Molly murmured. “A person could get giddy looking down at the sea from up there.”

  Still on her knees on the seat, Isabel turned toward her father. “Can we go sea bathing, Papa?”

  “Do you know how to swim?” he asked.

  “Yes.” When her father shot her a pointed stare, she bit her lip, then admitted, “No. But you will teach me, won’t you?”

  “I will,” he promised and looked at Grace. “Do you know how to swim?”

  “Of course!” she assured him. “I don’t ever remember not knowing.”

  “Spoken like a true Cornish girl!”

  Those words brought a painful wave of homesickness, and she looked out at the sea. As they had made this journey into Devonshire, Grace had refused to think about her visit home last autumn, but now her last trip into the West invaded her mind with brutal clarity, of how she’d stood in the drive of the house where she had grown up, staring up at the faces of her five sisters peeking down at her from behind lace curtains at the windows, feeling their hate for her at what she had done.

  “But I can’t see the house.” Isabel’s excited voice interrupted Grace’s thoughts, and she put the past out of her mind.

  The child bobbed up and down on the seat, more impatient than ever. “How are we ever going to get up there?” she asked as the carriage curved inland around the bay.

  Dylan didn’t answer but instead pointed ahead where the road split into two. One went straight on, ending at the bottom of the jutting headland, where steps had been cut into the cliff face, and a steep path led up to the house. The road to the right curved away from the sea, and the carriage followed that, winding up a series of grass-covered hills that led them northwest in a meandering, gradual climb. They passed through the farm, the dairy, and acres of orchards, where apple, plum, and pear trees were covered in blossoms and cattle grazed in their shade. Isabel wanted to stop, but Dylan said no, they would come down tomorrow. They passed the stables and paddocks, and when Isabel spied a pair of Devonshire ponies, she nearly jumped out of the carriage.

  The carriage merged into a thick grove of trees, and the road wound up for another mile or so until it crested the top of headland. From there, the road sloped down to a graveled drive that swept in front of the manor house of red brick, a house nestled amid trees, fronted with windows, and trimmed with climbing vines of wisteria and clematis. May flowers were blooming, and the brilliant blue of the sea beyond glimmered through the trees.

  The carriage had barely come to a halt before Isabel jumped down. To Grace, the rest of the afternoon was a blur of frenzied running as she tried to keep up with the child, who kept moving from one eye-catching sight to another. She had to see her room, and even though it was the nursery, she didn’t seem to mind, for she had a view of the stables and could see the ponies from her window. Satisfied, she grabbed her father’s hand and dragged him outside so she could see the grounds.

  She also wanted to see the sea, so Dylan took them down the steep path through a terraced garden and down the wooded path that led to the steps they had seen earlier. As they made the climb back up the path, Isabel raced ahead, up the flagstone steps of the gardens to the house, calling for Molly to come out and see the starfish she’d found washed high on the shore down below.

  “I feel as if we have walked a hundred miles,” Grace told Dylan in a breathless voice as they climbed the steepest part of the path. “Have you shown her everything you own yet?”

  “Everything?” He shook his head. “Even at the speed that little girl can run, we couldn’t show her seven hundred and sixty acres in a day.”

  “No,” Grace said, smiling, “I suppose not. Where is your family estate?”

  He pointed northwest over his shoulder. “Plumfi
eld is up toward Honiton, about ten miles from here. There are orchards there as well. I don’t know if Ian is in residence now. We do not keep each other informed.”

  “When your brother was at the house in Portman Square, he did not stay even for the night. I never had the chance to meet him. You and he are not close, are you?”

  “No.” Dylan paused, then said, “We were, when we were boys.”

  “What happened?”

  “He disapproves of me. He has no tolerance for my artistic passions and my…peccadilloes, shall we say? He feels I bring disgrace upon my family name. Nor do I have patience with him. He is very conscious of propriety and position. He talks in the language of diplomats, a dialect which is incomprehensible to me.” He shrugged. “Chalk and cheese, that is all.”

  Grace stopped midway up the flagstone steps to look around her. “This is a beautiful place.”

  He stopped beside her. “Thank you. I had been looking for a property for some time. The family estates are entailed, but Ian and I each received substantial inheritances. Mine included funds for the purchase of an estate of my own.” Dylan gave a laugh as he looked out over the sea. “I think it was the only way my father could think of to make me settle down and be respectable.”

  “Dylan?”

  He glanced at her. “Hmm?”

  “I do not think it worked.”

  He grinned at her. “The men of my family have always been the epitome of English gentry—upright, honorable country gentlemen. I am certain you know just what sort I mean.”

  She thought of her own father. “Yes, I do.”

  “The Moore men have all been like that—loved their horses and their dogs as much as they loved their women. They were the hunting and fishing sort, getting into a few scrapes at Harrow and Cambridge before marrying the right country girl with the proper dowry and settling down to life as country squires. My father messed up everything by falling inexplicably in love with a sweet, penniless Welsh girl, whose head was full of romantic ideas. She played the flute. Very different from anything the Moores had in the family tree, I assure you.”

  “You are a mixture, then, of both sides of your family, musical like your mother, fond of sport like your father. Where does the wild side come in?”

  He gave her a pirate smile. “That’s all mine.”

  Grace watched the wind carry his hair across his cheek, and as he shook it back, she wondered what it was about men who were wild and disreputable that attracted her so much. It seemed to be her lot in life. “Since your mother was musical, she must have understood your passion for it.”

  “Yes. I adored my mother. She knew what music was, you see, she comprehended it in the same way I do. She wrote symphonic poems before there was a name for them. She was the only person who supported my talent. My father could never understand why we both had this passion for music. Despite the fact that he loved my mother until the day she died, he never understood her. He never understood me. Ian doesn’t either. He is a great deal like our father. My mother died when I was a boy of eleven.”

  “That must have been hard for you.”

  “Yes.” He bent down and began to collect some of the small stones beside the path. “When she died,” he went on, “I had no one in my family, or anywhere really, who understood what I do and why it is so important to me. I began to rebel and do what I pleased, and my father could not really control me. He did not care about my music, and because of that, I did not care what he thought of me.” Dylan straightened, stretched his arm back, and threw one of the stones in his hand. It cleared the cliff and arched out to the sea. “After Cambridge, I went to Europe for four years. I toured. First, piano concerts, then conducting.” He tossed another rock over the cliff.

  “I understand why you do not tour now,” she said. “You do not need the money. But why do you not conduct?”

  “I just don’t.” He did not elaborate, and she did not press him. After a moment, he said, “Anyway, my father and I never got along. I only came home to see him once before he died.”

  Grace took another look at her surroundings. “Yet, when you were looking for an estate of your own, this is the one you chose,” she pointed out gently. “One near where you grew up, one that has orchards, one like home.”

  “Yes.” Dylan looked over at her and laughed a little. “By God, I did, didn’t I? I never thought about it that way. All I knew was that I loved this place from the first moment I saw it.”

  “Then why do you not live here all the time?”

  He was silent so long that she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. “London is…easier. I haven’t been here in quite some time. Two years, at least.”

  “But why not?” Grace gestured to the prospect spread out before them, the trees on either side, the white rotunda that gleamed a few feet away from where they stood, and the terraces of garden and lawn that sloped down into a wild tangle of shrubs and trees before it dropped over the rocky cliff to the ocean below. “How could you stay away?”

  “I had forgotten how much I used to love it here,” he murmured without answering her question. Then, with a shake of his head, he turned and started up the steps toward the house.

  “Used to love it?” she echoed, following him. “Do you not love it now?”

  “I don’t know.” He stepped up onto the terrace and took several steps along its length, then stopped to look out at the view again. “It is so damnably quiet here, so serene. I had forgotten that.”

  “You talk as if quiet and serenity are bad things. Would not those very things help you write music?”

  “No.” She watched his lips tighten as he turned his back to the sea. He sat on the edge of the short wall that surrounded the terrace, his hands curling over the stone edge on either side of his hips. He closed his eyes. “I don’t even know what serenity is anymore.”

  Grace thought of Etienne and his erratic mood changes. “What is the turbulence all about?” she asked him, almost as if to herself. “Does everything have to be exciting all the time?”

  “You do not understand.” He opened his eyes, but he did not look at her. Instead, he straightened away from the wall and started back toward the house.

  Grace watched him go, and something made her call after him, “Dylan?”

  He stopped, but he did not turn around. “Yes?”

  “I would like to understand.”

  “I doubt you ever could.” With that, he went inside the house.

  It wasn’t until Dylan was lying in bed that night that he fully appreciated why he never went to the country anymore. No diversions. No distractions. Country hours. Nothing to distract his attention at this hour of the night but the nightingale singing outside his window. Nothing to take him away from the hated, grinding sound inside himself.

  I’d like to understand.

  How could anyone understand what this was like, this maddening sound, day after day, night after night? Unless one heard it and lived it, one could never understand it.

  He tried to shut it out, but as usual, the harder he tried, the louder the sound became. Laudanum was nearby, ready to dull his senses into an opiate-induced haze that might pass for rest. He had brought hashish with him as well, but he was strangely reluctant to take either of them. He thought of Isabel and the hashish he had smoked that night at Angeline’s, and for a reason he could not quite define, he did not want to dull his wits anymore. It wasn’t something a father should do.

  He rolled onto his side, staring out the open French door onto his balcony, watching the cool ocean breeze play with the sheer white gauze curtain in the moonlight. If only he could spend the night like an ordinary person; how blissful to simply lay his head down, close his eyes, and drift into sleep.

  He knew from experience that eventually his mind would surrender to his body’s demand and sleep would claim him. Tomorrow perhaps, or the next day, but not tonight. He shoved back the sheet, got out of bed, and walked naked out onto the balcony.

  Nights in early M
ay were still a bit cool here on the coast, but he scarcely noticed the chill in the breeze. He inhaled the fragrance of the herbs in the garden below and the tangy smell of the sea beyond. The moonlight reflected off the caps of the waves in the distance like sparks in the night.

  Dylan went back inside and shut the door. He walked into the dressing room. Careful not to wake Phelps, and fumbling a bit in the dark, he located a pair of black Cossack trousers, took his favorite dressing gown off the hook on the door, and left the dressing room. He slipped on the loose-fitting trousers and shrugged into the robe of heavy black silk, not bothering to tie it. He couldn’t sleep, he might just as well work on the symphony, he decided and went downstairs. Since the music room at Nightingale’s Gate was on the ground floor, a fair distance from the bedrooms, he probably wouldn’t wake anyone.

  The moonlight enabled him to see well enough to find an oil lamp and friction matches in the drawing room before he passed through one of the three wide arches that led from there into the music room. He poured himself a glass of claret, opened the French door that led into the garden to let in the cool air, and he sat down on the upholstered velvet bench of the piano, placing the lamp in the holder on the right side of the music stand. Phelps had already placed a stack of composition paper, a desk set, and his folio on the closed lid, ready for him whenever he chose to work. To dampen the volume, he left the lid down.

  Given a choice, he preferred the Broadwood Grand in London to the one here in Devonshire, for the tone was just a bit richer, but one couldn’t just toss a grand piano onto the rack of a traveling coach and take it along. This instrument was almost as excellent, and when he ran his hand over the keys, he found that Mrs. Hollings had followed his instructions. It was in perfect tune.

  He played scales for ten minutes, then took a swallow of his wine as he scanned what he had already written.

  He was in the midst of the second movement, and as his gaze ran across the notes he had scrawled on the staff lines, he remembered why that was so. He was stuck. The chords he had finally worked out for the feminine exposition didn’t work here in the slow, lyrical second movement. He didn’t know quite why. He tried several different variations on the theme, but none satisfied him, and that was the problem. He was never sure what worked and what didn’t anymore, and as a result, he could not feel satisfied with what he had and just go on. He was constantly getting stuck.