Caroline drew a shaky breath, somehow knowing he was being more open with her than he had ever been with anyone in his life. He had not said he loved her, and she didn’t really know if she was ready to hear those words from his lips. She only knew they had come a long way since their first meeting, that they had learned to trust each other at least a little bit, and that they were deeply attracted to each other. For now, with the cloud of her memory loss still hanging over her head, it was enough.
They had to take care of first things first.
She moved toward him a fraction. “What do we do now, Pierre? Do we call the constable? It’s obvious Mrs. Merrydell’s presence isn’t going to jog my memory, so I would think she has outlived her usefulness. I want that woman and her son out of my life just as soon as possible.”
Pierre leaned forward, placing a quick kiss on the tip of her nose. “That’s my girl, pluck to the backbone. There’s only one small, nagging problem. Ursley has somehow slipped his leash, abandoning his room at the inn and eluding the bumbling man I sent to follow him after his meeting with his mother this morning. It’s so hard to get good help these days, you understand, what with the war. We do still have Mrs. Merrydell where we want her, but I don’t want the mother without the son. He’s a loose end I’d rather see neatly tied. Can I count on your help to flush him out of hiding?”
The idea of turning the tables on the Merrydells filled her with delight. “What do I have to do?”
He kissed her again, on the lips this time, and she was suddenly aware that they were, yet again, alone in her chamber and in a most compromising position. His arms held her gently, though she could feel the leashed strength of him against her, and she longed to experience what it would be like really to be held by him, loved by him.
She broke from his kiss, flushed and breathless, and pushed against the pillow. “Pierre? What do you want from me?”
He lifted his left eyebrow a fraction, causing her blush to deepen. “You tempt me, Caroline,” he teased, “but I have promised myself to be good, so I will answer the question you thought you asked. What I want from you now, dearest girl, is quite simple—I want you to die for me.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT WAS A ROOM rigged out for mourning the death of a beloved family member.
All the mirrors in the chamber had been shrouded with deepest black cloth, and the pictures denoting pleasant bucolic scenes or the smiling faces of various Standish forebears were all turned to face the wall.
The heavy, midnight-blue velvet draperies were pulled tightly across the wide windows, shutting out the light from the setting sun, and only a few softly flickering candles burned on either side of the black-crepe-hung bed that held the body of the late Caroline Addams—with two D’s.
All was quiet, hushed, until a high, piercing wail shattered the silence.
“Oh, my poor baby! My poor, poor baby!”
André came up behind the woman and took hold of her shoulders, his fastidiousness causing him to use only his fingertips in none-too-gently drawing her away from the doorway to Caroline’s bedchamber. It wouldn’t do to allow the harridan to enter and, most probably, cast her tall, angular body across the deceased in a distasteful display of grief.
“There, there, Mrs. Merrydell, attempt to get a grip on yourself, for all our sakes. Miss Addams was hardly your baby. It’s not as if you knew her all that well, much as I am gratified to see your deep concern.”
Mrs. Merrydell dabbed at her rouged cheeks with a lace-edged handkerchief, cruelly pushing a corner of the linen into one eye in order to manufacture a credible tear before she turned to face André. “It’s not just that, dear sir. I was in charge of her welfare.” She moaned disconsolately. “I should never have allowed her to go out for that ride yesterday. I knew, after all, that she was suffering some terrible scrambling of the brainbox—misplacing her memory, that is. She had no business on a horse, did she, sir? Oh, why did she have to die?”
“You mustn’t blame yourself, my dear lady,” he told her bracingly. “It was an accident, nothing more.” André looked past the woman into the chamber, to where Caroline lay on top of the bedcovers, neatly dressed in a white lawn nightgown that covered her from neck to toes, her arms crossed gracefully over her breasts, a small sprig of wildflowers held in her clasped hands. Pierre had added that last bit, and André privately agreed it was a nice touch, although he much preferred roses.
“And just as we all thought she had rallied,” he lamented sadly. “She was fine one moment this morning, sipping some of the lovely tea you made for her with your own hands and promising that she would even join us at table for dinner. And then—pouf!—she was gone, snatched from us in the first sweet flower of her youth, her last breath sighing from her body even as my son watched in horror. Ah, the pity of it, Mrs. Merrydell, the bleeding pity of it. And now we will bury her, hide her away in the cold, cold ground, without ever knowing her true name.”
Mrs. Merrydell flung herself heavily into André’s arms. “Oh no! Dear sir, no!” she cried in what might have been grief but could just as easily have been panic. “You cannot allow that to happen. Surely you must wait—in the chance someone may come to identify her! Surely someone will come!”
So that was it! “Someone” would come. That had been the part of the mother-to-son conversation Pierre had missed. André allowed himself a small smile. “It is a comforting thought, Mrs. Merrydell, and I have been placing advertisements in all the newspapers with just that hope in mind, since the very beginning. But in truth, madam, how long can we wait? After all, the weather is still warm. Excuse my indelicacy, but one cannot keep a dead body about indefinitely in the heat, can one? Of course,” he added, as if thinking aloud, “there is always the icehouse, I suppose.”
“Yes! That’s it! Put her on ice!” Mrs. Merrydell exclaimed excitedly, then quickly lapsed once more into loud sobs of anguished grief.
André looked over the woman’s shoulder and thought he could see Caroline’s chest rising and falling slightly in silent mirth. “There, there, Mrs. Merrydell,” he soothed, rolling his eyes in disgust at her blatant over-acting. Disengaging himself from her convulsive grip, he hastened the weeping woman down the hallway to the stairs before a giggling corpse could give the game away.
“I’M BORED.” Caroline pushed out her lower lip in a pout and crossed her arms over her chest as she sat in the middle of her bed, a deck of cards carelessly scattered across the satin coverlet. “And I’m hungry!”
Victoria, who had just entered the chamber, closed the door behind her and locked it securely. “Shhh!” she warned, a finger to her lips. “I’m supposedly the only person in this room who is capable of speech. For all our sakes, keep your voice down, Caroline.”
She reached into her pocket to pull out an apple. “Will this do for now?” She tossed it to Caroline, who deftly caught it with one hand. “I’m only sorry I couldn’t bring you my own uneaten dinner on a tray. I am convinced it was delicious, for everyone else ate their fill, even the grieving Mrs. Merrydell—who had two helpings of dessert—but I took one bite and thought I was going to disgrace myself by becoming ill right at the table.”
“An apple, and not a big one at that. André brought me part of a nice meat pie from the kitchens when he stopped by earlier, but all you could find was an apple? Ursley had better show up soon to identify my remains or I’ll starve to death.” Caroline rubbed the apple against the satin coverlet, then bit into it, pushing the bite to one side of her mouth to add, “I’m sorry you’re feeling ill, Victoria—it’s the baby, isn’t it? I know I’m being demanding, but Susan, my maid, is being less than useless.”
“She seemed quite competent to me,” Victoria said, frowning.
Caroline smiled. “That was before I died. She won’t come anywhere near me since laying me out. She said I gave her the creeps, talking and laughing all the time she was putting this white powder on my face and hands to make me look bloodless.” She turned her face this
way and that. “What do you think, Victoria? Do I look properly dead?”
Victoria ignored this question, and sat down in the chair beside the bed, rapidly fanning herself with her handkerchief. “It’s positively airless in here with all the windows shut. You may be enjoying yourself, Caroline, but I can tell you that—thanks to the unremittingly obnoxious Mrs. Merrydell—I have about reached the end of my tether. She insists on pestering us to be allowed to keep a vigil over your body, and breaks into hiccupping sobs every few minutes, just to let us all know how grievously she is suffering. I escaped up here just now because I was sure I would do her an injury if I had to remain in her encroaching company another moment.”
Caroline was instantly contrite. She slid from the high bed to pour Victoria a cooling glass of water from the pitcher that stood on a stand in the corner. “Poor thing,” she said sincerely, handing her friend the glass before crawling back onto the coverlet and recovering her apple. “The woman is dreadfully in the way, isn’t she? Pierre should be forced to handle her, not you.”
“Pierre?” Victoria laughed. “He’s too busy arranging for the removal of your perishable mortal remains to the icehouse in the morning. Not that he plans to actually put you in storage, as it were, but only to hide you elsewhere in the house, as it is difficult to have you laid out here, where Mrs. Merrydell might be able to sneak in and see your supposed corpse gnawing on a chicken leg. Pierre is convinced that Ursley will appear tomorrow as if on cue to view the body—clutching one of André’s advertisements in his hand, no doubt, and claiming you are his long-lost fiancée.”
“No doubt,” Caroline agreed coolly as she laid the apple core in a small dish on the nightstand. “Ursley Terwilliger is a toad, but he has always been an extremely punctual toad. As I recall, it is his single redeeming virtue.”
The water glass dropped to the floor unheeded, to splinter into a hundred pieces. “Caroline!” Victoria exclaimed in sudden excitement, her fatigue, and even the slight queasiness she had been feeling lately whenever confronted by food, forgotten. “It’s working, just as the doctors said! It’s above everything marvelous! All you needed was a start, some gentle nudging. You’re beginning to remember!”
Caroline put a trembling hand to her suddenly aching forehead and stared at her friend in wonder, not really seeing her but concentrating on a picture that was floating in the forefront of her mind. “I can see him, Victoria…sitting at the head of a long dining table…pushing food down his skinny throat as fast as he can. How dare he sit there? He doesn’t belong there.”
“Who does belong there?” Victoria prodded in a fierce whisper, leaning toward the bed. “Who belongs there, Caroline?”
“Caroline?” Caroline covered her eyes with her hands, trying to recapture the image that had splintered and disappeared. “Oh, it’s gone. It’s gone.” She looked at Victoria, her huge eyes burning with tears in her powdered, too-white face. “I—I don’t remember. Who—who is Caroline?”
“Oh, my dear Lord,” Victoria breathed in horror, wishing she could kick herself for her loose tongue. “You’ve forgotten who you are now! This couldn’t be what is supposed to happen. Just stay there, my dear, and try not to worry. I must get Pierre at once.”
Caroline was looking at her strangely, just as if she had never seen her before that moment. “Pierre? Who is Pierre? I know no one by that name.” She shook her head, then winced at the pain the movement caused.
Victoria’s eyes opened wide behind her spectacles, and she knew she was gaping at Caroline, her mouth at half-mast. “You—you don’t remember Pierre, either?”
“Pierre? No. Silly French name. And who are you? Did you tell me your name? Oh, my head. It hurts terribly. It’s so strange. I never get the headache. Oh, well, I can’t think about that now. What were we talking about? It hurts to think, just like that evening I tried champagne when I wasn’t supposed to and could barely remember how to walk. I’ll ask my questions again later. Would you mind if I were a poor hostess and lay down for a time? It helped enormously when I drank the champagne. Grandfather will surely be delighted to entertain you while I rest. We have so few visitors here at Abbey House, you know.”
Her heart pounding with mingled dread and excitement, Victoria dared to try pushing Caroline a little further. “Yes, of course,” she agreed swiftly. “I don’t mind at all, Miss— oh, dear, what a scatterbrain I am! Please forgive me but, like you, I have always had such a difficult time with names. Now I seem to have forgotten yours.”
Victoria held her breath as she waited for Caroline to answer.
The girl was already lying against the pillows, her knees drawn up high against her body, one hand tucked beneath her cheek. Her eyes closed, she murmured quietly, “Please don’t apologize. My name is Catherine. Catherine Halliford. But dearest Grandfather, he always calls me Caro.”
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT.
Pierre paced the floor of his father’s study like a caged animal, once more like the dark, brooding panther to which his father had once so aptly compared him.
Everything was wrong, he decided, pounding his fist into his palm. From start to finish he had bungled the affair, and bungled it badly.
It was his fault that Caroline—no, Catherine; he had to begin thinking of her as Catherine—was lying upstairs, deeply asleep or unconscious, he did not know.
He should have turned Amity Merrydell and her idiot son over to the constable the moment he had decided they were out to harm Catherine. Never mind that he had possessed no proof; never mind that all he could have told the constable was that the two were suspicious merely because of their presence. But no, he had been content to wait, believing himself superior to anything they might try, any rig they might run.
“Arrogant,” he said aloud as he walked to the drinks table to pour himself three fingers of port. “You’re so damned arrogant, Standish. I don’t know how you stand yourself, you’re so bloody perfect.”
And if he couldn’t have had the pair of them tossed into gaol, he should have taken greater care with Catherine. He had been placed in charge of protecting her, while his father had gone haring off in search of her true identity. It had been a simple job, elementary actually, something any moderately intelligent ape could have accomplished without undo effort.
But, no, he had to botch that as well, not once, but twice. “London society has dulled your wits, Standish,” he told himself, tossing off the port. “You’ve degenerated into the very worst sort of man, becoming nothing but a toothless drawing-room ornament.”
Even Sir John Oakvale, that featherbrain who had more hair than wit, could have done better than he had, and with one badly manicured hand strapped behind his back! It was a disgrace, that’s what it was, and Pierre knew that if he lived to be one hundred, he would never forgive himself.
Pouring another drink, he continued with his mental self-flagellation.
The day Ursley had accosted Catherine in the cobbler’s shop—that should have been the day the man drew his last breath. He should have throttled the miserable little worm, choked him until his eyes bulged from their sockets, then tossed his carcass in the dirt and had his harridan mother transported in chains to the other side of the world.
But, no, he had been too smart to do that, too enthralled with the supposed brilliance of his own schemes to consider that he might be playing a dangerous game with Catherine’s physical welfare.
Even when she fell from her horse, he had chosen not to act, but merely played the spy, watching Amity Merrydell and her son as they met at the bottom of the gardens to discuss strategy. Merely capturing them was too mundane, too expected. He was going to dazzle Catherine with his ingenuity, his fancy footwork, by tripping the Merrydells up at their own game.
The fine French crystal goblet hit the cold stones of the fireplace and exploded with an unsatisfying, splintering crash.
If he had been too thick, too impressed with his own brilliance to act before, why hadn’t he called a halt to the game w
hen his father had returned home with definite evidence that the Merrydells meant to kill Catherine? Yes, there had been the business about Ursley escaping the eye of the man sent to watch him, but how dangerous could that puppy be without his mother to direct him?
His reluctance had been only another excuse in an endless string of excuses that allowed him to continue playing the game.
Now Catherine’s overburdened mind had snapped beneath the strain, sending her into a dark, confused world where she knew her name but had lost all recollection of him, the man who loved her beyond life itself. What an evil justice!
He hadn’t been able to look at Victoria, meet that intelligent woman’s eyes when she had come to tell him what had transpired in Catherine’s bedchamber. He had fled from the room, leaving his father and Victoria to whisper between themselves, and had hidden here in this study, where his frustrated pacing was fast wearing a hole in his father’s carpet.
The only thing worse than going back over his many mistakes was thinking about the young woman lying in the room above him. His supposed redeeming Good Deed. Would this sleep she had slipped into ease Catherine’s confusion, so that when she awoke—if indeed she ever did awake—she would remember everything—her past, her present, and, he prayed with all his being, some slight knowledge that she may have planned for a future that had him in it?
Their future together. His heart squeezed with pain at the thought. How had he come to this—he, Pierre Claghorn Standish, who had been heart-whole for so long? When had it happened? When had his concern for Catherine turned to love; when had his very natural attraction to a beautiful young woman grown into passion?
He remembered her kiss, the feel of her soft warmth pressed against him, wordlessly telling him things he had no right to ask. Even in that he had behaved abominably, advancing on her when she was off balance, her mind confused, her body injured. He was a cad—worse than a cad. He didn’t deserve her.
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