by Marlowe Mia
“Because two strangers are enough for one small hamlet to absorb,” Lord Montford said. “Three more would be impossible to conceal without the first two becoming aware of them.” He tossed Brumley a withering glance. “Since we have arrived on Braellafgwen ahead of my son and . . . that other person, we will be able to easily shadow them once they arrive. Our presence here must remain a secret until the opportune moment.”
“Quite,” Alistair concurred. “To that end, let us find a spot to conceal ourselves and take turns watching for boat traffic from the mainland. If we miss them, we might lose the trail.”
Permanently, he added in silence. Besides, they’d need whatever craft Daisy Drake and Lucian Beaumont travelled in to carry them away from this cursed rock.
“Braellafgwen?” the innkeeper, whom they discovered was called Mr Dedham, asked. “Why ever would ye be wanting to go there? No one goes there. Haunted, it is. And the woods—all full of eyes, they says.”
The innkeeper’s surprise reassured them that no other party had asked about Braellafgwen recently. Perhaps Fitzhugh wasn’t dogging them, after all.
“Nevertheless, my sister and I wish to visit the island,” Lucian said.
Mr Dedham slanted a knowing glance at Daisy. Evidently, more than one young man had travelled this way with his “sister” before.
“We’re very keen on old druid sites and heard the island has a connection to that defunct religion,” she said.
“Don’t know as I’d call it defunct. Not very loudly, at any rate,” the man said. “Don’t do to upset the spirits, they says.”
“But there is a way to travel to the island?” Daisy asked.
“Oh, yes, there’s a way. Peter Tinklingham has a shallow drafting punt what can make the trip.”
“Excellent,” Daisy said. “And where will we find Mr Tinklingham?”
“You won’t. Leastways not till tomorrow morning,” the innkeeper said. “He took the doctor upriver to see about Mrs Bossy. She’s carrying twins, ye ken.”
“Well, I hope all goes well for her,” Daisy said. Childbed was no light matter. Graveyards were littered with the final resting places of young mothers who met their untimely ends trying to bring a babe into the world.
“Aye, so do we all. Mrs Bossy is the best milker in the shire. And since Will Tweazle filed off her horns, she’s of a much sweeter disposition to boot.”
“So, Mrs Bossy is . . . a cow?” Lucian asked.
Mr Dedham regarded Lucian with raised brows, as if he thought the young man were a bit softheaded. Daisy was beginning to remember why she wasn’t sorry not to be living in the country any longer.
“If all goes well, Tinklingham should be back by tomorrow morning,” the innkeeper said.
“Very well.” Daisy pulled her coin purse from her reticule. “We require lodging then. Two rooms, if you please.”
“I’d be happy to oblige ye, but the Wounded Boar has only one room left. Tomorrow’s the day the skiff comes up from London with a load of goods. Folk come to town to trade and they want to have first pick, ye see, so we’re a mite more crowded than usual.” He tossed Lucian a wink. “The room’s got a fair-size bed. Ye and your ‘sister’ may find it a tight fit, but I reckon ye’ll do.”
“My sister will take the available chamber, sir,” Lucian said. “I’ll make do in the common room, if you don’t mind.”
If Lucian had wanted to flash his title about, Daisy knew he could demand one of the other rooms from the commoners. He was likely the first viscount the sad little Wounded Boar Inn had seen in centuries. Of course, Lucian wasn’t dressed like a lord, so Mr Dedham might not have believed him. His dark ensemble was serviceable, but worn. The only bit of wealth about Lucian was the lethal-looking rapier at his hip, but the hilt was so plain, so utilitarian, it was obviously not the ornamental small sword of a gentleman. It was a serious weapon for an uncertain world.
So Lucian would bed down before the common-room hearth. Of course, Daisy was in perfect accord about not sharing a room with him.
But it rankled her soul not to have been able to refuse him first.
“A man and woman may strip naked and couple in every conceivable manner, but there is still no true intimacy until they bare their hearts.”
—from the journal of Blanche La Tour
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Daisy and Lucian spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the village and picking their way through the small churchyard. They read the headstones that were still legible and wondered at the ones whose inscriptions time had reduced to mere dimples in the rock. The vicar turned out to be a genial man who was willing to discuss the island with them.
“Time out of mind, Braellafgwen has been a . . . a sacred place, if you will,” the vicar had said. “Some may name it pagan, but there’s no denying there’s an unusual power, a strange sense about the place.”
“You’ve visited the island?” Lucian asked.
“Only once,” he admitted with a sheepish half smile. “It’s difficult to describe what it’s like.”
“Please try,” Daisy said.
“Well, the nearest I can come is this,” the vicar said. “I used to live in London when I was a lad, and sometimes, I’m ashamed to confess, I used to creep out at night to explore. Once in a while, I’d wander down a dark lane where I didn’t belong and all the hairs would stand up on the back of my neck. It’s like that on Braellafgwen. The island doesn’t want me there. If a place has no use for you, it’s best not to tarry.”
As they strolled back to the inn, the vicar’s words rolled around in Daisy’s mind. The innkeeper claimed Braellafgwen was haunted, and Mr Crossly certainly hadn’t wanted to put in there. Now the vicar had added his testimony to the growing mound of evidence for the strangeness of the place.
“Braellafgwen sounds a bit daunting, doesn’t it?”
“If you don’t want to go, you can wait for me here,” Lucian offered.
“I didn’t say that.” Daisy clasped his arm a bit tighter than necessary. “It’s just . . . I hadn’t thought of it before, but the Roman treasure’s been lost for centuries. Perhaps with good reason. Do you suppose there are some things that aren’t meant to be found?”
“Rubbish. I think rumours of hauntings were started by the druids to keep the uninitiated from stumbling on their rites,” Lucian said. “No doubt Meritus saw the tales about the place as a way of keeping the treasure safe, even if someone managed to get this far.” Grim determination settled on his features. “I’m not about to let fairy tales or a nervous vicar’s talk of a prickly scalp stop me.”
His straightforwardness should have calmed her. When Daisy had helped her family haul up the hidden gold beneath the castle of Dragon Caern, she’d been a child, afraid of the boom and hiss of surf she mistook for a real dragon. Back then, she enlisted the help of an old pirate, her friend Mr Meriwether, to calm her fears.
Now the little pixies of fear were dancing once again on her spine. But this time, she was no child.
“No, you won’t be rid of me so easily.” Daisy wanted an adventure. She wouldn’t let jitters rob her of one. “I’m going with you tomorrow.”
He smiled at her for the first time since their kettle-hurling argument. “I’d be hugely disappointed if you didn’t.”
They strolled back to the inn in companionable silence, willing to declare a cessation of hostilities, if not a formal truce.
The innkeeper served up a hearty supper of thick stew in the black-timbered common room. The rowdy patrons who’d booked up the other bedchambers crowded around the long trestle table, sopping up their stew with chunks of barley bread and telling randy stories, each more ribald than the last.
Daisy and Lucian kept to themselves till one of the men at the far end of the room wondered loudly “if a lady’s tits are softer than a barmaid’s.”
Lucian slammed his fist on the table. “I’d mind my tongue, if I were you.” He didn’t raise his voice, but the menace in his tone trave
lled the length of the room quite effectively.
“And who’s going to make me, gov?” the man said. “I got me three friends here, and looks to me as if you and the lady are traveling alone.”
Quick as a blink, Lucian was on his feet, the blade at his hip out and poised to strike like an adder. “We may be alone but we are not entirely without resources.”
Surprise coursed through Daisy. She’d observed Lucian without his shirt and knew he was well muscled, but she’d come to think of him as more the scholarly type. She’d never seen him move with such lethal grace.
The men pushed back from the table, swiping their mouths with their sleeves and brandishing long dirks. Now panic followed surprise through Daisy’s limbs.
“Lucian—”
“Daisy, go upstairs and lock yourself in the room.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a command, spoken with such ringing authority, it didn’t occur to her to disobey. Besides, she reasoned correctly that her presence would only be a hindrance and a distraction to him.
She scurried up the rickety staircase, but couldn’t bring herself to full obedience. She stopped halfway and sank onto the steps, pressing her face between the spindles on the barrister. If she could find something to hurl from this height, perhaps she could dispatch one of his attackers, but there were no friendly potted plants available.
Where on earth had that blasted innkeeper gotten off to?
Her heart pounded with fear.
The men circled, looking for an opening. Lucian turned with them, feinting with his length of steel like a great cat lashing out with its claws to keep the hunting dogs at bay. Daisy shoved a knuckle into her mouth to keep from crying out.
Then it began. One of the men lunged, and Lucian’s blade flashed. Muscle and sinew, intelligence and instinct, everything came together in perfect concert as Lucian danced with the rustics’ dirks. Daisy was both terrified and awestruck at the nimble, masculine beauty of his sword work. He fought to disarm, not to kill. One by one, they yelped and swore and finally dropped their weapons, unwilling to step within the reach of Lucian’s longer blade.
All but the first man.
“Bloody cowards,” he said when his friends withdrew. Throwing a knife was a final recourse in a brawl. If the aim was true, the gamble paid off. If not, the fighter found himself disarmed and at his opponent’s mercy. The man must have liked his chances. He flipped his dirk around, grasped it by the blade and launched it at Lucian.
Lucian tried to dodge clear, but the blade caught his sword arm just south of his shoulder. Daisy screamed. Lucian yanked the dirk out with his left hand and brandished both blades at his attacker, bellowing with pain and bloodlust.
“What’s going on out here?” The innkeeper finally reappeared through the door that led out to the summer kitchen, bearing an old but serious-looking blunderbuss. “You’re getting blood all over the floor, ye heathens. Get ye to yer beds, and I mean now or out ye all go.”
“I have no bed,” Lucian reminded him.
“Get ye upstairs with that ‘sister’ of yers then, before I throw the pair of ye out.” He cast a murderous glance around the room. “And if I hear anything louder than a mouse’s fart out of any of ye, ye’ll be sleepin’ with the pigs and payin’ me double for the privilege of finer bed companions than ye deserve. Now go!”
“I can climb the stairs by myself,” Lucian complained. Daisy fluttered about him, lifting his good arm over her shoulders as if she could actually bear his weight. “Stop. What are you—I don’t need your help. You’re more likely to send us tail-over-teakettle than anything.”
“It would serve you right,” she said as she kicked the bedchamber door open for them. “I mean, honestly! Taking on four simpletons with knives.”
“That’s just it. I was never in any real danger.” He removed his sword belt and draped it over the back of the only chair in the spartan room. “You said it yourself: they were simpletons.”
She snorted and slammed the door shut, throwing the bolt for good measure. “They weren’t the only ones.”
He yanked off his jacket and shirt. The wound was shallow, but he needed to stop the bleeding. Daisy was two steps ahead of him. She’d already ripped the flounce from the bottom of one of her petticoats and was dabbing at his biceps with part of it.
“We need some spirits. Mr Dedham is probably still in the common room.” She pressed the wad of cloth to his wound and moved his left hand to cover it. “Hold it there. I’ll be right back.”
“No, Daisy—”
The door slammed behind him and he sighed. For a moment, he had a dizzying glimpse at the rest of his life if Daisy Drake swirled at the centre of it. No matter what he said, this woman was always going to do exactly as she pleased.
Surprisingly enough, that didn’t bother him as much as it should have. He sank onto the chair and waited. She bustled back in with an armful of fresh muslin, already torn into strips. Apparently, knife fights weren’t all that uncommon at the Wounded Boar, so the innkeeper was well prepared. Lucian noted with pleasure that she brought up a small jug of spirits, as she’d intended.
“I don’t mind if I do.” He reached for the jug. She hugged it to her breasts, twisting to hold it beyond his grasp.
“Not yet. Only if there’s any left after,” she informed him. All business, she scrubbed his arm, first with soap and water from her washstand, then with the raw spirits.
“Yow!” he yelped when she dribbled a little on the gap in his flesh. It burned like the fires of hell.
“Careful,” she said. “That was definitely louder than a mouse fart, and I don’t think you particularly want to sleep with the pigs.”
“Aside from inflicting the most possible pain, why did you do that?”
“I was raised by pirates, remember. Mr Meriwether said his mates who sloshed a bit of rum on themselves while the ship’s surgeon stitched them up seemed to fare better than those who only drank the spirits.” Twin slashes of concentration formed between her brows. “Now you may have a drink.”
He tipped the jug and watched her as she wound the muslin around his arm. She turned her lips inward and sighed as she worked.
“Where did you learn to fight like that?” she asked.
“There was a girl once who bested me with a pike,” he said with a grin. “I promised myself that would never happen again, so I took my fencing lessons seriously from that day forward.”
“Then it seems you owe that girl a debt of gratitude instead of constant recriminations for something that you know beyond doubt was an accident. There.” She tied off the bandage and fisted her hands at her waist. “I suppose we must be grateful the wound wasn’t worse.”
“Well, my arm isn’t the only casualty.” He picked up his frock coat and examined it. Blood stained the sleeve to the elbow, and the knife hole was too jagged to patch without being noticeable. “That settles it. My association with you has officially ruined my entire wardrobe.”
“Would you have preferred I bared my breasts so they could satisfy their curiosity about their relative softness?” she said.
He caught her by the waist and pulled her between his spread knees. “I’m thinking to reserve that privilege for myself.”
He reached a hand behind her neck and brought her down for a kiss. Her lips trembled, then stilled beneath his as he slanted his mouth over hers. She was so sweet, so tender. He didn’t push when she failed to open to him, though it pained him to hold back. The rush of excitement from his fight coupled with her nearness had given him an aching cockstand.
She pulled away from him. “No, Lucian.”
“No?” he repeated with incredulity. He’d just faced down four armed men for her. What more did the woman want?
“We’ve behaved . . . I’ve behaved rashly in the past,” she amended. “It is an error I do not intend to repeat.”
“An error. You believe what we’ve shared, what we’ve been to each other is wrong?”
“As the wor
ld counts sins, definitely,” she said with a sad little smile. “As for myself, I would have said ‘no’ until very recently. But I’ve come to realize it was all a game with you.”
“That’s not true.”
“How can it not be?” she said, stepping back from him another pace. “You don’t trust me. Not enough. It was wrong of me to become . . . intimate with someone who cares so little for me that he doesn’t wish me to know his business.”
“Oh, Lord, we’re back to that.”
“If two people don’t share something as ordinary and mundane as the business aspects of their lives, how can they hope to achieve a deeper bond?” Her face threatened to crumple. “I know things have been difficult for you, Lucian, but believe me, money is not everything. I certainly don’t think any less of you for your financial situation.”
If only it were that simple . . .
“I’ve never met a man who worked harder than you,” she went on. “Society may frown on your efforts, but I admire you for them—”
“Daisy, stop.” He held up his hand. “This has nothing to do with money. Once we find the treasure, my concerns on that front are over, in any case.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me Mr Peabody was spying on your progress and working in concert with Sir Alistair?”
“Because of why they want to find the treasure. Fitzhugh intends to use it to fund another Scottish uprising to put James Stuart on the throne,” he said.
“But that’s treason,” she said, aghast. “If you didn’t want to tell me, why didn’t you go to the authorities and have them arrested?”
If he said the words, if he admitted his fears aloud, it would remove all doubt and make them real. But nothing was more real than his feelings for Daisy. And sharing this horrible truth was one way to show her how he trusted her. Needed her. His shoulders slumped. “Because I fear my father may be in league with the traitors.”
“And the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone.’ Perhaps it has escaped His notice, but it’s no treat for the woman either.”