How To Vex A Viscount

by Marlowe Mia

  —the journal of Blanche La Tour

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Lucian dragged a hand over his face. “And it’s not just that.”

  “Not just that? Not just treason, you mean?” Daisy’s eyes widened with surprise.

  “I fear my father’s losing his mind,” Lucian said.

  “Well, I knew he had an unreasonable hatred of my family, but plenty of people hold grudges, whether they have cause or not,” Daisy said softly. “It may mean they’re cantankerous, but it doesn’t mean they are mad.”

  “No, this is more than a grudge,” Lucian said. “He means your family, your uncle in particular, grave harm. I came across his journal lying open in the study. . . .”

  He hadn’t meant to pry, but the volume was spread on his desk, as if his father had been called away suddenly and hadn’t taken the time to sand the page and close it. His father’s normally spidery script was ballooned all out of proportion, almost a childish scrawl. The page was pocked with inkblots, and passages describing the earl’s most fervent ill wishes were virulently underlined. Some was pure gibberish. And the rest was deeply troubling. The venom in his father’s pen chilled Lucian’s heart with foreboding. No one should have that much hate boiling inside them.

  No sane person did.

  He looked up at Daisy’s clear-eyed face and couldn’t repeat what he’d read. “There’s more than that. He talks to himself. Late at night, far gone in drink.”

  “If I could count the number of nights I heard my uncle’s friend Mr Meriwether stumbling about Dragon Caern singing to himself, I could count the stars,” Daisy said.

  “Yes, but did Mr Meriwether sing of dismembering someone?”

  Daisy sank onto the edge of the sagging bed. “Pirate songs are not noted for delicacy, but no, there was nothing like that.”

  “The earl hides it well, but there’s something wrong behind his eyes. With each day, it’s more pronounced.” Being able to finally voice his concern flooded Lucian with relief. The problem wasn’t resolved, but he was exorcizing the demon a bit. “It’s as if little parts of him, all the good and decent parts I remember from my childhood, are going to sleep and something much darker is waking to take their place.”

  “And you fear he’s involved with Sir Alistair’s plot?”

  Lucian nodded.

  “I wonder if someone else doesn’t suspect it as well,” Daisy said, knitting her fingers together. “When Lord Wexford forbade me to see you again, he didn’t come right out and say so, but he hinted that he knew something about your family, something scandalous. ‘Something dangerous’ were his exact words. He didn’t wish to see me or, by association, himself and my great-aunt caught up in it.” She studied her tangled fingers. “I thought it must be some silly society debacle, but now, I wonder if he meant this Jacobite scheme.”

  Lucian’s lips flattened into a grim line and he stared down at the braided rug between his feet, a miasma of faded colours with no discernible pattern. It looked as hopeless as he felt.

  “Wexford must have caught wind of the plot,” Lucian said. “He doesn’t strike me as the sort who suffers society’s foolishness gladly.”

  A man who’d married a former courtesan, and one who couldn’t give him an heir to boot, effectively thumbed his nose at convention. Clearly the Earl of Wexford didn’t court public opinion that fastidiously. But treason would give any man pause.

  “Each time my father tried and failed to reverse the family fortunes, he slipped a little farther into the abyss,” Lucian said. “His latest ploy is to see me well married.”

  “To Clarinda Brumley.”

  Lucian nodded. “Maybe it’s my fault he’s become desperate enough to be taken in by the Jacobites. I told him in no uncertain terms that I would not wed Miss Brumley, not even if her chastity belt were cast from solid gold.”

  Daisy’s tinkling laugh lifted his spirits a few finger widths.

  “I’m glad you refused Clarinda.”

  “Not even the fealty a son owes his father could compel me to that,” he said, grinding a fist into his other palm. He was still staring at that miserable rug to avoid her direct gaze. Would she see his father’s desperation in his eyes as well? “That’s why we have to find the Roman treasure, Daisy. We just have to. If I can restore Montford, maybe . . .”

  “Maybe your father will be restored as well?”

  The bed creaked, and Lucian heard the soft swish of Daisy’s slippers on the worm-eaten wood floor. Her hand came to rest on the crown of his head, the fingers kneading and caressing. Tension drained out of him at her touch.

  “Oh, Lucian,” she whispered. “You’ve borne this load alone for so long.”

  She stepped closer and brought his cheek to the sweet trough between her breasts, still stroking him, still threading her fingers through his hair. Lucian closed his eyes. He wrapped his arms around her waist and inhaled her sweet scent, content just to hold her.

  She was warmth and light and all good things. And he’d wandered too long in threadbare darkness, not allowing himself to feel his need of anyone.

  But he needed Daisy. Needed her like he needed meat and drink, light and air. Like he needed his next heartbeat. Her lips were on his brow, his closed eyelids, his cheeks. Her touch swept across his bare shoulders, a feather’s wisp, healing and accepting. She seemed to want him to stand, so he did.

  He’d do anything she wanted.

  Her lips found his. His hands moved of their own accord.

  On the periphery of his mind he was vaguely aware of lacings being loosened and buttons undone and fabric sliding over silken limbs. But he was lost in the wonder of her mouth as they shed their clothing.

  Her skin, cool and delicious on his. Smooth and soft. The crook of her elbow, the dip of her waist, the flare of her hips. Her giggle was music when he brushed the ticklish spot behind her knees. He wanted to touch every part of her.

  Especially the hot, slippery parts.

  Helpless little gasps and pleading. The sounds she made went straight from his ears to his cock.

  I don’t sing, she’d told him once.

  He’d never tire of this song.

  She was in his embrace; then she was sprawled on the quilted coverlet, eyes heavy-lidded with desire. She lifted her arms to him, not in supplication or surrender, but in welcome.

  And he came home.

  Home to her warmth. Home to her softness. Home to her accepting heart.

  I love you, his body sang. As spasms of release racked his frame, his lips repeated the refrain.

  “I love you, Daisy Drake.”

  “The only true magic in this world is love.”

  —the journal of Blanche La Tour

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Sunlight shafted through the shuttered window, striping the soft, worn quilt with light. Daisy lifted a hand to shield her eyes, which seemed to be caught mid-stripe.

  She was lying on her side, with Lucian spooned around her, his long arm draped over her, his hand splayed possessively on her breast. Her nipple tightened at his finger’s nearness, and the skin on the nape of her neck prickled at his warm breath. Something hard and blessedly now very familiar pressed against her bum.

  The slow expansion and contraction of his ribs against her spine told her he still slept. She sighed, perfectly content for the first time in her entire life. An angel in heaven couldn’t have been happier. If she and Lucian never left this plain little room, it would be fine with her.

  He loves me.

  She drew the sheet up to her chin. He’d wrapped her in his love, safe and secure. Last night, she wasn’t pretending to be someone else. There was no libidinous lesson being taught. They were no longer grown children playing naughty games.

  They were lovers in the truest sense of the word, souls bared, hearts open. The pleasure given and received was a rending fire, stripping away all essence of self and merging them into a new entity, a shared spirit.

  Now in the quiet aftermath of passio
n, Daisy tested the link that had been forged and found it still sound. Love bound them together.

  In the days to come, he may yet try to shut me out and deal with his troubles alone, and I will probably still vex him beyond bearing. But love unites us.

  Lucian stirred and Daisy turned to face him, ready to offer her body and her heart to him once more. He responded in half a heartbeat, accepting all of her with joy.

  The plain little room faded around them.

  An hour later, they were standing on the village dock with Peter Tinklingham, deliverer of cattle midwives and proud owner of a slatternly-looking watercraft.

  “You’re in luck, gov. I usually don’t punt out to Braellafgwen this time of year.” Mr Tinklingham seemed totally unconcerned about the inch of standing water in the hull of his shallow-draft boat. “But the tide’s with us and the mist is a mite thinner than usual today. Besides, I knows a trick or two about putting in there.”

  “So you’ve been to the island often?” Lucian handed Daisy into the punt and hopped in after her. The bow threatened to dip below the surface, but the vessel righted itself quickly.

  “Not more often than I can help, ye understand.” Mr Tinklingham took his station at the stern, laying a sly finger alongside his crooked nose. “There be a few about who still hold to the old feast days. Every Samhain and Beltane, I make a good bit o’ coin ferrying odd folk to the island. Don’t know what they do there. Don’t want to know. ’Tain’t none o’ my business, long as they pays their fare.” He cocked his head at his new passengers. “You don’t have the look of them folk.”

  “Our interest in Braellafgwen is . . . scientific, not religious,” Lucian assured him.

  “If you say so,” Mr Tinklingham said as he poled into the broad channel. “Science or Satan worship. Expect folk could go even odds on them two.”

  The river was a dark ribbon of silty water, sparkling silver-brown in the sun as they eased around to the far side of the island. True to his word, Mr Tinklingham brought them in close. Behind a partially submerged, moss-covered boulder, a hidden set of stairs was carved into the rock, leading up to the table top of the island. Lucian asked their guide to return to this spot an hour before sundown. Then he and Daisy disembarked and ascended the mist-slick stairs. At the top, they turned to look back down. Mr Tinklingham had already poled away from the island. His boat faded into the mist and disappeared from sight.

  “A person could sail past that spot every day for years without realizing what’s behind that rock,” Daisy said.

  Lucian nodded. “Inaccessible. All the more reason to suspect we’ll find what we seek.”

  “Not many folk come here, and those who do don’t have Roman treasure on their mind. Caius Meritus was a genius to choose this island,” Daisy agreed.

  Leaves rustled in the wood nearby. Daisy turned sharply toward the sound.

  “What was that?”

  “Some animal.” Lucian grasped her elbow to lead her up the game trail. “Just because no people live here doesn’t mean there aren’t a few beasts about.”

  “Beasts?”

  “Small ones, I’m sure. The perfectly harmless sort,” he said. “Squirrels and rabbits, a deer or two.”

  When they broke free of the trees into a central clearing, Daisy drew a sigh of relief. The woods seemed oppressive in their tangled wildness and, as Mr Dedham had said, full of eyes.

  A sharp prickle tingled her nape. A vestige from a more primitive time, Uncle Gabriel had explained once, when knowing one was being watched might be the difference between taking to one’s heels for safety or the sudden death that stalked the unwary. It didn’t do to ignore a prickly scalp.

  The vicar would have agreed, she remembered. If a place has no use for you, it’s best not to tarry.

  No one out of the ordinary had come to the Wounded Boar but she and Lucian. And Mr Tinklingham was the only ferryman who regularly plied these waters, so she was fairly certain Fitzhugh and his Jacobites were far off their trail. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that something watched them. She glanced at Lucian to see if he felt the chill of unseen malice too, but his eyes were alight with discovery.

  “Would you look at that? Pagan blade and goddess sheath,” he whispered.

  Though the perimeter of the island was still murky with mist, the sun shone brightly on the centre. In the middle of the clearing, there were two standing stones of dark grey granite, glittering with embedded mica.

  One was a six-foot obelisk, an ancient phallic symbol pointing skyward. Formed from one stone, the four-sided monolith had been shaped by man, the tool marks leaving fading grooves in the granite. The other stone was carved in a large circle with the centre chiselled out, an obvious reference to the goddess.

  “There are plenty of exposed boulders on this island, but the stone is much lighter in colour than these.” Lucian approached the goddess stone and ran his hand over the inner curve. “Have you seen this granite nearby?”

  “No,” she said softly. To speak louder would have felt like sacrilege.

  There was a strange emptiness in the place. Barring that first rustle she’d heard in the woods and the occasional soughing of the breeze through the treetops, there was no sound. No drowsy hum of insects, no birdcalls, just a . . . silent expectancy, as if someone were waiting.

  If she listened hard enough, would she hear the stones themselves speak in slow, measured syllables? She gave herself a little shake to ward off the odd notion. Her imagination had always been keen. She usually considered it a blessing. Now she wondered if it might not be a dual-edged sword.

  “The stones were quarried elsewhere,” she said, relieved to focus on something as mundane as geology. “Brought here for a purpose.”

  “And long before the Romans, from the look of them,” Lucian surmised. He turned in a slow circle, taking the measure of the place. “But how do they help us find the treasure?”

  “‘Where pagan blade points to goddess sheath,’” Daisy quoted. “That’s just the trouble. The monolith is not pointing at the circle. It’s pointing straight up. Do you suppose we’ve got the wrong island?”

  “No,” Lucian said quickly. “This is the place. We’re close, very close. Don’t you feel it?”

  She felt something. All her senses were on heightened alert. They were definitely being watched, but she couldn’t voice her apprehension. Lucian would dismiss it as fancies, or worse, vapourish womanly weakness for listening too attentively to the wild talk of the locals about Braellafgwen. He might even laugh at her.

  So she held her tongue as they walked in circles around the great stones, measuring the distance in Lucian’s long strides.

  “Might Caius have buried the treasure between the stones in the centre of the clearing?” he asked. “That would be using them as markers of sorts.”

  “If adherents of the old religion are still using the island even now, it stands to reason that Braellafgwen has never been without occasional visitors.”

  “A disturbance of the ground would have been noticed and investigated,” he said, following her logic.

  They made another slow circuit, wending their way in a figure eight this time.

  “Perhaps that’s what happened,” Lucian finally said with a frown. “The Romans didn’t find the treasure, but do you suppose the Celts did?”

  Disappointment draped over him like a cloud casting its long grey shadow over the land.

  “Shadow!” Daisy said more loudly than she intended. “That’s how the blade points to the sheath. Look!”

  The monolith threw a long, dark shadow on the grass, knife-sharp and creeping inexorably toward the stone circle. They watched, spellbound, hardly daring to breathe. As the sun reached its zenith, the shadow struck the centre of the circle squarely and spilled past the opening toward the vine-covered rise beyond.

  “‘Where pagan blade points to goddess sheath, there shall my love be pleased.’ It’s definitely pointing.” Lucian hugged Daisy and pressed a quick kiss to
her temple. “You are brilliant. Come. Let’s see where it leads.”

  He grabbed her hand and they ran together like children escaping a tutor’s heavy-handed class, laughing and talking at once. The laughter stopped when they reached the raised ground, which seemed to be a rock outcropping obscured by dense overgrowth.

  “Another dead end,” Daisy said with a sigh.

  Lucian scoured the area with his gaze, standing stock-still. “I feel something,” he said after a moment. “A draft. There’s a void behind this greenery.”

  He began shoving the tangled vines aside, ripping them when he had to and slashing with his boot knife when they would give no other way. The fragrance of fresh-cut clippings filled the air, along with an older, darker smell.

  “There,” he said, stepping back to let Daisy survey his handiwork.

  Behind the hacked greenery, a black space yawned, a toothless maw in the rock face. Lucian stepped forward.

  “Are you coming?” he asked, when she didn’t immediately follow. “If you’d rather not, you can wait for me here.”

  “And miss the adventure?” she said, more lightly than she felt. “Surely you jest.”

  She turned sideways to slide through the narrow opening and followed him into the mouth of a hidden cave.

  “Did you see that?” Lord Brumley said from his place of concealment behind the broad trunk of an old beech. His hand tremored against the smooth grey bark. “They just . . . disappeared.”

  “Brumley, you idiot,” Sir Alistair said. “They’ve found an opening in the rock behind the vines. A cave of some sort. We could have searched the island for months without stumbling across it.”

  “Stay here for months? I should say not,” Brumley mumbled. “Not without even packing so much as a food hamper.”

  “What I mean is, they obviously have information to which we are not privy,” Sir Alistair continued. “We were wise to arrive soon enough to observe them undetected.”

  Lord Montford grunted noncommittally. The three had spent a miserable night on the island. The strange mist that surrounded Braellafgwen not only spawned fairy stories, it was an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. When the sun sank beneath the horizon, the woods came alive with their whining hum, and the voracious little demons feasted on the blue blood of two English lords and a knight of the realm without discrimination.