Laws, she’d been such a harridan to him. She pinched her eyes closed and tipped her head back to stop their burning. She couldn’t marry him, and she wouldn’t involve him in any more of her problems. He’d want to protect her, and she couldn’t bear it if he were hurt. He needed to be as far away from this debacle as possible.
She brushed a trembling hand across her forehead and gazed at the mantel clock—two more hours. The note had said to meet Lord Falgate in Berkeley Square at six and not tell anyone, or Nate and Jesse would be killed. What was that villain up to? How on earth could she bargain for the boys’ lives when no ransom had been demanded? She paced, thinking, and then dashed to her room to get ready.
***
Beau sat alone in his brother’s club sullenly drinking the most expensive bottle of brandy the place sold. His call on C.C. today had been a disaster. A righteous voice inside kept insisting she should have told him the truth, while another part of him grudgingly admired her. She’d turned her scandal into an asset by carefully weaving society’s condemnations into a veil of deception. Then she’d secretly trebled her father’s business.
Swirling his brandy in the glass, he gazed into the brown liquid. His heart ached mercilessly. Was he so intolerable she had to rush him off to Liverpool?
What if he asked his brother and Amelia to help? He rubbed his jaw. No. That would probably get him an exasperated sigh. Thomas had warned him about C.C. months ago.
He needed to face reality. He’d asked her twice to marry him, called on her two more times, and would have repeated the offer had she wished to be ‘at home.’ Today, after he forced her to own up to her deception, she threw him out. He might as well get it through his thick skull. The answer was NO.
For Christ sakes, they might have made a baby. Would she still say ‘no’ if they had? Perhaps he should leave for Liverpool. Maybe she’d miss him. He’d make sure everyone knew where he could be reached. She might feel less threatened with him out of town.
Lord Sutterland slowly rolled past in his wheelchair with a keen eye on Beau’s half empty bottle of brandy. He stopped and wheeled his chair around. For several moments he gazed between Beau and his bottle of brandy. “Bad business, old boy. I know an impending drunk when I see one. You’d better let me help you put away the rest of that bottle.”
“Ah, my lord,” Beau slurred. “Are you in need of lubrication? I’d be happy to share my bottle.” Beau waved down the attendant. Once the man brought him another glass, Beau filled it and handed it to the marquess, then raised his own in the air, “To what shall we drink?”
Sutterland swirled the liquor in his glass for a moment, considering. “To beautiful American women.”
Beau grimaced and gestured with his glass. “Now there is a sad, sad, saaad—” he hiccupped “—tale.”
Sutterland took a sip and gazed at Beau over the rim. “And this establishment has had the good fortune to sell barrels of this soothing elixir to anesthetize the dashed hearts and hopes of some of London’s most desperate. I’m surprised to find you here, though. Of any of her suitors, I would have thought you had the best chance.”
“Let me make sure we’re talking about the same person.” Beau squinted. “Are you referring to a certain beauty who has a heavy preference for purple?”
“Precisely.”
Beau realized the way he’d been hunkered over, he might have looked like he’d been crying in his drink. He took an unsteady breath and smoothed down his waistcoat. “I’ll not be in London much longer. I’ve plans to leave for Liverpool in a day or two.”
“Did you know Miss Collins and I played chess nearly every week since she arrived in London ten years ago?” Sutterland asked. “I hadn’t realized how much I’d grown to care for her until she left for America.”
Now here was something Beau should have known. He remembered seeing Sutterland gazing at her and his brother’s children when they played hide-and-seek at Grancliffe Hall. Sutterland, the old dog, was in love with C.C. too. Even though she’d rejected Beau’s proposals, his hackles went up. He gazed closer at the invalid.
For being in a wheelchair, the marquess’s fine tailoring didn’t hide his broad upper body, thick biceps and sturdy neck. A full mop of white hair framed strong, even features. Beau wondered how many arm wrestling matches the man had won. “My brother said you and he had been long-time friends.”
“Yes, we met at Eton and then went to Oxford together.”
Good God, the wheelchair and premature white hair made him look like an antique. At closer range, Beau realized he couldn’t be much older than Thomas.
Sutterland growled over the top of his drink, “Today I finally assembled my bouquet, worked up the nerve and asked Miss Collins to marry me.”
“Those were your flowers? Where on earth did you find so many prime specimens this time of year?”
“A favorite hobby. I grow them myself.” Sutterland took a large swallow of his drink and pursed his lips. “They didn’t help, though. She very politely declined.”
Beau stared into his glass of brandy and groused, “Consider yourself lucky, at least she was polite.”
“I take it she also rejected your offer?”
“This very afternoon.” Beau raised his glass to him. “She’s had a busy day.” He gulped the rest of his brandy.
Sutterland shook his head, chuckling sardonically. The merry rearrangement of his fine features made him look even younger than Thomas. “You know, I thought for certain she’d give you more consideration. After all the gold she spent on politicians, bribes and solicitors to stay your hanging and get you released from prison—a king’s ransom, she’d joked—I’d assumed you already had a place in her heart.”
Beau sat up straighter. “She’s the one who got me out of prison?” He’d always assumed it had been his brother. Oddly, this new information unsettled him. Why on earth did she do it? For some reason Rives’s name popped into his head. He knew there was a history between them, but Rives was one more topic she hadn’t explained completely.
Every riveting detail of Beau and C.C.’s first meeting at the pleasure gardens came rushing back. She’d melted in his arms and kissed him as a woman would a man she already cared for. Yet they’d never met until that night. It had been their first kiss that had driven a spike into the wall surrounding his heart. Since then she’d dismantled it bit by bit and claimed it for her own.
A string of blue-water curses rumbled up his throat. After what he’d learned this morning, he finally put it together. What an unsuspecting dolt he’d been. He was one of the most successful blockade-running captains in Nassau—commanding her ships. He’d made her millions. Of course she knew about him. Maybe not in the physical sense, but she would have gotten regular reports from her agent in Nassau. He gulped his glass of brandy to keep from spouting indecencies.
Sutterland snorted. “You didn’t know? I thought for certain she would have told you. Now I’ve bungled it. I swore to her I’d keep mum. She worked on it like a madwoman.” The marquess gave him a lopsided grin and swirled his drink again. “She is an original.”
Beau clenched his jaw and muttered, “Just another little detail she overlooked revealing.”
“I’m grateful to you for bringing her back safe and sound. But, dear boy,” Sutterland muttered, “it appears we were both bested. Falgate has taken the day. I never would have thought she’d give her nod to that blackguard.”
“Falgate? Nooo. I don’t believe it!”
Sutterland’s words were beginning to slur. “I know. Couldn’t believe my eyezz. On my way here, I saw her get into ’is carriage in Berkeley Square.”
“Are you certain it was him?”
“Without a doubt. His carriage and driver are distinctive.”
***
Beau soon left the club and staggered out into the murky street. He owed C.C. an apology. Had she not gotten him out of prison, he’d very likely be dead by now. After spending months with her, he thought he knew her, this aft
ernoon’s debacle notwithstanding. He also needed to find out what she was doing with Lord Falgate. Her being with him set off all Beau’s inner alarms. She hated Falgate and believed he’d killed his wife.
The scene in the library at Grancliffe Hall came back to him. Falgate had been making veiled threats to C.C. Had he found a way to extort money from her or force her into marriage?
Now past midnight and full of brandy, Beau had no idea where he was going. Hopefully, the bracing night air would sharpen his wits and help him come up with a plan.
As Beau passed a dark alley, he thought he heard a horse snort, followed by the creak of carriage springs. He stepped livelier. This was no time to be out alone. Footpads and cutthroats made their living robbing solitary blokes like him.
He peered around the deserted, foggy street. Only a dim lamp glowed in the distance. Something felt very wrong. Fear spurred him into an unsteady trot.
Before he’d taken more than a few steps, a hard object hit him in the back of the head and knocked him to all fours. Heavy footsteps approached from behind. Someone gripped his collar and yanked him backward, clamping a nasty-smelling rag over his mouth and nose. He knew that sickly sweet smell. Struggling, he fought with all his strength, punching and kicking at the assailant behind him.
Beau tried not to breathe as he clawed and pounded on the meaty hand clamping the rag over his face. But he’d already drawn in that first deep breath of chloroform. Within seconds, dizziness had his head spinning. A black void formed before his eyes, filling with millions of stars. And then…nothing.
Chapter 31
Beau awoke to excruciating pressure in his head. Something nasty filled his mouth and a cord wound tight about his face. A top-heavy sensation dragged at his upper body. The rest of him stretched the wrong direction everywhere else. His confusion worsened when he woozily opened his eyes. At first, all he could see was dark mist. Then he looked up and almost lost his stomach.
A thick mist swirled about him. Dim light outlined the shape of crates on a dock.
In the sky.
Beau pinched his eyes closed and tried again. As the fog thinned around him, he gradually made sense of the situation. The crates weren’t in the sky. He was dangling upside down at least thirty feet in the air—over a wharf.
He twisted to gaze up at his feet. A single cable held him by the ankles the way deep-sea fishermen hang a prize game fish. Ropes bound both his hands to his waist, trussing him up tighter than a chicken on a spit.
Everything about him undulated wildly. He struggled to swallow back nausea. Stomach acids threatened to exit his nose. Now he remembered the taste of chloroform and the meaty hand holding a rag over his face.
Thick fog had seeped through his clothes, chilling him to the bone. How long had he been hanging here?
The boom started to move, screeching eerily as it swung him through the air. Voices below oozed through the murk.
“What’s ’at up there in the fog, Fitz,” a hoarse voice slurred from below.
“Up where?” another voice rasped drunkenly. “I don’t see nothin’. Yeer, seein’ things again.”
“No, I saw somethin’. It looked like a huge flounder hangin’ by its tail. And it had yellow hair.”
“A fish with yellow hair?” The man guffawed. “You better stop drinkin’ that cheap gin, Whinny, it’s rotting your mind.”
Beau tried to yell for help. All that came out was a muffled moan.
The men’s voices grew softer as the cable carried Beau over the water, over the deck of a large ship and then down, down, down into its hold.
Within moments rough hands were on him, unbinding his feet and dragging him upright. Confronted with dizziness and stale cologne, the contents of his stomach finally lost their hold and launched upward. He choked, sickeningly.
A meaty hand wrenched the gag from Beau’s face and held him to the side to let him vomit. Afterward, Beau lolled his head miserably. All he saw were dim outlines. In his current state—drugged, deep in his cups and bound up like a holiday goose—he knew he was no match for the burly knave holding him.
A bald-headed scoundrel clattered down a ladder from above. He carried a lantern and marched before them lighting the way while he whistled a sprightly rendition of Beautiful Dreamer. The hair on Beau’s neck prickled. Rives had sung that song.
Following Baldy, the burly ruffian dragged Beau below, down alleyways and through the lower decks. The further they descended, the more rank the air became until it appeared they were in the very bowels of a large ship. Roars and bellows permeated the walls. Beau guessed this was probably a ship trafficking in rare beasts for private menageries.
Baldy pushed open a tall door. Urine and manure fumes saturated the air. Lanterns flickered up ahead in a gargantuan hold filled with barred cages and stalls.
Beau willed his eyes to focus. Everything around him undulated oddly. In the middle of the hold, three figures stood around a crate draped with a cloth. He heard a man’s voice say, “Do you, Miss Calista Caroline Collins, take Captain Shamus Hargreaves to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
There was a pause and then the woman said, “I do.”
Beau’s stomach lurched. Those two words sobered him more than hearing the man say her name. He must be delirious. The voice sounded like C.C.’s. She’d claimed she would never marry. Yet she was marrying Hargreaves? The villain had burned her uncle’s plantation, and probably killed him, making orphans of her little cousins.
“What’s going on here?” the bald villain yelled, rushing toward the makeshift altar. Recognition cut though Beau like an icy shard.
It was Rives’s voice!
Impossible. The drugs must have conjured some horrid hallucination. Beau and C.C. had drowned him in Nassau. Rives was dead.
The brute behind him shoved Beau forward. He squinted hard to bring into focus the three figures at the improvised altar.
A woman in a flowing yellow gown stood next to a tall, hulking scoundrel. She was wearing the same gown C.C. wore when Rives kidnapped her in Nassau. Could this be some odd warped jumble of memories? His mind couldn’t make sense of it.
In front of the couple stood a man in a long nightshirt, holding an open book. He said reverently, “I now pronounce you man and wife.”
“No!” Baldy barked, launching himself toward the threesome. “She’s not supposed to marry him, you imbecile. She’s supposed to marry me!”
Beau now saw the gun the hulking fellow held on the woman.
Turning, the man’s face finally took form. It was Hargreaves! He leveled the weapon on Baldy. “I decided the plans needed adjustment, Rives. She marries me, and I take the money her father owed me. Then I decide how much you get,” he sneered.
So this wasn’t a hallucination? Rives and Hargreaves really were here?
From an outward appearance of fiery anger, Rives demeanor suddenly changed to controlled calm. When he responded, his voice came out even and composed, carrying with clarity. “Calista knows she marries me or no one.”
“I’ve waited long enough,” Hargreaves snarled. “Her father owed me for my portion of the ships Captain Sterling sank. My life’s savings were in them. Elijah Collins thought he could marry Calista off to Sterling and get his money back, but he wouldn’t help me force Sterling to pay me for mine. So the way I sees it, for trying to cut me out, he owed me for what Sterling did. Calista is Elijah’s heir, so now she owes me.”
As the men continued to argue, Beau struggled to get his bearings and find something near him that might make a weapon.
“I went along with you ten years ago,” Rives said in a pleasant tone. One side of his lips curled into a grin. “Elijah also went back on his word to me and my parents. Since we were children, Calista was supposed to marry me. Not Sterling…not you…me.” His index finger gently tapped his chest.
With eerie stillness, he spoke to Hargreaves benevolently, as if he were a child. “You and I both got our revenge on Elijah. The newspapers—the whole
city of New York loved my stories about Calista, Sterling and his little harlot. And after you murdered the beautiful cigar girl, no one batted an eye when I fed the papers a story that drew suspicion away from you and onto Calista.”
“Revenge is only half of it. I want back what’s mine!”
“Yours? You mean your ships? Shamus, Shamus, Shamus.” Rives gave a mirthless laugh and said equably, “Captain Sterling couldn’t have sunk your ships. Hundreds saw him win a yacht race in Long Island Sound when your ships sank in the South China Sea. It wasn’t possible for him to be halfway around the world at the same time.”
“I say he was!”
Maybe it was the unreality of the situation, or the mixture of chloroform and brandy, or the absurdity of Hargreaves’s statement, but Beau found himself muttering, “Were the ships’ names the Pacific Princess and the Eastern Cloud?”
Hargreaves turned, and squinted at Beau as if he’d only now discerned his presence. “Aye. That was their names.”
“In truth,” Beau slurred, “the Royal Navy sank those ships…after the slaves were taken off. If you want reimbursement from the correct party…you’d best contact the queen. But then you’d have to face charges…for trafficking slaves and unlawful seizure and kidnapping.”
“How would you know about my ships?” Hargreaves snarled.
So he didn’t recognize Beau. “I was in the Royal Navy in the South China Sea.” Beau knew he’d said too much, and bit down on his tongue to keep his yap shut.
Hargreaves’s eye started to twitch and he worked his bulbous lips as if he was getting ready to spit. He shifted his weight, grabbed C.C. by the arm and gave them all a triumphant, rotten-toothed sneer. “No matter. Mrs. Shamus Hargreaves has a fortune that should more than cover my interest in those ships.”
The Trouble With Misbehaving Page 30