He sought her gaze for confirmation of this and saw warmth and welcoming and … dare he hope it?… love reflected in blue eyes fringed round with long and thick dark lashes. Overcome with his own emotions in the face of hers, Spencer feigned further irritation with Edward and forgetfulness of his subject. “Now, what was I saying before I was so rudely interrupted?”
Once again, Edward butted in. “You were saying you were a horse’s ass, I do believe, Spence, old man. A pompous one.”
Spencer smiled into Victoria’s eyes. “If you will excuse me, I must go strangle the life out of my cousin.” He made as if to pull his hands from hers.
She held tight. “Think of your aunt, Spencer. Remember, she loves him.”
“Damn. A terrible complication. But maybe we can still get rid of him.” Without letting go of Victoria’s hands, he turned more fully to his cousin. “Edward, you are herewith excused to go make your call on that poor young woman who’s awaiting your silly presence this morning.”
Edward crossed his arms over his chest. “A jolly good try, Spencer. But I’m going nowhere. I wouldn’t miss your being down on bended knee like this for all the lovely women in Savannah.”
Spencer stared at Edward’s clearly amused face and then returned his gaze to his wife. “Do you see what I must contend with?”
Her smile was radiant. They were both, Spencer knew, saying so many things with their eyes and their joined hands that they really could not yet say to each other, despite the moment. “Yes, I can, you poor man. However—”
“You’re calling him a poor man for having to put up with me? May I remind you, Victoria, that I am still in the room and can hear you?”
This time it was Victoria who looked past Spencer to Edward and said, while smiling, “Shut up, Edward. I was about to speak in your defense, actually.” The moment seemed to overtake her as her expression turned solemn. “I was going to say we need you alive to help us with this. Remember, this letter is only the first one. I have received others. And now that I’ve told you two, if these awful men find out in any way, it is Sofie who will pay, as will we unless we can stop them somehow.”
Edward made a sound of distress. “You’re absolutely right, Victoria: This is most dire. Forgive my frivolity. Most inappropriate of me.”
Once again, she smiled. “Not in the least, Edward. We must keep our heads and go about our daily lives, despite this awful burden. And I hope that laughter will be a part of our days. Indeed, with the barbecue and the crush of people there to wish Spencer and me well, we will have to put forward a cheery attitude and, all three of us, behave as if nothing is the matter.”
“Well spoken,” Spencer said, giving Victoria’s hands a last affectionate squeeze before pulling his away from hers and rising effortlessly to his feet. Further declarations between them could wait for a more private and appropriate moment. Catching him completely off guard was a sudden dizziness that forced him to tense his muscles and stand very still, a hand to his temple, until he regained his equilibrium.
“Spencer? What’s wrong?” Sharp concern put an edge in Victoria’s voice as she surged to her feet and put a bolstering arm around his waist. With her other hand, she held on to his arm.
As well, Edward had rushed to his other side and supported him from there. “Steady on, cousin. Why don’t you sit down?”
Spencer blinked until the room righted itself and he felt better. “No. I’m fine, really. Just a reminder that I’m not yet completely recovered.”
“Well, of course you’re not,” Victoria cried. “Will you please sit down, as Edward suggested?”
Because it was easier, and not because he felt as if he needed to do so, Spencer turned and—with his wife’s and his cousin’s help—sat down … again, a little too heavily for his pride’s sake. Victoria and Edward hovered over him like concerned parents. “I am really quite all right. And I would be obliged if you would take your seats, as well.”
With their actions performed in concert, as if of one mind, they parted and quickly flitted to their respective places. They looked so young and comical doing so, like scolded children, that Spencer felt bad for being short with them. He smiled despite himself and exhaled his amusement. “All right, then. Let’s see what we know, shall we?” He turned to his wife. “Please don’t be insulted by my next question, Victoria, but I feel we must ask those that come to mind, no matter how seemingly trivial or illogical.”
She sat up straight and folded her hands together in her lap, signaling her readiness to answer. “I understand and shall not be insulted.”
“Good. Now, the handwriting in the letter. I assume you recognized it as truly being Jenny’s? I mean, you have seen her handwriting before, correct?”
“Oh, yes. Many times. It’s hers. Had I believed the letter to be a forgery, Spencer, I … well, I like to think I would have turned to you for help.”
Although he doubted seriously that she would have, given his treatment of her at Wetherington’s Point, he smiled sincerely and hoped his expression revealed the depth of his feelings for her. “I like to think so, as well.”
“How precious,” Edward said with studied, probably feigned, boredom. “Before we get all moony-eyed and gushy, I have a question I would like to ask.”
Exhaling a purposely dramatic sigh, Spencer tore his gaze away from his wife’s beautiful oval face and turned to his cousin. “You have the floor, Edward. Ask away.”
Edward inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Thank you, kind sir. Victoria, in the letter, your friend Jenny says you are to do everything these dastardly devils tell you to do. What have you been instructed to do so far?”
Lending the act a fluttering butterfly quality, she raised a hand to her chest and held it against her skin, just below her throat. “That’s the odd thing, Edward. I haven’t been instructed to do a thing. I don’t even know how I’m involved or what these awful people think I can do. I don’t even know why they need me, except I’m a Redmond—was—and Jefferson is Sofie’s father and involved somehow and won’t help her. Do you see? It’s so confusing.”
“Yes, it is. So, in these other notes…” He pointed to the ones next to her on the sofa. “No demand for ransom? Anything like that?”
“No. Nothing. I wish there were. Doing something—anything!—is better than simply waiting and worrying. The only thing I know for certain is I am being watched.”
A lance of fear stabbed at Spencer’s heart and had him leaning intently toward her, his hand braced against the cushion between them. “Those men in the alley. Do you think that’s what they were doing out there?”
“I do. That, and these notes I’ve received say as much.” Victoria pointed to them there between him and her. “One at River’s End, and two here. I don’t recognize the handwriting, but it’s the same in all three. They’re clearly from the men who have Sofie.”
“You said ‘clearly’? How so?”
“They recount for me my day’s activities and then mention Sofie, as if to remind me of what’s at stake. But even that is not as frightening to me as how they are delivered.”
“How are they delivered?” Spencer felt a murderous anger well up inside him that his wife would be threatened and frightened by these cowards who preyed on innocent women and children. Well, now that he knew about this, he’d find them … and he’d deal with them, just as he had Loyal Atherton, only more seriously. Suddenly, that man and his romantic mooning after Victoria, despite accosting her for a kiss, seemed so inconsequential now as to be ridiculous.
“I can’t really say they’re delivered,” Victoria answered. “It’s more accurate to say they’re placed. They’re placed on my pillow.”
In the flight of a second’s passing, Spencer pictured, in his mind, an evil, shadowy villain sidling into Victoria’s bedroom and laying a note on her pillow. The sudden realization of her absolute vulnerability nearly stopped his heart completely. “Good God! Right on your pillow?”
“Why, the audacity o
f the act!” Edward cried. “They’re purposely trying to terrify you.”
Victoria nodded somberly. “And they are succeeding.”
Spencer shook a no-nonsense finger at his wife. “From this moment forward, Victoria, you are not to be alone for one moment of the day or the night, do you understand?”
“I do, and I shall be relieved not to be.” She peered at him from under the sweep of her fringe of eyelashes.
Her expression brought to Spencer’s mind images of them sleeping together—at long last. He cleared his throat. “Yes. Well. Here’s something that may have already occurred to you, Victoria, but it needs to be said for the benefit of all of us.”
She gestured for him to proceed. “Then please say it.”
“Unless we are talking about a very skilled sneak, and given that a stranger could not wander through River’s End, or here at this house, without being noticed and challenged, I can only conclude—”
“That a servant or other sort of employee is involved,” Edward finished for him. His expression suddenly changed to disbelief. “Good Lord, one hates to think of such betrayal after one has housed, fed, clothed, and employed a person.”
“It could be much worse than a trusted servant, Edward,” Victoria said quietly. “Given everything we’ve said here, and what Jenny said in her letter, I can only conclude that a member of my family is also involved.”
“You mean your brother.” Spencer spoke the words to spare her having to say them.
Nodding, looking as if her heart were breaking, Victoria stared at him with rounded and baleful blue eyes. “Yes.”
CHAPTER 14
They arrived at River’s End late that afternoon on the wings of a sudden and fearsome thunderstorm that seemed evilly intent on chasing them out of Savannah and into the surrounding jungle of the sandy, swampy lowlands. An ill wind, the storm’s precursor, circled around the horses’ hooves and the carriages’ wheels, frightening the animals and the occupants alike as it rose up in great swirls, like so many taunting spirits, threatening to tear away bowler hats and bonnets alike. The pines and the oaks and the cypress trees swayed hypnotically back and forth as branches and needles and leaves crackled with a secret language all their own.
What had first been white and scudding clouds quickly became black and gray bruises on the darkening sky, as though the rolling grumbles of thunder had struck them with fists and they bled warm rain upon the earth and the two struggling landaus. A shard of lightning crackling overhead in horizontal patterns reminded Victoria of the blood veins in an old person’s hands.
The soaked drivers, Zebediah and his brother, Otis, knew to direct the horses around to the side of the plantation home to the covered port where the passengers could alight safely from the landaus and proceed directly into the house itself. Welcoming Victoria, her husband, and their entourage into the small receiving room were the elderly, dignified butler named Virgil and two young, wide-eyed maids. The scene was a chaotic symphony of rain pounding on the roof, frightened horses neighing, anxious drivers calling out to the animals to calm them, the acrid scent of the lightning, the smell of the rich earth, and the happy cries of relief and greeting from the Redmonds to their arriving family.
Victoria’s mother, father, and brother stayed in the background, more toward the hallway behind them than in the actual fray of the arrival. Capes and coats and hats and bonnets, all of them dripping with rain, were shed and handed over to the servants, who also greeted the party of six cheerfully and with relief. “Welcome home, Miz Victoria,” Virgil said, bowing creakily and speaking slowly as he always had. “We shore enough thought we’d lose you to this here devil storm. I prayed and prayed and now I can thank the Lord you done made it through.”
Smiling, happy to see the old man, and more happy than she would admit to be back at River’s End, Victoria patted his arm affectionately and then, at his insistent urging, handed him her long and dripping cape. “Oh, Virgil, that water is dripping all over you and will ruin your nice suit of clothes.”
“Don’t pay that no never-mind. I’ll dry out, shore enough, Miz Victoria.”
“If you insist. But it’s good to be here, and I thank you for your prayers.” She smiled after him as he moved to Spencer, bowed formally, and held out his hand for his cape.
“Oh, my stars, look at y’all,” Catherine Redmond fussed worriedly in the background. Victoria turned, pointedly looking past her brother—she found it so hard to understand him or forgive him—to see her parents standing next to each other. Her mother craned her neck to look everyone over. Not an easy thing to do with the cramped, square room being so crowded. After all, the three River’s End servants, Victoria, Spencer, Hornsby, Mr. Milton, Rosanna, and Tillie were all wedged into it. “Why are you so wet? Didn’t Zebediah and Otis put the hoods up on the landaus for you?”
On the way here, Victoria had told Spencer her mother would fuss about these very things. She now exchanged a look with her husband before answering her mother. “Of course they did, Mama. It’s just that the storm came up so quickly. We were one minute in sunshine and the next in a terrifying downpour. Fortunately, Rosanna and Hornsby had packed well and were prepared with our capes at the first sign of bad weather. Still, in our rush to get the hoods up on the landaus and our capes unpacked and actually on us all, we were soaked.”
“You poor things, I can believe it. You’re the very embodiment of drowned rats. This weather, I swan, I never saw the like. I told your father you’d all be struck dead by lightning before you ever got here.”
“We thought so ourselves a few times,” Victoria assured her. She’d feared this next meeting would be awkward, given how she had left angry less than a week ago with Spencer and Edward in tow. But so far, thanks in large part to her mother’s chattering and fussing over them, so good.
“Now, where’s that nice young Earl of Roxley? Why isn’t he with you? I have a room already made up for him. And more than one female heart will be broken if he doesn’t attend the barbecue tomorrow afternoon.”
Before Victoria could answer, she felt Spencer take her elbow. Smiling down at her, but looking resolute, he threaded her safely through the crush of people and over to her family. As he walked, the other people parted, just as when he talked, everyone else quieted. The mark of a leader, Victoria knew. People treated her father the same way.
When they stood in front of the elder Redmonds and Jefferson, who had yet to say a word, Spencer said: “My cousin will be along, Mrs. Redmond. He had a social call to pay before he left Savannah, but I’m certain this weather has delayed him. I am, of course, assuming the Earl of Roxley has the sense to stay in out of the rain. But he may not have and could arrive momentarily, to no one’s surprise. Just as we have, come to think of it.”
Murmurs of laughter greeted his words, and then they all stood there, quietly, awkwardly, Victoria and Spencer facing her equally uncomfortable family. Victoria’s expression and her mood fell. Now that she faced them, she couldn’t find the right words and didn’t know what to say, what to do. Her father’s expression showed a certain amount of proud reticence tinged with a yearning. Jeff’s expression, oddly, mirrored his father’s. And her mother looked wide-eyed with tears rushing to them.
Though her heart pounded with apprehension, Victoria could hear behind her the nervous shuffling of feet and a few sniffles and a low cough. The poor servants and Mr. Milton. How awful this must be for them, too.
Into the tension-filled silence, Spencer said, in that wonderfully melodic and formal voice of his: “Forgive me my lack of manners. Perhaps you have not met my wife? Mr. and Mrs. Redmond, may I introduce you to the Tenth Duchess of Moreland, among her many other and lesser titles, more than half of which I feel certain she herself is not aware and could not therefore recite? Nevertheless, I present to you Her Grace Victoria Sofia Redmond Whitfield. You may know her as your only daughter. And you, sir”—he turned to Jefferson—“have the equal pleasure of knowing her as your younger sister.
”
For a moment, stunned silence held sway between Victoria and her family. But then, as one, they burst into laughter, and the tension was broken. Victoria surged forward to be enfolded in their embrace. As they kissed each other and hugged and cried, Victoria knew in that wonderful, noisy, rain-dripping, shining moment that she loved, with all her heart, John Spencer Whitfield, the Tenth Duke of Moreland, among his many other and lesser titles, all of which she felt certain he was aware and could recite.
* * *
Suitably dried off and his suit of clothing changed, Spencer stood in the billiard room on the first floor. He held a fine whisky in one hand and a finely crafted cue stick in his other. A very mellow cigar was clamped between his teeth as he squinted through its smoke to watch Jefferson Redmond, across the table from him, consider his next shot from all angles.
“The women tossed you out, did they, Your Grace?” Isaac Redmond asked cheerfully. A crystal glass of whisky in his hand and a cigar held between two fingers of his other hand, he sat in a big brown leather chair to Spencer’s right.
Spencer shifted his grip on his whisky so he could also hold the cigar with the same hand. He exhaled the smoke and said: “Most certainly they did, Mr. Redmond. I barely had time to dry off and change my clothes before I was summarily dismissed.”
“I’m not surprised. Not much feminine company out here for Catherine, so she’s sorely missed her time with our Victoria.”
Spencer barely bit back a correction. She was his Victoria now. He knew it was foolish to think such a thing. She was, of course, still this man’s daughter. But a powerful sense of possessiveness over her had seized Spencer earlier in Savannah, given all the danger she was in. Once he had his responses under control, Spencer politely said: “I can fully understand how Mrs. Redmond feels. Anyone who knows Victoria would rue every moment spent away from her.”
“Glad to hear you say that.”
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