“No one will see you. That is why I waited this late. Now, be quiet and follow me.”
Deirdre obeyed, too bemused not to. With only a single candle lighting their way, they traversed two corridors, ascended another flight of steps, tiptoed down a narrow, nearly windowless hallway, and mounted yet one more flight of steps, these steep and narrow, and passed through a doorway. Once that was closed and locked, Chloe set down her candle and darted into the shadows.
“Do not move. I know my way around here, but you may trip over someth—hechew. Dratted lavender. It always makes me sneeze.”
“Then what are we doing up here?” Deirdre sniffed the air. It smelled of lavender, turpentine, and years of dust. “What is this place?”
“One of the attics. Mama has her studio in the other. Here we are.” Something scraped along the floor. “Come this way. I cleared a path. Bring the candle.”
Deirdre picked up the silver holder and made her way past towers of trunks and a wardrobe with a padlocked door. She paused beside Chloe, who knelt on the dusty floor beside a trunk with its lid thrown back.
“Look.” Chloe plunged her hands into the trunk and held up several garments. “Kieran’s old clothes.”
“I see that.” Something about the jacket and trousers that must have belonged to an adolescent Kieran wrenched at Deirdre’s heart. “What are they for?”
But of course she knew, and she began to smile.
Chloe looked up, her eyes glowing golden in the candle flame, her smile broad. “For us to wear when we visit Dartmoor.”
Chapter 17
White’s fell silent the instant Kieran and Tyne walked through the front door. Though London was lean of company at the end of the Little Season, White’s enjoyed a comfortable number of visitors that evening. To a man, they stopped speaking, held glasses, cards, and newspapers poised as though performing a tableau titled Astounded Man. Eyes stared and mouths hung open.
The reaction was not as bad as Kieran feared when his father proposed that they pay the St. James Street club a visit the day after their arrival in London. They actually planned their entrance and strategy together for the first time in their lives. For the first time since Kieran could remember, they were not in opposition on a subject. Side by side, they were far from an insignificant force with which to contend.
Rutledge would have to contend with them. They had made certain that Lord Rutledge would be present before they made their entrance.
Scanning the faces of the assembled company, Kieran felt his gut tighten and his resolve to maintain an air of sangfroid slip.
Tyne looked as cool as ever as he bowed. “Good evening, gentlemen.”
A handful of gentlemen nodded. A few others cleared their throats and appeared as though they might rise and return the bow.
One man stood, looked directly at Kieran, then turned his back on the Ashfords. “I thought this was an exclusive club, not a Cheapside gaming hell.”
Kieran sucked in his breath. Every nerve in his body quivered with the desire to slap his gloves across the man’s face. But he had already caused trouble by engaging in a duel with Freddie Rutledge.
“Steady,” Tyne said from the corner of his mouth. To the assembly, no doubt waiting to see if Kieran or Tyne would rise to Rutledge’s bait, he offered another bow. “It is so cold in here, I do wonder if the weather in Greece is warmer.”
Kieran choked on a laugh. He did not think the atmosphere in the room was cold at all; his father’s words had just warmed him straight through.
Others did not hold their laughter in. Above his stiff shirt collar, Rutledge’s neck turned crimson, and his hands balled into fists against his thighs, one fist holding a pair of leather gauntlets.
Challenge the scorned younger son Rutledge might do, but not the respected and powerful father, a man twice his age. Kieran understood now why Tyne had warned him to keep his mouth shut at all cost to pride and leave the introductions to him.
Rutledge, however, was not without friends. Two young men from the back of the room strode forward to flank him. “Let us go, Ruttles,” one of them suggested. “I do believe the servants have forgot out which door to remove the trash.”
In a phalanx, they headed for their door. Kieran recognized the men as Rutledge’s seconds and did not wish to let them go.
He stepped into their path, forcing them to halt. “Just the . . . er . . . gentlemen I wish to see.”
They turned their faces away, but none could pass Kieran without bodily thrusting him out of the way.
“We have some unfinished business.” Kieran smiled. “Like who shot whom.”
“You shot before the signal,” one of the seconds declared in a rather squeaky voice. “Your own seconds agree.”
Kieran met and held his father’s gaze over the other men’s heads. If he could not get this to come out right, he lost something far more precious than his reputation—his father’s trust and respect that he was just beginning to gain.
“Yes, my seconds.” Kieran scanned the club, seeking someone who had been a witness to that night. “I do believe I had to rely on men I scarcely knew, Lord Rutledge here being in such haste to make an end of me—I beg your pardon, have an end to the affair—”
“Sir—” Rutledge raised the hand holding his gloves.
Kieran managed not to flinch and continued with an air of bored indifference. “The honorable meeting, if you prefer. Not that much honor was practiced there with all the seconds friends of yours.”
“You were the dishonorable one.” Rutledge’s handsome but dissolute face reddened. “You fired early.”
“And?” Kieran pressed.
“That is the kind of dishonorable action we expect out of an Ashford,” Rutledge said.
“Careful, lad,” someone spoke from the back of the room. “Don’t wish to make Tyne angry.”
Tyne looked as tense as a ship’s figurehead on a vessel named Avenger.
Kieran propped one shoulder against the wall and shoved his hands into his coat pockets. “Tell me, gentlemen,” he addressed the room at large, “is it dishonorable to decide that the whole affair is a farce and discharge one’s weapon into the air and without ever turning around?”
Men straightened and looked at one another. Eyebrows rose.
Rutledge and his friends shuffled their feet.
“And,” Kieran continued, “is it then honorable for the other man to fire at his opponent’s back?”
Gasps and murmurs of protest rose like storm winds.
“You’re lying.” Rutledge’s voice wavered between the same drawl Kieran affected and a strained squeal. “You will take it back.”
The gloves waved in the air, and Kieran more than half expected them to slap against his cheek. From the expressions of others, they expected it, too. When Rutledge seemed to think better of the blow that would signal a rematch on the field of honor, Kieran raised his own hands, tugged the ribbon from his hair, and pulled the waves back to expose his damaged ear. He turned his back to the other men so they could see that, if the ball had struck him from the front, it would have gone through his skull, too.
“Fortunately,” he said to the silenced room, “I have rather large ears.” Returning his attention to Rutledge and his friends, he offered them a warm smile. “So may we have the entire truth now, Lord Rutledge?”
Rutledge’s mouth opened and closed like that of a landed fish. Then he pulled himself to his full height, a head lesser than Kieran’s. “It don’t change the fact that you ruined my sister.”
“But he has ruined you, too,” someone spoke from the room.
Again, voices rose like a storm. Illegal or not, rules of dueling needed to be followed. Kieran had broken them, which was a bit questionable, yet was nothing in light of the other man shooting at his opponent’s back.
“If this is true,” one of the seconds asked with a sneer, “why did you not come forward sooner ’stead of fleeing the country like the coward you are?”
“I was unwell,” Kieran said. “I had a fever from the wound.”
The lies had reached his father by the time he recovered, and he had been ordered to board the Phoebe at Southampton and not to come home. Hurt and angry, he bought his letters of marque and sailed for the Caribbean. But now he had the chance to set things right, his father’s apology for believing the worst.
He smiled. “I can provide you with the name of the apothecary who attended me if you like.”
“You will pay for this.” Rutledge spat on Kieran’s boots, then stalked from the club, his friends in tow.
Kieran bent his head to replace the ribbon in his hair and looked down to clean the toe of his Hessian on the carpet. When he looked up, his father stood right before him, a glass of brandy in his hand and on his face an expression Kieran never expected to see directed at him—pride.
“You did well,” Tyne said. “I knew his father well. He was a fine man. How his heir turned out so badly I cannot work out.”
“Happens to the best men,” Kieran said with a self-deprecating laugh. “Or have you forgot that Rutledge is right about his sister? I can prove nothing about Joanna.”
How he wished that his father would say that of course Kieran was telling the truth about Joanna.
“Rutledge’s behavior certainly casts doubt on his sister’s honor,” Tyne said.
Better than nothing. Not what Kieran wanted. Yet what else did he deserve? He had not lived a virtuous life until his betrothal to Joanna.
Yet Tyne was right that no one wondered about whether or not Joanna Rutledge was as virtuous as her brother claimed until Kieran Ashford, Lord Ripon, came along. If not friendly, the men at White’s that evening were at least polite to Kieran, congratulating him on his marriage with only slightly raised brows. He knew those brows would climb higher once word got out that he was to be a father by the end of June or middle of July. For now, however, he enjoyed the camaraderie of his peers and the fact that Tyne did not altogether think him an embarrassment of a son.
The next day, however, he went out on his own, first to a solicitor with Daniel MacKenzie’s will, then to Drummond’s Bank. There he discovered that MacKenzie had deposited ten thousand pounds. Not a princely sum. A third of what the Ashford estates and other holdings brought in annually, but nothing to turn one’s nose up at either. If Deirdre had gotten hold of it, she would have been able to bribe any number of prison officials and fishermen to get her crew out of England. As matters stood now, she could not possibly have enough gold in her possession to make much trouble.
The letter Deirdre received from Kieran did not in the least induce guilt over the plans she was making with Chloe. Maybe if it had been warm and loving or even personal, she would have experienced a twinge of guilt for being disloyal to him in setting up arrangements for getting to Dartmoor for a visit to her crew. The note was worse than something she would have felt free to read to his mother and sisters. It was too impersonal to read to them.
My Dear Lady,
Our journey has been uneventful, even pleasant. If all continues to go well, we will be home for Christmas and probably before. I have sent instructions for you to receive extra pin money for Twelfth Night and Boxing Day gifts.
K
PS: Pet the dogs for me. I forgot to tell Mama to do so.
Deirdre burned it so his family would not find it and see how little he cared about his troublesome wife, then she descended to the sitting room where Phoebe kept the dogs in an effort to prevent their long, silky fur from invading the entire household. Deirdre had been making friends with the canines over the past three weeks. In the event she needed to slip past them in the night, she wanted them to recognize her as family and not bark.
They did not bark at her knock on the door.
Phoebe called for her to enter, and she stepped inside. Two of the dogs ran over to paw at her skirt and gaze up at her with beady black eyes and puppy grins. The rest of the pack swarmed around Phoebe, who perched on a low stool, the dogs’ brushes beside her in a basket, and a letter on her lap. One dog, the oldest female, also sat on her lap licking away the tears running down Phoebe’s face.
Deirdre closed the door and stood gripping the handle. “Bad news?”
Had Kieran kept something from her?
“No, no, good news.” Phoebe turned a radiant face toward Deirdre. “Garrett and Kieran are actually getting along. Listen to this. ‘Either five months at sea has greatly changed our son, or we have been doing him an injustice. Either way, he has an intelligence of which we can be proud and a streak of kindness he certainly inherited from you, my . . .’ Well, um—” She blushed. “Did you have a nice letter?”
Deirdre stooped to run her hand along Snowball’s back. “He told me to pet the dogs for him because he forgot to mention that to you. So here I am.”
“I’m certain he misses you greatly.” Phoebe picked up a second letter from her lap. One corner looked a little chewed. “He says he’s looking forward to Christmas pudding making. And . . . Oh, how nice. He and Garrett were invited to the Cantrells’. I’m pleased to see that Liza is going out into entertainments again. She was one of Chloe’s friends in town, and the poor girl lost her fiancé in Spain three months ago. Not that her parents thought a mere captain good enough for their daughter. I expect her parents will push for her to ally herself to a title this time.”
Phoebe and Tyne had probably intended her for Kieran.
Deirdre petted two more dogs. “I’ll leave you to your letters.”
She fled to a gallery in an older part of the house where family portraits were supposed to hang. Instead, with the Ashford family seat in Northumberland, the gallery in the house Tyne had purchased with prize money he made while a naval officer displayed Phoebe’s paintings. Deirdre had already been there and admired them, the color, the detail, the way she captured facial expressions in her portraits of humans and dogs alike.
Deirdre stopped in front of one of Kieran as a youth of perhaps sixteen. His hair was fashionably short then, his body a little gangly, but his eyes already bore that sleepy look that made a female with weaknesses like hers think of soft pillows and smooth sheets.
“Are you making Liza Cantrell think along those lines?” Deirdre asked the painted Kieran. “Will you still want your mistake of a wife when you return?”
Mrs. Barnes, Sally’s mother, had assured Deirdre that she would still have her figure at Christmas, though Deirdre hadn’t asked for the information. “Truly you will have more of one, my lady.” Laughing, she had gestured to her own abundant bosom.
Kieran might find her new shape unattractive. Her American accent would surely be repugnant and crude after the cultured tones of an English lady, especially after what she had said to him that last night, applying all the sailor cant she could muster to tell him what he could do outside of her presence. English ladies never said such things. They probably never knew such things. She was beyond the pale for the wife of a viscount, heir to an earldom.
But she had been in such pain, her tongue was her only defense.
The impersonal letter dampened more than the merest twinge of guilt the following morning when she and Chloe set out early allegedly for a day of visiting some families at the farthest corner of the estate. Instead, they stopped at an abandoned cottage along the way and donned the male attire Chloe had smuggled there on previous excursions. Kieran’s old clothes fit both of them tolerably well, though they needed to pin the waists on the trousers to keep them up, and wear more than one pair of socks to make the boots fit. A heavy mist made wearing broad-brimmed hats practical and acceptable for hiding their hair. Since they would never be inside a building, they would not need to take off their hats. One difficulty Deirdre encountered was wrapping her chest. She had done it for years without a twinge, but now the binding made her gasp.
“I can’t do it, Chloe, I won’t flatten.” Her heart raced while her spirits plummeted. “At the most, I’m not quite three months along, and already—this.�
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Chloe patted her shoulder. “Put on the greatcoat with the capes.”
“It’s too big for me. I’ll look like a scarecrow.”
“You are selling sweets and tobacco to prisoners at Dartmoor. No one expects you to be fashionable.”
“I suppose not.” She huddled into the greatcoat, and she and Chloe headed for the pony cart and the fifteen-mile drive to Dartmoor.
Upon seeing the barren land stretching out around the gray stone fortress, Deirdre doubted that she could ever get her men out. The walls were too high, the hiding places too few, the gorge leading from the coast to the high moorland too narrow. Yet the gates stood open, and others, as did Chloe and she, passed in and out with baskets and boxes of wares. Red-coated Somerset militiamen guarded the entrance, muskets and bayonets ready, and inspected the visitors. Still, with some coin, guards could be bribed.
Chloe had used a little of Deirdre’s gold to learn the days of the market and get a message to “anyone from the Maid of Alexandria” that they would have callers on the tenth of December. The smell of unwashed humans, wet wool, and other filth met Deirdre’s nostrils. Ships never smelled good, but the sea breezes kept the worst of the odors away once one was on deck. This was only the prison yard, the market area, open to the sky. The barracks in which the men lived would be far, far worse.
Kieran did this to them.
The reminder felt hollow. She had done this to them. Yet she could not have watched Kieran die in the filthy waters of St. George’s Harbor.
“Take this basket.” Chloe thrust a wicker container of wrapped sweets into Deirdre’s hands. “We must be quick.”
Deirdre followed her sister-in-law through the prison gates and into the thick of the milling throng. The men were pasty-faced and ragged. Their hair hung long and lank, often in greasy clumps, as though they either had given up or had no way to bathe. Up close, their stench brought on a nausea she hadn’t before experienced. She swallowed.
“Not here.” Chloe’s voice was a mere hiss.
My Enemy, My Heart (The Ashford Chronicles) Page 22