Must Be Magic

by Patricia Rice

  The cat yawned, stretched, and leapt from its perch to the windowsill, turning expectantly and swishing its tail.

  * * *

  “Leila—Lily—dear one, where are you?” a high-pitched soprano sang gaily. “I am here to help. Tell me all!”

  Smiling at her mother’s airy assumption that she could solve the problems of the world when she could barely keep her buttons fastened and her scarves about her, Leila rose from where she was planting seedlings. Hermione fluttered down the hillside, her hat askew and her skirts billowing. As a child, Leila had firmly believed her mother could trail dust in a rainstorm.

  Now that her nephew and his companions had departed to chase heiresses in Bath, Leila felt safe enough to dress for comfort. Shaking out her worn gardening skirt, she strolled up the hill more sedately than her parent came down it.

  She should have known one of her elders would arrive as soon as Christina and Felicity returned home. It had been weeks since they’d left—and since she’d last seen Dunstan anywhere except in the fields.

  The dratted man was avoiding her. She knew he was out there doing his duty, for the staff of gardeners had multiplied and activity in the fields around her had increased daily. She feared that if she intervened, he would pack up and she would never see him again.

  Leaving him alone was proving to be the most difficult thing she’d ever done in her life. She was accustomed to going after what she wanted, and she wanted Dunstan Ives. She needed to hear his voice, needed the reassurance of his presence, needed much more than was good for her.

  Her feelings for him terrified her far more than she could ever admit. How did people live with these rampaging emotions beating against the walls of their hearts?

  “Maman, how are you?”

  “Harried, dear girl, absolutely harried!” Her mother hugged her. “I don’t know why one of you couldn’t have a talent for dressmaking. It’s all so confusing. I’m sure I don’t know which gowns to choose and the modistes insist we need them all—even the bilious green one.”

  “The bilious green modiste?” Leila asked with laughter.

  Ignoring her daughter, Hermione glanced at the flower garden. “Very pretty, dear, but there’s not enough, is there?”

  Catching her mother’s shoulders, Leila steered her toward the house. She loved her careless, scatterbrained parent. Hermione had a generous heart and a gentle soul. She simply didn’t have a lot of brains. Or normally functioning ones, anyway.

  “I have to start somewhere, Maman. How are the girls? I take it they are arguing over the modiste’s recommendations?”

  “Christina is quite impossible!” Hermione wailed. “She says it’s an extravagant waste of time and money to clothe her since she’s already betrothed. Instead, she’s been frequenting gambling hells and coffee shops. I vow, I almost had failure of the heart when that Ives boy brought her home wearing breeches.”

  “I certainly hope the boy was wearing breeches, Maman.” Leila tried not to hear what her mother was saying. It could very well be the prelude to a plea for her to come home, and that she was determined not to do, despite her homesickness.

  “Do not be difficult, dear. You know what I mean. Christina was wearing breeches, and the Ives boy had to drag her home where she belonged.”

  “Which Ives boy, Maman? There are so many.”

  Hermione waved a frail hand. “I don’t know. One of the curly-haired ones, the bastards. Very polite-spoken, I must say. Ninian is having an influence. But that’s not what I’m here for. Where is that other wretch, the big, fearsome one? I want a word with him.”

  Oh, dear, she was in for it now. She couldn’t let her mother loose on Dunstan. It was a pure miracle that the marchioness was so thoroughly distracted by her younger daughters’ Seasons that she hadn’t noticed Leila’s flush at the mere mention of Dunstan’s name. Malcolms always sensed sexual involvement, or imagined it around every corner.

  “If you mean Dunstan, I daresay he’s draining a fen or moving a pond or building a fence somewhere,” Leila declared. “Shall we have some tea while you tell me everything that is happening in town?”

  “No, no, I haven’t time, dear.” For a small woman, Hermione was strong—and determined. She strode directly toward the carriage waiting in the drive. “Take me to him.”

  “Maman, I don’t know where he is,” she protested. “He is a busy man. Come in and visit, and we can send someone to look for him.”

  Hermione tugged a flying scarf into place and fixed Leila with her sharp blue gaze. “I know you would not willingly attach scandal to our name and ruin your sisters’ Seasons, but I cannot trust an Ives. If you insist upon associating with a suspected murderer, I must know he’s truly innocent.”

  “Aunt Stella has a hand in this, does she not?” Leila asked with resignation. Her duchess aunt had a way of knowing about matters in which she had no right to interfere. There would be no arguing with her mother once Aunt Stella became involved.

  Leila glanced down at her dirty blue skirt and couldn’t help imagining Dunstan’s expression when she showed up dressed like this with her mother in tow. She rather thought her flighty mother terrified logical Ives men as much as the reverse.

  Hermione clambered into the carriage with the aid of her footman and waited for Leila to enter before answering. “We’re concerned, dear, that’s all. The girls stopped to visit Ninian, and you know how that is.”

  Leila did. Ninian mothered everyone, even though she was younger than half her cousins. Leila might resent everything about her angelic married cousin, except it would be like resenting the sun or the moon. They merely beamed down anyway.

  “Maman, I don’t suppose I could talk you out of this, could I? I’ve already offered Dunstan Ives our help in clearing his name and he’s refused it.”

  Hermione rapped on the driver’s door, and the carriage lurched down the drive. “I don’t doubt he did, but you can never know what an Ives is thinking. They’re positively inscrutable.”

  Dunstan was not. He was as obvious as a blizzard on a sunny day. He wanted her, and he hated her for it. Simple. In a billow of skirts and petticoats, Leila flopped down on the seat cushion. “We could ask his maidservant if she knows where he has gone, I suppose.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Hermione replied, tugging at an unfastened glove loop.

  Leila rolled her eyes as her mother’s ancient carriage rumbled down the drive.

  Dunstan had warned her to stay away, but he hadn’t said anything about her mother.

  Thirteen

  Riding behind a tenant who was returning the oxen to their field, Dunstan noticed a movement on the rocky hillside harboring Leila’s cave. His heart lurched and his palms perspired in expectation until he urged his mount past the animals and realized the activity on the hill in no way involved Leila.

  He cursed his foolish disappointment even as he identified the climber as a young lad. When another figure pushed up from a prone position near the cave vent, Dunstan’s disappointment turned to rage. If some wretch had discovered Leila’s bathing place and spied on her—

  Slamming that thought to a halt, he pondered the idiocy of caring, and scarcely heeded the man who stood on the crest of the hill—until he realized that the Herculean figure silhouetted against the sky was watching him. Adonis. Or whatever in hell his name was.

  Adonis had first appeared out of nowhere at the marriage of Drogo and Ninian. He’d been appearing and disappearing ever since. He was more Ives than any Ives—with a more prominent nose, a browner complexion, and thicker, blacker hair than any of them. But he hung on no known branch of the family tree.

  Unable to ignore the Ives talent for breeding sons—in and out of wedlock—the family had accepted Adonis’s appearances with wariness and his departures with relief. Adonis never seemed to care one way or another.

  A youthful shout from the side of the hill returned Dunstan’s attention to the forgotten climber, and his heart nearly stopped beating. His son, G
riffith, hung on a rocky shelf, attempting to pull himself over. What the devil was he about? He would kill the boy, if the boy did not kill himself first.

  With a lazy stride, the big man on top of the hill sauntered down a path nearest the lad, leaned over, and apparently spoke a few words of encouragement. Heart in mouth, letting the oxen driver go on without him, Dunstan halted his horse at the foot of the rocks to watch his one and only son clinging to his precarious perch. He didn’t dare shout at him from down here. One quick move, and the boy could plunge to the rocks below. It wasn’t a long fall, just a cruel one. Images of his son’s broken, crumpled body obliterated all other thought.

  Grasping the last shred of his control, Dunstan dismounted just as Griffith found a handhold and began hauling himself upward. Dunstan gulped a lungful of air, and swore that if he didn’t keel over in terror first, he would heave the pair off the top when he reached them. Why, by all the planets, had the boy’s mother let him loose in the company of the lunatic Adonis?

  With careless disregard to his coat and stockings, Dunstan took the shortest route to the top, pulling himself up by tree trunks and through brambles. By the time he reached the crest, Griffith lay gasping for breath in the grass while Adonis looked on with amusement.

  “Well met, my friend,” he called. “I believe this one belongs to you.”

  Griffith shot up like a jack-in-the-box. Still gangly and loose-limbed at fourteen, his ragged dark hair falling across his bronzed brow, he scowled at Dunstan with an easily recognizable Ives expression. The boy had been sullen earlier this spring when Dunstan had left him behind with his mother. He had apparently graduated from sullen to rebellious in a few short months.

  “Does your mother know where you are?” Dunstan all but shouted. He never knew what to say to his son. He and Bessie lived in different worlds, and he’d long ago come to accept that a child belonged with his mother. Yet he wasn’t so certain how much longer Griffith could be called a child.

  The boy crossed his arms and glared. Dunstan raised a questioning eyebrow to the man who looked on—the man who always looked on, observing and never participating.

  “I found him tramping the road to London.” Adonis answered the unspoken inquiry with a shrug of his wide shoulders. “Thought maybe you’d want him more than the rogues he accompanied needed him.”

  “They were my friends,” the boy muttered. “I was fine. You didn’t have to interfere.”

  The big man gently cuffed the back of the boy’s head. “They were rogues who could have sold you to the press gangs or employed you as a thief, among other things.”

  Trying not to let his terror of what might have happened explode into rage, Dunstan focused on the one argument that was capable of making an immediate impression on his rebellious child. “Or they could have been rogues who would terrify me and your mother by holding you for ransom,” he added. He knew his son was devoted to his mother.

  “What would you care?” Griffith retorted, though he had the grace to look guilty.

  “You’re my son. What do you think?”

  The boy narrowed his eyes. “I think you wish I’d disappear, that I’d never been born. That’s what I think.”

  Dunstan crossed his arms and glared back. “I think you wish I’d disappear and never been born, and then you wouldn’t have to deal with anyone but your mother.”

  “That’s stupid,” the boy retaliated. “If you hadn’t been born, then I wouldn’t be here either. Everyone knows that.”

  Dunstan lifted his gaze to Adonis, who was grinning openly. “See, he’s an Ives. Not stupid, just pig-headed.”

  “So I’ve been told, though I’ve yet to discern the difference.” Adonis nodded at a carriage rumbling down the road below. “Why is it that whenever a tempest brews, a Malcolm appears?”

  “I might ask that of you,” Dunstan replied grimly, glancing in the direction indicated but not recognizing the vehicle. How could Adonis know who was in it?

  Ignoring the jibe, Adonis chortled and tugged the boy’s collar. “If the Malcolms get you in their clutches, you’ll be fortunate if you aren’t transported home on a broom.”

  Griffith looked as if that possibility would be far preferable to reaping his father’s wrath. He glanced toward the road with interest.

  “I’ll leave the two of you to the ladies.” In threadbare shirtsleeves, his coat flung over his shoulder, Adonis eased toward the far side of the hill. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  “Wait!” Dunstan called after him. He despised being in debt to any man, and he owed this one a far greater debt than he could ever repay. To lose his son would have killed him—a sudden insight that hit him with the impact of a runaway carriage. “I owe you. Come to the house, and we’ll talk.”

  Adonis eyed him skeptically. “There’s naught we can say to each other.”

  Dunstan grasped his son’s shoulders with both hands and let a tide of gratitude relieve him of the hostility and suspicion he’d harbored for the interfering stranger. “He’s all I have,” Dunstan said simply, squeezing Griffith’s shoulders and telling himself it was the sun causing the moisture in his eyes now that he had the boy in his hands again. “Come for dinner.”

  Adonis glanced at the approaching carriage, then back to the wide-eyed boy who was soaking up the exchange. “Later, then.”

  Although he strolled away as if he had all the time in the world, he was well out of sight before the carriage reached the foot of the hill.

  “He’s peculiar,” Griffith muttered.

  “You’re in a cauldron of trouble,” Dunstan retorted, releasing him.

  Dunstan had been only seventeen when he’d fathered the lad, eighteen the day Griffith was born. He’d held him as a babe once or twice when he’d been home from school, watched him grow from a distance, but Celia’s death had separated them as surely as his marriage had. He abhored the thought of hurting his child, yet he didn’t seem capable of doing anything else.

  The role of father did not come naturally to him. Dunstan’s own father had barely acknowledged his existence, so he had no good example to follow.

  If, as Leila had accused him, he’d been blinded to her nature by his prejudice against society, was it possible that his feelings of resentment toward his father had spilled over into his relationship with Griffith? Just how narrow-minded had he been all these years?

  And how the hell could he fix it?

  With younger brothers aplenty, he knew how to play the role of older sibling. Perhaps that would suffice for now. “Come along. I imagine you’re a mite peckish after that climb. What were you trying to do?”

  “Adonis said this is a faerie hill, and I was trying to find a way in.” Griffith scrambled down the path. “I’m so hungry, I could eat a cow.”

  Dunstan lingered a moment longer, watching the ancient carriage rattle and jolt below, and wondered again—how the devil had Adonis known who was in it?

  Leila stepped from the coach and eyed the bleak stone front of Dunstan’s cottage. “He’s not here,” she told her mother as the footman assisted her down.

  “How do you know that, dear?” Hermione asked placidly, catching her floating scarf and knotting it over her bodice. With a vague gesture, she sent the footman to knock.

  Leila always knew when Dunstan was near, but she didn’t try to explain that to her mother.

  She removed her lace cap from her pocket and tied it in a demure bow beneath her ear so she did not look quite so disheveled in her dusty gardening clothes. She watched Dunstan’s maid appear in the doorway, then throw them a glance over the footman’s shoulder, and shake her head.

  The footman returned with the message that the master was with the men in the south field and was not expected back until dinner.

  “Perhaps we could go to the south field,” Hermione suggested.

  Catching the scent of new-mown grass carried by a sudden breeze, Leila shook her curls. “He’s on his way, Maman. Let’s go in and have some tea.” She str
olled up the stone walk. “My mother has traveled a distance,” she said to the maid still standing in the entrance. “Might we rest and have some refreshment?”

  Minutes later, they were comfortably ensconced in Dunstan’s front parlor when the front door sprang open and a dirty young man flew across the threshold, followed by Dunstan in a rumpled and dusty frock coat.

  Leila hid a smile at her host’s disheveled state. She shouldn’t have worried that she wasn’t elegant enough for him.

  From beneath lowered lashes, she watched Dunstan’s surprise and what she hoped was a brief flash of appreciation at her appearance. Then he concealed his expression and collared the lad to perform the necessary courtesies. His son! She’d known Ives boasted of bastards, knew of Dunstan’s illegitimate brothers, she’d just never thought to come face-to-face with his son, especially one nearly full grown.

  The boy grimaced and looked longingly toward the kitchen. The dark coloring, large bones, and stubborn jaw proclaimed him Ives well enough, but his nose lacked the usual prominence. Leila knew nothing of boys and could not ease the awkward silence that fell after introductions were completed.

  “Martha will feed you. Don’t go any farther than the kitchen until I come for you.” Dunstan sent the boy away and glanced down at his own dirty attire. “I apologize, ladies. I did not expect company. Will you give me a moment?”

  “We shouldn’t have come, Maman,” Leila whispered as Dunstan disappeared upstairs.

  “Nonsense.” Hermione bit delicately into a watercress sandwich and glanced about her. “After years of raising girls, I find these Ives men fascinating. Even the young ones are exceedingly . . . masculine.”

  Grumpily, Leila snapped a ginger biscuit and savored the flavor. “You have two full-grown stepsons, Mama. And Father isn’t exactly lacking in masculinity.”

  Hermione tut-tutted and sipped her tea. “You know perfectly well that they have their lives, and we have ours. It is all very polite and not at all the hurly-burly of Ninian’s household, where men are underfoot at all hours. The poor dear. With her sensibilities I cannot imagine how she suffers the chaos of all those big men hurling passions about as if they were javelins.”