The officer scowled at his so-called friend, who clearly wasn’t behaving as expected.
Maria, pale now, looked from Bernard to Heath and then hurriedly to Torridon.
“It’s a good question,” Torridon said quietly. “And one that should be answered before all the others.”
Maria swallowed and turned her gaze back on Lieutenant Heath, who hadn’t even stepped down from the curricle. He seemed to be frozen in his seat, his appalled gaze hovering between Maria and Torridon.
“No,” Maria whispered. Then, in a stronger voice, she continued. “No, I don’t want to go with him. I’m sorry, Gideon. I have misled myself as well as you, but I don’t wish to marry you. In fact, I should have stuck with what I said the day after the ball. I don’t want to see you again. Whatever was between us is over.”
Heath’s Adam’s apple wobbled. He nodded once, seeming more anxious to get away from this situation than to elope. He didn’t even try to persuade her otherwise.
“Thank God that’s settled,” Bernard said in some relief. “I told you how it would be, Heath. She’s too young and she’s not for you. Even if she wasn’t the earl’s sister, she’s not for you. I’m going back to Blackhaven…” He glanced at Maria. “Unless I can drive you to the castle first?”
Maria shook her head a little wildly and grasped Torridon’s arm. “Oh no. I’ll walk back with Lord Torridon.”
“Oh, that’s who you are!” Bernard exclaimed, thrusting out his hand. “I’m Bernard Muir, Lady Wickenden’s brother. Very glad to make your acquaintance, sir.”
Torridon took his hand. “I believe I’m glad to make yours.”
Bernard grinned, then scuffed his foot a little awkwardly on the road. “I take it we’re in agreement on the subject of discretion?”
“You may rely on me,” Torridon said gravely.
Bernard grinned again. “Had to ask,” he said cheerfully and climbed on to the curricle, gathering the ribbons. Heath sat staring straight ahead.
“Bernard,” Maria said. “Thank you.”
Bernard saluted her with his whip.
“One more thing,” Torridon said. “Lieutenant Heath.”
The officer jerked his head around in alarm.
“Lady Maria has made her wishes plain.” Torridon said sternly. “If you do more than bow to her from a distance or even mention her name, I will know.”
Heath nodded curtly and muttered something to Bernard. He didn’t even look at Maria as the curricle set off in the direction of Blackhaven.
“How do you feel?” Torridon murmured, gazing after it.
“As if a huge weight has fallen from my shoulders. And yet I want to cry. He wasn’t what I thought, and neither am I.”
“Then I think,” he said thoughtfully, “that we should race back to the castle. Serena may surprise us yet with her own burst of speed.” With that he took off, loping through the trees. After a startled moment, she laughed and her feet pounded behind him. He grinned. “Can’t catch me.”
“Can I not?” she said at once.
Chapter Fourteen
The race through the woods with Maria got them back to the castle quickly. It also gave Maria the opportunity to run off her immediate blue-devils and face her family with greater ease of mind. Then, together, they entered the old part of the castle, following the trail of servants to the Tamars’ rooms in the old part of the castle.
“No, Serena,” Frances was saying firmly. “You can’t take the escritoire. Strictly speaking, it isn’t yours, it’s Gervaise and Eleanor’s.” She stood in the middle of the room beside Serena while the younger girls perched on the bed looking morose.
Serena seemed inclined to argue. “Gervaise told me years ago that I could count all of this mine.”
“Isn’t there any furniture in Tamar Abbey?” Frances asked.
“Not much, though Tamar says our own rooms are habitable—”
“Then that will include a desk, probably a much finer one than that old thing. Keep it here for when you visit.”
Torridon smiled to himself as Serena was persuaded. She even gave a reluctant laugh.
“I’m being a little ridiculous, aren’t I?” she said.
Torridon moved aside to let the last of the servants out with the bags containing the Tamars’ things that they would need for stop-overs during the various nights of their journey.
“Yes,” Frances admitted, casting a quick smile of welcome to Torridon and Maria. It did his heart good. “But never mind. You will soon be so busy that you won’t have time to miss the castle. After all, you never did when you came to London.”
“That is very true.” Serena seized her travelling cloak. “Come and wave us off then. Girls, do you have shawls or cloaks with you?”
“I don’t,” Frances remembered.
“I’ll fetch it,” Torridon said and, leaving Maria with her sisters, he strode off back into the main part of the castle and across the landing to the passage leading to his and Frances’s bedchamber.
Ahead, he saw one of the carrying servants coming out of their rooms and walking on, presumably to the nearest side-door. The man was clearly empty-handed, so he must have been delivering something from Serena’s room to Frances, which wasn’t entirely unexpected. But he found himself focusing on the figure hurrying away from him. Something was odd about the man, something he couldn’t put his finger on.
Not that it mattered. He found his wife’s shawl easily enough and hurried downstairs and back outside where the final farewells were being said. Serena thoroughly embraced everyone, including Torridon, with special hugs for her little sisters. Maria clung to her a little too hard, but managed to smile.
Tamar and his young brother were much more casual, although Tamar himself said something clearly serious to Braithwaite as they shook hands. Braithwaite smiled and clapped him on the back.
“Just take care of her, and invite us to stay,” he said.
Frances, after hugging Serena one last time came to stand by Torridon, her hand on Helen’s shoulder as the girls stood on the step below, waving dementedly.
The burdened cavalcade set off with its outriders, and everyone called goodbye and good luck messages after it. The girls would have run after it, but Gervaise and Frances held them back in case they got in the way of the horses.
“Don’t cry, Helen,” Frances said, squeezing the child’s shoulder. “It’s just like a big adventure for Serena, and you will see her and Tamar before you know it.”
Adventure, Torridon thought. For some reason, the word made him remember Frances in boy’s clothes, swaggering into the tavern… and quite abruptly, he knew what had been “wrong” about the servant coming out of their bedchamber only minutes ago. He hadn’t moved like a man. His rear hadn’t been a man’s. It had been rounded like a woman’s and it had rolled slightly in walking.
A woman dressed as a man coming out of Frances’s bedchamber. Ariadne Marshall.
No. It couldn’t be. Without a word, he turned and bolted back into the house. He all but ran across the hall and took the stairs three at a time, rushing to the bedchamber.
He had watched Frances bestow the rubies in her dressing table drawer. Yanking it open, he was thoroughly relieved to see the jewel case still there. Still, something made him open it just to be sure.
The rubies were gone.
“God damn it,” he fumed, slamming the drawer. Was that woman never content but with the last word? Seizing his overcoat and hat, he charged out of the room once more. On the stairs, he met Frances. “Have to rush! Back as soon as I can!” he said, dashing past her.
But she wasn’t having that. “Alan!” She flew back down the stairs after him, seizing his arm to make him halt. “Where are you going?”
“After the rubies,” he said impatiently. “They’ve been stolen.”
She blinked. “Again?”
For some reason, it made him laugh. “Sadly, yes, and she’s—the thief is getting away.”
She pounced o
n his slip. “She? Who?”
He had tried. There was no point now. “Ariadne Marshall,” he said reluctantly.
Her eyes widened. “Ari? Ari?” Her jaw dropped and snapped shut. She didn’t accuse him of obsessive hatred or even being mistaken. “Ariadne stole from me.” Her eyes refocused on his. “She took them the last time, too, didn’t she? That’s how you got them back. You took them back from her somehow, once you realized I had lost them. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He touched her cheek. “I didn’t want you to be wounded by her perfidy. I thought I would simply send her away.”
Unexpectedly, Frances caught his hand and held it there for an instant. “You are rather wonderful,” she whispered. She dropped his hand, scowling. “Ariadne never leaves a game alone. You can’t send her away. Order the carriage, Torridon; I’m coming with you.”
“No need,” he called after her. “I’ll be quicker riding in any case.”
“But you don’t know where she is!” Frances flung over her shoulder. “I know the country and I know Ariadne!”
He was bound to admit that was true, and so he ordered his own carriage instead of one of Braithwaite’s more sporting vehicles. He also begged the use of one of Braithwaite’s under-coachmen who also knew the country well. And he was glad he did, for as the carriage halted at the front steps and he strode toward it, Frances ran out of the house with Jamie in one arm, and a bag in the other.
*
“She’ll be at The Black Lion in Whalen,” Frances told her husband as the carriage set off at a smart pace. “There’s no other hostelry outside Blackhaven that she would tolerate.”
That Ariadne had stolen from her, not once but twice, stunned Frances. Below her calm and determination bubbled a cauldron of indignation, hurt, and shame. She had been foolish. But what really roused her ire was that Ariadne now dared to conduct this war with her husband.
“If my friendship truly mattered to her, she would not have done this,” Frances said flatly.
“I suspect she imagined I would not tell you,” Torridon said, “that despite my threats, I would keep her crimes to myself.”
“Why didn’t you?” Frances asked curiously.
Torridon shrugged. “There has been enough silence between us,” he muttered. “Enough unsaid.”
She covered his hand resting on the seat between them. “I do not need to be protected from honesty. Of any kind.”
His hand turned, and he threaded his fingers through hers. “I know.”
Jamie stared at the windows, watching the changing scenery flit by, fields and woods, and moors on one side, the sea on the other. The sea was tranquil today, a bright, glassy blue in the spring sunshine. Eventually, they trundled into Whalen, the carriage negotiating its bustling, muddy streets. It was not as clean or as genteel as Blackhaven. Whalen was a working town, the largest in the area until Blackhaven had begun to grow into the fashionable spa town it now was.
Frances’s heartbeat quickened as the carriage stopped, and Torridon handed her out. She had no idea what she would say to Ariadne, if she could even bear to look at her. But she did want to stand by her husband’s side and confront her.
“Alan, how important are the rubies to you?” she asked suddenly. They had originally been acquired by his great-great-grandfather, the third earl, who had presented them to his countess on their wedding day. They were part of the estate, a symbol of the Torridon name, wealth, and honor. To steal them was an insult to his family. Or at least she expected him to say something similar.
“I gave them to you,” he said shortly. “Not to her.”
She gazed at him in surprise, warmed by his answer and yet more curious than ever. But she had to contain her questions, for by then they had entered the inn and Torridon asked peremptorily for Mrs. Marshall.
“Oh, the lady left, sir, not a quarter of an hour since.”
“Thank you!” Frances seized her husband’s arm before he could ask more questions and all but dragged him toward the door. “She’s going south,” she said urgently. “We’ll catch her.”
Torridon was about to hand her into the carriage, when a familiar figure suddenly bolted out of the inn. “My lady, my lady!”
“Lawson?” Frances said in disbelief, turning to face the maid who was rushing across the yard with her cap askew. “Is Mrs. Marshall here after all?”
Lawson slid to a halt in front of her, already smiling at Jamie, who smiled back as if he remembered her. “No, my lady, but she’s riding—alone—and I’m to make my own way to London. But when I saw you and his little lordship…”
“Lawson is Mrs. Marshall’s abigail,” Frances told her husband, and the maid remembered to curtsey speedily, her attention still more than half on the baby. “She was most helpful caring for Jamie. How are you supposed to get to London?”
“On the stagecoach, my lady. It stops here tomorrow morning.”
But Torridon had focused on the other half of Lawson’s news. “She’s riding alone all the way to London?” he said in disbelief. “That would be ruinous, not to say downright dangerous.”
“She is reckless,” Frances allowed, frowning, “but by no means foolish. Lawson, has she gone to meet someone? Please tell me it is not Lord Sylvester Gaunt!”
“I don’t know who it is,” Lawson said reluctantly, “but I’m fairly sure she wouldn’t go far alone. And if she is planning to meet someone, she doesn’t want me there.”
Frances’s frown deepened, “But you know all her secrets, don’t you? Why would she keep this from you?”
“Because she’s planning to let me go, probably,” Lawson said morosely. “At least she paid my fare to London, where I’m more likely to find another position.”
“Lawson…” Frances fixed the maid with her kindliest gaze. “I shan’t be angry, but did you know she had stolen my rubies?”
Lawson’s eyes widened. “I thought you were wagering them!” She cast a half-frightened glance at Torridon’s stern figure. “Begging your pardon. But no, I had no idea she took them… wait, though, I did see an extra jewel case in her drawer. I thought it was a gift from the young lord who… er… called.”
“That particular young lord has less chance of buying rubies than you do,” Frances said wryly.
“Oh. In any case, I didn’t look inside. Mrs. Marshall cares for her own jewels. Such as she has left.” A troubled, mortified look filled her face. “I’m glad I didn’t know. I’ve always been loyal to my ladies, scrupulously loyal, but I can’t hold with stealing, my lady, and most certainly not from you! And you were so upset! What you went through to find them… and she let you! I couldn’t have kept quiet, my lady, I couldn’t!”
While Frances patted the agitated maid’s shoulder, Torridon asked, “Which direction did she take?”
“South, sir, along the coast road.”
“Then I suggest we look for her,” Torridon said briskly, and urged Frances into the carriage.
“Begging your pardon, my lord, my lady,” Lawson burst out. “Can I come, too? I have a piece of my mind to deliver to madam! Along with my resignation.”
“By all means,” Torridon said politely. “Join the party.”
*
Only a few miles outside Whalen was a fork in the road, with one way leading inland across the moors. Since Ariadne had been so focused on going to London, Frances was at first happy to carry on along the coast road, until they stopped and inquired of an old couple walking if they had seen a lady riding in this direction. They denied seeing anything except a farmer’s gig and a brewer’s cart.
“She could have ridden out of their sight,” Frances said.
“Why would she bother?” Torridon argued. “Their notice would mean nothing to her. But what would attract her along the other road? Is there another inn to stop for the night?”
“None that would be safe for her to stay alone,” Frances said. “There is The Crown, but I doubt she would reach it before dark.” She thought. “There are a couple of v
illages, a scattering of gentlemen’s houses… oh, and an old ruined church that Serena and I always thought was haunted. We rode there a few times with Gervaise.”
“I don’t suppose you mentioned this to Ariadne?”
Frances frowned. “I might have,” she said doubtfully. “But a ruined church doesn’t meet her minimal standard of comfort.”
“But it might as a mere meeting point,” Torridon said, and stuck his head out of the door to instruct the driver to turn, a tricky maneuver without spilling coach and occupants in the ditch. “We don’t need to go far along the road, just until we discover if anyone has seen her. If no one has, we’ll come back to the coast road.”
Since this seemed a sensible course, the coachman was instructed to halt and make inquiries of the first person he saw.
“Do you have somewhere to stay in London while you look for a new position?” Frances asked Lawson.
“I expect I can stay with my sister for a few days,” Lawson replied. She raised her eyes from her folded hands. “I tried my best with Mrs. Marshall,” she burst out, “but I just wasn’t comfortable with her ways. I know you and she got up to mischief together, but you were never less than a lady. Mrs. Marshall… all those men and secret letters and staying out all night. I’d rather not have to deal with such things!”
“I’m sure you’ll be able to choose from any number of respectable positions,” Frances soothed. “And then—” She clung onto the seat as the coach slowed too suddenly. Lawson was flung off on to the floor. Torridon leaned forward, reaching for her as the carriage came to an abrupt halt amidst the sound of snorting, stamping horses. Presumably, the coachman had found someone to question.
A male voice outside could be heard saying, “Don’t.”
Torridon, abandoning Lawson on the floor, leaned back and reached into the velvet pocket by the window.
“Don’t,” repeated the man who opened the carriage door at the same time. He wore a hat pulled low over his brow, and a neckerchief had been drawn up over the bottom half of his face. More importantly, he held a pistol in either hand.
The Wicked Wife (Blackhaven Brides Book 9) Page 16