“You did?” Frances said, startled. “When?”
“While the rest of you were preventing Serena loading up the kitchen sink. And I’ll tell you what, Frances, he’s a paltry fellow, utterly undeserving of any female companion, let alone your sister.”
“That bad?”
“Worse,” Torridon said. “But his so-called friend seemed a good fellow. Bernard Muir? Heath had borrowed his curricle, but he came to talk them out of it.”
Frances smiled. “I like Bernard. He’s Gillie’s brother.”
“I know.”
“How was Maria?” Frances asked with foreboding.
“Relieved mostly and a little sad. But I think she will get over it quickly.”
“I suspect Serena’s leaving had something to do with it all. We must make her feel more special.”
“I agree.”
Frances smiled at him, but he was gazing around the ruins.
“What happened to this place?” he asked.
“I don’t believe anything happened to it except old age, and a landowner who wanted a grander church. Then his descendant became Viscount Overton and acquired more lucrative lands in the south. I don’t think the family ever visit any more. Certainly, I’ve never met them up here. But I’m very grateful they left us a haunted ruin.”
The sun ducked suddenly behind a bank of cloud, darkening the scene. A ghostly murmur seemed to whisper amongst the grass at her feet and a chill passed up her spine.
She halted mid-step, staring up at Torridon. “Did you hear that?”
He didn’t answer. Gazing around him, he was obviously listening, too, as the echo of muffled voices drifted on the breeze and faded. He walked on. “I don’t believe in ghosts. But I understand why the locals call it haunted.”
“Serena swore she heard voices once. I thought she was making it up to scare us.”
Torridon drew her on to the substantial part of the ruin, through the broken, arched doorway into a room with ivy growing out of the ceiling. “That will be your undercroft?” he observed, gesturing toward the iron door.
“Look through the keyhole,” Frances advised. “You can see steep steps leading downward…” She broke off with a surge of excitement and lowered her voice. “Oh, do you think the sounds came from down there? There must be another way in.”
Torridon, who had crouched to put his eye to the keyhole, rose to his feet, and pushed gently at the door. To Serena’s astonishment, it swung silently open.
“There is a light shining from the foot of the stairs,” he murmured in her ear. “Perhaps it’s the vicar practicing black arts.”
Laughter caught in the back of her throat.
“I wish you would wait here,” he said, brushing his lips against her earlobe. She shivered. “If you won’t, stay behind me.”
In truth, since he immediately stepped through the doorway onto the first step, she could only remain behind him, for the winding stairs were too narrow to go side by side. Besides, there was no rail on the edge of the steps, so it seemed sensible to descend as close to the wall as possible.
As they did, the voices grew louder and more distinct. Many candles must have been lit to penetrate the darkness below, for there was enough light to guide their footsteps on the stairs.
A very echoey female voice drifted up to them. “It’s freezing in here. And damp. I couldn’t possibly have spent the night in such a place.”
Frances frowned, for behind the distortion of the bare room below, was a distinct familiarity in that voice. She wasn’t surprised.
“Then it’s as well I found you more comfortable transport,” a male voice responded. “If your ladyship could manage a short stroll.”
“How did you achieve that?” the woman, who was surely Ariadne, asked with lazy amusement.
“I held up a carriage and—er—took it. I even got the inn to feed and water the horses. They’ll be good and rested by the time we reach them. And we can travel by moonlight. How romantic is that?”
The highwayman! Without the ridiculous Scottish accent, of course. An elusive familiarity nagged at Frances. Did she not know that voice, too?
Ariadne gave a derisive laugh. “I suppose you will tell me you are responsible for the stars, too?”
As they rounded the next turn, Frances could see Ariadne and the highwayman, without his disguising hat and face-covering kerchief. They sat on a blanket in the middle of the huge, stone room. The rug was surrounded by a ring of candles, and between Ariadne and the highwayman laid a large heap of coins, jewels, and banknotes. Frances’s own reticule lay open nearby, as though tossed aside when the meagre contents were emptied out.
They had not locked the door above, presumably because they were planning to leave soon and did not expect visitors. How had they got the key? Frances suspected there were several copies around. No doubt thieves and smugglers and vagrants had been using this place for decades, their drifting voices adding to the “haunted” rumors and serving to keep people away.
At the foot of the stairs, Torridon took the pistol from his pocket. Frances’ heart beat faster, not so much with alarm as with the need to confront Ariadne with her perfidy. Especially when they drew nearer and her old friend changed position, revealing that she actually wore the rubies around her throat and dangling from her ears.
A quick, anxious scan of their surroundings showed Frances no sign of the highwayman’s pistols. Nor could she see the overcoat he had stashed them in on their last meeting.
It was he who saw them first, turning his head as if at some faint sound. His eyes widened, but not as much as Frances’s as she finally recognized the highwayman.
So, apparently, did Torridon. “Tom Marshall,” he said in admiration. “Congratulations on your revival.”
“Never dead, old boy,” Tom Marshall drawled, while his wife jerked her head around in astonishment. “Just escaping a few too-pressing debts.”
“Which you left your wife to pay for,” Frances said indignantly, forgetting for a moment how angry she was with her supposed friend.
“Well,” Tom said easily, never taking his eyes of Torridon, “people don’t dun the beautiful widow quite so hard. It gave us a few months until my new trade could bring in a little of the readies. Not bearing a grudge, are you, old man?”
“About you pointing loaded pistols and my wife and child?” Torridon said in a voice that froze Frances’s blood. “Oh yes, dead man, I am bearing a grudge.”
“Oh, dear God in heaven, you imbecile!” Ariadne exclaimed, glaring at her husband. “Did you not recognize them?”
“Of course I did,” Marshall said impatiently. “I’ve held up several people I recognize, as it happens. The whole point is rather that they don’t recognize me. Going to shoot me, my lord?”
“Why not?” Torridon said carelessly. “Since you’re dead already, it’s really a free shot. For the moment, I’m holding it in reserve. My wife’s rubies, ma’am, if you please.”
As if she couldn’t help it, Ariadne reached behind her neck, then dropped her hands again. “The clasp is too difficult. I can’t manage it on my own.”
Frances walked toward her.
“If you even look at my wife the wrong way,” Torridon warned. “I’ll shoot your husband.”
“Go ahead,” Ariadne said bitterly. “It will save me the trouble.”
Marshall laughed. “Marital bliss, eh, Torridon?” he drawled.
Frances bent and found the necklace clasp.
“I’m sorry, Fran,” Ariadne murmured with a surprising shade of anxiety in her voice. “You don’t hate me for this, do you?”
Frances loosened the clasp and caught the heavy necklace. “I don’t think we’re on first name terms any more, Mrs. Marshall. The earrings, if you please.”
“I wouldn’t have stolen them if they were yours,” Ariadne pleaded, obeying. “They were his. You kept telling me so.”
“You knew how much they meant to me and why,” Frances burst out, snatching the earrin
gs from her erstwhile friend. “Even if you won the bet—and you did, in fact, for my husband recognized me before the ball—we had agreed on one night.” She straightened, searching Ariadne’s face. She wanted to be dignified, behave as coolly as Torridon, but it wasn’t in her. This was betrayal. “I would have given you the money if you’d asked. I would have sold my own jewels to give you what you needed.”
Ariadne laughed with an unexpected hint of bitterness. “Where would have been the fun in that? And we did have fun, did we not?”
Frances stepped back. “No. Because you manipulated me from the beginning, to make me hand over the rubies, to come here so that you could meet your supposedly dead husband at my expense.”
“Are we counting a few shillings between us now, Fran? Is that what our friendship is worth in the end?”
Frances stared at her. “Apparently. You made it so.”
Ariadne lifted her chin. “He’s my husband.”
And what of Sylvester Gaunt and all the other lovers? Frances wanted to hurl the accusation, especially in front of Tom Marshall, to wound and destroy. But love came in many forms, and it seemed, even now, she would not risk Ariadne’s. If such it was.
“Your rubies were our retirement,” Tom said casually. “I had a buyer lined up in America and we were going to take ship from Liverpool. Until I heard Ariadne had stopped here and I rode up to join her.”
Keeping the pistol pointed at Tom, Torridon bent and picked up Frances’s reticule. She took it from him without a word and dropped the rubies inside it.
“The game is over,” Torridon said flatly. “If it ever was one, it stopped being so as soon as you threatened my family. You may keep the money—no one will ever be able to sort out now how much came from whom. But I shall take the rest to a magistrate and the law will be on your heels. You’d better take ship quickly.”
Keeping the pistol level, Torridon moved to the side, away from the stolen treasure spread over the rug. “Frances, be so good as to retrieve the… er… plunder.”
As she moved, she finally saw the highwayman’s coat. Tom was sitting on it.
“Have a heart,” Marshall protested. “How can we live lawfully in America if you take away our means?”
“Lawfully?” Frances said indignantly, snatching up necklaces and snuffboxes and stuffing them into her reticule. “You’d be living on the sale of stolen goods!”
“They’re gewgaws,” Marshall said. “Easily replaceable baubles belonging to people who already have too much.”
“By which you mean, more than you,” Frances retorted. There was no more space in her reticule, so she spread out a silk shawl and bundled the other items onto it. “And you don’t know that. You have no idea what these gewgaws meant to their owners, what damage you might have caused. Why do you imagine the rest of the world owes you, when you’ve never worked at anything in your life?”
Marshall’s eyes seemed to snap suddenly and he leaned forward. “I beg to differ,” he drawled. “I worked damned hard at being a highwayman. And I was good at it.”
There was an instant when she looked into his face and knew. But it was already too late. His right hand was lost in the coat beneath him. Torridon had seen the movement and hurled himself forward.
Why doesn’t he shoot? Even as the thought flitted through her brain, she knew the answer. Torridon was afraid he was aiming at her, and trying to throw himself between Frances and Marshall’s pistol.
A sharp explosion rent the air an instant before Torridon landed on top of Marshall. Frances even glimpsed the smoking, singed hole in the coat. She stumbled forward, unsure what she could do, just determined to try. Ariadne caught her hand as three pistols skidded across the floor in rapid succession, and the heaving mass of male limbs resolved into two men once more.
Torridon heaved Marshall to his feet, forcing one arm up his back so ungently that the highwayman squawked.
Frances wrenched her hand free of Ariadne’s and hurried on trembling legs to pick up her husband’s pistol and whichever of Marshall’s was still loaded. Her hands shook, but she found the heavier pistol and rose with it held gingerly in her left hand pointing downward.
Only then, when she turned to face the others, did she see the scarlet blood dripping over her husband’s snowy white cuff and onto the floor. The world tilted in terror.
“Actually, you weren’t good at it,” Torridon said, not even out of breath as he reverted to the previous conversation as if nothing had happened.
“Good at what?” Marshall panted furiously.
“Being a highwayman. A lady’s maid drove the carriage back to us and we followed you here.”
Marshall scowled, twisting round to stare at him. And then he laughed.
“You’re bleeding!” Ariadne exclaimed, starting toward Torridon. “Tom, you imbecile, you shot him!” Her skin was unnaturally white in the flickering candlelight as she swept up to him.
“I’m fine,” Torridon said impatiently. “It’s a scratch with barely any blood. His aim is shocking—he only hit me at all by accident.”
“You moved,” Marshall accused, but his gaze remained on his wife. A funny little smile played about his lips. “I see. So that’s the lie of the land.”
“Don’t be a bigger fool than you already are,” Ariadne retorted. For an instant, her eyes met Torridon’s, and an unlikely suspicion sprang into Frances’s head. Then Ariadne swung around to her. “Let us go,” she said abruptly. “You have your rubies, and most of what we would have used to begin a new life in America. We’ll vanish without scandal. You don’t want your names dragged into this sordid affair, which they will be if you bring the law into it.”
Frances met the gaze of her old friend, her stomach twisting with loss and possibly the ultimate betrayal.
“For auld lang syne,” Ariadne said.
Frances’s lips twisted. “For auld lang syne.” She glanced at Torridon, anxious to get him away, to see to his wound and get him to a doctor. “Shall we go?”
Torridon shoved Marshall away from him so that he stumbled and righted himself, rubbing his twisted arm. By then, Torridon had retrieved both pistols from Frances. “Bring the fired one, too. I wouldn’t put it past him to reload it and shoot us in the back.”
Frances obeyed, trying to force her mind to the task rather than to the painful speculation caused by that look in Ariadne’s eyes when she’d seen Torridon bleeding. So that’s the lie of the land… here was another slow, gaping wound, a betrayal far worse than that of a friend.
But she couldn’t allow such suspicion, not now. They had to get out of there safely. She had to see to Torridon’s injury and feed Jamie.
Laughter caught in her throat at the bizarre turn this day had taken. And yet the basics remained just as important.
Carrying her heavy reticule, Frances swept up the silk shawl and tied it into a bundle containing the rest of the stolen treasures. Then, she walked across the vaulted chamber to the stairs, occasionally looking back to make sure Torridon didn’t stumble over something behind him, for he walked backward, the pistols still pointed at Tom Marshall.
As they began to climb the stairs, Ariadne said, “Frannie.”
And in spite of herself, she glanced back over her shoulder.
Ariadne smiled. “We did have fun, didn’t we?”
Frances could have ignored the question or made some crushing denial. One hovered on her tongue. But her throat ached. She couldn’t lie and didn’t want to.
“We did,” she whispered. “I wish you luck, Ari.” She hurried up the stairs and through the door into the brightness of daylight above.
Torridon closed the door with a slam, added two of the pistols to her bundle, and took it from her. “Hurry,” he said grimly. “I don’t trust either of them.”
But as they strode through the ruins, she could hear the less-than-ghostly voices shouting at each other in furious argument. Torridon’s lips curled and he glanced at Frances, inviting her to share the sardonic joke.
“I think we’re safe,” she said with a breath of laughter that hurt.
Chapter Sixteen
Mark had already turned the carriage so that it waited perpendicular to the road and was ready to go in either direction. Frances directed him to take the back roads home to Blackhaven, mainly so that they would be nowhere near Whalen if and when the Marshalls boarded a ship there.
But her biggest concern was Torridon’s wound. And as soon as he had sat down beside her, and she’d acknowledged Jamie who was being dandled on Lawson’s knee, she began unbuttoning her husband’s coat.
“Frances,” he protested.
“If you can take it off yourself, do so,” she returned briskly. “And tear the sleeve of your shirt if need be so that we can see your wound.”
“Oh, no!” Lawson exclaimed. “Did that devil shoot his lordship?”
“His lordship insists he scratched him,” Frances replied, kneeling on the bumping coach floor to retrieve the medicine box that was kept beneath the seat. “And the devil in question is none other than Tom Marshall. They’re on their way to America.”
There was a pause. Frances was sure the maid’s jaw had dropped, but her focus was all on Torridon’s bared arm. With a flask of water and clean cloth, she wiped the blood away from the wound. He bore her ministrations without flinching, his gaze steady on her face.
The ball had gouged a lump of flesh from his upper arm, but to her inexperienced eye, had caused more damage to his coat, which had two singed holes in it.
“It’s only a graze,” Torridon said soothingly. “The ball just nicked me by accident. It will heal in no time. Let me—”
She batted his hand away and placed a dressing over the wound, which was still sluggishly bleeding. Then she wound a bandage around it to keep it in place. “This will do until the doctor sees it,” she said gruffly. Feeling his gaze still burning her face, she looked up at him and swallowed. “It might not be serious,” she said, low, “but it must hurt horrendously. How did you fight him like that?”
His lips quirked. “I’m a soldier. Or at least, I was. I’ve fought with worse. Most of us did.”
The Wicked Wife (Blackhaven Brides Book 9) Page 18