The Misfit Marquess

by Teresa DesJardien

  Lord Greyleigh stood still as stone for a long pause, but then he slowly nodded. "There are passages, designed into the original structure by an ancestor, I suppose. But they have long since been boarded shut. My mama took to using them, and it... upset my father to have her appear in various rooms at odd moments."

  "Well, I propose to you that someone has taken down the boards then, because I have had a regular visitor. She claims her name is Lily, and this afternoon she seemed to be carrying an infant. She is looking for a fairy, she says, and she had one of my jewels, a ring, in her hand. One with rubies and mother-of-pearl, a decidedly foreign design as it was brought from India." She paused and took a breath. "This woman ... a girl, really, I do not think is entirely in her right mind."

  "I have brought no one into this house named Lily," Lord Greyleigh said firmly, scowling. "There is no one named that on my staff."

  "Nonetheless, that is the name she claimed. She has long red hair, and every time I have seen her, it has been unplaited and unpinned, and not very tidy. She goes about barefoot, I think to be silent in her movements, and she is very young, perhaps sixteen at the most."

  Lord Greyleigh scowled terribly and turned his back to Elizabeth. She parted her lips to reassert she spoke the truth, that she was not insane or delusional, but before she could say anything more he turned back to her.

  "Show me this door," he demanded, moving at once to scoop her into his arms. Elizabeth clung to him, telling herself the excitement that rippled through her was the result of his abrupt movement and nothing else.

  Gideon threw himself against the oblong door shape, but it did not give. Under his breath he uttered a curse. "It is blocked from the other side," he said aloud as he rubbed his newly bruised shoulder.

  "I told you I was unable to find a way to open it," Elizabeth said, with perhaps a hint of triumph in her tone.

  Gideon turned to her where she sat on her bed, but it was so good to see her eyes once again lit by interest rather than fever, that he refrained from answering the comment. Instead, he motioned to the two footmen he had ordered to accompany him to Elizabeth's room. "Come with me. I know where the exterior entry was. Is," he corrected himself. "That must be how someone is entering the passages."

  "I wish I could see it, too," Elizabeth cried at once, putting up one hand as though to summon them back.

  Gideon hesitated a moment, for she was so recently come from a sickbed, but he was not immune to the entreaty in her gaze. He took the steps needed to cross the room and scoop Elizabeth into his arms once more. "I had no notion of starting on an exercise regimen," he told her tartly as he hefted her in his arms. "But it seems you are intent on seeing that I am made fit."

  If she took insult, she did not show it. If anything, she looked content. "You could let the servants carry me," she pointed out, her slender arms twining around his neck.

  There was no answer to be made to that either, so Gideon once more chose to say nothing. He used the effort of carrying Elizabeth down the stairs as a cover for his lack of speech, but really he was lost in thought.

  Elizabeth had so far proven everything she had said, lacking only the red-haired woman as proof. For that matter, Gideon himself believed that someone had been taking things for some while now. He had always supposed it was a servant, but it had never occurred to him that the rascal might be using the passages. It was not necessary to do so, for it was easy enough to pick up a stickpin or a watch fob and place it in one's pocket and take it from the house, without making use of the old passages Gideon had more than half forgot. A mere child could palm a small object and easily carry it from the house, let alone any of the servants. But the passages would make an excellent place in which to hide things, to avoid being caught by the surprise inspections of pockets that Gideon had ordered randomly done— and which had always failed to turn up any missing item.

  And the oddest part of it all? Sometimes things were brought into the house and left behind with no one to claim them. An old night rail, looking as if it might have been taken from some washline, or a bonnet with pink ribbons that everyone denied seeing before let alone owning, or a leather ball, or a dog's collar. The servants denied the things brought in as vehemently as they denied taking anything out of the house ... it had all made no sense whatsoever.

  Now Elizabeth had "found" a ring on a candle. Yes, she made sense when she spoke. Yes, the tapestry in her room certainly did cover a hidden door, but there was the rub. How had the injured and bedridden Elizabeth known of the door behind the tapestry? It was not as if she could go exploring! Could she? But why would she, even if her wound had allowed it?

  She had certainly known the inscription on the ring, but she could have read it long before she ever placed the ring on the candle! What proof was there that it had not been placed by her? Or proof that it had ever belonged to her? The truth was, she had possessed nothing when she had been brought into the house, or so his servants had reported to Gideon.

  If Elizabeth had been in his home for the past four or five months, Gideon knew he would have to accuse her of being the one who took and left things. Since that was not the case, he did not know what to make of Elizabeth's claims, her findings, her obvious glee upon "discovering" the pearl ring. He knew what he wanted to believe, knew what his mind kept attempting to take as proof of a mind more sound than he had feared, but which reason told him was unlikely.

  He walked through the open door that one of the footmen held for him, shook his head at a suggestion the man would help carry Miss Elizabeth, and stepped forward to lead the way. The weight of the woman in his arms was less than the heavy weight in his mind, no less so as he pondered what motivated him to keep Elizabeth there, against his heart, when he could hand her off to a servant.

  He stopped before an overgrowth of ivy, and after circling once in place, spied a nearby bench, on which he deposited Elizabeth. She did not meet his eyes, and he wondered what that meant. Did she feel guilt or alarm that they were about to uncover the secrets of the passageway? But, if so, why had she pointed out the passageways in the first place? Gideon shook his head, realizing that he felt almost as confused by all the seeming contradictions as Mama must have felt in her last days.

  Gideon and the footmen used their hands to pull at the ivy, at least until Gideon saw how the ivy had been lifted away from the wall to form a loose curtain on one side. "This is how they got in," he said with surety. Folding back the ivy curtain, it was possible to see a door beneath.

  He ordered tools brought, and in short order the ivy was pulled down, revealing an ordinary door that one would think was nothing more or less than a servant's entrance.

  "I never knew nothin' were here!" a footman named Sam declared, with eyes wide.

  "That was the intent," Gideon assured him. He reached for the metal door handle, and the door swung open easily, revealing how simple it would be for someone to slip under the ivy curtain and through the door.

  "Did you play here as a child?" Elizabeth called, shading her eyes, the better to see from her seat.

  Gideon shook his head, staring into the dark maw beyond the limited reach of the day's sunlight. "Only a few times, but then of course Mama learned of the passages, and in short order she had annoyed Papa by using them at all hours. She frightened him in his bed one night, a ghostly figure coming out of the wall, and that was when the half dozen or so doors into our rooms were all boarded from the inside."

  He turned back to look at Elizabeth where she sat on her bench. "Will you be all right there while we explore?" he asked.

  She nodded, looking anxious.

  Gideon turned to Sam, who had brought a lit lamp along with the hoes they had used to pull down the ivy. Taking the lamp, Gideon led the way in.

  Chapter 15

  When they reemerged some twenty minutes later, Elizabeth was visibly agitated. "What did you find?" she asked with widened eyes as Gideon crossed to her side.

  "The boards nailing the doors shut were all pulled
down. But the doors are crudely made, with rough cross boards, so someone has figured how to put a long board propped between the far side of the passage wall and the door boards, creating an easily removed block. A crude but rather effective block, in truth."

  "In other words, it would be possible to enter the rooms by first removing the block, but if the blocks are in place they would prevent the idle discoverer from coming into the passage from the room side?" Elizabeth questioned.

  "Exactly," Gideon said, and tried not to let his gaze narrow on her. What did it matter if she grasped the idea easily, and extending that idea, what did it matter if she had already been through the passages herself? Someone had, for the dust on the wooden flooring had been disturbed, and not too many cobwebs had dangled in his face as he'd made his way along. "There is nothing in the passages, nothing obvious anyway. No piles of stolen goods or pirated caches," he told her.

  Elizabeth's shoulders slumped. "I was hoping you would find the rest of my jewelry there."

  He shrugged, not sure how to interpret the disappointment in her tone. "I suppose only a more thorough search would prove there is no hiding spot, such as a loose floorboard. Do you wish it?"

  "Yes, please," she said with shy, even hopeful, grace that had him again doubting what his own good sense told him. These jewels might indeed exist beyond the scope of the one ring he had seen, but the only person to "take" them could well have f been Elizabeth herself. What game could she possibly be play1 ing at? This was mischievousness that went beyond anything his mama had ever manifested. But then again, what was a bit-of indulgence? Gideon instructed the footmen to search the passageways again, looking for loose bricks and boards and cubbyholes.

  He sat at Elizabeth's side, and when she squinted at the sun that was beginning to descend toward the west, only then did he realize he had not thought to bring a shawl or a bonnet for her. -He offered to return inside the house to get them, but she de-] clined, and then she turned down his offer to carry her back within. "I would like to be here to identify the jewelry if it is' found," she said earnestly. l

  "You could do that as easily inside the house."

  "I should like to see them as they are found." r

  Perhaps she did not trust him, or she did not trust his ser- > vants, or perhaps this was all some fancy she'd taken into her head, but she assured him she would rather stay.

  After an uncomfortably long and silent minute had passed, i Gideon rose. "I believe you require a bonnet," he said less than graciously. The truth was, it was difficult to sit in silence next to this woman, because apart from the promise he had made to her, he wanted her to answer questions that she either would refuse, or would not have enough sense to answer truthfully.

  Once inside, he gave his request for a bonnet to Frick, who lifted his eyebrows, pondering this unusual request. "We could borrow one of your mother's bonnets, my lord?" the butler suggested.

  "Very good."

  "I shall have it fetched at once," Frick said with a nod, and turned to issue his command to a footman, who clashed up the stairs. "May I bring another matter to your attention, sir?" Frick inquired.

  Gideon nodded absently, not paying much attention until the butler produced from his jacket pocket a woman's hair comb bedecked with a row of small diamonds. "This was found by Kendrick, not even an hour since." Kendrick was Gideon's

  master of hounds. "Somehow one of the hounds got into the house, sir, and when Kendrick was summoned to retrieve the animal, he found this comb secured in the creature's coat."

  "Could it have got there by accident?" Gideon asked, but even before the butler could shake his head, he suspected the answer.

  "No, my lord. It was deeply set in the tuft of hair behind the animal's head."

  Gideon pocketed the comb and sighed, not liking this new twist in his odd household, not liking its obvious link to Elizabeth. Still, there was nothing to be done about reality but to endure it; history had taught him that lesson.

  "Miss Elizabeth has had some personal jewelry go missing, Frick," Gideon explained wearily to the butler. "Anything that is found ought to be brought to me, and I will return it to her."

  Frick's eyes grew round. "It was poor enough when we had things being moved, but now am I to understand that we have a thief in the house?" he cried in horror, as if he were personally responsible.

  "We do not know that, Frick. Miss Elizabeth ... she may be confused, leaving things about. I should prefer this was handled quietly. Just tell the servants that a, er, game has gone awry, and the objects are to be returned to you when found."

  "Yes, sir," Frick said, obviously disapproving of such discretion, but also understanding its need.

  The footman returned with a straw bonnet with tiny red silk flowers bordering its poke brim. It had not been a favorite of his mama's, or at least not in Gideon's recent memory, but then again it had been quite some while since Mama had been well enough to leave the house. Ah well, he mused, at least now the hat went to good purpose. There really was no need for a shawl, he decided, as the day was quite fine.

  When he handed the bonnet to her, Elizabeth placed it on her head, tying the ribbons while she murmured her thanks.

  "Have they found anything?" Gideon asked, glancing at the open doorway, where the occasional flicker of light could be seen as the servants searched.

  Elizabeth shook her head. She glanced down at the pearl ring on her hand. "At least I have this," she said wistfully.

  If Gideon had not promised to refrain from questioning her about matters past, he would have done so now, but there was no point because he knew Elizabeth would not answer. She would feel shamed, if his guess as to a lover who had abandoned or cast her off were correct, and he could hardly blame her.

  Certainly half the reason he was himself rumored to be odd was that he had always refused to discuss anything that had to do with his mother, or his father for that matter. It had been important to him to keep his family's concerns as private as possible, to refuse to rise to the bait that other youngsters had thrown at him.

  Eventually he had demanded that he be schooled at home, for life at Eton, where he had been nicknamed Mama's Boy, had proved unbearable. The nickname had been meant to slice two ways, the obvious, and then too the implication that Gideon took after his mama, that he was as mad as she. The nickname had not followed him into adulthood, at least not to his face, but he had heard the echoing whispers behind drawing room fans all the same.

  Yes, he understood what it was to protect one's self, to wish to avoid being grist for the rumor mill. Gideon had always done all he could to protect his brothers from the sting of gossip, by persuading his papa that their education at home would make best use of the tutor's wages. Still, there was no way to keep the local lads from teasing and taunting Benjamin and Sebastian, of letting his brothers know their household was perceived as odd and awful.

  Just as he had tried to spare his brothers, he perceived that Elizabeth was protecting someone—a woman named Lorraine, whom she had spoken of during the fever. Whoever Lorraine was, Elizabeth sought to protect the woman, that much had been clear even through the rambling nature of her fevered cries.

  Pondering such thoughts caused Gideon to cast aside his own chagrin, and to let the afternoon sun induce in him a relaxed feeling. If he could, he would erase Elizabeth's past, whatever it was, but that was not a task for any man. She would be gone soon, and they had, after a fashion, much in common, so he would be a fool not to enjoy her company while it lasted.

  He sat beside her, stretching out his legs and leaning back on his elbows, and realized with a shock that he did indeed enjoy Elizabeth's company.

  How long had it been since he could say the same of any person, male or female, and truly mean it? He loved his brothers, but familial love was not always a smooth and easy path, and he was not entirely sure he would say he enjoyed Benjamin's rigid sense of self and Sebastian's too carefree bearing. Love and liking were different things, and here beside him sat
a person whom he had come to esteem despite all odds against that rare and wonderful circumstance called liking.

  He liked this addlepated woman who would not tell him her last name. Well, here was proof then—if she were mad, she was no more so than he.

  He laughed, and Elizabeth looked at him in surprise.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  He had to lift his hand to his mouth to swipe away a silly smile that threatened to paste itself there. "I... it is just"—he cast about for an explanation, and lamely finished—"I am used to being in the middle of estate matters, yet here I sit, letting the footmen do all the work."

  Elizabeth gave him a puzzled glance. "I would not keep you from joining the search if you wish to join it, my lord," she told him.

  "I do not wish to join it," he said, settling more firmly on his elbows. "And no more of this 4 my lord' business. I think when a man has spent as much time in a woman's bedchamber as I have in yours, that you ought to call me Gideon." He grinned at her, receiving a shocked stare as his reward.

  "My lord!"

  "Do not go all missish of a sudden, my dear Elizabeth. I have been calling you by your first name since the moment you could speak it, and it is high time you returned the favor. 'Gideon,' if you please, from now on."

  Elizabeth lifted an eyebrow, but even though she tried to look arch, he could see a small smile tugging at the corners of her lips. "What would Lady Sees say to that?" Elizabeth asked.

  "She would collapse away in a dead faint, but I really do not care if she would."

  "Neither do I," Elizabeth confided, and now she added her grin to Gideon's.

  They sat in silence, only it had become a companionable silence, the kind old friends share. Gideon had possessed one close friend from his days at school, Paul Yardley, so he recognized a friendly hush now it was between him and this woman.

  Ah, Paul, who had been struck down during the first assault against Bonaparte. Thinking back, Paul's loss had probably been the beginning of the end of Gideon's social attempts. Whispers could be borne with a friend at one's side, but when Paul had gone, so had Gideon's desire to tolerate the whispers for the sake of the company.