Lords of the Isles

by Le Veque, Kathryn

  Lucy began to have some small hope. “Did they reconcile? Did they—”

  “Lionel asked Dominic one final time who had fathered my child. When Dominic didn’t answer, Lionel put a pistol to his head and took his own life before Dominic’s eyes.”

  “Sweet God, no.” Lucy felt sick, her trembling hand pressed to her mouth. “How could he do such a thing to a child he loved?”

  “I don’t know. I only know that since the first moment Dominic discovered I was carrying my lover’s child, he began to take pieces of himself and hide them where no one could reach. When Lionel killed himself, he destroyed what little of my bright, loving Dominic remained. The boy who became earl in his father’s place battled just to survive the destruction left in the wake of my love affair and his father’s suicide.”

  Lucy knew how much strength it must have taken for the boy to wade through the morass of pain, fight the mockery, the hate, when he was broken inside, everyone he loved torn away from him by death and betrayal. She pictured the earl of Valcour as he was now. Strong, fierce, protecting those weaker than himself. But never allowing anyone to reach out to him, heal the scars that still seethed with poison twenty years later.

  “He all but drove himself insane attempting to rebuild the Valcour estates,” Lady Catherine said. “And his honor was the lifeblood that kept him fighting, trying, breathing.”

  “That was why he insisted on marrying me,” Lucy said softly. “Because of his honor.” But honor had seemed only some cold, empty catchword then, clung to by an arrogant English aristocrat, reeking of wealth and power and tyranny. Now Valcour’s words changed in Lucy’s mind, a desperate vow coming from a battered, soul-weary knight errant. Her heart squeezed at the image.

  “It was strange,” Lady Catherine continued. “Where Lionel had failed, Dominic seemed determined to triumph. It was as if his success were the final gift he could give his father—since he had been unable to give Lionel the truth he really wanted. Dominic dueled countless men who insulted me or dared to mock Lionel. Men far older and more skilled with a sword. Dominic’s hatred and pain drove him like demons. And his demons always brought him victory.”

  The vulnerable place in Lucy’s breast was aching, pulsing with empathy such as she’d never known. Images of a little girl pouring her pain out through her music mingled with those of a desolate boy, driving back dragons of betrayal with the point of a sword. Valcour, she thought with a kind of tender wistfulness, we are more alike than you could ever imagine.

  “Do you know what I have missed the most as the years have passed? What I have longed for more than anything else?” Lady Catherine hesitated. “The day Lionel came to carry him off to London was the last time my son ever called me ‘Mama.’”

  Lucy reached out and squeezed the older woman’s hands in both her own. Tears burned in Lucy’s throat, but Valcour’s grief was one too wrenching for something so commonplace as weeping.

  “Lucinda.” Lady Catherine’s eyes were huge and pleading. “Do not let Dominic suffer the fate Lionel and I did—a loveless marriage, a cold bed, emptiness, so much emptiness.”

  “I don’t know what I can do, my lady. When you and Valcour’s father began, you had infatuation. Valcour and I haven’t even got that.”

  “Don’t you? I saw my son this morning, rushing from his bedchamber.” Lady Catherine’s lips tipped in a tender smile. “His neckcloth was tied as awkwardly as a ten-year-old’s, his hair was unruly. And his eyes were filled with confusion and there is no other word to say it—fear. I have not seen that expression on my son’s face since the day Lionel St. Cyr was laid in the Valcour crypt. Child, I think he is falling in love with you.”

  A tiny thrill of hope shivered through Lucy’s veins. She sprang to her feet and paced away, remembering the fervor in Valcour’s hands and mouth, the tenderness that had stunned her, bedazzled her. She closed her eyes, remembering a hundred fairy stories, legends of princesses captured in towers, waiting for princes to release them. Perhaps this time it was the prince who waited, barred in the tower by pain and pride, arrogance and agony. Waiting for her to release him.

  She turned to Lady Catherine, who seemed to have shrunken somehow, through the tale she had told, weighed down by shame and regret decades old.

  Lucy realized what a torture it must have been for the gentle woman to expose her secrets, the courage it must have taken to leave herself open to the possible scorn and mockery of a daughter-in-law she barely knew. Not to mention inviting the wrath of the son she so obviously loved. For Lucy knew instinctively that Valcour would be enraged if he ever suspected that Lady Catherine had made such a confession, had shown Valcour’s secret anguish to someone else.

  Lucy crossed to Lady Catherine and knelt before her, catching the woman’s hands in her own. “You love Dominic very much, don’t you?”

  “More than my life. You will take care of him for me, won’t you? You will save him where I could not?”

  “How could I possibly—”

  “Love him, Lucinda.” Lady Catherine’s voice broke on a sob. “Please, please love my Dominic.”

  Love Valcour—a man who was like a shattered jewel, so many facets, shimmering, impossible to catch and hold and understand. Impossible to make whole again. A man who suddenly seemed not hard and cold but so very alone.

  Lucy caught her lip between her teeth, her own long-buried fears mingling with the pain that Lady Catherine’s story still stirred in her. How could the gentle noblewoman understand that Lucy was so much like her son, a heart still carrying scars from her past? It was still difficult for Lucy to trust, in spite of her parents’ love, in spite of years of their adoration. Shadows still lingered: her cruel stepmother, the wicked duke and duchess who had buried the soul of the child she had been in the grave with the tiny carved angel.

  To take such a risk, to reach out to Valcour, knowing he could very well shove her away. To love, with the chance of being rejected… The very thought made Lucy cringe inside. Did she truly have the courage to try?

  She rose and stroked Lady Catherine’s hair, a gesture very like one of Emily Blackheath’s own. “My lady, I am going to be lonely too here. Missing my sisters, my father, my… mother so much. I would like it if… if I could love you in their absence.”

  Lady Catherine smiled, and Lucy saw a shadow of the beautiful, dreamy girl who had charmed an earl and made another man love her in spite of any cost.

  “I would like that, child, more than you can imagine,” the older woman said.

  Lucy kissed her cheek. “You should rest now. I will come later and we can sew.” Lucy gave Lady Catherine a teasing smile. “My favorite stitching is still attaching buttons. When I first arrived at Blackheath Hall, I used to snip them off my father’s clothes, just so I could put them back on. Perhaps I should visit Valcour’s clothespress.”

  She was rewarded by a weak laugh. “You are like a ray of sunshine, child. Brightening this house that has been dim as a tomb for so long. I only hope…” The clouds were back, a darting of dread in Lady Catherine’s eyes. “I only hope that nothing ever happens to change that.”

  Lady Catherine released Lucy’s hand, and it was as if the older woman were withdrawing, as if she were suddenly afraid.

  “I never wanted to hurt Dominic,” Lady Catherine said softly. “Please know this, child: I would never want to—to dull the light in your eyes either.”

  Lucy left the chamber, feeling like a sleepwalker who had awakened in another world, where nothing was what it seemed. A world laced with mysteries and tragic love stories, tower rooms and fathers who returned from the dead.

  And knights errant with black eyes and tortured secrets locked in their hearts.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lucy stepped into the fresh morning air, the breeze kissing color into her cheeks and toying with the golden curls that wreathed her head like a halo. London rose up to greet her in a cacophony of sound. Street criers called out their wares, cartwheels clattered, their drivers
shouting out ill opinions of the other travelers on the crowded roads. Horses whinnied to each other in passing, while dozens of voices rose higher and higher, each trying to speak louder than the surrounding din.

  An entire world seemed held at bay by the bastion of Hawkvale’s vine-covered garden walls. She circled around the townhouse to where the stable stood, intending to begin her exploration with Valcour’s beautiful grays, already kicking up their heels in a paddock that was better kept than most people’s formal gardens. Lucy smiled, anticipating the soothing pleasure of stroking velvety noses, sleek necks, feeling the horses’ insistent nudges against her as they demanded attention.

  Before she had been returned to the loving care of her own mother, Lucy had poured out her loneliness and love through her music and in her adoration of any animal she could find—dogs and kittens, clumsy workhorses and lovely blooded mares. She had been more heartbroken by the loss of a nest of kittens at the Jamaican plantation where she had spent five miserable years than she had been at the death of her shallow adoptive mother.

  She had always had a way with wounded creatures, had been able to reach out to them with the trust and confidence she’d been unable to offer all but a few trusted people.

  When she was thirteen she’d found a peregrine, its wing broken, its body torn as it fought off a pack of circling hounds. She had swathed the injured bird in her petticoats and carried it back to Blackheath plantation to nurse it. She still had a faint scar on her arm where its talons had torn the skin. And yet, by the time the magnificent hawk was ready to take flight, it had been tamed to Lucy’s hand.

  What would it be like to tame Valcour as she had the hawk? The prospect was mesmerizing, alluring. Frightening. The talons of Valcour’s pain wouldn’t tear at mere skin, so easily healed with time. Rather they would tear at Lucy’s heart.

  She caught her lip between her teeth, Valcour’s compelling face rising in her mind, his eyes so fierce, so cold, and yet, black fire when he caressed her naked body, uncertain when she had reached beneath his passion, and touched him… in that far more vulnerable place, his heart.

  He would be her Hawk. The Hawk of Valcour. She grinned, delighted at a sobriquet as vivid as Pendragon, the one her father had used for so many years.

  Her musings were interrupted by the sudden sound of shouts in the stable, horses neighing in fear, hooves striking at stalls. Lucy scooped up her skirts and ran to the open door of the structure, expecting fire or thieves or some other calamity.

  But at that instant a small figure barreled headlong into her midsection, knocking her off her feet.

  She tumbled to the ground, a flailing, ragged little bundle kicking and struggling to escape her grasp as desperately as if she were dangling him over the jaws of a lion.

  “There he is!” one of Valcour’s grooms bellowed as he raced from the stables with a pitchfork clutched in his hands. “Unhand me lady before I skewer ye, ye sewer rat.”

  Lucy shook the hair from her eyes, glimpsing carroty hair and freckles on a face blotched with horrible purple bruises. Natty. She clutched the child to her. “Stop this at once!” she ordered the groom.

  “He’s dangerous, me lady! A thief. For all he’s a babe he’s probably cut a hundred throats!”

  “He’s done nothing of the kind!”

  “His lordship would hurl him to the authorities, he would!”

  “He would do so over my dead body. This young gentleman is a friend of mine, aren’t you, Natty?” Lucy loosened her hold on the boy. Natty scrambled to his feet, his breath rasping in his throat. He offered Lucy his hand to help her up, as courtly as any knight of the realm. Then he glared at the groom through one eye, the other swollen shut.

  “I been of service to milady before, you curst oaf! She said if I were ever in trouble, to find her. So I did!”

  “Then what were you doing in the stable? Plotting to steal my lord’s horses?”

  “I was jest catching my breath afore I went to find her.” He pointed at Lucy. “By the by, milady. There be a prime mare in the last stall. Bet she could kick the piss outta any horse in St. James.”

  The groom drew back, looking from the rag-tag street urchin to the new countess of Valcour. Lucy wiped grimy hands on her petticoats, trying to look as dignified as possible. “Go back to your tasks,” she ordered the groom. Then she turned to Natty. “If you would give me your arm, sir?”

  The child drew his dignity about him in a delightful manner, then did as she asked. They walked to the gardens, feeling the eyes of every stable hand on them the entire way.

  “That was prime, milady!” Natty said with a triumphant skip as they reached the garden. “Showed that bloody bastard—”

  But the moment they were beyond the shelter of the nearest hedge Lucy abandoned her dignified retreat and fell to her knees before the child, horrified at the sight of him so brutalized.

  “Natty, what on earth!” She reached out, touching the edge of a bruise that was almost black, and noticed that his freckled little nose was crooked where it had not been before. “Who did this to you? Who hurt you?”

  “It’s nothin’. Happens all the time. Usually when Pappy’s been guzzling Blue Ruin. Take exception to him breaking me nose, though. I was a handsome divil ’fore he did.”

  The boy’s cockiness wrenched at Lucy’s heart more deeply than any childish sobs could have. “By God, I’ll find that cowardly cur myself and break every bone in his body!”

  “No!” Natty shrank back in horror. “You want to make it so’s I can’t show me face on the street again! A girl running out to defend Natty Scratch? Me reputation would be in rags!” He made a face, then winced, as the battered muscles pulled. “I liked you the blazes of a lot better when you was a boy, y’know.”

  “If you think I’m going to let you go back to that monster, you’re mad!” Lucy’s brow furrowed with fierce resolve. “You can stay with me in the big house. There are plenty of rooms. I’m sure Valcour won’t even notice you are about—” But even as the words came out of Lucy’s mouth, she was imagining her husband’s reaction if she were to parade Natty into the grand townhouse.

  Her apprehension on that score was interrupted by Natty’s indignant cry. “What do you think I am? A beggar or something, living off charity? Got me pride, I do. And don’t you be suggesting I muck out stables or turn a kitchen spit for a few crusts of bread, either. I’m a working man, I am. Got a right thriving business. I just gotta find some other place t’ work from, somewhere Pappy Blood can’t come and get me.” Natty eyed the walled garden a little wistfully. “Now this place, ol’ Pappy wouldn’t dare come poking his nose about here.”

  “Then this is where you’ll stay.” Lucy glanced around, her eyes alighting on a tool shed in the far corner of the garden. She took Natty’s hand and they wound their way to it. There was a trap door at the foot, a storage area for broken tools. From the thick dust in it, Lucy doubted the gardener had entered it for years. “I’ll rummage about the house for whatever you might need. Candles and food, blankets.”

  “I could live like a king here,” Natty chirruped. “Nobody could find me!”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if you were king! Clever boy! How did you ever find me?”

  “Waited around at the house you told me about at the Gate—those American people. I was kind of hoping they’d have a red savage around to entertain me. But…” He shrugged. “Found out you were gone and waited. Saw you drive up with that ’ristocrat man who near flayed out Sir Jasper’s liver. When you left, I caught onto the carriage and climbed underneath. Had to hold on like bloody hell though. From the ride I got, would’a thought the bastard was aiming for every pothole in London. Tired me out, it did, so’s I curled up on the hay, meaning to stay jest a minute, and ended up snorin’ away like a drunken sailor ’til yer groom came greeting me with his pitchfork.”

  “You mean you’ve been hurt, waiting for help for days?” Lucy asked, with a sting of remorse.

  “Help? Be a cold
day at Satan’s fireside when Natty Scratch whines for help! I’m not a baby, you know!”

  “Of course not.” Lucy tried to keep her face serious, her admiration for the little boy growing by leaps and bounds. “Then why did you go to such trouble to find me?”

  The plucky expression on the boy’s face changed to a troubled one. “Got something for you.”

  Apprehension enveloped Lucy like the coolness in the shed’s cellar. “I don’t understand.”

  The boy dug in the front of his grimy jerkin and pulled out a crumpled square of vellum, the sealing wax broken. Lucy stared at it for a moment, as if it were a living thing.

  “Got it from the crazy man at the Gate. I told you if a soul alive could find him it’d be Natty Scratch. Mad Alex said it was important to get this letter to you. And he did give me a guinea.”

  Lucy forced herself to take the note, her memory filled with Valcour’s face, furious, fearful, his boots still stained with the dirt of an opened grave.

  From the time she left Virginia, she had been seeking Alexander d’Autrecourt, the mysterious father she had all but forgotten. But now she was beginning to hope she had found a far different treasure in the husband the fates had chosen for her. Perhaps the past was best forgotten.

  “Thank you, Natty,” she said, stroking the boy’s carroty hair. “You shall have another guinea from me.”

  “Natty Scratch don’t take coin from them as is his friends, milady,” the boy said grandly, then his brows puckered. “It be as a friend I tell you this. Be careful. I don’t think… well, people who’s not right in their head can be…” His warning trailed off. “You know what I’m saying.”

  She needed to be alone. “I’ll be careful, Natty,” she said. She took the missive out into the sunlight, but she was suddenly cold to the marrow of her bones. She slowly opened the letter, her eyes scanning lines that were scrawled in a way that made her nape prickle with apprehension.