It was a stunning discovery, and dazedly he shook his head, marveling at his own stupidity. No wonder he had suddenly lost interest in the widow Cresswell and young Julia Summerfield! Since the evening of the Mortimer ball, he had not given either woman a second thought—all his attention had been on the beguiling creature who had tried to pick his pocket! A soft smile curved his usually hard mouth, and he admitted wryly that at first, as Pip, with her saucy tongue and gamin grin, she had amused him; and then, as Morgana, whose soft body and sweet kisses inflamed him, she had utterly captivated him. There was no denying it—from the instant Morgana entered his life, she had fascinated him, and fool that he was, he had dismissed the powerful emotions she aroused so easily within him as mere lust! It wasn’t as his mistress that he wanted her to grace his home, but as his wife!
He stood there silently for several seconds, trying to come to grips with the astounding knowledge that an emotion he had once scornfully dismissed as having no place in his life now had him firmly snared in its tenacious coil. And that it was a pocket-sized, saucy-tongued minx whose only claim to good breeding was the fact that she was the bastard daughter of a man he heartily disliked who had brought him to this pass was the most amazing part of it! Still shaking his head at his own folly, he pushed open the door and walked into Morgana’s bedchamber.
She was not alone; the housemaid who had brought up her warm milk was still in the room. Royce vaguely recognized the young woman as one of the new servants they had hired from the area and then dismissed her from his mind, all his attention on Morgana.
The maid was standing in the opened doorway that led to the main hall and was obviously on the point of departure when he entered the room. Morgana, wearing a gauzy pale lavender robe over her demure white lawn nightgown, had her back to Royce, and she was busily pouring Ratter a saucer of milk from her glass.
A tender smile curving his mouth, Royce strolled a few steps farther into the room, admiring the enticing shape of Morgana’s buttocks when she bent down to give Ratter the saucer of milk. It was only when the cat began to hungrily lap up the milk that she straightened, and turning around, she spied Royce halfway across the room from her.
A breathtakingly sweet smile lit her lovely features, and with something perilously close to a squeak, she sped over the distance that divided them and hurled her slender body into his waiting arms. “Oh, but I have missed you!” she exclaimed guilelessly, her arms wrapping tightly around his neck. “Even with Jacko and Zachary in the house, it was very lonely without you.”
His blood racing, Royce stared down into her upturned features, the sheer force of his so-newly-discovered love momentarily robbing him of rational speech. His mouth brushing hers, his arms holding her crushed against him, he muttered, “Sweet! So very sweet!”
Oblivious to the maid gawking at them in the doorway, Royce kissed Morgana, the uninhibited eagerness of her response making her kiss everything a returning lover could have wished for, and Royce thoroughly enjoyed her ardent welcome. He kissed her for a long, long time, savoring the sweetness that was Morgana’s alone, his heart nearly bursting with the love he felt for her. It was only when they breathlessly parted that they became aware of the maid staring at them. Royce’s eyebrow lifted at the expression of horrified outrage on her young face, but before he could say anything, Morgana gently untangled herself from his embrace and said crisply, “Thank you, Clara, that will be all.”
Clara took one last clearly disapproving look and then shut the door firmly behind her. The name made Royce frown, and pulling Morgana back into his arms, he asked, “What do you know about her? Has she given you any trouble?”
Morgana glanced at him in surprise. “Clara? No, she is actually very pleasant to me. I have no complaints about her at all. Why do you ask?”
“Mmm, no particular reason,” he replied slowly, deciding that there was no reason to unduly alarm her—especially since there was probably nothing to be alarmed about! “Now, I believe that you were telling me, and very nicely too, how very much you missed me... .”
Morgana blushed, suddenly embarrassed at her shameless greeting to him, but Royce only laughed and kissed her again. Sitting down in a large, overstuffed chair, he pulled her onto his lap, and settling her comfortably in his arms, he nuzzled her ear and murmured, “I think if you give me a kiss or two, I might be able to remember why it was that I had to go to London.”
Morgana’s innocent joy in his return vanished, and feeling like the greatest beast in nature that she had forgotten even for a moment her brother’s plight, she questioned fearfully, “Ben? You were not able to free him?”
Holding her closer to him, he dropped a kiss on her head and said cheerfully, “Not as soon as I would have liked, but don’t worry, sweetheart; I’ve seen a magistrate, and he has assured me that he can arrange Ben’s release—provided Ben goes directly from Newgate to a ship sailing for America! In the meantime, I’ve made arrangements to make his stay in prison as pleasant as possible.”
They spoke for quite some time about Royce’s trip to London and his visit to Ben, Royce telling her all he had done, but deliberately making no mention of the special license and his plan for all of them to sail to America. Curled confidingly against him, Morgana watched his face with huge, anxious eyes, listening intently to every detail. When he finished speaking, her usually vivid little face sad, she said dolefully, “I know sending Jacko and Ben to America is the wisest course, but oh, I shall miss them so very much—even if you have promised to take me to them when you leave England.”
Royce took a deep breath and said carefully, “Well, that’s something that I’d like to talk to you about, my dear... .”
Morgana was only half listening to him, her thoughts on the dreaded departure of her brothers, and listlessly she got up from his lap and wandered over to where her glass of milk reposed on a small rosewood table. Picking up the glass, she was on the point of drinking it when there was a harsh exclamation from Royce, and the next thing she knew, he was flying across the room and, in one frighteningly violent motion, knocked the glass from her hand. Astonished, she stared at his white, grim features and demanded half-angrily, half-worriedly, “What is it? Why did you act so?”
He didn’t answer her, only grasped her arm fiercely and pointed. She gazed in the direction he indicated, and with dawning horror, she stared at Ratter, the cat’s lifeless body frozen in the last act of an agonized writhe, the partially finished saucer of milk inches from his horribly contorted body. Milk that she had been about to drink ...
CHAPTER 26
There was a tense silence as they stared in growing horror at the cat’s still form, and then, with a sob, Morgana buried her head in Royce’s chest. His face grim, he held her protectively next to him as he murmured soothingly in her ear, meaningless phrases that were, oddly enough, comforting.
Eventually her shock and fright lessened somewhat, and pulling slightly away from him, she gave one last watery hiccup; looking up into his set features, she asked disbelievingly, “Someone just tried to kill me, didn’t they?”
Royce would have liked to deny her simple question, and for one instant he seriously considered trying to cloud the truth, to console her with empty words, but she deserved better than that, and if, as it appeared, someone was trying to kill her, she needed to be alert and watchful for danger. His arm tightened around her shoulders and bleakly he said, “It would appear so—and I would very much like to have a conversation with young Clara.”
“Clara?” Morgana uttered dumbfoundedly. “Why would she want to kill me?” Her face clouded. “Why would anyone want to kill me?”
Royce had no answers for her. This unexpected attack on Morgana momentarily had him baffled. There were only two people who could have more than a passing interest in Morgana—the one-eyed man and the Earl of St. Audries. The one-eyed man was capable of anything, even cold-blooded murder, but Royce had difficulty believing that the one-eyed man, having failed to kidnap her, now wante
d her dead. And the Earl? What possible reason could he have? Granted Devlin might find it distressingly repugnant to discover his bastard daughter had become the mistress of a man he had made abundantly clear he disliked intensely, but murder? It didn’t make any sense! Someone, however, obviously wanted her dead! But who? And more important, why?
Settling Morgana gently in a chair, Royce mercifully covered Ratter’s pitifully twisted body with a pillowcase he snatched off the bed, and then, walking to the bell rope, he gave it a peremptory yank. Glancing across at her, he said harshly, “The next few moments may be exceedingly unpleasant. Do you wish to remain here?”
She nodded, keeping her gaze averted from Ratter’s body. “You seriously believe that Clara knows something about what happened?” she asked quietly, incredulity apparent in her cat-shaped gray eyes.
“It seems a logical point to start. After all, she was the one who brought you the milk this evening, and Harry Bullard saw her dismount from a vehicle this afternoon driven by a stranger—a stranger who seemed to be taking pains not to be seen!” Royce would not tell her any more. Under the present circumstances, he certainly wasn’t about to blurt out the fact that her father, the man who had callously abandoned her at birth, was lurking in the neighborhood and had been nosing around trying to elicit information about her! There was also no point in mentioning that Stephen Devlin was very high on his list of suspected poisoners—and he couldn’t bring up one fact without the other!
Sooner or later she would have to know that the Earl of St. Audries was her father, but as she had just survived an ugly brush with death, Royce didn’t feel that it was imperative she know that her father might have just tried to kill her! Let her concentrate on the stranger for the present, he thought reluctantly, but very soon, for her own safety, I must explain to her about Devlin.
Chambers answered his ring, a question in his blue eyes. “You rang, sir? Cook will have your tray ready in just a few moments.”
Royce nodded. “I’m not worried about that!” he said roughly. “What I would like to know is everything that you can tell me about one of the local housemaids who was hired recently. Clara is her name, and she just brought up Miss Fowler’s usual glass of warm milk.”
Looking slightly flustered and just a little anxious, Chambers answered readily, “You must mean Clara Holbrook. Her family is a local one, farmers, I believe, and when I first inquired about additional servants, her name was mentioned to me by several people as an honest, hardworking young woman—and so she has proven to be. Has she done something wrong?”
“That remains to be seen,” Royce replied austerely. “Have her sent up here, will you?”
Chambers left immediately, his features betraying little of the rampant curiosity that roiled in his breast. A few minutes later, there was a timid knock on the door, and at Royce’s command, it opened and Clara Holbrook entered the room.
Clara was not a prepossessing young woman. Just twenty years old, she was not very tall and was inclined to plumpness; her hair, which was a mousy brown, was stuffed untidily under a white frilled cap, and her large, faintly vacant blue eyes were the best features in a plain, moon-shaped face. Casting an avid glance around the room, an expression of excitement mingled with apprehension flickering across her features, she gave a brief curtsy. Since Ratter’s body was hidden from her, she saw nothing strange in the room and recited woodenly, “Chambers said that you wanted to see me, sir?”
“Yes, I did,” Royce said neutrally. “I’d like you to tell me about the gentleman who was so very kind to give you a ride back to the cottage this afternoon.”
The slightly vacuous expression that she habitually wore instantly vanished, and Clara paled noticeably. “I-I-I don’t k-k-know what you m-m-mean, sir!” she stammered, nervously twisting the corner of her white apron.
“I think you do!” Royce stated bluntly. “And if you are wise, young woman, you will tell me immediately what I want to know—if you don’t, I shall have no recourse but to send for the magistrate and have you detained for questioning in the attempted murder of Miss Fowler!”
“I never!” Clara burst out indignantly. “Why, I wouldn’t hurt a hair on Miss Fowler’s head!” Throwing Royce a hostile look, she muttered sullenly, “Which is more than can be said for some folk around here!”
Royce lifted one thick black brow and murmured sardonically, “I’m sure that you know what you mean by that comment, but before you regale us with what is sure to be a fascinating explanation, perhaps you would like to tell us how the milk you brought up for Miss Fowler this evening came to be poisoned!”
“You’re daft!” she protested vehemently. “It wasn’t no poison that I put into Miss Fowler’s milk!”
“Ah, so you admit that you did put something into her milk tonight,” Royce pounced immediately.
Clara glanced over at Morgana, who had been intently watching the swift exchange. Reassured by the encouraging smile that Morgana sent her way and feeling decidedly righteous, she answered boldly, “And what if I did?”
Royce contemplated her for a long moment, puzzled by her defiant air and the hostility with which she regarded him. Deciding that since she held him in such unaccountable antipathy, there was only one way to get to the bottom of this in a hurry, he commanded softly, “Come over here; I’d like to show you something.”
Mistrust evident in her face, she cautiously approached him. As she came nearer to him, the pillowcase that covered Ratter’s body came into her view for the first time. Perplexity obvious, she glanced from Royce to the patch of white on the floor.
“Go ahead,” Royce said quietly. “Lift it up and look underneath.”
Some of the tenseness that gripped the other two occupants transmitted itself to her, and after darting an uncertain look at each of them, she took a deep breath and swept aside the pillowcase. In horror she staggered backward, her gaze fixed on the cat’s grotesquely positioned body, the half-finished saucer of milk inches from the lifeless form. It would have been apparent to someone far less astute than Clara what had transpired, and her eyes nearly started from her head at the ugly sight; she gulped noisily and then, promptly burying her face in her apron, burst into tears.
Morgana rushed from the chair and put her arms around Clara’s plump shoulders. “Please don’t cry,” she begged gently. “Just tell us who gave you whatever it was you put into my milk this evening.”
Royce twitched the pillowcase from Clara’s nerveless fingers and once again covered Ratter’s body. “We don’t believe that you meant your mistress any harm ... but someone did, and you can tell us who it was.”
It took a great deal of coaxing, but in between fits and starts and bouts of profuse tears, seated next to Morgana on the sofa in the sitting room, to which they had adjourned, Clara managed eventually to tell her story. In growing amazement Royce and Morgana listened to the preposterous tale that Clara had been told.
“But, Clara, it is all untrue!” Morgana said fiercely. “Mr. Manchester has not drugged me!” A lovely flush staining her cheeks, she added passionately, “And you must believe me when I say that I have no other lover! Whoever this man is, he is not my lover and he has lied to you! He is the villain, not Mr. Manchester!”
Clara cast a nervous glance over at Royce where he sat in a chair across from them. His position and expression must have satisfied her, because looking back at Morgana, she said earnestly, “But don’t you see, miss, if you were drugged, that’s what you would say!”
“You’re forgetting one thing, Clara,” Royce interjected reasonably, despite having a strong urge to throttle the silly twit. “Whatever he gave you to put into her milk tonight, it wasn’t something to counteract the drug I have supposedly been giving her, it would have killed her!” His face exceedingly grim, he concluded harshly, “If my arrival hadn’t delayed her drinking the milk long enough for the poison to kill Ratter, there would have been two dead bodies lying on the floor in the other room, and one of them would have been the
young lady who is sitting next to you!”
This induced another bout of noisy sobbing and tears from Clara. Morgana threw Royce a mitigating look, and Royce grimaced disgustedly. It took Morgana a while, but once again she had Clara soothed and willing to tell them what she knew. But even though they questioned her closely, there was precious little else to be learned. She didn’t know the man—he was a stranger to her. No, she had never seen him around the area, and he had made no plans to meet with her again. Beyond describing him as heavily bearded, a tall man, she thought, but she didn’t know for sure since she had only seen him in the gig, she couldn’t tell them much more about him. He did have ever-so-nice manners, she confessed unhappily, and a proper way of speaking, and he dressed far more nattily than any of the local men she knew, almost as fine as a gentleman, but that was all she could tell them.
Smothering back a frustrated curse, Royce eventually dismissed her, speeding her on her way with the command “And tell Chambers to come up here to dispose of the cat!”
As could be expected, Chambers was aghast at what had happened, and once he had removed Ratter’s body and restored the bedchamber to a pristine neatness, he told Royce somberly, “I will take special care in getting rid of the milk so that it is not allowed to cause any further harm.” His face very worried, he asked quietly, “How is Miss Morgana feeling? What a terrible thing for her to experience! Who could have done such a viciously cruel act?”
“Morgana is just fine, although she is understandably shaken by what happened,” Royce answered candidly. “But as for who tried to murder her, I have no idea.” A steely glint in his golden eyes, Royce looked at Chambers and said bluntly, “I want Clara Holbrook out of this house at first light—and from now on, either you or Ivy are the only ones to touch any food or drink that is to be served to Morgana, and you alone are to bring it to her.”
Whisper To Me of Love Page 41