Clandestine

by Julia Ross

  To the man’s immense surprise, Guy shook him by the hand, forcing him to shuffle the hat and gloves beneath one arm.

  “All the best, Paul. Derbyshire’s very lovely. You’ll like it. And I think you and Rose may expect some rather handsome wedding presents, as well.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  Beaming, his face brilliant, Paul bowed his head and walked off.

  Guy glanced at the marble columns, the Italian stone floors, the gilt and ebony. Blackdown House must be the pinnacle of any footman’s career. Yet Paul would have given up everything he’d worked for just to be with Rose.

  Now the newlyweds could settle happily into a cottage on the Wrendale estates—part of the vast holdings of the Duchy of Blackdown—where Ryder and Miracle would spend several months with their new baby later in the summer.

  It was bloody absurd, of course, to be jealous of a footman, and he loved Ryder and Miracle, and Jack and Anne, far too well to feel envious of them. His cousins’ happiness shone like a golden flame of gladness deep in his heart.

  So where the devil did this burning indignation at the unjust caprices of Eros really come from?

  Guy laughed at his own folly and ran upstairs. He had far more important things to think about than his past failures with women.

  Ten minutes later he knocked at the open door of a room on the second floor, where cases of ivory carvings covered one wall. Sarah Callaway was sitting at a desk near the window, a writing case at her elbow, reading letters.

  Her red hair was scraped back into a network of tight braids that hugged the neat contours of her skull. A plain gray dress with a high neck encased her from head to toe. She looked every inch the schoolmistress.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Callaway,” he said. “I see Miracle’s been taking good care of you.”

  She glanced up. Sunlight flamed into a red halo about her head.

  Guy felt his stomach contract. Something in her open gaze seemed to see straight into his heart, as if she would strip away all of his subterfuge.

  Pink color washed into her cheeks. The freckles faded into a dance of tiny shadows.

  She rose to her feet and bobbed a greeting. “Everyone’s been very kind, Mr. Devoran. Thank you. Lord and Lady Ryderbourne came to bid me farewell about an hour ago. Please, come in. You sent for all of my things from Brockton’s?”

  “Why remain in a hotel, when you may enjoy the hospitality of Blackdown House?”

  Guy strode farther into the room, then stopped as if he’d run into a wall. His pulse quickened. If he raised his hand he could touch the edge of the faint aura that surrounded her. The scent spoke of simplicity and rest, yet it also inflamed some deep desire, as if he’d been offered manna when starving.

  With a quiet dignity she sat down and rearranged her skirts. “Thank you, sir. I’ve had all night to think about Rachel. I’m truly very grateful indeed for your assistance, and for Lord Jonathan’s and Lord Ryderbourne’s, as well.”

  He felt desperate to reassure her, so he deliberately kept his tone light. “Not at all. Solving problems is a hobby of mine. I’m glad that you came to me. Please, believe that!”

  Glad? It seemed a damned odd word to describe his true state of mind.

  Her hazel eyes remained focused on his face. “You’ve been out again today, sir? Did you find out anything more?”

  Guy swept one hand over his hair. “I slept until noon like the rest of the household, then I made another quick call on Grail before he left town. The duke and duchess already left for Wyldshay with Miracle and Ryder, I assume?”

  “Yes, they came to say good-bye. I understand that no one else is here, except for the duke’s widowed sister, Lady Crowse.”

  “She’s elderly and eccentric and you probably won’t even meet her. She’ll also leave for the country in a few days, but until then she’s your chaperon. Once the House of Lords prorogues for the summer, almost no one stays in London.”

  She sat back, her eyes thoughtful. “Then Daedalus has probably left for the country as well.”

  “Daedalus?”

  “I’ve been rereading Rachel’s letters.” Sunlight warmed her hair to bronze as she looked down at the scattered papers on the table. “This man who’s been terrorizing her. I thought it would help to give him a name.”

  He stepped closer. The scent of green apples enveloped him. His heart thudded as if he were setting a horse at a fence that was too high.

  How much sleep now? Five hours in the last forty-eight?

  “Then I hope your choice isn’t prophetic, Mrs. Callaway. In myth, Daedalus escaped.”

  As if he were a lamp, her skin glowed. “Yes, I know, but he was still the maze-maker. Perhaps you’d prefer to choose something else?”

  “No, Daedalus is fine.” Guy grasped a chair by its back and spun it into place, facing her across the table. “You will allow me to read your cousin’s letters?”

  Pretty color still warmed her cheeks. “Some of them are rather personal, and much of what she writes would no doubt seem only silly to you. But, yes, I think that I must. Some of them anyway.” She picked up a large sheet. It had obviously been read many times. “This is the first that’s even remotely relevant. It’s the letter where she first told me about that day on the yacht with you.”

  “She wrote it after she had arrived in London?”

  “Yes, last June. I can’t fathom why she’d lied to me for so long about still working for Lord Grail, when in fact she was scrubbing floors in that inn. I fear something very terrible must have happened to make her leave Grail Hall that Christmas. Yet whatever the truth of that, I’m certain that she was indeed desperate when she met you. Did Lord Jonathan think the same?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “Is that why you paid her so very much for taking a simple pleasure cruise? Enough to keep her without working for several months, you said?”

  “Your cousin played a more critical role in rescuing Anne than she really knew. Jack’s very wealthy. She was the recipient of his generosity, not mine.”

  “There’s more than one way to be generous, Mr. Devoran. Rachel’s fear may not have been over losing her position, but her panic about an uncertain future was real, and you were infinitely courteous and considerate in the face of it.”

  Discomfort crawled up his spine. “Was I?”

  “Yes, I think so. You must have guessed that she’d given you a false name and wasn’t used to working in a kitchen, yet you didn’t try to pry even once into her odd situation, did you?”

  “Why would you consider that to be kind? Perhaps I was merely indifferent.”

  “Here,” she said, holding out the paper. “Now that I know what really happened, it’s madly disconcerting to read this. Yet I don’t think that she made up everything, you see.”

  Guy felt as if he were suspended in some uncomfortable trap, like a fox snared in a wire. With enough gnawing he might yet get free, though it would probably be at the cost of a paw. Yet if he was to get to the bottom of Rachel’s latest disappearance, he was going to have to read her letters.

  He flicked open the paper and skimmed through the florid phrases.

  Mr. Guy Devoran was such a bright miracle of generosity, Sarah. As you know, I had been feeling quite desperate—

  Guy skipped several paragraphs of falsehoods about Lord Grail, until his gaze stopped once again on his own name.

  Not only was he incredibly kind, but Mr. Devoran is so very handsome and with such a wonderful smile. He made me think of Oberon. Not some silly fairy king, but the most powerful ruler in nature, all brilliance and light. I’m already half in love!

  Guy tossed the letter back onto the table as if he’d been scalded. While he had been searching in vain for Rachel—obsessed with that first meeting—she had been writing all this nonsense to her cousin?

  “She was exaggerating,” he said. “Most of this is gibberish.”

  Sarah gazed at him steadily, her color still high. “Yet I’m
almost sure that the heart of Rachel’s emotions is always true, even though the facts may be wrong. It’s the same with all the rest of her letters.”

  “God! How can one possibly know? Reading that is like swimming just beneath the surface of a pool, caught between the world of the air and the dark undercurrents in the water. Where the two meet, everything is distorted.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. “Ladies rarely swim.”

  He laughed and leaned back. “So what’s emotionally true about that letter? The relief that she was in possession of a large purse of gold and safely out of an uncomfortable situation, I assume.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “And her admiration for you.”

  “All very flattering,” he said, “but I don’t recall that she paid me much attention that day.”

  Her fingers moved rapidly as she sorted through the scattered letters. “Yet the same adulation runs through many of these. Remembering that one day at sea was a bright light in an otherwise dreary existence.”

  Part of him wanted to believe it. Rachel had said the same when she’d first turned up on his doorstep. I simply could not forget you, Mr. Devoran. Yet it couldn’t be true! She had disappeared for most of the year before that, hiding herself away even when he had discreetly advertised for her in the newspapers.

  “It was the ocean she remembered so fondly,” he said. “Not me.”

  Sarah’s skin paled, then flushed all over as if she were being boiled like a lobster, though she laughed.

  “Then perhaps you don’t realize your real effect on women, Mr. Devoran?”

  “I’m Blackdown’s nephew,” he said carefully. “That brings me a certain amount of attention, even some small glory. Yet I remain, as you see, unattached.”

  She looked down. “And that bothers you? I thought young gentlemen enjoyed being unattached?”

  “Of course,” he said dryly. “Like butterflies, we flit from flower to flower—even orchids.”

  Hot color burned over her cheeks. She began to fold the letters to set them back into her writing case.

  “My pulse has been a little unsteady since you first walked into this room,” she said. “I have thought it all through very carefully, the benefits and the risks.”

  He sat upright. “What risks?”

  “The minute I first saw you, I guessed that you might flirt a little. Young gentlemen always do, however automatic and meaningless it may be. Yet it’s not necessary, Mr. Devoran, and I prefer not be the recipient of any charitable gallantry.”

  Astonishment pinned him to the chair. “I don’t understand.”

  “No, because you’ve not thought about it very much. But since I’m not very pretty or eligible, your small attempts at flattery only put me very firmly in my place, as a female and a dependent.”

  A little flame of anger flared up his spine. “Forgive me, ma’am, but—”

  “But I am a female and dependent, of course. I just hoped—” She broke off and dropped her face into both hands. “Oh, goodness! I’ve only made it ten times worse, haven’t I?”

  Guy pushed up from his chair and strode away from the table. Jupiter! Of course she wasn’t pretty, any more than an exotic orchid was pretty. But only because Sarah Callaway was the most sensually attractive woman he’d ever met. Enticement frolicked with the freckles on her skin, hiding in shadowed hollows, rioting over her smooth curves.

  Though she was not, of course, eligible. She was the cousin of his most recent mistress. For the second day running, he felt like a rat.

  “You wish us to work as comrades,” he said, “and instead I’ve made you uncomfortable. I’m sorry.”

  Sarah dropped her hands and looked up. “No. I should crawl beneath the table and stay there.”

  He laughed. “Better to have it out in the open. You’re quite correct, ma’am. I’m a reformed man as of this instant.”

  To his immense surprise, she grinned. “We’ll see! You mentioned yesterday that you might go out to find Mr. Harvey Penland’s house in Hampstead today?”

  “If you’ll give me his exact address, yes, I intend to ride out there this afternoon. Why?”

  “I can ride,” she said.

  He turned to stare into one of the cabinets. Ivory animals marched along the shelves. Her face was reflected in the glass, wavering in front of the carvings as he moved.

  “Jack brought some of these back from his travels,” he said.

  “The little elephants and birds?” Sarah leaned her chin on her folded hands. “I was afraid that you’d be awkward about this, Mr. Devoran.”

  He spun about. “Awkward?”

  “In spite of your claim to be so reformed, you’re not-so-subtly pointing out that feats of derring-do—like gathering ivory from the far side of the world, or riding out to Hampstead to hunt for clues about the mysterious Daedalus—are hardly the purview of the fair sex?”

  “I can track Mr. Penland’s existence—or lack of it—more efficiently alone, that’s all.”

  “You only insult me by suggesting that I cannot handle the truth, Mr. Devoran.”

  “What truth?”

  She took a deep breath. “I deduced three things as I lay awake last night. The first was that by this morning you’d have decided to exclude me, even though it’s my cousin who’s missing.”

  He opened a glass-fronted door and picked up a little white ivory figurine. Her long flowing robe was intricately carved. Her hands and face bloomed like small flowers.

  “And the second?”

  “That you thought a little flirtatious pressure on a plain schoolmistress would further that aim by helping to drive me away.”

  Reflections multiplied in the open glass door. The shadows of the ivory figures danced away into both past and future.

  “Why should you think that I wish to drive you away?”

  “Because you and Lord Jonathan fear now that Rachel may be in real danger, and you want to protect me from knowing that. Am I right?”

  “Perhaps.” He set the figurine in front of her. “A fragile creature, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, but she’s Chinese. We Anglo-Saxon females are carved from solid chunks of wood and we’re much harder to break. I’m wretched with gratitude for your assistance in finding my cousin, Mr. Devoran, but I simply cannot allow you to exclude me altogether. That is what you were planning, isn’t it?”

  He propped one hip on the corner of the table. The Asian face gazed down at the folds of her dress, her ivory expression bland, though the angle of her head was both coy and flirtatious.

  “You’re a lady of remarkable intelligence, ma’am,” he said. “Even in the face of the most distressing news, you were able to hone in on a critical question: Were your cousin’s hands those of a scullery maid? Meanwhile, you’re absolutely correct. I’m quite content to pursue this investigation alone.”

  “She’s my cousin, Mr. Devoran. If you refuse to help me on my terms, I shall ask Lady Ryderbourne, instead, and I will not allow you to read the rest of Rachel’s letters.”

  He felt almost amused, though his humor was mixed with the discomfort that, without knowing what she did, she was determined to force him into ever-deeper levels of dishonesty.

  “Yet you will first tell me Penland’s address?”

  “No,” she said, putting both hands firmly on the writing case. “I think not.”

  Guy strode to the cabinet to set the ivory lady back on her shelf. No one knew about the house in Hampstead that Rachel had insisted he rent for her in the spring. They had arrived after dark, and she had never gone beyond the grounds. Nevertheless, he did not want to take Sarah anywhere near it—though it would be far more perilous, of course, if she went out to Hampstead alone.

  “Do you play chess, Mrs. Callaway?”

  “Yes, I have. I’m not particularly good at it. Why?”

  “You teach mathematics?”

  She shook her head.

  He laughed as he closed the cabinet door. Sunbeams scattered
from the glass, obscuring the contents.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I gave you my word not to abandon this quest, so you know perfectly well that I shan’t call your bluff. Otherwise, you’d never have risked making that last move. Yet I wonder why you show me your strategy quite this soon?”

  “Because I fear that you’re still keeping something from me, Mr. Devoran. Something important. Something quite other than this vague suspicion of danger.”

  He froze for a split second, before he turned to face her.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am.”

  “Will you tell me what it is?”

  “No, I will not.”

  Sunlight glared around her in an aura of gold. “Is it something that will harm Rachel, or prevent our finding her?”

  “No.” Guy strode back to pick up the chair and set it in its place by the wall. “You’ll simply have to trust me on that, Mrs. Callaway.”

  “There’s certainly no requirement to strip away all privacy, sir, yet you must also trust me. I shan’t become hysterical or difficult. I believe I even have some small courage. So I must insist that you not simply dismiss me. There’s no good reason for you not to take me with you to Hampstead.”

  “Except that you told me in the bookstore that we mustn’t be seen together,” he said coldly. “Was that just the fleeting impulse of the moment?”

  “No, not at all. Fortunately, things have changed since then.” She looked up. “Firstly, I had no idea then what kind of man you might really be, so it seemed wiser to accost you first in a public place. More important, Rachel was worried that Daedalus might be a friend of yours. If I had come to your house and run into him there, or if I’d been trying to explain things, and he’d arrived—” She stopped and blushed, though she laughed. “Oh, dear! I’ve entrapped myself, haven’t I?”

  Guy smiled, though his less noble suspicions had just been unpleasantly confirmed. “So it was indeed your cousin’s idea for you to seek me out?”

  Sarah rifled around in the box and pulled out another letter. She unfolded it and pointed to a few lines near the end.