Clandestine

by Julia Ross

  “Loddiges is a major importer, so there’s no surprise there. Pearse wouldn’t say who fetched them?”

  Sarah’s fingers stroked idly along the iron bands on the trunk, as if she were embarrassed not to be able to offer him more, then she looked up. Desire rose in his blood like a tidal wave. God! For what? To seduce the cousin of his latest mistress?

  “When I asked him directly, he changed the subject as if I were asking for the secret of the Gordian knot. I didn’t dare press him, so I had to let it go.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I never thought Pearse was Falcorne, because I’m damned certain that Overbridge isn’t Daedalus. Why would he persecute your cousin for her favors, when he’s besotted with his wife?”

  “I agree,” she said. “That seems impossible.”

  Guy paced to the fireplace. “That is who we’re looking for, isn’t it? Either an unmarried man, or a man who’d go mad over another woman?”

  “If Rachel’s letters are to be believed,” she said. “But you’re the one who proved how untrustworthy she can be.”

  He laughed then, because for all the intensity of his desire, he also took the simplest of pleasures in her quick mind.

  “Of course. We’ve no real idea of anyone’s motives in all this.”

  “Could this Mr. Norris be Daedalus?”

  “Barry Norris is certainly an odd fish. All bluff manner and heartiness, but there’s a shrewdly calculating brain behind it.”

  “And he collects orchids?”

  “Yes, but not seriously. Norris buys a few plants because they’re the fashion and he can afford it. Now we’ve eliminated Uxhampton, our only other real suspects are Lord Moorefield and Lord Whiddon. No one else in the area has the necessary resources, though Moorefield’s a pretty minor collector.”

  “And Lord Whiddon?”

  “Is quite manic for orchids. He’s also a bachelor and a recluse. It won’t be easy to get an invitation to visit him.”

  “So you think he might be our main suspect?”

  “Except that he doesn’t seem the type to persecute a woman.”

  “Does he ever send his gardener to London to buy his plants for him?”

  Guy turned from his desperate contemplation of the cold grate to stare at the scudding clouds outside. “Of course, though that doesn’t mean it’s the same man.”

  Sarah slipped from the chest and stood up. Moonlight cast her in shades of silver and gray. Her skin gleamed like the surface of a pearl.

  “Can’t you simply ask Lady Overbridge who brought her orchids back to Buckleigh?”

  “I already have. But Annabella has no more idea of how her gardens and hothouses are maintained than she does of the little girls who embroider her ball gowns, or how her meals appear on the table.”

  “You sound as if you don’t quite approve,” she said.

  Guy stalked to the window. “Of a lady who takes no care for the conditions of the people who sustain her pretty lifestyle? No, I don’t.”

  “Good heavens,” she said. “You’re a radical, Mr. Devoran?”

  He laughed. “Why the mockery, Mrs. Callaway? I suspect you share my opinions in this.”

  “Yes, but I’ve been forced to earn my living—”

  “Whereas I’m merely idle and useless? I’ve not forgotten.”

  Even in the shifting light, he knew that hot color raced over her face. Yet she bit her lip as if to prevent herself from laughing aloud.

  “I was a little rude in the bookstore, wasn’t I?”

  “Very,” he replied. “But we were strangers.”

  “Which only makes it all the worse,” she said. “I behaved very badly.”

  “Then we should not remain strangers.”

  She plunked herself back onto the seaman’s chest and tipped her head as she gazed at him. “Is this revenge?”

  “No,” he said. “Simple justice—though you’re under no obligation to oblige. I’m just curious.”

  “I don’t have any secrets, sir. What do you wish to know?”

  Guy tried to keep his manner casual, though a battle waged in his heart. His determination to remain detached fought valiantly with his burning desire to learn all about her—and lost.

  “How did you come to marry Captain Callaway?” he asked. “You said he was some years older than you?”

  “Fifteen, to be exact. He courted me and I accepted him. He owned a little house near Yarmouth, where he maintained warehouses. Everyone thought it a very good match.”

  “You didn’t love him?”

  She smoothed a fold of her skirt with one hand. “Not at first. But in the end, yes, very much.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have no right to pry. I didn’t mean to distress you.”

  The curve of her shoulder and neck glimmered in the moonlight. She gazed down at her moving fingers.

  “No. I’d rather like to be able to tell someone. If no one ever speaks of him, it’s as if he never existed. But I didn’t marry him for love. I married for security.”

  Guy sank onto his haunches and leaned both shoulders against the wall. He had asked, because he desperately wanted to understand her. Yet it was as if he had carelessly lifted the lid of an ornamental box expecting to find the usual contents—scissors or sealing wax—and instead found himself staring into the depths of a profoundly painful honesty.

  “Tell me whatever you wish,” he said quietly. “Nothing you say will ever go beyond these four walls.”

  Sarah Callaway dropped the pleat of fabric and stood up. Her skirts rustled softly as she walked back and forth.

  “I had no other real prospects and I wanted a home of my own. So when John—Captain Callaway—offered for me, I said yes. But we’d been married for only a few weeks when he went to Norwich on business, and was brought home in a cart. He’d collapsed suddenly on Elm Street.”

  “He couldn’t walk?”

  She shook her head. “He never walked again. He’d carried some fragments of metal in his spine ever since Waterloo. The doctors said there was nothing they could do.”

  “So you nursed him?”

  “Yes, for three months. I knew he was in excruciating pain, but he was kind and funny and clever, and he never complained. I’d never imagined that anyone could be so brave. That’s when I fell in love with him.”

  “Then he was a lucky man,” Guy said.

  “Lucky to die so painfully?” Her voice cut harshly across the cool air.

  “No. Lucky to have won your love honestly and die knowing that.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I wasn’t honest.”

  Guy carefully studied his boots. “Why do you say that?”

  Her skirts rustled as she moved restlessly in the dark. “Because while John lay ill a fire swept through our warehouses, and I didn’t tell him. People innocent of any wrongdoing lost everything they had stored there, and they had to be compensated right away. Meanwhile, the bill for the insurance lay lost among piles of other papers, because I had neglected to pay it.”

  “You cannot blame yourself for that.”

  “No? When John had worked so hard? In spite of his pain, he tried to teach me how to run the business. Yet a lifetime of work had already turned into debts, because of my mistake, and everything was already lost!”

  “There are times when kindness must outweigh honesty,” he said.

  Silence breathed quietly for a moment. Moonlight dappled her rigid back. A softer light gleamed on her cheek, where a few strands of hair had escaped from her cap.

  “Was that my excuse? I suppose so. I was forced to sell the house a few weeks before John died, and it was only luck that enabled me to keep that a secret. The buyers didn’t need to take possession until after the funeral.”

  “Yet he died knowing that you loved him.”

  “Was that enough?” she asked.

  “God, yes!”

  Her shoes rapped as she stalked across the room. “I don’t know, Mr. Devoran. You see, John knew that I
was hiding something, and it worried him. One day he tried to ask me what was wrong. Yet the moment he saw my distress, he made a joke and changed the subject: out of kindness to me, his silly wife, who’d allowed his life’s work to go up in flames.”

  “Because she was nursing him and had grown to love him,” Guy said. “And knew where her highest priorities lay—as he did.”

  Sarah hesitated by the door with her hand on the knob. Moisture gleamed faintly silver on her cheeks.

  “You’re very kind, sir,” she said. “I know the truth of what you say. I don’t berate myself so very much. That’s only another form of self-indulgence, isn’t it? Anyway, what would I have done with warehouses and a shipping business? I’m far better suited to be a schoolteacher, and I’ve made a perfectly good new life. Yet please don’t think that I’m always honest. I’m not. No more than anyone else.”

  “Yes, you are,” Guy said.

  Her knuckles tensed on the knob. “I’m glad to have been able to tell someone,” she said. “Not even Rachel knows how much I was at fault.”

  “And afterwards—?”

  “The Mansards blamed only Captain Callaway for what had happened. That’s the general way of thinking, isn’t it? That a man who leaves any business decisions to his wife is a fool.”

  Moonlight traced across the backs of his hands, throwing stark shadows between his fingers.

  “I can only honor any man whom you have loved,” he said. “John Callaway doesn’t sound like a fool. He sounds remarkable.”

  Sarah opened the door. Her shoes rapped softly away down the corridor.

  Guy sprang to his feet to fling open the casement.

  Night cast black shadows in a gray world. The lake lay still and dark, like a great expanse of wet slate. Yet where the moonlight reflected off a bank of low-lying mist to glimmer across the water, it looked like the White Lady walking.

  Who was that—one of the heroines of Celtic myth—the lady who’d come walking over the sea to her lover?

  Sarah Callaway would no doubt know, because she had escaped a painful girlhood by losing herself in books. And then she had escaped again to find a joy that was only seared by more pain in her brief marriage.

  He wished—quite insanely, but with a profound intensity—that he could wipe all of that pain away to find the girl she had also once mentioned, who had worn a straw bonnet and enjoyed carefree picnics with her cousin.

  —until hail obliterated all of our gaiety.

  Guy swung rapidly down the wall and strode off across the grounds.

  I’m glad to have been able to tell someone—

  Someone! She had told him precisely because he meant nothing to her, because she imagined that he was a perfect gentleman, because she thought therefore that he was always absolutely trustworthy and honorable, like the man she had married.

  The White Lady shimmered in the mist, trailing tears across the water.

  Guy shrugged out of his clothes as he walked, leaving garments strewn across the damp grass. At the edge of the lake he tugged off his boots and breeches.

  He dived naked into the cool moonlit water.

  Impossible to shed dishonor as easily.

  Faint phosphorescence fringed his shoulders and arms as he swam, but clouds moved to drop a black cloak over the lake. The mist vanished into darkness. The White Lady disappeared.

  Impossible, always, for any mortal to compete with a ghost.

  FIVE carriages bowled along the leafy lanes, each one carrying its bouquet of parasols. Sarah sat in the last carriage with the governess and the children, and tried not to watch Guy Devoran. Most of the gentlemen had chosen to accompany the carriages on horseback, as had Lady Whitely.

  Mr. Devoran controlled his spirited blood bay with unobtrusive skill: lithe, restrained, and a magnet for every female gaze. Lady Whitely rode beside him on a showy chestnut mare. His dark head bent a little toward her as she chattered. She glanced up at him and laughed, her blond ringlets caressing her lovely face, her neat figure displayed to perfection by her fashionable habit and elegant feathered hat.

  Sarah forced her gaze away. A sharp, dark pain stabbed beneath her corset, as if she had the right to be wounded by his paying such careful attention to a beautiful woman.

  Why on earth had she told him the truth about John? Not even Rachel had really known why she had broken off her mourning so precipitately to take up a post as a schoolmistress—and then the Mansards had died, and Rachel, too, was cast unprotected into the world.

  Yet how could a duke’s nephew ever understand any penniless gentlewoman’s plight? And how absurd that she had stared at herself in the mirror that morning and wondered if he could ever find her lovely! Yet Sarah had agonized over her appearance. She was not beautiful. She was even freckled like a currant bun, because—never really caring before—she had spent too much time in the sun.

  She reached deep into her heart to try to find acceptance, doing her best to laugh at herself, yet the pain still hurt.

  BARRISTOW Manor sat in a small fold of hills between the moor and the sea. Mr. Barry Norris and his wife welcomed their guests with wine and cakes, before they broke up into little groups to explore the gardens.

  Sarah walked with one of the younger girls and tried to explain the botanical structure of the flowers. Yet Mary Blenkinsop, interested only in one of the younger men—since she considered Mr. Guy Devoran far too far above her touch—simply giggled.

  “Is this really quite suitable, Mrs. Callaway?”

  Sarah looked up. Mrs. Barry Norris stared at her over the end of her long nose and sharp chin.

  “The gentlemen have retired to the glasshouse,” Mrs. Norris added. “Your opinion is wanted. Such pursuits may be acceptable, I suppose, for a widow, but certainly not for a young girl. Miss Blenkinsop may remain here with me.”

  Sarah smiled her thanks and hurried away. As she entered the orchid house, a voice boomed.

  “Stole m’ head gardener, sir!”

  “Really?” Guy Devoran said. “My heart bleeds, sir.”

  “Ever since the man left, the demmed plants have been dying. Ah! Here’s your little botanist! What do y’ think, m’ dear? Not hot enough in here for orchids?”

  Sarah had stopped just inside the doorway, but Mr. Norris marched up to seize her by the arm.

  “Take this bloody thing!” He pointed to a sad clump of brown roots in a pot. “Never bloomed once. Cost me a fortune! What the devil do ye know about making orchids bloom, ma’am?”

  “Nothing at all, sir.” Sarah bit back a grin. “I’m very sorry if you’ve been led to believe otherwise.”

  A similarly repressed mirth was dancing in Guy Devoran’s eyes. “But I thought you knew orchids, Mrs. Callaway? How foolish of me!”

  “I know them only from prints and from books, sir,” she said. “I’ve never grown one.”

  Barry Norris dragged her deeper into his hothouse. “But tell me what you think of these, ma’am! Only things blooming.”

  He pushed aside some greenery and pointed to a handful of small flowers.

  Seven orchids burst from the shade of a mass of spear-shaped leaves. Snowy outer petals spread open in erotic surrender.

  Eria rosea.

  At the heart of each blossom, blush-pink lips frilled around a small round knob, like a golden pearl.

  “M’ wife thinks the blooms shocking,” Barry Norris said with a guffaw. “Remind a man of things he ain’t supposed to think about.”

  Obviously fighting an incipient outbreak of hilarity, Guy Devoran coughed into a closed fist. “Tricky things, orchids,” he said.

  Afraid that she would burst out laughing, Sarah swallowed hard and walked away to gaze out at the gardens.

  “I’m so sorry to hear that you lost your head gardener, Mr. Norris,” she said as soon as she could trust her voice. “I trust the poor man wasn’t taken ill?”

  “God, no! Moorefield stole him. Chap by the name of Croft.”

  “Croft?” Guy asked. �
��The same fellow Moorefield just hired this spring?”

  Barry Norris gave Guy a sharp glance, as if beneath the crude, jovial facade he concealed a set of razors.

  “That’s no secret, sir. Clever chap with flowers. Moorefield’s been wanting the man for years, and he got him only a few days after the fellow got back from London in May.”

  Guy stroked the white petals with one gentle finger. “Then I’ll wager it’s exactly the same man that beat mine to the punch at Loddiges.”

  “Could ha’ been.” Norris kicked idly at a pot of greenery, his mouth pursed.

  “A shipment of some particularly fine orchids had just come in,” Guy said. “Annoyed quite a few of us, sir, when the pick of the crop was whisked out from under our noses and sent down here to Devon.” The Eria rosea trembled slightly as Guy dropped his hand and turned to face his host. “These are very fine specimens, sir. I believe I must meet your Mr. Croft.”

  “Then you’ll find the fellow at Moorefield Hall. But if these plants were the best to be had, I was cheated.”

  “Then perhaps another Devon gardener carried off the main prize?”

  Norris hesitated for a moment. “Damn me, if you’re not right, sir! If it’s rare orchids you’re after, you should talk to Hawk, not Croft.”

  “Hawk, sir?”

  “Whiddon’s man…went up to town at the same time as Croft—after orchids, you understand—and the rogues traveled back together. Now there’s a chap who can grow things!” He turned and grinned. “Better not take ladies into his hothouse!”

  Norris cackled at his own wit and stomped off to the doorway.

  His arms crossed over his chest, Guy Devoran leaned his shoulders against the wall, threw back his head, and laughed.

  Something in the set of his nostrils and the creases at the corners of his mouth poured through Sarah’s heart like molten gold—as if she were a rare coin and he were the furnace.

  Hating that vulnerability, she walked past him to the door.

  Mrs. Norris was shepherding the other ladies back toward the house. Trailing behind them, a nurse carried a golden-haired child in her arms. Norris’s expression softened as he gazed at them.