Clandestine

by Julia Ross

  And everything changed.

  Tears blurred her eyes. Distress creased her forehead.

  “It’s so lovely here,” she said on a breath. “Lovely!”

  Moisture gathered to overflow down her cheeks. Her nose tip turned pink. She bit her lip and swallowed, then covered her mouth with one hand.

  Her need overwhelmed him. Without a word, Guy gathered her in both arms.

  “Don’t!” he whispered against her hair. “Don’t! It’s only the ocean.”

  His lips found salt as he kissed her wet face, then sweetness as his tongue found her mouth. She kissed back with simple, undiluted fervor, as if she would seek succor from his tongue for all the ills of the world.

  Her body pressed against his, her breasts crushed against his chest. He stroked the tangled hair back from her face, cradling her head in both hands, and kissed her again. She clung to him with both hands, still kissing, as he sank with her to kneel on the still-warm sand.

  His ardor was direct and hot, firing lust in the groin, filling him with urgent, all-consuming desire. Yet a terrible, soul-deep longing also flooded his mind: to make everything right, to heal and protect, even when he knew that he had nothing to offer her but heartbreak.

  The red disk plunged at last into the ocean. Guy slipped his hands down to her shoulders to set Sarah at arm’s length. They were both still kneeling like suppliants on the sand. Her eyes swam with moisture beneath her shadowed lashes.

  “I’m sorry, Sarah,” he said. “I’m possessed.”

  He helped her to stand, then he walked away a few paces. A faint glimmer beckoned far out to sea, as if the water still remembered the day. White grains, like dense clusters of stars, clung to her skirts. For several moments they both stood in silence, gazing at the breakers teasing the shoreline, listening to the grind and splash as smaller waves broke over the rills of dark slate.

  Had the sun torn the heart from his body to drag it down with the daylight into the Underworld?

  “The tide’s coming in and it’s getting dark,” he said. “There won’t be much moon tonight. We must go.”

  Sarah jammed the bonnet on her head and turned to face him. The oncoming night left her face a pale oval, her expression impossible to read.

  “But how do we find our way back now? The daisies will have closed up completely, so Olwen’s path will have disappeared. Are there are other paths?”

  “To forgetfulness? I don’t know. But there are certainly other footpaths back to Buckleigh.”

  They turned together, as if nothing more needed to be said. Guy led Sarah back across the sand, until they were able to step over a narrow spot in the stream. Although its entrance was hidden amongst the beds of reeds, another well-beaten path led straight up the valley beside the water.

  They strolled side by side without speaking. Within another quarter mile the path plunged between high banks, so that it was like walking through a tunnel.

  Should he try to offer more apologies, or should he ask why the beach had made her weep? He had no idea where to begin. He only knew that his heart was racked by tenderness.

  “You’re right about the dark allowing confidences,” she said quietly. “Will you take it amiss if I offer a few more?”

  “God! No! I’d be honored, Mrs. Callaway.”

  “Sarah,” she replied dryly. “When a gentleman kisses a lady more than once, he may generally use her given name.”

  Her brave humor took him by surprise, though the lion pricked its ears, as if warning of dangerous ground.

  “Mine, as you know, is Guy,” he said. “In the dark we are only conspirators.”

  “I wished merely to say that I’m glad that I was able to tell you about John the other night. I’ve never been able to tell anyone the truth before.”

  “It must have been very dreadful for you,” he said. “And a worse burden if you’ve had to bear it alone.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. I never thought about it quite like that, but, yes, it does help to pour out one’s heart to a stranger.”

  “A stranger, Sarah?”

  “A clumsy choice of words. I meant someone one can trust, yet doesn’t expect to number among one’s friends in the future.”

  “And that’s what I am to you?”

  “Ours is only a temporary alliance, sir. We both know that.”

  “Yet I may still call you Sarah?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she said lightly. “Don’t you?”

  They strode on up the dark path. Trees clustered now on one side, offering glimpses of the little valley where the stream dawdled into marshy pools on its way down from the hills.

  She put a hand on Guy’s arm, stopping him, so they stood facing each other. “And the beach—”

  “It’s all right,” he said gently. “You can tell me.”

  “Toward the end John ran a fever. He cried out for the sea. He wanted to go home. He didn’t mean the home that we’d shared in our brief marriage. He meant the place he’d been born. He’d described it to me once. Not a house in a busy port full of ships like Yarmouth, but a little house by a wild beach, where he’d played as a boy. That was home!”

  Guy touched her cheek silently, then he tucked her hand into his elbow, and they began to walk on up the path.

  “I brought him some dried seaweed,” Sarah said. “I thought the scent might comfort him. But he shouted at me and dashed it to the floor. By then he wanted oranges, instead. Yet no fresh oranges were to be had. I couldn’t save him! I couldn’t even—”

  “He had you,” Guy said. “He knew that you loved him.”

  “Yet it was as if I lost him little by little. Some days he could recognize me. Other days he thought I was a stranger, then he thrashed in pain and nothing could comfort him. When he died, our housekeeper said it was a blessing, that now he was with God. But it wasn’t a blessing. It was terrible.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “So very sorry. You’ve known too much grief, Sarah. I’m dumb in the face of it. How old were you when your parents died?”

  “Seven, but I’d known the Mansards all my life, and they loved me like their own.”

  “But then you lost them, too.”

  Sarah tipped her head as if she would study his eyes, though the dark was now almost complete, leaving her a pale wraith.

  “Grief is such a selfish and bitterly lonely place,” she said. “It’s like a labyrinth, where it’s too easy to become lost in anger and self-pity. I didn’t mean to burden you with my wanderings in that darkness, Guy.”

  He touched her cheek again. Desire burned in his heart, the aching desire to absorb her sorrow into his body, to become one with her, to share all the depths of this anguish.

  And that was impossible, of course.

  “No, no,” he said. “I’m honored by your confidence, but I have no adequate words.”

  Yet she slipped her arms about his waist. “What if words won’t do?”

  Instantly he cradled her head in both hands and kissed her. Their lips moved delicately together, a soft, gentle kiss, desperate with tenderness.

  “Alas, alas,” he said at last, “but kisses are a dangerous form of comfort.”

  She dropped her head forward to bury her face in his shoulder. “Yet you do comfort me, Guy. I think you, too, have known some unutterable loss.”

  He felt it again then, the memory of so much fear and isolation, that labyrinth of loneliness and anger.

  “Only when my mother died shortly after giving birth to Lucinda, my sister. I was eleven years old and I’d adored her. My father was inconsolable. Birchbrook was plunged into mourning. There was a tiny infant who needed nursing. So I was sent to Wyldshay to live with my cousins for a year.”

  They linked arms and began to walk together up the footpath.

  “Which only compounded your loss,” she said. “You were a boy robbed not only of your mother, but also of your home, your father, and everything you’d ever known. You must have been desolated.”

  “F
or a while, yes. Yet Jack and I are the same age. The duchess, however fearsome she may sometimes appear, was infinitely kind. She even came to my room every night and allowed me to sob in her arms, without ever once making me feel that a boy shouldn’t cry. By the time I went home to Birchbrook, Jack and I had become as close as brothers and remain so to this day. So in the end, perhaps, I gained as much as I lost.”

  “Can life offer a net gain from grief?”

  “Not always. I was lucky. I lost my mother, but ended up with two families: the St. Georges, plus my father and Lucinda at Birchbrook.”

  “And I have Rachel,” she said.

  His step faltered as if she had knifed him. Guy almost lost breath for a moment as the blade pierced his ribs. Sarah had Rachel and only Rachel. She had no one else left in the world. And that was all that she really wanted of him and of their odd friendship: to have Rachel—not the real Rachel, but her memory of the innocent cousin she had grown up with—restored to her.

  An impossibility, unless life really offered miracles.

  Sarah’s head turned as if she heard something.

  Numb with renewed grief, Guy stared down at her. Yet the night shifted, demanding a quite different reaction.

  The sounds were barely perceptible, a faint thumping and the odd clink, somewhere ahead of them. They had lingered far too long, and now they had company.

  Instantly he repressed his anguish and his desire, and set one finger gently on Sarah’s lips. She nodded. Within seconds the faint noises became discernible: the muffled tread of wrapped hooves.

  Guy dragged her between a break in the trees and down the slope toward the stream. He thrust her flat onto the damp grass in the shelter of a patch of thick brambles.

  “Hush!” he whispered fiercely against her hair. “Someone’s coming!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FOR THE SPACE OF A HEARTBEAT SARAH KNEW REAL TERROR, but Guy held her steadily within the circle of one strong arm.

  The reverberation grew louder, the muted thud of feet, a slight rattle of harness. A string of ponies was coming down the footpath directly above them, though the hoofbeats sounded as insubstantial as if a fairy troop flitted by in the night.

  Guy kissed her quickly on the forehead, then he squirmed back up the bank on his belly, leaving Sarah huddled beneath her cloak.

  The procession continued to pass. No one spoke, no one whispered. No animal nickered or whinnied. Nothing but that furtive tread and the faint scent of horses and men slipping down to the beach.

  At last the sounds faded into silence. Sarah lay as if frozen, stifling her breathing in a fold of her cloak. The wait seemed interminable before Guy slid partway back down the bank and held out his hand.

  Fingers locked together, they scrambled back up to the path without speaking. The scent of ponies still lingered. A few stars had come out.

  Sarah and Guy walked back toward Buckleigh in silence.

  Her blood raced, in excitement, in trepidation, yet in the certain faith that Theseus strode beside her, the one man able to kill any monster. The feeling was heady, euphoric. Yet once they had entered the safety of the park, she released his hand.

  He glanced down at her, still without speaking. Then he walked away a few paces to stand gazing out over the lake.

  She sat down on a low wall and stared at him. Her heart pounded as if she had been running. His silhouette was as sharp as black paper against the dark shimmer of the water. His expression was lost to the night.

  Yet Sarah still felt wrapped in his warm, vital presence, as if he projected security.

  At last he turned back to her. Even in the dark she thought that he smiled.

  “We met smugglers,” he said quietly. “You’ll have guessed as much.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’ve suspected it for a while—and not simply that the local people do a little free-trading. One finds that everywhere on this coast. This is far wider and deeper than that.”

  “You’ve been actively pursuing this idea for some time?”

  “Every day, since we first visited Norris at Barristow.” He walked up to drop onto the wall beside her, though he still gazed out across the water. “Among other things, it explains all those orchids, glowing briefly, then dying, then being replaced at ruinous expense. Norris’s estate cannot provide enough to sustain that level of spending, nor can Whiddon’s. Jack’s certain that neither of them has enough other investments, and neither of them gambles.”

  “Your cousin Lord Jonathan?”

  “He and I are in constant communication, and his skills in subterfuge are far better than mine. We suspected that something like this might be relevant.”

  “How could smugglers be connected to Rachel?”

  “Because among the gentlemen leading that pack train to the beach were both Hawk and Croft.”

  A shiver ran down her spine. Freebooters might claim to be gentlemen, but the trade never shrank from violence. Informers and revenue men were sometimes tortured or killed.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, I see.”

  Warm and solid beside her, Guy spoke with clear, quiet conviction. “Furthermore, neither gardener would have been able to do this for long without his employer knowing about it, especially when those gentlemen appear to be taking a lion’s share of the profits.”

  She glanced toward the bulk of Buckleigh House. “You think Lord Overbridge is involved, too?”

  “Probably not, but I imagine Pearse and the rest of the staff have a very good idea of what’s going on and know enough to keep their mouths shut.”

  “So this explains why everyone’s been so close-lipped.” Though the air was still warm, she shivered again. “And why Lord Whiddon wished so desperately for us to spend the night, in case we saw something suspicious.”

  “Though I didn’t exactly expect to meet the smugglers on the path.” To her surprise, a little humor warmed his voice. “But this solves at least part of our local mystery. There’s a general conspiracy of silence to hide a lucrative free trade, in which Hawk and Croft can easily take some of the contraband up to London.”

  “And did so in May, then brought orchids back?”

  “Head gardeners on country estates often travel to inspect other gardens or buy new plants. It’s perfect cover.”

  Though she knew it was ridiculous, a small disappointment knifed through her, that he had had an ulterior motive for everything they had shared earlier that night, that even his taking her over Olwen’s daisy path had been just incidental to a wider purpose.

  “So this is why we went to the beach? You hoped to see evidence? Recent tracks, perhaps, or some disturbance on the sand?”

  “They leave no tracks because the last pony drags a thick branch to brush them away, and the boat was probably unloaded several days ago. They’ll have weighted the casks to float just below the surface of the sea.”

  “Do you think Whiddon suspects your interest in this? Is that why he invited us to his house?”

  He shrugged. “Very probably. But what I can’t fathom is why he or anyone would send either Hawk or Croft to pose as Falcorne to threaten your cousin.”

  “Perhaps Rachel found out about this somehow, and they wanted to silence her?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why else?” she asked.

  Guy leaped to his feet. “I don’t know. We shan’t solve it tonight. Come, we must get back!”

  He turned and strode away toward the house, forcing her to hurry at his heels. After his previous warmth, she felt absurdly abandoned. Perhaps it distressed him to admit that they were no closer to solving the mystery of Rachel’s disappearance. Perhaps he was merely anxious to escape the dangers—of all kinds—of the night.

  Sarah had no idea of the time, but the house would surely be shut up. No one was expecting them until morning. The back door that she unlocked when she met Guy at the Deer Hut, then fastened again on her return, would be bolted now from the inside.

  “How are we to get
in?” she asked.

  “Through the front door.” He stopped and turned to face her. “This is good-bye, Sarah.”

  As he spoke, the grand double doors were flung wide. Yellow light flooded across the grass. Sarah turned and blinked.

  Two gentlemen trotted down the front steps. Two ladies hovered in the lit entry hall behind them.

  “Good Lord!” Lord Whitely swung his lantern to shine its full intensity on Sarah’s face, then lowered it to glare at Guy. “Devoran? We were about to give up on you, sir!”

  “Damme, sir!” Lord Overbridge added, panting. “We’ve had a search party out for you for the last several hours.”

  “My nag went lame,” Guy said. “It was fastest to walk back. Most kind of you to be concerned!”

  “But we expected you to spend the night with Whiddon, sir. What the devil possessed you to return in the dark like this?”

  Guy took Sarah by the arm. His touch was casual, no more than was strictly correct.

  “Having suffered through the supper his sister provided, I would not stay at Whiddon’s if it were the last house on earth. I doubt that they’ve aired their guest rooms in thirty years.”

  “But to walk, sir!” Lord Whitely remonstrated. “And with a lady! Surely the inn in Stonecombe was closer? Our chaps found your man there—”

  “That rat-invested hovel?” Guy turned and raised a brow. “Surely you would not suggest that this lady and I should have spent the night there together?”

  Whitely spun on his heel and stalked up the steps. Guy and Sarah walked in behind him.

  Lady Whitely gave them both an arch smile. “We’re all most relieved to see you safe, Mr. Devoran. I trust Mrs. Callaway came to no harm? Such a sad adventure!”

  “It wasn’t far,” Sarah said. “I am well used to walking.”

  “Really?” Lady Whitely pursed her pretty mouth. “Is that why you have grass stains on your skirts?”

  Sarah glanced down. “I became a little fatigued and was forced to rest for a few moments on a bank. Mr. Devoran was most kind. He waited entirely without complaint for me to recover my breath.”