by Julia Ross
Guy opened the carriage door, handed Miracle inside, and climbed in after her. “My sword arm is at your disposal, ma’am, my lord.”
“Then I agree,” Miracle said. “A conspiracy of three!”
“I think I’m beginning to feel sorry,” Ryder said dryly as he swung up after them, “for Hanley.”
The carriage rattled away into the night. Miracle sat beside Ryder and listened to his dispassionate explanation. Blinded by her distress over Willcott, she had not allowed herself to think it all through before, but now goose bumps rose on her skin.
“So what are we left with?” Guy asked at last. “Setting aside Willcott’s death for the moment, the salient point would seem to be that the earl is searching for something.”
“Exactly. Let’s take it point by point. Hanley’s not the type to indulge in the wanton destruction of another man’s property, yet— even though they were leased from the duchy—he wrecked Miracle’s rooms in London. After what happened on the yacht, it makes no sense to assume that he was simply jealous. So he was indeed looking for something. He then directly accused her of stealing from him when they were alone in his carriage. Obviously, he thinks that Miracle has something of his in her possession, and this missing item is far more important to him than Willcott’s untimely demise.”
“So what the hell was Willcott’s role? That entire episode stinks to high heaven.”
“The words that come to mind are blackmail, extortion, fear,” Ryder said. “Hanley is afraid of something.”
“Of something that Willcott either knew or possessed,” Guy replied.
“Yet now that Willcott’s dead, the earl is even more terrified, not less.”
Guy turned to Miracle. “Did Hanley ever hint that he might be afraid of something?”
“No,” she said. “He never seemed to be a very emotional man.”
“Until Exeter, where everything changed.” Ryder stretched out his legs and stared at his boots. His profile gleamed dimly in the dark carriage, but his entire being shimmered with an aura of power. “What happened to your things, Miracle? Your jewelry and clothes. The possessions you’d taken to Exeter with you. Was everything left on the yacht?”
Her heart began to thump as she followed his thinking. “No, not all of it.”
Guy gave her an encouraging smile, his teeth white in the dark carriage. He was—he had always been—a lovely man. “Ah! So something was left behind in Exeter?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “I’d honestly forgotten about this until now. I wanted to block all of it from my mind. But when I decided to leave Lord Hanley, I managed to send a few things to Dillard.”
Ryder’s eyes seemed to reflect starlight. “Did the earl know that?”
“No, I’m sure that he didn’t. It was that last morning. It was all rather desperate. Lord Hanley wouldn’t let me out of his sight. But I couldn’t afford to lose my jewelry, and there were some other things that I valued. I doubted that I’d be able to smuggle anything off the yacht when we reached Lyme Regis. So I bundled some items haphazardly into a little bag and hid it beneath my cloak. I thought I might get the chance to give it to the innkeeper to post for me.”
“And did you?”
“No, that was impossible. Lord Hanley clung to my elbow the entire time, and—as I told you before—I was afraid to make a scene.”
“So how did you manage it?”
“When we’d first arrived in Exeter, I’d fallen into conversation purely by chance with another man who was staying at the inn. I saw him again in the lobby as we were leaving.”
Guy sat upright, as alert as a hunting dog. “Who was that?”
“His name was Melman, George Melman. In the few seconds while Lord Hanley’s attention was distracted by the arrival of our carriage, I managed to slip the bag to Mr. Melman. I was damned if I was going to leave it behind or take it onto the yacht, so when I saw the opportunity to outwit Lord Hanley, I took it.”
“You gave your valuables to a total stranger?”
“He was a Derbyshire man.”
Guy leaned back and laughed. “And Derbyshire men are always honest?”
“It seemed worth the risk. He’s also a minister. I’d already written my brother’s direction on a slip of paper for the innkeeper, so instead I gave it to Mr. Melman with the bag. I couldn’t say anything, but I tried to signal what I wanted with my eyes. He understood right away and nodded his promise to deliver it for me.”
“This exchange was entirely without words?”
“Yes, but I knew I could trust him.”
Ryder smiled, not in mirth, but with a kind of bitter recognition. “What exactly was in the bag?”
“I don’t know. Most of my jewelry, a little money. A couple of books that were precious to me. One of my fans, I think. I don’t really remember. It was all very hastily done. I had only a few seconds, while Lord Hanley used the chamber pot.”
“Yet you sent something to your brother that Hanley wants.” Ryder glanced out the window. “In which case, I doubt if he gives a damn about Willcott’s death. In fact, I’m prepared to wager that he was thrilled to find the man killed.”
“Which explains why he’s raised no public hue and cry against Miracle,” Guy added. “And why he’s so desperate to find her.”
Miracle shivered. Why should Lord Hanley think she had stolen something from him? It was absurd. She had rescued only a handful of personal possessions to thrust into her little bundle. Hanley hadn’t even known that she’d done it. Yet the thought of the earl tearing apart her London rooms—even her clothes and books, even the bed they had shared—sent cold ripples down her spine.
She remembered with horror his face in the carriage. I threw all of your trash into the sea. After all, your valuables weren’t there any longer.
“Does Hanley know that you have a brother?” Ryder asked.
Miracle glanced up at him, but his expression was lost in the darkness. “No. No one does. No one except you and Guy.”
“Then we have a little time,” Ryder said, “before the ax falls.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
EVEN THOUGH IT WAS SUMMER AND ALMOST MORNING, RYDER ordered the fire lit. After their journey across the Peaks in the unheated carriage, he was chilled to the bone. He downed a welcoming draft of hot coffee laced with brandy, then leaned back in his chair to stare down through slitted lids at the coals in the grate.
Wrendale, with its elegant rooms and landscaped grounds, belonged to the duchy, of course. Ryder was lord and master of all he surveyed. It was a surprisingly empty feeling.
Miracle, her face ashen with fatigue, had been taken up to one of the bedrooms by a startled maid. Though his blood yearned for her, though the memory of their passion obsessed him, he felt a very real discomfort about sharing her bed with Guy in the house.
His cousin stood at the hearth. He set his empty cup down on the silver tray next to the coffeepot.
“What do you want me to do?” Guy asked. “Waylay Hanley with tales of mayhem in the hills, while you and Miracle escape unnoticed to the Antipodes?”
“Unlike you and Jack, I can never escape unnoticed,” Ryder said. “It’s one of the perks of my position.”
“I never thought of it quite that way before,” Guy replied with a wry smile. “I suppose one of the advantages of having no such exalted position myself is that I get to waste my time pretty much as I please.”
Ryder poured himself a second cup. “And, for Miracle’s sake, you’re offering to put that freedom at my disposal now?”
“If you think I can help. I assume you have a plan?”
Now was not the time to think about Miracle, softly dreaming upstairs. The problem at hand needed cold, hard, analytical assessment, not the heated imaginings of a man blinded by lust.
“Part of one, at least. Whatever we do afterward, we’d better recover her missing treasure first and we don’t have much time. Hanley’s bound to find out about this brother, Dillard Heather. The man’s a shoemaker. He’d b
e no match for an earl.”
Guy turned to warm his hands. “You still think the crux of this business is some kind of extortion scheme?”
“Why else would Hanley promise Miracle’s favors to Willcott? Apparently, he wasn’t satisfying any deviant interests of his own.”
“God, it’s foul! I’m not sure how you refrained from killing Hanley yourself.”
Ryder sipped at his cup. “I didn’t know enough details to justify it when we last met, or I might well have done.”
Guy paced away across the room to stare out at the gray hints of dawn beyond the window. “But what the devil could Willcott have been blackmailing him about?”
“I’ve no idea. But if we’re right, he’ll go to almost any lengths to prevent our finding out.”
“But Hanley knows that you’ve taken Miracle under your wing. Doesn’t that make Wrendale an obvious target?”
“For what?” Ryder picked up the poker and rattled the coals in the grate. “If he came here in person, I’d take the greatest pleasure in shooting him down like a dog—after the proper formalities were exchanged, of course.”
“And I imagine he knows that. If it should come to a duel, I’d be happy to act as your second, of course.”
Sparks leaped in the soot at the back of the fire, scattering and disappearing like shooting stars. “Thank you. Anyway, I’ve had enough of skulking about the countryside like a vagabond.”
“Yet he’s bound to guess that Miracle’s going to tell you what happened on the yacht.”
“Which makes him doubly dangerous. He’s desperate to recover whatever he thinks Miracle stole from him. He’s probably equally desperate to silence her.”
“And to silence you?”
Ryder set aside the poker and leaned back into the harsh embrace of his chair. “That depends on what he believes my feelings are toward her. If the situation were reversed, Hanley would side with me against a courtesan—purely from gentlemanly solidarity—even though he hates my guts. So if he assumes that she’s only a temporary interest, he’ll trust that I’ll abandon her without compunction, rather than involve myself in a scandal.”
“And what are your feelings toward her?” Guy asked.
“That’s none of your bloody business.”
“No, I suppose not. You’re my social superior and five years older, for a start.” Guy’s boots thudded on the carpet as he strode back across the room. “We’ve never really been intimate, have we? Yet I spent my boyhood admiring your every gesture and striving to be more like you.”
“Good God! Did you?” Ryder laughed. “Obviously you’ve no idea how I envied you and Jack. From the day you were born, you both had so much more freedom than I did.”
“I suppose we did,” Guy said. “But we envied your power far more.”
“The grass is always greener.”
Guy stared down at the fire, as if making up his mind to something.
Ryder studied every perfectly shaped bone, every nuance of shape and texture, with cold objectivity. Guy Devoran had inherited all the fey good looks of the duchess’s family: tall and lean, but with the whiplike strength of a greyhound and the graceful economy of movement of the born horseman or swordsman. Women no doubt fell at his feet, if he so much as snapped his fingers.
Had Miracle ever loved him? Did she still?
“Yet perhaps this situation demands the tearing down of fences,” Guy said at last. “I happen to care a great deal about Miracle. The state of your heart may be none of my business, but—as you yourself just said—your intentions toward her are an important part of the picture with Hanley.”
Ryder poured more coffee, without the brandy this time. “You don’t like him, either, do you?”
“We’ve no personal feud, but he’s always made me think of a snake. I told Miracle—”
“Go on,” Ryder said with icy forbearance. “What did you tell Miracle?”
Guy dropped into a chair, then looked up, obviously aware of all the implications of what he was about to say. “I warned her not to accept him when he offered her carte blanche a few months ago.”
Not only grass was green. Ryder swallowed the ignoble impulse to strangle his inappropriately decorative cousin. “So you were on intimate terms that recently?”
“Not in the way that you think. We’re friends, that’s all.”
Ryder set down his cup and brushed aside the temptation to refill it with liquor. This was far too important to risk dulling his tired mind with more brandy.
“Perhaps you and I have never really been close enough,” he said. “Yet you’re my cousin and Jack’s best friend. I trust your integrity implicitly. I think we are, as you have just so astutely observed, going to have to spill our bloody guts to each other about Miracle.”
Guy gazed away across the room. His profile had that same damned angelic purity as Jack’s.
“I can tell you some of the facts about how I met her. As for the rest, I don’t know. Half of the story is hers. She might not want it told.”
“Not so easy, is it,” Ryder said, “when the boot is on the other foot? The same reservations apply to her present relationship with me, of course. However, her life is at stake. Hanley can decide at any time to bring a charge of murder against her. In the circumstances we’d better swallow our personal discomfort, and for her sake share all the information we have. Nothing said here will go beyond this room, obviously.”
“Very well,” Guy said. “I suppose I should start. I assume you know that she’s not a lady by birth?”
Ryder nodded. Distaste and curiosity and dread seethed in an unholy mix in his gut. He had avoided pushing Miracle for the truth about her past. Because he didn’t want to know? Because it was bound to reveal the impossibility of any real future together?
His cousin leaned forward, hands clasped between his spread knees, head bent as if he studied a speck on the carpet. “What has she told you of her upbringing?”
“Not much. She said she was apprenticed into a cotton mill when she was six.”
Guy glanced up to meet Ryder’s gaze. His eyes blazed. “Have you ever seen the inside of such a place? The mills are the pride and joy of our burgeoning industrial landscape up here in Derbyshire. The apprentices are properly fed and clothed, and they all go to church every Sunday. Yet the children work unimaginably long hours in indescribable noise and dust. The machinery stops for nothing, not even when a child falls asleep at the job, at the cost of an eye or a hand or a life.”
“I thought many of the new mills were built to be models of social care?”
“They are. But it’s a harsh life for a child without the comforts, however humble, of a home and a loving mother. That’s how Miracle spent five years of her childhood, sleeping on a straw pallet with the orphans in the apprentice house, working long hours in the mill, spending any remaining moments sewing and mending.”
“But she wasn’t an orphan,” Ryder said.
“No, but her father apprenticed her to the mill all the same.”
“He sold her?”
“If you like. She never saw him again. The only other activity besides church and work was a few hours’ schooling once a week. The apprentices are taught their letters, so they will make better Christians and more useful workers.”
“Which is more than one can say for the workhouse, or for the child of the average farm worker.”
Coals fell in the grate as the fire died down. Both men ignored the small sound, as if they were caught together in some desperate net.
“Farm life can be physically brutal, also, of course,” Guy said. “Yet the villages of England boast their quota of elderly rustics: men who’ve spent a tough life in the fields, yet are hale enough for all that.”
“God! Wyldshay is full of them. We’re as dependent on them as they are on us. It would be pretty damned inhuman to turn a man out to starve, after he’s labored for the duchy for a lifetime.”
“You also provide dame schools, so every child on the es
tate is guaranteed a decent chance in life. Yet somehow I think we’ll never see these mill children grow old. Their lungs fill with cotton dust. Their souls wither in the face of all that relentless machinery. The girls almost never see the sky, except in glimpses. Even the meanest crow scarer in the fields knows what it is to chase butterflies, or stare dreamily at the clouds.”
Or the stars—
“What happened when Miracle was eleven?”
Guy rubbed one hand over his mouth as if to brush away a bad taste. “She was seen walking to church with the other children one Sunday by a gentleman named Sir Benjamin Trotter. Her beauty was already quite extraordinary, I imagine, and her intelligence would have been obvious after two minutes’ conversation. Sir Benjamin bought out her apprenticeship papers and took her into his house.”
Dread uncoiled in his gut. “In what capacity?”
Beneath the flush of reflected firelight, Guy’s face was drawn. “What do you think?”
“For God’s sake!” Ryder’s head snapped up as disgust and rage ripped through his heart. “Did he begin to abuse her right away?”
“You’ll have to ask her. She told me only that Sir Benjamin gave her the run of his library. I think she’s grateful to him.”
“Though he ravished her when she was still a child?”
“I only know that, when he died, she was sixteen and had been sharing his bed for some time.”
A deep shudder racked Ryder’s body. “He’d made no provision for her in his will?”
Guy shook his head.
“What about her brother?”
“Dillard was still unmarried and living over a master shoemaker’s store. He couldn’t support her. Yet, whatever his other faults, Sir Benjamin had given Miracle the manners and education of a lady. She was accomplished and extraordinarily well-read. His family allowed her to keep her clothes and some trinkets, and a cousin handed her a few gold coins, so she traveled to London to become an actress. No other occupation was open, except the grinding poverty of occasional farm work.”
“Because she refused to go back to the mill?”
“Do you blame her? And having been publicly ruined, she couldn’t become a governess, or a lady’s companion, or even get work in a haberdasher’s.”