“And escape yourself into the bargain?”
Grace laid his flintlock pistols on the staircase’s lowest step. “I’d have confessed to the authorities before I came to you, but Lily’s name would have been brought up again.”
“What a courageous soul you are.” Samuel transferred the rapier to his right hand, alongside his sword, and reached down for the pair of guns. “Go, brave boy, and become a hero. If I ever see you again, I will slice you up like a blood sausage. Is that clear?”
Grace gave a stiff nod.
“You have no idea how close you are at this moment to losing more than a woman you never deserved,” Samuel said. “I cannot decide whether it is a kindness to let you go and know that you will be on the run for the rest of your life, or to end your misery right now.”
Grace looked resigned. “I would not blame you for demanding honor be met. And I meant no insult to Lily when I referred to her as your mistress. I—”
“My patience is depleted. I don’t want Lily to see you. Ever.”
“May I have your word as a gentleman that you’ll tell her the truth?”
“I gave you the only promise that should concern your future. If you have one.” He traced the rapier tip down Grace’s arm. “Walk.”
The chapter could have closed there. Samuel would have put down his pen in contentment. A confession made for a tidy ending. But the true world refused to conform to his literary ideals.
“I would give up anything to undo what happened,” Grace said. “I never knew I was a gambler until I came to London. Before then it seemed to be a harmless country pastime. It sounds implausible, but I feel as if a master hand had led me into temptation and plotted my demise.”
Samuel would have been delighted to take the credit for the captain’s downfall. He had indeed offered Grace the carte blanche to gamble on his account. But he did not regret what he had done. If anything, he would have acted more aggressively to offer Lily his protection.
The longcase clock in the corridor along the staircase chimed four. A moment later a cacophony of timepieces went off. Ignoring the clamor, Samuel ushered Grace out the door.
Samuel climbed to his favorite cairn on the moor, his rapier in hand. It was here that Sir Renwick had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the power to vanquish his nobly born half brother. Samuel felt a sudden and strange affection for the spot that had spawned the irredeemable character. Perhaps it was because from this vantage point he could make out the scars of the castle where his own family had lived and died. He had raged here while he mourned. It had been the darkest time he had ever known.
That was the past. The future sat in a cart that bumped along the old friar’s path toward him. He had watched Captain Grace ride away on the opposite road.
Now he watched like a man possessed as Lily approached. When she finally noticed him, she gestured at Bickerstaff to slow the cart. She jumped to the ground. Samuel laid down his rapier and hastened to help her over the stone-strewn slope.
“I bought everything I saw today,” she said, handing him a wicker basket before he could pull her into his arms.
But he did anyway, and the basket dropped, ribbons, tea, bread, and packets of thread falling at their feet. He ran his hands down her back, between the folds of her skirts. He caught a good hold of her bum. She made a breathless gasp into his mouth.
“You must have written at least twenty pages today,” she said. “It’s been days since you were this affectionate.”
“I didn’t write a decent word.” He led her to a secure place between an outcrop of lichen-speckled rock. He turned back briefly for her basket. “We had a visitor. An unwelcome one.”
Lily stared at him. “Is that why you look so care-worn and . . . not well?”
“I’ll tell you what happened on the way back to the house. You might recognize some of the signposts on the way.”
She stared past him in dawning comprehension. She saw the ivy-covered ruins of a bridge that spanned the stream running behind the cairn. “This is Sir Renwick’s unholy retreat?”
He managed a smile. Grace’s confession had befouled his mood. “One of them. And I’m afraid if I stay here I might succumb to his influence.”
The wind rose as they walked home together. Lily did not feel the cold. She felt numb after Samuel revealed what had happened while she was gone.
“Didn’t he ask to see me?” she asked, staring at the bleak shadows of the moor.
The rapier tip sent several pebbles skittering into a dark pond that glistened on the path. “Yes. He did. I refused to allow it.” He swung around to face her. “Did you want to see him?”
“No. Except . . .”
He stared at her.
“It might have been worthwhile to hear myself vindicated.”
“I was not willing to take the risk,” he said flatly. “If he had defied me, I would have run him through.”
“Are you going to run me through, too?”
He scowled. “What?”
She motioned to the rapier he held poised in the air. “My protector,” she said with a smile. “I would rather be your servant for the rest of my life than be his wife for even a day.”
Chapter 35
Marie-Elaine shook Lily awake that same night. She had been asleep for only an hour, thinking over Jonathan’s confession. She wished she had been able to confront him herself. But Samuel had been infuriated at the suggestion. Still, she wondered if this would redeem her in her family’s eyes. Had Jonathan even known the victim’s name? To be vindicated after her downfall. It was a hollow victory.
“His Grace has a fever,” Marie-Elaine said, pulling a dress from the wardrobe.
Lily put her hand over her eyes. Moonlight shone through the curtains, the branches outside. “What? At this time of night? Tell him to wait until the morning. I don’t care how many pages he’ll lose. It’s unreasonable to be up all hours, even for art.”
“It’s a real fever. It happens almost every year. He gets deathly sick.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“He hates anyone to think he has any weaknesses.”
Lily threw off the bedcovers and dressed in her warm wool gown. “I hope you have sent for a surgeon.”
“Yes.” The maid’s mouth turned down. “But he might not be here for two or three hours.”
Lily suppressed a sharp fear. Perhaps Samuel wasn’t as ill as Marie-Elaine made him out to be. Everyone in the house seemed prone to exaggeration. But he looked like a waxen effigy when she entered his bedchamber a few minutes later. Sweet herbs burned in the roaring fire in the stone hearth. The odor irritated her nose. Mrs. Halford was sponging his bare chest with a cloth soaked in camphor and aromatic oils. He regarded Lily through his heavily lidded eyes.
“Go.”
She went straight to the bed. He raised himself up, dislodging Mrs. Halford’s hand. “You should never have been brought here at all.”
“Why not?” she asked indignantly.
He shook his head. “I’m indecent. You were forewarned. Juliette is on the balcony. A woman shouldn’t lift a sword. Philbert was right.”
“He’s delirious,” Marie-Elaine whispered. “He rambles when he’s feverish.”
The grooves that bracketed his mouth deepened. “The ghosts are not happy,” he continued in a conversational voice, his eyes slowly closing.
“What ghosts, Your Grace?” Lily asked in panic, if only to keep him from slipping away. If he spoke of communicating with spirits when he was ill, did it mean that he was drifting into another world? “There aren’t any such things as ghosts,” she added. And then, without thinking, she laid her head on his chest to listen for his heartbeat.
Mrs. Halford gasped in horror. “No, no. You cannot—”
For the worst moment she had ever known, Lily thought he was gone. And it was then that she saw the scar tissue that ran from his sternum to his rib cage into his belly. She felt a firm pair of hands trying to pry her away.<
br />
“He’s delirious, miss,” Emmett said gently over her shoulder.
“What are those marks on his body?” Lily asked in bewilderment. She had never noticed them when they made love. But then, they had been together only in the dark. The scars looked like burns. “Why should he be ashamed?”
No one answered.
She swung around to stare at Marie-Elaine. “Why does he have to keep everything a secret? It’s not right. It’s—”
“He never makes much sense when he’s ill like this,” Mrs. Halford said, interrupting her. “I used to get the shivers every time he mentioned talking to the shades.”
Lily longed to know more, but then the door opened to admit a formidable black-caped man whose frazzled red-gray hair bespoke a frantic rush to arrive. “What have I told you all before?” he asked in dismay. “It does a patient little good for you to hover around his bed like crows. Get out, all of you. Get out of here so that I may go to work.”
“He needs us,” Lily said blankly.
“Fetch me a basin.” The surgeon withdrew a lancet from his dilapidated instrument case. “Marie-Elaine, do we still have a bottle of fresh dragon’s blood in the house?”
Lily drew back against Mrs. Halford’s bosomy warmth. “Dragon’s blood?”
“It’s only a plant, miss,” Emmett said, turning at the sight of the blood pricker.
“And kindly fetch me whatever laudanum you have at hand,” the surgeon added.
Samuel sat up with a glassy-eyed glare. “No opium. Never. I cannot write when my brain is numb.”
“Your Grace cannot write from the grave, either,” the surgeon said in a practiced tone of authority.
She did not want to leave Samuel, but the other servants swept her in a wave toward the staircase. She stumbled down the steps, Emmett and his twin reaching to steady her at the same instant. She strained her neck for a last look up at the duke’s suite. Mrs. Halford’s pale round face floated above the balustrade like a melancholy moon.
“I’ll find the laudanum,” Marie-Elaine said at Lily’s back. “There’s a tincture of mullein in the Welsh dresser, on the middle shelf behind the peppermint cordial.”
Lily nodded, but when they reached the bottom of the stairs to go their separate ways, she whispered, “Were those scars on his torso made by a burn?”
The maid dropped her gaze. “Yes. It happened during the fire at the castle.”
“But why should that be another of his secrets? He and I, well, we’re . . . He never spoke of it. Does he blame himself?”
“He doesn’t remember any of it,” Marie-Elaine said with a deep sigh. “The whole tragedy was wiped clean from his mind. He doesn’t remember how he got the scars.”
Chapter 36
The Plymouth innkeeper held a glass of wine to his severely beaten customer’s mouth. The chambermaid who had found the gentleman on the floor of his room had first thought he was dead. She recounted in tears to her employer that the handsome captain had tipped her generously to wake him at four o’clock that morning.
He’d had a vendetta to fulfill, whatever that was, in Calais.
“He said it was his fault that another man had stolen the lady he loved and he was going to prove to her how sorry he was.” She twisted her hands, turning away as the captain released a groan.
The innkeeper shook his head in sympathy. “No one saw who attacked him, but the old gent in the next room thought he heard arguing.”
“Do you think the person will come back?”
He frowned. “If he had a private grudge, I suppose it’s possible. It isn’t good for business. I know that.”
“Well, we can’t just put him on a ship and wish him bon voyage.”
“He’ll be better in a day or so—or he’ll be dead,” the innkeeper said heavily. “Until then we might go through his belongings to find mention of a relative or place of residence so that we can notify his family of his misfortune.”
The chambermaid applied herself to this task, diligently searching the captain’s clothes and traveling case. “There’s a map of Dartmoor here, sir.” She smoothed her hand across the creased folds. “It has a name written on it, too. A duke, no less. Have a look for yourself. Do you think he could possibly be the person responsible for beating this gentleman?”
“Anything is possible in the aristocracy,” he answered with a bitter shrug. “But I am not sure we want to tangle with a duke. The peerage is above the law.”
The duke’s fever broke on the third night.
His illness had depleted the emotional reserves of his staff. Lily dozed off and on the entire day after she realized he would get better. The cook burned a kettle of soup, and it was Bickerstaff who, sniffing the scorched air, flew into the kitchen and smothered the flames with his best broadcloth coat.
“God have mercy on us, woman!” he cried. “Can you imagine what the master would think were he to awaken and smell smoke?”
Mrs. Halford burst into tears. “I was halfway out of my chair before you knocked me back down with your theatrics.”
“That is a lie, Mrs. Halford.” He stared at his ruined coat. “It was your snoring I heard from the pantry.”
“Where you were sneaking a nip,” one of the scullery girls interjected, because she could afford to snap at the butler, but not the cook who generously fed her. “You all but pushed her from the hearth. I saw it. And I will testify in court if I have to.”
“Is that so?” he asked. “Then why didn’t you tend the kettle, you lazy slattern?”
“Mr. Bickerstaff,” the cook said, throwing her arms around the girl’s shoulders. “What a devilish thing to say!”
“Speaking of which,” a droll voice remarked from the arched doorway, “I daresay it is quieter in Dante’s Inferno than in this house. How, I ask, is a man supposed to work in this commotion?”
Lily’s eyes filled. What a dramatist. And yet she loved him all the more dearly for his sense of tragedy.
She hung back as the staff crowded around. Mrs. Halford blinked away tears and offered to make the duke a meal. Bickerstaff heaved a sigh, motioning for Emmett to bring His Grace a chair. The scullery girl picked up a broom and swept the ashes from the hearth.
And Samuel merely smiled, looking more embarrassed by the fuss than anything, staring into Lily’s eyes with an intimate gratitude that pierced her heart.
Lily plunged from one panic to another.
She wanted to make a good impression on Samuel’s sister. Lady Alice was his only surviving relative. She and Mrs. Halford pored over such gastronomical delights as mushroom soufflé, fried apples in custard, and cream-of-carrot soup. The Gobelin carpets were beaten again to within an inch of their weave. The housemaids, under Marie-Elaine’s command, even dared to infiltrate the library to dislodge the cobwebs strung between the vellum-bound volumes that were arranged from Abelard to the life of Zarathustra. Any apple seeds discovered were cautiously moved and reassembled in exact formation on the windowsills of the duke’s office.
None of this pleased Samuel, who, having regained his strength, came to Lily’s bed when she was too exhausted and preoccupied to put up a protest. He had regained his vigor with unearthly speed.
“You can’t continue to take these liberties when your sister is under the same roof.”
“Why not?” he inquired lazily, her nightdress discarded, both of them naked as sin, his fingers caressing her in an undisturbed, determined rhythm.
Lily’s hands moved down his back to his lean buttocks. He did not tense when she touched his scars. “Because I want to make a good—”
He entered her slowly, flexing his spine. “Go on,” he said, his attention clearly superficial, his penetration so welcome that Lily soon lost her own thread of thought.
“I’ll stop if you insist,” he acceded in a whisper, withdrawing from her as if it were a courtesy and not intentional torment.
She locked her ankle around his. “I have to rise before daylight—”
“As
do I.”
“—to attend my housekeeping duties.”
He whispered the words that her unconventional heart most wished to hear. “To hell with housekeeping, Lily. It was not mentioned in the terms of our original contract. Do you think I worry about the cobwebs in the corners?”
“I—” She arched off the mattress and parted her legs to draw him back inside her, whispering, “I don’t care much about cobwebs myself at the moment.”
His tongue swirled around the rim of her ear. Blood stirred in the hidden reaches of her body. “What do you care about?” he asked, his hand encircling her waist.
She shifted, aware that his voice had deepened, that his body felt tense. “Only you,” she said before his eyes locked with hers and he drove so deeply inside her that she cried out in surprise.
“Let me know if this is too rough.”
“It isn’t,” she said breathlessly.
He bent his head and kissed the swollen tips of her breasts. Her heart quickened at the relentless strokes that impaled her. She wanted to feel him embedded all the way. She twisted up, into him, seeking more, until she felt a tightness in her womb. The unbearable tension of impending relief.
Elusive. She was in knots. Soon. She whimpered as he kissed her with a deep and devastating tenderness that left her trembling. “Samuel,” she said in desperation. “I can’t take any more of your teasing. I thought you were kind.”
“But I am.”
She knew then what he meant to do, that he was prolonging, heightening her pleasure. “Cruel,” she whispered, and let him lure her closer and closer until she felt herself uncoil and break into pieces.
He reared up before she recovered. The lines of his face deepened in concentration. His body demanded the same bliss he had given her. She cushioned his every determined thrust, encouraging him by obeying her own instincts.
He moved like seduction unleashed at her urging. She wondered if she would be able to move at all the next morning, if she would even try. For an electrifying moment she met his gaze. She saw past his sensuality to the intense emotions he struggled to hide from the world. He beckoned her into their dark vortex, revealing his vulnerability to her without a word.
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