Lord Lynche opened his hand and looked down at her crushed fingers.
“Such a little hand, he said, “and yet it is strong enough to kill a man who deserved it.”
“That is not the law,” Carina pointed out.
“Do you think I care about the law or anything else except you?” Lord Lynche asked. “Why cannot we run away now, this very moment? Leave The Castle by the back door? We could be in France in the morning.”
“And forsake your mother?” Carina asked him. “Have you told her yet what happened last night?”
“I am not as brave as you,” Lord Lynche answered. “My lawyer arrived a few minutes before dinner was announced. I have not even told him as yet.”
“And if Sir Percy dies?” Carina asked.
“It will make no difference,” he said, his voice firm and resolute. “A debt of honour is a debt of honour and he must be paid in full and, as you know, at once. Presumably Percy has heirs. And they will inherit The Castle.”
Carina gave a little muffled cry.
“I thought that – I might have saved you,” she said.
“You have,” he replied. “You have saved me from myself, from thinking that money and position were all important. I know now there is something that outweighs them all. Shall I tell you what it is?”
“What is it?” Carina asked innocently.
“Love,” he answered. “Love such as I feel for you and I believe that you feel for me.”
He took a deep breath and then he released her hand and drew back from her.
“I dare not touch you,” he said, “or I shall take you in my arms and, if I did that, then whatever the loss in honour and decency, I should carry you away with me. Help me, help me, Carina, because I love you beyond the point of self-control.”
“I love you too,” she sighed. “But what – what is this secret that lies between us?”
“Don’t ask me,” Lord Lynche replied. “I beg of you not to ask me. As I have already told you, it is not my secret to divulge.”
Carina fought once more against the conviction that she must not break her promise.
Then, before anything else could be said, there came a knock on the open door and they saw that a footman stood waiting.
“Excuse me, my Lord,” he said. “Colonel Wakeford has asked if you will step downstairs.”
“Tell him I am coming,” Lord Lynche said.
“Very good, my Lord.”
They heard the footman run down the stairs.
Lord Lynche held out his hands.
“Come with me,” he said, “for I do not intend to leave you here alone.”
“I don’t want to be left,” Carina said. “I think I am afraid of my thoughts.”
She glanced round the nursery at the unopened bottle of champagne still standing in the centre of the table in the silver wine cooler, the pistol lying in its mother-of-pearl box, which she could see through the open door into the bedroom, the smear of drying blood on the floor and Dipa’s little white vest that he had worn that day hanging over the fireguard.
She felt a sudden terror that she would never come up here again, never feel the warmth of the fire or see the rocking-horse standing sentinel in front of the window.
But she knew that nothing she could say or do now could put back the clock.
The die was cast. She had taken the initiative into her own hands when she had drawn her mother’s pistol from the trunk and had made up her mind to kill the man who had wrecked both hers and her parents’ lives.
Slowly, with a little swish of her skirts, she moved towards Lord Lynche and placed her hands in his.
“It is not right that you should go through all this,” he asserted. “I would that I could bear it for you.”
She smiled at him a little unsteadily and, as she did so, she realised that the hunger of her lips was echoed by his.
There was an expression of yearning in his face that seemed to transform him from a bitter reserved man into an unhappy boy.
In that moment she longed as she had never longed before to put her arms around his neck and to pull down his head to her breast to comfort him.
For a moment she clung to his hand, feeling the strength of his fingers reassuring her. Then, as they had nothing more to say, they walked together in silence side by side down the staircase.
On the broad landing on the first floor most of the gentlemen of the party were congregated, standing outside what Carina guessed must be Sir Percy’s bedroom.
They were all talking excitedly together, but, as Carina and Lord Lynche appeared, there was a sudden silence.
Carina noticed that once again they avoided looking at her, turning their eyes away as if she was already a condemned woman.
Instinctively, because she was afraid not of them but of their unspoken condemnation, she drew a little closer to Lord Lynche.
“I told the groom to fetch a doctor, Justin,” Colonel Wakeford said, walking towards them, “and by a bit of luck the doctor was dining with your agent. It only took a few minutes to bring him here. He arrived a second or so ago and he is with Percy now. Would you like to go in to him?”
“I would rather you saw to it for me,” Lord Lynche answered.
“Of course,” Colonel Wakeford replied and turned and walked through the door that led to the bedroom.
“Suppose we go downstairs?” Lord Lynche suggested to the other gentlemen, who were now looking awkward and a little embarrassed. “I can imagine no more uncomfortable place to wait than on a draughty landing.”
He offered Carina his arm as he spoke. She put her fingers elegantly on it and her other hand on the banisters and they moved slowly downstairs.
Lord Lynche led Carina into the big drawing room, the room she had never seen before.
It was magnificent, and yet there was something cold and impersonal about it. And so instinctively she compared it with the room she had seen earlier in the day with its Adam ceiling, beautiful marble mantelpiece and long windows looking out onto the garden.
At one end of the drawing room there were the green baize tables that had brought disaster to Lord Lynche.
As they moved past them, Carina longed to call out that they must be burned and banned for ever from men who throw away all that they hold dear simply for the excitement of pitting their luck against each other.
Lord Lynche took her to a gold brocade sofa at the far end of the room and she seated herself, arranging the skirts of her dress around her.
Because she was a woman, she felt glad that in this moment of tragedy and crisis she did not feel crushed and insignificant, as she would have been had she not dressed herself with care.
Lord Lynche’s guests shuffled in one by one. They were obviously ill at ease, not knowing quite what to say.
So they talked amongst themselves and Lord Lynche stood strong and silent with his back towards the fireplace, an expression on his face that was difficult to read and his eyebrows slightly knit together in a frown.
Carina felt that to wait any longer would be unbearable, but at length the door opened and the doctor came in.
He was a middle-aged, kindly looking man and Lord Lynche moved across the room to shake him by the hand.
“It is good of you to come so quickly, Dr. Dalton,” he said.
“It was fortunate that I was dining so near,” the doctor replied.
He had somewhat bushy eyebrows, but the eyes underneath them were piercing and perceptive.
He looked around him, his glance resting on Carina for a moment before he said,
“I would like you to order your carriage, my Lord. I wish to remove Sir Percy to hospital.”
“He is alive?” Lord Lynche asked and Carina knew that it was the question that had been on everyone’s lips and on their minds since the doctor entered the room.
“But of course,” the doctor replied. “The shot was in the right arm, not the body.”
Carina felt the tension collapse as if it was tangible and fo
r a moment she held her breath, hardly able to believe what she heard.
“In the arm,” Lord Lynche repeated with a somewhat dazed expression on his face.
“Unfortunately the bone is shattered,” the doctor continued. “I think the arm will have to be amputated, although I shall know better when we take him to the hospital.”
“By Jove!” someone ejaculated. “That means Percy will not be able to play cards again. It’s his right arm.”
There were little smiles on the lips of several of the men present,
and Carina knew that, because they were the type of men who enjoyed each other’s misfortunes, they were glad that such just retribution should have overtaken Sir Percy.
“Then he is not going to die?” Lord Lynche said, almost as if he must hear again the confirmation before he could believe it.
“Die? Of course not!” the doctor snapped. “He fainted, that was why he was unconscious, from fear, I should imagine.”
“Fear – !”
The word seemed to repeat in a hiss around the room. There was nothing that could have been more damning for a person of Sir Percy’s calibre than to feel fear at the sight of a revolver held in a woman’s hand.
Lord Lynche walked towards the bell-pull and gave it a sharp tug.
“A carriage will be ordered immediately,” he said. “Will you ask for anything you may require to make your patient more comfortable, doctor?”
“Thank you, my Lord.”
The doctor walked briskly from the room and, as soon as he had gone, the silence that had encompassed everyone since Carina and Lord Lynche appeared on the landing was broken.
The guests laughed and talked amongst themselves and then most of them almost instinctively seemed to gravitate towards the card tables.
There was a grog table at that end of the room and Carina saw them go up one after another to help themselves as if they were in need of sustenance and stimulation after what had occurred before they could return to normal life.
After a second or so Carina and Lord Lynche were left alone at the other end of the drawing room.
Lord Lynche suddenly sat down beside her on the sofa, sitting forward so that he was between her and the rest of the room, a protective shield from anyone who might now have felt he was no longer inhibited from looking at her.
“I have failed,” Carina said a little wistfully.
“No, you have succeeded,” Lord Lynche answered. “You have inflicted on him a far worse punishment than death and you have prevented him from ever robbing anyone else as he has robbed your father and me.”
“Will he still keep everything?” Carina asked.
“I will not begrudge it him,” Lord Lynche said, “for I have a feeling that Percy would give it all up for the use of his right arm.”
“I feel deflated,” Carina said. “I was ready – to go to prison.”
“You have done something that even Percy’s death might not have accomplished,” Lord Lynche said. “You have made his friends see that he is, after all, a chicken-hearted chap. They will never forget that he fainted from fear. And laughter is harder to bear than even a disability.”
“He will keep Claverly and he will have The Castle,” Carina said. “I hoped to prevent him ever enjoying such things again.”
She saw the expression on Lord Lynche’s face.
“You are remembering that you have not told your mother,” she said intuitively.
“I know,” he answered. “I must go now and talk to my lawyer and then I must be brave and face her. Your courage will give me the strength for that.”
“Oh, don’t talk about my courage,” Carina said. “I feel ashamed and rather foolish. I have tried to do so much, and achieved – well, nothing.”
Lord Lynche did not answer and after a moment Carina asked in a low voice,
“If you leave The Castle, what will happen to Dipa and me?”
“You will come with me wherever I go,” he answered. “Do you think that I can be without you, without seeing you and without knowing that you are there?”
She felt the flames rise within her at his words and at the passion in his voice.
“Could we bear it?” she asked. “Knowing that we cannot express our love – for reasons that you will not tell me?”
“I am not certain that I could bear it,” he answered, “day after day, year after year, seeing you and yet being unable to touch you.”
“I love you,” she whispered. “Isn’t that more important than your secret?”
She saw the glow in his eyes and the sudden tightening of his lips.
“Don’t tempt me too far,” he replied in a voice hoarse with emotion. “I want you more than I could believe it possible ever to want a woman. I love you as if you were an angel in Heaven itself, but also as a man loves his wife who means more to him than anything else on earth. I want to kiss you, I want to hold you close to me, I want to make you mine. Oh, Carina, try to understand, but don’t drive me too far.”
She felt herself trembling at his words and as if the passion in his voice swept over her in a full tide.
And then she rose to her feet.
“I must – go,” she said a little unsteadily.
He rose as well and she saw that he was very white but his eyes were dark and, when he looked at her, she felt as if he kissed her lips.
He moved towards the door and had just reached it when Colonel Wakeford came into the room holding something in his hand.
“Look what I have here,” he exclaimed.
He flung it down on one of the baize tables and Carina saw that it was a box packed full of playing cards.
“What the devil is it?” one of the players who had been interrupted from his game demanded.
“I got it in Percy’s room when I was helping the doctor get him ready to go to hospital,” Colonel Wakeford answered.
“I saw his valet trying to kick it out of sight. It made me curious and I insisted on seeing what it was. It is full of cards, fifty or sixty packs all wrapped up with the seals unbroken. You see them?”
“Well, what of it?” someone asked. “Percy told me once that he usually makes his host a present of a number of new packs. He said that if there was one thing he disliked it was dirty cards and people in the country seldom have enough new ones in their house.”
“He brought you some cards when he arrived here, didn’t he?” Colonel Wakeford asked Lord Lynche.
“Yes, I believe he did,” Lord Lynche replied vaguely, “but we had a lot in the house as it happened. Percy seemed to want to play with his, so I thanked him for bringing them.”
“He wanted to play with his,” Colonel Wakeford said significantly. “Exactly.”
He turned to one of the older men in the room.
“Arthur,” he said, “I would like you to open one of those packs and put it down on the table in front of you.”
The elderly man took a pack from the case, broke the seal and, unwrapping the fresh crisp cards, spread them out in front of him on the green baize table.
“Well?” he asked.
“Justin, do you have a magnifying glass?” Colonel Wakeford enquired.
“I think so,” Lord Lynche replied.
He walked towards a desk and came back with a large magnifying glass with a silver rim and a handle engraved with the Lynche crest.
Colonel Wakeford took it from him and gave it to Lord Arthur.
“Look at the cards closely,” he said.
He picked one up, turned it face down and put it in front of him.
“This one, for instance, it is the ace of spades. Do you see anything peculiar about the back of it?”
Lord Arthur inspected it carefully.
“I am not sure,” he said after a moment.
Colonel Wakeford was searching through the pack.
“This is the king of hearts,” he said and put it down beside the other card, “and here is the king of diamonds.”
“Good Lord!” Lord Arthur ejacul
ated. “You mean – ”
“I mean what you can see,” Colonel Wakeford said. “The cards are marked.”
“I don’t believe it,” someone cried.
“See for yourself,” Colonel Wakeford replied. “I opened four packs upstairs before I came down here. You see that tiny white marking? It is almost imperceptible unless you know where to look for it. It might have been a printer’s error, but you will find it on every ace and king in the pack. Look for yourselves.”
Hands went out to snatch the cards from the case. The wrappings were thrown on the floor and the cards were spread out.
“It’s true!” someone exclaimed. “By Heaven! I would not have believed it!”
The room was quiet for a moment and then someone sprang to his feet.
“By God, the swine shall pay for this!” he cried. “He took twenty thousand off me last month and I had to go to the money-lenders to pay it. He was cheating – cheating – cheating all the time and we never realised it!”
“I think sometimes he played straight,” Colonel Wakeford said, “but he would egg one on, working up to a kind of climax until a great deal hung on the turn of a card. Then he knew what to play and how to play it.”
“I will have him hounded out of every Club in London,” Lord Arthur said quietly, which was somehow more dramatic than if he had spoken with any expression in his voice.
“But he must repay me at any rate,” the man who had lost twenty thousand pounds said almost hysterically.
“I think we can say that all debts for the last six months will be refunded or cancelled,” Lord Arthur replied. “Beyond that the situation would be too difficult. Huntleigh, you have, I know, lost not only large sums of money, but also a property in Berkshire. I will undertake that the deeds are returned to you. And, Drayton, you owe him about ten thousand since we have been here. Forget it.”
Lord Arthur hesitated and looked at Lord Lynche.
“Need I go on?” he said with a thin smile. “I think you are all feeling a sense of relief.”
“I am feeling more than that!” a man exclaimed. “I would like to kick the swine from one end of St. James’s to the other. One thing is certain, that we will see he never plays again.”
The Fire of Love Page 18