The Nightingale Legacy

by Catherine Coulter

  “So you must have lived with your mother and father—when he wasn’t back here at Mount Hawke being poisoned by your grandfather—in one of these houses. That seems the most likely, North.”

  “It’s possible. I shall write to my man of business in London and ask him to give me a full accounting. It’s something I must do in any case. He could tell me when my father and mother lived in one of those houses.”

  “Perhaps we could even go to the one in Yorkshire and see your friends. Now, there’s something else I want to tell you, North. No, don’t kiss me again just yet, just listen to me.” She cupped his face between her palms. “You’re my husband. I love you and I will always love you, even when you’re old and haven’t a tooth in your mouth, and all bent over. I’ll still love you. Since I’ll probably be in the same condition, it shouldn’t prove too difficult. I will never, never betray you. I would kill anyone who tried to harm you. You are mine and what is mine I keep forever.”

  His breath hitched. “Caroline,” he said, his hands coming up to clasp her.

  Owen walked whistling into the entrance hall, saw them standing there, Caroline’s arms around her husband’s neck, and said, “What is so serious? Is something wrong? Oh, I say, who are those women? They weren’t there before, were they? No, there weren’t any portraits of women anywhere, and I thought that was quite odd.”

  “No, Owen,” North said, dropping his hands as he turned to face Owen. “Caroline found all my ancestresses in a room on the third floor and brought these two down. We’ll see that the others are restored and hung in their original places.”

  “Caroline always had her nose everywhere when we were growing up,” Owen said, staring at the portraits. “You wouldn’t believe the stories she told me about when she was at Chudleigh’s Young Ladies’ Academy. She was a terror, North, never kept her mouth closed and never minded her own business. She always wanted to fix things, even me. Oh, I got a letter from my father. You won’t believe what he’s done, or perhaps you would, given you know my father quite well.”

  It was very late. Caroline was reading in the library downstairs, a small branch of candles at her elbow. She was wrapped warmly in a scarlet dressing gown that she hoped North would admire excessively and wish to examine closely, then perhaps remove. She missed him and yet he’d been gone only three hours. He was visiting Sir Rafael Carstairs at Carstairs Manor. It had rained hard the past three days and there was a cave-in problem at one of the tin mines. They were meeting with other owners and managers to solve the cave-in and equipment problems in three of the mines.

  It was odd, but she’d discovered that she hadn’t wanted to stay in that big bed alone. It was cold and lonely and she hated it. No, she would wait for him to return, thus her presence in the library, reading Gottfried of Strasbourg’s version of the Tristan and Isolde story, written back in the reign of King John, that mangy and cruel fellow who’d finally been forced by his barons to put ink and quill to the Magna Carta. Good for the barons.

  This story was darker and uglier than Malory’s later tale of doomed lovers, the only person worthy of compassion and respect being the dishonored King Mark. Ah, the patient and virtuous King Mark who only exiled his nephew Tristan and his own wife Isolde for their treachery, didn’t cleave Tristan in two and stick a knife in his young wife’s breast. Caroline knew that if she’d been King Mark, she would have gulleted the betrayers with great pleasure. Ah, but myth was more gentle and more lasting because it skillfully interwove all the classic themes of tragic love, betrayal, just a hint of triumph, but finally death.

  This, then, was the portrait of all the Nightingale men since North’s great-grandfather. How noble they must have believed themselves, and how utterly conceited, comparing themselves to the mythical King Mark of Cornwall, going so far as to claim he’d held court here and not on the southern coast near Fowey, as legend had it.

  At least they hadn’t touched King Arthur, leaving that richly magical king to live and die at Tintagel, a belief held fiercely by many Cornishmen. And, unlike King Arthur, whose legend lived on and on, few seemed to know or care about poor King Mark and his betraying wife and randy nephew. Caroline thought Arthur had been too strong a figure for the Nightingale men to take on, whereas the gracious King Mark, really a wilting ninny, was much easier prey, much more satisfying fodder for their fantasies.

  She rather wished the Nightingale men had picked King Arthur for their idol, for he’d endured, unlike the weakly sweet King Mark. After all, he, too, had been betrayed, by his queen Guinevere and his prize knight, Sir Lancelot. She shook her head. She realized they’d picked King Mark simply because he was the more forgettable, thus not many folk would care enough to bother disagreeing with them and their claims. Where people were impassioned about King Arthur, they were tepid at most when it came to poor old King Mark.

  Caroline settled into the story. It was very difficult to decipher in the medieval French, but she did make out that Tristan, once exiled with Isolde, or Iseult, as the French wrote, swore to be with her “one heart, one troth, one body, one life.” But good old Tristan proceeded to meet another Iseult and fall in love with her. So much for men and their constancy, she thought. Caroline yawned and went to search again through the references to Tristan, reverently collected by all those Nightingale men who had nothing better to do since they were such idiots with their wives.

  Caroline read until the words blurred, her eyes felt gritty, and she yawned hugely. There was so much and it was all, she was certain, from the colorful imagination of Gottfried, whose work, however, was taken quite seriously back in medieval times, silly as it seemed to Caroline now. The book fell from her hands onto her lap, then slipped to the carpet.

  She awoke to a scream that made her fall off the settee.

  30

  SHE WAS ON her feet in an instant, her skirts yanked up to her knees, running into the entrance hall. She skittered to a stop and stared. Owen was straddling Bennett Penrose, his hands fisted in his shirt, shaking him hard, then pounding his head against the pale gold-and-white marble. Bennett was fighting him but he wasn’t having much success. He was yelling like a man who knew he was in dire straits. Caroline felt immense pride in Owen at that moment.

  “Owen! Goodness, I think you’re splendid, but you must stop it, you’ll kill him.”

  “He deserves it, the bloody bugger!” And Owen smacked Bennett’s head again to the marble.

  “Well, he does, true enough, but I don’t want you to hang for killing him.” She lightly touched her hand to Owen’s fist. She saw his rigidity, his utter fury, and realized she’d never seen him so out of control in all his life.

  “I gather it was Bennett who screeched?”

  “Oh yes, and that was even before I hit him the first time, bloody little weasel.” Owen looked down at Bennett Penrose, whose nose was bleeding profusely and who looked dazed and very pale in the dim candlelight cast by the wall sconces. He didn’t yell again. Caroline thought he realized it would cast him into a very poor light to be yelling like a demented goat.

  Caroline ripped off a strip from her petticoat. “Here, Bennett, wipe your nose. I don’t want you bleeding on the beautiful marble. North wouldn’t like it.”

  Owen got off him and stared down at the very handsome young man who was now struggling to sit up, dabbing his bloody nose. There was a wealth of dislike and, Caroline thought, of contempt in Owen’s voice. Well, he had beaten Bennett very satisfactorily. “Now, Penrose, you’ll tell us why you were sneaking about.”

  Bennett continued to rub at his nose, without much success.

  “Oh, goodness, let’s go to the kitchen and get some water,” Caroline said, and led the way to the nether regions.

  Owen shoved Bennett into one of the chairs around the huge kitchen table where, Caroline realized, the three male martinets ate their meals with the three females. She wished she could be present at one of those meals. They probably gave each other severe indigestion. She could just hear Chloe and
Molly giggling at nothing in particular and see the pained look on Tregeagle’s face.

  Caroline wet a cloth and handed it to Bennett. She wanted to smash it against his nose herself. “Keep cleaning yourself up and tell us what you were doing here.”

  “Nothing, I wasn’t doing anything,” Bennett said finally. He sounded for the world like a sulky boy. “This stupid fool jumped me, caught me completely by surprise, and when I hit the floor the blow stunned me so this fool could gain the advantage on me, otherwise it would have been he with the bloody nose and the cracked skull.”

  Owen snorted and rubbed his bruised knuckles with satisfaction.

  “No, Owen, don’t hit him again,” Caroline said. “He will, you know, Bennett, and so will I if you don’t tell us what you were doing here. You and I made a bargain. You got money and I was free of you, forever, as were all my friends. Now here you are again, skulking around at Mount Hawke very late at night. I would say that you’re extremely lucky that North isn’t here. He would kill you.”

  “I knew he wasn’t here,” Bennett said behind the cloth, now dotted liberally with his blood. “I’m not stupid.”

  “Ah, so you thought that since it would just be Caroline, you damned bugger, you could do whatever you wanted.”

  Caroline wondered at that moment what Owen was doing here. Well, at least his purpose wouldn’t be of a nefarious sort. “Why, Bennett?”

  “You damned hound, you weren’t coming after Alice again, were you?” It was close but Caroline managed to hold Owen’s hands down until he calmed sufficiently.

  “Good God, no,” Bennett said. “Keep him away from me, Caroline, or I might be forced to hurt him. I wasn’t after Alice. That little slut is probably so fat and ugly now I would puke to look at her. No, I lost the money. It wasn’t my fault. This fellow cheated me out of it, the bastard.”

  “You lost the money gambling?”

  Bennett nodded.

  “You came here to steal something?”

  “Well, not really, perhaps something small and not cumbersome, maybe Lord Chilton’s strongbox from his estate room if I could have found it. But I didn’t even find the estate room because this fool caught me by surprise.”

  “I find that remarkably interesting.”

  The three of them turned to see North standing in the kitchen door, leaning negligently against the door frame, his arms crossed over his chest. “You are the most miserable worm I have ever known in my life,” he continued to Bennett in an utterly dispassionate voice. “Caroline, my dear, I trust the worm hasn’t overset your nerves?”

  “Yes, he did with his yelling. I fell off the settee in the library. You see, North, I’d fallen asleep waiting for you. I ran out like a demented dervish to see Owen sitting on Bennett’s chest in the entrance hall. He was bashing his head quite nicely against the marble. I moved Bennett here when I realized his nose was bleeding. I didn’t want him ruining that beautiful marble.”

  “Very thoughtful of you,” North said, still not moving. He looked very dangerous in that moment, and Caroline shivered. It was his stillness that was so frightening, that outward calm that wouldn’t give an enemy a clue that he was ready to kill.

  “I shouldn’t have stopped,” Owen said, looking at North. “He’s always going to be a problem, North. At least my father has settled things.”

  “Yes, he did, didn’t he, and we never expected him to do it.”

  “If your father told the truth in his letter,” Caroline said. “Mr. Ffalkes is a cunning fellow. I’m sorry, Owen, but it’s true.”

  “I know from painful experience that you’re right,” Owen said. “But this time I believe him. He will marry Mrs. Tailstrop but I do think he’ll snag her pug Lucy and drop the animal in a ditch. He quite hates it, you know.”

  “I’ve written to Mrs. Tailstrop,” North said. “We’ll see what she has to say.”

  “I didn’t know you’d done that,” Caroline said. “That was very smart of you, North, not that it surprises me.” She sighed then, eyeing Bennett, who was suspiciously quiet, just dabbing his nose.

  “What will we do with him?”

  “Let me beat him to a pulp,” Owen said, and massaged his knuckles vigorously.

  “We could hang him with the three male martinets,” Caroline said hopefully. “He could rot and fall to the ground with the rest of them and the apples we don’t end up picking.”

  North just shook his head at them. “A nice thought, but not enough finesse, Caroline. It’s such a pity we’re certain he didn’t kill your aunt or the other two women. That, I admit, does depress me.” He paused a long moment, giving Bennett a very thorough look. Finally, he said, “Why not send him to your father, Owen?”

  Owen gave a bark of laughter and Caroline grinned. “Oh goodness, he’d whip Bennett into shape, North—that or he’d kill him. What do you think, Caroline?”

  “Hmmm, Bennett could work for your father, couldn’t he, Owen? Either that or North could see that he was transported to the Colonies.”

  “It’s either going to Honeymead Manor or starving,” North said. “You don’t have a sou, do you, Penrose?”

  Bennett, still blotting at his nose, shook his head.

  “Nor do you have my strongbox.”

  Again, Bennett, shuddering only slightly, shook his head.

  “I don’t suppose you want to be transported?”

  Bennett put his face in his hands. He was silent as the clock that had stood in the corner of the kitchen that had stopped running the moment it was brought into Mount Hawke some seventy-five years before.

  “Well?”

  Bennett moaned and said behind his handkerchief, “I never heard of any heiresses in the Colonies.”

  “I’ve finally found our squirrelly lad,” North said to Caroline a week later when they sat across from each other at the breakfast table. It was quite early and thus they were the only ones present.

  “The one who couldn’t put two words together without jumping out of his boots?”

  “That’s the one. Flash tracked him down in Trevellas. He’s the son of a dairy farmer. He took Timmy the maid there before he took me just to make sure he had the right lad. Poor Timmy the maid couldn’t imagine how he didn’t know him. It upset him terribly that he’d let me down.”

  “All right, tell me. Who gave him the letter?”

  “Coombe.”

  She felt both relief and depression. “Oh,” she said. “Well, at least we know.”

  “Would you like to be with me when I confront Coombe with this?”

  “Yes, I suppose it would be best. Oh dear, North, the three of them have been so quiet lately. I’d rather hoped they’d come to grips with things.”

  “Oh no, I never believed that for a moment,” North said. He rose and tossed his napkin onto the white tablecloth. “More’s the pity.”

  An hour later in the library, Coombe stood before his lordship, who was sitting behind the massive mahogany desk that dominated the entire corner. Coombe saw movement from the corner of his eye and felt a spasm of anger wash through him. It was that upstart girl who’d managed to snare his innocent noble lordship, the Female Person the master still doted on. What was going on?

  “I met a young boy named Johnny Trilby, a lad who stutters and who does odd errands for people who pay him well because he’s a cute little fellow and they feel sorry for him. His father approves, you see, lets him out of his chores on the dairy farm because the people pay him well and the father takes just about all of it.”

  Coombe stood straighter, saying nothing, looking over North’s left shoulder.

  “Young Johnny told me you paid him to give me that letter. Odd but I didn’t recognize your handwriting, Coombe, but I haven’t seen much of it, have I, since my return? And I was only sixteen when I left Mount Hawke.”

  “There is a mistake, my lord,” Coombe said, his voice smooth as the bolt of crimson velvet that North had bought from a tinker near Oporto, Portugal, two years before and pl
anned to give to Caroline at Christmas. He’d carried it around with him for so long it probably had moth holes in it. “Yes,” Coombe said, “it’s a mistake and not at all my fault. I venture to say it is all her fault, for everything has been topsy-turvy since she came here that first time, pretending she was in shock over her aunt’s death.”

  Caroline said, “Your timing was excellent, Coombe, that or your luck. You had to have Johnny Trilby deliver that letter to his lordship when you knew that Dr. Treath was off to see me.”

  “No, Caroline,” North said. “It wasn’t difficult at all. I fancy if we question Dr. Treath, he too will have received a message purporting to be from you, Caroline, telling him you were concerned and wanted to see him. Doubtless you also wrote in your letter that you would be pleased if he wouldn’t speak of it, to anyone, including you. Am I right, Coombe?”

  Caroline said after the silence stretched on without Coombe filling it, “I’m very curious about something, Coombe. Do you really believe that all the Nightingale wives betrayed their husbands?”

  “Dead sure,” Coombe said, stiff as a nail, staring still over North’s left shoulder. “Disloyal trollops, every one of them.”

  “Yet you lied to North, telling him that I was meeting my lover when in truth it was all a fabrication.”

  “You will betray him, it’s just a matter of time. I only wanted him to get rid of you now before you really do cuckold him and make his life a misery.”

  “You want him rid of me even before I present him with an heir?”

  “No, never! I—oh, dear.”

  “It appears you didn’t think things through clearly, Coombe,” North said. “It appears your dislike of her ladyship and all the changes she’s brought to Mount Hawke clouded your reasoning. You mucked it up, didn’t you?”

  Coombe nodded now. “Yes, I suppose I didn’t think things through, my lord. I wanted her gone from here so you could be happy again.”

  North could only stare at Coombe in utter astonishment. “Happy again? When the devil was I ever happy? Before I escaped my father and his utter lunacy? As happy as I was when my grandfather was still alive and ranting and screeching around here like a lunatic, not even allowing the vicar’s wife to visit Mount Hawke, much less any person who happened to be female? As happy as I was in the army getting shot at in more battles than I care to remember? As happy as I was in my solitude, for a man alone I’ve been all my life, Coombe. Good God, man, I don’t believe I’ve ever been quite so happy in my entire bloody life as I am now. With her. With my wife. Do you understand me, Coombe, she’s my wife.”