Blackhaven Brides (Books 5–8)

by Lancaster, Mary

  Benedict smiled. It wasn’t pleasant. “We can’t stop the flow of words from her now.”

  Swayle felt sick to his stomach. He could deny whatever the child said, but he could not denounce her, make out she was lying from hatred since he’d just spent weeks convincing everyone he and Rosa loved each other like father and daughter.

  “You made her,” he managed to choke out.

  “Made her what, Swayle?” Benedict pressed. “And I really think you should remove your hand from Mrs. Grant’s arm, for she does not care for it. And if Grant does not knock you down, I will.”

  “More violence, sir?” Swayle snapped, clutching at straws. However, he released Mrs. Grant, whom he’d forgotten in the sudden confrontation with Benedict. He needed to get away from here and either regroup or move on. Perhaps he should go back to London…

  With what dignity he could muster he stalked past Benedict, ignoring the vicar and Richard Benedict who were approaching rapidly. He swiped up his cane from the corner he’d left it in and leaned on it a little more than before as he made his way out of the ballroom to the blessed coolness of the foyer.

  Here he could at least draw breath and think. He could not ignominiously turn tail and run, for that would surely confirm his guilt. He would refresh himself in the gentlemen’s cloakroom and pray for inspiration.

  Forcing himself to smile and bow to the few late arrivals in the foyer, he walked past them and abruptly stopped, staring at the individual leaning beside the doorman as though having a pleasant chat.

  “Miller!” he blurted.

  Miller grinned and tipped his disreputable hat. “Mr. Swayle.”

  What the doorman was thinking of, allowing such an individual into these hallowed halls on the night of a gentry ball, was beyond Swayle. Presumably Miller had, finally, come to report his abject failure. Too late, for the evidence was flaunting herself inside.

  “Get out,” Swayle snarled. “I’ll deal with you later.”

  “This the man?” the doorman said. And Swayle, peering closer, saw that it was a different doorman from the last time he’d been here.

  “Aye, that’s him,” said Miller, and the doorman straightened so suddenly that Swayle knew without doubt that he’d made a deadly mistake.

  “Name’s Bolton,” the “doorman” said conversationally. “I’m from Bow Street, and you, Mr. Swayle, are under arrest.”

  There was nothing else for it. Swayle leapt back and lashed upward with his cane.

  “Watch out,” came Benedict’s warning cry from behind. “It’s a sword-stick!”

  He remembered, damn him, he remembered everything. But it was too late. Swayle had already drawn the sword free and thrust hard, not at the runner but at Miller.

  *

  Caroline had observed the moment Swayle began to make his way out of the ballroom. Although naturally outraged by his part in trying to kill her—for no better reason than to make Javan suffer—it was his cruelty to Rosa that made her really want to witness his downfall.

  She excused herself from the group of people Serena had introduced her to and followed him. She wasn’t surprised to meet her husband in the doorway. She even took his arm and felt the hint of tension in him. For he had planned this with military precision, including the unsettling of Swayle by their presence and by the accusations that had come from Kate Grant. They had been supposed to come from her husband the vicar, but it seemed Kate had got there first. Either way, the encounter had its desired effect. Swayle had left the ballroom, where the Bow Street Runner and Killer Miller awaited him.

  There were only a few people in the foyer, and voices carried. Caroline heard Miller’s identification quite clearly, and then the runner’s somewhat arrogant introduction.

  “Damn it,” Javan muttered, detaching his arm from her hold. “Bolton’s supposed to secure him before her reveals–”

  He was already running across the entrance hall and shouting his warning when Swayle jumped out of easy reach and dragged the sword from his cane. His intention was clear—silence the man whom he’d paid to commit murder. And Miller was both bound and hemmed in by the door and the wall.

  Terrified for Javan, Caroline stumbled after him. Two ladies emerging from the cloakroom screamed. A gentleman shouted a furious demand that the fight be taken outside.

  Then Javan slammed into Swayle’s back, his arm streaking around his enemy’s throat and locking hard as he dragged him back. The sword missed Miller’s heart by a fraction of an inch.

  Swayle jerked, trying to shake him off, to make use of the weapon in his right hand. But the sword could not reach Javan, and Swayle could not dislodge him with his constricted elbows or his feet. Javan seized his right wrist in a grip so hard that Swayle cried out in his effort to hold on to his weapon.

  “You, stay where you are,” the runner instructed Miller and advanced menacingly upon Swayle.

  The sword clattered to the floor, and Bolton, the runner, scooped it up. Javan’s arm squeezed tighter until Swayle made a horrible choking noise. Caroline, her heart in her mouth, was suddenly terrified that Javan would kill him. She ran the last few paces, seizing his free arm.

  “Javan, don’t,” she pleaded.

  “Give him up to me now, sir,” the runner said authoritatively.

  Javan gave a last squeeze and almost hurled Swayle into Bolton’s grip. “Of course.”

  Only then, with Swayle safe and choking in his hold, did the runner turn to Miller. “You still here?”

  Miller shrugged. “I could have legged it while you wrestled with him. Didn’t seem right when the colonel there saved my life. I take it kindly, sir.”

  “Don’t,” Javan said. “I need you to send this dog to prison, if not to the hangman.”

  “Happy to oblige.”

  “We got it written down and witnessed,” the runner said carelessly. “Magistrate don’t care if he’s there or not.”

  “Then I’d no need to hurry,” Javan said flippantly.

  “Very glad you did,” Miller admitted, jerking his head at the runner, “for he was no help, blabbing before he was meant to. Just cause a man looks like a cowardly weasel don’t mean he’ll come quietly.”

  Bolton had the grace to look sheepish, muttering that no harm had been done.

  “No,” Javan agreed, his fist clenching once more. “It gave me the chance to hurt him, to feel the breath leaving his body.”

  “I never laid a finger on Rosa,” Swayle gasped. “She’s lying if she says I did.”

  Sparks flew from Javan’s eyes. Caroline couldn’t prevent him stepping closer. “No, you didn’t need to,” he uttered with searing contempt. “You just threatened her, frightened her into never revealing your pathetic plan to kill me when I came home. She overheard you and Louisa discussing it, and you scared her, a child of eight, who didn’t even understand most of what you’d planned, with vile threats I will not repeat here. You told her she’d never see either of her parents again if she ever opened her mouth. Children can be literal. She never did open her mouth. If she never said anything, she’d never say the thing you’d kill us for. Louisa dying only reinforced your threats in her mind.”

  Javan’s fingers curled reassuringly around Caroline’s pleading hand. He took a breath and even smiled, though it wasn’t a pleasant smile. “But here’s the thing, Swayle. She beat you without speaking. She wrote it all down.”

  She had. On their return to Blackhaven this afternoon, they’d called first on Dr. Lampton to get him to look at Caroline’ wound. Afterward, he’d shown them his notebook where Rosa had written her answers to his questions on their last meeting. And where she’d drawn a picture of what had frightened her.

  “I didn’t think anything of it at first,” Lampton had told them. “I thought it was just her doodling, a way of avoiding what I’d asked her to think about. For the answers she wrote down were evasive and uninformative in the extreme. But it was a good drawing for a child of her age, and I began to think I’d actually seen this
fellow. Have I? Have you?”

  And Rosa had come and taken the book from them, and without urging, had sat at Dr. Lampton’s desk and written down a long, terrible stream of words. By the end, tears were dropping onto the paper, blotting the ink, and she’d clung to her father, trembling and weeping silently into his coat.

  If Caroline had not already loved him to distraction, she would have fallen for him just for the way he comforted Rosa, a mixture of gentle explanations and praise and a secure, constant embrace. Caroline’s throat constricted all over again at the memory, at the thought of the child’s pain. And Javan’s fury, so tightly controlled that his hand trembled as soon as it stopped stroking Rosa’s hair.

  Bolton opened the door to haul his prisoner out.

  “And him?” Swayle asked, as though he couldn’t help it. “How did you get a runner here so fast?”

  “Actually, it took some time,” Javan said. “I wrote to Bow Street as soon as I saw you at Braithwaite Castle. It wasn’t my first discussion with the runners about you, but a year ago I had no proof. This time, because they thought you’d followed me, they were more interested.” He swung away, dragging Caroline’s hand through his arm. “For Rosa and for Caroline, I hope they hang you. Take him away, Bolton, before I kill him myself.”

  Inevitably, perhaps, it was Serena who lightened the moment. At the head of the throng that had spilled out of the ballroom to see the “fight”, she gave a pleased little clap at Javan’s parting line. And the applause was taken up by several people and then by everyone in the vicinity.

  Javan looked startled, then amused in a slightly embarrassed way. He bowed dramatically before the company, like a stage actor, which delighted them further. Then he led Caroline through the throng and back into the ballroom.

  “You’d better dance with me now to let the noise die down,” he muttered.

  “It won’t die down if you dance with your own wife,” she warned humorously. “You’ll be shunned.”

  “Oh well,” he said, taking her into his arms, for it was a waltz which had struck up. He held her carefully, allowing her injured arm to lie across her breast. “They might as well know that the wicked governess who set her cap at an earl and a baronet before me, has finally caught her lesser man.”

  “There is nothing lesser about you, Javan,” she said warmly. “There never was.”

  “And were you never a wicked governess?” he teased.

  “No,” she said with dignity. She let her thumb caress his hand. “Or at least, only in my thoughts.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Caroline had noticed Colonel Fredericks almost as soon as they’d arrived at the ball, but with the matter of Swayle looming largest in her mind, she didn’t truly consider his possible importance to Javan until she saw him again after the waltz.

  Leaving Javan to explain the recent events in the foyer to Lord Tamar, she slipped away to speak to Fredericks, who was then sitting beside Miss Muir and her young sister-in-law. Caroline greeted the ladies, who were friends of Serena’s, and turned to the colonel.

  “I don’t suppose you remember me, sir—”

  “Of course I do, Mrs. Benedict,” he said at once. “And I’m very glad you’ve led the colonel out of cover.”

  “I wonder if I might have a word, sir?”

  Fredericks sprang to his feet with unexpected energy. “Of course. Excuse me ladies, must stretch these old legs of mine! Let us take a turn about the room, Mrs. Benedict, while you tell me what I can do for you.”

  “I believe,” Caroline began delicately, “that you are most knowledgeable about the war on the Peninsula and privy to information that passes the rest of us by.”

  “Certainly I am curious—not to say nosey!—by nature.”

  “Do you know of the fort at San Pedro?”

  “I know the place you mean.”

  “The British took it in the spring of 1812, and then I believe the French took it back in the summer.”

  “Fortunes of war,” the colonel said with a shrug.

  “How did the French take it?” she asked bluntly.

  “Head on, I believe. We evacuated.”

  Caroline took a deep breath. “Were the British betrayed? Was that why they were so overwhelmed at San Pedro?”

  Fredericks blinked and cast a glance that might have been involuntary, at Javan, who was then walking into the card room with Tamar and a couple of the marquis’s cronies.

  “Actually, it was a tactical withdrawal,” he said. “We wanted a large number of French shut up in the fort so that a large contingent of troops could get through to Badajoz. And in fact, San Pedro was back in British hands within a month.”

  “Then it was already back in British hands by the time Javan escaped?”

  “I believe so,” Fredericks said, looking mystified. “Why do you ask?”

  She took a deep breath and lowered her voice. “The French told my husband he’d babbled in his fever—no doubt torture-induced—and betrayed the way in to San Pedro.”

  She needed to know, for Javan’s sake. For her own, she did not care what a man said when he had no control of his words. She would love Javan whatever he had said or done and nothing could change that now. But she so wanted to set his mind at rest. To stop the nightmares if she could.

  “Spite,” Fredericks said with a shrug. “Probably because he’d told them nothing. The French would always have got into San Pedro, because that was where we wanted them for those few days at least.”

  She frowned. “Did Javan not know that?”

  “Of course not. His task was not connected to San Pedro when he was taken. His troops achieved their own objective before they were overwhelmed getting back to the main army. Some of them were captured. That I cannot discuss with you at the moment, so I hope it is not relevant to your…inquiry.”

  “I don’t believe it is,” she said warmly. “Colonel, might I ask you another favor? Would you speak to my husband? You see, I think he believes his honor is lost. That is why he sold his commission.”

  “And spoke to no one but Wellington before he did,” Fredericks said thoughtfully. His gaze refocused on Caroline and he patted her arm, before presenting her with a glass of champagne and sauntering off to the card room.

  Five minutes later, Caroline couldn’t help glancing in. Her husband sat some distance from the card tables, his elbows on his knees, his eyes on his crossed hands as Fredericks talked beside him. His scar was livid from the rigid set of his jaw. Then, slowly, Javan raised his gaze to Fredericks’s face. He did not blink.

  Fredericks stood and briefly gripped his shoulder before walking away to the tables. Surreptitiously, like a boy ashamed to reveal grief, Javan dashed his sleeve quickly over his face, then sprang to his feet and strode away to the opposite door that led to the foyer rather than the ballroom.

  Caroline smiled rather shakily, praying she’d done the right thing. But when she walked into the foyer, it was in time to see Javan’s unmistakable figure leaving the building. Without thought, she hastened to the cloakroom to change into her outdoor shoes and retrieve her new evening cloak. They’d come home via Carlisle, and Javan had insisted on making a few purchases, including the ball gown and pearls and the engraved gold ring that she wore tonight.

  Despite her hurry, he’d vanished from the street by the time she got there.

  “May I send for your carriage, ma’am?” asked the doorman—the genuine doorman, this time.

  “No, I thank you…my husband is waiting for me. Goodnight.”

  She thought she knew where he’d gone, and it wasn’t far. She turned right up the road toward the harbor.

  He leaned against the harbor wall, gazing out to sea over the bobbing fishing boats and the small pleasure yacht which had tied up since Caroline had been there last. She went and stood beside him.

  For a moment he didn’t say anything, but he knew she was there, for his fingers found hers and threaded through them.

  “I was coming back,” he assur
ed her.

  “I know. But I thought it was time to go home. Rosa may not sleep until you’re back.”

  “I think she will. I think what she wrote eased her in some way. And she understands Swayle cannot hurt me or anyone else she loves.”

  “He could spill venom at his trial,” Caroline warned.

  “That will hurt him, not me or Rosa. I’ve protected her from the wrong things.”

  “No, you’ve just protected her.”

  He looked at her at last. “As you’re now protecting me? You set Fredericks on me, didn’t you?”

  “I asked him about San Pedro. He seemed shocked that you believed what you did.”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t believe it precisely. I was just afraid it was true and even more afraid to enquire in case I found out it was.” His lip curled. “I never thought of myself as a coward before.”

  “It’s not cowardice, it’s confusion. You had too much tragedy in your life at one time to think clearly about everything. Your capture, torture, escape, leaving the army, returning home to…what you did.”

  “Perhaps,” he allowed. His thumb stroked her hand. “You light my way, Caroline Grey.”

  “As you light mine.”

  “Do I?” he whispered, caressing her cheek.

  “I, too, have been lost, in my own way.”

  He kissed her lips, a soft brief kiss that sparked deep inside her. “Then let us go home and find each other.”

  *

  As Javan handed her out of the carriage in front of Haven Hall, a hulking figure loomed out the shadows.

  “Oy!” Williams called indignantly. “What do you think you’re doing here?”

  “Miller?” Javan said incredulously, pausing in his act of thrusting Caroline behind himself for protection. “Aren’t you supposed to be with Bolton?”

  “He let me go,” Miller said cheerfully as Javan shone the lantern on him. Then he sighed. “Well, sort of. I nipped off while he was more interested in the gentry cove—Swayle. I don’t think he’ll mind, especially if you was to take me on.”