“You weren’t in love with Mama?”
“Oh, yes, but as I said, it isn’t necessary. A similarity of thought, of values, of philosophies, that is what is necessary. A certain respect for each other. Nothing more.”
“I never heard Mama agree with you on anything, yet I heard the two of you laughing many times when you were alone in your bedchamber. I used to listen with my ear pressed against the door when I was young. Bessie, one of the maids, caught me, and told me never, ever to do that again. And then she blushed fiery red.” Evangeline laughed at her father’s own rise in color. “It’s all right, Papa. As you said, I’m nearly twenty years old, old enough to know a bit about what happens between a husband and wife. But as I said, as far as I know, neither of you ever agreed on anything, even down to what you had for dinner. Mama hated sauces, and you hated to see a piece of meat naked.
“Mutual respect? I don’t want a marriage like that, Papa. Besides, Henri is so very un-Eng—” She stopped cold.
“Ah,” said her father.
She gave him a smile that was on the sheepish side. She fanned her hands in front of her. “The truth is, many times words fail me when I speak of Henri.”
“Perhaps you would wish to say that poor Henri is so very un-English?” Monsieur de Beauchamps regarded his daughter from beautiful deep gray eyes. He felt a surge of concern. He knew with perfect clarity in that moment that his daughter would never find contentment in his country. But she would try to pretend, for him. No, he was wrong. He was tired. She would come around. Hadn’t he finally given in and assumed contentment for England? He’d spent more years there than she had lived.
“Papa, I’m sorry, truly, but I would rather depart this earth a withered spinster than marry Henri Moreau. Then there are Etienne Dedardes and Andre Lafay—they’re oily, Papa, yes, that’s exactly what they are. Their eyes don’t meet yours when they’re speaking to you. Oh, I don’t know, they’re nice, I suppose, but they’re just not to my liking. And their politics, surely they shouldn’t speak of the king as they do.” Then she gave a sublimely Gallic shrug, most unlike, he thought with a fleeting smile, her English mother.
“There has been so much change, Evangeline. Louis has not behaved as he ought since his return to France. As much as I deplore it, I understand that many Frenchmen feel betrayed by his stupidity, his excesses, his lack of understanding of the situation here.”
“I don’t see that the common folk can lay claim to the high road. They themselves are so cursed petty toward each other. And they have the gall to mock the English, who saved them. I must tell you it makes me quite angry.” She shut her mouth, rubbing her palm over her forehead. “I’m sorry, Papa. I’m tired, that’s it. My tongue doesn’t always obey my brain when I’m tired. I’m a witch. Forgive me.”
Monsieur de Beauchamps rose and walked to his daughter. He lifted her out of her chair. He looked into her brown eyes, Claudia’s eyes, full and wide and so deep, a philosopher could find the meaning of some truths in them. He patted her shoulder and kissed her lightly, in his ritual manner, on both cheeks.
“You are beautiful, Evangeline. You are more beautiful on the inside than you are on the outside.” “I’m a pea hen and you know it. Compared to you, I’m not even a pea.”
He merely smiled, lightly rubbing his knuckles over her chin. “You are also too used to the stolid English. They are, I suppose, a comforting race, if one doesn’t mind being perpetually fatigued by their heavy meals and boring conversation.”
“So what you love about me is merely my French half? Surely, Mama never bored anyone.”
“No, she never did. I love even your fingernails, ma fille. As for your dear mother, I’m convinced that her soul was French. She admired me, you know. Ah, but I digress. Perhaps an old man should accept the fact that you are, despite his wishes, more English than French. Do you wish to return to England, Evangeline? I am not a blind man, you know, and I realize that since your return you have not been happy.”
She hugged him tightly, her cheek against his, for she was very tall for a woman. “Papa, my place is here with you. I’ll grow accustomed. But I won’t marry Henri Moreau.”
Suddenly there was loud banging on the heavy doors downstairs, and the sounds of boots kicking against wood. There was a scream. It was Margueritte. Then there was Joseph’s voice, loud and frightened. Another scream, the sound of someone being struck hard, and a man’s loud voice.
“Don’t move,” Monsieur de Beauchamps said to her. He was at the bedchamber door, flinging it open. She heard the sound of heavy men’s boots thudding on the wooden floor of the corridor. It sounded like a small army.
He suddenly backed away, and Evangeline rushed forward to stand beside him. Two heavily cloaked men appeared in the doorway. Both of them held guns.
One of them, his face pitted and dark with beard stubble, stepped forward, his eyes on Evangeline. He said nothing, looked at her, not just her face but her breasts, her belly. She felt such fear she thought she’d vomit.
He said to the other man, “Look at her. It is as we were told. Houchard will be very pleased.”
The other man, fat, his face pale and bloated, stared at her. Guillaume de Beauchamps yelled as he managed to wrest away his gun and rammed it into his big belly. “You won’t touch her, you puking little pig.” A gun slammed down on his head. Evangeline rushed to her father, trying to catch him as he fell unconscious to the floor. She ended up half on top of him. The man with the pitted face raised the gun again. She covered her father’s head with her body.
The other man was clutching his fat belly. He gasped with the pain. “No, don’t hit him again. He won’t be any use to us dead.” “The bastard hurt you.” “I’ll live.”
“The old man will pay.” He turned to Evangeline. Houchard had taught him the value of fear and shock, particularly when it was deep in the night. He looked at her breasts, then said, “Take off that nightgown now. Hurry or I’ll do it for you.”
Chapter 3
Chesleigh Castle
Near Dover, England
The bloody rain had finally stopped. The late afternoon sun was still bright. Seagulls whirled and dived overhead, then wheeled back to the ocean not a hundred yards away. The smell of the sea was strong in the breeze. It had turned out to be a beautiful day.
Richard Chesleigh St. John Clarendon, eighth Duke of Portsmouth, turned his matched bays onto the gravel drive of his ancestral home, Chesleigh Castle, an old pile of gray stone that had held reign over this section of the southern English coast for the past four hundred and twenty-two years. He pulled his horses up in front of the wide stone portico. A gull flew close to the head of his lead horse, Jonah, and he laughed aloud at the look of utter outrage in that magnificent animal’s eyes.
“It’s all right, boy,” he called out, and jumped down from his curricle to the gravel drive. His head stable lad, McComber, was standing there looking at the bays as if they were his own. He rubbed his gnarled hands together, then took the horses’ reins. “Been good boys, have ye?” he said, stroking first Jonah and then Benjamin, feeding them bits of apple as he told them of their bloodlines, all unspoiled for at least five hundred years. The duke rolled his eyes.
“Rub them down well, McComber. They’ve worked hard today. I wonder why the gulls are so aggressive all of a sudden?”
“I hear tell it be a storm that’s coming,” McComber said.
“We just had a storm. We have a storm every week, sometimes twice a week.”
“Well, it do be winter and England, yer grace. Put the two together, and ye don’t have much reason for perkiness. Aye, I know. Meybe it be some smugglers and the gulls don’t like the smell of ‘em.”
“We haven’t had smugglers in fifty years,” the duke said. “You sound like you’re coming down with something, McComber. Take better care of yourself. I’ll wager you caught it from Juniper, who’d better be tucked snug into his bed as we speak.”
“I’d niver get close enuf to tha
t little bug to catch nuthin’.”
His tiger, Juniper, and McComber hated each other. He’d never discovered why. It was apparently a deep, strong hatred of longstanding, a tenacious hatred and abiding, a hatred one couldn’t help but admire.
“I don’t care if you’re sickening from Cook’s blood pudding, have a care.”
“Aye, yer grace,” McComber said. “But ‘tis true, I’ll niver ketch a whimpering thing from that little bleeder, never ye mind wot ‘e says aboot me mother.” Then he began talking a mile a minute to the bays as he led them to the magnificent stables to the north that the duke’s father had enlarged some thirty years before.
The sun was getting low in the west. The wind was rising. It was getting colder. The duke sniffed the salty air, breathed in deeply, then looked again at that wonderful sun which hadn’t shown itself for three days.
He looked up to see Juniper, who should have been in bed, running hard toward him, his crimson livery coat flapping in the breeze. “Your grace! I’m here. Oh, dear, I particularly asked Bassick to tell me when you neared. He likes McComber better, and thus he didn’t give me warning and so I’m late, and all of a flutter. Oh, dear, he’s taken the bays, hasn’t he? He’s taken my boys.”
“Yes. And he won’t knobble them or harm them in any way at all. Go back to bed, Juniper. Trust me to take care of the horses. You will remain in bed until you no longer are hacking your tongue out of your mouth.”
Juniper gulped, coughed, gulped again. “It’s just a touch of something bilious, your grace,” he said, looking toward the stables, seeing the bays prancing happily behind that blackguard McComber.
“I don’t want to have to bury you just yet, Juniper. Out of my sight.”
Juniper continued to look up hopefully at the duke, a very large, handsome young man who, in all the years Juniper had known him, had never been ill from anything other than drinking too much brandy. It was nothing for the duke to ride in an open curricle, the rain battering down on him, the sea winds tearing through his thick hair. For Juniper, had he done something so ill-advised, he would be shortly six feet under the ground with a stone on his head and a daisy planted on top of his belly. The air was still damp from the interminable rain, the breeze off the Channel damp and chill. He shuddered. “Go,” the duke said again.
“Aye, your grace,” Juniper said. “Oh, your grace, I forget to give you this. It was brought just an hour ago by one of those men who works for your friend Lord Pettigrew.” He handed the duke a thin envelope with turned and twisted edges.
The duke didn’t wait. This had to be it, he thought. It just had to be over now. He tore open the paper and read:
We thought we had him, but he escaped our net. Sorry, Richard. Keep faith. We’ll get the murdering bastard yet. DH
The day turned suddenly and completely black. He looked up and saw only bleak clouds that were filling the sky, turning it a nasty ochre color. He crushed the paper in his hand. They’d all been so certain, knowing that they’d catch the miserable traitor who’d brutally garroted Robbie Faraday in an alley near Westminster in early December.
He wanted to smash his fist into something. He turned to see Juniper staring at him in fascinated horror.
“Go away, Juniper. Now.”
Juniper ran back up the wide, deep front steps, wondering what horrific news was in the letter he’d happened to snag from the messenger while Bassick was in the pantry chastising one of the footmen.
Well, the young duke had many things on his mind these days, though Juniper couldn’t say what any of them were. Maybe it was a woman. Now, he knew, everyone knew, that the duke was a randy young man, so randy that he was already a legend in this part of England. And that brought Polly, the in-between maid, to mind. Maybe he could cozen her into bringing him some of Mrs. Dart’s hot quail-egg soup. Maybe he could even talk her into spooning some into his mouth. Maybe after he ate, he could convince her that he wasn’t too sick to slick his fingers through that pretty hair of hers.
The bleak look faded from the duke’s face. He frowned at Juniper for a moment, his dark eyes narrowed. He yelled as Juniper’s foot hit the top step, “You won’t tumble Polly, and that’s the end to it, Juniper. I don’t want her ill. Go away and stop your dreaming.”
Just then the great oak front doors were flung open by his ancient butler with a flowing mane of white hair that any man of any age would admire to the point of black jealousy. The duke remembered that when he was a little boy, he had believed God must look like Bassick. His father had grinned down at him and said, no, not God. He looks like Moses.
“Send Murdock out here, Bassick.”
Scarce an instant passed before a tall redheaded footman, impressive in his crimson and gold livery, appeared at the duke’s side.
“Escort Juniper to his bed and tuck him in. If he doesn’t stay put, tie him to his bed. Tell Cook to prepare him some nourishing soup. Tell Polly not to trust a thing he says. Tell her simply to stay away from him.” Murdock gave Juniper a commiserating look and led him away.
“His grace shouldn’t know these things,” he heard Juniper say low to Murdock.
“Aye, that’s the truth of it, but he does. He once knew I’d taken off my shirt to show Betsy the scar on my right shoulder.” Murdock sighed deeply. “She loved that scar.”
“Then why did she marry the butcher’s son in Eastbourne?”
No answer for that question, the duke thought, and smiled, but it was quickly gone. He eyed the crumpled letter in his hand. Damnation. They’d been so close. He’d been awaiting word for two days that they’d finally won. His mood was blacker now than it had been but an instant before. “Juniper, Bassick will have Mrs. Needle see to you. You do whatever she tells you to do. That’s an order.”
He heard his tiger groan and saw Murdock give him a pat on the back.
Bassick said in his slow, stately way, “Mrs. Needle alarms him, your grace. Understandable, I suppose. She has the aura of a witch, with her gray, twisted hair, her pink scalp showing. She even has a pot that sits on a hob in her fireplace. If it were just a bit larger, it could pass for a witch’s cauldron. The concoctions she prepares tend to be on the odorous side. And she talks to herself. It’s unnerving to the more uneducated of those around us, your grace.”
“It won’t destroy his manhood,” the duke said, “and believe me, that’s all Juniper ever thinks about. As for Mrs. Needle, my mother has always maintained that she is responsible for more people coming back to health than God even wanted to live.”
Bassick cleared his ancient throat. “I am given to understand that Mrs. Needle now praises the restorative powers of spicy French mustard, mulled wine, and a small pinch of fresh seaweed. I’m not certain if this is imbibed or applied to the offending part of the body.”
“Hopefully neither of us will ever have to find out.”
Bassick said an amen to that even as he looked briefly toward the second floor of the north wing of the castle. He fancied he could smell the noxious odors that emanated from her herbal laboratory. The duke turned and strode up the deeply indented stone steps. He didn’t wait for Bassick to catch up with him to relieve him of his greatcoat and gloves, but continued in without a backward glance, his Hessians landing loudly on the marble entrance floor. He wanted privacy. He wanted to brood, then begin to plan again. This time he would involve himself in the actual strategy. If there was bait needed, he would be it. Drew Halsey had had his chance to catch Robbie’s murderer, and he’d failed.
“Your grace! Wait a moment, please. I forgot to tell you something important.”
The duke’s black brows snapped together. He called back without turning around, “It can wait, Bassick. I’m in a devil of a mood, truth be told. A black cloud is hanging just over my head. It will rain buckets on me any minute.
“Leave me be. Just keep everyone away for a while.”
“But, your grace, it’s something you really should know.”
The duke recognized Bassick’s
hovering tone. If he weakened now, he wouldn’t be free of him until midnight, if then. “Let me alone,” he yelled. “I’ll call you when I wish to hear your important news. If you hired two new parlor maids, it’s all right. Swell our rolls. Let us employ every able-bodied person in the county.” He turned slightly and waved a dismissing hand toward the old man, who had been at Chesleigh Castle since before the duke was born. “Keep everyone out of the library. If you really care about me, that’s what you can do to make me bloody happy.” “But, your grace—”
The duke felt a sudden stab of apprehension. “Is Lord Edmund all right?”
“Certainly, your grace. His lordship spent his afternoon on his pony. He is now enjoying his dinner with Ellen, in the nursery.”
“Excellent. Then say no more. If Mrs. Dent is beating the scullery maid, tend to it yourself.”
The duke turned on his heel, his tan greatcoat swirling about his ankles, and strode the length of the entrance hall, past the medieval tapestries that hung like thick curtains over the ancient stone walls. He left Bassick with his mouth unbecomingly open, half-formed words still on his tongue, a look of perturbation in those rheumy blue eyes of his.
Enough was enough, the duke thought. He’d not only spent two hours with a friend of his father’s, Baron Wisslex, who was dying bravely, with his son hanging about, just waiting for his turn at the title, but then he’d come home to hear the damnable news from Drew Halsey, Lord Pettigrew. He pulled up short, feeling a stab of pain in his foot.
He had a rock inside his boot, of all things. He sat down on a heavy Tudor chair set beneath the portrait of a bewigged ancestor, a great-great-uncle of the last century, and pulled off his Hessian. He flicked out the small pebble, rubbed the sole of his foot, then rose again, not bothering to pull his boot back on. He ignored the footman who was standing not ten feet from him, magically appearing from one instant to the next to see if there was anything required.