A Much Compromised Lady (24 page)

* * *

Glynis wet her lips. The hall and main
staircase had been the worst part—it had looked so like her dream
that a chill had swept through her and she had had to step around
the spot where she had dreamed that her father’s broken body had
lain.

Some dreams are only dreams
, she
repeated to herself. St. Albans’s words, but she found comfort in
them.

Now she sat on a hard, high-backed settee in
a small room at the back of Dawes Manor. Books filled
floor-to-ceiling cases along two walls, and the fire opposite the
windows was unlit, although the room faced north and still held a
chill from the cool summer night.

The butler’s frown had made clear his opinion
of unescorted females who arrived with their hair disheveled, no
bonnet, no gloves, no carriage, and no companion for
respectability. The man would have turned her away, but she had
given him Bryn Dawes’s card and his expression changed from sour
disapproval to cautious uncertainty.

However, the best drawing room was obviously
not for the likes of her. He had led her to the library, to this
cold room, and told her to wait.

She did so. Her hands chilling and her nerves
taut.

Ah, but this seemed almost as much a risk as
the one Christo sought in confronting their uncle. She clung,
however, to the memory of the kindness in her cousin’s voice from
when they had met in the churchyard. And though he had chattered on
like a fool, she could not help but feel he had meant what he said
when he had offered aid. And he had said the world weighed heavily
on him.

She knew that feeling too well of late.

The door opened. Pulse quickening, she rose
from the settee beside the unlit fire. And she realized she had
seen him only as a shadow by moonlight.

Tall with wavy brown hair cut short, he would
have been a handsome man if not for the pox marks scaring his
cheeks, leaving them rough and cratered. Lean and long-limbed, he
dressed with casual disregard in a baggy, dark brown coat, buff
breeches, and unpolished riding boots. He wore a purple
handkerchief knotted around his throat and his white shirt points
drooped over it. His buff waistcoat also looked too large for him,
as if perhaps he had been ill of late and had lost weight.

As he came toward her, his hands
outstretched, eyes the color of polished maple warmed and she found
herself thinking she had not been wrong to trust him.

But his smile faded and his step faltered as
his glance caught on the damaged box in her hands.

He frowned, and looked at her, his dark
eyebrows tilting up in the center and slanting downwards at the
edges.

“I ought to have a quote for this, but all I
can seem to think of are questions and more questions. Come, but
you must sit down. There is a story here, and you had best start
talking before I talk too much. Do sit, please. And thank you for
coming to me. If I had known you were this beautiful, I would not
have been so bold. But I am glad you are and that you did.”

She did not sit down, but thrust the box at
him. “I see you recognize this.”

He nodded and took it from her. “It was whole
last I saw it, but, yes, I know it. Only how does it come to you,
and in pieces. Oh, dear, here is the pheasant feather I tucked
away. It was my pet, but father had it killed for dinner. I still
cannot eat wild bird, but you do not care about such things. You
have your own story to go with this, I expect. ‘Thou messenger of
sympathies...’ That is Shelley, but you probably know him as little
as you do Keats.”

She scowled at him. “You are not making this
easier!”

He smiled, and a rare warmth stole into his
eyes and almost made her forget those marks upon his cheeks. “I
know. I do beg your pardon. I am striving to. My mother used words
to sooth, and I inherited that from her. It drives my father wild
as well.”

He gestured to the settee. “Do sit, please,
and tell me everything, and I promise to stop my infernal
chattering and do nothing but listen.”

She did so.

He sat in the chair next to the settee, the
box on his lap. And he listened.

At first, she hesitated over her words,
uncertain how much to say, but no judgment flashed in his eyes. His
face remained passive, and his body leaning slightly toward her. It
was as if he listened with every part of his being. And so the
words began to flow.

In the end, she told him everything.

His jaw tightened once when she mentioned her
father’s death. And some fleeting emotion passed through his eyes
when she spoke of the attack that left her mother blind. But he
said nothing. Not a word of denial or outrage. Almost as if he had
somehow expected to hear this.

He kept one hand—narrow, with tapering
fingers—over the box as she spoke.

When she finished, he sat very still a
moment.

Glancing down at the box, he shook his head.
“I never knew. ‘While yet a boy I sought for ghosts...’ And if I
had known...”

Rising suddenly, he left the box upon his
chair and went to the bookcase. He hefted out a book bound in black
leather, rifling its pages as he spoke.

“I was ten when my father showed me the Dawes
Dragonbox, saying it would come to me as his heir. I found it
endlessly fascinating. It did not hurt, of course, that father
seemed obsessed with it as well—it is a badge of title, you see.
And then I found the mechanism and opened it—rather more delicately
than you—and I found this.”

The book had fallen open, and he came back to
her, holding out a folded paper.

Glynis took it and unfolded the thick paper.
Fine copperplate writing stood out sharply, black ink on vellum.
Her glance traveled down to the signatures at the bottom of the
marriage license. She let out a deep breath.

Her mother’s dream had not been wrong—her
mother had not been wrong. Her father had married her mother. It
was all as she’d been told.

Smiling, Bryn sat next to her on the settee.
“Welcome to the family, cousin. You look very like your father. I
can see it now. His portrait hangs in the great hall, rather hidden
away, I am afraid, but perhaps I shall be able to show you
someday.”

She looked at him, frowning. “Why? Why would
you give this to me?”

His eyebrows tilted up in the center again
and he regarded her, his expression take aback. “How can I not? It
was another matter when I thought this an issue without issue. I
almost gave this, in fact, to my father, but he was in one of his
tempers—as was I about my poor pheasant when I first came across
this. So, as my petty act of revenge, I tucked my own treasures
into the box, but I could not very well destroy family papers, so I
put them where they would not be found someday by someone other
than my father.”

Glynis glanced at the book he held.

Bryn smiled, but his eyes did not warm.
“Shakespeare. My father thinks the only verse anyone needs read is
the Old Testament. Poetry is for the weak-minded.”

She looked up at him. “My brother has gone to
see him.”

Bryn’s smile left his face. “That I would not
recommend. I think—I pray—your father’s death was an accident. But,
in any case, my father will not welcome either of you. He is a
proud man—’burning pride and high disdain’—and at the least he will
make your lives miserable if he can. He is rather good at
that.”

She heard the mix of regret and resentment in
his voice, but her worry for Christo overrode all other
concern.

She lifted the marriage lines. “There is no
need for my brother to have to face your father anywhere but in a
court of law once this is in Christo’s hands. But I must get it to
him before he goes to Nevin House.”

Frowning, Bryn nodded. “When did they leave?
Hours ago? It is not likely that we shall arrive beforehand, but
the toll roads will slow them, and if we travel faster and
lighter—but are you certain you will not allow me to take these to
him?”

She shook her head and her hands closed
around the paper. She ought to allow him to take them. She knew it.
But she could not bear the thought of letting this proof out of her
sight, or out of her grasp. Now she had proof of her true heritage,
she would not wiling part with it.

Bryn nodded and stood. “Very well, but it
will be a hard ride.”

Shocked, she looked up at him. “Ride?”

“Yes. It’s our only chance to gain some
speed. You do ride, do you not?”

Glynis stood. “I can do whatever I must.” And
she prayed that was true.

In a matter of minutes, Bryn had set the
household into a bustle with orders for horses, his hat and the
pound notes from his desk, and saddlebags with cheese and bread
packed for them.

“We can eat as we ride—it will save time,” he
told her.

All of it seemed to happen in an instant, and
yet Glynis fretted, too aware that Christo had left with St. Albans
hours ago.

Her cousin found her a cloak—in case night,
or rainfall, caught them on the road—and he led her to the stables.
She stared at two enormous hunters as they were led from the
stable, and thought how high up they were, and what a long way from
their backs to the ground. She pushed up her chin. For Christo, she
could ride anything.

She allowed her cousin to toss her into the
side saddle. And after an uncertain and uncomfortable few miles,
with her clinging to her gelding’s mane, she decided that her
cousin had as good an eye as Christo for a comfortable mount.

They changed horses at Ross, after crossing
the Wye. And changed again at Highnam, well before crossing the
Severn. To Glynis the pounding of hooves on the dry, hard road
became an urgent drumming.
Faster. Faster. Faster.
But Bryn
kept the pace to a steady canter, with rests to walk between,
saying it served far better than blowing their mounts with laming
gallops.

At Burford, bone-weary, Glynis decided she
would give anything for the comfort of St. Albans’s coach. And for
its speed. She mounted a restive chestnut, far too tired now to
worry about her weak skills with a horse, or how high she sat, or
anything else other than to reach London and have this trip
finished.

Her horse followed Bryn’s. They kept mostly
to roads now. The wooded paths that Bryn had taken in Herfordshire
and Glocestershire were left behind. At last, the green of Ealing
Common came into view, and she could glimpse the smoke of London’s
sky in the gathering twilight.

They had ridden for so long Glynis had lost
count of the hours. Lightheaded from fatigue, she took strength
from the litany:
Not long. Not long to Winters House.
And
she could not help but think of the bath St. Albans had offered her
when she had first arrived, and how she ached for one now.

But soon Christo would have the papers in his
hands and would feel no need to confront their uncle. If only they
were not too late.

Night had claimed London’s dark streets as
they set a brisk trot through the city outskirts, and Bryn slowed
their pace. As they neared Mayfair, lamp boys dodged out to offer
to light their path with lanterns, and flambeaus burned before the
great houses.

Gratitude warmed her that her cousin could
lead the way through the maze of streets, but when he drew rein
before an unfamiliar mansion, she frowned at him.

“This is not Winters House.”

Bryn swung off his horse and came around to
her mount’s side. “No, I thought it might be best if—”

A crack like thunder echoed dully from the
house, interrupting Bryn, startling the horses and Glynis. Bryn
swung around. With a muffled oath, he dashed up the steps to the
house, leaving his horse standing in the street, its reins
dangling.

Struggling with her skirts and the reins, it
took Glynis precious moments to be free of the side saddle’s
pommel. She slid off her mount to find a footman hurrying from the
house.

“Mr. Dawes said I was—”

“Here, hold them,” she said, thrusting the
reins at the footman. Lifting her skirts, she ran up the steps to
the house.

She did not have to ask for directions.
Servants stood in the hall, voices hushed with speculation and
gazes locked on the broad, circular staircase. Glynis ran up the
steps.

She knew the sound of a pistol firing.

In the upper hall, she paused. She heard the
muffled thud of Bryn’s booted feet and ran after him. Off to her
right a door stood opened and light poured into the corridor.
Glynis stopped, her hand going to her tight, tight throat.

Please, let it not be Christo
, she
thought, pulse racing. And if it was St. Albans who lay bleeding on
the floor, she would kick that wretched
gaujo
, she thought,
almost sick with fear for him.

Only it was neither man who lay on the
floor.

Shock froze her in the doorway. Bryn stood
there, and his arms came around her, as if to block her view, but
she had already glimpsed what he tried to shield her from
seeing.

Francis Dawes, Lord Nevin lay on his back on
a rose-patterned carpet, his face mottled by purple splotches and
his sightless eyes open, bulging and dulled by the lack of any
spirit to light them.

Glynis swallowed convulsively, and her
stomach clenched. Her hand came up of its own to grip her cousin’s
arm. Taking a deep breath, she forced her gaze away from the man
who had been her uncle—the man who had wanted her and her family
gone from this world, but who now lay dead before her.

Looking up, she realized the gentleman in
formal evening attire—the one that she had not recognized at first
and who now bent over the late Francis Dawes, his hand over the
dead man’s heart—was her brother.

Clean shaven, hair cut, immaculate in black
coat, pantaloons and white shirt, cravat and waistcoat, he
looked...he looked like a
gaujo
lord himself.