Clandestine (13 page)

Mr. Devoran guided his team to a high knoll and pulled up.

“A remarkable view.” He gazed up at the high, drifting clouds, already stained by the oncoming sunset. “Yet it's the sky that makes this place so remarkable.”

Smooth skin stretched over the hollow where his throat met his jaw: a defenseless place, usually hidden. A wave of heat spread unbidden over her breasts and up her neck.

“Yes,” she said, looking away across the valley. White shafts of light broke between the clouds to light up a few chosen spires. “It's almost as if something sacred transpired from the clouds.”

He glanced back at her. Dark fire burned in his gaze. “One is certainly closer up here to the vast vault of heaven, but it's Nature herself who feels holy.”

“Why is Nature always female?”

“You don't agree that she is?”

“I don't know, though I suppose it's because Nature is the source of all life.”

“No, it's because she's fascinating, capricious, and changeable.”

“Like a typical female?” she said.

“I didn't say that.”

“No, but it's implied, isn't it? Yet Nature is also capable of unpredictable violence.”

“True,” he said. “The worst of male attributes.”

He moved his team forward until they reached another hillock. Mr. Devoran signaled his tiger, who leaped down to take the horses' heads, then he walked around the carriage and held up his hand.

“Come, Mrs. Callaway. The view is best if one walks just a little way up from here.”

She took his fingers and allowed him to lead her to the highest point. London lay spread out before them. Shafts of dying sunlight glanced over the great dome of St. Paul's and picked out the silver thread of the Thames.

“The works of man are also lovely,” he said. “But sadly enough, usually only from a distance. From here, the rooftops cluster around each church spire like cygnets around a flock of swans. A little closer, and you'd be confronted with all the misery and dirt of a great city.”

“You'd also see splendid buildings and statues and art and gardens,” she said.

“But nothing, you must agree, anywhere near as inspiring as the setting sun?”

They stood in silence as color bled slowly from the sky, until the bruised grays and blues were shot through with threads of gold and crimson. At last a faint lime green leached up behind the clouds to dissolve away into darkness, pierced only by the Evening Star.

“Venus,” he said. “It'll be truly dark soon. We must get back.”

Sarah said nothing as he helped her into the carriage. Yet she caught a sudden flash of real concern in his eyes.

Damnation! He had seen that hers were blurred with tears. Pain seared her heart that he had noticed and possibly even cared a little, though she had no idea why.

T
HE
long summer twilight softened the oncoming darkness as they returned to Blackdown House. Lady Crowse expected her guests to share a small supper, but Sarah pleaded a headache and retired immediately to her room.

Guy watched the sway of her skirts as she marched away up the stairs. Sarah Callaway had inadvertently set up a disturbance in his heart and in his loins, like a squall blustering through clouds and threatening rain.

Though he was not in the least hungry, he ate a light meal with the duke's elderly sister, then dutifully played cards until she was ready to retire. He did his best to be amusing, but several times he caught the old lady's gaze shrewdly assessing him, as if she saw the signs of rot at the core.

Eight watched them play, then snapped at Guy's fingers when he carried the parrot up to Lady Crowse's apartments for her. The bird had learned most of his vocabulary, as well as his suspicion of strangers, from the duke's eccentric widowed sister.

Much to Guy's annoyance, Eight grumpily repeated his favorite new phrase at almost every step. “Safe from who, sir? Safe from who?”

The parrot was not interested in having anyone, least of all an untitled cousin, correct its grammar.

Alone at last in Ryder's study, Guy paced like a caged cat, while a knife turned slowly over and over in his gut.

Was Sarah weeping up there alone in her elegant guest chamber? Or was she too angry with him to allow grief? Either way, every encounter with him—and every piece of news that she had received from him since their first meeting in the bookshop—must have caused her nothing but pain.

Meanwhile, Rachel's letters sat on Ryder's desk like the nine holy books that the Cumaean Sibyl had offered to King Tarquin.

Sarah had sent them down with a brief note:

Guy cursed, then laughed at himself. Of the nine holy books, six had been burned unread. The remaining three had been said to contain the secrets of the gods. But of course, the Cumaean Sibyl was also the prophetess whom Aeneas had consulted before his descent into the Underworld.

Meanwhile, Rachel's letters lay piled neatly in chronological order. In what sense could they possibly contain any real emotional truth?

Before he wore a track in the carpet, he forced himself to sit down and unfold the first, written soon after she had genuinely gone to live at Grail Hall. The front bore the date and the earl's name, with the stamp “FREE”—one of the privileges of the peerage.

Lamplight washed over the paper, highlighting the creases and the crabbed writing, crossed and crossed again to make all of her news fit onto one sheet.

My dear Sarah…

He read through the second, then the third.

The months with Lord Grail appeared to have been essentially uneventful, though Rachel's letters were often witty, with little flashes of a dry humor that she had never shown him.

However, there was no hint that she had met any gentleman of interest there, and nothing to betray why she had fled without notice that Christmas. The same amused tone continued as she pretended to her cousin that she was still working at Grail Hall, when in fact she had gone—where?

He studied the franks and postmarks. The scrawled signature looked identical, the postmarks the same.

Guy looked up for a moment. Obviously, someone had been able to usurp the earl's franking privileges. Presumably, just as she had enlisted Harvey Penland, Rachel had suborned a servant at Grail Hall to intercept and forward her letters from Sarah. But why?

Rachel had spun such an elaborate superstructure of lies, no ancient Greek oracle could possibly have matched her.

Guy pulled out a sheet of clean paper and sketched out a calendar to cover the twenty-six months since Rachel's parents had died. The day when he'd first met her at the Three Barrels to take her out on Jack's yacht fell almost exactly in the center, leaving roughly thirteen months before it, and thirteen months since.

He marked the first seven months after the Mansards' death:
Grail Hall
. Ink spluttered from the pen as he circled the following Christmas and added a question mark. She had certainly left Grail Hall then, but the next five months remained blank.

Guy took another sheet of clean paper and dashed off a quick note to his cousin:

He rang for a footman and sent off his letter, then he ringed the day on the yacht and wrote “Knight's Cottage” across the next eight months, ending when Rachel had fled Hampstead to throw herself on his mercy.

The lamp burned down as he read the dozen letters that covered those months. The fantastic tales about being employed by one Harvey Penland, gentleman. The imaginary children, given names and individual personalities, the descriptions so clear that he could visualize each one.

All of it false.

Rather than call for a servant to refill the lamp, Guy stood and lit candles.

He left blank the few missing days at the end of January, after Rachel had left the cottage and before she had turned up on the doorstep of his townhouse.

Then came the rest of February and March.

Guy stared at the empty boxes on his calendar, then he wrote “GD—The Chimneys” across the nine weeks during which Rachel had claimed to Sarah that she had met Daedalus and then become afraid of him, though she had in fact been living safely in Hampstead with him.

She had written only three letters in all of that time. Guy picked up the first, which the maid must have handed to the Norfolk stable lad to post for her. It would seem that the lovely Rachel Mansard had been able to inspire devotion in impressionable males everywhere she went.

Walking back and forth in front of the fireplace, Guy flipped open the letter and scanned the first few lines—more nonsense about Penland's imaginary brood—until he found the relevant passages: Rachel's account of meeting the man Sarah was calling Daedalus, the maze-maker, the villain.

His gut drew tight as if he were strapping on a sword, as if he were about to enter a maze to meet monsters.

He skimmed over Rachel's florid descriptions:
I never saw such lovely eyes on a man…so very tall a lady might even find him a little forbidding…the most compelling…

Nothing identified the man as Guy Devoran, but neither did a single word contradict that idea. Guy forced himself to read it through again. It was hideously disconcerting to know that Rachel had secretly written to Sarah about him, all the while disguising the real nature of their relationship.

His blood churned with something that felt a great deal like rage.

The next letter had been written five weeks later, and there it was again. Buried amongst the fictional news of her life as a governess, Rachel had written another glowing account of her handsome new follower, Mr. Penland's nameless friend.

This was even worse than the last.

Guy dropped the paper as if it had thrust out a wavering, forked tongue.

However he tried to interpret these letters, anger uncurled in his gut. He may have thought briefly that he was in love with Rachel. He had never thought for a moment that she loved him in return. How dare she claim otherwise to her cousin?

He leaned back to stare blindly at the ceiling.

He had rented the house with the top-hatted chimneys only because Rachel insisted they live secretly in Hampstead. Obviously that had been so that she could keep using Harvey Penland as her go-between with Sarah. But could it also be that she wanted to be close to an earlier admirer, someone she had indeed met at Knight's Cottage?

Ryder's presence was almost as strong in this room as if he were truly still here:
I hate to have to ask this, Guy, but could she have been seeing someone else at the same time?

Yet he couldn't doubt the sworn testimony of his servants, and he and Rachel had barely been apart for those nine weeks. Days and nights in the bedroom with the oriel window. Meals shared in the pretty dining room that overlooked the garden. Quiet interludes in the library, when Rachel read novels while Guy took care of the ongoing business of his life.

He had returned to his townhouse on only a few occasions in all that time and had always come back to the house with the chimneys the same day. Rachel had never known ahead of time when he might leave for a few hours, or how quickly he would return.