Clandestine (7 page)

“So nothing as simple as a costume would have fooled him for a moment?”

“A parrot's a natural companion for any wicked set of rogues.” He filled two wineglasses and held one out to her. She thanked him and took it. “Though I'd trust no one better, my cousins can try anyone's patience. It's fortunate that Miracle and Anne have tamed them as much as they have.”

“Can duke's sons be tamed by their wives?”

He laughed. “That depends on what you believe needs taming.” He gestured to the table. “But now perhaps I may make amends for all the outrages you have suffered by suggesting that you try some of these delicacies before you faint away from either hunger, a well-directed derision, or righteous indignation.”

The wine was deliciously cool. Savory aromas saturated her nostrils. Yet any desire for food had disappeared. Sarah's heart was still beating too fast, as if he led her ever deeper into a mysterious forest where at any turn she might be suddenly lost. He had neatly avoided her real question about the parrot, and she felt almost as if she was being—with great subtlety—tested in some way.

“My indignation began hours ago,” she said lightly. “When you first sent that footman to fetch me here.”

“I trust Paul didn't offer you any real insult? If he did, I'll have his hide.”

“Your man certainly demonstrated a most improper level of familiarity, Mr. Devoran. He insisted on wrapping his arm about my waist as if we were a courting couple.”

His mouth twitched again, but he frowned with mock gravity. “The duchess's footman—and he was obeying Miracle's orders, not mine. It's well known that Paul is stepping out with Rose, the maid who's now waiting so patiently in your room at Brockton's. Miracle no doubt gave strict instructions: If you were to pass as Paul's sweetheart on your journey back here, you and he had better behave accordingly. None of the Blackdown staff would ever disobey Miracle, principally because they worship the very ground that she walks on.”

“The ground that springs into blossom as she passes? Like Olwen White Track?”

“Jack mentioned that?” His eyes darkened as he glanced back at her. “You're familiar with the ancient tales, Mrs. Callaway?”

“This one, certainly! The hero Culhwch fell in love with Olwen's beauty, but her father refused them permission to marry, unless the hero could perform a series of seemingly impossible tasks involving a great many magical creatures—”

“The untamable hound!” He grinned and saluted her with his glass.

Chin high, she returned the gesture. “The boar of fierce bristles—”

“Kings turned into beasts!”

“A giant with a sword—”

“And a hag of terrible aspect!”

“At which point, Culhwch had to enlist the whole of King Arthur's army!”

Deep creases marked his cheeks as he laughed aloud. Sarah stared at him, breathless, as if caught again in that magical net where wonders might soon be laid in her lap.

Yet he turned away with studied casualness. “And thus we learn that not even a hero can win his lady too easily.”

“Obviously not!” She gulped down her mad emotions and took a deep breath. “Or not in the face of such dreadful opposition—”

“Because the heart of such stories is always that true love is almost impossible to win.” He began to fill a plate with food for her. “Or at the very least that it can only be found by fighting through a thicket of obstacles.”

“I don't know. Surely love isn't a battle? Anyway, Olwen was really only a goddess of flowers—”

“No, she was a woman in love.” He glanced up, apparently deadly serious. “Why else would she sow a path of white petals as she walked?”

“I don't know.” Her stomach contracted into a knot of trepidation in the face of his intensity. “I don't know what you mean.”

“Never mind! These particular tales are damnably obscure. How did you ever come across them?”

She clutched the stem of her wineglass as if it were a talisman. “When I was a girl, I did nothing much else but read. I had access to a wonderful library.”

He gazed a little ruefully at the feast on the table. “Then you must know that in Arthur's court no one may embark upon the banquet until some miracle has been performed.”

Sarah stared at his cleanly boned hands, lovely and lean, as he set the plate back down.

“What kind of miracle does it take?”

“I've no idea.” He smiled and stepped closer. “I only know that I'm starving—and that one wayward sheep is still caught in your hair. Stand still!”

His fingers smoothed past her ear. Hot awareness flooded. Her pulse launched into its wild race, that deafening, hot surge of desire in the blood. Every strand of red hair leaped into vibrancy.

His throat ran cool and strong to mesh smoothly with the flexing muscles of neck and chest. The shadow of fleeting dimples still marked his cheeks.

Yet his gaze was shuttered, the fire banked, as if he felt nothing but this careful courtesy.

Far more than she had ever wanted any man, Sarah wanted Guy Devoran. His intelligence. His company. But most of all his lean, virile body and clever mouth, his lovely hands and wicked tongue.

She wanted to know him as a wife knew a husband. No, more than that! As a mistress knew a lover—

A long-buried fear crashed through her defenses. However heady, it was madness to allow such feelings. Young gentlemen had never been serious in their attentions toward her. That kind of interest had always only been Rachel's—

The wineglass slipped from Sarah's fingers and toppled, spreading glistening chaos over the supper table.

“My cousin! I'm only here because of Rachel!”

Face hot with embarrassment, she grabbed a napkin and tried frantically to mop up the mess.

As if burned, Guy Devoran strode away to the fireplace, then whirled about. “Leave that, please! You're not a maid who must clean up spilled wine.”

Sarah dropped the cloth and faced him. “No! When my mother died, Rachel's parents raised me as if I were their own child. I owe the Mansards everything. But now that their orphaned daughter so desperately needs my help, I dance away the evening, while you—”

“Go on, Mrs. Callaway!”

Her anger sustained her, though she felt almost faint. “There's no reason for us to discuss the romantic tales. They were
my
secret passion. Rachel was never interested in them. Nothing about Olwen and Culhwch will help us to find her. What's really going on here, Mr. Devoran? Are you testing me in some way? Do you still doubt my honesty, or—”

“God, no! It's not that!”

“Then what are you hiding—you and Lord Jonathan? Why did you think you needed a parrot to play watchdog? Why bring me up here to this private room? What do you dread telling me, sir? That you won't help me, after all? That—”

“No!” He paced to the window. “I wished only to set you more at ease, so that you would trust me a little further.”

“Trust you with what, sir? With my integrity? So that I should forget why I came here? And thus allow us both to overlook my awkward pleas on Rachel's behalf? I recognize that I had no right to demand your assistance and I'm sure that you don't—”

His fist struck the folded wooden shutter, making it boom. Her blood thinned into water.

He spun around, his gaze stark. “You must have far more faith in me than this, ma'am, if I'm to continue to search for your cousin.”

Goose bumps rose on her arms. “You've
already
tried to find her?”

“How do you think I spent most of yesterday? Why do you suppose I was so late arriving here tonight, and thus had to enlist Ryder and Jack? I've done nothing but hunt for Rachel Mansard since you left me in the bookshop. I thought you'd have surmised as much.”

Fear clenched in her stomach. “And you've discovered something terrible?”

“No! God! Nothing to immediately alarm you, or I should have broken the news right away.” He strode back across the room as if demons nipped at his boot heels. “I have every reason to believe that Miss Mansard is perfectly safe. She certainly wasn't abducted. So, yes, perhaps I have been testing you. Why not? Why should I accept the unproven word of a stranger? However, you may rest assured that I'm absolutely convinced now of your honesty.”

“So you have been hiding something?”

His gaze might devour shadows. “I simply hesitated to tell you how many of your assumptions about your cousin are misplaced.”

The implications broke and scattered in her mind. “You mean to suggest that Rachel ran away voluntarily? Or even…
eloped
? That's impossible! Why would you even suggest such a thing? She feared and hated this admirer!”

“I strongly suspect that the man she described doesn't even exist.”

“You think she was lying to me?”

He stopped again at the fireplace. Dried flowers shredded in his fingers to rain into the cold grate. “Devil take it, but I know of no way to soften this!”

“I remember,” Sarah replied with rigid determination, “when Rachel and I were caught outside once in a summer squall. Black clouds ripped suddenly across the blue sky. Our picnic baskets bowled away. Our dresses flapped liked flags as we tried to hold on to our bonnets—until hail obliterated all of our gaiety. That's how I feel right now, as if I were drenched once again in that icy downpour. You don't need to spare my sensibilities, sir. I'm a widow in my mid-twenties. Please, tell me the truth!”

His eyes darkened, as if Oberon, too, had just seen his bright kingdom swept away in a gale.

“Then pray sit down, ma'am! I don't believe that Miss Rachel Mansard is in any direct danger at the moment, but neither is she quite what you think.”

S
HE DROPPED ONTO A SOFA AS IF HE HAD CUFFED HER, YET
she looked up at him with unbending courage.

“In what way, sir? I think I can claim to know my own cousin. Please, tell me exactly what you believe you've discovered.”

Guy paced back to the window. “Even if that might require me to tread the uncomfortable path between deception and unkindness?”

“I need to hear everything, sir, whether or not you believe it is kind.”

His veins thrummed with the triumphant intensity of hot male blood. He had touched her three times. The first through the medium of the orchid petals. The second just to remove her headdress. The third to allow his fingertips to caress her hot, naked skin and bright hair.

He had needed to distract her before she stumbled too close to certain truths, but she had responded as a cat responds to the sun: torn between basking and seeking the cool of the dark, acutely tuned to sensation.

Yet something about Sarah Callaway disturbed him far more deeply than that sensual recognition.

Reflections wavered on the glass as if myriad candles floated outside in the darkness. Dancing, counterfeit flames. He would not lie to her, but he most certainly could not tell her the whole truth, even though he needed every scrap of information she could give him. It was going to be like walking a tightrope.

“Very well.” He turned to face her. “I'm afraid your cousin's letters have been misleading you for most of the last eighteen months.”

“But that's nonsense! Rachel and I have always shared everything.”

“Do you really want the truth, ma'am?”

She flushed. “Yes, of course. I'm sorry. Please, go on!”

“Then let's begin at the beginning,” he said, “on the yacht on that spring day last year. She wrote that she was still a governess at the time?”

“Yes, for Lord Grail. He'd just returned from a visit to France. That's why Rachel and the children and Lady Grail were staying in Dorset, and not in town as they had the previous May. A friend of the family found her the position right after Mr. and Mrs. Mansard died.”

“Which would have been in the April of 1827—a little over a year before I met her?”

Wariness darkened her eyes, though that had been simple enough for him to discover.

“Yes. I was most relieved that she had found such a good place. Why?”

“Her parents' death left your cousin in reduced circumstances, I take it?”

“There were unexpected debts.” The apricot brows drew together in a small frown. “Yet once Rachel had recovered from the shock, she wrote the most amusing letters about Lord Grail's household, letters full of wry observations—”

“And falsehoods, I'm afraid.”

Indignation marked her cheeks with a quick flush of color. “In what way? She wrote to me from Grail Hall all that summer. And though I'm sure that she in fact spent a miserable, cold Christmas, she made it all sound most amusing. It's a huge old house—”

“Yes,” he said. “I've been there.”

“Then you'll understand why Rachel was beyond glad when the family removed back to town the following spring. Perhaps she embroidered things a little to make her letters more interesting, but how could you possibly know?”

Guy strode across the carpet to take the seat opposite hers. He leaned forward, hands clasped in front of him, forearms braced on his thighs, as if he could convince her by sheer force of will.

“Because, although she may have told you that she worked for him for the best part of a year, your cousin left the earl's employment after only seven months.”

The flush in her cheeks flamed to scarlet, then died as if a red lantern had been extinguished. “No, that can't be true!”

He watched her carefully, as if he still needed to prove to himself that she was absolutely honest. Rachel had always lived like a queen bee in a hive full of lies.

“The truth is a mansion of many rooms,” he said gently. “We don't need to open every door, but—”

“Is the path between deception and cruelty proving so much more bitter than you feared, sir?” she interrupted defiantly. “Please, explain how you know all this!”

“Grail's a member of my club. It never occurred to me before to interrogate him about his children's governess. Why would it? However, he was perfectly straightforward when asked. Yes, he employed Miss Rachel Mansard after her parents died. She was wonderful with the children, the best governess he'd ever had. But she walked out without warning just before that Christmas—a good five months before Jack asked her to accompany me on the yacht.”

The freckles stood out harshly against her white skin. “Five months? So how was she living all that time? Had she found another position and not told me? I don't understand. If she was not employed by Lord Grail, what was she doing when Lord Jonathan met her?”

He wanted rather badly to offer her some physical comfort. The mad thought uncurled that he could sweep away all of her distress if he kissed her. But there was no viable way to sugarcoat the truth, and perhaps he already respected her enough not to try.

“I'm afraid that—far from being employed as a governess—your cousin was presiding over a bucket.”

“A bucket?” she repeated blankly.

“An instrument used to wash floors. Jack found her in the kitchen of an inn called the Three Barrels not far from the docks. Though a decent enough place, it was not the most highly regarded in town. Your cousin was working there as a common scullery maid, Mrs. Callaway.”

“But that's incredible!” Her hands closed into fists. “Why would Rachel do such a thing?”

He picked his words carefully, making sure that each one was exactly, literally true.

“As I already told you, we barely exchanged two words that day. Your cousin didn't confide in me, nor tell me why she'd chosen such an unfortunate occupation.”

She turned her head to stare at the stone urn, rooted now in its drift of broken petals. Shadows settled in the poignant, vulnerable hollow where her throat met the curve of her jaw.

“But she wrote that you made her laugh.”

“Perhaps I did. But only because Jack—through me—paid her enough to live in style without any responsibilities for the next several months. It was obvious that your cousin would have been in desperate straits otherwise.”

Her eyes became suspiciously bright. In a flurry of blue silk she stood up and walked away.

“And Lord Jonathan would confirm everything that you've told me?”

Guy rose to his feet and strode back to the table to refill his wineglass.

“Not what happened on the yacht. He wasn't there. But he can certainly confirm how he first found Rachel Wren.”

She stopped at the window, a silhouette against the London night. “Then there must be some misunderstanding, that's all.”

“What exactly do you question, Mrs. Callaway?” he asked. “Lord Grail's word? Jack's? Mine?”

She rubbed one hand over the shutter, as if to remove the invisible impact of his fist. A few strands of haphazardly pinned copper hair had escaped to trail over one blue silk shoulder and straggle down to the curve of her waist.

“Even if Rachel did deceive me about those five months,” she said, “do you also suggest that all of her letters since then have been lies?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I've not read them.”

“No, it's impossible!” She spun about. “The very idea is ridiculous!”

Guy swallowed wine. “Then you think I am lying, Mrs. Callaway?”

“No! I don't know! I don't know what to believe—and perhaps I misunderstood about her still being with Lord Grail—but Rachel would
never
have worked as a scullery maid. Not for five months. Not even for a day. What did her hands look like?”

Genuinely taken aback, he glanced up from his glass. “Her hands?”

“Yes, her hands!” She stalked back across the room, her skirts flowing like water. “Were they red and chapped? Sore? Clumsy? Like the hands of a female who was used to scrubbing floors?”

“I don't know.” He closed his eyes for a moment as he tried to remember.
Rachel, mysterious, defiant—and lovely enough to blot out the sun
. “She was wearing gloves.”

“Then was she distressed? Upset? Surely you can recall every detail of her appearance, Mr. Devoran? Gentlemen always do.”

He set down his glass. How very neatly she had unwittingly confronted him with the heart of his dishonor!

“Your cousin's charms are difficult for any gentleman to ignore,” he said with stark honesty. “However, she spent that whole day standing alone in the bow, gazing out across the whitecaps toward France. If I had been forced to guess at her state of mind, I'd have said that she was more relieved than upset.”

“Relieved? About what?”

“Presumably because she knew I'd be rewarding her in gold for her time. As soon as Jack and Anne were safely away, I delivered your cousin back to shore, where she caught the next coach to London.”

“Exactly!” Her eyes shone. “Where that agency had found her new employment with Mr. Penland in Hampstead.”

“I doubt it,” he said. “No ladies' employment agency in town knows of a widower with six children with any such name.”

Sarah sank back onto a chair. “But Rachel received all of my letters at his address—and replied to them—throughout almost the whole of last year. The nursery was upstairs, near the roof. In February it was hard to heat, and the children—two boys and four girls—shivered as hoarfrost flowered on the windows. I remember that particularly, because Rachel wrote later that Jack Frost only mimicked the ice in her heart, for that's when she began to be afraid of her persecutor. She cannot have made up all of that!”

At the moment he'd rather be anywhere than in this room with Sarah Callaway. Rachel had certainly seen ice on the windows in Hampstead in February, but not in Mr. Penland's nursery.

“Why not?” he asked. “We've already established that your cousin dissembles.”

“No!” she said. “Whatever Rachel was doing in the five months before she met you, she couldn't have invented those six children, nor the man she met after Christmas. Her emotions about that were far too real.”

“Which emotions?”

“When she almost fell in love,” she said. “When her admiration turned to loathing. When he began to terrify her.”

His gut contracted as if he'd been punched. The metaphorical rooms in that elaborate mansion of truth echoed and boomed as he slammed closed every last door, but one.

“Nevertheless,” he said, “your cousin was not abducted.”

Her fists clenched as if she would strike him. “I still don't see how you can be sure of that!”

Exasperation burned in his blood and set him pacing the room. Almost as if convincing her of this would solve everything, when he knew it was only the first turn of a terrible labyrinth.

“If I weren't absolutely certain of everything I'm telling you, Mrs. Callaway, I'd never burden you with such uncomfortable facts. Your cousin lied to you last year about continuing to work for Grail. I strongly suspect that this Penland and his six children don't exist. But either way, Rachel Mansard just left London voluntarily.”

“No.” Her skin had become chalky, insubstantial, as if she were fading into a phantom with bright, burning eyes. “I don't believe it. After writing as she did, she'd never have abandoned me like this without a word. No! Something terrible is going on, and I cannot fathom what it is.”

Guy strode back to the table where he refilled his glass, with brandy this time. His throat felt as if that February hoarfrost still lingered there.

“There are advantages to being Blackdown's nephew. It wasn't hard to get information out of her landlord, her maid, the neighbors who'd noticed such a lovely young lady living in their midst. Your cousin settled her accounts, packed her valuables, and walked to an inn, where she took the night coach to Salisbury. No one accompanied her, nor forced her.”

A little shudder passed over her shoulders, as if an undertow of pain dragged through her blood.

“Then I must thank you for your help, Mr. Devoran. Since I'm not related to a duke, no one would give me that information.” Her voice was tight, almost prim. “Thus I'm sorry if I wasted your time with my foolish concerns. Yet you've equally wasted mine by not telling me the truth straightaway. I can hardly comprehend why you didn't do so. I think I must return to Brockton's—”

His glass shattered like hailstones among the dried flowers in the fireplace, soaking them.

Fiery color flooded back into her cheeks.

“I said that your cousin left town of her own free will, Mrs. Callaway,” he said. “I did not say that her reasons weren't desperate, or—since she slipped away so secretly—that she might not still be in some kind of trouble. Rest assured that whatever uncomfortable truths may emerge, I shan't abandon either you or your cousin. I give you my word on that.”