Devotion (50 page)

A sudden shattering of sound erupted from below—a sharp explosion. In an instant, Salterdon twisted, his face contorted; he clawed at his back and gasped for breath.

"Sir!" she cried, grabbing
htm
as he bent double.

"Not . . . me," he groaned,
then
pushed her away, stumbled toward the door. "Clay,
Something's
happened to my brother."

Maria ran after him, into the corridor where the sounds of screaming and shouting from below made her heart climb her throat. "Salterdon," she cried as he ran stiffly toward his room.

He emerged with the gun he had threatened the help with. "Get the devil to your room and lock the door."

"I won't."

"
Dammit
,
Maria,
now is not the time to turn stubborn
on me again." Pushing by her, he moved down the corridor that seemed eerily quiet all of a sudden. Maria ran after him, tripping on the hem of the scarlet gown.

Salterdon stopped at the head of the stairs and backed up slightly, raising his hand sharply to stay Maria.

Just below him on the steps stood a figure hidden within layers of clothes, a cloth hood pulled down over its head, a gun in its hand. Obviously, he was not yet aware of Salterdon's presence behind him.

In the foyer, guests stood frozen, all eyes fixed on the body sprawled facedown on the floor, a growing pool of blood oozing from beneath it.

Basingstoke!

Maria felt her knees go liquid. She clutched the balustrade with both hands and willed away the sudden faintness swirling like some bottomless black eddy in her head.

Suddenly the duchess shoved her way through the crowd. Draped in her finest Chinese silk, her silver hair spilling from its anchor of diamond-studded hairpins, she tottered momentarily,
then
fell upon the man's procumbent form with a mournful wail.

"
Ya
daft buggers," the figure on the stairs cried in an eerily familiar feminine voice. "
Ye've
gone and killed the wrong bloody man!
Ye've
shot
Basin'stoke
.
Criminy
, can't
ya
ever do anything bloody right?"

A second hooded man shoved his way through the terrified spectators, waving a pistol in their faces so they screamed and stumbled over themselves in an effort to give him room.

Slowly, Salterdon eased down the stairs, clenching his teeth against the controlled exertion of moving his legs. The wolf was back—the dragon, his mien an unearthly mask of explosive outrage. His face looked bloodless.

The hooded figure below stooped over Basingstoke and the duchess, who sobbed at her grandson's body.
Then he looked up, directly at Salterdon, and his eyes widened.

Salterdon grabbed the gun-bearing perpetrator from behind and slammed the barrel of his gun against his temple. "I would advise you to drop your gun now, you son of a bitch, before I blow his head off."

The robber dropped his bag of booty,
then
flung the gun to the floor. In a panicked voice muffled by his hood, he shouted, "This were all his
doin
'. Blackmailed me, he did.
Said if I didn't do the duke in he'd see us rot in prison."

Maria sensed the movement behind her a second too late. An arm clamped around her waist. A knife pressed to her throat.

Salterdon turned, the gun still shoved into his captive's temple. His face, having already drained of color, became as smooth and still as stone.
"
Edgcumbe
.
You bastard."

Edgcumbe
breathed rapidly in Maria's ear. "Too bad you couldn't have expired with dignity, Your Grace. It would have been much less messy for us all. Do you know what it's been like these last many years? Watching a worthless, self-indulgent wastrel
dissipate
money so foolishly while I—a gentleman of some esteem—am forced to pander continually to old women and disease-infested
ingrates
in order to make ends meet."

"Let her go," Salterdon said.

Maria winced as
Edgcumbe
squeezed her more tightly.

"I think not.
At least . . . not yet."
He nudged Maria toward the stairs. "Perhaps in a day or two when I've contrived a way to satisfactorily settle this distasteful circumstance. We should see then just what sort of sacrifice you're willing to make for a common little strumpet. How much will you be willing to pay for her life, Your Grace?"

Clutching the stair rail with one hand, Maria eased her way down the curving staircase, her breath burning in her constricted throat.

Reaching the foyer, looking neither left nor right, Maria allowed the pressure of
Edgcumbe's
body to direct her toward the door. Suddenly, the hooded thief who had earlier bent over Basingstoke stepped before them, blocking their exit.

Maria knew his identity the moment she saw his angry eyes through the menacing slits in the hood.

Thaddeus !

"
Bleedin
' bastard," he hissed to
Edgcumbe
. "
Ya
didn't say aught about nothin' like this.
Ya
said it would go off like clockwork, that we would go about our business of
liftin
' their damn purses,
managin
' to slip Salterdon a bullet—"

"You killed the wrong man, you idiot."

Edgcumbe
attempted to shove Maria by him. Thaddeus grabbed her arm.
"I
ain't
lettin
'
ya
have '
er
."

"No?"

Thaddeus slowly dragged the hood from his head.
"
Naw
,
guv
.
Ye'll
'ave
her over me own dead body."

"Ah. Well. Suit yourself, sir."
Edgcumbe
raised the pistol to Thaddeus's forehead and pulled the trigger.

Maria
screamed. For an eternity, it seemed, Thaddeus continued to stand there, his eyes wide and
panicked,
his forehead open and blood where his flesh used to be. Then, like a collapsing house of cards, he dropped to the floor.

A welter of cries erupted. Finally jarred from their earlier
stupification
, men and women, all in their finest Parisian attire, fell over one another as they attempted to stumble through the nearest doorway, leaving the pitiful image of the Duchess of Salterdon crumpled over Basingstoke's body. "Help him," she wept aloud. "Someone help him. He's bleeding to death."

But it was the shrill screams of the thief on the landing, still gripped by
Salterdon, that
reverberated the charged air.

"
Lud
,
lud
, '
e's
gone and killed '
im
!
Bastard! I'll see
ya
hang along with me, I will, if it's the last thing I bloody well do!" With that, the figure lurched from Salterdon's grip and stumbled down the stairs, ripping away the hood, aiming the gun in a wild, wavering fashion toward
Edgcumbe
and Maria.

Edgcumbe
shot her. The bullet drove Molly back and she hit the floor with a sickening thud, her blonde hair spilling like yellow and crimson sunbursts around her head.

"Perhaps you'll take me seriously now,"
Edgcumbe
announced to the terror-struck onlookers. "Would anyone else care to die? I'll be more than happy to—"

A thump—an obscene noise that sounded nauseatingly
like
a melon cracking.

The arm gripping Maria tightened violently; she thought her ribs would shatter, then she was falling, being dragged down from behind, hitting the floor so jarringly the world spun around her.

Laura Dunsworthy, a fireplace poker gripped in her hands, stared down at the carnage she had delivered to
Edgcumbe's
head. Turning her wide green eyes up to the shocked spectators, she declared, "Oh my. I fear I've killed him."

"Who would'
ve
thought it," Gertrude said.
"Our own Thaddeus, ringleader of highwaymen.
And Molly . . . daft girl.
I always told her she'd find herself in more trouble than she'd know what to do with." Gertrude beamed Basingstoke a smile. "
Ye'll
rest now,
m'lord
.
Ye'll
be sore in that shoulder for a while, I vow. Just between you and me, sir, I hope yer a sight better patient than yer brother.
Gorm
, but he tried a person's patience, not to mention our sanity."

Basingstoke winced and looked at Salterdon. "I always said you would get me killed eventually."

Salterdon paced the room, his hands in his pockets. Then the duchess
entered,
a touch of her old fire and determination painting color on her cheeks. She looked from one grandson to the other before saying, "It seems my ability to judge character has become a trifle lacking in my advancing years.
Edgcumbe
has just confessed to the constable that
Thackley
was involved in this little scheme as well. I should have seen it coming, of course. Occasionally, however, we choose for whatever reason to deny what is most apparent before our eyes."

The duchess took a chair next to Basingstoke's bed.

She wrapped her hand around his and squeezed, still not taking her gaze from Salterdon. "I've spoken with Dunsworthy. He demands that we continue with this soiree once the guests have had time to calm down and collect themselves."

"Does he?" Salterdon sneered. "God forbid that a little human brains splattered over the foyer would get in the way of him roping his daughter a duke for a husband. I suppose we must get our priorities straight." Where the
blazes was
Maria? It had been hours since he'd last seen her. He walked to the door.

"She's gone," the duchess said.

He turned, stiffly. Knife-like pain sluiced through him as he focused on his grandmother's face. The realization occurred to him in that instant that never in his thirty five years had she refused to meet his gaze directly, but she did so now.

"I beg your pardon," he said dryly.

"Gone.
I paid her
her
wages and sent her on her way. Now that you've obviously recovered so thoroughly I hardly thought it necessary to keep her on."

For a long moment, he said nothing, just absently rubbed his aching shoulder, realizing that it wasn't his shoulder at all that hurt so damn deep inside he couldn't breathe.

Again, he turned for the door.

"If you go after her," the duchess declared in a slightly panicked voice, "I'll disinherit you completely. You'll never see a farthing of my money or a stone from any of my estates. You'll be a pariah to your peers. You'll spend the remainder of your life in abject poverty. So tell me, Your Grace, is she so important to you that you would risk all of that?"

Salterdon said nothing, just left the room, closing the door behind him and briefly leaning back against it.

Maria was gone. Not so much as a word of goodbye. She was gone and he would go on with his life as it was intended to
be . . .
as his forefathers had intended it to be.