Exile’s Bane (28 page)

“In the end,” Gorgon said with his usual sneer. “I intend to leave nothing useful behind.”

In that moment of shocked silence around the table, Gorgon’s gaze fell on me. His sneer softened, his mouth parted, lips quivering, and he expelled a breath of consuming desire, for his eyes burned with what he wanted of me. But, fearful that I might summon the ghost and her powers, he had been forced to restrain himself, something he was sorely unused to doing. How long that restraint would last was a matter of serious concern to me.

Peg returned to the table, but merely stared at her plate. Beside her, Annie watched Gorgon in fascination. This was not the first time I had witnessed the girl’s fascination with the warden. She had clearly never had a breast mauled by the brute.

“Follow with Elena or leave her behind.” The earl brought my attention back to the table with a disparaging motion. “I care not which.”

My mouth fell open in shock and disbelief, though I had long known these were my uncle’s true feelings for me. If I could not benefit him, he apparently had no use or concern for me.

“Huh,” Gorgon said, with a magnanimous lift of his bearded chin and an affected sniff. “Never fear, I shall bring her and take her to wife. She has many talents, Charles, as you will come to see.”

Peg and Annie looked at me in questioning surprise.

I smiled gracefully, though dread wound around me like a shroud. Deceit was rampant. My mouth went dry, and my stomach churned. Was there no one I could trust? The answer to that question left me bereft, for I had rejected Duncan just as surely as I had loved him. My limbs shook and tears threatened.

“How many men did we lose?” I asked in a trembling voice, searching for some hope for Duncan and his prince.

“Thousands,” came Devlin’s belligerent answer, after a moment of consideration. “At least five thousand, an entire moorland littered with dead men piled three high. Another, oh, at least two to three thousand wounded, thousands more captured. We were soundly beaten with heavy losses, our cannon captured, and forced to surrender or flee the field. As I have told you, I was lucky to come away with my horse and my life.” His dark eyes watered. “Tor House cannot stand against the unopposed tide of Parliament and their Scot allies. Worse than that, I have been warned of a pact among certain Parliamentary and Scottish generals to tear this house down, block for block.”

“What?” I croaked. Anger spiked in my racing blood, strengthening me, my face suddenly hot. I leaned back in the chair and looked around at the comfortably furnished gallery, at my ancestor’s portraits lined along the walls, the screens, the chairs, the massive hearth that gave such comfort in winter. “Surely that is just rumor. Why would they—”

“That is how much they hate the King—which is what this place stands for. This great house has been my life, Elena. I am inconsolable over this. Yes, someone other than you loves this fortress. Yet, if I cannot have it, I would rather the Roundheads and the Scots tear it down. I leave for the isle first thing in the morning. You ladies will follow with Warden Gorgon, as he has stated.”

“You would abandon this house to certain destruction?” I cried in disbelief.

Everyone at the table gawked at me, Gorgon and Devlin in amazement, Peg and Annie in alarm.

“What would you have me do? Die defending it?” my uncle said snidely, as though such a thought was unconscionable.

“We must leave while we can,” Gorgon said. He shushed me with a nudge at my arm and a calculating smile. Conspiracy blazed in his amiable gaze.

Peg had not touched her food, and Annie had been too overcome to serve herself. Both near tears, they begged to be excused and left the gallery, anxious to get away from the impending doom the earl had brought with him.

There was no reason to stay, and I followed, but instead of going left to our rooms, I turned right at the door and went slowly down the great stair, my mind lost in reverie. The uncertainty of Duncan’s fate tore at me. Yet my dreams had told me what I should have known all along. Over and over it had played out before me. Talented fighter that he was, his chances were slim, especially if he stayed with the prince, whom he would not abandon. My heart ached like a burning boil in my chest at the thought of him dead on that field.

Quiet voices floated down to me from above. I looked up and stopped above the center point of the stairs, just under the gallery’s open lattice.

This particular step, close under the screens at their starting point, was in a position where I could not be seen. Yet I could distinctly hear the earl’s words, as though he were right beside me.

“He doesn’t know, does he?” said the earl, in a hoarse whisper.

I stopped, my slippered foot left dangling over the next step, like a statue along the stair banister. Interest piqued, I settled on the step.

“No. From what I understand of Thomas’ ramblings, the old earl never told him,” Gorgon said from a distance.

The sounds of clanking cutlery came to me. Another moment passed.

“Had I known we would ultimately lose Tor House,” the earl murmured, “it would not have been necessary to dispose of that decrepit old man. He cried, you know, like a baby, on this very floor.”

Who were they speaking of? My father, John, had never achieved the earldom. Which meant . . .

“Nice to realize that, with him dead in his grave these two years past,” came Gorgon’s sardonic voice. A chair scraped across the floor.

My aching heart thumped noisily in my ear. They had poisoned my grandfather? There was no other meaning their words could take. But what had the old earl kept from whom? And why would he bother to do so?

“You might consider a similar fate for Thomas. He remains a problem best eliminated.”

Stunned, I clasped my hand over my mouth.

“He has been useful,” Gorgon responded, close to the screens. “With the loss of the house, however, it is true, his appeal degenerates. He is incapable—a fool and a braggart.”

“Why, then, have you kept him around you? To keep me close to you, perhaps?”

This last question made no sense to me. The last thing Gorgon wanted was the earl skulking close by.

“In a manner of speaking.” Gorgon’s cold laugh sounded. “Let us call him insurance.”

“Do you not think that a moot idea?” my uncle crooned. I could imagine his ironic half-smile, though I had no idea what he meant.

“This will be our last night truly alone,” Gorgon said to the sound of crushed taffeta.

Silence fell heavily through the lattice.

“You will come to me?” the earl asked. He must have turned back into the room, for his voice trailed away.

So they planned to continue their conversation later, in the earl’s rooms. Yet there seemed something sinister and distorted about the way the earl spoke those words.

Had my uncle truly killed his own father? Could he not wait to inherit? The very idea was like Uncle Charles, impatient, untrustworthy, and self-serving. Yet I sensed another, deeper reason. Something I could not discern.

I spent the rest of the day searching for Thomas and, too exhausted and upset to eat, did not attend dinner. To avoid Peg’s and Annie’s questions, I went to bed, but did not sleep. I rose at first light, put on a simple serge gown in the dressing room to avoid waking anyone, and departed our quarters before either Peg or Annie knew I was up. Though my deep concern for Thomas still drove me, I needed to catch my uncle before he left and bargain for my life. He did not want me around, but I needed his assurance that if I disappeared he would not mount a search for me either, that I would be as free of him, as he felt free of me. I would fight to the end for Tor House. But if all else failed, I wanted to be free to search for Duncan, whether he be dead or alive

In the distance, heavy boot steps sounded on the great hall slates as I descended the south stair. The boot steps stopped, and soft voices replaced them. I reached the end of the hall to find the earl and Gorgon no more than ten feet into the great hall backing away from an embrace.

It was still in the dark of pre-dawn, and torchlight splashed around the front entry. In the shadows, the earl’s chair stood expectantly on the dais, an ermine robe over an arm, as though awaiting its new lord. A cool breeze fluttered through the room and down the hall.

A familiar purple and red bite mark on the earl’s neck, just under his ear, jumped out at me. The sight of little Paul Simpson’s battered body flooded into my mind.

I jerked, unable to believe my eyes. This lord of the realm wore the wound like a badge. He twisted his head away to demonstrate this perversion, his adoring gaze held solidly on Gorgon. He bowed to him, yielding and subservient.

I edged into an alcove and closed my eyes in sick understanding. Revulsion rose like gorge in my throat. It was not only boys Gorgon used, but men. And I had now seen what Countess Marie Louise had experienced. The earl’s behavior was a stupor-like trance, as though he were in thrall to Gorgon, his lover. This aberrant relationship explained everything, put every travesty into context. The earl’s insistence that I marry Gorgon had been to keep Gorgon close at hand and dispose of my claim in the same act. No wonder he had interfered in Gorgon’s attempt to rape me. This unnatural alliance made all else moot.

The cool stone of the alcove roused me from my untimely introspection. To be caught now would mean my life. Their secret had been kept with poison all these years, and they had planned my demise in a similar manner.

The earl departed with a sizable guard. Gorgon’s delay in leaving was a pretense, I was certain. Even if he did follow, I would not go with him.

Gorgon’s boots clonked up the great stair, and I raced back the way I had come. With the earl gone, I now
had
to find Thomas. I woke Mrs. Deane, but she had not seen him.

“That young man’s newfound obsession with wine will be the death of him,” she railed, sitting up in her bed.

I raced to the wine cellar and there he was, drunk, huddled in the dark coolness of the far corner behind the last tall wine rack, crooning to himself. I approached and glanced down at the pathetic wreck. How could he have been a problem, other than his obnoxious ways? Besides, Gorgon had gone out of his way to shelter him. A pretext, apparently. But for what?

“Come out of there.”

He smiled sheepishly and worked his way to his feet. He stepped out and swayed into me.

“You need me,” he slurred, leaning drunkenly into my face, his breath rancid with wine.

“I have come to warn you.” I pushed him out of my immediate proximity. “You must leave. Soon. Eat no food, take no drink.”

“What? Why not?”

“Gorgon plans to poison you. I overheard him discussing his plans with the earl, who has left Tor House.”

“Humph. It’s not the earl I hide from. Gorgon pinches and gouges me cruelly. Now he wants me gone, too. Is that it?”

“Essentially. What reason did Gorgon give you for coming to your defense in June?”

“He gave me none. And what did you do to him just lately? He seems fascinated, yet afraid of you. I have never seen him scared of anyone or anything.”

“Um.” I raised my chin in haughty innocence. “I played a little trick on him.”

“I asked him what was wrong and he acted as though I had caught him in some heinous act.”

Though I thought I had lost the ability, I smiled broadly.

He frowned. “Gorgon did recently advise me my confidence would no longer be required. I am not sure what he intends, and so your suggestion is not out of line in the least. The last boys he had brought in did not last more than two or three sessions. I want no sessions, if that is his plan.” He slapped his hand over his mouth and shot me a look of utmost horror, his face suddenly pale. “You do know about Gorgon’s boys, don’t you?” he mumbled from behind his hand.

“Yes. A despicable thing.” I sighed, wondering if he knew about the earl.

He attempted to stretch an arm, his old expression of self-satisfaction, but lost his balance and barely caught himself on the wine rack. It rocked alarmingly, but finally settled back into place.

“Poison, you say?” He gave me a flat, level-eyed stare.

“We must depose him and send him away naked,” I spluttered. Anger rose quickly to the surface of my thoughts and to my blazing face. I had to take a chance on Thomas.