Lord of Scoundrels (28 page)

Then, after he’d consumed a few pieces of toasted bread and a cup of broth, and had stopped looking like a freshly dug-up corpse, Dain turned his attention to the small copper tub by the fire.

“Her Ladyship sent clean clothes for you,” Dain said, indicating a chair upon which Phelps had heaped the garments. “But you must wash first.”

Dominick’s gaze darted from the clothes to the tub and back again several times. His expression became anguished.

“You must wash first,” Dain said firmly.

The boy let out an unearthly howl that would have done an Irish banshee proud. He tried to struggle up and away. Dain caught hold of him and picked him up off the bed, oblivious to pounding fists, kicking feet, and deafening shrieks.

“Stop that racket!” he said sharply. “Do you want to make yourself sick again? It’s only a bath. You won’t die of it. I bathe every day and I’m not dead yet.”

“No-o-o-o!” With that piteous wail, his son’s louse-infested head sank onto Dain’s shoulder. “No, Papa.
Please
. No, Papa.”

Papa.

Dain’s throat tightened. He moved his big hand up the lad’s woefully thin back, and patted it gently.

“Dominick, you are crawling with vermin,” he said. “There are only two ways to get rid of them. Either you have a bath in that handsome copper tub…”

His son’s head came up.

“Or you must eat a bowl of turnips.”

Dominick drew back and gazed at his father in blank horror.

“Sorry,” said Dain, suppressing a grin. “It’s the only other remedy.”

The struggling and wails ceased abruptly.

Anything—even certain death—was preferable to turnips.

That was how Dain had felt as a child. If the boy had inherited his reaction to laudanum, one might reasonably deduce that he’d also inherited Dain’s youthful aversion to turnips. Even now, he was not overly fond of them.

“You may have the hot water sent up now, Phelps,” said His Lordship. “My son wishes to bathe.”

The first wash Dain was obliged to handle himself, while Dominick sat rigid with indignation, his mouth set in a martyred line. When that was done, however, he was rewarded with a glimpse of the peepshow, and told he might play with it as soon as he was clean.

Dominick decided to conduct the second wash himself.

While he was making puddles about the tub under Phelps’ watchful eye, Dain ordered dinner.

By the time it arrived, the boy had emerged from the tub, and Dain had towelled him dry, got him into the old-fashioned skeleton suit Jessica had found, and combed his unruly hair.

Then the coveted peepshow was put into Dominick’s hands, and while he played with it, Dain sat down with his coachman to eat.

He took up his knife and his fork and was about to cut into his mutton when he realized he’d taken up his knife
and
his fork.

He stared at the fork in his left hand for a long moment.

He looked at Phelps, who was slathering butter on an enormous hunk of bread.

“Phelps, my arm works,” said Dain.

“So it do,” the coachman said expressionlessly.

Then Dain realized his arm must have been working for some time now, and he hadn’t noticed. How else had he held his son’s head up while spooning tea into him? How else had he carried him and patted his back at the same time? How else had he moved the boy’s rigid body this way and that while bathing him and washing his hair? How else had he dressed him in that pestilentially impractical suit with its rows and rows of buttons?

“It stopped working for no known medical reason and now it’s started working for no reason.” Dain frowned at the hand. “Just as though there had never been anything wrong with it.”

“Her Ladyship said ‘tweren’t nothing wrong with it. Said—meanin’ no offense, me lord—’twere all in your head.”

Dain’s eyes narrowed. “Is that what you think? That it was all in my head? That, in other words, I am
addled?
”

“I only tole you what
she
said. Me, I reckon there were a silver o’ some’at them sawbones didn’t get. Mebbe it just worked itself out.”

Dain brought his attention back to his plate and commenced cutting the mutton. “Exactly. There was a medical explanation, but the French quack wouldn’t admit he’d made a mistake, and all his friends stuck with him. There was something in there, and it simply worked itself out.”

He was swallowing the first bite when his attention drifted to Dominick, who lay on his belly on the rug before the fire, studying the Battle of Copenhagen.

The problem of cosmic proportions had shrunk to one sick and frightened little boy. And somehow, during that shrinking, something had worked itself out.

As he gazed at his son, Lord Dain understood that the “something” had not been a silver of metal or bone. It had been in his head, or perhaps in his heart. Jessica had aimed left of his heart, hadn’t she? Mayhap a part of that organ had been immobilized…with fear? he wondered.

Se mi lasci mi uccido
, he’d told her.

He had been terrified, yes, that she’d leave him.

He realized now that he’d felt that way since the day she’d shot him. He’d feared then that he’d done the unforgivable, that he’d lost her forever. And he had not stopped being afraid. Because the only woman who’d ever cared for him before had abandoned him…because he was a monster, impossible to love.

But Jessica said that wasn’t true.

Dain left the table and walked to the fire. Dominick looked up at his approach. In his son’s dark, warily upturned countenance, Dain saw his own: the black troubled eyes…the hated beak…the sullen mouth. No, the child was not handsome by any stretch of the imagination. His face wasn’t pretty and his body was awkwardly formed—scrawny limbs, overlarge feet and hands, and great bony shoulders.

He did not have a sunny disposition, either. Nor did his filthy vocabulary enhance his appeal. He wasn’t a pretty child and he certainly wasn’t a charming one.

He was just like his father.

And just like his father, he needed someone—anyone—to accept him. Someone to look upon him and touch him with affection.

It was not very much to ask.

“As soon as Phelps and I finish dinner, we’re setting out for Athcourt,” he told Dominick. “Do you feel strong enough to ride?”

The boy gave a slow nod, his eyes never leaving his father’s.

“Good. I will take you up on my horse, and if you promise to be careful, I may let you hold the reins. Will you be careful?”

A quicker nod this time. And then, “Yes, Papa.”

Yes, Papa
.

And in Lord Beelzebub’s dark, harsh Dartmoor of a heart, the sweet rain fell and a seedling of love sprouted in the once barren soil.

By the time Lord Dain finished his neglected dinner, Charity Graves should have reached Moretonhampstead. Instead, she was in Tavistock, some twenty miles in the opposite direction.

This was because Charity had collided with Phelps at the back entrance through which she’d planned to escape. He’d told her Lord Dain had come to collect his boy, and if Charity knew what was good for her, she would quietly and quickly disappear. Before Charity could summon up the required maternal tears and wails of grief at giving up her beloved son, Phelps had produced a small parcel.

The parcel had contained one hundred sovereigns, another fourteen hundred pounds in bank notes, and a note from Lady Dain. In the note, Her Ladyship pointed out that fifteen hundred quid was better than nothing and a great deal more agreeable than residence in New South Wales. She suggested that Miss Graves book passage to Paris, where her profession was better tolerated, and where her advanced age—Charity was perilously near the dreaded thirty—would not be considered so great a drawback.

Charity had decided she was not a grieving mother after all. She held her tongue and made herself scarce, just as Phelps recommended.

By the time she’d found her gig, she’d done a simple calculation. Sharing twenty thousand pounds with her lover was an altogether different matter from sharing fifteen hundred. She was fond of Rolly, yes, but not
that
fond. And so, instead of heading northeast for Moretonhampstead, on the road that would take her to London, Charity had headed southwest. From Tavistock, her next stop would be Plymouth, she decided. There she would find a vessel to take her to France.

Five weeks earlier, Roland Vawtry had tumbled into a pit without realizing it. By now he was aware he was at the bottom of a very deep hole. What he failed to see was that the bottom was made of quicksand.

Instead, what he saw was that he’d betrayed Charity’s trust.

Yes, she’d raced to Postbridge, straight to the inn where she knew Vawtry was staying. Yes, she’d sent for him, instead of discreetly hiring a room of her own. And yes, that meant that the occupants of the Golden Hart knew the tart and he were connected. Still, since Vawtry had used a false name, there had remained a chance Dain wouldn’t discover the truth.

That chance, Vawtry belatedly discovered, had died when he’d panicked and abandoned the brat.

The boy would have heard Charity call him “Rolly,” and worse, would be able to describe him. Dominick had stared at his mama’s “friend” throughout the meal he’d started spewing up minutes after finishing it.

Charity, being so quick-witted, had perceived the problem. She’d told Vawtry to take the boy because that was the safest, wisest thing to do.

He was “worth money,” she’d also said.

Vawtry had considered all this while cowering under a damp pile of hay, undecided which way to run and wondering whether he had a prayer of escaping the innyard unnoticed once he did decide.

But the place had not erupted with men commanded to hunt Roland Vawtry—or anyone else—down. No more satanic roars had issued from Vawtry’s recently abandoned chamber.

Eventually, he had collected his courage and crept from the hay wagon.

No one accosted him. He walked as coolly as he could to the stables and asked for his horse.

It was there he learned of his reprieve.

The Marquess of Dain, he was informed, had all the inn servants—and not a few customers as well—running themselves ragged because his boy was sick.

Then Roland Vawtry saw that Fate had given him a chance to redeem himself in his beloved’s eyes.

It did not take long to figure out how to accomplish that.

After all, he had nothing to lose now.

He was not only five thousand pounds in debt, but facing, he had no doubt, a rapid dismemberment at the Marquess of Dain’s hands. Dain had other things on his mind now, but that wouldn’t last forever. Then he would hunt his former comrade down.

Vawtry had one chance only and he must take it.

He must carry out Charity’s plan…and he must do it all himself.

M
rs. Ingleby had told Jessica that when Athcourt had been enlarged and remodeled in the sixteenth century, the layout had been similar to that of Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. The ground floor had been the service area primarily. The family apartments had occupied the first floor. The second floor, lightest and airiest, thanks to its high ceilings and tall windows, had held the state apartments.

In Dain’s grandfather’s time, the functions of the first and second floors were reversed, except for the Long Gallery, which continued to display the portrait collection.

The nursery, however, as well as the schoolroom and nursemaids’ and governess’s quarters, remained where they’d been since the late fifteen hundreds, at the northeast corner of the ground floor—the coldest and darkest corner of the main house.

That, Jessica told Mrs. Ingleby, shortly after Dain and Phelps had departed, was not acceptable.

“The child will be distressed enough at being separated from the only family he’s known and brought to a cavernous place filled with strangers,” she said. “I will not exile him to a dark corner two floors away, where he is sure to have nightmares.”

After a consultation, the two women had agreed that the South Tower, just above Jessica’s apartments, would be more suitable. Whatever needed to be moved out of the South Tower rooms could easily be transported across the roof walkway to one of the five other towers. The servants could do the same with items brought in from other storage rooms. That would leave a few very long trips from the present nursery to the new one, but only a few. Most of the room’s furnishings had been put into storage twenty-five years earlier.

Thanks to Athcourt’s grand army of servants, the project made rapid progress.

By the time the sun set, the new nursery was furnished with a bed, a rug, fresh linens, and handsome yellow draperies. The latter were not quite so fresh, but acceptable after a good shaking out in the twilight’s clear air. Jessica had found a child-size rocking chair as well, rather battered but not broken, and a pull-along wooden horse minus half its tail, and most of the set of wooden soldiers Phelps had mentioned.

Mary Murdock, who’d been selected as nursemaid, was sorting through a trunkful of His Lordship’s boyhood belongings for enough garments to see an active child through the days before a wardrobe could be made up for him. Bridget was removing the lace collar from a small nightshirt, because her mistress had told her that no boy of the present generation would be caught dead in that fussy thing.

They were working in the North Tower storage room, which had become the campaign’s head-quarters, for it was to this place the previous marquess had consigned most of the artifacts of his second wife’s brief reign. Jessica had just unearthed a handsome set of picture books. She was piling them onto the windowsill when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of light in the darkness beyond.

She bent close to the thick glass. “Mrs. Ingleby,” she said sharply. “Come here and tell me what that is.”

The housekeeper hurried across the room to the west-facing window. She looked out. Then her hand went to her throat. “Mercy on us. That must be the little gatehouse, my lady. And it looks to be…on
fire
.”

The alarm was sounded immediately, and the house swiftly emptied as its inhabitants raced out to the gatehouse.

The small pepperbox structure guarded one of Athcourt’s lesser-used gates. Its gatekeeper normally spent Sunday evenings at a prayer meeting. If it burnt to the ground—which was likely, for the fire must rise high before anyone could see it—the loss would be no catastrophe.

However, His Lordship’s timber yard was not far from that gate. If the fire spread thither, the timber stacks would be lost, along with the sheds filled with sawyers’ tools. Since the timberyard supplied the lumber used to build and repair the homes of most of the estate’s dependents, the fire was a community concern, drawing every able-bodied man, woman, and child from the village as well.

Everything happened, in other words, just as Charity Graves had promised Vawtry it would.

All of the small world of Athton descended upon the blazing gatehouse. In the excitement, Vawtry had no difficulty slipping into Lord Dain’s house unnoticed.

It was not as easy, though, as it would have been a week hence, as originally planned. For one, Vawtry couldn’t pick his moment, but had to set the fire soon after a rainstorm. The wood and stone pepperbox was stubbornly slow to take fire at all, let alone blaze up to the heights necessary to be seen from miles around. Thanks to the damp, the blaze would also be slow to spread, which meant it would be under control a good deal more quickly than was comfortable for Mr. Vawtry.

Furthermore, the original scheme had required him only to make the conflagration. Charity had been responsible for getting into Athcourt and making off with the icon. Instead, Mr. Vawtry was obliged to play both roles, which meant a mad race from one end of the estate to the other—all the while praying the concealing darkness wouldn’t also conceal an obstacle that would cause him to break his neck.

Thirdly, Charity had been in the house several times and knew the general layout. Vawtry had been there once, for the previous marquess’s funeral, and one overnight stay was not enough to master the scores of stairways and passages of one of the largest houses in England.

The good news was that, as Charity had promised, no one had bothered to lock all the doors and windows before running off for firefighting heroics, and Mr. Vawtry got into the proper end of the house with no trouble.

The bad news was that he had to wander from one room to another before he discovered that the north backstairs route Charity had described lay behind a door disguised as part of a wall of well-preserved Tudor-era printed paneling.

Not until after he’d found it did he recall Charity’s laughing remark that all the servants’ exits “pretended to be something else, like there were no servants at all, and the big house run itself.”

Still, he managed to find it, and after that it was quick work to reach the second floor.

The door to Dain’s apartments was the first on the left. As Charity had assured him, one needed but a moment to slip in and another to cross the vast chamber and collect the icon. Most important, the icon was precisely where she’d said it would be.

Lord Dain kept the heathenish picture his wife had given him on his bedstand, Joseph the foot-man had told his younger brother…who had told his betrothed…who had told
her
brother…who happened to be one of Charity’s regular customers.

But never again, Vawtry vowed as he exited the bedchamber. After tonight, Charity would share her bed and stunning skills with only one man. That man was the daring, heroic Mr. Roland Vawtry, who would take her abroad, away from Dartmoor and its unwashed rustics. He’d show her the sophisticated world of Paris. The French capital would seem like fairyland to her, he thought as he hurried down the stairs, and he would be her knight in shining armor.

Lost in his fantasies, he pushed open a door, raced down a set of stairs…and found himself in a hallway he didn’t remember. He hurried to the end, which turned out to be the music room.

After going through half a dozen more doors, he ended up in the ballroom, from whose entrance he saw the massive main staircase. He started toward it, then paused, undecided whether to try to find the back stairs again.

But it’d be hours before he found it, he told himself, and the house was empty. He made for the stairway, hurried down and across the broad landing, round the corner…and stopped short.

A woman stood on the stairs, looking up at him…then down, at the icon clutched against his breast.

In that instant’s flicker of Lady Dain’s glance from his face to the precious object he held, Vawtry regained his wits—and the use of his limbs.

He ran down the stairs, but she lunged at him, and he dodged too late. She grabbed his coat sleeve and he stumbled. The icon flew from his hands. He regained his balance in the next instant, and pushed her out of his way.

He heard a crash, but didn’t heed it. His eyes on the picture at the foot of the carpeted stairs, he raced down and snatched it up.

Jessica’s head had struck the wall and, grabbing blindly for balance, she knocked a Chinese vase from its pedestal. It struck the railing and shattered.

Though the world was reeling perilously toward darkness, she dragged herself upright. Firmly grasping the railing, she hurried down, ignoring the colored lights dancing about her head.

As she reached the great hall, she heard a door slam, and masculine curses, then the hurried tap of boots upon stone. Her mind clearing, she realized that her prey must have been trying to escape by the back way and got himself lost in the pantry instead.

She dashed down the hall toward the screens passage and reached the pantry door as he was running out.

This time he dodged her successfully. But even as he was bolting for the vestibule, she had grabbed the nearest object at hand—a porcelain Chinese dog—and it was out of her hand almost in the same instant, hurtling toward him.

It struck the side of his head, and he staggered, then sank to his knees, still clutching the icon. As she ran toward him, she saw blood trickling from his face. Even so, the wretched man wouldn’t give up. He was crawling to the door and reaching for the handle. When she grabbed his collar, he twisted about and flung his arm up, knocking her away so violently that she lost her balance and fell over onto the tiles.

Jessica saw his fingers wrap around the handle, saw it move…and flung herself upon him. Grabbing a fistful of his hair, she slammed his head against the door.

He was pushing at her, screaming curses while he tried to twist free, but she was too furious to heed. The swine was trying to steal her husband’s precious Madonna, and he was
not
going to get away with it.

“You will
not!
” she gasped, slamming his head against the door again. “Never!” Slam. “Never!” Slam.

Vawtry let go of the door and the icon and rolled sideways to get her off him.

She wouldn’t be shaken loose. She dug her nails into his scalp, his face, his neck. He tried to roll on top of her. She thrust her knee into his groin. He jerked away and folded up onto his side, clutching his privates.

She had just grabbed his hair again, in order to dash his skull to pieces upon the marble tile, when she felt a pair of strong hands wrap around her waist and haul her up, off Vawtry, off the floor altogether.

“That’s enough, Jess.” Her husband’s sharp tone penetrated her mindless fury, and she left off struggling to take in the world about her.

She saw that the great door stood open and a crowd of servants stood frozen just within it. In front of the mob of statues was Phelps…and Dominick, who was holding the coachman’s hand and gazing up slack-jawed at Jessica.

That was all she saw, because Dain swiftly swung her up over his shoulder and marched through the screens passage and into the Great Hall.

“Rodstock,” he said, without pausing or looking back, “the vestibule is a disgrace. Have someone see to it.
Now
.”

Once his wife was safely in her bath, with Bridget tending her and two sturdy footmen posted at the entrance to her apartments, Dain returned to the ground floor.

Vawtry, or what was left of him, lay on a wooden table in the old schoolroom, with Phelps standing guard. Vawtry’s nose was broken and he’d lost a tooth and sprained a wrist. His face was caked with dried blood and one eye was swollen shut.

“All in all, you got off easy,” Dain said, after surveying the damage. “Lucky she hadn’t a pistol on her, aren’t you?”

By the time he’d carried Jessica to her room, Dain had figured out what had happened. He’d seen the icon lying on the vestibule floor. He’d heard about the fire as he rode up to the house. He could put two and two together.

He did not have to interrogate his son to understand that Vawtry and Charity Graves were partners in crime.

Dain did not bother to interrogate Vawtry now, either, but told him what had happened.

“You let a greedy strumpet with great, fat udders turn you into a blithering idiot,” Dain contemptuously summarized. “That’s obvious enough. What I want to know is where you got the idea the thing was worth twenty thousand pounds. Confound it, Vawtry, couldn’t you tell just by looking at it that it was worth five at most—and you know no pawnbroker would pay even half that.”

“No time…to look.” Vawtry was having a hard time getting the syllables around his swollen gums and mashed lips. His utterance sounded like “Oh—die—ooh—rook,” but with Phelps’ help, Dain was able to interpret.

“In other words, you never saw it before this night,” said Dain. “Which means someone told you about it—Bertie most likely. And you
believed
him—which is imbecilic enough, for no one in his right mind listens to Bertie Trent—but then you had to go and tell Satan’s own whore. And she, you have discovered, would sell her firstborn for twenty thousand quid.”

“You was foolish, no mistake,” Phelps chimed in mournfully, like a Greek chorus. “She sold her boy for only fifteen hundred. Now, don’t you feel like a bit of a chucklehead, sir? Meanin’ no offense, but—”

“Phelps.” Dain turned a baleful eye upon his coachman.

“Aye, me lord.” Phelps gave him a wide-eyed look that Dain did not believe for one minute.

“
I
did not give Charity Graves fifteen hundred pounds,” His Lordship said very quietly. “As I recall, you most sensibly suggested that you head to the back of the inn, to prevent her escape in case she eluded me. I assumed you’d been too late and she’d fled. You did not volunteer information to the contrary.”

“Her Ladyship were worrit the ma might make a fuss in front of the tyke,” Phelps said. “Her Ladyship didn’t want him upset no more than he was like to be already with you chargin’ in. So she told me to give the gal some quietin’ money, Her Ladyship said, ’n she could spend it how she liked. So she spent it on quietin’ the ma, ’n wrote a note, tellin’ the gal to take it ’n go to Paris ’n have a good time.”