Patricia Veryan - [Sanguinet Saga 04] - Love's Duet (34 page)

The breath caught in her throat.
Stephen
? "No!" she cried ringingly, jumping to her feet, stretching out her hands to him. "I don't believe it! Not you!"

He watched her in abject misery but made no move to touch her. How
horrified she was—and rightly so. God forbid she ever knew the full
story of what had gone on in Green Willow Castle! God forbid she ever
had to lie awake at night, remembering… as he did!

"It was Damon," she cried frenziedly. "
He
got you into it! It was—"

"Do you not understand yet? Cam joined but only to protect me! Were
it not for your contemptible Viper, I would be as dead today as the man
they murdered and the dogs they killed to torment him! He saved my
life, Sophia! And thereby—God help him—has ruined his own!"

Her knees gave out under her. Her throat was dry, and the room
seemed to fade into shadows. Vaguely, she realized Whitthurst was
helping her to sit down.

"I do not understand," she whispered, clutching at him. "What—?"

He sat beside her, his face white and strained. "Don't talk, my dear. Listen. And—try not to hate me—too much."

Thompson carried the silver tray into the music room and paused,
scowling toward the chair where his master sprawled, his long legs
thrust out before him, one hand over his eyes, the other trailing over
the chair arm, loosely holding an empty goblet. It was the chit who'd
brought his lordship to this pass. He'd knowed the minute he'd laid
eyes on her, with her looks and her shape and Quality wrote all over
her. A fine damned mess! He stalked forward, and his scowl deepened as
the Marquis lowered his hand, leered up at him, and said thickly, "Took
y'time!"

"Thought you was asleep, milord," Thompson growled.

"Almos' was. Poten' stuff this brandy." He waved his glass and mumbled, "Pour me'nother, if y'please."

"You've had too much a'ready," his devoted minion observed.

"That'll be'nuff outta you!" warned Damon, shaking one finger in
owlish reproof. "Bring th' damn brandy… an'… sight less disrespec'!"

Holding his master's hand steady while he half filled the goblet, Thompson announced coldly, "I been thinking on retiring."

"Good idea," choked Damon, a little watery-eyed from having taken
rather too large a gulp. "Y'may now… retire, an' curl up in y'r li'l
beddy." This deliberate misinterpretation amused him, and he chuckled
foolishly.

"To a farm," clarified Thompson, aiming a polar stare at the top of
his lordship's windblown locks. "And if you pour it down yer gullet
like that, you'll be drunk as a wheelbarrow 'fore you can say—"

"Jim Ro-Robinson!" said Damon, and raised a triumphant cheer.

"About my farm," Thompson glowered.

Damon waved a dismissing hand. "Farms—smelly places. No self 'specting butler'd be
s-seen dead in one!"

"
You
got three," Thompson pointed out sapiently. "An' if
you'd not put more into 'em than what you've took out, bringing 'em up
to snuff—"

"Never cared much f'snuff," Damon mused. "Vaille uses it, though. Spanish… Spanish Bran, mixed with a li'l Br-Brass…?"

"Brazil!" snorted Thompson.

Damon peered up at him. "You try that, too? Never would've thought it! An t'think you use th' same's
Mon
Père
. Whoops! Mus'n call him that!" He chortled merrily at this fine joke.

"I take leave," said Thompson in his best London accent, "to tell
your lordship as how your lordship is foxed." He slanted a reproving
glance at the hilarity this remark elicited and, feeling safer now,
ventured scathingly, "What I'd like to know is—how you going to get up
early in the morning? Which is a whole fat four hours from this here
minute!"

"
Get…up… early
? Good God! Why should I do… 'gusting thing like that?"

"To meet your foreman on the site is why! Going to pay off all the contractors. Remember?"

"Pay 'em off!" Damon agreed, waving his glass with disastrous
results. "Jolly good've you, Jack! Know where the blunt is. Don't mind,
d'you?"

Perhaps it was as well, thought Thompson. His Nibs looked a bit
better now, even if he was going to pay the perishing piper in the
morning. When he'd first come home, he'd looked like he'd been pulled
through a knothole! "Come on," he offered. "I'll get your lordship to
bed."

"No, no. Comfable here. Lots o'drinking t'do yet! You go on up."

The valet regarded him narrowly, then, satisfied, withdrew.

Damon waved his glass with great deliberation, singing happily to himself.

He awoke to find it quite cold in the room, the grey light of dawn
frosting the edges of the drapes. He was alone and comparatively sober.
Recent events came back to him gradually. He had done what he'd set out
to do. Vaille would not come here again. And Sophia would probably…
marry Hartwell. He clenched his fists against that awareness. But she
would be safe. He'd not have to live with the nightmare fear of her
beauty being marred or her precious self hurt or killed. That was all
that mattered.

His eyes lifted to the harpsichord. He stood, holding his head on,
and wandered to the instrument, touching the blackened hole wistfully.
Now what? If he died, the lack of funds would be immaterial. But
supposing his luck held? His father had said "a small allowance"—and if
he knew Vaille and the feelings he must hold for his disgraced son, it
would be small, indeed. He had so hoped to complete Cancrizans. He
glanced fondly around the gracious room. Mama had loved the Priory, and
now it held new memories—memories that made it infinitely more dear to
his heart.

His attention was caught by the old parchment on the music rack, and
he picked it up idly. If he could decipher it, his worries would be
over. This weird unmelodious music held the key to the location of the
treasure, he was convinced of it. At first, he'd thought there was a
secret panel somewhere in the room and that the sequence of notes,
played in some rhythm or volume or with some certain repeat might cause
it to open. Far-fetched, perhaps, but he'd struggled with it for weeks
totally without success.

His fingers wandered over the keys, and he smiled faintly as he
recalled what Sophia had said of the "music." The notes seemed to have
been arranged without rhyme or reason… "much as a child might toss a
pile of alphabet blocks onto the floor and hope to find them arranged
into words…"

Arranged into words! Suppose the poor Jacobite gentleman had used
notes to spell out his message? His heart beginning to race, he sat at
the bench. The first note was middle C. What if he used the A below it
as his base and went on up the alphabet from there? The next note, in
the bass clef, was A! His excitement mounted. C… A…! Now, by Jupiter,
it
might
be! He stood, seized a branch of candles, and
hurried into the library, music in hand. He seated himself at the
reference table, pulled over the inkstand, a quill pen, and a fresh
sheet of paper and went to work.

Whitthurst stood by the mantle with his back to Sophia, unable to
endure the stricken look on her face. She had, he knew, always looked
up to him with trust and love. What must she think now? Would she ever
again be able to think of him without disgust now that he'd told her
the whole miserable story? It had begun with the old demon of boredom:
too much money acquired too young; a spendthrift, easygoing father; a
gentle stepmother who, adoring him, had only remonstrated mildly at his
extravagances. The parties, the gambling, the seasons at Bath or
Brighton, the entire social whirl couldn't fully satisfy his youthful
energy. Longing to go to Spain, yearning to get into the fighting, he
had bowed to his stepmother's pleas that he not leave England. After
his father's death, the ties binding him to their country seat in Kent
had tightened further. When Sophia went to Italy, her absence had left
Singlebirch even less exciting. He had plunged ever more wildly into
gaming and, a little frightened and much too dangerously in debt, had
begun to run with too fast a crowd.

He hadn't realized at first what he was getting into. Frequenting
ever-seedier hells, drifting closer to the dock areas, roaming the
streets late at night, kicking up all manner of minor disturbances,
exhilarated by the excitement of encounters with the Watch. Waking
sometimes with an aching head in some filthy, verminous parlour or
rooming house, not too sure what had happened, revolted by his
surroundings, yet always returning to his friends when boredom took him
again. And then, one never-to-be-forgotten night, he had found a
distinguished gentleman beside him at one of the more gruesome hells
and, succumbing to the ingratiatingly polite attention of this
stranger, had by dawn been deep in debt to him. Very drunk very soon,
he remembered little of what transpired but had awakened next afternoon
in a luxurious bedchamber, waited upon hand and foot by bold-eyed maids
and inscrutable gentlemen of the chambers. He had learned he was at
Green Willow Castle, and his host, the notorious Lord Sumner
Craig-Bell. Horrified and eager to get away, he hadn't known he was
already trapped. Not until later had he learned that Craig-Bell was the
leader of Cobra and he himself a helpless captive, so incriminated he
dared not make his escape; blackmailed and threatened into
ever-deepening crimes; forced to attend the meetings—masked, of course,
as they all were, but with Craig-Bell and the six lieutenants aware of
his identity and ready to make it public if he refused their demands.

And what demands! Small pieces of information about members of the
ton
.
Access to business or personal papers in homes where he was a trusted
visitor. Scraps that made no sense to him but that, added together,
became choice sources of revenue to the club. The luring of others into
deeper involvements; the wild, sickening parties. The girls—about whom
he said very little to Sophia. One night had almost driven him to
self-destruction. A little village girl, stealing innocently away to a
meeting with her sweetheart, had been tricked into the castle, made
drunk, and so degraded that her poor mind had given way. How they had
laughed, Craig-Bell and his cronies! And he had gone back to
Singlebirch, sick and shivering, and had become so ill that his
stepmother had summoned Dr. Upton and had him cupped, not realizing his
fever was the result of mental rather than physical ills.

This, because of his self-disgust, because she must understand how
low he had sunk, because of his inherent honesty, he did tell Sophia.
Her grief so unnerved him that he'd had to stop and now stood there,
staring at the dead fire, wondering if she would ever speak to him
again.

"Is that," she quavered at last, "why Mama went… to India?"

"No!" He swung around. "I had to talk to someone before I ran mad!
But not Mama! She is so frail—I dared not. And if I'd told almost
anyone else in the family, they'd have been sure to confide in their
wives. You know how they are. So— I sent word to Damon."

Trembling, Sophia looked up at him and waited.

"The summer Papa took me to Europe and then fell out of the carriage
in Marseilles and broke his ankle, Camille was in Florence. Papa sent
me down there, perhaps you remember' me writing of it? Cam had a lovely
villa, and we all—" He thought of the lovely Gabrielle and broke off in
some confusion. "And, he was very hospitable," he went on lamely. "We
hit it off extremely, and after he came back to England—you was in
Italy then, of course—we became close friends. It was always a joke
between us that he was my uncle. Still I looked up to him, I suppose.
So when I got into this frightful mess, I turned to him. He came down
to Kent at once, and I told him everything. Lord, what a brutal scold
he dealt me! Then he bought me my colours, and—I was in the hussars
before I knew what had happened!"

Sophia, her handkerchief pressed to her quivering mouth, could
scarcely see. Camille had decided—so wisely—that a noble dying was far
preferable to the nightmare Stephen faced. What his continued
association with that hellish club might have led to did not bear
thinking of. And how she had hated Camille, little dreaming what he had
spared them.

"I didn't know," the Viscount said heavily, "what he was going to do."

She stiffened and, dashing the tears away, breathed, "What
could
he do?"

"He joined Cobra," he said tonelessly. "I don't know how. Perhaps
Craig-Bell thought he'd be able to get his hooks into Vaille. It don't
signify."

"But—why? Surely, after what you told him—?"

"He despised 'em long before that, Chicky. A friend of his had been
a victim of one of their… funny little pranks. I'd come to know Cam
quite well by then, and I didn't trust him, so before I sailed, I made
him give me his solemn word he'd say nothing. I… know what Craig-Bell
does to people who cross him."

Sophia's hands were twisting frantically at the soggy handkerchief.
Her face very white, she moaned, "He… Camille… wasn't the one
who—started that fire? Who destroyed them? Stephen? My God! It wasn't
Camille
?"

"It was! It was! The blasted fool! The Runners had been after Cobra
for years but couldn't find the smallest clue. Nobody dared speak—we
were all so hopelessly incriminated, and we all had loved ones who
would have been… disgraced. Craig-Bell is incredibly vicious. You do
not know, Sophia…"

She did know, to some extent. For, at last, it was all falling into
place. Camille had withdrawn to country obscurity after a famous
statesman, standing next to him, had been shot down on a London street.
They'd been aiming at the Marquis, not Rondell! For their own
protection, he rebuffed the visitors he must have longed to welcome to
his lonely home. He lied constantly; had they guessed the truth,
nothing would have kept them away. Vaille, certainly, would be firmly
installed at Cancrizans! And Feather? Nothing would drive that grimly
devoted lady from his side if she suspected he was in danger! So many
things became clear. That wicked note to Ariel and the resultant battle
had been Cobra's doing, of course—the big man had been a tool for
murder! Did that mean they had tortured Camille long enough? Was his
death now decreed?