Seduced by a Stranger (17 page)

Second, Sebastian’s words denoted that he knew far more about her than she had willingly shared, far more about her than she knew of him.

“Tell me about the wonderful things you saw in Egypt,” she prompted, her tone polite and even, betraying none of her thoughts.

“Wonderful things? I suppose there were some. And dreadful things, as well.” He set his cup on the table and shifted forward in his chair, leaning toward her with his forearms on his thighs. “I have been there many times. My most recent travels took me to the tombs of Qurna. There was gold in every tomb. A man could become rich on the treasures buried there.”

“Are you such a man?”

He sat back and shrugged. “I must confess that I was tempted. Gold and jewels aplenty beneath a thousand layers of dust. But I suppose I have some principles left. Robbing the dead lacked appeal.” Again, he grinned, a practiced, engaging smile. “Now, robbing the living is another matter entirely.”

Refusing to be baited, she asked, “What were the tombs like?”

He lifted his cup and saucer once more, and Catherine realized he was always in motion, never still. That in itself was enough to differentiate him from Gabriel, even if there had not been all the other clues. Gabriel was the eye of the storm, motionless, commotionless, but never serene. His was a quivering stillness, like a bowstring drawn taut, while Sebastian was laced with suppressed tension, ever shifting position in a suave, fluid way.

“The tombs,” he mused. “Darkness all about, and narrow passages, stale and dank. In some, we were obliged to get down on our knees and crawl, with the bite of sharp stones beneath us and the stink of death heavy in every breath.” His smile faded and his gaze grew distant. “The torches flickered and failed for want of air, and my nose and mouth and eyes were filled with grit. And all about…I can hardly describe it. Wrapped bodies, ancient and desiccated, stacked one atop the next, and shapes of other things, indistinguishable in the poor light. Statues. Carvings. Things that were half jackal, half man.”

Catherine nodded in mute encouragement, drawn in by his tale, imagining the place he described.

“One of the men in our party sought a moment’s rest. He sat upon a wooden box, when with a crash of bones and wood, he found himself sinking in a sea of mummies as his weight bore down on centuries of remains. So tenuous was his position that we were forced to wait several moments until the bodies settled and we could haul him out without sacrificing ourselves to the same fate. Imagine”—he gave a short laugh—“drowning in a sea of the ancient dead. For a long while after, I looked over my shoulder, certain that ghosts followed. You have no idea.”

Did she not? She had her own ghosts that followed close enough to nip at her heels. “Why would you visit such a place? What is the appeal?”

“I have been visiting such places since I was a child. My guardian, a most unconventional man, had a penchant for travel, and he dragged me along.”

His guardian. She wanted to ask about that, to query his exact relationship to Gabriel, to understand the link that made them cousins, but she was not so forward as that.

“Why do I continue to visit?” He paused, rubbed his fingers along his jaw. “Adventure. Knowledge. To be anywhere but here.”

She sucked in a breath at his blatant admission. “And yet, you return here and call it home.”

“Yes. In the end, Cairncroft always calls us home.” There was bitterness in his tone and a sardonic edge. “Do you know,” he said, lowering his voice as though to share a confidence, “the Egyptians mummified their dead in preparation for another life.” He gave a hard huff of laughter. “We simply bury them and let them rot.”

Or let them burn
, Catherine thought.

He slanted her a glance beneath his lashes, and she wondered if she had given herself away by expression or action. But, no, he merely wanted to judge her response to his tale as he continued, “One thing I have always found particularly fascinating are the canopic jars and their gruesome contents.”

“Gruesome?”

He nodded. “They are jars made of limestone or pottery, or even bronze. They hold the entrails.” After a heartbeat, he continued, “The ancient Egyptians cut the organs out and assigned one to each jar. Liver, lungs, stomach, and intestine. Four jars, often decorated with images of their gods.”

He was testing her, watching her, determined to see if she would become missish at such vile description. Why? Was this merely a game for his entertainment, or was there a deeper purpose?

“Liver, lungs, stomach, and intestine…Not the heart?” she inquired coolly, though her attention was split now between his answers and something in his words that nagged at her, disturbed her.

Again, he laughed. “No, the heart they left intact to be weighed at judgment.”

Judgment.

She opened her mouth to ask what the heart was weighed against, but before she could speak a new voice interjected.

“The heart is weighed against a feather.”

Catherine gasped and jerked about in her seat. Gabriel stood in the doorway, one shoulder against the frame, arms crossed over his chest. The cut of his brown riding coat accentuated the breadth of his shoulders, and the color reflected in his eyes, lending them a warm brandy glow. His hair was windblown, his gaze intent. Her heart gave a sharp little kick in her breast. Because she was glad to see him, though she ought not to be.

In that instant she realized that despite the cousins’ resemblance, for her it was Gabriel who made the air sizzle and crack, made her pulse speed up and her breath come a little faster. Beside him, Sebastian paled.

The realization rankled. Of course she would be attracted to the villain rather than the flirt.

“Gabriel.” Sebastian rose from his seat.

“Sebastian.” The cousins clasped hands and then broke apart, Sebastian returning to his place on the settee, Gabriel choosing a chair directly to Catherine’s right, far too close for her peace of mind. The tip of his boot brushed her hem, and she surreptitiously pulled her skirt away, only to look up and find him watching her. It came to her that he had chosen this proximity with the purpose of warning his cousin off, as though demarcating his territory or ownership. She thrust the thought aside as quickly as it materialized. Surely he did not think of her that way. As
his
.

And what vile malady assailed her that any part of her wanted him to?

“Please, do not let me interrupt,” Gabriel said, his lips curved in the barest hint of a smile. It did not reach his eyes. Had she ever seen him smile openly and fully? Had she seen a smile reach his eyes?

Perhaps…once or twice. She recalled the day at breakfast when he had first returned from London, she had seen his lips curve enough to carve a crease in his cheek and make tiny lines fan from the corners of his eyes. A rare happenstance. The rest of the time he seemed to mirror the expressions he saw in others, or perhaps he attempted an appropriate response, but never
felt
the emotion he portrayed.

What sort of life had he led to engender such a lack…or was it a trick of birth that had made him this way?

She realized that Sebastian was speaking, filling the silence with some unimportant comment. About the weather. Again. Shooting a glance at Gabriel, she found him watching her with the faintest flicker of shared amusement as she murmured a reply.

Quickly returning her attention to Sebastian, she said, “Do continue with your description of your travels.”

“Yes, do,” Gabriel prompted with a complete lack of inflection. The way the two men had greeted each other was both warm and cool. Was there genuine pleasure in their exchange? She could not say with certainty.

“The Egyptians believe each tomb is sealed with a curse placed there by their ancestors,” Sebastian offered, speaking to her, but looking at Gabriel.

“Of course. A curse,” Gabriel murmured.

Catherine recalled Mrs. Bell’s talk of curses and tragedies, and she wondered if there was some secret the two cousins shared. From the exchange of glances, she thought perhaps there was. “What sort of curse?”

“One that must be nullified with a counter-curse lest the tomb’s opener suffer a vile and painful demise,” Sebastian replied, his tone overly dramatic, as though he poked fun at himself. Or did he poke fun at her? She was not of a mind to ask him. “They say only a handful of Egyptians know the counter-curse. I cannot claim to have faith in such fribble, but I am a cautious fellow. I made certain never to be at the forefront of the charge into the tombs lest I be afflicted.”

Catherine blinked, taken aback at his casual admission of what some might construe as cowardice.

As though he read her thoughts, Sebastian laughed. “Not fear, Catherine.
Caution
. The difference is subtle, but there nonetheless.” He slanted an unreadable glance at Gabriel. “Cowardice is not a St. Aubyn trait.”

Sebastian used her given name so casually, and she wondered if it was that or the mention of cowardice that had Gabriel stiffening in his seat. The movement was ever so slight and she might have missed it except she was utterly attuned to his presence. His mood. His every breath. The way his lashes swept down to veil his thoughts.

And that made him unutterably dangerous to her.

“Do you believe in curses, Catherine?” Gabriel asked, his tone cool and remote.

Was this the man who had comforted her, kissed her? Yes. Somewhere inside the cold exterior lurked at least a modicum of passion. Perhaps a vast storm of it. She had felt it, shared it. Hadn’t she? Or had she only imagined it, a reflection of the tumult he stirred inside her?

“No, I do not.” But even as she made her reply, she wondered if her words were the truth. Had there not been occasions when she believed her own life had been cursed?

The thought had proven anathema to her nature. She had always regarded her ability to overcome whatever horror was visited upon her—to
survive
—as a sort of gift. But at the darkest of times, doubt had crept up on her, whispering to her.

“Perhaps you should,” Gabriel said, with an inflection that might have been either humor or derision. Aimed at her? At himself?

Sebastian watched them with blatant interest. He could not have missed the undercurrents in every word they spoke, or the way she subtly shifted her hand away when Gabriel had moved his to brush her own. It was no accident. She did not believe anything Gabriel St. Aubyn did was accidental.

They engaged in innocuous conversation for only a few moments more, when Gabriel abruptly lost patience.

“Enough.” He rose and offered Catherine a shallow bow, then turned to his cousin. “We have things to discuss, Sebastian. Join me.”

With a dark look, quickly masked, Sebastian rose as well and took his leave, far more politely than his cousin. Gabriel gestured for Sebastian to precede him, and only then did he turn back to Catherine, the light from the window touching half his face, painting his hair and the glint of beard on his jaw in shades of glittering gold, leaving the other half of him in shadow. Reaching out, he stroked the backs of his fingers along her cheek, the touch barely there.

She stared at him, her breath frozen. Then he turned and followed his cousin from the room.

For a long while, she sat alone in the parlor with the beam of sunlight slanting across her skirt and her thoughts spinning like a child’s top. It was only when she glanced up and saw a pottery vase on the pedestal table that she again thought that something about Sebastian’s description of the canopic jars nagged at her. Something…

And suddenly, it struck her.

Rising, she stood in the center of the room, seeing nothing, her heart pounding, her mouth dry. Recollection of the words from the newspaper clipping that described Martha’s body slammed her. Coincidence was an impossibility, but perhaps she was wrong, perhaps—

Closing her eyes, she recalled the horrific article, every word branded in her mind though the actual paper was gone, burned to ash.

Her clothes had been cut away from the torso, and the chest and abdominal cavities opened with a sharp instrument, without precision. On postmortem examination of the body, he found the lungs, liver, stomach, and intestine removed, again, without precision. The heart was untouched.

 

Her legs trembled and she sank down onto the chair once more. Martha was dead. Four of her organs removed, and the heart left behind, exactly as Sebastian described in his blithe recounting of the canopic jars and their purpose.

Had he shared those stories with a particular purpose in mind?

When exactly had he returned from Egypt? Had he been in London when Martha was killed?

Icy dread touched her. She pressed her fingers to her brow, thinking, thinking. Her suspicions were impossible. Ridiculous.

How many people lived in London? Any one of them could be the killer. Why in Heaven’s name did she think there was some significance, some link, between the killer, the organs removed from Martha’s body, and Sebastian’s recounting of the purpose of the canopic jars?

Her thoughts spun in a cacophony of sound and light, and emerging from the melee was the recollection of Gabriel asking her if it was Martha’s death that had her so distressed, or the fact that Martha’s organs had been removed. He had known that fact despite only glancing at the article, not reading it in its entirety. She had noted it then, remembered it now.

For some reason, she thought, too, of Madeline’s story that day in the garden about a girl found covered in blood.

With a shake of her head, she took a deep breath, counted back the days…and realized that although she could not account for Sebastian’s whereabouts, she knew from his own admission that Gabriel had been in London in the days before Martha’s body was found.

“On a bright and sunny day”—Sebastian paused long enough to glance at the window—“well, somewhat sunny when the clouds break. Either way, here we sit in the gloom.”

“We are not sitting, as yet,” Gabriel pointed out, handing him a glass of brandy.

“But we are shrouded in gloom.” Sebastian shrugged and settled with lazy insouciance in a high-backed leather and gold chair. “You are nothing if not consistent, cousin.”

“It is bright enough,” Gabriel said. The sconces were lit and he had dragged the heavy curtain open a hand span. “Besides, I thought you would have had enough of the sun after Egypt. England’s clouds must be a welcome change.”

“One would think.” Sebastian laughed, but there was a brittle edge to the sound. “We make a pair, don’t we? Skulking about in the shadows like two creatures of the night.”

Gabriel studied him a moment. There was something odd about Sebastian, something hard. A new edge that had not been there the last time Gabriel had seen him, before he left on his latest trip. “Is there a particular reason you are skulking, Sebastian?”

His cousin offered a tight smile, then tossed back half the brandy in his glass.

“I am only restless,” he said, and Gabriel knew it for the lie it was. Then Sebastian laughed and winked. “Perhaps your Miss Weston will entertain me.”

Anger raised its head and snarled, the emotion so raw and sudden that Gabriel almost let it slide free. He was stunned by the force and speed of his rage.

“Perhaps not,” he replied, his tone diamond hard. He turned away and stared into the hearth as the clock on the mantel ticked loud in the quiet. The flames made him think of her, of the light she brought to his world of dim passages and hidden caverns and the darkness of his soul.

He clenched his fist by his side, appalled at his thoughts. He was no romantic fool. Yes, she brought light, but if he let her come too close, she would singe him as surely as any flame.

“Well,” Sebastian observed dryly, “you are as charming a conversationalist as ever, cousin.” He pushed himself from the chair and half rose. “I believe I
shall
seek out the lovely Miss Weston once more.”

“Stay away from her.” Gabriel spun to face his cousin, his tone frigid, cold-blooded rage raising its saurian head.

Sebastian sat back down, his expression contemplative, and raised his glass as though in a toast.

“Ah,” he mused. “So that is the way of it. I had not imagined that you would ever don the mantle of jealousy, cousin.”

“Do not imagine it now,” Gabriel replied, his tone even, his mask once more in place.

Jealousy. The notion was absurd. Yet the sight of Sebastian and Catherine sitting in cozy camaraderie in the parlor had reached inside him and clenched like a fist, twisting him up tighter than a Gordian knot. Jealousy. He had never known the like. The emotion was unfamiliar. Unpleasant in the extreme.

Lifting the poker, he prodded the log and watched it spit and pop. He thought of Catherine’s night-dark eyes and thick straight lashes, imagined them hooded and lazy with passion. He thought of her lips, forming polite words in conversation. Then he thought of them pressed to his, open and eager. Hungry. As he was hungry.

He wanted her to kiss no other but him, and the fact that he had to leave the choice, the timing, to her was like a blade in his gut. He had wanted her from the start, and grew tired of that wanting. For a patient man, he was remarkably
impatient
when it came to her, edgy and overeager.

“Stay away from her,” he said again, and finally turned away from the fire to face his cousin once more.

Sebastian sipped his brandy and studied him with raised brows and overblown surprise.

“Do not tell me you are smitten, Gabriel?” His brows lowered and he continued in a musing tone, “Do you know who she is? What they say about her?”

Gabriel almost laughed. “Do you know who I am? What they say about me?” he answered, faintly mocking.

“Gabriel—”

“No,” he said, his tone carrying the rasp of a razor on a strop. “Speak to me of anything but her.” He paused, then offered far more than was his habit, only because he
needed
to set the thoughts free and Sebastian was as close to holding his trust as any living being. “She haunts my nights. My days. My every thought.” He met his cousin’s gaze and made things as plain as he possibly could. “Catherine Weston is mine.”

The words echoed in the cavernous room, and in that moment, he knew them for utter and complete truth. Catherine was his. She only had not recognized it yet.

“Then I shall find another to play my games with,” Sebastian said. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “Will you marry her?”

The conundrum of that had occurred to him. Would he? The question made Gabriel acutely aware of the differences between himself and a normal man. He knew what the answer ought to be. She was a baron’s daughter. Of course she would expect marriage.

Wouldn’t she?

And if he did marry her, how was he to keep his secrets then? And how was he to explain that he would never give her a child?

On that topic, he was implacable in his resolve. Never would he doom an innocent babe to the taint of the St. Aubyn line.

“Are you afraid I will sire a pup and any hope you have of a baronetcy will be lost?” Gabriel asked, avoiding a direct answer to his cousin’s question because, in truth, he did not have one. “Fear not, cousin. I shall never have a child, and you know my reasons for that. Your right of succession is safe.”

“I care little for that,” Sebastian said with a wave of his hand.

It was the truth. Gabriel knew it. Sebastian was rich in his own right, and a title would likely only tie him down in a way he would despise. He preferred to move about, to travel. To flee the ghosts of his past rather than face them. Gabriel could understand his actions, even envy them to a degree.

There had been years, endless dark years, when he had dreamed of leaving England and roaming the world as his cousin did.

“What did you learn at Hanham House?” he asked, changing the subject to one far less palatable, but necessary.

“Very little. They were not forthcoming when I asked them to produce him in person. They claimed he was too overwrought for visitors. Suggested I should return another time, perhaps in a matter of weeks. They only brought me a letter that appears to be in his hand, but might have been written days, or even weeks past. There is nothing specific. I have it here if you wish to see for yourself.” He dragged the letter from his coat.

Gabriel stared at the thing in revulsion. He did not want to see it or read it or know anything it contained. “Set it there,” he said, jutting his chin toward the desk, careful to keep his tone bland as oatmeal.

For though he trusted Sebastian more than most, if he measured that trust evenly against grains of sand, there would be pathetically few on the scale.

“Do you wonder about my cousin?” Madeline asked as they walked in the garden the following afternoon. Catherine had insisted, certain that a bit of fresh air and healthful exercise could only be beneficial. Their pace was sedate, the day fair. They walked the path that curved along the lake. Madeline had chosen it, though Catherine could not say why. The surface was a dark and putrid green, the breeze churning up small waves and carrying the pungent scent of the brackish water.

“Which cousin?” she asked, for there were now two in residence.

“Gabriel.” Madeline exhaled in a huff. There was a dark edge to her tone as she said his name. “Sebastian will tell you enough without my help. He finds himself to be a fascinating topic indeed. Besides, I think you are not so interested in him.”

Catherine slanted her a sidelong glance, feeling a warm rush of embarrassment at the blunt observation, as though Madeline had somehow peeked into her secret musings. She had been thinking about him. Gabriel. Images came at her, unwanted, unbidden. The touch of his hand on her nape as she sobbed; the small kindnesses he had offered—a cool cloth, a glass of water. Simple things she had not even known she needed until he brought them to her.

The memory of his kiss, hungry, possessive, made her lips tingle even now, and she wondered exactly what Madeline knew that made her raise the topic of her cousin Gabriel.

Nothing. Of course, she knew nothing.

Madeline had been tucked in her bed, cradled in laudanum-induced slumber when Gabriel had come to Catherine’s chamber.

“I do wonder about your cousin,” she replied at last, linking her arm with Madeline’s. “Would you like to talk about him?”

“Not in the slightest.” Madeline pressed her lips together and toed at the dirt with the tip of her boot before walking on. “But I shall because there are things you must know, things I must tell you while my mind is my own and I can speak the words I wish to say rather than the ones that trip to the tip of my tongue and fly free whether I will it or nay.” She paused and drew a ragged breath. “We both know that I am not always lucid now.”

Pity twisted Catherine’s heart. The self-portrait painted by Madeline’s words was horrifying, all the more so because Madeline was brutally aware of her own decline.

“Tell me whatever you wish,” she murmured. “I shall listen.”

“Avidly, I am sure,” Madeline observed with a dull laugh, and Catherine could not deny it.

“Yes. Avidly.” She lowered her head as they walked and stared at the thin, brown grass on either side of the dirt path. A clump of pansies burst from the earth, the color of their petals somewhere between butterscotch and yellow, the centers darker. They made her think of Gabriel’s eyes, liquid topaz in the light, amber gold in the shadows.

“Do not romanticize him, Catherine. He is not a good man, or a kind one. Do not paint him in variegated hues of light.” Madeline stumbled to a stop, clutched her arm all the tighter, and finished with a harsh cry, “He is a monster.”

A handful of black birds that had been pecking at the dirt startled at her cry. Their wings slapped air, the sound like the snap of a rag to shake out the dust. The sight of them reminded Catherine of the night of her arrival and the dead bird on the drive.

She turned her head to find Madeline tracking their flight, her features scrunched tight, as though she battled tears.

A lump clogged her throat as Catherine realized how transparent she was. Even Madeline, with her tenuous grasp on reality, read the yearning that burgeoned in her heart for Gabriel St. Aubyn, a man whose own cousin believed him capable of murder. Her lungs felt tight, each breath a struggle, the weight of her regret heavy on her breast. Once before, she had been blinded by attraction, by gratitude, by the kindness a man showed her that she had believed came from his heart. False kindness. She had paid a horrific price for her folly.

Was she allowing herself to walk the same path once more? Had she learned nothing at all?

No. She was wiser now. Stronger.

Then why did Gabriel’s words haunt her in the dark of night and the light of day? Why could she not thrust aside the things he had whispered to her?

Because you are parched and I am water, because you are breathless and I am air
, he had said, the images evoked by his words stroking her already sensitized nerves. He believed she would come to need him.

To ache for him.

He was wrong. She must guard herself and make certain that he was wrong.

It was only in a moment of weakness that she had allowed Gabriel to kiss her. There was her excuse. She would not allow it to happen again. She would never permit herself to need him that way. It was a definite path to heartbreak and ruin. She had learned that much, at least.

Beside her, Madeline swayed in place, her eyes closed, her lips pressed tight together. What paltry color had been in her cheeks leached away now until she was white as bone.

“My tale is long, and I tire so easily,” she said. “Perhaps it would be best if we return to my chamber”—she looked nervously to the left, the right, and lowered her voice—“though it is likely safer to speak out here. The walls have ears.”

Of that, Catherine had no doubt. Mrs. Bell’s ears, or the footman’s or the cook’s. Servants who made themselves invisible, but saw and heard much. But she knew that Madeline spoke of other ears, those belonging to creatures no one but she could see.

They made their way inside, Madeline leaning heavily on Catherine’s arm. The trip up the flights of stairs was laborious; Madeline begged for rest again and again. What would take Catherine a matter of minutes to ascend on her own took the two of them the better part of a half hour. At last, they reached Madeline’s chamber.

“Shall I summon the maid to help you change?” Catherine asked.

“Will you help me?” Madeline sighed. “I only like Susan. She has gentle hands. But she has gone away.”

As Catherine helped Madeline to remove her walking gown and don a fresh nightrail, she was heartened to note that her friend’s form was slender but not wasted despite her poor appetite and the minuscule amount of food she ingested in Catherine’s presence. Perhaps she nibbled a bit when no one was with her.

“Open the curtains so I might see the sky,” Madeline murmured as she settled in her bed.

Catherine did as she requested, then returned to her side and lowered herself to the edge of the bed. A thick ribbon of silence wove about them, interrupted only by the quiet sounds of their breathing. Madeline’s eyes were closed, her features relaxed.

After a moment, the chirping of birds carried through the glass panes, and Catherine turned her face to the window, thinking that Madeline had drifted to sleep, that her opportunity to know more about Gabriel was lost for the moment.

“He killed them.”

Catherine started at the sound of Madeline’s voice, the fine hairs on her arms rising. She bit her tongue against the flood of questions that swelled to her lips like breakers on the shore, agonizingly aware that Madeline would tell her tale at her own pace or not at all. That much she had learned in her time at Cairncroft Abbey. With pounding heart, she waited.