The Deepest Sin (32 page)

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Authors: Caroline Richards

BOOK: The Deepest Sin
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Her eyes softened. “I do recognize love when I see and feel it,” she continued, her gaze never wavering from his, showing courage to the end. “I think I loved you from the moment I saw you standing in the entrance at Montfort,” she confessed. “You were so tall, so large and so damnably distant despite your easy charm. And here I was, a woman well into her fourth decade, and you made me stop and catch my breath like a young girl.” She stopped. “No, not like a young girl because that pales in comparison to what I felt, what I feel ...”
He sat unmoving, and for a moment she thought he hadn't heard her.
Her fingers playing with the stem of her wineglass, she continued carefully. “You were right. I was married to a past that was keeping me from living, hanging on to a ghostly love that was never right, even in the beginning. I know that now. If Montagu”—she paused, “if Faron had truly loved me, he would never have believed his cousin Jerome's lies about me, despite his grievous injuries. Nor would he have done those sick, heinous ...” She stopped, placing a hand over her lips.
When she recovered, he was at her side, and her sorrow made his heart clench. He pulled her into his arms, raising a hand to brush a curl away from her eyes. He swept it back, fingers tracing the curve of her ear, trailing down her neck. “I love you and nothing else matters.” There was triumph and assurance in his voice.
“And I love you,” she whispered fiercely. “If you need further proof, when I heard Blythe's voice in the stairwell at the Fitzwilliam, all I could think about was the danger you were in. I knew then that I would risk anything to save your life.”
He kissed her tenderly, as though for the first time, his hands stroking her hair. “No wonder I love you,” he said, his breath warm on her lips. “My courageous, beautiful, brilliant Meredith.”
She pulled back and laid a finger over his mouth. “You are the courageous one, getting involved with me and my complicated life. The attack in Rashid, the sandstorm and then all the business with Whitehall. And then the night I came to you, using you ...”
He smiled. “The least of my complaints, my love.” He cupped her jaw, ran his thumb along her cheek, savoring the softness of her skin and the tremble of her body in response to his touch. He leaned in, setting a hot kiss on the delicate skin just below her ear.
The breath shuddered out of her. “We do well in that regard,” she said, her voice low.
“Yes, we do,” he said with a slow grin. “Why do you think I never gave up on you?”
“You are a cad after all,” she said, but with a responding smile before a shadow crossed her face once more. “I just wish it were over.”
“It is over,” he said with typical arrogance. “Tomorrow we will go to Claire de Lune and discover who is behind these events, root him out once and for all.” He kept his suspicions to himself, relieved that the painful intensity in her voice had dissipated.
She stiffened slightly, her eyes shuttered. She placed one hand upon his chest and pushed him back a fraction of an inch. “In my heart I wish nothing more than for us to return to England together, rather than traveling on to Blois. And I feel guilty having you by my side, risking you as I have risked the lives of Julia and Rowena, for too long. And yet, I know this is necessary, to end things that should have ended years ago. It is something I must do.” By myself, she wanted to add, but didn't.
A small lie on her part, but before she could continue, he stopped the words with his mouth on hers, his hands sliding around her body to cup her buttocks, pressing her hard against him until he felt the playful resistance leave her. Her lips were soft and yielding, her body moving on his. He raised his head, his familiar, wicked smile back in place. In response, she grabbed hold of his hand, her grip confident and sure, and pulled him toward the bed in the center of the small room, never taking her eyes from his.
Chapter 14
M
eredith waited until well after midnight before she carefully slid out of bed, murmuring to Archer, who slumbered beside her, something about using the privy down the inn's narrow hallway. Her escape was simple, slipping into her clothes and out the door, her saddlebag gripped in one hand. Taking the servants' stairway down, she edged out the kitchen door. No cook or proprietor was to be seen.
The cold was a slap in her face, the night clear with a full moon. A groom slumped in the corner of the stables unaware that she led her horse from its stall. She waited to saddle it and tie on the saddlebag until she was a few yards from the stables. She led the horse in silence only moments as the road to Blois appeared
Archer would awaken and encounter cool sheets instead of the warmth of her body. She wasn't certain that he knew the location of Claire de Lune and desperately hoped that he would understand and not follow her. A hastily scribbled note was all that she had left as explanation. This was the final battle and one that she would fight—at last burying Montagu Faron and the shadow he had cast over her life and those she loved for far too long.
Riding through the night and early morning, she was alone with only her thoughts, a dangerous place to be. She recognized firsthand now that the workings of the mind were as dangerous as those of the heart. Thoughts of Archer intruded, were pushed aside, suppressed. Then they insistently stole back into her mind, more relentless than before. She loved him with the zealousness of the converted, and the acknowledgment did nothing to dispel the hurt of leaving him behind at the inn. Her chest ached with the pain of it and with every mile she came closer to Claire de Lune without him. Even if he managed to follow her to the chateau, he would not know the location of her true destination.
The road was suddenly heart-stoppingly familiar. Claire de Lune rose in the distance, a fortress built in the sixteenth century by Charles I, its four sides centered around a courtyard with a back wall, later destroyed to obtain a better view of the Loire River below. With its hundred rooms, its turrets, graceful arches and mullioned windows, it seemed conjured from a Renaissance fairy tale. But Meredith knew that fairy tales were for children, best outgrown and left behind like toys in the nursery.
Instead of following the curved road to the chateau framed by plane trees arrayed like a regiment of soldiers, Meredith urged her mount onwards. The sun was cresting the horizon, burning off the frost on the pastoral landscape. Here was a moderate climate long beloved of kings, queens and the powerful. Years fell away as she found the narrow roadway outside Blois where the little cottage waited. The trees were bare now yet still graceful, the bowers of shrubs and roses waiting for spring. Even in December, she recalled the smell of blossoms, the delicate scent setting off a small explosion of memories.
She stopped before she could see the cottage. The rosebush was still there, and she dismounted. The ground at her feet was crisp with frosted leaves and the imagined scent of blossoms disappeared. The air was acrid with burning vegetation, a gardener's bonfire, she reminded herself, starting at the scent. She gathered her pelisse closer, despite the warming sun marching its way across the blue sky above the river.
It was time to go. She walked her mount along the narrow path, kicking away leaves in her way, surprised that she was no longer beset by memories. Like the dusty mementos in an attic, the yellowed portraits, the forgotten toys and love letters tied with ribbon, they were the detritus of a squandered life. That was the reason she had come today to exorcise the past, without which she could not go forward into the future with Archer. She owed it not only to herself, but even more to him, Julia and Rowena.
The small cottage had changed very little from her dreams and nightmares. And why should it? It had been built three hundred years before and would last another three. Tying up her horse behind it, she approached the door and peered through the window.
Where there had once been a book-lined wall, there was emptiness, and the bed that had once dominated the main room was gone, along with its rumpled silk sheets and damask coverlets. She opened the door and closed her eyes.
 
Muslin curtains wafted gently in a summer's breeze. It was a book-lined room, papers scattered on the polished wood floor, a single candle burning low in its holder. The center was dominated by an opulent bed, fitted with the finest sheets and damask coverlets where two naked figures slept entwined, their bodies heavy with fulfillment. The girl lay on her back, her red hair fanned across the pillow, one arm falling loosely around the back of her partner. His dark head was pillowed next to hers, a leg flung possessively over her thighs, trapping her into the sumptuous feather mattress.
A small sigh escaped her lips, a muted sound of remembered desire that faded into a contented breath. Meredith felt the familiar body by her side, in tune with hers after long hours of passion. She kept her eyes closed and a smile on her lips, breathing in the scent of the summer breeze finding its way through the open door.
Meredith opened her eyes to an empty room, with wood floors covered in dust. The empty bookshelves mocked her save for one object glowing in the slant of sunshine. It beckoned, a finely tooled leather mask, calling her closer. She took a step, then another, the distance seemingly insurmountable. Her hands shook, hovering over the mask.
“It has been a long time indeed.” A familiar voice came from behind her. “Welcome home, Meredith Woolcott.”
With the slowness of nightmares, she tried to turn around just as her feet flew out from under her, spilling her to the floor. A blinding pain split the back of her head, and the room blurred, faded and then returned, before the light contracted to a pinpoint and finally disappeared.
 
Each time Meredith tried to move her limbs, she felt her whole torso resist. She wanted to open her eyes, but she feared what she would see, preferring to stay in the protectiveness of deep sleep. She slipped away again, the surface under her hard and unrelenting. Gradually the darkness coalesced into a series of shapes and densities of gray. The silence was profound, deeper than anything that she had ever experienced and yet she sensed with sickening dread that she wasn't alone.
The warmth of an afternoon sun pouring through glass coaxed her eyes open. Her head pounded from a bruise at the base of her neck. She pulled herself upright against a wall. A man was sitting by the open door, his face obscured by shadows, the wings of the chair seeming to envelop him, cutting him off from the rest of the empty room.
He held the mask in his hands. Meredith's throat went dry, the pounding of her temples keeping time with the rising swell of bile in her throat. The man awaiting her was not Faron. She knew simply by the way he held himself and, when he turned his head away from the shadows, the way his lips thinned over his teeth.
Giles Lowther. He slowly raised the mask and placed it over his face. Meredith struggled with nausea, swaying to a seated position on the floor, her hands and ankles bound. Her first attempt to speak was a rasp, inarticulate and cut short.
“I never did think you were that intelligent.” The words hissed through the slit in the mask. “And this ridiculous denouement only proves it.”
Meredith could not have reached for her pistol in the folds of her skirt. In any case, it would be gone.
“For once, you don't know what to say,” Lowther said, admonishing her with an upraised finger. He sat up straighter, and as though looking in a mirror, made a minute adjustment of the mask.
There was nothing to say. She understood now, the pieces of the puzzle sliding into a horrifying whole. He was looking at her expectantly, forcing her silence into another kind of submission. “You were always jealous of Montagu,” she finally said, trying to control her voice. “It was never Jerome, was it? It was you who was behind the attack that changed everything.”
Lowther ignored her, flicking a hand over the mask. “Nor for that matter, did I ever believe that Faron was so bloody brilliant.” His voice rose, echoing in the emptiness of the room. “I was the brilliant one. I was the one who came from nothing, the gutters of East London to the gallows of Paris where he found me. And a good thing he did. Because I was the mastermind behind every success Faron ever had.”
Meredith's mind flashed back in time, and saw the hazy outlines of Giles Lowther shadowing Montagu Faron, a mere silhouette that she could scarcely remember.
He laughed softly, as though at a private joke. “Oh, yes, I recognize that you were barely aware of my existence. The two of you.” His lips curled in disdain. “I was the one who plotted to ensure we would get the maps that Lord Strathmore led us to, with your half-sister Julia used as bait. Don't look so shocked. How long did you believe you could keep that a secret? That the two children you plucked from the nursery fire were your father's daughters, his bastard children, the pathetic result of his affair with a village slut? The daughter of a priest who met her end in the nursery fire. Well deserved, if you believe in God and retribution.” He shook his head. “It was only Faron's maudlin sentimentality, and the fact that you held him in thrall, that prompted him to allow those children at the chateau.”
Meredith closed her eyes against the tears, but they came anyway. When she opened them, his eyes locked upon hers. “And Lord Rushford and your beloved Rowena—I was the one who strategized the theft of the Rosetta stone so Faron could add it to his bloody collection.” His pale eyes glowed behind the mask. “I did not attend the Sorbonne. I did not have the benefit of tutors, such as your well-respected father, the Cambridge don. But what I did have was the ambition and the sheer intellect to absorb knowledge as it came my way. As castoffs, as discards.”
A moment ago, she had felt grief. But now something harder quickened her blood, a desire to know, to understand.
“You attacked Faron that night after we met here. And later, you set fire to the nursery.” It was a test.
Lowther took a deep breath, inflating his barrel chest. His eyes settled upon her, trying to gauge the depth of her knowledge. He smiled behind the mask, shaking his head slowly. “I didn't have to, you fool. Jerome was easily led, the half-wit, the product of generations of aristocratic inbreeding.” He sneered. “And amazingly, after the accident, Faron was putty in my hands, eager to believe every last poisoned seed I planted in his mind.” He glanced at her slyly. “I even told him that you had rutted with his cousin Jerome. Urging him to set fire to the nursery was child's play after that. Please forgive the figure of speech.”
Lowther had stopped talking, but his voice continued to echo in her head. The pounding at her temples turned to a ringing in her ears. She twisted her wrists against the leather bindings, the scars on her forearms burning.
“I watched him die, you know, my dear Meredith.” His tone had turned to a ragged whisper, whistling from the slit in the mask. “The first attempt at the hands of your half-sister Julia—immolation. And the second at the hands of your half-sister Rowena—drowning. And Faron did drown, I assure you, in the cold waters of the Channel.” His voice was hoarse with triumph. “I made sure he died once I no longer had need of him.”
Meredith clenched her fists, the nails drawing blood. The physical pain sharpened her senses, giving her a window of clarity as she forced herself to her knees. The door tilted and the walls rippled.
Remaining seated, the mask still in place, Lowther watched. “You feel unwell,” he said at length.
Another wave of nausea rolled through her.
“There's nothing to fear. Don't fight it.” He sighed and then smiled behind the mask with something like compassion. “If I'm feeling generous, I shall ensure that the smoke kills you before the flames do.” And then he looked past her, through the glass wall of the French doors as though the cottage was already nothing more than smoke and ashes.
A surge of anger spiked through her, straightening her spine, conserving her strength. If there was only a weapon, a wine bottle, a vase that she could use. Her eyes settled on her saddlebag sagging next to Lowther's chair. Her stomach clenched.
Lowther caught the direction of her gaze. “Of course, of course,” he said like a remiss host. “Thank you so much for reminding me. I might have forgotten... .” He leaned over and opened the bag, extracting the copper cylinder, still wrapped in red silk. “You were most helpful, Meredith, even more so than your wards, in bringing me precisely what I wanted. Now can you guess what this kaleidoscope, this innocent child's toy, holds? Other than a few glass beads that so delighted Julia and Rowena when still in the nursery at Claire de Lune?”

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