Touch of Rogue (29 page)
Authors: Mia Marlowe
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Fantasy, #Historical Romance
Besides, based on what he’d read in the partial manuscript Lady Cambourne had absconded with, when the daggers were originally cast, it was through a combination of metallurgy and the magic art of a metal mage.
He unpacked his traveling desk and wrote out the exact specifications for the binding. The wind howled outside the shuttered window, sending enough air through the leaky casement to make the lamp flicker.
“I’m still the binder,” Malcolm said to the Watchful Eye as he sanded the drying ink and folded the instructions. “My will is what joins the blades together. I set my seal on these instructions. See?”
He melted a glob of red wax on the note and pressed his signet ring into it.
“I am the binder,” he repeated to the spirits of the air. “Jacob Preston can’t bear the touch of metal, so he can’t wield the rod. The power of the staff will answer to me.”
Why would a man rejoin the blades, only to give the Staff of Merlin to another?
The question popped into his mind and swirled around it, taunting him. The powers were testing him to see if he were worthy of the staff.
The question popped into his mind and swirled around it, taunting him. The powers were testing him to see if he were worthy of the staff.
“A man can be persuaded to do almost anything,” Malcolm said as he looked back at the wavering image of Lady Cambourne in his gazing ball. “All one need do is find the proper motivation. I am the first cause. I am the mover. My command binds the daggers together again.”
The wind moaned like the souls of the damned. Malcolm took it as a sign that the powers recognized him as the Binder and ultimate wielder of Merlin’s Staff.
C
HAPTER
28
HAPTER
28
J
acob insisted on waiting till moonrise to set out for Lord Cambourne’s grave. He didn’t want to draw attention to their activities and bring down the wrath of the current earl in the process. The estate was large enough, and the grave far enough from the Dowager’s House, to require use of the coach.
acob insisted on waiting till moonrise to set out for Lord Cambourne’s grave. He didn’t want to draw attention to their activities and bring down the wrath of the current earl in the process. The estate was large enough, and the grave far enough from the Dowager’s House, to require use of the coach.
“Algernon is buried in the woods at the top of the next rise.” Julianne pointed out the coach window as they plodded along the narrow ruts.
Her husband had planned this drive through his sprawling estate as a pleasure path. Even when his age prevented him from riding horseback, he still enjoyed traveling a circuit of his land by carriage. The drive led past the duck pond, meandered through a meadow dotted with sheep, and finally wandered into the deep woods.
When Algernon had been denied burial at the church, Julianne had hoped her stepson would build a small mausoleum beyond the extensive gardens and hothouse. Tucked away, it needn’t have marred the sweeping views from the manor, but it would have made the grave more readily accessible.
Instead, he wanted his father’s body as far from the main house as possible, out of sight and out of remembrance. The new Lord Cambourne had let the pleasure path his father had designed go untended over the last few years. In another five, the drive would be overgrown and unrecognizable. No one would be able to find his father’s grave.
Fortunately, the gigantic old hemlock still stood at the top of the hill. It was her guidepost. Julianne had made one last trip to the site before she left for London to look for the final dagger. In some ways, it seemed fitting that Algernon rested in the land he loved, but the location of his grave was so remote, so desolate, standing over it never failed to make her chest ache over the injustice.
She knew, without needing proof, that he hadn’t taken his own life. But even if he had, she’d never understand why that should obliterate his memory in the minds of his family and friends.
Jacob rapped on the coach ceiling and the driver reined the horse to a stop.
“We’re not there yet,” Julianne said.
“We’re close enough to walk from here.” Jacob opened the door and handed her out. Fenwick leaped down from his perch beside the driver and unloaded a collection of shovels and picks from the boot. “Once you show us where the grave is, I want you to return to the coach. You’ll be warmer.”
She nodded in understanding. He was trying to spare her, but her imagination was probably worse than reality. “Thank you for doing this for me.”
“Haven’t you realized yet that I’ll do anything for you?”
Words caught in her throat, so she pressed a kiss to his cheek. She’d spend the rest of her life making sure he didn’t regret it.
Then Julianne turned to the matter at hand. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to remember her husband’s face. To her surprise, she found his image had grown hazy in her mind, all the little details that make a person unique fading into the mist. She could remember only that he was a good man, a decent, gentle, scholarly sort who, through no fault of his own, had gotten involved in matters beyond his understanding.
If her memory of Algernon’s face was faulty, her recollection of his gravesite was crystal clear. She led the four men unerringly to the spot. Ten paces from the north side of the hemlock’s thick trunk, there was a man-sized indentation in the winter-hard turf. In two years, the disturbed earth had shrunk from a mound to a sunken, compacted spot. The bare tree limbs rattled in the wind overhead, clattering like a dance of old bones. Shadows wavered in the moonlight like disembodied wraiths caught between this world and the next. Julianne’s teeth chattered and she tried to convince herself it was from the cold.
Nothing remained of the hothouse roses she’d left on Algernon’s grave at her last visit, and she had nothing to leave for him now. Instead, she was going to take.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Algernon’s ghost and turned back to the coach, clutching her cloak about her in the stiff wind. Her husband had been murdered, disgraced in death, and now his grave was being desecrated.
When she heard the strike of picks and the bite of shovel blades tearing into the earth, she lifted her skirts and ran the rest of the way back to the coach, grateful not to watch.
The Kilmaines’ driver offered to help, but even with four able-bodied men digging, it took a long time to hack through the hard ground to the depth of Lord Cambourne’s resting place. In the time since his death, the woods’ roots had burrowed back into the space above him and formed a living fibrous shield for the dead.
They toiled on as the moon sank in the west and Fenwick lit a lamp to shed light on their work. Despite the cold night, all four men had shed their jackets and were sweating profusely by the time Jacob’s shovel struck Lord Cambourne’s simple pine casket.
“More light,” Jacob ordered and Fenwick lifted the kerosene lamp to throw a yellow halo around the deep hole. In short order, Jacob cleared the surface of the casket and pried up the edges of the lid.
“Allow me,” George said, and shouldered Jacob aside. “I’m more accustomed to this sort of thing, old chap.”
Jacob was grateful to his friend. Not because he was the squeamish sort. It was simply that the idea of grave robbing sent a superstitious tingle down his spine. He knew the blades were there. He’d been hearing their soft hum for the last half hour, but actually taking them from Julianne’s husband made him uncomfortable. He was beginning to feel he owed the old earl a debt he couldn’t repay.
“They should be at the foot of the casket,” Jacob said as he lifted the lid.
“Right-o,” George said, his voice as cheerful as if they were playing whist at White’s and he’d just been dealt a winning hand. “Here they are. One, two, three, and four.”
He plopped each leather-encased dagger on the grave’s edge as he counted them off. “Let me check one more thing.”
George bent over the earl’s body and pulled back the rotting fabric of his waistcoat and shirt to expose his breastbone. Something metallic glinted in the lamplight. “Ah, as you thought. He’s wearing an amulet just like the one the countess now bears.”
If the daggers hadn’t been sheathed in leather, Jacob was convinced they’d have traveled up Lord Cambourne’s dead body to lodge between his ribs afresh. With four of the murderous blades loosed from the coffin, he wasn’t willing to trust Julianne’s safety to old leather or the metal mesh corset he’d insisted she wear. The diabolical blades fed on human blood and misery. They needed to be destroyed, but all he could do now was contain them.
“Fetch the box, Fenwick.”
His man ran back to the coach to retrieve the platinum-lined strongbox from the boot. The coach was parked a quarter of the way down the hill on the other side of the massive hemlock, so Jacob couldn’t see it from Lord Cambourne’s grave. And fortunately, Julianne couldn’t see the desecration from where she waited, though he knew it troubled her all the same.
Damn Ravenwood for putting them through this.
“Do you want this amulet too?” George asked, pointing to the iron circle on the corpse’s chest.
“No, leave it,” Jacob said. “It’s done enough damage.” He wished he could persuade Julianne to remove the one she wore, but she was adamant about not allowing additional harm to come to Gil if she could help it. Jacob closed the lid on Lord Cambourne’s casket, climbed out of the grave, and tossed a shovelful of dirt back into it. “Let’s finish the job.”
“Mr. Preston!” Fenwick’s voice cut through the night. “Oh, sir, come quick.”
Jacob dropped the shovel and sprinted back to the coach. Fenwick stood by the open door, his face drawn in dismay. “What is it, man?”
“I heard someone moaning and thought Lady Cambourne might be ill, so I cracked the door to see, but ...” He gave a helpless little wave of one hand toward the interior of the coach and the moaning started afresh.
Jacob pulled the door open. Gilbert Stout squirmed on the tufted velvet squab, bound hand and foot, with a gag between his teeth. Julianne was nowhere to be seen.
“Gil!” Jacob worked the gag out of his mouth. “Where’s the countess?”
“I’m right sorry, guv,” the boy said. “Sorry as ever I can be. He plopped me down here and then he took her.”
Jacob made short work of the knots at the boy’s wrists and ankles. “Why didn’t she cry out?”
“Maybe she didn’t have a chance.” George stooped to retrieve a white handkerchief that had been dropped on the ground near the coach. He gave it a sniff and then jerked his arm out stiff, holding it as far from his face as he could. “Chloroform. She was asleep in seconds. Fiendishly clever of him.”
“How long has she been gone?” Jacob surveyed the winding trail they’d taken into the woods, but saw no one.
“Long enough,” Gil said. “I been making all the noise I could for hours it seemed like, but didn’t no one hear me till Fenwick there.”
Between the wind and the rustling wood and the exertion of digging, none of them would have heard anything less than a full-throated scream. Maybe not even that when the wind kicked up. Jacob gritted his teeth in frustration. “I should have told the driver to remain with the coach.” Instead he’d been grateful for another strong back to help dig up the grave.
“Don’t blame yourself,” George said. “Who could have predicted Ravenwood would do such a thing? And why? It’s not as if we weren’t trying to meet his demands.”
“As to that, I guess he’s changed his demands, seein’ as the countess is a more important hostage,” Gil said with a tight-lipped scowl. “He stuffed this note in my pocket before he left. Reckon it explains why he took her.”
Gil dug into his trousers and came up with a much folded piece of foolscap, affixed with a wax seal.
“Cheeky bugger,” George said when he saw the seal. “Not even trying to hide his identity.”
“Why should he? He knows we won’t go to the authorities lest he harm Julianne.” Jacob ripped open the note and tried to read it in the lamplight. He was so angry, he couldn’t make his eyes focus. Amid the spidery handwriting there were diagrams and dimensions and snippets of Latin interspersed with English. “This makes no sense. Where does he want us to deliver the daggers?”
George took the note from him and held it up to the light. “Not the daggers. He wants you to have them rejoined into a single staff, according to these specifications. Then you’re to deliver it to the Giant’s Dance on the twenty-first of December at sunset.”
“Giant’s Dance?” Jacob said, anger making his neck heat, despite the raw coldness of the night. “What the hell is that?”
George shook his head. “You never did pay attention in history class, did you? It’s the old name for Stonehenge, of course. I always did think those monoliths were surely connected somehow with Druids.”
“We’re going to need a smith,” Jacob said, trying to focus on how to meet Ravenwood’s demands when all he really wanted to do was strangle the man barehanded. “And a damn good one.”
“There’s a fellow in the village near here,” Lord Kilmaine’s driver said. “I grew up on a little barony in the next shire and brought the estate horses to him to be shod each spring.”
“I misspoke. We’ll need someone with more skill than it takes to shoe a mare,” Jacob said. The alloy was such a hodgepodge of metals, with different tensile strengths and melting points, he didn’t see how the ore could be brought back together once the daggers were melted down. “We’ll need a miracle worker.”
George turned the note over. “Oh, there’s more.” He read the few lines of script and looked up at Jacob.
“What?” Jacob demanded, slamming the side of his fist against the coach in impotent rage. The horse shied at the blow and might have bolted if the driver hadn’t caught his halter and calmed him. With effort, Jacob swallowed back his anger. It wouldn’t help Julianne one bit.
“He wants you to wear something until you deliver the staff,” George said. “And he threatens harm to the countess if you fail to comply.”
“Believe him, guv,” Gil piped in.
“What is it I’m to wear? A jester’s cap? A highwayman’s mask?”
George shook his head. “The old earl’s amulet.”
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