Regency Surrender: Scandal And Deception

Chapter Thirteen

Will rode out to meet his brother that morning, still full of the strangeness of his new life. The horse beneath him was the chestnut gelding. It was a better choice than his foolish attempt to ride Zeus. But while full of spirit, it simply was not Jupiter.

It still hurt to think that he had been the cause of the old horse’s death. His father had cautioned him, practically from the cradle, that the Bellston family was known for its hot blood and rash actions. He had taken the advice to heart and been cautious and circumspect in all things. Because of this, his life had been well ordered and scandal-free.

At some point in the last year, his training had failed him. He had lost an old friend and his memory as well. But he’d gained the most precious gift a man could earn: the love of a woman who he could love in return. There was probably something to be learned about the need for balance in all things and the danger of being too punctilious for one’s own good, but he could not quite grasp it.

He could remember the feelings of unease, before the christening. He’d had the nagging feeling that his formerly feckless brother was somehow leaving him behind and that his own youth was slipping away unspent. Since then, he had allowed himself to be driven by passion to foolishness.

Not that passion was such a bad thing, when in its rightful place. Most times, Justine was as moderate and sensible as the old William might have wished. But last night, she had proven to be as wild and tempestuous as an adventurous man might have longed for.

They had woken at the dawn and made love again. Her bad dream was forgotten. Each time he’d touched her, she’d laughed. It was a joyous, abandoned sound, as though she’d never laughed before in her life, keeping the happiness bottled inside her until he had come to release it. Her climaxes had been much the same, giddy with desire and overcome with love for him. Her eagerness to please was no longer mechanical and worrisome. It was just her half of a shared gift.

When they were finished, she had thrown herself back into the pillows again, pulling him with her to share kisses and drowse until it was time to rise. When he had left the room for breakfast, she was still there, the covers pulled over her face to reveal nothing but a tangle of red-gold hair. The thought made him smile in a satisfaction deeper than he could ever remember.

Adam cantered up to him on the path leading away from the house and noticed the change almost immediately. ‘Enjoying the summer weather, Will? Or is there some other reason for this total transformation in you?’

‘Transformation?’

‘Just now, you were grinning like an idiot.’

Will grinned all the harder in response. ‘It would be ungentlemanly to say more than that I am a happily married man.’

Adam raised his eyebrows. ‘You have rediscovered the reason for your sudden union?’

‘Some of it, at least.’ If he’d had even a taste of this before they’d married, the need for an immediate elopement was now clear to him. ‘Let us say, I am pleased to find her as devoted to me and my happiness as I am to her and hers.’

Adam laughed. ‘I would have said something similarly vague after only a short time with Penny. As I remember, you doubted our compatibility.’

‘I could not have been more wrong about that,’ Will admitted. ‘And I am pleased to admit that I have been wrong about Justine. I do not remember what first drew me to her. Perhaps I never will. But I no longer question the rightness of it.’ If that much was true, did he really need more? He pushed his previous thoughts aside. ‘I think I will not brood over-long about the absence of memory. The present is more than enough to keep me happy.’

‘And your wife is settling into her place in your home?’

‘She seems to be managing well,’ he said. Then added, ‘But it will be difficult to know for certain. She really is quite shy. I doubt she would complain if things were difficult.’ He thought of her fear in the night, and wondered if he should press her about it. She would deny all, he was sure, and smile until he was convinced that there was no reason to question her.

He gave his brother a worried look. ‘She is not likely to request help, even if she needs it. It is as if she does not think herself worthy.’

Adam frowned. ‘We noticed similar behaviour when she came to us. I think she is unaccustomed to having family on whom to rely. Perhaps her life was more difficult than she lets on. I am sure, in time, she will come to be more comfortable with you.’

‘I should certainly hope so.’ Will frowned as well. ‘But I should hate to think that I contributed to her isolation in any way. Her sister is some distance from here, boarding in a school in the south.

‘You are sending for her, I assume?’

‘Of course.’ He frowned. ‘But why did I part them at all? It was most unkind of me. Justine has no wedding ring on her finger. Did I not bother with that, either?’ Nor had he written his family to expect her. ‘What if I’d died from this injury, without making provision for her happiness?’

‘She arrived with your own ring, worn on a chain around her neck. She said that all was done in a hurry and you had promised to take care of it when you arrived home. In the meanwhile, she has been content to do without and never once complained of it. Do not be so hard on yourself,’ Adam finished, with a slight shake of the head. ‘A newly married man can be allowed a moment of selfish pleasure.’

So, it had been selfish of him. Even Adam had noticed. And it had been more than a moment. If he understood the situation, he had seduced her without promise of marriage, then kept their union a secret for some weeks. It sounded almost as if he was ashamed of his actions.

Things would change, from this moment on. ‘She is always doing without, even when there is no need of it. I will not allow that in the future. I will find some way to bring her out of herself. She is delightful company, when I can get her to speak.’

‘So I told you,’ Adam said, smiling. ‘And she does enjoy her morning stroll.’ He pointed ahead of them, on the path. The woman they had been discussing was walking through the wood, pale and quiet as a ghost. She had stopped at the darkest part of the little copse of trees, the dull gold of her gown and spencer blending with the dying leaves. Will had always felt there was a certain air of mystery about it. But today, it was as if they had interrupted a fairy in some mystic rite. ‘Justine!’ he called. ‘What are you doing here, darling?’

Her response to his voice was surprising. Rather than greeting him with pleasure, she started like a rabbit, turning this way and that, as though searching for concealment. Only when she realised the hopelessness of escape did she straighten her shoulders and turn to them. She smiled timidly, offering a curtsy. ‘Your Grace. My lor—’ She stopped herself in mid-word and said, ‘Will’, as though just remembering their relationship.

If Adam thought her behaviour odd, he did not remark on it. They dismounted and walked their horses towards her. ‘You should have told me that you wished to visit the grounds,’ Will said, being careful to keep any censure out of his voice. ‘We might have ridden out together.’

‘I did not think to, until after you had gone,’ she said, eyes downcast. ‘And I prefer to walk.’

‘You must find her a horse,’ Adam remarked. ‘Even for an indifferent rider, the skill can be useful in such remote holdings as ours.’

‘You are right, of course,’ Will said, thinking of the placid mare in the stables. He did not wish to see her cooped up in his house, afraid to ask the servants to harness the carriage horses. ‘If you do not wish to ride, I will teach you to handle a pony and cart.’ When she looked at him with trepidation, he added, ‘Then you might take your sister for rides to the village, whenever you want.’

That was the trick, he suspected. At the mention of her sister, her mood changed instantly. ‘Whenever I want,’ she repeated, with a marvelling smile.

‘But today, I hope you are enjoying your morning.’ He leaned forward to kiss her lightly on a cheek which was warm with the flush of embarrassment. ‘The trees are lovely this time of year, don’t you think?’

‘It is most glorious,’ she agreed.

‘The gardens are nice as well. I am surprised to find you here and not touring them.’ Nice as it was, this was hardly the most interesting spot on the property.

She paused for a moment, then admitted, ‘I was reading something, and it put me in a mood to explore.’

‘Really?’ He remembered the stack of old books that had been set out in the library and the probable contents of his mother’s diary. Then a thought struck him and he smiled. ‘Are you chasing ghost stories, my dear? For certainly, if there is a place on the property that is haunted, it must be here, where the murder occurred.’

Perhaps that had not been what she meant. At the mention of death, her face went white as a sheet. ‘Here?’ she said in a breathless squeak.

‘A murder here?’ Now it was his brother who was surprised. ‘I do not recall any such thing.’

‘You were away at school that year,’ Will said. ‘I was kept home. It was the year I had the fever. Mother told me later that she did not write to you for several months. They were dreadfully worried that, if you guessed how sick I was, you would want to come home and they would lose us all.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Adam said, remembering. ‘You could not have been more than eight at the time.’ He looked to Justine, filling in the details of the family history. ‘You are lucky to have your husband. I did not learn until much later that he was near death several times that year. We lost our baby sister as well. The details of that will be found in the family Bible, should you be interested.’

‘I looked,’ she admitted, as though it were some guilty secret. ‘But there was no mention of the other man. The murdered one, I mean.’ Then she added in a strangely cool voice, ‘I should have thought such a thing was worthy of more notice.’

‘The household was far too distraught to deal with the situation as it should have,’ Will admitted. ‘And our mother was an excellent woman, but scatterbrained in such things as record keeping and correspondence. I am not surprised that she did not tell Adam at all.’

‘But you knew of it,’ she said. ‘Even though you were sick.’ She was looking from one to the other of them intently. ‘I gather the robber was not caught.’

‘Robber?’ he said. He could not remember if he had mentioned the circumstances.

She glanced around her. ‘In a place such as this, the motive must have been robbery.’

‘Yes. Of course.’ After so much pretended apathy, it was a surprise that such a gruesome tale drew her interest. Or perhaps it was not so surprising. Will had to admit, this particular story was a mystery to him as well. There was something about it, itching and scratching at the back of his mind. Perhaps it was the effort of looking so far into the past that gave him a pain in his head. ‘I do not remember many of the details either,’ he admitted. ‘I heard only bits and pieces of the story myself and was far too sick to care for most of it.’ Then he smiled, for he was sure this would interest her. ‘But I will tell you one thing that I am sure the family did not write down. I was the one who found the body. I do not remember very clearly.’ He glanced at the others in apology. ‘That seems to be my excuse for so many things lately. But I was near to lost in the fever, the night the crime occurred. My nurse had fallen asleep and I wandered from bed, looking for something to cool me. The doctor had forbidden that I have ice in my water.’ He shook his head, trying to remember. ‘I went through the kitchen, down the hill towards the ice house to get some. It is lucky I did not fall into the river and drown myself, for we are very near to it now.’

‘And you found a dead man?’ Now Justine’s eyes were wide with shock.

‘Or near dead. I seem to remember him speaking to me.’ Will frowned again. ‘Although I cannot remember what it was he said. That was probably part of the delirium. He was quite cold when they found him. It took some time for me to get back to the house, and to persuade the family that there was, indeed, something to find here.’ He glanced around him, pacing off the space. ‘No. Here. Almost exactly. I remember standing beneath this tree and seeing a raven on the branch above me.’

‘A raven,’ Adam said sceptically.

Will shrugged. ‘It was probably another symptom of the fever. The raven screamed and dropped a crown at my feet, then it flew away.’ There was that moment of blankness again, where he felt that there was something important that he should remember, but could not.

Then Adam laughed, ‘You saw King Arthur? In our wood?’

Will looked to his wife again, who was watching him with round eyes, totally confused. ‘Wales is the land of Arthur, my love. If you like fanciful tales, I will read to you of him some night. But there is a legend that he was transformed when he died, and became a raven.’

‘Or was buried in a cave. Or taken to Avalon,’ Adam supplied unhelpfully. ‘There are many stories about what happened to him. But I think we can guess what my little brother was reading, on the night he went wandering in the woods.’

At this, Will laughed himself, then offered up a moment of silence for the poor lost man. ‘And here I am, twenty years later, with a head full of nonsense. But that is all I know of the story.

‘If you are worried, you needn’t be. Adam’s lands are quite safe. Even in my father’s time, such a crime was the exception, not the rule. This is the only instance I can recall where the perpetrator was not captured and dealt with.’

‘You can recall?’ she repeated. For a moment, the look of doubt in her eyes was replaced with a sceptical glint.

It was so out of character with her usual passive nature that he laughed. ‘We both know how well I can trust my memory. But you can trust me when I tell you that you may walk these paths in safety, day or night, and you will have nothing to fear. Now let me take you up into the saddle and I will give you a ride back to the house, so you do not ruin your slippers in the mud, or misstep and slip down the bank and into the pond. The water on this side is clear as glass and very deep. Perfect for swimming in summer, if you enter on the opposite bank, near Adam’s house. But here, it is better for cutting ice. At Christmastime, we will come with skates and you shall see.’

Then he mounted his horse again and scooped his wife up to ride in front of him, so he might point out other, less morbid landmarks of her new home.

* * *

Back in her room, Justine glanced down at the mess she had made of her day dress and slippers scuffling around in the leaves of the forest. She had been a fool to go out before ascertaining the location of her husband and the duke. But in his note, Montague had advised that he would meet her near the oak at the head of the village path, should there be news. Until she was sure that Margot was safe, she must at least pretend to obey and make a daily visit to the spot.

Did he know he was directing her to the very place were the murder had occurred? She shivered again. This had been the first morning in ages where her father’s death had not been her waking thought. To lie in Will’s bed, for even a few minutes, thinking of nothing but the night before was an unimaginable liberty. It could not last, of course. After breakfast, she was back to playing Montague’s spy.

She had made her way to the rendezvous point with the hope that she would soon be free of him. Then, out of nowhere, the past had come to remind her of her duty. She must go there again and search more thoroughly.

It had been years, of course. No trace of evidence could have remained. If there were truly diamonds to be discovered, they would not be stuck in a hollow tree where anyone might see them. But she knew she would return to the place, even so. She would not be able to help herself.

It had been even more foolhardy to encourage Will to remember. He might just as well have said, ‘Of course. How could I forget Hans be Bryun, the diamond merchant? And you are his daughter, the woman that stood and watched as I was nearly murdered in Bath.’ Despite what had happened on the previous evening, she’d have been in custody before she could explain herself.

But she could not have resisted the temptation to ask. It was fortunate that William Felkirk’s amnesia was as impervious as ever. Her hopes had risen when he’d admitted to being there the night of the murder. But even then, he could not remember anything helpful. Nothing but useless details about birds and crowns, while her father had lain bleeding in the oak leaves at his feet.

She must remember that he had been but a child and very sick. If there had been a death in the family, and illness, she now knew why the old duke had been far too preoccupied with their own family to give any thought to hers.

But still, to have learned her father’s last words after all this time would have been as valuable as diamonds. She let out a sigh and with it she released the last of her bitterness towards the Felkirk family. While her life had been unfair, she must admit that it was no real fault of theirs. Having walked the path where the crime occurred, she had no reason to believe it was not as safe as William claimed. She had always imaged some lawless wilderness where a merchant might fear to tread after dark. But she was sure that there was not so much as a poacher on the land, much less a highwayman. No one could have predicted that his cries for help would be delayed by worries over a sick child. His death was not accidental. But the circumstances around it were much easier to understand then they had been.

It did nothing to ease the hurt of her past. But if she had thought to get revenge, as Montague had, she could find no logical justification for it. The duke, his wife and her William were quite blameless in what had happened to her father, and to her.

But if they were not at fault, then who was? If the path was not particularly dangerous, how had someone discovered her father on it? He would not have announced, when passing through the local inn, that he carried a bag of valuable stones in his pocket. Yet, someone must have known of his plans and waited on the path for him.

‘I have something for you.’

She started again and looked up to see Will standing in the doorway that connected their bedrooms. She must learn not to jump at the sound of her husband’s voice. It should be as familiar to her as her own. And after last night, sleeping in his arms, she had to admit that it was a pleasure to hear. At the memory, she remembered to greet him with a smile. ‘A gift? I am sure, whatever it is...’

‘Is not necessary? On the contrary, the thing I bring is yours already. You should have had it for some time. Giving it to you was one more thing that I had forgotten.’ He held out a closed fist to her. ‘Close your eyes and open your hand.’

She did as he wished, trying to stifle the feeling of excitement. He might be simply be rewarding her for her behaviour in bed with him. She had received such gifts before and felt the disappointment and shame that came with them. Could not the pleasure be enough to satisfy them both?

Then, she felt the slim, cool band of metal resting on her palm. She had an illogical desire to yank her hand away before she opened her eyes and saw what she knew must lie there.

‘I must have promised you this, I am sure,’ Will said, in the voice he used when trying to manufacture memories to fill the void of the last six months. ‘It belonged to my mother and was set aside, waiting for my marriage.’ He shuffled his feet, as though embarrassed that he could not offer her more. ‘It is not so grand as the duchess ring, of course. Although I doubt Penny would mind giving it up to you, should you want it. She says it is far too heavy to be practical. All of the best pieces are already in her jewel box. But they are entailed. This is mine. And now, it is yours.’

He withdrew his hand to show the delicate gold setting with a single rose-cut diamond at the centre of it. She could not help her instincts. What her father had not bred into her, Montague had taught, so that she might be his partner in the shop. She held the stone up to the light, searching for flaws.

It did not shine as a brilliant cut might, but the stone was perfect, a testament to elegance. The setting was etched with vines and made it look even more like the flower it was meant to represent. The colour was a clear blue-white, the weight, if she subtracted the gold, was slightly over a carat.

It was not worth as much as the stones her father had lost. But should she sell it, she would have several thousand pounds. It was more than enough to launch both herself and her sister on a new life, free of the interference of Mr Montague.

‘Don’t you like it?’ Will was still standing before her, hand outstretched, ready to place it on her finger. Instead of responding with gratitude, she was calculating the value of a lover’s gift.

She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she spoke from her heart. ‘It does not matter to me what Penny has. This is the most beautiful ring I have ever seen. I would not trade it for the world.’

‘That is what I hoped to hear,’ Will said, with a satisfied smile.

It was true. She wanted this ring as she had no other. She’d no jewellery of her own, other than the string of pearls she had been given on her sixteenth birthday. They had been her mother’s and had been less a present than an inheritance. For all the other pieces that passed through her hands, she had never been more than a model. A pretty neck to hang things on so that Montague might sell them. She had long since stopped coveting them.

The more she looked at this ring, the more she wanted it and all it symbolised. She burned to have it and to have the man that held it. It meant safety, peace and an unbroken circle of union.

‘Let me help you.’ He meant with the ring, of course. He wanted to put it on her finger. But something in his voice was coaxing her to tell him how much help she really needed.

She let herself be wooed and closed her eyes again. He slipped it on and whispered, ‘With this ring, I thee wed. With my body, I thee worship. With all my worldly goods I thee endow.’ Then he warmed the finger with a kiss. She opened her eyes to see him looking up into hers. ‘That is right, isn’t it? Were they the words I spoke to you, when we married?’