Beauty and the Duke (18 page)

E
rik skirted a grove of oaks and pines, pulling rein at the top of the wooded trail before descending nearer to the rushing river. The sound of it blocked out all noise, but he watched several elk drift slowly out of the wash and continue past him. He could dimly see the tracks left by another horse ahead of him. The trail wound around the glade and continued to the levee work site. There were a few scattered clumps of dead trees and debris where the river, during a storm last year, had swept away the road that once used to be here.

After another mile, he dismounted in front of a thatched cottage and tied his horse to a hitching post. His eyes settled on the single gray Arabian, chewing on a clump of wild grass. Normally the paddock behind him would be filled with horses. But work on the levee had halted this spring. Those few non-superstitious individuals who chose to remain lived in the large lodging quarters a half mile away. This cottage was where Erik worked when he was present at the site.

The door opened and a woman stepped outside.

“Lara,” he said, holding the note she had sent him that morning. A note that had pulled him away from lunch and one that he had not been pleased to receive.

Her black silk gown swished with her hesitant movements. Black netting lay across her upper face and attached to her hat rim. Erik could not remember seeing her in anything other than black or dark blue for seven years.

Lara Maxwell, with her blond hair and blue eyes, was still a pretty woman. But all her life her younger sister, Elizabeth, in both appearance and personality, had overshadowed her.

Where Elizabeth had been like vibrant sunlight, all passion and flair and heat when she walked into a room, Lara had been much like a single burning candle, warm and inviting, but barely noticeable next to her sister.

Erik might have married Lara Maxwell had Elizabeth not returned that year from Paris, blowing into Sedgwick like a firestorm after her years living away at a school in France.

Lara opened the door for him to follow her. “I am so glad you came.”

He grabbed her arm. “What is this note about?”

She looked over his shoulder as if expecting to see they were not alone. “I apologize for the subterfuge but I needed to speak to you in private.”

“Why? You are welcome at Sedgwick Castle. We don’t need to be meeting like this.”

“Yes, we do. Please, can we go inside? There is a chill in the air.”

Erik followed her into the cottage. His eyes took in the desk and wooden filing cabinets. Her reticule and gloves lay on the desk next to a standish. Other than the fact that the curtains had been opened to allow in sunlight, nothing had been moved or changed since he had been here last week. She had not even lit a lamp. Yet, he had the feeling she had been here a long time, waiting for him.

She fumbled through her reticule and pulled out a folded sheaf of paper. “I apologize for the subterfuge, I truly do. I needed to warn you. This came to our house yesterday. I intercepted it before Papa found it.”

Erik took the letter and unfolded the sheaf, frowning as he read the words.

A chill went down Erik’s spine. Then fury.

“Can you now understand why I do not want Papa to see this, Erik? Whoever is playing such a cruel hoax will only kill him. This is the second one in as many months we’ve received.”

“Why haven’t I been informed? Who else knows about this?”

“No one knows. Not even my brother. I came here directly this time. I couldn’t tell you before because it was too horrible and I thought someone only wanted to hurt Papa. Then this one came yesterday.”

“Lara,” he said cautiously, “you do understand this is not your sister?”

Tears welled in her blue eyes. “In my heart, I know it to be true. But it’s her handwriting, Erik.
Look!
People still claim to see her.
Why
must we be tortured in this way? I don’t understand the cruelty.”

“My guess is blackmail.”

“Papa is desperate to believe she is still alive, that is
true, but we have no money to pay anyone for information about Elizabeth.”

“Do you have the first letter?”

She shook her head. “No, I burned it at once. Are you going to give this one to the constable?”

“Is that what you want me to do?”

“No. But it frightens me. Have you considered what this can do to
you
?”

“I have always told you I can take care of myself, Lara.”

She dabbed at one corner of her eye with her knuckle. “But you have taken the blame for everything already and paid for it dearly. I would not be responsible for hurting you again. Especially now that you have been forced by circumstance to remarry.”

He shoved the letter in his jacket pocket. “Circumstance?”

“Everyone knows you need a son.” She ducked her chin as she pulled on her gloves. “You must endeavor to introduce her to Sedgwick at the country fair next month. You have not been in seven years. It will be good to let people know you are among the living again. You have suffered long enough.”

“Have I?”

Since most believed he was responsible for Elizabeth’s disappearance, he doubted people considered he’d suffered at all. Other than business, he had not been received in anyone’s house in seven years. Unfortunately, most of those who would cut him directly in public also needed his money, including Lara’s father.

Lara pressed her cheek to his shoulder. “Papa is wrong, Erik. You could never have killed my sister. I know that you still love her and feel much guilt over what happened. It was never your fault.”

Erik put his hands on Lara’s shoulders. It was just such an occasion as this that Elizabeth had walked in on seven years ago. The only
guilt
he felt now was in allowing himself to take responsibility for an incident that was no incident at all. Erik gently pulled Lara from his arms. “You need to go home. As it is, you will barely get back before dark.”

He walked her outside to her horse. “From now on if you have something to tell me, do so at Sedgwick Castle. Understand? We’ve nothing to hide.”

She nodded and adjusted her hat atop her tightly coiffed hair. “Except that letter. Please don’t let that letter find its way to Papa.”

Erik gave her a leg up onto the saddle. She adjusted her leg over the horn. “You have been my closest friend, Erik. I don’t know how I would have survived these past years without you.”

“The guilt was never yours to carry either, Lara. Let it go.”

Erik’s mouth tightened as he watched her ride away, then went inside the cottage. He walked to the hearth and lit a fire among the peat, disposing of the letter in the flames.

He hadn’t told Lara that he’d also received such a letter some weeks ago, shortly after his return from London. Clearly, whoever was doing this was not satisfied with Erik’s inaction, and now wanted to provoke Elizabeth’s father. Someone wanted people to believe Elizabeth was alive. Why?

After spending most of the afternoon with Aunt Sophie and toiling over her notebook detailing observations she’d taken about the cliffs and surrounding terrain, Christine gave up trying to work. Erin was napping when Christine went to the nursery. It was too
late in the day to venture outside. Becca and the housekeeper had trekked to the village earlier, but Christine had not gone with them. Not so much because her backside was still tender from the hours she’d spent last week bouncing on the back of an ill-gaited mare, or last night in bed, but because Erik would be gone until nightfall and this was an opportune time to explore unhindered.

Christine found the library. After walking across a carpeted room and opening the heavy brocade draperies to the early evening twilight, she turned.

Erik’s refuge was a throwback to history, an antiquated museum of Scottish artifacts and furnishings, from the inlaid baroque tables to the medieval chairs. She picked up a compass, then set it down. She slid a finger along the beveled edge of the mahogany desk. The top of the desk was empty of clutter and in perfect order, much like his household.

She pulled open the drawers, not sure what she was hoping to find. Secrets. Something no one else knew about him perhaps.

In the bottom drawer, her hand paused on a worn copy of C. A. Sommers’s book,
No Beast of Myth
. In London, Becca had said Erik had read the book.

She started to lift it, then edged it aside. Erik’s drawings were stacked neatly beneath the book. Architectural sketches. They were good, she thought, as she flipped through two dozen images of building designs in various stages of completion. Some looked years old. Most were unfinished, as if he’d reached a certain point in each, then stopped.

She had never pictured Erik as an artist of any kind. Artists seemed to be sensitive, emotional people. Not that she’d known many, but she’d followed Aunt Sophie to art fairs in Devonshire and Greenwich and had met
some of those cheerless few who spilled their passions all over a canvas for the world to see. People who were far braver than she was.

She touched his charcoal pencils and tablets, then, resettling everything back in the drawers, Christine slumped in the high-back chair behind his desk.

Other than the drawings, she’d found nothing, no letters or personal correspondence, no secret notes tucked away in false-bottom drawers, no hidden clues that might reveal an undiscovered character trait. He was much as she saw him, his personal life like his business dealings. All the pieces fit together like cogs in a wheel and ran like a well-greased machine. Nothing was out of place.

As her gaze shifted to the mahogany shelves filled with books that encased three walls from top to bottom, she rose to her feet and, setting her hands on her hips, looked from one end of the room to the other. She wondered if there was anything in the world Erik did not have. “You must have every book ever written for the last thousand years, my laird.”

“Not every book,” Boris said from the doorway. He carried a tea tray. “I saw you coming this way, mum. You did not eat much at lunch and I thought you might need refreshment.”

“Thank you, Boris,” she said as he set the tray on Erik’s desk.

Although bent with time and arthritis, he was still a tall man, and Christine found herself looking up at him. She smiled. “You aren’t by chance making sure I am not doing anything untoward in here, are you?”

“No, mum. If Lord Sedgwick wanted to keep you out, he would lock the door and the drawers,” he added, clearly ignoring the heat in her cheeks as he poured a
cup of tea. “Have you had the opportunity to see all the estate, yet?”

Accepting a cup of tea, she laughed. “Good heavens, no. I have barely seen the entire floor where my apartments are.”

“It can be rather daunting, mum.”

With the exception of Annie, most of the servants avoided her. She did not imagine it was out of rudeness, for servants did not mingle with their masters—or masters’ wives—but still it was nice to have a conversation with someone familiar with Sedgwick Castle.

She observed the room. “Lord Sedgwick must love to read.”

“He is well-read, mum. When one grows up as an only child in a world filled with doting servants, one learns to entertain oneself. This has always been his favorite room at Sedgwick since he was a boy.”

She looked at the cases, filled with the finest, rarest books in the world, all behind glass, and knew most were too rare and valuable and not touched in centuries. In truth, any normal person would be a little intimidated by this room. But then Erik was not a normal person.

“You have been with this family a long time, Boris?”

He returned his attention to the tray as he folded a serviette. “I was here when his grace first come to Scotland, mum. A nipper he was. No one knew the kind of steel inside that lad. When he was twelve, he discharged most of the staff for slovenly and disorderly behavior. I am one of the few that remained.”

“And were the others disorderly and slovenly?”

“Yes, mum. The last Sedgwick duke was a wastrel and allowed the household to go into disrepair. Most of them underestimated their new master.”

“Because he was young?”

“Because he was a Sedgwick. His grace’s predecessor did much to continue the Sedgwick tradition of drinking and carousing. The bloke rode off into the woods one icy night and got himself killed when his horse broke its leg. We found the duke near the road, where he had frozen to death. Despite what people continue to think about the current Sedgwick duke, the master has done much to turn the estate around.”

“He never speaks about his mother,” she found herself asking.

“And he won’t,” Boris said. “There was bad blood between him and Lady Rebecca’s da, his stepfather. Lord Sedgwick discovered he was stealing from this estate’s coffers. Then one night the man was drunk and his grace caught him beating his mam. Sedgwick nearly killed him. He got himself an undeserved reputation that night.”

“That is why people claim him violent and capable of murder?”

“His mam did nothing to dispel the rumor. Lady Rebecca’s da is dead now, but his grace never forgave his mother for staying with the wastrel and supporting him over her own son when he took the man to court to remove him as tutelary of this estate.”

Boris said nothing more. After a moment, he brushed off his hands. “Is there a book you fancy, mum?”

She remembered
No Beast of Myth
lying in Erik’s desk, its presence reminding her of her purpose for coming to Sedgwick. “Since you are here and I am trying to find my way around, maybe you can help me locate Lady Rebecca’s fossil collection.”

Christine followed Boris through the bailey to the glass hothouse. She had never been back here and welcomed the fragrant breeze against her face, the scent of
loam heavy in the air. “Most people do not come out here,” he said, leading her past a row of planter boxes, explaining that the fossils were kept here because of the dirt that usually accompanied their find, and because many of the servants found it a near sacrilege to have dead things in the house.