Authors: Briar Rose
"Grandfather." Lion swept him a bow, the slight edge to his voice transforming that term of endearment into a cutting barb. He straightened, leveling his eyes at the older man, giving no quarter, asking none. Hate burned in Lion's gut, made bile rise in his throat. He forced his most sardonic smile. "You haven't changed at all."
The old man gave a snide chuckle. "I wish I could say the same for you, my boy. You have changed a great deal. So much that I would scarce have believed it had I not seen the evidence with my own eyes."
"A hazard of growing up, I would assume."
"I would rather say the tragic cost of forgetting every lesson I ever taught you."
"Not
every
lesson." Lion crossed to where the table was still set, the food untouched, one chair wildly askew, as if flung back in a hurry—but why? Because Rhiannon had been desperate to escape this room and the crafty old spider who played caesar within it? Yet her gypsy cart still stood out front.
She would hardly have set out across the countryside on foot, would she? No. No matter how threatened she felt, a horde of grandfathers couldn't have made her abandon that pitiful excuse for a horse she loved so much.
"You always insisted I not be careless," Lion observed. "And yet, forgive me, but it seems you have misplaced my betrothed."
"Ah, yes, your fiancée. When news of your engagement reached me in Belfast, I couldn't resist seeing her for myself." A smile thin as black ice curled Paxton's lips. "Never fear, Lionel. You cannot believe I would be so careless, once a treasure such as Miss Fitzgerald was delivered into my hands."
Lion fought back a chill. He had heard that tone in his grandfather's voice before, the quiet whisper, as lethal as a Japanese blade cutting to the bone. "Where is she?"
Paxton gave a rumbling laugh. "Why, my dear Lionel, you show a most ungenteel interest in this girl— a mere pauper from what I can tell, of no remarkable beauty or grace."
He wanted to fling the old man's words back into his face, rise to Rhiannon's defense. Paxton Redmayne would never understand how fine Rhiannon was, how rare, worth a thousand of any other woman who ever breathed. But it was obvious the old man had already guessed too much. Damned if Lion would give him any more weapons for his arsenal.
He feigned a yawn. "It is considered very bad form to misplace one's fiancée—especially for an officer. Shows an appalling lack of attention to detail. Now if you will be so good as to tell me where I might find her? In the stables visiting a sick horse? Tending a maidservant's toothache?"
He let his mouth curve into something of a sneer, trying desperately to make the old man believe that the accustomed vein of selfishness still ran deep inside him. He needed the cunning bastard to believe Rhiannon was... what? An ornament to further his military career? A necessary bauble, much like a dress sword—relatively useless, a damned nuisance at times, but inescapable just the same.
"I should have guessed such a woman would follow such common pursuits as nursing horses and servants. Doubtless she'll have your commanding officers eating boxty bread and boiled potatoes from your table before long." Paxton heaved a long-suffering sigh. "Lionel, Lionel, we have had our differences in the past, but I never expected to find that you had turned into a fool. Someone should rid you of that common Irish wench before you make yourself the laughingstock of the king's army."
Lion brushed a speck of dust from his sleeve, damned if he'd let his nemesis guess what a tempest of fury and outrage and sick, sinking dread had been unleashed within his chest. "Perhaps I wish to make a fool of myself. How better to make a fool of you? Displaying the degradation of your... what was it you once called me—your masterpiece? Your life's work, Grandfather?" Lionel spread his arms in bitter mockery. "What do you think of your efforts now?"
For the barest second something flashed in Paxton Redmayne's eyes, something so savage it made Lion's pulse trip in warning. Then it was gone. "You are a rank failure," his grandfather said. "But then, even the most superior of men fail in their efforts from time to time. It is said Michelangelo took a hammer to one of his sculptures, raging at it because it wouldn't speak to him. An understandable reaction when one has been bitterly disappointed."
"Disappointing you has become my life's work," Lion asserted. "Every man must have a purpose. You taught me that."
"And you taught me to choose a more worthy candidate to use my talents on. I should have guessed that in the end you would be worthless, tainted by the absurd morality of your father, no matter how hard I tried to excise it from you."
"Astonishing that he had any morals at all, with you as his sire."
"I? Your father's sire? Let me banish that delusion. I merely claimed that I was so the French authorities would put you under my guardianship."
Lion was stunned at the numbing wave of relief that swept through him. Had he even realized the subtle horror he'd felt all these years, believing that Paxton Redmayne's blood flowed in his veins? A self-loathing so profound it had shaded every breath he drew. For if he was flesh of his grandfather's flesh, was he not capable of anything? Was he not tainted by evil, poisoned, lost, beyond hope?
His grandfather's low chuckle startled him from his thoughts. "Ah, you feel that I've absolved you now, of some enigmatic sin. But there are stronger bonds than those of mere blood. We are alike, Lionel. I knew it from the moment I first saw you."
"I am nothing like you." For the first time, Lion believed it.
"We are far superior in intellect to the paltry fools who bumble about in our path. Admit it. Has anyone else ever managed to challenge you? Who understands things to the depth you do?"
Lion remembered Rhiannon, the gentle probing of her eyes, the magnitude of her loving. Was there anyone who understood the human heart more completely? Even the battered, pain-deadened heart of the boy Paxton Redmayne had attempted to destroy?
"It is possible to know everything yet understand nothing," Lion said.
Paxton rolled his eyes heavenward. "That sounds like something your fool of a father said to me once. Never did I meet anyone who had squandered such potential. Brilliant he was, but so tangled up in doing good, in caring for the brainless peasants, that he squandered his gifts. He was never more than a paltry country doctor, trading his powders for hen's eggs."
"Then I wonder you had anything to do with him."
"Necessity, boy. Fate. A runaway carriage crashed into a crowd of shoppers on a Paris street. Stephen Kane happened to be nearby. He raced through a hideous tangle of crazed horses, overturned carriages, injured people. He tended everything like a madman— efficiently, brilliantly."
Lion tried to grasp this image of a father he could scarce remember. A good man. A brave man. A decent man, so busy fighting to heal others that he'd ignored the danger to himself.
"Several of the victims would have died without his efforts. I was eternally grateful for their distress."
The strange comment yanked Lion back from the scene playing out in his imagination, the desperate groping for some picture of his father—the shade of his hair, the shape of his mouth. But all he could hear was the echo of that deep voice calling him "my little Lion."
"You were glad of their distress? Why? Were you conducting some sort of study?"
"No. The chaos gave me a chance to talk to you. Your father perched you high upon a stack of boxes to keep you safe. You were barely four years old, but you sat there so intent, watching everything. Your eyes were so hungry—frightened, yes, sickened by what you saw—and yet it was as if you were devouring everything with that voracious mind of yours. From the first moment I spoke to you, I knew that you were exactly what I had been searching for."
Lion's stomach turned at the image of the small boy perched on the edge of an abyss more dangerous than he could ever know, while his father, oblivious to the devil who had slipped into their lives, was fighting to save others. It was chilling, the thought that if his father had been just a half an hour earlier in his travels they never would have stumbled into Paxton Redmayne's sight. Things might have been so different. Something buried deep in Lion cried out, reaching for that life that had never been, that father he had known for far too short a time. Love he might have known even before he met his gypsy angel.
But much as he craved knowledge of the family lost in childhood shadows, he needed to find his lady, make certain she was safe.
"You've never seen fit to regale me with such family information before. I have little interest now."
"You have no curiosity about who your parents were or why they were in Paris?"
"Rhiannon is my concern."
"Ah, then you are more like your father than I would have guessed. It took me scarce three doctor's calls to discover that he was nigh out of his mind with worry about your sister, who was going blind, despite your father's best efforts.
"Ah, yes, the great healer was helpless," Paxton mocked with a laugh. "It was quite amusing. He'd cast his practice in Ireland to the winds, couldn't even speak French, but hoped a doctor he'd heard of, a specialist neck deep in research, could save what little was left of your sister's sight." The old man chuckled. "Yes, trust the Irish to be impractical. I should've guessed from the moment I knew Celtic blood ran in your veins that you would be impossible to govern."
"I take that as the highest compliment," Lion said, knowing it was true.
"Your father spent every shilling he possessed before he realized the French specialist was a charlatan whose research was an elaborate fraud. By that time the disease that was stealing your sister's sight threatened to take her life as well." A smug smile curved the old man's mouth. "I knew of another doctor, one who might offer him hope."
Lion's hands tightened into fists, imagining his father's helplessness, desperation. Paxton Redmayne prying through a well of soul-deep pain and grief and using that pain against him. "What did you do?"
"I offered him everything money could buy: life for his daughter, the possibility she might even be made to see again, and more coin than your father could earn in a lifetime. In exchange I asked that he sell me only one thing: you."
Lion's stomach churned at the impossible choice Paxton Redmayne had offered. And at the horrific certainty that Lion's father had taken it. He must have, for Lion had ended up in Paxton Redmayne's hands. Then why did Lion suddenly find himself asking? "Did he do it? Sell me to you?"
"Your father? He wouldn't be reasonable, of course. No, you were his pride and joy, his little Lion." Paxton sneered at the endearment, the brief phrase that was all Lion remembered from the man who had tossed him high in his arms.
"Then how—"
"I took what he wouldn't give me."
Lion imagined countless scenarios—God knew, he'd seen the lengths his grandfather would go to to get his own way. "Then I have family out there somewhere?"
Paxton made a show of unfurling the ruffles at his cuff. "It would have been most untidy, leaving them alive to search for you. And they would have. They were the sort to turn the world upside down until their dying day. I merely hastened that day, to save myself the inconvenience."
"That day? You're talking in riddles!"
"I told you from the beginning your family died in a fire. I neglected to tell you that I paid someone to set it."
Redmayne's blood ran cold—for the death of the family he'd never had a chance to know, and for other, more immediate reasons. By thunder, why would the old man be babbling about such a thing? Confessing to murder? What possible motive could he have? Lion didn't dare think about it. He'd lose control of his hate, his fear.
"That was all a long time ago," he said. "I'm scarce going to be outraged regarding people I don't even remember, if that was your intent."
"No. I was merely reminiscing about the lesson it taught me, what I had to avoid the next time. The merest breath of parental love can taint a child forever."
Next time... The words unnerved him with all they hinted at. But he had to concentrate on finding Rhiannon, sweeping her off somewhere safe. There was no limit to the lengths his grandfather would go to.
"I haven't the time to bandy insults with you," Lion said. "I have duties that await me. Summon Rhiannon, and I won't intrude on your hospitality any longer."
Cunning shone beneath Paxton's lowered lashes. "Are you afraid for her, boy? You needn't be. She's in the tender care of your most trusted aide, Sergeant Barton." The old man caressed the words as tenderly as if he were testing the sharpness of a blade, watching in pleasure as a thin line of blood rose where it touched his skin. "Barton has proved to be a most useful young man time and again. I cannot thank you enough for your astuteness in making him your aide."
There could be only one meaning to that. Barton had been in league with his grandfather all this time. The youth had somehow been shackled into doing the accursed devil's will, and now Barton had escorted Rhiannon into the jaws of one of Paxton Redmayne's diabolical traps.
Lion fought rising panic and hardened his voice. "Where is she, old man? Tell me or—"
"Or what? The first thing I taught you was not to make threats you cannot carry out. Any move then becomes ridiculous, blustering like a helpless child."
"This is no threat, I assure you. Take me to Rhiannon now, or I'll have to kill you." He made the words sound careless. Could the old man know how many times Lion had imagined killing him late at night, when the horror filled his dreams and slicked his body with sweat? He'd imagined killing Paxton Redmayne as the only certain way to end his legacy of evil.
His grandfather laughed, pacing to a small table that looked frighteningly familiar—the gaming table, set with its exquisite chess pieces. Had the old man carried it with him all this time? "Ah, you are reduced to making threats. What did I teach you? To consider every issue from your opponent's point of view. Think, Lionel. You can hardly blame me for attempting to reclaim what you stole from me the day you left Rawmarsh: the queen."