“Please, Lord Wilde,” Sarah begged. “Check on Ian for me.”
Chuffy went back to scratching his nose. “Need a reason to be down there . . .” His wide brown eyes lit. “Ah. Just the thing. Bruised nerves. Need brandy. Brilliant.”
“You are,” Pippin agreed, dropping a kiss on his cheek. “Now Sarah and I will turn our backs while you change.”
Chuffy didn’t precisely dress. He pulled on a pair of pantaloons and a chartreuse dressing gown and yanked off the nightcap, which only served to pull his hair into peaks, like a meringue. Pippin saw it and patted it down.
“Be careful,” Sarah said, as Chuffy headed to the door.
“Don’t worry. Never questioned.” He flashed a winsome, sweet grin. “Benefit of lookin’ dim. Worked since boyhood. Had nanny convinced m’brother was eatin’ all the cakes.” He shook his head. “One look at us woulda told the story. She never looked.”
“What should we do?” Sarah asked.
“Go back to Pip’s room. Safer.”
And that quickly, he was out the door, his rolling gait making him look even more like a perambulating bear. Sarah took a breath, then another. It would be all right. She had reached Chuffy. He would take care of things.
She wished she believed that.
“Where do we go?” she asked, reaching for the door.
Pip ducked her head. “My room. End of the hall…oh, good lord. Now I’m talking like Chuffy. I have to retrieve my dressing gown from Lizzie’s room.” She pulled open the door. “Meet me there,” she said, and pointed to the last door on the left.
Waiting to see Pippin tiptoe back toward the gallery, Sarah followed Chuffy toward the front of the house, where the stairway swept down across from Pip’s room. It was so tempting. The house was quiet again. Surely Sarah could slip down the stairs and listen from the shadows. She only wanted to hear Ian’s voice. To know that he was all right. To have the excuse to later soundly box his ears for frightening her so badly.
She reached the stairwell and took hold of the banister, a sleek line of mahogany she knew swept unbroken down three stories. She paused there, listening to a clock tick on the floor below and the house groaning a bit in protest as it settled. No voices. No outcry. Just the endless, precise passage of time.
She held on to her common sense and turned away, back to Pippin’s room.
“What the blazes are you doing here?”
Gasping, she spun to face her worst nightmare. Ronald, fully dressed with a glass of brandy in hand, his neckcloth as mussed as his hair, was walking toward her.
“I asked you a question.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “I came to see my sister.”
He sneered. “At four in the morning?”
“Would you have let me in at any other time?”
“I would not.” Before she had the chance to move, he grabbed her wrist. “Why tonight?” he demanded. “Why now? You wouldn’t have anything to do with my other surprise guest, would you?”
Her heart faltered.
Ian.
“Busy night, Ronald? I am sorry, but I came tonight because I have finally run out of money for the farm. Since I can make no other move until we know for certain whether my husband is alive, I thought to beg a loan from my sister. She has always been kind in the past.”
She shrugged, as if it were that insignificant, when she knew he must hear the thunder of her heart. She could barely breathe past the panic that grew in her chest.
Fortunately, Ronald had too little imagination to distrust her. “Well…we’ll just have to make sure. And then—” His smile was rapacious. “I will fulfill the promise I made to you.”
“Which one, Ronald?”
“The one in which I told you that the next time I saw you in this house I would have you arrested for trespass and extortion.”
She tried to pull away, but her brother was strong. Square and solid, with the blond Ripton features that had been so beautifully reproduced in Lizzie and less successfully on Sarah. The scar across his eyebrow was new, she thought. Not quite healed, like the slash of an epee. A fall over a fish knife, more like.
“Exactly how have I extorted you, brother?” she asked, knowing that it was the easiest way to distract him.
He smiled, which sharpened her fear. “Any way I decide.”
She smiled right back. “You would actually have your own sister arrested?”
“I would have a thieving bastard arrested. Now, come along. Sadly, the town gaol isn’t secure enough for anything more than the odd drunk. I think Ripton Hall can offer some lovely accommodations until the next assizes.”
His hand like a vise around her wrist, he dragged her down the stairs, the brandy still held in his free hand. Sarah tried desperately to think of a way to escape. Push him, trip him, punch him in the face. The problem was that each option would undoubtedly end up injuring her worse.
“There are benefits to being duke,” he said absently, as if thinking. “If I cannot keep a trial and transportation quiet, I can simply make sure you leave and never come back. In fact, your husband’s cousin is due here soon. He should be delighted to help.”
Sarah shuddered. “You do business with Martin Clarke?”
“Who do you think introduced me to your precious Boswell? You can’t imagine I would consort with a nonentity like him in the normal way of things.”
She had always wondered how the marriage had been arranged. A month ago, she might have still cared.
“In fact,” Ronald mused, “I imagine Martin will be most grateful if I get you out of his way. You have been a proper thorn in his side, you know.”
“Don’t be absurd, Ronald,” she said. “You cannot simply make a woman vanish.”
His smile frightened her all over again. “I admit I haven’t tried yet. For now, though, it is enough that I have cause to accommodate you in the cellars.”
She stumbled, sick at the thought. She had never seen the old dungeons. She had heard about them, though. An endless number of close, black, weeping cells constructed for the sole purpose of making their inhabitants lose hope.
They had almost reached the first story landing. Sarah knew that if Ronald got her to the cellars, she would lose. She didn’t think about it. She simply threw herself against him. He shouted as he lost his balance, the brandy glass flying from his hand and arcing into space. Sarah scrabbled for the banister as the glass shattered on marble two stories below, but Ronald refused to let go of her. End over end they tumbled, thudding like stones on the sleek, carpeted stairs, their momentum carrying them right past the first floor landing and all the way down to the marble foyer.
Bouncing badly, Sarah slammed into the floor. Almost instantaneously Ronald followed, his knee cracking into her nose and bouncing her head again. It was one insult too many. As her head cracked against marble, she saw a flash of brilliant light. She heard Roland screech like Willoughby caught in a fence. And then, nothing.
Closing the French door behind him, Alex Knight stepped back into the library and shook the water off his jacket. He was soaking and chilled. He was even more afraid. Afraid of what he would return to. Afraid of what he had missed. Afraid of what had sent him out to the garden in the first place.
There had been no one waiting in the maze, of course. No one anywhere on the lawn. Just a note,
Wait here,
sitting on the little stone bench that faced a fountain of Venus rising from the seashell. A Venus whose face he knew too well.
He had waited. He had waited for two hours, the weight of his cowardice bearing down on him. Finally he knew that it didn’t matter if they came. It didn’t matter if they brought every letter and freed him. He had to get back to the library.
Stepping over to his chair, he bent to pick up the book that still lay open on the floor. A quick look around the library made him feel exponentially worse. A casual observer would never have noticed, but several pieces of furniture had been moved. His brandy glass was missing from the table where he’d left it. He closed his eyes in despair.
“Were supposed to be here,” he heard from one of the wing chairs, and felt even worse. He didn’t even need to open his eyes to know who his accuser was. “Wait for Ian.”
“I was called away,” he said, his voice sounding flat even to his ears.
Chuffy shook his head. “Too bad,” he said, and lifted what he had in his hand. A broken brandy snifter. “Think they got him.”
Alex knew they had Ian. And it was his fault.
Chapter 19
Well, Ian thought, testing the ropes that held him to the chair, at least he’d been smart enough to hide the flask back in the tunnel. If only he knew where Sarah was. If only he knew she was safe.
Please, God,
he thought, desperately seeking calm.
Let her have found Chuffy. Let her be well.
He could handle anything, as long as she was safe.
“I don’t think you appreciate your situation, Colonel Ferguson,” the silky voice insisted beside him. “We can do anything we want to you, and no one will care. When your body washes up on the beach in a few days, they will shake their heads and think how a traitor had met his just fate.”
Ian laughed, even though it hurt. Hell, by this time, everything hurt. He could no longer see out of his right eye, his nose was broken again, and at least one tooth was loose. He didn’t even want to think about his ribs.
“Wheesht now, lassie, if ye’re trying to seduce me, ye’ll have to do a better job. I’ll wash up on that beach no matter what you or I do this evening.”
He didn’t even bother to look at her. He’d had his fill of the beautiful Minette, who had pulled up a chair and a glass of wine to watch her minion beat him into pudding. And that was before she had asked her first question.
“Too bad about your portrait,” he said through his split lip. “It was a nice likeness. The crabs should be enjoyin’ it.”
At least he was able to put a crimp in her plans. It wasn’t enough. He had to get out of here. He had to find out who had set him up. He needed to know why it had been these two thugs waiting on the other side of the library door instead of one of the Rakes.
And he had to know that Sarah had reached safety.
“You are saying that you lost my lovely miniature in the English Channel.” The Frenchwoman didn’t sound convinced.
He shrugged, his ribs grating. “Just like I did the last twenty times you asked.”
“I do not believe you, me.”
This time he grinned. He could at least win the little battles. “Paint another, lass. This one’s gone.”
She gave a little nod, and Ian braced for another blow. His ribs again, taking his breath and making the world dim.
Dia,
he was growing tired of this. If only he could get those ropes to loosen a bit.
“One of your friends betrayed you, Colonel,” she purred as she rose sinuously to her feet, wineglass in hand.
She was licking her lips, as if she could taste his pain. Ian supposed he should have been repulsed. He wasn’t. He didn’t feel anything but impatience. He’d suffered worse than this at Salamanca when his horse rolled on him. At least this time he didn’t have a musket ball in his shoulder.
There were quite a few people in this ill-lit cesspit: Minette, dressed in a low-cut red velvet gown and diamonds; four bully boys, lumpish ex-boxers with small eyes and big hands; and, most intriguing, an older gentleman who kept to the shadows, where his face couldn’t be seen. Ian knew the man was older, because his hair gleamed in a silver nimbus in the lantern light. Thin, aristocratic, amazingly still. Ian would have given his claymore to know who it was.
“I realize you have a certain…rhythm to your work, Mimi,” the man said in a soft, curiously sibilant voice. “But I really must insist on moving things along. I must go.”
“Mimi?” Ian shook his head. “You’re wrong. It’s Minette.”
Move into the light,
he thought, watching the man.
Let me know who employs this monster.
It was Minette who answered. “Ah, but I am both, Colonel. I am…many things to many men.” She sighed and sipped her wine. “And yes,
chéri,
Minette knows she must move along. She will hurry. First, though, the colonel needs to know that his so good friends turned on him. That he will never recover his name. He will always be called a traitor.” Leaning close enough for Ian to smell the faint patchouli scent she wore, she reached out an elegantly manicured finger to wipe a bit of blood from his bottom lip. “That is, if he lives long enough to be shunned,
non
?”
Ian couldn’t seem to turn away from her. She was looking at the dark red drop that slid down the pad of her finger, her pupils enlarged. Giving Ian another sultry smile, she put her finger up to her mouth and sucked. Then, as if experiencing sexual pleasure, she let her eyes slide closed. No one in the room so much as breathed.
“You know, don’t you,” she said, stroking his cheek with the damp finger, “that I am the one, me, who is the world’s most proficient at the knife.”
“I heard.”
If nothing else, she was quick. Ian was still distracted by the smear of red on her full pink lips when he felt a sharp jab at the side of his neck. He hadn’t even seen her unsheathe the bloody thing. She watched the knife pierce his skin. He held perfectly still. He wasn’t about to give her more pleasure by flinching.
“It would be so easy to pluck out your eyes,” she murmured, shivering. Ian knew damn well the shiver wasn’t from disgust. The silver-haired man’s was.