Shameless (41 page)

Neil narrowed his eyes at her, and she made a face at him in return. Retrieving the pistol, she turned just in time to note Hugh’s arrested look, and the glance he exchanged with someone behind her, whom she presumed was Nick.

“Take that pistol from her, Barnet,” Nick directed.

“’E don’t need no pistol to do what ’e does, Colonel. You just remember that.” A familiar gravelly voice addressed the warning to Nick as the speaker stepped carefully around Neil to relieve Beth of the pistol. George Barnet, a giant of a man with the squashed features of a former pugilist, had served as Nick’s batman during the war, and as his right-hand man since. Beth had known him for as long as she had known Nick, and liked him very well.

“Hello, Barnet.” She gave him a quick smile.

“’Ello, Miss Beth.” Nodding at her, he cast Neil a wary glance. “We was that worried about ye, miss.”

“I’m sorry.” This reminder of the distress her disappearance must have caused everyone who cared about her brought her sisters instantly to mind.

“I reckon it weren’t your fault,” Barnet replied as, bearing away the pistol and shooting Neil a poisonous look even as he took care to give him a wide berth, he returned to his position at Nick’s shoulder. “ ’Twas ’im.”

“No! No, it wasn’t! You have it completely wrong, all of you!” At their collective intransigence, she felt like stamping her foot. “Hugh, Nick, unless you want me to tell you this very private story in front of everyone, we should step into the parlor now.” Relying on her status as a beloved little sister, she resorted to giving both beseeching looks.
“Please,
won’t you hear me out?”

Once again Hugh and Nick exchanged looks.

“Or you could just shoot me out of hand,” Neil suggested.

Beth shot him a killing glare.

“All right, we’ll listen.
You
”—the abrupt change in Hugh’s tone once again made it clear that he was addressing Neil—“keep well ahead of us.”

“We’ll be right outside this ’ere door, Colonel,” Barnet said grimly as Beth led the way into the private parlor. “Ye or ’Is Grace only need to give a shout.”

By the time Nick closed the parlor door behind them, Neil had propped a shoulder against the fireplace and turned a sardonic face to the room while Beth, seeing how dark it was with the shutters closed and the fire having died to an orange glow, lit a candle on the embers and touched it to the tapers in the wall sconces on either side of the fireplace. Nick and Hugh, she noted, stationed themselves well apart along the back wall. Both kept their pistols trained on Neil.

Returning the flickering candle to its holder in the middle of the table, she moved to stand beside Neil. Not that she truly thought he needed her protection, now that there were only the four of them, but just in case.

“How are Claire and Gabby? Are they much overset?” she asked.

“As you may imagine,” Hugh answered drily. “Claire was beside herself with anxiety when last I saw her. Gabby, while bearing up, was white as a ghost and unable to eat. I doubt they’ve improved any while we’ve been scouring the countryside in search of you.”

“Oh, no!”

“We promised we’d get you back safe,” Nick added. “We left them together, along with my children, under guard at Richmond House in
case your abductor”—here he shot a sulfurous look at Neil—“should have decided to target them, too.”

“But Neil didn’t abduct me,” Beth objected. “He rescued me, rather! I think it must have been William—Lord Rosen—who arranged to have me kidnapped.”

“Is that what he’s led you to believe?” Hugh thrust a hand into the pocket of his greatcoat and pulled forth a folded sheet of paper. As he unfolded it, Beth, from the corner of her eye, thought she saw Neil respond with a nearly imperceptible wince.

“What is that?” She looked from the paper to Hugh.

“This was written by him, and delivered to me after you disappeared. Allow me to read it to you.” Glancing down at the paper, he began: “‘My dear Richmond: It is my pleasure to inform you that I have in my possession the Lady Elizabeth Banning, who I propose to keep until you should present yourself, in person and quite alone, to reclaim her. At that time, I am confident that our differences can be settled. Please accept my profound assurance that if you do not follow my instructions to the letter, and arrive in good time at the location I shall subsequently acquaint you with, the consequences to the lady will be, shall we say, unfortunate.’”

He stopped, but Beth had already turned her attention to Neil, who met her shocked gaze with a rueful look that advertised his guilt as loudly as a shouted confession.

She frowned. “But you
didn’t
.” Her conviction gained strength as she mentally reviewed events to see if she could possibly have misinterpreted them. “You had nothing to do with kidnapping me.”

He sighed. “No, I actually didn’t. But only because someone—I agree that it was most likely your spurned suitor—beat me to it. The dismal truth is, I went to the park that morning to carry you off with me, by persuasion or, um, whatever means was necessary, with the intention of using you to draw Richmond to me. For what purpose I imagine you can guess.”

She regarded him indignantly. “What a shabby thing to have done!”

“Shabby?”
Hugh choked out as Neil shrugged in silent apology. “Dastardly, rather.”

“Beth . . .” Nick began.

She rounded on them. “But don’t you see, he
didn’t
kidnap me. He may have—most reprehensibly!—formed the intention of doing so, but instead he rode after me and saved me from the most dreadful— Oh, let me tell you the whole story, and you may judge it for yourselves.”

Which is what she did, starting with their first encounter in the library at Richmond House and ending with Hugh and Nick’s arrival on the scene, glossing over only the most personal moments. When she finished, Neil’s arms were folded over his chest and his countenance was absolutely expressionless, while Hugh and Nick seemed to waver somewhere between astonishment and horror.

“First things first.” Hugh was the first to recover. “Are we to understand that there is even now a dead body lying concealed in the shrubbery at the back of this inn?”

Beth nodded.

“It’s not that well concealed,” Neil told them. “I was on my way to move it when you showed up. Unless you want to have to answer a number of awkward questions presently, I suggest you have someone convey it to the woods behind the stable before the sun’s well up.”

With a speaking look at Hugh, Nick moved, opening the door and saying something inaudible to, Beth presumed, Barnet, who was, as promised, just beyond the door.

“You don’t need to worry about the marriage. It won’t be allowed to stand.” Finished giving his orders to Barnet, Nick closed the door again, rested his back against it, and looked at Beth. His tone was comforting. For all his soft words, his pistol was once again trained on Neil. Hugh’s had never wavered, and she wondered with despair if they had heard a word she’d said.

“It’s perfectly legal,” Neil drawled. “No grounds for overturning it whatsoever.”

“You made sure of that, didn’t you?” Hugh’s expression turned
ugly. “Whether it can be overturned or not doesn’t matter, you bounder, because Beth will, in any case, shortly be a widow.”

“But I don’t wish to be a widow!” Beth said before Neil could reply. She shot a quelling glance at him, to find that he was once again looking mockingly at Hugh. Frowning him down, she looked at Hugh again. “I don’t wish to have the marriage overturned, either. I am not saying that it is precisely what I would have chosen, but if fate had not forced my hand in this way, I daresay I never would have married at all. I— Believe me when I tell you that I would as soon be married to Neil as anybody.”

“Thank you.” Neil gave her a small, ironic bow.

“Beth, don’t think we don’t understand how it must have been.” Nick’s voice was incredibly gentle. “You’ve been through a shocking experience, and are naturally inclined to regard the man who saved you from the worst of it as a hero, but . . .”

“I am not such a fool, Nick, and you know it!”

“Indeed, that passel of females I encountered at the White Swan told much the same tale,” Hugh said reluctantly. “That was before you came up with us, Nick. They claimed he rescued them from all manner of dangers.”

“Oh, did you see Mary, and Peg, and Alyce, and the rest, then?” Beth asked Hugh, eager for news of them. “I assured them that if they assisted me to help Neil escape from that dreadful Tandy and his men, you would see to their safety.”

“I did.” His voice was dry.

“Enough of this. Beth needs to know the truth about what he is.” Nick, looking impatiently at Hugh, cut that line of conversation short. “She’s built up this image of him in her mind, and the only way to counter it is to tell her the truth. She has
married
him, for God’s sake. But you’re the one here who has the authority to break the confidentiality of the War Office, not me, so it’s your call.”

“If you mean to acquaint me with the fact that he is an assassin, you needn’t bother,” Beth said. “He told me himself.”

“Clever of you,” Hugh said to Neil. “But I fancy you didn’t tell her
the entire truth.” His attention shifted to Beth, and his expression softened fractionally. “In the world he inhabits, he’s known as the Angel of Death. He got that sobriquet because of the sheer number of people he has killed, and because of the ruthlessness with which he does the job. Once he is set on a target, the target is as good as dead, along with anyone who happens to get in the way. He is the best at what he does, and in this case to be the best is a terrible thing. With the war over and our men coming home, it was the unenviable task of the War Office to acknowledge that some operatives we were forced to use to secure victory could not be reintegrated into the populace. I promise you that only a very few were deemed impossible to rehabilitate. He was at the top of the list, judged an extreme danger to society.”

“And did you make that determination, Richmond?” Neil’s voice was very soft, while his eyes gleamed diamond hard.

Hugh returned his look steadily. “No, but I agreed with it. I still agree with it.”

“But it’s
wrong,
” Beth burst out. She glared at Hugh. “Did you not kill anyone during the war? Of course you did! Claire says you will not say much about your time on the continent before you met her. Indeed, I feel if I, or Claire, knew the full total of your activities there, we would feel quite as much horror toward you as you expect me to feel toward Neil now.” As Hugh’s mouth tightened in silent acknowledgment of a hit, she rounded on Nick. “And as for you, Gabby has told me some of what you did. You were instrumental in the capture and execution of a great number of spies, weren’t you? Just because you did not generally kill them yourself does not make you any less guilty, you know.”

Nick’s expression changed, too, and Beth knew she had scored there as well.

“I would have expected better of you than to try to hide behind a woman’s skirts, Durham.” Hugh’s voice was harsh.

“Now, there you mistake, my old friend. It’s you who have been hiding behind a woman’s skirts. I would have killed you the night I entered your house had I not encountered Beth instead, and I would have killed you today had it not been for her.”

“You might have tried!”

“I would have succeeded.”

“Stop it, both of you!” Grabbing hold of Neil’s sleeve to shush him, Beth flashed a furious look at Hugh. “The point is that neither of you—none of you—is lily white. I doubt anyone who served in that frightful war is! But it’s over, and you moved on”—then her gaze shot to Nick—“and you moved on, and Neil is going to move on, too. If there is some kind of death order out against him, you must just rescind it.”

“Even if I wished to, I don’t have that power,” Hugh said.

At the look on his face, Beth felt her stomach drop clear to her toes. The arm beneath her hand tightened, and her hand clamped onto the hardening muscle. Unless Neil wished to be stopped, however, she knew her grip was useless. With a terrible sense that events were beginning to spin out of control, she felt Neil gathering himself beside her, and knew to what purpose.

“No! You can’t do this, either of you! By God, after all those bloody years of war, aren’t you both sick of killing?” It was a cry straight from Beth’s heart.

“Hold a minute.” Straightening away from the door, Nick looked at Hugh. “I know it’s not in your power to rescind the order. Indeed, I wouldn’t be willing to wager much on the chance it could be rescinded. But it might be circumvented.”

“How so?” Though Hugh replied to Nick, his eyes never left Neil.

“We have a dead body on our hands, I apprehend. If we claimed it was his, who, outside of those in this room, would know the difference?”

Silence greeted that.

Hugh frowned thoughtfully at Nick. “Your men.”

The fact that he allowed his eyes to shift away from Neil made Beth breathe a little easier.

“They were under my command during the war, and since then they’ve worked for me in various, uh, jobs for the government—something that I’ll thank you not to tell your sister.” Nick addressed this aside, along with a monitory look, to Beth, “who has an unfortunate
tendency to worry.” He directed his attention back to Hugh. “They’re totally trustworthy.”

“There is a man named Fitz Clapham,” Neil said in a negligent tone, as if the discussion was purely academic and the outcome didn’t matter to him at all. “He, too, is a government-sanctioned killer, and unfortunately he knows what I look like.”

Beth gave him a quelling look. The last thing they needed was him throwing rubs in their way.

“Does he?” Hugh’s frown deepened.

“But only as the Angel of Death. He has no knowledge that I am in truth the Marquis of Durham.”

“You will never encounter him. He will never see you,” Beth interjected. “The two of you will henceforth exist in different worlds.”

“That’s a problem,” Hugh said to Nick, as if she hadn’t spoken.

“A negligible one,” Nick replied. “As Beth said, it is highly unlikely their paths will ever cross.”