The Deception (8 page)

He leaned toward me as well. “It involves my sister, you see. Caroline.”

The firelight fell on his hair and for a brief, unsettling moment I had a vision of another man, another face. I shook my head as if to clear it and remembered the time that Adrian had told me he had a sister.

Harry said, “She’s married now—happily, thank God. Has two children and lives in Dorset. But ten years ago, when she was sixteen, she eloped with Charlwood.”

“What!”
The fire cracked as if it were as horrified as I.

He nodded. “It’s the truth. She wasn’t happy at home— well, I mean to say, none of us were happy at home—and she fancied herself in love with Charlwood. Our fathers had never gotten on, and I think Caroline envisioned herself as another Juliet. At any rate, they actually set off for Scotland. Adrian found out about it, thank God, and went after them. Caught up with them in the early afternoon and got her home before my father knew what had happened.”

“Ten years ago?” I said. “Adrian must have been a boy ten years ago!”

“He was seventeen and home for the summer from Eton. He was so furious with Charlwood that he forced a duel on him. Caroline told me about it later. Adrian brought swords and the two of them actually had a duel. Right on the road!”

Harry’s voice was full of awe as he recounted this deed. I pictured the scene and shuddered. It was lucky for Caroline that Adrian had won. I said as much to Harry.

“Adrian always wins,” Harry said with simple faith.

I sat back in my comfortable chair, ran my hand over the faded arm, and contemplated the information I had just been given. Ten years ago my uncle had been twenty-two. It could not have pleased him to be beaten by a seventeen-year-old.

The fire hissed in the silence and I said, “So Adrian denied Charlwood the wife he wanted, and in revenge Charlwood made Adrian take a wife he did not want.”

Harry leaned back and stretched his booted legs in front of him. “That’s about it. You must have looked like manna from heaven to Charlwood. It would have been even better for him if you had been ugly, of course, but you served the main purpose. You scotched Adrian’s marriage with Lady Mary Weston.”

I felt a pang. “Did he love Lady Mary?”

Harry shrugged. “I don’t know about love, but he was certainly going to marry her.”

“They weren’t engaged.”

“He just hadn’t got around to asking her yet.”

“Perhaps she would have refused him.”

Harry gave me an incredulous look. “Refuse
Adrian?”

“It is not inconceivable,” I said with dignity.

He didn’t even deign to reply, so vapid did he consider that remark.

We finished the plate of muffins in silence. When the last crumb had been devoured, I suggested to Harry that he might like to accompany me to the stable. He agreed and we put on our warm riding coats, left the house through the side door, and walked together along the graveled path that led to the Lambourn stables.

The grounds at Lambourn were almost as simple as the house. Along the path to the stable there were two stone outbuildings that had at one time served as the dairy and the cookhouse and that now, with the family no longer in any regular residence, were filled with odds and ends of furniture that were no longer needed in the house. The path itself was flanked by turf, winter brown now, but in spring it would be richly green.

The stable buildings were constructed of the same stone as the house. There was the carriage house, which at the moment contained only a simple country cart, and the barn. The barn held twelve box stalls, all of which looked out on a cobbled central yard. Five of the double Dutch doors were open at the top to allow their occupants air and sunshine; four of the stills belonged to Lambourn’s equine residents and one to Harry’s horse. I started toward the newcomer’s stall, curious to see what he was riding.

The open door revealed a bright chestnut Thoroughbred gelding, who was happily munching on a pile of hay. I regarded him critically. “What a nice horse,” I said to Harry, who was standing beside me. “He looks as if he has smooth gaits.”

Harry looked at me in surprise. “They are smooth. How did you know that?”

“One can often tell by the way the shoulder is set.”

The surprise on Harry’s face slowly turned to something else. It was a change I had seen dozens of times before. I will never understand why men refuse to think that women are capable of judging a horse.

“Let me show you Elsa,” I said, and we moved along to the mare’s stall. She was finishing up her own lunch hay, but when she heard my voice she glanced over her shoulder. She didn’t nicker—Elsa thought nickering was undignified—but she moved with queenly graciousness to the stall door, where she accepted a lump of sugar and allowed me to rub the white star on her forehead.

Harry’s mouth was hanging open, and I smiled. The last few months had seen a dramatic change in Elsa’s appearance. Her neck had a lovely crest, her back had filled in, and her quarters were starting to muscle up nicely. In another year she would be magnificent.

“How old is this mare?” Harry demanded.

“Sixteen,” I said.

“That’s what I thought. What have you done to her?”

“I’ve been riding her.”

He looked at my skirt, this time openly. “You don’t use a sidesaddle?”

I shook my head. “I learned to ride astride, and Papa said it would be a shame to make me change.”

Willie’s voice came from behind us. “Would you like me to saddle her up, my lady, so you can show Lord Henry how she goes?” He sounded so much like a proud father that I had to smile. Both of the grooms at Lambourn really cared about the horses in their charge.

“I’d like to see her go,” Harry said. We stood together in the bright cold sunshine and watched while Willie saddled Elsa. On the far side of the barn there were three large fenced paddocks, and I had made a riding ring in one of them by spreading wood shavings over the frozen ground. This is where we took Elsa. The two men watched as I fitted my foot into the stirrup and swung up into the saddle.

I have been riding horses in front of my father’s customers for almost all my life, so it didn’t make me at all nervous to ride now in front of Harry. He was impressed. He should have been. Elsa was forward and light and absolutely elegant.

“Divorce Adrian and marry me,” Harry said when we came to a perfectly square halt in front of him.

I laughed.

“Where did you learn to ride like that?”

“My father. He attended the French cavalry school at Saumur when he was a young man, so he was well grounded in classical equitation.”

Harry nodded. “You don’t use an English hunting saddle, I see.”

“Papa abhorred the hunting saddle,” I said frankly. “He said it is responsible for the English being the worst riders in the entire civilized world. He got this old French military saddle for me about five years ago. I wouldn’t part with it for anything on earth.”

Harry grinned. “Your father would have gotten along great guns with Adrian.”

This was not as great a surprise to me as you may think. I had been both astonished and delighted when I first got on Elsa to discover how rhythmic her gaits were, how responsive she was to the lightest of aids. And Elsa had been Adrian’s horse.

Harry was going on, “Your father would have been happy to know that one of Adrian’s projects in France this last year has been to get the king to restore the cavalry school at Saumur.”

Papa would have been more than happy to hear this; he would have been ecstatic. It had pained him deeply to think that the art of classical equitation might be lost forever.

I smiled radiantly at Harry. “That is wonderful news,” I said warmly.

Harry blinked.

“Why don’t you let Willie saddle up one of the other horses for you and we’ll go for a ride together?” I suggested.

* * * *

By the time we returned from our ride across the Downs, Harry and I were great friends. He would not be going back to Oxford after Christmas, he confided to me as we were sitting in the dining room over Mrs. Noakes’s roast beef dinner. He had been sent down for some silly prank—he did not think it was silly, but I did—and now he had to write to tell Adrian the bad news.

“I don’t get control of my own money until I’m twenty-five,” he told me gloomily. “So for the next four years, I’m dependent upon Adrian. He’s going to kick up stiff when he hears that I’ve been sent down.”

“I don’t blame him,” I said candidly. “Whatever are you going to do with yourself for the next eight months?”

“Damn!” he said. Mr. Noakes gave him a dire frown, but he didn’t notice. “Adrian never went to Oxford. When he was my age he was having fun out in the Peninsula. Now that the war’s over, there’s nothing for my generation to do except go to boring old school.”

I smiled at Mr. Noakes to show him that Harry had not offended me. “How thoughtless of Wellington to have ended the war before you had a chance to get killed,” I said.

“Dash it all, Kate,”—we had gotten on first-name terms in the first half hour of our ride—”I know war ain’t fun. But, don’t you see, it’s a way of becoming a
man.”
He scowled at his glass of wine, picked it up, and drained it off. “Of course, you don’t understand,” he muttered. “You’re a girl.”

I understood more than he thought. It could not be easy for an ardent young boy like Harry to have such a paragon for an elder brother. Harry was searching for a way to prove himself as good a man as Adrian, and the only outlet he could find was the harebrained pranks that he knew in his heart were not manly but simply juvenile.

“How did your brother come to go out to the Peninsula?” This was a question that had puzzled me for quite a while. The heir to a great title was not expected to risk his life in battles—that was something a younger son was supposed to do.

We had finished dinner by now, and Harry said abruptly, “Let’s go back to the library.”

I certainly did not want to leave him alone with a bottle of wine—I thought he had had quite enough already—so I agreed.

“Adrian went to the Peninsula to get away from my father, of course,” Harry said when we were once again settled comfortably in the blue chairs in front of the library fire. “The same reason that Caroline let herself get talked into that wretched elopement.”

I thought about this for a while. “Your father was not a ... kindly ... man?” I asked.

“He was a monster,” Harry returned bluntly. “Used to fly in a rage and use his whip on us.”

I was dumbfounded. “He
hit
you?”

“He hit Adrian, mostly.” Harry ran his fingers through his hair and regarded me with somber eyes. “He used to take the blame for things Caroline and I did. He was bigger, he’d say. The hitting stopped when Adrian got big enough to hit back, but the fact of the matter was, my father was a bastard to live with.”

“But what of your mother?” I asked in horror. “Did she not try to prevent this?”

“My mother died when I was a baby,” Harry replied in a matter-of-fact voice. “Things got better for us when Caroline married Ashley. I went to live with Caroline and Adrian went to the Peninsula. When my father died four years ago, we all rejoiced.”

I was appalled by this vision of life in an earl’s household. I thought of the cold lifeless rooms at Charlwood and wondered if my own grandfather—who, according to Cousin Louisa had been a “hard man”—had presided over the same kind of reign of terror as the one that had prevailed at Greystone.

How lucky I was to have had Papa, I thought fervently. I may have missed having the security of a settled home and income, but I had never once doubted that I was loved.

“Adrian is going to think I acted like a fool, getting myself sent down like this,” Harry said now despondently. “And what’s worse, he will be right.”

This was a boy who needed a mission in life, I thought, looking at his drooping figure. And I had one to offer him.

“I think my father was murdered,” I said. “And I’d like you to help me find out why.”

Harry had snapped to instant attention at my words. “Murdered?” he said. “What do you mean, murdered?”

I told him how Papa had been shot, and about his dying words. “I mentioned them to your brother,” I said, “but he did not take them seriously. He told me that dying men often drift away in their minds. I have no doubt that he is correct, but Papa was not one of those men. He knew very well where he was and what he was saying. He made arrangements for my uncle to be sent for. He ....” Here my voice wobbled dangerously, but I took a deep breath and steadied it. “He told me that he loved me. He was not drifting away.”

“It don’t sound as if he was,” Harry agreed. “But what did he suspect?”

“I don’t know, but I think it has to do with the Marquis of Stade. For some reason, Papa was insistent that he had to show the two hunters we had picked up in Ireland to Stade. He went directly from Ireland to Newmarket, without stopping to see any of his usual customers and without previously approaching Stade to see if he would be interested. This was not Papa’s normal way of doing business, Harry. Then, after Papa’s death, when I was in London with my uncle, I had a strange encounter with Stade.” And I told him about my meeting with the Marquis. “He knew exactly who I was when he stopped Mr. Putnam,” I said. “Something is not right. I can feel it.”

“Do you think Stade is the one who shot your father?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I think he was shot deliberately. Even the local magistrate thought it was odd that someone would have a gun in that part of the woods.”

Harry was silent, obviously lost in thought. I got up, went to the fire, rested my booted foot on the grate, and held out my hands to its welcome blaze. I felt chilled to my bones.

Mr. Noakes walked in. “Will you be wanting your horse brought around, Mr. Harry?” he asked.

Harry exploded. “Dash it all, Noakes, why are you so anxious to get rid of me?”

“It is not proper for you to stay alone in the house with Lady Greystone,” the old man said repressively.

“She’s my sister-in-law!” Harry said.

“She is a very young lady and her husband is away.”

“Well, it ain’t good for her to be all alone either,” Harry retorted. “She needs a little company.”