The Scarred Earl (17 page)

They watched the fishing party, at ease as Persephone would have thought her little sisters incapable of being with a virtual stranger and realised they had accepted their
brother-in-law-to-be as part of the family. Unforgivably envious that her family might prove a greater attraction than she was herself, she took her eyes off them long enough to look to her mother for more information about her fiancé.

‘Mr Farrant Forthin was not blessed with good looks, then?’ she prompted.

‘No, and little wonder Farrant hated the boy, I suppose, considering he was mean-minded by nature and always ready to blame Alex for his own sins and omissions. I can see why old Lord Tregaron had the boy visit as often as he could until he died, but once he was gone that only made Alexander’s life more difficult. He had to live with a father who was jealous of his future possessions and a brother determined to strip him of as many of them as possible by fair means or foul. I often wondered what Lady Elyssine Llyn saw in the husband she insisted on marrying, despite her father’s opposition and every scrap of common sense her friends tried to talk into her. Walter Forthin turned out to be every bit as bad as they said and I wonder if she ran away because he beat her and perhaps worse.’

‘How could she leave her son with such a father?’

‘I doubt he touched the boy with his own stamp so plain to see, despite the lad’s good looks. But how could she make him live a poor and precarious life?’

‘Poor Alex,’ Persephone observed as she continued to watch his every move as if there was no keeping her eyes off him. ‘Having an indifferent father and jealous brother was bad enough, but it seems his mother was spineless as well.’

‘They certainly produced a far finer character in your future husband than any of them deserved, my love, especially since the world seems a little too ready to believe him a rogue because he carries a few scars,’ her mother said, watching her future son-in-law gently guide her youngest daughter’s ham-fisted attempts at fishing at the same time as keeping an eye on Helen, who was now out of her mama’s direct sight, sketching the scene with her usual sharply observed fluidity.

‘He’s not a rogue at all,’ Persephone heard herself fly to Alexander’s defence as if she was totally besotted with the man and
blushed under Lady Henry’s knowing look and secretive smile.

‘Oh, I rather think he is a little bit of a one, my dear,’ Lady Henry replied sweetly, chuckling at her eldest daughter’s confounded look when Persephone eyed the man in front of her once more and duly noted her wolf in wolf’s clothing had little of the perfect gentle knight about him and a lot of dangerous predator.

‘You could be right,’ she said with a secretive smile.

‘Of course I am, I’m your mother,’ Lady Henry replied complacently.

Having established her omnipotence, Melissa Seaborne was content to let her younger daughters go their own way while she sat and planned the perfect autumn wedding in her head. Persephone finally succumbed to tiredness on the softly cushioned day bed and her other daughters forgot to be in awe of Alex’s spectacular, if slightly battered, good looks or the past experiences he carried on him for all to see.
Yes
, Melissa decided as she reviewed her day,
it’s all going so much better than I dared to hope back in June, when Alexander and Persephone were forever glaring at each other as if they hated
what they saw
. Now she only needed her eldest son to come home and her younger one to stop chasing ladybirds and carousing with his more disreputable friends and settle to the sort of life that would make him happy.

‘These rumours of your involvement in Mr Seaborne’s kidnap are impossible to pin down to a particular source, my lord,’ the agent Jack employed informed the Earl of Calvercombe a week or so after the announcement of his lordship’s engagement to Marcus’s sister.

‘Gossip needs no evidence to flourish,’ Alex said with a resigned shrug.

‘It’s an oddly persistent piece of tittle-tattle, don’t you think?’ Mr Frederick Peters asked his latest employer impassively.

‘This whole business is devilish odd.’

‘And carried out with a very definite purpose in mind, my lord.’

‘Obviously to make me redouble my efforts to find Rich Seaborne and my cousin,’ Alex said, distaste at the idea of betraying one brother to recover the other bitter on his tongue.

‘The Duke believes his eldest cousin disappeared deliberately, so his staying lost
could be his way of avoiding some great trouble for him and his, my lord,’ the clever young lawyer suggested.

‘Very likely, but it won’t bring his little brother back. Marcus’s disappearance argues someone wants Mr Richard Seaborne back out in the wide world very badly indeed, Peters. Buying up that ring, if he didn’t steal it from Rich some time during the last three years, must have cost a small fortune, even if he got it from a fence.’

‘Which argues he must have left a clue behind him somewhere; perhaps a minor detail he forgot to cover up that will lead us to the man behind all this in time.’

‘But maybe not soon enough for Marcus. Anyway, I’ve been trained to pick out the smallest clue to a man’s true allegiance, even when he’s proclaiming his loyalty to the heavens. I’ve seen no sign of such double-dealing since young Marcus Seaborne disappeared.’

‘But have you applied such tactics to all your acquaintance, my lord?’

‘What acquaintance would that be, Peters?’ Alex asked, to remind the man he wasn’t exactly a social animal.

‘Inside knowledge or close observation
led to this kidnap, my lord. It was a shrewd as well as a cruel move to take the gentleman shortly to become your brother-in-law. It’s an open secret you were a hunter after the hidden and intangible in service of your country, so what better man is there to chase his quarry down if he could find a way to make you dance to his tune?’

‘Jack told me you were a shrewd devil, but I wonder if even he knows how clever you really are, Peters.’

‘Praise indeed, but the answer to this puzzle may well lie with you, however clever or stupid I happen to be to think so, Lord Calvercombe.’

‘You honestly believe someone I know is party to this scheme, if not actually behind it?’

‘You were out of the country and attached to Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army for several years and have kept yourself very private since your return. Few outsiders can know much about you other than by rumour, my lord.’

‘I never thought being a recluse might help me find my future wife’s brother one day, or I might have embraced solitude with a gladder heart,’ Alex observed with a smile that
softened his guarded expression more than he probably knew when Persephone entered the room.

‘No doubt, my lord,’ the acutely observant Mr Peters agreed blandly.

‘What have you been discussing whilst I was busy struggling with our enormous guest list, my lord?’ Persephone asked as she slipped her hand into Alex’s as if that was where it belonged.

‘Your brother,’ he replied with a grim look she wished she could soothe away.

‘Which one?’ she asked bleakly.

‘The one who disappeared against his will, rather than the one Peters here believes lost himself and my cousin quite deliberately.’

‘Which is only what you had come to believe of your own accord, is it not? Have you two come to any conclusions about Marcus’s disappearance though?’

‘Only that someone I know might be involved, if I could only find him among my slender acquaintance,’ he answered with a preoccupied frown.

‘Why don’t we make a list of anyone who might be even remotely connected to you and the kidnapper? Since I seem to have
been given the role of list maker today, you can recite whilst I record,’ she invited him with as intimate a smile as she dared unleash on them with this thread of waiting tension strung so tight under all their dealings nowadays.

Chapter Twelve

‘A
n excellent idea, Miss Seaborne,’ Mr Peters approved with a brief smile that made her like him far more than she’d been inclined to on first meeting.

‘Thank you, Mr Peters,’ she said meekly and eyed Alex expectantly.

‘I have few enough relations for us to concern ourselves with,’ he admitted as he seemed ready to take seriously the possibility someone he knew might be at the heart of all this. ‘Apart from Annabelle, who we know too well has not been seen or heard of for three years, I only have one or two living relatives. My Great-Uncle Mortlake Forthin is nearly ninety and probably incapable of carrying out such a complex scheme, even if
he had a reason to move against such a powerful family and risk dangling on the end of a hempen rope.’

He paused while Persephone wrote the name down anyway, on the supposition nobody could yet be ruled out, however unlikely they might sound.

‘Then there is my father’s scandalous cousin Corinthia, who married a part-time horse-dealer and circus acrobat rejoicing in the name of Luciano Clevedon. She was banished to one of the remoter of my predecessor’s estates with him to contemplate her sins in obscurity and bring up the only child they produced who survived birth.’

Persephone wrote both those unlikely names on her list. ‘So what was the poor child’s name? I must say your family seems as addicted to thinking up unlikely names for their children as my own sometimes allows itself to be,’ she said while he brooded over the dilemma of naming anyone else who might want to harm him and subjecting them to Peters’s rather merciless scrutiny of their every word and action when they could be totally innocent.

‘Electra!’ he finally recalled. ‘I knew it was something outlandish, but neither she
nor her parents were often discussed by the family, even when my father and brother were speaking to me long enough to talk about them.’

Persephone wondered how unlucky Electra felt about being rated neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring and deemed unfit company for even such a rackety family as the Forthins.

‘And which of the remoter family estates were they sent to?’ she prompted.

‘How I wish my steward was here to remind me, since he was my late grandfather’s man and seems to have acquainted himself with the finer details of my new estates far better than I have managed to myself up to now,’ Alex mused, then shook his head as she shot a questioning look at him. ‘I refuse to believe Griffiths has any hand in this murky business. He looked after my interests whilst I was out of the country and nobody else bothered to try to check my father’s depredations. He’s a sincere churchman who could never square it with his conscience to put Marcus at risk. He’s also a genuinely good man and I’m not such a fool I haven’t learnt to recognise one of those rarities when I meet one.’

‘I shall put him in the least likely column, then,’ Persephone conceded, exchanging a quick look with Mr Peters to silently agree he would look at the Penbryn steward anyway, despite his employer’s scruples. ‘Did this Electra of yours have any children herself?’

‘I recall my father laughing about Electra wedding the son of a local vicar, but I wasn’t particularly interested in my father’s idea of a good story at the time. He and Farrant thought it a great joke that the daughter of a circus acrobat and possibly the proudest and least well-favoured lady they had ever met had to content herself with such a humble, if respectable, mate. I believe they still live on the estate my cousin allowed them to occupy as an act of not particularly splendid generosity.’

‘So she and her husband live in this obscure manor and you can’t recall the name or location of it?’ she asked, sharing Peters’s frustration that Alex couldn’t recall the name of an estate he now owned. If ever a group of people had reason to resent the senior branch of their family tree, it was this particular one.

‘I doubt if old Octavius gave them a second thought once he had ordered his cousin
to retire to it and live there quietly without bothering him. It was probably falling down round their ears even when they went there and I hate to think what kind of dereliction they have had to put up with since.’

‘I dare say this Electra, and any children she might have, must resent you and yours for treating her so callously, don’t you think?’

‘Why, what did I ever do to them?’

‘Nothing, but they might fear you will remember them one day and evict them from the ramshackle home your late cousin grudgingly allowed them, so that it can be sold. I wonder how it must feel to be allowed to stay in your home on sufferance, and fear losing even that shabby and unkempt shelter at the whim of a man they don’t know.’

‘Desperate, I should think,’ he conceded, frustrated by his inability to recall more. ‘My father and brother had no time for family and Cousin Octavius probably left them to scratch a living as best they could from the home farm and whatever else they could use to their advantage. He probably thought he’d been very generous to them, when he thought about them at all,’ he said on a pass
down the room he was pacing as if action might release the name he sought.

‘My mother might be able to help, as she seems to know all sorts of unexpected details about families I’ve never even heard of,’ Persephone offered as she sat and waited for this remote memory to fall into place and sympathised silently over his own spartan childhood, spent with two such selfish and preoccupied men.

She couldn’t recall ever meeting Farrant Forthin or his disreputable father, but had never thought she could hate a pair of dead strangers as she hated those two. Every detail Alex let fall about his lonely and loveless childhood made her loathe more fervently a father and brother who could treat a sensitive young boy so harshly. It explained why he was so devoted to his little cousin, she supposed, when the one spark of warmth in their young lives had been their affection for one another. She felt her former jealousy fall away and was actually grateful to Annabelle and hoped she and Rich were happily lost in some safe place together.

‘Kingslake Moot Castle! That’s the name of the place and a ramshackle old barn of a house it is as well, if only half what I’ve
heard of it is true,’ Alex said at last, breaking off his pacing to give her one of those rare, un-self-conscious smiles she secretly treasured more than gold. ‘Remnants of the castle and the manor house built within its walls in Tudor times are more than half-ruined, according to the report Griffiths commissioned from an architect who worked on Penbryn for my grandfather. The two tumbledown old farms that make up the so-called estate are not a lot better, although Griffiths put works on the farmhouses and cottages attached to them at the top of our list of urgent repairs. I dare say my cousin’s family were too proud to beg for work on the castle to take precedence when the surveyor was making his report, or perhaps they were too bitter at being marooned there in the first place.’