This Rake of Mine (28 page)

"Pippin, what have you done?" Felicity gasped.

"I-I-I was only trying to—" Pippin began.

"Oh dear, look at what you've discovered!" Tally said, pointing over her cousin's shoulder.

Pippin turned around and glanced at the library wall—a wall that had moved, leaving a gaping hole. "A secret panel!" she whispered, rising from the floor and standing before the entrance to what looked to be a dark tunnel down into the depths of the house.

"Stay back," Miranda admonished. "You don't know what is in there."

Brutus, however, bolted into the darkness with the ferocity of a dog twice his size, barking and growling as if he had found an entire nest of rodents.

Tally went after him, probably having already forgotten Miranda's admonishment to stay back, so Pippin followed her, if only to catch her and stop her before she fell into some pit or other problem that would only deepen the mire they were already neck deep in.

But Pippin's progress was halted by Tally, who hadn't gone more than a few steps into the tunnel.

"A-a-a-ah," Tally stammered, pointing down at Brutus, who had something in his mouth. She began shaking from head to toe.

Pippin squinted to see better, and then probably wished she hadn't.

"Miss Porter—" Pippin squeaked.

Miranda was at her side in a moment. "What is it?" She fell silent at the sight before her, then managed an, "Oh, dear heavens!"

Brutus hadn't caught a rat. Rather he had a sheet, which he had pulled back to reveal a man. A very dead man.

Felicity joined them, her eyes growing wide with horror, her lips moving to form a word, but the ability to say it escaped her.

But Miranda knew what it was.

Murder.

It was as she had feared. There'd been a murder last night. How else could one explain the darkened stains of blood across the man's chest, the blood on her nightgown.

The blood on Jack's hand.

"We must be gone from here," she told them, pulling them away from the body and snatching up a reluctant Brutus. "Before anyone sees us." Closing the passageway, she glanced at the library door, her teeth working her lower lip.

While flight seemed the best choice, she couldn't do that. The man inside deserved retribution, but how?

Then Miranda remembered something from the other day.

"Pippin, put those books back on the shelf. Felicity, close your mouth, it is unbecoming. Tally, take a deep breath and regain your composure, then help your cousin with the books."

Tally, not being much of a librarian, began shoving the volumes back in willy-nilly.

"Tally, they have to go in order," Pippin chastened.

"Order? What are you talking about? There is a dead man in there and you are worried about the books being neat?"

"No, we have to make them look like nothing has been disturbed," Pippin said, sorting the books.

"Miss Porter," she asked as she set the last volume, a thick book on ancient English history, back into place. "What are we to do now?"

"We are going to fetch the magistrate."

Jack had spent the night pacing the floor. Malcolm was dead, and Miss Mabberly… well, he wasn't so sure now.

But how could it be that Miss Porter was…

The woman he'd long thought dead.

After she'd fled upstairs, he'd stood looking after her for some time, telling himself he was as mad as Lord Albin, as ramshackle as Lord Hal.

Miranda Mabberly couldn't be alive.

Remember…

"Remember what?" he demanded of the shadows that seemed to haunt him. "Remember bloody what?"

There was nothing to remember. The chit was dead, and Miss Porter was… very much alive.

Hours later, Jack was still toying with the idea of giving Bruno's suggestion about the crates a try.

"I thought they were leaving," he said to Mr. Birdwell, as he watched Miss Porter and her trio of acolytes walking across the lawn at a fast clip. He should catch up with her and demand an explanation, demand she tell him who she was.

But if she did, and she was indeed the woman he suspected her to be, then what?

Not that he wanted anything to do with her. She'd concealed her whereabouts and left him to twist in the wind of ruination even as she'd made a life for herself well away from Society.

While he'd… well, he'd been banished here.

"They are leaving," his butler replied, sounding as disappointed as the girls probably were at their inability to secure a match.

"Not you as well," Jack said, turning from the window and glancing at the man.

"I don't see that Miss Porter would be such a bad prospect for matrimony."

Not for him. Not when he looked back at her, spied the curve of her hips, that undeniable hair. Then it hit him again, just as her kiss, her sighs from last night had revived his memories. Gads, she was Miranda Mabberly. How had he not seen it before?

But he had. Back at Miss Emery's, later when she'd arrived in his dining room like a phantom from his past, when he'd held her in his arms. He'd known—and had ignored the truth.

Because to have her back in his life meant that he had a responsibility to her.

No, he didn't. Not now. Not when she'd deceived him.

Birdwell glanced out the window as well. "Odd that Miss Porter would take the girls on a walk now, all things considered."

"Considering what?"

"Well, apparently one of the young ladies disabled the harnesses last night so as to delay their departure—"

Jack shook his head. "You mean they aren't leaving?"

"Oh, yes, they're going. That man of theirs, Stillings, carries a spare set. When I last saw them, Miss Porter had taken them into the library to ring a peel over their head."

Jack's gaze shot up. "The library?"

Even Birdwell paled. "Oh, my lord it never occurred to me that—"

Jack was already out into the hall, charging down the stairs. Despite his rheumy appearance, Birdwell still had some speed in him and was hot on his heels.

There was just too bloody much at stake.

When he gained the library, Jack chastised himself at first for overreacting.

Really, did he think that four women could uncover the secret passageway in the Thistleton Park that had outwitted Cromwell's best agents, not to mention generations of excise men and local magistrates who had all tried to catch the eccentric Tremonts in some nefarious act? None of them had ever discovered the tunnel, the secret passageway that led down through the house and into the sandstone on which it was built, until it reached the beach. There the entrance was hidden by the treacherous waters of high tide and a large rock at low tide. Even then the opening was just enough to slip past at low tide, if one knew it was there to chance.

It was how he'd gotten Grey into the house undetected—though it had been a close go, the tide coming in fast and the tunnel filling higher and higher with sea water with each successive wave.

And it was where he had hidden Malcolm's body until his "guests" departed and he could give his friend a decent burial in the ancient graveyard behind the garden.

"All appears well," Birdwell said, nodding his head approvingly after he'd inspected the room.

Jack agreed, but that didn't explain Miss Porter's odd decision to take the girls on a trip down the cliff path.

A turn about the garden—what there was of it—was not unheard of before one climbed into a carriage before a long day's travel, but a hike?

He couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong.

Bruno came in just then. "Where are those troublesome gels?" he asked. "Their man out there says he's ready to go." He eyed Jack, who was down on his knees examining the shelf that concealed the latch. "Never knew you to be the bookish sort, milord."

"Do shut up, Jones," Birdwell told him. "We think the ladies might have discovered…" He coughed and lowered his voice. "Might have discovered our other guest."

Bruno's eyes widened. "Nah. Go on with ya." The man shook his great shaggy head. "That would be a—"

"A disaster," Jack said, sitting back on his heels and staring in disbelief at the evidence before him. "I can't believe it."

"What is it?" Bruno asked, kneeling beside him and looking at the books before them.

"That," Jack said, pointing at the lower shelf.

"They look just fine to me," Bruno said. "All nice and neat and in order."

"In order?" Birdwell gulped.

Jack nodded, for the butler understood exactly what that meant. The books were all in place, in perfect arrangement, even the one that shouldn't be—an ancient volume on early English history.

"Christ!" Jack cursed, getting up and glancing over his shoulder at the window beyond.

"How could they have discovered the tunnel?" Birdwell asked.

"It doesn't matter how," Jack said, shoving back the curtain and staring unseeing out into the tangle of his gardens. "Which way did you say they went, Birdwell?"

"The cliff path."

Jack groaned. "Oh, demmit. They've gone to Nesbitt Hall. They're off to fetch the magistrate."

Bruno put his two meaty paws together and cracked his knuckles. "Not if I stop them first."

"No," Jack told him before Birdwell jumped in and he'd have to step between the two men he needed to pull off a magnificent deception. "We've got to hide all this before Norris arrives." He turned to Bruno and Birdwell. "And then we'll deal with Miss Porter and her charges."

Bruno rubbed his hands together with glee. "Me crates!"

Miranda had spent the time fetching Sir Norris trying to reconcile the grisly discovery they'd made in the library with the man she'd danced with not twelve hours earlier.

Jack? A murderer?

She couldn't believe it, yet how could she not when faced with so much damning evidence?

The dead man. The manacles and ropes in the tower. The mysterious tunnel.

The blood on her nightrail.

She shuddered. Of all the things she had told Sir Norris—once they'd managed to get the man to leave his breakfast—she hadn't told him about the blood on her nightrail.

How could she? And yet by not offering the evidence that would surely send Lord John to the gallows (which was where, Sir Norris had said more than once in the last hour, that devilish Tremont belonged) wasn't she guilty as well?

"I've got 'em now," Sir Norris chuckled as he led the way along the path, his pack of hounds bounding around them. To the rear of this unlikely parade were several large fellows Sir Norris had summoned from his stables to help take Lord John into custody. " 'Tis a proud day, it is, Miss Porter."

"Yes, well, I just wonder if there is an explanation for all this," she posed, not utterly convinced that Lord John was the vicious criminal Sir Norris claimed him to be.

Certainly the facts, well, were damning, but…

No, it was too simple to take Sir Norris's road and dismiss Jack as just another of those "crackbrained Tremonts."

Perhaps Jack was a ne'er-do-well, but she couldn't shake a sense of something else that had been in his kiss last night.

Grief.

He'd taken hold of her like a man drowning. He'd kissed her as if he'd expected to find a balm in her lips, something, anything to take away a pain he couldn't fathom.

They rounded the corner and slipped though the opening in the wall and into the tangled yard of Thistleton Park.

"Disreputable," Sir Norris complained. "But we'll see to Lord John today. Yes, we will."

"What do you mean to do with him?" Felicity asked.

"Why, hang 'em, miss," he replied with glee. "As quickly and straightforward as I can."

Miranda stumbled to a halt. "Hang him?"

Sir Norris spat at the ground. "Now don't be getting missish about the matter. He's gone and committed murder, and he'll hang for it. No way around it."

"But perhaps there is a reasonable explanation for why this man is dead," Miranda offered, knowing that her words were falling on deaf ears, for Sir Norris was already up the front steps and pounding on the door.

Miranda held her breath and waited for Birdwell to come. Nervously, she glanced around the yard and realized all eyes were fixed on their party. The men working to cut up the oak, the lads from the stable.

Suddenly she felt like a traitor.

But she wasn't the guilty party, she told herself, wishing she could say the same to the men staring at them.

Sir Norris pounded on the door again, and finally it opened, but it wasn't Birdwell who answered but Lord John himself.

He looked as rakish and devil-may-care as ever in his shirtsleeves and black breeches. "Sir Norris, what a surprise! I see you've escorted the ladies home. I was starting to fear they'd gone missing—"

"Enough of your chatter, Tremont," Sir Norris said, shoving the door open and pushing his way in without an invitation. "I got you dead to right this time. You'll hang for sure." The man continued into the house as if it were his and marched straight to the library.

"And good morning to you, as well," Jack said. Glancing back over his shoulder, he smiled at the rest of the party. "Good morning, ladies. How are all of you this fine day?"

The girls filed past him, bobbing their heads politely but eyeing their former hero with disillusionment.

"That bad, eh?" he said. "Miss Porter, what say you? I doubt you've been struck dumb this morning. You always seem to have an opinion and aren't shy about sharing it."

Miranda shook her head. "I-I-I…" she stammered. "I didn't know what else to do."

He eyed her quizzically. "So you invited Sir Norris over? I can think of less drastic steps to take."

"Lord John, you shouldn't jest," she told him.

"Lord John, is it? What happened to 'Jack'?"

She stared down at the tips of her sensible boots.

"Hmm," he mused. "Shall we retire to the library and see what Sir Norris thinks he has against me… this time?" He winked at her, then went off toward the library whistling a jaunty tune, as if this were nothing more than a lark.

Miranda shook her head.

"Miss Porter," Pippin whispered, "I don't want Sir Norris to hang Jack."