Folly's Reward (23 page)

There was a dreadful, echoing silence. Prudence longed to go to Harry. She wanted to hold him, to kiss him, to do anything to ease the agony she saw in his white features. Instead, she sat on her wooden chair, as if doomed to live out her days in its callous embrace.

“I don’t believe it,” Richard said. His features seemed somehow blurred, attenuated by shock.

“Neither did I, at first, but unfortunately there’s proof.” Harry reached into his pocket and brought out a sheet of paper. He handed it to Richard. “Lady Dunraven gave me this just before you arrived. Read it aloud, if you please! Everyone here knows what it contains, except you and Miss Drake.”

Richard glanced at the yellowed sheet. “This is part of a letter?” He turned to Lord Belham. “Sir, the signature is yours.”

Lord Belham stood as if turned to stone. His voice seemed to come from a great distance, but he smiled.

“Read my damnation aloud, Lenwood, for God’s sake! Lady Dunraven chooses to orchestrate a farce and plans to win, whether we admit the truth or not. So why hide anything from this company?”

Richard’s black eyes met his mother’s. Lady Acton nodded and dropped back to her seat. She seemed unmoved, but a small frown of anxiety marred her forehead. He glanced back at his brother.

“Very well, Harry,” Richard said, his face like granite, and began to read.

“‘It is with very great regret, sir, that I am obliged to inform you that your accusations are correct. The countess’s son is indeed my child, the fruit of an adulterous liaison between us. Nevertheless, the earl is not to know. Henry will be raised as his legitimate offspring. In spite of your revulsion, sir, for my behavior in this instance, I do most earnestly beg that you will divulge this truth to no one, for the sake of the child. His mother’s shame is hers to bear, while my own is yours to punish as you see fit—’”

Harry interrupted. “Enough, Richard! What a dreadful irony to think that Lord Acton preferred me, a bastard, to you, his own son! All those damned lessons, all that proud bombast about my achievements, all that intense pressure to fulfill his expectations, wasted on another man’s get.” He stared insolently up at Lord Belham. “Do you deny that this letter was written by you, sir? The first page is missing, but your name is at the end. Please don’t tell me that it’s a forgery.”

“The signature is mine,” the marquess said. He was very calm. “Written to my own father. Though it does not mean what you think, I would have given my right hand not to have had this come out, even now. Such things are best left buried forever, for what the hell can be achieved now, except hurt to innocent parties?”

Lady Acton rose abruptly from her seat and walked over to the ancient arrow-slit window.

“These windows are designed for warfare, not for light,” she said into the appalled silence. She spun about and fixed her second son with her black gaze. “But you were wrong about everyone here knowing about this letter and its contents, Harry. I did not. And–”

A knock sounded at the door. Prudence turned to look at the innocent oak planks, as if the sound were the knell of doom.

Lady Dunraven laughed. “Come!”

The door opened and a face peered in.

“Well, Lady Dunraven,” the newcomer said. “As you ordered, here I am. Now Mr. Harry Acton’s family have run him to earth, perhaps they might want to meet the villain that nabbed him?”

It was the man with the eye-patch.

For a moment there was perfect silence.

A stranger. A man who knew nothing of old scandals or family secrets. A man obviously from another world—as far removed from the
beau monde
as the Orient.

Richard recovered first. The color drained from his face, but he left Harry and strode over to the man with fists clenched.

“Damn you for a black-hearted brute, sir! Am I to take it that you were responsible for kidnapping my brother after having him beaten?”

“This man intended me no harm, Richard,” Harry said with deadly certainty. “There was just a little trouble controlling the enthusiasm of the hired accomplices. Thanks to him, it was only one blow, and I asked for it. I was indulging in my unfortunate tendency of being abominably irritating. Besides, our villain knows you. I was sickened with glowing accounts of your martial exploits all the way from the Chilterns to Argyle.”

Richard hesitated as he gazed into the man’s face.

The man with the eye-patch grinned and saluted. “Captain Acton, ain’t it? Lord Lenwood, as Harry tells me you’re rightly called now. I knew you in the Peninsula, my lord, though you wouldn’t know me.” He touched the eye-patch. “Lost this at Badajoz. That was a rum do, wasn’t it, my lord? I knew Mr. Acton was your brother all along. Assure you I’d never have let him get hurt, if I could have stopped it.”

“By God, Sergeant Keen!” Richard relaxed visibly, as once again the calm control slipped over his features. “I remember you for a brave man. Badajoz took finer lives than either of ours. I’m sorry about your wound. You were sent home afterward, of course. But you were a good soldier. Why the hell have you now taken to a life of crime?”

Sergeant Keen was instantly offended. “Wasn’t any crime, my lord, to track down Mr. Acton to bring him to Dunraven. He’d contracted in France to fetch a paper for Lady Dunraven, and was just being helped to keep his word as a gentleman. You wouldn’t want your brother forsworn, now, would you?”

“Sergeant Keen did not know that I had lost my memory, Richard,” Harry said. “He thought I was just being awkward.”

“You were bringing your message
here
, Harry?” Lady Acton asked.

Prudence watched with astonishment as the countess moved gracefully back across the room, as if this were merely a social gathering.

Dear Lord! Were they all so expert at concealing their emotions—at revealing no weakness before the lower orders? But what about me? I am no more a member of the peerage than Sergeant Keen.

The countess sat down and began to laugh. “Oh, dear heavens preserve us! Very well, let us have this little mystery out, at least. What was in the paper?”

“A formula for a fulminate mixture, and a plan for a new firing mechanism,” Harry said. As controlled now as Richard, he spoke of it with casual nonchalance. “I obtained it in France from a master gunsmith.”

“So that’s where you went after Madame Relet’s little fire,” Richard said.

Harry glanced at his brother. “The man turned up as if by magic, when I was looking for any excuse not to come home. I worked with him on some experiments with the new percussion systems. If we could only contain the charge in a reliable cap that would fire when hit by a hammer, we could do away with flint, and priming pan, and all the attendant drawbacks of our flintlock pistols.”

“Imagine!” Lord Belham said dryly. “A weapon that never misfired or flashed in the pan, and would be reliable in any weather or any conditions.”

“Exactly,” Harry said. “The gunsmith in France thought he had the perfect mixture at last. He had been in correspondence with Lady Dunraven about it. He would have been committing treason, perhaps, when we were still at war with France, but we were at peace when he gave me the formula to bring to Scotland. Napoleon was imprisoned, and the Bourbons solidly on the throne. So there was nothing terribly heroic about it.”

“You did not know, of course, of any family connection to Lady Dunraven,” Lady Acton said.

Harry glanced at his mother. “I knew only that Dunraven Castle was a long way from Acton Mead.”

Lady Acton stared directly at the dowager countess. “No doubt you chose my son as a messenger quite deliberately. What a perfect chance to strike back at me! How could he have known of any link between us? This French gunsmith must have made such a convenient agent, knowing Harry’s fame as a dead shot and his natural interest in firearms. But you are surely not going to tell me that you have spent all these years experimenting with guns, Lady Dunraven?”

The dowager countess laughed again.

“That is exactly what I have been doing. The patent for the first truly reliable percussion cap will be worth a fortune. And when I had word that your son was in France and looking for some exploit on which to waste his talents, I seized my chance. Unfortunately, Harry is as untrustworthy as the rest of your clan. When he failed to arrive as promised, I sent Sergeant Keen after him.”

“I came from France in a small private boat,” Harry said. “It went down in a storm.”

The dead-calm control was still there. Prudence found it almost more frightening than his earlier display of passion.

“And the formula?” Richard asked.

Harry looked back at his brother. “When I remembered that I was supposed to be carrying it, the paper was already gone. So Sergeant Keen tracked me up and down England to no avail. This entire adventure has been an exercise in folly.”

“But the formula was not lost, Harry.” Lady Acton folded her fan. She gazed at Harry with an odd longing. “Miss Drake found it and sent it to London. Lord Belham has it.”

Prudence could not watch Harry’s face. This was surely the last nail to hammer down any vestige of feeling he might have had for her. She had not trusted him enough to show him what she had found in his coat, and had unwittingly betrayed him to his enemy, instead.

Worse, that enemy had now been revealed to be his real father.

She closed her eyes. This revelation about Harry’s birth made her totally irrelevant, didn’t it? It was an enormity that could never be forgiven. Lady Acton had lied to her during their journey, but how much worse if for four-and-twenty years she had lied to her son?

It was too overwhelming, too much to take in, and far too much to think about clearly.

She only knew that she ached for Harry, and for herself, and for every stupid misunderstanding and mistake they had ever shared.

Lady Acton turned to the marquess. “For heaven’s sake, Belham, put us out of our misery. Is the flintlock firearm about to be made obsolete? Has Harry single-handedly put the future into our hands?”

Lord Belham glanced at her, remote, cool. Yet the air thrummed between them.

“It will be obsolete in ten years, Lady Acton. There is no question about that. Some of us in government are encouraging every experiment designed toward that aim. But it will not be made so by Harry’s secret French missive.”

“Don’t tell me that even that was a wild goose chase,” Harry said.

Belham’s dark gaze swept across the room to Harry. “I had wished to impart such an embarrassing fact to you in private, sir, but it seems we are all destined to wash our dirty linen in the market square today. The paper Miss Drake sent to London did indeed contain plans for a new pistol design and formula, but not one that will work to the purpose. It has been tried and has failed. I’m sorry. Here, you may have it, if you wish.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out a wrinkled scrap of paper. Prudence recognized it immediately.

“But that’s mine!” Lady Dunraven imperiously reached out a hand. “Harry Acton was supposed to bring it to me.”

Lord Belham dropped the paper into her fingers. “By all means, Countess. I admit when I first realized what it was, I thought it might be valuable, but it is entirely spurious. Make of it what you may.”

“No! There must be some mistake.”

“No mistake,” Belham said.

Lady Dunraven crushed the paper in her hand and tossed it into the fire.

“You mean,” Sergeant Keen said, scratching his chin, “that all my hard work was for nothing?”

“So it would seem, sir.” Harry began to laugh. “And your highwayman friend hit me over the head for even less.”

Sergeant Keen shook his head, saluted, and left the room.

Harry stood. “And I’m damned if I can stay here to hear any more. You will excuse me, Mother, your ladyship, my lord.”

“One moment, Harry!” Lady Acton said. “You may not leave yet.”

Her second son smiled at her, a deadly, chilling, soulless smile.

“Ah, no doubt you wish to know why I stayed in France? Only because I thought I was in love with Helena, and I didn’t want to do to my own brother what Lord Belham did to Lord Acton. Of course, I didn’t know at that time about your splendid example, or that such blood would taint my veins. No doubt, since Helena has never noticed anyone but Richard, there was never any real danger. Nevertheless, those were my reasons at the time. I’m sure you will think them the reasons of a fool.”

He bowed with elaborate grace and strode from the room.

He had not once glanced at Prudence.

* * *

She wanted to leave also, to escape—anything rather than sit here in this grim stone keep and watch a family destroyed by the discovery of an ancient scandal.

Prudence glanced up at Lady Acton, expecting to see that lovely face ravished by the revelation that had just been made. Instead, the countess seemed merely very angry. Two spots of bright color burned in her cheeks, making her black eyes extremely bright.

Her voice when she spoke was pitched very clear and low, with a bite like a steel blade.

“How dare you, Lady Dunraven! I didn’t think that even you would stoop so low. Of course, I could not speak freely before Sergeant Keen. So you have succeeded in causing me pain, as you wished. I can forgive that. Many years ago, it was I who unwittingly brought pain to you. What I cannot forgive, however, is that you have chosen to strike back at me through my son.”

“Ha!” Lady Dunraven crowed. “He was willing enough.”

“For God’s sake! For God’s sake, you are a withered, embittered old woman. Can you never excuse me for being seventeen years younger than you? Can you never pardon me for loving Lord Belham when I was sixteen? Can you never forgive that he loved me back? He was younger than either of my sons here, and you see how young they are. I was just a girl who had met her first love. There should have been nothing to stop a match between us. Thanks to you, we each married someone else and broke our hearts over it. Would you so cruelly begrudge us a few moments of stolen pleasure, four years later, if we were so weak?”

“Dear God, Mother!” Richard said, going to her. “Don’t tell me this is true about Harry?”