Heartless (22 page)

And now Luke had succeeded to the title.

And then Henrietta's head snapped up, the unpleasant memories gone. There was a horse on the driveway ahead of her, standing perfectly still. On its back was a tall, slim man completely covered in a long black cloak, and his face was more than half covered with a black mask. His tricorne was worn low on his brow.

“Madam,” he said softly, “I have startled you.”

A highwayman on William's land, Henrietta thought indignantly. She lifted her chin and glared at him. She would be damned before she would show fear.

“What do you want?” she asked. “I have nothing of value beyond my rings and a few coins in my purse. My brother will see you hanged.”

He looked rather attractive when he smiled.

“I want nothing that is yours, your grace of Harndon,” he said, causing Henrietta to raise her eyebrows. “Perhaps I wish to restore to you something that is rightfully yours.”

“Oh?” Henrietta was intrigued—and indignant. “Be off with you, fellow,” she said briskly. “You will get nothing from me today.”

But he leaned forward in the saddle and smiled again. “I do not wonder,” he said, “that the duke is enamored of you, madam.”

“I believe,” she said, “you have the wrong duchess, fellow. Now if you will excuse me.”

But he only rode closer, bringing his horse to the side of hers so that their knees almost touched. His eyes observed her keenly through the slits of the mask.

“What I do need from you is some assistance, madam,” he said.

There was an aura of unmistakable masculinity about a masked and mounted highwayman, Henrietta thought. And he was looking at her with open appreciation. Henrietta had been starved for male admiration for such a very long time. She did not count the local landowners who were quite beneath her notice.

“The duke has a wife,” the highwayman said, “who married him under false pretenses.”

“Anna?” Henrietta said.

“Anna, yes,” he said softly. “She will be leaving him sooner or later, your grace.”

Henrietta frowned and forgot her air of aloof disdain. “She is your—?” she began.

“Ah, no.” His eyes caressed her, from her riding hat to the low neckline of her riding habit. “There is no romantic attachment between the lady and myself. I merely wish to free the duke of an encumbrance in the interests of justice. You can help me, madam.”

“I?” Henrietta wore no handkerchief at her bosom to preserve modesty. She was proud of her bosom. And she was glad now that she had neglected to wear the handkerchief. “How so, sir?”

“Allow me to explain,” he said. But before he did so, he took her right hand in both of his, drew back her glove, and set the bare skin of her wrist to his lips—first the back then the front. She felt the tip of his tongue against her inner wrist.

Henrietta shivered with pleasure. “Who are you?” she asked.

He smiled at her. “But that is question upon question, madam,” he said. “Shall we deal with the first? The second is of no importance.”

A
NNA
had succumbed to temptation. When Luke had slid his arm from beneath her head and untangled his body from hers in order to get up for the usual early-morning ride, she had grumbled into wakefulness.

“Go back to sleep,” he had suggested as he did most mornings.

And this morning she had rolled over into the warmth his body had left behind on the bed and done just that. And so she had missed their ride together, always her favorite part of the day.

She stood at the bedroom window, looking absently out at gardens that were rapidly losing their color and at distant trees that were giving hints of the changing season. Someone had been in and built up the fire and lit it. She must have been sleeping like the dead not to have heard. But she was sleeping for two, she reminded herself as excuse for her laziness.

She spread a hand over her abdomen. Through the thin fabric of her nightgown, which she had put on after rising from bed, she could feel the satisfying swelling. Luke had touched her there last night, as he frequently did now, and commented that she must have lost her waist somewhere.

The months of her marriage had brought a measure of contentment. The child in her had become a real being, felt not only with her mind now but also with her body. There was the tiredness, the insatiable hunger, the movements, the swelling. She was enjoying her impending motherhood with the deep gratitude of a woman who had expected to be a spinster and barren all her life.

It had been longer than three months. They had been home for more than two. She was beginning to believe in freedom. She was beginning to believe in happiness.

The house was running smoothly. She had made herself busy carrying out her duties as Luke's duchess and she believed that her husband's dependents liked her. She had made friends of all their neighbors. She organized dinner parties and card parties with informal dancing for the young people. She eagerly accepted the invitations that came in return. And Luke, she felt, of whom his neighbors had appeared wary at first, was being accepted again.

Emily seemed happier here than she had ever been at home. Luke was unexpectedly kind to her, and Emmy had taken to him. And Emmy had found a hero in Ashley and followed him about whenever she had the opportunity. Anna had told him apologetically that he must not allow the girl to make a nuisance of herself but he had replied that he liked the child and enjoyed her company. It was often not necessary for Emmy to follow him about. Often he took her walking or even riding, always with her nurse's knowledge and Anna's permission. They made a strangely touching pair, the deaf child and the lonely, unhappy man. They seemed to find contentment in each other's company.

Anna had been unable to spark any sort of romance between Agnes and Ashley even though she had tried subtly to bring them together. Agnes, pretty as she was, was just too shy of handsome men—and Ashley was excessively handsome. There were other handsome young men in the neighborhood, some of them interested, but Agnes seemed to prefer the very ordinary, rather portly, and dull Lord Severidge, Henrietta's brother. He was a man who had no conversation other than his farms and his horses and hounds, and yet Agnes could sit quietly at his side during a dinner and listen and talk with him with apparent interest.

It would be a good match, Anna supposed, if ever it came to the point. But, oh dear, such a dull one. She smiled at her own thoughts. Whoever Agnes married would be a man of her own choice. If she chose to marry a dull man, then so be it. But how could anyone prefer William to Ashley? Not that Ashley had shown any particular interest in Agnes either, of course. Ashley, Anna suspected, was too young to fix his interest anywhere yet. And unhappy and unsettled. Poor Ashley!

Doris, too, was unhappy, though less restlessly so than Ashley. There was no communication between her and Luke either though Anna had tried once to explain to him that Doris probably felt unloved. She did not care to remember the chilliness of his reply. It was all very sad. Between Doris and Anna a friendship had resumed.

Doris had even raised the subject of Ranelagh with her and admitted that none of what had happened there had been Anna's fault.

Anna's friendship with Henrietta had not cooled despite Henrietta's anxiety on the afternoon when she had told Anna about the past. And Anna had tried to put the past resolutely out of her mind though she had once mentioned it to Luke himself. It had nothing to do with the present.

And Anna tried, too, not to think of her own past. Her new home, her advancing pregnancy, her deep contentment helped her. She felt sometimes like someone who had recovered, pale and weak, from a long illness and was slowly but surely convalescing. She felt health of body and mind being gradually restored.

And yet, of course, it could not last.

On this particular morning she heard her maid in her dressing room even before the girl had been summoned and turned from the window as the girl tapped on the door of the bedchamber and opened it hesitantly.

“There is a letter here for you, madam,” she said, holding it out. “It came by special messenger, to be delivered into your hands.”

Anna remembered then that an unfamiliar rider had come up the driveway to the front doors while she had stood at the window and had emerged after a few minutes and ridden away again. She had hardly noticed at the time. He was probably scarcely out of sight among the trees even now.

She knew. She did not need to take the letter and look at the writing on the outside to know, though she did both. She knew.

“Thank you, Penny,” she said. “I will want to dress soon. Return in half an hour, will you?”

“Yes, madam,” the girl said, bobbing a curtsy and withdrawing. She closed the door into the dressing room.

“It has been a long time, my Anna,” he had written. “Sometimes I regret my decision to allow your marriage. But patience will bring us both ultimate and endless happiness. You are to bear Harndon an heir, I hear.”

Anna spread a hand over her womb and closed her eyes for a few moments. She felt dizzy and very, very cold.

“But you are beautiful even in your impending motherhood,” the letter continued. “Your green morning gown—the satin one with the darker robings—made you look a part of nature as you strolled in the garden in it two mornings ago. And young Collins admired you almost to the point of indiscretion in your blue sack dress
à l'anglaise
at his mama's rout the evening before last. You see, I am never far away, my Anna.”

She thought she might faint. But her muscles were too rigid to allow her to fall. Or to move away from the window. She felt eyes on her from behind every tree. She felt eyes on her from the room behind. But she could not turn.

“You must not forget,” the letter continued, “that you are merely on loan. A little test, then, my Anna—forgive me. There is the small matter of an outstanding debt that must be settled. Two hundred pounds, not a great deal, you see. There is an old gamekeeper's cottage a hundred yards west of the gates into Bowden park. There is a large stone on the doorstep. The bill will be beneath it today. You may take it, my Anna, and replace it with the money. I will then consider the debt paid. Before nightfall, if you please. Your servant, Blaydon.”

After several minutes, Anna folded the letter with hands that trembled only slightly. She was used to such letters. In such ways had she redeemed many of her father's debts though she knew that there were enough left that he would be able to hold her in thrall for the rest of her life. Though it was not just the debts. If it were, she knew that she would go begging to Luke. Luke would pay them for her sake, though now it was her brother who would benefit, not her poor father, who was dead. And not any of the girls. Charlotte was married. Agnes and Emmy were safe here at Bowden.

Yes, she would go begging if it were only the money. She would salvage her pride by insisting on paying it back little by little out of her allowance. And she would tell Victor, who knew nothing of the extent of the debts and who believed that by some miracle their father had paid them all before his death. Victor would pay Luke back gradually.

Luke would not miss the money, huge as the debts were. He had told her that he had two vast fortunes. And he would not refuse her, she was sure.

But it was not just the debts. Or even mainly the debts. She had redeemed many of them, although almost none of them with money. She had redeemed them by doing what he had told her to do. She had chatted brightly to neighbors and distracted them at parties and assemblies while he stole priceless ornaments and jewels. She had charmed gentlemen with whom he played cards, flirting her fan at them or showing an accidentally indiscreet amount of cleavage or smiling with warm eyes, distracting them while he cheated them of small fortunes. Once she had even accompanied him into a town where she was not known and haggled alone with a jeweler over the sale of some jewels—jewels he had stolen from her neighbors and friends.

After such occasions, he had returned one or more of her father's bills to her, sometimes wrapped about a gift.

The mystery of the disappearance of so many valuables in the neighborhood was never solved. But Sir Lovatt Blaydon had many “witnesses” to the fact that Anna was the thief. And he had two witnesses willing to testify that she was a murderer, that she had pushed her father to his death from the roof of their house. It would seem that she had motive for all those crimes. Everyone had known that her father was close to ruin. Everyone would believe that she had stolen in order to prevent it from happening and that she had killed him in order to stop the piling up of more debts.

Everyone knew how fiercely devoted she was to her brother and her sisters.

And so she could never go to Luke. For it was not a matter of paying off the debts. The debts were only the means by which Sir Lovatt had got his hold over her for reasons of his own that eluded her understanding.

The debts would never be paid off. Even if she went to Luke and persuaded him to pay them all, doing so would not help her. If she went to Luke, she would risk having Sir Lovatt angry at her and finally carrying through on all his threats. Luke would believe that he had married a woman whom witnesses could prove to be a thief and a murderer—and indeed she was an accessory to many of those crimes. All of Luke's wealth and position would be unable to save her from the gallows.

Anna went into her private sitting room. There was money in a drawer of the escritoire, enough money. Luke had insisted she have it though she had told him she had nothing on which to spend it here at Bowden. She sat down and counted out two hundred pounds.

She set her forehead down on the desk, closed her eyes, and drew several breaths, fighting both faintness and nausea. Her green morning gown. She had strolled in the garden with Henrietta and Emmy wearing it. And she had worn her blue dress to the Collinses', where young Cecil Collins had touched and rather embarrassed her—and amused Luke—with his calflike admiration. How had he known? She got resolutely to her feet and hurried to her dressing room to ring for her maid. Why wait for the full half hour to pass?

•   •   •

It
was a beautiful day, with the slight nip of autumn in the air. Emily was outside as she so often was and as she loved to be. It was not difficult to escape from her nurse especially now that she was fourteen and almost grown up. She was alone this morning, Ashley having ridden off to visit some friends. Emily loved Ashley as she loved her own soul, but she never minded being alone. Most of her life she had been alone, though rarely was she lonely. She had always known herself loved, especially by Anna.

Even as she thought it, she saw Anna in the distance, emerging from the house. Emily's face lit up and she took a few hurried steps in the direction of her sister. It was rare these days to have Anna to herself. Anna was usually with Henrietta or another member of her new family or with Luke. Emily loved Luke too, though she was sorry that he was such an unhappy man. She was glad that her dearest sister had married a handsome and splendid and kind man. Ashley did not believe he was kind, but he was.

But Emily stopped before she was spotted. Anna, she could see, did not want company. She looked about her as she stood on the upper terrace, almost furtively, and then she hurried away through the formal gardens, head down, not at all enjoying her surroundings. She was on her way to some definite destination without company and without a carriage of any sort to take her there.

Emily frowned. There was something about her sister's bearing that reminded her . . . She had almost forgotten. She had seen Anna's great happiness. Anna loved Luke dearly and she was going to have a baby. Emily had forgotten Anna's great unhappiness or at least she had pushed it back into memory, assuming that it was all at an end. But there was something about Anna now . . .

Emily found herself following her sister, careful to keep out of sight. That was not easy to do on the long lawn beyond the gardens, but Anna did not look about her again. She hurried onward, her eyes on the ground ahead of her. When they reached the woods, Emily could follow more closely.