I Loved a Rogue The Prince Catchers (27 page)

“Why haven’t you done so?”

“Before he was imprisoned, my brother wrote a will. Eleanor, you and your sister are his legal heirs.”

“Sister? But I have two sisters.”

“Oh, my dear child, it will all be clear soon. You will see.” She squeezed her hand. “But you must promise me one thing before you go in.”

“Of course.”

“You must not mention the name Caulfield.”

TALIESIN WALKED TOWARD
the Duke of Lycombe’s vehicle where Betsy waited.

“Your mistress is becoming acquainted with her family. She will want you shortly, I suspect.”

Jutting her chin away, silently the girl went toward the house.

“Sir?” Treadwell said. “What shall I do with the girls and Pendragon?” He gestured to the carriage team.

“I think you will have some time before departing. Await Miss Caulfield’s instruction.” He went to the stable where he had spoken with the groom three days ago that seemed peculiarly like a year. The stable was long and well kept, like the stable at Kitharan, except empty.

He would return home. She would not return to Drearcliffe now, and he would go on as he had before Arabella had called him. How, he wasn’t quite certain. But he’d done it once before. Wasn’t that how he had become who he was now, free and unfettered? Unbound.

Betsy returned after some time, her freckled face wreathed in glee. A servant from the house followed her.

“My mistress has been invited to stay the month!” she proclaimed like a king’s trumpeter. “Mr. Treadwell, you must unstrap the luggage now and help carry it inside.” She saw to the task with triumphal efficiency. With a final lifted brow at Taliesin over her shoulder, she marched inside with them.

Taliesin went to his horse and, like a vagabond, prepared to take to the road.

EDWARD
BRIDGEPORT-ADLER WAS
emaciated and pale, the flesh hanging on his frame and his hair gray. But his eyes focused on her in wonderment.

“Grace?”

Eleanor’s tongue tripped over her hope. “No. I am Eleanor.”

He blinked. Twice. “Eleanor?” In a whisper: “My daughter?”

Her eyes filled with tears. She nodded.

He came forward, touched her cheek, and a tear fell down each of his cheeks. “I am redeemed.”

MARY SAT WITH
them. His memories came in pieces, some solid, others like mist.

“What of your sister? What of Arabella?”

“She is well, Father.” To say the word
father
, to believe it, was a sweet struggle. “As is Ravenna.”

His eyes emptied. Mary’s face worried. His hands clutched at the tail of his coat.

“Ravenna was an infant when our ship wrecked, father. Only six months old.” Eleanor glanced at her aunt.

Mary’s eyes were keen upon her brother. Expectant, it seemed.

“Ravenna . . .” He stood and shuffled to a table across the room that was strewn with papers. His chambers were comprised of a dressing room, sitting room and bedchamber, all neat and clean except for piles of papers and maps. He leafed through the folios, his movements growing jerky, agitated.

“What are you looking for, Edward?”

“Hmn, Mary?”

“I asked what are you looking for?” She spoke gently, as if encouraging him. “Eleanor and I would like to know.”

He swung around. “Eleanor. I am remembering,” he said with abashment. “It helps, you see, to jar the memories if I look at my records.”

“Your records?” Eleanor said.

“Records of those years. Documents. Letters. Grace sent letters. And Alejo. They were avid correspondents. I would not allow her to come to the mountains with us, of course. The battles were too fierce, everything unpredictable. She was safer on the coast, safer there with you and Arabella. But after I was captured, Alejo left immediately, to take her the news of my execution . . .” He returned his attention to the papers, lifting one then another, and studying them.

“Edward,” Mary said. “What happened after Alejo told Grace of your execution?” It seemed to Eleanor that Mary knew, that she only wished him to remember.

He lifted his head and peered at his sister. Then he returned to his chair and pulled it close to Eleanor’s knees.

“Your sister’s name is Ravenna,” he said with more certainty now, as though confirming it to himself by saying it aloud.

“Yes. It is an odd name for an English girl. Did my mother choose it?”

His lips cracked into a smile. The confusion in his eyes retreated entirely. He looked clearly at her. “Do you know it? The city of Ravenna?”

“I know that it was once a capital of the Roman Empire.” She looked at the maps strewn on the table close by, like the maps her papa stored in bookshelves at the vicarage. Once, when Taliesin and she had discovered those maps, they pored over them, sitting on the floor, shoulders nearly brushing. “Have you been there? To Ravenna?”

“No,” he said. “Alejo had. He told me many times, many times, that of all cities in the world, he loved Ravenna the greatest. A city of a thousand mosaics sparkling like jewels, he said. Once he likened them to your mother’s eyes.” He smiled. “Alejo was a horseman, a warrior, and a rebel. But he was also something of a poet.”

A frisson of energy rippled up Eleanor’s neck. “He was your friend?”

“The best friend a man could have. We fought together side-by-side in the mountains, a band of rebels battling for justice alongside escaped slaves. I trusted him with my life. And with my wife. When they seized me and took me away to execute me, I told him to protect her.”

“What happened to him?”

He placed three fingers upon his brow, above his eye. “I read about it some months ago,” he said quietly. “There.” He gestured to one of the tables covered with papers. “As though I had never known it before.”

“You hadn’t, brother,” Mary said. “I only discovered these papers when that young man came calling last spring and I went into the attic to search. It was only then that Aunt Cynthia revealed to me the truth: how, before she perished, Grace had sent your personal belongings to me, including the letters she had written to you before your capture, and to Alejo after they believed you dead.”

He nodded. “Yes. He told her of my execution, then he returned to the mountains to continue the fight we believed in so fervently.” He lifted his eyes to Eleanor. “Alejo was a great revolutionary. We met on Jamaica the year you were born, when I was quartered there. After I left my unit and took your mother to San Domingue to aid in the struggles there, he and I were like brothers. He never said it, and he never betrayed me, but I knew he loved her. When I was captured, I knew he would protect her and my daughters with his life if it came to it.”

“They didn’t know you were still alive.” As Eleanor spoke, the image of her youngest sister’s black eyes and black hair and olive skin—so unlike hers and Arabella’s—was before her. “They didn’t know you were in England, that you had not been executed after all. Did they? It was a secret, what Lord Boswell had done to save you, bringing you back to England. Wasn’t it?”

“Alejo and Grace married, Eleanor,” Mary said quietly. “Before he returned to the mountains. Their letters to each other in those months speak of it.”

Her father studied her eyes. “Your sister, Ravenna . . . What does she look like? Does she have your appearance? Mine?”

Eleanor’s throat was thick. “No, Father.”

“Are her eyes black? And her hair? Is her spirit untamable?”

“Yes. Who was he, Father?”

“Colonel Alejo Torres, son of the feuding horse lords of Andalusia. Royalty.” His smile was soft, and proud. “If I had been executed as my wife and dear friend and all others believed I was, if I had not lived and made their marriage invalid, Eleanor, your sister Ravenna would be a princess.”

WEARINESS CAME UPON
Edward abruptly, and Mary hurried Eleanor out of his apartments. But he insisted that Eleanor remain at the house, and grew distressed when she demurred. After she agreed to it, he calmed.

“I cannot impose upon you,” she said as her aunt showed her to a bedchamber. “Yet I have so many more questions.”

“You must stay, Eleanor,” Mary insisted. “My brother spoke more clearly just now than I have heard him in decades. Stay, I beg of you.”

“But Mr. Wolfe has been insulted.”

“No need to fret about
that
gentleman, miss,” Betsy said. “Seems to me he was fixing to leave when I came inside.”

“You must stop him from leaving if you wish it, Eleanor,” Mary said. “Then hurry back and I will tell you all that I can.”

Eleanor ran to the stable. Her father’s groom and Mr. Treadwell greeted her. No black stallion stood in a stall. She gripped the door.

“Where is Mr. Wolfe?”

“Well, now,” the groom said, “he took that fine horse and said he’d best be on his way.”

She had prepared herself for his departure. But now the air went from the surface of the earth entirely. No air. No breaths. She left the stable, dizzy, telling herself that she was strong and free, because all she could do was insist upon it until it became true.

By the lake at the bottom of the hill, Taliesin was leading his horse toward her. Heart careening somewhere between the sun and the moon, she walked swiftly, the damp wind whipping at her skirts, her fist bunched around the pouch containing her family’s ring in her pocket.

He released the stallion’s lead and came to her.

“You have found what you sought,” he said. “I am glad for you.”

She grabbed his hand and pressed the small pouch into it, then closed his fingers around it.

“Take this to Arabella. I pray you. I will write to her and explain all. My father is well—well enough that he knows himself, and me, and has told me more than I ever expected to learn. And my aunt is kind. But I don’t understand everything yet, and I need to know. I will remain here until Arabella can come. But I want her to have this immediately, and I cannot entrust it to anyone else.” She could not look into his face.
Strong and free
. She would not weep now, not today of all days. “Will you do this last for me?”

“Of course.” Without looking at it, he tucked the ring in his coat.

“I am sorry for what those evil people said.”

“Eleanor, I don’t care—”

She put her fingers over his lips. “Allow me to say that I am sorry. For everything. Forgive me. I don’t think I could bear it if we parted on poor terms.”

A pause. His eyes were shadows of distance. “There is nothing to forgive.”

“Thank you for what you have done for us.” She stroked his jaw, stealing a final memory of him into her senses, imprinting him upon her flesh.

He grasped her hand, slipped it to the back of his neck, and bent his mouth to hers. His kiss was good-bye. She felt it in the touch of his lips like the end of summer, of childhood, of all that they had been—companions, competitors, friends, and, if she allowed herself to believe it, lovers. A sob gathered in her throat.

“Good-bye,
pirani
.” His voice was rough.

She watched him mount, then turn Tristan about in an arc. Without looking back, he spurred the great horse away, as though leaving any time and not the last. She ached, bottomlessly, hopelessly. Nothing could relieve it. But life must be seized now, she told herself. She mustn’t waste another moment pining over what had never been.

FOR THE FIRST
time in years Taliesin rode directionless and without awareness of time. Eventually his horse’s steps slowed and dusk thickened. He found a bridge spanning a creek, went beneath it, and slept.

It was over. Finally. Forever. He would not return to St. Petroc and she would not call on him again. The darkness had returned but this time deeper, more desolate. Now he could see that always before he had harbored hope.

She had said good-bye with great finality—thrice. He should count himself fortunate that she left nothing to question.

Over.

He should continue to Combe without delay, but despair curled about him like vines. Forgetting would not be found in a luxurious mansion in the company of those who loved her, but in the hard ground beneath his back and, above, the diffident stars that never felt pain, and the moon that watched him with silent sympathy.

After several nights of such vagabondage, however, Tristan complained. He was a gentleman’s mount, weaned on oats and warm stables. He did not appreciate scrubby spring grass as much as a Rom’s horse should.

Taliesin rode to an inn and found lodging for the pampered beast. The innkeeper served him ale brusquely, as though he hoped he would leave soon. He didn’t. He considered drinking the entire contents of a bottle of whiskey and then breaking furniture. He decided against it. Years ago he’d had the excuse of youth and hard treatment.

Now he had no excuse. He’d made his choice, and she was well, not only a gentlewoman but the daughter of a man with considerable means and aristocratic connections. No longer a poor vicar’s daughter. If he hadn’t been such a blind idiot a month ago he might have considered the potential disadvantage of helping her find her real family. But a month ago she’d been the sister of a duchess already. And he had believed himself impervious.

He wanted for her what she wanted for herself. He wished only for her happiness. After delivering the heirloom into Arabella’s hand, he would continue with the life he had made for himself. If they summoned him again he would not go.

Settling back into the shadowed corner of the taproom, he reached into his pocket and withdrew the object she had given him. A ring. A man’s large gold ring, set with a costly gem. She wanted Arabella to have it. Wise, of course. Her father’s family had made no attempt to find his daughters. They were not to be trusted. Eleanor wished this ring safe elsewhere.

He leaned forward over his glass of ale and held the ring to the light of the candle. He turned it over in his fingers. What symbol had intrigued her so? And what had she learned about it in Elijah Fish’s workshop? Mysteries she had not wished to share with him. Mysteries . . .

Through the flat gem shone a clearly etched insignia. Taliesin recognized it. He never saw it, but he recognized it well, and a pounding, haunting heat filled him from his fingers to the back of his throat to his gut. He sought breaths, blinked hard. But the symbol did not change, blood red in the flickering candlelight.