Lily (Flower Trilogy) (33 page)

To Rand’s surprise, the man didn’t respond with one of his characteristic explosions. “My son hadn’t kept a diary in years.”

Rand’s heart dropped to somewhere in the vicinity of his knees, but Lily seemed undaunted. “Are you certain, my lord?”

“I knew my son,” he said shortly.

She rubbed his dog’s back and gave a graceful shrug.

“Well, it couldn’t hurt for us to look, could it? You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

Her tone could melt butter in a snowstorm, not to mention a man’s heart. In his current mood, Rand’s father was no exception. “Go ahead,” he said. “But ’tis a waste of time. And even should you find my son’s writings, I am certain there will be nothing in them that would exonerate Margery’s lover.” His gaze on Lily was almost apologetic. “My lady, I appreciate your care for my dog, but you cannot marry my heir.”

“I understand, my lord,” she said softly. But as she rose to join Rand and Kit near the door, her eyes looked determined as ever.

Rand appreciated that determination more than words could say. As they turned to leave, he took her arm.

“We’ll get Margery to help, too.”

“She’s not here,” came his father’s voice behind him.

More than a little concerned, Rand swung back.

“Where is she?”

The marquess waved a hand, apparently unaware that his son had assumed the worst. “Windsor, with Etta. They went to choose fabric for her wedding gown.”

As the vision faded of Margery locked in a dank dungeon somewhere—not that Hawkridge Hall had one—

Rand’s shoulders slumped with relief. “They’ll be back soon, then?”

“First thing tomorrow morning.”

“They are staying overnight to choose fabric?”

“And fittings or some such. They were to visit a seamstress. I gave them leave to stay the night at an inn, since they seemed to think it would be dark by the time they finished. I know nothing of these womanly things.”

The man knew nothing of Margery at all, Rand thought incredulously. His foster daughter wouldn’t care what she wore to be wed against her will. Rand would lay odds Margery was spending the night with Bennett Armstrong—and he wasn’t surprised her old nurse had conspired to arrange it. The two had always been thick as thieves, females in a household run by men. In fact, Margery was likely the reason Etta had decided to stay after her nursemaid days were finished.

The men standing guard over Bennett had all been at Hawkridge for years, and Rand imagined they were as loyal to Margery as Etta. While they wouldn’t go so far as to allow an escape—they’d doubtless face death for a betrayal of that magnitude—he suspected they’d turn a blind eye to an overnight visit.

By all appearances blissfully unaware, his father stroked the dog’s head. “Now be about your business.

The sooner you give up on finding this diary, the better.

You need to prepare for your wedding. To Margery,” he added with a glare.

Refusing to rise to that bait, Rand turned and walked away. There was no point in arguing now. . . . When he’d found what he was looking for, it would be a different story.

The most logical place to start, of course, was Alban’s suite. Unlike the single small chamber that had been Rand’s refuge during his childhood, the marquess’s heir had had three rooms to call his own. They began in his bedchamber proper, a darkly paneled room that sat between the other two and provided entrance to them all.

“Cluttered as ever,” Kit remarked when they walked in.

“Nothing has been touched.” Rand paused on the threshold. “’Tis as though he still lives here.”

“He’s not been gone that long,” Lily said gently. She skimmed a hand thoughtfully over the unmade bed. “Perhaps his death is still too fresh for the housekeeper to deal with.”

Rand crossed to his brother’s dressing table and opened a drawer. “No. I cannot believe Alban changed enough to ingratiate himself with the staff, even in fourteen years. He was ruthless in both his expectations and treatment of them.

I suspect they are as relieved to have him gone as I.” Finding nothing but a neatly folded stack of cravats in the drawer, he slid it closed and opened another. “If this room is undisturbed, ’tis my father’s doing.”

Ignoring a frisson of unease, Lily inspected a pile of books on Alban’s night table. “What did his diaries look like?”

“Nothing in particular, if I remember right. Whatever blank books he could find.”

All the books on the table had titles on their spines, so Lily assumed they weren’t journals. Just to make sure, she began opening them.

Rather than checking the obvious places, Kit lay down on the floor and stuck his head beneath the red brocade bed skirt. “There’s a box under here,” he said, pulling it out.

’Twas long, large, and flat, made of wood with a heavy, locked hasp. “The diary must be in there,” Lily breathed, amazed that they had found it so easily. “Where do you suppose we can find the key?”

“Where would you keep a key?” Rand asked, almost to himself. Or perhaps he was addressing his brother’s ghost.

“Behind the headboard?” Lily suggested.

Rising to his feet, Kit rubbed the back of his neck.

“Maybe under the mattress.”

“No,” Rand said. “Alban was more clever than that.

’Twill be in this room, but not anyplace that obvious.”

He began methodically lifting objects while Lily checked the headboard and Kit looked for a key tucked into the ropes that supported the mattress. Both of those places revealed nothing.

“Aha!” Rand peered into a Blue Willow jar that he’d found on the mantel. His other hand held a wad of cotton that had concealed the key beneath.

His fingers shook as he worked the lock. Please, Lily prayed silently, let this be it.

But it wasn’t. Rand raised the lid to reveal, not books, but an astonishing array of various knives.

Lily stared in horror. “Some of them have dried blood on them.”

“Alban never was very tidy.” Rand’s gesture encompassed the general condition of the room. “Frightening, isn’t it?”

Lily nodded and swallowed hard, her gaze still fixed on the jumble of sharpened steel. Curved blades and straight, serrated and smooth, double-edged and honed to a deadly point. “Perhaps we have no need to find the diary now. This should convince your father that his eldest son had no good in mind.”

A short, harsh laugh rent the air. Kit’s. “I expect not.

Alban’s penchant for hunting was well known.”

Rand nodded. “He rarely carried a firearm, either.

Alban liked to kill with his hands. I’m surprised he even tried to shoot Bennett, although I suppose that goes to show his desperation to see the man dead.” He released a pent-up breath. “No, I’m afraid this proves nothing except that my brother was fascinated with knives. I doubt the marquess will find that to be startling news.”

“It seems he was fascinated with killing, too.” Lily shivered, imagining all the creatures that had died at his hands.

While she’d never objected to hunting for food, somehow she knew he’d had other reasons for hunting. She looked up and met Rand’s eyes. “I believe Bennett. The man that owned this collection would not hesitate to murder.”

“We still must find his journal to prove it.”

But a careful, exhaustive search of the bedchamber revealed nothing. They spent a hour combing Alban’s dressing room—reaching into his pockets made Lily’s skin crawl—and another turning his sitting room upside down.

Nothing.

Kit plopped into a red-and-gold-striped chair. “We’re missing something.”

“There is no desk in here,” Lily said. “Where did he write?”

Rand began pacing. “In his bedchamber. At his dressing table. Did you not see the quill and ink?”

“But the drawers there were filled with accessories, not paper.”

“Alban didn’t write letters,” Rand said peevishly. “He only wrote in his journal.”

“No.” Kit disagreed. “I think Lily is on to something.

Perhaps at sixteen, when you left home, Alban wrote only in his journal. But he died at thirty. Surely he was handling some of the estate work by then. Did he not have a study?”

Rand gave a weak shrug—a shrug that alarmed Lily because it made him look like he might have given up.

Could Lord Hawkridge have been right that Alban had stopped keeping a diary? The thought was so disturbing she was afraid to voice it aloud.

“No, this is the sum total of Alban’s rooms,” Rand said desultorily. “Perhaps he shared the marquess’s study.”

But Rand’s father was
in
his study when they went there to search. He looked up from his paperwork, impatiently tapping his quill on the desk as he swept all three of them with a cold gray gaze. “I can assure you,” he said curtly, “you will find nothing of Alban’s in here.”

Lily deliberately smiled, a smile she suspected would have done Rose proud. “My lord, I am certain that your son, as your heir, would have assisted you in the task of running your estate—”

“Of course he did. He was never a man to shirk his duties.” Lord Hawkridge’s eyes swung toward Rand, as though to say he
was
one to shirk.

Lily felt her hackles rise. Rand had had no choice but to make his own life—not if he’d wished to survive. And though his life would be changing now, he certainly deserved time to grow accustomed to the idea. Besides, she could see no need to rush. Lord Hawkridge appeared almost indecently healthy for a man of his age, not that he was elderly to begin with. Fifty-two, Rand had said. And for all they knew, he could live to be a
hundred
and two.

She forced her lips to remain curved in that smile. “Did Alban do that sort of work with you here in this study?”

“Of course not. I told you, there is nothing of Alban’s in here. He converted part of the library into a study for himself.” With that, he looked down and scribbled something on one of the papers in front of him.

“Converted part of the library,” Rand muttered as they trooped upstairs. “I suppose his own three rooms weren’t large enough.”

Their footsteps sounded muffled on the woven rush matting that covered the floor of the Long Gallery. Gilt-framed family portraits lined the lengthy chamber, hanging on dark, gilt-trimmed panel walls. Noticing one in particular, Lily stopped.

The painting showed a younger Lord Hawkridge standing behind his seated lady, who held a white kitten on her lap. Her blue eyes looked kind, and Lily liked her on sight. The marquess’s eyes looked . . . happy, Lily decided in surprise.

He must have been very much in love.

Beside that portrait, another young man gazed from a canvas, a man Lily guessed to be Alban. He resembled Rand, except his hair was darker, his smile cooler. His eyes, however, of indeterminate color, looked so cold as to make his smile seem warm in comparison.

There was, of course, no portrait of Rand.

“Professors do not rate paintings,” Rand said dryly beside her.

She looked back to the picture of his parents. “She looks very loving,” she said of his mother. She could almost see the woman’s graceful fingers stroking the silky, purring cat.

“She was. The only love I ever received.”

“Not the only,” Lily said quietly, and Rand squeezed her around the shoulders.

Kit had gone ahead through the library and into a small room beyond, where a massive desk took up most of the space. Upon entering, Rand immediately moved behind the desk and began opening drawers.

Kit was already pulling books off the shelves. “These are deep,” he said. “There is another row of books behind the first.” He gestured to the opposite wall. “Lily, you can start over there, and we’ll meet in the mid—”

She was heading over to do as he suggested when she heard his indrawn breath. She swung back. “Have you found them?”

“I think so.”

Behind the books he’d removed sat a long row of multicolored spines, none of them marked with titles. As he drew one out and opened it, a grin spread on his face.

“Yes, this is a diary. An older one, from 1664. Now we just need the most recent.”

Her heart racing with renewed hope, Lily pulled out another and flipped open the cover. “I cannot read it.”

“’Tis in code,” Rand told her, standing over her shoulder.

“Oh, now I remember.” The dates, at least, weren’t encrypted. She turned pages, noting this one ran from mid-1668 to early 1669. “You got in trouble for breaking the codes, did you not?”

“Did he ever,” Kit confirmed with a wry grin.

“When I translate the latest diary,” Rand said, “’twill get us
out
of trouble. Let’s find it.”

Though thirty-odd journals crowded the shelf, none of them were the most recent. They looked behind the books on all the other shelves, floor to ceiling, but there were no more journals to be found.

An hour later, when they’d closed the last cover of the last book in the small room, Lily dropped onto a chair.

“What now?”

Rand’s jaw set. “We search the rest of the house.”

“’Tis gargantuan! And one small diary could be anywhere . . . if it even exists.”

“It exists,” Rand forced through gritted teeth. “My brother didn’t record his life for twenty-nine years and then suddenly stop.”

Lily felt like her emotions were on a swing. Down and then up. Up and then down. Dejection settled in for now.

“It could take days. We could still be searching when the priest shows up to marry you.”

“Lily.” Rand came over and took her face in both hands, raised it for a soft kiss. “We will find it, and
we
will be the two who are married.” He looked at Kit. “We may as well start here in the main library.”

That lofty, two-story chamber was easily eight times the size of Alban’s study. Lily took one look at the endless shelves and felt like crying.

This would never do. She had to regain her spirits, had to do her share of this enormous task. Rand wasn’t giving up, and she couldn’t, either.

But after the excitement of the discovery and the disappointment that had followed, she couldn’t face starting over just yet. “I’m going to check on Rex,” she told the men. “I’ll be right back.”

Downstairs, she hugged the huge mastiff round his neck, tight, as though she could draw strength from his big, warm body. After all, he’d survived a harrowing ordeal and, from the looks of it, come out none the worse for wear. When he licked a slobbery path across her face, she laughed. “All right, then. I’m going to find that diary.”