Lord Harry's Folly (38 page)

The marquess took the handkerchief from her unresisting fingers and efficiently wiped her face. “Of course, my love, I realize that you can’t wish to remain in this house. I want you to come with me, Hetty, for we can be wed as soon as I can procure a special license. It will take me just a day.”

To his utter bewilderment, she pulled away from him. “Listen to me, damn you. I told you that you won’t be held to your offer of marriage. I will have none of your pity, do you hear? I would now, your grace, that you leave and contrive to forget all that has passed here today. God knows I can’t do anything about it. God, how I wish it had been Filey.”

The marquess rose and clasped her arms, forcing her to face him. “That’s really quite enough, Hetty. You must have lost what few wits remain to you if you ever think I would take a wife out of pity. Hetty, can you not understand that I care very much for you? That I love you? That I held you on my lap and stroked you with my fingers until you gained your pleasure and cried out in my mouth?”

“No, don’t talk like that. How many women have you held like that, caressed like that? It can’t mean all that much to you. You have told me yourself that you felt no love for Elizabeth, yet, you offered her marriage. Wasn’t that from pity? From some sort of misplaced gentleman’s honor?”

“Damn you, it’s not the same thing and you know it.” He wanted to shake her. “Hetty,” he said, gentling his voice, “you must know how I feel about you. Stop being at cross-purposes with me, it serves no cause. We are what we are and Sir Archibald won’t change, ever. We must accept him. We must accept the situation. We will mourn Damien, the damnable waste of it, the tragedy of it, but we will do it together.”

She regarded him coldly, in dead silence.

He continued softly, “You can’t make me believe you don’t care for me, Hetty. I have gotten to know you quite well, you know. You cried out in my mouth. I gave you pleasure you’ve never had before, I’ve made you feel things you want forever. Admit it.”

He would have preferred to haul her over his shoulder and get her away from this house, from her father, this very moment. But he knew Hetty. She would very likely tell him to go to the devil if he became the least bit autocratic, even if it was for her own good. Yet he hated to leave her to deal alone with her grief and sense of betrayal. She had turned away from him, presenting a board-stiff back. He had no idea what she was thinking. It scared the hell out of him.

“Hetty,” he said. She didn’t turn, so he continued addressing her back. “I don’t want you to believe that I shall continue pressing you. I’ve told you how I feel, and I would that you think about my words. I also know that you love me, that you love me deeply. However, I know that you’re not thinking clearly right now. Neither am I. We both need some time, you especially. I will leave you now and if you wouldn’t mind, I would like to come for dinner this evening. Perhaps then we can more rationally discuss what we are to do.”

“Very well,” she said, and he had the impression that she wasn’t actually agreeing with him, merely acquiescing at the moment so that she could be alone.

Rabbell entered the library, his face set in deep worry lines. “Your grace.”

The marquess pulled his attention from a sheaf of papers that, in all truth, he’d been reading and rereading and he still had no idea what the content was. “Yes, Rabbell?”

“It seems, your grace, that an odd person has arrived knocked at the front door, he did urgently demanding to see your grace. He informed me, your grace, that it was a matter of the gravest importance, concerning a Miss Rolland.”

“What?” The marquess bounded to his feet. “Don’t just stand there, show the damned fellow in.”

But a moment later, the marquess was facing a pale, out-of-breath Pottson.

“Oh my gawd, she up and skuttled the pike, your grace.”

“She’s what?”

“Loped off, gone without a word, your grace, fleeced the rod. Millie’s fit to be green with worry, begged me she did, to come to you, seeing as how you’d know what to do.”

The marquess felt suddenly quite cold. Damn, but he was a fool for ever leaving her alone. “Why does Millie believe that Miss Rolland has run away, Pottson? It has been but three hours since I left her.” Even as he spoke, the marquess found himself gazing toward the windows. It was already dusk. Night was soon coming.

“She told me, your grace, that Miss Hetty was acting oddlike, not saying a word, merely staring off when there was nothing to look at. Millie leaves her for only five minutes and when she comes back, Miss Hetty’s gone. Nobody even saw her leave, your grace, even the scullery maid, Agnes, who knows everything everyone does.”

“I see,” the marquess said. “Even Agnes didn’t see her. You’ve done right to come to me, Pottson.” As concisely and quickly as possible, the marquess told Pottson what had happened during the afternoon.

“Gawd,” Pottson said, then whistled softly. “Master Damien’s own father. Jesus, it’s well nigh unbelievable. It makes a man glad he didn’t even know which man were his father when something like this happens.”

“I know I can rely on your discretion in this matter. Even her brother, Sir John, will never know what happened. Now, we must try to determine where she would have gone.”

“Miss Hetty adored her brother, worshipped since she was a child, if your grace knows what I mean,” Pottson said after but an instant, his words making perfect sense to him. The marquess, however, didn’t understand.

“Sussex, your grace. It’s Sir Archibald’s country home, Belshire Manor, I believe is the name, near to Atelsfield. It’s where Master Damien is buried.”

“Thank you, Pottson. We needn’t worry about Sir Archibald, I don’t think. If he misses her at all, he will merely believe that she accompanied me to Thurston Hall. Yes, I’ll pen him a note from my sister. It will serve.”

He clasped Pottson’s hand and shook it. “Don’t worry. I’m leaving now. I’ll fetch her home.”

The marquess sat on the edge of a ditch and raised his voice to the heavens, his curses fluent and loud, despite the fact that he was quite alone. A curricle wheel was still spinning just beside his elbow, and his horses were stamping and whinnying. He pulled himself to his feet and soothed his horses as best he could, all the while searching out the scurrilous, half-hidden rock that had so arranged itself just beyond the turnpike entrance past Hatfield that it had ripped a curricle wheel cleanly from its axle and sent both the curricle and the marquess off into the ditch. He wondered without humor if the elements were conspiring to script a farcical play with him as the bumbling, ill-fated hero.

It didn’t help matters when the bay hack he was forced to hire in Hatfield proceeded to throw a shoe not many miles beyond where his broken curricle still lay at odd angles in the ditch. Leading his horse some five miles to the village of Davondale did nothing to improve his temper, and it was only after three mugs of strong local ale that he was finally able to review the day’s events with a modicum of good humor. The marquess was slightly foxed when he finally made his way up the old winding staircase of the Gray Goose Inn to fall in between the none-too-clean sheets of a rather rickety, too-short bed. He found that he could not long nurture his sense of ill-use, for images of Hetty, perhaps courting the same types of minor disasters that had befallen him, made his stomach knot with cramps. The shrill, off-key cuckoo chirped one o’clock in the morning before he was finally able to squelch his more dire imaginings and make peace with the lumpy bed.

The following morning, after an indigestible breakfast of watery porridge and rock-hard toast, he strode out of the inn and gazed grimly at both the slope-shouldered mare and the gray sky. He had no doubt that before the day was out, he would be drenched to the skin. Damn, he thought, if he caught a chill from this escapade, he would force Henrietta to wait upon him hand and foot for at least five years. He smiled at the thought of what he would have her do. He smiled more widely at the thought of what he was going to do with her. When he caught up with her. When he made her come to peace with herself and with him.

It wasn’t until midafternoon of the following day that the marquess drew up his sweating horse in front of a set of rusty iron gates just off the main road from Briardon and read the deeply etched sign, BELSHIRE MANOR. He was so certain that Hetty had reached her birthplace before him, for whatever else she was, she was endowed with an overabundance of ingenuity, that he began to picture their meeting. He couldn’t believe that she would really be surprised to see him. What would she say? He couldn’t wait to see. However, he knew that deep down there was such pain in her that he wouldn’t be able to trim her sails for leaving him. Ah, her pain. He didn’t know how he would deal with it, but he knew that he would have to. He still couldn’t believe that a father had sought his own son’s death. All because of politics, all because Sir Archibald had convinced himself that Damien was a traitor not only to the family but to England. It boggled the mind. He couldn’t begin to imagine how Hetty was dealing with it.

He led his horse through the creaking iron gates and found himself facing a three-story pink brick house, dating, from the looks of it, from the Stuarts. It was set amid a small park. The grounds showed only superficial signs of care. There was a general air of a long absentee master about the manor, and, he thought, of a less than sterling staff in attendance. He drew up his horse in front of deep-set flagstone steps and looked about for a stable boy. No such luxury, he thought, and tethered the mare to a bedraggled yew bush.

It was some minutes before his loud knock was answered by a gaunt-featured, bent old man wearing a shiny black suit with oddly pinned-down lapels that reminded him forcibly of the garb his agent, Spiverson, habitually wore. Prim lips were drawn tightly into a line of suspicion as the old man looked him up and down. As if I were some sort of peddler, the marquess thought, not realizing that in his dusty, travel-stained clothes, he could hardly fit anyone’s idea of a peer of the realm.

“I’ve come to see your mistress,” he said without preamble. “Tell Miss Henrietta that the Marquess of Oberlon requests her presence immediately.”

Even though Dawley had rusticated for over twenty years, he still knew well the voice of Quality, and the line of suspicion became one of perturbation. Miss Henrietta? He didn’t believe that he could have overlooked her presence in the manor. But he doubted an instant, for his grace sounded so very positive.

He cleared his throat. “Forgive me, your grace, but Miss Hetty hasn’t been in residence for close to seven months now. I believe she’s in London, your grace, with Sir Archibald.”

The marquess frowned. The butler was telling the truth, he didn’t doubt that, but it simply didn’t seem possible that he could have arrived here before Hetty. He grew suddenly cold. He, himself, had suffered several mishaps. “It’s likely she will arrive shortly from London. I trust it will not disaccommodate you if I remain for the night, for it’s urgent that I see her.”

Dawley thought that the marquess’s presence would very much set Mrs. Dawley on her ear, but of course he didn’t offer this observation to his grace. He bowed low, silently praying that Mrs. Dawley had something beside the pig’s cheek to serve the marquess for dinner.

The pig’s cheek didn’t end up on the marquess’s table, but rather several slices of overly salted ham, unearthed from the larder by a frantic Mrs. Dawley. At least the port was passable, he thought idly, as he stretched his feet toward the warm fire set in the parlor. He drummed his fingers together with rhythmic precision, trying to trace what would logically have been Hetty’s movements from the moment she fled from London, but found himself almost immediately stymied, for he couldn’t really be certain if she’d traveled by horse, on a coach, as a female or as Lord Harry. He felt extraordinarily helpless, a circumstance he truly detested. His life had been too much out of control of late.

He rose and absently kicked a crackling log with the toe of one dusty, mud-caked boot. Where the hell was she anyway? He had even delayed his journey until the morning, thus giving her many hours to reach her destination before him. At the moment, he seemed to have very little choice but to remain at Belshire Manor until noon on the morrow. If Hetty hadn’t arrived by then, well, either she had been delayed, or had never intended to come here in the first place. He thought of Jack and Louisa and their home in Herefordshire. Perhaps the very fact that they were in Paris would induce Hetty there, for she could be alone.

He didn’t find Hetty at Sir John’s home in Herefordshire, and it was an extraordinarily weary and worried man who reined in yet another hired hack at the front steps of Thurston Hall, six days after his frenetic and fruitless search had begun. There had been no main road or village that he had passed without inquiry, and, now, he admitted, he simply had no more ideas. He hadn’t the energy to continue back to his town house in London. Deep within him, he knew in any case that there would be no news of Hetty awaiting him were he to return.

He mounted the steps, and without bothering to sound the knocker, pushed open the great front doors. As the afternoon was gray and overcast, the entrance hall seemed chill and dim, both the weather and his home reflecting, he thought, his own depression.

It was with sudden tight-lipped anger that he greeted the obviously tipsy Croft, who was weaving his way toward him, consternation paling his flushed face at the unexpected sight of his master.

“Oh dear. Oh my goodness. Oh Lordie, it is your grace, is it not?”

“You miserable sot! Damn you, Croft, get belowstairs immediately. I don’t want to see that bulbous nose of yours again until you’ve sobered up from drinking my port.”

“Er, it was the sherry, your grace. We’re low on the port. Your late father was never very fond of port.”

“Damn you, I should sack you right now, it’s no more than you deserve.”