Moonlight on My Mind (12 page)

“You married me because you wanted to help me?” Patrick’s mouth suddenly felt dry. He couldn’t fathom it. This was Julianne Baxter, for God’s sake. Sharp-tongued gossip, self-absorbed beauty. He would have liked to imagine she’d married him because her reputation had crashed on the shoals of Reverend Ramsey’s eager eyes, and that he’d been the only piece of flotsam within arm’s reach she could find to keep afloat.

But the sort of motivation she had just divulged required a good dose of empathy to go along with her infinite supply of recklessness.

She shook her head, setting errant curls in motion and a trail of tears spilling down one cheek. “You are a decent man, Patrick. A good man.
That
is why I married you. Not because of my reputation, or even because of our past. I married you because I wanted to. And I do not regret doing it.”

Patrick preferred to imagine those tears weren’t real, that she could produce them at will, like her myriad, shifting smiles, but her sorrow-clogged voice sounded far too authentic for comfort. He could see her reaching blindly for a truth that didn’t exist.

This, finally, chased him into the hallway and yanked shut the door. He slumped down onto a floor that smelled of mildew and urine and held his breath until the sound of the key finally, hesitantly, reached his ears. She had chosen to listen to him in this, it seemed. To protect herself from the men downstairs?

Or to protect her heart from the man who arguably had worse intentions?

Because he was not decent or good. Not even passably so.

His earlier anger drained away, leaving only a hollowed out space in his heart. Inevitably, guilt flowed in to take its own rightful place. Julianne’s conscience might now be clean, but his was miles from absolution. Because no matter how contrite she seemed over her role in the events of eleven months ago, it was still
his
finger on the trigger,
his
bullet in Eric’s heart. Decent men did not argue with their brothers just moments before killing them. Decent men did not hide like cowards in faraway towns while their families mourned.

And decent men did not marry a woman—even a woman as beautiful and maddening as Julianne—to remove her as a potential witness.

Chapter 12

T
he last leg of their journey wound through the market village of Shippington, then took them through five miles of rutted roads flanked by newly fallow fields. The monotony of the late afternoon sunshine was broken up by the occasional dark forest where the oak trees met overhead in a yellow riot. In another few weeks, Patrick knew, the spindled limbs would lose their leaves to frost, but for now they kept a firm grip on their dying charges.

Though he’d made the trip in reverse scarcely eleven months prior, he no longer felt as though he remembered the way. Perhaps it was because he was arriving in a coach pulled by a team two breaths shy of the knacker, rather than his father’s well-sprung coach and matched set of bays. Or, perhaps it was because he was arriving with Julianne, the very woman whose accusations had chased him away nearly a year ago, and whose tearful confession had driven him into the stairwell last night. She’d been withdrawn most of the morning, keeping even her false smiles tightly cloistered. It seemed a night of sleeping alone did not sit well with his wife.

A night of sleeping in the inn’s rank stairwell had not improved his view either. He’d overcome the initial surge of anger she’d conjured with far less difficulty than he would have imagined, dousing its spread with a healthy dose of introspection. It was impossible, if one applied logic, to blame Julianne for his current circumstances. Her attempt to protect a vulnerable servant might even border on admirable in the eyes of some. She’d believed the truth of her words at the time, even if her decision to protect her maid from scrutiny was ill-considered. And truly, she seemed to
want
to do the right thing now, to the point of being willing to admit her mistake in a very public way.

But he could not let her confess the truth at the inquest. If she did, she might reveal that there was another potential witness lurking somewhere in Yorkshire, one who apparently
did
think he had murdered his brother. Better to keep the original plan intact, and prevent Julianne’s testimony from coming to light.

And for the near future, better to focus on dealing with the inevitable wrath of her father, even as he steeled himself to deal with the staggering loss of his own.

The coach disgorged them onto Summersby’s manicured lawn, the same lawn where he had played as a child and grazed his horse as a rebellious young man, much to the consternation of the head gardener. The springy earth beneath Patrick’s soles felt foreign after eleven months gone. When he had returned from his studies in Italy, excited about his future and convinced he could persuade his father to loan him the money to open a veterinary practice, he’d scarcely paid the lawn any attention. But now that he was returning to set his feet upon soil that belonged to him, he felt as though he were sinking.

The driver clattered off with a quick slap of reins, and a glance toward the bank of east-facing windows confirmed the source of the driver’s haste. The manor stretched high above the hopeful swath of green lawn, reaching three slate-tipped stories into the sky. Never the most hospitable of visages, Summersby Manor’s front windows were draped in black today, yawning black holes sequestered behind glass.

A mourning wreath hung on the door, a macabre sort of welcome, and the hair along his arms pricked to attention at a burrowing memory, one of his last moments at Summersby. A pair of red-eyed maids had been covering the windows with black crepe as he’d left. Grief had not been reserved for the immediate family. The entire staff had loved Eric, even with his reputation as a bit of a rogue. He’d flirted with the maids and played dice with the footmen, no doubt fleecing them with the skills learned from his time in London’s gaming hells. His death—so sudden and unnecessary—had been devastating to them all.

And Patrick was the man who had destroyed it all with a single, careless mistake.

He had no idea what to expect inside, except this: his mothers and sisters needed him. But needing him and welcoming him were not the same thing. His father’s letters these past few months had touched on his mother’s ebbing grief, but he wasn’t sure how much his father had been hiding from him. Certainly, his father had never mentioned his own declining health, or that his mother had known where he was hiding.

Patrick gained the front steps with Julianne’s bag in his hand, but as his hand reached for the door, her fingers grazed his arm.

“Wait,” she said. “You should knock and have us announced.”

He gritted his teeth around the absurdity of the request. “Such formality is not needed, I assure you.”

She tilted her face upward, the brim of her bonnet shading her eyes to obsidian. “Nonetheless, I’d appreciate the opportunity to be presented. I was not exactly welcome here during your father’s funeral. When I left this house a week ago, your mother still viewed me as the girl who’d orchestrated your downfall. She needs to see we are returning of an accord.”

“This is hardly the time or place to plan a grand entrance, Julianne.”

“It establishes our circumstances without fumbling over explanations.” She paused a brief second before adding in a softer tone, “And it shows your mother she must accept me as your choice.”

It occurred to him—belatedly, perhaps—that his new wife didn’t just
look
like a countess. She thought like one. She was the person more experienced with social customs, more adept at the execution of manners that would need to come with this new life he did not want, but could not avoid if he was to ensure a decent future for his mothers and sisters. He’d always presumed such things would be Eric’s domain. His refusal to take an interest in the estate, in politics, in manners, was part of the friction that had so frequently existed with his father.

That he was arriving with Julianne on his arm was the height of irony. If nothing else good came of this marriage, he had at least gained the sort of wife of whom his father—though apparently not his mother—would have approved.

He moved his hand from the door handle to the knocker. The sound seemed final, hammering at his ears. Gemmy sniffed his way up to the door and added his own demand, scratching against the wood and whining anxiously.

The door swung open to reveal Mr. Peters, Summersby’s butler, dressed in solemn black. The elderly man’s eyes widened in recognition. Patrick had known Peters his entire life, and yet had no idea how to present himself at the moment. As the prodigal son, returned home to disrupt the tranquillity of the grand manor?

Or as the new earl, come to take his far-from-rightful place?

Gemmy showed no hesitation on the matter. The terrier darted between the butler’s legs.

“Oh no!” Julianne moaned. She elbowed them all aside as a ferocious explosion of snarls and growls rose up from the foyer.

“I thought you wanted to be announced,” Patrick called out in confusion, as frozen by the tempting flash of ankle his reckless wife was displaying as by her lack of manners.

“Gemmy has already done it for us.” Her panicked voice reached Patrick in a rushed blur of vowels and consonants. “And I would hate for my dog to kill yours.”

C
onstance and Gemmy were locked in a fierce battle for supremacy as Julianne skidded to a stop in the middle of the foyer. The two dogs tumbled across the black and white marble tile in a ball of flying fur and clicking teeth. She became aware of an undulating smear of black at the edge of her vision, evidence of a gathering crowd dressed in the somber hues of mourning.

And yet, no one stepped forward to offer assistance.

Perhaps they felt that a canine palaver of this magnitude would soon be over. To an uninformed bystander, bets would have probably been laid in Gemmy’s favor, even given the dog’s missing limb. He outweighed Constance by at least twenty pounds, and carried the ancestry of ferocious ratters in his blood. Those bystanders, however, would have been wrong.

Constance might be a fluffy white dog that fit in her mistress’s arms, but Julianne had seen her pet chase down a mastiff in Hyde Park and come out victorious.

Poor Gemmy didn’t stand a chance.

Julianne reached for the scruff of both dogs’ necks, trying in vain to pull them apart. A high-pitched yelp—was it from Constance or Gemmy?—sent her panic soaring, but she couldn’t see her way to a good handhold on the twisting animals. “I need help!” she called out.

Patrick materialized by her side, a large vase of flowers in his hand. She glared at him, her hands full of writhing dogs. He’d spent the entire day ignoring her, and last night had left her emotions so tattered she’d spent a night tossing in disturbed dreams.
Now
he was standing before her with flowers? But then he tossed the flowers aside and a spray of shockingly cold water from inside the vase rained down on all of them.

It occurred to her—in a sputtering fit of pique—that her husband was quite capable of using water for things other than washing when the situation called for it.

Gemmy scrambled away to cower between Patrick’s legs, his tail pinned contritely against his body. Constance blinked up through her water-clogged lashes, holding out a pathetic, wet paw. Julianne’s heart did that odd flopping thing it always did when Constance looked up at her that way.

“Oh, you poor, poor thing,” she moaned, dropping to her knees and scooping the damp, furry bundle into her arms. She buried her nose in the Constance’s thick coat, breathing in the familiar, musky smell. She’d not wanted to leave her pet when she’d been sent back to London after the funeral, but her father had insisted that Constance would have been too much for her to manage on the train alone. Little did he realize what she’d managed to accomplish anyway.

“What in God’s name is going on here?” Her father’s voice pulled Julianne’s gaze up from her undistinguished position on the floor. Now it was her stomach’s turn to do its own flopping thing that always accompanied her father’s disapproval. Eyes of nearly the same piercing green as her own glared down at her, framed in white-bearded formality.

And, as per usual where she was concerned, her father’s mouth was turned down in a distinct frown.

“Father.” She rose on guilty legs, and her fingers curled into the comfort of Constance’s fur. “I . . . that is, we . . . came as soon we could.”

“How quickly you’ve come seems irrelevant, if you consider the fact you’re supposed to be in London.”

Julianne shifted Constance to her other arm as the dog’s wet fur began to seep through her bodice. “If you would but listen for a moment, I am trying to explain—” Her voice tapered off as the countess, Patrick’s mother, stepped out of the blurry sea of faces.

No, that wasn’t quite right.
Dowager
countess.

Because Julianne was the countess now, even if no one yet realized it.

Lady Haversham stared up at Patrick, her hand lifting to cover the surprised oval of her mouth. Julianne had not realized it during the funeral, but now that mother and son were standing together, she could see the similarities between them were startling. They possessed the same thin, angular face, the same far-too-serious brown eyes. The woman’s hair was threaded with gray, but it showed evidence of having once matched Patrick’s own light brown color.

Much as Julianne had once mistaken Patrick’s lack of expression as evidence of his guilt, she was at first tempted to interpret Lady Haversham’s stony features as evidence of the woman’s disapproval. But if she had learned anything from the past few days, it was that such quick impressions could be wrong.

“Mother.” A subtle vibration could be heard in Patrick’s voice. “I received your letter. I was so very sorry to learn of Father’s passing.”

The dowager countess’s hands clenched in her black skirts, and her mask slipped, ever so slightly, to reveal the anguish beneath. “Thank you for coming home. You are welcome here.”

“That remains to be seen.” Julianne’s father took a menacing step toward Patrick. “Please explain why you have arrived with my daughter without a single chaperone between you. I may have been your father’s good friend, but by God, if you have compromised my daughter’s reputation in any way, I will demand satisfaction.”

Patrick stiffened, and Julianne laid a gentle hand on her husband’s arm. Her father was not to blame, for any of this. And if Patrick endangered either himself or her father in something so foolish as a duel she would never, ever forgive either of them.

Patrick cleared his throat. “I suppose it depends on how you would define compromise, sir. If you are thinking of calling me out, you might want to consult Julianne first. I doubt she’ll appreciate being made a widow.”