Ravishing in Red (36 page)

They had not spoken again of the dilemma regarding the powder. She knew that Sebastian had not brought the matter up with Morgan, however. The distraction was still in him, and yesterday, when they were with the marquess for a few minutes, she had seen how Sebastian looked at his brother in a pensive way that reflected how the decision troubled him.

The chair reached a landing and turned a corner. Wittonbury could see his mother and her now. “Well, come along,” he called. “I don’t intend to contemplate nature all alone.”

Lady Wittonbury glided to the top of the staircase. He noticed. “You too, sister. We will have a garden party.”

They followed the chair out to the terrace and out onto a patch of grass flanked by two stone paths. The footmen set it down. Dr. Fenwood tucked a blanket around the marquess, then walked away to take a position a good fifty yards away.

Footmen and gardeners hurried to move some iron chairs close. A small table emerged from the house. Sebastian had been carrying two books, and he set them down.

He checked his pocket watch. “For all the drama, that barely took fifteen minutes. In the future it can be done faster, and they can have you back up in your chambers in less than ten even today. Just have Fenwood call for the men.”

Wittonbury nodded. His mother sat her iron self in an iron chair and beamed approval. Audrianna strolled toward the house with her husband.

“Was this his idea?” she asked.

“He was at the window and admired the garden. I said he should go down and did not hear him object.”

“He seems contented enough.”

“He knows that his old life is within reach. He can taste it. He refuses to hope and yet he has begun to hope all the same.” He gazed over at the quiet conversation between mother and son. “It would be a hell of a thing if scorn waits for him when he can finally leave this house.”

“Have you decided what to do?”

He shook his head. “My courage fails me whenever I try to speak to him about it.”

He left to go about his day. The marquess beckoned her to one of the chairs. Lady Wittonbury encouraged her to feel like an intruder with the tight smile of forbearance that she wore.

Audrianna sat as an observer, not a participant. She watched the marquess’s animated expressions and talk. He was delighted to be out here. Maybe even excited. Yet from deep within him she sensed, as she always had, a melancholy that was too quick to accept fate.

“It was good of you to occupy me for a while,” he said to his mother after a half hour. “I know that you have calls to make, and you should do that. Audrianna will keep me company for a while longer before I go in.”

Any other woman might have missed the dismissal for what it was. Lady Wittonbury did not. She possessed the ability to exude grace that had a razor’s edge, and she took her leave with an invisible but cutting huff.

Wittonbury tilted his head so his face received full sun. He closed his eyes. “The warmth is peaceful. It makes me deliciously lazy.”

“Rest if you like. I will stay here while you do.”

It appeared he would, but after a few minutes he spoke. “Are you happy, Audrianna? Are you making friends?”

“I am happy. I have some new friends.”

“I am glad to hear that you are. My brother has been preoccupied with something of late. I am glad it does not touch on you.”

“Actually, I think it does. He has learned quite a bit about that gunpowder. We discovered that my father was probably complicit, but that there were others involved too, in worse ways.”

He did not move. His eyes remained closed. She felt an alertness claim him, however. “That is interesting. What else has he learned?”

She told him about the young gunner, and the marks on the kegs, and the discovery of the company’s name. She described the scheme to take good powder out of kegs and sell it to a smuggler, and how a man at the arsenal and one in London had been paid to ensure that the tests cleared the bad powder, or that the reports of bad powder were lost.

She went no further. She did not say that Sebastian knew who owned that mill during the war. She had said enough for him to guess the rest, however, if he knew the truth already.

He opened his eyes and looked around the garden. A little sadly, but also very thoughtfully.

He inhaled deeply. “Then he will know it all soon, if he does not already.” He shielded his eyes with one hand. “Thank God.”

His composure wavered and he shielded his face yet more. He collected himself and looked at her. He appeared truly relieved. Also frightened and desperate.

Her heart hurt for him. “He recently learned about your two friends. He is not sure that he wants to know all of it now.”

“No, of course not. But he will decide that he must. It is the honorable choice.” He looked down at his lap and legs. “I believed this was my punishment. When I learned what Kenny and Symes had done, and how I had aided them—a man does not send his oldest friends to prison or worse. So, I went to fight, to make amends. When fate decided a higher price was required, I accepted my loss as fair.”

“Is that why you have fought that healing? Because you thought fate would exact a higher price instead?”

“No, dear girl. I deserved this punishment, and so I did not believe there could be any healing in the first place.”

She reached across the little table. He took her hand in his.

“Do your friends know that you know?”

He shook his head. “They thought they were very sly, but if you have known a man most of your life, you can tell when something is up. So it was with them. Little comments between them, spoken out of turn. A new carriage that Kennington could ill afford. Reckless gambling when there had been none in the past. I suspected they had some scheme with that mill. There was a third partner, a man I did not know. He had lured them into it with promises of great riches. Neither one is wealthy, so they were enamored of this investment and insisted it was pouring out money beyond their dreams.”

“Perhaps it was. Their good fortune was not a reason for you to know what they were doing.”

“So I have told myself. But I knew. Within their joy at all that money to spend, there was also fear and guilt. I could smell it. I was concerned, because I had put in a good word for them. My name obtained the contract, not theirs. And then, the earliest reports drifted back about that massacre—long before the war ended, long before the first word in the papers, the army knew something had gone very wrong on that hill for those men. And I learned of it, the way powerful peers often do.”

He looked away and shook his head. The hold on her hand gripped tighter. She almost told him not to speak of it because his distress was so plain. Having started, however, he seemed determined to finish.

“I told Kenny and Symes that there had been this horrible mishap with some powder, and asked them how it could happen with all the quality checks. I sought their expertise. After all, they owned a mill that made the stuff. Not possible, they swore. And yet it had happened.” He looked at her, with eyes as intense as his brother’s could be. “And I knew. I just knew it was their powder, from their mill. It was on their faces and in their voices, as they feigned ignorance. They are neither one sly by nature, nor good at lying. I had convinced the army to buy ordnance from two fools who had done something that got good men killed. And I also knew that I would never forgive myself.”

And so he had accepted the imprisonment of infirmity when it came, as a justice. She imagined him waiting for the truth to come out these last years, hoping his brother learned everything but also dreading that day at the same time.

What had Sebastian said?
I do it for him
. And he did, but in ways he had never guessed.

“Tell Sebastian what I have just said, when you know he has decided to go forward,” he said. “I do not want him to ask me about it. He deserves better than having to interrogate his own brother about such a thing. Nor could I bear to face him that way. I might as well end this in moral cowardice, as I began it, I suppose.”

“You were not a coward. This was not your crime. You were duped by two good friends.”

“I should have guessed they were up to no good. Kenny and Symes invest in a mill? My brother would have been duly skeptical, as I should have been. I should have demanded to meet and know the man who proposed this to them. I should have told Sebastian where to look when he began his search, rather than fear that what little I had left of my dignity would be taken away by disgrace.”

“And yet you did not stop him. You encouraged him. He would never have pursued it otherwise.”

“I expect that murderers half hope that they will be caught too, so the fear of capture will end. Such are the contradictions of the soul. I have come to know mine too well.” He raised her hand, kissed it. “I am sorry that your father’s name was pulled into this, Audrianna. When it was, I asked them if they knew him to be a man who could be bought. They both said no, and I am sure that they spoke the truth.”

“My father gave the final approval before powder was distributed. If reports of bad powder came from an arsenal, he would have seen them. I would like to believe that you can be so sure of your friends’ opinion of his honor, but suspicion fell on my father for a reason.”

He vaguely shook his head. “Whoever was their man at the offices of the Board of Ordnance, it was not him. That was perhaps the worst part—to see another good man suffer and die because of my weakness. I never thought he would kill himself. Kenny and Symes probably did not either. Thus did three idiots and cowards hurt your family.”

She dared not believe him. He lied to make some good of this for someone; that was all. He had nothing to lose now. Yet her heart filled with hope, and affection that he had said it, even if it were not true.

He released her hand. He found his handkerchief and wiped his face. “The papists say confession is good for the soul. Perhaps they are right.”

He called for Dr. Fenwood, and told him to bring out the footmen.

 

 

 

 

T
hat night she gave Sebastian as much love as she could along with pleasure. She let her care burn in each kiss she gave his body, and his scent and touch burn her soul. She finally took him into herself, absorbing him deeply, holding him tightly, and moved in the hard rhythm that would allow them the ultimate escape together.

She collapsed on him, with her heart bursting with the emotions that she had brought to this bed. A memory came to her, from not long ago at all, of wanting to make him admit he was wrong about her father. Of blaming him for her pain. Then another memory, of his sweet care when she realized he had not been wrong at all.

She remained in the embrace that held her to his body. She turned her face so her mouth was beside his ear.

“I have been thinking about your dilemma. I think that it would be best to allow this investigation to die.”

His embrace tightened. He rolled, so that she was on her back and he could see her face.

“You think that I should walk away, now that it touches on my family?”

She wished he would not view it that way, even if that is exactly what she meant.

“Whatever your brother did, he has more than paid, has he not?”

“They are two separate things. His condition is tragic and he has suffered, that is true. But it was not in payment for his negligence.”

He thinks it was
. The marquess had given permission for her to convey his confession, but she would rather not. If Sebastian knew for certain of his brother’s involvement, he might believe he could not let this die at all.

“If you ask him about this, accuse him of this—you will create a chasm, no matter how honest you have been, and no matter what he says.”

“Damnation, do you think I do not know that?” He rolled again, without her. Away from her. He lay on his back with his tight profile limned by the glow of the lamp on the far table.

“Would it not be better, then, to just not know?”

“I thought you wanted to know everything. To have the truth. There is no chance of exonerating your father, if he was innocent, if I end this now.”

“Frans said—”

“Frans found a name in a newspaper,” he interrupted. “Now that I know the truth of this scheme, the planning and the dangers—I am not convinced your father had a role. Quite the opposite.”

So this also preyed on his mind, as he weighed and balanced duty against the brother he loved. And yet, his opinion only pained her because it put her at the center of the grief that might come to this family.

“They would go to someone they knew and trusted, not approach a stranger. That would be much too risky,” he said. “We may have indeed hounded an innocent man to the grave, as you always thought. There can be no compensation for that, certainly not to him but even not to you, but at least his name can be cleared. My brother’s embarrassment would be a small price to pay for justice.”

The sore could still hurt if poked, even if it no longer bled. A good deal of guilt had plagued her as she decided what to do, especially since the marquess had said that her father would indeed be exonerated. But her old quest seemed very small when she saw the anguish that this decision gave Sebastian.

“I will remember my father as he was. I do not need another victim to take his place. Whatever decision you make, please do not make it because of me.”

His head turned so it faced hers. He looked over at her for a long time. The mood between them became drenched with the kind of intimacy that normally existed right after passion’s soul-baring ecstasy.

His hand sought hers between their bodies. “You humble me sometimes. You offer gifts of yourself in ways that—”

He moved on top of her, so his skin touched hers from torso to legs. He gazed at her so thoughtfully, so intensely, that she feared what he perceived.