The Arrangement (31 page)

I drew in a deep breath and didn’t answer.

The moon, which had been hidden behind a cloud, suddenly came out and illuminated the garden with a pale, eerie glow. The white climbing roses next to me looked almost unearthly in the pale light. Raoul pressed me further: “No inexplicable accidents ever befell him before he came here to Savile Castle?”

“No, they did not.”

His face looked bleached as white as a bone in the moonlight, and his eyes were dark and unreadable. He said, “So it seems we must assume that there is something connected to the castle, or to the people within the castle, that poses a danger to Nicky.”

I broke off one of the white roses and began to shred its silky petals with nervous fingers. I said, “Raoul, I have been wondering about Roger. I didn’t tell you this, but the day he took me out driving he asked me if I would agree to give up Nicky’s inheritance if he could persuade you to go along with such a plan. I told him that I would agree, but that I doubted he would be successful in persuading you.” I looked up from the mutilated flower in my hands. “Did he ever approach you about this?”

He was looking down into my face with those unreadable eyes. “Yes, he did, and I told him that I would not consider such a thing.”

I said a little breathlessly, “I have been wondering— what would happen to that money if Nicky should die?”

Raoul’s reply was slow and deliberate. “It would go back into the estate.”

I pricked my finger on a thorn, winced, dropped the rose, and stuck my injured finger into my mouth. I said around it, “And be immediately available to the new Lord Devane?”

“Yes.”

I took my finger out of my mouth. “Roger is in desperate need of money, Raoul. Do you think he might be desperate enough to try to do away with Nicky in order to get his hands on Nicky’s twenty thousand pounds?”

Raoul reached out to blot a drop of blood from my lip with his finger. His touch gave its usual lightning shock to my nervous system.

He shook his head. “For one thing, Roger has no surety that he
will
be the next Lord Devane, Gail. And even if he is, he will have the money from the rents that I have been holding. Nicky’s money would be nice but not crucial to him.” A faint look of contempt crossed his face, the look of a strong man for a weak one. “At any rate, I doubt that Roger would have the nerve,” he said.

I did not agree, but I thought I had said enough.

Raoul stepped toward me and put his hands on my shoulders. “I know you don’t like to talk about this, sweetheart, but I am utterly convinced that these attacks on Nicky—if they are indeed attacks, and I am now inclined to believe that they are—are related to George’s will.”

I stood stiffly and said nothing.

“Gail,” Raoul said, and his long body bent over me, drawing me toward him until I was pressed against his warm, protective strength, “why did George leave Nicky twenty thousand pounds?”

My body was rigid, resisting the familiar magic of his touch. I said, “I don’t know.”

He said persuasively, “Sweetheart, I can’t help you if you won’t trust me. You must know that I would never hurt or betray you. But if I am to be of any help to you at all…”

I ripped myself out of his arms.

“Will you leave me alone?” I cried wildly. “Nicky’s birth is not a mystery and I have no idea why George left him that damned money! I don’t want it, I never wanted it, and I am utterly terrified that it is the reason why someone is trying to kill him! In fact, I have been thinking that for safety’s sake perhaps I ought to get him away from the castle altogether.”

Raoul’s face was hard and bleak in the moonlight. All of the tenderness was gone from his voice when he asked, “Might I ask where you would go?”

“To Aunt Margaret’s.”

His face grew even bleaker. “I think that I will be able to protect Nicky better here than you would be at your aunt’s. The first thing I plan to do is hire some Bow Street runners to act as guards for him, and for the other boys as well, until we get to the bottom of this situation. And I
will
get to the bottom of it, Gail, that I promise you—no matter what I might end up uncovering.”

His words sounded as if they might be more of a threat than a promise.

“Will you check on how deeply Roger is in debt?” I asked.

“I will check.”

“And there is a man lurking around the Black Swan—name is Wickham. I overheard him talking to Mr. Cole about selling him some information.”

“I will check on this Wickham as well.”

The scent of the roses was all around us and the nightingale was still singing his heart out from the castle walls and we stood looking at each other with the chasm of my refusal to confide in him between us.

Raoul said, “It’s about time for the tea tray, I think.”

“Yes,” I said in a hollow voice, “I suppose it is.”

I knew from the look on his face that he would not be placated if I tried to move back into his arms now. As we walked together toward the house, I wondered in despair if things would ever be the same between us again.

* * * *

There was a very large footman sitting in the hallway outside my room when I arrived upstairs. Nicky was already in bed when I went into my bedroom, but he was not asleep.

I put my candle on the bedside table and looked into his face. He looked wide awake. “Charlie and Theo said that I was a baby for wanting to spend the night with you, Mama,” he said.

“It is not every day that you see someone killed,” I returned reasonably. “I don’t think it is babyish to need some reassurance, sweetheart. You are, after all, only eight years of age.”

“But Charlie and Theo are sleeping in the nursery tonight. They are not sleeping with their mama.”

“Charlie and Theo are brothers. They have each other,” I said.

“That’s true; they are both sleeping in Charlie’s room,” Nicky agreed. Then, tentatively: “They said I could sleep in there with them.”

It began to dawn on me what my son was trying to say.

“Nicky, would you like to go back to the nursery and sleep with Charlie and Theo?”

“It is just that they will call me a baby if I don’t, Mama,” he said earnestly. A tuft of hair was sticking up at the back of his head and he looked so precious that I wanted to cry. “It is not that I don’t want to spend the night with you.”

I thought of Raoul’s words and took a deep breath. “If you wish to go back upstairs, that is perfectly fine with me.”

“You will be all right alone?” Nicky asked anxiously.

I could almost have laughed, the turnabout was so ludicrous.

“I will be fine,” I said.

He began to scramble out from beneath the covers. “Well then, I think I will go upstairs.”

I had not yet undressed, and I said, “I’ll accompany you.”

The footman sitting outside my door went with us and on the third floor we encountered yet another footman sitting in the passageway outside the nursery apartment.

“We’ll see that Master Nicky gets safely tucked up for the night,” both young men assured me.

Since Nicky clearly did not want me to escort him into Charlie’s room, I thanked them and went slowly back downstairs to the bedroom that now would contain neither Nicky nor Raoul but just my lonely self.

Nicky was growing up, I realized, and for the first time I let myself wonder what I was going to do when he really was grown up and I was alone. I had never thought that way before. I had never let my eyes look that far ahead.

Raoul had been right about one thing, I thought. I couldn’t try to stop my son from growing up just because I was afraid of what my life was going to be like without him.

I got into my solitary bed and blew out my candle.

Once, perhaps I might have been able to marry again, I thought. Once, perhaps I could have settled for life with Sam Watson.

“Twere all one

That I should love a bright particular star

And think to wed it, he is so above me.”

Shakespeare’s poignant words sounded in my mind.

Raoul,
I thought with something that approached anguish.
Oh, Raoul.

I had rebuffed him tonight, and he had been very angry. It was not that I did not trust him, it was just that I was utterly convinced that the facts surrounding Nicky’s birth had absolutely no bearing on the problem we were faced with at Savile.

I thought about being the one to make the first move and going to him that night, but even if I did go down the stairs to his room, I was not certain that he would be there, and the thought of encountering his valet was unnerving, to say the least.

So I lay awake instead and tried to occupy my mind by thinking about the people who were living at Savile Castle and trying to imagine who might possibly have something against my son.

Raoul and Ginny I did not even consider.

Roger I had already singled out as a likely suspect.

Who else might have a motive? I wondered.

Harriet? Could she hate Nicky, whom she thought was George’s bastard son, so much that she wanted to do away with him? I acquitted the pregnant Harriet of being personally responsible for any of the attacks, but there were plenty of villains for hire now in the postwar world and she certainly could have engaged someone to do her dirty work for her.

It was hard to know what was going on in Harriet’s mind. She spoke very little, except to her father, and manifested herself to the rest of us mainly as a heavy, brooding, spiteful presence.

I would not put it beyond her to wish Nicky dead.

Then there was Mr. Cole. He had made no attempt to hide the fact that he resented George’s bequeathing twenty thousand pounds of Cole money to what he considered George’s bastard, but could that resentment be so severe that he could try to do away with Nicky? Unlike Roger, Cole still had an enormous amount of money, and now he had the prospect of a possible grandson to inherit Devane Hall.

Of course, there was that mysterious Mr. Wickham and the information he was trying to sell to Cole. But Wickham very probably represented Cole’s other business interests and had nothing to do with Nicky at all.

The final member of the Savile household was John Melville, and the only reason I considered John at all was that he was Raoul’s heir. I remembered him warning me on several occasions that Raoul would never marry again, and, while I was not foolish enough to think that John feared that Raoul would marry me, I remembered how he had told me several times how much Raoul had suffered when his wife and child died.

Could John hope that the death of another child whom Raoul had grown fond of—Nicky—might reinforce his determination never to marry again?

Upon reflection, I had to admit that this was a ridiculously weak argument.

In fact, the only villain who made any real sense to me was Roger. I wondered if perhaps I ought to go against Raoul’s advice and get Nicky away from the castle, but I was afraid that if I was on my own, with no protection for Nicky but myself, he would be even more vulnerable. After all, I wouldn’t be hard to find for anyone determined upon mischief.

I would remain at the castle, I decided, and I determined that in the morning I would ask Raoul if he could get a Bow Street runner to keep an eye on Roger as well as on the boys.

It was raining when I woke the following morning and I went down to breakfast with a headache. There was no one in the dining room and I sat drearily at the table sipping my coffee and nibbling desultorily on a muffin.

Harriet came in when I was starting on my second cup of coffee and I stared at her in surprise. She never came downstairs in the morning but had been breakfasting in her room ever since I had come to the castle.

“I didn’t expect to see you, Harriet,” I said with a note of inquiry.

“I didn’t sleep well,” she replied gruffly, “I thought that if I got out of my room for a while perhaps I might be able to nap later.”

Once again I felt an unwanted twinge of sympathy for George’s widow. She really looked miserable. Her skin was sallow and there were dark circles under her eyes. I thought that this wait to see whether or not she was bearing a son must be hellish, and a comparison to Anne Boleyn suddenly popped into my mind.

“You need to sleep or you will make yourself ill,” I said in a gentler voice than I had ever used to her before.

“I can’t sleep, though,” she replied fretfully. “I lie there and I try and I try and I try, but I can’t!”

I had had my share of nights like that, so I knew what she was talking about.

“Will it be so very dreadful if this child is a girl?” I asked. “You will still have your title, after all.”

“It can’t be a girl” she replied tensely. “Papa would be unbearably disappointed if it was a girl. He wants a grandson who will be Lord Devane of Devane Hall. I have to do this for him. I have to.”

“But he will still have a daughter who is Lady Devane,” I pointed out again.

Her caterpillar-like eyebrows almost joined in the middle, so intense was her frown. “That isn’t good enough for Papa,” she said. “I wouldn’t have Devane Hall, you see. Roger would have that.”

What kind of pressure was this to put upon a pregnant woman? I thought indignantly. My Anne Boleyn comparison was appearing more and more accurate.

“I could write to my aunt and ask if she has a recipe to help you sleep,” I said tentatively. “I am quite certain that she would be able to recommend a few soothing herbs.”

Harriet’s dark eyes regarded me with a mixture of hope and suspicion. “Why should you want to help me? You hated me for marrying George. I always knew that.”

I sighed. I didn’t know the answer to her question myself. I only knew that suddenly I felt sorry for Harriet and that it was hard to continue to hate someone you felt sorry for.

“I don’t know why I should offer to help you,” I said. I pushed away my scarcely touched muffin. “Perhaps I really mean to poison you.”

Her heavy gaze held my face. “I don’t think so,” she said finally. “You don’t care about George anymore now that you’ve got your hooks into Savile.”