The Belligerent Miss Boynton AND The Lurid Lady Lockport (Two Companion Full-Length Regency Novels) (60 page)

Anne ran to the bell pull and yanked it, pulling the length of rotted velvet down around her ears.

Amanda raced into the corridor and loudly called for Rice to bring two footmen.

Bo and Jared trotted out into the garden to see what they could see, which was not much.

Glynis and Rory O'Keefe never moved.

Within moments, Walter Grey was laid upon a long sofa with Gilly deftly removing his left arm from his jacket and gently tearing away his homespun shirt.

"Rice," Kevin barked, "have Willie ride for the doctor."

"That drunken sot? Whatever for?" Gilly exclaimed heatedly. "Rice, send for Mrs. Whitebread, please. Tell her Walter's been shot. She's to bring along whatever's necessary and meet us in the blue bedchamber. The first thing we must do is remove the bullet while poor Walter's still unconscious."

When Rice didn't move, debating in his mind whose order to obey, Amanda came up behind him and gave him a slight shove. "Get on with it man; go fetch Mrs. Whitebread." Obviously Lady Storm couldn't doubt Gilly's ability to handle the situation and, after all, Rice seemed to decide, that lady had seen the young mistress deliver a baby. Rice bowed to the ladies, shrugged in Kevin's direction, and went off to do as he was bid, clearing his throat the better to yell Gilly's request at the deaf housekeeper.

The men waited downstairs while Willie, who had been called for by Mrs. Whitebread, assisted the ladies. Anne, pleading fatigue, had already gone off to bed.

The O'Keefe's had taken themselves off within minutes of the disturbance, Glynis's ploy of declaring herself faint at the sight of blood earning her nothing but a sneer of disgust from the man who had minutes earlier been fondling her fingers, while Rory, who usually had to be pried out of The Hall, seemed for once to be in a mighty rush to depart.

"Who could have shot Grey? And more to the point, why?" Kevin asked of the two men who remained in the room with him. "He's such an inoffensive creature. Did you know the man so abominates violence that he has removed all the traps in the home wood? Why, he only allows the foresters to thin out the rabbits and other small game once we're nearly knee-deep in vermin."

"Been to his cottage," Bo contributed, nodding. "Overrun with creatures."

"I've seen the man riding about the estate in a pony cart," Jared, keeping up his end of the conversation. "Isn't that a rather odd way of traveling for an estate manager? Horseback seems much more convenient."

Kevin chuckled and explained that Grey was a notoriously poor horseman. Gilly, amending her list of demands the very morning after their wedding, had prevailed upon Kevin to purchase the pony cart to ease the manager's ever-stiff hindquarters. "It was a nice change to see the man sit down when he came into my office. For a while there, I was convinced his knees didn't bend."

Amanda came in just then and held out a square of white cloth for the gentlemen's inspection. In the middle of the cloth sat a small, round metal ball Willie had just lately extracted from Grey's shoulder.

"No poacher uses that size shot," Kevin declared. "It looks like it came from a large pistol. Has Grey been able to say anything yet?"

"Yes, he's conscious, unless the laudanum Mrs. Whitebread gave him has him slumbering again by now," Gilly announced, coming into the room. "He told us he was taking the night air near the maze when he heard something moving in the shrubbery. When he went to see if an animal was stuck in the thick branches, he was shot. That's all he remembers."

"Sounds like he stumbled onto something he wasn't meant to see," Jared offered, lighting a cheroot after Gilly and Amanda nodded their permission. He thought better with a cheroot in his hand and, after taking a few puffs, declared that Grey had probably come afoul of one of three likely suspects: the intruder, a smuggler, or a spy.

"A spy!" Amanda and Gilly exclaimed in unison.

"Oh, come now, Jared," Kevin scoffed in an attempt to discount his friend's words. "Surely spies have more pressing things to do than hang about The Hall. We have no military secrets here."

"Too right. Spies in London. Not here," Bo agreed, seeing the wisdom of diverting the ladies from the idea of a spy operating in the area, a careless slip of Jared's tongue that had already set martial lights to glinting in both women's eyes.

"No, no," Amanda disagreed quickly, standing up and beginning to pace, the gleam in her golden eyes causing her loose-lipped spouse to grimace in real pain. "This area is
prime
for spies, what with being right on the coast and so near to France. Of course it was a spy. He probably had a rendezvous set up with someone he hired to take him across the Channel."

"The Straits," Gilly corrected automatically. "We call it the Straits around here. It makes sense of course, this theory of yours, Jared. Except for one thing. No one around here would help a spy. We're all loyal citizens here."

"There are the local smugglers," Jared felt forced to point out, knowing it was too late to turn his wife, or Gilly, away from the subject. "Surely the spy—if there is one, which, upon reflection I seriously doubt—" he said in deference to the withering looks he was receiving from Kevin and Bo, "might have offered them a chance to earn some extra blunt carrying messages, or even the man himself, to and from Calais."

"Well, the constable will come tomorrow to question Grey once he's feeling more the thing," Kevin pointed out, feeling Gilly's withering glare boring into his back. "Until then—gentlemen, ladies—I suggest we try to keep our imaginations in check. Gilly?" he prompted, turning and holding out his arm to her. "It's been a long day. I think we might all follow Anne's example and make an early night of it."

The others agreed, and soon Gilly found herself in the sitting room of the master chamber, still holding onto Kevin's arm, but anxious to head for her own rooms and a bit of privacy in which to think over what had happened in the Large Saloon.

However, just as she reached her own door and was about to depress the latch, Kevin dropped his pose of affable husband. "Hold there, please, if you will, wife, as I have a few things to say to you."

Gilly's shoulders slumped as she turned to face him. "If you're going to try to tell me that Harry and the others have been toting a spy back and forth on their boats, I don't want to hear it. Because that's ludicrous, Kevin, and you know it."

"It's also highly debatable," he said, taking a single step in her direction. "However, that's not what I want to speak with you about, not right now. You made a spectacle of yourself downstairs tonight with that lurid song, wife. I know you were trying me on, but I warn you, Gilly, one of these days you'll go a step too far. Only Walter Grey's arrival on the scene saved you this time, although I'm not at all sure I shouldn't take you to task right now and save myself some aggravation."

"Try, and I'll do you a mischief," Gilly countered just as angrily, and the battle was joined. "Besides, it's I who should be dealing out punishments, if the way you drooled over that simpering Glynis O'Keefe all night long, listening to her silly prattlings like they were priceless pearls of wisdom, hadn't made me so sick to my stomach I have no energy left with which to box your ears."

Kevin stormed across the carpet to confront his wife. "And what of her
brother?
Talk about nauseating scenes. Why, I waited with bated breath, sure you'd leap into his lap at any moment and begin to purr."

"My behavior does not signify," Gilly sniffed, "as it pales beside your truly embarrassing pursuit of anything in skirts. I must say I find your taste in women, if Miss O'Keefe can be used as an example of your preferences, to be most disappointing. I thought even you beyond finding the weak attractions of such a silly widgeon appealing."

"Ha! And I suppose you're to be commended for flirting with a toad-eating pest like Rory O'Keefe? I beg to differ, my dear, as I believe it shows only that you're very green indeed. No real woman would look twice at such a pale imitation of a man. You do yourself no credit, madam, if such as he could be your ideal."

All at once Gilly had enough. Stamping her foot in fury, she exploded: "I think the man is an ass, a complete and total
ass!
I only played up to him in an attempt to make you jealous, fool that I am. It was Amanda's idea, and there hasn't been a sorrier notion since I once fleetingly believed I could come to care for such a hardhearted womanizer as you."

"Oh, is that right?" Rawlings shouted back, his anger at Gilly's deception making him temporarily blind to the fact that he had tried much the same tactic as his wife—again at a friend's suggestion. That Gilly had let it slip that she had once found him appealing did not register at all.

By the time these facts did strike him, Kevin was alone in the room, Gilly having clapped one hand to her betraying mouth and run for the safety of her bedchamber and her protector, Bunny.

Kevin stood stock-still in the middle of the sitting room for some moments, a decidedly silly grin upon his face as he realized they had both been playing games to see if they could strike sparks off each other. But his face was near to splitting with his elation when he recollected Gilly's last admission and her resultant consternation at letting it out in the heat of the moment.

"She's not indifferent to me after all," he exclaimed happily to the empty room. That put an entirely new light on the situation between them. Now that there would be no more smoke screens between them, as neither needed to keep up the pretense of flirtations with the O'Keefe's, perhaps they could begin to rebuild their relationship on a more solid base.

And, as there was no better time than the present, he'd just go to her now, and they could discuss the matter.

Miss Roseberry opened the door of Gilly's chamber just as he lifted his fist to knock, begging entry. She nodded curtly to Lord Lockport, and laid down her pallet outside the threshold in preparation for another night of guard duty.

Kevin already knew the doors leading to Gilly's bed from the servants' room and the corridor were now firmly locked after his intrusion of the night before, and he saw no choice but to give up any idea of seeing Gilly that evening.

"Ah, the guard dog doth settle in for the night, teeth bared and ears flattened," he said, bowing. "I tremble in fear, and withdraw, madam." So saying, he turned and slowly walked to his own door with as much sangfroid as he could muster, quietly closing it behind him.

In his campaign to win his wife's affections, the first barrier to be breached, Kevin knew, was the routing of the redoubtable Miss Roseberry. He went to sleep still thinking of a way to overcome that determined lady's defenses.

#

Kevin had just dismounted and was walking his horse slowly back to the stables when Willie came running towards him waving a scrap of paper as he forced his bowed legs to hurry.

"What's forward?" the Earl asked quickly, thinking about the shooting the night before and wondering if Walter Grey had suddenly taken a turn for the worse.

The local constable had come and gone; a sad excuse of a man who spent more time mumbling and scratching his head than he did checking the area around the maze for possible clues. That was why Kevin had ridden out this morning, to do a little clue-hunting of his own, with very little results. The trail down the grassy slopes to one of the caves did look to have seen recent use, but there was no path from anywhere in that area that led towards The Hall.

But Willie, after stopping in front of Kevin and pausing to catch his breath, shook his head in the negative to his master's unvoiced question and just shoved the paper he held under Kevin's nose.

"Easy there, man, easy. You're likely to take a slice out of me with that thing. Here—give it to me," Kevin ordered.

He quickly unfolded the sheet and read its contents aloud: "'Come to the center of the shrubbery at noon. Do not fail. It is a matter of life and death!'" He then turned the sheet over and said curtly. "There's no signature. Who gave this to you?"

"I finded it jammed under a stone on the mountin' block," Willie panted, still a bit breathless. "It's bad, ain't it? I thought it wuz bad."

Kevin shrugged, his tan buckskin hacking jacket straining across his shoulders. "Well, as it bears no salutation as well as no signature, this note could be for anyone from anyone," he reasoned. "But you did well to bring it to me, Willie. I thank you. Did you show it to anyone else, or tell anyone what it contains?"

Willie colored under his swarthy darkness, kicked once or twice at the loose stones under his feet, and admitted, "I doesn't read, yer lordship."

"Sorry," was all Kevin answered, trying to ease both the groom's embarrassment and his own, for having asked such a ridiculous question. Putting a companionable arm around Willie's thin shoulders he, with a few well-chosen words, then managed not only to relax the man but also enlisted his aid in keeping the contents of the note a secret.

"It's nearly twelve now. I'll just go and change out of my dirt," (not the least of which had lately come from his close association with Willie's dusty coat) he said then, "and be off to a small
tête-à-tête
the with the author of this melodramatic piece of nonsense."

A good ten minutes past noon Kevin was to be found nonchalantly sauntering through the gardens on his way to the maze, undoubtedly the "shrubbery" mentioned in the note. He was—as he certainly appeared, dressed in impeccable "gentleman-taking-his-afternoon leisure" attire—in no great hurry to discover who had sent the note, which he did indeed think to be a hysterical bit of exaggeration. The handwriting was definitely masculine, but the crabbed hand was unrecognizable to him. Who could have written it? Who was it meant to summon? And to what purpose, what end?

He took a better hold of the malacca cane he had tucked up under his arm. If Willie had somehow uncovered a note from some secret admirer meant for Gilly, Kevin was sure to get a little exercise swinging that cane a few minutes from now. In fact, rearranging Rory O'Keefe's handsome face held more than a little appeal...