The Last Hellion (36 page)

"You're the most aggravating female who ever lived. There's no pleasing you."

Vere crouched beside the dog. "It's raining, Susan. What the devil do you want to lie in the rain for, when you can lumber about a great, warm, dry house and trip the footmen and throw all the maids into fits of terror? Mama's in there, you know. Don't you want to see your mama?"

A deeply despondent doggy sigh was her answer.

Vere collected the various parcels he'd thrown down when Susan threw herself down, then stood up and marched into the house.

Once inside he bellowed for Jaynes.

"The damn dog won't come in," he said, when the valet finally skulked into the hall.

Leaving Jaynes to deal with Susan, Vere hurried upstairs and into his Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

bedchamber.

He threw the parcels on the bed. He pulled off his wet coat. Turning to toss it toward a chair, he saw his wife, sitting on the rug before the fireplace, her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped about them.

His heartbeat quickened to triple time.

Avoiding her gaze and trying to steady his breathing, he knelt down beside her.

Looking for words, and looking anywhere but at her face, he saw the box her ink-stained fingers encircled.

He stared at it, frowning, for a long moment. Then he remembered. Jaynes. The lacquered box.

"What have you got there, Grenville?" he said lightly. "Poison for exasperating husbands?"

"Keepsakes," she said.

"They're not keepsakes," he said stoutly, while well aware the lie was written plain on his face in vivid scarlet. "I like to keep a lot of rubbish in my pockets because it makes Jaynes wild. You make it easy because you're forever leaving debris in your wake."

She smiled. "You're adorable when you're embarrassed."

"I'm not embarrassed. A man who's spent half the day conversing with a dog is past embarrassment." He put out his hand. "Give it back, Grenville. You're not supposed to go poking about in a fellow's personal belongings. You should be ashamed of yourself. You don't see me sneaking behind your back for a look at the next chapter of
The Rose of Thebes
, do you?"

He felt rather than saw the box drop into his hand, for his gaze had shifted to her face. He caught the startled look in the instant before she blinked it away.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

"I'm not blind," he said. "I saw Lady Dain's ring—the great ruby, amazingly like your description of the Rose of Thebes. I'd had my suspicions before of who St.

Bellair really was—interesting, isn't it, how the letters can be rearranged to spell

'Ballister'?—but the ring clinched it. Today, I found out—in the same way you did, I reckon—where Lady Dain's ruby had come from. Whether originally looted from a pharaoh's tomb, no one could say. But the jeweler's agent did buy it in Egypt."

To her credit, Grenville didn't try to pretend she didn't know what he was talking about. "You suspected be-fore?" Her blue gaze was soft with wonder. "How did you suspect?
No one
suspects. Even Miss Price, who is almost painfully perceptive, gaped at me for a full minute when I told her."

"You gave yourself away in the last two installments, when Diablo started sounding like
me
."

She swung up onto her feet in a rustle of bombazine. She began to pace, as she had done last night.

He sank down onto the carpet and lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head, which was turned to the side, so he could watch her. He loved to watch her walk, long confident strides that would have seemed mannish if it weren't for the arrogant sway of her magnificent rump.
That
was all woman.

This was but a temporary respite, he knew, and not much of one at that. While he lay apparently at his ease, images advanced and receded in his mind, like shipwreck victims upon the waves.

He'd taken Susan to Southwark, to the Marshalsea. He'd seen children, some hurrying out—on errands for parents who could not leave the prison—and some returning, more listlessly, their steps dragging as they neared the gates.

His wife had been one of those children, and he knew what the Marshalsea had Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

stolen from her.

…
take me to meet my new family
.

He knew what she wanted in Bedfordshire.

"Oh, it's impossible!" She flung herself into a chair. "I shall never manage you."

She set her elbow on the chair arm and her chin on her knuckles and eyed him reproachfully. "You undermine and overthrow me at every turn. Every time I want you to do something you find disagreeable—which is practically everything

—you find a way to turn my heart to mush. What have you done, read every word I've ever written, and analyzed and anatomized it?"

"Yes." He turned his gaze to the ceiling. "And if I'd known that was all it took to turn your heart to mush, I could have saved myself a good deal of money today—

not to mention sparing myself Susan's aggravating company."

There was a silence, during which, he assumed, the parcels on the bed finally attracted her attention.

"You wicked man." Her voice was low and not quite steady. "Have you been buying me gifts?"

"Bribes," he said, sneaking a glance at her. She had left the chair to go to the bed, and stood looking at the packages. "So I wouldn't be obliged to sleep in the stables."

After Rundell and Bridge, after the Marshalsea, he'd taken Susan from shop to shop, with one break for sustenance in a private dining parlor of a coaching inn.

"Perhaps you're not so good at reading my mind as I believed," she said. "That thought never crossed it."

He got up and went to her. "Open them," he said.

There were notebooks, their rich vellum pages bound in leather as soft as butter.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

There was a cylindrical pen case of delicately worked silver, with an inkwell that screwed to the bottom of the tube. There was a small traveling writing box, decorated with scenes from mythology, whose compartments contained pens, inkwells, and pounce box, and whose small drawers held wafers, notepaper, and a silver penknife. There was a silver inkstand, as well as a papier-mâché pencil box, filled with pencils.

"Oh," Lydia softly exclaimed time after time, as the wrappings fell away to reveal the treasures.

And, "Oh, thank you," she said at the end, when the wrappings lay strewn about her, on the bed where she sat and on the floor. She had the writing box in her lap, and she opened and closed the tiny drawers and lifted the lids of the compartments and took out their contents and put them back again—like a child enchanted with a new toy.

She felt like a child, truly. There had been gifts, on her birthday and at Christmastime, from Ste and Effie, and pretty ones, too: shoes and frocks and bonnets and sometimes a pair of earbobs or a bracelet.

This was altogether different, for these were the instruments of her trade, and she, who traded in words, found her vocabulary robbed, along with her heart.

"Thank you," she whispered again, helplessly, while she looked into his handsome face and gave up all hope of ever being sensible again.

Pleasure shone in his green eyes, and his mouth curved into a smile that reduced the mush of her heart to warm syrup. It was a boy's smile, half mischief, half abashed.

"My humble offerings have pleased Her Majesty, I see," he said.

She nodded. Even if she could have strung words together at the moment, she didn't dare try, lest she commence bawling.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

"Then I collect you're sufficiently softened up for the coup de grace," he said. He reached into his waistcoat pocket and withdrew yet another parcel.

This one he opened himself, turning away, so that she couldn't see what it was.

"Close your eyes," he said. "And let go of the damn writing box. I'm not going to steal it back."

She let go of the box and closed her eyes.

He took her right hand and slid a ring onto her fourth finger. She knew it was a ring, smooth and cool, and she knew her hand was shaking.

"You can look," he said.

It was a cornflower-blue sapphire, rectangular and simply cut, and so large it would have appeared gaudy on any hand but hers, which was no daintier than the rest of her. Diamonds winked on either side.

She was aware of tears winking from the corners of her eyes.
Don't be a ninny
, she told herself.

"It's… lovely," she said. "And—and I shan't say you shouldn't have, because I don't feel that way at all. I feel like a princess in a fable."

He bent and kissed the top of her head.

"I'll take you to Bedfordshire," he said.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

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Vere sat at his study desk, surrounded by crumpled wads of paper. It was Saturday morning, and he was trying to compose a letter to Lord Mars. That should have been easy enough, but Grenville had warned him to be diplomatic…

whatever that meant.

Vere was about to go looking for her, to demand specifics, when she opened the door.

"Lord Mars is here," she said, "and by the looks of him, it isn't a social visit."

Moments later, they were in the library with His Lordship.

He was travel-stained, trembling with fatigue, and unshaven. "They've bolted,"

he said, as soon as Vere and Lydia entered. "Please, for the love of God, tell me they're here. Safe. The girls, I mean. Elizabeth and Emily."

Blank, cold, Vere stared at him.

Grenville hurried to the decanter tray and filled a glass, which she gave to Lord Mars. "Do sit," she said. "Collect yourself."

"They're not here." His shoulders sagged. He sank into a chair. "I feared as much. Yet I hoped."

Feared. Hoped. Tell me they're here. Safe.

The room darkened, shrank, and swelled again. Something swelled within Vere, cold and heavy. "Bloody hell," he said between his teeth, "You couldn't keep Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

them safe, either?"

"Safe?" Mars rose, his face white and stiff. "Those children are as dear to me as my own. But my affection, my care, avails nothing, because I am not
you
." He pulled a crumpled note from his pocket, flung it down. "There. Read for yourself what they have to say. The girls you've neglected. Not a word from you. Not a visit. Not so much as a note. They might as well be lying in stone coffins with their brothers and parents, as far as you're concerned. Yet they left the shelter of my house, where they've been loved and cared for—dearly,
dearly
. They left because their love and loyalty is with you." ,

"Please, sir, collect yourself," said Grenville. "You are overset. Ainswood is, too." She urged Mars to sit, put the glass back in his hand.

Vere read the note. It was but a few lines, that was all—a few daggers to the heart. He looked at his wife. "They wanted to be at our wedding," he said.

She took the note from him, quickly read it.

Mars drank a little. His color returned. He went on talking. The girls must have left before daybreak on Monday, he told them. He and his brothers-in-law had set out looking for them by midmorning. Yet despite the mere few hours' start the girls had had, the men had been unable to discover a trace of them. No one had seen them—at the coaching inns, tollgates. They couldn't have made it to Liphook, because he'd combed the village and its environs.

Mars took out a pair of miniatures and laid them upon the library table. "They are not ordinary-looking," he said. "How could anyone fail to notice them?"

Vere stood looking down at the small oval paintings, making no move to pick them up. Shame was acid in his mouth and a cold weight in his chest. He would have recognized them, yes, would have seen Charlie in them. He didn't know them, though. He would not have known the sound of their voices, because he'd Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

scarcely ever spoken to them, never listened, never paid attention.

Yet they'd run away, from love and protection, to see him wed because, Elizabeth had written, "We must make it clear that we wish him happy, as Papa would have done. Papa would have gone."

Vere became aware of his wife's voice. "You will make ready while Lord Mars takes some time to rest." she told him, "though I know he doesn't wish to. Send messages to all your cronies. You want as many eyes as you can muster. You will take half the servants; I'll keep the other half, to help me cover the London vicinity. You must take some maids as well. Women see things differently than men do. I shall contact all my informants."

She turned back to Lord Mars. "You must send your wife a message, to assure her that matters are in hand. I know you wish to wait until there is good news, but it is dreadful for her to wait and not know anything."

"You are generous," Mars told her. "You make me ashamed."

The duchess lifted her eyebrows.

"We closed ranks against you," Mars said. "Because you were not highborn.

Because of scandal."

"She's a Ballister," Vere said. "Dain's cousin. You snubbed a Ballister, you pious snob."

Mars nodded wearily. "That's what I heard. I thought it was idle gossip. I saw my mistake a little while ago." He rose, carefully set his empty glass down. His hand trembled. "I've slept little. At first I believed my eyes played tricks on me. I thought I was seeing ghosts." He essayed a smile, not very successfully. "That of the third Marquess of Dain, to be precise. You are remarkably like my old nemesis in the Lords."

"Yes, well, she'll be
our
nemesis if we don't find those girls," Vere said shortly.

Loretta Chase - The Last Hellion

"I'll take you up to a room. You'd better have a wash, and something to eat, and contrive a nap if you can. I'll want your brain in working order."

He took Mars's arm. "Come along, then. We'll let Grenville marshal the troops.

It's best to stay out of her way when she's
organizing
."

Athcourt, Devon

"I say, Miss Price, you do have a knack for makin' yourself scarce, not but what it's easy enough in this pile. I wonder why Dain don't keep a post chaise handy to carry the ladies at least from one end of the place to the other. But the truth is, no one would blame a fellow for thinkin' you was avoidin' me, which," Bertie added with a stern look, "ain't sportin', especially when he's raked fore and aft and you knew what I was goin' to say, didn't you?"