The Marquess Who Loved Me (19 page)

“He’s in here?” Ellie interrupted. She’d successfully kept the vision of his bloodied face out of her mind that morning, but she wasn’t sure she was prepared to see it again.

“I couldn’t leave him in the ditch. There was no better place to put him. But unless we tell the magistrate to post notices, we have no way of discovering who he is.”

“What do you want me to sketch? I remember his face — there isn’t enough left to draw.”

Nick dropped the key into his pocket and put his arm around her shoulder. “There’s no need to see the face. I know you aren’t accustomed to such things.”

Ellie shook her head to clear it. She wasn’t eager to see the man again, but if she had to, she wouldn’t let herself vomit again. “I’ve seen wounds like that before. I can handle myself.”

Nick’s hand stopped in mid-caress. “Where would you have seen such a thing?

“Did you not hear?” She counted the months. Her father had died a year earlier, but it had taken a month or two for the rumors to spread. If Marcus had written the truth in a letter to Nick, he might not have received it before his ship left India. “I suppose you wouldn’t have. Officially, Father and Richard died in a carriage accident. Sophronia pulled every string she could to sway the reports. But really, my brother shot Father in the head and then turned the gun on himself.”

She said it as one repeated an oft-told bit of minor gossip — as though she didn’t sometimes still dream of her father and wish he had survived. Her nonchalance was a lie, though. In the dreams where he survived, it was only to tell her that he loved her.

And that was as delusional as any other fantasy she could have.

Nick dropped his arm away from her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“When?” she countered. “We’ve had more pressing issues to address. And anyway, it’s all in the past. How he died doesn’t matter, does it?”

But it did matter. There had been no time for deathbed conversions or last confessions. Just her father’s voice from three weeks before his death — the last time she’d given in and taken dinner with him. He had told her to stop mourning and find some purpose other than redecorating “that peasant’s house.”

She’d never admit it, but he may have had a point.

Nick frowned. “Did he ever apologize for…”

“Charles?”

He nodded.

Ellie snorted. “Of course not. He’d have found another Charles for me if I hadn’t become so disreputable and recalcitrant. But I understand him now, better than I did before.”

“What do you understand?”

“He did what he thought was best. Do I hate him for it? Yes. But he wasn’t evil. He just…wasn’t very nice.”

Before Nick responded, Marcus cleared his throat. “I’m sure this conversation is delightful, but may I suggest you continue it in the house? It’s far too cold out here.”

Nick unlocked the door and ushered them into the gloom of the windowless shed. Enough light came in through the door to make out an outline of the body; he added to it by lighting the lantern that sat on nearby stool. The corpse lay on the floor with a blanket covering it, and he knelt down to pull the blanket aside and reveal both arms, but not the head or chest.

“My batman discovered these tattoos when he checked for identifying marks. If you draw them, Trower can take them to the London or Southampton docks after the snows clear and possibly find which ships he sailed on.”

Ellie looked over the corpse. Most of the tattoos were simple designs and short words dyed into his skin. They would be easy enough for a novice to create during his breaks in the ship’s watches. Two or three were more intricate, created by a skilled artist — perhaps a tattooed warrior of the South Pacific?

She started sketching. The designs were small enough that she could fit them all on a single large page of her sketchbook. “Do you recognize any of them?” she finally asked after several minutes of drawing.

“No, but there is one he may have received when he crossed the Equator for the first time,” he said. “Sailors who’ve never crossed it before are put through any number of ordeals — shaving, tarring, and other, mostly good-natured, humiliations. Passengers like myself just have to contribute the alcohol on our first voyage across. But I might have gotten a tattoo myself that night if I’d had another cup of rum.”

She pictured him standing on the rail of a ship, the salt spray driving his hair back in the wind. It was enough to make her hand pause, wishing she could draw that instead of a dead man’s tattoos.

“You must have seen such wonderful sights,” she said, returning to her work.

He crouched beside her, examining her handiwork as she drew the last tattoo — a serpent wrapped around an anchor. “Sights beyond imagining. I wish you had been there to paint them. My words cannot do justice to them the way your colors can.”

“Perhaps someday, with whatever funds I have left, I shall go abroad,” Ellie said, shading in the serpent’s head. “I should have done so years ago, but I wasn’t quite ready to go alone.”

He was silent at that, but she didn’t notice until she’d finished the drawing — and realized, as she focused on their conversation rather than her pencil, how much she’d given away.

“No matter, though,” she said brightly, shoving the sketchbook at him. “Now that you’ve returned, you can take the estate. Marcus, would you care to escort me to Greece now that you may take a holiday?”

Marcus raised his brows as she stood and dusted off her skirts. “Have your forgotten that you are angry with me?”

Nick laughed. It was genuine mirth, not the cutting disdain he so often gave her. “She can be remarkably inconsistent when she doesn’t remember who she’s claimed to love and hate.”

“Claibornes,” she muttered. “I shall go to the Continent myself, then. If you are very kind to me, Nick, perhaps I will send you a sketch occasionally while you moulder in the House of Lords.”

“You
would
have me stuck in London for eternity, wouldn’t you?”

She wouldn’t. Nick belonged somewhere more primal, somewhere with a harsh purity to the sea and sky — not in Parliament or the ballrooms, where he didn’t have the patience to even play those murky social games, let alone win them.

“I’d have you on an isle in the Mediterranean,” she said. “Think of all I could paint there.”

His eyes flashed. But he didn’t respond. She was glad of it. She’d been too truthful, hadn’t hidden that statement beneath a jaded, sultry tone. She wanted him, all to herself, with Homer’s wine-dark sea and the flawless Mediterranean light serving as a backdrop for all the passion she’d always poured into her paintings of him.

That was a truth.

The worse truth, though, was that her heart — that poor, confused, angry beast — somehow had started painting a future with him again. A future with laughter, and love, and fire.

The future she had thought she’d finally, finally let go.

Stop mourning and find a purpose
, her father’s voice said.

Ellie turned abruptly for the door, wading through the awkward, heavy silence that followed her confession. “I hope I helped,” she said, her voice too loud. “I shall see you both at dinner, yes?”

She didn’t wait. They didn’t follow. She heard Marcus’s low whistle, heard Nick mutter something that made his brother laugh, but she didn’t turn back. She knew her mythology — if she turned back, she would be lost.

She was already lost.

She dipped down, scooped up a palmful of untouched snow, and pressed it against her face. The cold shocked her and she sucked in a deep, cleansing breath. The crisp air burned as she inhaled, froze as she exhaled. It was enough to help her slow her steps, enough that by the time she returned to the house, her wet face felt composed.

But not enough to save her from herself. Which left the question — should she run as far from Folkestone as her funds and courage could carry her?

Or should she let her heart fight, grimly, hopelessly, incurably, for a future she was sure Nick would never give her?

Hours later, after another of her chef’s delectable but interminable dinners, Ellie wanted wine. Great, overflowing vats of wine, in such quantities that the fumes alone could cloud her judgment. She would drink to excess, flirt and laugh and dance until she could no longer stand, and confront reality in the morning. Or the afternoon, when her head stopped spinning. If she waited long enough, she could repeat the cycle again without confronting reality at all.

Could she spend the four months Nick demanded in a state of utter inebriation?

She suppressed a scowl and reached for her teapot, part of the Spode service that had been a wedding gift. Her father had commissioned it for her and Charles, and she had received it long after she’d already put off her mourning. “May I refresh your cup, Aunt Sophronia?” she asked.

Her aunt held up her cup with an irritated sigh. “I know you’ve found your respectability now that your sisters are with you, and I applaud you for it, but I had hoped for stronger stuff. Where are the perfectly matched footmen bearing chalices of wine?”

“Packed up and put away, your grace,” Ellie said as she poured. “But the tea is excellent, don’t you think?”

Sophronia sniffed. “I don’t wish to waste my remaining years on tea. And from the way your fingers are drumming the pot, you don’t wish it either.”

Ellie deliberately set the teapot aside and folded her hands in her lap. “You are a terrible influence, aunt.”

They were sitting slightly apart from the rest of the women in the company, who had spread themselves throughout the connected drawing rooms after dinner as they waited for the men to join them. But Sophronia was formidable enough to say anything she pleased, whether she had an audience or not. “I am above reproach,” Sophronia declared. “And if I say we should have wine, then no one would think to question it.”

“Very well, I shall summon the butler. You are not making it easier for me to reform myself.”

Sophronia sniffed. “You never did invite me to one of your bacchanals. I refuse to allow you to reform before I attend one.”

Ellie looked through the connecting doors to where Kate and Maria sat together, giggling and sharing secrets. Even if they had both set their caps for Sebastian, it was all innocent — not the kind of trouble they would have found themselves in at one of her earlier parties. She turned back to Sophronia with a small shrug. “You are too late for a bacchanal, aunt. And anyway, I couldn’t play the jade forever. Everyone must change eventually.”

Sophronia leaned in, suddenly serious. Ellie had seen the liver spots hidden under Sophronia’s gloves, but her grip was still strong as she took Ellie’s hand. “You can change however you wish, Elinor. I admit, I would rather see you become a patroness of Almack’s than some dreadful, loose-moraled minx. But I thought you’d learned this lesson already — be who you want to be, not whatever someone else would make you.”

“And if I don’t want to host another infamous party?” Ellie asked.

Sophronia waved a magnanimous hand. “There are other hostesses who will take your place. But I’ll still have wine tonight.”

Ellie laughed. Sophronia was a force unto herself. Ellie was a force in some circles as well — and could be in others, at least as long as they didn’t know of her sudden poverty and Nick’s lascivious demands.

But did she want that kind of influence, the kind that gave her power without friendships and solitude without anyone to question her? Or should she take her aunt’s advice and chart her own course?

Lady Salford joined them then, choosing to sit with Sophronia and Ellie rather than some of the younger ladies. “I must compliment your chef, Lady Folkestone,” she said as Ellie poured her tea. “Your meals are as charming as I’ve always heard.”

“Thank you, Lady Salford. I hope to persuade him to stay with me rather than Folkestone — I am sure his genius takes the credit for why people accept my invitations.”

She couldn’t afford her chef, or her parties, but Lady Salford couldn’t know that. At least if Ellie turned respectable, she might live more cheaply. Far better to be thought a dull stick than a bankrupt one.

Lady Salford took the cup from Ellie’s outstretched hand. The conversation stayed neutral, never dropping into unseen currents. Lady Salford was eminently proper — not boring, precisely, but not one to even tiptoe on the edge of scandal. How she’d raised her children to be such rebels was a mystery. Her daughter Amelia was a secret writer; her niece Madeleine, whom she had raised for decades, had acted on a public stage; and her son Sebastian was somewhat of an enigma, since he spent most of his time on his plantation in the Caribbean. Only Alex, now Lord Salford, was proper — but perhaps he was just a late bloomer when it came to sin.

By the time the men entered the drawing room a quarter of an hour later, Ellie was itching for some sin herself. Propriety was all well and good. But the wine Sophronia had ordered and the restless prickling under her skin as she spoke of nothing and more nothing with Lady Salford combined to make her reckless.

If this were five years earlier, she might have taken a lover from one of her guests — a rake who wouldn’t hurt her but also wouldn’t press for the heart she couldn’t give him. But she’d been done with lovers for ages.

Until Nick had walked into her ball and claimed her. He walked into the drawing room the same way tonight, part proprietor, part predator. He’d leashed his darkest elements, feigning some transparent bonhomie with Lord Norbury, who regarded him with the confused, suspicious air of a man who had been warned to expect a lion and was instead presented with a housecat.

Ellie would have laughed at the thought of Nick as a housecat, but she knew his claws weren’t sheathed for her sake. Until tonight, he’d barely spoken to anyone in the party but her. His manners at the previous night’s dinner had been cold and aloof. Tonight, though, he had mounted a charm offensive that would have left all the foreign diplomats in the Court of St. James in the shade.