The Scarred Earl (24 page)

Then Alex had come like a thief in the night, thinking he was too scarred for fine young ladies to look on, and shaken
her
world without trying. He was so harsh and changed and wounded by life, he’d made her temper snap into action to cover up her contrary feelings when he met her eyes with a challenge in them and fear she would turn away with revulsion. All she had really
wanted even then was to wander off into the night with him and comfort them both for what war had done to him, she realised now. But it wasn’t their night. Thanks to her interfering cousin a joyous consummation between them would have to wait another four weeks, and every day felt endless as a prison sentence.

‘Thank heavens the guest wing is as far away from the rest of us as we can get,’ he muttered wickedly now and made her splutter with unexpected laughter.

‘I don’t think your distant cousin drew breath the entire time we were shut up in that wretched carriage together,’ she replied, in danger of forgetting her sister and the rest of the human race once more and trying hard to snap herself back to reality. ‘My brother will need all the patience he can muster, and a large supply of cotton wool to stop his ears with, until he has his new family settled, I fear,’ she told him.

‘Aye,’ Alex agreed with a rueful smile. ‘I should try to persuade him they must come and live at Penbryn, instead of staying here to plague your family.’

‘You
are
my family now, Alex. You can’t isolate yourself from the Seabornes again
when you’re about to marry me, unless you’re prepared to disown me after all.’

‘Never, but are you truly willing to endure weeks of that silly and selfish female’s company, after the hours you just spent with her?’

‘Don’t joke about our marriage, Alexander.’

‘I wish I knew what you two were talking about,’ Helen said acerbically, ‘and it’s getting darker with every minute. Why on earth won’t you come inside and argue about nothing to your heart’s content in comfort?’

‘Where you can hear and see us, I suppose? Are you really prepared to marry into relatives like mine, Alex? Some of them are a sad challenge to their family’s patience at the best of times.’

‘I should certainly like a couple of ready-made little sisters to plague,’ he replied with one of his self-deprecating smiles for Helen.

‘As if we need another over-protective male in our lives,’ Helen said and rolled her eyes, but Persephone knew her love had made yet another conquest.

Persephone decided Marcus could tell the rest of the family it would be getting a closer alliance with the Warrender family than they
were aware of, while she went upstairs and enjoyed the luxury of a hot bath after such an appalling journey. After their interminable carriage ride, she began to wonder if a nice quiet dungeon might not have its attractions compared to any space that contained Electra Warrender for more than five minutes at a stretch.

‘I have one more errand to run today, my dear,’ Alex whispered after he had shepherded Persephone inside and Helen could think of no more excuses to linger.

‘Does it concern him?’ she asked, knowing he could understand she meant the lurking enemy she had been terrified might attack either Alex or Marcus all the way home, despite that ugly fracas in the woods that might be expected to send him scurrying back to his lair with his tail between his legs.

‘Not this time,’ he said uninformatively.

‘You will be careful though, won’t you?’ she said with the flutter of terror in her heart at exactly what that enemy could do to them, now they needed each other so profoundly. Alex shrugged and gave her a long look that told her he hadn’t quite come to terms with
her own insistence on living a normal life, despite that enemy.

‘What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,’ he told her with a look that reminded her a little too well of the wild and unrepentant young buck he’d been when she was a wild and equally shameless romp of a schoolgirl.

‘Lady Henry has ordered supper to be served in an hour, Miss Persephone,’ Hughes informed her sympathetically when he ghosted back into the hall to find her staring out into the shadows after Alex, as if she might be able to send her love and protection after him somehow.

‘I suppose I’d best go upstairs and change then,’ she said with a weary sigh and trudged upstairs to remove what felt like the dust of ages and one or two of Kingslake Moot Castle’s ancient cobwebs that she hadn’t been able to brush off the skirts of her travelling gown.

Luckily Electra decided she wasn’t the centre of attention and sought her bed as soon as the informal meal was over. The wedding guests had finally departed and even Corisande had taken herself off to London
to order that outrageous gown to outshine the next bride. So there was nobody left to tattle the story abroad when Marcus finally told his mother and sisters the story of his kidnap. Persephone’s thoughts drifted from the comical narrative Marcus made out of his ordeal as she wondered why her fiancé had slipped away again as soon as dinner was over, until Alex returned and gave her an even better reason to be distracted from a tale she already knew.

‘Is all well?’ she whispered as he joined her on a sofa apart from the others so stealthily she doubted they noticed he’d returned, or perhaps that he’d ever been absent to start with.

For her the air fizzed with energy and life the moment he came into the room, but the rest of her family weren’t in love with the man and could hardly be expected to feel acutely conscious of his every move as she was.

‘Very well,’ he murmured with a smug look and refused to say why his errand had been so urgent he couldn’t have stayed to share the telling of Marcus’s tale.

‘Hush!’ Helen urged sternly when her eldest
sister tried to quiz Alex more closely. ‘Marcus has got to the best bit.’

‘He should go on the stage,’ Persephone replied with a frown that should say she only believed about one word in five out of his colourful narrative.

‘Anyway, I can’t tell you much about how I was brought to Alex’s Gothic horror of a castle. I was unconscious throughout and have no real idea who left me there or how I was received by my host and his family,’ Marcus said.

‘Can’t you make something up?’ Persephone asked with a sceptical look that told him she knew part of his tale had been trumped up between him and Alex on that long ride back to Ashburton.

‘Not when Mr Warrender is sure to know more about this bit than I do,’ he said with a deference his future father-in-law clearly found as unlikely as the rest of Marcus’s tall tale.

‘Which is little more than nothing at all,’ the unassuming gentleman said with a baffled shrug Persephone refused to take at face value as well.

‘Yet you must have seen this man who claimed to be Calvercombe before that day,
or surely you would not have believed his story and done as he bid you by locking Marcus up until the man had firm proof of his evil deeds?’ Lady Henry pointed out, proving to her eldest daughter she saw through all the holes in the story they were spinning as easily as she could.

‘Aye, he arrived one day about a month ago, announced he was in two minds about letting us stay in his lordly wreck of a house and convinced my wife he would find us a neat house in some minor watering place where we would be much more comfortable, if we did exactly what he asked us to from now on without questioning the whys and wherefores.’

‘But why did you believe he was Alex?’ Persephone couldn’t help asking.

‘Because he told us he was, I suppose, my dear,’ Mr Warrender replied with a shrug.

‘And that was all it took to convince you, sir? Anyone could go about the countryside claiming to be the Earl of Calvercombe by that reckoning.’

‘Indeed, but my wife assured me the man was her cousin, although he insisted on keeping the collar of his coat pulled high about
his face and his hat low on his brow, so I was amazed she could discern anything.’

‘We heard that you had suffered disfigurement whilst serving in India, you see, my lord,’ Antigone admitted bravely. ‘So the fact the man did his best to hide his face convinced us he was you and, as we have never set eyes on you in our lives, why would we question his identity when he claimed to be you?’

‘Which was very astute of him, don’t you think?’ Alex said cheerfully and Persephone gave a quiet sigh of relief that he’d got over caring what the world thought of his scars, as long as the bit of it he cared about valued him for the unique person he was, with or without them.

‘He thought he could use Marcus to pressure the rest of the family to find my eldest son and Miss de Morbaraye for him, did he not?’ Lady Henry cut in, refusing to be diverted from the cold and heartless core of Marcus’s abduction by his inference it was done for every other reason he could come up with but that one. ‘And he clearly thought that, by blackening dear Alexander’s good name with his lies, he could throw any pursuit
off himself, which was a despicable trick even for a villain.’

‘What a truly wicked man he must be,’ Helen said with a shiver of unease.

‘Certainly he’s a clever, as well as a desperate, one to come up with such a wild scheme to draw Rich and my cousin Annabelle out of hiding,’ Alex added into the quiet as they all realised how close evil had come to the Seabornes this time. ‘If he wants to find them so badly, he’ll be even more dangerous now we have contrived to get Marcus back without paying the devil’s bargain he offered us.’

‘But we are all on our guard now,’ Mr Warrender said with a quiet resolution Persephone hadn’t thought he had in him, but she supposed his beloved daughter’s fate was now wrapped up with a Seaborne, so their cause had become much more important as far as he was concerned.

‘Then you and Marcus must be sure to stay especially so, Mr Warrender, considering you are the only ones who have actually set eyes on the villain. Although we are all assuming he has acted alone, somehow I don’t think this scoundrel would trust anyone else to hold such power over him,
do you, Alexander?’ Lady Henry said with a shrewdness Persephone knew should not surprise her, after twenty-one years of living with her clever mother.

‘No,’ he replied with a thoughtful frown, ‘but it was a clumsy move brought about by frustration that Rich didn’t do as he probably expected and turn up for Jack’s wedding. I suspect the man knew it was a strategy that was unlikely to bring him the results he wanted, but he had to know if we are secretly in contact with Rich. If your eldest son came out of hiding to protect his brother all the better, ma’am, but at least the man now knows as much as we do about Rich and my cousin’s whereabouts, which is nothing at all. He’s learnt where not to waste effort in future and we know why Rich is so determinedly absent, so both of us have learnt a little from the fiasco.’

‘It didn’t feel trivial at the time,’ Marcus protested indignantly.

‘You need a keeper,’ his fond fiancée told him gruffly.

‘Then isn’t it lucky I stumbled across you, my love?’ he said with such genial obnoxiousness nobody would have been surprised if Antigone smacked him.

‘I don’t think that was luck,’ his beloved said with a long cool look for her father, which he returned with cherubic innocence.

Persephone decided she’d been wrong to write him off as an amiable, if somewhat doleful, nonentity. Marcus would enjoy a challenging life with his fiery Antigone and she was far better suited to his stubborn Seaborne nature than some meek little débutante he could slot into his life and hardly even notice she was there as he went on his merry way. How satisfying that in doing evil, the villain of the piece had done her younger brother so much good all unknowing, and even brought about her own marriage to a man she couldn’t envisage living without.

‘Come, my dears,’ Lady Henry said with a motherly look at her eldest daughter and younger son as weariness finally caught up with them both, ‘there will be plenty of time for talking in the morning, after we all have a good night’s sleep.’

‘Meet me on the terrace at dawn,’ Alex murmured in Persephone’s ear when Lady Henry discreetly averted her eyes so they could say goodnight.

‘Why?’ she asked sleepily, surprised into meeting his dark gaze and seeing devilment
and far more complex emotions deep within them as he silently asked her to trust him. ‘Oh, very well,’ she said as she took the candle he offered and smiled up at him as she fought off wave upon wave of weariness.

‘Come on, my love. I think I’d best come and help you out of your gown so you don’t wake up face down on the pillow come morning fully clothed,’ her mother said and put an arm round her elder daughter’s waist to tow her off to bed as she had when Persephone was a little girl and far too stubborn to give in to the night.

‘Why?’ Persephone repeated to her betrothed almost as sleepily as she had last night after she unlocked the side door of the family wing of the house several hours later and stepped out into the waiting dawn to meet her love.

‘I’ll answer all your questions when we’re further from the house,’ Alex told her mysteriously and she let him lead her through the September dew, despite the fact it got her soft-soled shoes unromantically wet and she still felt dazed with sleep, even after the shock of cold dew against her once-warm feet.

‘Are we walking all the way to Ashburton village?’ she demanded once they were far enough away for the sharpest-eared chambermaid not to hear them if she spoke softly enough.

‘We’re not,’ he said uninformatively.

Seeing her mama’s landaulet waiting for them at the first stand of trees where it was hidden from the house, with Scrooby and his grooms doing their best to stop the team protesting at leaving their nice comfortable stable so early, she finally dug in her heels and refused to move until he told her what he was up to.

Alex eyed her cautiously as if she might erupt into a fury if he didn’t handle this very carefully indeed, but she saw vulnerability in his eyes as well as the sheer masculine arrogance of him and bit her tongue, for now.

‘Will you marry me?’ he asked with a gravelly harshness in his deep voice that told her how serious he was and how much her answer mattered to him.