The Scarred Earl (3 page)

‘I wonder if your namesake argued with Hades before he bore her off to join his dark world?’ he mused with a nod at the artfully carved Persephone nearby.

It felt as if he was drily discussing classical mythology with a tutor at Oxford or Cambridge, except she was sure he’d never looked at one of them with lust in his fathomless deep-blue eyes. There was a spark of something more dangerous than mere need lurking in them to disrupt her peace of mind as well, and she struggled to free herself of a spell she was sure he hadn’t wrought deliberately, since he seemed to dislike her almost as bitterly as she did him.

‘Persephone’s mother raged after her daughter to wrest her from her dark lord and his underworld,’ she managed to argue, despite a fast-beating heart and this odd feeling of being cut off from the real world in here, with him.

She ought to turn and walk away, of course, but the reckless Seaborne spirit had got into her along with her fidgets, so she stood her ground and met look for look. Trying not to acknowledge a terrible heat had
sprung to life deep inside her and was making her a stranger to herself; she reminded herself he was a stranger and would remain one if she had any sense.

‘Only for half the year, remember?’ he argued. ‘Do you think she was content above ground and missing her lover until winter came back and she could join him? I suspect she couldn’t wait to lie in his arms again while the earth rested and she could escape the constant pleas and botheration of mere mortals.’

‘It’s just a myth, a neat story to entertain simple people and explain away the seasons without need for deep thought,’ she replied in a breathy voice so different from her usual tone that she scolded herself for being a fool and letting him unnerve her.

‘Persephone was a fertility goddess, Miss Seaborne. Her cult wove deep into the fabric of ancient Greek life and held her responsible for far more than a little extra daylight and the wearing of lighter clothing for a few months.’

‘I understood that Greece, being a Mediterranean land, enjoyed little change in climate between summer and winter, Lord
Calvercombe,’ she said in as unemotional a tone as she could manage.

He was so close it seemed almost a crime not to touch his scarred face and explore the smooth firmness of the unmarred side. He seemed to be two facets of man: one smooth and bronzed and as perfect as man could be, the other battle-scarred, cynical and deeply marked by the terror and evil he must have met. Intriguing to find out how a young Apollo like Lieutenant Forthin had become bitterly reclusive Lord Calvercombe and if much of one remained in the other, despite his hardened exterior. Also incredibly dangerous to her peace of mind—she had enough to worry about without him fascinating and infuriating her by turns.

‘Tell the men of the mountains there’s no winter there when they battle feet of snow, Miss Seaborne, and all their kin and cattle crowd in the house for warmth and travellers and luckier souls stay by the sea to seek what warmth there is. Winter exists everywhere, Persephone, even if sometimes it lives only in the souls of men.’

‘How do you know?’ she had to ask softly, sensing the real Alexander Forthin beneath
all the armour and scepticism and wanting to know him better.

‘I’ve seen it,’ he said, seeming continents away, lost in a bleak place where men carved their hatred of others on the faces of their captured enemies, either to extract their secrets, or for the twisted pleasure of torture itself.

Her fingers itched to soothe those silvery, healed scars of his and assure him he wasn’t at the mercy of merciless men any longer. He seemed to remember where he was and who he was talking to, and stepped away as though he could read her mind and her thoughts burned him.

‘You have a way of extracting secrets that could be a potent asset, Miss Persephone Seaborne,’ he accused, as if she had broken his solitude and peace after a hectic day, not the other way about.

‘It might indeed, if I wanted to know them in the first place,’ she said as icily as she could.

‘
Touché
, my dear,’ he said with a rueful smile that almost disarmed her.

‘Go away, Lord Calvercombe,’ she ordered coldly.

‘If only I could, Miss Seaborne,’ he said
regretfully, ‘but something evil this way comes, to paraphrase those witches in
Macbeth
you probably know all about, given your erudite education. I can’t let it harm you whilst Jack is otherwise engaged.’

‘Why not?’ she said childishly. Though she was acutely disturbed to know he felt as if a dark blight was eating at the edges of Jack and Jessica’s glowing happiness as well, she was unwilling to acknowledge she and this apology for an Earl might have more in common than either of them desired.

‘I’ve seen what a man’s worst enemy is capable of, more often than I care to recall in India. Do you think you’re immune to the evil we humans do each other purely because you’re lovely, rich and well born? You could only cling to that belief for seconds after stepping on to a battlefield, unless you really are as impervious to the lives of mortals as yon stone depiction of your namesake,’ he told her, as if she were the unreasonable one and he temperate as a May morning.

‘No, I’m not so arrogant, whatever poor opinion you may have cobbled together from second-hand gossip and supposition. Nevertheless, I have a brother out in this wide and weary world somewhere and I fear deeply
for him, Lord Calvercombe, despite my selfish, shallow and hard-hearted nature. If facing whatever threatens Rich is the only way to find out what happened to him, and why he either can’t or won’t come home, then I will face it. I certainly don’t need your help to do so.’

‘Then you really are a fool,’ he said harshly, and she couldn’t resist giving a shrug, as if his opinion didn’t matter.

‘Not fool enough to put faith in a man who sneaks about in the dark to meet his old friend as if he doesn’t trust him. Jack would welcome you joyfully if you came up his drive in rags with not a penny to your name.’

He had the grace to blush as she spoke of the hurt her cousin had felt when Lord Calvercombe didn’t trust his generosity of spirit to face him by daylight. She recalled the June night when Alex Forthin met the Duke of Dettingham at midnight and they found more in the dark than either had bargained for.

Independent of each other, she and Jessica had stalked them in brilliant moonlight. Whilst Jess had met her match in the enchanted depths of the wilderness walk in full midsummer bloom on the way back
that night, Persephone came away from her first sight of the man she remembered from Rich and Jack’s schooldays as fabulously handsome, if arrogant, with a vague sense of disappointment. He probably would have annoyed her even if she weren’t already furious that he could think any Seaborne would turn from his scars in disgust.

‘I was misinformed,’ he defended himself, but this wasn’t the time to find endearing his gruff reluctance to admit he was wrong. ‘The Duchess told me I was unfit to be seen by light of day.’

‘Jessica said that? No, she would never spout such rubbish, any more than she could revile you for a hurt that was none of your fault.’

‘That’s debatable,’ he said ruefully. Then, catching sight of her renewed fury at his dismissal of Jessica’s generosity of heart, as well as her extra sensitivity to society’s uneasy reaction to her own damaged leg, he held up his hand to stop her tirade. ‘I mean it’s a moot point that this was not my fault—’ he flicked an impatient finger at his damaged face and eye ‘—if I’d obeyed orders and not been an arrogant young idiot, I would never have been captured in the first place.
Perhaps life would then have been very different for me if I’d done as I was bid, Miss Seaborne, but you leap keenly to the defence of relatives or friends others dare to criticise, do you not?’ he asked almost as if it were the first admirable quality he’d found in her and common justice made him admit it. ‘It was Jack’s grandmother, not his new wife, who informed me I should not bother him or the ladies of the house party he was hosting with my repulsive countenance. I can see for myself Jack and his Jessica will be likely targets for every enterprising beggar in the Marches, once word gets out how good and benevolent both are. Hopefully Jack’s to-hell-with-you manner will disguise it well enough for them to keep a few guineas in their coffers to feed their family when it comes along.’

‘I think it might manage that,’ she couldn’t help responding with a rueful smile at the idea of the fabulous wealth of the Seabornes being dissipated by her shrewd, if sometimes soft-hearted, cousin. ‘And can’t you see for yourself that’s just the sort of thing everyone expects the Dowager Duchess to say? If you haven’t realised by now that’s half the reason she goes on saying such things, then
you’re a bigger fool than I thought you to be that night.’

‘She’s
your
grandmother,’ he replied as if that explained a great deal.

‘We all have our crosses to bear,’ she said lightly.

She refused to see any of herself in the famously rude old lady, who had terrorised her husband and both her sons and their wives as Duchess in power, until her husband died, annoying her more in death than he had in life. The Dowager Duchess had retired to the mansion in Hanover Square and a lofty house near Bath she had inherited from her nabob father, rather than yield precedence in her former domain to a mere daughter-in-law, or endure living in Ashburton Dower House for the rest of her days.

Since she had decamped for her own houses, the Dowager refused to discuss events at Ashburton, or Dettingham House in Grosvenor Square, much to her sons’ relief. Or at least she had until Jack was rumoured to have done away with Persephone’s brother Richard. Then the Duchess had decreed it was high time Jack wed and put that silly story down as the fairy tale it was by siring direct heirs to replace Rich in
the succession. Persephone wondered if it annoyed her haughty grandmama that Jack then went about it in his own unique fashion and fell head over heels in love with Jessica Pendle. She surprised herself with the conclusion the Dowager was almost smug about that very outcome, as if she’d planned it all along, and learnt to distrust the wily old tyrant more than ever.

‘At least you
are
blessed with a close family,’ Lord Calvercombe interrupted her reverie and the uncomfortable notion her grandmother was omnipotent after all.

‘Sometimes that’s more a curse than a blessing,’ she said, trying not to feel sympathy for a man who was as alone as a powerful aristocrat could ever be.

‘I could certainly curse your brother up hill and down dale at times.’

‘If only you would find him safe and well while you did it, I might join you.’

‘Yet from what you said just now, you would put yourself in danger for him if there was any prospect you might find him by doing so, or did I mistake you?’

‘Yes, I would, but even when he makes me wish I was strong enough to shake him until his teeth rattled, I still love him. Richard
is my big brother after all, Lord Calvercombe, and can’t help being annoying at the best of times.’

‘It doesn’t mean you have to love him for it, Miss Seaborne. I can’t recall any love ever existing to be lost between myself and my own half-brother, or between my father and his elder brother for that matter. Rivalry over an empty thing like a title, especially when the estates that goes with it are in the condition mine were after they all finished quarrelling over them, apparently transcends brotherly love so far as we Forthins are concerned.’

‘Being raised in such a nest of rivals, I suppose it is little wonder you don’t understand how deeply we Seabornes feel about each other, my lord. Your example proves how very lucky we are to do so, I suppose.’

‘Or that you are better and more generous people than we are.’

‘Far be it from me to suggest it,’ she said innocently, then wondered why there was a flash of some powerful emotion in his eyes, as if he had an impulse to do something very foolish indeed.

‘Perhaps it’s because my cousin Annabelle wasn’t born a Forthin that I loved her so
much,’ he said almost as if he was reasoning something out loud, rather than confiding in her. ‘And why I must find her, or at least know what happened to her, while I was too far away to help. She is the only child of my cousin Alicia and her nautical husband, Captain de Morbaraye, and she came to live at Penbryn once she was considered in need of an education, while they carried on sailing the seven seas.’

‘Penbryn was your father’s house?’

She was interested because his precious Annabelle disappeared at the same time as her brother Richard. This discovery had provoked his midnight visit to Ashburton—and there was nothing personal about her memories of that night, she excused herself. She wasn’t intrigued by this complex and contrary man; she only needed to know Rich was alive and well, and if his search helped prove it then all well and good.

‘Penbryn was my mother’s home,’ he replied with a puzzled shake of his head and a distant look in his eyes as if trying to recall her. ‘It was probably only because she was heiress of Penbryn Castle that my father married her in the first place, since my uncle didn’t have a Welsh castle and it must have
annoyed him to know his younger brother would live there with his second wife. You can probably only imagine how my brother hated me for inheriting the castle when he was the eldest son. In his own opinion, as well as that of the law, he should have had everything, although he had no blood ties to my late grandfather, the Earl of Tregaron, whatsoever.’

‘If the castle is yours, why did you join the army and leave it for India?’

‘Have we not discussed the fact I’m a fool already, Miss Seaborne?’ he asked with a wry smile that set her heart skipping all over again when it made him look boyish and almost lovable.

It should not be allowed. She could cope with him bitterly furious at life; could easily endure arrogant and aloof Lord Calvercombe with little more than an irrepressible flutter of girlish excitement; but the complex man underneath made her long for all sorts of things the Earl would never countenance.

‘My grandfather tied up my inheritance until I attained the age of five and twenty,’ he went on. ‘Since my legal guardian was to administer the trust and my brother became that guardian when my father died, I
could not endure seeing him play ducks and drakes with my inheritance whilst I waited impatiently for that day. I decided I’d better put a few thousand miles between us, before I gave in to the urge to strangle him before he did more damage.’