The Scarred Earl (8 page)

‘Which is why you feel so guilty about his disappearance now it has proved to be more sinister than you thought, I suppose. It’s become your duty to find him and make amends, don’t you think?’

‘You could be right.’

‘Don’t sound so surprised,’ he said with a disarming grin that suddenly made him as dangerous as the most notoriously charming rake.

‘However I feel, he’s still missing and now Marcus is being held into the bargain. The ring was clearly put there to spur us into finding Rich and your ward, if they truly disappeared together, and we have no way of knowing if Rich or your cousin are his true quarry. The implication is plain enough: we must find Rich in order to get Marcus back.’

‘Which speaks of desperation don’t you think?’ the Earl of Calvercombe said contemplatively, his brooding gaze on the Seaborne
ring as if it might tell the story of its adventures if he stared at it long enough.

‘Desperate men do desperate things, my lord,’ she agreed grimly, wishing it was as easy as wanting to know where the thing had been these last three years and having the answer miraculously pop into her head. ‘At times like this it would be good to believe in magic, don’t you think?’ she asked rat her absently.

‘Only if there happened to be a way of controlling each aspect of it, since the white side apparently carries a very black opposite. It always seemed to me there must be a vast price to pay for supernatural gifts, even if I did happen to believe in them.’

‘Being a Welshman you might more easily do so than most.’

‘Why? Because Shakespeare put supposed sorcery in Owain Glyndwr’s mouth it has to follow all Welshmen believe they can “call spirits from the vasty deep” if they so desire? I can’t decide if it’s worse to be thought deliberately fey or deeply credulous by right of birth.’

‘Why do some of your countrymen foster the impression your homeland is magical, then?’

‘It seems lovely and challenging to me without extra enchantment, but I’m only a bastard Welshman. My father was solidly English and so are my titles and most of my lands. I only suppose that when a people lose the chance to determine their own destiny they escape into a past of legend and power to avoid their day-to-day lot.’

‘I don’t seek to diminish the legends or suffering of your countrymen because I made an idle remark, Lord Calvercombe. I was brought up in these Marches, don’t forget, my nurse used to tell me stories of magicians and fierce dragons as well as the great princes of Gwynedd. Wales always seemed a green and enchanted land to me, as well as sometimes a very wet one—a caveat you must grant me from experience. I used to stay with my mother’s cousins in Pembrokeshire as a child, if I’d been good enough to deserve such a treat.’

‘I warrant that didn’t happen very often,’ he said with a look that might be admiring if it didn’t come from him.

‘No, I was a sad romp in those days.’

‘Only in those days? How you do surprise me, Miss Seaborne.’

‘Good, I should hate to be predictable.’

‘Believe me, there’s very little risk of it. I consider myself lucky if you fail to attack me on sight these days.’

‘I thought you were trying to harm Jack that night in the park and I wasn’t so very far wrong about your motives, was I? You may not have come here to hurt him physically, but you would have fought him if he took exception to your wandering about his estate as if you owned it, wouldn’t you?’ she challenged, trying to control a blush when she recalled her conduct the first time they met this summer, outside the summerhouse by the lake where Jack had gone to confront the elusive intruder stalking his lands by night.

‘I was frustrated at not being able to find a trace of my cousin Annabelle once they apparently left London together,’ he muttered gruffly, clearly ashamed of a lapse of judgement.

If that was the only reason he had agreed to take a role in Jack and Jessica’s wedding, Persephone couldn’t help admiring Jack’s ruthlessness in using any weapon handy to persuade his old friend to stand shoulder
to shoulder with him when he needed him there most.

‘I still can’t find her and we’re wasting precious time arguing whilst the trail is going cold and both your brothers are now missing,’ he pointed out.

‘How do you suggest we change that state of affairs, then? I doubt Marcus’s kidnapper left us a convenient trail of breadcrumbs to follow to his lair.’

‘I intend to make use of the talents nature gave me and Sir Arthur Wellesley and India refined when you finally take me to the place where Marcus’s hat and Rich’s ring were found and leave me to look and think,’ he told her irritably. She supposed it was the only course of action available given that Marcus and his captor must be long gone by now.

‘Very well,’ she conceded, but again that vital grip of his tightened without hurting her and stopped her in her tracks. ‘What? You demanded action and now you hold me back from taking it? You really are the most contrary as well as the most infuriating man I ever came across, my lord.’

‘You will take no part in this affair apart from showing me the place Marcus’s hat and
Rich’s ring were left,’ he said as if he had the right to dictate to her.

‘Intending to kidnap and imprison yet another of my unlucky mother’s brood, are you, my lord?’ she demanded hotly. ‘That’s the only way you’ll keep me from doing everything I can to find Marcus and then bring the black-hearted rogue behind his abduction to justice.’

‘Don’t tempt me,’ he rapped out furiously, glaring down at her.

‘Shall we get on? You’re the one impatient to be going.’

‘And you didn’t have a stern enough beating when you were young to make you tolerable to your fellow man now.’

‘Only a bully resorts to such ridiculous theories when logic fails to get him what he wants from life,’ she informed him in what she hoped was a superior tone as her heart thudded in her breast. She wished she was half as confident as she sounded that she must take a part in the search for her brothers.

‘Then let’s away, before I give in to my baser instincts and drag you upstairs and tie you to my bed to stop you plunging headfirst into whatever danger is on offer.’

‘Let’s, I’ve no time to stand here listening to the raving of a lunatic.’

‘If I spend much longer with you, no doubt I
will
be mad as a March hare, madam, since you would try the patience of a saint,’ he muttered darkly and, keeping her hand firmly in his, urged her out of the room and towards the stables before either of them could think better of the expedition.

Somewhere between Jack’s private domain and the vast ducal stableyard, the Earl of Calvercombe’s grip became merely the comfort of hand on hand and, despite her determination to hate him as fiercely as she had it in her to loathe a man who didn’t actively wish her harm, she found the contact reassuring. He was uniquely irritating, but he was also a capable and battle-hardened ex-soldier. The closeness of him felt nigh irresistible to a wilder self usually buried under her serene exterior as well, and she did her best to ignore the silly creature.

It was folly to turn to the Earl of Calvercombe for comfort, but she needed a man of action. She had even thought about sending Joe Brandt after Jack and Jessica for perhaps half a minute. If she thought it would
do any good, she wouldn’t hesitate, but all it would achieve would be to give their unseen enemy the satisfaction of knowing they had been dragged back from their wedding journey for no useful purpose. While there was a stubborn and arrogant overlord on hand, why bother landing herself with another imperious aristocrat like Jack to stamp about the place being masterly?

No, Alex Forthin was the ideal man to outfox their mysterious enemy, and she prayed nobody would send for her cousin behind her back and ruin his honeymoon. As they waited for the horses to be saddled, she made herself stay by the mounting block while the Earl went to help, telling herself it would make him even more impossible if she shared that conclusion with him.

She sighed for some sensible female company and wished Jess home after all. At least she would share her driven anxiety for Marcus and the frustration of being a ‘mere’ woman who was supposed to sit and await the warriors’ return like a sweet little heroine in a story. At last the horses were ready and she tried not to feel like a fragile and fairy-like débutante as his lordship arrogantly tossed her up into the saddle
before she could manage for herself. If she didn’t assert herself, she would end up on the sidelines, forlornly awaiting news while he took over.

Chapter Six

S
ilence reigned while they rode across the park absorbed in their own thoughts. Persephone racked her brains for a clue as to where her second brother could have been spirited off to. Fifty years ago the roads had been so bad no stranger would have got far along the road without half the neighbourhood knowing where they were. Now the post roads were fast and it had been a dry summer, so Marcus could be halfway to Ireland or London by now. She tried to put herself in the shoes of his kidnapper, but found it impossible, and frowned gloomily at the broad shoulders of Lord Calvercombe instead.

She wondered if Annabelle de Morbaraye
had been glad her youthful guardian was a few hundred miles away and preoccupied once she was old enough to want a life of her own? Persephone contemplated how it must feel to be so alone in the world and decided with a shudder that, no, Annabelle would not have been grateful for his absence. From the sound of it, Alex Forthin’s half-brother and father had been selfish men who cared for nobody. Persephone thanked God she had grown up surrounded with love.

‘That’s the Three Sisters’ Oak,’ she pointed out as they took the undulating rise from house to deer park and saw the venerable tree in the distance. ‘I don’t know if you came here with Jack and Rich when you were still of an age to climb it. My sisters consider themselves far too aged and ladylike to tear their skirts and dirty their slippers on it nowadays, but I suspect Marcus wouldn’t be above doing so even now.’

The mental picture of her scapegrace brother unconscious and ill in the hands of a desperate man tripped her up and she forced back hot tears that would only confirm all his suspicions about weak females.

‘He’ll soon be back here plaguing you again,’ he said, as if he knew how she was
feeling, which seemed unlikely when he’d clearly loathed his own half-brother.

‘You can’t say that, you don’t know.’

‘I can use the brains I was born with. Marcus is more boy than man yet, despite twenty-three years of life and the ladybird you suspect he has installed nearby. I dare say he enjoys the status of the Seaborne name, whilst knowing he will never be called upon to run the family estates or the many other holdings that make up your family’s empire. One day he might find a use for the energy and intellect he was born with, but for now he’s an engaging scamp. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that, if your elder brother is truly lost, he must take over his estates and your late father’s business interests in his stead. It must seem one of his best virtues in his family’s eyes that he’s not in the least bit avaricious.’

‘He’s not very ambitious, either,’ she admitted, astonished his lordship drew such shrewd conclusions about the people around him.

‘Born into his shoes, you would feel differently, I suspect.’

‘I would want to forge my own path,’ she informed him, fairly sure he wasn’t listening
as he took in every detail of the oak and its surroundings, then jumped off his horse to examine the ground for clues.

‘And woe betide anyone who tried to say you nay?’ he asked with a quick glance up at her, still seated on her favourite gelding and warily watching him.

‘Of course,’ she agreed with a regal nod of her head.

‘Would you be a warrior or a bandit queen in another time, I wonder?’ he mused idly and she felt her temper rise again when he seemed amused by the idea.

‘If I had the choices of a gentleman’s son, I’d have become a sailor or an army officer. I don’t have enough tact or duty for the church or the law.’

‘No doubt you would be a general or an admiral before you had left your twenties,’ he told her as he bent to examine a piece of dry turf as if it was the crown jewels.

‘Now why do I think that wouldn’t be a good thing, I wonder?’ she asked, intrigued by whatever he found so riveting, but refusing to ask.

‘Because I disliked or distrusted most of those I’ve met.’

‘You do have a glowing opinion of me, don’t you?’ she felt stung into asking.

‘Because I don’t pander to your reputation as the toast of St James’s, it doesn’t mean I lost the use of both my eyes in India, Miss Seaborne,’ he said to the few blades of dried up grass he found so fascinating.

‘Have you any idea how annoying it is to be dismissed as merely decorative, my lord?’ she demanded.

When he merely shrugged and continued with his studies, she eyed him furiously. But she wondered if he might understand after all, when she considered what a young Adonis he’d been before he went to India.

‘Can you see with your damaged eye?’ she heard herself ask with horrified fascination, as if she were a spectator at a carriage accident. ‘I beg your pardon, how tactless of me.’

‘Not at all, although I hate it when females stare at my wreck of a face, then turn away as if they might turn faint when I gaze back. If you do that, I might ride away and refuse to let you interfere in my affairs for ever,’ he told her with a sardonic smile that threatened to turn her silly and schoolgirlish anyway.

‘They aren’t your affairs, they’re mine,’ she made herself say sharply.

‘Anything that concerns your eldest brother is related to my missing cousin. This whole business is clearly aimed at flushing Richard Seaborne out of cover, so don’t make the mistake of trying to stop me finding out what happened to both your brothers and my ward if I can, Miss Seaborne.’

Swollen-headed beast of a man. Did he really think she would use her looks to fascinate him into forgetting his precious Annabelle?

‘I doubt a stampeding herd of wild horses would sidetrack you from a course you were determined to follow, Lord Calvercombe,’ she said stiffly.