The Wyndham Legacy (34 page)

“Yes,” she said, studying her own thumbnail, “but I seem to be having trouble with the tune. The words are clever, truly, but the tune is floundering.”

He looked down at her, cupped her chin in his palm and kissed her, then just looked some more. He was thinking about those pearls and which was more luminous, the pearls or her breasts.

“All right, Marcus, either we go to the music room right now and you prove your mettle else I'll never let you forget it, never.”

“Let's go,” he said, then lifted her, set her on his desk and put her slipper back on her foot and deftly tied the ribbon. “Shall I knot the ribbon on that brutal slipper, or have you regained your control?”

“You'd best knot it.”

 

It was very late, a late-summer rain pounding against the windowpanes. They were sitting in front of the fireplace even though the fire had quite died down to glowing embers, but they didn't care, for they were writing another ditty, this one about Napoleon and all his mistresses, a song the Duchess swore would never leave the bedchamber. Marcus told her the rumor of the emperor's lack of majesty in his male part. She stared at him and said quite seriously, “How odd. I thought that all men were the same in that area. I mean, couldn't that song apply to all of you? There are differences, really?”

He turned red with outrage, yanked her against him, and kissed her until she was panting and laughing at the same time.

A knock came at the door, and Marcus cursed, then sighed. He called out, “Enter!”

It was Antonia and she was carrying a silver tray on her arms.

“Goodness,” the Duchess said, leaping off Marcus's lap. “What do you have there?”

“A present from Badger. He said you were both to drink it down. He called it a por-ency drug, not to me, but to Spears, who was with him. I just overheard it and Badger looked very uncomfortable and he cursed.”

“A potency drug?” Marcus said, trying to keep the smile off his face.

“That's right. When I asked him what that was, he said it was an aphrodisiac. What's that, I asked him, but he just wagged his finger at me and told me to make myself useful, so here I am. Spears looked as if he would cry he was so embarrassed. I think he was mad at Badger for telling me words I want to know but probably shouldn't. It was very curious. Fanny wanted to bring it so she could look at you and get all moon-eyed, Marcus, but I wouldn't let her.”

“Thank you, Antonia.” He said to the Duchess, “Just two more years.”

The Duchess took the tray from Antonia and set it on a tabletop. She sniffed. “It smells like hot chocolate to me, with something in it I can't identify. Perhaps it's chopped snail toenails.”

“Badger said you were to drink it and then do what you normally do. He said you'd know what he meant.”

“The bugger. Yes, Antonia, we know. Thank you, muffin. Go to bed now.”

When Antonia was gone, Marcus raised a cup and gave the Duchess the other. “To us, to snail's toenails, and Badger's attempt at heir-making.”

“Hear, hear,” she said and drank deep. “An heir. I surely like the sound of that.”

They were asleep soon, snuggled together, her head tucked against his neck.

T
HE BRIGHT MORNING
light shone in her eyes. Odd, but she didn't want to open her eyes, the light was too bright, it hurt, but finally, she did slit her eyes open.

“Hello, Duchess, it's about time you joined us. As you can see, your dear husband is already awake, unhappy with me and with his headache, and naturally he'd kill me if it weren't for the tight ropes around his hands and feet. Your bonds aren't quite as tight. I don't intend for you to suffer, not you, never you.”

She stared in blank astonishment at Trevor. “I don't understand. Where are we? What are you doing here?”

“To begin with,” Marcus said, his voice so calm it frightened her, “he somehow drugged that hot chocolate Antonia brought to us last night.”

“Yes, certainly. She said Badger made it. I don't believe it. It's not possible, not Badger.”

“Of course Badger made it and added the laudanum to it as well, just as we'd planned,” Trevor said. “But believe what you will, whatever romantic, honorable swill enters your minds. But didn't you wonder at all when Badger came back here and told you that all the Colonial Wyndhams were accounted for in London? No, I can see you didn't. Pity, but too bad.

“Odd that you survived the bullets that day. Three bullets in your wretched bodies, but you still managed to live through it.”

“You're a miserable shot,” Marcus said.

Trevor very slowly turned to him, rose to tower over him,
raised the butt of his pistol and brought it down hard on his shoulder.

“Stop it, damn you!” She was struggling, yanking hard at the ropes around her wrists, ignoring the pain that ripped through her, yanking and pulling until Marcus said, “No, Duchess, I'm all right. Just hold still, love.”

Trevor returned to his place, an overturned crate he was using as a chair. “What a brave hero he is, don't you agree, Duchess? Yes, my cousin Marcus needs to learn who is in charge now. Even now that he's in exquisite pain he won't accept that he's finally lost. No, Marcus isn't a man used to losing at anything. Ah, Duchess, don't look at me like that, with blood—my blood—in your eyes. Obey your husband, just hold still. I am sorry about you, my dear, but I have no choice about this, none at all.

“Ah, Marcus won't even moan from the pain and he does hurt, Duchess, he does indeed. Isn't that odd? He knows he's going to die, yet he holds to that myth, to that absurd men's code, whatever the hell it is, that dictates that he won't yield and he won't plead with me. Well, no matter.

“Duchess, if only you hadn't forced Marcus to marry you before that magical date of June sixteenth, I could have let you both live, or at least I would have considered it. All that lovely money, but then, Duchess, I learned you got fifty thousand pounds from your father and I wanted that too. I wanted all of it and the Wyndham legacy—which I never believed was real—and the title of earl of Chase, and now that's what I'll get. Everything. Now I'll have everything. I must remember to compliment your dear mother, Marcus, on solving the mystery. I'll do it whilst we're all in mourning for your double tragic deaths.”

“But you're rich,” she said, trying desperately to clear her head, which was aching abominably, trying to understand, trying to
talk
to him. “You said you were very rich.”

“Would you expect me to admit to poverty, Duchess? I jested about it to allay any suspicions either of you might have had. I was so open with both of you. No, there's very
little money left, though my family doesn't know of it for I've kept it to myself, for I am the head of the American Wyndham family and very soon now I'll be the head of the entire Wyndham family. My father—your uncle—was a wastrel, no other way to say it. He left us with food in the pantry, a little maid he'd gotten pregnant, and naught else. I was pleased he finally fell in a duel for making love to another man's wife. I was left with no choice. I was the head of the Wyndham family. No one else. Why do you think I married Helen? And I was but twenty-two years old. She was the richest girl in Baltimore and her father was a miserable old miller when all is said and done. No more, no less.”

“But a very
rich
miserable old miller.”

“Yes, my dear, beyond rich, at least that's what I believed at the time. I killed him then wooed Helen. She was so soft, so vulnerable in her grief, so tedious in her innocence, but I did enjoy her delicious little body until she grew large with child. Then it was easy, a fall from her mare from a spur I planted beneath the mare's saddle, left alone in the rain to catch a chill, and it happened as I planned it to. She went into labor and both she and the brat conveniently died, leaving me a broken man.

“But that money ran out. I was still the head of the Wyndham family. What to do? Then we heard from Mr. Wicks, bless his old man's kindly heart. He really believed the two of you would never reconcile your differences, whatever they were. The poor old bastard had forgotten about lust and youth. And you, Duchess, you lusted after Marcus since you were a child, didn't you? You wonder how I know that? Well, to give credit where credit is due, I must thank dear Aunt Gweneth and her lovely detailed correspondence with my mother all these years. She wrote of you, how she admired you—your serenity, your unpretentious modesty—how very well-bred you were despite your unfortunate antecedents, but how she suspected that you would set your hooks into Marcus since you couldn't
have Mark or Charlie, for they were your half-brothers, and your dear earl father wouldn't allow that.

“Mr. Wicks didn't write all that much, but dear Aunt Gweneth did, every small piddling detail of her wearisome life, for she was a spinster, living off the charity of her brother and what else did she have to do? I learned about everything, about the earl's bitterness, his hatred of you, Marcus, because you didn't have the good taste to die with Mark and Charlie, and you, Duchess, the precious bastard whose mother he loved all his benighted adult life. Ah, how Aunt Gweneth despised your mother, Duchess, for she feared the woman's influence. She hated her sister-in-law, but she was a known evil, wasn't she? But your mother, what would the slut do once the countess was dead? We know, of course, he married your mother, the stupid fool, and we suppose he died a miserable man because she died first.

“Wrenching isn't it, all of it? Pitiful, really. But here we are and it's all very real now and nearly to the end. Did I tell you that I wanted to leave James in America for the boy has such a kind heart, as unsuspecting of evil as Helen was, but he wanted to come, insisted, so I made the best of it, insisted he was sullen and hadn't wanted to be here, and you believed it, even about the young lady he'd left behind in Baltimore. He had a fancy to meet you, Marcus, and you, Duchess. He doesn't know what life can be and how it can change men and make them what they don't really want to be.

“James won't learn, for I will protect him as I will Ursula. It will be only the best for both of them and they will die as innocent as they live in their innocence now.”

Marcus thought, let him talk and talk and talk, even as he worked the knots that bound his wrists together. He'd believed Trevor would be a dandy, a fop, but he was none of those benign things. But he'd seen him as a man, a man to admire, a man to spar with, to share stories with, but he wasn't any of those things, he was evil and somehow
twisted. Marcus realized then the truth of the rhymes and said blankly, “My God, you're the bloody monster in the clues. Always there, always waiting to do evil, to harm and to lie and to kill. That's what the monk meant in the Duchess's dream and that's what the poem meant. Where there's life there's evil and one must always be on guard against it. You're the evil here and you always were.”

“Am I the monster? I don't really like the sound of that, Marcus, dear cousin. I suppose you're right, but still, it bothers me. I only do what I have to do. My mother is very expensive, you know. I told you, I want James and Ursula to have the very best and I couldn't provide it except this way. If Helen had been richer . . . ah, but she wasn't, the silly little slut. My mother adores French fashions. What was I to do? And Ursula will be beautiful very soon now, not more than two years now and she will be glorious, a woman men will want. She must have her chance, and I am the head of the Wyndham family. It is my responsibility to see that she has it.”

“You're not the head of the Wyndham family, I am.”

“Not for very much longer, cousin, not for more than a few more minutes.”

“I don't suppose you would consider releasing us and returning to America,” Marcus said.

Trevor laughed, threw back his head and laughed deeply, his strong throat working. “Your only release will be with your death, cousin.”

Time, the Duchess knew, they had to have more time. The bonds about her wrists were loosening even more. He had been considerate, if such a thing could be said of him. He hadn't tied her all that tightly. He believed her a woman, thus not a threat to him. He hadn't bothered to tie her ankles. She had to keep him talking. She had to think, dammit. So much had happened, so much pain, and he'd been responsible for all of it.

She looked at him until he met her gaze. His eyes softened. It scared her to death, but she said calmly enough,
“So you have been planning this? For how long? And you said that Badger was your partner. How did you get together with him?”

Trevor leaned toward her. She jerked back, unable to help it. He just grinned at her. “I find I'm fatigued, Duchess, and quite tired of talking. I believe the two of you now understand why I'm doing this. I really don't want to kill you, Duchess, I'd much rather plow your belly until you became ugly to me, your belly all swelled out with child. Women with child should stay hidden. They're hideous. You should have seen Helen, all white and thin save for her huge belly. It was quite repellent. I wanted to call her a spider, but I couldn't, not until she was lying there, thrown from her mare, and then I told her what she was, what she truly was, and she screamed, not with terror from me but because the child was coming and it was ripping her apart.”

Her bonds were free. He was seated on that overturned crate some six feet from her, a pistol dangling lazily in his right hand. What could she do?

“Well, Marcus, tell me, dear cousin. Who is the stronger? Who is the smarter? Who fooled you completely and utterly? Ah, yes, I am the head of the Wyndham family. I am fit to be the head of the Wyndham family, more fit than you. You and your asinine honor, your Englishman's code. It makes you blind, makes you gullible.”

She leapt to her feet and jumped at him, clawing at his right hand, madly tearing and screaming at him.

Marcus jumped to his feet and threw himself at Trevor. But his hands were tied, his feet were hobbled, no more than a couple of inches between the ropes that bound his ankles. Trevor knocked him off easily enough, then whirled about and threw the Duchess to the straw-covered floor. He fell on top of her.

But he was looking at Marcus, who was standing, just barely, and he was ready to charge again. “Don't move, cousin, or I'll put a bullet right in her lovely mouth.”

She felt the hard metal against her lips. He pressed harder until her mouth was open and she tasted the cold metal, felt it press against her teeth.

Marcus took several clumsy steps back.

“Sit down.”

Marcus sat.

Trevor looked down into her white face. “I enjoyed dressing you last night. You have a very lovely body, a woman's body, but lithe and slender, curved so very nicely. Odd, but Marcus looks like me. But we're cousins, aren't we, so it makes sense. Large men, dark, well-made men, fashioned to impress other males and seduce women. Did I tell you that little Helen couldn't get enough of me? She loved to touch me, to kiss me all over. Of course, I taught her how to kiss a man. I let her have her way and pleased her in return, until she bored me, then that was all I let her do, kiss me and caress me.

“Shall I strip you before I have to kill you? No, you don't like that thought at all, do you, Duchess? I repel you. I didn't before but now I do. You love him, don't you? I always believed you did, even though he was too stupid to realize his good fortune. And now it's too late.”

He got off her, rising slowly to his feet. “Well, you tried to take me down, Duchess. I like that. It proves you're of my blood, not cowards, either of you. But the time has come to finish this. I will make it quick, I promise you. I'm not cruel. All you have to do is drink a bit more, and you'll fall asleep just as you did last night. Only this time you won't wake up. I'm going to tie each of you to your horses. Unfortunately they will both go off the rather dramatic cliff just to the east of Trellisian Valley. I don't want to have to kill Stanley, he's a good mount, and as the earl of Chase, I would like to ride him now and again, but I must make it believable. I'll untie you once you're dead at the bottom of the cliff and drive back to London. I'll be there in the bosom of my family when we receive word of your tragic deaths.”

“Why did you wake us up?” Marcus asked. “You could have given us enough and killed us without this charming scene you've played out. Ah, that's it, isn't it, Trevor? You wanted us to know it was you all along. You wanted to bray and brag and gloat.”