Unraveling the Earl (34 page)

There were no stockings drying on the rack, or even dangling
from the chandelier. Shoes did not litter the plush carpet, dresses did not
hide the long settee or the chairs and tables.

Not a single lacy undergarment was draped over the desk.
Instead a small porcelain statuette sat on the smooth surface. Henry recognized
the shepherd and lamb immediately, a gift from Fanny on his birthday, one he’d
kept on the chest of drawers in his bedchamber at Idyllwild. When he lifted the
figure, he saw that it now sported a small hairline crack, neatly severing
shepherd and lamb, and another winding around the boy’s neck.

Had Georgie accidently dropped the small statue and whisked
it away to be fixed? But why hold on to it all this time? And why leave it
sitting in the center of the empty desk?

Unless she’d suspected he would come looking for her and
left the figure prominently displayed so that he might find it, some sort of
convoluted message for him to puzzle out.

Henry tucked the statuette into his pocket and turned to
survey the too empty, too immaculate bedchamber.

The room had the feel of abandonment, the air hot and musty
with only a lingering whisper of starch and stale tobacco and Henry imagined
Georgie pacing before the windows, blowing thin streams of smoke out into the
night while Tag Alogne packed her possessions into trunks.

Pushing open the door to what he assumed to be a bathing
room, he found instead the largest dressing room he’d ever seen. As big as most
bedchambers, the space was lit by two windows set high on the back wall. Along
one wall hung a handful of dresses and two dozen or more empty hangers. Shelves
lined the opposite wall, forgotten bonnets gracing the top tiers, a few folded
shawls and reticules the lowest. In the middle, overlooked shoes and boots
dotted the shelves, leaving gaps between, like a mostly toothless grin, mocking
him.

Henry wandered around the dressing room, running a hand over
a white dress trimmed with red ribbon, lifting a pink silk slipper, thin
ribbons trailing over his wrist.

His foot hit an object on the floor and he looked down to
discover the mate to the slipper in his hand lying on its side, the heel
delicately carved and improbably high, the smallest scuff mark on the toe.

Henry bent down to retrieve the discarded shoe, lined the
pair on the shelf and stepped back, idly running one finger over the pointed
toes, not truly paying attention to what he was doing but rather thinking of
Georgie.

But there was something odd in the way the pair of slippers
sat beside one another, something off in their height that snagged his
attention.

Lifting one slipper in each hand, he balanced them on his
palms and lifted them up to the light.

“Jesus,” he breathed, taking in the difference in the heels,
the right a good half of an inch taller than the left.

Dropping the slippers to the shelf he retrieved a pair of
boots, stiff satin dyed a pale blue rather than the soft kid leather ladies
preferred.

Of course, Georgie would no more wear something that had
once possessed a face than she would eat the same.

Again, the right heel was taller than the left.

Images danced around in his head, overlapping and playing
over one another in dizzying speed.

Georgie circling around to his left as they walked arm in
arm through the green at Somerville.

A childhood injury. I’m afraid the uneven terrain will
set me off my gate. You don’t mind if I lean on you just a tad?

Georgie standing before him that first night dressed only in
stockings and the same pink slippers.

Georgie self-consciously removing her slippers and stockings
at Idyllwild, dancing disjointedly in the rain wearing Bea’s goulashes, limping
down the hall to the kitchen, standing on one foot at the stove.

Georgie curling her bare leg against her hip, away from
prying eyes.

I took a fall down a flight of stairs… Most days I hardly
remember my fall or the folly that led to it.

Henry dropped the boots to the floor and reached into his
pocket, pulling out the boy and lamb, trailing his thumb along the fissures
that had separated shepherd from lamb, however briefly, and the crack that had
decapitated the boy.

I was raised on a sheep farm…forever making pets of the
sheep and throwing temper fits when they were slaughtered.

My virginity went for a kind word and a pair of fleeced
lined mitts…offered up my virginity to another woman’s handsome husband for the
life of a lamb with a lame hind leg.

I did not regret it, not until the next day when
Mum…Millie told me that Archie had died in the night and I saw that she knew
what I had done.

You must come for George as we are no longer able to care
for the child.

I do not wish to speak of him, to give him a name is to
give him life and he is dead to me.

“Ah, Christ,” Henry whispered, his hand clenching around boy
and lamb. “Damn it all, she was just a girl.”

“A girl who needs her hind-end tanned, make no mistake.”
Mountjoy spoke from the open door of the dressing room. “Never mind, the
lass’ll be back in time for the wedding. She’s got nowhere to live and not a
farthing to her name if she don’t marry you, and well she knows it.”

“What are you saying?” Henry turned around, a shiver of
premonition dancing down his spine. “This is Georgie’s house.”

“Ach, this house don’t belong to George,” Mountjoy replied.
“It came to me with everything else. Lady Joy thought I could manage George,
curb her wild ways by dangling the place before her. Hell, maybe the grouchy
old woman had the right of it. I bullied her into marrying you with it.”

“You threatened Georgie with the loss of her home should she
decide not to marry me?”

“Don’t get your smallclothes in a wad,” Mountjoy groused.
“It worked, didn’t it? I missed the big announcement last night on account of a
pretty pair of tits and a bit of strategizing, but I’ll read about it in the
paper and I might even loiter at the back of the church to hear the banns
called.”

“Damn,” Henry breathed, oddly disoriented as the
ramifications of the Duke of Mountjoy’s manipulations took root.

Did I mention that my grandmother left me the house?

Don’t lose the gems. They belonged to Lady Joy and I’ve a
sentimental attachment to them.

Henry desperately wanted to believe that Georgie had only
gone off on a short journey to sort out her tangled thoughts and emotions, just
as Beatrice had said.

The damaged boy and lamb in his pocket told him otherwise.

Georgie had not only bartered away her happiness, she’d
given away her grandmother’s house and doomed their unborn child to the same
stigma of illegitimacy she’d lived with all her life.

And she’d done it all, sacrificed everything in a convoluted
bid to save him.

“Pardon, Your Grace, but there is a gentleman asking to call
upon Miss Buchanan.” Dobbins stopped just behind the duke wearing the same smug
expression he’d worn when Henry had arrived and he knew the butler had
interrupted only to be sure he was aware that a man was calling on his woman.
“What should I tell him?”

“How the hell should I know?” Mountjoy thundered. “Tell him
whatever a servant with a stick up his arse tells an uninvited caller.”

“Bugger off?” The cheerful, lilting Scotts burr belonged to
a young man of perhaps twenty years of age who stood just beyond Dobbins in the
open doorway to Georgie’s bedchamber.

“Chester McDougal, you pretty piece of fluff, what the hell
are you doing in my house?” The Duke of Mountjoy strode across the room to
greet the newcomer, all smiles and back pounding. “Have you run out of gossip
for that rag you work for and come looking for some at the source?”

This was the boy Georgie had knocked to the ground when
she’d rolled a barrel down a hill?

Pretty was an apt description for the man’s delicate
features, for the wavy mahogany hair falling over his forehead and for the blue
eyes that bordered on lavender.

“Your Grace,” the young man greeted, stepping to the left
and mostly out of way of Mountjoy’s back slapping. “Pardon my presumption,
calling on your household at barely nine of the clock and finding my way
upstairs. Alas, it is most imperative that I speak with Miss Buchanan.”

Even his manners were pretty. As was the powder-blue jacked
he wore over a waistcoat in a slightly darker shade and the immaculate cravat
tied beneath his gently squared, smooth chin.

“Shut your trap,” Mountjoy thundered. “Calling hours ain’t
for family.”

Of course he was a Buchanan, he had the eyes if not the
surname.

“Hastings, this maggoty bit of thistledown is me mum’s
second sister’s third daughter’s fifth, no sixth son.” Mountjoy’s introduction
was convoluted, though cheerfully given. “This here is George’s affianced
husband, the Earl of Hastings.”

Purple eyes went wide and one hand whipped behind the pretty
boy’s back and out of sight.

“What’s that you’ve got there, lad?” With surprising speed
for so giant a man, Mountjoy loomed over the lad and snaked one long, muscled
arm behind him. “Best just to give it up, boy. I’d hate to have to explain to
your mum I broke your fingers.”

“Ah, leave off, Gilroy,” the boy whined, not a pretty sound
at all. “The letter’s meant for Miss Georgie.”

“Writing love letters to a betrothed lady,” the duke chided,
pulling the missive from behind its apparent author’s back.

“It’s not a love letter,” he protested. “And I didn’t write
it, Georgie did.”

“That’s Miss Buchanan to you.” Henry words were soft, the
boy was her kinsman after all, the tone was a warning, the man had no business
receiving letters from his betrothed.

“It isn’t what you think,” McDougal said in a wheedling
voice. “It’s just…well, Buchanan business.”

“Buchanan business,” Mountjoy repeated, stepping back and
unfolding the creased and frayed paper.

“You are not going to read Georgie’s private
correspondence.” Henry crossed the room to intercept the letter but the
red-haired giant only circled around the perimeter and out of his grasp, head
bent and lips moving.

“Georgie…that is, Miss Buchanan will have my head this time
for sure,” the pretty boy predicted.

Mountjoy snickered and kept reading.

McDougal wrung his hands.

Henry spun around, keeping the duke and Georgie’s letter in
his sights, curiosity nipping at his heels.

“By God, if this isn’t vengeance worthy of a Buchanan,”
Mountjoy whispered in unmistakable awe. “Battle well chosen, victory assured
and deniability guaranteed. Damn, the lass is good.”

“What the hell is in that letter?” Henry demanded as he set
off in pursuit of his future cousin by marriage.

“And the timing,” that cousin continued a tad breathlessly.
“Even I wouldn’t suspect she was the culprit of so fiendish a plot. Hell, fancy
pants, if I didn’t know George’s illegible scrawl I would put the blame
squarely on your puny shoulders.”

“That is not the reason I did not publish it.” Fancy pants
puffed out his chest.

“You didn’t publish the story?” Mountjoy finally lifted his
head to spear the boy with a glittering glare.

“I intended to,” he admitted, bravely meeting that hot
glare. “And I would have if I hadn’t seen the notice of her wedding to his
lordship laid out on the press waiting to be put to print.”

“What’s that bit of spot-on-timing got to do with the price
of tea in England?” Mountjoy demanded.

Henry had had enough of the hints and clues and too few of
the answers scrawled upon parchment. “Give me the damned letter.”

In true Buchanan form, Mountjoy met him halfway, offering up
the answers, be they fact or fabrication, without a care for the consequences.

Henry made his way to the window, pushed back the lacy
curtain and bent over the missive, two pages of tattered parchment, the ink
faded and smudged but for one name squeezed into a space too small to contain
all of the letters.

Ethelred Brunhilde Octavia, Baroness Drummond.

It wasn’t so much a letter as a list of facts. Names and
dates and locations, scrawled across the page in a sloppy, slanting hand
without benefit of punctuation, proper spelling or spacing.

I never learned to write more than a few simple phrases
but I can read the classics, balance a ledger down to the last penny and find
Madagascar on a globe.

It must have taken Georgie hours, days, sleepless nights to
compose the missive.

She’d likely carried it with her as she’d journeyed across
the country, searching out clue after clue only to come up empty-handed, the
blank space taunting her, haunting her.

The story was as simple and as old as time.

A young unmarried lady, a single glittering London Season,
doors opened by a reigning matron, seduction at the hands of a notorious,
penniless rake.

A babe born in the country, hidden on a small estate,
rescued by a grandmother, reunited with her true family at the castle of a
duke.

A fairytale, a gothic story, a ghost yarn told around a
bonfire.

The letter was unsigned, concluded with four rhyming lines
that had been crossed out, but were etched in Henry’s brain.

Hush my countess, Connie is near

Husband’s a scoundrel, maiden is here

Matron was lonely, Connie was there

Until another, the halo will wear

“By God. It truly was about vengeance all along.” Henry let
loose a snort followed by a great rumbling chuckle and looked up to find
Mountjoy towering over the pretty boy.

“How could I publish her past right alongside her future
that way?” Chester McDougal demanded. “I know I’ve only a drop of Buchanan
blood and I’ve never understood the vendettas and whatnot the rest of you live
by, but Georgie deserves a happy future, even if she’s hell-bent on sacrificing
it to the past.”