Amber (Jewel Trilogy, Book 3) (42 page)

"Mistress?" The guard shook her shoulder. "Mistress, you cannot just sit here."

She opened her eyes and took a deep breath. No, she could not just sit here. The man reached down a hand, and she let him help her up.

Her brothers. She needed to get to her brothers. Hopefully they hadn't made fools of themselves already by asking the king for a highwayman's pardon.

And she needed to lean on them, too. To let them take her home. They would order up a bath, and she'd wash off the incredible stink of Newgate. Then she'd sleep and escape this nightmare her life had turned into.

She had no money left for a hackney, but when she tearfully asked a driver to take her to Whitehall Palace and promised to see he got paid, he agreed.

The gatekeeper at Whitehall was not about to let a servant girl in.

"I'm Kendra Chase, the Marquess of Cainewood's sister."

"Sure you are." Dressed in red livery, the man looked her over with patent disbelief. "And I'm King Charles himself."

"I mean..." Drawing a shuddering breath, she closed her eyes, opened them, and tried again. "I'm the Duchess of Amberley."

"Kendra!"

The voice, heavy and seductive, came from an open window overhead. She'd forgotten Lady Castlemaine's suite was over Holbein's Gate. Although both of them had spent the Commonwealth years with King Charles's exiled court, Barbara, the king's longtime mistress, had never been her favorite woman. But this wasn't the time to be choosy.

"Barbara!" she called up. "My brothers are here, and this gentleman refuses to let me in."

"Dolt," Barbara said. Her titian head disappeared from the window, and a minute later she was standing on the other side of the scrolled wrought iron gate.

Kendra felt like a guttersnipe beside Barbara's lush, fashionable form, but she couldn't dredge up enough energy to feel properly chagrined. She was so tired.

"Let her in, you clodpoll," Barbara said. She'd never been known for her tact. The gate swung open. "I know just where your brothers are." Before Kendra knew it, she was following Barbara down the maze of halls that traversed Whitehall's two thousand rooms. "And your husband along with them."

"What?" She stopped in her tracks, her heart leaping with relief—until she realized Barbara had to be mistaken.

"You're married to Amberley, aren't you?" Barbara pouted as she took Kendra's arm and hurried her along. "And I wasn't invited to the wedding. You know how I like a good party."

"We didn't have much of a wedding," Kendra said woodenly. Trick wasn't here—he was dead in the ground in a graveyard near Newgate.

Coming to a stop, Barbara threw open a magnificent carved and gilded door. Beyond, Kendra saw a splendid sitting room in shades of gold and black. A fire blazed on a marble hearth. King Charles sat in a tufted velvet chair, his head thrown back in laughter. Jason sat in another, laughing along with him.

And reclining on a black satin daybed, a smile curving his lips and a cheroot in one hand, sat Patrick Iain Caldwell.

The bastard wasn't dead.

If she'd had a pistol at her disposal, she'd have rectified that.

She bolted past Barbara, retracing her steps through the palace and outside. The hackney was still waiting, and when a hysterical woman begged the driver to take her to a town house, he wasn't about to disagree.

She hadn't known it was possible to feel such deep hurt. No matter Trick's reasons, that he could let her go through all that, allow her to think he was
dead
...

It was the most unforgivable betrayal she could imagine.

He would never, ever measure up to even the lowest of her expectations. She couldn't live with such a man—couldn't live with herself if she accepted such a marriage. Such a lack of basic caring and commitment.

Cold anger. It was the safest emotion to feel, the one—the only one—that would protect her from being ripped apart.

She was going to her house, not Trick's. Caldwell House had never felt like hers, and it never would, any more than Amberley or Duncraven had. When the hackney pulled up in front of the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, she couldn't wait to get inside.

As always, Goodwin opened the door. "A bath, please, Goodwin. And pay the hackney driver, if you will."

Leaving him openmouthed, she barged past, heading for the wide, curving staircase and the comfort of her feminine chamber upstairs. A chamber no man had ever slept in.

Ford was waiting in the entry, seated in one of two matching brocade chairs. "Kendra."

Not wanting to, she stopped and turned.

His blue gaze swept her costumed form. "When we arrived at Whitehall and learned from King Charles what had happened, Jason sent me back immediately to let you know your husband was well and would soon be free. But you weren't here."

His voice betokened both vexation and distress, but she didn't have it in her to express sorrow for causing him worry. Not now. She had no space left for any more emotions now.

"I sent six servants out looking—"

Turning away from his accusatory eyes, she climbed the graceful stairs, one foot in front of the other, just as she always had.

Her chamber was the same as always, too. A green oasis of familiarity. Nothing in her life had been familiar lately—not her feelings and not her surroundings. Here, in her old room, she could flip back the calendar to last June, when she'd been an innocent virgin going on about her boring life.

Here, in her old room, she could call for a bath and wash away not only the stink of Newgate, but all her confusing emotions. The first blush of love and the subsequent hurt. The incredible joy of fulfillment, the disappointment and disillusion. All of it—the ups and the downs, and the downs and the ups, and the final descent into that pit of despair.

She'd never appreciated how wonderful her old, predictable life had been.

When the bath was prepared, she peeled off Dulcie's clothes and sank into the steaming water right up to her chin, ready to recover that lovely, boring life. Who needed a husband? Especially one who felt so little for her that he would lie to escape her and then let her think he was dead and laugh it off like the world's best joke.

She knew when it was time to give up.

With shaking fingers, she unfastened the clasp on the amber bracelet and let it fall to the carpeted floor. Then she tugged off the plain gold band. When she dropped it, it rolled a few inches from the carpet onto polished wood before landing flat with a tiny
plop
. Until now, since that fateful day in Cainewood's little chapel, it had never left her hand.

She hardly noticed her tears dripping into the lavender-scented water. Just as she hardly noticed the knock at the door until it opened.

"Kendra."

The expression on Trick's face was achingly apologetic, but she'd been through that before. He wouldn't fool her ever again.

Sinking deeper into the water, she dashed the tears from her cheeks and narrowed her eyes. "Who invited you in here?"

Still dressed in rumpled black velvet and looking more than a little unsteady, he quietly shut the door behind him. His gaze flicked to the amber bracelet, then back to her. "You didn't complain the last time I walked in on your bath."

Despite all the anger and hurt, she blushed to remember. "That was before I left you," she said. "That was a lifetime ago, when I was still blind and innocent."

He walked over, and, wordlessly, handed her a crumpled piece of paper.

Tearing her gaze from him, she unfolded it with wet, shaky hands. The five words were barely legible, thick swashes of rusty red-brown.

DON'T WORRY JUST AN ACT

Leaning close, he turned the paper over in her hands, and her heart turned over along with it. He straightened while she read the words in black ink—the writing she hadn't been able to make out at the trial.

When love on my sweet wife's wings
Comes to hover within my walls
If I turn it away with untruths and deceit
'Tis myself I must blame for the fall

Trust must be earned then earned again
Ere forgiveness can overcome sorrows
Yesterday's errors wiped from the slate
May leave room for joyful tomorrows

Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars well-turned
While I bear hope, mayhap forlorn
My love will be returned

Poetry written in prison.

Reassurance written in blood.

Tears flooded her eyes, blurring her vision. Instead of her mint-green chamber, what she saw was the damp, crowded courtyard outside the open courtroom of the Old Bailey. Instead of the soft swish of water, what she heard was the jeering crowd. And she remembered Trick's stricken face as he tried to reach her, first with words and then with this very same note—and the expression in his eyes when he failed to succeed.

"Why?" she asked, finally ready to listen. "Why all the lies?"

He stayed riveted in place. "Before I ever met you," he said slowly, "I made a promise to King Charles. I thought that promise, to my sovereign, was more important than my wife. I was wrong. And if I've lost you because of that mistake, I'll never forgive myself."

Oh, God, he was getting to her. Could she allow herself to feel this again? "What was this promise?"

"I was never really a highwayman. That was naught but a ruse to find some counterfeiters who were bedeviling the country's economy, emptying the king's purse and undermining his credibility. I was part of his scheme to uncover it."

"Just as I guessed, only I never completed the connection."

He nodded. "And I'd sworn not to tell a soul. I never considered that the Black Highwayman might become a wanted man. When it happened, Charles devised a plan to get rid of him, so I could live my life as the duke without anyone ever suspecting that the highwayman and I were one and the same. He arranged for the arrest and the public trial. And he had a doctor drug me to make me look ill, and that same doctor visit later and paint blue spots on my body, then declare me dead and carry me away. I suggested we use black nightshade."

"Dwale." The fever, the slowed breathing, the weakness, the dilated eyes. She should have realized. "It killed your mother, Trick. It could have killed you."

"Weeks of it killed my mother, and my father recovered, after all. It was one dose. A calculated risk, and at least I knew what I was getting into."

"It was a perfect plan," she admitted. "Brilliant."

"Not perfect. Because Charles still refused to let me tell you. And I was foolish enough to believe we could pull this off over a couple of days when I could give you another excuse to be gone, and you'd never find out."

"But I did."

"Aye." He took a step closer, then swayed. "I was wrong,
leannan
. I trusted you even if Charles didn't, and I should have told you everything, no matter that he ordered me not to. I was wrong to think you'd never find out, and I was wrong to lie to you about what I was doing. But most of all, I was wrong to think any promise to a king, or the king himself, is more important than you. Nothing is more important than you."

Disregarding Royal orders was considered much worse than highway robbery.
Punishable by hanging
, she heard herself whisper deep in a dungeon in Scotland.
Punishable by hanging, drawing, quartering...

"Nothing is more important? Not even treason?"

"Nothing. I knew it—I knew it while I sat in that prison awaiting trial, wondering where you were and whether rumors had reached your ears to cause you torment. And then, when I saw you standing at that rail..."

His eyes mirrored the anguish she'd seen in them that moment.

"But by then," he continued, "it was too late. I was too weak, too drugged." He swayed again. "I still am, it seems. They told me I wasn't recovered enough to come home yet, but, like you, I didn't listen. Like you, I
couldn't
listen, not when my love was at stake." He risked a tiny grin, that chipped tooth peeking through a tentative smile.

It cracked her heart.

She'd been wrong, too. He'd asked her to trust him, said there were things he couldn't tell her. But she hadn't listened. She wanted to say she understood, but her throat closed with emotion.

She looked down to the paper in her hand, the dear words blurring through fresh tears. In his own blood, he'd tried to tell her not to worry. And he'd written a poem for her, admitting his love, promising to earn her trust, asking for forgiveness.

Poetry. He'd shared himself, just as she'd hoped for all along. His wall had finally come down.

Or maybe she'd managed to scale it.

He came forward and took the paper from her trembling hands, setting it aside.

Then he stepped right into the water.

"Your boots!" she gasped.

In the big tub, he knelt at her feet. "I own a shipping line and a warehouse stacked with imported goods from all over the world. I can buy a hundred pairs of boots."

His voice was thick and unsteady, his amber eyes so intense they seemed to spear her to her very soul.

He reached beneath the water to take her hands in his. "Don't you understand,
leannan
? I can buy almost anything—anything, that is, except your love."