Debt of Honor (24 page)

Numbly, he had put her note in his pocket and stared at the body again, the venomous words replaying in his mind. Then he sat down heavily on the side of the bed and extended his hand to touch her.

By God, once he had loved her more than life itself. How had it come to this? And she was with child! Had Burdett known? And, if Burdett could anticipate the outcome of the cowardly decision he had made last night, would he have made a different one? Did he care enough?

Percy had known the answer all too well after he and Wilkinson spent an hour waiting for the cad that morning.

The twisted cruelty of what had happened and the deep, soul-wrenching pain of knowing that nothing could be undone had burned like a red-hot poker stuck into his belly. Percy’s shoulders had begun to shake with sobs until his entire body convulsed. He had turned on the bed, stretched along Sarah’s stiff form, put his arms around her for the last time, and had given in to his emotions.

After a while, he had become aware of the audience of servants crowding around the door and watching him.

That had been more than two years ago.

Lettie’s unanticipated and unwanted arrival this summer turned into a miraculous thaw after a long and harsh winter. He thought he had laid the nightmare to rest at last.

He had merely made room for another one.

Cool September wind gently lapped at his face. Percy turned into the lane leading to the home-farm buildings. Perhaps Farley was in his office. There were probably many inconsequential problems on Farley’s hands with which to fill the time. Dull, stupid things, all requiring immediate and undivided attention. Perfect to keep Percy occupied, away from the disaster of his marriage and his life.

His hopes were answered. Though surprised by the unexpected visit, Farley managed to bring up on no notice at all a host of more or less unimportant issues for his employer to weigh in on.

Alas, none of these tedious things succeeded in calming Percy’s mind. The steward and he rode out to check on the progress of a barn’s construction and to inspect another in apparent danger of collapsing, but the hours spent on that task were no remedy at all. No matter how much Percy wanted
not
to think about what had transpired in the library that morning, his stubborn brain would not cooperate.

As the day progressed and the shock of Lettie’s announcement wore off, doubts began to assail him with a growing urgency. A question he had tried hard to avoid finally elbowed its way to the forefront of his thoughts and overshadowed everything else.

What if Lettie was right?

Could
she be right?

It was impossible to focus on anything Farley was saying. Percy even caught himself asking his steward the same question twice because he simply had not heard the answer.

What if Lettie was right? What if Sarah had lied?

Or, he feverishly rephrased the latter question,
so what
if Sarah lied? Did it even matter any longer?

Percy suddenly saw with perfect clarity that for the past two years, he had desperately
wanted
to believe Sarah because that was the only way in which he could explain the disaster that was their marriage. And having an explanation had somehow dulled the unbearable guilt that had turned his life into a nightmare after her death. Having an explanation had allowed him to come to terms with the discovery of his own defect.

He had never spoken to anyone about Sarah’s note. Lettie was the first one to hear the whole story from him. And there was no denying her logic—and his naïveté.

How misplaced was his trust in Sarah’s word after she had deliberately deceived him. Since her death, he had blamed himself for what happened, but now he tried to see the whole thing the way Lettie did.

By God, how many people had assumed that he had killed Sarah in a jealous fit? Who had told Lettie so? Was he the only one blind here? He should have anticipated, even if nothing had happened between Burdett and his wife, that many would easily jump to the worst conclusions. After all,
he
had prepared a perfect foundation for gossip—Mr. Anthony Burdett escorting Lady Hanbury, day in and day out for over a month, while Sir Percival busied himself with running his estates, his nose in the books or out somewhere in the hedgerows, but never anywhere near his wife and her companion. Had Ethel’s guests and his neighbors seen him as a ridiculous, absentminded husband waiting to be cuckolded at the first opportunity? Had they known what he would have never known if he had not opened the door to Sarah’s bedchamber that day?

Was he now, instead of blaming Sarah, blaming Lettie for what Sarah did?

He heard the words
beams
,
roof
and
rotten clapboards
and realized that Farley was talking about the almost-collapsed barn.

But he could not think about any barn now, even if it were on fire.

There could hardly be two women more opposite to one another than his first and second wives. Sarah, always unhappy, secretive and preferring seclusion to his company, had excluded him from her life to such a degree that he had hardly known anything about her.

Lettie, on the other hand, had never shunned him and had spent hours drawing or reading in the library while he attended to his correspondence or other tasks. He had been lately spending more and more time in the orangery too, reading there while she painted. He had never set his foot in the orangery for more than a few minutes at a time when Sarah was alive.

Unlike Lettie, who had thrown all her talent and energy into the restoration of Wycombe Oaks and accompanied him thither almost daily, Sarah had never gone with him anywhere unless they had been invited by one of the neighbors.

And then there were the modeling sessions. And except for the last ten days he had spent in London, Lettie had slept in
his
bed each and every night since that first one over two months ago. She was the first person to greet him in the morning and the last one to bid him good-night. And every night, she was his passionate lover. There was nothing of Sarah’s passive, irritated submission in Lettie’s eagerness for him.

Moreover, he could think of no one with whom she might be involved. There was nothing to substantiate his accusation except his stubborn justification of Sarah’s behavior, simply because when he looked in the mirror, he wanted to see not a cuckolded idiot but a suffering saint.

He was worse than an idiot. He was a willing perpetrator of self-deception, and by doing so had hurt terribly the person who was dearest to him in the entire world.
So what
if Sarah lied? It made no difference where Lettie was concerned. How could he doubt his beloved Lettie when he should have long ago questioned Sarah’s veracity? Two plus two was always four, no matter how one tried to come up with a different result.

Percy impatiently turned his horse around. Farley stopped in the middle of a sentence, eyeing him warily. Percy muttered an excuse and spurred the animal, leaving the steward and the half-collapsed barn behind. Poor Farley was probably going to hand in his resignation, but that thought was carried away by the wind hitting Percy’s face as he galloped home.

He had to stop Lettie from leaving.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Percy reached the portico with such speed and brought his horse to a halt so suddenly that by all laws of physics, he should have been ejected from the saddle into a direct contact with the front door. Somehow he avoided such undignified dismounting and managed to reach the ground in what was generally considered a normal way of getting off a horse. He threw the reins over the top of a cone-shaped boxwood in a tub flanking one of the columns and reached the door in one stride. He had wasted too much time. By now, the sun had begun its descent toward the horizon.

In the entrance, he almost collided with one of the footmen.

“I thought I heard someone in the hall,” the servant explained.

“Is Lady Letitia home?” Percy asked.

“No, sir” was the bland reply. “Her ladyship departed earlier in the day.”

Something slammed in Percy’s chest, though surely not the heart he did not possess.

“When?” he almost growled.

“About four hours ago, sir.”

Four hours! He had wasted those hours pottering around, taking up Farley’s time for nothing, instead of stopping Lettie from leaving.

“Did Lady Letitia say where she was going?”

“No, sir.”

A yawning, black hole opened under him.

“Her ladyship took the traveling carriage and a lot of baggage,” the footman added. “It appeared she planned a longer journey.”

Indeed, a lifelong journey without him. And it was only his fault, no one else’s.

Percy was already running up the stairs, two at a time. Self-flagellation could wait until he had hours of solitary driving to get through.

“Have the curricle ready without delay,” he called briskly from the landing. “Tell the groom to prepare for a longer journey.”

He burst into Lettie’s room, his nonexistent heart clanking with a desperate hope that his servant was wrong.

The room was, as always, neat, but so palpably empty that cold agony gripped him by the throat again. Nothing on the dressing table. The only adornment on the escritoire, beside the candlestick and the inkstand, was a flacon from which protruded the pink head of a hydrangea he had pilfered from the gardens this very morning.

Percy frantically opened the drawers of the commode. Empty. So was the armoire in the dressing room.

Remorse and despair assailed him again. How could he expose Lettie to all the dangers of traveling alone when she was with child?
His
child, for God’s sake. He felt so dizzy he grabbed the bedpost for support.

But standing in the middle of Lettie’s empty bedchamber was not going to help. Turning on his heel, Percy swallowed against a powerful constriction in his throat and strode into his room.

Pergot was laying out dinner clothes on the bed.

“Traveling clothes,” Percy ground out.

Pergot turned his head unhurriedly and raised his eyebrows in question. Was he deaf?

“Traveling clothes instead of these, Pergot, if you please,” Percy repeated louder and with impatience, then cleared his throat and added in a gentler tone, “and a traveling trunk for a few days’ journey. Be quick about it.”

Pergot muttered the acknowledgment and applied himself to the fulfillment of his new orders without one blink of an eye, though with an agonizing disregard for urgency. The valet moved today like a dignified snail.

Percy opened his mouth to say he’d find the clothes himself, but, just then, Pergot shut the door to the dressing room behind him, robbing Percy of this option.

Unable to abide idle waiting, Percy strode out into the corridor and toward the stairs. He might check the orangery. Had she taken all her things? What about Endymion?

Percy ran down the stairs, nearly bumping, at the bottom of the staircase, into Slater, who had just emerged from the back corridor.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” the butler said with some anxiety. “There is something I believe I ought to bring to your attention before you leave.”

“Cannot this wait?” Percy asked. Slater could very well manage on his own. He had done so after Sarah’s death whenever Ethel darted through the house insisting she’d sort Sarah’s belongings. But Percy had had no intention of revealing to Ethel the real reason behind Sarah’s death and Burdett’s sudden departure. The less anyone knew about it, the better. In those harrowing days, Slater had proven a formidable first line of defense.

But now the butler shook his head. “If I may offer my opinion, sir, it may be better if you examine the box.” He walked to the commode next to Sir Giles’s portrait and pulled open the top drawer. “I believe it belonged to the first Lady Hanbury.”

Percy felt sudden pressure in his chest. He had checked the entire house, determined to hunt down even the smallest trinket that might remind him of Sarah, then packed all her personal items, destined for return to her parents. How could he have missed anything, he thought, watching Slater take out of the drawer a tole box the size of an average octavo volume.

“How do you know this was Lady Hanbury’s?” he asked.

“I recall, sir, that Lady Hanbury used to take it with her to the orangery all the time. Mrs. Vernon’s sons found it behind Sir Giles’s portrait the last time she was here, before your departure for London, while playing at a treasure hunt. Mrs. Vernon made them return it to Lady Letitia before they claimed the treasure, and her ladyship put it in the top drawer of the commode.”

Sarah’s box behind Sir Giles’s portrait?

Suddenly, recollection hit Percy like a furious blow to the gut, taking him back to the moment when Anthony Burdett had left Sarah’s room after he discovered them together. Burdett murmured some empty consolation to Sarah, and without a single glance back, hurried down the stairs. A moment later, Percy followed him. The hall was the place where he saw Burdett for the last time, kneeling on the floor by Sir Giles’s picture, hastily stuffing some papers into his coat pocket.

“What do you wish me to do with the box, sir?” Slater interrupted his thoughts. “Lady Marsden nearly fainted at its sight, so it may be safer to remove it from the hall, in case she determines to go on opening all the drawers, as she used to. Shall I give it to you now, sir, or later?”

“Let me have it now,” Percy decided, taking the box from the butler. “Thank you, Slater.”

Slater bowed and retreated through the servants’ door.

Percy turned the box over in his hands. Yes, now he remembered having seen it once or twice when he had gone to the orangery, Sarah sitting in her favorite chair, writing in a little notebook, sheets of paper strewn on that overdecorated table from Bombay.

He traced the gilt decoration with his fingers, unsure what to do. Did he really want to know what she kept inside? What would it change?

But curiosity prevailed. Percy fumbled with the lid until, with some effort, it snapped open.

On top was a little notebook. No doubt the same one he had seen her use.

He took it out and placed it on the commode. The box contained more things: a small watercolor wrapped in an almost-translucent tissue paper, a locket and a cotton sachet containing a handful of letters.

He considered this collection of memories, at first uncertain what to do with them. Sarah clearly did not mean to share them with him. It seemed she had given the box to Burdett, who must have been the one to put it behind the frame, having taken only what was of value to him. Given what Percy had found out about Burdett afterward, such supposition was certainly plausible.

Under different circumstances, Percy would have packed everything back inside the box. But he did not owe Sarah anything. He had never kept secrets from her. In hindsight, he had realized after her death how secretive she could be. He had a strange feeling that the box in his hands was more than a girl’s pretty scrapbook filled with dried flowers and awkward drawings.

He took everything out of the tin and put all the objects on the commode, next to the notebook.

The locket drew his attention. Its pretty tortoiseshell case with a silver rim had silver initials inlaid in the center:
ST
. Those were the initials for Sarah Thornhill, before she became Lady Hanbury.

Absentmindedly, he rubbed the smooth surface with his thumb and turned the locket over.

And the nightmare swallowed him again with all its brutal force. The other side of the case had another set of initials in silver, no less familiar to him:
AB
.

Percy’s nonexistent heart thudded with sudden realization of what this meant. With shaky fingers, he unlatched the little clasp that held the locket closed.

It fell open in his hand. Inside were two portraits, Sarah’s and Burdett’s. Between them, in a smaller glass compartment made to fit the inside of the locket, was braided hair. He recognized Sarah’s black strand and Burdett’s dark blond.

In that instant, his already shattered life came crashing down on his shoulders, and Percy sagged under the weight.

The pretty trinket stood witness to what could not be denied. Sarah and Burdett’s affair two years ago had not been merely the result of favoring circumstances, as he had always believed it to be. Sarah and Burdett’s affair had been a
reunion.
They had known each other
before
Percy married her.

The locket burned his hand, spread heat through his veins like wildfire until it enveloped all of him, dimmed his vision and excluded from his mind everything beyond the two faces that seemed to mock everything he had ever held dear. He hurled it away. It hit the stone floor, and the delicate case crashed to pieces, dislodging the initialed tortoiseshell from its silver rim and freeing the glass case that rolled awkwardly until it stopped a few feet away against the edge of the carpet.

Why had Sarah married him?

Had she really fallen in love with him that spring eight years ago? Or had it been just a sudden infatuation that she regretted as soon as they married? Had she married him to spite Burdett because they had quarreled?

Love could be blind indeed. He had loved Sarah so much that he saw only what he craved—her love for him. He believed in it, perhaps in defiance of the evidence that, had he been less blinded by his own feelings, would have stared him in the face with more effect.

With an absentminded glance at the pieces of the locket strewn on the floor, Percy swept everything back into the box and walked with it to one of the chairs half-hidden under the staircase. He sat in it heavily.

The journal was the first thing he took out again. The ribbon holding the soft vellum cover together yielded to a single yank, and pages covered with dense, small writing fanned out in invitation.