Fallen Angel (53 page)

"W-Watch me, Deveryn," she said, then again, with more conviction, "Just you watch me!"

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In his lodgings in Jermyn Street, at three o'clock of the morning, having broached his third bottle of burgundy, the Viscount Deveryn found to his annoyance that he still could not banish from his mind the picture of Maddie as he'd last seen her, like a furious, helpless kitten, spitting her impotent rage at him. One part of him wanted only to stop her mouth with kisses and love her into silence; the other, and the one which surfaced most often, wanted to tumble her skirts above her ears and lay the whip to her bare bottom.

He could not believe that she would speak to him in such terms after everything that had passed between them. "Liar! Adulterer! Cheat! Murderer!" He was none of those things! How dare she fling such baseless accusations in his teeth when he was the one who was more sinned against than sinning? It was
he
who was the victim of them all—Cynthia Sinclair, Donald Sinclair, and most of all, Maddie Sinclair. He wished to God he'd never heard the name Sinclair, had never come into Scotland, had never put his heart into the hands of the little spitfire. They were ruthless hands, as his bruised heart could testify.

And that last cut—
that
was the most wounding of all! He did not think that he would ever forgive or forget the manner in which he had been left to discover for himself that he was to be the father of her child.

"Women!" he said aloud, conveying, in that one word, all the scorn of the bewildered male for an enigma which could not' be grasped by his superior intellect.

"Yes, my lord," murmured his valet noncommittally, and unobtrusively went about removing the remains of a late supper which it was evident his lordship had scarcely touched.

"Where was the champagne? Where were the soft words?" demanded Deveryn rhetorically.

"Quite so, my lord," responded Martin, with the merest hint of ingratiating sympathy.

The viscount stared morosely into space, moodily reviewing the besetting sins—and there were many—of the love of his life. Maddie Sinclair Verney might be a brilliant scholar, but as a wife she was positively brainless.

His thoughts wandered to Maddie as she had been that morning, articulate, lucid, and so endearingly humourous as she had delivered her address, a set-down really, to the complacent males in her audience. How startled they had been! How proud he had been of his clever, little wife! But dammit if she had not meant every word for
him!
It was so unjust! He was a broadminded fellow—liberal to a degree. How dare she lump him with men in general as if his ambition stretched no further than the begetting of heirs. He was sure he scarcely gave a thought to the succession.

"Should she give me a son, no doubt I shall be expected to weep buckets of crocodile tears and go about Friday-faced for the rest of my miserable existence," he told his valet.

Martin's stoic demeanour suffered a momentary lapse. He recovered quickly and managed a toneless, "Quite."

"It's not as if I don't like girls, you understand," said the viscount conversationally. "She's welcome to fill my house with 'em. After all, my mother's a female, and so are my sisters. Nobody has ever accused me before of not being fond of the softer sex. But dammit, man, she has no right to keep me from my sons."

Martin had no ready answer for this intelligence, but a more sober eye than Deveryn's would have noted that the colour had receded somewhat from the valet's normally sanguine complexion.

"Mark my words, Martin," continued his lordship, waxing belligerent, "there isn't an ounce of romance in a woman's heart. Bookkeepers and bankers, every last one of'em! Debits and credits—that's all they understand. What's the matter with you man? You look to be three sheets into the wind. Oh, stop fussing and go to bed."

Martin, wisely, gave every appearance of obeying his master's bald command. An hour or so later, he returned with a blanket which he threw over Deveryn's softly snoring form after having first removed his master's immaculate boots.

At noon the following morning, Deveryn wakened, his head throbbing savagely, his bones aching from having spent the night in the cramped confines of his favourite armchair.

Almost immediately, his eyes lit on a silver salver on which reposed a single folded sheet of paper. He reached for it and studied the several Greek characters which were written in a bold hand across the top of the page. They formed his name. He knew at once that it came from Maddie. Inside were two short sentences, again, in Greek letters.

Perhaps it was the effects of his night of dissipation, perhaps it was because the viscount had scarcely glanced at Greek since his Oxford days. Whatever the reason, it took him a full five minutes to work out that he was not reading Greek words but a mere transliteration of English words into Greek letters.

The note was short and cryptic. He read, "Medea Part Two begins. I hope you are watching, Deveryn."

He reached Curzon Street within thirty minutes, having bathed, shaved, and changed his garments. He was not surprised to find Maddie gone and the house in an uproar.

The Countess of Rossmere silently remarked that her son was not in his best looks. To be frank, and the countess was nothing if she was not frank, she thought the same might be said of any of the several persons who graced her drawing room on that particular cold and blustery Saturday evening. Only her husband, the earl, gave the appearance of being totally unaffected by the events which had overtaken them in these last several hours.

Her eyes wandered to Samuel Spencer, and her heart softened. He looked to have aged ten years since she had last spoken to him at Carlton House—was it only a week or so since? A flash of irritation showed itself in a small frown which clouded her smooth brow. It was intolerable that the men of the Verney family should conduct themselves with so little propriety, as if beneath the veneer of their impeccable manners, they concealed their true nature—something wild and savage beyond taming. Though her mother's heart went out to her son since she knew that he was wretched beyond permission, her sympathies were mostly for the girl. No one knew better than she how ruthless a Verney male could become when thwarted in love. Her own male relatives—and she sliced a glance to her cousin, Raeburn, who was tête-à-tête with Miss Spencer—were gentle and chivalrous creatures. Why couldn't the Verneys be more like them?

It was inconceivable that any one of her male relatives would browbeat a young girl into a clandestine marriage and then proceed to exercise his conjugal rights given the unhappy situation in which the girl found herself. She was sure she had been ready to sink when, in reply to his father's pointed enquiry about the consummation of the marriage, Deveryn had tersely admitted that not only had he been on the most intimate terms with his wife in Scotland, but also at Dunsdale, and in London besides. Small wonder that Maddie had bolted when she discovered that she was pregnant! Still, her mother's intuition told her that the viscount had not divulged the whole story. She could not believe that he'd held off from making his marriage public until he'd had a reply to a letter he had sent to Maddie's guardian in Canada. She could not believe it because it was so untypically
 
Verney to wait on any man. She suppressed a shudder. She did not see how things could be worse than they were.

She gave the signal and the two footmen who had been stationed by the door moved quietly into the room and removed the remains of a cold collation of which only the earl had eaten heartily. The door closed upon the departing servants and several voices rushed into speech at once. Only Deveryn, slouched in a chair, hi6 legs stretched out before him, maintained an aloof and forbidding silence.

It was Lord Rossmere whose commanding tones, all the more menacing since he rarely raised his voice, cut across the flurry of recriminations and comment.

"Mr. Spencer," he said in a voice that was wont to send his servants scurrying for cover, "these senseless recriminations are redundant. Why my son and your granddaughter chose to marry without your consent has already been gone into. She had no guardian in England to whom application might be made for her hand. Oh, I agree that Deveryn has much to answer for, but I, for one, am wearied to death of rehashing old issues. If there is anything new to be said on the subject, I am willing to listen. If not, I suggest we let Jason get to bed. He has an early start ahead of him tomorrow."

From the depths of a commodious wing armchair, Miss Nell Spencer offered tremulously, "I think that Maddie was not happy when my father informed her that her betrothal to Raeburn was to be published in the papers."

"Well, of course she wasn't happy," exclaimed Spencer, patently annoyed. "What a dim-witted thing to say. How
should she be when she was already wed and expecting another man's child?"

The Duke of Raeburn reached across and clasped Miss Spencer's trembling hand in his own strong one and squeezed in a comforting gesture. "Why was I not advised that the betrothal was to be published so soon?" he asked coldly, looking at Spencer.

Samuel Spencer shot His Grace a withering look. "Where were you, Raeburn, these last few weeks? We scarce saw you in Curzon Street. And when you did come, it was Nellie to whom you paid court. Good God! In my day, we knew how to sweep a lady off her feet. Yes . . .
well . . .
we all know which gentleman beat you to it. I thought merely to put things on a more regular footing. Some silly fop had already approached me about offering for Maddie. The girl stands to come into a fair bit of money. I'd no wish to have a stream of suitors camping on my doorstep once she increased her circle of acquaintances. The announcement of your betrothal would have put a stop to all of that."

The earl approached His Grace and proffered a crystal glass of ruby red liquid. "What? A reluctant swain, George?" he quizzed in a soft undertone. Raeburn disengaged his hand from Miss Spencer's clasp and accepted the glass without comment.

Deveryn, adjusting his long body in his chair, said with the first interest he had shown in the last hour, "But there was no announcement of the betrothal in any of the papers."

"No," admitted Spencer grudgingly. "Maddie and I had words on the subject. I agreed to defer the publication till after I returned from Paris. Only see what a bumblebroth awaited me today when I stepped over my threshold."

"Be thankful for small mercies," drawled the earl. "Deveryn remained here in London until you should arrive from Paris so that he might explain in person the unhappy circumstances of your granddaughter's disappearance. If he'd gone tearing after her, as he wished to do, think of the torment you would have endured not knowing the why or wherefore. As I understand, the several messages she left behind were remarkably uninformative."

"Why didn't you go after her at once?" demanded Spencer. "You've given her a good two days head start as it is."

Deveryn shrugged. "Speed is not of the essence in this instance. I can't overtake her as I would surely have done if she had travelled by coach. And there's not another packet going to Leith for several days. At least we know her destination. I'll catch up to her soon enough."

The countess tilted her head to one side and, addressing Spencer, said softly, "You said that you and Maddie had words. What does that mean, precisely?"

Mr. Spencer gave a short, deprecating laugh. "I know what you're thinking, but you're very far off. Good grief, don't you think I learned from my mistakes with Maddie's mother? I tell you, nothing of any significance happened. I did not lose my temper or threaten the girl in any way, shape or form. On the contrary, I let her have her way about the announcement to the papers."

"And so you did," said the countess soothingly. "Why don't you just begin at the beginning and tell us what was said?"

Though it was evident that Samuel Spencer thought he was embarking on a useless exercise, after a few false starts, he gave an abridged account of his last conversation with Maddie.

"Naturally, I tried to persuade her to fall in with my designs," he said, unconsciously truthful. "I thought if she knew her father had been in favour of the match, she would have been more open to Raeburn's suit." He seemed to lose interest in what he was saying to follow some private train of thought.

"But she wasn't, was she?" observed the countess gently.

He fixed his gaze upon her. "No," he stated. "And now we know why," and he shot a truculent look upon Deveryn's harshly carved features.

"There's something more, isn't there?" intoned the countess in sudden intuition. "Something perhaps which you feel has no bearing on Maddie's disappearance and which you don't feel comfortable confiding to strangers. But you know, Mr. Spencer, it were wiser if we knew everything that happened that night."