Fascination -and- Charmed (67 page)

“In which case I shall kill him,” Etienne said sleepily.

“With my blessing,” Anabel agreed. “There is also the possibility that he is working for Chauncey but has learned nothing at all about you.”

“He will still die for what he’s done.”

“Exactly.” Anabel moved Etienne to a spot where he could rest his open mouth over a nipple. “But it is more likely he has found out something, yet does not have enough proof.”

“Can’t follow that,” he said, using the end of his tongue and enjoying her wriggling.

“If he already had enough proof,” Anabel said impatiently, “we would not be having this conversation.”

Etienne thought about that. “ ’Spose not. Makes it all hopeful in that case, don’t it?”

“Hopeful indeed.”

“Dashed fellow’s overstepped the mark regardless.”

“He certainly has.”

Etienne slipped out of Anabel. “He’s got to die. Nothing else for it. Honor and all that.”

“Yours and mine, my love. All that remains is to time his death appropriately. And hers.”

Etienne rolled away until he could see her face. “Hers?”

“Of course hers. Only way to make certain you get her dowry.”

“Don’t follow you.” In fact, he was getting remarkably sleepy.

“If it becomes necessary, we’ll make it look as if you killed Innes while he was in the act of stealing your fiancée and she died by accident at the same time.” Anabel steered his face back to her breast. “Do you get my meaning?”

“No,” he mumbled around a mouthful.

“It’s simple,” Anabel said, sounding irritable. “Naturally, Chauncey would never draw further attention to his daughter’s infamous ruin by an adventurer. At our suggestion to Chauncey, the world will learn that Lady Philipa died at the hands of her kidnapper—Calum Innes—and that you were wounded while attempting to save her. Chauncey will insist you keep what’s rightfully yours.”

She was clever, he’d grant her that. “It might work.”

“It will,” she said happily. “You’ll get Cloudsmoor—and me!”

There were times, Struan thought, when Calum Innes could be a remarkably sanctimonious devil. “This is no easier on me than it is on you,” he told Calum now. “I could never have foreseen having to flee London in such a manner.”

They had instructed their coachman to stand ready while they took a walk. In truth, Calum had demanded that they walk and talk.

Calum marched ahead. Without looking back, he said, “Of late, I’ve seen no evidence that you see anything particularly clearly.”

Arguing was almost useless while Calum was in this mood. “You do agree that we had no choice but to leave London when we did?”

“After what you did?” Calum raised his arms and let them fall. “I have no doubt that if we’d stayed longer we might already be dead men. Set upon and killed by Mrs. Lushbottam’s tailors or whatever. Chopped up and scattered upon the waters of the Thames to be gobbled up by gulls.”

Struan gritted his teeth. For days, since they’d left London in the middle of the night, Calum had raged about his friend’s idiocy. “Look,” Struan said to him now, attempting to sound reasonable, “I had hoped that long before we arrived in Cornwall, you’d have helped me think of a serviceable solution.”

Calum waited until they were out of earshot of the coach before turning upon Struan. “You abducted a fifteen-year-old girl from a brothel,” he said, his nostrils flaring. “And, not satisfied with
that
debacle, you agreed to add her revolting little brother to our menagerie.”

“How could I have
known
she was but fifteen?”

Glancing at the coach where Ella and her spindly, red-haired brother, Max, sat with noses pressed to the windows, Calum shook his head. “When you did discover how old she was,
how
could you have promised to find a place for her
and
her brother?” He paced back and forth beside a crumbling stone wall.

“I
will
find a place for them, I tell you,” Struan insisted. With every passing mile on the journey from London, he’d felt more desperate and more convinced that they might
not
come upon some childless farmer, or innkeeper, or—

“A childless farmer or innkeeper,” Calum said, as if he’d heard Struan’s thoughts. “And I allowed you to make me believe it might be possible for such a saint to exist.”

How could he have guessed Ella was only fifteen—or that she would be a charmingly determined miss for whom he would quickly develop fatherly feelings?

What in God’s name had possessed him to champion the girl? How had she managed to persuade him to help her rescue her brother from the squalid circumstances she’d been forced to accept from Mrs. Lushbottam?

“It isn’t as if I did not
feel
for them,” Calum said. “But we’re here, by God. We’re in Cornwall, and Franchot Castle lies over that ridge.” He indicated a steep, heavily wooded rise behind him.

“Surely the Franchots might know someone who could—”

“Oh, my
God!
” Calum said explosively. “Of course, I am not already faced with an overwhelming task. No, no. It will be a simple matter to approach the Franchots and ask them to help us with two ill-bred,
homeless children.
” Every time he emphasized a point, his dark eyes blazed and the lines of his handsome face grew sharper.

“Quite so,” Struan said, feeling sheepish yet again. “Naturally, that would be difficult. Anyway, the family will not be here for some days.”

“And dashed awkward that’s going to be to explain,” Calum said, frowning deeply. “Turning up at the castle before Franchot and his party.”

“There was nothing for it but to make our getaway at once.” Struan smiled, reassuringly, he hoped. “It’s a matter easily enough dispatched. We tell the castle servants we had business elsewhere that took us out of London a little early. Then—so we’ll tell them—the business was more easily attended to than expected, so we came here direct.”

“Very plausible.” Calum’s frown had become a scowl. “But it does not deal with the real problem, does it?”

“No.”

“This is a disaster,” Calum said.

“Yes.”

“Poor little devils.”

A
chink had appeared in the opposition’s armor.
Struan’s spirits lifted, but he made certain that condition didn’t show. “What makes you call the children that?”

“I was lucky,” Calum said morosely. “I got dropped on your father’s doorstep before I became old enough to know hopelessness. Unless I miss my mark, those two have already been to hell and back, and they still belong nowhere and to no one.”

Struan glanced away. He should have known Calum would eventually relent.

“I want to climb the ridge,” Calum said. “Franchot Castle will be visible from here. I’d like to see it from a distance.”

Struan made no comment. He followed Calum through a gap in the wall and over rough grassland toward the trees. Although the summer day smelled sweet, a bite sharpened the wind, and gray-edged clouds had begun to pile high in a pale sky.

Marching onward, Calum began to talk again. “I should never have allowed you to persuade me to bring them. How in God’s name shall we explain the presence of a fifteen-year-old girl with a cockney accent who resembles an exotic goddess—and a ten-year-old boy who is supposedly her brother and who should have been drowned at birth?”

Struan tripped on a rock and cursed. “Ella needed my help,” he said, drawing in a hissing breath. “I felt that from the moment I saw her.”

Calum made a snorting sound. “She is a beautiful creature and you wanted her.”

“As I have said,
many
times, I did not
know
she was only fifteen. Now that I do, I have one concern—her safety.”

“Fortunately for her, you are a man of honor and high sensibilities,” Calum said grudgingly. “But this is a disaster, man. We should never have traveled this far with them.”

Struan turned around to look in the direction of the coach. Max, the brother Ella had produced, now leaned out the door.

“We must think of something.” Calum shook his head and struck off through rowan trees heavy with clusters of white blossoms. “A ten-year-old child—a
monster.
And you could not have chosen a more ill-fated time to visit these disasters upon us.”

Struan strode behind him, batting aside branches that swung back in Calum’s furious wake. “We should not leave them alone in the carriage.” The fact that he understood Calum’s ire made it no easier to tolerate. “They have both suffered enough without adding the fear of yet another desertion in a strange place.”

“The girl is not afraid,” Calum said without looking back. “And if she is not afraid, neither is the boy.”

“How can you be certain?” Struan hurried to catch up.

Calum eyed him sideways. “Unlike the black thing that beats within my breast, your heart’s goodness is easily felt, my friend. Ella knows you for the gentle man you are, and her brother trusts her judgment implicitly.”

“I believe there is much she has not told us.”

“Indeed,” Calum agreed. “The story of how she came to be in Lushbottam’s clutches is vague. Which market did the old hag find her in, one wonders? And how exactly did Ella and Max come to be alone and at the mercy of this nefarious band to which she refers?”

“Questions I have asked myself more than once,” Struan said.

The uphill path was exceedingly steep, and soon all their breath was required for the effort. The crest of the ridge slashed southward, toward the sea, and when they reached the top, Struan instantly crouched and stared about in wonder. “Magnificent,” he said, filled with awe by the sweep of meadowland that rolled away into a wide valley beneath them. “And so is that.” He pointed to a castle somewhat more south of them, clearly silhouetted against the sky.

“Aye,” Calum said, and Struan saw the flicker of muscle in the other man’s cheek and the narrowing of his eyes against the wind. “Franchot Castle is wondrous, isn’t it? What man would possibly consider needing so much?”

Struan eyed him curiously. “Men—powerful men—have always aspired to building great homes, Calum. And you would like to claim that Gothic marvel as your own.”

“It
is
my own,” Calum murmured. “But I’m not certain I want it.”

Struan wasn’t sure what to say. Surrounded by high walls, the castle stood on an elevated mound and seemed poised in the air with the steel-blue English Channel beyond.

“A fine fortress,” he finally commented. “The cliffs would make it impenetrable from the sea, and no army could have approached its walls without coming under attack from within.”

Calum nodded. “True enough. It is overwhelming. Overwhelming to me.”

Struan realized that this man who had grown up in a great castle had never viewed it with the assessing eyes he now set upon Franchot Castle. “It puts me in mind of a clever child’s creation,” he told Calum. “All towers and turrets and grand elevated terraces. What is it that catches the light? White marble, d’you think? A sugar castle. How it must glitter by moonlight.”

Calum said nothing.

“Such gardens,” Struan remarked, deliberately filling the silence. “Flowers everywhere. Even from here I see their brilliance. Symmetry. See the flights of steps? They would not be visible from lower land. Some former Franchot must have been in Italy and fallen in love with the gardens there.”

Still Calum did not reply.

“Would you like me to leave you alone?” Struan asked.

Calum started and looked at him, his eyes slowly lightening. “No. Forgive me. I was preoccupied. There is so much to consider here, so much I am not certain of. I feel drawn to this place and I know it is only right that I claim justice for the wrong done to me. But it would all change…My life would change so, Struan, and I’m not certain I should like it overmuch.”

Calum had always had a clear mind. Even when they’d been boys together—Arran included—Calum had been the quickest to see the way of things and the way things would best be accomplished.

“Do you understand?” Calum asked, watching Struan’s face intently.

“Yes,” Struan said, putting an arm around his friend’s shoulders. “Yes, I understand. Much lies ahead of you, Calum. But with each day’s events, you’ll make the right decisions.”

“I hope—” Calum stiffened and took several steps forward to peer down the hillside. “Do you see that?”

Struan followed the direction of Calum’s pointing finger. “What? No…The cart, d’you mean?” Below them, on a narrow track running parallel to the ridge, a fat nag hauled a cart on its bumpy way.

“There was a lane through the trees to the highway not long before we stopped the carriage,” Calum said, turning to look back in the direction from which they’d come. His old boyish grin widened. “I’d not say no to a ride rather than a steep downhill climb. What say you? I’ll wager that cart goes the way that will save our boots.”

Struan found no argument with that notion. “And perhaps the man who drives the cart will have an answer to our dilemma.”

“
Your
dilemma,” Calum retorted, starting downhill, running and sliding and using his arms to keep his balance.

They misjudged the distance to the track, and by the time they arrived on the narrow, stony path, there was no sign of the cart.

“Damn,” Calum said. “Hurry, man. If we have to walk the way now, we’ll be lucky to find the carriage before nightfall.”

Side by side, they set off at a rapid clip, and it was Struan who saw how they could shorten the distance between them and the cart by using a narrow switchback around a bush-covered hillock.

“Hurry!” Calum called, breaking into the full run that had so often proved a boon in his early days. “I hear it.”

Winded, Struan arrived back on the cart track a second behind Calum and several seconds behind the cart, which swayed along, its hunched, roughly cloaked driver oblivious to his pursuers.

“We’d best call out,” Calum said, closing the distance with a loping stride now. “Wouldn’t want to cause the poor old chap to have apoplexy.”

“No,” Struan agreed, and shouted, “You there—wait!”