Folly's Reward (24 page)

Lady Acton laughed and touched his cheek.

“No, of course not. You and Harry are full brothers, sir. Much as I may have wished it, I did not bear Lord Belham a son. No, the truth is far worse than that, for though it does not touch upon my honor, it strikes very deeply into my heart.”

Lord Belham turned to her. “Felicity, can you ever forgive me, my dear?”

“That you did not tell me? It was not only your secret to tell.”

“Then what did the letter mean?” Richard asked.

“It’s very simple,” Lady Acton said. “The countess that Lord Belham wrote to his father about was his aunt, now sitting here triumphant, Lady Dunraven. She was thirty-three when she seduced him. A beautiful, worldly thirty-three. He was nineteen. They were lovers for almost a year. When he wanted to end it and marry me, she threatened to tell the world and damn the consequences.”

Lady Dunraven laughed. “My lover was my nephew. What a lovely tale of incest!”

“Not in blood,” Belham said. “Yet even when I promised to give in to your demands, you still told my father and the Duke of Bydover—”

“Told them that he had ravished her,” Lady Acton added. “The threat of that scandal was more than enough to prevent my marriage to Lord Belham. What I did not know is why she did it. Lust for a hale young man? Lady Dunraven never felt any emotion so honest. Nor did I know why this withered old crone went to so much trouble to use Harry to trap me into coming here, but I do now.”

Lady Acton began to cry, entirely without shudders. Her black eyes simply filled with water, and tears spilled down her exquisite cheeks.

Lord Belham made an odd, broken gesture, but he did not go to her.

“It was in order to get an heir for Dunraven, wasn’t it?” Lady Acton looked away from Richard and stared straight at the dowager countess. “You took a boy into your bed so you would get the son that your husband hadn’t given you in twelve years of marriage. Even if he suspected, Lord Dunraven would have kept silent, as long as nothing was made public. His own sister’s boy. Was that close enough to count as his own?”

“I gained out of it everything I wanted,” Lady Dunraven said exultantly. “So, yes, I used young Belham like a harlot. Why not? You can’t imagine how lovely he was!”

“Yet you couldn’t bear it when he wanted me, Lady Felicity Roseleigh. Your beautiful paramour fell in love with a girl closer to his own age and wanted to marry her, and you have never forgiven either of them to this day. You are a sad, pathetic creature, Lady Dunraven. And you always were.”

Prudence longed to be anywhere else, but she sat as if pinned to her chair. She groped to make sense of it. All this long-ago scandal, all these passions felt by people now growing old. Love, greed, hatred, did nothing dim with time?

Richard rose to stand at his mother’s shoulder. His face was still very white and set.

“And the child of that affair was also named Henry?” he asked quietly.

“Yes, of course,” Lady Dunraven said, her elation undimmed. “It was my husband’s name, the least I could do, after making him a cuckold with his own sister’s boy. Lord Belham and I had a son together to inherit Dunraven. That’s him on the wall over there: Bobby’s father, the fourth Earl of Dunraven, who died this last winter in London. You did not know that, did you, Lady Acton? You did not know that I had a child with the man you loved. He may have told you that I seduced him. Ha! He did not tell you that I bore the seed of his loins.”

Richard turned to Lord Belham. “Forgive me, sir. But we are all involved now, whether we wish it or not. Am I to understand that you are, therefore, in truth Bobby’s grandfather?”

“Yes.” Belham’s bones shone stark beneath his skin. “Bobby is my ward, my second cousin, and my grandson. My son, Henry, his father, died in my arms. Now can you believe that I would never have harmed a hair on the child’s head?”

Prudence knew that she shouldn’t intervene. That this was deeper and more personal than she had any right to be hearing. But the agony of it was too much!

She rose from her chair and faced Lady Dunraven.

“Then why did you send me away with Bobby?” she asked. “Why did you tell me his life was in danger? Are you mad?”

“Sit down, Miss Drake! You forget yourself. You are in
my
employ, young woman. Pray, don’t forget it.”

Lord Belham came up to her and took her hand. “Miss Drake, I’m sorry that you have been subjected to all this. The dowager countess sent Bobby away, simply so that I shouldn’t be able to take care of him. Perhaps she’s right. The notorious Black Belham is hardly a suitable companion for a five-year-old boy, even if he is the child’s real grandfather. But I am also his legal guardian, and Bobby’s future is under my control, not hers. She used you, as she has used people for sixty-two years. It was just a last spiteful gesture from a spurned woman, that’s all.”

Lady Acton gazed at him. Her eyes were dark pools.

“It makes no difference, Alex,” she said in her beautiful, carefully modulated voice. “It makes no difference that she bore you a son. None at all! We have each of us made a new life since then. Good God, do you think I care anymore that your aunt had more of you than I could ever have? We were children. What the devil did we know of love? No, there is only one thing that matters to me now—”

“Felicity, please!”

She silenced him with a lifted hand. “And that’s Harry! Lady Dunraven has done her damnedest to damage my son. Life has left us behind, but Harry is the future. I have no tender feelings left for any man, but I do care very much that Harry is not harmed further by this old witch. If you had told me earlier that Bobby’s father was your son, I might have been prepared. Instead, I have just seen Harry reduced to despair by a letter of which I knew nothing, and was helpless to prevent it.”

“Mother, don’t!” Richard slammed his fist against the wall. “Harry will only have to give all this a moment’s reflection to know that Lord Belham isn’t his father. No, there’s more wrong with Harry than this foolish imbroglio. Perhaps none of us can mend that.”

“Then what is to be done, Richard?”

Richard looked across the room at Prudence, sitting stiffly in her chair.

“Let Miss Drake go to him.”

“Miss Drake?” Lady Dunraven’s white hair glimmered in the dim light. “Yes, what role has Miss Drake played for the last several weeks? Traveled alone, unchaperoned, with the vicious Harry Acton? You have let me down, young woman. You are dismissed from my service and from Dunraven Castle this instant. There will be no references. As far as I’m concerned, your character stinks like mud.”

Richard ignored her. “You know this place, Miss Drake. You lived here with Bobby, didn’t you? Can you guess where Harry might have gone?”

Prudence closed her eyes. She did know. She knew it in her bones and in the tips of her fingers. It was where she would have gone, if she were in pain and her world had shattered about her.

“He will be on the battlements,” she said.

The stair leading up to the top of Dunraven Keep made a tight spiral in the thickness of the masonry. The curve was such that a right-handed man with a sword had the advantage defending the stone steps against attackers coming from below.

Prudence grasped her skirts in one hand, running her free fingers over the rough stones of the outer wall. There was no handrail, not even a rope. It was a treacherous, dangerous climb for a woman in long skirts and old boots. She was entirely unaware of that. She only knew that her Prince Hal was up here and needed help.

She stepped out onto the topmost ramparts of Dunraven Keep.

“I have made a bloody fool of myself again, haven’t I?” Harry said.

He was leaning against the merlons. A small breeze ran from the mountains in wild, fey gusts to lift the dark hair from his forehead. He did not turn his head to look at her. He was gazing out across the black waters of the loch.

Rank upon rank of towering, snow-capped peaks stretched away into the distance, green and gilt-edged grays dissolving to a hazy blue where the mountains met the sky in perfect communion. Harry seemed as remote and as lonely as the hills, his voice cold, his skin pinched white by the breeze and by a chilling, bone-deep fatigue.

Prudence stopped where she was. She felt awkward, dumb. How could she reach him? Did he even want to be reached?

“You know, this is a remarkable landscape, Miss Drake. I am awestruck, humbled, belittled by rocks and water. I should like to dissolve into it, become a runnel of dampness on a cliff face. What’s that mountain there? The one that looks like an old woman crouched over her fire?”

“Beinn Mhor—the Big Mountain.”

Harry tried to wrap his English tongue around the soft sounds. “
Ben vore
.”

He was giving her a way out. A way not to face everything that had happened. A way to be polite strangers and say good-bye politely.

She began to name the peaks and valleys. The rolling, lovely Gaelic names: the Mountain of the Aspens, the Moor of Black Crows, the Pass of the Moss.

And beyond them lay the sea, the wild beckoning ocean, home of the silkie.

Prudence closed her eyes and felt the cold breeze kiss her cheeks with ice.

“They fall in love with him because he’s comely,” Bobby said.

“But can his lady never keep him by her side?”

“Only if she can find his fur coat and burn it. Then he’s a man forever and she can marry him. But if she doesn’t do it right, he dies.”

She opened her eyes and made herself look at him. At every loved detail of his face and bones and body, the long, graceful lines of back and leg, and the wild, wind-tossed hair.

“You owe a great many people an apology,” she said harshly. “Are you too much of a coward to give it?”

Harry spun about. Strong color washed up over his face to stain his high cheekbones and emphasize the deep blue of his eyes.

“Yes,” he said baldly. “What use is an apology when the act is so damned? Do you think there are words in the language sufficient to take back what I said to my mother?”

“You want to take them back?”

“Oh, God.” Harry wrung a hand over his mouth. “It wasn’t even true, was it? For God’s sake! How could I have believed, even for a moment, that she would not have told me?”

“She did love Lord Belham, but he isn’t your father. The letter was about something else.”

He dropped his hand. His eyes looked bruised, cerulean on cobalt, like the mountains fading into the sky.

“So I am the legitimate get of the Earl of Acton, after all—though Lord Belham is a better man. And thus my mother isn’t a liar. How the hell could I have let that old witch deceive me?”

“Lady Dunraven had her own reasons for misleading you and giving you that letter. She wanted to hurt Lady Acton. She arranged it, didn’t she, so that you didn’t have any time to think about it?”

The flush was fading, to leave him dead white again. “There’s no excuse for what I said.”

“You are hurt,” Prudence said. “You have been beaten and injured. You had just read something that left you in shock. It was only human to react to it.”

Harry turned back to the parapet. He laid his hands, palms open, fingers splayed, on the merlons on each side of him. His profile was cut cleanly against the sky.

“Only human? To let emotion override reason and lash out at those who love you, because their love prevents them from striking back? Then I’m damned if I want to be human, angel.”

“Lord Belham wrote that letter to his father almost thirty years ago. It was about Lady Dunraven. She had seduced him. When he met your mother, they wanted to marry. Your grandfather prevented the marriage and broke her heart. Yet Lady Acton didn’t know until now that Lord Belham and Lady Dunraven had a child together, Bobby’s father, Henry, who became the fourth earl. What have you ever done to hurt her that could come close to that? Are you so damned proud that you won’t take or offer forgiveness?”

“It’s not pride.”

Harry gripped the stone of the battlements as if he would break off pieces and hurl them into space. Bones and tendons stood out starkly on the backs of his hands.

Prudence stared at them, those beautiful, elegant hands, still callused from his work on the narrow boat.

“If it’s not pride,” she said. “Then what is it?”

“It’s shame,” he said at last, and his voice choked on it.

And then she was devastated, for Harry closed his eyes above cheeks wet with tears.

Prudence reacted instantly, without thinking or weighing the consequences. She ran up to him and pulled his hands away from the stone.

He turned blindly to her as she put her arms around his body and held him.

“Let it go, Hal! For heaven’s sake, let it go! You are human. You are one of us. Filled with flaws and pettiness and folly. You have made mistakes. You will keep on making mistakes. That’s what humans do. We strive to be better and only continue to fail. We’re just trapped here for a little while in these frail bodies, haunted by our own awareness. It isn’t possible to become unaware, like a seal or a running stream. Why are you pretending now that nothing is wrong with you? I saw that man hit you with his pistol. Richard struck you, as well. Doesn’t your head ache?”

Harry laughed weakly into her hair. His arms wrapped around her back, holding her tightly to his chest.

“Like the torments of the damned, angel. I think the grand old Duke of York is marching his ten thousand men up and down in my skull with full drums and bagpipes.”

“Then what’s the use of heroics? You must come inside and lie down. Will you? I’ll see if there’s any willow bark in the kitchen.”

Gently he released her and held her away at arm’s length. “Dear Prudence, when did you become such a bully? Very well.”

Harry kept her hand in a tight grasp as he led her back to the head of the stairs. He opened the little wooden door and began to run lightly down ahead of her.

Prudence tried to take one step and gulped. The center post of the stairs dropped away into nothingness, turning her vision dizzy and her knees to water.