Guilty Series (53 page)

Grace lifted her head, glancing at Osgoode, then at Mrs. Ellis. “She's not in the kitchens or any of the servants' rooms? And she's not outside in the park?”

The butler and the housekeeper both shook their heads.

“It doesn't make sense,” Grace said. “If she changed out of her nightgown and took her cloak, she must have run away, but why didn't she take any of her things with her?” No one answered her, but then, she hadn't expected an answer.

“We shall search the house once more, and if we don't find her, we'll have to call the constables. Osgoode, have the footmen search the park again, the north and south mews, and all around the square. If they see anyone outside at this hour, have them ask if they have seen her. Mrs. Ellis, take the maids and search the servant quarters. Work your way up. Molly and I shall take the nursery and do the same in reverse. Molly, come with me.”

The group started to split up, when the bell for the front door sounded. “Oh, maybe someone's found her!” cried Molly as Osgoode opened the front door.

Molly proved to be right. It was Dylan, sans his evening coat and cloak, with a sleeping Isabel in his arms. Grace was so relieved at the sight of them that she went weak in the knees.

He glanced at the group in their nightgowns and dressing robes. “Looking for something?” he asked as he stepped into the foyer.

“Bless us and save us!” Molly cried. “She's been with the master all this time.”

The servants began to ask questions, but Dylan cut them off. “Hush, or you'll wake her. She's all right, just worn out.” He started toward the stairs. “Molly, come with me. Everyone else may go back to bed.”

Molly went with him as he carried Isabel up the stairs. Grace, who had no intention of going back to bed without finding out what had happened, followed them to the nursery. She waited nearby as Molly pulled back the sheets and Dylan placed Isabel in bed. When the nanny reached for the sheet and counterpane to cover the child, Dylan stopped her.

“I'll do it.”

Grace watched him as he tucked his daughter in for the second time that night. She studied his countenance and the grim set of his shoulders, and she knew something dreadful had happened. She suspected that Dylan had not taken his daughter with him voluntarily, but that was as far as her speculations went before Dylan straightened away from the bed.

He looked across at Molly, who was twisting her hands together in nervous agitation. “If you ever leave her alone again,” he said quietly, “I shall send you packing. Do you understand, Molly?”

“Oh, yes, sir!” she whispered, so relieved by the second chance that her knees almost gave way. She grasped the bedpost. “Thank you, sir.”

Dylan leaned down and kissed the unconscious child's forehead. “Sleep, little one,” she heard him say. “And don't cry anymore.”

He strode toward the door, and Grace followed him out of the nursery and down the stairs. “Why was Isabel crying?” she asked as they reached the ground floor. “What happened?”

“Go to bed, Grace.”

She watched in astonishment as he opened the front door. “Where are you going now?”

“For a walk.” He shut the door behind him.

Grace turned and went back up the stairs. Inside her own room, she blew out the candle, but she was still far too agitated to just go back to sleep. She walked to the window and looked down at the square. The moon was bright, illuminating the shrubs and trees of the park in the center of the square. She caught sight of Dylan almost at once, but he was not taking a walk. Instead, he was sitting on a bench in the park, his body slumped forward, his face in his hands.

Something was horribly wrong.

Grace pulled her black leather short boots from beneath the bed and hurriedly laced them up, then put her dressing gown back on. She grabbed her cloak, wrapped it over her nightclothes, and went downstairs. When she came outside, she found that he was still sitting in the same place and position, and he did not look up as she closed the front door softly behind her and walked to where he sat.

It wasn't until she was standing almost in front of him that he noticed her. He stiffened at once, pulling his hands from his face. He sat up. “I thought I told you to go back to bed.”

“I do not do things just because you tell me to.”

He didn't even smile. “True.”

Grace sat down beside him. “Dylan, what's wrong? What happened?”

He was silent for so long, that she didn't think he was going to answer her question, but he finally did. “Isabel climbed onto the back of my carriage and followed me tonight.” He paused, took a deep breath, and turned his head to look right into her eyes. “I was at a seraglio.”

Grace stared at him in shock, yet she did not know why she should be shocked. After all his passionate kisses, after she had refused him, he'd gone to a bawd. Her body remembered every place he had ever kissed her or touched her, and he'd gone to a bawd.

“I see.” She looked away.
It doesn't matter,
she told herself.
The child is what matters.
“Did Isabel—” she broke off, too appalled to continue.

“She saw me, yes.”

The harshness of his voice caused her to look at him again, and she watched as he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, just as he had been before she'd come down.

“How she got into the place without anyone seeing her, I don't know,” he said, his voice lowering to a hushed, agonized rasp. “She saw me with a—”

“Whore?” Grace supplied the word when he did not.

He did not flinch at the hard edge to her voice. “I do not blame myself for that part of it. I was on fire, and you know it.”

“Are you saying I am to blame?” she asked quietly.

“No, damn it, that is not what I am saying!” He sat up, turning on the wrought-iron bench to face her. “I am saying that I wanted you so badly, I just could not accept not having you. So I went to the courtesan who looks the most like you!”

Grace stared at him, astonished by the revelation. After a moment, she asked, “Am I supposed to be flattered by that?”

“She is a poor substitute, I grant you, but there it is. I am a man, I am a bachelor, and I am accustomed to having a mistress. When I do not have a mistress, I seek out other feminine company, and that fact is hardly a secret. I am not going to defend myself for needs and desires that are natural and just.”

Grace did not know how she felt about the fact that he'd gone to a courtesan who resembled her because he couldn't have her. How was a woman supposed to feel about something like that? Disgusted? Complimented? Appalled?

She reminded herself she had no claim on him. She had rejected him, her choice. He'd gone to a whore, his choice. Not much surprise there, except, of course, on the part of a little girl, who, if her father were a different sort of man, would not have felt the need to follow him out at night.

Another thought struck her, one that made her stomach lurch. “Did Isabel witness this-um-interlude?”

“We did not have our clothes off yet, if that is what you mean!”

“Spare me the details, please.” In her mind's eye, she could see him with some scantily clad blond, his hands roaming over her body in the very same ways he had touched her. Grace suddenly felt pain, like a bruise deep inside. “If you do not feel the need to defend your actions, then why are you so upset?”

“Why?” His voice rose. “Should I not be upset? I got Isabel out of there as quickly as I could, of course, but needless to say, she was devastated by the entire incident. She cried all the way home. She told me—” He stopped.

“What did she tell you?”

“She said—” He paused to take a deep breath, then he said quietly, “She told me that I was just like all the other men her mother knew.”

“Dear God.” Grace felt sick. She pressed a hand to her mouth. “Her mother was a courtesan.”

“Yes.” He looked away. “I remember her now. A French girl with brown eyes and brown hair. I wanted exclusivity, but I had not come into my inheritance yet, and though I was touring, I wasn't making enough at that time to keep her. We parted company after a week or so.”

Grace did not want to hear any more. She rose from the bench. “So, now you know how your daughter spent her first eight years. It is up to you how she spends the rest of her life. What are you going to do now?”

“Be a real father. What else can I do?” He stood up and faced her. “We will leave London as soon as I can make the arrangements and the servants can pack. We're going to Nightingale's Gate, my estate in Devonshire. Isabel wants a pony and an apple orchard and a father, and by God, she's going to have them.”

W
hen Dylan made up his mind, there was no diverting him. An express was sent to Devonshire to alert the skeleton household staff that the master was coming down and the Broadwood Grand had better be tuned before he arrived. Half the London servants were sent on ahead to complete the staff, while the servants remaining in London got everything packed, and Grace and Molly tried to keep Isabel from coming out of her skin from the excitement of really going to the country.

Within a week, the three of them were in Dylan's landau with him, heading west along the South Devonshire coast. They traveled past Seaton toward the small fishing village of Cullen-quay and Dylan's property, Nightingale's Gate.

“But what does it look like?” Isabel demanded for the hundredth time. She stood up in the open carriage and flung her arms out in a sweeping gesture that encompassed the countryside around her—the hedgerows and rolling hills to the north and the sea coast to the south. “Does it look like this?”

“Perhaps.”

“I know we're getting close. We must be by now. When shall we arrive?”

“Soon.”

“Papa!” Isabel threw herself at him and pounded his shoulder playfully with her fist. “Why won't you tell me?”

Dylan grinned. “Because you keep asking me.”

Grace and Molly both laughed, but Isabel gave a huff of exasperation. She resumed her seat beside Grace and was silent for a few minutes. But then, with the incredible persistence that only children can manage, she tried again. “It really has apple orchards?”

“Yes. Apples, pears, plums.”

“That's all right, then. Why is it called Nightingale's Gate? Are there really nightingales?”

“Yes.”

“Papa!” she said when he did not elaborate. “Will you not tell me anything?”

He shook his head. “I don't have to,” he answered and pointed over his shoulder toward a wooded headland that rose on the other side of the small, shallow bay directly ahead. “There it is.”

Isabel jumped up again with a cry and moved to kneel on the carriage seat beside her father, her tummy pressed against the back, leaning as far forward as she could in the open carriage.

Grace also leaned forward for a view, leaning around her pupil to look toward the head land, where a large brick house was nestled high up the cliff amid the trees. “It is beautifully situated. What a prospect it has of the sea.”

“Bless me,” Molly murmured. “A person could get giddy looking down at the sea from up there.”

Still on her knees on the seat, Isabel turned toward her father. “Can we go sea bathing, Papa?”

“Do you know how to swim?” he asked.

“Yes.” When her father shot her a pointed stare, she bit her lip, then admitted, “No. But you will teach me, won't you?”

“I will,” he promised and looked at Grace. “Do you know how to swim?”

“Of course!” she assured him. “I don't ever remember not knowing.”

“Spoken like a true Cornish girl!”

Those words brought a painful wave of homesickness, and she looked out at the sea. As they had made this journey into Devonshire, Grace had refused to think about her visit home last autumn, but now her last trip into the West invaded her mind with brutal clarity, of how she'd stood in the drive of the house where she had grown up, staring up at the faces of her five sisters peeking down at her from behind lace curtains at the windows, feeling their hate for her at what she had done.

“But I can't see the house.” Isabel's excited voice interrupted Grace's thoughts, and she put the past out of her mind.

The child bobbed up and down on the seat, more impatient than ever. “How are we ever going to get up there?” she asked as the carriage curved inland around the bay.

Dylan didn't answer but instead pointed ahead where the road split into two. One went straight on, ending at the bottom of the jutting headland, where steps had been cut into the cliff face, and a steep path led up to the house. The road to the right curved away from the sea, and the carriage followed that, winding up a series of grass-covered hills that led them northwest in a meandering, gradual climb. They passed through the farm, the dairy, and acres of orchards, where apple, plum, and pear trees were covered in blossoms and cattle grazed in their shade. Isabel wanted to stop, but Dylan said no, they would come down tomorrow. They passed the stables and paddocks, and when Isabel spied a pair of Devonshire ponies, she nearly jumped out of the carriage.

The carriage merged into a thick grove of trees, and the road wound up for another mile or so until it crested the top of headland. From there, the road sloped down to a graveled drive that swept in front of the manor house of red brick, a house nestled amid trees, fronted with windows, and trimmed with climbing vines of wisteria and clematis. May flowers were blooming, and the brilliant blue of the sea beyond glimmered through the trees.

The carriage had barely come to a halt before Isabel jumped down. To Grace, the rest of the afternoon was a blur of frenzied running as she tried to keep up with the child, who kept moving from one eye-catching sight to another. She had to see her room, and even though it was the nursery, she didn't seem to mind, for she had a view of the stables and could see the ponies from her window. Satisfied, she grabbed her father's hand and dragged him outside so she could see the grounds.