In the Arms of a Marquess (22 page)

Ben could not help but laugh. The unfamiliar sensation in his chest brought quick memory of the last time he had laughed, chasing after a beautiful woman in the midst of a thunderstorm, the rain washing away every doubt. Everything but the moment.

But Lady Fitzwarren’s words spiked a disquiet he had ignored far too long. For Constance’s sake he must now address it.

He strode toward the foyer. His hostess would not mind his abrupt departure, and he’d had enough tonight of the decadent torture of watching Octavia across a room and not being able to touch her. Her eyes had told him that her words were sincere. He had no doubt she despised lying, and he would not ask her to do so again. He was through with lies, through with subterfuge and mistrust. Tomorrow he would see her and try to discover if she was too.

B
en read through records at his house late into the night, then rose before dawn and rode to the docks. The sound of the Thames lapping at the wharf met him beyond the dock walls, and he knew the water would be black beneath shining gas lamps.

Despite Creighton’s dedication to his work, his secretary never appeared before the sun. Ben let himself into the office on the second story of a building across from the gated entrance to the docks, and struck a flint to light a lamp. Then he unlocked a cabinet drawer and pulled forth a file. An hour later Creighton appeared, the gray of morning outlining him in the door frame.

Ben nodded a greeting. “Where is the ledger with the inventory taken of the hunting box after the fire?”

Creighton’s stony face opened. Ben waited through his secretary’s momentary astonishment with a patience he did not feel. He’d gone through every document relating to the incident, and, just as years ago, nothing suggested any mystery. The place had burned when a lit coal went astray from a grate when all were asleep. Any suspicions were unfounded. He was on a wild goose chase.

“I beg your pardon, my lord. It is still at the cottage. I considered it best left on the premises in case you should find use for it while there.”

Ben stuffed the papers into the file.

“I will ride down there now. Send a message to Samuel to meet me at the inn with a bag. I do not need my valet. I will be gone only overnight.” He went to the door and paused. “When is the
Eastern Promise
scheduled to sail?”

“A week Tuesday, sir.”

“I have not forgotten about her peculiar cache.”

“Of course you have not, my lord.” Creighton sounded offended.

“Have the former quartermaster’s report ready for me when I return. And look into a sailor named Sheeble, his business and close associates.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ben took the southeastern road toward Canterbury, but far before reaching it turned south into the woodland in the direction of Hastings, coming to his property swiftly. The modest pieces of land he owned in England all clustered about the same locale. Except for his father, the previous lords of Doreé had never strayed far from London or Paris.

He stabled his horse at the inn, greeting the tepid welcome of the locals with few words and plenty of coin. They resented him. Jack had been their favorite. In the months before the fire, he had spent all of his time at the lodge, moving in there permanently after Arthur’s death. Jack had told him with a laugh of defeat that since he’d restored Fellsbourne, the lodge felt more like home—more like someplace Arthur had lived. Ben had agreed.

Then the hunting box burned, and Ben hadn’t anyplace left that reminded him of either brother. His renovation of the house in Cavendish Square had as much to do with recapturing a sense of his half brothers’ presence there as erasing his father’s obsession with a land to which he never wished to return.

At the time, he hadn’t any idea that eschewing India had everything to do with the woman he left there against his will. His anger and resentment had boiled far too thick to see that clearly. He hadn’t seen clearly again until he looked upon her smile once more.

He left his horse at the inn and walked the path through the copse to the remains of the cottage. As he emerged from the stand of willowy ash and thick oak and pine, the sight met him as it always did, a leaden fist to his midriff. The broken piles of burnt stone looked forlorn, soot still clinging to the gray rock that had once been walls and foundations, square holes for crossbeams gaping like mouths bereft of tongues.

He moved toward the only structure still standing. Set apart from the cottage by thirty yards, the stable had escaped the flames. A groom escaped the tragedy as well, along with several horses. Afterward when Ben made the decision not to rebuild, he offered the fellow a place at Fellsbourne.

The stable had been converted to a storage room with a locked door and space enough for objects salvaged from the smoldering ruins. Ben pulled out the keys.

Within, dust motes stirred in the slits of sunlight chasing through the high-set window paned with thick glass and crossed with iron bars. He opened the door wide to allow in daylight. Ignoring the piles of miscellaneous charred debris of his father’s and brother’s life at the cottage, he unlocked the cabinet. A slim leather-bound volume rested within.

Creighton’s neat script covered a hundred or so lines of the ledger’s first few pages. He read it through, not bothering to cross-check the listed items with the objects stacked in the chamber; Creighton was as fastidious with his work as he was discreet. Ben closed the book and returned it to the cabinet. There was nothing of interest here, only partial memories and burnt dreams. Constance’s dreams.

In the morning he would return to London and call upon her. Lady Fitzwarren was right. He had waited far too long to force Constance into this conversation. But enough time had passed now. Neither of them were the children they had been seven years ago. She must move on, just as he intended to.

Locking the stable door behind him, he pocketed the keys and walked in a pensive mood through the falling evening back to the inn. He took dinner in the taproom, checked on Samuel and his horse in the stable, and closed himself in his bedchamber.

He awoke into the darkness between midnight and dawn, his heart pattering in the cavity of his chest. Nothing stirred in his chamber, downstairs, or outside. The inn was quiet, the village asleep. But the alarm that woke Ben had not come from without.

He pulled on his clothing and took a lamp from the taproom. Dry leaves crackled beneath his boots along the short path through the wood to the ruins. He passed their uneven, black mass, cast in shadows by the waning moon, and went quickly toward the stable. His hands on the key and padlocks were steady. Preternaturally so. He unbolted the door and again went straight to the cabinet, his breath frosting.

The ledger rested cold in his palms, like the knife driving into his stomach as he read and reread a single line of the inventory.

Fowling piece, 46 in., single barrel, cherry(?) stock.

Ben knew only one man who used such an antiquated weapon, the single barrel fitted out with a special hardwood for the buttstock.

Cherry. Walker Styles’s favorite.

But Styles had not been at the hunting box when the fire took his best friend’s life. He was in Sussex, checking up on matters at his family’s estate. In fact, Walker had not been to the cottage for nearly a year before the fire. As crushed by Arthur’s death at Waterloo as Jack and Ben had been, Walker avoided anywhere that reminded him of Arthur, including Fellsbourne.

Then Jack died, along with their father, and Ben abruptly came into the title and estate. Walker had been at his side through it all. A stalwart friend, grieving too, but ever present with advice and support to the younger son who had never expected to inherit an English lordship. Ben never suspected him of anything but intense loyalty and a mourning heart.

Suddenly craven, he could not bring himself to investigate the pile of carefully tagged items in the storeroom, to see the weapon for himself. He locked the ledger in the cabinet and returned to the inn. Three sleepless hours later he woke Samuel and told him to settle the bill and return to London.

Ben saddled Kali, strapped a pack containing a pistol and smallclothes behind him, and set off for Fellsbourne.

When he reached his estate he paused to tell his butler he had arrived for the afternoon only, and went to the stable. He found the old groom from the hunting box rubbing down a saddle horse’s sweat-darkened coat.

“G’day, milord.” The man unbent and tugged his cap. “This here’s a fine fellow. Just had him out for a run up the hill. Got your blunt worth of this one, I’ll wager.”

“Yes, he has a smooth gait, doesn’t he?” Ben moved into the stall. The gelding nickered, pressing his nose into Ben’s palm, searching for treats. Octavia had ridden the animal not a fortnight earlier. Constance had chosen him for her.

Constance
.

“Andy, I’ve a question for you.”

“Milord?” The currycomb stalled on the gelding’s flank. The man’s brow puckered.

“Do not concern yourself,” Ben reassured. “It has nothing to do with your work here. I am quite pleased.”

“Thank you, milord.” His skinny shoulders dropped.

“I wish to ask you something concerning the days prior to the fire at the hunting box.”

“Don’t know that I remember much about those days. ’While back.”

“Yes, Andy. But you see, I have a most pressing need to know a particular detail, one I daresay you will recall without any effort.” He spoke as though of the weather.

“I’ll try to remember, milord.”

“I will appreciate your effort. Do you recall, were my father or brother entertaining guests in those days just before the fire?”

“Well, no.” The man shook his head. “I can’t say as there was anybody about that week, with the rain like it’d been. Milord thought it poor shooting in rain, you know.”

Ben’s breath stole out of him slowly, relief slipping along his veins.

“Ah, yes. Of course. The rain.” The very reason for the ample charred remains of the cottage. The rain had fallen hard and fast for nearly a week then let up. But as the cottage burned, the clouds let loose again, halting the fire’s progress prematurely but still too late, leaving a ruin of lives in soggy puddles.

“ ’Cept milord Styles, course,” Andy added. “But he weren’t but family, at the box so often that year before the fire, specially after Master Arthur passed.” The groom nodded thoughtfully. “Came to get me after he got out of the house. We stood there watching, both of us weeping like women. Didn’t mind crying myself since he was, after all.” He tugged his cap lower. “Th’other week when he were here he brought me a bottle, if you don’t mind me saying, milord.”

“Not at all,” Ben murmured, limbs frozen, lungs in a vice grip.

“Drank it with me, in fact. Said it was for old times. For Lord Jack.”

“Of course. Thank you, Andy. I had wondered. Now I know.”

“Yessir.”

Ben left the stable, dragging himself hard from the place his heart and mind pointed toward, a place he hadn’t been in years, of such profound loss he shunned it because it hurt too much to linger there.

Styles had been there the night of the fire, yet he had never spoken of it. Moreover he lied about avoiding the box for so many months. Andy would have no reason to tell tales now. Already overwhelmed with taking up his new role in England so soon after his uncle’s death, when the tragedy occurred Ben hadn’t been in any right mind to interview the sole surviving member of the household, and Andy had not offered up any information voluntarily. Perhaps the local magistrate had questioned him, but Ben never knew.

Ben could only imagine one reason Styles would withhold such information from him.

The fire had been his fault.

His stomach clenched, his head spinning. The only man he had trusted since the death of his brothers and father, the single person who from the moment Ben acceded to the title accepted him without hesitation . . .

He strode up the drive beneath the lowering sun, struggling to hold the truth at bay. But it came, a tidal wave of pain and betrayal. He walked blindly through the front door of his house toward the parlor.

“Mr. Scott, I will be remaining the night.” He shut the door, went to the sideboard and poured a drink. Somewhere within the second bottle he hazily recalled telling Octavia that alcohol would not help with her distress. He sloshed the remaining contents of the bottle into his glass and drank it down.

B
en remained at Fellsbourne for three days, most of those hours spent in the same parlor, draperies drawn to shut out the day, his assiduous servants making certain that the liquor never ran dry. On the third night he finally roused himself sufficiently to stumble to the master suite.

Still half disguised, he awoke shortly after dawn in the bed in which he had made love to Octavia not a fortnight earlier. He dragged himself up and to the window, drew the curtains aside and pressed open the pane. The gray, misty air smelled of moss and molded leaves and fresh hay, of life and death continuing in cycles as old as the birth of the continents and oceans, oblivious to the cruelties of their inhabitants.

He must return to London. He would confront Styles and hear his old friend’s story. Perhaps he had it all wrong. Perhaps Andy remembered it poorly.