Lily (34 page)

She squared her shoulders. Her mind was made up. Devon wasn’t home yet—he wasn’t due back from a meeting of mine owners in Truro until late—but she intended to wait for him. In the library, perhaps, with Clay. Maybe Clay could cheer her up. Turning her back on the wind, she started the steep climb toward the house.

Devon threw open the tall casement window set between gilt-framed portraits of the first and second Viscounts Sandown. A blast of wind struck him full in the face. He shut his eyes and inhaled the cool, humid tang, hoping it would clear his head. The sea air had already wilted the stiff sheet of foolscap he still held in his hand. He read the short message again, folded the letter, and put it in his pocket. A moment later he resumed his pacing.

The gallery at Darkstone connected the second floor of the house with the west tower. It was a long, high hall, chestnut-paneled, with dark paintings of myriad illustrious Darkwells hanging between all the windows. The furniture was pushed back along the walls, leaving the carpeted center clear so that the master could pace up and down when the weather prevented him from pacing out-of-doors. That wasn’t the case tonight, and yet here he was, back early from Truro, too lost in though to bother finding his way outside again.

It was Lily, as usual, who occupied his mind. Preoccupied it. It seemed to him he’d though of little else but Lily Troublefield since the day they’d met, but never more so than lately. He was aware that she wanted him to make a decision, come to some conclusion about his intentions. The problem was that what he wanted and what she wanted were worlds apart. He wanted to be with her, to enjoy her, to give her pleasure; she wanted promises of a lifetime and a commitment of emotions. But his emotions were all used up.

It didn’t help that he understood perfectly why he couldn’t bring himself to make a place for her in his life, his heart. Maura had been dead for five years, but he had forgotten nothing. He recalled with crystalline clarity the fierce heat in the beginning, his obsession with her, his compulsion to possess her. Just as clear was the memory of his bitter, withering disillusionment, the self-loathing and mortification when he’d discovered that the object of his most passionate and tender feelings was faithless and deceitful. She’d run off with his bailiff. They had stolen his money and his baby. They’d kept the money but thrown the baby away when it had become an inconvenience to them. Devon felt an ancient agony rising in him, like acid eating at his vitals, and shut his mind against the dreadful memory of finding Edward, his tiny son, dead in the old woman’s cottage. Those memories led to black, bottomless despair, and he had traveled the road there much too often.

And none of it had anything to do with Lily. He repeated the words in his head, fervently. The top of his mind believed it, knew it must be true. Something underneath, though, something potent and unhealed, shifted restlessly, not sure. An image of Alice Fairfax came to his mind; he saw her quiet face and kind eyes. Alice was a lady to her bones. She would be faithful and trustworthy. She would be
safe.
Was that what he wanted? Was that what his life had come to?

A few months ago he’d have answered yes, without hesitation or regret. Then he’d met Lily, and all his staid, rigid, spiritless expectations about his life had caved in like rotten wood. He’d abused her, insulted and ignored her, done all in his power to keep her out of everything except his bed. But despite his best efforts, she had won. Against his will she’d renewed him, worn down the barriers he’d erected so skillfully, and given him a glimpse of a different future full of feeling and risk and joy. He’d tried to protect himself by insisting that all he felt for her was physical desire—and that had been novel enough, since for five years women had been nothing but unavoidable accessories to his joyless and infrequent acts of sexual release. To experience passion again had felt strange, dangerous. To feel more than passion had terrified him.

It still did. But he and Lily had to come to a resolution. He’d told her he loved her, but was it true? He thought about her constantly. Was that love? When he was with her, he was happy. Was that love? He had no idea.

He stopped pacing and leaned against the wall beside a formal portrait of his grandmother. His hand closed over the letter in his pocket. It was from the Marchioness of Frome. Her ladyship wished to inform him that she had never heard of Lily Troublefield, much less employed her in the capacity of housemaid. The problem of dishonesty among servants worsened every year; she feared to say it, but she suspected his lordship had been the victim of a deceit. She could only hope it had stopped at the hiring, and that Miss Troublefield had stolen nothing more from him than his trust.

The only surprising thing about the letter was how little it surprised him. From the beginning, he’d known that Lily wasn’t what she claimed to be. It hadn’t mattered to him one way or the other then; his interest in her had been circumscribed and quite particular, all he’d wanted to do was seduce her. Later, he simply forgot about it—forgot that she’d resorted to a phony Irish brogue to get herself hired, that she was a thousand times too refined to be a maid, that she stringently avoided questions about her past and occasionally told him outright lies. Now he found it at least ironic that she demanded complete trust from him—“I’m me, I’m Lily, and I would never hurt you!”—while she’d evidently been a great deal less than candid with him about herself.

But all that was by the way. She was concealing something; he expected she would tell him about it when it suited her. Even now, he didn’t particularly care what it was. The important thing was to decide what to do about her.

He resumed pacing. A sound—a shot?—brought him up short. He thought it had come from downstairs. It couldn’t, of course, have been a shot. What, then? A shutter blowing against the house, probably; the wind was strong enough for it. But it had been sharper than that, more high-pitched. The house was quiet now except for the whining wind. He remembered that Clay had been in the library when he’d gotten back from Truro, going over copper ore weight figures for the ticketing tomorrow night. Devon descended the stairs unhurriedly, watching the candles flicker in sconces along the walls, buffeted by drafts of wind even here. A storm was coming up from the sea.

“Clay?” he called in the corridor, seeing lamplight glowing in the library door. He went inside. Clay wasn’t there. But the doors to the terrace were open. One slammed against the wall now, and he knew with relief what the “shot” had been. Damn Clay, why hadn’t he closed the doors? Papers from the desk had blown all over the room. In a corner of his mind, he wondered what Clay’s strongbox was doing on the desktop. Clay usually kept it locked in the bottom drawer. He hurried to the French doors and pulled them shut.

He saw Clay when he turned back. Lying on the floor behind the desk, face down. Blood in his hair, dark and dreadful, soaking his shirt.

Devon ran to him, knelt beside him, shouting, “Clay!” He touched him with desperate hands, then gently turned him over. A small black wound gaped in his hairline, above his right brow. His blue eyes were wide and glassy, staring up at nothing. He was dead.

Devon cried out an anguished, incoherent protest. He dropped his forehead on Clay’s chest and squeezed his eyes shut, fingers tangling in his brother’s shirt. “No,” he said, over and over and over. He stopped when horror began to supplant his disbelief.

Then he felt it—something, a movement of Clay’s chest. He jerked up, fingers tightening. “Clay!” he bellowed. He pressed his ear to his brother’s heart, harder, harder, and finally he heard a weak, fluttery sound, so faint he was terrified he’d imagined it until it came again.

He jumped up and ran for the door, shouting for Stringer. When no one came, he rushed out, calling all the while, down the hall toward the servants’ stairs. Stringer appeared in the archway, coatless, buttoning his waistcoat.

“Get a doctor! Send MacLeaf—Clay’s been shot. A head wound, he’s bleeding. Get Penroy from Trewyth, it’s closer. Move!”

Stringer stood stock-still, blinking stupidly. Suddenly Cobb appeared behind him, and Devon sagged with relief.

“Clay’s been shot. It’s bad. Send MacLeaf for Penroy.”

Without a word, Cobb turned and ran for the front door.

Devon told Stringer to bring blankets, then raced back to the library. Clay hadn’t moved. He was dead-white, eyes open and unfocused. Devon sank down beside him, full of dread. He reached for Clay’s limp wrist with terrible reluctance, and saw the pen in his hand. The paper under it. Two slanting, spidery words on the page said, “Lily shot,” before snaking away to an ugly blot of black ink.

“Lily shot.” His vision clouded. He blinked to clear it, but the words stayed the same. Black on white, clear and unambiguous and inexorable. “Lily shot.”

He heard Stringer coming. He watched his own unsteady fingers surround the paper and pick it up like a handful of coins, crumpling it. Turning away from the hurrying butler, he slid the wrinkled wad into his pocket. For a moment he went blind and deaf. Then Stringer dropped blankets beside him, and the man’s helplessness brought him back to himself.

They covered Clay up, tucking warm wool around him carefully. Devon reached again for Clay’s wrist, and the thready hint of a pulse caused his own blood to beat again.

Cobb returned. Devon stayed where he was, touching Clay, watching his face. Clay’s staring eyes were strange, disturbing. Devon closed them with his fingers, and a tremor of revulsion shuddered through him. Cobb said something; he didn’t hear. Clay was absolutely still but Devon was trembling, as if from cold. He asked Stringer to light a fire. He could hear the other servants in the hall, huddling, whispering. Suddenly he got to his feet.

“Stay with him, don’t leave him,” he told Cobb hoarsely. Grabbing up a branch of candles, he went out.

He didn’t expect to find her in her room but he went there anyway. And stopped in the middle of the floor as the wavering candlelight picked out the shine of a small tin trunk lying open on her bed. He went toward it slowly. A corner of a piece of paper showed under one of her garments. He pulled the cloth aside and stared down at four neat stacks of twenty-pound bank notes.

Lily saw Devon coming toward her as she toiled up the last of the twisting stone cliff steps. She felt the familiar jerky little dance in her chest, and smiled in anticipation. He was back early—how lovely. The seriousness of what she had to say to him and her uncertainty about his reaction to it were no match for the sudden wild delight that welled up inside at the mere sight of him. The wind shredding the clouds apart uncovered the moon for a few seconds; by its watery, glimmering light she saw his face. Her smile faltered.

“What’s wrong?” she asked when he stopped in front of her. “What’s happened?” Blackness lowered again; she couldn’t read his expression. But something was terribly wrong. The tension in his body was visible, even in the murk. “Dev, what is it? Has someth—uh!” She cried out, more in astonishment than pain, when he caught her arm and yanked her to him, his other hand gripping her shoulder. She heard his voice like a low growl in her ear, saw his teeth bared in a feral grimace, sensed the effort he made to control his inexplicable fury.

“You weren’t expecting me home so soon tonight, were you?”

“What? No, I—Devon? You’re hurting my—” She broke off again when he gave her a violent, teeth-rattling shake and began to pull her toward the house. She trotted along behind him, wrenching at his fingers to loosen his numbing grip on her arm, but his hand was like a vise. “Stop it, why are you doing this? Don’t, you’re hurting me. Devon!” She fell, striking her knee on the terrace step. He didn’t look back or break stride, only pulled harder so that she had to stumble to her feet and run, limping, to keep up.

“What is it?” she cried, weeping now. “What are you doing?” He made no answer, and she could see nothing in his face but rage.

He dragged her around the side of the house to the front door. Inside, he shoved her toward the main staircase, hauling her up when she tripped on the stairs. She stumbled against the banister, and a piercing pain knifed between her ribs. She dropped to her knees, stunned, holding her breath. Without a pause, he cursed her, pulled her to her feet, and forced her to keep climbing.

When they reached the door to her room, he threw her inside. His face made her quail; his clenching hands terrified her. “I don’t know what you think I’ve done!” she cried, holding her side. “Will you tell me?”

Her innocent pose infuriated him. Snarling, he leapt at her and grabbed her by the hair. “I’d have given you the money. Murdering bitch, you didn’t have to shoot Clay for it.”

Lily blanched. “Oh God, Dev. Clay?” she quavered. “Shoot Clay? Is he hurt badly?”

Devon’s body was burning. He dropped his hands because he wanted to tear her hair out by the roots.

She felt the first wave of true panic. His violence was palpable, barely suppressed, and she sensed that it would take very little to push him over the edge. Speaking carefully, trying to sound calm, she said, “Devon, please listen to me. I didn’t shoot Clay. There’s been a mistake. Why would you think it?”

“Because of that.”

She followed his wild eyes and saw the money. So much money. “But—
I
didn’t—”

“What’s your real name?”

“Trehearne,” she answered immediately. “I’m Lily Trehearne, I come from Lyme Regis. My parents are dead, but my guardian wanted me to marry his son and I c-couldn’t—” She started to stammer when he took a menacing step toward her. “It’s true!” She fought hysteria, holding her hands up as a shield. “I ran away because he said I stole his money, and he was hurt, I was afraid he might die—” She heard what she was saying, and despaired. “Oh God! Mrs. Howe was in Chard and I spoke to her—Devon,
listen
to me! I was going to explain it to you tonight!” She couldn’t stop crying. It all sounded so outlandish, like a clumsy lie even in her own ears. “I don’t know what this money is! I would never hurt Clay. Please, I was going to tell you everything, and then go away if you didn’t want me.”