My Wicked Marquess (36 page)

“Well, I might have gone to school with him,” Max said slowly. “But the person I'd remember would have been just a boy. Do you have a picture of him when he was younger?”

Lady Westwood lit up. “Oh, yes! Would you like to see one?”

“Very much, ma'am. Do not trouble yourself, my lady,” he said quickly when she started to get up. He took note of her stiff movements and shook his head. “Point me to where it is, and I shall bring it to you.”

“Oh, but it's all the way upstairs in his old room.”

Max flashed his most disarming smile. “Which door?”

“First door on the right at the top of the stairs. But I'll send John—”

“No need.” He nodded with a warm smile. “I'll be back in a trice.”

Daphne was fascinated. What on earth was he about?

His explanation seemed simple enough, but in light of Virgil's letter, she grasped that Max wanted to get into Drake's chamber, God only knew why.

Well. She supposed that the best way to eventually get
answers out of him was to assist.

She endeavored to entertain Lady Westwood while he was gone. But perhaps she should have been more concerned with footman John.

The liveried servant was standing in the doorway with a bristling posture and a bit of a scowl in the direction Max had gone.

“How dear he is,” Lady Westwood was cooing about the perplexing, infuriating, unknown quantity called Lord Rotherstone.

“Occasionally,” she conceded. “I see your footman is as protective as my husband.” She nodded toward footman John, who also heard her words.

Lady Westwood smiled.

“You needn't look so concerned, John,” Daphne spoke up wryly. “To the best of my knowledge, my husband is not a thief.”

Just a liar.

To her surprise, however, footman John showed no sign of humor at her idle jest.

He returned her smile with an icy stare, then he left the doorway and went after Max.

 

Very well, he could admit it. He could throttle his wife for being here, but Daphne's friendly visit to the lonely old lady seemed a good deal less suspicious than if he had simply arrived here himself, as planned.

It figured she knew Lady Westwood. The blasted woman seemed to know everyone in England. His main concern had been for her safety, but the moment he had seen her standing quite unharmed out on the portico, his thoughts had moved to his second gravest worry—her current and understandable fury at him.

The two disparate halves of his life had begun to collide and crumple into each other, and he had no idea what he ought to do.

No, he thought.
Correction
. He knew exactly what he ought to do. The problem was, it could cost him everything.

Stealing up to the top of the staircase, Max had found
Drake's apartment within Westwood Manor, and was quickly and methodically searching them for anything useful. There was a sitting room, a bedchamber, and a dressing room.

It was possible Drake on his last visit home might have left some telltale sign of whatever sort of leads he had been following at the time of his disappearance.

As Max moved through the apartment searching high and low for clues, he continued to battle with himself over how much, if anything, to reveal to Daphne.

Telling her about the Order would change the whole picture for her, and he did not assume she would be pleased with what she saw. It might only make things worse. Maybe she'd be better off not knowing the burden that lay so heavily on the family that she had married into. He didn't dare imagine how she might react when he told her that one day, they might have to hand their own son over to some future recruiter, as he had been handed over to Virgil twenty years ago.

Closer to hand, telling Daphne about the Order also meant placing the security of their whole secret web in her hands. Every new inductee into their world of deception became another risk to all of them.

Trusting the woman he loved with his own life was not too difficult. But if he revealed the Order to her, that meant placing Rohan and Jordan and Virgil's lives in her hands, as well—and through them, all the other agents in the field. They were trained to keep secrets. They'd had it beaten into them. But she was not. Any Promethean could then take her and extract by means of fear and threat and pain whatever information Max had entrusted to her.

With one weak link in the chain, the whole cause could be lost. Oh, God, he couldn't possibly tell her. His closest friends, the only friends he really had, might hate him for it.

But then again, if he did not reveal the truth of who he really was, he was going to lose his marriage, and the heart of the only woman he had ever loved.

He was holding on to hope like the last strand of a fraying lifeline that she might just let him off the hook. Maybe she
would accept not knowing the full truth, like an ordinary wife. But Max knew full well that that was not the sort of marriage Daphne had agreed to in the hayloft of the Three Swans Inn.

He had won her hand at last by promising that they could make their own country, set their own rules, and he had promised to be open with her, as much as possible.

Agonized over what to do, he put the whole tangled matter into a little mental box for the moment, and forged on with the mission at hand.

The question, however, about how much of the truth past generations of Order agents told their wives about their activities made Max wonder if old Lady Westwood had any inkling about the real reasons that Drake had sailed off to the Continent.

His own mother had been told next to nothing. It was customary to keep the women out of it.

God, he was so angry at himself for his carelessness, letting her catch wind of his double life in the first place. How could he be so stupid?

It was so unlike him—almost as if some small, ornery part of him had
wanted
to get caught.
Disturbing thought.
It was almost as if he had undermined himself on purpose, against all logic, so that his darling Daphne could finally know him completely, and their love could be whole…

Just then, Max sensed a presence outside the door to Drake's apartment, which he had closed.

He went motionless, then he glanced at the bottom of the door. Through the faint daylight coming in under the seam, he could make out the shadow of two feet.

Somebody was listening to his movements inside the apartment. When the door swung open abruptly a moment later, as if to take him off guard, Max was already alerted to the fact that he was not alone.

The large footman from downstairs gave him a bow of cursory respect, but the belligerent glare behind the man's eyes revealed his disapproval. “Can I help you, sir?”

“Ah, yes, excellent.” Max assumed a breezy tone, but
the footman did not look happy about his snooping. “Lady Westwood asked me to fetch some…childhood portrait of her son. Can't seem to find it.”

The footman stepped toward the bookshelf and plucked down a miniature painting in a gilded frame.

Max feigned a sheepish smile. “Ah—of course. Right in front of my eyes.”

“Anything else, my lord?” the servant intoned without a hint of impertinence.

“No, no. Er, thank you for your assistance.”

The footman remained planted in place, making it clear he was not leaving until Max did.

He was eyeing Max's pockets as though studying him to see if he had taken anything from the room.

Max was well aware that his behavior must seem a tad bizarre. Since he could not think of any fresh excuses off the top of his head to account for his snooping through the belongings of Lady Westwood's supposedly dead son, he fixed a haughty smile on his face and exited the room, the little boyhood portrait of his fellow agent in hand.

Damn, where could Drake have hidden any final clues he might have left behind before his capture?

The irritating footman shadowed him all the way back to the drawing room, where Max politely handed Lady Westwood the portrait of her son.

She took it and trailed her gnarled hand lovingly over it. “We had this made of him before he went away to school.”

“A very handsome boy,” Daphne remarked.

“He took after his father. So, did you know my Drake, Lord Rotherstone?”

“Yes, I believe we once engaged in a rather brutal round of fisticuffs at school.” Max smiled.

Lady Westwood laughed. “That sounds like him. Over what manner of disagreement, do you recall?”

“Some minor point of honor, I believe, though the details have escaped me. It was long ago.” Max noticed the footman still eyeing him suspiciously from the threshold of the room. “Ahem. I almost didn't find it, but your man there was good enough to point it out.”

“Footman John,” Daphne informed him.

“Indeed, I was just telling your wife how this fellow has become quite indispensable to me, though he's only been here two months. I hardly know how I ever got on without him.”

“Two months.” Roughly the same time period as their wedding, the day Max had seen Drake. Max's stare homed in on the man. “Is that so?” he murmured.

Footman John, seemingly in spite of himself, returned his stare the way no common servant ordinarily would dare.

“Where were you in service before this?” Max inquired, moving toward him, putting the two women behind him.

“I worked for a family near Cambridge, my lord.”

“By what name?”

“Lamb.”

“I see. Lady Westwood, what prompted you to hire this fellow? Perhaps a sudden unexpected vacancy on your staff?”

“Why, yes, my lord. How ever did you know?”

Max narrowed his eyes, not taking his stare off the man. “A lucky…guess.”

Without warning, footman John suddenly bolted.

Already expecting this, Max flew into action, charging after the footman—or rather, the Promethean spy.

 

Daphne's jaw dropped as her husband tore out of the room hot on the footman's trail.

“Good heavens!” Lady Westwood uttered some distance behind her as Daphne rushed out into the corridor to see where they had gone.

“Stay back!” Max barked at her over his shoulder—an order also meant for the other servants, who also came rushing onto the scene in a flurry of anxious activity.

Footman John went barreling out a back entrance, and Max was right behind him.

Daphne rushed back into the drawing room, and crossed to the large picture window just as footman John raced across the raised terrace.

He vaulted over the low stone balustrade as Max appeared
mere steps behind him.

Dropping down to the flat green below, John had taken only two or three paces when Max leaped off the same stone balustrade and tackled him onto the ground.

The men rolled to the grassy area just below her window, exchanged several crushing punches before climbing to their feet, circling like lions.

Daphne gasped as footman John suddenly produced a knife. Lord, she might be angry at her husband, but she did not want to see him stabbed before her eyes.

John swung the knife savagely at Max, who ducked aside, lunged for the man's arm, and used the force of John's own attack to throw him facedown onto the ground.

Before he could get up, Max was behind him. He swept out his pistol and thrust it against the back of the man's head, roaring at him not to move.

Daphne tore herself away from the window and ran outside without a word to Lady Westwood, who sat there, pale with shock.

As she rushed out the back door that Max had used, she found that the rest of the male servants had poured out onto the terrace, and seemed close to rioting over the violence that had broken out.

“Everybody, please remain calm!” Max was ordering them. “The situation is in hand! You, go get some rope to bind him.”

“What's he done?” another footman demanded.

“This man is a fugitive,” Max declared to the rest of the servants. “He took this post under false pretenses. I'd wager my best horse that his predecessor on your staff lies somewhere on these grounds in a shallow grave.”

“He lies!” footman John yelled from the ground.

“Stay down and keep your hands behind your head!”

“Peter? He's murdered Peter?” the servants murmured among themselves.

“Why would he do that?” the plump housekeeper cried.

“He is involved in Lord Westwood's disappearance,” Max declared. “I'm taking him into custody. Now, would you bring me that rope.”

“Do as he says!” Daphne ordered with a sharp look.

A groom from Her Ladyship's stables brought Max a three-foot lead rope in short order. “Will this do?”

He nodded and took it. “Daphne?”

“Yes, my lord?”

“Come here.”

Heart pounding, she went over him. “Keep the gun on him. If I say shoot him, you bloody well shoot him. Can you do that?”

She looked at him in shock, then glanced back down at the man who had tried to stab her husband, and nodded.

Max handed her the pistol. She kept it trained on the footman with both hands while her husband quickly tied John's wrists behind his back with a wicked knot that would likely have impressed Horatio Nelson himself.

“Your husband is mad, Lady Rotherstone. I beg you, call him off!”

“Don't you dare speak to her.”

“I have no idea what this is about!” he insisted.

“Oh, really?” Max backed Daphne off a couple of steps with a curt nod. Then he hauled the servant to his feet.

Daphne kept the pistol pointed at John, her pulse throbbing in her ears.

Max jerked the footman around to face him. He laid hold of the man's lapels and without warning, ripped open the top few buttons of his livery coat, exposing the region of his heart. Daphne caught a glimpse of a round mark on the footman's chest, either a brand or some sort of tattoo.

A look of disgust came over Max's face. “Footman, eh? An odd career for one who bears the
Non Serviam
.”