The Belligerent Miss Boynton AND The Lurid Lady Lockport (Two Companion Full-Length Regency Novels) (66 page)

As she was the instigator of the project, Amanda outlined her plan of attack. They would first dissect the rhyme line by line, then word by word, or even letter by letter if necessary, until they had succeeded in gleaning its meaning.

"'For now, on humble pie you dine,'" Amanda quoted from the paper in her hands. "All right. Who wants to be first?"

"Pies are baked in the kitchens," Anne offered vaguely.

"Kept in pantries," supplemented her husband. "Blueberry last night. Quite good. Came down for more at midnight. It's gone now. Knew it would rain, could have saved some. All gone now, though. Pity."

Kevin pulled agitatedly at his shirt cuff and broke in on Bo's gastronomic reminiscences. "A person eats pie in the dining room. 'You dine,' I believe it said."

Standing so that he could look over his wife's shoulder, Jared remarked, "There's eight syllables in that line." He paused for a moment to read further. "Eight in the second as well." He raised his head and looked at Kevin. "They all have eight syllables. Do you think that means anything?"

A glass of burgundy at his lips, Kevin paused and smiled evilly. "It means you can count to eight. There are four lines in the rhyme. That makes for a total of twelve, unless you combine the two as either forty-eight or eighty-four. Or you could subtract four from eight to get four, or multiply four by eight to get thirty-two, or you could—good God, who cares what you get.
I'm
getting a headache."

They left Jared's number theory for the time being, and Amanda read the second line. "I give you, girl, an anodyne."

"The girl is Gilly," Anne said unnecessarily, and they all agreed. "The rest of that line is simple too. You remember that anodyne means something that removes pain?"

Bo preened openly. "That's my sweet wife. Pretty
and
smart. Quite beyond my touch, actually. A lucky man, that's me."

Rice took that moment (while Anne and Bo were holding hands, gazing adoringly into each others eyes, and the others were busily trying to seem to be looking anywhere but at the billing and cooing twosome) to bring in the tea tray.

Amanda sat in for the absent Gilly and began to pour the tea before Kevin could recall that his wife was shirking her duties and thus create a disturbance by going off to drag her back to the large saloon, and Jared took up the reading of the rhyme.

"'Your Fortune waits with endless time,'" he intoned slowly, lingering over each word. "There's the
time
that sent you racketing through The Hall peering into Sylvester's clock collection."

"Yes," Kevin concurred wearily, "and a bloody waste of time it was too, pardon me ladies for my crudity. The only good to be gained from that little episode was the money derived from their sale. That, and the resultant peace and quiet that had for a space seemed impossible to achieve amid all that ticking and chiming. Go on, Jared."

"'Two clues; your name and this wry rhyme,'" Jared concluded solemnly. "If this rhyme is a clue, then I fail to see it. But what's this about a name? That seems as likely a place to begin as any."

"It must refer to Gilly's odd string of names," Amanda broke in excitedly. "Kevin—didn't you once tell us she had quite an assortment of them? Like a person reading the roll at a girl's seminary, I believe you said."

He nodded and recited sing-song, "Eugenia Giselle Horatia Dawn Fortune. Ludicrous, isn't it?"

Anne disagreed. "I think they're lovely names. Let's see. Eugenia, like anodyne, is Greek, meaning well-born, or noble. Giselle, on the other hand, is German, and that, while a pretty sounding name, has quite a depressing meaning. Hostage, or a pledge of some sort."

By now Anne was the center of attention, with everyone on the ends of their seats, hanging on her every word. "Go on, Anne," Kevin directed tersely when she paused. "You have our full attention."

Anne looked at her friends, saw their agitation, and hurried on. "There isn't much more. Horatia, from the Latin, refers to the keeper of the hours, and Dawn is English and simply means the dawn of day. As for Fortune—that truly horrid surname your uncle was so cruel as to heap on poor dear Gilly's innocent shoulders, that is from the Latin
fortuna
, meaning fate or destiny. Oh, my!" Anne exclaimed as the full import of everything she had just said was brought home to her. "Oh, my stars! Do you believe it truly means something? Everything put together, I mean?"

Kevin couldn't sit still any longer. Jerkily rising to his feet, he paced back and forth across the worn carpet, the cane he had plucked from its resting place against a chair now softly tapping against his left palm. "A well born hostage to fate. That's got to be it. Gilly was born legitimately enough, but when her twin brother died, Sylvester's grief turned into anger against Gilly—the girl-child who had dared to survive. Mrs. Whitebread told me Gilly's mother was an invalid from the time of the births until she died, obviously not a good subject for breeding purposes ever again. He couldn't murder her and hope to get away with it, so he hoped to discredit her."

"Yes, that makes sense. Sylvester declared the secret marriage ceremony to be a sham and let everyone think his poor wife a mistress and his child a bastard," Amanda broke in, quickly grasping the situation as it had been nearly two decades before. "Sylvester probably wished to marry again in hopes of producing another heir now that both his first and second-born sons were dead. If he couldn't discount his marriage to Gilly's mother as a fraud, he had no hopes for siring another legal heir until the poor woman died."

Now Jared took up the story, adding his own conclusions to the mix. "But I'll wager he'd reckoned without the reaction of the local gentry. Believing he had foisted his lightskirt on them for nearly a year, they all cut him from that day on. And since Sylvester was by then already a bit of an odd duck, never leaving the estate for more than a day at a time, he had no chance to find another gullible woman to wed. He stayed on at The Hall, refusing to repair the entailed residence he couldn't pass on to his sons, and slowly, as his strange interests became obsessions, he withdrew from the world entirely."

Kevin finished the story: "He kept the estate running reasonably well until his health began to deteriorate about seven years ago. But for the last three years of his life it was, ironically enough, Gilly who acted in his stead as best she could, with little or no money at her disposal.
God!"
He slammed his cane angrily against a table leg. "What a great lot of evil that man has to answer for!"

After everyone had taken turns venting their spleens on the subject of Sylvester's ignominious misdeeds, it was Anne who ventured to ask, if Gilly's names were to serve as their clues, just how the name Dawn fit into the puzzle.

And therein lay the rub. It didn't fit. It didn't fit at all.

#

When luncheon was announced with Gilly still refusing to make an appearance, Kevin stormed out of the dining room, his appetite nonexistent in the face of what he had discovered.

Suddenly the enormous Hall seemed too confining. Kevin had Willstone bring him his greatcoat and, dismissing the valet's cackling about ruining his Hessians in the puddles, not to mention getting soaked and probably taking a deathly chill, he went outdoors for a walk.

His steps led him eventually to the maze where, once he had reached its centermost part, he collapsed onto a cold, wet stone bench and dropped his head into his hands.

His thoughts centered on Gilly. His poor, deprived, cheated Gillyflower. How sadly they had both used her—first Sylvester, and now himself. He'd forced her into marriage, made her a woman over her protests and, he now realized—and this was the very worst sin of all—he'd usurped her rightful place as heir to the late Earl's private fortune, which her father could and should have bequeathed directly to her.

She'd been deprived of a normal childhood. That was crime enough. But if only her father hadn't blackmailed her into marriage, she could at least now be looking forward to being one of the richest, most beautiful, most sought after young women in the ton. Her title, face, and fortune would have served as carte blanche for anything her heart desired. She would have been free to travel, to meet people (and now Kevin's handsome face contorted in real pain), to fall in love with and marry any man she chose.

Kevin's depression deepened. Gilly had been right, he conceded too late—they should have forgotten the puzzle ever existed. Sylvester's private fortune would still be theirs in less than a year, and they'd been on their way to finding a good life together, even if it was a rocky road they were traveling.

Gilly had been slowly beginning to care for him. Kevin needed desperately to believe that. But once she was told she was legitimate? Well, then, sooner or later she herself would be bound to think of all the things he was already in the process of kicking himself over, and any chance for their future together would be completely and utterly destroyed.

Raising his eyes and his clenched fist to the skies, Kevin cursed aloud, "You've won, you crafty old bastard! I may have the title. I live in the house you loathed to leave me, and I may reap the rewards of the estate you worshiped. I will, either now or within the year, receive the great fortune you amassed. But you've robbed me of my self-respect, and made me wish to be nothing more than purse-pinched Kevin Rawlings once again. Oh yes, Sylvester, at last your detested grand-nephew understands why you're letting him have your fortune. You knew that by the time I got it I'd have reason to loathe every last groat."

The wind off the water whipped Kevin's greatcoat around his calves, but he didn't noticed that he was cold, that he was wet nearly to the skin. "And you did it so shrewdly, so cunningly, knowing I'd be sickened to think I'd taken advantage of a helpless girl like your daughter. But your revenge turned out to be even better than you hoped for, didn't it? More devastating than even your most insanely devious dreams. For you gave me something I'd never hoped to have, and then snatched it away again once I'd come to depend on it for life itself. You gave me Gilly. You gave me love. And then you took them both away."

He stood up, then turned his back on the cloudy skies. "I hate you Sylvester Rawlings," he said dully, all the fight, all the heart, going out of him. "I hate you and hope you roast in Hell for what you've done to us."

The rain had dwindled to a fine drizzle, but still Kevin's face was streaming droplets of water—his tears competing with the raindrops—impairing his vision as he made blindly for one of the pathways out of the maze. He had gone no more than a few feet when the toe of one of his Hessians collided with something, and he found himself laid out belly-down among the weeds.

Cursing at the ruin of both his Hessians and his greatcoat (it seemed as if Willstone had wished this particular mishap on him), Kevin hoisted himself to his knees and turned to discover what had tripped him.

It was the same metal object that had foiled Glynis's escape attempt—he saw that, now that he could examine the object in the daylight—but what sort of object was it?

He pulled it upright, ripping it free of the vinelike weeds that held it to the ground, and at last realized that what he was holding was a stylus that had become another casualty of Sylvester's neglect. "There must once have been a sundial in this clearing," he mused out loud before suddenly shouting, "A
sundial.
Of course. Why didn't I think of this before? What else is a sundial, if not
endless time!"

Heedless of the damp and mud permeating the knees of his buckskin breeches, and uncaring of the dirt that soiled his hands and shirt cuffs, Kevin scrambled about the clearing on his knees, searching for more evidence of the sundial's existence. After he located a dozen iron tablets, each bearing large Roman numerals from one to twelve placed flush with the ground in a wide circle, it was easy to find the groove at the center of the circle into which the stylus had once been fitted.

This had to be it. This had to be the endless time of the poem. Much as he wished he had never embarked on this treasure hunt, Kevin now was in a fever to see it concluded. If Amanda had been right in her first supposition that Gilly's birth record and her mother's marriage lines made up the fortune, and if all their speculation earlier in the large saloon had been correct, he owed it to Gilly to give her what was rightfully hers.

Her legitimacy.

#

A thin, watery sun was just breaking through the clouds as Kevin raced to get the others. He exploded into the large saloon through the French doors from the garden and, spying out Gilly, who had at last reappeared, he pounced on her demanding, "When were you born?"

Gilly was struck speechless. Her husband, whom a person would be hard pressed to fault for ever harboring even a speck of lint on his immaculate clothing, was somehow standing before her, looking like a horse that had been ridden hard and put away wet.

He had a smudge on his thin aristocratic nose and another across his chiseled chin. His glorious blonde hair was dark with rain and appeared for all the world like he had combed it with a rake. His clothing would have to be bundled up and put in the fire (there was no salvaging a stitch of it), and his beautiful patrician hands—the ones just now cutting off all the circulation in her arms from just below the shoulders—bore mute witness to the fact that he had been scrabbling in the dirt like an urchin.

Gilly's inventory of her husband had taken only seconds, but even that short span was too long for him. He shouted his question again, this time punctuating each word with a hard shake of her shoulders. "Tell me, Gilly! When were you born? What day, what month?"

"It—It was in April. April eighth. Why? What's going on? What's the matter with you—you look positively ill!" Gilly spluttered, truly upset at Kevin's bizarre behavior. "Jared? Bo? Shouldn't somebody be doing something? Getting him a drink of brandy? A dry blanket?"

"Ah-ha!"
Kevin crowed, releasing Gilly and turning toward the others—all of them equally dumbfounded by both his wild-eyed appearance and his question. "Don't you understand?" he yelled triumphantly. "April eighth. It had to be. Oh, I guess it could have been August fourth just as easily, but it was April eighth. Jared! Surely you understand. It was your idea."