The Ghosts of Greenwood (23 page)

“I should think they might, since I’ve aired them at great length.” Dickon gave her a little shake. “Dammit, Livvy, how can you doubt that I love you?”

“Because I’m pregnant!” wailed his wife. “And it’s all your fault.”

She was damp, disheveled, and utterly adorable. The Earl of Dorset possessed, in addition to his quick temper, a strong sense of the absurd. “My poor darling. Of course it is my fault. And had I known you would be so unhappy, I would never have—”

Livvy choked out a watery gurgle of laughter. “Of course you would have. Moreover, I wanted you to. But I don’t want you to want anybody else, even when I am waddling about fat as a flawn!”

“You will never be fat,” Lord Dorset assured her. “And I promise that I wouldn’t, even if you were. I am going to embrace you now, sweetheart. Do you think that would be all right?”

Sniffling, Livvy allowed as it might.

“Fascinating,” observed Hubert. “If beside the point.” Casanova, roused from slumber, fluffed up his fur and stalked across the room to crouch at Dulcie’s feet.

The Baroness rapped her knitting needles on the arm of her carved chair. “An auburn-haired marauder. It would appear our villain is Cade.”

Sir John eyed her over the hem of his handkerchief. “You are forgetting Gypsy Joe.”

“Am I?” The Baroness glanced at the door. “Enter stage left, perfectly on cue—”

Followed by a frantic-looking Gibbon, the tinker strode into the room. “You honor us with your presence, Giuseppe,” said Dulcie. “More fool you.”

He made her a courtly bow. “
Sarishan, rani.
I heard the
garda
were looking for me.”

Sir John shot an angry glance at his hostess. “And who told you that? Never mind. What do you know about the murder of Connor Halliday?”

“More than you do,
shanglo.
” Giuseppe’s tone was grim.

Jael moved away from Hubert. “You would take the word of a horse trader?” she spat.

Giuseppe’s gaze remained fixed on Sir John. “Where do you wish me to begin?”

The Chief Magistrate hesitated. “Perhaps,” suggested Hubert, “a discussion of the missing Janthina might prove interesting.”

“Interesting but hardly relevant.” Lady Bligh set aside her knitting. “I believe I’ll check on Ned.”

Which meant, Sir John deduced, that Dulcie had no interest in anything Gypsy Joe might say. And
that
meant she knew everything already, but hadn’t cared to share that knowledge with him.

He glared at the tinker. “If you have information of a helpful nature, out with it, man. You might begin by explaining your activities for the past several weeks.”

Giuseppe folded his arms across his chest. “My activities have little to do with anything. The doings of one Abel Bagshot are far more interesting. Ask
him
about the highwayman’s hole at his inn. Ask him also about the tunnel that leads from his cellars to the temple in Lady Margaret’s Garden, and who made use of it.”

“
Jakel!
” snarled Jael, before Sir John could speak. “Better, ask our helpful tinker what he saw in that garden last night. He had met me at the hothouse and remained when I left.”

He flinched, as if she’d struck him. “I stayed briefly and then went about my business. Whatever happened, happened after I had gone.”

Lest he start sneezing again, Sir John pinched the bridge of his nose. “A tunnel in Lady Margaret’s Garden leads to the inn?”

“The inn wasn’t always as respectable as it is now,” Giuseppe explained. “Nor were the Hallidays. Every able body in Greenwood was once involved in smuggling.”

“I’m far less interested in past violations of the law than in the implications of that tunnel.” Sir John narrowed his eyes at Hubert. “You were in the inn the day Connor Halliday died.”

“Aha,” said Humbug. “Suspicion swings back to me. I could have stolen into the tunnel when mine host’s back was turned and set out to commit murder? How perspicacious you are, Sir John. Why didn’t Abel Bagshot notice my departure, I wonder? But I daresay you will think of something once you have me in chains.” He bowed to Jael. “Bid me farewell, my treasure, although I trust we shall shortly be reunited. I also trust it won’t be beneath the gallows-tree.”

Jael turned her back on him and strode toward the screen passage. Giuseppe said, “
Miri pen—
”

“Observe puss set among the pigeons,” Hubert groaned.

Sir John, in his long practice of the law, had come into frequent contact with tinkers and their kin. Contact during which he had gained a fair understanding of the Romany tongue. Incredulously, he repeated, “Your
sister?
”

“My half-sister,” Giuseppe corrected, as Jael disappeared behind the screen. “Who Connor Halliday horsewhipped.”

Behind her, Jael heard a crash, as if the screen had been knocked over, and a roar of angry voices. Hubert sounded in fine dramatic fettle. He would be fortunate if Sir John
didn’t
drag him off to gaol. Jael slipped past a startled footman and out the front door, then picked up her skirts and raced to the stables, where she appropriated a horse and a heavy jacket from an equally startled groom. Without waiting for a proper saddle, she flung herself, in a flurry of scarlet skirts and embroidered stockings, onto the horse’s bare back. The groom goggled open-mouthed as she rode out
ventre a terre
for Halliday Hall
.

What had Giuseppe been thinking? Why had he presented himself, like a pig on a platter, to Bow Street? Tinkers had no happy history with representatives of the law.

Had
Giuseppe shot Ned? Or Connor Halliday? Was he prepared to sacrifice her — or, more likely, Hubert — to save his own neck? Or had Giuseppe come to the Castle because he feared being shot himself?

Jael recalled Ned telling her that peacetime meant three things to those engaged in the business of fighting wars: promotion, starvation, or half-pay. She had responded, with perfect truth, that she understood how a man might prefer the horrors of battle to a monotonous civilian life.

Nevertheless, Jael could not credit that Ned had taken to shooting people — himself included — simply because he was bored. True, Ned might have shot Connor Halliday from some misguided notion of chivalry. However, no one would convince Jael he had likewise shot himself. Did Ned decide to put a period to his existence, he would do so with the minimum of fuss and in a manner meant to cause his family the least possible distress.

Giuseppe could have shot Ned. He could also have shot Connor. Once, Jael would have happily shot Connor herself.

But that was in the past. Or had been in the past, before she returned to Greenwood. Jael wasn’t sure how she felt now.

The avenue of beeches stretched before her. Jael rode through the formal entry, as she had a hundred times before, past old stone walls and ancient trees. How had Ned learned of the tunnel? Who had lain in wait for him there?

Jael tethered her horse in the storage shed and followed the narrow pathway to Lady Margaret’s Garden, pushed open the gate. In her mind’s eye she saw the garden as once it had been, a place of beautiful disorder, of perfectly composed individual landscapes made up of plants and rocks within a symmetrical arrangement of trees.

That garden no longer existed, nor did the girl she had been, and it signified nothing that she could forever find her way blindfolded along these paths. Jael walked past the shattered statue and misshaped dwarf trees, the restored fountain and freshly tended flowerbeds. Her footsteps slowed as she crossed the whimsical arched bridge, its once-gay colors faded now to weathered gray.

The red brick temple waited. Its door hung ajar.

Jael paused on the threshold. The temple was not deserted. She saw the intruder before he became aware of her.

Silently, she moved forward. Her reflected image shimmered in one of the broken mirror shards.

Slowly, he swung round. Despite the many years that had passed since they last met, he looked much the same. “So. You’ve come here to relieve an old victory,” she murmured. “Or was it a defeat?”

If he felt anything at sight of her, he hid his emotion well. “You’re trespassing,” he said.

Jael sank down on the chipped marble bench. “I’ll shove my trunk, mayhap, if you grease my palm. What price the gypsy brat, eh, cully? A bobstick of rum slim?”

He frowned down at her. “I don’t like to hear you talk like that.”

Jael curled her lip at him. “I should care what you like? Keep your distance, fool.”

Ignoring her warning, he propped a booted foot beside her on the bench. “You’re the fool, to come back here. What did you expect to gain?”

This close, she could see the marks of passing time around his mouth and eyes. “Answer me one question. Why did you wait so long to be rid of your twin?”

She hadn’t expected he would tell her, and he didn’t. “You’re keener of wit that once you were,” he said.

“And you were ever a cool devil. I won’t let you shift the blame onto Giuseppe, you know.”

“Your precious Giuseppe.” His foot thudded to the floor. “Who do you think put Sir Wesley wise, all those years ago?”

“Giuseppe?” Jael was suddenly reminded of the Baroness’s orange tomcat, playing with a mouse. “I thought Connor—”

“You thought?” he scoffed. “Think now. What had Connor to gain from it? That damned tinker has always cut his garment to fit his cloth.”

Giuseppe had betrayed her? Jael felt as if the ground had been cut away from beneath her feet.

She made a quick recover. “Ancient history. Curse you,
why?
”

“I’ll answer your question if you answer mine. What brought
you
here?” His gaze rested on her ruined cheek.

Jael fought down an impulse to turn her face away. “Maybe I’m just a sweet and sentimental lass.”

His mouth twisted. “Curiosity, I’ll wager. You wished to see what sort of man I had become. Just what
would
you tell the constabulary, if I let you tell them anything at all?”

“Ah, now you threaten me?” Jael leaned back on the bench, arms around her knees, hand mere inches from the knife hidden beneath her skirts. “As for what I tell the
muskros—
You won’t enjoy Newgate. The narrow courts and lack of drainage, the windows that all look inward so the prisoners can’t glimpse the outside world. You won’t like catching gaol fever, or seeing the corpses left to fester in the fetters where they died.”

“You would see me hang?”

“I’ll be in the Press Yard on the morning of your execution. I’ll see your leg-irons knocked off, and the yeoman place the rope around your head.” Jael took surprisingly little satisfaction from the shocked look on his face. “You killed your brother and Sir Wesley— How did you manage to frighten the old man to death? Now you’ve tried to murder a poor boy who’d done nobody harm. Why?”

“Why didn’t you come back before now?” Again, he answered her question with a question of his own.

“I did return, once, to try and tell Sir Wesley what I’d learned. Instead it was Connor who had the truth from me, that Sir Wesley wasn’t his real father, that Lady Margaret had been violated and passed off on him her bastard sons.” She watched his eyes narrow. “You didn’t know? Few did. I found out by accident. All your planning has been for nothing,
dilo
. You can’t lay claim to the Halliday fortune. You aren’t a Halliday.”

“A bastard,” he said slowly. “That explains why my mother acted as she did. And my brother also.” He studied her face. “The scar is nothing. It will even fascinate a certain kind of man.”

Had he become that kind of man? Jael’s hand edged closer to her knife. “Your brother would have thrashed me even worse, had not Giuseppe stopped him. Save for that ‘damned tinker’, I would not be here now.”

 “And you’ve been paying for his silence ever since.”

Jael shrugged. “I didn’t want Sir Wesley told. He wasn’t to blame.”

His bitter mouth twisted. “From where I’m standing, he looks to have been at fault for a great many things.”

Where he stood, realized Jael, was much too close.

He grasped her chin, forcing her to stare up into his face. “Cut your losses,
chavi
. Go back to where you came from while you still can.”

Would that she could. Jael had been right to warn Giuseppe that the past couldn’t be sloughed off like a snake shed its dead skin.

“Even were I to oblige you,” she said, “Abel Bagshot won’t long hold his tongue. Soon enough everyone will know of your visits to Greenwood. That you deliberately cultivated your resemblance to your brother so that you might more easily masquerade as him.”

“Oblige me?” His grip tightened. “You’ve never done that in all your life. Maybe I
should
put an end to this.”

Jael felt the knife hilt through her skirts. She had but to grasp it, she reminded herself, and carve that taunting expression off his face.

“You’ve been dropping veiled hints about Janthina,” she said, because she must say something, before the past rose up to swallow her whole. “You mean to produce the missing heiress. You’ll never get away with it, Cade.”

“No? With your cooperation, it might serve me well.” More gently now, his hand cupped her cheek. “Think of it: the Halliday fortune, ours to share.”

With superhuman effort, Jael refrained from flinching. “You were eager to see the last of me, but moments past.”

“I’m eager, yes, but not necessarily to see the last of you.” He pulled her to her feet. “Perhaps I want to make amends.”

And perhaps a leopard could change its spots. Most men feared to touch Jael without permission, yet she made no protest when this man drew her into his arms. She even raised her lips to his. “Go to London,” he repeated, his fingers gentle in her tangled hair. “Wait for me there.”

Jael had closed her eyes, as if in passion, but in truth to mask her thoughts. “Nay, I’ve no notion to go so far away.” Her lashes fluttered open. “I’ll hide in the tunnel and you can meet me when you please.”

He looked totally, devastatingly, uncomprehending. “The tunnel?”