The Prince of Ravenscar (44 page)

“Vicky told me how you'd adored Lily, how you still did, and how if I wore her gown, arranged my hair like hers, even wore the bloody locket, you would admire me more. She knew your supposed affection for me was all an act on your part, didn't she?” When he only shook his head, Leah laughed, a harsh, grating sound that held no amusement at all. “All the drama in this room, the mysteries that should have been uncovered years ago, and a score of crushing memories that eat into your hearts, and so much blame. I fancy all this blame can be spread around.

“But there is only one fool in this room.” She laughed again, pointed to herself. “Look at me, Richard! Am I the image of your long-dead sister?”

He gave her a long look. “I never liked that gown on Lily.”

Leah stared at him. “So you admit it?”

He said nothing.

“Yes, if I were you I'd keep quiet as well. Here's some truth for you—all you did was use me, Richard. Why, then, do you want to marry me? I could give you no more information. Why, Richard? Or was your proposal all part of your elaborate ruse, to ensure I was fully secured and tied to you, that I would do whatever it was you wished me to do?”

T
he silence stretched endlessly. Leah laughed, a wrenching laugh that made Roxanne want to leap up and strangle Richard Langworth, but she knew what happened was her sister's decision. Leah said, “Well, I see you won't wish to answer me. You're not entirely stupid, are you? I hate this gown, too, and my hair?” She laughed again. “My hair looks absurd.”

Roxanne said, “Richard, would Lily have applauded you for your actions? Or would she be horrified at what you've tried to do, at how you've stopped living your life and wallowed in a grief so corrosive it poisons the very air you breathe? Would she say your actions no longer have anything to do with your grief for her? That you know nothing else, and thus you are trapped in your hatred and it has become you?”

Richard began pacing again. “Lily would understand. She always understood; she loved her family more than she ever loved you, Julian. I am not obsessed, damn you, Roxanne, I am not.”

“Were you going to kill me, Richard?” Roxanne asked.

“No. Manners would have taken you to the Continent, left you there. I swear to you, there was nothing about rape.”

Roxanne walked to him, stared him in the face, drew back her fist, and slammed it hard in his belly. He whooshed out breath, staggered a bit. “I don't think you would have cared what Manners did to me. You are a coward, and you don't deserve anything good in your miserable life. My sister asked you a good question: Why do you still wish to wed her after using her so abominably?”

Leah jumped to her feet. She looked at each of them, then her eyes came to rest on Julian. “It is all your fault. If you hadn't murdered Lily, none of this would have happened.” She turned to Richard, her hands on her hips. “I find I agree with Roxanne. You are a coward, Richard, and you have no honor. Your father is right. You have grown twisted in your grief. As for Vicky, who knows what she is really thinking about anything. You are not a healthy man, Richard. What you are is pathetic.”

Leah walked out of the room, not looking back.

Julian looked at Richard. “I believe, finally, I know what happened to Lily.”

THAT EVENING

 

 

 

J
ulian said quietly from the doorway of the drawing room, “Vicky.”

She looked up from the book she was reading. She didn't move, merely regarded him without expression. “You should not be here, Prince. Surely you are still too weak from your injury. You were stabbed only two days ago.”

He had to keep standing, he thought, despite the vicious gnawing in his side. He
would
keep standing. He had to finish this. Now. He said, “I am well enough.”

“Why is Richard standing behind you? He might have a gun, you know; he might shoot you and bury you near to where you shot Lily. Don't you think that fitting? You're here as well, Papa. What is this?”

Baron Purley walked into the drawing room and sat down next to his daughter. He picked up her hand. It lay limp between his strong ones. He studied her long fingers, so much like Lily's. “Would you like to have a Season in London, Vicky?”

“I? Now? Why should I?”

The baron said, “Did you not tell Leah you didn't wish to have a Season because you might meet a prince and he would kill you, like Lily was killed? But you know, Vicky, you know the prince did not kill Lily. You know it.”

Vicky grew very still. She stared at each man's face.

Julian said, “I know, Vicky. I know.”

She looked from her father's face to her brother's, both set and still. She looked down at her father's big hands. She shook her head.

Julian said, “I know Lily never had a lover, Vicky. It simply wasn't in her, not the girl I knew all my life, not the girl I married. I also could see no guilt in anyone else. So I was forced to face it—she either killed herself for some reason I simply could not fathom, or something else entirely happened. For the life of me, I couldn't find my way to the truth. Until Leah came into the room today wearing Lily's grown, her hair dressed like Lily's hair. By you, Vicky.

“Tell us, Vicky. Tell us what happened that afternoon in the garden. Tell us what happened between you and Lily.”

Vicky never looked away from him, but Julian knew she wasn't seeing him, she was seeing her sister on that hot, long-ago afternoon in the wildly blooming garden.

She said, her voice far away, as if reciting a story she'd read, “You still don't know anything, Prince—particularly, the truth. The fact is Lily was going to leave me.”

“What do you mean she was going to leave you?” Baron Purley squeezed her white limp hand, but there seemed to be no life in that hand. He said gently, “Vicky, Lily was here nearly every day after she married the prince. When he was gone from Ravenscar on his shipping business, she spent entire days here; she even slept here in her old bedroom. I saw very little change. What do you mean she was going to leave you?”

There was no pain in Vicky's simple words as she spoke them, her voice utterly without feeling. “I killed her. I killed my own sister.”

Julian clutched the back of a wing chair. He felt nausea and pain, and couldn't think. Then the sickness passed, leaving only the pain. “Tell us why you killed her, Vicky.” He walked slowly to sit on her other side. He raised his hand and cupped her cheek. “It's time, you know, time to understand what happened, so all of us can place it in the past, where it belongs.”

Richard was still standing by the open doorway, his face deathly white. He said, “Please, Vicky, tell us.”

Vicky looked again at her hand held between her father's big ones. She raised her eyes to Julian's face. “Lily loved you, Prince, she loved you too much, more than I wanted her to, but since I knew you all my life, knew you liked me, I wasn't all that upset when she married you. She would live at Ravenscar. If you went to London, I would go with you. Everything would continue on the way it always had.

“I don't think you realized it, but our souls were one, Lily and I, and we both knew it, even though Lily never said the words to me. From the very beginning I recognized I was part of her, and she was the very best part of me. She was my mother, my sister, my very best friend, and she loved me without reservation. But then it happened.”

“What happened?” the baron asked.

“I came to her in the garden. Her hands were dirty from pulling up weeds, and she was smiling, wildly happy, and it burst right out of her. ‘I am going to have a baby, Vicky. The Prince and I are going to be parents.'

“She'd come to tell me she was letting me go, that it was time I matured, that I spread my wings and became my own woman.

“I couldn't believe these words came from her mouth. She nearly sang the words, she was so happy. She told me it was time for me to leave my home, time to get away from her, time for me to go to London and have a Season, as she had. She told me I would find a gentleman who would please me, that I would marry, and have my own children. She told me I didn't need a mother any longer—namely, her—that since our own mother had died so long before, she had played that role to me, but now I was grown, I was my own woman. She would now be my sister, and I would soon become an aunt.

“I knew to my soul I didn't want that, knew that I wanted only her, and I wanted her forever, but I saw she was resolute. I knew she'd made up her mind. And so I finally agreed and left her. I fetched one of your pistols, Papa, and I found her still in the garden, humming, happier now because she'd done her duty by me and set me free. I still remember her face—how very radiant she looked.

“I told her we belonged together, that I wouldn't let this child in her womb continue to grow and come out of her and make her leave me. She tried to grab the gun, to protect her babe, and the gun went off.” Vicky stared down at her hand, still held in her father's. “She looked up at me in the instant before she died. She smiled and told me it would be all right. Then she was gone.”

Julian felt the past whip into the present and crush him. Lily was pregnant with his child, and Vicky had killed her, killed his babe
.
He felt such pain he wanted to yell. This damnable girl had been responsible for all the pain and death and misery. He wanted to kill her, to take her white neck between his hands and choke the life out of her, as she had killed Lily, as she had killed his child.
His child, dead with its mother, never to know life, to know him, his father, or Lily, his mother—

Julian had believed he'd understood, but he hadn't. He'd thought of the obsession in father and son but had not considered Vicky, not really, until he realized obsession was part of her as well, and he'd believed Vicky had considered her sister marrying him as betrayal. But she hadn't. No, it was all about their unborn child.

He hadn't realized how profoundly Lily had affected Vicky's life. But he did now, only it was too late. And what would he do? Accuse Vicky of murder and see her hanged?

No justice, he thought, for Lily, for him, for Richard, or for Vicky's father. He wanted only to lie in bed and sleep away the pain in his body and the pain in his heart.

There was not a single sound in the room except for Vicky's sobs and her low strangled words, “I wanted to die, too, but there was only one bullet in your gun, Papa, only one bullet.” Lily's father drew her against him. Lily's brother stood, again utterly alone, in the center of the drawing room.

Julian looked from the baron to Richard to Vicky, now lying limp against her father's chest, her father's hand lightly stroking her hair.

Julian knew the truth would remain in this room. He also knew that what Richard had done, what his father had done, that all of it would remain in this room as well. None of it would ever be spoken of again.

Such misery,
he thought,
such utter waste,
and he thought again of his unborn child and wanted to weep.

FOUR WEEKS LATER

 

 

 

C
orinne sat in the Ravenscar pew at the front of the beautiful Norman church, built by the conqueror's own hands. The church had been protected by the long line of Brabante dukes throughout years of interminable wars and destruction. Ravenscar was large for a local church, and most villagers were able to cram inside. Those not able to be seated in the row upon row of wooden benches lined up against all the walls. There were even those who stood outside the open doors, listening to the service. All the Ravenscar servants, Pouffer at their head, were seated directly behind Corinne. She knew the moment the service was over they would scramble madly back to Ravenscar to set out enough food to feed the entire village. It would be a fine celebration, and Julian's wine cellar would be severely depleted by the end of the day.

Corinne looked at the two couples standing tall and proud before the Reverend Hubbard, known as the Young Vicar, having attained only his sixty-fifth year. He was so happy he looked fit to bursting with it. She listened to his words, beautiful, rich words that flowed smoothly out of his mouth, words that would bind these beautiful young people together. The four of them were so happy the air seemed to glow around them.

She listened to her son's strong voice, to Sophie's sweet one, so pure and happy, and saw dear Roxanne looking at Devlin through her veil, and who knew what she was thinking? When she spoke her vows, her voice was resonant and calm, reaching to every ear in the church, and to Corinne's ear, she already sounded like a duchess, and she smiled, thinking,
You will surely set Lorelei back on her heels, Roxanne.
Devlin, so vampire-white he was today, he'd announced to them all, and wasn't it perfect for his wedding? He was so obviously pleased with himself that it fairly burst from him, sounded arrogant and happy;
odd,
she thought,
but true.

Both uncle and nephew were dressed in stark black. Roxanne wore a pale yellow gown, her glorious red hair piled atop her head, lazy curls drifting down to touch her shoulders. As for Corinne's soon-to-be daughter-in-law, Sophie wore a gown of pure white. She looked very young and innocent, yet, Corinne remembered, she was older than Corinne had been when she'd wedded Julian's father.
Ah, it was so long ago. How was one to remember what one felt so many years before?
But these two, they were right for each other, their bond deep and abiding.