The Scarred Earl (23 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Beacon

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BOOK: The Scarred Earl
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‘That she would shoot him if he tried to get the key off her and they were staying exactly where they were until Lord Calvercombe appeared in person, or realised the game was up and went away again.’

Electra’s mouth opened and closed a few times and her eyes went frantically from one to the other as if looking for a clue as to their mood. When she failed to find one, she fell back on the standby of fainting artistically on to the nearest soft surface. Alex and Persephone left her there to wonder how long she should take to recover and followed Mr Warrender downstairs to the cellar.

‘My wife suffers with her nerves,’ he claimed loyally.

‘It looks as if everyone else suffers from them more than she does,’ Alex observed drily.

‘Perhaps,’ Warrender replied with a sad shake of his head and Alex couldn’t help thinking some resolution would have improved his marriage a great deal, even if he shuddered at the very idea of being leg-shackled to a harridan like the one upstairs. ‘My late mother-in-law brought Electra up to think herself neglected by the family she was so proud to belong to,’ Warrender went on. ‘Corinthia Clevedon was a very difficult woman who married a feckless fool who wasted what money they ever had. She spoilt her only child as if she was heiress to a fine estate, rather than tenant of a near-ruinous pile of stones. My wife lacks the character to see it was all a sham, I fear, and thinks the world owes her something for all those disappointed hopes,’ he explained and Alex silently conceded it sounded a very unhealthy upbringing.

‘Your own daughter can hardly have grown up with that delusion,’ he said grimly, taking in the neglect and ruin outside Electra’s genteel cocoon.

‘Antigone has had a little too much reality in her young life.’

‘Then we must conspire to improve her lot, Mr Warrender,’ Persephone said and Alex smothered a groan as he wondered how many poor relations and assorted waifs he’d be expected to house when he finally had a Countess in his bed.

‘You haven’t met my daughter,’ her host informed her dolefully and shook his head as if he didn’t know which was worse to live with, a stubbornly deluded wife or a resolutely realistic daughter.

‘Maybe not, but Marcus seems to have survived the encounter,’ Alex murmured as they descended a steep stone stairway and could soon hear a heated argument echoing along the vaulted stone passageway below.

‘A redoubtable young gentleman,’ Mr Warrender agreed and Alex wondered if he’d underestimated reckless and flighty Marcus Seaborne after all.

If the unladylike curse that preceded the sound of a large key being turned hastily in the door at the end of the passageway was anything to go by, Miss Warrender had misjudged him as well. Signalling the others to keep silent, and astonished when they
obeyed, Alex waited to see what his young friend would do next. He was pleased to see Marcus take a look out to assess what lay ahead instead of barging headlong into trouble, even as he somehow managed to control the wriggling and furious lady trying her best to push him aside so she could go first.

‘They don’t want me, you tenfold idiot. Any sensible man might want to shoot you, but they won’t put a bullet in a woman,’ she argued furiously.

‘Fool yourself. Their lives might hang on silencing you and keeping me in their power. Blackmail and extortion are capital crimes, my dear.’

‘I know,’ the girl told Marcus with an undercurrent of anguish in her husky voice and Alex sympathised with Antigone Warrender and decided his love was right to start a campaign for a better life for her latest protégée before she had even met her.

‘Any trial would need a witness to prosecute,’ Marcus told her with what sounded suspiciously like tenderness to Alex.

‘And if you catch the man behind all this, won’t you need us to tell our tale in order to punish him?’ she asked as if ready to
do whatever honesty demanded, whatever the cost.

Alex was astonished how different from her dam Miss Warrender obviously was. A conundrum Marcus would have to struggle with if he truly had tender feelings for his unusual keeper.

‘There won’t be anything left to say
when
we catch him,’ Marcus said grimly.

‘I should imagine the man I saw just now has plenty to say, whoever he might truly be,’ Miss Warrender insisted doggedly.

‘Good afternoon, Marcus,’ Alex intervened to prove it.

‘Forthin, you can’t know how glad I am to hear your voice,’ Marcus exclaimed and managed to thrust the door fully open as if he didn’t have several stone of resisting woman fighting him every inch of the way.

‘Believe me, Seaborne, I can,’ Alex drawled and Marcus grinned broadly.

‘Dare say you can,’ he said. ‘Since I’ve found out the hard way that losing your freedom is almost as bad as losing yourself, you have my most profound admiration for coming out of it as sane as you have,’ he added, with a severe look for the lady who now appeared to be trying to hide behind him.

‘Thank you. Once I might have disagreed I was anything of the sort,’ he said, even as Persephone pushed past him to hug her brother fiercely.

‘Marcus,’ Persephone crooned contentedly and Miss Warrender stiffened, then flinched away from Marcus as if she’d been stung.

‘Per-se-phon-ee,’ he greeted in what Alex guessed was a childhood joke at their unwieldy names. ‘Don’t you dare get my shirt damp now it’s been so tenderly washed and mended by my fair hostess,’ he joked.

‘Miss Warrender?’ Persephone asked the girl.

‘Who are you?’

‘At last, a name,’ Marcus said with a hard look for his hostess.

‘Better you didn’t know who we were, and I refused to lie.’

‘I can imagine. Am I allowed to know the rest, or is that a secret as well?’

‘I am called Antigone, Mr Seaborne,’ the girl said with her chin in the air and Alex couldn’t help admiring her for admitting it so defiantly.

‘Never mind,’ Marcus replied with a complicit grin. ‘My sister Persephone sympathises as well, don’t you, love?’

‘Deeply,’ his spectacularly lovely Miss Seaborne agreed with a shake of her head that set her glowing chestnut curls dancing and probably made Antigone long for even a pinch of her elegance, although she did seem to relax a little once she realised the beauty in Marcus’s arms was actually his sister.

‘We have great deal to answer for,’ Mr Warrender put in mournfully from the back of the procession. ‘My mother-in-law considered it almost as fine a name as the one she gave her own daughter and neither of us felt able to argue for something more usable at the time, my dear,’ he told his daughter apologetically.

‘Never mind, Papa, since Miss Seaborne and her brother seem to live with their names, I dare say mine will not trouble me overmuch in future.’

‘I’m sure something can be done with it,’ Marcus informed her as if he would be using some form of it a great deal in future and she shook her head emphatically.

‘No, I shall go out as a housekeeper, so it will not be used at all.’

‘No sane household would employ you,’ Marcus told her brusquely and Persephone
and Alex exchanged knowing looks at his obvious displeasure.

‘I know enough about managing on next to nothing to fill a book. Any sensible householder would be delighted to give me a job.’

‘No woman would employ you and I doubt any man would take you on with anything approaching a pure motive in his heart.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, I’m a plain spinster with no prospects,’ she insisted gruffly and Marcus kissed her in front of her father, his sister and the openly amused Earl of Calvercombe.

‘You’re not plain,’ he informed when he raised his head. ‘Nor are you going to be a spinster for much longer. Say you’ll marry me, so I don’t have to take you back into that cell and lock you in with me until you’re well and truly ravished.’

‘You don’t really want to ravish me, or marry me,’ she argued bitterly.

‘Want to bet on it?’ he asked with a rakish leer and, since he had obviously liked it the first time, kissed her again and she kissed him ardently back, despite her doubts.

‘Shall we leave them to it?’ Alex asked Persephone as Mr Warrender allowed himself a smile of fatherly satisfaction.

‘Better if we get them both away from here, don’t you think, my lord?’ Mr Warrender asked when the young lovers looked up as if they barely understood their own language.

‘Aye, while that cunning villain is free none of us is totally safe.’

‘And Mr Peters
was
able to flit in and out of the castle without being seen,’ Persephone pointed out.

‘I dare say one cannon-ball lobbed into the midst of the keep would set the whole lot tumbling about our ears as well,’ Alex agreed ruefully. ‘I’m surprised you found a safe place to hold a prisoner here,’ he told Mr Warrender.

‘The keep is sound enough, my lord, as I’m sure your surveyor reported. He seemed a truthful man of forthright opinions. My wife disliked him intensely.’

‘This is her home,’ Persephone allowed and Alex sighed, knowing rebuilding and refurbishing Kingslake Moot Castle had leapt to the top of his list of things to do.

‘She will have to leave until the place is sound and you will need staff to keep it so even then,’ Alex said, wondering where he
could safely place the Warrenders so they weren’t constantly under his feet.

‘They will come to Westerhowe with me,’ Marcus declared.

‘You should wait until you’ve met her mother before you decide anything so rashly,’ Alex warned with an apologetic glance at the Warrenders.

‘It doesn’t matter, although I hope you’ll be a good brother-in-law and restore the place, so I can have my bride to myself before the end of the next decade.’

‘I haven’t agreed to marry you yet,’ Antigone protested.

‘Yes, you have—don’t you dare have second thoughts now.’

‘I never said I would marry you.’

‘You didn’t need to; your enthusiasm for the idea said it for you.’

‘Nevertheless, a lady likes to be asked.’

Marcus Seaborne amazed himself and everyone else by hastily kneeling on the stony floor and taking Antigone Warrender’s work-worn hand in his. ‘Will you marry me and make my life worth living, Antigone?’ he asked earnestly and she looked down into his for once very serious green Seaborne eyes.

‘Are you sure?’ she finally managed.

‘My life will be no fun without you in it. Be my big adventure, love?’

‘Yes,’ she breathed and flushed with joy until she looked exotically lovely, even in her washed-out grey gown and austere hairstyle.

Just wait until he sees her in a gown of dusky rose-pink silk with her hair dressed to make the most of those midnight-dark curls
, Persephone promised them both silently. This summer would be a very lucrative one indeed for Madame Elphine and what luck the exclusive modiste had already agreed to leave her beloved London for the wilds of Herefordshire to fit Persephone with her latest triumph.

Chapter Sixteen

‘Y
our brother seems to have grown,’ Alex remarked quietly when he handed Persephone down from the carriage at the side door of Ashburton New Place the family used to come and go informally.

‘And he’ll need every ounce of maturity he can call on,’ Persephone murmured wearily. ‘I can’t tell you how I wish you and Marcus had listened and let me ride back with you.’

She massaged her temple to ward off a headache from a thirty-mile journey over bumpy roads, listening to Electra Warrender prattle endlessly about herself. Antigone had endured the monologue as if so used to the endless sound of her mother’s voice she
hardly heard it any more, and Mr Warrender had cunningly insisted on sitting on the box with Brandt Senior and playing guard to their wary cavalcade.

‘I had to know you were safe inside the coach, not giving that vile rogue a chance to hurt me mortally by targeting you out of frustration. You’re going to be my wife, Persephone. How could I endanger you so when he’s been robbed of his quarry and is still intent on hunting down your eldest brother?’

‘Don’t,’ she argued huskily. ‘If you’re even thinking of keeping me chained to your side for our whole married life we might as well part now, whatever the cost.’

‘It’s too high for me,’ he said after a tense pause when she could see all sorts of possible terrors running through his vivid imagination. ‘Promise you won’t take wild risks for the thrill of it, Persephone. It will drive me insane if my wife is out running her head into any danger on offer to prove how brave she is every hour God sends us from now on wards.’

‘I’ll make sure you’re included in any I take on, then,’ she promised lightly.

‘Probably the best bargain I’ll get from
you, but don’t be surprised if I’m grey as a badger before I’m thirty.’

‘I doubt it, my love,’ she told him and raised her hand to smooth windswept raven hair, oblivious to the fuss and greeting taking place behind them once Lady Henry and her daughters realised Marcus was finally home and had brought a very odd assortment of guests along with him.

‘Mama says you can adjust his lordship’s hairstyle when we’re not so busy, Persephone,’ Miss Helen Seaborne informed her as if she had no idea her elder sister and once awe-inspiring Lord Calvercombe wanted to be alone.

‘Does she indeed?’ Persephone said as she emerged from the cocoon she and Alex seemed to have wrapped themselves up in against the world without the spark of anger her sister was probably hoping for. ‘I rather doubt it.’

‘Well, we do have three unexpected guests and Marcus to accommodate at very short notice,’ Helen said, as if that excused passing on the message with her own unique slant on it.

‘Lucky the guest wing has been so very well aired in the last few weeks then, is it
not, little sister?’ Persephone pointed out and met her sister’s inquisitive gaze with a bland smile.

Helen would just have to find out about love and marriage for herself, as her cousin and elder sister had in their turn, however impatient Helen was to start adult life and find her own hero. A woman needed maturity to take on the weight and depth and sheer feeling of such life-changing emotions, Persephone reflected. She had been too awed to accept the possibility for herself even in June. Her best friend Jessica had been struggling to come to terms with the fire and need that had flared into life between her and Jack so fiercely even they couldn’t ignore it, so the reality of passionate love was there in front of her and she couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist.

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