The Thirteenth Earl (11 page)

Cassandra paced the dead end of the labyrinth, worrying that she had given Thaxton the wrong directions. She retraced her path, only to find it correct. She retraced it again, correct again. Her anxiety had reached a fever pitch by the time night had fallen, especially when a servant had nearly caught her in Lucy’s room.

It had been worth it, though. She had not one, but two very interesting things to share with the viscount.

Her day had contained a series of homilies about him. Lady Dorset preached that Thaxton was poisonous. She maintained it was not wise to “play this game with him,” as she put it. Thankfully, the marchioness did not quite know the extent of the game. And then, of course, the summons from Miles at lunch. She met him in the library, and he had said, in no uncertain terms, that they would be married in three weeks. He mentioned that her father would have been disappointed if he had seen her behavior at the ball, chastising her as if he were a parent himself. He said he hoped that there would not be another performance like that; he implied it would be easier if she demurely accepted her fate. He more than implied she should never again so much as look at Jonathan Vane. He expressly ordered it, this time with a veiled threat to drag her out of the house party, echoing the words of Lady Dorset.

The tension between them made it even easier to beg off dinner due to sickness, especially since he could not accuse her of being with Thaxton, since the viscount held his stalwart position at the table. She did not think Miles wanted to see her any more than she wanted to see him.

Now she heard footsteps approaching and shrank back into the shadows in case it was a stray party guest. Thaxton rounded the corner, the moonlight making him a sleek silhouette.

“There you are,” he said, drawing her into his arms as soon as he saw her. She gave a little gasp, not of offense, but of surprise and delight. “There was a faulty part of our plan, you know.”

“Oh, no,” she said, shaken by his statement as much as by the fact that she relaxed into his arms without much prompting.

“Just that a night without you was torture.”

“Goodness, Jonathan. Be serious.”

“I am serious. The dinner table without you was the eighth circle of hell.”

“Not the ninth?”

“Lucy, false prophet; Miles, panderer; I, seducer. Eighth.”

“Seducer?”

“If you would give me the chance. But your note seemed urgent. What have you found?”

“These.”

Cassandra extracted herself from his arms and went to retrieve the evidence. She held up the strange contraptions she’d found in Lucy’s stocking drawer, shoved into the back corner. When the blocks struck each other, they produced a very distinct sound. She clapped them together, raising an exultant eyebrow at Thaxton.

“Recognize that?” she said.

“Sounds like our talkative ghost. Ingenious.” He took them, turning them over in his hands, unbuckling one of them. “Worn, I suppose?”

“Under the skirts, I think.”

She very much expected him to make an off-color joke, but he remained silent. He stared at the proof—she could not read his expression.

“I half hoped you would not find anything,” he said. “Part of me wanted to believe the séance was confirmation of my unalterable fate.”

“There is a freedom to believing in fate, I imagine. Less responsibility for your actions.” She paused. “But I think this means both the wailing woman and the séance can be somehow explained, that they are the same issue.”

Yet on the question of unalterable fate,
she thought, rolling the second artifact she found in Lucy’s room around in her palm. She was no longer sure that she should even mention that she had also found a pair of Miles’s cuff links with Lucy’s jewelry. The engraving on both little studs a damning
MRM
. Cassandra did not know Miles’s middle name, but it was clear enough who owned them. What did it matter to Thaxton that on top of Lucy being a fraud, she was also Miles’s mistress?

Neither was it necessary to tell him that though she had been joking before, she was now seriously considering running away. Considering how much she would need to support herself, likely places that would take in a woman without asking too much about her previous life.

“What else?” Thaxton said. He was looking at her with narrowed eyes, with obvious suspicion. “There is something else.”

She nearly burst into tears. He knew she was upset,
that
he noticed. She steeled herself.

“It is irrelevant to the investigation,” she said.

“Cassandra. What is it?”

She did not answer him, but opened her palm. He held one of the cuff links up to the sky; the silver glinted and the initials came into view as he rotated it.

“What I am about to say is only half-serious,” he growled, “but if you want me to kill him, I will.”

“Were it that easy,” she lamented.

“Do not marry him,” he said, the words spilling out as if they were pursued.

“I do not have much of a choice,” she said, sounding much more stoic than she felt. No matter how much she enjoyed the viscount’s company, he was not going to save her from anything in the state he was in. “In any case, it is not your concern. With the discovery of those wooden blocks, I think we can safely say Lucy Macallister has no supernatural powers.”

“But what of the bell?”

“I assume she had some other trick. No matter how mad your father is, Thaxton, that woman was lying to get a rise out of you. Why—that is what we do not know.”

“Lucy and I had never met before this week. Why me, even if she is connected to Miles? Why bother?”

“Your history with Miles, the rivalry?”

“There is no rivalry, at least on my part—he is beneath my notice most of the time. I endeavor to ignore him, not goad him. Does this not seem like an elaborate and hurtful prank, if it was just to scare me? I am already an exile. Miles is reentering society. What does it matter? It seems like a lot of effort to put forth.”

“It cannot have been just to scare you,” she said, peering up at the sky through the top of the labyrinth. It was a cool night, one that would be outright cold in a few hours. But that was not what made her shiver. “They want something from you.”

“But what? And what do we do?” he asked, sounding as if he truly had no idea how to proceed. The truth was, neither did she. Until his father wrote back, they would not know if Lucy had been to London.

“Wait. See if your father writes back, see if they try to pull any other capers.” The moon was climbing higher. “We should get back to our rooms. Miles may try to check on me.”

Cassandra watched Thaxton’s face tighten.

“Do not let him touch you,” he said, prowling toward her. “Cassandra. Do not marry him. It enrages me that he even shares air with you.”

“I do not intend to,” she replied, trying to maintain her equilibrium. He stepped in front of her again so fast that her vision swam. She raised a hand against his chest, stopping his offensive. “Not that it is any of your business.”

“Ah,” he said, recoiling from her gesture. “There it is.”

“Hmm?”

“I knew after what happened in the dumbwaiter that it was a matter of time before you told me I was a blackguard. I cannot help it . . . I want to kiss you.”

“I grant that it was an enjoyable diversion, but we cannot go on.”

“Why?”

Not a whine, not a plea, just a bald question. And she could not think of a proper answer.

“It is . . . unwise.”

“I am a gentleman—mad or not—and if you think what we have been doing is untoward, it will cease. I thought—I rather thought we were both having fun.”

“Yes,” she said. “Too much.”

“But what of the investigation?”

“I do not know why you would need me from here,” she said, though she very much wanted him to need her, “but the house party will go on as planned, and if you require help, I am a note away.”

“I see,” he said. “Farewell, then, Miss Seton. A thank-you is in order, I believe.”

“Not at all, we both . . .”

“Thank you, nonetheless. Good night.”

The viscount turned back to navigate out of the labyrinth, and Cassandra was left to ponder the implications of that curt
I see
.

So, he had gotten roaring drunk. He got properly shot in the neck, he hit the benzine, he got corned, however you wanted to term it. He did so because he thought he might love the girl.

That would not do.

It would not do especially because she had all but told him it was over between them by calling off the investigation. So, if he loved her, it opened up a new world of torture. He would have to watch her marry another man (not Miles, if fate was kind) and then inevitably run into her at parties, where they would make strained conversation. She would grow increasingly uneasy around him, and he would never be able to erase the memory of their strange passion.

Eventually, he assumed, she would stop going out of her way to greet him. The thought festered like a canker.

Thaxton fell asleep in front of the hearth, leaning back against a chair, sprawled on the floor. It was how Sutton found him the next morning. The viscount opened his eyes to the valet looming over him, a look of panic on his usually unsympathetic face.

“Kind of you to fret, Sutton, but I am not dead. Mostly not dead.”

“Yes, I see, my lord. It is a relief.” He wrung his hands a few times over. “But there is something . . .”

Thaxton felt his stomach drop, not the most pleasant feeling when one has been hitting a bottle. Sutton had left his sentence dangling like a sail in choppy wind.

“For god’s sake, man, what is it?”

“Your door, my lord.”

“What of it?”

“There is—there seems to be a marking on it.”

“Cannot rule out the possibility,” he said, pulling himself up to the sofa, “that I crashed into it last night, scuffed it with my boot or dented an old slat.”

“No, my lord, not like that. It is . . . we think it is blood.”

“Are you quite serious?” Thaxton rubbed his bleary eyes and crossed over to his desk. Maybe he was still soused. He could have sworn Sutton said his door was covered with blood.

“Nan—the head maid, my lord—says it is, and she saw enough of it while Spencer was growing up, terrorizing the household. She knows what blood looks like.”

Thaxton regarded the back of the door, which looked ordinary enough.

“Blood as if someone had hurt themselves?” He looked down at his scruffy attire, slept in and crinkled, but not stained. “I realize I was foxed, but I do not think I harmed myself.”

“You do not understand, Lord Thaxton,” Sutton said, a faint thread of exasperation running under his dismay. “There is a symbol on your door, drawn in blood.”

“Oh?” he said, throwing back the remains of the whisky in his glass, stale from the night before. Thaxton assumed at this point that he was hallucinating, the first steps of descending into madness, and he decided to embrace it. There was blood on his door, a symbol. All right, then.

“Sir?” Sutton asked, flummoxed.

“You should tell Spencer, I suppose. Have it cleaned up.”

Sutton’s reply was lost to the spectacle of Miss Seton, throwing the door open and tearing into the room past the traumatized valet. She stood just past the threshold, her eyes scanning the room frantically until she saw him.

“Jonathan,” she breathed with visible relief. “Oh, thank goodness.”

Reflexively, he tried to pat his hair down, as it stood up in random chunks. With his hand halfway to his head, he realized that he had no reason to impress her anymore.

“Eliza told me about your door—she is trying to control the talk around the estate. I panicked, I admit. I thought something might have happened to you. Of course, the servants mostly already know—”

“I’m sorry, Miss Seton,” he said, carefully formal, “but I have no idea what you are ranting about. And you cannot be here.”

She turned to her side, where the face of the door loomed. He caught a peripheral glimpse of angry red slashes, but her frantic mood took his attention first. Cassandra was behaving as if a life, his life, was in danger. She gestured grandly—of course she did, her damned always-mobile hands—and went so far as to stamp her foot.

“Have you not seen this?” She pointed.

“I had not bothered,” he said, sinking into his desk chair, bringing himself nearer to the whisky. If also nearer to his scandalized valet. “Is it horrifying?”

Thaxton knew Sutton was dying to say something about the unaccompanied banshee in the door of the bachelor’s quarters.

“Look,” she said angrily. She ran her finger through the drawing on the door, and it came away dripping with a rapidly browning red. “Look, Jonathan.”

He finally did. There was indeed a giant symbol on his door. It almost looked like a letter
t
, yet much longer on the stem with a bowed horizontal line—meaningless, and therefore it looked esoteric, but he would recognize it anywhere. Scrawled through all of his father’s notebooks. It was most assuredly drawn in blood.

Thaxton had risen to his feet before he knew it.

“Get Spencer,” he said to Sutton, hearing his voice as if from a distance. “I need you to get Spencer.”