Twice Tempted (27 page)

Finally, desperate for a resolution, Fiona gave Mae’s hands a good squeeze.

“There is nothing else I can do, Mae. Chuffy, I know you wish to share your telescope with Mae, but until she sees reason, I forbid it.”

Mae’s eyes flew open. Chuffy made to protest. This time Alex hushed him. Fiona steeled herself against the anguish in her sister’s eyes, the stark betrayal. The tears that slowly tracked down pale cheeks. She stayed there on her knees as Mae pulled her hands away and stood. She stayed as Mae walked out of the room.

She felt Alex’s hands on her arms. “You had no choice,” he said.

Of course she had a choice. So she stood to receive her sister when she returned, her back rigid, her eyes bright and brittle, the battered little pillow in her arms. Fiona almost chastised her. This wasn’t the time to rely on old crutches.

And then, the tears flowing faster, Mae handed the pillow to Chuffy.

Fiona gaped. “What did you do?” she asked, hushed.

But Mae couldn’t seem to pull her gaze from the lavender thistles. Giving Mae a quizzical look, Chuffy pulled out a knife. Mae screamed. Fiona yanked the pillow out of Chuffy’s hands.

“Don’t…” She was shaking. “Please, be careful.” She laughed, as if her objection weren’t primal. “Our mother stitched this. It’s all we have of her.” Clutching the pillow close, she turned to Mae. “Did you hide the messages in here, Mae? Why?”

Her sister’s eyes were awash in tears now as she lifted them to her. She looked so forlorn, more fragile than Fiona had seen her since their mother’s death. “I’m sorry, Fee. I’m so sorry.”

Fiona dropped the pillow to the table and took Mae’s hands. “Why should you ever be sorry, sweetings?”

Now, Mae was sobbing. “Because I’ve betrayed you. I shouldn’t. I knew that. I
knew
it. But it was all I had of him. All I had…” Mae gulped. “And he was so awful to you. I heard him time after time after time. He hated you. He wanted to hurt you. But, Fee…he was my grandfather. And these were all I still had of him.”

So she had stuffed the puzzles into the talisman they had managed to hold on to from their mother. Mae had carried the only family they had around in her arms and blamed herself for it. Fiona felt her heart shatter. She felt the weight of Mairead’s guilt crush her. How could she have ever made Mairead think that keeping a memory of her grandfather was disloyal to Fiona? How could she have so burdened her sister?

She thought she couldn’t feel worse. And then, worse happened. Because when she let go of Mae’s hands to hold her, Mae turned to Chuffy and walked into his arms instead.

Chapter 16

A
s if doing Catholic penance for hurting Mae, Fiona picked the seam out of the pillow on one side, tiny stitch by tiny stitch, to find the interior crammed tight with slips of paper, some of them all of three years old. Fiona fought a tide of pain at the sight of them. Her own grandfather’s betrayal and Mae’s hopeless yearning. Could she really still believe that the puzzles were innocent? That his puzzles, which were actually codes and cipher games, weren’t actually weapons against the throne? Could she bear it that Mae had hidden them from her so that she could keep a piece of their grandfather?

Mae sat in the lilac salon, curled up on the settee, her eyes half-closed, as if it would keep her from seeing Fiona working in the next room. Waiting for his codes, Chuffy sat on the floor at Mae’s feet.

“Only need to copy ’em,” he said again, his hand on her knee. “Put ’em back.”

Mae couldn’t seem to look at him, only nodded.

Her fingers working by instinct, Fiona couldn’t take her eyes from her sister. She couldn’t swallow past the stone that seemed to have lodged in her throat. She felt suddenly cast adrift, her purpose faltering, her pole star shifted. Almost worse than the revelations about the pillow, could it be that Mae no longer needed her? Could her sister really turn to Chuffy when she had only turned to Fiona in the past? Could it be that Fiona would no longer have her sister to give her life focus and reason?

She didn’t think she could bear it. All she had was Mae.

“Happy endings,” she heard next to her and looked up to see Lady Bea standing alongside, a cup of tea in her hand. The old woman smiled, set it down before Fiona, and patted her cheek. “All’s well that ends well.”

Fiona managed a smile. Was it? She wasn’t so sure.

With another pat, Lady Bea wandered through to the salon, where she joined Mae. In time Chuffy returned to the table and began to sort through the papers. He pulled out that well-thumbed little book again, as if suddenly the key would make itself known. Fiona would have been happy never to see those ubiquitous little letter groupings again.

And then Alex returned and made it worse yet again.

Fiona had been separating out all of the little papers into the different codes that had been used. At least they didn’t have to decode them. The messages were written right beneath the code, where she and Mae had used them to prove their prowess.

Bluebird will not sing for us. It must be removed from the cage.

Mother arrives twelfth June with dozen bags and five staff.

Ignio.

The other sentences had never made sense. The last, though, suddenly sent shivers down Fiona’s spine.
Ignio.
Latin for “ignite.” What could they have been igniting? What had been the results? If only she and Mae had dated their puzzles, she might remember.

She was so caught up in the papers that she didn’t hear the footsteps approach. She didn’t have to. Suddenly her limbs were tingling and her belly tightened. Alex was here. She looked up to see him settling into one of the free chairs, his features drawn, his shoulders sagging. She ached for him. She ached to hold him, to soothe him. To have him soothe her. She smiled when she wanted to weep.

“How is your father?” she asked, striving hard to keep her hands to herself. The paper in her fist crackled as she crumpled it.

Alex smiled. “Sleeping. I think Michael saved his life.” Wearily he scrubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t know what I would have done…”

She couldn’t bear it anymore. Reaching across the table, she twined her fingers through his. “As Lady Bea told me earlier, all’s well that ends well.”

When he looked up at her, she caught that darkness again. The flicker of something that didn’t belong, and it frightened her. She knew, though, that this wasn’t the time to ask.

“Come to lend us a hand, old man?” Chuffy asked, lifting a handful of papers. “Could use it.”

Alex’s smile was rueful. For some reason, that alone squeezed Fiona’s stomach. “I’m here to make your life more complicated,” he said. “Or solve all your problems. I’m not perfectly certain which. I’ve found another line from the poem.”

Chuffy immediately went on alert. Fiona wondered what was wrong. Something felt off. Then Alex reached into his pocket and drew out a large round locket on an intricate gold chain and handed it to Chuffy.

“Open it.”

Chuffy adjusted his glasses and flipped the locket open.
“Thrice times thryce I have begged you…”

Chuffy and Fiona both gasped. “It’s the third verse,” he said and dove into the book. “But again. Different. Here.

So oft have I begged thee

to let me dip my pleasure wick

within your luscious honeypot

to cure my heart and soul.

He was beet red by the end of the reading. “Sorry.”

“Three,” Fiona said, reaching for the open locket. “Why three?”

“Or is it nine?” Alex asked. “Three times thrice.”

Chuffy scrubbed at his face, dislodging his glasses. “We’ll have to go over the poem all over again.”

“Mae!” Fiona called, turning for the salon. “We need you here! You need to look at these patterns again.”

She would never have heard Chuffy a minute later if Mae hadn’t come right over. When Mae joined her, pulling papers together and searching for new patterns, Fiona was briefly too distracted to notice that Chuffy and Alex had gotten up. But Mae worked in absolute silence. Suddenly it was as if the two men, coming to a halt in the hallway, positioned themselves at the other end of a whispering gallery. Mae never heard them; Mae was focused. But Fiona did.

“Bad news, old lad,” Chuffy said in hushed tones. “There’s no question. Most of those notes Mae kept were government codes. And not the kind marquesses on the Privy Council would have. Somebody had those girls committing treason.”

Fiona froze. Pain sheared through her.
Sweet God.
It was true.

“Don’t say anything,” Alex answered. “Not now. And if they ask about the Tudor rose, it’s a coincidence. Fiona said that it is in her family crest. It’s also on the locket.”

Chuffy hissed. “Worse and worse. Where did you get the locket? Does it have to do with your father?”

Alex took his friend’s arm. “Yes and no. I’ll explain later. Our focus now is to break that cipher.”

“Thought it was to protect the women.”

There was an odd hesitation that caused Fiona’s breath to hitch. “Yes,” Alex said, sounding strained. “Of course. But breaking that damn code can’t hurt.”

“And connecting the Tudor rose can.”

This time Alex didn’t answer at all. Suddenly very afraid, Fiona picked up the locket and closed it. And there, on the front, just like on the cover of the watch Mae had found, was etched a ten-petaled Tudor rose. The Tudor rose that was so perfectly echoed in the Hawes family crest. Fiona swore her heart turned to stone. She couldn’t think past her own complicity.

Why should she feel responsible? She hadn’t known what the puzzles were all about. She and Mairead had solved them in ignorance. But she did. She felt as if the weight of her grandfather’s sins rested squarely on her shoulders because she had done his work for him. Because she had enlisted Mae just so she could keep her busy.

Everything was falling apart, falling away. Her honor was superfluous, her honesty long since sacrificed. And now her future was compromised in a way she might not be able to redeem.

The good news was that once Chuffy returned to the table, nobody noticed Fiona leave. Alex had continued up to his father’s room, and Lady Bea was embroidering honeybees on handkerchiefs. Mae looked up at Chuffy with a hesitant smile, and he dropped a kiss on her forehead. And then, as if there had been no crisis, no threats or tears, the two sat down together and bent their heads over the codes.

The kitchen staff noticed Fiona come through to collect her redingote. The guards in the back garden noticed her settling on the little stone bench as the sun sank behind the west wood. But no one thought to ask why. No one thought to wonder why she would go outside bareheaded and alone into the deepening dusk. Which was just as well. Fiona wasn’t certain she could tell them.

*  *  *

Alex wasn’t quite certain where he meant to go. He just needed to move. Michael had just turned to him and smiled.

“Faith, and aren’t I the most brilliant feckin’ doctor on this cretin-infested island?”

Alex looked over to see his father sleeping, real color in his cheeks for the first time since he’d seen him, his breathing easy, his body relaxed.

“He’s better?”

Michael gave a considered nod. “Better, yes. Well, no. I’ll tell you now, my lad. The last thing he should do is trek back to that frozen wasteland, king or no king. Can you figure a way to get him to stay?”

Of course he could. Break his father’s trust and call his mother home. She would take care of matters. But that would take weeks, and Alex wasn’t certain how to control his father that long.

“I’ll find a way.”

Michael nodded. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to leave Mr. Sweet here to keep watch, and I am off to sleep. You want to show me where?”

And so here Alex now stood at the head of the staircase with no idea where to go or what to do. He just knew he had to get away from everyone else. He headed down the steps and toward the back of the house, deliberately avoiding the main rooms.

Dinnertime was past, but everyone had been served on trays anyway, the demands of his father and the work overriding social convention. So the only noise came from the kitchen and the only light from the various fireplaces and a few well-placed candles. Even so, he headed straight through to the library and out the French doors.

The brisk night air brought him up short. He was in no more than shirt, breeches, and boots, and the breeze was playing devil with his overheated skin. He should go in.

He didn’t. He began to pace. He would have preferred to ride, pushing his chestnut gelding hard over the harvested ground, the wind pulling at him and the darkness soothing him. Security forbade it, though.

So he walked. And all but stumbled over another resident of the garden.

“Fiona? What are you doing here?”

Fiona startled so badly, she almost fell when she jumped to her feet. Alex grabbed her arm to steady her, but she pulled away. He halted, oddly hurt by her rejection. She stood as stiffly as a nanny, her head erect, her hands folded at her waist, her head turned away, the dim starlight slipping through her untidy hair.

Something was wrong. She was too silent. Too still.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.” And yet, instead of turning, it seemed she continued to look for something in the other direction. There was a waxing moon out tonight, and the sky was thick with smoke. And yet, Fiona’s head was thrown back as if she could peer through it to the lights she followed.

“I can’t find him,” she said, her voice curiously small.

Alex found himself looking up. “Who?”

“Orion. No matter how bad things got, no matter the changes and upheavals, he has always been there. Kind of my rock. My anchor.” She pointed toward the southwest sky. “He should be right there.”

Alex stepped closer, the unconscious pain in her voice embedding itself in his chest. “He is. You know that.”

She lowered her head, but still didn’t look at him. “I’m not quite so sure anymore.”