White Regency 03 - White Knight (21 page)

Mary came inside and quickly began taking
away the bowls when she noticed Grace’s interest in them. Grace turned to
Calum. “I hope you will forgive us for interrupting your breakfast.”

He shook his head. “Nae trouble, my
lady. We were a’ready finished.”

“You have a lovely home,” she
said, noting the small feminine touches—fresh wildflowers set in a jug upon the
table, a bit of colored cloth fashioned as a curtain over the window. Grace
walked about the room. She stopped before a wooden peat box to admire a woolen
blanket that lay across its top. Intricately woven, its design reminded Grace
of the shawl her grandmother had given her years earlier.

It was as she was fingering the finely
spun wool that Grace realized there were sounds coming from inside the peat
box, sounds not unlike the whimpering of a child followed by the distinctive
shh’ing
of comfort.

Without hesitating to ask, Grace took the
blanket away and lifted the cover off the peat box. Behind her,
she heard Mary give a
cry of alarm as Grace discovered a woman crouched inside with a small child of
no more than two years clutched tightly against her. The woman was trembling,
staring at Grace in terror. The child immediately began to cry. Mary shouted
something in Gaelic and then buried her face against Calum’s chest, sobbing.

Grace turned to Calum. “What is
wrong? Why is she hiding in there?”

Calum’s expression had grown utterly
defeated. “I know I canna expect you to forgive such a t’ing, my lady, but
by the grace of God, they had no other place to gae.”

“Forgive? What is there to forgive?
I’m afraid I do not understand.”

Alastair came forward from the doorway to
explain. “My lady, the woman inside the peat box is Mary’s sister Elspeth
and her daughter. They had previously lived on the neighboring estate until
they were evicted.” He turned to Calum, his expression sympathetic, then
looked to Grace once again. “What Calum realizes but you do not, my lady,
is that there is an unwritten law among the lairds of the estates and the local
magistrates that any family found offering their home to another family who has
been evicted will as punishment suffer the same fate.” He hesitated.
“They fear you will now evict them from their home as well.”

Grace looked slowly around the room at the
myriad of faces all watching her—Calum, his boys, even Mary, her face wet with
tears, and Elspeth, who was now standing inside the peat box. Grace might as
well have been the monarch of hell for the look of pure and utter terror they
all returned to her.

Anger, fierce and raw, began to burn
within her. It was barbarous and cruel that these poor people should live under
such a terrible threat every day, fear of simply offering shelter to their own
family lest they should be turned out as well. She watched then as the two
boys, Calum and Ian, walked slowly to her, their eyes never leaving hers as
each of them gently placed her gloves upon the table, returning them to her as
if hoping, praying that this one small gesture might keep her from punishing
their loved ones.

Grace blinked away the tears that had
begun to form in her eyes and turned to Elspeth, who still stood behind her.
She was clutching her daughter tightly in her arms, the child’s tiny face
tucked away against the safety of her mother’s neck. Grace held out her hands.
“Please let me take her for you so you can climb out of that box.”

Elspeth looked confused. Calum spoke to
her in Gaelic, nodding, his tone reassuring. Slowly, tentatively, Elspeth
loosened her hold on the child, handing her to where Grace waited to take her.
Grace took the girl and held her against her while Elspeth quickly climbed out
of the peat box with Calum’s help. The child looked at Grace and sniffed, her
chin quivering. Grace smiled at her and touched her softly on her cheek, wiping
away a tear. “It will be all right,” she whispered, and pressed a
kiss to the soft curls at her forehead before handing her back to Elspeth.

Grace took a deep breath and turned to
speak to Calum. “You fear that I will evict you from your home because of
the actions of others who hold a position similar to mine. I give you my word,
Calum Guthrie, that no such thing will take place. Not today. Not ever. There
will be no ‘Improvements’ such as have occurred elsewhere in the Highlands here
at Skynegal. Please be sure to tell the other tenants what I have just said.”

Calum stared at her a moment in disbelief
and then his face broke into a broad, beaming smile. He quickly repeated what
Grace had said to Mary and Elspeth in Gaelic. Mary covered her mouth with both
hands in surprise while the boys, Calum and Ian, raced forward and threw their
arms around Grace’s skirts. Grace glanced at Calum, who had drawn his wife and
her sister into his arms. His eyes were closed and he looked as if he were
fighting tears himself. She looked to Alastair, standing to the side, spectator
to the scene. He was smiling, his own tears glistening in the low light, and
when his gaze caught hers, he nodded, mouthing the words “Thank you, my
lady, thank you.”

London

Some people will have a bad day; still
others a bad week. Christian Wycliffe, Marquess Knighton was having a bad two
months—moving as he was into the third, things weren’t looking any more
promising.

He had lost his wife—he preferred the term
“lost” because the words “been abandoned by” sound so
final, so irretrievable, and he had every intention of retrieving Grace, Lady
Knighton, if only so he could read her the riot act for having so successfully
vanished without leaving the slightest trace.

He would never forget the day he had found
her gone. His first thought had been that she had been taken by whoever it was
who had left the anonymous and menacing message at his doorstep. The thought
that it would be Grace who would pay for his sins had brought Christian lower
than he’d ever thought possible. He’d spent the first two days of her
disappearance condemning himself for it, until one of the maids pointed out to
him that she’d found a number of Grace’s gowns missing. As it turned out, only
the gowns she had brought with her to their marriage were gone, along with the
shoes, the stockings, even the hair ribbons she’d had before becoming his wife.
Still, it wasn’t until Eleanor discovered her sketching supplies missing too
that they knew for certain Grace had left on her own.

While staring at the empty space in her
wardrobe, Christian remarked that he had never known of Grace’s fondness for
sketching. It was a fact Eleanor was all too ready to comment upon.

“You would have noticed,” she’d
said to him crossly, “had you given Grace even the slightest bit of your attention
while she was here.”

Christian had been humbled in the face of
his sister’s indignation, quite simply because he could do nothing to refute
her accusation. It had been he and no other who had driven Grace away, and it
was a thought he wasn’t alone in, either. The servants blamed him, too. In
fact, he was beginning to think the cook was purposely oversaving his suppers
to punish him. He could see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices even
as they tried to pretend she would soon be returning. The maids still brought
fresh flowers to her bedchamber, replacing them anew when the blooms withered.
Once he’d even found Forbes adding a bit of water to the vases as if by doing
so, Grace might somehow turn the corner to notice his efforts as she always
had, thanking him for tasks Christian had only taken for granted.

Each morning, when Christian woke to
confront the empty bedchamber through the door adjoining his, he would stand on
the threshold and stare at her bed, neatly made in pale blue brocade and lace,
untouched for weeks now. He wanted to know how she was, where she was sleeping,
if she was safe. The thought that she might still come to danger because of his
having caused her to flee kept him up and pacing through most every night,
pausing every so often to stare out the window to the street as if somehow,
some way, she’d magically walk by.

But she never did.

It had gotten so he had begun to wonder if
her appearance in his life had been naught but a dream, a brief stretch of his
imagination. Flashes of her would come to him from out of nowhere. He could see
her brilliant smile the night of the Devonbrook ball when she had walked on his
arm for the first time as his wife. He thought of her utter acceptance of him,
even when he had treated her badly. He might well have been persuaded to
believe she had been naught but an illusion, if not for the melancholy faces of
the servants reminding him each day that Grace had been no dream, no illusion,
but a gift he had stupidly tossed away.

Not an hour after he had found her gone,
Christian
had
hired four of Bow Street’s best to search for her, each going off in a separate
direction. He had expected to have Grace back within days, but thus far the
runners hadn’t been able to turn up so much as a footprint. Christian couldn’t
help but begin to fear the worst. The longer Grace remained missing, the worse
he felt about her leaving, and the more he knew that when he found her—
if
he
found her—of the many things he wanted to do, most important among them was to
tell her how very wrong he’d been.

It had taken Eleanor’s barbed scorn when
they had discovered her gone to finally open Christian’s eyes to the fact that
Grace was as much a victim in their marriage as was he. He’d been so consumed
with his own bitterness toward his grandfather, so angry at his powerlessness,
that he’d taken his anger out on her, as if she had been to blame somehow. But
he had treated her abominably. Whenever he thought of that last night when she
had come to him, practically begging him to care about her, he winced. It was a
plea to which he had only responded with cold selfish indifference. He’d been
so frustrated with himself because no matter how he had vowed not to allow her
to affect him, he had found himself utterly unable to resist her. Grace had
been an easy target that night, standing before him in her nightdress, so
vulnerable, begging him to give her some small indication of regard. And when
she’d finally laid open her heart to him, he had simply stared at her, arrogant
and proud like every other Westover before him.

You could have been anyone …

He would never be able to forget her
expression, utterly cast down, when he’d spoken those words to her. He’d been a
bastard and he couldn’t fault her for leaving because of it. What he could
fault her for was being so damnably good at hiding from him. He wanted to go
after her himself instead of sitting idly by, powerless and waiting, but even
that was denied him. There was still the current situation with Eleanor to deal
with.

With nearly every marriageable nobleman in
England in town for the season, Eleanor, it seemed, was hell bent on falling in
love with the one man she could not possibly wed, Richard Hartley, the Earl of
Herrick. Over the
past
weeks, Christian had spent his days trying to figure out where his wife might
have gone, and his nights doing everything in his power to keep Eleanor and
Herrick from forming any sort of lasting attachment. It was not an easy task,
for he had to do so without drawing any suspicion from Eleanor. Unfortunately,
since the time when they had been children, his sister had always had the
uncanny ability of being able to see right through to the heart of a matter,
despite any attempts at subterfuge.

She had noticed Christian’s reserve
immediately and had even asked him directly why he was so opposed to Lord
Herrick. Christian had simply responded that he would prefer that she take the
season slowly and allow herself to meet any number of young men rather than
committing herself to the first one who had noticed her.

In other words, he’d lied.

Blessedly, just that morning Christian had
learned that Herrick had been called away from London to his estate in York.
His absence would give Christian several weeks respite. Perhaps fortune might
even smile upon him long enough to have Eleanor fall in love with another.

Christian stared thoughtfully at a
miniature portrait of his sister that stood on the fireplace mantel. If he
could only tell Eleanor the truth for his objections to Herrick, she would
understand the reasons why she could never marry him. But Christian knew he
could never tell her the truth, for if he did, then the even deeper truth would
come to light, something Christian had spent his life trying to hide.

A knocking on the study door pulled him
from his troubled thoughts. Christian set Eleanor’s portrait back on the
mantelpiece just as Forbes came in.

“My lord, Lord Cholmeley is here to
see you.”

Good grief, Christian thought, peering at
the timepiece. It was only nine o’clock and he’d barely finished his first cup
of coffee. He was certainly not in any frame of mind to face Grace’s uncle.

“Tell him I’m not in.”

“He is most insistent, my lord. He
has, uh, begun making certain threats.”

Christian raised a brow.
“Threats?”

“Yes, my lord, of the sort that would
only serve to further breed scandal.”

Christian frowned. He had been afraid of
this. His time to repair matters in his marriage without all and sundry knowing
about it had apparently passed and the time he had dreaded most was now upon
him. He could hide the truth of Grace’s absence no more behind excuses of
headaches and upset stomachs. With Cholmeley spouting off, soon all of London
would know that he had been abandoned by his wife before the ink was barely dry
on the marriage documents.

Christian drew a deep breath. “Then I
guess you’ll have to show him in.”

While Forbes returned to the marquess,
Christian poured himself a second cup of coffee, adding a splash of brandy to
it, knowing somehow he would need it.

Tedric, Lord Cholmeley, came bursting
through the door with all the polish and refinement of a violent hurricane. He
didn’t wait to be acknowledged, but sputtered without preamble, “What the
devil have you done with my niece, Knighton?”

Christian stared at the marquess,
attempting to maintain a measure of calm. “Sit down, Cholmeley.”

But Cholmeley ignored him. “Everyone
knows how secretive you Westovers are. What did you do? Kill her? Is she buried
outside in the garden, pushing up your pansies even now as we speak?”

Christian looked to the door where Forbes
was standing, mouth agape. “You may leave us, Forbes. And please close the
door behind you.” All he needed was for one of the other servants to
overhear Cholmeley’s blithering; soon half of London would think he was a
wife-murderer.

Christian waited, counting to ten even
after the butler had gone. He took two sips from his coffee and looked at
Cholmeley again, saying quite distinctly, “Sit down, Cholmeley—now.”

The elder marquess shut his mouth and took
the chair in front of Christian’s desk. His expression, however, remained just
as agitated, his fingers gripping the carved arm of his chair.

Christian looked at him. “First, you
can quit the theatrics. You know very well I did not kill Grace.”

“Then where is she? I know she’s not
here. I’ve questioned your servants. No one has seen sight of her for some
time.”

“No, not since she apparently went on
a visit to you. You should have been the last to see her.” He looked at
the marquess. “Perhaps I should be questioning you about her
whereabouts.”

Tedric shook his head in disgust. “It
is a poor example of a man, Knighton, who can’t keep track of his own
wife.”

Christian couldn’t argue against the
insinuation, but that didn’t mean he liked hearing it, especially from someone
like the marquess. “Be that as it may, let me assure you I am making every
effort to find her.”

Tedric came to lean forward at the very
edge of his chair. “Every effort? If you want so badly to find her,
Knighton, why the devil are you here?” he pointed to the desk,
“instead of out there”—he waved a hand toward the
window—“finding her yourself?”

“Yes, Christian,” came a
familiar and unwelcome voice from the doorway, “do tell us, why are you
here instead of out tracking down your wayward wife?”