Kitabı oku: «The Regency Redgraves: What an Earl Wants / What a Lady Needs / What a Gentleman Desires / What a Hero Dares», sayfa 6

CHAPTER SIX

THE WINE IN JESSICA’S SITTING room, again tonight, was of good quality, but there was an insufficient quantity of it for his needs. There might not be enough wine in all of London sufficient for his needs, as his need was to drown the disquieting feeling he’d taken some sort of fateful step into an unknown he did not recognize and had little chance of escaping unscathed.

“What in bloody hell just happened in there?” he muttered, directing a fierce glare toward the bedchamber door before downing a full measure of wine and filling his glass once more.

He’d set out to prove a point. He’d set out to taste the wares so blatantly put on offer the previous evening. He’d been out to convince himself that a night spent wakeful, consumed by thoughts of what he would like to do to Jessica Linden, had been an aberration, perhaps caused by some juvenile fit of pique over that ridiculous pistol, possibly brought on by simple curiosity: Could she live up to the intriguing expectations he’d felt as he’d helped her unbutton her gown?

He damn well hadn’t expected what had happened. He felt half defiler of innocence, half possibly king of the world, as she’d been so genuinely passionate, so clearly astounded as he took her over the top with him. She’d seemed eager at first, then resigned, even detached from her surroundings, a whore who would endure, even attempt to feign interest, if only her client would take what he’d paid for, and then let her get back to work.

And then…damn. He’d nearly lost himself in her then, hadn’t he? That never happened. There was always a part of himself he withheld, that part of him he shared with no one, tried to believe didn’t even exist.

She’d seemed so vulnerable. He didn’t want vulnerable, had no use for vulnerable. He wanted expertise, and he paid for it. Paid well for it and then walked away when it suited him to be gone.

She’d made him want to stay in the bed with her, she’d made him want to hold her, feel her heart beat against him, listen to her breathe as she drifted into sleep, her head on his shoulder. By God, he couldn’t get out of that bed quickly enough!

Was that something she practiced? That intoxicating mix of reticence and passion? If so, she’d definitely perfected her technique, because he wanted more. He’d been satisfied, but certainly not satiated; she shouldn’t still be in his mind, but she was.

He should leave. What was she going to do, chase him down Jermyn Street? Confront him again in Portman Square? No, of course she wouldn’t do that. She hadn’t been anywhere near Portman Square last night, yet he’d done nothing but think about her.

He’d simply have to get her out of his system, that’s all. She’d hit him unawares, unprepared, the mistress of whatever game it was she played. She’d been married, she lived her life on the fringes, she’d probably had more lovers than many women had consumed hot dinners. She’d offered her body, clearly not for the first time. Her trick was in somehow making him feel she’d offered more.

A week, two, and he’d wonder what he’d ever seen in her that had attracted him in the first place.

Gideon nodded his head, as if in agreement with himself and his plan, and then settled down on the slightly shabby sofa, glass in hand, to await her exit from the bedchamber. She’d walk in, that chin of hers held high, so like how Trixie faced down the world, and he’d close up her buttons while he recited verses of Paradise Lost inside his head to keep his mind occupied, and then they would discuss his father’s damnable Society.

Not that he’d tell her anything too specific…just enough to keep her interested until he lost interest in her. As for her assertion they weren’t to become lovers? Let her lie to herself if she wished, let her repeat that lie each night as he left her warm and rosy from his lovemaking.

Yes, two weeks. Perhaps a month. No longer. Until he figured her out, until he figured out what had just happened.

Tonight, once he’d shared some small morsel of what he knew, he would escort her downstairs, he’d carefully lose five hundred pounds at the faro table in lieu of actually offering her payment for her services, and he’d return to Portman Square, lock himself in his study and drink until dawn.

It wasn’t much of a strategy, and thank God both Valentine and Max were not in residence, but for the moment, the plan satisfied him.

He could hear her moving about in her bedchamber, and a very long ten minutes later the door opened. She was once again clad in that damn black gown, so at odds with the flowing mane of red hair that put the lie to the prudish ensemble.

Without speaking to him, she turned her back and employed both hands to lift her hair, giving him access to the long row of buttons…and her bare back. What woman shunned at least a chemise, wearing only a pair of those flimsy French drawers tied at her waist? What torment for a man to look at that high-necked gown, those modestly covered arms, knowing what lay beneath! Modesty and vice. No and yes. Prude and wanton. Oh, yes, the mistress of the game she played.

Gideon drew his finger down the length of her spine, and she shifted her shoulders slightly, either in delight or to warn him to stop. He couldn’t know, and he doubted she would tell him unless he could goad her into an answer.

“Perhaps an hour was an insult to myself,” he whispered beside her ear as, instead of putting his hands to the task of closing her buttons, he slid them inside the gaping fabric, to gently cup and squeeze her unbound, uplifted breasts, his thumbs circling her taut nipples. Item three on the list of things he wanted to do to Jessica Linden he’d composed in his head during his nearsleepless night.

For a moment, she seemed ready to melt against him. For a moment.

“Richard was correct in his assessment. You are your father’s son, aren’t you, Gideon? Does nothing save rutting occupy your mind for more than a minute?”

“You—” He withdrew his hands, closing his mouth on the word bitch, and buttoned her gown as impersonally as he’d pull on his own boots. He’d figure her out, there would come a day when he called the shots, when she would be rebuffed, left feeling like a pleading, bleating fool. But clearly, he told himself, not yet.

“Thank you,” she said as she lowered her hands, and her luxurious curls tumbled free past her shoulders. She then immediately sat down and looked up at him, clear-eyed and composed, as if they’d just come upstairs, and nothing had happened between them. “How do you know my father and Clarissa were murdered?”

That she’d traded her body for information was clear now. She’d let him have her so that they could get down to business. A cold woman.

Gideon took up his wineglass once more. He could play the game as coolly as she did, better. He’d had considerable practice. “I don’t know if your stepmother was deliberately killed. She may simply have had the misfortune to be in the coach. But Turner was definitely murdered. Their hired coach supposedly overturned at night, with the full, lit coach lanterns breaking, the oil spilling out and igniting. Trapped inside the coach, your father and his wife were burned to death.”

By now, Jessica had her hand to her mouth, finally shaken out of her reserve. “My God. I always believed he was destined for hellfire. But not while he was still aboveground. Yet, clearly an accident. Why did you question it?”

Gideon set down his wineglass. “I was already aware of other deaths, other members of the Society perishing in accidents. All, like your father, wearing the rose. Orford, last spring, shot by mistake by another hunter in his party—just whom, nobody could say, as they were all drunk, all shooting as fast as their bearers could load for them. Sir George Dunmore drowned six months ago after somehow toppling into the Channel from a friend’s yacht in the middle of the night, the conclusion being that he must have slipped on the rainwet deck and tumbled overboard.”

“Both plausible conclusions,” Jessica said. “But there was another one?”

“Yes, the one that finally aroused my suspicions. A few months later it was Baron Harden’s turn to be careless. He took a tumble down a dark flight of stairs after leaving his mistress. When I heard of your father’s accident just outside London, most especially the part about the coach lamps, I was already past believing all these accidents were a matter of coincidence. I immediately traveled to the estate, to view the bodies for myself before they were interred.”

Jessica’s brown eyes widened. “That’s ghoulish. How could you even look at them?”

He was in no mood to tread softly. “The bodies were in no fit condition to be laid out in the house, thankfully. So the answer to your how is, with a fat bribe to the groom guarding the remains in the stables until the interment, my extremely discreet physician brought along for his expertise, my valet, Gibbons, holding up a lantern for us, handkerchiefs tied around all our faces and wearing riding gloves we immediately consigned to the waste bin.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “I believe I was asking a rhetorical question. But thank you for that explanation. You are a determined man, aren’t you?”

“When I want answers, yes, I go after them. They actually didn’t die in the fire, Jessica. From what my physician could tell, admitting my own limited contact with dead bodies, they’d both sustained pistol shots to their skulls. Fire doesn’t melt bones, most of all, the skull. With a little prodding at the remains, the holes were not that difficult to spot.”

Jessica had gone rather pale. “Shot. Not an accident at all. At least they didn’t burn, thank God.”

“No, the fire was meant to obscure the wounds. The coachman, alas, was long gone, so I couldn’t question him.”

“Had he shot them? Perhaps set the coach on fire to cover what he was about. A robbery, I would suppose?”

Gideon shook his head, amazed at her sangfroid. She was shocked, but she showed no signs of subsiding into a swoon; her mind was ticking along in a rational fashion. “Anything’s possible. Am I being too suspicious, Jessica?”

“No,” she said quietly. “My father was always tight with his purse, so the fact he’d hired a coach rather than bring his own cattle and servants to London isn’t surprising. Lord only knows who he hired. Their deaths could have been a result of a robbery, but when combined with the other supposed accidents? All of the men members of your father’s Society?”

“They wore the rose. To me, that links them. Four accidents stretches coincidence a step too far.”

“I only wonder why he and his wife were traveling to London at that time of year. No one can count on the roads being anything but snow-filled or quagmires. Did your sleuthing extend to finding an answer to that question?”

“No, but you’re right, I should have thought of that. I was in London to settle some financial affairs for my former ward, turning them over to her bridegroom’s man of business, or else I wouldn’t have been in town myself.”

“Lucky for you, I suppose, and your theories.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Damn, why didn’t I think to ask myself that question?”

“How lowering to discover one isn’t omnipotent, Gideon,” she said sweetly, so that he glared at her. She shrugged. “I was only thinking it would be interesting to know their reason for the journey. A fanciful mind might even consider the notion they were on their way to a meeting of the Society you’re so certain was dissolved two decades ago.”

This wasn’t the first time she’d alluded to that possibility. He might as well tell her the rest.

“We’ve had some curious happenings at Redgrave Manor in the past year. Glimpses of lit lanterns moving through the estate at night, strange holes appearing inside the greenhouse which, when investigated, seem very much to have been caused by the cave-in of some sort of tunnel being dug beneath it. Oh, yes, and my father’s crypt was broken into. His remains have gone missing.”

“What?”

Well, at last! He had begun to wonder if the woman was completely unflappable.

“Yes, that was very much my reaction, as well. However, in the interests of full and honest disclosure, save for the rare sightings of curious lights at night this past month or more—possibly poachers—I can’t for certain say when the tunnel was dug, but only when that portion of it collapsed. As for the theft of my father’s body, that was only discovered when lightning struck a nearby tree and it fell, a large branch breaking one of the stained glass windows. We none of us enter the mausoleum unless it’s to shelve another Redgrave—we’ve got enough of them in there that we stack them up like bolts of cloth in a Bond Street shop, you see, and then wall them in. The stone used to wall up Barry was on the floor of the crypt, broken in two, the body gone. But again, the theft could have occurred any time in the past twenty years.”

Jessica was quiet for some time, her hands twisting in her lap, before she looked at Gideon again. “Do…do you think perhaps they took him—your father, that is—almost immediately? To, um, to perform their own ceremony? Oh, Lord, that’s disgusting.”

“And only one of several possibilities,” Gideon said, just voicing his thoughts of the past few months aloud easing his mind somewhat. “To whit—propping him up on some throne to overlook their activities? To grind up his bones into powder, mix that in with sheep’s blood or some such ridiculousness, and drink the man? To slice him up, as they did the saints of yore, with each member then blessed to carry a knucklebone as a memento, a holy relic? Don’t answer yet—I’ve had time to consider more than that. There’s one more. Did his followers, as my father was the acknowledged leader, believe the supposed treasure was interred with his bones, and come looking for it?”

Jessica held up her hand to stop him. “Not that last one, surely. A treasure? Why would your family do that? And why would anyone take the body with them, whether there was some sort of treasure to be found there or not?”

“I agree. It was only one of many possibilities, and a rather feeble one at that. However, I do believe, after years of not believing it, there may be some sort of treasure. Some precious gem perhaps, made a part of a larger golden rose, the symbol of the Society? Or something they prayed to—mayhap an enormous diamond stuck into the fat belly of a pagan idol?”

Jessica tucked her legs up on the couch, as if prepared to stay there all night, until she’d somehow solved the problem that so confounded him. “But wouldn’t every member of the Society know the location of that sort of thing? They all gathered for their—I hate saying ceremonies. The word is too respectable for what they did.”

“Drunken orgies?” Gideon offered. “Debaucheries? Deflowerings of whores paid handsomely to pretend they were intact innocents being offered up for some carefully orchestrated sacrifice? The open passing around of wives in some hope of alleviating the boredom of marital fidelity? Christ! Their own wives. Were they willing or unwilling, do you think?”

She shot him a dark glance that made him want to know more of what had happened to have her run off with James Linden. “I’m not convinced the members cared. All done in praise of the devil.”

“Devil worship. Imitators of Sir Francis Dashwood and his ilk, but without any cursory bow to a pretense of an interest in the intellectual. we’re back to that. I’d rather think them drunks and idiots. Otherwise I’d have to believe my father—my father!—discovered a way to make them all able to believe they were better than they were, acting in some higher purpose. Still, it’s possible. I don’t know how he’d have accomplished it, how any one person manages to twist minds to do his every bidding, no matter how vile, but he could have managed it.”

“Until his wife shot him in the back when he was about to duel down her lover,” Jessica said quietly. “I’m sorry. Was…the man one of the Society?”

“I can’t say anything for certain. I was only nine years old at the time. I thought he was my new tutor, a Frenchman who’d fled France immediately after the fall of the Bastille. He’d only been at the Manor for a few weeks before both he and my mother were gone.”

“Again, I’m sorry, Gideon. Not that your father was shot, I can’t honestly say that, but that you lost your mother. I’m certain she didn’t want to leave you. She must have felt she had no choice.”

“I wonder if she would have made that choice if she could have known she and her lover would be swept up in the Terror two years later and sent to the guillotine. As someone reminded me just today, in the end the bill must always be paid.”

For a moment, he could see his mother in his mind’s eye. Beautiful, loving, but sad. Her eyes had always been so sad. There had been times he could coax a smile from her, but those times had been seldom. He treasured those few good memories. Strangely, he remembered his father only through the painting of him as a young man that hung in the portrait gallery.

Damn, but this woman was getting to him. He never thought about the boy he’d been twenty years ago. He’d never spoken of any of this. Not with his siblings, not with his grandmother. He’d shut it all down, all he’d felt at the time, all he’d so carefully avoided since he’d been awakened to the news of what had happened just before dawn that long-ago morning. Max and Val had been too young, and Katherine only an infant. He’d been the only one to really understand what dead meant, what gone meant.

Jessica got to her feet. “So what bill has come due for the members of the Society?”

Gideon snapped himself back to attention.

“I can think of one theory. It’s not as if any of them could be proud of what they’ve done, and want it out in the world. The sins of relatively young men, trotted out for an airing twenty years later, could be more than embarrassing. Add even the whisper of devil worship to the mix, and the secret becomes dangerous. Your father sat in Parliament, remember. Someone may be blackmailing the others, or simply killing them off to silence them. I can’t even be sure how many of them there are. There could be some who no longer wear the rose.”

“Thirteen,” Jessica said quietly. “The devil’s dozen. At any time, there must be thirteen. James told me that much. One dies, two die, they must be replaced, or there can be no ceremonies. I promise you, they were still active five years ago. There could have been several new members since your father’s time. The usual method was to draw from the blood relatives of the members. And, of course, a member’s eldest son inherited his father’s position by right.”

Gideon looked at her curiously. One day they’d have to speak more of this James Linden. “No one has ever approached me.”

“You were a child when your father…died. As an adult, I doubt anyone would have dared. You’re a rather formidable man, Gideon.”

He looked at her in sudden realization. “Adam.”

“Yes, very good. Adam. Because the Society must still exist, I’m certain of that now more than ever. I’ll grant you, I was appalled at what I saw this morning, but not so much so that I’m not relieved he’s…he’s…well, we both know what he is.”

“A bacon-brained halfling who couldn’t locate his own backside with both hands?”

Jessica smiled. “Thank you. Adam is, after all, my brother. I didn’t want to say it myself.”

“You’re welcome. Still, until and unless you’re proven wrong, I suppose I’m now doomed to keeping him close, explaining that particular part of his inheritance, and then watching over him?”

“Yes. I was going to tell you tonight, if I thought I could convince you to listen to reason. Because you’re right, I can’t protect him from the Society if they’re desperate enough to go after him. But you can. My initial reaction was they wouldn’t want him. But if they’ve run out of suitable candidates, they might make an exception.”

“You say I can protect him, and I can. From the ones I know of, yes, but we can’t know them all,” Gideon said, the futility of what he was attempting to do all but smacking him in the face like a cold, wet cloth. He’d been curious, intrigued, and now he was beholden, damn it, the reluctant guardian of one Adam Collier, spotty-faced giggling twit who’d probably think dressing up in a mask and hooded cloak, playing at devil worship, to be the height of good fun.

But it was left to Jessica to really shock him.

“We might, soon. You’ve been seen sporting that horrible golden rose, remember? When I first saw it, I thought you were a member, something that should have occurred to me before I ever contacted you, I suppose. Still, I almost immediately realized you’re not. I believe you on that head.”

“I’d hoped wearing it would—I don’t really know what I’d hoped. I’ll not wear it again. And, again, I apologize.”

“Yes, I know. As I apologize for the pistol. But who is to say, now that my father’s dead, and considering Adam’s clear unsuitability once anyone with two reasonably good eyes sees him, that rose might gain you an invitation to be the new thirteenth member. The eldest child of the founder, Gideon? You’d be a splendid catch.”