The Secret Lover (36 page)

"I don't know," he admitted at last. "But we'll find our way, I promise you." Or he would die trying.

And they rode on, each wondering what a pair of outcasts could do in this world.

The skeleton staff left behind at Hamilton House had taken to lazy afternoons of napping and a little friendly wagering on card games. On occasion, such as this fine summer day, they would challenge the groundsmen to a game of cricket on the south lawn. The stable master was just taking his turn at bat when they heard the shriek. All of them whirled around as one, straining to hear the sound and identify it. Another one immediately rent the air, then another.

Everyone was suddenly running in pandemonium—the men toward the house, the women to gather up and hide the implements of their game, the butler anxiously directing them. One maid suggested it was perhaps little Ian returned to them, but an older, wiser cook shook her head.
That
, she said authoritatively, was the sound of a ghost. It was Elspeth Hamilton come to chastise them for playing instead of working.

None of them could have guessed it was a madwoman. None of them had ever seen the combination of sea green, orange, and pale blue swirling about one set of ladies' skirts, or a woman of mature age and bearing run across a lawn barefoot.

And certainly none of them had ever seen Lord Hamilton looking quite so… happy. Or, in these last few months, quite so lucid. Praise God, the underbutler said. The housekeeper adjusted her cap and squinted once more to ensure she wasn't seeing things, then proclaimed it a bloody miracle that he was even walking. All of them cautiously crept forward as they attempted to determine what to make of the woman.

She smiled brightly, waved and wished them all a fine day in half-French, half-English. She then whirled about and put her arm around Lord Hamilton's waist, strolling casually beside him as he moved forward to where the staff was blindly assembling.

"How you do, D-Darby," he said politely to the butler. "M-may I introduce Madame Honorine Fortier. I intend to m-make her m-my wife,"

he said, and smiled so brilliantly at the woman that they all felt the force of it. More than one felt the smile spread to their own lips.

A dozen or more pairs of eyes peered at Honorine Fortier, who nonchalantly brushed the grass from her hem, then at Lord Hamilton again. Impossible. At least improbable. Perhaps a true miracle, because the old man was actually smiling and talking.

The same dozen pairs of eyes shifted to Honorine Fortier again. And they smiled.

In the village of Grantham, Trevor instructed his driver to pull into the courtyard of the Willowbough Inn, where he took a room for the night. He was exhausted, having bounced around in that bloody coach all day long.

He was also furious. An old crow in Essendine had told him a small gelding meet would be held in Peterborough that afternoon.
That
had cost him several hours and several hundred pounds, paid in the form of two of his team of four grays. The meet had been rigged, fixed to favor the owners. It was so bloody obvious.

He should have known better than to listen to a woman, for Chrissakes, and much less a withered one hawking vegetables.

Trevor angrily tossed his hat onto what looked to be a very lumpy mattress, then withdrew his purse. The contents looked quite bleak. The bastard at St. Neots had cleaned his pockets last night; Trevor remained convinced the man had swindled him. He exhaled his exasperation and dropped heavily onto the mattress. He had to find his father. If he didn't find him soon and force him to sign another banknote, he would be ruined. The very thought sent a chill up his spine—he was on the verge of losing everything.
Everything
! His creditors could not be long behind him now—the situation was impossible, the only answer being the old man's shaking hand when he needed it.

But what if he was wrong? What if they hadn't gone home at all, but she had instead whisked him away to France? Christ God, what would he do then?

Trevor angrily snatched up his purse again. Twenty crowns. With a little luck, he could double that. That was all he needed, a bit of luck, that was all.

And his father.

As the eastern sky was beginning to show a faint hint of light, a small, tenacious group of men surrounded the card table in the back room of the Willowbough Inn, their eyes bloodshot and their whiskey glasses empty as they stared down at the cards being dealt.

None of them noticed the gentleman from London slip out the front door of the common room, instead of climbing the stairs to retire, as he had said he would do.

Trevor ran almost soundlessly across the courtyard toward the stables.

Carefully, he pulled the door open, freezing when one horse lifted its head and whinnied. He waited a moment until he was certain the horse's rustling hadn't sounded any alarms. When the horse turned its head away from him, Trevor walked calmly into the stables, down the center of the pens, in the direction of a single door leading to an adjoining room, where a handful of drivers slept on pallets.

No one stirred when he opened the door; a faint snoring set the rhythm of their sleep. A lamp at the far end of the room was burning low—but it was enough light to find his driver. The man was quite large; in the darkness, his shape rather resembled a cow carcass. Careful not to disturb the other drivers, Trevor moved quietly to where he slept and nudged him with his foot.

The man did not move.

Trevor nudged again, harder, making contact with the soft flesh of the man's bum. With a small cry of alarm, the driver rolled and sat up all at once, blinking hard before grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes and looking up.

He blinked when he saw Trevor. "Milord?" he asked, incredulous.

Trevor went down on his haunches, put a finger to his lips. "How quickly can you ready the team?" he whispered.

"The hostler comes at daybreak. Then it's not more than a quarter of an hour," he whispered in response.

Having no intention of waiting for the hostler, Trevor leaned in closer to the driver. "I mean
now
."

The driver winced sharply. "
Now
? But it's the middle of the night, milord!"

The idiot obviously could not grasp that was precisely the point. "I am well aware of the time! I would leave
now
, and the sooner and more quietly you can be about it, the better!" Trevor rose to full height, stared down at the groggy driver. "Get to your feet," he whispered harshly, and turned on his heel.

The driver followed him a few moments later, stuffing his shirt into his trousers as he stumbled through the door. When he saw Trevor standing just inside the stable he started, pressed his hand to his heart. "God's blood, milord, you gave me another fright!"

"Where are the grays?" Trevor asked, impatient. The driver nodded toward several stalls on the right. Trevor looked over his shoulder, saw the head of one, and looked to his driver again. "And the coach?"

"Behind the stables, milord," he said, nervously wiping his hands on the sides of his pants.

"Bring it round."

The driver looked as if he might speak, but then apparently thought the better of it. Trevor waited until he had disappeared through the stable doors, then walked to where the grays were penned and began to methodically bridle them.

In spite of the cool night air, a sheen of perspiration dotted his forehead and neck as he worked. It was not, however, the slight exertion that had him perspiring, oh no. It was fear, a raw, gnawing fear, a sense of impending doom that had been eating away at him for weeks, growing stronger every day.

The situation was hopeless. He had sunk so deeply into the morass that it seemed impossible he would ever extricate himself, even with his father's considerable, but unconscious, help.

It still amazed Trevor that he had ever managed to ensnare himself in such a predicament to begin with. It had happened so quickly, so silently—

he had not understood what trouble brewed until a man purporting to be the rather dubious "friend of a friend" accosted him on a dark road in Nottingham one night. That man told Trevor, in no uncertain terms, that if he did not requite the nearly two thousand pounds he owed a moneylender, that he might potentially find his young son missing. That threat had chilled him to his marrow—certainly he had had his fair share of gambling debts in his life, but he had never found himself in the position of having to borrow money, not like he had begun to do.

It was all because of one particularly ugly game of cards; he had lost a bloody fortune. But his finances were in terrible disarray—he had suffered an astounding loss at the parish horse races in the spring of that year when the mare on which he had placed a small fortune went down with a broken femur. That, coupled with Elspeth's dying and directing that the remainder of her small inheritance be settled in trust for Ian, had left him with scarcely anything on which to live.

So he had gone to the moneylender about whom he had heard in gaming rooms around the parish. The man lived in a small, rundown house on the edge of Nottingham. Its dilapidated appearance belied the rich appointment within its walls—the parlor to which Trevor had been shown was full of valuable artwork. The lender himself, dressed in a blue velvet smoking jacket, was dripping in gold rings and a pocket watch. He had nodded sympathetically as Trevor had explained his predicament, then smiled reassuringly when he had signed over the banknote, urging Trevor to take all the time he needed to repay the debt.

Apparently, three months was too long for the moneylender.

Truly, Trevor had never meant it to drag on so long, but it happened that he experienced the most incredible string of bad luck—he couldn't win a hand of cards or a horse race to save his sorry life. Whatever he tried, he only managed to lose more money while the interest on his debt to the moneylender mounted at an extraordinarily rapid pace.

When the man had accosted him in Nottingham, Trevor had no place else to turn but his father.

His father. The viscount had condemned gambling as long as Trevor could remember. This point he had made abundantly clear when Trevor was a young man. He had foolishly bet his finest horse on a game of cards and had lost. When he asked his father for the money necessary to buy it back from his friend, his father had flatly refused. "Let this be a lesson to you, son" was all he had said. Trevor lost his horse. He had never spoken to his father about his gambling again, although his father knew from others that he continued to do so, and let it be known that he did not approve in action and in deed.

Nonetheless, desperate times called for desperate measures. Trevor had been duly frightened by the threat against Ian and was prepared to ask the old man for a loan, if only for his son's sake. The seizure had taken that opportunity from him. The viscount was hardly capable of seeing after his accounts, much less making a loan on them.

Trevor had devised his scheme one evening after giving his father a dose of the opiate the doctor had prescribed to ease any pain. As he had watched his father drift into the oblivion of the drug, he had been struck with the idea of perhaps forging his father's signature on a banknote.

He hadn't really meant to steal from his father, he'd really only meant to borrow. As he was certain his father would have loaned him the money, given the threat against Ian—and assuming, of course, that Trevor could make him understand it. But seeing as how he could not make him understand it, he couldn't really see the harm in signing for his father.

After all, the man was incapable. Why not simply
help
him sign the banknotes? Then it wouldn't be stealing, not really.

That night, Trevor had placed the pen in his father's gnarled hand, pressed it against the paper, and helped him form the letters. It had dumbfounded him when his father actually began to sign the document of his own accord. Trevor had dropped his hand, stood back in horror as his father completed his signature without so much as looking at the paper. It was as if some part of him had not died with that seizure; some part of him understood what he was to do and even remembered how to go about affixing his name to a document.

Looking back on it now, as he led the first gray out of the stable, Trevor marveled at how easily that one wish to repay a disreputable moneylender had escalated into the machination that was his scheme now. His father had signed literally thousands of pounds over to him. Even as he began to improve, to regain the use of his limbs, parts of his memory, Trevor continued. It was astoundingly easy—giving a man who cannot remember most things a strong dose of opiate night after night had the desired effect

—his mind remained incapacitated. And Trevor had, somehow, rationalized it time and time again in his own mind.

There was a part of him that would never regret the deceit. It was only fair, to his way of thinking.
He
was the legitimate son of Lord Hamilton.

He was spending
his
inheritance. When he thought of that goddamned imposter, how he would attempt to take what was rightfully his, Trevor fumed—the man had no right, no claim to what was his, and he would die defending that if he must!

Which meant, of course, that he had to reach his father first, reach him before the swindler managed to do it and somehow convince the old man that he
did
have another son.
Rubbish
! Oh yes, he'd die first before allowing that man to have a single pence of what was rightfully his.

Trevor quickened his step.

By the time he and the driver got the team harnessed, the night was beginning to lift. There was no time to go in and retrieve his things from the dingy room at the top of the stairs—it would be a bloody miracle if they were able to drive out unnoticed, much less get down the road before the authorities were sent after him.

With a strict warning to the driver to be quick, Trevor climbed into the coach and sent him along with a sharp rap above. The coach lurched forward; Trevor held his breath, waited for the sound of shouting, something to indicate that the innkeeper was demanding payment, or the gent from Coventry was realizing he had slipped away without paying him the one hundred pounds he had lost and had given his word to pay this morning.