0764213512 (R) (21 page)

But he was stuck with her instead. Feeling the sigh from the soles of her feet, she nodded and trudged her way back to the house.

Twelve

A
re they determined to go, then?”

Lilias spun around from where she stood at the edge of the garden, watching Rowena with Lady Ella and the Duchess of Stafford. She pulled out a grin for O’Malley, though it seemed every time the other maid saw her, she was as like to frown as to smile. “Pardon?”

“To Delmore.” O’Malley nodded toward the north, where the neighboring estate apparently stood. “For this house party.”

“Oh.” She looked back to the garden. O’Malley’s mistress was laughing, Rowena smiling. Good to see, and to hear her Wena humming of an evening. Coming out of her shell a bit and seeming to enjoy this new company.

Did she need any more proof that she had done right in this plan? As for the duke’s plans . . . “His Grace certainly speaks of it as indisputable fact. Is there a reason they shouldn’t?” She hadn’t forgotten the younger woman’s odd comments the day they arrived, but for the life of her she could make no sense of them.

Now O’Malley sighed and tucked a raven wisp of escaped hair back into her chignon. “It isn’t mine to tell the whole story, but sure and I can’t let you go in blind. Delmore and its mistress—there’s darkness there. It’s where Her Grace and I were held prisoner last year when the late Lord Pratt kidnapped us. It’s . . . I’d like to shake some sense into His Grace, is what, were it mine to do.”

Lilias frowned. Lewis and Lapham had told her a bit about the kidnapping, but they had failed to mention it had all happened at the place they were headed to in an hour’s time. “And the current mistress?”

“Widow of the criminal. There wasn’t evidence enough to arrest her, but we all feel quite certain she was involved.” O’Malley’s gaze, northward again, went unfocused. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Duke of Nottingham in the last two years, it’s that there’s no talking him out of something when he thinks it the right thing to do. But sure and you need to know what he’s taking you into. You need to pray, if you’re the praying type. And if you’re not, you’d best become the type mighty quick.”

The gust of wind was hardly to blame for the chill that swept up Lilias’s spine. “Ye can be sure I will. Is it safe? To go?”

“If His Grace thought otherwise, he wouldn’t be taking his family, aye?” Offering a weak smile, O’Malley turned away. “Still. Sometimes we see what the masters don’t. Or won’t. Keep your eyes open while you’re there, Cowan. And your heart inclined toward prayer. We’ll be doing the same from here.”

Not knowing what other response to make, Lilias nodded and watched the maid stride back into the safety of Whitby Park.

The week had gone too quickly. Rowena rubbed a finger absently over the smooth silk of her new dress and wished they weren’t leaving. Or that if they were, it would be to go home, not to yet another houseful of strangers she would have to learn to smile at just in time to leave yet again.

Scarcely away from home all her twenty years, and then to four separate houses in the course of a month—the Brices in Edinburgh, Whitby Park, Delmore, and only then to her new home in Sussex.

“Oh, he’s
always
doing that.” Ella shook her head, grinning. “I don’t know how I put up with him.”

Rowena wasn’t sure what she had missed, though she had to assume the “he” was Brice.

Brook chuckled. “Trust me, I know. If you recall, the first time we met was in such a circumstance. As if you believed for a moment that he had fallen in love with me in a thirty-second acquaintance.”

Aye, definitely Brice. Rowena’s chest went tight. She ducked her head to study the handsome little face of Abingdon, who had fallen asleep in her arms a few minutes ago. And to tell herself not to be jealous, given that Brice
hadn’t
fallen in love with Brook.

He claimed.

Ella’s laugh chimed sterling and bright. “I confess it took me a moment to be sure. Brice being Brice, he could well have up and announced one day that he’d met a young lady and the Lord had struck him with an epiphany that she was to be his bride.”

The silence fell quick and heavy. Rowena glanced up, ready to look away again quickly.

But the horror in Ella’s eyes at the realization of what she just said was eclipsed by the laughter that soon spilled from her lips again. “And so he did!”

“And aren’t we glad of it?” Brook smiled over at Rowena, her eyes certainly clear of any dark emotions. “I’m so pleased we’ve had these days to get to know each other, Rowena. I only wish we had more of them. Good friends are too hard to come by.”

Rowena could nod her agreement to that. “Aye. Though I can’t imagine ye have too hard a time of finding them.”

Brook breathed a laugh. “Don’t you? I’m not exactly what most English expect of their nobility. Am I, Ella.”

Ella, of course, grinned. “You’re so much better.”

“Ha! I like to think so, of course,
mais alors
. Most disagree. I am headstrong and thumb my nose at tradition and am all the time doing what society thinks I ought not.”

Her?
Rowena gave her finger to the sleeping bairn, who obligingly curled his tiny hand around it. And granted the thumbing of her nose, anyway. But how could society help but love someone so bold? So beautiful?

They couldn’t.

“She disbelieves me,” Brook said in a mock whisper to Ella, gaze still on Rowena and a smile hovering at the corners of her mouth. “I am being perfectly honest, Rowena. Had your husband not made such a show of being fond of me—he being the darling of London long before I arrived on the scene—I probably would have been laughed out of Town.”

“Which you would have happily seized as an excuse to come home. She hates the Season.” Ella waved a hand as if dismissing her friend’s foolishness.

Rowena was stuck on that
being fond
. A show, she said. But of course she would. She married another, and Brice would surely have laughed off his affections, if he’d had them, wouldn’t he have done? Or maybe it really was a show. Which just pointed to how skilled he was at putting one on.

Confusing, all the same.

“Of course I hate the Season. It’s a bunch of deceptive nonsense. Isn’t that right, Duke?”

Rowena’s head snapped up, around. Brice was just stepping into the garden’s entrance, his grin as bright as usual.

“I haven’t the foggiest notion what you’re talking about, Brook, but I don’t dare argue.” His attention moved from Ella to Rowena. “Are you ladies ready? The bags have been loaded, and it’s time to go.”

Rowena stood, careful to hold the baby as motionless as she could. “Aye.”

“I suppose.” Ella pushed herself up too, though a pout had overtaken her dimples. “If we must.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.” Frowning, Brook stood too and approached Rowena with her arms outstretched for her son. She said something in French that Rowena couldn’t follow.

Brice sighed. “We’ve been through this. It’s necessary.”

“Hmm.” Taking the wee one with practiced ease, Brook managed to smile at Rowena in one second and scowl at Brice in the next. “We have different definitions of that word,
n’est pas
?”

“So it would seem.”

“And we shall see which of us is right this time—statistically, it has to be my turn soon.”

“We shall, indeed, see.” Brice offered his elbow to Rowena. But his grin wasn’t so bright anymore. “Come, darling. We’re in the car again.”

Rowena let herself be ushered out of the garden and around to the drive. Wondering more with every step what in the world they weren’t telling her.

O’Malley was right—darkness gathered here. Lilias felt it the moment she stepped inside Delmore with the other servants, and it didn’t abate at all through the afternoon. She folded away the last of Rowena’s new gowns, sidled over to the window, and let loose the shudder that had been threatening to shiver its way down her spine all day.

Her cousin in Ireland would insist they must have built this place over a fairy path. Her grandmother would be more apt to murmur about witches and devils. Lilias didn’t pretend to ken what it might be. But something lurked here. Something slithered through the corridors and clawed up the walls. She felt its cold breath. Saw its shadow from the corner of her eye.

Were it up to her, she would never have unpacked—they would have headed straight back to Whitby Park. So close, but a world away.

The door opened, and she spun to see Rowena slipping in, face flushed. “What happened?”

The lass shivered. “Nothing. Just . . .”

“Aye. Ye feel it too.” Lilias bustled forward with Rowena’s warm wool wrap. The fire had been set an hour ago, but the chill wouldn’t leave the room, and the silk Rowena was wearing today may be pretty as the morning mist, but it would be no warmer. “Here, lass. How was tea?”

Rowena sighed, slipped her arms into the wool, and folded herself up into the chair nearest the hearth. “I dinna ken. The men were all elsewhere, and the women . . .” Her brows knit. “I dinna ken why we’re here, Lil. Ella and Charlotte—they quite obviously dislike our hostess.”

“Well, I should think so.” Any woman who chose to live amidst these shadows . . . Lilias shook her head. “I dinna ken why we’re here either. Did yer husband tell you how Lady Pratt’s husband kidnapped the Duchess of Stafford? Well, it was before she wed the duke, but all the same. The servants at Whitby Park think the lady must have had something to do with it.”

Rowena’s mouth gaped. “But they . . . they’ve said nothing to me, none of them. Neither Brice nor his mum nor Ella. And it isn’t as though I avoided any of them these last few days, as I had before.”

Perhaps Lilias should have kept her own lips sealed on the matter too. But no, O’Malley was right—if their hostess were the type to play in darkness, then they all needed to be on their guard. And one would think that His Grace and his family would recognize as much. She perched on the arm of Rowena’s chair and smoothed back the soft brown curls that framed her face. “Ye’ve been more sociable the last bit at Whitby Park, true enough. But ye still look so sad, lass. What has you so puggled? When ye seem to be getting on better with His Grace?”

Rowena drew her knees up to her chest and pressed her cheek to them. Were Lady Lochaber to see such a posture, she would chide her something fierce. Her mother would have too, once upon a time. But Nora had given up caring too soon. And how was Lilias to enforce what she herself had never learned?

She trailed her fingers through the girl’s hair, plucking out pins as she went. The low chignon wouldn’t do for tonight’s dinner. “I heard you laughing with him last night in the hall. That’s something, aye? And I glimpsed you in the garden, holding the duchess’s baby. Ye must have made friends.”

One of Rowena’s shoulders lifted, settled. But it was the look in her eye more than the shrug that made Lilias straighten with a sharp breath. “The babe, is it? Holding hers made ye miss the idea of yer own. But Wena, ye must be practical. Ye must ken ’tis best this way. Ye’ll have a child—a legitimate one, the duke’s, soon enough. Ye just go to him and—”