Games of Pleasure (21 page)

WYLDSHAY CASTLE ROSE LIKE A MAILED FIST FROM THE broad waters of a lake. The Earl of Hanley gazed up at the towers as his coach horses trotted over the arched stone bridge and beneath the portcullis. He stepped down into a courtyard. A pair of tall oak doors were immediately flung open on silent hinges by two bewigged footmen.

Wyldshay was excruciatingly well run.

“Is Lord Ryderbourne at home?” he asked as a more senior servant came forward. “Or perhaps the duchess?”

The man led him into the Great Hall, where he was kept waiting. Stone dragons leered at him from the fireplace. On another wall St. George wrestled with a rearing white horse as he speared a green serpent to the heart. Yet when he was eventually led into an elegant parlor, the Duchess of Blackdown walked up to greet him with both hands extended, as if he were a long-lost son.

“Hanley? How very charming! To what happy chance do we owe this unexpected visit?”

The earl bowed low over her rings. “The happiness is all mine, Your Grace.”

She sat down in a rustle of skirts and waved him to a chair. “Yet handsome young men do not pay surprise calls on their mother's friends without good cause, do they? No doubt you really came to see Ryderbourne. Alas, he is not at home.”

He buried the small rush of triumph. “Alas, indeed! Yet when I met him on the road, he expressly said he was driving here. Perhaps I misunderstood? He has returned to London, instead?”

Her eyes were brilliant, like those of a pagan idol. “You met my son on the road?”

“We enjoyed breakfast together at the White Swan on the Bristol turnpike.”

Her smile seemed a little bored. “Then he must indeed be at Wyldshay. Perhaps he has gone down to the coast, or is making his rounds of the farms. I have no idea. I do not keep track of my son's movements, Lord Hanley. By all means, go in search of him, if you wish.”

He stood up. “Alas, Your Grace, I have pressing business. I can't stay. I wished merely to pay my respects before traveling on.”

She called a servant to see him out. Hanley strode back to his waiting carriage. His man was waiting to fold up the steps and close the door.

“Well?” the earl asked.

The servant touched his hat with one finger. “The duchess already knows that Lord Ryderbourne isn't in London, my lord. She sent a servant up to town with a message for him, but the man returned empty-handed this morning. And the groom says his carriage returned here several hours ago, but His Lordship wasn't in it.” The man grinned. “You might say he's disappeared, like.”

“Then we return to the White Swan as fast as these damned nags can carry us!”

The duchess watched from a window as the carriage rattled across the bridge. Her mouth curved when it turned north.

“Ah, my dear boy,” she said to herself. “So where are you? Wherever it is, I rather hope you are having an adventure.”

RYDER allowed Miracle to ride away alone. The white pony cantered up the wet path toward the hill track. Beauty fretted, eager to follow, yet he held the mare in check, fighting memories.

If the earl had appeared on the horizon at that moment, Ryder would have been tempted to shoot him down without mercy. Not with the confused rage that had once made him try to hit his brother without warning, but with an ice-cold desire for justice.

Apart from his fury over Hanley, it was almost impossible to sort out his feelings about Miracle. He knew only that he could not let her slip away into disaster. Whether she wanted his help or not, he would pursue her to the ends of the earth. Though what he would do when they reached the world's end, he had no idea.

He was under no illusion about sharing any real future with her. Wyldshay was not just his duty. It was his love and his passion, and had been since the day he had first opened his eyes and seen the great inheritance into which he'd been born. He glanced down at his hands, clenched too hard on the reins.

Miracle could enslave any man with her sensual beauty and she knew it. For perhaps the first time in her life she was trying not to do it, instead. That perhaps could've been seen—in a rather back-handed way—as a compliment, even when she was so obviously failing.

Ryder eased his fingers and choked back a kind of mad, frustrated mirth at his own impotence in this.

Even if he thought he could somehow clear her of the charge of murder, what could he offer her? To install her in a townhouse in London as his mistress? Perhaps in the very same rooms where she had so recently been welcoming his enemy? The idea repulsed him. In the face of that, even his burning desire seemed only tarnished and sordid.

The wealth and power of the Blackdowns was almost infinite. Ryder outranked every man in the kingdom, except for the handful of dukes and marquises. That knowledge had both haunted and enthralled him all of his life. As long as he could remember, if he reached out a hand he could have almost anything he desired.

It was a little disconcerting to realize that this time he had no idea what he wanted.

Miracle was almost out of sight before he allowed Beauty to follow.

 

 

SHE rode blindly, tears coursing down her cheeks. Surely he could not follow her now, not after what she had said to him. She would ride on to Derbyshire, recover her valuables from her brother, take a ship to America, and never see or think of her white knight again. Every scullery maid in the kingdom understood perfectly well how any real prince would treat her, whatever fantastic promises he made at the ball. And perhaps it was a kindness, too, to remind the prince of that, before he made too great a fool of himself.

At least the storm had blown itself out. A bright breeze blustered from the west, drying out her sodden clothes and promising a dry night. Still, it would be miserable to camp too near the track that hugged the exposed hilltops. As the night drew in, she rode Jim down into a little valley. Before long she found a sheltered spot where a spring bubbled out of the rocky escarpment. The place seemed hidden enough to risk a small fire.

She hobbled the pony and turned him loose to graze, then hunted under the trees for some dry sticks. Once she had them burning, Miracle lay for a long time wrapped in her cloak staring up at the sky.

The same cold stars glimmered down on every hamlet and village and town, every great country house, every field and factory and workshop in England. Their thin light sparkled on the Channel and the Severn Estuary and the Irish Sea. Those identical stars sent their faint phosphorescence to haunt the sails of His Majesty's navy and every flotilla of small fishing boats, flung far across the sea, until at last they disappeared over the curve of the horizon to discover new oceans sparkling beneath the Southern Cross.

Many, many years ago the wonder of it all had enchanted a young girl who had once been allowed to stare up through a telescope, after so many years of sleeping in darkness. How could she have imagined that the same starlight was beating down onto the dark head of a lonely young lord, who listened with heartbreaking intensity for the music of the spheres?

She closed her eyes and buried her face in her arms.

So he had robbed her even of this: the chill comfort of infinity.

 

 

RYDER found a perch among the roots of a great tree, where he could see into her little clearing without being seen and keep watch as she slept. When her fire burned down, he gathered more wood with infinite caution, his boots easing into the damp ground with each careful step. Burning with frustrated desire, he added more fuel to the fire. When she turned in her sleep, he tucked the cloak back around her shoulders without waking her, then crept away.

The night creaked and rustled with small sounds—a mouse nibbling, a stoat hunting—then quavered with the long-drawn cry of an owl. Ryder wrapped himself in his cloak and stared at the sky. How many years had it been since he had allowed himself to sit and do nothing like this?

A strange mixture of elation and unease tickled at the back of his mind. For the limited duration of this adventure, he had no truly weighty responsibilities, only the simple demands of a journey without his usual entourage. No ducal carriage. No liveried servants. Just himself, a sleeping woman, and the vast, rustling world.

He felt as if his life were temporarily stripped to an unknown essence that he couldn't quite grasp, while he busied himself with the mundane tasks that his real existence never demanded: gathering firewood, taking care of a horse. Perhaps if he allowed himself to truly comprehend the wheeling silence of the heavens—perhaps if he managed to penetrate the real mystery of this woman—he would learn something so vital it would change him forever.

As soon as dawn glimmered, Ryder walked back through the woods to the spot where Beauty grazed, hidden in a hollow. Before any farmhand could find that his neglected patch had sprouted such a jewel—like a pearl in an oyster—Ryder saddled her and led her back to Miracle's camp. Holding the mare by the bit, one hand in readiness over her nostrils lest she whinny, man and horse remained lost among the trees.

At last Jim started down the path. Before pony and rider were too far out of sight, Ryder swung into the saddle.

He followed her the same way the next day as the hills gave way to the broad vale of a river, and the stone escarpments of the Cotswolds slipped abruptly into half-timbered prettiness. The drovers' road now turned west toward Wales. Miracle picked a lane that ran north and slightly east, straight into the heart of England.

Ryder rode steadily after her, dog tired from lack of sleep.

They were traveling now through the rich pastures and wood-lands of Warwickshire, where every track led in and out of a village, and every road led straight to a town. Ryder made necessary detours for supplies, then followed Jim's prints, cantering where he had to, so that he would not fall too far behind. If Miracle was not going to disappear down one of a multiplicity of lanes, he had to stay close on the pony's heels.

The third evening she turned down a narrow track through thick woods. It led to a ruined farmyard. The remains of a cattle barn lay open to the sky. Young trees had set up camp like an invading army among the broken pigsties. Locals had obviously been robbing the place of dressed stone for decades. The ground beneath the shattered walls was soft with moss.

Throughout the drizzly night Ryder kept his vigil with his back propped against the wall of a wrecked granary. The abandoned platforms for the ricks showed gaping holes where some of the stones had been hauled away. A fox trotted by on silent feet, his sharp muzzle testing the air. Ryder met the animal's questioning gaze for a moment, before the fox raced away into the undergrowth.

Dawn had begun to dilute the shadows when the sound of heavy breathing ruptured the quiet. A shiver of alertness shocked down Ryder's spine. Caught on the edge of dreaming, he had almost drifted into sleep.

Two men were tramping up the path. They were neither masons nor woodsmen.

The small glow of Miracle's campfire burnished their ragged clothes and desperate faces. One of the men whistled softly between his teeth and nudged his companion with an elbow.

“Aye, and there's a pony, too,” the other man hissed.

His companion pulled out a long, wicked knife, and stepped forward.

There wasn't time to stand. Ryder leaned forward, sitting with both forearms on his knees, and spoke quietly, so that Miracle wouldn't wake. “Not so fast, my lads!”

Four eyes swiveled toward him, trying to focus in the half light.

“Well, if it ain't a sparrow squatting on a stone,” one man said.

“A sparrow with pistols,” Ryder replied. “Speak softly, if you please.”

“I see two empty hands.” The second man stared with obvious belligerence, yet his voice dropped to barely more than a whisper. “Sure you have a gun, mister?”

The duke's son raised a brow. “You doubt me?”

The men looked at each other, then shifted nervously from one foot to another. “No harm meant, m'lord.”

“I believe you gentlemen have taken a wrong turn. Your path lies to the southeast. I prefer not to waken the lady with any sudden noise, but if needs must—”

“Of course, m' lord. Of course.” One of the men doffed his leather cap. The knife had disappeared. “No harm meant, Your Lordship. Jeb and I didn't mean no harm at all, didn't mean to trespass on Your Lordship's lands. We was lost.”

“Just decent, hungry folk, looking for honest work,” the other man said. “If Your Lordship would happen to be in need—?”

“No.” Ryder reached into a pocket and tossed a couple of coins. “But here's something for your trouble.”

The ruffians grabbed the money from the air, then turned and hurried off down the path.

The innocent sounds of the woods trickled back into the sudden silence. Miracle turned in her sleep. A deep satisfaction flowed through Ryder's blood.

 

 

HE was trotting Beauty along a well-worn lane that meandered along a stream bank, concentrating on picking out the pony's odd-shaped shoe print, when a pheasant burst from the undergrowth. The bird whirred up beneath Beauty's nose. Ryder's balance adjusted automatically as his mount twisted and ducked. He gathered reins, annoyed only that he had given her enough slack to allow it to happen. He must be more tired than he knew.

“Ah,” Miracle said. “So you ride like the god of horses, even in your sleep! Of course, any son of the Duke of Blackdown has spent half his life on horseback.”

Jim and his rider were blocking the way ahead.

The mare threw up her head and whinnied. Ryder allowed it, all his concentration riveted on Miracle. His pulse hammered. Broken sunlight cast entrancing shadows over her face as she gazed at him.