Jane Feather - [V Series] (46 page)

Marcus didn’t respond to this impassioned plea. Instead, he inquired in a tone of distant curiosity, “Tell me, was it pure coincidence that I received an invitation from Morcby for tonight?”

Judith’s color deepened and the fight went out of her again as she saw the hopelessness of her position. “No,” she confessed dismally. “Charlie—”

“Charlie? Are you telling me that you have involved my cousin in this deception … this betrayal?” His eyes were great black holes in his white face.

“Not exactly.… I mean, I did ask him to procure the invitation but I didn’t tell him why.” She stared at him, her hands pressed to her burning cheeks, devastated by what she had said, by what he was entitled to feel.

He drew a deep, shuddering breath. “Get out of my sight! I can’t trust myself in the same room with you.”

“Marcus, please—” She took a step toward him.

He flung out his hands as if to ward her off. “Go!”

“Please … please
try
to understand, to see it just a little through my eyes,” she pleaded, unable to accept her dismissal, terrified that if she obeyed him, the vast gulf yawning between them would become infinite.

He took her by the upper arms and shook her until her head whipped back and forth and she felt sick. Then his hands fell from her as if she were a burning brand, or
something disgusting that he couldn’t endure to touch any longer. While she stood dazed in the middle of the room, rubbing her bruised arms, he stormed out, leaving the door swinging open.

Judith crept into a deep chair by the fire and huddled into it, curling in on herself, racked with deep shuddering spasms of devastation.

She didn’t know how long she’d been crouching there like some small wounded animal in emeralds and spider gauze and satin before Marcus returned.

He stood over her and spoke with a distant politeness. “I’m sorry if I hurt you. I didn’t intend to. Come upstairs now, you need your bed.”

“I think I’d rather stay here, thank you.” She heard her voice, as stiffly polite as his.

Marcus bent and scooped her out of the chair. He set her on her feet. “Must I carry you?”

She shook her head and started out of the room. Neither of them could endure such physical contact tonight—not with all the rich, sensual memories embedded in such a touching.

She walked ahead of him up the stairs and into her own room. Marcus turned aside through his own door.

J
udith lay awake through the last remaining hours of darkness. She stared upward at the canopy over the bed, her eyelids peeled back as if they were held open with sticks, her eyeballs feeling shrunken and dried like shriveled peas. Despite a bone-deep bodily fatigue and total emotional exhaustion, she couldn’t imagine sleeping. She lay straight-limbed in the bed, the sheet pulled up to her chin, her body perfectly aligned on the mattress, feeling the throbbing bruises on her arms where Marcus had held her and shaken her as the only truly alive parts of herself.

There ought to have been a sense of completion: The long dark road to vengeance had been traveled. Sebastian was in possession of his birthright and whatever depredations Gracemere’s profligacy had worked upon the estate,
Sebastian would work to put right. George Devereux was avenged; his children had a place in the world he had been driven from.

There ought to have been a sense of completion, of satisfaction. But there was only emptiness. Where there should have been gain there was only the greatest loss. What price vengeance when set against the loss of love? She had tried to have both and what she’d won was ashes on the wind.

Except for Sebastian, she reminded herself. Sebastian could now have the love of his Harriet, now that he had something to offer her. Sebastian could retire to the country and fulfill his bucolic dreams. And for herself …?

The only thing she could do for Marcus was to remove herself as gracefully as possible from his life. There was no legal impediment to such a disappearance. She would tell him so as soon as she could. On which melancholy decision, she managed to fall asleep just as the sun came up.

She awoke at midmorning, rang for Millie, rose and dressed in desultory silence. “Is his lordship in, do you know, Millie?”

“I believe he went out after breakfast, my lady.” Millie brushed a speck of lint from the sleeve of a blue silk spencer before holding it out for her. “You’re looking a trifle fatigued, my lady,” she observed with concern. “A little rouge might help.”

Judith examined herself in the glass. Her eyes were dull and heavy in a pallid complexion. She shook her head. “No, I think it would just make things worse.” She fastened a string of coral around her throat and went downstairs to the yellow drawing room.

“Mr. Davenport left his card an hour ago, my lady.” Gregson presented the silver salver.

“Thank you, Gregson. Could you bring me some coffee, please?”

Sebastian had scrawled a note on the back of the card:
Why aren’t I jubilant? I feel as if we lost not won. Come to me when you can. I need to talk to you.

Judith tossed the card into the fire. She would probably be feeling the same as her brother even without the catastrophe with Marcus. The intensity had been too great to leave one feeling anything but drained. And she needed Sebastian now as she’d never needed him before.

“Lady Barret, my lady,” Gregson intoned, entering the room with a tray of coffee.

Judith saw Agnes’s face as it had been last night, a mask of rage and hatred. Her heart jumped then seemed to drop into her stomach. She opened her mouth to tell Gregson to make her excuses, but Agnes walked in on the heels of the butler. Her face was almost as pale as Judith’s.

“Lady Barret.” Judith bowed, hearing how thin her voice sounded. “How kind of you to call. Another cup, Gregson.”

“No, I don’t wish for coffee, thank you,” Agnes said. She didn’t return Judith’s bow but paced the room, waiting for Gregson to finish pouring Judith’s coffee.

When the door closed on the butler, Agnes swung round on her daughter. Her eyes blazed in her face, where two spots of rouge burned in violent contrast to her pallor. “Let us take off the gloves, Judith. I don’t know
how
you did it, but I know
what
you and your brother did last night.”

“Oh?” Judith, struggling for calm, raised an ironic eyebrow. “And what was that?”

“Somehow, between you, you cheated Gracemere.” Agnes’s voice shook and her pallor had become even more pronounced. Her hands trembled and she clasped
them tightly together. “You ruined him!” Her voice was a low hiss and she advanced on Judith, who stepped back, away from the force of this vengeful rage.

“He would have ruined my brother as he ruined our father,” Judith said, a quaver in her voice. There was no point in denying the truth with this woman, who seemed somehow to know everything anyway. Unconsciously her hands passed through the air as if she could thus dispel the enveloping evil miasma.

Agnes laughed, a shocking crack of amusement. “Unlike you and your brother, your father was a weak fool. He had no idea how to stand up for himself … or to hold onto what he owned.”

Judith stared at the woman. Even through her fear and outrage, she recognized the truth of what Agnes had said. But she had always assumed exile and poverty had destroyed George’s stability and willpower. Agnes was implying that it had an earlier genesis. “What do you know of my father?” she demanded. “What could you possibly know of the life he led?”

Agnes laughed again and abruptly Judith turned from her. “Get out of my house, Lady Barret.”

“I’ll leave when I’ve said what I came here to say, Judith.” Her voice dropped to barely a whisper, but each word had bell-like clarity in the still room. “You will pay for what you did … you and your brother.”

“Oh, I am paying,” Judith said softly, almost to herself. “You don’t know how much.” Then her voice strengthened. “But my brother will now enjoy his birthright. Sebastian will take his happiness with both hands now.
His
happiness and place in the world is assured.”

“He will pay,” Agnes reiterated with a cold certainty that sent renewed chills up Judith’s spine.

She could think of nothing to say to combat the
menace in the room and, when Gregson opened the door, turned with blind relief toward the distraction.

“Lady Devlin, Lady Isobel Henley, and Mrs. Forsythe.”

“Judith, it’s the talk of the town,” Isobel exclaimed, swirling into the room in a cloud of muslin. “Your brother exposed the Earl of Gracemere as a cheat!”

“I left before midnight,” Cornelia put in. She tripped on the edge of the rug and caught herself just in time. “But Forsythe was full of it over the breakfast table. He says Gracemere will never be able to show his face in Society again … Oh, I beg your pardon, Lady Barret. I didn’t see you standing there.”

Under Judith’s incredulous stare, a complete change came over Agnes. The ice left her eyes, a tinge of normal color returned to her cheeks. Her voice was as light and nonchalant as ever. “As Lady Isobel says, it’s the talk of the town. I’m sure everyone will be beating a path to your door, Lady Carrington, to talk of your brother.”

“I wonder how long the earl has been cheating,” Sally commented, sitting down beside the fire. “It couldn’t be that he only began last night, could it?”

“Unlikely,” Judith said, trying to respond normally. If Agnes Barret could behave as if there were no history and the things that had been said in this room had never been spoken, then so could she. She drew on a lifetime’s experience with a masquerade and showed her own mask of insouciance.

“But how did Sebastian know?”

“He’s been playing with the earl for the last two months,” Judith said, shrugging, averting her eyes from Agnes. “I imagine he realized something wasn’t quite right before.”

“Miss Moreton, my lady.” The door again opened and an excited Harriet bounced in.

“Oh, Judith, I could barely contain myself … such extraordinary news. Is it true that Sebastian discovered the Earl of Gracemere cheating? Oh, how I wish I could have been there.” Then Harriet saw Agnes and subsided, blushing furiously.

“You have, of course, never cared for Gracemere, have you, my dear?” Agnes remarked. “Nevertheless, one shouldn’t gloat over another’s misfortune.”

“I find it hard to call it misfortune, ma’am,” Isobel said, scrutinizing the plate of sweet biscuits on the coffee tray. “When a man deliberately sets out to injure another man and is unmasked, misfortune seems a misnomer.” She selected a piece of shortbread.

Agnes bowed coldly and began to leaf through a periodical on a console table. Cornelia kicked Isobel’s ankle with lamentable lack of delicacy and an uneasy silence fell for a minute. Then Sally spoke with customary good nature. “It’s quite shocking news, of course. But one can only assume that the earl had a compelling reason to play in that manner. Debts of unmanageable magnitude … what other explanation could there be?”

“You’re right,” Cornelia said. “We shouldn’t be the first to throw stones.”

“No,” Sally agreed, thinking of four thousand pounds’ worth of pawned rubies.

In the next half hour, it seemed that half London was indeed beating a path to Judith’s door, agog to learn any details that might not be generally known. Judith dispensed hospitality, asserted she had no inside snippets of gossip since she hadn’t seen her brother since the previous evening, and all the while her head spun with conjecture. What possible revenge could Agnes and Gracemere have in mind? The speculation took her mind off her trouble with Marcus to some extent, but did nothing to restore her equilibrium. She waited impatiently
for her guests to take their leave, so that she could go to Sebastian.

“Judith, I must go home, Annie has the croup.” Sally appeared at Judith’s elbow. “Nurse is quite good with her, but the poor little love frets if I’m away too long.”

“I’m sorry.” Judith received this information with less than her usual attention. “It’s not serious, I hope.”

“No … Judith, is something the matter?” Sally regarded her friend closely. “You seem
distrait.”

“It’s hardly surprising,” Judith said, trying to pass it off, gesturing around the crowded room. “After last night.”

“I suppose not. What did Marcus have to say?” It was a shrewd guess, but Sally was good at guessing games when it came to Devlins.

Judith shook her head. “Not now, Sally.”

Sally accepted this with a nod and a compassionate kiss. “Oh, I was forgetting, Harriet had to leave … some errand she has to run for her mother. You were deep in conversation and she didn’t want to interrupt, so I said I’d say good-bye for her.”

“Thanks. I expect Sebastian will be able to answer all her questions later.” Judith smiled, but the strain in the smile was obvious. Sally pressed her hand briefly and left.

Judith looked around the room and realized that Agnes Barret had also made a discreet departure. But then she wouldn’t have expected her to make any farewells.

Judith walked to Albemarle Street as soon as the last visitor had left. Sebastian had been watching for her from his front window and came to open the door himself. “I’ve been hiding,” he confessed. “I saw Harry Middleton this morning, but I’ve had Broughton deny me to everyone else.”