Love's Reward (24 page)

How could he? After two years, how could he greet Juanita like this!

“Of course. I invited you here,” she said in her softly accented English. “You were welcome to arrive at the front door, but melodrama was always your style, wasn’t it?”

Joanna caught her breath as Fitzroy swung over the rail of the musicians’ gallery.

Light played across his lithe back, casting monstrous shadows, a vampire arriving by moonlight, ruffling the curtains, bringing the scent of power and ruthlessness into the maiden’s bedchamber.

He dropped lightly to the floor and gave them all a small bow.

“As it is yours.” Fitzroy laid down his cane and took a glass from the tray. “Is the wine poisoned?”

The shoulders shrugged beneath the mantilla, the movement clearly discernible in the shadows.

“Everyone is drinking it. Did you think I would poison them all, just for you?”

He turned to her and saluted her with his filled glass.

“Why not? Tragedies often end with the stage littered indiscriminately with corpses. Enough innocent men have died already to make a very promising start.”

“But they all loved you, Fitzroy
querido
, while everyone here hates you: your brother, your mistress, and your poor little wife, who isn’t a wife at all. What a disgrace! A scandal! How could you do it? Betray noble Richard Acton’s sister into harlotry? You
have
taken her to your bed, haven’t you? I was told that you had sworn not to, but knowing the carnality of your nature—”

She stopped with deliberate provocation.

Joanna forced herself to breathe. She glanced at Quentin and Lady Carhill. They seemed suspended, like spectators at a play.

This cannot be real,
she thought.
Richard also saw her die.

Yet Fitzroy sat carelessly on the edge of the table, swinging one booted foot. He took a frugal sip of his wine.

“Did Quentin tell you that? How very fraternal of him! As Richard of Gloucester said, ‘Inductions dangerous!’ Shall we start at the beginning? You greeted my wife at your door as if you were old friends. Where the devil did you meet her, Joanna?”

Joanna gulped at her wine, feeling the blood rush back to her face.

“At the house party at Fenton Stacey.” She was amazed that her voice came out of her throat. Yet the tones seemed ordinary enough, even calm. “When this lady arrived there, her name was given only as Mrs. Barton-Smith. We talked about art. Indeed, it was she who told me about Harefell Hall.”

“Ah, now I see.”

Fitzroy smiled at her. It was the smile he had given her on their wedding day.
Take courage!

Joanna couldn’t understand it, so though her heart yearned, she said nothing.

Her husband turned to his brother. “And was that when you became this lady’s lover, Quentin?”

Quentin blushed. The color rushed up from his high collar to flood into his brown curls.

“Does it matter?” he replied.

“My dear brother, I really don’t care whom you bed, but this does seem just a trifle indiscreet, doesn’t it?”

Fitzroy’s careless stance and the pitch of his voice appeared exactly calculated to make any other man want to knock him down. Yet Quentin seemed to melt. He slid down the post and dropped into a chair. A tremor passed over him.

“If you must know, I didn’t know until today who she was. She told me she was a widow, Mrs. Barton-Smith, just as Joanna said. And then she told me about you. I haven’t wanted to believe that my own brother is such a bastard, but every day you have proved it.”

Fitzroy laughed and turned back to the shadowed figure in the lace mantilla.

“Cleverly done,
mi corazón
. I imagine it was easy enough to persuade Quentin to run away with Richard Acton’s sister. I wondered what the devil had persuaded him to such an odd act of gallantry. It must have seemed perfect to you.”

Joanna closed her eyes. Oh, dear Lord! Juanita had used her, pulling the strings like a puppeteer, encouraging her to run away from Miss Able’s with Quentin, all to enmesh Fitzroy in disaster?

What else had she orchestrated? It made simple Joanna Acton totally irrelevant, didn’t it?

“It was exquisite.
Más vale tarde que nunca
. What better revenge?”

“And why did Lady Carhill and Lady Reed cooperate? Gaming debts?”

“How did you know?” Lady Carhill cried, leaping suddenly to her feet. “Oh, Fitzroy! I had no idea, none, that it would come to this! How was I to know that Mrs. Barton-Smith was really your wife? She said she had been married to an officer in Spain, but that he’d died there, and that you had tried to seduce her and all the other wives—that you were rapacious, a destroyer of the weaker sex.”

“So it seemed a fair enough exchange to help her to punish me a little?”

She nodded, her eyes wet. “The night of my ball, Lady Mary was supposed to find us together—you’d have hated that, wouldn’t you?—but you took the key and left too soon.”

“You had lost a great deal of money, Lady Carhill?” His voice was gentle. “You see, I know your reputation as well as you know mine.”

“Remuda de pasturaje haze bizerros gorgos.”

Joanna looked blankly at Juanita.

“Change of pasture makes fat calves,” Fitzroy translated.

How could he still smile? Joanna watched his hands as he set down his glass, the square palms and supple fingers that had touched her so sweetly only last night.

A fierce pain started somewhere below her ribcage and ran choking up to her throat.

Yet she could not interfere. What rights did she have in this?

“So we have established a charming trail of connections,” he went on. “Fitzroy Mountfitchet, Lord Tarrant, the infamous rake, finds himself on the other end of the chase, forced into an unwanted marriage, seduced into publicly taking mistresses, only to be used and tossed aside in his turn. Meanwhile, he is to be harassed, kept guessing, driven mad by red herrings. Exquisite in its simple symmetry. But what about the real Herring and Flanders and Green? Didn’t they deserve the retirement they’d earned? Or was it because they were witness to the realities of that first impetuous marriage?”

“Those men? They were scum,
campesinos
. It is beneath me to consider them.”

Was she rattled a little? The soft Spanish voice sounded less steady.

Of course, Fitzroy was not playing the part that Juanita had planned for him. She had expected to have the upper hand, to be in command. Exhausted, drenched, bones shattered, he should have been dragged into this room without warning to face a ghost.

Instead, he sounded ruthless, his anger clear.

“Because their loyalty was mine? In spite of all the beauty and charm of their officer’s wife, they were not corruptible, were they? Was that enough to justify their deaths?”

“It was necessary,” she said coldly, “to make you take me seriously.”

“Ah, no, there you are wrong,
novia.
I take you very seriously. And I resent it. I resent what you have done to those who could not defend themselves. Those men had families, mothers, fathers, now left to mourn them. And how the devil do you justify what you are doing to Joanna?”

She laughed and snapped her fingers.

“Lady Joanna Acton? So ripe and so innocent at Fenton Stacey! She wanted to become an artist.
You
have made her a harlot, Fitzroy, not I. It was not my fault that you married her. But why did Richard Acton let you live to do it? Does he apprehend how you have been treating his sister? I thought it reasonable to let him know. So what will you do when he calls you out?”

“I don’t know,” Fitzroy replied. “Perhaps I will ask for rapiers. Lenwood’s good with a blade, but he has a very sorry aim with a pistol. I’m afraid, if I were to let him shoot at me, he would make a mess of it.”

Footsteps sounded behind them. The murmured words of a servant. The opening of a door.

Joanna spun about. A man strode into the room. A thin shaft of sunlight fell across his blond hair, so that it flamed like the sun for a moment.

Her brother tossed down his gloves and stripped off his coat. The brass cap on his cane blazed into fire as it also caught the sunbeam.

“No doubt I would,” Richard said to Fitzroy with deadly emphasis. “Lady Kettering has been kind enough to elucidate your behavior the night of her ball. She went into considerable detail.”

“How unfortunate,” Fitzroy said.

Joanna watched him, the controlled movements, the patient voice. She could not understand what he was doing, or how he must feel, but through her own pain she saw his and ached for him.

Yet the heat of Richard’s anger was palpable, burning unchecked below the surface.

“Do you deny that you let my sister arrange the rendezvous in the summerhouse?”

“No.” Fitzroy now seemed merely weary of it all. “Though I’m sorry that you were present that evening.”

“And that this was not the first such time?”

“As I’m sure you’ve been informed by now, no doubt with some inventive embellishments, there was also Lady Reed. However, Joanna did not arrange that. She, along with most of the
beau monde
, just witnessed it.”

Richard’s sword hissed from its cane.

“So it’s to be a duel, after all, Lord Lenwood?” Fitzroy said.

“I don’t believe you can claim the privileges of a duel, Tarrant. The niceties of seconds and attending doctors are reserved for gentlemen, not for vermin that needs to be destroyed. So by all means, let it be blades! And why not now?”

“Richard, no!”

Joanna leaped from her chair. Fear and shock had left her numb for a moment, but the sight of his naked steel sent the blood rushing back into her limbs.

“No! Something else is happening here, something more than you’ve been told!”

Her brother’s face was implacable, the line deep between his brows. Richard, too, had fought in the Peninsula. Richard, too, knew how to kill.

“Stand aside, Joanna! For you to defend him only makes it worse.” He stepped forward, his face contorted with fury. “Quentin, for God’s sake, keep her out of the way!”

“Richard, you promised! Fitzroy, don’t fight him!”

“I think, dear heart,” her husband replied gently as he shrugged out of his jacket and took up his sword cane, “that Richard is not in the mood to listen to reason. Shall I let him impale me? Or shall we fight, like two game little cocks in the ring? Quentin, you’ve been bloody useless up to now. Will you please do as her brother asks and keep Joanna safe!”

Quentin caught her from behind and pinioned her arms.

Fitzroy held up his weapon for a moment in a salute, as he had done in the wood where the old soldier had been shooting at pigeons. Then he vaulted back over the table to meet the full impetus of Richard’s attack.

The swords clashed together, ringing steel on steel, then scraped, squealing, as the men broke apart.

“Quentin, let me go!” Joanna insisted. “Stop them, for God’s sake!”

“Oh, no, Lady Tarrant. Orders are orders!”

She struggled, trying to elbow him, but Quentin held her firmly.

Boots scraped on the bare boards of the floor. The two figures swayed back and forth in the gloom, their blades firing a brilliant shaft of light whenever they sliced through a sunbeam.

Fitzroy backed away from Richard’s ferocious series of lunges, working hard, blocking, parrying the lightning thrusts.

He was tired, with that bone-deep exhaustion that had been his companion since the day Joanna had first seen him, scowling at her after she’d kissed Quentin at the Swan. A slight hesitation slowed his reactions, his blade lifted only barely in time, a split second delay between parry and riposte, as if he moved in treacle and had to drag through the weight of it to move his arm.

Yet Richard was relentless, carried on the pure, high wave of his disgust and his rage, and he was an excellent swordsman, graceful, fast, and uncompromising.

It was only a matter of time before Fitzroy made a fatal mistake.

Joanna folded in Quentin’s hands, allowing her full weight to sag against him.

“By God,” he said, easing her limp body to the floor. “She’s swooned. Lady Carhill!”

As soon as he released her, Joanna rolled away and sprang to her feet.

“Help me, Lady Carhill,” she cried. “It’s insane to let them fight in the dark. Let’s open the shutters, at least!”

“No!” the Spanish voice cried. “Stay where you are!”

“Oh, fiddlesticks, do what you want!” Joanna raced to the nearest window. “So I’m just a harlot and you’re his real wife! Whatever he did, however badly he treated you, if you’d ever loved him, you would never have wanted to cause what’s been happening to him these last weeks. Does love believe in revenge, or understand such viciousness?”

Joanna grasped the iron bar. It fell back easily. In moments she had flung wide the first pair of shutters and flooded the room with light.

Fitzroy was trapped against one of the posts that supported the roof.

As the shutters banged open, Richard caught the full force of the sunshine in his eyes and was blinded.

In that moment Joanna knew that her husband could have killed her brother easily, but Fitzroy spun away, only to be forced to fall back yet again before a renewed assault.

Blades clattered. Boots rasped. Both men gasped for breath.

Yet in spite of their deadly purpose, Richard and Fitzroy, in their white shirts and tight breeches, were partners in a duet of startling beauty. Every movement was strong, lithe, graceful, the steel as elegant as the men as it sliced through the air, meeting and parting in a ballet of death.

The red flowers that blossomed on Fitzroy’s shirt seemed only a natural part of it, until he swore, dropped his blade, and started to laugh.

“‘Who spoke of brotherhood? Who spoke of love?’” he quoted. “
Más vale ser necio que porfiado
. Better to be a fool than obstinate, they say.”

He sank, still laughing, to the floor.

Richard stood over him, pale with shock, his bloodstained sword still raised.