My Darling Gunslinger (28 page)

The sounds of the sword fight were loud and unmistakable, rapiers clanging, the soft hiss of a man’s indrawn breath, the shuffle of boot heels on gravel, a grunt followed by a low curse.

Charlotte followed the perimeter of the garden, looking for a break in the espalier, until finally she saw a stream of moonlight on the grass just up ahead and with it the way to the other side. By sheer force of will she moved slowly and quietly when she wanted to run screaming to the hole in the hedgerow. The gap was narrow and deep, the old windbreak having grown thick and dense over the years.

She’d only just entered the narrow breach, the clash and clang of the swords reverberating through the otherwise silent corner of the garden, when a fierce shout joined the cacophony. The clatter of metal on stone preceded a soft snicker of amusement.

For a moment there was silence, thick and heavy, before a shrill scream filled the air, followed by the scuffle of booted feet on dirt and pebbles.

A bark of laughter echoed through the night, lifting the hairs on the back of Charlotte’s neck and stealing the air from her lungs. The sound, hollow and eerie, nearly hid the unmistakable thud a body hitting the ground.

Charlotte gave up on stealth. With a scream of her own, she plowed through the tall hedge, her efforts hindered by the branches snagging her gown, scratching her bare arms and tugging at the curls piled atop her head.

With pistol raised and knife poised to throw, she finally emerged on the other side. Lunging to the left and crouching low, she took in the scene at a glance.

Two bodies lay on the ground nearly atop one another and a third person knelt amid splayed skirts, dark head bent over the hilt of a sword.

Lady Sylvia rose unsteadily to her feet, her face a pale oval in the dark, her eyes wide and unblinking.

Quickly, Charlotte closed the space that separated her from the two motionless forms, silently sending up a prayer that one of those bodies was not that of Tyler Morgan.

Eustace Johnston had been sliced from sternum to groin, or perhaps groin to sternum. Either way, his blood formed a dark line between torn powder-blue waistcoat and snowy-white shirt, his sightless eyes pointed heavenward as if seeking salvation.         

Frederick Grenville’s cravat was barely mussed. In fact, his attire was perfectly neat and tidy but for the blood spreading outward from the wound through his heart. Long lashes shielded his eyes and an almost wistful smile was frozen for all eternity upon his lips.

Lady Sylvia stood over her husband’s body, the tip of the sword dripping blood onto the bridge of his nose to slide down his cheek like a crimson tear.

“Where is the other sword?” Charlotte asked as raised voices traveled up and over the hedge, at least a dozen men if she had to guess, still a distance away, likely stumbling around looking for the break in the hedge.

“Mr. Johnston was unarmed when Frederick sliced him from his manly parts to his heart.”

“Eustace Johnston had no heart.”

“As to that, he said he hadn’t the heart to continue with whatever task Frederick had set him to.” Lady Sylvia had yet to look away from the body at her feet. “So Frederick killed him.”

“Who killed Frederick?” Even as she asked the question, a flash of movement to the left had her head whipping around. A tall, dark-haired man stood in the shadow of a twisted sycamore tree. A sword dangled from his right hand while the left was pressed to a wound low on his hip.

Charlotte spun to face him, her legs bent and her weight balanced on the balls of her feet in readiness to move, to fight or flee as needs be. Raising the pistol, she pointed it at the man even as her left hand drew back, her knife balanced on the tips of her fingers.

“No!” Lady Sylvia cried. “Please, no.”

Charlotte ignored the other woman entirely, her eyes trained on the danger in the small clearing that ought to have been a garden behind another mansion, but was instead a tiny scrap of heathland in the middle of Mayfair.

The danger smiled, his teeth flashing white in the dark, and brought his sword up until the blade touched his forehead.

A swordsman’s salute.

“KC?” Charlotte barely heard her own voice over the roaring in her ears.

“My lady.” The ne’er-do-well youngest son of Baron Chatsworth lowered his rapier to present her with an elegant bow.

A hundred questions filtered through Charlotte’s mind, but she only watched silently as KC blended into the shadow of the hedge and disappeared on silent feet, the glint of his sword growing dimmer until it, too, disappeared.

Now my dreams are full of you and I can’t see as how that’ll change anytime soon.

Tyler Morgan

In the aftermath of what was to become known in certain circles as Grenville’s Last Fall, Lady Charlotte Morgan wondered if she’d somehow stumbled into a hidden bog on that odd little slice of open heathland.

No sooner had Karl Chatsworth vanished into the night, than a dozen men poured through the crack in the hedgerow, Ty at the forefront with pistols drawn and his hat missing entirely.

Lady Sylvia dropped her husband’s sword and fell to her knees beside his lifeless body, sobs wracking her frame as she poured out a convoluted tale of a jealous husband, an argument gone awry, one man murdered in cold blood and another, distraught and fearful of the consequences, falling upon his sword.

Ty swept Charlotte into his arms, offered up some nonsense about a lady’s delicate sensibilities, and carried her along the tall greenery clear to the street and into their carriage.

At which point Charlotte’s delicate sensibilities caught up with her and she curled up on his lap and let seven, nearly eight years of fear and panic and rage loose in a torrent of tears. She cried until they reached Westlockhart House, cried while Ty carried her to their bedchamber and stripped her to her chemise, cried as he placed her gently in the big bed and crawled in beside her, pulling her close and allowing her tears to flood his chest.

The following morning Charlotte came awake in slow, sluggish degrees, as if waking from a laudanum induced stupor. A faint pulse of pain shot through her temples as she raised heavy, gritty eyelids. Sunlight streamed through the open windows of the bedchamber, forcing her eyes closed once more. Rolling gingerly to her back, she raised one trembling hand, instinctively reaching for Ty’s warmth and comfort in the bed beside her. Instead her hand landed on soft, cool linen.

It was then the absolute silence of the room penetrated her muddled mind. It was the sort of silence that spoke of complete and utter solitude, and one Charlotte was entirely unaccustomed to. There was an eerie quality to it, a soft hum of vibration that was a sound unto itself, an odd empty void echoing inside her head.

Disoriented by the queer notion, by the sudden wave of loneliness accompanying it, Charlotte pried her heavy lids open and scrambled to sit. The soft rustle of the bedcovers tangling about her legs and the small moan falling from her lips were infinitely loud in the otherwise silent room.

As were the memories of the previous night, rushing over her and nearly swamping her in emotions as twisted and tangled as the bedcovers. Horror she recognized, along with shock, fear, anger and a host of others she’d become intimately acquainted with throughout all the years of running and hiding.

Where was the relief she’d anticipated? And what was this strange, hollow feeling, as if someone had out carved out a blank space inside her, vast and vacant.

Frederick Grenville was dead.

Sebastian was safe.

Ty’s soul had been spared the added weight of one more death.

So why were tears streaming down Charlotte’s cheeks? Why did she feel as empty as the silence surrounding her?

“Ridiculous,” she muttered, as much to fill the silence as to remind herself she’d gotten precisely what she’d wanted when she’d set off from the Zeppelin. “You’ve too much to accomplish today to sit about wallowing in…whatever this queer feeling is.”

Any other day, the self-directed admonishment would have gone a long way toward helping Charlotte to shake off the foreign feelings. But this wasn’t any other day.

Not even thirty minutes soaking in a warm bath with lavender compresses over her eyes while servants bustled noisily in and out of her bedchamber could set her entirely to rights.

As she drifted down the stairs, the queer feeling of emptiness lingered in the peripheral of her awareness and the peculiar quiet hummed softly in her ears.

Surely, she had only to find Ty in this great mausoleum of a house for the odd sensations to dissipate, if not disappear altogether.

It wasn’t the first time in her life Charlotte had made an error of monumental magnitude and likely it wouldn’t be the last.

If the silence that had greeted Charlotte upon waking was a dim hum, the silence that greeted her as she entered the dining room was a dissonance of noise, pummeling her from all sides.

Ty sat at the head of the linen-draped table, a plate piled high with eggs, ham and toasted bread before him. Dressed in a worn gray shirt and black vest, he looked as if he had a mind to go out and round up cattle on the London streets.

His hat rested on the table beside his plate and it struck Charlotte as wrong, that perfectly clean, stiff new hat sitting there on the pristine white linen. It ought to have been dusty, the brim mangled just so from years of tugging and pulling.

A prickling sense of unease flickered through Charlotte, a loose thread weaving in and around the hollow emptiness and silence that was anything but quiet, leaving her feeling off-kilter and unbalanced.

Dredging up a smile from a long-buried horde of patently false, socially requisite smiles specifically designed to hide all manner of turbulence, she greeted her husband with a soft, “Good morning.”

Ty barely glanced up, apparently more concerned with cutting a slab of ham into precise squares than greeting his wife.

Charlotte kept her smile firmly in place, never mind the tightening of the thread of unease until it felt as if it might strangle her. “Did you sleep well?”

Ty’s only response was a grunt that might have conveyed anything, or nothing at all.

“I thought we might see to booking passage to Norway this morning,” Charlotte said as she headed to the sideboard to fix her own plate, though she very much doubted she could manage so much as a single bite. “Perhaps we might even find a fast ship setting sail today. Can you imagine the look on Sebastian’s face were we to catch up to
The Splendor
in the middle of the North Sea?”

Ty pushed a square of ham beneath his eggs, his dark head resolutely bent over the task.

“Why, he’d likely think he’d woken up in one of the pirate stories he likes so well.” While a footman lifted the lids of various silver dishes, allowing her to select coddled eggs, fruit and toast, Charlotte kept up a steady stream of conversation about pirates and whatever else came to mind.

It hardly mattered what she said as Ty made no effort whatsoever to join in the conversation.

When her plate was filled to the brim with food she couldn’t possibly eat, she took the seat at Ty’s right, settling into the chair and flicking open her napkin with a sharp snap as loud as the retort of a rifle.

Ty continued to stare down at his plate where every perfectly proportioned square of ham had disappeared beneath the eggs. While she watched, he started in on the toast, cutting each slice into thin strips.

“Marauders of old were barbarous philistines, expeditiously waylaying merchant vessels in order to commit atrocious, diabolic, nefarious and heinous acts of malfeasance.” She offered the words up in blatant invitation, hoping to elicit a gravelly laugh, a raised brow or, at the very least, a quirk of her husband’s lips. “Often upon unsuspecting, innocent, irreproachable and gregarious sea captains whose only crimes were endeavoring to earn an equitable recompense for their diligent exertions.” Charlotte ran out of breath about the same time she ran out of multisyllabic words.

Ty’s lips didn’t so much as twitch, though he did leave off mangling his buttered toast. Carefully, as if it were of paramount importance, he lined up his knife and fork on the tablecloth just so.

Charlotte waited a full two minutes for some sort of response before finally giving up. She reached for the paper neatly folded beside her place setting, yanking it open with enough force to tear one corner clear away.

Perhaps her husband was simply feeling as unsettled and discombobulated as she was this morning. Surely, if she gave him a bit of time, he would cast off whatever seething emotions had hold of him. At which time they might engage in a civilized, not to mention two-sided, conversation. About the previous night’s gruesome events, about the vicious gossip Mrs. St. Germaine had spewed in his ear, about their upcoming journey to retrieve Sebastian and his guardians.

“Honestly, these newspaper men should all be taken out and shot,” Charlotte cried some five minutes later, tossing the sorry excuse for a paper onto the table. “They’ve dubbed poor Sylvia
Lady Siren
, added a secret affair with Eustace Johnston, and embellished last evening’s events until they bear no resemblance to the truth whatsoever.”

“I’ve already taken care of it,” Ty replied, his words clipped. And still he did not raise his head, did not lift his gaze from all those thin strips of bread and the mountain of eggs hiding a full slab of ham.

“You’ve shot the newspaper men?” Charlotte teased, nerves skittering. “Why, Tyler Morgan, you accomplish more before breakfast than most men do in an entire day.”

“The
Anna Maria
sets sail tomorrow morning,” Ty replied, for all the world as if he hadn’t heard her attempt at humor, poor as it was.

It took Charlotte a moment to comprehend his words, and when she did she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d heard a single word she’d spoken after her enquiry into booking passage for Norway.

“Oh, that’s perfect,” she said. Only it wasn’t perfect. Something was terribly wrong, though she couldn’t fathom what it was, not with the odd hum of silence that wasn’t silence at all, but a faint, persistent ringing filling her ears. “We’ll likely arrive only a few days behind
The Splendor
. Perhaps we might stay on in Norway until Ethel and Ken’s babe is born. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

“I’ve reserved the finest suite and arranged it so a maid and footman will travel with you,” Ty continued, his voice curt and cold.

“With us,” Charlotte replied on a gasp. “A maid and a footman will travel with us.”

“I’m setting sail for New York this afternoon,” her husband of barely a month replied quite as calmly as if he hadn’t just sliced her heart into so many thin slivers of toast. “From there I’ll take the train to Mystic.”

“You’re leaving me?”

“You hardly need a hired gun now Grenville is dead.” Ty finally raised his head and Charlotte flinched when eyes as cold as winter frost met hers.

“Ty, we’re married,” Charlotte began, her mind racing for explanations, for solutions, for anything that might freeze the moment until she could find the words to make it right.

“Not that you needed me even for that,” Ty went on, plowing over her words.

“Oh, good God, is that was this is about?” Charlotte pushed back her chair with a lurch and scrambled to her feet.

“This?” he barked.

“This irritability, this temper,” Charlotte replied. “You’re angry because you weren’t the one to kill Frederick? Well, I wasn’t either, and you don’t see me in a snit about it.”

“I am not in a snit.” He immediately gave lie to the words when he rose to stand, his hands fisting at his side and his eyes shooting cold sparks. “What the fuck were you thinking going after Grenville alone?”

“I was thinking he was in the garden with only Eustace Johnston for protection,” Charlotte cried. “I was thinking I might never find a more fortuitous moment to rid the devil from Sebastian’s life. I was thinking I didn’t want you to be the one to end his miserable life.”

“We had a bargain, Countess,” Ty growled.

It was the first time Ty had used her former title and he infused the honorific with enough cold scorn to freeze Charlotte’s heart. For one wild moment she actually imagined she felt a frigid wind whipping around the poor organ, freezing it solid between one beat and the next.

“We had a wedding,” she countered. “We
have
a marriage.”

“An interim marriage.” Ty’s words shot forth like bullets, unerringly finding their target, and her heart shattered into a million tiny shards of ice

“I thought…” Charlotte started, only to realize she hadn’t any idea how to complete the sentence.

As if reading her mind, Ty pounced. “What did you think would happen when Grenville had been dispatched to his maker, Countess?”

Charlotte only looked at him, her gaze taking in the sharp angles of his face, the soft bronze tint to his skin, the wide sensuous mouth, and the pewter gray eyes flashing with what might have been regret.

“Did you think we would settle into your husband’s mansion and live happily ever after?”

“You are my husband,” Charlotte whispered.

“Surrounded by more luxury than a body needs, with servants at our beck and call?” he went on relentlessly, ignoring her words yet again. “Paying calls and promenading around the park? Attending balls where people pay closer attention to gossip than the music? Did you think I would be content to live in this stone wasteland?”

“I don’t know,” Charlotte admitted. “I don’t know what I thought, what to think now.”

“Well, I’ve done plenty of thinking.”

“We’ll collect Sebastian and then we’ll decide. Together.” Her voice was barely above a whisper as she fought a mounting sense of doom. If she could only keep him from uttering the words, she could somehow salvage their future.