Proper Scoundrel (34 page)

He’d winced and agreed while Jade laughed. She knew he’d wanted to clear the night so he could try to wheedle his way into her bed. She found the notion as charming as she found him. She might have let him in, given today’s happy nuptials, if not for this disastrous turn. But if she thought too much about the only choice left to her, she’d make herself sick. Yet she couldn’t get on with it, until the bridal couple went on their rice-strewn way, so she put on a smile and returned to the celebration.

Three hours later, Jade drove a dray cart pulled by a sturdy dray horse.

She crossed the open field, turned onto the wide path at the eastern side of the beech wood, and headed toward the parcel of land that Neil ‘Blasted’ Kirby had optioned to the South Downs Railroad.

She knew exactly where to find the wall that led to the grave.

Once she arrived, Jade followed a legacy of directions. She started walking at the end of an unmortared stone wall to the right of a path and took six paces from the hedgerow toward the far left of a stand of white pine.

There, she drove her shovel into the earth.

By the time she’d dug a hole approximately six feet long and two feet deep, she began to marvel at her grandmother’s strength. Gram had always been a frail, wiry creature. Then again, she’d endured enough beatings to toughen a mouse.

Merry Mouse, Jade thought, on a bubble of hysterical laughter.

She dug another couple of feet, and still no body.

Suppose a stone wall stood now where none stood before? She might have started from the wrong place and ended at the wrong stand of pine. But looking around, it didn’t seem possible.

She released an unwitting cry of frustration and continued to dig from inside the hole, deeper and deeper still.

When she hit something soft, she stifled a gasp ... as if she might have hurt the bloody wife-beating cadaver. Her heart’s thumping calmed only when she discovered that Grandfather was wrapped in a cover of sorts. She lowered her lantern to better observe beetles and such skittering in and around the rotting fabric.

On a gasping shudder, Jade placed the lantern up on the edge of the grave and began to pull the wrapped corpse by what she hoped was its feet.

She giggled at the ridiculousness of the scene, should anyone come upon her, aware that if she didn’t release her trepidation in some way, she’d scream.

She had ended so deep in the earth, she wondered not only how to get Grandfather out, but herself, as well, when a wave of dirt came flying over the top, snuffing her lantern, stopping her heart, and making her drop Grandfather. When that organ started pumping again, it knocked fast and hard against her ribcage, cutting her breath. Had she back-tossed the dirt? Had it come from above? A hedgehog, or another animal, might have tossed it out while digging or scampering.

No matter her mind’s logic, her heart continued to race. Heeding it, she raised the shovel like a club, peered into the darkness and listened to every night sound.

“Need some help?”

Jade screamed, tossed the shovel at the bodiless voice, and tried to scramble from the grave, aware suddenly that the solid step she’d used to gain purchase must be Grandfather’s head. She had no control over the demented sounds coming from her throat. She scared herself with her nightmarish scream, but she couldn’t seem to stop.

Something dropped into the grave behind her, accelerating her wild panic. It, he, someone tried to keep her there, immobilize her.

She fought for her life.

“Jade. Jade, stop.”

Reason tried to intrude but she couldn’t seem to check herself.

“You’re hysterical, Jade. Stop ... sweetheart.”

Her captor’s hold loosened. Soft kisses blessed the back of her neck. She stilled, like a roe deer in lantern light, captured, but not.

Marcus turned her. The moon, momentarily free of the clouds, shed light on his concerned face.

She cried in his arms.

She wept for a battered woman forced to murder or die ... for months of ravaging fear, all for naught. Then she wept for her and Marcus, for all they would never share, and all she’d kept from him, all that he would now know anyway.

With worry, he gazed at her as if she were daft. And she must be, because now she laughed through her tears as she tried to tell him she wasn’t. And somewhere along the way, she forgot which to do, laugh or cry, and she laughed at the absurdity. “Step aside, Sir. You’re standing on my grandfather!” Her mirth over her foolish words ended in sobs.

“I’m here,” Marcus said. “It’s time to let me help you.” He held her, without judgment, without words, for a long, long time.

She welcomed his silence and calmed.

He lessened his hold, held her at arms length, examined her face. “Why are we digging the old boy up?”

She had to use his handkerchief before she was able to talk, then she found it necessary, in a flash of topsy-turvy awareness, to get off Grandfather’s chest.

There, inside a grave, beside a corpse, Marcus kissed her brow. “Do you feel better? Are you ready to tell me about it,” he asked in the same way he might were they strolling across the lawn.

Amazed by the incongruity, Jade nodded, and Marcus hefted her by her waist to sit her at the edge of the grave, her legs dangling, a little like Ivy sat his puppets.

Marcus jumped up to sit beside her. “Odd time for a treasure hunt, Scandal.”

“Odd time for a saunter, Scoundrel.”

“So ... that’s Grandfather.”

Jade looked into the grave. “Poor old bastard.”

Marcus’s lips twitched. “Beecher said he went missing; you said he died, but I was too caught up in you to realize the significance of the discrepancy. Who planted him?”

Jade sighed. “Grandmother. She told me she ruined her favourite jade figurine doing it.”

“Hard to dig with a figurine.”

“She might have used a shovel for that part.”

Marcus nodded. “Self-defence, I’d wager, ’cause he beat her?”

“’Twas murder—in her mind.”

“The magistrate might have seen it differently.”

“Or not.”

Marcus nodded. “Or not. But she’s gone. She can’t be punished now. Why not tell the magistrate and have done with it? Why the delaying tactics with the railroad?”

“To keep it from meeting its deadline, thereby stopping it from exercising my land option, and digging up Grandfather, of course.”

“Another company would have tried soon enough, you know. They’re lined up, three deep, to get a charter for this route in the hopeful event we fail. Coastal routes are prime property. Again, why not summon the magistrate and be done?”

“Giles Dudley,” Jade said on a sigh.

Marcus sat straighter. “I should have myself shot.”

“I think not.”

“Dudley’s the cousin trying to have your grandmother declared insane, right?”

“You knew about that?”

He waved away her question. “If Grandmother’s ... peccadillo ... comes to light, she’s got to have been insane, therefore, he succeeds in wresting Peacehaven away from you, and your girls lose their refuge. I am so dense. I had all the pieces, but I was too love-struck to put them together.”

Marcus punched the ground with a fist. “Damn, I just remembered another piece. Your pirate ancestor who beat a dog to death and buried it out here.” He pointed downward, a question in his look.

Jade nodded. “Gram’s big old Newfoundland.” She looked into the grave again, as if searching. “He should be down there somewhere. He was there first. Grandmother was trying to make a point.”

“I doubt your grandfather understood that.”

Jade sighed. “I know. Too bad.”

“Wait, your grandmother named you after a murder weapon?”

She laughed. “My mother named me after my grandmother’s favourite jade figurine before the ... momentous event.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Gram told me about it on her deathbed, the same day I discovered the family skeleton might very well be dug up by the railroad. Did I have time to be bothered?”

“Do you still have that figurine?”

Jade nodded.

“Can I have it as a wedding present? I love Jade.”

Jade stifled a sob. “You know I can’t marry you. And you can’t still want me, after everything I’ve done to you.”

“Some of the things you’ve done to me have become memories that console me.” He hesitated. “Guess they’re going to have to last me a lifetime.” He sounded hurt, resigned.

Jade swallowed the sorrow that rose in her throat to choke her. “Damn it. You don’t want me. My family tree is riddled with wife-beaters and murderers.”

“All you need is some aristocratic blood injected into your vermin-riddled—Ouch!”

Jade rubbed his arm where she’d pinched it. “Sorry.” They regarded each other solemnly, sitting at the edge of a grave at midnight, lantern light once again casting a glow across a certain dead branch of her tainted familial tree. “Marriage is impossible for me, Marcus. Gram was right. If I relinquish myself to you, to passion, I forget all else. I cannot afford to lose my purpose. If I give my heart or my hand, I’m living proof I’ll lose my focus, my very self.

“You’ve already given me your heart, but you’re afraid to admit it, so that argument’s useless. You’ve been caring for your girls as well as ever, despite your love for me, I’d like to add.”

She ignored him. “If I lose the Benevolent Society for Downtrodden Women, the women in my care will lose as well. Being attracted to you makes me weak and ... needy. A woman must remain alone and invulnerable to remain strong.”

“Balderdash!”

“I must think and do for myself, Marcus. I need to be strong. About that, Gram was right. But about one thing, I believe she was wrong.”

“Which is?”

“Men. Not all of them are created equal. Some of them are good.”

“If I’m so bloody good, why won’t you keep me?”

“You know I can’t—”

His brutal kiss stopped her words. She allowed it to distract her for less than a minute, before she pulled regretfully, but forcefully, away.

Anger turned Marcus hard, dispassionate. “Let’s finish what you started. What next?”

“Relocate Grandfather. Garrett’s railroad crew is going to cut a course through here in a few days, to prepare the land for track. I told him he could.”

“Garr and Abigail turned their coach around to come back and tell me that. That’s why I’m here. They were worried about you.”

“They couldn’t have known—”

“No, but we all know you well enough to know that no small thing kept you fighting. Giving up was so out of character for you, we knew something else must be afoot.”

Jade huffed, put out to have been so easily read. Then she stilled. “Where’s Emily?”

“With Ivy, of course. He heard why Garr had returned and promised on his life to keep Em and Molly with him while I came to find you. The girls were sound asleep when I left. Molly was tucked up with Sergei the Wolf and Emily had Hungry Hedgehog and Merry Mouse. She didn’t want to separate them on their wedding night.”

Jade smiled sadly. Emily wouldn’t appreciate her separating herself from Marcus, either. “I’ll bring the cart closer. Can you get Grandfather out of there? That hole’s deeper than I am tall.”

“Having a little trouble with that, were you?”

“Not as much as I’m going to give you, if you don’t start moving.”

Marcus jumped into the grave and got moving.

By the time he filled in the old grave and dug a new one, about half a mile nearer Peacehaven, on non-optioned Smithfield property, two additional hours had passed.

“You should have brought two shovels,” he groused as he climbed out of the new grave and wiped his brow with his sleeve.