Revenge of the Barbary Ghost (22 page)

But would the magistrate understand that about Darkefell? If the marquess continued to refuse to explain what he and St. James fought about, would he be in danger of arrest? She watched him, aware of a desire to reach out and touch his cheek, the dark outline of his beard showing despite exquisite barbering. She wished she could run her fingers along his jaw, touch the pulse at his temple, kiss the lips that were pressed together as he thought. He had begun to weave a dangerous spell over her, she mused, one of fascination and obsession. She thought about him far too much now. She turned her gaze away, to find that Pamela was watching her with a slight smile on her weary face.

“I think I’ll pay a visit to young Mr. Netherton,” Darkefell said. “Though I doubt I will tell him my real motive.”

“Pam and I could visit Miss Lovell,” Anne said, tapping her gloved fingers on the table. “If she had a definite understanding with Mr. Netherton, then it is unlikely he would have considered St. James a serious rival. Perhaps they cleared things up after his attack on Marcus the night of the assembly.”

“That
is
one thing you could do that I could not,” Darkefell agreed. “Captain St. James’s prior connection with Miss Lovell would be all the explanation you need.”

Anne rose, and Pam, too, stood. “But I suppose, right now we ought to return to Cliff House,” Anne said, thinking that Pam was exhausted and near the end of her tether. She didn’t know what else to say to the marquess. Anne was increasingly uneasy with the amount of information she had to keep from him. Without Pam’s permission she couldn’t tell him about St. James being the ghost, Pam’s involvement in the smuggling, her connection to Micklethwaite or even Puddicombe’s threats.

“May I speak to you alone, for a moment, my lady?” Darkefell said, his gaze fixed on her eyes.

Trembling a little, she said yes, and they walked out of the inn coffee room toward a tree on the village green, as Pam sat on a bench outside the inn and waited.

Darkefell, brushing against Anne as they walked, said, “I would kiss you, right here and right now, if I could.”

Her heart thumping, her breath catching in her throat, Anne said, “You shouldn’t say things like that, Tony.”

He stopped and stared down at her. The breeze lifted locks of his dark hair from his forehead and he swept them aside. “Why not? Why should I hold back the truth?”

“Do you have anything to say other than … other than that you want to kiss me?” She pulled at her gloves and stared off into the distance, toward the church.

He frowned. She wasn’t meeting his eyes, and her frankness was one of the things he loved most about her. What wasn’t she telling him? “I’m going to ask some questions around the village. Is there anything you’re keeping from me, Anne?”

“Why do you ask?”

He grabbed her shoulders and ducked to catch her gaze under the brim of her hat. “Tell me! Was St. James mixed up in this smuggling business?”

“Why?” she blurted out, meeting his gaze. “Have you heard anything?”

“No,” he said, reluctantly. “But it’s a reasonable surmise. Why else would he be on the beach in the middle of the night? He must have been killed down there. I’ve heard of this Lord Brag who is the masked leader of the St. Wyllow Whips; I’ve been wondering if St. James was Lord Brag. Perhaps he was in partnership with the boat captain, Micklethwaite.” When she didn’t reply, he said, “Anne, this is no time to keep things from me. I thought we were working together on this?”

She didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then she turned her gaze up to him, but it was shuttered, the clear honesty usually present in her gray eyes clouded with evasion. “Tony, I am bound by promises I have made. I will tell you all I can, when I can, but I cannot promise complete candor.”

A cold chill crept into his bones. “Don’t do anything foolish,” he pleaded.

“I have to go,” she said, avoiding his eyes again. “Pam is so tired. You’re going to come to us tomorrow, after the funeral, aren’t you?”

He assented and watched her go, walking arm in arm with Pamela St. James. What was she keeping from him, and why? St. James
must
have been tangled up in the smuggling business.

A few minutes and a few questions later he had found his destination, and entered a barrister’s office on a narrow, sloped back street in St. Wyllow. There, laboring on a stool by the pool of weak daylight streaming in the window, was young John Netherton. Darkefell cleared his throat and the fellow looked up, startled, throwing a blotch of black ink over the document he was copying.

He slipped from his stool, bowed, and said, “What can I help you with, my lord?” as he tidied the blotched document, crumpling it and mopping up the ink.

“Is your master in?”

“No, my lord,” the young fellow said. “He’s absent today, on business in St. Ives.”

“Good. It’s you I wish to talk with. Let’s get out of the dreadful stuffy room and walk.”

Netherton finished cleaning the mess and locked up the office, then the two men scaled the narrow, steep street to the village green. Darkefell wondered how best to bring up the subject of Julia Lovell and Marcus St. James, but he needn’t have worried about that. Netherton began the conversation.

“I heard you bested Captain St. James, the night of the assembly. I would have shook your hand if I’d seen that, sir. That man needed taking down a peg or two.”

Darkefell glanced sideways. “You do know he is dead, murdered, and in a cowardly, brutal fashion.”

Netherton nodded, his open countenance showing no remorse for his previous comment. “Doesn’t change the fact that he was a slimy eel, my lord. Those officers, they think they can take anything they want, come into St. Wyllow, drinking, flirting,” he said, his voice trembling. In a lowered tone, he added, “Turn a young girl’s head with their ways, they do, splashing money about, making promises.”

“You’re not sorry he’s dead.”

“I’m not,” he said, vehement, his jaw set and chin thrust forward. “He would have been an awful husband to my Julia, an’ I heard he was going to ask her pa for her hand. Old Lovell would sell his soul to the devil to climb up in society beyond his family worth, and the captain bragged about his connections, used a lot of big names, Lady Anne Addison among ’em. Not for Julia’s sake, though, does her pa want to move ahead,” he ranted. “No, it’s for his own arse-kissing sake, beggin’ your pardon, my lord, for the profanity. He thinks if he can just get in the right circles, he can get himself a knighthood.”

Darkefell reflected that he had felt much the same sentiment, that he was not completely sorry St. James was dead, because the captain’s death eliminated a rival for Anne’s hand. Though the sentiment was beneath him, he still felt a fellowship with the younger fellow. “He was courting Lady Anne, too, you know.”

“And makin’ love to old Lady Foakes.”

“Who?”

Netherton plunked down on a bench in the middle of the green, and put his face in his hands. “St. James was having an affair with Lady Foakes, Julia’s chaperone, the one who was supposed to be getting Julia married to someone uppercrust,” he said, his voice muffled. He scrubbed his face and looked up. “I’m not good enough for Julia, Lady Foakes figures. Prob’ly right on that score,” he said, gloomy. “St. James began to make those sheep eyes at the old bat, and I noticed something odd. Both of ’em—the captain and Lady Foakes—would be gone for a while at the same time. He was giving her what she wanted, and she made sure he was first in line for Julia’s hand.”

“Did you tell Julia this? That her chaperone and her suitor were having an affair?” Darkefell asked, not shocked, but wondering how it all jibed together.

“How could I? She was confused, my lord,” he said, turning his earnest gaze toward Darkefell, his pale blue eyes prominent. “One day, she’d be sure she wanted me, and the next, the captain would come around, sweet talking, telling her stories of places he’d been, things she should see, people he could introduce her to. He’d say she was too good to become a drab housewife—and she is that, sir—and she’d doubt me. I couldn’t hurt her by telling her the truth about Captain St. James.”

“You’re a better man than I, Netherton. I would have used any shred of displeasing information I had to crush St. James’s reputation if I thought it would do one single jot of good in the eyes of a lady for whom I care.”

“Instead, you beat him good and proper,” Netherton said, gazing at him with slavish worship.

Darkefell shifted uneasily. “I’m not proud of that, though I wouldn’t take it back. If I had it to do over again, I would have made it a fair fight first, though, told him I was coming for him.”

“You can’t fight fair with that sort, my lord.”

Was that true? In a game where the stakes were high, as high as love and life, was fighting fair for dolts? Darkefell examined the fellow, who had the pale, sallow look of someone who worked too hard indoors, and said, gently, “And so now, will Miss Lovell marry you?”

“I don’t know. It’ll be years before I can marry. But at least she won’t marry St. James.”

With a social climbing father and a chaperone who wanted her to marry above her station, she would likely marry someone else, though. “Is Miss Lovell’s father wealthy?”

Netherton nodded.

“And does he have a son to take over the brewing business?”

“No. Julia is his only child and he’s a widower.”

“Do you love the law, as a profession?”

Netherton shrugged.

“I would advise you, Mr. Netherton, to do this,” he said, then explained a course of action that might be the fellow’s only chance at marriage to Julia Lovell in the next ten years.

“Do you think that will work, sir?” the fellow said, a rush of color coming into his cheeks.

“Two things will doom it to failure,” Darkefell said. “If your Julia does not love you, there is no hope at all, or if you cannot follow through with what I have suggested, you will fail. But go, do your best. It is taking a chance, but why should you not? You’re young and in love.”

Netherton stood and turned to him, his pale eyes shining with hope. “I’ll go this minute.” He grasped Darkefell’s hand and wrung it. “Thank you, my lord!” he croaked, and took off, racing across the green, his step light, when just a half hour before it had been heavy with hopelessness.

“That was very good advice, young man.”

Darkefell turned to see the elderly blind man who had been speaking to Anne a few days before. He stood a ways away, one hand out, steadying himself on the village green’s pump. The marquess stood and said. “Your bench, sir.”

The old fellow walked with simple confidence to the bench and sat, both hands cradled over the knob of his hand-carved cane. “Abraham Goldsmith is my name, sir, and you are a marquess, so I’ve been told. Your fame spreads. That was very good advice you gave to the young fellow. I hope he succeeds. Young love should always succeed.”

Interested, Darkefell sat and examined the old man, saying, “Young love often turns into middle-aged anger, and then old cynicism, does it not?”

“If you believe that, my lord, excuse an old man saying this, but you have no right to be trying to marry Lady Anne.”

Darkefell grinned. Village gossip; his pursuit of Anne was likely a topic for many a tea table conversation. Let them talk; it mattered not one whit to him. “You think you know her that well?”

“I hear the smile in your voice, my lord, but having talked to her for a half hour, I know her well enough to know that she will never be one of those cynics you talk about.” He paused. “I think
you
know that, too, for it is one of the things that makes you want to marry her.”

“You don’t think I want her for her dowry? It is considerable, you know. Lady Anne is a very wealthy woman.”

“I am no fool, just because I’m blind. If you wanted a fat purse, you could pluck any girl from that sad marriage market in London.”

“Excuse me saying this, sir, but for you to disparage the Season … do your people not arrange marriages, much as we do?”

“Yes, with probably the same mixture of outcomes, both good and bad.”

They sat in silence for a while. The old man’s words had raised within him again the same question that plagued him over and over: Why did he so badly want to marry Anne? Was it simply true love, a sentiment he had never particularly believed in, in his life, viewed so seldom it was the merest chimera, wavering on the horizon, but never close enough to experience.

Though she had all the allurements he had been taught to consider—impeccable lineage, good dowry, excellent health—a hundred girls would have satisfied the requirements and been more malleable and easy to manage. In truth, he had not looked forward to marriage because his resolute sense of fairness would not allow him to do as many men of his acquaintance did, get the wife with child and leave her in the country for duty, while keeping a mistress in town for pleasure. The idea of being leg-locked for life with a copy of his sister-in-law Lydia, a girl who would vacantly stare at him if he sharpened his wit on her, a young lady who did not know the difference between a spinet and Spinoza, filled him with a sense of uneasy desperation. Certainly there were girls with minds ready enough to be taught, but did he want to become some husbandly schoolmaster, trying to cram enough knowledge and thinking into a young lady’s brain so she could be sufficiently sharp and able to hold a conversation outside of the marital bed?

But Anne! From the first moment he met her, he had a burgeoning hope that life—
his
life—need not be a solitary journey. He had never been attracted to any woman in quite the way he was to Anne. Plain, outspoken, unmanageable, independent, smart and contrary: she was all that and more. He would never be able to ride roughshod over her, and that excited him. She would challenge him at every turn. He’d always been sure a wife would either bore him within a half year, drive him wild with impatience, or make him despise himself
and
her because of her inability to stand up to him. Not one of those things worried him in the slightest about Anne.

And he thought he might love her, for she inspired a tender protectiveness he had never felt toward any woman. Though he was just as likely to experience a desperate exasperation over her inability to stay out of trouble, but that was a small price to pay for such joy as he found in her presence.