The Mysterious Heir (10 page)

Then the afternoon came when he returned to his house in London for a forgotten bit of paper and had seen again the mad recurrence of his waking nightmare. Only this time it had been the pudgy pale buttocks of Sir Belvedere that he saw trembling above his wedded wife. Sir Belvedere, a great useless, foppish fellow, had wept and pleaded and named five other fellows who had done the same thing and then left in a
great haste, shrinking and sniveling, though Morgan had not even touched him.

“I did try,” Kitty said, her dark eyes wide and frightened at her husband's great stillness where she had expected bluster and rage. But he only stared at her.

“Are you going to beat me?” she asked.

“Dogs are beaten,” he said with deep sadness, “and if you beat a dog, you are left with a cringing cur who is afraid to do more than lick your boot. That is never what I wanted, Kitty. I only wanted a wife.”

He left the house as silently as he had come.

When he returned a week later, he set Kitty's maid to packing, sent his servants scurrying to close the house, and called for his coach to be readied for a long journey the next morning. And it was not until they were long out of the City that he finally spoke to his wife. The words he then spoke were almost the last he ever had with her.

“I have joined the regiment,” he said calmly, “and shall leave the country soon. I am returning you to your father. I have the legal right to lock you in a cellar in chains if I so choose, so do not think yourself ill-used by this turn of events. You shall stay with your father until one of two things occurs. You can gain your freedom in divorce if my father dies, or gain it as a widow if I do. But there you shall stay until either thing happens. And if you don't, I shall return and make myself a widower. I promise you.”

He had gone from her father's house, riding like a fury loosed out into the world. Leaving her father weeping and begging forgiveness, and leaving her wearing her strange sad smile. He had gone to the battlefields and distinguished himself, since he courted death so assiduously. But death is a famously coy mistress, he discovered, and gave favor to other, less deserving men.

He was in hospital, waiting for his shattered leg to mend, when word came of Simon's death. He made his painful halt way back from funeral to funeral. For word came to him, even as he consoled his father, of his wife's last illness.

He was in time to stand over her bed and hear her last painful breaths. She lay, her inky hair witch-wild, scattered across her pillow, and breathed deeply as her father, twisting a Bible round and round in his hands, explained how difficult a birth it was.

“Don't despair, Morgan,” she whispered, opening her eyes to focus on him, “for it died too. The physicians were wrong, you see. But I truly liked you, Morgan. And”—and here he had to bend to catch the last words—“you really were the best, you know. Truly.”

“Enough!” the seventh Earl of Auden cried aloud, his hands tightening on the reins with the force of his thoughts, causing Scimitar to shy. Patting the great horse back to calm, the Earl wrenched his thoughts back to the present, back to the pale green spring morning. He turned Scimitar toward home. A mad start, this, he admonished himself, going back again over lost ground, a foolish unprofitable thing brought on by this ridiculous enterprise. Damn Bev and Tompkins, damn their eyes. I will pick them an heir and be done with it, and whoever I choose will be better than that sad blue babe my loving wife delivered herself of. At least whoever I pick will be my choice, and at least someone's legitimate son. But not his. He would not contemplate marriage again, not yet. Perhaps not ever. But he could not rid himself of women.

After Kitty, he had gone through a period of celibacy out of revulsion and, he admitted, out of fear of mockery or inadequacy. Then he had swung to excess, proving again and again that Kitty's wild need could not have arisen through any fault of his. Now he had come to terms with the entire female sex.

He still needed them, he liked them, and more damnably, he desired them. So he dealt with them on his travels on the Continent and he dallied with them only there. He would not return to London, where the echo of whispers still burned in his ears. Neither would he form alliances with local country lasses; the idea of practicing a sort of
droit du seigneur
revolted him. He had no wish to populate his district with farm and household help all bearing the same stamp of his face. He would not emulate old Lord Babcock down in the South, whose identically hawk-nosed footmen, maidservants, and tenant farmers were a joke through the land.

Instead he sated himself in far-off places, and only then did he return to his great love, Lyonshall. Here he stayed in his heart's home, until desire sent him ranging for surcease through the wide world again. He would settle the matter of the succession intelligently, he thought, as Scimitar moved on muffled hooves through the young grass to carry him unerringly home again. And he would be done with his regrets and inchoate wishes. He would choose an heir from this unpromising assortment of relatives and put an end to the impostor's plans. Then he would free himself to live out the rest of his life on his own diminished terms. This decided, as if to speed his own decision, he urged Scimitar to make haste homeward.

The Earl had reached the bottom of the long drive when he saw his friend Bev, neat as a pin and dressed to an inch, striding toward him and calling a hello to him.

“Where have you been, Morgan? It's almost luncheon and no one knew what you were about. Your guests are roving all over looking for you. You may have had a delightful time riding about, but I've had to placate them all and chat them up, and fiend take it, all they wanted to know is where you were.”

“I was out, as you said, riding, and having a delightful time,” the Earl said coldly.

“Don't look it,” his friend said doubtfully. “Look worn to pieces.”

“I shall assemble those pieces and go to greet my guests,” the Earl said more amiably, seeing the concern on his friend's face.

“Anthony and I fancied a ride ourselves, but I didn't think it right to desert the ladies, don't you know,” Bev complained. “They've been asking after you all morning.”

“Now, Lady Isabel's wrath at finding me gone, I can imagine,” the Earl said, thinking of blond, seductive Isabel, who had been one of Kitty's confidantes. “But how you managed to prize a question, much less a word, out of Anthony's great-eyed cousin, I do not know.”

“She's a very nice sort of girl,” Bev asserted stoutly. “You just frighten her, I think. She's just a bit shy.”

And the Earl, walking Scimitar slowly back to the stables,
called over his shoulder, “Have a care, Bev, the shy ones are the very worst sort.” As I, he thought with a grim nod, should well know.

“I ain't in the petticoat line, Morgan,” Bev grumbled after him, “as you should know.”

6

Although it was only a two-page letter she had finally penned to her uncle, begging permission to return home, Elizabeth spent the better part of two days reading and rereading it whenever she was at leisure in her room. Soon there was not a comma nor a period in her missive that she had not contemplated and corrected several times. And yet, it would not have been a great surprise to anyone who knew Elizabeth well to see her carefully tearing her earnest little letter into small shreds on the fourth day of her visit to Lyonshall.

It was not as if a single thing had changed since she had written it, nor that anyone had spoken with her and counseled her to destroy it. It was rather that Elizabeth had grown heartily disgusted with herself and her lack of enterprise. Her mornings were usually spent roaming her room waiting for the clock to chime noon. Her luncheons were spent in tongue-tied misery at the Earl's lavish table, her afternoons in solemn contemplation of her host's gardens and walks. After she dressed in solitary dignity, her evenings were used up first with the business of dining with the assembled company and then in retreating to a corner of the room while the other guests entertained each other. She had suffered through Lady Isabel and Lord Beverly's duets at the pianoforte, had watched Anthony or Richard and her host playing desultory games of chess, and had listened to Owen recite bits of tedious poetry for the company's edification.

As she had sat quiet as a clam she had also seen Lady Isabel making an unmistakably dead set at their host. She
made such generous play with her eyelashes that Elizabeth wondered sourly that the Earl had not contracted a chill from the breeze that was set up by them whenever he turned to speak with his fair guest.

Although Lady Isabel was charming and effusive with all the rest of the company, she had obviously early on discounted Elizabeth as either competition for herself or, indeed, as a person of consequence at all, and scarcely addressed any but the most inconsequential of remarks to her. Owen followed his mother's lead, but then, Elizabeth thought in all fairness, the child seldom spoke to anyone unless spoken to first. Cousin Richard hadn't a syllable for anyone, he seemed so intent upon some inner conflict.

It was not as if Elizabeth had no opportunity to speak. The Earl had tried on some few occasions to coax some comment from her, but he so overwhelmed her that she blushed to recall her half-witted responses to him. But Lord Beverly was an easy chap to speak with. Although he was more than a decade older than her cousin and every inch the impeccable man of fashion, Elizabeth soon found that she treated him with the same easygoing maternal tolerance that she used in dealings with Anthony. And that seemed to be the treatment he was most pleased with.

Yet the person she most needed to have in conversation was the one she found the most difficult to get alone. For Anthony was busy every moment of his waking day. He slept the mornings away, only to rise and go about some lighthearted business with his new friend, Lord Beverly. If he was not in that exquisite's company, he managed to steal off to precincts unknown until mealtimes, and then he was up and off again. It seemed to Elizabeth, who knew Anthony as well as she knew herself, that he was deliberately avoiding her. That was enough to firm up her resolve. So she tore her letter into neat shreds and incinerated it at her hearth. Then, although it was the quiet time of day when all the guests were dressing for dinner, she eased her door open, took in a deep breath, and went off to beard Anthony in his den.

His room was far down the corridor and round a turn in the hall. The Earl, Elizabeth thought as she walked quickly towards
Anthony's room, seemed to be a conservative gentleman and had housed his female guests far from the gentlemen's quarters. It was her own cousin she was going to visit, but as these were definitely masculine preserves she was entering, Elizabeth felt a bit nervous at invading them, so she rapped a bit more imperatively at Anthony's door than she had planned.

“H'lo, Liz,” Anthony said as he opened the door. “Whatever are you doing here?”

Conscious that in some way she ought not to be there and momentarily a bit annoyed at Anthony's new breezy manner of speech, no doubt learned from Lord Beverly, Elizabeth entered his rooms and said snappishly, “We have got to talk, Anthony. You've been very expert at eluding me. But we've been here for some days and we haven't had a chance to speak. I had to discover how things were going with you.”

“Don't know what's eating at you, Coz,” Anthony said, going back to his mirror to arrange his neckcloth. “You've seen it all. Shouldn't have any complaints. Everything's going just as it ought.”

“Anthony,” Elizabeth said patiently, “the night we arrived, we were expecting to find an old gentleman on his deathbed. When we discovered the Earl to be otherwise, you seemed ready to fly into the boughs. Don't deny it. And now you appear to be pleased with the circumstances. If you would be so good as to leave off fiddling with that neckcloth for a moment, I would like you to enlighten me as to your sudden change of heart.”

“Well, that just it,” Anthony said, grimacing as he noticed the left side of his cravat was now an inch higher than the right. “Nothing's really changed, Coz. Nothing at all. The Earl still needs an heir. And I am here on the spot. What more do you want?”

“But the whole circumstance has changed, Anthony,” Elizabeth said, turning to fidget with the fringe of a hanging of Anthony's bed. “Even if you were named heir, it would only be a temporary measure. For the Earl's a young man and might soon supplant you with a son of his own.”

“No fear of that.” Anthony grinned, seeing his toilette completed at last, and turning to his cousin. “You look very
fine tonight, Elizabeth. But I don't know that it's proper for you to be here in my rooms.” He frowned.

“Whatever are you talking about?” Elizabeth said with some surprise.

“Well, it's true you're my cousin, but it's not at all the thing for you to be here, in secret, in my rooms. You're the one who lectured me on all the proprieties, you know.”

“Not that,” Elizabeth said with consternation. “There's nothing wrong with my being here. How else would I be able to get you alone, when you're flying off in all directions all day? And I am more than your cousin, Anthony. I taught you your first word, if you recall,” she said defensively, wondering all at once if he weren't right about how her visit might be construed by others, but trying to get in a few words before she left. “What was that you said about the Earl not supplanting you?”