The Windflower (48 page)

"Oh, Nan," he said to her, laughing. "How could you? Very well, then. As you say, I'm a pirate, and I've kidnapped you."

"But you have! He has! He's telling the truth!"

It was no use. None at all. The landlady began to tut-tut, the kitchen maids to giggle, and the ladies with the poodle to talk about the want of conduct prevalent among young females of this generation. The landlord clapped Devon heartily on the back and proclaimed him the scourge of the Seven Seas, adding with a sly wink that he supposed the shot was to be paid for in pieces of eight! There was a good deal more of that kind of badinage, which Devon allowed to continue until, apparently, he felt that he was well revenged.

A mile from the inn he stopped the carriage beside an arched stone bridge above a brook where cows rustled, half-concealed in the rushes. She shrank from him but had no strength to fight when he entered the carriage with a length of rope and bound her wrists.

"I'll say this for you," he conceded grimly. "You try."

Evening came, a smoky mauve lip on a black horizon. They had stopped often to change horses. Twice he had brought food to the carriage, and she'd had to eat it with her hands tied. She'd had to ask him to make a third stop with choked-back pride. This time the "convenience" was a beech copse where wasps zigzagged among tiny hawkweed flowers, and convenient it was not, because he refused to untie her wrists. If his acute golden eyes noticed the trail on her cheek left by tears hastily knuckled dry with bound hands when she came back to the carriage, he gave no sign of it. Mentally retracting everything she'd thought earlier about his basic decency, she was so wretched, she almost had the relief of being able to convince herself she hated him.

She slept, or it seemed so. A gray veil settled over her vision; a soft roar muffled all other sound; her mind carried meandering dream images. Awareness came occasionally in swiftly vanishing stabs. Some fragment of her stuporous brain registered the choked turnpikes, the change in sounds and odors, the brilliant flash of bright-lit shop windows glancing off her eyelashes. She slid into wakefulness in a still carriage, her body crumpled over her valise. Her spine felt like a stiff iron pipe, her eyes burned from lack of rest, and her throat was sandy. Devon, gathering her upright, was shrouded in rotating star points. Blinking rapidly against the altering intensity of light and the fresher air as he drew her outside, she pulled out of the steadying arms, her pattens clicking against a pavement.

"Don't," she snapped. "I can walk."

"As you wish," he answered impassively, not taking his hand from her elbow. Her strained eyes focused on his unreceptive features and then turned wildly over her shoulder toward the street alive with the chime of bridle and harness as elegant town coaches passed upon its great breadth. Buildings of immense proportion lined the even pavement, their Corinthian pilasters and dazzling Venetian windows dwarfing a frontage of darkened shrubs.

"Where am I?" she whispered.

"In London. Portland Place," he said, taking her valise in one hand and escorting her through an openwork iron gate toward a portico that housed the fan-vaulted door of a tall Palladian mansion.

Disoriented by fatigue, she said, "This isn't a prison?"

"I suppose that would depend on one's philosophical bent," he said, but then seeing she was much too tired to make anything of that remark, he added, "No, it's not generally considered to be a prison. Frightened out of your wits, are you?"

Letting her anger show, she ground out, "Would that please you?''

"It might. Everyone likes to be taken seriously. To which I add the homily—"

"People must lie in the beds of their own making," she finished. A weary tear tickled down her nose, and she removed it quickly with the hunch of one shoulder.

"Precisely. How nearly in concert are our minds."

Her back, which she had been able to keep straight in front of him for most of the day, began to slump. "I'm too worn out to be particular. Show me
any
bed, and I'll sleep in it."

He laughed. It was the first time she had heard him laugh naturally in weeks, and she had forgotten how appealing and tender his face could become, the corners of his eyes relaxing into an engaging crinkle of smile lines, the ashen-blond hair purling in the night air.

"All in good time," he said. "There's someone I have to talk to first."

Her bound hands lifted, palms upward, toward the doorframe, and she said wonderingly, "You know someone who lives
here?"

"Yes. Come along, Merry pet."

Exhaustion and terror clenching at her throat, she watched Devon raise his hand to the paneled mahogany door and beat an imperative summons on the heavy brass knocker.

The door was opened almost immediately by an imposing personage with spaniel jaws who was unmistakably a butler. His chilly "How may I serve you?" dissolved into astonishment as he stepped back, staring at Devon, his sparse gray eyebrows mounting his forehead.

"Your Grace!" he exclaimed.

"Good evening, Harris," Devon said in a tranquil voice, drawing Merry ruthlessly into a deep entrance hall. He glanced toward the graceful upward curl of a marble staircase. "Is Cathcart in?"

The butler seemed to have recovered himself, like an old but sturdy chair taken to the upholsterer's. "Indeed he is, Your Grace. His lordship has just this minute arrived home and repaired to his dressing chamber." Walking to a doorway with a handsomely carved architrave, he continued, "Permit me to offer Your Grace the use of the library. There's a fire made up within, and I think you will find it quite comfortable. And if I may be so bold, Your Grace, as to say how happy an occasion your safe return is and will be to your family and acquaintances—a happy occasion indeed. Lord Cathcart will want to be informed of your arrival without delay."

"Thank you." Devon's hand on her arm forced forward Merry's balking footsteps.

She was perhaps not able to control her emotions as well as she might have wished in times of duress, but recent bitter experience had trained her to keep thinking. Pulled despite her shallow resistance into a large well-ordered library, she closed her mind to the Chinese rug, the aged monastic manuscript supported in an open position on a library table. Devon stood by the door inquiring genially about the butler's gout and rejecting an offer to surrender their outer garments. She was just wondering whether that last might be interpreted to mean they would not stay here long when the phrase
Your Grace
seemed to unclot slowly from the rest. Badly shaken to learn that Devon was on saunter-in-at-midnight terms with an English lord, and shamed by being handled brusquely in front of such an obviously reputable gentleman as Mr. Harris, she had failed to register the title. If
Your Lordship
was the form of address for a marquis or an earl, then
Your Grace
must be the proper mode for a— For a
what?
Who was this man? The soft closing of the door behind her generated a hiss of fear in the nerves that surfaced her skin. She turned to find Devon standing alone by the doorframe, regarding her steadily, the closed expression opening in the marigold firelight to a steely courtesy that encouraged her to voice her thoughts. She heard her own voice whisper,
"Hirundo poeciloma.
You knew the swallow. And the gull—you trained it to come to you. Because you are the son of a naturalist, aren't you? And an artist. No one has ever understood my drawings as clearly. And that—that night on the beach I heard you speak almost with sympathy about the American cause." His expression was lightly interested; as though she was revealing no more than the solution to some childish riddle.
A house full; a hole full; you cannot gather a bowlful. What is it? Smoke.
His casual fingers had begun to uncatch the buttons of his greatcoat. At sea, in Rand Morgan's world, this man wielded great power. Her only chance had been that his danger would fade without Morgan's legions behind him, but she saw now with bitter frustration that instead it would grow, blossoming like herb of grace, into something more omnipotent than she ever had imagined. Staring fully into the intense mosaic gold of his eyes, she said, "Now 1 understand. You are Devon Crandall. And the Duke of St. Cyr, aren't you?"

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Brian Farquhar, Lord Cathcart, stared distractedly at the hurried flash of his carefully polished Hessian boots as they descended his black marble stair. Potbellied water drops were scattered like buttons on the bottommost step. Little Lyn must have had another accident with his shaving water; when she was away from under his housekeeper's firm hand, nothing could induce the girl to use the servant's stair. "T'other is so much grander-like," she was wont to pipe, and if Harris noted the spill, Lyn was sure to receive another sharp scold. With an exasperated sigh Cathcart bent to soak it up in his handkerchief.

The library door, he saw, was closed, and behind was Devon, back intact after more than a year of wandering in hell's own company to places God only knew. America? Canada? The Caribbean? Rumor had placed him in all three, often at the same time. And now he was here, his return as cavalier and careless as his departure. His family didn't know of his homecoming, that much was certain. Not two hours ago Cathcart had been sitting with Devon's mother, Aline, helplessly watching her wilt under Countess Lieven's subtly malicious quizzing about the absent duke. Cathcart remembered how he had cursed Devon silently for the agony of worry he so readily inflicted on his loving family. Perhaps it would be more judicial, Cathcart reflected, to curse instead the circumstances that had made Devon as he was.

Still fresh in his mind were the time-framed pictures of Devon as the beautiful, too perfect child demigod, creating remarkable machines generating electrical current that no one could understand but the boy himself, and running through the silvery beards of a barley field beneath the dark golden-tinged wingbeats of his eagle. Aline used to whiten when the majestic predator landed, deadly talons slashing the air, on her son's slight forearm, but Devon's father would only put back his great mane of tawny hair and laugh. Jasper Crandall had been that kind of man.

Jasper's death was one of those abstruse tragedies that leave one feeling flawed and unrelentingly mortal. A healthy, interested father sitting with his gifted son studying leaf sections under a microscope, Jasper Crandall had lifted his head, set down the small tweezers in his hand, and slumped forward in death, his brain massively hemorrhaged.

Much later that same night, retiring to the black solace of his own bedchamber, Cathcart had heard a light, clear-voiced command coming out of the darkness that had said, "Put out the candle, Brian."

Cathcart's uncomfortably dilating pupils had found Devon sitting dry-lashed on the bed, his bright head flossed in reedy moonlight.

"Why did my father die?" There was a shattered soul in the thoughtful childish voice, and Cathcart, numb from the loss of the man he had respected above all others, had heard himself blundering foolishly through empty phrases about divine will and submission to fate. He had spoken at length, the words coming haltingly. It was not until the clock of French porcelain on the mantel chimed the hour of midnight that he realized Devon had left quietly and he was alone. From that hour on Devon had found his own answers.

Uncrouching from the step, Cathcart glanced with rueful distaste at the water-heavy handkerchief in his hand and dispossessed himself of it underneath the hall porter's chair.

Devon stood by the walnut sideboard, helping himself to brandy. Cathcart was vaguely aware of a girl in a muddy Pilgrim's cloak standing beside the fire. A young female, Harris had dryly termed her. After asking Harris several times if he was quite certain the young person was indeed a
female
and receiving Harris's patient, pitying reassurances that yes, surely it was a girl and not Cathcart's absent son, Cathcart had lost interest in her beyond his inevitable irritation and awe that Devon had the temerity to bring one of his haphazard trollops to the town residence of his godfather. The lateness of the hour hardly made it any better. But as Devoir turned, setting down glass and bottle, Cathcart found himself forgetting everything beyond the brainstorming warmth of Devon's subtly delighted smile. Devon crossed the room in clean, quick strides to take him in a charmingly exuberant embrace.

Held at arm's length by his godson's strong bronzed fingers, conquering his filling throat, Cathcart said awkwardly, "So you're back."

Devon separated his hands and shrugged, a continental gesture. "As you see." The boy looked good—brown and self-possessed and superbly physically conditioned; the rich heavy hair had been eating sunlight. He had grown into the engagingly fashioned looks that had been almost overpowering when he was younger; maturity had revealed outwardly the extent of the inner depth.

"You haven't been home?" Cathcart asked, knowing the answer, testing the water.

"No. I'm counting on you to advise me where the batteries are placed before I approach the citadel. Are they well—Mother, Grandmother?"

"Yes. Yes, of course. But I
don't have to tell you that you've been sorely missed." The one comment, and no more. Lord Cathcart had learned with Devon it was best not to lecture. "Tonight I was with your mother."

Devon eyed Cathcart's knee breeches with an appreciative grin. "'Carlton House?"

Cathcart felt his face soften into an answering smile. "Carlton House," he agreed. A small movement from the silent figure by the hearth drew Cathcart's attention to her. Reluctant as he was to permit or acknowledge her presence, he said politely, "Have you eaten, either of you?"