Unmasked (10 page)

Hester rolled over on to her stomach on the grass, propping her chin in her hand. “Life is going to be unconscionably boring if I have to behave well all the time.”

“Life is going to be unconscionably short if you do not,” Mari said. “Now, I suggest that you go and change into something more respectable and I will go and take something for my headache and later, when we have had time to think, we may talk about what else we are going to do.”

“I could fetch you some mint tea,” Hester said generously, “given that I am the cause of your headache.”

“It would take vats of it,” Mari said. “I was thinking more in terms of laudanum and then I need worry about nothing at all. I am in jest,” she added, at Hester’s look of alarm.

Arm in arm they made their way up to the terrace and in through the garden door. Hester went off to the scullery to fetch some hot water to wash and Mari made her way into the hall. From behind the closed kitchen door she could hear Jane’s voice raised in alarm over the state of Hester’s clothes, and Hester spinning her some tale about falling from her horse and ripping her gown. Mari shook her head slightly over Hester’s glib lies.

There was a vase of lilies on the hall table, scenting the cool air with a hint of the exotic. Beside the flowers, on a silver tray, were two letters. Absentmindedly Mari picked the first one up.

I know who you are. I know what you did. You will pay me for my silence.

Icy slivers of fear slid down Mari’s spine. She could still hear Jane’s and Hester’s voices but they seemed to have faded to a murmur at the back of her mind. She could feel the warmth draining from her. Nick Falconer’s face rose before her eyes, the straight, dark brows, the uncompromising line of his jaw, his mouth. Surely he could not be the one who threatened her like this? Mari’s instinct told her that he would never do such a thing. He was too direct, too plain spoken. He was an army officer. He was supposed to be on the side of the angels.

But she could not trust her instinct. She could trust nothing and no one. Worse still, if it were not Nick who threatened her, then someone else was out there who knew her history and wanted to use it—and her—for their own ends. Once again, as on the previous night, she felt a terrible, insidious desire to go to Nick Falconer and tell him the truth about herself, to draw on his strength and ask for his protection. Her heart screamed at her to do it and her head told her she was nothing but a fool and it was the surest way to the gallows.

She crumpled the note fiercely in her hand. If there had been a candle alight, she would have burned the note there and then. And she knew that she would permit no one, neither some stranger in the shadows nor Nick Falconer himself, with his deep, dark perceptive gaze, his sinfully tempting mouth and his incendiary touch, to take everything she had gained away from her. Whatever happened, she would not succumb to him.

L
AURA
M
ATILDA
A
NNE
Elizabeth, twelfth Duchess of Cole, sat before the mirror in her dressing room, her chin resting on her hand, and stared despondently at her reflection. She was wearing an evening dress and had dismissed her maid, as she was about to go downstairs for dinner and the evening’s entertainment. But now she hesitated for one long moment, staring at herself, wondering if what was inside showed on the outside.

She hated house parties. She hated the fact that she spent half of the year rattling around Cole Court on her own and the other half with the place full of strangers she had no wish to get to know better.

All she wanted was to spend time with Charles and most fervently of all she hated the fact that he showed no desire to spend time with her.

Tonight there was to be a card party, another entertainment for her guests, another opportunity for Lord Henry Cole to bray about his exploits on the hunting field, for Lady Faye to push poor Lydia into the lap of some local landowner in the hope of an advantageous marriage, another chance for Nick Falconer to watch them all with that disconcertingly observant dark gaze of his, as though they were all exhibits in a freak show. Laura liked Nick—she sensed that he was a very straight and honorable man—but he frightened her, too. He saw too much. She knew it would not take him long to realize that she was desperately in love with Charles and that, shamefully, her husband, Nick’s oldest friend, had no time for her at all.

Laura had been in love with Charles Cole since she was eleven years old. She was the elder daughter of the Earl of Burlington, whose land marched with the Cole Yorkshire estates, and she had known from her earliest years that she was intended for a dynastic match. It was her destiny and she had accepted it without question. She was bred for it. Marriages of convenience were what the daughters of Earls
did.
What they did
not
do was fall in love with their future husbands in an unbridled, passionate and entirely uncontrollable manner. She had transgressed the rules of aristocratic liaisons and had humiliated herself in the process.

Often, when Charles was in London and she was in Yorkshire, she would sit in the library and wonder what he was doing at that very minute. Was he attending the House of Lords? Was he at his club? Was he—unbearable thought—making love to an opera dancer or in a Covent Garden whorehouse? She sat and tormented herself thinking about Charles but she doubted that he ever wasted a moment thinking about her. When they had first been married—ten years before—she had suggested eagerly that she should accompany him when he went up to Town and had been crushed when he had refused. He had not done it unkindly, for there was nothing cruel about Charles, but his indifference hurt her more than any malice would have done. It was the very absence of feeling at the heart of their relationship that pained her.

When she had confided her misery in Hester and Mari, they had both agreed that she should travel to Town unexpectedly one day to surprise Charles. Laura had thought about the idea. She had got as far as packing a portmanteau and summoning the carriage, but then her courage had failed her. What if Charles was in bed with his mistress when she rolled up on the doorstep? She had no idea if he had one but she thought it entirely likely that he would. Most men had certain needs, so she had heard, and he seldom satisfied them in her bed. How could he? Their beds were over two hundred miles apart. Even worse than contemplating surprising him with another woman was the thought that he would greet her arrival with a complete lack of interest, throw her a word across the breakfast table and return to his newspaper. She knew that Hester, so much more tempestuous than she, would
demand
Charles’s attention but Laura was not like her cousin-by-marriage. Laura was restrained, elegant, the perfect Duchess.

Laura stared into her own hazel eyes. She felt more akin to Mari, with her mysterious past and her icy outward shell, than she did to vibrant Hester. Laura knew all Mari’s history and understood that the one thing that they had in common was that they both wore a disguise, Mari as a respectable widow and Laura herself as the perfect Duchess. They were both impostors.

Laura sighed, stood up and tried to smooth the creases from her gown. It fell straight to the ground. She had no bust and no waist to speak of. She felt as angular and sexless as a washboard. It was no wonder that Charles shunned her bed.

Her guests were already assembled when she walked into the blue drawing room. She knew that she should have been there earlier to greet them and she could tell from Charles’s expression that he was a little surprised by this departure from her usually faultless behavior. She saw the ring of faces watching her. It was the same people, night after night, the same conversation and the same entertainments. Sometimes her life felt like a whirling top that never stopped spinning through the same scenes.

Mari was absent tonight. She had sent a note to apologize for an indisposition brought on by falling from her horse—again. Laura had smiled ruefully to hear of it because Mari was utterly hopeless at riding but insisted on trying all the same. Hester was there of course, although Laura wondered why, since she knew that these predictable social events bored her to tears. And there was John Teague, still gazing forlornly at Hester, and Henry Cole with his rheumy eyes from too much drink, and Faye, her mouth turning down at the corners with discontent. There was Nick Falconer chatting with Charles and looking inordinately attractive in evening dress, and next to him Dexter Anstruther who was, as all the maids had noticed, an extremely handsome young man. Laura’s gaze moved on to Charles himself and immediately he eclipsed everyone else in the room. She felt a hopeless, desperate wave of love submerge her, just as it always did. Their eyes met and he gave her a slightly quizzical look as though checking she was quite well and that she would not let him down in front of their guests. Laura gave him a faint reassuring smile in return and wondered, suddenly hysterical, what they would all say if she burst out, “Good evening, everyone! I have something to tell you all. I am one of the notorious criminal gang who ride out as the Glory Girls and take from the rich to give to the poor. I am telling you this because secretly I am hoping to be found out—and finally shock my husband out of his
intolerable
indifference toward me!”

She imagined Charles’s face if she did it, imagined wiping that uninterested expression from his features and replacing it with astonishment, disbelief, anger. At least she would have made him feel something for her. Anything would be better than nothing. In that moment her love for him teetered on the edge of hatred.

She took a deep breath.

“Good evening, everyone,” she said. “I do apologize for keeping you all waiting. Shall we go in for dinner?”

H
ESTER DID NOT COME
home that night. Mari lay awake listening for the sound of the carriage and her friend’s step on the stair but it never came. She heard the clock strike two and eventually she fell into a light sleep troubled by dreams that had her tossing and turning for the rest of the night. Jane’s face was disapproving when she brought the morning tea and, when Mari got up, she saw that there was one cup untouched again on the tray and her heart sank.

It was to raise her spirits that she went out early again, immediately after breakfast, taking the path that led down to the river this time. She walked slowly, listening to the crunch of last year’s beech leaves underfoot and making very sure that no one was following her. She valued the freedom of being out in the open air. It was also a pleasure to be walking, not riding. Really, she was not sure why she persisted in trying to succeed at something she was clearly not very good at. Native stubbornness, she supposed. Her mother had always maintained that she was too obstinate for her own good.

For a second the clear, tumbling water of the river shimmered before her eyes and she blinked back the tears. The most difficult thing to bear of her entire experience had been the discovery that her family had perished the same winter that Rashleigh had brought her to England. As soon as she had escaped him she had made discreet inquiries. She had had some wild dream that she might pay for them to join her, somewhere safe, somewhere they could all be together. The news that they had died in a fever epidemic that had swept the country had been the final blow. It had almost destroyed her.

With a sigh she placed her little straw basket down on the grassy bank at the side of the river and sat down beneath a wide-spreading oak to remove her shoes and stockings. She had deliberately chosen one of her oldest gowns this morning, a demure dress of striped pink and white that she had joked to Hester made her look ridiculously like a debutante. Hester…For a moment a frown marred her brow. Much more of this behavior from her friend and she would go to Half Moon House herself and drag Hester out of the bed of whichever farmhand was her current fancy. Hester’s dangerous and self-destructive behavior simply had to stop.

She rolled her stockings up neatly and placed them in her shoes, then picked up the little basket and walked across the soft grass to the water’s edge. A kingfisher, startled from its perch on an overhanging branch, winged away along the river with a soft cry.

The river was low because it had not rained in a long time and the water only came up to her knees. The mossy stones slid beneath her bare feet and the soft, smooth sensation was delightful. She loved feeling so close to the earth, loved watching the way the bright green fronds of the ferns uncurled themselves amongst the damp stones and the way that the purple saxifrage peeped from between the roots of the trees. On the other side of the river, though, she had found a veritable treasure trove, a secret that she shared with no one. She settled the basket a little more firmly on her arm, tucked up her skirts and picked her way carefully over the slippery stones and through the fast-flowing water.

In a patch of chalky soil on the far bank was the plant she sought, its tiny scarlet fruits glistening ripe in the sun. She had learned from her reading that wild strawberries liked the limestone ground hereabouts, and when she had found her own crop of them, she had been delighted. They were exactly like the ones she grew in her hothouses, only smaller and sweeter, and the fact that they were hidden away here by the river and no one knew of them made their flavor all the more delicious to her.

She had nearly reached the bank and was about to scramble out when the stone beneath her feet shifted without warning and she almost fell. Grabbing for a branch to steady herself she felt the stones shift again, slipped, felt her balance go, and knew she was about to fall headlong into the river. The inevitability of it flashed through her mind and then an arm came hard around her waist and someone scooped her up into his arms and she was held hard and fast.