Vanity (50 page)

Her fingers trembled for the first time that evening as
she lifted the pouch from its resting place. She opened it and shook the tiny ring onto the palm of her hand. It exactly matched the one Rupert had shown her. She pressed the eye of the bird with the tine of a dessert fork on the table. The mechanism sprang open, and she pictured it fitted to that other ring to form a signet ring.

Her hand closed fiercely over her dearly won prize.

She had it.

And now that she had it, what next?

She went to the window and flung back the curtains. Gray streaked the eastern sky. She opened her palm and looked at the circular imprint of the ring where it had dug into her skin.

Was Rupert’s life worth this ring? Was any vengeance worth risking the hangman? What kind of injury could cause such a man as Rupert to risk his life to avenge it?

Octavia shivered, aware for the first time of her nakedness. The crimson glow of triumph faded, leaving her feeling cold and gray and bleak.

Turning back to the room, she gathered up her clothes, dressing herself as decently as she could to make the quick dash to her own apartments.

How long would it take Philip to discover the loss of the ring? Somehow she didn’t think he would go straight home. He would visit the stews, find some whore on whom he could wreak his rage and humiliation. But daylight would presumably bring him banging on the front door. It wouldn’t occur to him in a month of mad Sundays that Octavia might have purloined his ring, so presumably he’d make excuses for searching the parlor. Always assuming he could bring himself to face again the scene of such mortification. He wouldn’t want to see her, of that Octavia was convinced.

But before he came, both she and the ring would be safely out of the house. The gates of Newgate opened in two hours, at seven, and Lord Nick would receive the veiled lady as soon as visitors were permitted.

She tugged on the bellpull to summon Nell and began to throw off her evening dress.

“Y’are up betimes, my lady.” The maid hurried in fifteen minutes later, blinking sleepily. She set a tray of hot chocolate and sweet biscuits on a table and tried to stifle a yawn.

“Yes, I’m sorry to wake you so early, but I have an errand to run,” Octavia said. “Lay out my riding habit.” She poured a cup of chocolate and dipped a biscuit into the steaming drink. A sleepless night had made her hungry. Or at least she assumed hunger and fatigue were responsible for her queasiness and the uncontrollable shivers that ran through her.

She certainly felt stronger after the chocolate and biscuits, and her face, after the application of hot water, looked a little less drawn.

“Should I tell Mr. Griffin to summon the carriage, my lady?” Nell pinned up the cinnamon hair in a knot at the nape of Octavia’s neck.

“No, I shall walk,” Octavia said. “Pass me the black hat with the veil.”

Nell obliged, hiding her curiosity as her mistress adjusted the hat and dropped the veil over her face. “The black cloak, my lady?”

“Thank you.” Swathed in anonymity, Octavia hastened from the house.

Griffin, summoned early from his own bed by his mistress’s unusually early call for her maid, closed the door behind her as she hurried down the street in the fresh morning air. He was frowning as he went to his breakfast. Entertaining a gentleman late into the night in the absence of her husband and then leaving at crack of dawn, on foot and unescorted, dressed as if for a funeral, was not the usual behavior of a fashionable lady. Or at least, he amended, the early-morning jaunt in that strange garb wasn’t.

Octavia hailed a hackney on the corner of Piccadilly, gave the jarvey directions to Holborn, and sat on the very edge of the seat as the vehicle swayed over the cobbles and the cries of the street sellers rose on the morning air.

The ring was in the palm of her hand inside her glove, and her fingers were closed tightly over it. With her other
hand she hung convulsively on to the strap above the window as she perched precariously on the edge of the seat, unable to relax sufficiently to sit back.

Her eyes were on the window aperture, monitoring their progress, and she realized she was murmuring encouragement to the driver under her breath, urging him to increase his speed; and once, when he took a turn that she thought was out of the way, she had to restrain herself from banging on the ceiling to put him right.

But eventually he drew up outside the prison. “This what you want, lady?”

He sounded doubtful, leaning down from the box as Octavia stepped out of the carriage.

She made no reply, merely handed him his fare, before hurrying to the gate. The gate keeper peered at her veiled countenance. “Who you come fer?”

“The highwayman, Lord Nick,” she said in a low muffled voice.

“Does all right fer visitors, that gennelman does,” the gate keeper said jovially, unlocking the postern gate. “Quite a party ’e ’ad last even. Sent out fer ’alf a dozen bottles of sherry an’ the makin’s fer a punch bowl. Very jolly they was. Very merry.”

Octavia again refrained from comment, assuming Ben and Rupert’s other cronies from the Royal Oak had made up the party. And who was she to object if his friends came to cheer him up? If only she could persuade them to help her come up with a way to effect his escape.

She crossed the press-yard, already thronged with prisoners and their families, and went through the internal gate leading to the spacious chambers on the state side. She ran up the stairs, glancing occasionally into the rooms she passed where doors stood ajar. They were all comfortably furnished with what seemed in some cases to be their occupant’s personal possessions.

She had brought Rupert’s books and the chess set, but she could arrange for more comforts to be brought in. A decent bed, chair, washstand.

His door was closed and she raised her hand to knock, then changed her mind and lifted the latch. The door swung open and she stepped inside.

“Amy? Bring me some tea, there’s a good girl.” Rupert’s sleepy voice came from a mound of bedclothes on the narrow cot. “I’ve a head on me to fell a prizefighter!”

“Serves you right!” Octavia declared, throwing off her veil. She bounded across the room and jumped on him, sitting heavily astride him. “I hear you had a great party last night, with punch and immoderate quantities of sherry.”

“Oh, you weigh a ton!” Rupert moaned, heaving himself onto his back in an effort to dislodge her. “Get off me, woman!”

“No!” Leaning over, she pulled the covers off his face and kissed him. “How could you amuse yourself without me?”

“I doubt you’d have enjoyed it, sweeting,” he said with another groan. “We played cards all night and I lost a fortune.”

“Well, I brought you some more money,” she said, settling herself firmly on his belly. “And books and a chess set … and something else.”

Rupert squinted up at her. He could feel her suppressed excitement, the currents of tension running through her. She looked happy, almost convincingly so, as if the cheerful exterior was not simply masking her dread and despair.

“What else?”

She drew off her gloves with an air of great mystery and slowly uncurled her palm. Delicately she extracted the ring from the little silk pouch and dropped it onto his chest.

“What the hell …?” His hand closed over it but he stared at her, and his eyes were abruptly filled with a dark and savage fury. “What did you do for this?”

Octavia’s stomach began to churn. She hadn’t known what to expect, but she hadn’t expected to see this terrifying rage. “Nothing, really,” she said, shaking her head.

“Get off me!”

His voice was low, but the command was so ferocious, she had scrambled to the floor without realizing it.

Rupert flung aside the bedclothes and stood up. “Damn you, Octavia! I told you it was over. I told you I would not have you involving yourself with that sewer rat! Now, what did you do? Tell me. Every damn thing!”

“Nothing. I …”

“Tell me!”
His eyes were great holes in a face that had the gray-white tinge of a corpse.

Octavia pressed her lingers to her lips, struggling to gather her senses. Her voice as leaden as a winter sky, she told him how she’d sought Bessie’s help. She described the encounter with Philip as flatly and objectively as she could, hoping with her cold, clear words to distance the reality, to banish the ghastly degrading images she could see flying through his mind. But his face grew grayer, his eyes emptier, and finally she lost her composure.

Her voice cracked as she stepped toward him, one hand outstretched in appeal. “Oh, God, Rupert.
Please
don’t be so angry. I did it for you. I wanted to show you that you mustn’t give up. That things can be done … that …”

“Quiet!”
he thundered, thrusting her hand away. “You talk arrant, self-deceiving nonsense. This place is not an illusion. Grow up, woman, and face the truth.”

“No.” She shook her head. “No, I won’t face your truth. It’s not the truth. There is a way.”

“Go home, Octavia,” he said with abrupt weariness. “It doesn’t help me to listen to your fairy tales.”

“But—”

“Go home, I say!”

“You be wantin’ yer breakfast now, Lord Nick?” Amy’s pert voice came from the doorway. “Now that yer visitor’s leavin’.”

She glanced at Octavia with smoldering triumph. Clearly she’d been listening to the last exchange.

“Yes, and bring me tea and hot water,” Rupert said.

He turned from Octavia and strode to the window where he stood looking out into the yard. He opened his hand and Philip’s ring fell to the floor. It rolled across the
boards and came to rest against the skirting, a bright circle in the dust.

Octavia dropped the veil over her face. The sound of her running feet stumbling down the stairs echoed in his head.

I
t was a long time before Rupert moved from the window. Amy brought in his tea and breakfast, but he didn’t turn as she set it down with a clatter of crockery and cutlery.

“This’ll get cold, sir, if ’n ye don’t eats it soon.”

“Leave it, Amy.”

“Well, will there be anythin’ else? Should I jest tidy up while—”

“Leave, girl!”

Amy backed to the door and scuttled away without another word.

Rupert bent and picked up Philip’s ring. He let it He in his palm before taking out his own from his shirt pocket and slowly marrying the two. He slipped the signet ring onto his right hand and held it up to the light. The eyes of the bird seemed to gleam knowingly at him from an exquisitely engraved tree branch.

He had it. And when Philip saw the whole ring on Rupert Warwick’s finger, he would know his twin again. Watching that knowledge dawn on his twin’s face would be Rupert’s moment of vengeance. All that would follow from it would be simply restitution. Philip might try to fight
publicly Rupert’s claim to be the missing Cullum Wyndham, but once he saw the ring, he would know in his blood that he couldn’t succeed. And he would know that the harder he fought, the more fool he would look.

The ring would serve as Cullum Wyndham’s introduction to the family lawyers and the family doctor, those who would find concrete proof of the returned heir’s identity when they examined and interrogated him. His body bore scars and marks that the doctor would know, and the claimant possessed details of domestic history that only a member of the family could know.

The ring would bring Philip’s house of cards tumbling to the dust.

And the ring bound Cullum to uphold the honor of the Wyndhams, preventing him from forcing his brother to face his own ruin and his own past. Revealing his identity now would drag the name of Wyndham through the mud. It would broadcast to the world that the true Earl of Wyndham was a common highwayman on his way to the hangman. And he couldn’t do that. He could not dishonor Gervase’s memory.

Hell and damnation!
Rupert poured himself a mug of tea and gulped it down, scalding his tongue and the back of his throat. But the burning liquid cleared his head.

He refilled the mug, then began to pace his prison, unable to lose the images of Octavia tangling with his twin.

It didn’t matter that she’d outwitted Philip … that she’d subjected him to the most telling mortification a man could endure. She had still exposed herself to the hands and mouth of a vicious cur, and she’d done it without Rupert’s knowledge and at a time when he could do nothing to help her. She was quite without protection and he was stuck in this place, helpless. Powerless to alter his own situation or to have a role in Octavia’s.

Didn’t she understand how that made him feel? How his frustration and his self-contempt were a sour well bubbling deep inside him. And instead of understanding, sympathizing, lending him gentle sweetness and comfort, she had put herself in danger. She had acted, while he could
only sit and twiddle his thumbs and contemplate his execution. And what she’d done was futile. Pointless. His secret must go to his grave. And the possession of the ring now only highlighted the powerlessness of his position. The futility of his vengeance.