Earl Crush (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #2)

Chapter 11

Do you know when it started for me, love of mine? It was that first moment. The very first instant that I saw you on the doorstep, in your green dress and your green shoes and your hair the color Nature uses for things so sublime you cannot hold them in your hand. Autumn. Sunset. A flame.

—from the papers of Arthur Baird, written upon the back of an envelope, never sent

In Haddon Grange, they divided their forces.

Strathrannoch was tasked with remaining out of sight so as to avoid recognition. His afternoon activities seemed mostly to consist of lurking and attempting to look less conspicuous and strapping and earl-ish.

Lydia and Georgiana, meanwhile, wandered down the main thoroughfare in search of the boardinghouse Arthur and Huw had described to them. It had grown chilly in the fortnight since they had arrived in Scotland; Lydia held her embroidered pelisse close around her. Late-blooming cranesbill and lacy white hydrangea spilled from window boxes and pots set along doorways. Clematis in a dozen shades of blue and violet twined along thatched roofs.

Lydia’s plan had been twofold. Georgiana—who’d dressed down for the occasion—would make her way to the boardinghouse’s kitchens and begin to work her magic upon the serving staff. Lydia, meanwhile, meant to delicately pump the owner for information about Davis Baird.

Like most of Lydia’s recent plans, this one had been better in theory.

The owner was a brisk, bluff woman who had no time for mousy English spinsters. Every time Lydia attempted to speak, the woman finished her sentence with an impatient huff, and within the first several minutes, the four or five probing questions Lydia had prepared about Davis Baird had gone straight out of her head.

Things did not improve from there. By the time a quarter of an hour had passed, Lydia found herself back on the street outside the boardinghouse, having asked such useful questions as “Do you keep beds in your bedchambers?” and “Have you ever heard of, um, earls?”

She’d also apparently rented herself a room, which she scarcely remembered doing and certainly had not intended. But there was a key in her reticule in the place where several coins had formerly resided, so she supposed she’d somehow been talked into it.

Thankfully, Georgiana had been more effective.

“He’s been there,” Georgiana whispered under her breath as she caught up to Lydia in front of the milliner’s shop halfway down the main road.

They reunited with Arthur and Huw behind the local inn’s stables, where they’d temporarily boarded the horses. Arthur slouched against the wall. He’d once again lost his jacket and cravat, though if he’d thought to make himself less noticeable, showing a vee of muscular chest was certainly not the way to go about it.

Lydia was not, of course, looking at his chest.

“We’ve just missed Davis,” Georgiana informed them. “He stayed in the boardinghouse as recently as last week. It seems he came back here after his stay with you at Strathrannoch Castle, though he mostly spent his time out of the village—the chambermaids I spoke to did not know where. He has his room rented for the remainder of the month, although I gather he meant to be away for some time, as the laundress said he’d left not a stitch of clothing behind.”

“Well done, lass,” said Huw, turning an astounded gaze upon Georgiana. “You can’t have been in there half an hour, and yet you learned all that?”

Georgiana did not smile easily, but Lydia could see her gratification in the tiny tilt at the corner of her lips. “It was not the first time I have posed as a disgruntled servant, and I suspect it will not be the last.” Her expression went abstracted—considering, Lydia suspected, how a mysterious missing boarder might feature in her next novel.

Arthur’s jaw was tight. “I cannot understand it. Where would he have been spending his time? There are few aristocrats in these parts, and none of the people who usually put him up. And how in hell can he afford to rent these rooms for a month and yet live elsewhere?”

His brows were drawn together, his face set in lines of worry that had become familiar to Lydia in the last two weeks.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but we are closer now to finding out.” She felt a sudden impulse to soothe him, to step closer and place her hand on his shoulder. To run her fingers over the rise of muscle there and learn its contours.

She didn’t.

“And you, lass?” asked Huw, turning his white-bearded face to her. “What did you find out from the owner of the place?”

“Ah.” She licked her lips. “I, er, rented us a room.”

“Good,” Georgiana said. “That will make it much easier for us to search Davis’s chamber.”

Lydia appreciated this generous interpretation of her efforts.

Huw’s face, meanwhile, lit. “Excellent. We scarcely need Bertie and his craftiness with these two along, do we, Strathrannoch?” He gave Arthur a congenial sort of nudge.

“Indeed. They seem to have plenty of schemes of their own without any outside interference.”

Huw nodded, as though this were the highest of compliments. Given his affection for Bertie, perhaps it was. “Whom do you mean to have search the rooms?” he asked Lydia.

She had just a moment to appreciate the stable master’s willingness to allow two women to take the lead in planning the affair when Arthur interjected.

“I’ll do it,” he said firmly.

She lifted her chin to catch his gaze, which was irritatingly high up. “How can you? The owner, at least, will know you by sight.”

“And the chambermaids and laundress too,” put in Georgiana. “I asked them.”

“Georgiana and I will do it,” Lydia said. “I’ll go up to the room I rented, and Georgiana can meet me there—we can get into Davis’s room together—”

“For Christ’s sake,” said Arthur, “I cannot let you put yourself into danger for me.”

“What danger? What do you anticipate is waiting for us in an empty room?”

Arthur glowered at her. “I don’t know, but I will not let you face it alone.”

Lydia scowled right back. “Fine. If you can come up with a way to get yourself into the upstairs hallway without being recognized, then feel free to come along.”

“This is a terrible idea,” Arthur muttered that evening.

Huw at his side nodded. “Probably.”

“You’re not supposed to agree with me, man!”

“Your solution to the dilemma of your familiarity in these parts involves homemade explosives. You expect me to tell you this is wise?”

“You tell Bertie his mad ideas are clever all the time.”

Huw leveled a gaze at him. “You are no Bertie when it comes to scheming.”

“A fair point, to be sure.” Arthur rubbed a hand over the back of his neck and then finished wrapping the wick he’d fashioned from threads of his cravat. “All right. ’Tis done.”

He handed Huw his tinderbox, the lengthy wick, and the small incendiary device he’d crafted from a pinch of black powder, strips of bark, pine needles, and padding from the remainder of his cravat. “Remember what I told you. Place it just beneath the window outside the dining room where everyone inside is busy with supper. It will flare up because of the pine needles and make a nice, loud boom. The building’s brick, and there’s no dry shrubbery about, so there should not be any danger of fire. But you’ll keep an eye on it anyway?”

“Of course.” Huw looked slightly injured. “I must say, Bertie’s ideas usually involve less… arson.”

“For Christ’s sake, ’tis not arson —”

Huw was grinning beneath his beard. Arthur scowled at him.

In a few moments, the other man had the bundle placed and the wick lit, whilst Arthur lurked—there was really no other word for it—in the darkness behind a stand of trees. Huw stepped back hastily as the wick caught, and, within moments, the fire licked its way up to the device.

The volume of the subsequent explosive crack was startling even to Arthur, who was expecting it. At the same time, the pine needles caught fire and flared up in a bright yellow-white blaze, producing a thick column of noxious smoke.

It did not take long after that. The window was flung open, and people began to pour out the front of the building to investigate.

Arthur smothered a brief flash of glee at the success of his device and made for the servants’ entrance.

It worked better than he had expected—O Huw of little faith!—for the stairs to the second-floor bedchambers were dark and empty, and he was up them in a trice.

Georgiana met him in the hall. “Can you pick the lock?” she whispered. She was frowning. “I’d thought the door would be open so that the maids could enter and clean, but evidently your brother’s desire for privacy outweighed the demands of hygiene.”

“Aye,” he murmured back. “Pass me a few of your hairpins.” He could make his way around a simple latch, to be sure—it was just a bit of metal. And if it were something more substantial, he could bloody well kick the door in and figure out how to pay for it later.

Fortunately, breaking the door down did not prove necessary. While he worked with dirk and pin, Georgiana fetched Lydia from the chamber she had rented, and by the time Lydia was at his side, he had the door open.

“Go,” whispered Georgiana. “I’ll keep watch from the other room and distract anyone who comes by. Be quiet and quick and go out the servants’ entrance when you’ve finished.”

Lydia did not speak, only flicked a dark blue glance at him before slipping past him into the room. Her skirts brushed his trousers, and her bare arm whispered against his sleeve. He caught her scent, warm and sweet and—what was it? Vanilla? Cream?

He gritted his teeth and put his mind to the task at hand.

Lydia dashed immediately to the small escritoire at the corner of the room, so he perforce made for the wardrobe. It had no latch or lock, and the inside was all but bare. A shelf of linens, a sachet of dried lavender within, and, on the ground, a leather satchel that had his heart racing before he discovered that it held only a few stale bannocks and a stoppered flask. He uncorked the flask and gave it a sniff. Water.

His heart lurched with disappointment, and he turned back to Lydia. “Have you found anything?”

She was bent at the waist as she rifled through the escritoire’s drawers, leaning over the arm of the wooden chair. There was nothing overtly provocative about her pose; her dress, the fabric soft and striped in a pattern of blue and white, covered her nearly to her toes. He could make out her slippers—blue spangles today—and the hint of her stockinged heels as she stood almost on tiptoe.

No, there was nothing salacious about it, which meant there was no good reason for the direction his mind chose to take: Lydia bent over the chair, her skirts around her waist, her hair loose and wild and wrapped in his fist.

“Yes,” she said, and he nearly lost his head entirely before he realized she was answering his question.

He came toward her. “What have you found?”

She stood, her heels sliding back into her slippers. Her eyes were bright. She liked this, he realized—the thrill of discovery, this exploration behind closed doors. “Invitations, mostly—five of them, all signed by Lady de Younge. Do you think there could be some kind of romantic entanglement between them?”

Arthur choked. “I don’t suspect that, no. Lady de Younge was a close personal friend of our mother.”

Lydia tipped her head to the side. “And you think a separation in age makes a tryst between them unlikely? Or do you think it improper? I understand some people quite prefer older women—”

“For Christ’s sake.” He put his hand over hers to take the invitations, rather effectively cutting off her flow of words. “I think it unlikely because she was our mother’s friend . Give me those.”

The tops of his ears felt rather hot, and her fingers were cool and delicate beneath his, and the excitement of the clandestine search sang in his veins as he touched her. He wanted to keep touching her.

He had not been so close to her since the moment in his drawing room when he had run his thumb along the line of her mouth.

He had not stopped thinking of it.

When she spoke, her voice was just a bit breathless. “They are dated within the last month—I imagine he was at Strathrannoch for most of that time, which is why they seem to have gone unanswered.”

“Aye,” he said, releasing her fingers with some effort so that he might flip through the cards. “But still, it gives us some idea of where to look next. If we cannot make out his direction, perhaps the de Younges will know more.”

“Perhaps so.” She returned to the drawers, bending again, and from his vantage above her, he could see the line of her bodice, the sweet swell—

Ah. No. He could remove his gaze from her person, resume looking at the letters, and at least pretend not to be wild with lust over the redheaded Englishwoman who had come to propose marriage to his brother .

Somehow that protestation had grown rather distant over time. He tried to call it back.

“The rest of the drawers seem to be empty,” she said, “aside from some blank foolscap.”

He dropped the cards on the corner of the escritoire, having assured himself that there was nothing more to be gleaned from them. “Have the paper out.”

She did as he bade, though she directed a small frown in his direction. “You needn’t be so high-handed, you know. And I already looked through them—the sheets are blank.”

He made a small sound in his throat and then he picked up the paper and took it to the window, holding it at an angle in the dusky light.

“Oh,” Lydia said, and the approval in her voice was clear. “I would never have thought—do you see anything? Any impressions in the paper?”

Of course she would grasp what he was about. He already knew she was clever as hell, on top of being openhearted, sympathetic, alarmingly organized, and so brave and loyal it made his chest ache.

He was so flustered by her nearness that for a moment he thought he’d imagined what he saw on the foolscap, pressed deep by the impression of a pen.

But no. He’d not imagined it. He lifted the paper, tilted it against the light.

Lydia , it said.

And then—again and again, scratched out and restarted messily across the page: I’m sorry. I don’t know how to tell you. I’m sorry.

The soft sounds of Lydia’s breathing, the clatter belowstairs, the hum of a maid in the hall—all the sounds around him went dim as he looked down at the words.

He’d… known?

Davis had known who she was? Davis had regretted his actions?

Davis had meant to tell her the truth.

Arthur passed the paper wordlessly to Lydia. He felt—ah, hell, he could not stop himself from looking at her face. He was torn between the desire to give her privacy and the desire to burn the bloody thing before she read it. He didn’t want Davis to hurt her again. He didn’t want Davis to talk to her, damn it. He wanted—he wanted—

He watched, frozen, as she read the words.

She blinked rapidly, her lovely eyelashes fluttering. “I don’t understand,” she murmured. “That’s Davis’s hand. I recognize it. But how could he have known my name?”

“I don’t know,” he said roughly. If she started to cry, he was going to kill his brother.

But no. The thought struck him like a knife. He couldn’t kill Davis, because—what if Lydia still wanted him?

Arthur had assumed that the revelation of Davis’s misdeeds would have quashed Lydia’s affection for his brother. Surely she would not still love the man who had meant to use her for his own gain.

But this paper showed something different. This paper showed a man who regretted what he’d done. A man—perhaps—whom a woman in love might be able to forgive.

He found himself doing some violence to the remaining blank sheets of paper in the tightening grip of his fist.

Lydia’s gaze flickered to his hand, which now held a small snowball of crushed foolscap. “Goodness. Give me those. Have they anything you can discern?”

He had no idea. He hadn’t bloody checked. He’d been too busy watching Lydia’s face and trying to divine whether she seemed pleased or crushed or filled with longing.

But he could not make her out. She smoothed out the stack of papers and—did he imagine it? Did her fingers trace her name in his brother’s messy scrawl? He did not know.

The remaining papers held faint impressions of numbers and sketches that looked rather like Arthur’s own diagrams and designs. He had known—of course he had known that Davis too was handy with a drawing pencil. Only he had forgotten, somehow. It had been a long time since he’d seen that side of Davis.

Lydia flipped through the pages, holding them this way and that against the light. “They’re measurements,” she said finally, shaking her head. “I can see a mark for scale here—perhaps this is a building or a bridge.” She looked up at him, eyes wide, face mystified. “Could this be some alteration to your rifle scope design?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I ground the lenses myself with a process of my own invention. I do not think he could create another scope, even with the benefit of my notes. But I… I don’t like to think of Davis loose in a city with the prototype.”

She blanched. “These numbers—could they reflect the rifle’s range?”

“Perhaps. I can’t say for sure.”

She had drawn closer to him as they shared the papers, and now she placed a hand on his upper arm. He could feel her fingers, five light points of contact. His focus tightened onto the small square of connection between them, and his body tightened too. His head spun.

He wanted her. He craved her.

It was as though the revelation that Davis had known her name had shone a bright light into the shadowed corners of Arthur’s heart. He did not want her to want Davis. He wanted her for himself, all to himself, and the hell with the rest of the world.

Christ, he was like a child with a toy! Mine , he wanted to say. This one’s mine.

He needed to get out of this room. Proximity to Lydia Hope-Wallace seemed to cause his brain to behave in bizarre and unpredictable ways.

Unlike his brain’s, his body’s response was altogether too predictable, particularly south of his waist.

“Take the papers,” he said. “The invitations as well. We’ll take it all.”

She looked up at him. In the dim light, with the sun slipping below the horizon, all the vivid colors of her were faded: an ember instead of a conflagration. But he knew each vibrant shade well enough that it did not matter. He could see the color of her hair with his eyes closed.

“Won’t Davis suspect something?” she asked. “When he returns? If we’ve taken his papers?”

“He might,” Arthur allowed, “but he won’t know that we were responsible. These papers are the best we have to go on. I say we hold on to them.”

She nodded and tucked the papers into a pocket concealed at her waist by a wide ribbon.

By mutual consent, they searched the remainder of the room. She peered under the bed and washstand; he leaned the mirror away from the wall to look behind it. He ran his fingers along the backs of all the paintings, hoping fruitlessly for a hidden compartment—what he wouldn’t give for a map! With a big X across it, ideally marked Davis’s Secret Hideout .

There was nothing else. Davis had left the room almost Spartan in its cleanliness.

It was peculiar. The Davis that he knew was not slovenly, but he was a bit careless, always dropping things and leaving piles about left and right. Rather like Arthur himself.

Perhaps Davis had changed in this too. There were so many ways in which Arthur no longer knew his brother. He did not know what to make of their discoveries this evening, and his mind reeled with revelations and with Lydia’s proximity.

When they were done, she peeked her head out the door, then whispered, “All seems clear.” In the hallway, he followed closely behind her, and they crept to the servants’ staircase without issue.

They were halfway down the stairs when disaster struck, in the form of a raucous male voice lustily singing “The Fair Maid of Islington.”

Arthur froze, an instant of paralyzed panic. It might not be someone he knew—but if it was—and if they saw him coming out of Davis’s chamber—with Lydia —

How safe would she be, if Davis learned that she’d discovered the truth?

Arthur did not know. But he knew he could not let her come to harm.

In the moment it took him to recover from his shock, Lydia leapt past him back up the stairs. “Come up!” she whispered frantically. “He’ll see you!”

The voice was growing louder. “Hell,” he said, “no time—”

And then he grabbed Lydia about the waist with one hand, yanked the pins out of her hair with the other, and pressed her to the wall, burying his face in the curve of her neck.