Chapter 8
T here were close to a hundred guests overflowing the front salon. Carr fixed a well-practiced smile to his face, practicality having reestablished itself. The damned haunts he could deal with. It had been the notion that Janet could actually return…. Nonsense! An ignorant woman’s ravings.
He waded into the crowd, greeting people as he went. No matter that he did not know a good half of them by either name or face, nor that they appeared at his door as the hangers-on of those who’d received bona fide invitations. The more wastrels, the better.
He poured himself a glass of port, downed the contents in one draw and poured another, eschewing the pale tea he drank most evenings. He eyed the crowd with a connoisseur’s appreciation. No huge-stakes men here tonight. Mostly middling wagerers. A number of gulls, a cheat or two.
“Your Grace!”
Carr lifted a brow in acknowledgment of the tall, extremely thin man threading his way toward him. It was James Wells, Lord Tunbridge, distant cousin to the future king, George III. Tunbridge was said to be educating the crown prince in royal—and royally carnal—sports. An agreeable situation, seeing how Tunbridge was in his power.
“I would have a word with you, sir,” Tunbridge said breathlessly. “I … It’s important. Very important.”
“Really?” Carr asked. “To whom?”
“Why, to me.” A light sheen sprouted on Tunbridge’s high forehead.
Deuce take it, the man wanted something. Carr was not in the mood. “Later, Tunbridge. My guests—”
“Your guests will wait, Lord Carr,” Tunbridge said, his voice hardening. “Please. I have been of great service to you these past few years, as well you know, and now I would ask but a few minutes of your time.”
“You’re making demands, Tunbridge?” Carr asked mildly. “How very annoying for me and how very dangerous for you.”
Tunbridge flushed but raised his chin. He was going to be plaguesomely persistent.
“Very well,” Carr capitulated, taking Tunbridge’s arm and drawing him through the open doors that led out into the courtyard.
Outside, the sun had relinquished the sky and the wind had died down. A thin fog drifted up the low, flinty apron that sloped away from the castle. The noise from the party within melded with the elemental rumble of the sea.
“Now, what is it, Tunbridge?” Carr faced the tall man.
“Your daughter, sir.”
“What of Fia?” Carr asked with awakening interest. Of late his gorgeous young daughter was an unpredictable creature, one minute an unruly jade and hoydenish flirt, the next, a Sphinx, inscrutable and cold.
Her attitude toward him had certainly changed in the last year. Once she’d been his familiar, seeking his company and amusing him with her sardonic wit. But now she’d turned her gifts against him, and honed them, too.
What had Fia done now? Publicly denigrated the fool’s manhood?
“Before you choke on whatever it is you have to say, Tunbridge, I feel obliged to tell you that I have no intention of fighting any duels over anything Fia may have said or done,” Carr said. He held up his hand, silencing Tunbridge when he would have interrupted.
“No. Listen. If you have a quarrel with the girl that only blood-letting can satisfy, I suggest you find one of her swains to champion her. I shan’t.”
“No! Of course … why … I mean … no! No!” Tunbridge grew bright red.
For reportedly being one of London’s most celebrated duelists, Carr thought impatiently, Tunbridge certainly lacked dash. “Out with it, man! What the devil are you trying to say?”
“I … I don’t want to kill Miss Fia. I wish to marry her!”
Carr stared at him a full minute before throwing back his head and laughing. He laughed until his side hurt and tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. He laughed until he could laugh no more and when he’d finally finished, he sniffed and withdrew a lace kerchief from his wrist and dabbed at his eyes and nose, occasionally hiccuping up another little chortle.
“Oh, thank you! I had need of a divertissement. I vow, Tunbridge, I would never have taken you for a wit.”
Only then did he see that Tunbridge was not laughing. The color had leached from his face, leaving bloodless lips forming a thin line. Tunbridge had been serious.
When Carr realized this, he also remembered anew that Tunbridge—whose dueling career had been severely curtailed when Carr’s son Ash impaled Tunbridge’s hand on a stiletto—was still accredited to be more than passing proficient with a rapier. Still, Carr really wasn’t in the mood.
“I will give you the benefit of the doubt, sir,” Tunbridge ground out, “and assume that you misunderstood my intent, that being to take Miss Fia to wife.”
“No, I didn’t misunderstand you,” Carr said, tucking his kerchief back in his sleeve. “And the answer is no.”
“Why not?” Tunbridge demanded. “My lineage is impeccable, I am a baron, but most tellingly I am in the royal family’s confidence.
“You, sir, ought to appreciate the extent of my influence on His Majesty as I have used that influence this past year and more in persuading him to revoke his decree that exiled you to Scotland. I have almost convinced His Majesty that your habit of losing rich young wives is, indeed, an unfortunate tragedy and nothing more sinister. I can just as easily convince him otherwise.”
For a full minute the two men studied each other in silence, Carr with bored indifference, Tunbridge quivering with outrage. Finally, Carr sighed. “Are you quite through, Tunbridge? Fine. A moment of instruction ’ere we proceed to your suit.”
Tunbridge blinked, startled.
“The trick to blackmailing, Tunbridge,” Carr lectured calmly, “is that one must be willing—and able—to carry out whatever threats one uses to pressure one’s victim into complying with one’s purposes.
“Take, for instance, yourself. I know you’ll do your best for me because should I fail to return to London—and that very, very soon—you realize that I will have no choice but to console myself with my latest acquisition, that being Campion Castle. How long has it been in your family, Tunbridge? Two? Three hundred years?”
Tunbridge’s quivering ceased. His face had fallen into the slack proportions that Carr was beginning to recognize as being as habitual as they were unfortunate.
“Not only that,” Carr continued mildly, “but I ashamedly admit that I will then likely enjoy imagining your own situation in a deportation vessel, having finally been brought to justice for the business with that Cheapside whore so many years ago.”
“But I was drunk!”
“Ah!” Carr wagged his index finger playfully. “But I was not.”
Tunbridge blanched further.
“Now, I have been reasonable this time because finding another toadie with your particular connections so late in the game would prove tiresome. It can be done, of course, and should it prove necessary, will be. Bear that in mind, Tunbridge, the next time you feel the urge to try your hand at extortion.” Carr cocked his head. “Do we understand each other?”
Mutely, Tunbridge nodded.
“Good. Now, pray tell me, what is all this about Fia?”
Like a puppet whose strings had been severed, Tunbridge’s shoulders slumped. His face betrayed his potent unhappiness. “She is a siren! I swear it. She drives me to distraction.”
“Yes.” Carr nodded. “I hear she’s good at that sort of thing.”
“She’s bewitched me, I tell you. She’s a succubus!” Tunbridge continued, his voice desperate. “’Tis the only way to account for this obsession she has roused in me.”
“Now, wouldn’t that be a lovely rumor to start on the eve of her presentation?” Carr muttered irritably. He might have to deal with Tunbridge after all if he continued this sort of gibberish. A “siren” was fascinating; a “succubus” was disturbing.
Tunbridge held out one hand in supplication. “I must have her. I must.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“But why not?” Tunbridge asked pitiably. He looked utterly bewildered and in pain. Carr silently applauded Fia’s skill. “I am rich. I am well connected. Whyever not?”
“Because I already control you,” Carr explained. “Marrying Fia to you would be redundant. No. Fia will marry someone who does not bow beneath any of the other influences I can bring to bear.” His smile relayed a certain pride. “Because Fia is the ultimate inducement”
“But … but I want her!” Tunbridge complained, having abandoned all attempts at manly forbearance.
Carr clapped him companionably on the shoulder. “Come, man. Grow a spine. Besides, Fia would use you up and spit you out within a fortnight. Begads! The chit is but sixteen! Why, she’s just using her milk teeth on you. Imagine what she will be at twenty. Thir—”
The faint sound of a Highland pipe drifted out of the fog, cutting Carr’s words short He lifted his head sharply. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Tunbridge asked indifferently. “What would you say should Fia declare she wished to marry me?”
“She doesn’t” Carr squinted into the soft shimmer of the twilight-kissed fog. A dark figure moved therein. He was certain of it. A dark masculine figure clad in a belted plaid. “Do you see anything out there?”
“Why won’t she?”
Carr spared Tunbridge one dismissive glance before once again scanning the mist. “Why would she?”
Apparently, the answer to this pointed query finally convinced Tunbridge of the futility of his petition. With a deep sigh he slunk away. Carr barely noticed. His eyes were turned toward the drifting fog. His ears strained to hear the McClairens’ sepulchral pipes. Nothing.
Damned haunts. Had the dead nothing better to occupy their time than with children’s games of hide-and-seek? With a curse, Carr quit the terrace and followed the dew-glistened granite steps down into the garden. He strode purposefully along the footpath between the topiaries, bizarre and fantastical shapes clipped from living yew and boxwood. The fog swirled about his legs, the damp seeping through his white silk stockings and staining the pale blue satin covering the heels of his shoes.
At the end of the garden, where yet another set of pink granite steps led to a still lower terrace, Carr paused and peered out. Below him bracken and gorse had infiltrated the once regimented beds of roses and rare botanicals. The shadows had thickened down there. Night had found purchase. The fog was denser, the air colder.
“Come out, you cursed McClairen spirits! I am here! Haunt me!”
No reply met his shouted challenge. No ghostly form materialized. No pipe trilled from the darkness. Nothing.
Every time he’d had an … experience it was the same; a furtive movement from the corner of his eye; a gust of chill wind where no wind could be; a drumbeat in the middle of the night that could have been his heartbeat but wasn’t.
It was driving him— No! It was not driving him anything. It was distracting. An annoyance. That was all.
“What’s this?” he shouted to the gloom beneath. “Do the dead still fear the living? Do Scots flee the British even in death? Cowardly phantoms!”
The very silence seemed to mock him. With a hiss of rage he swung around and retraced his route, keenly aware of eyes upon him, of ghostly smiles jeering. He’d begun stalking up the stairs to the terrace when his eye caught a splotch of muted color tangled amid the mist and rose vines beside him. A scarf? Odd he hadn’t noted it before, but then, his attention had been on other things.
One of his female guests must have been using the gardens for an assignation. Damned cold weather for an assignation. He leaned over and picked it up. He’d started forth once more when he chanced to glance down. Abruptly he stopped, riveted by the sight.
In his hands he held a frail length of heavy silk, its once bold colors dulled and faded by time or wear or a decade of being drowned beneath the sea. One side was raw and frayed though the other edges were neatly rolled and stitched. Someone had rent it in violence.
He closed his eyes. Opened them. It had not disappeared. Or mutated into some other piece of cloth. He crushed it in his fist. He recognized it.
This was Janet’s arisaid , a woman’s version of a plaid. The McClairen plaid. He could not mistake it. She’d worn it the day she’d died. It had been he who’d ripped it, infuriated that she would dare consider wearing it to his ball. One piece she’d wrapped around Fia. This was the other half.
He’d not seen it since he’d watched it floating beside Janet’s body at the base of McClairen’s Isle.
Where he’d thrown her.