Chapter 21 #2
Chastity felt sick. Cyn snarled, and for a moment it looked as if he would skewer the man, but he moved back and lowered his sword. He bowed slightly to his brother. “My apologies for interrupting your discussion.”
“Not at all,” said Rothgar. “Walgrave? Why not admit it? You doubtless had your reasons.”
But Walgrave held firm. “I deny all of it. I thought Lindle had more courage than to spew lies on command, but I was mistaken.”
Verity came in with Nathaniel and Fort. She paled at the sight of her father, and gasped to see Lindle covered in blood.
“Lady Verity,” said Rothgar, “have you retrieved the paper mentioned earlier?”
“Yes,” said Verity, and produced the folded, sealed paper, walking forward to give it to Rothgar.
Walgrave snatched it, and in one move threw it into the fire and pulled out a pistol. “Keep back!” he cried. “No one try to snatch that out!”
They all watched as the paper blackened and then caught, to flame into ash.
Walgrave started to laugh. “At last! Free! Ha, Rothgar, for all your clever tricks, you’ve cleared my way. You can have my damned family, every plague-ridden one of them. May they make your life hell as they’ve made mine!”
“Hell surely comes from the company there,” said Rothgar, looking thoughtfully at the ashes of the evidence. “You appear, however, to have won. Perhaps you could be noble in victory and admit that your daughter did not lose her maidenhead to a man.”
The earl was giddy with liberation. “Certainly,” he declared. “Though what the devil good it will do you I can’t imagine.”
“Perhaps in writing,” said Rothgar, indicating a desk where paper and ink stood ready.
The earl hesitated, but he was still grinning madly.
It was as if success had succeeded where threats had failed, and tipped him into insanity.
“Why not? But I’ll write that I did it to force her into a necessary marriage.
It doesn’t alter the fact that Vernham was in her bed, and I deny any part in that. ”
Chastity was weighed by a dull sense of failure. Rothgar was making the best of things, but without the evidence of treason, nothing could be done. Nathaniel could soon be under attack, and nothing that had happened here could do her any good.
“What?” cried Vernham, leaping to his feet. “You won’t put the blame on me, you devil! It was all your plan, every bit of it, just to stop my brother from using that letter. It may have gone, but I know it word for word. I can still tell the world—”
Walgrave turned and shot him.
The crack of the pistol reverberated in the small room and Chastity clapped her hands over her ringing ears. Vernham crashed back into his chair, a look of amazement on his face, blood spreading over his chest. He tried to speak, then grimaced in sudden agony as he died.
Cyn dropped his sword to pull Chastity into his arms, as Verity was held by Nathaniel. Chastity clung to him, but then pushed away to stare at her father. “That was cold-blooded murder.” She looked around at all the men. “You can’t let him get away with cold-blooded murder.”
Her father dusted his sheet of paper with fine sand and delicately tapped it clean, then held it out. “Here, girl. Take this and hold your tongue. Learn to keep out of men’s affairs.”
Chastity grabbed the paper, but threw it aside. “Men’s affairs? Men’s affairs have ruined me!”
“I’m pleased you at least realize the finality of that.”
“And you don’t care. You, my father, don’t care that I am unjustly vilified. How can you think you can serve England when you cannot serve your family?”
“My family exists to serve me,” he said, rising. He shoved her carelessly out of the way.
She grabbed Lindle’s sword from the floor, and despite the outcry, lunged at her father.
He deflected the blade with the pistol, but the point slashed into his sleeve, gashing his arm.
He snarled, and swung the pistol viciously at her head.
Chastity felt it brush her temple as Cyn tackled her to the ground and safety.
“. . . in the noble house of Stuart we see fortitude and verity, accompanied by victorious chastity, all virtues dedicated to the greatest good of England.”
Everyone froze. Silence fell over the room as they all turned to where Rothgar stood, reading from a document. A bloodstained, slightly chewed document.
“No,” choked Walgrave.
Lindle giggled.
“You really should have read it before you burned it, shouldn’t you?” asked Rothgar mildly.
“No!” howled the earl. He raised his pistol and fired, but it was already discharged, and merely clicked. He hurled it at Rothgar. It missed.
“Kill him!” he raged at his two henchmen. Still on the floor, half under Cyn, Chastity saw that at last the earl was mad, but would he cause the deaths of all of them?
The two men had merely been goggle-eyed observers to all this mayhem. Now they looked at each other and did nothing.
“Kill him, or I’ll see you hang! I’ll ruin you. I’ll ruin your families . . .”
The men looked to Rothgar for help.
Rothgar smiled. “Now, my lord,” he said to the purple-faced earl, “you dance to my tune rather than the Vernhams’. Do you think you will like it any better?”
“Never,” snarled Walgrave. He plunged a hand into the pocket of the nearest man and pulled out a pistol. The man, clearly terrified by all these goings-on, stood like a dummy and did nothing.
By the time Walgrave raised the gun to fire it, however, both Brand and Rothgar had firearms aimed at him.
“An interesting situation, isn’t it?” asked Rothgar, “You could kill me, but you will surely die. Are you ready to meet your maker?”
Walgrave’s mouth twitched in a rictus of hate. “I’d rather die than give you the victory, Rothgar. You’ve been a thorn in my flesh for too long.”
“I’m pleased to be appreciated.”
“Give me that document, and no one need die.”
“No,” said Rothgar. “But I give you my word not to use it as long as you live quietly at Walgrave Towers, take no further part in government affairs, and do not concern yourself with your offspring anymore.”
“What?” cried Walgrave. “Dance to your piping for the rest of my life. Never, you fiend!” He waved his pistol around the room wildly.
Would he shoot Rothgar?
Brand?
Fort?
Herself?
With a cackle of insane amusement, Walgrave backed toward the door. “Don’t try to stop me!”
“You may leave,” said Rothgar calmly. “Just remember my conditions. Unlike Vernham, I will lose nothing by making this paper public.”
“Public,” Walgrave crowed. “Yes, public . . .” He opened the door and ran cumbersomely into the hall.
Cyn leaped to his feet. “He’s mad. He’ll hurt someone.” He ran after him.
Chastity struggled up too, hampered by skirts and domino, and followed with all the others.
She heard Walgrave howling something about treason and Rothgar. He was trying to incriminate Rothgar . . .
She dashed into the marble hall to see her father waving his pistol and ranting about traitors and fornicators like a mad preacher. Guests cowered behind chairs and pedestals. Chastity saw Fort enter the far side of the hall and move swiftly to control the earl.
It happened so quickly.
The earl’s demented eyes focused on someone in the gaming room. “You . . . !” he snarled. “You! The author of all my woes . . . !”
Fort whipped out a pistol. “Father, no!”
The earl aimed.
Fort shot him.
The earl’s arm jerked, and his own ball ricocheted harmlessly off a marble pillar. He crumbled in an ungainly heap. Chastity had the peculiar thought that he would hate to be seen in such an undignified position.
She ran forward, but her father was quite dead. Shot through the heart. She looked up and saw Princess Augusta sprawled inelegantly unconscious in her chair, cards spilled from her hands. She had been the target and had fainted from terror.
Chastity looked up at Fort, where he stood white and frozen, staring at what he had done. Then Verity and Nathaniel were at his side.
Excited chatter, shot through with weeping, built all around them. Cyn pulled Chastity into his arms and away from the body.
Brand and Rothgar’s pistols had disappeared from view. Rothgar moved smoothly to calm alarmed guests, but Chastity noted that he did nothing to prevent people from gathering in the hall. Elf appeared and ran forward to tend to the princess, untying Augusta’s mask and applying smelling salts.
Word immediately spread as to who the mysterious lady was, exciting the gentry rather more than the corpse.
Rothgar passed by and quietly instructed Cyn to take Chastity away from the center of the action. They accordingly moved back through the crowd. What now? How many of those events had been part of the clockmaker’s design? Surely even Rothgar would not have planned for a son to shoot his father.
Would he?
She looked over, but Fort had disappeared from view.
“Cyn,” she said, “I must go to Fort. He must feel so terrible.”
But Cyn grasped her arm. “Not yet. Verity is with him.” He edged them around the back of the crowd to a place where they could see and hear what went on in the card room.
Augusta had regained her senses and was being tenderly assisted to a chaise. Rothgar bowed solicitously over her, assuring himself of her health.
The princess pressed a cool cloth to her head. “That man. Walgrave,” she said in her German-accented English. “I have never liked him. He was a bad influence on my darling Frederick.”
“I fear he went mad, your highness,” said Rothgar.
Augusta moved the cloth slightly, clearly coming to terms with the situation. “He was shouting about treason. I think he accused you of treason, my lord marquess.”
“Said you’d been a Jacobite in the ’45,” said Lady Fanshaw. “Man was crazed. You couldn’t have been out of the schoolroom in that year.”