Chapter 12
“Ruby.”
Ruby rolled over and pressed her face into her pillow, shutting out sound and light in a pile of down.
“Ruuuuu-beeeee.”
She batted a hand in the direction of the voice—it was Tamsin, crisp and vigorous and far too alert—and tried to sink back into the dark heat of her dream.
The cove. The sand. Captain Malcolm Archer, gleaming in the sunset, the roar of the ocean, his hand on her waist, her heart beating like a drum as he set his mouth to her—
“Ruby. Wake up.”
She groaned into the pillow. She did not wish to wake. She had a vague sense that her dream—hot and blurred and pleasurable—would give way a reality that she did not particularly wish to recollect.
“Do you think she might be ill?” That was Alice’s sweet, worried voice. “She seems fevered and she’s making a dreadful sound.”
Ruby flopped over, her eyes still clamped closed. “I’m fine. I’m perfectly well. I only . . . fancied a lie-in.”
“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning!” Tamsin sounded scandalized.
That made sense. Ruby had not been able to sleep until dawn, what with the way she kept tossing and turning and alternately quashing her memory of her encounter with Archer in the cove and fantasizing wildly about what would have happened had it continued.
She had an excellent imagination, on top of what she’d read about in Aristotle’s Masterpiece. In her mind, Archer had . . .
No. She refused to dwell upon it for a second day running. He was an irrepressible flirt, and she a foolish wallflower. He’d only murmured hot words and removed her gloves to throw her off her course. He’d had no intention of kissing her or caressing her or hiking up her skirts and—
She squeezed her eyes shut harder. “Perhaps I am fevered,” she muttered. In her brain.
“Sit up,” said Tamsin ruthlessly. “Open your eyes.”
“We’ve brought tea,” Alice said, “and bacon too. I stole it out of the pan myself while the household was distracted.” She sounded a trifle smug at this minor crime.
Ruby opened her eyes, shoved herself into a seated position, and accepted a cup and saucer from Alice. The plate was empty; Vanessa, in the corner, appeared to be gnawing on the bacon.
The windows in the chamber sparkled now, and someone—probably Tamsin—had thrust aside the filmy drapes Ruby had hung.
Sun poured into the small room. Ruby had whitewashed the walls one evening when she’d been unable to sleep, and then had picked out the elaborate white scrollwork in a deep blue-gray paint, the color of the sea at dusk.
The floor was covered in a fanciful blue-and-white unicorn rug she’d found in one of the lower parlors, and more lacy fabric swathed the four-poster bed.
She’d cleaned the bedding with hot water and lye and a rough brush she’d turned up in the stables, and—
The room looked beautiful now. She’d known it would.
It had occurred to her, these last weeks, that she loved it here at Pomeroy House. Loved the immense cliffside manor with its oddities and its dogs. Loved her own freedom, and the sense that she knew how to set things right.
She loved matching her wits with Captain Archer’s.
She’d told herself her treks across the cliffs and down to the beach were for the purposes of investigation—for determining what he was truly about when he was not attending his duties at Pomeroy House.
The truth, she feared, was simpler. She wanted to see him.
“We’ve been waiting for you to rise for half the morning,” Tamsin said. “We have news.”
Ruby looked up. “News?”
“Tam has made a discovery,” Alice said. “She’s been sneaking about.”
Tamsin patted Alice’s hand. “You helped, dearest. And Vanessa.” She fixed her gaze back on Ruby, who was attempting to restore her brain to its usual functioning with a hearty application of warmish tea. “You know that I’ve been trying to get into the captain’s office ever since we arrived.”
“I am aware of that, yes. It’s always either locked or occupied by Eugénie.”
Tamsin seemed to be trying and failing to suppress a grin. “Well. Captain Archer is nowhere to be found this morning, and so I thought I’d mount another attempt.”
Ruby did not wonder where Archer was. She did not.
“Eugénie was in there as usual, attending to her secretarial duties,” Tamsin went on, “but Alice and Vanessa happened to discover a small family of stoats living in one of the upper chambers.”
“Vanessa discovered them,” Alice said modestly. “I merely accompanied her.”
“And then all the dogs somehow became involved. There was quite a lot of noise and baying—really, Ruby, I am astonished that this did not wake you—and Eugénie and I sprinted for the staircase to find out what the devil was going on.” Tamsin’s eyes gleamed.
“But then, while she was distracted, I doubled back and found myself alone with all of Captain Archer’s papers. ”
Ruby felt an odd sensation in her belly.
She knew that Captain Archer was lying about something.
Though he was clearly familiar with the Monfalcone royal family—his declarations in the library and the cove had determined that much—there was still a great deal about the man and his staff that did not make sense.
And yet . . .
Some part of her shrank back from the idea of Tamsin rifling through his ledgers and records. She did not want to hurt him, somehow. Even if what endangered him was simple truth.
But she bit her lip and thrust back the notion. He would be fine. She was the one who stood to lose everything if the truth of her circumstances came out.
“And?” she prompted. “What did you discover?”
“Quite a lot,” Tamsin said. “He is the steward of Pomeroy House. There were years of letters from Signor Neri attesting to Captain Archer’s employment.”
An absurd wave of relief swamped Ruby, and she had to take another sip of tea to recover herself.
“But as far as I can tell, most of the rest of the staff are not. Employed here, I mean. There’s a budget—a modest budget—for a steward and a groundskeeper.
Nothing for footmen or a cook or a secretary.
Gerry and Lamentation and Wall and Eugénie—if those are their real names—” Tamsin hesitated, then forged on.
“They’re not meant to be here, Ruby. They’re frauds.
Fakes. They’re no more employed by House di Sangro than we are.
And if I do not miss my guess, they are funding their continued residence with a side of casual smuggling. ”
Ruby’s brain called up the vivid image of Archer in the cove—a play of light and shadow, a chiaroscuro portrait in the fading light. The sand on his angular cheekbone, the heat of his gaze. The easy line of his mouth gone deathly serious.
Astra inclinant, sed non obligant.
The stars incline us, but they do not bind us.
“I know,” Ruby murmured. “I already knew.”
Somehow, she had. In the library, he had answered her queries smoothly until the moment her questions had shifted from his role in the house to Lamentation’s. Only then had he lost control of the encounter and launched into his outrageous tale of the Scourge.
She could recall with vivid clarity the moment in the kitchen when Lamentation had mentioned an attack and Archer had gone instantly, ferociously alert.
She remembered how he’d covered her with his body outside the kitchen at dawn, and the way he’d rescued her, without thought or hesitation, at the inn.
He could not hide his nature. His first thought—the first instinctive leap of his body—was to protect. To keep the people around him safe.
If he was lying, he was doing it for his staff. Not for himself.
She looked up. Tamsin had her arms crossed over her chest. “You already knew?” she said.
“Are you telling me that I nearly had an apoplexy when I thought someone had discovered me in the office—it was a bat, if you’re wondering, not a person—and you already knew what I was in there risking my life over? ”
Ruby couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “Had you died of a bat-induced apoplexy, please know we would have left that out of your eulogy.”
Tamsin scowled.
“Ruby’s right,” Alice said. “Your eulogy will be filled with only the most dignified of encomia. You can trust us.”
Ruby smothered another laugh and relented.
“I didn’t know that exactly, no. It’s only .
. .” She hesitated, trying to put her feelings into words.
“I knew that Lamentation and the others had been with Captain Archer for a very long time. And I knew that whatever deception the captain was about, it involved keeping his people safe.”
Tamsin gave her a long, considering look. “I see.”
Ruby felt herself blush, just a little, beneath the acuteness of Tamsin’s gaze.
Alice, meanwhile, had begun to fuss with the lace on her frock. “Do you . . .” She paused, her dark lashes veiling her eyes, and then looked up again. “Do you suppose we ought to tell someone what we’ve discovered? The Monfalcone royal family? Or perhaps your father?”
“Absolutely not,” Ruby said.
She paused. The words had launched themselves from her mouth before she’d even thought to formulate them. Her father . . .
Her father would want to hear what they had learned. She knew he would—even if it meant revealing her presence at Pomeroy House.
But if he knew the truth, her father would oust the false staff and thereby prove his usefulness to the Monfalcone royals. He was proud of his position of influence with the di Sangro family; if he had the opportunity to further cement his status, he would take it.
Her father would never let Captain Archer and his people stay.
She glanced at Tamsin, and her heart fluttered with relief. Tamsin too was shaking her head.
“No,” Tamsin said. “Not a chance.”
Alice sighed and sat down on the chintz chair that Ruby had personally carted up a flight of stairs.
“Oh, I’m so glad. I would have gone along, had you two insisted upon it.
But it would have been wrong, I think, to throw them out of their home.
” She looked up, a little hesitantly. “Even if they aren’t properly supposed to be here. ”
“Dear heart,” Tamsin said, “you do not always need to appease us, you know. You are allowed to have opinions of your own.”
“I do have my own opinions,” Alice protested. “In fact, I think smuggling is a perfectly reasonable career in the face of the same rapacious oligarchy that has put into place the Corn Laws.”
Ruby blinked. She had not known Alice felt so decidedly about free trade.
“But there’s nothing wrong with following your lead,” Alice went on. “With trusting my dearest and cleverest friends to make the right decisions.”
“I am very good at leading,” Tamsin said, and Alice laughed.
On the bed, her teacup balanced on her knees, Ruby didn’t quite laugh with her.
Alice favored harmony. She had always moved easily through the world; the fact that the world had turned its back on her seemed a great betrayal of fate. Alice was meant to be charming and lively and cosseted—she was not meant to be an outcast like Ruby.
But—it was true, now that Tamsin pointed it out. Alice was only too willing to sacrifice her own desires if by doing so she might keep the peace. If smothering her own wishes made other people happy.
And had Ruby not done the same?
Before she’d turned nineteen and made her debut, she had traveled all over the Continent with her father and her sister.
She could recall so many days with sun-soaked clarity: Cass on the steps of the Tower of the Winds, her bonnet strings fluttering behind her head; their father, pleased and content in the morning, his tray full of black coffee and crisp pastry with rose-petal jam.
The three of them together and happy, and she, Ruby, trying to keep them that way.
How much of her life had been devoted to just that delicate balance? How long had she spent trying to fulfill her father’s desires for her and for Cassandra?
If she told her father about Archer and his false staff, the earl would be pleased. Proud of her. She knew he would. And if she did not tell him—if she let Archer and his crew remain—her father would see it as a betrayal.
The notion was horribly uncomfortable, digging at her ribs like stays knotted too tight. She wished she did not care about his approval. She would have liked for defiance to be easy—for her long-held need for her father’s approbation to vanish like smoke.
It hadn’t. She still hated to displease him.
But dash it, she could be uncomfortable if she had to be. She could weather her father’s scorn, if that was what it took to do the right thing.
Tamsin was chewing aimlessly at one of her thumbnails. “I don’t think we should reveal their secrets,” she said. “I like them. And their silly pack of dogs. But”—she dropped her thumb and looked at Ruby—“they don’t know you won’t reveal them.”
Ruby felt her brows draw together. “What do you mean?”
“Blackmail,” Tamsin said succinctly. “I think you should blackmail Captain Archer.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Tamsin’s freckled face had taken on a distressingly piratical cast. “Locate him, tell him what we’ve discovered, and then threaten to reveal what you know to your father, unless . . .” Her mouth quirked. “Unless he agrees to keep our presence here a secret from House di Sangro.”
“Then he would know for certain we’re not supposed to be here,” Alice protested. “There is no way to blackmail him without revealing our own fraudulent purposes here.”
“Alice, darling, I have a strong inkling he already suspects.”
Ruby hesitated.
She thought of Archer’s face in the cove, the charged push-and-pull of their strange dance. The way honesty crept in like starlight around the fractures in his charm.
Astra inclinant, sed non obligant.
“I’m not going to blackmail him,” she said finally. “I have a better idea.”