Chapter 23 #3
She slept, or it seemed so. A gray veil settled over her vision; a soft roar muffled all other sound; her mind carried meandering dream images.
Awareness came occasionally in swiftly vanishing stabs.
Some fragment of her stuporous brain registered the choked turnpikes, the change in sounds and odors, the brilliant flash of bright-lit shop windows glancing off her eyelashes.
She slid into wakefulness in a still carriage, her body crumpled over her valise.
Her spine felt like a stiff iron pipe, her eyes burned from lack of rest, and her throat was sandy.
Devon, gathering her upright, was shrouded in rotating star points.
Blinking rapidly against the altering intensity of light and the fresher air as he drew her outside, she pulled out of the steadying arms, her pattens clicking against a pavement.
“Don’t,” she snapped. “I can walk.”
“As you wish,” he answered impassively, not taking his hand from her elbow.
Her strained eyes focused on his unreceptive features and then turned wildly over her shoulder toward the street alive with the chime of bridle and harness as elegant town coaches passed upon its great breadth.
Buildings of immense proportion lined the even pavement, their Corinthian pilasters and dazzling Venetian windows dwarfing a frontage of darkened shrubs.
“Where am I?” she whispered.
“In London. Portland Place,” he said, taking her valise in one hand and escorting her through an openwork iron gate toward a portico that housed the fan-vaulted door of a tall Palladian mansion.
Disoriented by fatigue, she said, “This isn’t a prison?”
“I suppose that would depend on one’s philosophical bent,” he said, but then seeing she was much too tired to make anything of that remark, he added, “No, it’s not generally considered to be a prison. Frightened out of your wits, are you?”
Letting her anger show, she ground out, “Would that please you?”
“It might. Everyone likes to be taken seriously. To which I add the homily—”
“People must lie in the beds of their own making,” she finished. A weary tear tickled down her nose, and she removed it quickly with the hunch of one shoulder.
“Precisely. How nearly in concert are our minds.”
Her back, which she had been able to keep straight in front of him for most of the day, began to slump. “I’m too worn out to be particular. Show me any bed, and I’ll sleep in it.”
He laughed. It was the first time she had heard him laugh naturally in weeks, and she had forgotten how appealing and tender his face could become, the corners of his eyes relaxing into an engaging crinkle of smile lines, the ashen-blond hair purling in the night air.
“All in good time,” he said. “There’s someone I have to talk to first.”
Her bound hands lifted, palms upward, toward the doorframe, and she said wonderingly, “You know someone who lives here?”
“Yes. Come along, Merry pet.”
Exhaustion and terror clenching at her throat, she watched Devon raise his hand to the paneled mahogany door and beat an imperative summons on the heavy brass knocker.
The door was opened almost immediately by an imposing personage with spaniel jaws who was unmistakably a butler. His chilly “How may I serve you?” dissolved into astonishment as he stepped back, staring at Devon, his sparse gray eyebrows mounting his forehead.
“Your Grace!” he exclaimed.
“Good evening, Harris,” Devon said in a tranquil voice, drawing Merry ruthlessly into a deep entrance hall. He glanced toward the graceful upward curl of a marble staircase. “Is Cathcart in?”
The butler seemed to have recovered himself, like an old but sturdy chair taken to the upholsterer’s.
“Indeed he is, Your Grace. His lordship has just this minute arrived home and repaired to his dressing chamber.” Walking to a doorway with a handsomely carved architrave, he continued, “Permit me to offer Your Grace the use of the library. There’s a fire made up within, and I think you will find it quite comfortable.
And if I may be so bold, Your Grace, as to say how happy an occasion your safe return is and will be to your family and acquaintances—a happy occasion indeed.
Lord Cathcart will want to be informed of your arrival without delay. ”
“Thank you.” Devon’s hand on her arm forced forward Merry’s balking footsteps.
She was perhaps not able to control her emotions as well as she might have wished in times of duress, but recent bitter experience had trained her to keep thinking.
Pulled despite her shallow resistance into a large well-ordered library, she closed her mind to the Chinese rug, the aged monastic manuscript supported in an open position on a library table.
Devon stood by the door inquiring genially about the butler’s gout and rejecting an offer to surrender their outer garments.
She was just wondering whether that last might be interpreted to mean they would not stay here long when the phrase Your Grace seemed to unclot slowly from the rest. Badly shaken to learn that Devon was on saunter-in-at-midnight terms with an English lord, and shamed by being handled brusquely in front of such an obviously reputable gentleman as Mr. Harris, she had failed to register the title.
If Your Lordship was the form of address for a marquis or an earl, then Your Grace must be the proper mode for a—For a what?
Who was this man? The soft closing of the door behind her generated a hiss of fear in the nerves that surfaced her skin.
She turned to find Devon standing alone by the doorframe, regarding her steadily, the closed expression opening in the marigold firelight to a steely courtesy that encouraged her to voice her thoughts.
She heard her own voice whisper, “Hirundo poeciloma. You knew the swallow. And the gull—you trained it to come to you. Because you are the son of a naturalist, aren’t you?
And an artist. No one has ever understood my drawings as clearly.
And that—that night on the beach I heard you speak almost with sympathy about the American cause.
” His expression was lightly interested; as though she was revealing no more than the solution to some childish riddle.
A house full; a hole full; you cannot gather a bowlful.
What is it? Smoke. His casual fingers had begun to uncatch the buttons of his greatcoat.
At sea, in Rand Morgan’s world, this man wielded great power.
Her only chance had been that his danger would fade without Morgan’s legions behind him, but she saw now with bitter frustration that instead it would grow, blossoming like herb of grace, into something more omnipotent than she ever had imagined.
Staring fully into the intense mosaic gold of his eyes, she said, “Now I understand. You are Devon Crandall. And the Duke of St. Cyr, aren’t you? ”