Chapter 24
Brian Farquhar, Lord Cathcart, stared distractedly at the hurried flash of his carefully polished Hessian boots as they descended his black marble stair.
Potbellied water drops were scattered like buttons on the bottommost step.
Little Lyn must have had another accident with his shaving water; when she was away from under his housekeeper’s firm hand, nothing could induce the girl to use the servant’s stair.
“T’other is so much grander-like,” she was wont to pipe, and if Harris noted the spill, Lyn was sure to receive another sharp scold.
With an exasperated sigh Cathcart bent to soak it up in his handkerchief.
The library door, he saw, was closed, and behind was Devon, back intact after more than a year of wandering in hell’s own company to places God only knew.
America? Canada? The Caribbean? Rumor had placed him in all three, often at the same time.
And now he was here, his return as cavalier and careless as his departure.
His family didn’t know of his homecoming, that much was certain.
Not two hours ago Cathcart had been sitting with Devon’s mother, Aline, helplessly watching her wilt under Countess Lieven’s subtly malicious quizzing about the absent duke.
Cathcart remembered how he had cursed Devon silently for the agony of worry he so readily inflicted on his loving family.
Perhaps it would be more judicial, Cathcart reflected, to curse instead the circumstances that had made Devon as he was.
Still fresh in his mind were the time-framed pictures of Devon as the beautiful, too perfect child demigod, creating remarkable machines generating electrical current that no one could understand but the boy himself, and running through the silvery beards of a barley field beneath the dark golden-tinged wingbeats of his eagle.
Aline used to whiten when the majestic predator landed, deadly talons slashing the air, on her son’s slight forearm, but Devon’s father would only put back his great mane of tawny hair and laugh.
Jasper Crandall had been that kind of man.
Jasper’s death was one of those abstruse tragedies that leave one feeling flawed and unrelentingly mortal.
A healthy, interested father sitting with his gifted son studying leaf sections under a microscope, Jasper Crandall had lifted his head, set down the small tweezers in his hand, and slumped forward in death, his brain massively hemorrhaged.
Much later that same night, retiring to the black solace of his own bedchamber, Cathcart had heard a light, clear-voiced command coming out of the darkness that had said, “Put out the candle, Brian.”
Cathcart’s uncomfortably dilating pupils had found Devon sitting dry-lashed on the bed, his bright head flossed in reedy moonlight.
“Why did my father die?” There was a shattered soul in the thoughtful childish voice, and Cathcart, numb from the loss of the man he had respected above all others, had heard himself blundering foolishly through empty phrases about divine will and submission to fate.
He had spoken at length, the words coming haltingly.
It was not until the clock of French porcelain on the mantel chimed the hour of midnight that he realized Devon had left quietly and he was alone.
From that hour on Devon had found his own answers.
Uncrouching from the step, Cathcart glanced with rueful distaste at the water-heavy handkerchief in his hand and dispossessed himself of it underneath the hall porter’s chair.
Devon stood by the walnut sideboard, helping himself to brandy.
Cathcart was vaguely aware of a girl in a muddy Pilgrim’s cloak standing beside the fire.
A young female, Harris had dryly termed her.
After asking Harris several times if he was quite certain the young person was indeed a female and receiving Harris’s patient, pitying reassurances that yes, surely it was a girl and not Cathcart’s absent son, Cathcart had lost interest in her beyond his inevitable irritation and awe that Devon had the temerity to bring one of his haphazard trollops to the town residence of his godfather.
The lateness of the hour hardly made it any better.
But as Devon turned, setting down glass and bottle, Cathcart found himself forgetting everything beyond the brainstorming warmth of Devon’s subtly delighted smile.
Devon crossed the room in clean, quick strides to take him in a charmingly exuberant embrace.
Held at arm’s length by his godson’s strong bronzed fingers, conquering his filling throat, Cathcart said awkwardly, “So you’re back.”
Devon separated his hands and shrugged, a continental gesture.
“As you see.” The boy looked good—brown and self-possessed and superbly physically conditioned; the rich heavy hair had been eating sunlight.
He had grown into the engagingly fashioned looks that had been almost overpowering when he was younger; maturity had revealed outwardly the extent of the inner depth.
“You haven’t been home?” Cathcart asked, knowing the answer, testing the water.
“No. I’m counting on you to advise me where the batteries are placed before I approach the citadel. Are they well—Mother, Grandmother?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. But I don’t have to tell you that you’ve been sorely missed.” The one comment, and no more. Lord Cathcart had learned with Devon it was best not to lecture. “Tonight I was with your mother.”
Devon eyed Cathcart’s knee breeches with an appreciative grin. “Carlton House?”
Cathcart felt his face soften into an answering smile. “Carlton House,” he agreed. A small movement from the silent figure by the hearth drew Cathcart’s attention to her. Reluctant as he was to permit or acknowledge her presence, he said politely, “Have you eaten, either of you?”
“Yes. Recently.” As though he had observed Cathcart’s unwilling interest, Devon looked in the girl’s direction and said, “Come here, Windflower. The good marquis would like to see what you are.”
Her back, encased in cloak and hood, was toward Cathcart.
He watched the slim shoulders square. The weightily resettling fabric of her cloak snagged the dark hood at its base, spilling it backward to release a thrilling dance of cherried honey curls.
She turned where she stood, her gaze flying defiantly to Devon’s.
Lord Cathcart was not a man who gaped at women.
He had spent the better portion of his adult life in a deep if chaste love for Devon’s mother, Aline; for ten years he had enjoyed a more intimate and discreet liaison with a lovely and sophisticated woman whom he supported generously.
Nor was he a lad in first flush who felt his body stir to every lure, but wish it or not, Lord Cathcart knew he had begun to stare at this young girl.
Half his reaction certainly was admiration, but the other half was pure fascination with her incredible similarity to the Italianate oval-faced ideal.
She might have stepped from a sea-flecked shell.
Beneath deep, fantastic eyelids, her gentian eyes were bright as a wren’s, their vision outwardly directed and unselfaware.
The chin was small and solid, made as though to fit in a man’s hand.
Only the nose was not meticulously proportioned to its setting, though the very delicacy of the fragile teardrop nostrils added to rather than detracted from the charm of her features, lessening the classic severity.
She carried herself with more dignity than her years warranted, though the face was a study in sensitivity.
You wanted to smell the fragrance of her hair.
What in the world was this solemn fairy princess doing with a man of Devon’s reputation?
“Good evening, Miss—?” Cathcart tried kindly.
“Her name is Merry,” Devon said, his tone matter-of-fact. “It may not suit your notions of politesse, but you’ll have to call her that; I don’t know her last name.”
The young girl’s show of spirit was dying into wan bewilderment as she looked from Devon to Cathcart, and it appeared to the marquis as though the cautious blue eyes were having trouble assessing him.
It came to him then that she was tired, very tired.
The radiant skin had disguised that at first. Gratefully Cathcart experienced the dissolution of his instinctive male reaction into something reassuringly paternal.
She was, after all, hardly more than a child, and from the glances that had passed between her and Devon, it was evident he had used her like a vandal.
Admitting wryly to himself that only a moment ago he had been planning not to acknowledge her, Cathcart approached the girl, gentling his expression because she seemed ready to cringe from him.
Good Lord, what had Devon been doing to her?
He had never seen a woman look upon him with fright before, and it distressed him.
At something of a loss and growing increasingly angry with Devon for placing him in this situation, he said, “Welcome to my home, Merry. It must be hot for you in front of the fire in your traveling garments. If you’ll allow me…
?” She stared at him in a stunned way, though she made no protest as he loosened the clasp underneath her chin and drew the cloak from her shoulders.
Her hands, small even for a woman of her refined bone structure, were folded neatly into the lap of her skirts. In a second’s horror Cathcart saw that she was bound.
“What the devil!” He took her wrists together and examined the deft bindings.
The flesh beneath the rope was scraped and cold.
Intense anger strained his words as he rapped out at his extraordinary godson.
“Have you taken leave of your senses?” To his annoyance Devon showed no shame; in fact, he appeared to be a little amused.
“I’m sorry. I knew you’d be shocked. But she keeps trying to run away from me.”