Chapter 28 #5
Raven gave her a gentle look and stroked the underside of her chin slowly with a curved finger.
“No. Before we were in sight of Land’s End, I knew what Devon meant for you.
” Her expression of utter incredulity and puzzlement brought a light smile to his lips.
“He came to me after they had me clapped in iron bracelets, y’know, because he couldn’t much bear the thought of me weeping myself sick over you.
Soft at heart, he is; I told you. He said he meant to have you as soon as he could once find out who the devil you were.
What he wanted was the truth first, and then he was going to make you his own, even if you were a doxy from the back streets.
And when I asked him if he meant marriage or a house on Green Street and maintenance, he said he’d be damned if he’d leave you to your own devices in a hired house; he meant marriage.
So y’see, sweetheart, that’s wh—” The break in his words was abrupt.
His palm closed delicately, insistently over her mouth, and when she started and tried to pull away, he tightened his fingers.
He shook his head sharply, holding her eyes in an intent gaze, and then released her quickly and disappeared into the flat blackness between two honeysuckle bushes, his movement a smooth flow that hardly disturbed the shrubs’ heavy crop of ornamental berries.
Surprise was the only thing that kept Merry from demanding to know whether he’d taken leave of his senses.
She stood in the sudden quiet, looking around herself at the haphazard patterns of the lantern’s silty light.
Not a sigh of air touched the slumbering foliage.
Raven’s last words were ringing softly in her ears, and she was frowning bewilderedly over his unexplained retreat when suddenly an oddly metallic thrill slithered like cold mercury along her nerves.
Fear. The feeling came from another plane, a long-buried instinct that erupted without logic like the fret of a dog lifting its half-napping head to growl at some faint, ominous echo of a sound.
Then she heard it. A rustle. A hiss of displaced vegetation.
Footsteps printing stealthily on moist soil.
Her first shamed impulse was to dive headlong into the honeysuckle bushes behind Raven, but as quickly she soothed her overwrought imagination; because what could happen to her here, of all places, and with Raven so close?
And for goodness’ sake, it must only be Cat returning already, or some chance guest rambling in the garden’s inviting coolness.
Only her heart grinding uncomfortably against her ribs refused to be soothed.
A dark shadow plunged in the blackness of a far thicket.
And then a man stepped into the clearing, the light slowly showing her the contours of his face.
His eyes were dark hollows shaped like peach pits.
The doughy glow of the light’s cornmeal rays suffused his cheeks, catching brightly in his eyebrows and profuse side-whiskers, limning the severe sculpting of his nose and his sharp-cut nostrils.
She knew him. Before she saw the green-silver glint of his eyes, she had remembered that face. His name left her lips in a whimper.
“Granville.” Fast-rising, involuntary terror surged through her.
This man above all others had come to be the nightmare nemesis who had been the distant author of her most wrenching unhappiness.
Her fear was anguished, riveting. It was only when her eyes flew to the glimmer in his hand and she saw the light dancing off the silver furniture of a small double-barrel pistol that her limbs thawed to allow motion.
She retreated from him, little tumbling half steps halted by the wooden bench pressing into the backs of her thighs.
“Yes,” he said in a soft tone. “Run. Run away, you idiotic scrap of skin and blood. You have no notion how much it would please me to be provoked into burying a bullet in your hair. Unless what you have under it is empty, you’ll stay where you are.
And don’t bother looking around so hopefully.
I know you’re alone. I saw the boy leave you. ”
“H-how—”
“For a week I’ve been trying to get close to you, my pretty, and bloody hard it’s been, as well as Devon has you guarded. I never quite expected this little piece of good fortune. A helpful juvenile, Cat. I had him once when he was a child. Did he tell you?”
Three thoughts hit Merry in such rapid succession that she had to force her mind to capture and hold each one.
The first was that on the instant whatever doubts she had entertained about who might be right or wrong in Devon’s apocryphal and confusing battle with Granville had been totally resolved in Devon’s favor, and that thought was surprisingly potent in its power to give her comfort.
The second was that the “boy” he had seen leave her was Cat, and not Raven, and she was not as alone as Granville thought, which was a comfort also.
Her third thought was not so much a rational concept as a flash of blinding rage that this man would use such a hideous weapon to attack her.
Like a seed fallen upon fertile earth, even that last impression nurtured her, turning her feelings away from her own fear and channeling them into a tidal wave of protectiveness toward Cat.
This creature was not a phantom. He was here, and human, and she must face the repugnant necessity of dealing with him.
Her icy anger made it easier to pretend that she had regained her composure and her courage.
“What do you want?” she asked in a voice carefully shed of color.
He laughed suddenly, standing where he was, the sharp sound curling like acid in her senses.
“What do I want? You puling trollop, your pretty husband has been chasing me the width and breadth of the country since three days after he set foot in Falmouth. Now that he has the proof he needs to convince himself—if not a court of law—that one of my raiders brought down a ship with his sister on it, my life isn’t worth a stone penny.
Don’t show me that face of bovine innocence!
I know he had my letters stolen from the Guinevere.
Before he had proof, Cathcart and Morgan kept him off me, tender souls.
They didn’t want him to trade his life for mine.
But there’s enough in those letters to implicate me in feeding information about British shipping to American privateers, if he’s broken the code.
And—clever youth that he is—don’t try to tell me that he hasn’t. ”
She had no intention of telling him anything of the sort. Nor did she mean to reveal that those papers were no longer a threat to him, through a soaking she’d given them in her attempt to escape Devon.
He seemed to take a queer satisfaction in her silence.
“Interesting of them to take you as well. By the time it occurred to me that the papers must have vanished through Devon’s busywork, I regretted I’d been so gentle in my methods of disqualifying you as the future Duchess of St. Cyr.
Obviously he didn’t believe the charming tales I spread about your easy virtue in New York. ”
Merry could have enlightened him about that as well. Again she kept her mouth resolutely shut. Was he trying to see what information he could shock out of her?
Granville’s narrow lips stretched into a soft crescent.
“My consolation was thinking of the things Devon surely must have done to you before Rand Morgan bothered himself to notice who you were. And with Devon’s repressed sensitivity it must have been quite a moment for him when he realized what an innocent you really were.
Come here, poppet. Why are you hesitating?
Come.” He was drawing a round golden object from his pocket, displaying it to her by a dangling chain. “Study it, Merry. Is it familiar?”
Moving stiffly, without grace, she crossed the clearing to take the offered object in her hand, trying not to touch his skin, though she wore gloves.
Her heartbeat slowed almost to a standstill as she studied the thing she held.
It was a Swiss watch, gold, with a fine enameled back and rose diamonds on the face, and Merry knew the inscription before she read the elaborately engraved words.
To Carl, on the occasion of his eighteenth birthday.
With fondest regards. James Wilding. It had never, to her knowledge, left her brother’s possession.
So rarely did their father make a gesture of affection, Carl cherished this one.
In an aching voice Merry whispered, “How did you come by this?”
“He gave it to me. No. Let me be more accurate. I took it.” The smile, a cruel one, extended this time to his eyes. “He’s here in London with me, did you—”
“That’s a lie!” Anxiety had sharpened her voice.
His brow rose over the smoky green glitter of his eyes.
“Is it? If you think so, my fair delight, you and I have nothing more to say to each other. Farewell.” Smiling sardonically, he flicked her cheek with a careless finger.
“Have the watch as a keepsake. Your brother surely won’t have any further use for it.
” He turned as though he would have left her, but she stopped him with a terrified protest.
“Please! No! I don’t understand…”