18 #3
“There was this horrible woman I knew years ago, you see,” the man began, silky voice bouncing off the foliage, making Oliver feel surrounded by a hundred malicious Lord Durands, “a woman who claimed all manner of things in the name of botany. And very often at the expense of myself. She was an evil one, never missing an opportunity to vilify me, to discredit the work I do. I could perhaps have forgiven all that, of course. I am a generous man, after all. But then she had the audacity to claim my work as her own, tried to pass off my hard-won experiments as the products of her disturbed mind. The very experiments that I am finally about to publish without the stain of her lies.” He gave a harsh, grating laugh that ran like a thousand pinpricks over Oliver’s skin.
“I do not mind admitting that I did not mourn her when she died.”
He looked to Oliver then. “Mrs. Iris Rumford is the product of that woman.”
“Is she, my lord?” Oliver managed, even as his mind whirled. Yes, he knew Iris was the daughter of a botanist, a woman who had died some years past, whom she loved and missed dearly. Since Durand was reiterating those facts, what she had told him about her past had been true.
Yet she had conveniently left out pertinent information, hadn’t she? Such as the immensely important fact that Lord Durand and Iris’s mother had been enemies?
“Indeed. Which makes every interaction I have had with the woman suspect. To have the daughter of the woman who maligned me skulking about just before my exhibition and the publication of my paper, which will prove once and for all that her mother was a fraud? It cannot be mere coincidence. I expected something of this sort to occur, of course. It is why I hired you on, after all. There is nothing a person will not do when fame and fortune are on the line.” The earl stopped then, letting loose a chilling laugh, one that made Oliver’s very bones shudder.
“She even asked me about those same experiments, didn’t she?
To think I welcomed her into my home, my study, these very glasshouses. ”
He turned the full force of his furious gaze on Oliver, and it took everything in him not to take a step back from the earl. The man was shorter than him by half a foot, with the soft form of one unused to manual labor.
Even so, Oliver had never seen a more dangerous man. It blazed from his eyes, a kind of unhinged rage that said he would do anything to get what he wanted. He had always felt something was off about the man, that his sleek smile and overly friendly manner could not be trusted.
He had not expected to be so right.
He supposed he should be pleased that his instincts remained intact, that he had not lost that part of him that had guided him so well and for so long.
But if his instincts had not failed him in this, didn’t it mean they had not failed him in other things as well?
Namely that his suspicions about Iris, suspicions he had more recently questioned and discounted, had been correct as well.
He had felt from the first moment he’d seen her that she had been up to no good, that she’d had ulterior motives.
Yet in the days that had followed, she had quieted each and every one.
Now here was proof that he had been right to suspect her of nefarious purposes.
The daughter of Lord Durand’s enemy, who had been sneaking about that man’s glasshouses, who had then been introduced by her friends as someone merely interested in his collection?
It could not be coincidence. Bile filled his mouth at how thoroughly she’d tricked him, and he swallowed it down with immense effort.
Everything hurt, from his body to his head, and most especially his heart. He’d been a fool. A damned fool.
But Lord Durand was not through, not by far.
“This is, of course, where you come in, Beckett.” The man’s lips stretched into a semblance of a smile, an echo of the false cheerful facade he typically showed to the world.
One that appeared more the bared teeth of a rabid dog about to attack than human.
Oliver shivered at just what that mask had been hiding.
“You were a Bow Street Runner,” the earl continued. “I know you have certain talents the typical man does not. I want you to use those talents.”
“I—I don’t understand, my lord,” Oliver managed through numb lips.
“It is simple, really. You will make certain that Mrs. Rumford rues the day she decided to cross me. I really don’t care how you do it. Just make certain it is done.”
He turned to leave. Before Oliver could react—God knew what might have happened had his shock dissipated and the rage boiling up in his veins had time to take hold—the earl turned back.
The unhinged look was gone, the mask firmly in place, that too-friendly smile on his lips that, somehow, some way, was more frightening now that Oliver knew what was beneath.
“Oh, I have forgotten myself. How are your mother and sister settling in?”
A ringing started up in Oliver’s ears. “My mother and sister?”
“Certainly. I would be a poor excuse for an employer indeed if I did not inquire about them. You have a lovely family, Beckett, and I was happy to have been able to provide you with a position and them with a home. Especially after that horrible year following your departure from the Runners.” His smile widened.
“Your sister is especially lovely. She is, what, seventeen now? Nearly of age. Yes, a lovely girl.”
With that the earl strode away. Oliver, suddenly unable to breathe, clawed at his cravat until it hung limply about his neck.
But it didn’t help. Gasping, spots swimming in front of his burning eyes, he dropped to his knees on the hard path.
Visions of Verity’s and his mother’s faces spun in his mind, strained with want.
And with them was Iris, so damn lovely he wanted to cry.
She had no right to be there, of course, as one of the people he worried about.
She had fooled him, tricked him. Betrayed him.
Had she seduced him on purpose? Had she made certain he was thoroughly distracted so she might succeed at whatever it was she was planning to do?
His heart cried out that she could not have done something so underhanded.
Not Iris. She was one of the most forthright and honest people he had ever known.
While his instincts had told him she was up to no good, they had also sensed that he could trust whatever came out of her mouth.
Yet wasn’t omitting pertinent information just as good as lying?
Hadn’t she betrayed his trust in leaving out just who her mother had been to the earl?
Not that he gave a good damn about Lord Durand.
If he weren’t forced to work for the man, he would be only too happy to see him tumble off a cliff. But his mother, his sister?.? .? .
His head ached as his heart and mind went to battle with each other, fear slithering through him.
But he could not stay here forever, hoping and praying that the last half hour had been a bad dream.
Rising to his feet with immense effort, he strode from the glasshouse.
No matter the exhausting day he’d had, no matter that he wanted nothing more than to return home and bury himself beneath the covers of his bed and fall into a dreamless sleep, he had a job to do—a vile job, but a job nonetheless.
His mother’s and sister’s safety depended on it.
And he would not think of green eyes as wide and brilliant as the sea, nor a smile that made his heart feel, for the first time in his life, as if he were whole.