Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Magnus trudged through the tangled garden. By rights, it should be Turner who was trying to find Charlotte’s missing lapdog. Magnus had certainly ordered him to. But Turner had claimed to need a respite before making a second walk into the village.
“My arthritis, your lordship,” he’d reminded Magnus. “You know how it plays up.”
Magnus had cursed and grumbled, but he’d ultimately given in, agreeing to find the dog himself. Turner was the only servant he had. And Magnus was not, after all, a monster.
Though he did have his moments.
This was beginning to feel like one of them.
His patience had already been at its limits when he’d left the house. Now, after having circled the garden once with no result, he was in danger of losing it—and his temper—altogether. If his make-believe-wife’s dog was still on the grounds, it was doing an excellent job of hiding itself.
“Is nothing in this benighted place where it’s supposed to be?” Magnus swiped at the undergrowth with one of the broken branches he’d picked up during his initial turn around the garden. “First my missing inheritance, now a missing dog. What next?”
Perhaps the Manor really was cursed.
Its every appearance supported the fact.
What had once been the showplace of the county, with its famous rose gardens, priceless paper hangings and paneling, and furnishings that would have bankrupted a lesser noble, was now an utter ruin.
As if an evil witch had cast a devastating spell over the place.
An enchantment that had destroyed everything in its path, withering it away to rot and to dust.
The thought brought Magnus no comfort. He had to believe he might yet discover where his father had concealed his vast fortune. That it was here someplace on the grounds, carefully hidden. For it had to be somewhere. It certainly wasn’t in the bank.
“The late Lord Eversleigh wasn’t overfond of banks at the end,” his father’s solicitor had told Magnus when they’d met in his law office on Magnus’s arrival in Dover. “He preferred his fortune remain in his own keeping.”
“He took his money out of the bank?” Magnus had asked in disbelief.
“Every farthing,” the solicitor had said. “He also took the late countess’s jewelry. It has not been accounted for since.”
Magnus had blanched at the implication. “He sold my mother’s jewels?”
“Not to my knowledge, my lord. He merely took them.”
“And what about the money? Are you telling me that he spent it all?”
The dour solicitor had looked at Magnus gravely from behind his cluttered desk.
“There’s no evidence of any expenditures on Lord Eversleigh’s part.
Rather the opposite, if you’ll excuse my candor.
He dismissed the staff at his London house shortly before his death, leaving nothing for its maintenance.
As for his estate in Yorkshire, it has completely fallen into ruin. ”
“If he didn’t spend it, and it’s not locked away in another bank somewhere—”
“It is not, my lord.”
“Then it must be at his house in London,” Magnus said. “The jewels as well. You say he never left the place in the end?”
“No, sir. Except…” The solicitor consulted his notes. “He did travel to Yorkshire the year after removing his funds. To visit Moorcross Manor, I presume. It was not a lengthy stay.”
He’s hidden his fortune at the Manor, Magnus had concluded.
His mother had begun refurbishing the ancient estate in her early days as countess. In the aftermath of her death, it had become his father’s obsession. The place where he’d poured all his energies. No expense had been too great. No luxury too grand.
Moorcross Manor had been both the beginning of Magnus’s father’s descent into grief-stricken eccentricity and the culmination of it. It was only logical that he’d have brought his fortune here at the last.
It was the sole reason Magnus had come home.
To retrieve the more than three hundred thousand pounds that made up his inheritance.
It was a princely sum. The interest alone would be sufficient to set Magnus up for life.
Somewhere far from here—an isolated villa in a remote region of France or Italy, perhaps.
There would be no more battles. No more fighting. At last, Magnus could find some degree of peace. The kind that only money could afford.
All he had to do now was find his father’s hiding place.
An easy enough task, Magnus had foolishly believed. Yet his father’s cunning had so far eluded him. Three days Magnus and Turner had been here. And three days their searches had turned up nothing.
And now this. The whole enterprise unceremoniously interrupted by a nosy female and a fruitless effort to locate her missing, and very probably nonexistent, dog.
Magnus batted at the undergrowth again in another attempt at rousting the creature. He was just on the verge of giving up when a flicker of movement beneath a nearby tangle of rose bushes caught his eye.
Casting aside his stick, Magnus dropped into a crouch to get a better view. A flare of satisfaction coursed through him. It was a dog, all right. But this was no pedigreed lady’s lapdog. It was small and black, and filthy as all hell.
It growled menacingly from its hiding place beneath the rose bushes. A thoroughly uncivilized sound, more suited to a wild animal than a lady’s pet.
If Magnus didn’t know better, he’d think it was a street dog. It certainly had the craftiness of one. The little beast had enshrouded itself in the protection of the thorns. There would be no way to catch it without being ripped to shreds.
“Brilliant,” Magnus said under his breath. “But you’ll have to do better than that.” He reached for the dog.
It shrank from his hand with snapping jaws, retreating farther beneath the branches.
“Be still, you mongrel.” Magnus delved deeper, stifling a string of oaths as the thorns raked his flesh. “I said…be still.”
Charlotte examined the valet’s craggy countenance as he leaned over her to adjust her pillow.
Her head was aching dreadfully. Pain emanated from the wound on the back of her skull into her temples, eyes, teeth, and neck.
She felt rattled. Physically shaken. All damp hair, aching bones, and queasy stomach.
Her clothes were uncomfortably tight as well.
Corset pinching at her midsection and skirts wound around her legs in a constrictive tangle. She couldn’t easily move.
But it wasn’t any of that which troubled her at present. It was this man’s completely unrecognizable face. She stared at him, growing more unsettled by the moment.
It was the oddest thing. Like a thick gray storm cloud had settled over her brain. She couldn’t remember the fellow at all. Yet, as far as she could discern, he was a longtime retainer of her husband.
Which was another troubling fact.
She had no memory whatsoever of her husband.
And he seemed the kind of gentleman that a woman would remember.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, and leanly muscled, with thick black hair and piercing, steel-gray eyes.
An athletic sort of man, she gathered, though not a handsome one.
His face was too angular. His cheekbones too high and his jaw too sharp.
Everything about him spoke of severity and ill-temper.
Like a ravening wolf who would rend friend and foe alike.
And then there were the scars.
Great burn scars along the right side of his face, across his ear and approaching his eye.
The burns had even taken some of the hair at his temple.
A gruesome, disfiguring wound. Textured and shiny, not quite the color of his skin.
Along with his ill-temper, it made him seem not entirely human. More a beast than a man.
Yet, he had touched her with a certain degree of gentleness.
Which meant that there was some little good in him. And surely there must be, else why would she have consented to be his wife?
A frown notched her brows. It was vaguely mortifying to be so much in the dark about the man she’d married. Goodness, she didn’t even know his name! All she had learned so far was that he was a lord and that she was a lady. But lord and lady who, and of what?
“Sure you don’t want more tea?” Turner asked, drawing back. “Or something to eat? We don’t have much in the larder to speak of, but I—”
“I don’t require anything,” Charlotte said. “Except…perhaps you might answer a few questions?”
The valet’s expression shuttered. He took a step back from the bed. “I ain’t the best man to be answering questions, my lady. You’d do better to ask…”
There was an awkward silence.
“My husband?” Charlotte finished for him.
Turner dropped his gaze. “He, uh, should be back anytime with your dog.”
Anytime?
Charlotte didn’t know when that might be. The bedchamber was so dark and grim, with its heavily draped windows and single low-burning glass lamp, she couldn’t tell if it was presently day or night.
How long had she been asleep up here? Hours? Days?
She straightened the bedclothes over her midsection with anxious fingers. The patterned quilt was thin with age and the sheet so worn, she could practically see through it. “What do you call him?” she asked.
“Your dog? That’s a question only you would know, ma’am.”
“Not my dog. My husband. You call him ‘my lord,’ but lord what?”
“Err…” Turner retreated another step into the shadows. “It’s, uh, Eversleigh. But only lately. Afore that it were something else.”
“Eversleigh.” Charlotte strained to remember. “And I am Lady Eversleigh?”
Turner didn’t reply.
“I must have hit my head very hard,” she said.
“You did at that, my lady,” Turner agreed quickly. “Happen the doctor will come soon and sort you straight.”
“How long was I—”
Her question was interrupted by the sound of heavily approaching footsteps. It was accompanied by a fury of angry yips and growls.
Charlotte’s pulse quickened in alarm. She pushed herself up on trembling arms as the door to the bedchamber burst open. A blood-stained Lord Eversleigh stalked in holding a snarling little dog. The creature was all but foaming at the mouth.