Chapter 11 #2
“Not tonight, thank you Harold. Have food sent on trays to Webb and Megan and myself in an hour. We need to rest tonight as it’s been quite the journey. I’ll speak with my uncle before heading to my chambers.”
The Duke of Saxton’s study was exactly as Oliver remembered it—a room designed to intimidate.
Dark paneling, portraits of ancestors staring down in collective judgment, a desk the size of a small country behind which his uncle sat like a king on a throne.
The fire burned high and warm, and the contrast to the frozen mountains he’d spent the last week traversing was almost dizzying.
His uncle looked up from his papers, and his expression moved through surprise, irritation and finally a cold, assessing calm that Oliver had never trusted.
“Well, this is a surprise. I thought you were in London.” The Duke set down his quill. “You look like something the dogs dragged in from the moor.”
“Thank you, Uncle. Always a pleasure.”
“Sit down before you fall down. You look half dead.” The Duke gestured to the chair across the desk with the air of a man granting an audience.
At sixty, Edward Sommerset, Duke of Saxton, was still a formidable figure—silver-haired, sharp-eyed, with a jawline Oliver had inherited but the Duke had none of Oliver’s father’s warmth.
“Where in God’s name have you been? I had your steward telling me you’d gone north to inspect property and then nothing.
Days of nothing. Your letter was a masterpiece of deliberate vagueness. ”
“I was in Wales.”
Dead silence.
“Wales.” His uncle repeated the word as if Oliver had announced a visit to the moon. “You disappeared for days to go to Wales.”
“James Hartley is dead.”
The Duke’s expression shifted. James had visited Saxton Castle often enough over the years that even his cold uncle recognized the name. “Hartley? What happened?”
“He was murdered.” Oliver watched his uncle’s face carefully. “The Earl of Penharrow had him killed and made it look like a riding accident. James sent me a letter before he died telling me the truth and asking me to do something about it.”
“So naturally you charged off to Wales alone, like a green lieutenant with something to prove.” The Duke’s voice held equal measures of exasperation and something that, in another man, might have been concern. “And did you? Do something about it?”
“I retrieved a witness. A woman Penharrow had held captive at his hunting lodge.”
The silence that followed was a different quality entirely. Oliver watched his uncle process this, watched the calculation behind those sharp eyes.
“A woman,” the Duke said finally, his voice careful.
“Her name is Megan. He took her as a child. She’s been his prisoner for over fourteen years.” Oliver kept his voice even, though the words still burned like acid in his throat. “She witnessed his crimes. She can corroborate everything James died trying to expose.”
The Duke leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers in a gesture Oliver recognized as his thinking pose. Outside, the wind moved through the castle grounds, rattling the study windows. Finally, his uncle spoke.
“I know Penharrow.”
Oliver stilled. “What?”
“He’s not a solid acquaintance, but I have met him.
” The Duke’s expression was closed, careful.
“He’s a man of considerable influence in Wales.
Well-connected. Wealthy enough that certain doors remain open to him that perhaps shouldn’t.
” A pause. “And dangerous enough that wise men look the other way.”
“Wise men,” Oliver repeated softly.
“Don’t take that tone with me, boy. I’m stating facts, not admiring them.” The Duke stood, moving to the fireplace. “What exactly do you want from me?”
“Guards posted tonight, at the perimeter, the gates, the east wing where Megan and Webb are quartered.” Oliver rose as well, too tired to sit while he argued. “Penharrow’s men tracked us across half of Wales. He won’t simply accept that she’s gone. He’ll come for her.”
“Then let him.” His uncle’s voice was quiet, flat.
“Oliver, think clearly for a moment. What exactly do you hope to achieve here? You have a woman with no family, no standing, whose only value is as a witness to crimes that happened in Wales, against a peer who has the money and influence to bury any testimony she might offer before it reaches a courtroom.” He turned from the fire.
“Give her money for safe passage. Set her up somewhere quiet in the north and let Penharrow go.”
The words dropped into the room like stones into still water.
Oliver stared at his uncle and felt something crystalize in his chest—cold and hard and absolute.
“Let him go,” Oliver repeated.
“Yes.”
“The man who murdered James Hartley.”
“A man who could destroy this family if you make an enemy of him.” The Duke’s voice didn’t rise, but the edge in it was unmistakable. “James Hartley was a fine young man and I’m sorry for his loss, but he is gone, Oliver. Nothing you do will bring him back. And whatever this woman suffered—”
“Whatever she suffered?” Oliver’s voice was dangerously quiet.
“—is not your responsibility to avenge. You are the heir to this dukedom. You have obligations that stretch beyond your personal sense of honor. I will not have you jeopardizing three hundred years of this family’s standing for a woman of no consequence and a dead man’s vendetta.”
Oliver looked at his uncle for a long moment. This man who had raised him without warmth, who had molded him into a suitable heir, who had measured every choice Oliver ever made against the Saxton name and found it wanting.
“A man of no consequence,” Oliver said. “That’s what you called him, isn’t it? Years ago, when James first came here with me. A baron’s third son with no prospects and too much idealism. You thought I’d grow out of the friendship.”
“I thought you’d understand that sentiment is a luxury men in our position cannot afford.”
“James understood my position better than any man alive.” The words came out rough, honest, past the careful control Oliver had been maintaining.
“He knew exactly what it was to be the heir. The obligation, the loneliness, the particular misery of being surrounded by people who see only the title. He never looked at me and saw the Marquess of Astor. He saw me. And I will avenge him.” Oliver’s jaw tightened.
“I will not let his death mean nothing.”
“Noble.” The Duke’s voice was cool. “And foolish. What about the woman? What do you really know about her beyond what she’s told you? If the rumors are to be believed, I suspect she’s Penharrow’s wh—”
“Careful.” The single word stopped his uncle cold. Oliver took a deliberate step toward the desk. “Choose your next words carefully, Uncle.”
Something shifted in the Duke’s expression. Perhaps it was the look in Oliver’s eyes. Perhaps he simply recognized a man who had reached the limit of his patience and found nothing left on the other side but absolute certainty.
“She was six or seven years old,” Oliver said, his voice like cold steel.
“He stole her from a village fair, and she spent the next fourteen years as that man’s prisoner and his victim.
She has no family that she can remember.
She cannot read or write because he deliberately kept her ignorant to ensure she couldn’t ask for help.
She watched a stable lad hang from gallows because he tried to get a message out for her.
She watched him die and she has carried that ever since.
” He held his uncle’s gaze without flinching.
“She is twenty-one years old and has never in her adult life been permitted to make a single free choice. And you would have me send her away quietly and let the man responsible continue on with impunity and likely recapture her and perhaps kill her.”
The Duke said nothing.
Oliver moved toward the door. “I want armed men at every entrance, and someone posted outside the east wing specifically. I will deal with Penharrow, and I will deal with the legal strategy, and I will deal with the consequence to this family’s standing.
All of it, but you will give me this castle as a safe harbor, and you will post those guards. ”
“And if I refuse?”
Oliver stopped with his hand on the door. He didn’t turn around.
“Then I will stand guard myself. Outside her door. All night. In the hall. Without sleep.” A beat.
“And when your household asks why the heir to the Saxton dukedom spent the night on the floor outside a guest’s room, you can explain your reasoning to them, and if that doesn’t work, I will go back to the army and ensure I don’t come home and your title and estate can go some obscure relative if one can be found. ”
He heard his uncle exhale. The sound of a man who recognized when he had been outmaneuvered.
“The guards will be posted within the hour,” the Duke said stiffly.
“Thank you.” Oliver opened the door. “And Uncle, James deserved better than an unmarked grave and a polite lie. I intend to ensure he gets it. I think somewhere beneath all that pragmatism, you know he did too.”
He left before his uncle could answer and walked down the corridor toward his own chambers, feeling beneath the exhaustion something that had been absent since the moment he’d first read James’s letter.
Not peace exactly. There would be no peace until Penharrow answered for what he’d done.
But purpose. Clean and sharp and sure.
He had work to do.
* * *
The bath had been the most extraordinary thing that had happened to her in fourteen years because Penharrow was not here or waiting for her. Not only that, but she also had a fine meal too. She was full and totally content. Nothing was as good.