Elizabeth Thornton - [Special Branch 02] (23 page)

Her breathing was erratic not only from all her exertions, but also from the overwhelming sense of relief at finding him safe. She said on a choked sob, “I called to you as I descended the stairs.”

She sensed rather than saw his sudden, startled movement. “I’m not in the mood for company,” he said harshly. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

Her throat was aching from all the tears she’d shed. “I had to come.”

He moved again, and at last she saw him, his profile silhouetted against one of the broken windows. He combed his fingers through his hair. She stood there miserably, aware of her own inadequacy, but even more aware of his pain.

He suddenly lashed out with his open hand, sending some small object tumbling to the floor. “It should have been me!” he railed. “I’m the reckless brother. Ask anyone. But not this time.” His voice cracked. “Sweet Jesus, what got into him? He couldn’t
even swim and he jumped in to save me. We almost made it. Then we were swept away again.”

Stifling a whimper, she felt her way around a table and other small obstacles until she reached him.

“It’s all my fault,” he said. “It’s—”

“Don’t!” She stopped his next words with a kiss.

She was aware of the rain beating against the windowpanes; she heard the mournful shriek of the wind. She tasted brandy on his lips and the salt from the spray as the waves surged toward land. Then everything faded and she was aware only of Jason.

When he lowered her to the floor, she wasn’t afraid. She had come so close to losing him, that she needed this, needed to feel his strong arms around her and his heart thundering against hers. He was alive. He had cheated death. In that moment, it was enough.

Her bed was his coat; her pillow was his arm. They didn’t undress; there were no words of love. It was a swift and silent coupling. There was pain, but she didn’t cry out. She wrapped her arms around him and showed him, with all her innocent ardor, what she was afraid to put into words.

Her joy was short-lived. When he finally lay still, it wasn’t her name he spoke. “Leigh,” he murmured drowsily. “Leigh, I’m glad you came.” Then he drifted into sleep.

Leigh
. The name burned into her brain like a white-hot poker. She was numb with shock. She wasn’t angry. She was appalled. Pain and misery flooded every part of her being. She saw now that this must be their trysting place. And all unawares, she had taken Leigh Granger’s place.

Crushed, humiliated beyond anything she had ever known, she slipped from his arms and made her way back to the house. The only thing that made her
humiliation bearable was the thought that Jason didn’t know what a fool she had made of herself.

And he would never know.

In the days that followed, there was more to think about than herself. George was gone, and the awful realization that they would be deprived of his presence forever was just beginning to sink in. On the few occasions she saw Jason, it was obvious that he suspected nothing. In fact, he was preoccupied. He was master of Haddo now, and there was much to do. If she was subdued, no one noticed it. They were all in shock, all grieving. Life would never be the same again.

Almost at once, the awful truth about Haddo’s financial situation came to light. Unbeknownst to them all, George had gambled away everything in the gaming halls of Brighton. Bankruptcy stared them in the face. Right after the funeral, Jason went to London to meet with solicitors and creditors, and that was the last she saw of him.

The news was not good. The only solution, Grandmother Radley bluntly declared, was that Jason would have to marry for money. Gwyn had already decided that she could no longer stay on at Haddo. The thought of Jason bringing a wife home to be mistress of Haddo, a wife she would have to love as her own sister, filled her with dread.

So she made her escape in the time-honored way of desperate women everywhere. And what a disaster that turned out to be.

Yet here she was, eight years later, in the fold of Haddo as though she had never been away. Everything seemed the same, yet everything was different. She was different, older and wiser, and she had a son to protect.

She dwelled on that thought for a long, long time before she padded back to her bed.

In the morning, she got up early and went for a walk along the beach. The fishermen’s hut had disappeared. She learned from Harvard that it had blown down in the ferocious gale in the winter of eighteen nine, and the locals had used it for firewood.

It was fitting, she thought.

J
ason stretched his cramped muscles and, rising from his desk, wandered over to the open window. On the lawn outside his study, Chris and Mark, along with their mothers, were playing croquet, but their laughter brought no answering smile to Jason’s lips. Almost a week had passed since he’d brought Gwyn to Haddo, an uneventful week, and though he was well satisfied with how his family had welcomed her—there were no hostile undercurrents that he could detect, and if there had been, he would have dealt with them swiftly and implacably—he was far from happy.

Looking out on that pretty, domestic scene, he found it hard to believe that someone had tried to kill Gwyn. In her pale green pelisse and straw bonnet, she looked as fresh and untroubled as the daffodils that spilled from their flower beds to encroach on Haddo’s dignified lawns. The color was high on her cheeks; her auburn hair tumbled wantonly around her shoulders. Her flashing smile and ready laughter would have convinced anyone that she didn’t have a care in the world.

He was glad, fiercely glad, to see that she had recovered from the attack, and that the horror of that
night was fading from her mind.
This is where she belongs
, he thought. This is how he wanted to see her.

Every morning, they went riding along the beach, no more than a canter, until she had regained her strength, and every evening, he insisted she entertain them by playing the piano. It didn’t take much persuasion to get Gwyn to play the piano. He wished she would look at him the way she looked at that inanimate block of mahogany, and touch him, and play him. He would make the sweetest music she had ever known.

The thought made him grin, but the grin faded when he returned to his desk and picked up a letter he had received that morning from Richard Maitland. He’d already read it several times. Though they were making progress on the Johnny Rowland case, Richard wrote, there was still nothing that connected Mrs. Barrie to it. But the danger to her was still real, in his opinion, and their vigilance must not be relaxed.

He’d be out of town for a little while, Richard wrote, because something had come up, but when he returned, he hoped that Jason could bring Mrs. Barrie to him so that he could question her in person.

Jason tossed the letter aside and stared into space. His sense of frustration was growing by the hour. He couldn’t concentrate on anything. There were architect’s plans needing his attention, and a strategy that one of his business partners had sent him for taking over Barton’s bank. He couldn’t even drum up a tepid interest.

His pent up frustration boiled over, and with a swipe of one hand, he sent architect’s plans and documents flying to the floor. He wanted to be up and doing. He wanted to be questioning witnesses. Of course, he wanted to keep Gwyn safe, but he was
going insane cooped up here while Richard chased down leads. He hadn’t even tracked down the maddening attorney, Armstrong, so that the mystery of the legacy could be cleared up. Armstrong’s preaching engagements took him from one end of England to another, and his hapless clerk knew only that his employer would be back on the sixteenth, and that was a week away.

He’d tried to fulfill the role Richard had assigned him. He’d talked to Gwyn, trying to draw her out or jog her memory on anything unusual that had occurred in the last little while, but she couldn’t elaborate on what she had already told him.

So what it amounted to was that he’d become her jailer. She couldn’t ride on the downs because there were too many riders there; she had to stay close to the house and always be in sight of one of the grooms or Brandon or himself.

There had to be a break in the case soon or he, for one, would go mad.

Cursing under his breath, he picked up the papers and plans he’d sent flying, and forced himself to concentrate on the architect’s plans for enlarging the stable block. He hadn’t been at it for more than a few minutes when Sophie poked her head round the door.

“Are you busy?” she asked.

“Not at all.”

Since Sophie wasn’t in the habit of seeking him out for idle conversation, he immediately rolled up the plans and set them aside. “Come in and sit down.”

She took the chair he indicated and, Sophie-like, came directly to the point. “I’ve changed my mind about going to London, Jason. Oh, I’m not looking for a come-out with balls and parties and so on. But … well … it might be good for me to broaden
my horizons, you know, see the sights, take in concerts and lectures.”

“Broaden your horizons?” Jason leaned back in his chair, stretched out his long legs, and studied his sister’s face. “Those are not your words.”

Sophie dimpled. “No. Actually, they’re Gwyn’s. We had a long conversation this morning, Jason, and she made London sound like the most exciting city in the world, not like Grandmama, who only talks of balls and parties, and boring, eligible young gentlemen who may or may not want to offer for me.” She looked at him with big, appealing eyes. “Couldn’t you persuade Gwyn, I mean, when she is fully recovered, to come and live with us in London? Then she can be my chaperon.”

Jason smiled. “You like Gwyn, don’t you?”

“I should hope so. I won’t say that she was like a mother to me when I was a child, but at least she didn’t chase me away like the rest of you did.”

“I don’t remember chasing you away.”

“That was unjust. You were so much older and were hardly ever here.”

This innocent observation found a mark that was never intended.

“Why are you frowning?” asked Sophie artlessly.

Jason stopped frowning. “I was thinking about David Jennings. I seem to recall a difference of opinion with your grandmother when you declared that wild horses could not drag you away from him.”

“And you said, in your usual, odiously unruffled way that maybe wild horses couldn’t, but you could and would if you thought it was in my best interests.”

Jason laughed. “I meant it, Sophie, and I still mean it.”

She said archly, “Aren’t you afraid I’ll elope?”

“No.”

“Gwyn did.”

His jaw set. “That’s different.”

“How is it different?”

“There was some sort of misunderstanding between Gwyn and your grandmother. Grandmother wanted Gwyn to wait until the period of mourning for George was over.”

“You mean, wait for a year?”

“Yes. But Gwyn didn’t want to wait. Nigel Barrie was a soldier. When he was posted to Portugal, Gwyn went with him.”

She shook her head slowly. “And you allowed it?”

Jason shrugged indifferently. “I had no say in the matter. As you so succinctly put it, I was never here. By the time I learned of the elopment, it was too late. They were already married.”

“I see.” She thought about this for a moment, then went on, “If you had been here, would you have given permission for them to marry?”

“Certainly,” he said, not quite truthfully. “To my knowledge, Barrie was a decent young man. Gwyn loved him. The circumstances were exceptional. He was going off to war. It was unreasonable to ask them to wait for a year. As I said, it was an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

“Mmm.” She lapsed into another reflective silence. Finally, peeking up at him, she said provocatively, “Would you come after me if I eloped with David?”

“You can count on it, but we both know that’s not going to happen. Sophie, I’m not blind or stupid. I know very well that your interest in Jennings waned a long time ago.”

She straightened in her chair, glared at him, then surprised them both by suddenly gurgling with laughter. “Oh, Jason,” she said, “I’m so fickle, sometimes it worries me.”

He smiled. “When you stop being fickle, that’s when I’ll start to worry.” He studied her for a moment.
“Don’t you think you should set your grandmother’s mind at rest?”

“Certainly not! All that would achieve is that she’d redouble her efforts to get me married to Mr. Hunter. That’s another reason I want to go to London. Gwyn says it will take me out of Mr. Hunter’s orbit, and Grandmother won’t be there to play matchmaker.”

Jason said, “I would never allow you to marry a man you could not love.”

She answered him with feeling. “You don’t know how persuasive Grandmother can be.”

“Oh, don’t I!”

At these words, her eyes lit with speculation, but when her brother merely folded his arms across his chest and regarded her steadily, the light in her eyes died away. “Jason,” she said diffidently, “do you think Gwyn was happy with Nigel?”

Her question startled him. “By all accounts she was. Why?”

“It’s just that, when I told her I wanted the kind of marriage she had with Nigel, she told me not to be a silly goose. She said that if I had to take anyone as my example, it should be Trish, but even that was foolish because no one could truly know what anyone’s marriage was like unless they were one of the partners to it.”

“She said that?”

“Yes. And she said a lot more besides.”

“Well, don’t look so crushed. I’m sure all she meant was that no marriage is perfect.”

“I suppose … yes, I’m sure you’re right.”

After Sophie left him, Jason picked up a pencil and stared at it blindly. He was thinking about Gwyn and her marriage to Nigel Barrie.

Though he had met Barrie once, at one of the regimental balls in Brighton, he couldn’t remember a
damned thing about him. It was only after Gwyn eloped that he learned Barrie had been a frequent visitor to Haddo, but everyone thought it was because he was George’s friend. Obviously, there had been more to it than that, for the elopement came so soon after George’s death as to cause a great deal of unpleasant speculation.