Perilous Risk (6 page)

“I am very sorry that your cousin’s illness lingers but I will not entangle myself with his duchess.”

Lady Ruel nodded meekly and picked up the box with the herbals in it. Rebecca watched her leave the shop with a growing, heavy weight upon her heart.

Oh, but it is not my responsibility!

Firmly, she took herself in hand and set about her evening routine to close the shop. Then she brought her father his evening cup of tea with a dollop of peach brandy in it.

The dark blue blanket wrapped about him made his hair glow silvery white. He wore it longer than was fashionable now and it lay about his shoulders, shining and sleek. Combined with his large, hooked nose, it gave him the appearance of a bird of prey, much like the bald eagle the Americans took such pride in.

His pale blue eyes pierced into her, as though searching for secrets.

She suppressed a shiver. “How are you feeling this evening, Father? Is the fire adequate?”

She offered him a tentative smile.

He continued to search her face. “What is with all these grand ladies coming to see you lately?”

“Just customers, Father.” Did her voice shake? She sat in the chair opposite him, careful not to slosh her teacup.

“The young, plump one with the fetching little hat. She’s been here before. Who is she?”

“That is Lady Ruel.” Rebecca took a deep drink of her own tea. When she went to bed, no longer under Father’s gaze, she’d have a generous Scotch whisky.

His bushy white brows lifted. “Lady
Ruel
, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Oh good heavens.” Disapproval sounded in his tone.

“Pardon me, Father?”

“I thought we were done with the mighty Earl of Ruel.”

Rebecca’s stomach tightened and her gaze skittered away from his. “His wife is a customer. Nothing more.”

“That’s a relief.” He lifted a slightly gnarled hand and waved it. “No good ever came of mixing with the nobility. They expect everything and they never pay their bills.”

“She pays her bills.”

“There’s other trouble from their sort. They have too much power and they like to wield it over the rest of us. Best to just stay away.”

“Of course, Father.”

He gazed at her with a sceptical air. “How many years did your family’s need for you take second place to his lordship’s whims? He asked you to take a leap for him and you responded how high.”

She had the grace to flush. The heat burnt her cheeks, her ears. Suddenly, she was sixteen again and being called to account for having smiled too brightly at the neighbour’s son. “Father, please, I am home now.”

“Yes, but for how long, eh?”

“He’s married.”

“I never knew of an aristocrat who was married in anything other than name.”

“It has been five years.” She swallowed back a burning in her throat. “You still don’t trust me?”

“There’s more than one gentleman in that cesspool of vice and privilege known as Mayfair.”

That ball in her stomach grew tighter and tighter. “I am
home
now, Father.”

He gave her a derisive sort of smirk. “Yes, you’re home. But you have yet to sell that house he gave you.”

She refused to cow. “I give this family my service all week. Isn’t that enough?”

“Most women would want the fellowship of their kin on the Sabbath.”

“I am a mature woman. How I chose to spend my Sundays is my concern.” God, without her Sundays spent in quiet solitude, in her own home, she’d go mad.

“You have never made peace with your place in this world.” His accusatory tone cut into her.

“I have made peace with it.” She could hear the sharp note of defensiveness in her own voice. It was perhaps disrespectful to him but she couldn’t help it.

“You have but one son and nothing else to show for your youth.”

“Edwin is a fine son. He has made much of himself. I have need of no other.”

He fixed a glower upon her. “Don’t make things prettier than they ought to be. Edwin floundered in his studies and your grand lover bought him a position.”

Her mother’s heart contracted with pain to hear such criticism levelled at her son. “Edwin struggled with his studies, that’s true. But he has a good heart and he is a good listener. He will make a fine clergyman.”

“When Howland died, you ought to have come home and I could have found you a worthy husband.”

“Father, please…I—”

He waved his hand, a quick, jerking motion. “Pah, then, go to bed. We’re going to be up early in the morning in the distillery and I shall have need of your alertness.”

Rebecca’s energy was considerably sapped when she reached her bedchamber. She stripped her clothes off numbly then pulled her nightdress over her head without even splashing her face with water. She didn’t even bother to have her whisky.

Her eyes were so heavy she could scarcely keep them open long enough to clean her teeth.

But when she finally lay in bed, she remained wide-awake, haunted by the memory of those deep, dark blue eyes. Pleading.

She recalled years ago, when Jon’s cousin had died young. Jon had told her that most of the males in his family were born with weak lungs. The condition was so prevalent that many times only one male child survived to reproduce from each generation.

Jon was the last male of his generation.

Young Lady Ruel had a heavy load on her shoulders and she was trying so hard to bear up. To be an excellent mother to a son who might well not survive the coming winter with its attendant fevers and agues.

Now she was also forced to watch her cousin, the only relative she had living in England, be slowly murdered by his own wife.

In the past, you have thought such vicious, uncharitable things about Lady Ruel. And you have always despised people who gossip, people who are cruel and shun others.

Rebecca tossed in the bed and sighed.

Her jealousy for Lady Ruel had turned her into someone she didn’t always like. Now she had the chance to make up for that. To force herself to become a better person.

What was it really going to hurt her to go have a look at young Saxby?

* * * *

A petite female figure in a pale grey pelisse alighted from a hackney and hurried through the rain up the steps to the Duke of Saxby’s house.

He’d watched the woman enter this house every night this week. He knew who she was. But didn’t know what she was doing here.

A burning pain erupted in his stomach. The rat that lived in his guts had awoken and begun gnawing away. Stephen Drake pulled back from the rain splattered window of his carriage and rubbed his stomach. Rats were the most loathsome creatures. But he’d learnt to respect this one, for at the least provocation it could metamorphose into a fire-breathing serpent, twisting like burning death through his innards. He took several uneasy breaths and the pain eased a bit. He brushed his hands together briskly then closed his eyes and pressed his warmed palms to them.

Keep your mind on the task at hand.

He couldn’t even imagine how Rebecca had come to be entangled here but he must figure it out. He must know. There could be no possibility for error, not if he was to be able to protect her.

He focused on what he already knew. Maria Seymour, the new Duchess of Saxby, had once been the Earl of Ruel’s mistress. Something had happened between them about five years previous because Ruel had apparently taken certain intimate letters he’d held in his possession and shared them with several influential persons. It had quite ruined the lady. The resultant scandal and shunning by Society had sent her to live abroad for several years.

The Earl of Ruel. Now there was a potentially explosive keg of powder.

Stephen recalled not but a fortnight before, he had been observing Ruel through a peephole at the office of one of his agents, a private investigator.

The severity of dark green painted walls, walnut wainscoting and furniture was mitigated somewhat by the lamps’ soft yellow glow.

“Her husband’s lingering illness is most suspicious.” The tall blond man sat back in his chair and drew his brows together. Pinched skin over the bridge of the nose and his hard-boned facial structure gave him an expression as though he were
perpetually scowling.

He certainly wasn’t the handsomest of men.

But Lord Ruel had been Rebecca Howland’s choice. Then he had cast her aside to wed a wealthy ice-princess. Such was a nobleman’s repayment for loyalty. “And her association with the Earl of Barnet cannot be a wholesome one. I know her too well,” Ruel said.

Ah yes, the Earl of Barnet. Here was the interesting portion. Stephen had asked his network to report anything they heard related to the Earl of Barnet. Ruel’s tone had betrayed his rancour toward Barnet. The reason for that was easy to guess. An inveterate Whig, Ruel was an up and coming star within the House of Lords but his rival, the powerful, older Earl of Barnet blocked his further progress.

But what was the reason for Ruel’s continued grudge against his former mistress? And how might that information, once gleaned, be of benefit to Stephen?

The thin red-haired man coughed delicately and adjusted his spectacles. “Lord Ruel, I can investigate these matters for you, but it will cost a good deal of money.”

“I don’t care about the expense.” Ruel crushed his cigar out with particular vigour.

“All right, so you wish me to find something so incriminating that the lady will be forced to leave England again?”

Lord Ruel had looked up. “I wish to see her sent to gaol.”

The words had been spoken with perfect calm. Deathly, chilly calm.

“I understand, my lord.”

Lord Ruel had stood. “No need to usher me out.”

Mr Smith had stood. “Very well, my lord, I shall be in touch as soon as I know more.”

The Earl of Ruel’s vengeful zeal was disturbing but if it interfered with Stephen’s mission in any way, he would simply place Lord Ruel under house arrest or some other means of keeping him away.

The situation could be managed.

Excitement had surged through Stephen. A puzzle to solve, with perhaps some significance to national security. Who could say? Time would tell.

A few moments later, the door to the chamber where Stephen waited opened.

Mr Smith stood there quietly. “You were wise to send for me,” Stephen said. “Charge Lord Ruel whatever your customary rate is and keep it. I shall tend to this business.”

Coming back into the present moment, aware suddenly of the damp chill sinking into his bones and the steady drum of rain on the carriage roof, Stephen frowned. All his earlier excitement to engage his mission had now been crushed. Now it was a tricky matter that he must deal with using extreme caution.

How the devil had Mrs Rebecca Howland come to be involved in this quagmire? Moreover, what could Stephen do to keep her safe?

At the intense emotion that thought evoked, the rat grew peckish again and began to chew once more. Unthinkingly, Stephen placed a protective hand on his stomach.

Christ. How long did he have now?

No mental activity. Absolutely nothing emotionally straining. The grey-haired doctor’s expression had grown sober as he had prescribed bed rest—
bed rest
—and that he employ a nurse and take warm milk or beef’s broth at short intervals round the clock.

If you don’t do exactly as I say, you’ll be dead in a matter of months.
The doctor peered over his spectacles.
A matter of months.

So, Stephen had given up everything that made life worth living. His work. Palatable food. Claret. Even oranges, which he loved more than anything else. And he had adhered to the prescribed regimen for months.

And whist he had not yet died, the treatment hadn’t done him much earthly good either. He had decided that he might as well live right up until the end. Still, he saw no reason to force death’s hand. He fished in his pocket for his bottle of pills and his flask of watered claret and washed the medication down. Then he sat patiently, rubbing his stomach and willing the medication to work.

* * * *

“He was recovering.” The words, icily said, put a heavy weight into Rebecca’s guts and she gaped at the other woman.

Masses of dark brown hair that glinted in tones of deep, fiery auburn and sparkling gold lay about her shoulders, fanned out upon a jade green velvet gown that accentuated her lush figure. She seemed impossibly tall. Sensual. Beautiful. Yet Maria Seymour’s eyes were like sleet-coated agates. “That is, he was recovering until that latest—what was it you called it?”

“A strengthening posset.”

Rebecca glanced at the bed. The alabaster cast to the patrician features didn’t seem so very out of place for such a fair-haired young man. In the large mahogany bed, beneath the gold and green satin coverlet, with his lashes laying like sandy-red crescents on his cheeks, the duke appeared to be sleeping. She turned her attention back to Maria. “It was mild. You could have given it to a baby with no ill-effects.”

Maria raised her brows in a sceptical expression. “Well, your
medicines
have killed my husband.”