Chapter Twelve
Why could I not have married a placid wife of average wit with a complete lack of curiosity?
Endymion wistfully considered that fleeting thought whilst he tried to compose an answer for the far too quick-witted woman he’d married. An answer that would not undo the entirety of his inept wooing. At least, he hoped his wooing had persuaded her to take him into her bed.
He could always tell her the truth. The late duke would, no doubt, turn over in his grave.
“Women do not need the truth. They need to hear whatever gives them comfort. It is all they want or understand.”
She turned on her side and stared at him expectantly. They occupied her bedchamber. Where did she keep her Manton? He braced himself.
“My grandfather—ompff! What the devil?” His head had gone fuzzy. His wife had swatted him with one of the half dozen large pillows at the head of the bed.
“If you say your grandfather dragged you to a London brothel the way he did his two sons, I shall kick you from this bed and march you off the estate at gunpoint.” She pushed away from him, sat up and swept the considerable length and weight of her hair behind her.
“My father and his brother are dead. How do you know—”
“Your mother. After your father’s brother died, your mother refused to allow the duke near you. She did not want him to raise you the way he did his own sons. She…told me not long before she died.” She looked away.
He had so many questions; not that her answers would change anything. His family was gone and Rhiannon was all he had left. His chest squeezed tight and a sort of achy pang, like the hurt of a sudden cold wind, lodged beneath his ribs. The truth. Right.
“It wasn’t a brothel.” Endymion lay on his back and stared at the tapestry-work canopy over her head. He combed his fingers through her tresses. “He set up a mistress for me in a house on Bruton Street when I was eighteen. After I came back from Oxford, I spent all of my time with my books or with Voil. The duke thought he and I were…”
His delicate bride, with the sheet and counterpane drawn across her naked breasts, snorted and rolled her eyes. “Even were he so disposed, Lord Voil would not put up with you as his paramour for five minutes.”
“Undoubtedly. What of you, Rhee? Will you put up with me?”
“If I had taken a lover all these years? Would you put up with me?”
Rage roared through him. Primitive and so powerful, he clenched his fists to keep it inside where it belonged. She raised her chin, as bold and defiant as Boudica herself and more alluring than any woman he’d ever known.
“I’d be furious to the point of madness. Unfair of me, I know. But as you said, I am a bit of an arse.”
“No, Your Grace, I said you were a complete horse’s arse.”
“Of course,” he replied and forced his hands open. “So, you did.”
She worried the side of her bottom lip, a gesture he remembered from childhood schemes and old hurts.
“I put her aside when my grandfather died,” he confessed.
“You had the same mistress for seven years?”
“I was eighteen years old and an idiot, Rhee. She was my mistress the first year. After that, I did not share a bed with her. I only visited her when I needed to escape and find the peace and quiet of a household that would leave me alone.”
“The duke. Great Uncle Richard. Expectations.” Endymion shook his head. “The silence in the house when I disappointed them or asked about the past.” She didn’t need to hear this. Those years were over and their treatment of him had only made him stronger.
“Why didn’t you share her bed? Why did you put her aside when the duke died?”
“I was married. I realized that honor in my dealings with everyone else was nothing if I did not honor my vows to you. When Lord Richard found out, he declared it a result of my mother’s Methodist inclinations.” A sudden heat lashed across his cheeks. He was blushing. In all his thirty-two years, he never, ever remembered blushing.
“Lord Richard is a disgusting, indolent arse,” she declared as she slid next to him and lay her head on his shoulder. Dear God, at the gentle warmth that suffused him.
“Obviously a family trait.” He put his arm around her. “Am I forgiven?”
“Hmmm,” she murmured, tapping her chin with her finger.
“I’m trying to decide. I should be furious and ban you from my bed forever.”
“But as this woman must have been an excellent teacher and saved me from another night like our wedding night…” She ran her finger around his nipple and then across it.
“Please don’t say another word about our wedding night. I am not certain my manhood can survive it.”
“Or your stomach, for that matter,” she said with a sly grin.
He rolled her beneath him and laced the fingers of her hands with his. “Shall I show you what else I learned, Your Grace?” He fused his mouth to hers in a deep, invasive kiss that left them both shaking.
A shadow rippled across her features for a moment. Then she smiled. The sort of smile Helen must have gifted Paris with, the sort of smile to cause a man to start a war rather than give up a woman he cannot live without.
“I should like that very much, Your Grace. Very much, indeed.”
Endymion hated reading in a moving coach. He especially hated reading estate ledgers in a moving coach when there were so many more inventive ways to spend time traveling slowly along a mud-sodden road toward God only knew where.
“Are you paying attention, Dymi?” his exasperated wife inquired. His wife he’d much rather have straddling his lap with the skirts of her blue kerseymere gown hiked up around her hips.
“You have been keeping two sets of accounts for the last seven years and only recording part of the estate’s income because you suspect either my uncle or the estate manager he hired of embezzling said profits from the estate.”
He wanted to believe her. He wanted to take her back to Pendeen and spend the rest of the evening in her bed. Babcock would get to the bottom of the discrepancies in the accounts. Rhiannon had admitted to underreporting the accounts, but where was the money? Two parts of his body—his brain and his cock—warred, a problem he’d never encountered before, and it irritated him.
She snatched the ledger from his lap and slammed it closed before dropping it into a leather portmanteau. “I don’t suspect, I know. Apparently, that isn’t good enough for you.”
“Ah, yes, Babcock, whom you trust, will go over my ledgers and solve all of my problems. Nothing for me to worry my silly female head over.” She folded her arms across her chest and stared out the coach window into the late afternoon gloom.
“Would you like to tell me what this is truly about, Rhee? You’ve been nervous and petulant since you kicked me out of your bed and demanded I meet you in front of the house in a few hours dressed for travel. Where are we going? And more important, why?” He left unasked the question he most wanted answered.
Where was the woman he’d made love to most of the night? Where was the woman who’d fallen asleep in his arms and given him his first night’s rest in as long as he could remember? He’d awoken to find her standing in the middle of her bedchamber, wrapped in that tatty, flannel robe, a scrap of parchment in her hand. She’d given him his orders and disappeared into her sitting room to summon her maid.
“Here,” she said without turning away from the window, that same piece of paper in her outstretched hand. “I received this message last night. We are on our way to Zennor.”
“Zennor?” His entire body went cold. Zennor, the tiny village he, his mother, and brothers had fled to after his father died, and the duke had them thrown from the house. His mother had gone by the name of Lizzie Bryant, and he and his brothers had used their ordinary middle names rather than the romantic names their father had given them.
Endymion understood better now his mother’s reasons for trying to keep them hidden. She’d chosen an obscure village close enough, the duke might never suspect. Hiding in plain sight. He remembered now, the rumors had them living in Manchester, with her working as housekeeper rather than a tavern maid in an ancient, rundown inn. He honed his attention onto the message his wife had received.
The farmer, Wilson, is responsible for the accident at the mines.
He is to meet his master at The Mermaid’s Tale.
Tomorrow evening as the sun sets.
The Mermaid’s Tale, where his mother had worked. Where she had died, or so he’d been told.
“She was killed by a customer at the damned tavern she dragged you and your brothers to after your father died. What sort of end did she expect, subjecting all of you to such a disreputable, dangerous place?”
Lord Richard de Waryn was not known for his sympathetic nature. He’d been hard on Endymion to break him of his lowborn ways. He’d warmed to him as the years went by and these days, like many older gentlemen, he tended to keep to himself.
“You are not the only one with spies in my household, Your Grace.”
“A malingering houseguest and a poor excuse for a spy.” Endymion shoved his hands into the pockets of his dark blue hunting jacket. A storm brewed a few miles away. The chill he’d sensed earlier settled into his bones. The scents and scenery passing outside the lumbering coach, increasingly familiar, threatened to suffocate him. He tapped his forefinger against the top of his thigh. “Why could Voil not do this, or your Mr. Thomas?” He sounded bored and put out, just as he planned. He’d determined not to show even an inkling of the shroud of dread wrapping itself tighter and tighter around him.
“Josiah is a stranger in Zennor. He came with Papa from Yorkshire when they were both young men. Lord Voil would stick out like a whore in church.” She turned away from the window, her brown eyes huge in a face pale beyond reason. “They look after their own in Zennor, Dymi. You are your mother’s son, and it is time.”
“Time for what?” Endymion spread his arms across the back of the seat. Even lacking the ducal crest, the unmarked coach afforded every comfort—wide, tufted, leather-covered seats, with thick carpeting on the floor and ornate carriage lamps on either side of the interior.
He adopted the pose of idle aristocrat, luxuriating in his riches, when his heart thudded like a blacksmith’s hammer and his mind screamed at him to turn around and go home, to Pendeen, or better, to London. Seemed a practical idea until his gaze fell on her hands plucking at her skirts. And then his focus was drawn to her face and he knew. Against everything he’d ever learned at his grandfather’s side, against all sense and logic, Endymion resolved to face whatever demons he must to keep her safe.
The coach slowed and pulled to a stop within the narrow confines of a ramshackle stableyard. The inn outside the coach window appeared equally weathered by time’s unkind hand. Three stories tall, white-washed, with a pitched gabled roof, crooked windows, and a series of chimneys belching smoke into the waning light.
And hanging from a creaking, rusty arm, the faded sign he’d seen in his nightmares for as long as he could remember. He stepped down the coach steps and studied the worn wood swinging above the tavern door. Thunder rumbled out to sea. The figure on the sign held him transfixed. The narrow lane behind him, the stableyard, everything fell away. Every hair on the back of his neck stood on end.
“Dymi?” A small hand, frail as fine china and strong as iron, slipped into his. “We need to go inside before we are seen. Can you… Do you think you…”
He grasped her hand, tightly, forcing himself not to crush it. “According to you and Voil, I spend too much time thinking and planning.” He turned his back on the sign and still felt its eyes on him. “Is it too much to hope this tavern serves a decent pasty?”
“You’ll be lucky if it serves a decent swill,” the coachman muttered. He flipped the collar of his coat up around his neck.
“As we discussed, John,” Endymion said as he led Rhiannon up the steps to the ancient oak door. He glanced down the road in the opposite direction from which they’d come. A chill shot through him. The road was empty, but he heard horses, horses galloping toward the inn, and then the blast of a musket so real he flinched.
“This is a bad idea,” Rhiannon suddenly said. “John, take us back to Gorffwys Ddraig.” She began to tug Endymion toward the coach.
Endymion shook his head against the fog of remembrance. “Bad ideas never stopped us as children, Rhee. Look sharp, John.”
“Aye, Your Grace.” The coachman strolled to the corner of the inn and settled onto the stone mounting block there, his legs outstretched and his hat pulled down over his eyes.
Rhiannon released his hand and pulled the hood of her long, black cloak over her head. Endymion quirked an eyebrow.
“Robert Wilson does not know you. He does, however, know me,” she said and tucked her arm through his.
“Which is why you neglected to give me the particulars of this adventure until it was too late to lock you in the cellar,” he muttered in her ear as they made their way through the crowded taproom toward a table in the back corner.
She snorted. “It might have worked had you not showed me every way out of that cellar when we were children.”
“Short-sighted of me. Almost as short-sighted as bringing my wife to confront the man whose manhood she threatened to shoot off.” He motioned her into the chair next to the wall. One by one, Endymion scanned the faces of the room’s occupants and then dropped into the chair between his wife and the taproom. “Is he here?”
“Not yet. What did you discuss with my coachman?”
“I ordered him to watch for trouble, warn us if trouble arrives, and to drive the coach around to the back of the inn to meet us.” He signaled the young tavern maid who wound her way through the maze of tables toward them.
“I don’t suppose he told you he’d already had those exact instructions from me?” she asked, peering at him from beneath her hood like some mischievous fey creature.
“No, he did not.” He didn’t know which irked him more—his wife’s cheek or her coachman’s. Her coachman. Would he ever win over Rhiannon? For if he did not, the estate at Pendeen would never truly be his.
She covered his hand with hers. “They have answered to me for seventeen years, Dymi.”
“And they allow you to run about Cornwall willy nilly with no thought to your safety?”
“It is not their place to allow or disallow me. They have kept me safe these seventeen years.”
“When they can find you. How are they to see to your welfare when they don’t know where you are half the time?” He clenched his fist under the table and cursed himself for a fool. Every word gave her the opportunity to hurt him.
“What can I do for you, guv’?” the maid asked when she finally reached their table.
“Two of your finest ales, if you please.” Endymion flipped a gold crown onto the maid’s tray. When she did not move, he glanced up to find her staring at him.
“You are—” The maid shut her mouth with a sharp click of her teeth. Endymion glanced down to find Rhiannon had leaned across him to wrap her hand around the young woman’s wrist.
“Hello, Hannah,” his wife said softly. “We need your silence, if it isn’t too much trouble.”
“Is he who I think he is?” the tavern maid asked.
Endymion had never heard such a cryptic conversation in his life. A cold breeze swept in from the front of the tavern as a group of men pushed their way into the taproom.
The young woman, with hair black as night and eyes as blue as a summer sky, moved to block Endymion’s view of the door. “Then you’d best take him up the stairs and down the back because the men who just came in have come in here every night for seventeen years.”
Endymion erupted from his chair. Rhiannon grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the rickety stairs behind them. He turned on her, rage savaging every inch of his being.
“Not tonight, Dymi,” she insisted. “Not like this.”
“Go,” the maid, Hannah, urged. “They have not seen you yet. Go.”
He stood in the shadows and studied the faces of the four men dressed in ratty, old militia jackets. He did not recognize them, but something about them stoked a fire in him he suspected had burned for a very long time.
“We were meant to wait and see who meets Robert Wilson,” Endymion said even as he allowed Rhiannon to pull him away.
“He’s here all the time these past weeks,” Hannah said as she took a quick peek over her shoulder. “I’ll send word to Tall William. Go!”
Silent as a wraith, his wife led him up one flight of stairs and then another. As she started down the sloped floor of the second-floor corridor, Endymion stopped in his tracks. A narrow staircase rose to the third floor. The steps and bannister, hand-hewn and unfinished, pricked at his memory. He’d been here before, so much so he did not doubt he could close his eyes and ascend those steps as surely as he might those in his London townhouse.
Rhiannon came to him. She took his hand and tried to lead him away. Her face, white and strained, sent icy flares of warning through his body. And still he followed the lure of familiarity, no matter how laced with horror it seemed. He did not release her hand and she had no course but to follow him. At the top of those stairs, a narrow walkway led to what appeared to be another staircase leading down to the back of the inn. He had to bow his head to tread the walkway. To his left, Endymion saw exactly what he expected—a single door that led to the single room beneath the low-beamed ceiling.
“Dymi, don’t,” Rhiannon pleaded even as she peered behind them as if in anticipation of footsteps following. “You don’t want to do this.”
He heard her, she sounded far away, but he heard her. He raised the door latch and stepped into the chamber, Rhiannon’s hand still clutched tightly in his. The lingering stench of damp and disuse permeated the room. He released her hand, strode to the window and threw open the shutters, flooding the room with the light of the rising moon. In spite of the disuse, the floors and walls, the corners and furnishings sported very little dust and no cobwebs. To the right stood an old four-poster bed, the mattress sagging beneath a holland cover. To the left, three cots stacked one atop the other rested against a bare white-washed wall.
There’d been other furnishings—a threadbare rug, a rocking chair, a table and stools. All gone, save in his memory. He let go of Rhiannon’s hand and paced the confines of the room, in search of what he knew not. His breath, perhaps. He’d lost the ability to draw air into his lungs. Warmth? Bone-numbing cold washed over him in pounding waves.
“This is where she brought us,” he said, each word pulled from the dark place where his previous life had been placed for safekeeping. “After my father died.”
“Yes,” Rhiannon replied from just inside the door.
“And this is where she died.” Even as he said it, Endymion saw only darkness in his mind. Why could he not remember?
He turned back to the window, pushed it open and leaned out into the night.
Rhiannon drew in a breath behind him, half gasp and half something more visceral. The window offered a view of the ribbon of road leading away from the inn, over the hill, and across the moors to the sea. The road blazed across his mind. He’d ridden it on horseback a thousand times. And then one night…
The storm he’d heard in the distance moved closer. Lightning split the sky. The ensuing thunder cracked like gunfire. He started. Again, it sounded. And again. A musket. Not thunder, a musket. One shot, fired into the night. A warning. He and his brothers had incurred the wrath of the magistrate and the militia. The soldiers had lain in wait, but the musket shot had warned Endymion and his brothers, and they’d ridden away. They’d ridden away as their mother lay dying in this very room.
Endymion breathed deeply. He braced his hands against the window frame. His lungs burned. His head pulsed with the echoes of that single musket shot over and over again. His heart raced in time to the rumble of hoofbeats on the road. Above it all, the death wail of a woman lanced through him. The wail of a ghost, the ghost of The Mermaid’s Tale, the ghost that had kept him from ever returning to Cornwall.
He dug his fingers into the wood of the window frame. No! He was the Duke of Pendeen. He was the master of his emotions, in control of every aspect of his life. Nothing and no one had the power to break him.
“Dymi.” Her arms crept around him. The warmth of her body pressed his back. She clasped her hands over his heart. He covered her hands with his as she rocked him ever so slightly back and forth. “I don’t know why I brought you here.”
“I needed to remember,” he rasped. “They murdered her because of us.”
“No, Dymi, it was not your fault. It was never your fault.”
“We rode as highwaymen—Hector, Achilles, and I—robbing my grandfather’s friends. The militia came after us, but they murdered her. They murdered her because of us.” The words came out in painful gasps. His throat tightened. His eyes burned.
“No.” She slipped around him and held his face between her hands. “She would never want you to believe that. Your mother loved you. More than you will ever know.”
“Why didn’t I remember? My mother was murdered, and I didn’t remember.” He rested his forehead against hers. It helped. God forgive him, but it helped to lean against the slight woman Fate had joined him to all those years ago.
“You did remember, Dymi,” she said and leaned up to kiss him. “Somewhere inside, you knew. They didn’t want you to remember—your grandfather, your uncle. But I was here. I always remembered. I remember it all. I kept it for you until you were ready.” He hugged her to him. Her tears dampened his waistcoat and shirt.
He tilted her face up and wiped her tears with his thumbs. “What a ramshackle husband you are saddled with, Your Grace. Broken into pieces, one foot in London and one foot in the past.” He gazed into her eyes, anchored himself there. “You were mine to protect, Rhiannon, and I have done a bad job of it in every way.”
“And you were always mine, Endymion. No matter how broken, you were always mine to pick up and put back together. Whatever has passed between us, I have not forgotten that.” She rested her palm against his cheek.
He drew in a deep breath and then another. “Those men had something to do with it, Rhee. I cannot let it pass.” He started around her. She wrapped both hands around his forearm.
“Not tonight. Your mother was born in this village, but most people do not remember you. You start something tonight and they will kill you. No one in Zennor will say a word about it.”
“I am the Duke of Pendeen and those men murdered my mother,” he snapped.
She rolled her eyes and grabbed his hand. They crept out onto the walkway. “The men in that taproom care not one whit who you are, Dymi. Their ancestors ate their own dead, for God’s sake. They’ll kill you and toss you into the sea without a second thought. This way.” She picked her way carefully down the back staircase.
“Bloodthirsty lot,” he muttered. “They’ll kill me, but what of you?”
“We’ll never know. If they take you, I have every intention of using the commotion to make my escape.” They reached and slipped out the inn’s back door. “There you are, John,” she greeted the coachman. “To Gorffwys Ddraig, if you please. As quickly as you can.”
Endymion had no sooner tossed her into the coach and hefted himself in beside her than the conveyance rolled slowly from behind the tavern and turned quietly onto the road. Once they’d lost sight of the tavern, John sprung the horses and they raced toward home.
Endymion had not called any part of Cornwall home in a very long time. The raw remembrances he’d just experienced did not bode well for it ever being where he wanted to remain. He’d lost so much to this place. Yet, seated next to him, his hand clasped between hers, his wife had never lived anywhere else. She’d kept his family’s estate, his grandfather’s legacy, and Endymion’s lost memories all these years. How much of the turmoil roiling inside him was the shadow of his mother’s death and how much was the thought of returning to London and leaving Rhiannon here?
The coach jolted, slid and tilted. Endymion wrapped himself around Rhiannon as they slammed into the padded side. Two shots sounded over the frightened neighs of the horses. The coach stopped dead in the road.
Rhiannon, eyes wide, pushed out of his embrace and reached for the door handle.
“Stay here,” Endymion ordered as he pushed her away from the door. He snatched a pistol from beneath the seat across from them and flung the door open.
“Look out, Your Grace,” John shouted from the driver’s bench where a man held a pistol to his head. The man, one of the ragged militia men from the inn, cuffed the coachman with the butt of his pistol.
Two more of the men approached Endymion from the front and rear of the coach.
“Drop the pistol, Your Grace,” the man next to John ordered. “Don’t make my friends take it from you.”
Endymion heard a hammer being pulled back behind him. Thank God, his wife never listened to him. He turned toward the man on the coach, aimed, and shot him between the eyes. Rhiannon leaned out of the coach and shot the man who approached from the rear. In the confusion, Endymion rushed the man who approached from the front, but failed to reach him before the man got a shot off. Once he knocked the man off his feet, Endymion pounded him senseless in a few punches.
Endymion turned to find Rhiannon sprawled in the road. He stumbled to her side and rolled her over into his arms. He ran his hands over her and when he reached her face he encountered a wetness that appeared black when he held his hand up in the moonlight.
“Rhiannon,” he barked as he shook her. “Rhee, wake up.” A living, breathing monster of fear clawed at the edges of his control. For her, he had to remain calm, when all he wanted to do was roar against the death and treachery that threatened to take the last, the only, the most treasured thing left to him in Cornwall.
The coachman thrust a handkerchief at him.
“Hand her to me,” a voice spoke out of the darkness. A tall, rangy horse stepped onto the road as if from nowhere. The rider, dressed in black, wearing a tri-cornered hat with a white plume, reached a hand down to Endymion.
The clatter of hoofbeats coming from the direction of Zennor sounded in the distance.
“I suggest you and your coachman unhitch the horses and we all ride for Gorffwys Ddraig before the rest of those hired ruffians catch us.” The man urged his horse forward until horse and rider entered the bright light of the full moon.
Endymion wiped blood from Rhiannon’s face. He glanced up at the man leaning down from his horse, hand outstretched. He shook his head, checked his wife’s even breathing, and stared up at the man once more.
“Hello, Dymi. Now hand your wife up here, and let’s ride, shall we?”