Darling Beast

Then her eyes had been filled with sick despair.



He took out his notebook and wrote, Don’t want you to be seen by the other gardeners and Indio.



She frowned over his words as he dug into the wicker basket she’d brought with her: a new shirt—thank God—some socks and a hat and a smaller, cloth-wrapped parcel filled with lovely food.



After Bedlam, he’d never take any sort of food for granted again.



“Who’s Indio?” Artemis asked, quite reasonably, as he bit into an apple.



He held the apple between his teeth—ignoring his sister’s wrinkled nose—as he wrote: Small, very inquisitive boy with a dog, a nursemaid, and a curious mother.



Her eyebrows shot up as he crunched the apple. “They live here?”



He nodded.



“In the garden?” She glanced around at the charred, crumbling walls of the musician’s gallery. In front of the gallery was a row of marble pillars, which had once supported a roof over a covered walkway. The roof had caved in during the fire, leaving only the crumbling pillars. Apollo had plans for those pillars. With a little scouring, and a judicial blow from a mallet here and there, they would become very picturesque ruins. Right now, though, they were just gloomy, blackened fingers against the sky.



He’d commandeered one of the rooms behind the gallery, where once the musicians, dancers, and pantomime players had prepared for their performances. Here he’d propped a big, oiled tarp over one corner to keep out the rain and wind, and brought in a straw mattress and two chairs. Spartan accommodations, certainly, but there were no fleas or bedbugs, which made this heaven compared to Bedlam.



Apollo took back his notebook and scrawled: They live in the theater. She’s an actress—Robin Goodfellow. Harte has given her his permission to stay here for the nonce.



“You know Robin Goodfellow?” For a second Artemis’s ducal dignity fled her and she looked as awed as a small lass given a halfpenny sweet.



Apollo decided he needed to find out more about Miss Stump’s acting career. He nodded warily.



Artemis had already recovered her aplomb. “As I remember, Robin Goodfellow is quite young—not more than thirty years, certainly.”



He shrugged carelessly, but alas, his sister had known him for a very, very long time.



Artemis leaned forward, her interest definitely engaged. “She must be witty, too, to play all those lovely breeches roles—”



Breeches roles? Those tended to be risqué. Apollo frowned, but his sister was nattering on.



“I saw her in something last spring, here at Harte’s Folly with Cousin Penelope. What was it?” She knit her brow, thinking, then shook her head. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. Have you talked to her?”



Apollo glanced pointedly at his notebook.



“You know what I mean.”



He skirted the truth: My circumstances don’t lend themselves to polite social calls.



Artemis’s mouth crimped. “Don’t be silly. You can’t continue to hide forever—”



He widened his eyes incredulously at her.



“Well, you can’t,” she insisted. “You must find a way to live your life, Apollo. If that means leaving London, leaving England, then so be it. This”—she gestured to the tarp and chairs and straw mattress—“this isn’t living. Not truly.”



He grabbed the notebook and scribbled furiously. What would you have me do? I need the money I invested in the garden.



“Borrow from Wakefield.”



He scoffed, turning his head aside. The last thing he wanted was to be in debt to his brother-in-law.



Artemis raised her voice stubbornly. “He’ll gladly lend you the money you need. Leave. Travel to the continent or the Colonies. The King’s men won’t pursue you so far, not if you take another name.”



He looked back at her and wrote angrily, You would have me abandon the name I have?



“If needs be, yes.” She was so brave, his sister, so determined. “I hadn’t wanted to mention this before, but I think I might’ve been followed.”



He looked at her in alarm. Followed here today?



“No.” She shook her head. “But on other days I’ve come to visit you. Once or twice I thought a man was following me.” She grimaced. “Never the same man, mind, so it may be I’ve entirely made the thing up.”



He frowned at her.



“Don’t give me that look,” she said. “I wasn’t sure—I’m still not sure—but don’t you see? If I was followed, if someone were to discover your hiding place… Apollo, you simply can’t stay here. You must leave the garden. Leave England. For your own safety.”



He blinked and stared down at his notebook, the paper smudged from his hand. He wrote carefully, I cannot. I didn’t do it, Artemis.



“I know,” she whispered. “I know. But you don’t have any way of proving it, do you?”



He was silent—which was answer enough, he supposed.



She placed a hand on his arm. “This stubborn refusal to leave England will be the death of you or worse.” She leaned forward. “Please. You’re kind and smart and… and wonderful. You didn’t deserve Bedlam and you don’t deserve this awful half life. Please don’t let—”



He turned his shoulder to her, but that had never stopped his sister when she was on a tear.



“Apollo. Please don’t let obsession or… or revenge consume you. A name is important, I know, but it’s not nearly as important as you. Don’t let me lose my brother.”



At that he did look up to see—oh, God, no—that her eyes were glittering. That he simply could not stand. He reached out and took her hand in his, the feel of it familiar and calming.



She inhaled. “Just promise me you’ll not give up on life.”



He pressed his lips together, but nodded firmly.



She smiled tremulously. “Besides, perhaps with this Robin Goodfellow about you’ll find something else to find interest in. She’s quite pretty, isn’t she?”



Pretty wasn’t the right word. Gamine, sly, seductive… his brain stuttered on the last and for a moment he thought he’d give himself away. How fortuitous that he’d been practicing a dumb face. Apollo used it now on his sister, who retaliated by laughing and flinging an apple at him.



He caught it deftly and wrote, How is His Grace the Ass?



She frowned over the notebook as he’d known she would. “You really must stop calling him that. He did, after all, save you from Bedlam.”



He snorted and wrote, And then chained me in his sinister cellar. I’d be there still if you hadn’t released me.



She sniffed. “ ’Tisn’t sinister—especially now that he’s using most of it to store wine. Maximus is well, thank you for inquiring. He sends his regards.”



He gave her a look.



“He does!” She tried to appear convincing, but he merely shook his head at her. Had it not been for Artemis’s persuasion—and Wakefield’s regard for her—Apollo would still be languishing in Bedlam. Wakefield had certainly not freed him because he thought Apollo sane—or innocent.



Artemis heaved a sigh. “He’s not nearly as awful as you make him out to be—and I love him. For my sake, you ought to take a more charitable disposition toward my husband.”



Apollo privately wondered how many times Wakefield had heard the inverse of this little speech, but he nodded at his sister anyway. There really was no point in arguing the matter with her.



Her eyes narrowed for a moment as if she found his capitulation too easy, then she nodded in return. “Good. Someday I’d like you two to be friends, or,” she added hastily as he cocked an incredulous eyebrow, “at least polite to one another.”



He didn’t bother replying to that. Instead Apollo rummaged in the bundle of foodstuffs further. There was a big loaf of bread and he brought it out and set it on a piece of wood to slice.



“There’s actually another matter I needed to talk to you about,” his sister said, her voice unusually hesitant.



Apollo looked up.



She was turning an apple around and around in her fingers. “Maximus heard it from someone—I suspect Craven, because for a valet, he certainly seems to know everything about everyone. It’s just a rumor, of course, but I thought I should tell you anyway.”



He abandoned the bread and placed a fingertip under her chin to make her look at him.



He cocked his head in question.



“It’s the earl,” she said, meeting his eyes.



For a moment his mind went blank. What earl? Then, naturally, it came to him: the unsmiling old man in a black full-bottomed wig who’d come to see him once—only once—to inform him that as the man’s heir he was to be sent away to school. The old man had stunk of vinegar and lavender and he’d had the same eyes as Apollo.



Apollo had loathed him on sight.



He stared into his sister’s eyes—thankfully the dark gray of their mother’s—and waited.



She took both his hands, giving him strength as she said, “He’s dying.”



Chapter Five



The king saw what his wife had birthed and drew back his arm to kill the monster, but his priest stayed his hand. “It is rumored that the people of this island once worshipped a god in the shape of a great black bull. Better, my liege, to let this thing live than risk offending such an ancient power.”…



—From The Minotaur



Captain James Trevillion glanced at the small brass clock on the table next to his chair. Four fifteen. Time to return to his charge. Carefully he placed a lopsided cross-stitch bookmark between the pages of the book he was reading: The History of the Long Captivity and Adventures of Thomas Pellow. He picked up his two pistols and shoved them securely into the holsters of the wide leather bandoliers that crisscrossed his chest. Then he reached for the cane.



The damnable cane.



It was plain, made of hardwood, with a wide head. Trevillion leaned heavily on the cane, bracing his crippled right leg as he heaved himself to his feet. He paused a moment to adjust to standing, ignoring the ache that shot through the leg. The ache was bone-deep, which made sense, since it was a bone of that leg that’d been broken—not once, but twice, the second time catastrophically.



It was the second break that had cost him his army career in the dragoons. The Duke of Wakefield had offered him another job instead—although Trevillion still wasn’t entirely sure if he should be grateful for that offer or not.



He glanced out the window as he waited for the ache in his leg to die down. He could see several gardeners laboring over a crate in the back garden. As he watched, the top was pried off, revealing rows of what looked like sticks packed in straw.



Trevillion raised his brows.



He pivoted gingerly and limped out his door and into a hallway in Wakefield House—the duke’s London residence. His room was at the back of the house, at the end of one of the corridors. Not a servant’s room, certainly, but not a guest’s, either.



Trevillion’s mouth quirked. He lived in a strange limbo between.



It took him five excruciating minutes to negotiate the stairs down to the floor below. Just as well that the duke had been so generous with his living situation.



The servants had the topmost fifth floor of Wakefield House.



He could hear feminine laughter now as he laboriously approached the Achilles Salon. Quietly he pushed open the tall, pink-painted doors. Inside, three ladies sat close together, the ruins of a full tea service on the low table before them.



As he began limping toward them, the youngest, a pretty, plump, brown-haired girl, turned in his direction a full second before the other ladies looked up as well.



He marveled at how Lady Phoebe Batten was always the first to be aware of his presence. She was blind, after all.



“My warder comes for me,” she said lightly.

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