A Winter Scandal (35 page)

He shot his cuffs and straightened his jacket as Myles stepped over to Ian and shoved his snowy-white handkerchief into the other man’s hand. Ian cast a glance toward the doorway, and Rawdon casually stepped in between Ian and the door. Ian slumped and brought the handkerchief up to his face, dabbing at the blood that trickled from his lip and nose.

“You’ve been lying to me all this time,” Gabriel said, his voice low and hard. “You fed me lies about Alec to protect your own cowardly—”

“No! I swear to you! I didn’t lie about Rawdon. I heard all those stories. He did attack Miss Fortner.” At a low, growling noise from Rawdon, Ian edged closer to Myles. “I’m telling you the truth. Yes, all right, I was jealous of Rawdon—hell, he was going to marry the woman I loved! But I believed everything I told you. The stories were true: I heard them. I—” Ian glanced at Rawdon and swallowed, then looked at Gabriel and Myles.

“Where is Jocelyn?” Gabriel asked. “What did you do to her? Where did you send her?”

“I did nothing! I swear it!” Ian waved his hands wildly. “Please, you must believe me. It’s true: I loved Jocelyn. I tried not to, but I could not help myself. She was so beautiful and fresh, so full of vivacity.”

“Which you promptly drained from her!” Gabriel glared. “A man who loved her would have come to me and asked for her hand, the way Rawdon did. My God, I trusted you! And all the while, you were dishonoring my sister!”

“I wanted to marry Jocelyn! I did! If I had known she was carrying my child, I would have married her. I swear to you. But she didn’t tell me. I didn’t know. That must have been why she accepted Rawdon’s proposal. I tried to talk to her after that, but she just cried and sent me away. She said she had to do it. I never heard from her after that. I was in despair.”

“I ought to break your bloody neck.”

“Gabriel, I promise you—I knew nothing about her leaving. I was as lost and confused as you were. I assumed—” Ian stopped and again cast an uneasy glance at Lord Rawdon, looming on one side of him. “I thought that Rawdon must have found out about Jocelyn and me. That he threatened her, sent her away somewhere to avoid the scandal. I thought …” Ian’s voice dropped. “I thought he had killed her to keep her from shaming him and his name.”

“Not everyone thinks like a coward as you do,” Rawdon told him.

Ian did not look at him, only at Gabriel. “I don’t know where Jocelyn went or why. And I know nothing about her coming back here or about that baby. I don’t even know if it’s mine.”

“I remember now,” Myles said suddenly, straightening. “You had blond hair when you were a child, didn’t you, Ian? It just got darker as you got older. Blue eyes like Matthew’s.”

“We don’t know that,” Ian said in a cajoling tone. “That is why I was talking to Hannah. I was trying to find out where Jocelyn was and—”

“Oh! So this is where everyone is!” said a bright female voice from the doorway.

“Sweet Lord,” Myles muttered under his breath as they all turned to find Emily standing at the edge of the room, smiling at them.

“Oh!” Her hand flew to her mouth in consternation. “Ian! Dearest, what happened?” Lines formed between her brows and she looked from one man to another. “What is going on here?”

“Um …” The men glanced at each other.

Thea, turning her gaze from Ian to Gabriel, stiffened, gasping, “Gabriel! She’s gone. The maid is gone!”

“The maid?” Emily asked. “What maid?”

“The devil take it!” Gabriel whirled and looked around the empty room. “Now we’ve lost her.” He spared one short, hard glance for Ian. “I want you out of my house tonight. I don’t want to see your face again. Ever.” He turned. “Excuse me, Lady Wofford.”

Gabriel hurried out of the room, with Myles and Rawdon right after him, leaving a stunned Lady Wofford with her husband. Thea followed at a more sedate pace. As she strode back toward the party, Thea heard a sharp cry of “No!” from Emily, followed by a crash of something breakable and the sharp staccato of a woman’s heels. Apparently her cousin had gotten little succor from his wife.

Thea turned into the wide central hallway of the house and glanced about, debating where to search for the missing maid. She could see the three men had spread out through the rooms of guests, looking for the maid.

It did not seem to Thea, however, that the girl would try to hide among the guests. Hannah’s instinct, surely, would be to flee. She might fear that Ian would come after her again even though she had already revealed his secrets. Thea was unsure why the maid had not simply come to Gabriel from the beginning, but her pattern so far was to run and hide. And that, Thea thought, meant running out into the night.

Hurrying into the small cloakroom, she grabbed up her own cloak and headed toward the back of the house. Her hope was that Hannah would not have simply fled into the cold, but would first have gone upstairs to her room to get her coat—and probably the rest of her things, as well. Instinct, Thea surmised, would send the maid up to and back down from her room by way of the servants’ stairs in the rear, and she would exit by one of the rear doors.

Thea slipped down the back hallway behind one of the servants carrying a tray. At the end of the hallway, where the servant turned left into the kitchen, was a short hall leading to the back staircase. At the base of it was a door to the outside. Just as Thea reached the hallway, she saw a woman in a cloak slipping out the back door. Excitement surged in Thea.

Turning, she grabbed a servant who was walking toward her with a full tray. “Quick, fetch Lord Morecombe! Quickly! It’s terribly important! Tell him she’s gone outside!”

Not waiting to see if the servant obeyed her, Thea darted out the door after Hannah. Fortunately, torches had been planted festively at intervals all around the house, so that the evening was not completely dark. Thea saw the maid slip around the corner of the house ahead of her, and she took off running after her. She did not want to yell and thus spur the girl into running faster.

But Hannah was well in front of her, almost to the front of the house by the time Thea rounded the corner after her. Hannah was hurrying, almost trotting now as she reached the front garden and started up the path to the street. Just as Hannah reached the road, a man stepped out of the shrubbery and grabbed the girl from behind, clamping his hand over her mouth before she could scream.

“No! Let go of her!” Thea shouted, and started toward them. “Gabriel! Help! Help!”

Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, Thea saw a flicker of movement. Startled, she half-turned just as a heavy stick crashed down on her, knocking her to the ground.

Nineteen

B
ecause Thea had turned, the
stick slammed into her shoulder rather than her head, so even though the blow threw her to the earth, it did not knock her out. Thea hit the ground and rolled, twisting back to grab at her attacker. Thea was shocked to realize that she was reaching for a woman’s skirts rather than a man’s ankles, but she did not stop to think about it, just latched onto the woman’s legs through the skirts and pulled as hard as she could. The woman hit her again and again with the stick, her blows landing with thuds on Thea’s back, but Thea held on grimly, crawling forward to wrap her arms more tightly around her attacker’s legs.

The woman let out a high shriek and began to kick and pull away from Thea in a panic. It was her undoing, for she fell heavily to the ground. She tried to crawl away, but Thea sprang forward and gripped her by the shoulders, wrestling her around. The woman let out another shriek and whirled, striking out wildly, and for the first time Thea saw her face.

“Lady Wofford!” Thea was so stunned that her grip loosened, and Emily’s hand connected with Thea’s face, landing a sharp, hard slap.

Thea responded by doubling up her fist and punching the other woman on the jaw. As she pulled back her fist to hit her again, a man’s arm went around her and lifted her from the ground.

“There now, my love,” Gabriel’s amused voice said in her ear. “That was a splendid facer you planted, but no need to continue the mill. Everything is all right. It’s over.”

“Gabriel! The maid! Hannah! He—” Thea pointed toward the street where the man had grabbed the fleeing maid.

“Don’t worry. We have them.”

Thea relaxed as she saw that Lord Rawdon had a firm grip on the man who had attacked Hannah, while Damaris and her housekeeper were on either side of the maid, leading her back into the house.

Myles hauled the still-struggling Lady Wofford to her feet. She let loose a string of curses that made Myles’s brows rise. “You stupid, insufferable hussy!” she screamed at Thea. “You interfering old tabby! I ought to tear every hair from your head!” She jerked against Myles’s restraining arms. “Let me go, you fool!”

“Not just yet, my lady,” Gabriel said grimly. “No one is leaving until we get this straightened out.”

Twenty minutes later, they were
all assembled in the library. The party had ended abruptly, with Damaris and her servants politely seeing the guests, agog with curiosity, on their way. One of the card players, the Squire, was also the local magistrate, so he had remained, settling himself at a table and adopting a judicial air. Lord Rawdon was planted in front of the closed door into the gallery, barring the exit.

Emily sulked in one of the chairs facing the Squire, her husband, Ian, beside her. Ian wore a dazed expression on his battered face. The blood on his lip had dried, and the rest had been wiped away, but his nose was swollen and one cheek reddened, his eye above that cheek puffed and red, as well. Emily, with bits of leaves and dried grass clinging to her hair and clothes and her hair straggling down on one side, looked bedraggled but defiant, an appearance only heightened by the noticeable swelling on her jaw where Thea had punched her.

Gabriel loomed beside the Woffords, arms crossed over his chest, his face stony. A few feet away from Emily sat the man who had attacked Hannah, his hands tied together and the other end of the rope tied to the arm of the chair. Myles was planted behind him. At right angles to the Squire and to Emily and Ian, completing the square, sat the maid Hannah. Her face was splotched from tears, and bright red spots were on her face, promising future bruises, where her attacker’s fingers had dug into her skin as he clamped his hand over her mouth.

Thea sat between Damaris and Daniel a few feet away, watching. Her cheek still stung from Emily’s slap, and she was certain that she would have a number of black-and-blue marks down her back the next day, but she liked to think that Emily’s jaw was equally sore.

“Now,” Squire Cliffe said heavily, sending a majestic glare all around. “What in the name of heaven has been going on here tonight?”

“Nothing that need concern you,” Emily said, dismissing the country squire and turning to Gabriel. “Really, Gabriel, this is nonsense. The local law has nothing to do with any of this. It will only cause us all embarrassment to drag these people into it.”

“If you think I am going to ignore the fact that you attacked Miss Bainbridge or that your hired thug over there assaulted Hannah and kidnapped my nephew, you are in for a rude awakening. I can assure you—”

“Kidnapped!” The Squire turned his glare on the man tied to the chair.

“I never,” the man said shortly.

“The devil you did not,” Gabriel responded. “You struck me with a log! We wrestled in the snow. You are the man who stole Matthew from Miss Bainbridge’s house.”

“I don’t know that man,” Emily said firmly, “and I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“The hell you say!” The kidnapper straightened and glared at Emily. “You ain’t pushing this off on me. I been doin’ your dirty work for two years now, and you’re not gullin’ them into thinkin’ I done it alone. You hired me, right enough, and you told me to take that brat. You think I’d a come up with that on me own?”

“And why should I hire you to do anything with some by-blow that Miss Bainbridge”—Emily shot a venomous glance at Thea—“found in the church?”

“I presume because that child is your husband’s son,” Gabriel replied bitingly. “Though I cannot imagine what you hoped to accomplish.”

“She was trying to keep you from findin’ out, that’s what!” Hannah spoke up, her voice hoarse. “She didn’t want the world knowin’ it was her husband’s side-slip. Nor that she was the one what sent my lady out of the country!”

“What!” Ian recoiled from his wife, his dazed face sharpening. “You knew about Jocelyn?”

“Of course I knew, you fool!” Emily rounded on Ian, her eyes blazing. “I am not an idiot! Unlike your friends.” Her scornful gaze went to Gabriel and Rawdon before she turned back to her husband. “I offered you everything! I was willing to take you and all your debts. My father even made good your father’s obligations. I gave you a carriage and four, a hunter, a hack, fine clothes, anything and everything you wanted. And all I ever wanted in return was your affection! Your respect! Instead you made a fool of me, whoring around with that trollop Jocelyn! Getting her with child.” Her lip curled. “I knew. I knew it all!”

“But how could you know? I didn’t even know she was carrying my child!” Ian exclaimed.

“You are a simpleton,” Emily told him bitterly, the anger draining out of her voice, replaced by contempt. “I intercepted the letter she wrote you. You are not the only one who enjoyed getting his hands on my gold; your valet was happy to take my coins as well.”

“You bribed Jossman?”

“I
paid
him, which is more than you were prone to do. My grandfather may have been a cit, as you were so fond of throwing in my face, but he taught me the value of well-paid employees. I knew all about your secret correspondence with your paramour. It was easy enough to send her a note, pretending to be you. Jossman is also quite adept at forging your hand.”

“No doubt another task you paid him well for!”

“Indeed.”

“Enough of this nonsense!” Gabriel’s voice cracked out. “I don’t care about your squabbles. I want to know what happened to my sister! Where is Jocelyn?”

“I have no idea where she is,” Emily retorted. “Nor do I care. The last time I saw her was when I pointed out to her the impossibility of her marrying Ian.”

“What did you say to her to make her leave?”

“The silly goose thought that she would run away with
my
fiancé!” Emily flared. “She wrote telling him that she was carrying his child. She had planned to marry Rawdon to hide her shame, and I was prepared to live with that. I knew that eventually Ian would tire of her or she would lose her heart to Rawdon or some other man. But then she wrote Ian, saying she could not marry without love and begging him to run away with her so that Ian and she and the bastard child could be a family. And I knew that Ian might very well be besotted enough to do it, however idiotic it was. So I had Jossman write her as Ian, saying he would leave with her, but I was the one who met her.”

“Dear God!” Ian stared at his wife as if he had never before seen her. “What did you tell her?”

“I told her you would never marry her. You were so thoroughly in debt you would be thrown in debtors’ prison in a matter of months if you did not wed me. I told her you had no intention of marrying her or acknowledging her bastard, and I offered, out of the kindness of my heart, to help her. I gave her money to live on. I gave her the services of Pendergraft over there to get her out of the country to Italy and establish her in a pleasant house there. I even paid her a comfortable stipend to support her and her maid and the child.”

“Yes!” Hannah cried. “So long as she never contacted any of her loved ones again! You broke her heart, you did. Not just giving up his lordship, which she was too fine a woman to have wasted her love on, anyway. But you wouldn’t let her even write her brother or her mother! Always crying her heart out, she was, missing everyone. She wouldn’ta got so sick if it wasn’t for that.”

“Sick! What are you talking about?” Gabriel strode over and pulled Hannah up from her chair. “What is the matter with Jocelyn?”

“I dunno. She was sick ever since she had the wee one.”

“Was sick?” Gabriel paled, his mouth tightening. “What do you mean? Is she … dead?”

Hannah nodded, and Thea heard the harsh intake of Lord Rawdon’s breath, the only sound that broke the utter stillness of the room. Gabriel turned blindly away, and Thea jumped up, going to him. He wrapped his arms tightly around her.

“She gave me the baby and told me to bring him here to you, my lord,” Hannah went on after a moment.

“Why, then, did you try to sell the brat to me?” Emily retorted caustically.

“I didn’t try to sell him!” Hannah retorted as Gabriel swung around to fix his sharp gaze on her.

“What exactly
did
you do?” he asked her.

“I was goin’ to take him and bring him up meself, that’s what. ’Twas I who’d taken care of him, anyways, ever since he was born. My lady couldn’t. It was the wet nurse and me. And I needed money, that’s all, to keep me and the baby from starvin’ to death.”

“What a bag of moonshine! It was extortion, pure and simple,” Emily told her. “You promised to keep quiet. You said you didn’t have to take the baby to Morecombe as Jocelyn told you to—with her dying breath, I might add. You said you could take the baby off and no one would have to know. And if I did not pay you, you were going to take him to Morecombe and tell everyone what I had done! You threatened to ruin me!”

“I deserved something! It was me what took care of her ladyship and the little one. I was the one who did all the work. What was I going to get if I handed him over to her brother? Nothing! A job back maybe if I was lucky, and if I wasn’t, being blamed for my lady running away in the first place! I shoulda got something!”

“Yes, well, you would have, if you had brought the baby with you!” Emily retorted, jumping to her feet. “If you hadn’t decided to stick him in the church for Miss Propriety over here to find!”

“And if I hadn’t hidden him, you’da knocked me over the head and taken him! That’s why you had that man there with you. I ain’t a fool. I knew better than to bring the babe with me. I know you been searching for me, and it weren’t to pay me. You’da killed me tonight if they hadn’t stopped you, and you’da done it back then, too. The same reason you had him try to steal the wee one away from her!”

“Enough!” Gabriel roared. “Enough of these recriminations! I don’t care which one of you is a more wicked person. Neither of you have enough humanity in you to fill a teacup.” He fixed his gaze on Emily. “The truth is out now, and Hannah was right: you are ruined in the
ton
. Whether you will go to jail will, I suppose, depend upon what the magistrate decides and whether Miss Bainbridge wants to press charges. I will count myself fortunate never to see you or your husband again.”

Gabriel swung to Hannah. “As for you, you should probably be locked up, as well.”

“I took care of her! I did. Miss Jocelyn depended on me.”

“So did we all, and you betrayed us. All I want from you now is to know where Jocelyn is. Where did she die?”

The girl shifted and looked down. “She’s in Oxford, sir. That was as far as we could get afore she gave out.”

“Very well.” Gabriel turned to Thea. “I must go. I have to take care of her.”

“Of course.” Thea looked up at him, her eyes welling with tears for his pain.

Lord Rawdon stepped forward. “I will go with you.”

Gabriel turned to him. “Thank you.”

Gabriel took Thea’s hands in his and squeezed them, lifting them to his lips. “I shall return.”

Thea nodded, the tears spilling onto her cheeks. Gabriel bent and kissed her forehead, and she threw her arms around him, clinging to him for one long moment, not caring what anyone thought or said. She stepped back, and Gabriel strode out of the room, Lord Rawdon beside him.

Thea arose from the prayer
bench in front of St. Dwynwen’s statue, where she had given up the same prayer of thanks she had uttered for the past two weeks, and walked out of the church. Turning toward the ruins, she wound her way through the gravestones. She stopped at the edge of the graveyard and looked at the pile of stones that were the ruins of the old abbey. Her eyes paused on the arches of the cloisters, and she thought of the afternoon she and Gabriel had spent there and the kisses they had shared inside the sheltering walls. A longing as sweet as it was painful pierced her, and she looked past the ruins to the trees, imagining beyond them the sturdy bulk of the Priory.

The Priory was empty now except for a cadre of servants. Gabriel’s guests had left the day after Gabriel rode off with Lord Rawdon. Sir Myles had come by to bid good-bye to Thea. He was returning to London, where he would rejoin Gabriel and Rawdon. Thea had no idea where Ian and Emily had gone. Squire Cliffe had tossed Lady Wofford’s man in jail, though he had not had the will to bring charges against a peer’s wife. In any case, much as she disliked Emily, Thea had not cared to press charges, either. Matthew was healthy and unharmed, and Emily could no longer do anything to him now that her secrets had been revealed. And whatever pain Lord and Lady Wofford had caused Gabriel and his sister, Thea doubted that any of it was punishable by law. It would only cause scandal for Gabriel and his family if Lady Wofford were hauled into court. Thea suspected that Ian and Emily’s life together, exiled from the life of the London
ton,
would be punishment enough, anyway.