Elizabeth Mansfield (26 page)

To make matters more confused, he still suspected that he’d fallen in love with her. Nothing she did, no matter how annoying or reprehensible, had the power to loosen her growing hold on him. Even
Elinor’s recent and quite wonderful letters hadn’t managed to free him from the subtle, inexplicable allure that Cassie seemed to exert on him. What was wrong with him? How could he have permitted this devious and manipulative female to lure him from his pledged loyalty to his first love?

It surprised him that even the recent letters had not brought him back to his earlier state of mind. None of the letters Elinor had written before had moved him as much as these. They made Elinor seem more gentle and touching, and a good deal less sorry for herself. She seemed, somehow, to have matured. Why, then, hadn’t they made a difference? Why hadn’t they weakened the growing hold that Cassie had on his emotions?

Perhaps it was because the change in Elinor’s style of writing made her seem, suddenly, a bit unrecognizable. He couldn’t hear her voice in the words any more. And the strange handwriting added to the confusion. It almost seemed as if someone else had written those letters. Even the way Elinor had said his name sounded unfamiliar. What was it she’d written?
I had this ridiculous urge to paint your name across the sky—Robert, Robert, Robert!
She’d never called him Robert before. From early childhood she’d always called him Robbie. Everyone called him Robbie except …

He sat up with a start, a shocking idea flashing across his brain like a lightning bolt. Everyone called him Robbie except
Cassie
!

The idea, once it burst upon him, took over his mind with the crystal clarity of truth.
Elinor hadn’t written those letters at all! Cassie had!
He could even hear Cassie’s voice saying the words! He didn’t know how, and he certainly didn’t know
why
, but he was as sure as his name was Robert Rossiter that Cassie had done it. And as the conviction grew that he’d stumbled on the truth, a knot formed in the pit of his stomach, and, slowly, a fury such as he’d never known burst out and spread like a poison to every part of his body. He wanted to take a chair and heave it through a window. He wanted to smash the walls with his fists. He wanted to feel Cassie’s throat in his two hands and squeeze it until she went limp and lifeless in his hold. Yes, that was it! He wanted to
murder
her!

Maddened with rage, he lit a candle with shaking hands. Then he plunged down the stairs to his study, pulled out the three letters and stormed up again, the candle in one fist and the letters clenched in the other. Using his shoulder to batter his way in, he crashed through Cassie’s door.

Cassie, curled into a ball under her bedclothes, had just dozed off when the crash woke her. She sat up, shuddering in terror as Robert, eyes glittering with rage in the eerie light of his single candle, strode to the side of her bed. “What, ma’am, was the meaning of
this
?” he snarled, holding up the letters before her.

“R-Robert?” she stammered, not sure whether the threatening apparition standing over her was a vision from a nightmare or Bluebeard in the flesh.

“Yes, it’s ‘Robert.’” He shook the letters in her face. “Well, ma’am? Explain, if you can, why you wrote these damned letters!”

“Oh, heavens,” she gasped, turning ashen, “how—?”

“Never mind how! I am a dozen ways a fool, but did you think me such a dupe that I could be humbugged by these … these inept imitations?”

“Robert,
please
!” she begged, sitting up and edging along the headboard away from him in sheer terror of his white-lipped rage. “Don’t go on! I didn’t intend—”

“Didn’t intend what? To humbug me?”

“Well, no … yes … I m-mean … not exactly …”

He slammed down the candle on her bedside table. “What sort of craven evasion is
that
?” he demanded. “
Of course
you intended it! When someone signs a letter with a name that is not one’s own, the intention
must
be to deceive, isn’t that so?”

“Yes, but—”

“And you
did
write these, did you not? And you did sign Elinor’s name to your fraudulent creations?”

“Yes,” she answered in a hoarse, shamed whisper. “Yes.”

He stared at her, her admission of guilt killing the last hope, hidden somewhere deep within him, that he’d accused her wrongly. “How could you?” he asked with unmistakable loathing, dropping the letters from his hold as if releasing something noxious. “What have I ever done to you to make you wish to make a mockery of my private sorrows?”

“Robert!” she cried out, agonized. “You
can’t
believe that I meant to mock you!”

“What else am I to believe? The more I think about it, the more repugnant the act becomes. I never intended for you to know anything of Elinor’s existence, since it was not a matter that had anything to do with you. But you learned of it somehow—Eunice’s glib tongue, I have no doubt. And having learned of it, you couldn’t just let it be. You had to interfere, is that it? You somehow discovered that she wrote to me, although I don’t know how—” Just then, another hideous awareness broke upon him like a blow to the jaw. “Good God!” He glared down at her with increased revulsion. “You must have stolen into my study, opened my desk and
read her letters
!”

Cassie shut her eyes in utter humiliation, unable to face the burning hostility in his. “Oh, Robert, I’m s-so …
sorry
,” she mumbled helplessly, dropping her face in her hands.

“Sorry!” He spat out the word with utter disdain. He pulled her hands from her face, grasped both her shoulders and lifted her up until her eyes were on a level with his. “Never mind your ‘sorry’! What I want to know is
why
!”

Tears welled up in her eyes. “I thought … I only w-wanted … for you to be h-happy.”

“Happy!” He gave a mirthless, disbelieving snort. “I’d like to wring your blasted neck!” he ranted. “If you’re going to keep on
lying
, you surely can do better than that!”

Her eyes looked pleadingly into his. “It’s the truth, I swear. What other reason—?”

He shook his head. “I wish I knew.” He dropped his hold on her and let her fall back upon the pillows. Their eyes met, hers wide with acute, tormented remorse and his narrowed with such bewildered antipathy that she had to turn away and bury her face in the pillows.

“All these months I’ve wondered what sort of woman it was I’ve married,” he said after a long silence, his voice now quieter but infused with scorn. “I’ve never been able to understand you. It didn’t seem possible that you, with your oh-so-gentle manner and oh-so-modest demeanor, would agree to shackle yourself to a stranger merely for the sake of calling yourself a viscountess. But I could think of no other motive. Yet you came to live here, far away from any society among whom you could preen yourself with your new title. And you won everyone over, even Sandy, who’d once described you—before you put him in your spell—as a ‘manipulative
intrigante
.’ You even had
me
believing I was falling in love with you. What a damn fool I was! You
are
a manipulative
intrigante
after all! You first wrested control of the household from Eunice—and so cleverly, too, that you now have her eating out of your hand. And now, I suppose, it is
I
whom you want to control, although how you intended to manage it with forged letters from Elinor is beyond my puny understanding. As to the why of it, it is all too subtly devious for me. But all at once I find I don’t care any more. I don’t
want
to understand. I just want to take myself out of here, before I choke on my disgust of you!” And with those cutting words, he slammed out of the room and left her to her shame.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Robert drank all of an almost full bottle of brandy before falling on his bed. He hoped that getting himself soused would help him forget the devious little schemer to whom he was leg-shackled. He fell asleep hugging the empty bottle to his chest. Several hours later, deep in a dream in which he was holding Cassie tightly against him and trying desperately to make out the words she was murmuring softly into his chest, he felt someone tugging at what he was holding in his arms. He opened his eyes to find Loesby trying to take away the empty bottle while glaring down at him with a pinched-mouth expression of disgust. “So ye’re awake, are ye?” the valet sneered, removing the bottle from his lordship’s suddenly unresistant grasp.

Robert shut his eyes again. “Someone’s hammering inside my head,” he mumbled miserably.

“Serves ye right,” Loesby retorted unsympathetically, stalking to the windows and pulling back the draperies with such loud force that his lordship groaned. “Do ye wish to wear wut ye slept in, me lord,” he asked, his nose wrinkled in revulsion, “or do ye wish to change?”

Robert put a hand to his aching forehead. When his valet called him “me lord,” it always meant trouble, but his head pained him too much to exert himself to find out why. Besides, he had troubles enough. His last words to Cassie were still reverberating in his brain and making him feel like a bounder. In his sleep his brain had been actively recalling to his consciousness the many occasions when she’d seemed so completely sweet and charming that it was hard to believe that she could be the devious schemer she had seemed last night. She’d committed a serious transgression, true, but he hadn’t given her sufficient opportunity to explain. He’d said many unkind things that he was now sorry for; the hammer blows in his head were not the only things making him feel sick. Somehow he knew that he would not feel better until he spoke to her again. All he wanted now was to go to her room and talk things over calmly.

He lifted himself up from his pillow, groaning with the effort. “I’ll change later,” he told the valet. “Just hand me my boots.”

“Wut fer?” Loesby asked scornfully as he took a clean shirt from the chest of drawers. “Do ye think ye’re goin’ somewheres?”

“Yes. I’m going to see my wife, if you don’t mind,” his lordship retorted, pulling himself erect by hanging on the bedpost.

“Ye’ll ’ave to run pretty quick,” Loesby said. “She’s miles away by now.”

Robert felt his chest clench. “Miles away?”

Loesby nodded. “Sent fer the carriage at seven this mornin’. Said she’d changed ’er mind again and was off to town. She looked mighty red-eyed about it, too, if ye ask me.”

A feeling of desolate emptiness swept over him. “Did she leave a message? A note?”

Loesby shook his head. “No, but I found these in ’er room, tossed in the grate.” He gave Kittridge a sly look as he handed him the three crushed, buff-colored envelopes. “Fished ’em out just before the maid set about lightin’ the fire.”

“I suppose you think you’ve earned my undying gratitude for that,” Robert growled, stuffing the letters into his pocket. “Well, you haven’t. Don’t think I’m not aware that you read them. I have as much privacy in my life as a damned fish in a jar!”

Crestfallen and angry, he ordered Loesby out of the room and lowered himself slowly back down on the bed. Cassie was gone. His wife had left him. Was her departure supposed to be a punishment? And if so, was it meant for him or for herself? Well, at least he knew the answer to that.
She
might have been red-eyed, but
he
, he acknowledged as he put a shaking hand to his hammering head, was sick unto death.

A few days later, however, he’d recovered not only his health but his rage. He’d spent the time of his recovery dwelling on his injuries. His wife had injured him by her inexplicable invasion of his privacy. His sister had injured him by supporting his wife against him, for he’d soon deduced that it was Eunice who’d been enlisted to post the fraudulent letters. Sandy and Loesby had injured him, too, by siding with Cassie all the time. He’d been wounded to the heart by all of them!

By the time three days had passed, his rage was full-blown. He was furious that Cassie had left without a word. He was furious that he’d even
considered
making it up with her. He was furious that he was unable to put his mind to anything else. Something had to be done to release all the fury pent up inside him. “Send for the phaeton, Loesby,” he ordered suddenly. “I’m going to settle things once and for all. We’re going to London!”

Loesby, who’d been glowering at his lordship for three whole days, broke into a smile. “Well, well,” he chortled, rubbing his hands together in approval, “
now
ye’re talkin’!”

Chapter Thirty-Four

The first person who greeted Lord Kittridge on his arrival at the Rossiter House in Portman Square was his brother Gavin. “So, Robbie, you’ve finally come back to town, have you?” the lad asked, not even pausing on his way out the door. “That’s splendid.”

“Just a moment, Gavin,” his elder brother said, catching his arm. “Why aren’t you at school?”

“I’ve been sent down. But I’m too busy to go into details now, old fellow. I’m off to Tattersall’s to look at a roan. See you at dinner.”

Kittridge looked after his brother with a troubled frown. The boy was wasting his life, and no one seemed to be in the least concerned about it. He was about to call after him when his mother suddenly appeared, descending the stairs with her delicate grace. “Darling!” she exclaimed in delight. “We weren’t expecting you until the nuptials. What a lovely surprise!”

He kissed her cheek. “You look thriving, Mama,” he said. “Planning a wedding must agree with you.”

“I wish I could say the same for you, my dear,” his mother said, peering at him keenly as she took his arm and strolled with him to the sitting room. “You’ve shadows under your eyes, and you’re looking too thin. I knew that your marriage to that
bourgeoise
would undo you, no matter what encomiums Eunice heaps on her.”

“See here, Mama,” Robert chided while he handed her over the threshold and into an easy chair, “I won’t have you casting aspersions on my wife. If I look worn, you may blame it on the fourteen-hour drive from Lincoln—”

“
Robbie
!” The scream came from the doorway, and in flew Eunice in a flurry of ruffles and flounces. She threw her arms round his neck ecstatically. “What are you doing here? We weren’t expecting you for weeks! How lovely that you came so soon! Where’s—?”