Fallen Angel (6 page)

"Thank you."

His pose was deliberately aloof.

Tears welled in the violet eyes, and trembled on long, lush lashes. "Don't be cruel, Jason. I need you now, more than ever."

Deveryn's rigid stance relaxed by degrees and the expression in the cold blue eyes warmed slightly. "You've had a shock. Let me get you a glass of sherry."

This was soon done, and he resumed his former stance, though there was now nothing of hostility to be observed in his manner.

"Now tell me what happened," he said gently.

With a great deal of persistent questioning and a little patient leading, the viscount was finally in possession of the main facts of the case, namely, that Donald Sinclair had lost his life in a swimming accident in Scotland—in December of all months, for God's sake.

After several moments silence, while the widow wept copiously into her lace handkerchief, Deveryn offered, "Naturally, I'll do everything in my power to help you. Tell me what it is you wish from me."

The tears dried, though the lips still trembled.

"Jason, do you mean that? Will you stand by me in my hour of need?"

"What do you have in mind?" he asked politely, though there was a wariness in his eyes.

The pouting lips parted slightly, and Deveryn watched as the tip of her pink tongue slowly moistened her lower lip. Familiarity to the gesture had inured him to its sensual potency.

"Donald made a new will. Well, you know how wild he became when he found out I had a lover. There was no reasoning with him. He has cut me out completely, I'm sure of it."

"But there must have been some sort of marriage settlement."

"Only a verbal one. He promised me Drumoak at his demise. You need not look so surprised. I was an orphan and without dowry when he married me. There was no guardian to see to my interests, then, and no one now to be troubled about my unhappy fate. Jason?" Her voice turned husky. "He told me that you had taken everything from him—that he had given the deed to Drumoak into your own hand. What do you mean to do with it?"

"It was always my intention to return it to your husband. I have no desire for a property in Scotland."

"In that case, you can have no objection to handing it over to me."

He took his time before replying. "I seem to remember that there is a child—a daughter by his first marriage."

"Yes, Madeleina, a spoiled brat of a chit, a haughty creature, but no child. She's of an age with me, perhaps a few years younger, and she set her father against me from the first."

"But surely, under the circumstances, she will see that you are provided for from the estate."

"She won't, you know. Nothing would please her more than to see me destitute and begging for my bread on the streets of London. Girls like her, pampered from the cradle, have no notion of the shifts we less fortunate women are forced to just to stave starvation from the door. Well you must have known that my only reason for marrying Donald was to put a roof over my head and bread on the table. It's a sordid tale, I know, but not uncommon, surely?"

He found her conversation distasteful and her disloyalty to her late husband revolting, but he merely said, "Still, the girl has some claim on her father's estate, and I cannot simply hand over the deed of the property to you without some investigation."

"You needn't think that Madeleina will be without resources. Her maternal grandfather will take care of her."

"Who is he?"

"Samuel Spencer. Do you know him?"

"Not personally, but I've heard the name somewhere."

"They say that he's well-breeched, and there are no male heirs to inherit."

"Nevertheless, I think I should get in touch with your husband's solicitor. Do you know who he is?"

"Someone in Edinburgh. He'll be at the funeral and afterwards, I suppose, the will will be read. Oh, I shall die of mortification, I just know it. These Scots are very close, you know. To them, I've always been an interloper. They've never accepted me."

And then the tears dropped in earnest. Though they left him unmoved he was willing to own that it was a weapon the lady employed with consummate skill.

He watched the performance impassively, his eyes cooling to boredom, the impenetrable half-smile becoming fixed on his lips. It never occurred to him that the grieving widow was in need of comforting. After a moment or two, he said with a hint of impatience, "Come! Dry your eyes. I don't intend to throw you to the wolves, you know."

Other men in his position, he knew, would simply send the deed on to the solicitor in Edinburgh and wash their hands of the whole affair. He wished that he might, and could scarcely understand the impulse that prompted him to become actively involved in the woman's affairs again.

Her shoulders gradually stopped heaving. The handkerchief was laid aside, and she peeked coyly up at him through the matted spikes of her wet lashes. The appeal of those enormous, amethyst pools fringed by soot-black lashes was powerful. Deveryn was not unmoved by the picture she presented. Cynthia Sinclair's intensely brooding beauty was not in question. But the appeal was all to his senses. Now that she was free, a hot and heavy affair he would have entered into without regret. But the lady had set her sights higher. He was sure of it, and it made him cautious.

Cynthia's eyelashes fluttered nervously, and her eyes dropped to her clenched hands. The impassive expression on the viscount's face was not the one she had hoped to see. She smiled to hide her disappointment, and thought that he would be a very difficult fish to net. But the task, she believed, was not beyond her.

Her lips parted and she asked breathlessly, "You'll help me?"

"Why not?" And he abruptly pushed himself from the mantel and closed the distance between them.

"You'll give me the deed to Drumoak?"

He took her by the hand and she unresistingly rose to her feet. For a moment, she thought he meant to take her in his arms, but he merely led her to the door.

"In all conscience, I cannot do that. But with your permission, I propose to escort you to your destination in Scotland."

Her mouth fell open, and Deveryn permitted himself a small, genuine smile. "I intend to be your advocate, you see. No one shall take advantage of you as long as I hold the trump card."

"The trump card?"

"The deed to the property."

He escorted her into the vestibule and had her wraps brought. He could see that his offer had momentarily deprived her of speech.

"I'll make all the arrangements," he said smoothly. "Be ready to leave at first light tomorrow. Oh yes, one more thing. I'd be obliged if you would travel in company of your abigail. Apart from wishing to guard your reputation, you'll be glad of the company. I myself intend to spend a good part of the time on horseback."

She laid a hand on his arm and hope kindled in her eyes as she looked up at him. "Why are you doing this?" she asked softly.

He regarded her with an inscrutable expression for a long moment, then said very deliberately and cruelly, "For old time's sake. Nothing more."

Her hand dropped, and the smile on her face died.

When the door finally closed upon her, Deveryn returned to his study and poured himself a stiff drink. After a few quick swallows, he sat down at the desk and threw off a terse note to his mother informing her that he was obliged to delay the projected sojourn into Oxfordshire. He had it sent round immediately to Manchester Square.

Having done this, he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and withdrew some papers. In his hand, he held the deed to Donald Sinclair's property in Scotland and the vowels for the sum of money which Sinclair had lost to him at Watiers. He pocketed the deed to Drumoak and absently replaced the vowels in the desk drawer knowing that he would never see them redeemed.

He shut the desk drawer with a snap and quickly penned a note to his man of business giving him
carte blanche
to act for him in his absence. He left it conspicuously on top of the desk, knowing that Hepburn would find it first thing in the morning when he arrived for their weekly appointment. By that time, he would be on his way to Scotland.

Though it meant foregoing the reunion with his family at Dunsdale and put him to no little inconvenience, he felt he owed Cynthia Sinclair some recompense for their, short-lived
affair. A fortnight out of his life did not seem too heavy a penance to pay to satisfy the pangs of conscience. Still, it would give the gossipmongers something to tattle about, and cancel his strategy of the last month to allay the suspicions of the ton. A line from Scotland's bard, Robbie Burns, came to mind. "Man proposes, God disposes." Somehow it seemed appropriate.

Deveryn threaded his way through the throng of customers in the White Horse's crowded lobby, and he made his exit through the main door. He delayed for a moment on the front steps, his windblown locks warmed to a lambent glow by the light from the oil lantern which hung from a bracket on the wall of the porch entrance. A couple of locals, their collars turned up against the rising wind, eyed the tall greatcoated stranger with veiled interest, and sidestepped him neatly. As they pushed into the welcoming warmth of Inverforth's only inn, their muffled greeting was carefully neutral. Before the door closed behind them, the din from the taproom wafted through to Deveryn's ears. It was Saturday night in the thriving metropolis of Inverforth, he thought with a cynical twist of his mouth, and it was evident that every able-bodied male in the indifferent parish, from farm labourer to squire, was bent on drowning his sorrows, or celebrating his good fortune, with his likeminded neighbours. God, how these Scots could drink! Not that he blamed them. Wresting a living from the land was a wretched enough business at the best of times without having the burden of Scotland's miserable climate to endure.

He stepped out of the shelter of the porch and struck out along the high street towards the blacksmith's forge. If he wasn't mistaken, there would be snow before morning. He cursed under his breath. Not for the first time since he had set out on this ill-advised journey, he wished he were in the bosom of his family at Dunsdale, and damn if he could understand the impulse that had made him forgo all the comforts and pleasures of home to escort his erstwhile mistress to this Godforsaken neck of the woods.

His eye was attracted to the faint light that illuminated one of the stained glass windows of the parish church. It was then that he recollected the reason for the sorry pass he was in. His favourite brother-in-law, the vicar, would roast him unmercifully if he, Deveryn, ever admitted that it was an attack of Conscience which had swayed him, to a course of action he found distasteful in the extreme. He might have known, he told himself with a resigned shrug, that Conscience and Comfort were, in essence, incompatible.

A light sprinkling of snow began to fall, and he hunched his shoulders. In his eagerness to escape the toils of Cynthia Sinclair, he had inadvertently left his hat in the private parlour where they had earlier dined. Wild horses could not drag him back to retrieve it. Though there was not the slightest necessity for it he had determined to check on the smashed carriage wheel which had come to grief in one of the many potholes that turned the Edinburgh to Inverforth thoroughfare into a facsimile of Swiss cheese. Even if the blacksmith had forged a new rim, weather conditions made further travel impossible for the moment. It made an overnight stay at the White Horse inevitable. The thought soured his temper to a new low. He turned his collar up and cursed again. The snowflakes, like damp petals, fell with increasing vigour.

Maddie felt the shock of them as they beaded to moisture on her lashes. She checked Banshee with a slight touch on the reins and she turned her face upwards to test the density of the cold blast of icy crystals. She hesitated. Apart from the occasional light from a cotter's snug cottage hugging the rise, the darkness hung about her like damp cotton wool. The muted roar of the breakers as they surged against the shoreline warned her that an easterly wind would soon whip itself into a . fine fury.

If the threatening storm broke, Maddie did not doubt that Aunt Nell would talk herself into a royal dither, quite unnecessarily, when she discovered that her niece was not behind Drumoak's stout stone walls. In normal circumstances, Maddie would have turned Banshee's head and made for home.

She had no wish to occasion her aunt the slightest anxiety on her behalf. But Maddie was beside herself. Duncan had given her the intelligence before dinner that Malcolm had arrived home from the university in St. Andrew's and was, even now, at the manse on the other side of the village. His intention was to wait upon her on the morrow. But Maddie could not wait.