Folly's Reward (3 page)

Lord Belham turned from the fireplace. His mouth was set in something very close to a sneer.

“And why, pray, should anything happen to Robert? The little Lord Dunraven isn’t sickly, is he?”

“He enjoys very robust health. But the life of a five-year-old hangs by a slender enough thread.”

“I suppose it does,” the marquess said dryly. “Might I see the child and judge for myself?”

“He is not here.” It was said with considerable triumph.

“But you had the boy brought here as soon as you knew your son was dying.”

“So I did.”

“Then where, pray, is Robert now?”

The Dowager Countess stood up. She thrust out one scrawny hand and shook a finger in the marquess’s face.

“Where you can’t get to him. Where he can grow up into his estates without hindrance. Where there is no profligate gambler and rake to threaten his health and his innocence. I have sent the child away.”

“Oh, God!” Lord Belham said with obvious sarcasm. “Then how the hell am I supposed to get my hands on his inheritance?”

“Not by doing harm to my little grandson, sir!”

“Madam, whether I am the blackest villain in Britain or not, do you really think I plan to murder an infant, even if he is the fifth Lord Dunraven?”

She pursed her lips. “Neglect would be enough. Neglect and a little carelessness. Then you might turn me out of here, sell Dunraven, and pay off your gaming debts and your mistress’s duns. Any small thing could snap the thread that holds life in little Bobby.”

If Lord Belham was angry at such an outrageous suggestion, it didn’t show in his face. He paced for a moment as if considering his next course of action.

“Very well,” he said at last. “You win. I have pressing affairs in London, and I don’t have time for this. Keep your grandson where you will, madam. I wash my hands of it.”

He gave her a stiff bow and left the room.

His carriage stood in the castle courtyard, the rampant eagles of Belham emblazoned on the door panel. Lord Belham stopped and looked at them for a moment, then he ran his fingers over the painting and smiled.

“Wherever you go destruction flies with you,” he said under his breath to the bating eagles. “Unspeakable vice smolders in your fiery glance. So sweet Lady Dunraven is too smart to let you get your depraved and bloody claws into her little grandson. What a pity!”

He grinned up at his coachman. “We are to turn around, George. To hell with the horses!”

“But they’re being baited, my lord,” the coachman replied.

Lord Belham laughed. “Since the shafts stand empty, so I see. But once my steeds from Hades have had their supper, we head back to England.”

The coachman scratched his head and nodded. What was one more queer start from the marquess?

Meanwhile his master walked into the stable. His secretary was overseeing the feeding and grooming of the team.

Roberts raised his brows at the sight of Belham’s face. “Does Lady Dunraven not part willingly with her grandson, my lord?”

The marquess’s voice was very soft. “We retreat, Roberts, defeated and without the child. She has sent him away. But leave a man here to ask about discreetly, will you? Have him pursue the runaway and report directly back to me. The boy must have had a nursemaid with him, or a governess, or tutor. He or she will have friends somewhere, connections. Scotland isn’t so big. I want little Lord Dunraven found. Is that clear?”

Roberts bowed his head. “Perfectly, my lord,” he said.

* * *

The next day brought a fine mist, which enveloped the MacEwens’ household in its soft embrace. Prudence sorted through the mending and the wash, and then went up to the nursery to find Bobby and give him his breakfast.

The room had been bedroom, schoolroom, and playroom for all the MacEwens’ children. It was still filled with toys and books. A fire burned merrily in the grate, and a maid was polishing the brass around the fender.

Bobby’s bedclothes were tumbled about, but he was not there. Prudence knew a moment of panic.
Lord Belham had broken in during the night and spirited the child away!

She dropped into one of the battered old chairs and caught her breath at her own absurdity.

“Bobby is in the stables, ma’am,” the maid said, stopping her polishing and giving Prudence a merry smile. “He’s very taken with the drowned gentleman.”

“The drowned gentleman? Oh, no! I mean, of course. Thank you.”

Prudence hurried back down the stairs and out into the yard.

She had hardly forgotten the man Bobby had found on the beach. In fact, she had dreamed about him. He had come swimming into her room in his sleek sealskin coat, sinuous, graceful, with the wild, thyme-laden, salt-rich scent of the Outer Isles about him. When the fur dropped away, he stood gloriously naked at the foot of her bed. He had held out a hand to her and laughed.

She had woken, her heart beating too fast, to stare with consternation into the cold dark of her little room. Thank goodness the dream had been so vague and shadowed! What on earth would Papa have thought of his calm and capable daughter, if he knew that she had such dreams?

The thick mist cloaked the buildings and wreathed silently around the chimneys. The peaks that rose behind the house had disappeared. Except for the steady murmur of the surf, sounding muffled and ghostly in the distance, a stranger would never have known that the MacEwens lived between the sea and the mountains.

A bright light shone from the little harness room at one end of the old stable, a place with a stove and a bed. Prudence walked up to the door and looked in. Entirely absorbed, Bobby knelt by the stove. Since he had dressed himself, the buttons on his muslin suit were mismatched.

The man from the beach squatted in his shirtsleeves beside the child. His dark head tilted as he listened.

“This is the silkie. See here! He comes out of the sea and drops his fur coat. Then he looks like a man.”

Bobby pushed a little scrap of fur up a slope he had created by wrinkling the edge of the rag rug. A twig wrapped in the fur emerged to play the part of the naked man.

“But his home is the sea?”

“Yes, and he’s the strongest man there is, and he’s lord of the fishes and the whales and the seals.”

“And do the ladies admire him for that?” the man from the beach asked quite seriously.

“They fall in love with him because he’s comely,” Bobby said.

“But can his lady never keep him by her side?”

Bobby picked up the scrap of fur and threw it toward the stove.

“Only if she can find his fur coat and burn it. Then he’s a man forever and she can marry him. But if she doesn’t do it right, he dies.”

“Then it’s rather a risky venture to try to wed him, isn’t it?”

“Well, she doesn’t always marry him,” Bobby said.

“Ah. Do the lady and the silkie have children?”

Bobby clutched at the little stick figure. His blond head bent so that his face was hidden.

“If there’s a little boy like me, his father will come for him one day and take him, and teach him how to swim in the ocean. But till then the silkie’s swimming forever out in the cold sea between Mull and the Skerries. I wish he would come. I wish he would come soon.”

Prudence could hardly hear the man’s reply, his voice was so gentle. “Perhaps the silkie has to swim out there in the wild Atlantic, for it’s his nature and he cannot help it. But it must be very hard for his little boy who is left behind.”

“It is,” Bobby said. “Very hard.”

“I should like to meet a silkie. Wouldn’t you?”

Bobby looked up, eyes damp with unshed tears. “They never admit who they are,” he replied.

The man said something in the child’s ear too quiet for her to hear. Bobby smiled, a sudden rush of faith lighting his face like a lamp.

She felt like a brute to interrupt, but she must.

“It’s time for your breakfast, Bobby,” Prudence said.

The harebell eyes glanced up. He looked very different now that he was bathed and dry. In spite of his simple clothes, he seemed every inch a gentleman and extremely self-possessed.

“Why, Miss Drake! Breakfast sounds like an excellent idea. But what celestial fare do angels eat? Shall we dine on ambrosia and honeydew?”

Bobby ran up to her to fling his arms around her skirt.

“I want eggs,” he said.

Prudence hugged him, then watched the child run across the yard back to the house. She glanced down at the man, now resting comfortably on the floor with his back against the wall. He grinned up at her with a bravado that dared her to object.

“Whoever you are, please don’t do this,” she said. “It’s not fair to Bobby.”

“What isn’t fair?”

“That you should try to charm him. What if he begins to care about you? He lost his mother when he was too little to remember her, and his father has been dead only a few months. Why should Bobby matter to you? How long do you plan to stay here? A few days? A week?”

His dark lashes dropped over his blue eyes for a moment. “I shall not do Bobby any harm. I only offer him a little friendship.”

“A friendship? Is that what I saw happening here? He is besotted with you. Good heavens, sir! You are only a passing encounter in this child’s life. It’s unconscionable that you should encourage him to care about you, then leave him bereft once again.”

The warm glow of light from the stove flickered lovingly over the bones of his face.

“Then you don’t think strangers should offer love to each other, even briefly? What a cold-hearted world you would like to inhabit, angel!”

“Love? That’s an emotion that grows out of knowing a person well. By definition strangers can’t love each other.”

He lifted his lashes and gazed straight at her with a treasury of lightly felt mockery.

“Not even in Christian charity?”

It only made Prudence angry.

“We’re not talking about Christian charity,” she snapped. “We are talking about wantonly engaging deep, personal feelings that can’t be returned. That you have no intention of returning.”

“How can you know what my intentions are?” The laughter disappeared from his face. “As it happens, I don’t agree with you at all. I think the world is a lonely enough place, so lonely that the people in it should love each other whenever they can, even if for only one day, or for only one night, as long as they’re honest with each other.”

“What has honesty to say to the matter?”

“It says that caring and sympathy are feelings that should never be withheld. Why the devil shouldn’t Bobby find a little temporary comfort in me, if he wants to? And if the child gives me his trust, I promise you I shan’t betray it.”

Prudence was truly angry now. “This is arrant nonsense, sir, and you know it. Out of vanity, you’re letting him form an attachment, which you will break as carelessly as a crust of bread, leaving him completely abandoned. I would be very grateful, therefore, if you would keep your distance.”

“Sorry, angel. I don’t agree and I won’t do it.”

“Sir, Bobby is in my charge. I think I know what’s best for him.”

In a remarkably smooth movement, he stood and walked boldly up to her. His voice had become tight, as if he also bit back anger.

“No, you don’t, Miss Drake. You don’t even know what’s best for yourself. Why the devil do you pull your hair back so severely? It makes you look like a nun. Is that the idea?”

Prudence felt hot color burn up her neck. “We’re not talking about me, sir. We’re discussing the child.”

“You may be talking about the child, sweet creature of heaven. I am talking about you. Are you honest? I don’t know who I am and I freely admit it. Do you know who you are?”

“I am Prudence Drake,” she said, and hated to hear the frantic, unsure tones in her own voice.

“And who is that? A governess, very prim, very proper. Have you ever let your hair down?”

“What do you mean? Of course.”

“No, I don’t mean when you comb it out at night and instantly trap it back into a severe plait again. Have you ever let down your hair and run along a beach in your shift? Or pulled out your pins because a warm breeze is blowing from the summer sky and you want to feel the long tendrils caress your bare arms? Have you ever let down your hair in front of a man?”

The flood of uncomfortable heat coursed through her body. “Oh, good gracious! This is absurd and outrageous, sir.”

He grinned and the odd mood was broken.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it? Yet I would still like to know, though I have no idea why. Forgive me, Miss Drake. I am just a scoundrel from the sea. But when you suggest that I might do some harm to the child, it makes me forget my better manners. I beg you will accept my most humble apology, if my talk runs wilder than my more honorable intentions.”

He gave her a glance so full of contrition that Prudence felt her indignation die away, although her uncertainty and the flush in her blood remained. Truly, how could this man do Bobby any damage? Was she—ignobly—jealous, that he had so very simply and quickly earned the child’s confidence?

“Very well,” she said. “I realize that all this must be very hard for you, too. Not knowing who you are or whence you came. How do you suppose you acquired your ease with children? Do you think you have a little boy of your own?”

“Good God! No! At least, I don’t believe that I do.”

He looked down at his hands and spread the fingers, long, slim, square-ended. Naturally elegant hands, undamaged but for some scrapes and blisters of recent origin. Hardly the hands of a sailor!

“I’m not wearing a wedding ring,” he said.

“Not is there the trace of one, sir, so I do not think you are married.”

He glanced back at her, and she knew that even if he had asked for forgiveness, she was not entirely forgiven.

“Not that the lack of a wedding precludes bastards, of course.”

Prudence flushed scarlet with chagrin. He was baiting her deliberately. She refused to rise to it.

“Perhaps you have brothers and sisters, then.”

“John,” he said suddenly. His expression opened, as if touched with genuine revelation. “I have a little brother, John. And sisters.”

“What are their names?”