Maggie MacKeever (25 page)

Perhaps she
should
put a period to her existence. That tempting notion she abandoned; it would suit the odious duke all too well. “Sandor! Who else would dare?”

Sandor! Everything always came back to Sandor! “By God!” uttered Neal. “He’ll pay for this! Lucky for Sandor that he’s not here or I’d—I’d carve out his damned gizzard!”

Thrilled by so forceful an attitude, Delilah clapped her hands. Before Miss Mannering could further encourage Neal’s bloodlust, Binnie intervened.

“Stuff!” she responded, unappreciatively. “You’ll do no such thing! I forbid it, Neal! Leave Sandor to me! Where has he gone, by the bye? He generally doesn’t emerge from his bedchamber before noon.”

“He can hardly emerge from what he didn’t go into!” Neal poked at the stuffed rabbit, one limb of which Toby was chewing. Toby looked quite blissful, Neal the opposite. “It seems he hasn’t come home since he left here last night. And I know for a fact that he hasn’t called upon the fair Phaedra, because she’s locked in her bedroom, teetering on a decline. The colonel told me so. So where Sandor may be is anybody’s guess. Maybe somebody has murdered him!”

This explanation should have gratified a lady with a burning desire for revenge, one who had spent many sleepless hours assuring herself she wished never again to find herself in the duke’s untrustworthy presence; but Binnie was so sadly pulled-about that she could not be expected to react rationally.

“I bid him go and be damned!” she wailed. “But I didn’t think he really
would. Go
away, that is! Not that I should care if I never laid eyes on him again—but he may be lying somewhere, hurt! We must do something!”

Neal was quite eager to do something, he professed: he would break the head of the man who had reduced his sister to such a sorry state. Binnie protested; she might wish to see the man responsible for her unhappiness boiled in hot oil, but she didn’t wish him dead. To this fine feminine illogic, Neal retorted scathingly. Binnie burst into renewed sobs. Lest matters deteriorate into total chaos, Miss Mannering lent a hand.

Before any retribution could be dealt the duke, Delilah pointed out, the duke must be found. With that necessity in mind
,
she suggested that she and the lieutenant might take the air. A stroll through the streets of Brighton might turn up some clue as to the duke’s whereabouts. Were they to find the duke himself, she consoled Binnie, she would endeavor to see that Neal dealt him no mortal blow. Once the matter of the missing duke was resolved, they would turn their energies on the problem of Toby. Victory was achieved, after all, one step at a time.

The lieutenant professed himself agreeable; taking Caliban with them, he and Delilah departed according to plan. Binnie was left to preside over the nursery. Gloomily, she stared at Toby. A sympathetic youngster, he immediately ran across the room, leaned against her knees, thrust the stuffed rabbit in her face.

This generous offer of solace, Binnie gently refused. Were her fears groundless? Was it possible that the insolent, disdainful Duke of Knowles could have met with mishap? True, to this point the duke had led a charmed life—but Binnie had a strong presentiment that his luck had abruptly run out. Naturally it was not concern for Sandor’s well-being that prompted Binnie’s disquiet; were retribution to be exacted from her cousin, she wanted to be the one to give the devil his due.

The nature of that retribution, she anticipated pleasurably. Tar and feathers? The rack? The duke’s mocking head would admirably adorn a pike. At this ghoulish point in her reflections, Binnie was interrupted by Toby, who was attempting very energetically to climb into her lap.

The child’s chubby face was tantalizingly familiar, Binnie decided as she lifted him. There was a distinct resemblance— but to whom?

CHAPTER TWENTY

Although his mocking head did not adorn a pike, nor his handsome body a rack or a vat of boiling oil, the Duke of Knowles had encountered a fate almost as dire as any wished down on him by Miss Baskerville. Slowly, His Grace was becoming aware of this unpalatable development.

First to penetrate His Grace’s consciousness was an abominably aching head; second was that the world had gone utterly black; third, that he could not move any of his limbs so much as an inch. A lesser man might have been thrown into a state of panic by these discoveries. The duke was not. The duke was unaccustomed to going down to defeat; he had so little notion of bearing his losses bravely that he found it impossible to comprehend that loss might be his fate. Some reasonable explanation for his dark immobility must undoubtedly exist. He searched for it.

After his confrontation with his shameless cousin, Sandor had left his house in a rage. He had gone to Raggett’s, then to the Cider Cellar, then to an establishment of such low estate that it lacked even a name. His recollection was a trifle hazy; he believed he’d consumed a large amount of diverse intoxicating beverages. Perhaps this accounted for his throbbing temples, the sensation that at any moment he might cast up his accounts. But if the duke’s malaise was the wages of sin—said sin being an overindulgence in the grape—his was definitely the most monumental hangover ever inflicted on mortal man. His skull felt as if it had suffered repeated blows from a heavy object....

Ah! A glimmer of enlightenment! Sandor recalled that, perhaps due to the quality of the refreshment served in the establishment of low estate, he had taken a notion for a moonlight ride along the seashore. It was a pastime in which he occasionally indulged, when he was drunk as a lord and the tide was coming in, sending his horse galloping across the sand, through the splashing waves. Sometimes the beast would shy when a foamy breaker rolled under his feet and retreated as abruptly, as if in sport. Once the duke, caught unawares, had taken a drenching.

Not so on this occasion; his clothing was not damp. Indeed, the duke had no memory of fetching his steed. Valiantly, despite the pain attendant upon rumination, he strove to piece together his progress. He had left the establishment of low estate—Oho! A fragmented memory of difficulty encountered in the control of his extremities, of a dark side street, a figure with arm upraised.

Drugged, then, and set upon. For what purpose? Not simple robbery, or he would have been left where he’d fallen—and what criminal existed so desperate as to attack the Duke of Knowles, who was of a temperament to see such presumption punished on the Nubbing Cheat? But if no simple ruffian, then who was responsible for the duke’s current plight? Thinking clearer now, if with no less difficulty, the duke explored his predicament. His immobility, he discovered, was due to ropes that tightly bound him; his sightlessness attendant upon a blindfold. Additionally, he was rendered speechless by a foul-tasting strip of cloth.

The duke’s temper was not improved by the discovery that he was trussed up like a chicken ready for the cooking pot. Anger lent lucidity. Somehow, decided the duke, he had made an enemy. Further cogitation led him to admit—the duke was cold and selfish and stern; humorless and compassionless and dissolute; but he was perfectly capable on occasion, albeit rare, of recognizing his own shortcomings—that there might be several people with good cause to wish him ill. This realization caused Sandor not an instant’s chagrin, nor did it inspire him with unease. Since he lacked any more amusing way to pass the time, his lordship compiled a mental list of his potential enemies.

No short time later, the duke abandoned this pursuit, having narrowed a staggering number of potential ill-wishers down to the few who were capable of utilizing a practical outlet for their malice. Colonel Fortescue, the fair Phaedra? Had the colonel learned the extent of his wife’s indiscretion, he might well have been driven to seek redress. But the colonel was a man of honor, and therefore would have been far more likely to challenge his rival to a duel than to have him set upon by ruffians. That suspect then, Sandor erased from his list.

Phaedra was a far more likely candidate; despite her threats, the duke had not been especially attentive of late. Perhaps she had chosen this queer way to exact revenge. It made little sense; Phaedra could hardly make her husband jealous with a gentleman who was locked in some filthy hovel—that his prison was no model of good housekeeping Sandor had determined; his sense of smell was unimpaired, and the stench of his surroundings, a pungent aroma comprised of unwashed bodies and soured food and even less wholesome items, made his fastidious nostrils twitch. Unable to imagine what advantage it would serve Phaedra to reduce him to such straits—and Phaedra had already shown herself in possession of a very calculating foresight—the duke also dismissed her.

Which brought him to the members of his immediate family. Sandor did not even briefly consider that Edwina should wish him harm. He accorded a great deal more thought, however, to the Baskervilles.

That Neal heartily resented his guardianship, Sandor was aware: Neal would have resented anyone in a position to wield authority over him. Sandor had not been deterred by Neal’s dislike of the situation from keeping a firm hand on the reins, nor was he especially disturbed that Neal failed to comprehend the benefits to himself of such discipline. Neal had bid fair, at the time Sandor took up his guardianship, to become a rare young blood, damnably hot-at-hand, and ripe for any spree, having from his cradle been indulged in everything by his doting parents and his equally doting sister. Had Neal been allowed to pursue the path he wished to tread, he would have speedily been in the hands of moneylenders and Captain Sharps, just another of the countless young bucks who set out to sow their innocent wild oats and ultimately reaped ruin. Sandor had not allowed that to happen, had ensured that Neal, if still damnably hot-at-hand, had developed from a pampered brat into an unexceptionable young man. Additionally, he had done so without breaking the boy’s spirit. That Neal should resent his guardianship did not surprise the duke, nor did it cause him distress. He had imagined Neal would come round, in time.

Could he have been mistaken? Could he have pushed Neal too far? Sandor thought not. He had not been unreasonable, had provided Neal with the lieutenancy in the Hussars that he craved, had permitted his singularly inappropriate betrothal to Miss Choice-Pickerell. Neal’s resentment had no reason to so suddenly overboil.

The duke was left with only one remaining suspect. Her, he didn’t want to think about at all. Yet he must; if he was to free himself from this predicament, he must first determine how it had come about, must prepare for the next action of the enemy. What would that next action be? Was death to be the only means by which he was released from this stinking place? The duke contemplated that notion with singular disfavor. Surely, if murder were intended, it would have been best accomplished in that dark street? Perhaps the plan had somehow gone awry, some providential interruption had made it necessary that instead of being bludgeoned to death on the spot he had been conveyed to his odiferous prison.

It must not be thought that the duke trembled in terror at the prospect of imminent demise; he did no such thing. His Grace had no intention of dying to suit anyone, and certainly not the misguided Miss Baskerville. But why should Binnie wish him dead? If she was so desirous of protecting her guilty secret, she should have never brought it to his house. Surely Binnie didn’t think to keep her by-blow—what had she called the brat? Toby?—forever hidden from the world.

A trifle belatedly, the duke wondered how she had managed to do so for this long. And why had she allowed the child to be born out of wedlock? If not the man responsible for her predicament, there had been other gentlemen who wished to marry Binnie. A very large number of gentlemen, now that Sandor counted them. He should not have been surprised; Binnie was first-rate, fine as fivepence, despite her retiring habit and her adder’s tongue; but surprised he was, perhaps because Binnie’s amused rejection of his own proposal had led him to conclude she wished to marry no one.

At all events, abruptly, she had become betrothed to Mark, the man among all her suitors most unsuited to her. Mark was a perfect gentlemen—and therefore hardly of a nature to long retain the interest of a lady accustomed to keeping assignations with gay and profligate men. Perhaps Binnie thought Mark would be easily led.

That was not the explanation she’d rendered, of course; but one could hardly expect so debauched a lady to admit the depths of her duplicity. Those depths astounded Sandor, who even now found it difficult to credit that Binnie, while conducting herself in public with the utmost decorum, had in private indulged in veritable paroxysms of intemperance and vice. And what the devil had led her to turn his house into a hotbed of scandal? Furthermore, what had induced her, when he had subtly indicated his awareness of her intimate acquaintance with the fleshpots, to slap his face? Sandor thought he had displayed an admirable tolerance of her shortcomings. So little had Binnie agreed that she had called
him
depraved.

Working futilely to loosen his tight bonds, Sandor remembered what else Binnie had said. This required no effort; Binnie’s words were branded as if with fire on his memory. Could she seriously believe he harbored avaricious intentions toward Neal’s inheritance? Surely she could not think he was on the dangle for Miss Mannering! The claim that he had ruined his cousin’s life was the most outrageous accusation of the lot. Were Binnie’s life ruined, it was through no action of the duke’s. Odd that she should remember a vindictive remark made so many years ago. It had been no more than the truth: Binnie
did
possess an unbecoming levity.

He did not mind it, especially; Sandor was well accustomed to Binnie’s ironic manner, her knack for seeing humor in a situation that looked serious to him; he had learned to appreciate partly Binnie’s love of the absurd. Because she joked about a matter did not mean she failed to appreciate its seriousness, merely that she was not a lady who wore her heart on her sleeve. Still waters, the duke decided in a burst of originality, could run very deep.