Nicole Jordan (39 page)

“I fear my son is headed for a serious fall. Simply put, I think you could very well break his heart.”

Diana stared, surprise and denial warring within her. “Whatever leads you to that conclusion?”

“In part because Christopher overcame his aversion to marriage enough to propose to you. He has always adamantly refused my choices, claiming he would never wed any of the milksop brides I threw at his head. So if he wants you for his wife, you must be very special indeed.”

“I think you give me too much credit, your grace.”

“I doubt it. You are vastly different from any woman he has ever pursued, and therein lies the danger.”

“I would never deliberately hurt him, I promise you,” Diana vowed truthfully.

“I pray that you don’t,” Redcliffe said, his tone grave. “Take my word for it, Miss Sheridan. My son has extremely strong feelings for you. To my utter amazement, he paid me a visit a short while ago regarding the exposure of his portrait. He was quite angry and disturbed in your behalf—enough to ask my assistance in controlling the damage to your reputation. If you wonder at my shock, it is because this is the first time since he was a boy that Christopher has ever willingly sought my help.”

Even so, Diana thought frowning, that proved little about the nature of Thorne’s feelings toward her. It was not so remarkable that he’d enlisted his father’s aid, since he felt largely responsible for this new scrape about his portrait.

Yet before she could respond, the duke continued. “Of course I will do whatever I can. I believe you know I am a patron of the Royal Academy. I intend to rally some of their chief artists to your defense, starting with Lawrence. He is already an admirer of your work, and I shall make certain he makes his opinion quite public.”

Diana felt her jaw go slack in amazement of her own. Sir Thomas Lawrence was the premier portraitist in England, and the favorite of the Prince Regent. His support would go a long way toward restoring her withering prestige.

“Th-thank you, your grace,” she heard herself stammer.

“I am sure you know that if the talk cannot be stemmed at once, you are liable to lose many of your clients.”

“Yes, I know all too well. And I am grateful for your support, truly.”

“You are to be my daughter-in-marriage soon. It is the least I can do. As I mentioned, your fame—or infamy, either one—reflects on my family name. But for my son’s sake, as well as your own, I would rather it be fame.”

With a courteous bow then, the duke took his leave of her, but his visit had jolted Diana and given her new reflections to stew over.

She could not put much credence in his concern. It seemed clear that Redcliffe truly loved his son and wanted to see him happy, but she couldn’t believe Thorne was all that vulnerable to her.

In the first place, the duke didn’t realize their betrothal had begun as a pretense and was only temporary. Thorne was only insisting on marriage now out of honor and a wish to protect her.

But more important, a man like Thorne was unlikely ever to give his heart.

He is far more likely to break
my
heart,
Diana thought with despair and a growing fury at herself for allowing her emotions to become so involved.

Clenching her fists, Diana moved over to a chair and sank down weakly. She was grateful for the duke’s warning, though. How
could
she have been so witless? She had let her relationship with Thorne go much too far.

It had been criminally easy to relax her guard with him these past two months. She’d never been so fiercely attracted to any man as she was to Thorne. He had filled her life with passion and laughter and beauty. But she was in grave danger of falling in love with him.

And this time if she lost her heart, it would be a thousand times worse than the last.

Diana squeezed her eyes shut. She was furious at herself for being so incredibly foolish again, yet it was not too late to act. She had to break off their betrothal without delay.

Thorne was prepared to disregard his aversion to matrimony in order to give her the protection of his name. But she couldn’t let him make such a sacrifice. He had already done so much for her. It was her turn to protect him.

She had to end their engagement; she had to set Thorne free of any obligation he felt toward her.

And then, somehow, she would have to carry on with her life and try to fill the gaping hole that his absence would assuredly leave.

Thorne had no difficulty procuring a special marriage license that very afternoon, although he knew persuading Diana to make use of it would be another problem altogether. Rather than press her, he resolved to spend his time trying to undo the damage that making public his scandalous portrait had wrought.

Enlisting his father’s aid had gone sorely against the grain, but Thorne would willingly humble himself before his noble sire if it meant salvaging Diana’s reputation. And if anyone could influence the outcome of the battle, it would likely be Redcliffe.

When Thorne returned home late that afternoon, however, with a special license burning a hole in his pocket, he had a visitor who drove any thought of impending nuptials or familial feuds from his mind.

John Yates met him in the entrance hall, a grave look on his face. “We finally have word about the elder Forresters,” Yates said. “And it’s much as you suspected.”

“One of our retired agents responded to your inquiries?” Thorne asked, knowing it was still too soon to have received any reply from Sir Gawain on Cyrene.

“Yes. Mr. Richard Ruddock. He came all the way from Yorkshire and is waiting in your study to speak to you.”

Thorne immediately followed Yates to his study, where an elderly man rose to greet him. Thorne recognized Ruddock as a fellow Guardian who had given up the excitement and danger of the order in favor of a quieter existence in his old age.

“I would have responded to Mr. Yates’s letter much sooner, my lord,” Ruddock apologized, “but regrettably I was visiting my granddaughter for her lyingin.”

“I thank you for coming now, sir,” Thorne said sincerely. “Yates tells me you have knowledge of the Forresters.”

“Indeed I do, my lord.”

Ruddock had already been offered wine, so Thorne settled himself in an armchair to hear the elder man’s story.

“Your letter said you wished to know if anyone recognized the name of Forrester, and so I did. Josiah Forrester was a traitor to the Crown and came to a tragic end. It was during a mission in August nearly twenty years ago.”

“What was his crime?” Thorne asked.

“He was a country gentleman who ran a profitable smuggling ring with the deadly habit of murdering the King’s Revenuers. For years the local authorities had no success against their perfidy, so the Guardians were called in—charged with crushing the band of smugglers and stopping the murders.”

“Did Sir Gawain have any responsibilities for this mission?”

“To be sure. Sir Gawain was our designated leader. We apprehended several of the killers, and meant to arrest Forrester and bring him to London to stand trial. His estate was near Eastbourne in Sussex. We went there with a handful of troops to serve a warrant, but from the first moment, we ran into difficulties. When Forrester spied us coming, he shot one of our men and barricaded himself inside the manor house, using his own family as hostages. He vowed he would kill them rather than be taken alive.”

“He had two children?” Yates interjected.

Ruddock nodded. “A boy and a girl. For nearly two days we were at a standoff, but then Forrester’s wife tried to escape and he killed her. We managed to shoot him and save the children.”

“How old were the children then?” Thorne asked.

“I couldn’t say exactly. The boy was perhaps twelve. The girl was several years younger, possibly seven or eight. The boy’s name was Thomas. I remember vividly because he was covered in his parents’ blood. He not only held us to blame, he was like a rabid animal in his hatred for us—sobbing and snarling and calling us murderers while trying to claw our faces. It took three soldiers to restrain him.”

Thorne could picture the violent scene that the two young children had witnessed.
Thomas and Venus.

“I also remember,” Ruddock added grimly, “because Sir Gawain himself was wounded—shot in the leg by that vengeful boy.”

It was Thorne’s turn to nod. The baronet still walked with a limp twenty years later. It must have been after that disastrous incident that Sir Gawain had retired from active missions and returned to Cyrene to take over leadership of the Guardians. The timing seemed to fit.

“So what happened then?” he asked Ruddock.

“All of Forrester’s properties were confiscated by the Crown, but we saw to it that his children were sent to respectable work homes.”

“And they never forgave you for it,” Thorne murmured to himself.

For a moment, he fell silent. An eight-year-old girl was possibly too young to understand exactly what had happened, but the boy had evidently put his own construction on events: The Guardians were murderers, while his treacherous father was elevated to sainthood. Yet both children had suffered the trauma of losing their parents and their privileged life at the same stroke. It would be no wonder if they held the Guardians—and Sir Gawain specifically—to blame for the collapse of their entire world. No wonder if they were set on vengeance even after all this time.

Thorne now had little doubt that Venus wanted revenge against the Guardians. Not only were they responsible for her parents’ deaths, but afterward, she had been separated from her brother and sent to an orphanage, and then ended up earning her living as a lady of the evening.

It was no stretch to imagine that she’d purposefully seduced Nathaniel as part of her plan for revenge. Either Venus or her brother might have killed Nathaniel because he’d suspected them of working with French spies.

Yates interrupted his dark thoughts. “So how do we proceed? We need more evidence against Madam Venus, do we not?”

“That we do.” Thorne felt his mouth set in a grim line. “I think a return visit to Sussex is in order.”

Despite his frustration at having to abandon Diana at this crucial juncture, Thorne penned a note to her, expressing regret that business required him to be away from town for a few days. Then he and Yates set out for Sussex early the next morning.

Thorne’s first intent was to visit the estate that had once belonged to Josiah Forrester, where the attempted arrest of a traitor by the Guardians had ended in violence and tragedy. The second was to call on the magistrate of the district to discover any further knowledge about Josiah Forrester’s orphaned children and their possible relationship to the local smugglers. If Thomas and Venus-Madeline had indeed been involved with French spies last spring, there might somehow be a connection to their Sussex past.

To Thorne’s gratification, both visits yielded enlightenment. And both his hunches proved right.

Upon arriving in Eastbourne, he and Yates booked rooms at the largest inn and immediately began making inquiries, starting with the parish church, where land deeds were recorded. There was no need to examine church records, however, for the young vicar was somewhat familiar with the transactions, even though they had occurred before his time.

After confiscation by the Crown, the Forrester estate had been sold to a neighboring gentleman. But then approximately ten years ago, Thomas Forrester had returned to Eastbourne and purchased his childhood home for himself and his sister Madeline. The property now belonged to Madeline Forrester, after her brother’s sad demise in a London fire last fall.

When Thorne and Yates drove out to the estate, they found the manor house in good repair but with only a small staff of servants. The butler, however, readily answered their questions, saying that his mistress rarely visited but paid them well to oversee its upkeep.

They were required to wait until the next morning before the local magistrate, Squire Whickers, was available to receive them, but the squire proved a font of information.

He clearly remembered the violent death of Josiah Forrester twenty years ago and could fill in numerous details about his treachery—how his deadly band of Freetraders had murdered several British revenue officers, and how he’d killed his own wife and threatened to kill his innocent children rather than be arrested.

Whickers also knew the location of the workhouse where young Thomas Forrester had been sent: nearby Lewes. It was Thomas’s more recent intrigues that most interested Thorne, and the squire also had some damning information about those.

“Last fall,” he recounted, “I aided the Home Office in exposing a spy ring that had long been suspected of selling secrets to the French. Two of the spies we captured claimed to have been given documents by Thomas Forrester, which resulted in a warrant for his arrest. It was shortly afterward—in October—that Thomas perished in a fire. I always wondered if he killed himself to avoid paying for his crimes, but it seemed ironic that his fate was so similar to his father’s brutal end.”

Thorne frowned thoughtfully. This was the most promising lead yet that Nathaniel had had valid reason to investigate Thomas Forrester last spring—and why Thomas and perhaps Venus, as well, would have wanted Nathaniel dead. It also explained why the Foreign Office had no knowledge of Thomas Forrester: because the Home Office had been the one to crush the ring of spies.

“Is there anyone hereabouts,” Thorne asked, “who could connect Thomas directly to these spies? Anyone he might have employed to aid him?”

“Aye, there are a handful of Freetraders who hired out their services to him. They were duped into carrying letters to France, transporting agents and such, but their roles weren’t serious enough to get them hanged. I expect they could be persuaded to tell you what they know about Thomas, especially if you were to offer a reward. Now that the fellow is dead, there is no longer any reason to keep his secrets, I’d say. Even less so, since he was likely a traitor. If you wish, my lord, I could arrange for you to interview them, although it may take a day or two to contrive.”