Scandal's Reward (12 page)

The color was still drained from his face, but he replied quite calmly. “Then I am found out at last in my true colors, Miss Hunter. But I have succeeded, haven’t I, in my schemes? For you have told me what I wanted to know. How could your opinion of me possibly matter now?”

“It matters not a whit, sir, since I do not imagine that we shall meet again.”

There was silence for a moment, before he replied.

“Then this is good-bye, Kate. I shall leave Fernbridge tomorrow. Have no concern for your sisters. Amelia has eyes for no one but Captain Morris. She has hardly been aware of me. As for Annabella, I have been a childish adventure that she will forget with the next storm. I amused her, but I have done her no harm.”

With a formal bow, he was gone. Catherine watched him stride off up the gravel walk, before she turned away and left the garden. She could not face her sisters. Dagonet would have to make her excuses for her.

* * * *

The excuses were made with a remarkable grace, so Amelia and Annie left together without the slightest idea that anything very terrible had gone wrong. Captain Morris, however, was not to be so easily put off.

“Did Miss Hunter discover what you wanted, Charles? Did Mary hold the clue to your reinstatement in society?”

Dagonet dropped into a chair. His face was set like stone. “I am doubly damned, my friend. She succeeded only too well. It would appear that I arranged to meet Milly Trumble that day, though why I should have done so, I have no idea. I wrote a note, in fact, which Mary had kept. I have thus not been proved innocent, but undoubtedly guilty, and so my nefarious schemes have backfired in my face. I have, however, learned something else that was unknown to me.”

“Which is?”

Dagonet laughed bitterly, and leaping to his feet, began to collect up his few belongings that lay scattered about the room.

“The name of the man who found us that day: a certain John Catchpole, my uncle’s favorite henchman, and a man remarkably good with horses. I am off to Newmarket, Captain. The races start next week and it’s about time that I mend my sorry finances in the betting tents.”

Morris stood up. “I’m devilish sorry to see you go, sir.”

“Never fear, David! Like a bad penny, I’ll turn up when you least want me. But credit me with at least enough sense to make myself scarce before your wedding. You’re marrying into a very fine family, you know.”

The men shook hands and Dagonet made for the door.

At the threshold he stopped and turned back for a moment. “You may set your mind at ease, Captain, about Catherine Hunter, the brave and beautiful sister of your beloved. Her heart and virtue are quite safe. I have made sure, you see, in my competent way, that she despises me.”

* * * *

Amelia was a radiant bride. The weather and the arrangements conspired to give her a perfect day. She received the well-wishes of the entire parish, then she and Captain Morris left Stagshead for the Lake District for their honeymoon.

Mrs. Charlotte Clay and Sir George Montagu had ridden away from Lion Court in the large carriage shortly before the wedding. George declared himself unutterably bored with Exmoor and announced he was off to Scotland for some shooting. Charlotte had received an invitation to visit from a bosom acquaintance, with whom she would be able to indulge in many happy hours of shredding the reputations of others.

Life at Lion Court settled back into its humdrum routine. Lady Montagu spent a week or two bemoaning the departure of her children, then quietly slipped into her old habits. The name of Devil Dagonet was never mentioned, but Catherine saw his face everywhere in the house. She could not rid her mind of him. How could she have been so foolish as to almost lose her heart to such an out-and-out rogue? If she thought, however, that she could be free of any mention of him for very long, she was mistaken. She entered the parlor one morning to find Lady Montagu in a state of considerable agitation.

“Oh, Miss Hunter! The most unexpected thing! I am quite overset. Lord Somerdale wishes me to go to Bath this instant.”

“I hope your father still enjoys his good health, Lady Montagu?”

“Oh, yes, indeed. His health is still quite sound, remarkably so for a man of his age. No, he received a letter from Charlotte, oh — weeks ago!” She glanced down at the sheet in her hand and read: “Your daughter, ma’am, has had the effrontery to send me the most impertinent piece of gossip.” She looked up at Catherine, her brow wrinkled with distress. “He has been fretting over it for all this time and now demands that I go and give him an account of the whole. How Mrs. Clay could have been so careless as to so upset her grandfather, I don’t know, but she wrote and told him of our terrible visit from Charles de Dagonet. I must go. You will accompany me, won’t you, Miss Hunter? We must leave at the earliest convenience. Bath! It means so much packing and trouble that we might as well go right on to London, for I am promised to visit Charlotte in November.”

Thus, two mornings later, Catherine left Exmoor for the first time. Comfortably seated beside Lady Montagu in her cumbersome coach and firmly setting aside all thoughts of the dangerous Mr. de Dagonet, she set off for Bath. With the further promise of London, she was in the highest spirits and she could not deny, even to herself, the greatest curiosity to meet the notorious Marquis of Somerdale, grandfather to both Dagonet and Sir George Montagu, his stout cousin.

The town of Newmarket, not far from Cambridge, was the heart of the horse racing world and a Mecca for all those young men of fashion who had nothing better to do with their time and their money than lay wagers at the October meetings. The course was a constant pandemonium of noise and color. Fashionable sporting gentlemen rubbed shoulders with the professionals of the turf and the serving classes, all mad with the frenzy of outguessing the odds. The air reverberated with the excited cries of men and horses.

Charles de Dagonet stood a little apart from the milling crowds, his broad, elegant shoulders propped against a railing, and quietly surveyed the scene.

He had no intention of placing bets on the horses. The pay he had received in the Peninsular Campaign had been modest enough, and now he had no income at all. With his slender resources, he could only mend his fortunes in a situation where skill played a greater role than chance, and that was at the gaming tables, not at the track. It was not long before the event occurred for which he had been so patiently waiting.

“Good God! Dagonet! When the deuce did you return from France, sir? The last I saw, you were at Wellington’s coat-tails in Paris. That was in June.”

Dagonet swept a graceful bow which instantly inspired a surge of envy in the young man facing him. “Good day, Wrackby. I am returned to England, as you see, and have spent the intervening time making housemaids mumble and stealing jewels. I trust I find you in good health?”

The young Viscount Wrackby made as if to clap Dagonet on the shoulder. Then he recalled that Devil Dagonet wasn’t the kind of chap with whom you got too familiar, so he wrung his hand instead, memorizing the reply he had just heard to share later with his cronies.

“Oh, never better! You’re the very fellow anyone could the most wish to see. Kendal and Frost are here. You remember them from Paris? Come, after this match, we’ll give you a game of dice! There’s a tent set up over yonder. You know that Crockford’s opened a hazard saloon in Newmarket town? It promises to outshine his own Hell in St. James’s Street.”

A few moments later, Dagonet was walking with a group of the most fashionable dandies, any one of whom would have given half his fortune if he could only affect quite that air of casual menace, to the spot where they could best see the start of the next race: a match between a colt and a filly.

“You’ll lay a pony on Mr. Lane’s bay colt out of Scalper, Dagonet?” Wrackby lowered his voice to a whisper. “A ‘cert’, sir! The filly has been made safe. The ring men shout themselves hoarse over a fixed thing.”

“I’d not back him,” Dagonet said with a smile. “My guess is that the filly will win.”

Lord Kendal instantly followed his lead, and stared at Wrackby for a moment through his quizzing glass. “Indeed, she will, sir! The colt has no wind; without wind he has no air; and with no air, sir, he’s no dandy and no gentleman, but a scurvy rogue. We’ll have none of him! I’m for the mare.” He took out his book, where all his bets were recorded.

“But Golden Rule has took poison! I had it from one of the touts. The bay colt has more wind than the filly, sir. I’ll lay you a hundred on him.”

“And the blacklegs are in on the game, Wrackby,” Dagonet said. “Save your guineas and I’ll take them off you at hazard.”

Wrackby hesitated. Dagonet had the infuriating habit of almost always being right and now Kendal would benefit, but it was too late. There was a roar as the two horses came under starter’s orders. The bay colt was fretting and dancing under his jockey. He was a sleek, nervous horse, and the filly who was supposed to be poisoned certainly looked sleepy in comparison.

“Such a steed was Cyllarus, tamed to the rein of Amyclean Pollux,” Kendal drawled. He did not seem in the least concerned that the filly was so quiet.

“Hardly Amyclean Pollux, my dear chap,” Dagonet said smoothly. “The jockey’s an English John Bull. But the colt is mishandled, wouldn’t you say?”

“Never say so, sir!” Wrackby exclaimed. “Mr. Lane has the best lads in England.”

“Not unless he has the hire of one John Catchpole. I never saw a better man with a horse.”

“Catchpole?” Frost said. “I’ve heard of him: used to run Lord Bentwhistle’s stables in Hertfordshire. An Exmoor chap, wasn’t he?”

Dagonet smiled. “The very man. Is he still there?”

“Devil take me if I know, sir!”

“I care nothing for your Exmoor men, Frost,” Wrackby said. “I still say it’s the nag, not the filly, wins the money. I’ll stake you all a dinner he’ll win by two lengths.”

Lord Kendal turned and quizzed the Viscount until he blushed. “What, sir? He’s not worth a doxy’s promise.”

The horses were off. Within a hundred feet, the bay colt stumbled and checked, and Golden Rule, who was supposed so reliably to lose, won by several lengths.

“I’m ruined! I had a hundred guineas against her.”

“And a dinner, sir!”

Some time later, bemoaning their losses with a curious lack of conviction, the dandies retired to the gaming tent, and ordered the most expensive wine they could find.

Led by Dagonet, the conversation soon become a debate over the virtues of the various training methods espoused by different horsemen, but nothing more was to be learned about John Catchpole. Still later that night, after a comfortable meal consisting of soup, sauces of lobster and oysters, various dressings, sausages and roast beef followed by jellies, tarts, nuts, cheese and fruit, all liberally washed down with claret and port, the gentlemen found themselves around the gaming tables at Crockford’s, wagering deep against the rolls of the dice.

At four in the morning, mysteriously still almost sober, though admired as the wit of the evening by his fellows, Charles de Dagonet walked thoughtfully back to his lodgings the richer by four hundred guineas and a vital piece of information about a certain Exmoor man.

The next morning early he set out for the famous Hertfordshire training stables of one Lord Bentwhistle.

* * * *

“And what the devil do you have against my grandson, miss?” snapped Percival Blythe, Marquis of Somerdale.

Catherine looked steadily at the old man facing her across the neat parlor in his rented rooms in Bath. He was nothing like she had expected. Devil Dagonet’s irascible grandfather was as round as a plum and about the same color. The florid cheeks were haloed by a shock of snow-white hair and whiskers. His left leg, in a soft woolen stocking to relieve the pain of his gout, was propped up on a needlepoint stool. At every other sentence he pounded the floor beside his chair with a silver-topped cane, while the brass buttons on his chest leapt with the effort.

He glared at her. “Well? I can tell you don’t care for him. He’s a damned rascal, and what’s worse, he broke his word to me; but the jewelry was his, and there’s no female on this earth can resist him.”

“Then I hope I am the exception, my lord,” Catherine said.

“Do you, by God?”

At which point, Lady Montagu tried to intervene. “Father, you cannot imagine how dreadful it was. Dagonet threatened me with a pistol. In my own house!”

“My house, madam!”

“Yes, well. Miss Hunter cannot do other than despise him. He had the temerity to insult her in front of us all.”

The old gentleman glared at Catherine once again. “So he kissed you! If I were sixty years younger, I’d do the same myself.”

“I see where Dagonet gets his arrogance, my lord. Had you done so, I should have reserved just the same distaste for you.”

“You’re a damned impertinent baggage, young lady!”

Catherine’s blood was up. “And you, my lord, are a despotic old man.”

Lady Montagu’s mouth dropped open, but to her immense surprise, before her father could reply, her companion began to laugh.

“This is too absurd, my lord,” Catherine said, between gasps of merriment. “I pray you will forgive me, for I mean no disrespect.”

Then suddenly the marquis was laughing too, in a great shout of good humor, leaving Lady Montagu to wonder how on earth the unprepossessing Miss Hunter had managed to win over her father with less effort and more completely than she or her own children had ever done.

* * * *

Later that day, Catherine sat alone at the harpsichord. Softly she sang the words to the old song:

“We lingered where the water flows; sweet promises her eyes did make.

I gave her but a single rose, but she my heart and soul did take.

I am a knight without a grail; I am a tower without a dove;

I am a ship without a sail; and lost am I without my love.”

It was the song she had been singing when Dagonet found her in the grotto. She shook her head, furious that the words should bring her a memory of his sea-green gaze. It was no use. However carelessly he had used her, she must know more about the mystery of Devil Dagonet. What she had learned from Mary clarified nothing, really. From what Lord Somerdale had said earlier, there had been some matter of honor, of a promise made between gentlemen. That had certainly been part of the reason for Dagonet’s banishment and his grandfather’s rage.