Secrets of Surrender (26 page)

“Most admirable, sir. However, you are late now in revealing this.”

“I owed Benjamin a debt of honor, and hoped his name might be spared.”

“Of course. Yet you would be questioned. You had to know it would come out.”

“I intended to answer much as Mr. Bradwell did. Without perjury, but without interpretation, either. However, Benjamin Longworth is dead, and after much thought I concluded that my debt died with him. His brother is a scoundrel to be sure, but he has sins enough without answering for his older brother’s too.”

“You are very certain regarding the earlier dates of the thefts?”

“Completely certain. Most of that money was gone before Benjamin Longworth went to fight in Greece.”

The prosecutor insisted on quizzing Lord Hayden on which of the witnesses had in fact been Timothy’s victims. Kyle decided that would take a good while. He slipped out of the Old Bailey for some air.

Many people milled there and the surprise revelations spread. That caused some confusion and arguments. With some luck it would cause some confusion among the jury too. Perhaps that was the real reason that Lord Hayden had delayed in revealing the total truth.

The weather mocked the sad events inside the building. Unseasonably warm, it offered a taste of the season waiting to break. A cool breeze carried the scents of renewal to tease one’s skin.

“I expect Lord Hayden’s litany will take at least an hour.”

He pivoted. Rose stood behind him with her bonnet in her hand.

“I expect so. He appears to have memorized those records.”

“Alexia says he never forgets numbers. I suppose no man forgets paying out over one hundred thousand pounds.”

She appeared calm enough. Composed. More than she had the last few days. Waiting for a bad thing to happen was worse than it actually happening in many cases.

“Did you know, Rose? That your older brother was part of it?”

She nodded. “Not the specifics of who took what from whom. Alexia confided the truth last summer after Tim was gone. Lord Hayden arranged for Tim to repay those people, only to then discover that there were more thefts. It devastated me when I learned that they both were bad, and I was not inclined to parse through the blame.”

“I am relieved that he chose to make the distinction between their crimes today.”

The barest smile curved her lips. Her eyes were sad but as clear as crystals. She gazed at him as if she could see right into his mind.

She embraced him and placed a careful kiss on his chest before releasing him. “I thank you, Kyle, for the way you spoke in there. Tim does not deserve the care that you took to do as little harm as possible. I fear that he will not understand how hard it must be to show kindness to someone who has only wronged you. He is too childish to know the sort of strength it takes to show mercy to someone whom you believe should hang.”

“I did not do it for him, Roselyn.”

“No. It was to spare me. To protect me. To honor me. I know that, and I will always be grateful.” She glanced to the building and steeled her posture. “I must return, so that I am there when it ends. I do not want him to be alone for that.”

“Of course.”

She walked away. He strolled along the building’s facade, delaying his own return. He would get back in time for the verdict and the sentence, though. He did not want
her
to be alone for that.

A little commotion broke into the street. Boys ran down carrying newly printed broadsides, shouting the news. Most of them announced the surprises in Longworth’s trial. One, however, shouted less dramatic information.

Kyle walked over to the lad and bought the sheet. It bore a black border and a very brief story.

The Earl of Cottington was dead.

Rose walked beside Lord Hayden, trying not to retch from the smells within the prison. She carried a basket of necessities for Timothy, and also a few small luxuries. He did not deserve the latter, but she remembered how Alexia used to send her such things during the months of wearying practicality last year.

Alexia could not come with them, considering her condition. Lord Hayden had forbidden Irene’s company as well, and now Rose understood why. Newgate was a terrible place. They passed large cells where men and woman did things that no girl should see. From Lord Hayden’s stern expression, she guessed that he thought no decent woman should be seeing them either.

Tim was in a small cell with only five other men. His accommodation in this more private abode had been Lord Hayden’s doing. Hopefully it would be Lord Hayden’s final time laying out money for a Longworth.

The turnkey moved the other prisoners out so she would not have to tolerate their interference.

Tim faced them once they were alone with him. His smile was a halfhearted, sad attempt. “It is good to see you, Rose. It was kind of you to come to the trial too.”

“You are my brother, Timothy. Irene sends her love, as does Alexia. Alexia is going to have her child soon, and could not join me here. I wrote to you with the happy news but I doubt you received the letter.”

“Is Irene well?”

“Most well. She lives with Alexia and Lord Hayden. She has been spared most of—well, most of it.”

Tim had the decency to thank Lord Hayden for helping Irene. He then eyed Rose with less grace. “Your husband wouldn’t come with you, I see.”

“He has gone north, to the Earl of Cottington’s funeral. But, no, I do not think he would have come anyway.”

Tim’s mouth twitched at her reference to the earl. “I expect Norbury is the new earl now. Good thing the verdict came down before that was widely known, or I’d be swinging for sure. Norbury wanted me dead and silent so I could never talk, and I’ll laugh in his face that he failed. Not that what I face will be much better than dying.”

“Do not talk like a fool,” Lord Hayden snapped. “Transportation of fourteen years is not hanging. You will be alive. Eventually you will be free. You are young and can start over. You should thank God that the judge showed mercy.”

“Mercy, hell. I’ll die anyway, just slowly. They work men like slaves over there. I hear it takes half a year on a ship to even get there. I only borrowed some money, that’s all. I was going to pay it back if you hadn’t forced me to admit to it when you did. You could have said it was all Ben’s doing in court too. They would have believed you.”

Lord Hayden tensed enough that Rose thought he might hit Tim. “Except it was not all his doing. That would have been a lie.”

Tim’s face twisted in emotion and anger. “You are glad this happened. Glad they found me. Glad that Ben is dead. I know that you are.”

Rose moved closer to calm her brother. “You are speaking foolishly. Lord Hayden helped you in there. He has helped us all along. But for the money that he laid out last summer, this would truly be a final farewell, Tim.”

Tim’s eyes misted but his petulance did not subside. Rose looked at Lord Hayden. “Could I be alone with him? For a half hour, no more?”

Lord Hayden seemed relieved by the suggestion. “I will be outside the door. If the turnkey gets impatient, I will hold him off.”

She propped her basket on the little crude table that was the chamber’s only furniture. “I brought you some things for your voyage and later. Do you still have the clothes that you had in Italy?”

Tim nodded, and watched as she set out her little gifts. She had packed practical items that one takes for granted, like scissors and pins. But she had also tucked in a tin of tea, a few sweets, and a bag of shillings. Also some paper and pens, so perhaps he would write if he could.

“No brandy?” he asked.

“No spirits, Tim. You would do well to stay away from them forever.”

He shook his head in disgust. He paced away.

“Tim, what did you mean when you spoke of Norbury? You said that he wanted you dead so you could not talk.”

He scratched his head, then gestured broadly to push the question away. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. I’m as good as dead this way.”

“It may not matter, but I am still curious.”

He came back and poked through the little gifts. “We spent some time in each other’s company maybe four years back. We met while gaming, and he condescended to have me in his circle for some of his diversions on occasion.” He opened the tea and sniffed. “He has this estate in Kent, not far from one of his father’s. He has parties there.”

“I am aware of those parties. Did you attend them?”

Tim flushed. “There was a bit of trouble at one. His lady friend and he had a row, and she left. So that night I was, um, sleeping, when I heard this woman scream. That was it, just once, but not a good scream…um, not the sort one might hear there, is what I mean.” He got more red.

“I understand.”

“Yes, well, it bothered me, so I went to see if someone was hurt and I heard it again. I followed it that time, I could tell it came from below, so I went there and I found him. He had a scullery maid in the library. She was no more than the age of a schoolgirl and he’d tied her up and, well—”

“Did he know you had seen this?”

“He wasn’t noticing anything much when I looked in.” He shrugged. “He had hurt her bad. She had the signs of blows, that was the first thing I saw, not that I stayed long. She tried to spit out the handkerchief he’d used to gag her. He noticed and hit her so hard I thought she went out.”

Not that I stayed long.
He had not tried to stop it. He had closed the door on that poor girl’s suffering.

“If you left, and if he did not see you, why would you think he pursued you to silence you?”

His face fell. He flushed again.

“Timothy, were you so stupid as to approach Norbury? Did you tell him what you saw and ask for money to keep silent?”

“Not much. A damned pitiable amount, when things were bad last spring. He never even answered the letter. He knew I couldn’t do it.”

“I expect he did. But, of course, he could never be certain.”

She pictured Norbury, weighing whether Timothy had the courage to either swear information against a viscount or pursue blackmail. Norbury would never be secure that a fit of bravery or a bad conscience would not inspire her brother at some point in the years ahead. Tim might not even have gone to a magistrate. He could have just written a letter to Norbury’s father.

How convenient for Norbury when Tim’s own crimes made him vulnerable. A hanged man is most silent.

She piled the gifts back in the basket. She set out the paper and ink and pen. “You will write that story down, Timothy. Right now.”

“It won’t matter, Rose. No one will believe the word of a convict, not against the man who swore information against him. It will look like nothing more than a story I concocted for revenge.”

“You will write it anyway. Then you will write something else for me, as I dictate. If you do this for me, write these two letters, you will have committed two good acts, Tim. Two noble, honest ones to begin balancing out all the bad ones. It is a small beginning to reclaiming your soul and self-respect, brother.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

K
yle arrived late back in London. He entered the house tired and low in spirits.

The house was silent. There was nothing different, nothing special. Yet as he stood near the door his soul exhaled the way it used to when he went back to Teeslow during a school holiday. It was the emotion of a person returning home after being gone.

Home. The sensation of comfort seemed novel, and very pleasant. He had not really thought of any place as home for some years now.

As he mounted the stairs, he noticed a glow at the bottom of Rose’s door. He had not expected her to be up this late.

He went to his chamber and shed his frock coat. Jordan had left everything ready should the master unexpectedly return. Kyle aimed for his dressing room, but paused by the bed. A stack of letters rested there, where they could not be missed.

He recognized the crest. He had seen it often before, on letters sent by a man now dead. These were from a different Earl of Cottington, however. Jordan, ever mindful of rank and title, had left them because he assumed they required immediate attention.

Kyle moved them to his writing table. Norbury could wait a while longer. In a day or two Kyle would read these letters and decide what to do about them.

He passed through the dressing rooms and entered Rose’s chamber. She sat at her writing desk in a pink undressing gown and white lace cap, peering at a paper in the lamplight. She jotted, then scratched her chin with the pen’s feather.

“Writing poetry, Rose?”

She startled, then threw down the pen and came to him. Her embrace was one of comfort as much as welcome.

Her feminine, living warmth made the best balm for heart and body. Just her scent helped the clouds of sorrow to thin.

“It was a grand affair, I expect,” she said quietly.

“Very grand. Lots of sashes and ribbons and lords and ladies. Norbury arrived back north after me. He dallied here in London to celebrate his inheritance, no doubt. Once home, however, he played the grieving son to perfection.”

“I think the symbolic son grieved more.”

Probably. God knew he had grieved enough for a son of any kind. He had known, even as he grieved, that it was not Cottington alone that he mourned, but his boyhood and his youth and his roots that one by one would be severed in the years ahead like this one had been.

“Come and tell me all about it.” She led him to her bed and made him sit beside her.

“I would rather not, if you do not mind.” He did not want to explain that he had not really attended the funeral. He knew he would not have been welcomed. A confrontation was coming with the new earl and Kyle had not wanted it to mar the respect for the old one.

He had watched it all from a distance, looking down from a hilltop where he could spy the procession and the new tomb in the manor graveyard. He preferred it that way. He could be alone with his thoughts there.

“Of course. I understand.” She patted his hand sympathetically, much the way a mother would.

He clutched her hand and raised it to his mouth. He pressed his lips to her skin.
Home.
“Did you see your brother?”

“Lord Hayden brought me.”

“I suppose that was fitting.”

“Sadly so. Tim is not much changed, I am sorry to say. No wiser. Still childish in his views. He may not survive what is coming.”

“If he chooses to, he will. If he is your brother he cannot be too weak. He just needs to find the strength inside him, that is all.”

“And if he doesn’t—you are correct. It will be his choice.”

“Let us speak of better things, Rose. Surely there have been normal, happier events these last days. A new bonnet, perhaps? News of Alexia? How is Henrietta faring?”

She laughed. It was a lovely sound of life. It affected him like a spring breeze.

“Alexia is well but quite uncomfortable. Irene is surviving the shock of learning about our brothers’ crimes. I do have a new bonnet, as it happens, and we have been invited to a party.”

“A party. Now that is blessedly normal for London. Who is giving it?”

“Lady Phaedra and Lord Elliot, so it may not be so normal after all. It will be in Easterbrook’s house. It is to honor the painter, Mr. Turner. She knows him, it turns out. Anyone who is anyone will be there, along with her old circles who are said to be very interesting people. Artists and such. She was very specific that you were to come.”

“I look forward to it. The most proper and the eccentrics all in one place. I wonder if the marquess will make an appearance himself. He should enjoy it.”

“Maybe I will ask him and find out. I am going to try to call on him tomorrow next. I must give him the earl’s message. Alexia promised to use her influence to have me received.”

Kyle looked around Rose’s chamber, so full of the touches and details that spoke her presence in his world. He slid his arm around her back and pressed a kiss to her temple.

“It is good to be back, Rose. I should have stopped at an inn, but I forced the coachman to push on. I walked in the door and immediately felt at peace. It has been a long time since I entered any place and felt that way.”

“It is a good house. The sort that becomes more comfortable with time and familiarity.”

“It was not the building, but because you were here.”

“I suppose people become more comfortable with familiarity too, Kyle. That is what it means to be married.”

Perhaps, but it had not been comfort that he experienced the last fifty miles. Instead, a building anticipation occupied him. He thought of nothing except being with her, talking to her, lying with her. Loving her.

She made him rise, and folded down the sheets. “It is late and you are tired. Sleep here with me.”

He took her arm and turned her into his embrace. He plucked at her lace cap. It rose gently off her crown.

It was late, but not too late. He was tired, but not that tired.

“I told you that he would not receive you. It is always like this. He doesn’t even pretend that he is out of the house. He just sends down the same message.
Not today, thank you.
” Henrietta shook her head in dismay at her nephew’s rudeness. “You would do better to write him a letter. That is what I do. I write a letter, post it, then it comes right back to this house and goes up to him with his other mail. That is a fine kettle of fish, isn’t it?”

“I cannot communicate this in a letter. I am obliged to speak to him.”

“If you had waited until I arrived, Henrietta, we might have had better luck,” Alexia said. “I was not very late.”

Alexia had breezed in right after Hen decided to take matters into her own hands. Now the rejection had come, and Rose would have to wait for another day.

“Do as I said. Write him a letter. I believe that he even reads them.”

“I think I shall, but I wish to avoid the time it must travel to and fro if it is posted. May I?” Rose gestured to the library’s writing table.

“By all means. Now, Alexia, tell me who has accepted Phaedra’s invitation. I have heard that she is friends with some extraordinary people.”

While Alexia gave a report, Rose jotted her note. She folded it and called for a footman to deliver it.

“There are those who think she should make it a masked ball, so those who are dying to attend but think they should not can still come,” Hen said.

“Phaedra would never countenance such cowardly behavior,” Alexia said.

“If she wants the best of the best—”

“She is inviting the best of the best for your sake and mine. If they choose not to attend, it will not signify to her.”

Hen smiled vaguely while she tried to accommodate the idea that such matters would not signify to someone, even Lady Phaedra.

The footman returned. “The marquess will receive you in the drawing room, Mrs. Bradwell.”

Hen’s eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed in annoyance. Rose followed the footman to the drawing room.

She waited a good while. Long enough that she wondered if he had changed his mind. Maybe he intended to put her in her place by letting her just sit for hours. Considering her note, there would be a type of justice in that.

Finally, however, he entered the chamber, looking distracted and vague and barely allowing a corner of his mind to attend on where he was.

She curtsied. “Thank you for receiving me.”

“Since you threatened to take up residence in the library until I did, I had no choice. Aunt Hen and her daughter are quite enough feminine intrusion on this house, thank you.”

“That was bad of me, I know. But I would like to discharge this duty quickly. It would not do to give you a man’s dying words a year hence.”

He angled his head back and gave her a good inspection. “That you were so charged is odd, since I barely knew the man, but speak you must and speak you will. I am listening.”

Her mouth felt a little dry. “He insisted that I use his exact words. Please keep that in mind—”

“Speak them, Mrs. Bradwell.”

She fixed her gaze on the carpet twenty feet away. “He said to tell you that you shirk your duties most shamefully. It is time that you got out in the world and stopped indulging your bent for eccentricity. You must marry and sire an heir and take your place in the government. He said that your family has too much intelligence to waste it and that your life is not yours to live as you like and that is the damned truth of it.”

She heard no cursing. No anger. She snuck a look at him.

Nothing. No reaction at all. He had just been scolded from beyond the grave, taken to task like a schoolboy, insulted in a way, and he did not care.

“Now I know why he told you to wait until he was dead.”

“I dreaded this obligation because it was a very rude message. However, I decided that the charge would be useful because it might enable me to see you privately. It is my hope that you will spare me a little more of your time.”

He thought that over. He gestured to a settee. “A little more will not matter, I suppose.”

She sat down. He did not. She wished he would. He just stood ten feet away, his hands clasped behind his back, with half of his attention waiting to hear what else she had to say.

“Lord Easterbrook, I have an odd question to ask you. Did you pay my husband to marry me?”

Rather more of his attention gathered on her. “Why do you think anyone did? You are a beautiful woman. That was reason enough for him, I am sure.”

“Thank you for the compliment, but with an intelligent man a woman’s beauty only goes so far.”

“If you think there was more to it, why not ask him?”

“Because it does not signify anymore in matters between him and me. I ask for other reasons.” And because Kyle wanted her to believe he had not profited too much other than in having her herself. No matter what she learned here today, she would allow that little illusion to stand.

“No doubt Hayden interfered if anyone did. Why would you ever think it was me?”

“Lord Hayden says he did not and he does not lie. Lord Elliot has been too absorbed by his recent marriage to much notice my situation. Your aunt Henrietta would be a most odd angel of mercy to a fallen woman. I think it was you because there is really no one left.”

He strolled over to a table near the window and absently jostled the top of a bejewelled gold box there. “I will admit that I might have encouraged him a little. It would be indiscreet to explain how.”

“Why?”

“It had nothing to do with you. Alexia, however, has brought my brother more happiness than he probably deserves. I appreciate that, and I am moved to make her happy if I can.” He paused. “She seems to inspire me.”

“To kindness?”

“No, not to kindness, Mrs. Bradwell. To optimism.”

It was not the motive she had hoped to hear. She stood. “I see. I had thought that perhaps…well, good day. Thank you for receiving me.”

She reached the door before he spoke again. “What had you thought?”

“That perhaps you cared about fairness and justice. That you had interfered to right a wrong.”

That appeared to amuse him. “And if I had?”

“I would have asked your advice on a matter of that nature.”

“Fascinating. People rarely ask me for advice. I can’t think of the last time it happened.” He appeared genuinely charmed by the extraordinary nature of her suggestion. “I can claim no experience in giving advice as a result, but the novelty of the notion diverts me. If you still want to ask, I will do my best.”

Rose extracted Tim’s letter from her reticule. “Norbury’s interest in my brother was not just about money, or pride, or justice. Tim told me the truth, and I had him write it down.”

Easterbrook took the letter and read it. “Have you shown this to your husband?”

“No. That alliance will be strained enough with the death of the earl, and already is full of bad blood. After the business with me, if Kyle saw this, he might…”

“Misunderstand that business with you? Think there was more than you admit? Call Norbury out?”

“Something like that.”

Easterbrook scanned the letter again. “It is the word of a criminal. Questionable at best. Useless in the least.”