Thunder and Roses (58 page)

Nicholas shouted, “Clare!” His expression frantic, he dropped to his knees and lifted her upper body onto his lap.

Clare looked past his shoulder and saw that a swearing Wilkins was reloading with unbelievable speed. As the gunman raised his weapon, she tried to warn Nicholas of his danger, but she couldn’t seem to speak.

Another shot exploded, this time a lighter, sharper crack than the rifle. Scarlet blossomed on Wilkins’s chest and he spun around and fell, his rifle spinning through the air before it, too, struck the ground.
            

Clare turned her head and saw Michael lying flat on his belly, the pistol firm between his hands and a wisp of smoke trickling upward from the barrel. He was not only alive, but he had saved Nicholas’s life, she thought with mild wonder. Truly the Lord worked in mysterious ways.

Clare felt dazed, not quite able to grasp that a skirmish that was over in seconds had left two men dead. Michael seemed uninjured, for he got to his feet easily, but she was too numb to know whether she was seriously wounded or merely stunned.

As Nicholas ripped open Clare’s left sleeve, pain shafted through her and she whimpered. After a quick examination, he said soothingly, “The bullet went through your upper arm. It must hurt like bloody hell, but it missed the bone. You’ll be all right, Clare. Even the bleeding isn’t too bad.” He yanked off his cravat and bound her arm tightly.

Her numbness began to wear off. As Nicholas said, her arm hurt terribly—anyone who talked of “only a flesh wound” had never had one—but it was no worse than when she had broken her ankle.

Cautiously she sat up, and Nicholas moved her back a few feet so that she could sit supported by the wall. After settling her, he said violently, “Why the hell did you do something so stupid? You could have been killed!”

She gave him an unsteady smile. “Why didn’t you do something to protect yourself when Wilkins was reloading?”

“I knew that Michael would take care of him. And when I knew that you had been hit …” His voice broke off.

“You risked your life for mine, love. Can’t I do the same for you?” Clare said with a gentle smile.

His face worked as he tried to control his chaotic emotions.

Before Nicholas could speak, Michael said, “Lady Aberdare is all right?”

Nicholas inhaled, his expression smoothing out. “Yes, t
hank
s to you.” He touched Clare’s hair with fingers that still trembled slightly.

“Stand up and move away from your wife, Aberdare,” Michael said harshly. “It’s time to settle what brought us here, and I don’t want her to get hurt.”

The note in the other man’s voice cut through Nicholas’s preoccupation. He looked up, suddenly wary.

Michael was standing silhouetted against the setting sun, his pistol locked in his hands.

And the gun was pointing straight at Nicholas’s heart.

32

 
His gaze on the pistol, Nicholas stood and stepped away from Clare. “So we’re back to that,” he said conversationally. “You never did say why you want me dead.”

Michael moved closer. With the sun no longer behind him, Nicholas could see the wild despair in his green eyes. Whatever madness Michael carried had been triggered by the violence that had almost engulfed them all.

White-faced, Clare struggled to her feet and leaned against the stone wall. “If you kill Nicholas, you’ll have to kill me too, Lord Michael,” she said fiercely. “Do you think

I’ll keep silent if you murder my husband?”

“Of course not. You’ll see me hanged, and justly so. That doesn’t matter.” He stepped over to the whip. Keeping his gaze on Nicholas, he stooped and tossed it out of reach. “Perhaps I’ll save the hangman the trouble of executing me, because I can’t imagine living with myself after this.”

“Then don’t do it!” she cried. “What has Nicholas done to warrant death at your hands?”

“I promised that justice would be done, never thinking that I would be called on to fulfill my vow,” Michael said bleakly. “When the time came, I turned coward. I spent four years in the army, hoping that a bullet would spare me from having to do this. Yet fate preserved me and brought me here.” Pain crossed his face. “I can no longer fight fate.”

“To whom did you make your vow?” Nicholas asked softly. “My grandfather? He hated me and did his best to alienate my friends, but I never thought he would try to have me killed.”

“Not your grandfather. Caroline.”

There was a moment of frozen silence. Then rage exploded through Nicholas. “Christ, so you were one of her lovers! I should have guessed. The evidence was all there, but I didn’t want to believe it.” His voice cracked. “I wasn’t able to believe it, not of you.”

“We loved each other from the first time we met, at your wedding, when it was already too late,” Michael said, his face stark with guilt. “Because you were my friend, I fought against my feelings, and so did she. But … but we could not stay apart.”

“So you became another victim of Caroline’s lies,” Nicholas said with furious disgust.

“Don’t speak of her that way!” Michael’s fingers whitened on the butt of the pistol. “She would never have been unfaithful if you had not mistreated her so wickedly.” His words poured out as if they had been festering. “She told me all about you—your cruelty, the revolting things you forced her to do. At first I had trouble believing it. Yet how much does a man know about how his friends treat women?”

“And how much does a man know about how a woman treats other men?” Nicholas said caustically.

Before he could continue, Michael cut him off. “After I saw the bruises on her body and she had cried in my arms, I came to believe.

Caroline was terrified of you. She said that if she died mysteriously, you would be to blame, and that I must avenge her. I gave her my word, never thinking that I would have to carry it out. Even though you had treated her monstrously, I never believed you capable of murder.”

“If Caroline had bruises, it was because she liked her sex rough—as her lover, you must have noticed that,” Nicholas snapped. “And she died in a coach accident because she insisted that the driver go too fast. I had nothing to do with it.”

“Perhaps you caused the accident, perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. If she hadn’t feared you, she would not have fled Aberdare when you were caught in the act of bedding your grandfather’s wife! You are as responsible as if you shot her in the heart.” Michael wiped the sweat from his face with a trembling hand. “Did you know that she was pregnant when she died? She was carrying my child, and she was running away to me. I had begged her to leave you earlier, but she refused from some mistaken sense of honor.”

“Caroline didn’t know the meaning of honor.” Nicholas’s mouth twisted. “But maybe you did father her child. Certainly it wasn’t me—I hadn’t touched Caroline in months. You weren’t the only candidate for the honor, though.”

“Don’t slander a woman who can’t defend herself!”

The hysterical edge in Michael’s voice forced Nicholas to rein in his anger. Though he had never truly believed that his old friend wanted to kill him, the fact that Caroline was involved changed everything. Now Michael was holding a gun, and if he snapped, Nicholas was a dead man.

He would have to reveal the whole ugly story; there was no other choice. Unable to suppress his furious bitterness, Nicholas said, “Caroline was my grandfather’s mistress.”

There was a moment of horrified silence, and he heard Clare gasp. Then Michael shouted, “You’re lying!”

As Michael’s finger tightened on the trigger, Clare cried out desperately, “No! I beg you, don’t do this.”

The urgency of her plea caused Michael to hesitate, his face reflecting the struggle raging inside him.

Swiftly Nicholas said, “Damn it, Michael, we’ve known each other for twenty years, and for most of that time we were closer than brothers. Don’t you owe me a chance to be heard?”

The wildness faded a little, though Michael didn’t lower the pistol. “Go ahead then, but don’t expect to change my mind.”

Nicholas drew a deep breath, knowing that he must be both calm and convincing. “As you know, my grandfather arranged the marriage to secure the succession. Once I met Caroline, I agreed to the match quite willingly. But the marriage was a lie from the start. When I made my offer, she tearfully confessed that she was not a virgin—that an older man, a friend of the family, had seduced her when she was fifteen years old. She wept very prettily, and was so convincing that I would have called her seducer out if she hadn’t said the man was already dead.

“I was willing to overlook what had happened, yet after we married, I began to wonder if she had told me the truth—she was remarkably skilled for a girl who claimed to be the next thing to a virgin. At the very least, she had had a serious affair. I didn’t like the idea that she had lied, but women have never had then freedom to sin that men have. I decided that Caroline thought that she had to conceal the truth in order to make a respectable marriage.”

The planes of his face went taut when he thought of his gullibility. “I wanted to make excuses for her. She said that she loved me, you see, and she was so responsive that it was easy to believe her. And I … I don’t know if I loved her, but I wanted to.” Nicholas started to say more, then cut himself off; he would rather be shot than reveal more of himself.

Returning to the safer topic of his wife’s behavior, he said, “I thought we had a good marriage until the night I went to her bed and found love bites on her breasts. She made no attempt to deny her infidelity. Instead, she laughed and said that she didn’t expect fidelity of me, and I shouldn’t expect it of her. She claimed to know how to prevent conception, and gave me her word that she would not bear a child that was not mine.”

Once again he felt the disgust that had swept through him when he realized that the marriage he had begun to need was a travesty. “I flatly refused to accept those conditions. Thinking she could change my mind, she tried to seduce me. When I refused, she became furious, saying that no man had ever left her, and swearing that she would make me regret it. And she did. Christ, she did.” He caught Michael’s gaze with his own. “That little scene took place in April of 1809. Would it be fair to say that her love for you overcame her moral scruples about adultery within a few weeks of that night?”

The
grayness
of Michael’s face was answer enough.

Nicholas took an unobtrusive step closer to Michael before continuing. “I packed her off to Aberdare and stayed in London myself. In retrospect, I should have been suspicious of how tamely she went, but I was too confused to think clearly. After a spell of trying to find the meaning of life in bottles and boudoirs, I decided that it was time to go to Aberdare and talk to Caroline. I thought that she might have had a change of heart and we could try to cobble the marriage together again.

“Instead, it was a classic theatrical farce: the foolish husband returning home unexpectedly and finding his wife in bed with another man. And the other man was my grandfather.”

It was betrayal beyond his worst nightmares, and even now his stomach knotted with remembered horror. “They both laughed at me while the old earl happily explained how clever he had been. Very like Madoc, now that I think about it. From the beginning, my grandfather had despised my Gypsy blood and schemed for a way to get around it. He was hampered by the long illness of his first wife, but as soon as she died, he married again. However, Emily failed to conceive, in spite of his best efforts.”

“You’re lying,” Michael said tightly. “Why should your grandfather go to such efforts to have another son when you would inherit anyhow?”

“You underestimate his ingenuity,” Nicholas said dryly. “He prepared a set of obviously false documents about the marriage of my parents and my own birth. If he had managed to sire another son, he would have destroyed the real papers and taken the false ones to a lawyer, saying sorrowfully that his desire for an heir had encouraged him to believe that I was legitimate, but he could deceive himself no longer. I would have been disinherited and thrown out like the piece of rubbish he always thought I was.”