To Seduce a Sinner (32 page)

The sword pressed very tightly against Jack’s throat, but still he spoke up bravely.

“I would tell you who won the rings, my liege,” he said, “but, alas, you would not believe me in any case.”

The king bellowed, but Jack raised his voice to be heard over the royal rage. “Besides, it does not matter who won the rings. What matters is who holds them now.”

And just like that, the king was silent and every eye in the royal banquet hall turned to Princess Surcease. She seemed as surprised as any when she reached into the little jeweled bag that hung from her kirtle and drew out the bronze ring and the silver ring. She placed them with the gold ring already on her palm, and then all three lay together.

“Princess Surcease has the rings,” Jack said. “And it seems to me that gives her the right to pick her own husband.”

Well, the king hemmed and the king hawed, but in the end he had to admit that Jack did have a point.

“Who will you choose to wed, my daughter?” the king asked. “There are men here from all corners of the world. Rich men, brave men, men so handsome the ladies swoon when they ride by. Now tell me, which of them will be your husband?”

“None.” Princess Surcease smiled, helped Jack to stand on his stumpy legs, and said, “I will wed Jack the Fool and no other, for he may be a fool, but he makes me laugh and I love him.”

And then before the stunned eyes of the entire court and her royal father, she bent and kissed Jack the Fool, right on his long, curved nose.

What a strange thing happened then! For Jack began to grow, his legs and arms lengthened and thickened, and his nose and chin receded into their normal proportions. When it was all over, Jack was himself again, tall and strong, and since he wore the wonderful suit of night and wind and carried the sharpest blade in all the world, well, you can imagine, he was a very fine sight indeed.

But poor Princess Surcease did not like this handsome stranger who stood so tall before her. She wept and cried, “Oh, where is my Jack? Oh, where is my sweet fool?”

Jack knelt before the princess and took her little hands between his big ones. He leaned his head close to hers and whispered so only she could hear, “I am your sweet fool, my beautiful princess. I am the man who danced and sang to make you laugh. I love you, and I would gladly take on that twisted, horrible form again, if only to see you smile.”

And at these words, the princess did smile and she kissed him. For although Jack’s form had changed so much she no longer recognized him, his voice had not. It was the voice of Jack the Fool, the man she loved.

The man she’d
chosen
to marry.

Scotland
July 1765

It was as the carriage bumped around a bend and the decrepit castle loomed into view in the dusk that Helen Fitzwilliam finally—and rather belatedly—realized that the whole trip may’ve been a horrible mistake.

“Is that it?” Jamie, her five-year-old son, was kneeling on the musty carriage seat cushions and peering out the window. “I thought it was ’sposed to be a castle.”

“ ’Tis a castle, silly,” his nine-year-old sister, Abigail, replied. “Can’t you see the tower?”

“Just ’cause it has a tower don’t mean it’s a castle,” Jamie objected, frowning at the suspect castle. “There’s no moat. If it
is
a castle, it’s not a proper one.”

“Children,” Helen said rather too sharply, but then they
had
been in one cramped carriage after another for the better part of a fortnight. “Please don’t bicker.”

Naturally, her offspring feigned deafness.

“It’s pink.” Jamie had pressed his nose to the small window, clouding the glass with his breath. He turned and scowle¶>

Helen stifled a sigh and massaged her right temple. She’d felt a headache lurking there for the last several miles, and she knew it was about to pounce just as she needed all her wits about her. She hadn’t properly thought this scheme through. But, then, she never did think things through as she ought to, did she? Impulsiveness—hastily acted on and more leisurely regretted—was the hallmark of her life. It was why, at the age of one and thirty, she found herself traveling through a foreign land about to throw herself and her children on the mercy of a stranger.

What a fool she was!

A fool who had better get her story straight, for the carriage was already stopping before the imposing wood doors.

“Children!” she hissed.

Both little faces snapped around at her tone. Jamie’s brown eyes were wide while Abigail’s expression was pinched and fearful. Her daughter noticed far too much for a little girl, was too sensitive to the atmosphere adults created.

Helen took a breath and made herself smile. “This will be an adventure, my darlings, but you must remember what I’ve told you.” She looked at Jamie. “What are we to be called?”

“Halifax,” Jamie replied promptly. “But I’m still Jamie and Abigail’s still Abigail.”

“Yes, darling.”

That
had been decided on the trip north from London when it became painfully obvious that Jamie would have difficulties
not
calling his sister by her real name. Helen sighed. She’d just have to hope that the children’s Christian names were ordinary enough not to give them away.

“We’ve lived in London,” Abigail said, looking intent.

“That’ll be easy to remember,” Jamie muttered, “because we
have
.”

Abigail shot a quelling glance at her brother and continued. “Mama’s been in the dowager Viscountess Vale’s household. Our father is dead and he isn’t—”

Her eyes widened, stricken.

Helen swallowed and leaned forward to pat her daughter’s knee. “It’s all right. If we can—”

The carriage door was wrenched open, and the coachman’s scowling face peered in. “Are ye getting out or not? It looks like rain, an’ I want to be back in th’ inn safe and warm when it comes.”

“Certainly.” Helen nodded regally at the coachman—by far the surliest driver they’d had on this wretched journey. “Please fetch our bags down for us.”

The man snorted. “Already done, innit?”

“Come, children.” She hoped she wasn’t blushing in front of the awful man. The truth was that they had only two soft bags—one for herself and one for the children. The coachman probably thought them destitute. And in a way, he was right, wasn’t he?

She pushed the lowering thought away. Now was not the »ow y, time to have depressing thoughts. She must be at her most alert, her most persuasive, to pull this off.

She stepped from the rented carriage and looked around. The ancient castle loomed before them, solid and silent. The main building was a squat rectangle, with small windows irregularly placed in a flat front. A Gothic arch held wooden doors. High on one corner, a circular tower projected from the wall. Before the castle was a sort of drive, once properly graveled but now uneven with weeds and mud. A few trees clustered about the drive struggled to make a barricade against the rising wind. Beyond, nearly black hills rolled gently to the darkening horizon.

“All right, then?” The coachman was swinging up to his box, not even looking at them. “I’ll be off.”

“At least leave a lantern!” Helen shouted, but the noise of the carriage rumbling away drowned out her voice. She stared, appalled, after the coach.

“It’s dark,” Jamie observed, looking at the castle.

“Mama, there aren’t any lights,” Abigail said.

She sounded frightened, and Helen felt a surge of sympathy. She hadn’t noticed the lack of lights until now. Perhaps no one was at home. What would they do then?

I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Helen tilted her chin and smiled for Abigail. “Perhaps they’re lit in the back where we can’t see them.”

Abigail didn’t look particularly convinced by this theory, but she dutifully nodded her head.

Helen took the bags and marched up the wide shallow stone steps to the huge wooden doors. They were almost black with age, and the hinges and bolts were iron—quite medieval. She raised the iron ring and knocked hard.

The sound echoed despairingly within.

Helen stood facing the door, refusing to believe that no one would come. The wind blew her skirts into a swirl. Jamie scuffed his boots against the stone step, and Abigail sighed almost silently.

Helen wet her lips. “Perhaps they can’t hear because they’re in the tower.”

She knocked again.

It was dark now, the sun completely gone and with it the warmth of day. It was the middle of summer and quite hot in London, but she’d found on her journey that the nights in Scotland could become very cool, even in summer. Lightning flashed low on the horizon. What a desolate place this was! Why anyone would willingly choose to live here was beyond her understanding.

“They’re not coming,” Abigail said as thunder rumbled in the distance. “No one’s home, I think.”

Helen swallowed as fat raindrops pattered against her face. The last village they’d passed was ten miles away. She had to find shelter for her children. Abigail was right. No one was home. She’d led them on a wild-goose chase.

She’d failed them once again.

Helen’s lips trembled at the thought.
Mustn’t break down in fro»eakem nt of the children.

“Perhaps there’s a barn or other outbuilding in—” she began when one of the great wood doors was thrown open, startling her.

She stepped back, nearly falling down the steps. At first, the opening seemed eerily black, as if a ghostly hand had opened the door. But then something moved, and she discerned a shape within. A man stood there, tall, lean, and very, very intimidating. He held a single candle, its light entirely inadequate. By his side was a great four-legged beast, far too tall to be any sort of dog that she knew of.

“What d’you want?” he rasped, his voice low and husky as if from disuse or strain. His accent was cultured, but the tone was far from welcoming.

Helen opened her mouth, scrambling for words. This was not at all what she’d expected. Dear God, what was that thing by his side?

At that moment, lightning forked across the sky, close and amazingly bright. It lit the man and his familiar as if he was on a stage. The beast was tall and gray and lean with gleaming black eyes. The man was even worse. Black, lank hair fell tangling to his shoulders. He wore old breeches, gaiters, and a rough coat better suited for the rubbish heap. One side of his face was twisted with red angry scars. A single light brown eye reflected the lightning at them diabolically.

Most horrible of all, there was only a sunken pit where his left eye should have been.

Abigail screamed.

THEY ALWAYS SCREAMED
.

Sir Alistair Munroe scowled at the woman and children on his step. Behind them the rain suddenly let down in a wall of water, making the children crowd against their mother’s skirts. Children, particularly small ones, nearly always screamed and cried and ran away from him. Sometimes even grown women did. Just last year, a rather melodramatic young lady on Princess Street in Edinburgh had fainted at the sight of him.

Alistair had wanted to slap the silly chit.

Instead, he’d scurried away like a diseased rat, hiding the maimed side of his face as best he could in his lowered tricorne and pulled-up cloak. He expected the reaction in cities and towns. It was the reason he didn’t like to frequent areas where people congregated. What he didn’t expect was a female child screaming on his very doorstep.

“Stop that,” he growled at her, and the lass snapped her mouth shut.

There were two of them, a male and a female. The lad was a brown birdlike thing that could’ve been anywhere from three to eight. Alistair had no basis to judge since he avoided children when he could. The female was the elder. She was pale and blond and staring up at him with blue eyes that looked much too large for her thin face. Perhaps it was a fault of her bloodline—such abnormalities often denoted mental deficiency.

Her mother had eyes the same color, he noted as he finally, reluctantly, looked at her. She was beautiful. Of course. It would be a blazing beauty who appeared upon his doorstep in a thunderstorm. She had eyes the exact color of newly opened harebells, shining gold hair, and a magnificent bosom that any ma»somappn, even a scarred, misanthropic recluse such as himself, would find arousing. It was, after all, the natural reaction of a human male to a human female of obvious reproductive capability, however much he resented it.

“What d’you want?” he repeated to the woman.

Perhaps the entire family was mentally deficient, because they simply stared at him, mute. The woman’s stare was fixated on his eye socket. Naturally. He’d left off his patch again—the damned thing was a nuisance—and his face was no doubt going to inspire nightmares in her sleep tonight.

He sighed. He’d been about to sit down to a dinner of porridge and boiled sausages when he’d heard the knocking. Wretched as his meal was, it would be even less appetizing cold.

“Carlyle Manor is a good two miles thataway.” Alistair tilted his head in a westerly direction. No doubt they were guests of his neighbors gone astray. He shut the door.

Or rather, he tried to shut the door. The woman inserted her foot in the crack, preventing him. For a moment, he actually considered shutting her foot in the door, but a remnant of civility asserted itself and he stopped. He looked at the woman, his eye narrowed, and waited for an explanation.

The woman’s chin tilted. “I’m your housekeeper.”

Definitely a case of mental deficiency. Probably the result of aristocrats overbreeding, for despite her lack of mental prowess, she and the children were richly dressed.

Which only made her statement even more absurd.

He sighed. “I don’t have a housekeeper. Really, ma’am, Carlyle Manor is just over the hill—”

She actually had the temerity to interrupt him. “No, you misunderstand. I’m your
new
housekeeper.”

He remembered that one was supposed to be kind to mental deficients. Why? He wasn’t sure.

“I repeat, I don’t have a housekeeper.” He spoke slowly so perhaps her confused brain could understand the words. “Nor do I wish a housekeeper. I—”

“This is Castle Greaves?”

“Aye.”

“And you are Sir Alistair Munroe?”

He scowled. “Aye, but—”

She wasn’t even looking at him. Instead, she had stooped to rummage in one of two soft bags at her feet. He stared at her, irritated and perplexed and vaguely aroused because her position gave him a spectacular view down the bodice of her gown. If he was a religious man, he might think this a vision.

She made a satisfied sound and straightened again, smiling quite gloriously. “Here. It’s a letter from the Viscountess Vale. She’s sent me here to be your housekeeper.”

She was proffering a rather crumpled piece of paper.

He stared at it a moment before snatching it from her hand. He raised the candle to provide some li»proighght to read the scrawling missive. Beside him, Lady Grey, his deerhound, evidently decided that she wasn’t getting sausages for dinner any time soon. She sighed gustily and lay down on the hall flagstones.

Alistair finished reading the missive to the sound of the rain pounding steadily on his drive. Then he looked up. He’d met Lady Vale only once. She and her husband, Jasper Renshaw, Viscount Vale, had visited his home uninvited only a little over a month ago. She hadn’t struck him at the time as an interfering female, but the letter did indeed inform him that he had a new housekeeper. Madness. What had Vale’s wife been thinking? But then it was near impossible to fathom the workings of the female mind. He’d have to send the too-beautiful, too-richly dressed housekeeper and her offspring away in the morning. Unfortunately, if nothing else, they were protégés of Lady Vale, and he couldn’t very well send them off into the dark of night.