At Your Pleasure Page 8

But she had no choice.

  As she made for the door into the hall, Grizel cried after her, “Milady, wait!”

  She could not wait. He would be killed—murdered, dead—and then, why, all her plans would be for naught, for news of his mistreatment would bring the king’s full forces down upon Hodderby, wouldn’t it? So she must save him. She must. She had no choice.

  6

  Adrian’s thoughts grew grim. There were any number of harmless explanations for a group of mounted men approaching the keep after dark, but none could account for why this approach failed to raise an alarm. How had none of his men come out to discover the nature of the party?

  Sword in hand, Adrian tried the heavy oak doors to the entry hall. Finding them locked, he remounted and rode hard around the back of the house for the kitchen yard.

  Here the door stood open. As he dismounted, he caught sight of a candle flickering in the dimness, clutched in a slim, small hand.

  The candle lifted, revealing the marchioness’s face as she set it aside on a ledge. Now her other hand emerged from behind her back.

  Joining hands, she lifted her pistol, making his head the target.

  “Step away from your horse,” she said in a shaking voice.

  He heard himself laugh: a short, sharp sound expressive of disbelief. “My God.” Do not underestimate her, he’d told Lord John. “What did you do to my men?”

  “They are unharmed,” she said. “They will sleep through what is coming, and their lives will be spared for it. If you wish to live, too, you will come with me now, quickly.”

  That weapon was heavy. She would not be able to aim it for long.

  “Who are those men?” he asked. He already knew that her brother was not among them; on the ride here, he had intercepted a messenger with news of Colville’s escape from an inn outside Dover. But if these were her brother’s allies, why did they risk approaching Hodderby before Colville’s arrival?

  Something here drew them. But what?

  “I will answer no questions,” she said. “Time is short. Do you die or do you come with me?”

  He dropped the reins and stepped sharply forward. She made a convulsive flinch, but held her ground.

  He could take the pistol by force. But guns had unpredictable temperaments, and a stray shot would expose his position to the approaching party.

  He took another step, mirrored by her measured retreat. She seemed confident with the weapon, surprisingly strong, and too comfortable aiming it between a man’s eyes.

  The sense of absurdity evaporated, leaving a clear, forceful anger that made his lungs expand. “Your trip to the apple orchard,” he said. “You were arranging for our murder.” And he, like a green fool, had attended instead to her tousled hair, to the sweet shape of her mouth and the taste of her tongue.

  His contempt was all for himself. Her skill at enmity outstripped his by far.

  “If I wanted you dead, I would not have bothered to fetch you,” she said, “or to drug your men besides. Obey me and no harm will come to you.”

  He offered her a smile that made her suck in an audible breath. “You are the fool, then. Think you a sleeping man makes a less tempting target than a waking one? Your brother’s friends will slit their throats like lambs on feast day.”

  “They will not.” But the break in her voice betrayed her sudden doubt. She had not thought on this possibility before. “They would not,” she said hoarsely.

  He sheathed his sword so he could step through the narrow doorway. The silence within the house was like the unnatural hush of a cathedral—or a tomb. “You cannot keep walking backward,” he said grimly. A staircase rose behind her, a servant’s passage to the upper floors.

  She jerked her chin. “Your neckcloth. Remove it and tie it around your eyes.”

  He saw red. “I will not.”

  “Do it!”

  He drew a long breath. “I will not blindfold myself while enemies prowl this house with swords drawn.”

  “I order you!” Her voice was high now.

  “Best shoot me,” he said flatly. “For I do not take orders from you, Leonora Colville.”

  For the space of three heartbeats they stared at each other. His rage began to yield to more calculated thinking. With it came a new view of her.

  Despite his own advice to John Gardiner, he had underestimated her. She held the pistol like a bandit queen, magnificent in her posture, shoulders square, chin high, every line of her defiant. Silently she dared him to mistake her for someone he might intimidate.

  It was a rare man who outwitted him, and never more than once—but she, whom he had known so well, had managed it very neatly.

  He did not wish to admire her. Loathing was the wiser course. But God help him if she did not remain the boldest, most sharp-witted woman he had encountered. He would never find her like again—not for courage; not for wit; not for spirit.

  And she squandered all these things—she squandered herself— on her brother’s doomed, doltish cause.

  “You will obey me,” she said. “For all it chafes your masculine vanity, Adrian Ferrers—you will obey, unless you doubt my willingness to shoot.”

  And then she lowered the pistol to take aim at his thigh.

  “That will cripple me and kill me just as well in the end, only more slowly.”

  “Then advise me on a better aim.” She sounded deadly calm. “For I mean to take one.”

  From the depths of the house came the sound of a slamming door. Her regard flickered away.

  He lunged at her, catching her wrist and hauling it high over her head, her fingers around the pistol trapped hard within his grip. Ignoring her shrill yelp, he used his body to drive her back into the wall. He pinned her there for a long moment, listening, over the sound of her rough breathing and his own, to the activity in the rest of the house.

  A moment of raucous laughter, at which she stiffened.

  The tinkling of breaking glass, and then the louder splintering of something large being upended.

  “The dining room,” she whispered. “They are near.”

  He squeezed the slim bones of her hand. She fell silent.

  Now came the heavy trundling of boots. He felt her tremble. A puff of breath escaped her.

  “How many?” he demanded.

  When she did not speak, he hooked his free hand in her hair and yanked back her head. Her tears did not move him. He was no longer a stupid boy in love. “How many?”

  “Forty,” she spat.

  In the light from the candle a few steps away, her eyes were dark holes, a skeleton’s hollows. She was lying, of course. There had not been so many men as that in the group he had seen emerging from the trees. But the lie made her position ever clearer.

  She was a part of this—not incidentally. She was as much a part of it as her godforsaken brother.

  And by placing herself in opposition to him, she had eliminated all complexities. She had made herself fair game.

  Effectively, now, she was his.

  A terrible pleasure washed through him, dark as sin, hot as triumph. In the space of a breath, his careful illusions unraveled. Almost he laughed. Indifferent? There was nothing in him indifferent to her. He had waited for this turn, hungered for it.

  He leaned over her, looming deliberately. “Tell me you would have shot me.” It would be laid plain between them, here and now, his lack of obligation to her. No earthbound moralist would fault him for doing with her as he wished. “Tell me.”

  For a mute moment she looked back at him silently, her eyes huge in the dim light. Then, her mouth twisting, she said, “I would have.”

  He smiled. “Yes,” he said gently. “So you would have.”

  His fault, he saw now, had been to dwell on the past, and the sweeter, lighter love that had once been theirs. His soul had grown darker in the intervening years—and so, too, had hers.

  The woman she had become fitted his interests perfectly.

  “I will take you to London,” he said,
his quiet voice a strange contrast to the loud thump of blood in his ears. He would force her to better purposes than the puppetry of her rotted, conniving family. She was his now to possess.

  “Prithee try,” she shot back—and without warning, twisted.

  Her knee smashed into his balls.

  He took a sharp breath through the blinding pain, but his grip, for one agonized moment, weakened.

  And then she had the gun between them, pressed into his chest.

  A door opened at the end of the hall. A man’s voice rang out: “Who’s there?”

  He struggled with his hoarse breathing, watching only her. For six years he had seen nothing of her in her face, but this wildness in her now, this he recognized. Even at this impossible moment, everything in him quickened in response to it. Only now her wildness had fangs; now she had developed the willingness to bite.

  Her mouth pursed into a bloodless line. From the quick pulse in the hollow of her throat, she was panicking, undecided.

  But then she swallowed and her chin tipped up. “It’s Lady Towe,” she called. She met Adrian’s eyes and her face hardened. “I have a prisoner.”

  7

  Nora watched as the last of Rivenham’s lackeys were dragged into the larder. “What do you mean, ‘what news you wrest from them’?”

  The two men exchanged a look she did not like. They had given her no names, and their accents were not local; but they seemed to know her brother well enough, and had spoken fondly, in these last minutes, of his talent for dice. Nevertheless, she felt increasingly uneasy.

  None of this had gone to plan. They had dug up the cellar an hour ago, and the last of the arms had been loaded onto the cart. But they had refused to take the gunpowder: her brother had given them no instructions for it, they said, and so they lacked the means to transport it elsewhere.

  With her main hope foiled, she desired them to go. But though the moon had long since passed its zenith, they yet loitered. These two in particular hewed to her side, almost as though to watch her.

  She cast off manners now to speak bluntly. “You cannot linger.”

  “Only a bit longer,” the dark man told her. He had a sharp, wolfish face and a week’s worth of beard on his sunken cheeks. “Let them awake, and we’ll speak to them one by one before taking our leave.”

  “We’ll begin with Rivenham,” the other added.

  She looked this one square in the eye. There was a hint of Irish in his vowels, though his sun-touched hair and weathered skin made him indistinguishable from men who worked the land anywhere. “Rivenham will tell you nothing.”

  His mouth quirked, a smirk that quickly faded as she scowled at him. “We have our ways, your ladyship.”

  “What ways are those?”

  “Any man will speak if the price for silence is high enough,” the dark one said.

  She did not like his tone. “Torture? Is that what you mean?”

  He shrugged.

  She realized then that he was French. His narrow face and the slight laziness of his vowels had suggested it, but the shrug solidified her suspicion. A Frenchman and an Irishman in her kitchen, speaking casually of torturing the Englishmen locked in her larder.

  The word burst from her. “No.”

  Both of them stared, uncomprehending as donkeys. “Perhaps your ladyship should retire for the night,” the Frenchman suggested. “We will handle the mess. When you wake in the morning, you’ll find it was as though these men never came to trouble you.”

  She tightened the hand in her apron pocket, her grip hard around the pistol. It was no easy weapon to disguise, and with every movement she feared it might discharge. But instinct had made her keep it close and concealed, and it comforted her now. “In my brother’s absence, I govern this household and what occurs within it. Your task was to retrieve the arms. The king’s men will not be molested.”

  The Irishman loosed a scornful laugh. “Oh, ho! And what will you say on the morrow, when they wish to know the cause of their so-interesting dreams?”

  “Rivenham will not leave you in peace,” the Frenchman murmured.

  She feared he was right. She could not forget Rivenham’s remark. His voice had grown rough as he promised it: I will take you to London.

  She understood his meaning. He viewed her as a traitor now, as much as he did David.

  But a man’s pride was given to violent pronouncements that his logic, in a cooler mood, would be forced to refute. And surely—surely he would never hurt her.

  The thought made her bite her lip in frustration. She could not count on any such fanciful notions!

  And yet . . . to let him be slaughtered . . .

  She shook her head. “I am a woman. Who will believe me capable of this business? You have repacked the floor; there is no evidence that anything untoward happened here. Better you return these men to their beds, so they will wake none the wiser to their night’s travels.”

  “These men are not fools,” the Frenchman countered. “They will know they were drugged.”

  “And Rivenham will inform them of it if they have doubts,” the other added.

  She set her jaw. “Those are my concerns. I recommend you mind your own. I believe they will prove sufficient.”

  A brief, uneasy silence passed. The two men exchanged another look. Then the Frenchman gave an impatient wave. “Very well, we will do as you say.” To his companion he gave a short nod. That one wheeled and went for the door, she assumed to fetch the others for the task of hauling sleeping bodies.

  “But Rivenham,” the Frenchman went on, “must be ours. You understand,” he continued sharply over her protest, “that none of the others were conscious for his return. When he fails to appear, they will assume something befell him on the road. Meanwhile, you may tell them that the entire household sickened. They will have no proof to the contrary, only suspicions. So, too, with Rivenham’s disappearance: indeed, their search for him will occupy several days, when otherwise they might have been in our way.”

  He smiled at her, pleased by the neatness of his plot.

  She felt an oncoming sickness, like to make her vomit. She had thought herself so clever with this diversion. If only Rivenham had not returned when he had!

  Had her brother been here, he likely would have ordered her to accept this man’s proposition. But if she did, Rivenham’s life would be forfeit.

  She opened her mouth but her wits forestalled her. What protest could she lodge to persuade this man? He would find her concern for an enemy suspicious indeed.

  An enemy, she reminded herself, but the notion held no more power over her reasoning than it had yesterday, in the wood.

  And anyway—a Frenchman and an Irishman! She was her brother’s sister, her father’s daughter; she knew her duty. But she would not give up any Englishman to such as these!

  “Rivenham is not your business,” she said coldly. “You have the weaponry. Do not overstep yourself.”

  The man blinked. As the rest of his party came trundling into the kitchen, he stepped past her to unbar the larder door and admit his men entry.

  She heard no sound of protest from Adrian, which pitched her alarm higher.

  As the first of his men emerged with a limp body slung between them, the Frenchman spoke again. “Alas,” he said, “I’m afraid I cannot—”

  Her panic suddenly burned into anger. She walked past him through the doorway into the chill of the storeroom.

  They had tied and gagged him. His men slumped around him, their limbs carelessly crossed, their sleeping faces slack, eerily vacant.

  His eyes met hers over the cloth that bound his jaw. She could feel his rage like the heat of a great bonfire.

  A streak of blood painted his jaw.

  “My lady,” came the Frenchman’s call behind her.

  “You wounded him?” She turned on her heel. “You attacked a man whose hands were bound?”

  The Frenchman rolled his eyes. “This is not a game.”

  She did not li
ke his condescending airs. Picking her way to Adrian’s side, she hauled out the pistol.

  Seeing it, the Frenchman halted.

  “You will do me this favor,” she said through the thundering of her pulses. “You will return the slumbering men to their beds. Then you will leave. Lord Rivenham will remain with me. Should anyone wish to dispute it, I will test this cantankerous piece with your head as the target.”

  She felt incredulous stares pressing into her. She did not look away from the Frenchman’s wolfish face.

  His gaze narrowed and traveled down her. It was a survey meant to assess the strength of her intention and her ability to carry it out.

  The gun seemed to weigh as much as a millstone, but her arms did not shake as she raised them.

  The Frenchman could not afford to abuse her. She knew that, and so did he. She was the daughter of Lord Hexton, new advisor to the rightful king of England, His Catholic Majesty James Stuart.

  “We will have to lock you inside,” he said sourly. “We cannot risk his escape before we are well clear of this place.”

  Was that meant to frighten her?

  Perhaps it should. Rivenham had good cause to be unhappy with her. She might regret being cloistered with him.

  But she could not back down now. “Then do so,” she said. “My servants will release me in the morning.”

  A muttering went up from the other men. But the Frenchman, after another cold moment of silence, only shrugged. “As you wish.” He sketched a mocking bow. “I do hope her ladyship will not regret it.”

  As did she.

  It took ten long minutes for the rest of Rivenham’s men to be cleared out. In all that time, she never lowered the gun nor removed her focus from the Frenchman and his minions, though her every sense screamed of the peril immediately at her side: the furious Lord Rivenham, whose eyes must surely by now have burned a blister into her cheek.

  At last, the door slammed. She waited for the thud of the bar being set into place and the rattle of the lock as someone tested it. Only then did she lower the pistol. A gusty breath burst from her.

  Her knees folded, taking her to the floor.