The Duke Page 15

  “Men are generally odd creatures,” Libby said with a furrow in her brow. “Except Papa and the duke. Here, Iris. This crate first.”

  When the streams of sunlight across the floor shortened, Amarantha rose from her knees and dusted off her skirt.

  “Can you spare me, Libby? I would like to stretch my legs.” And find him.

  “Take care that Mrs. Tate does not see you go, or she will tease you again about your liking for exercise in order to bring to everybody’s attention Jane’s delicate constitution.”

  “Jane is so dull spirited,” Iris said. “She doesn’t even care that we are living in a haunted castle.”

  “There really are no such things as haunted castles,” Libby said.

  “Then why does everybody call the duke a demon?”

  “Because everybody is silly. Do pass me that skull.”

  In the foyer, Amarantha gathered her cloak. There were few servants about, and no one else around either as she pulled the hood over her hair, tucked her hands into her pockets, and walked to the gate in the forecourt wall.

  In the keystone of the arch, a star had been carefully carved. With six points and a crossbar at the base of the top triangle, its lower points touched three other symbols: a trio of wavy lines, a triangle, and a vertical almond.

  To see it in situ now, when six months earlier she had seen it all over Edinburgh—on gateposts and the corners of buildings—gave her the oddest sensation of possession. Which was ridiculous.

  Continuing through the gate, she passed beneath the tree branches. To one side, another wall separated the drive and a church.

  On the hill opposite, a horseman appeared on the road, the hooves of his enormous mount churning up the slushy mud. Two dogs ran alongside, large and shaggy. The Duke of Loch Irvine had returned.

  Amarantha awaited him. He was alone, and she had come here for precisely this moment—her twirling nerves be damned.

  The master of Haiknayes and Kallin rode a massive black beast and wore a black coat. He was altogether intimidating, and when he reined in the horse before her the sight of his splendid shoulders and powerful thighs did nothing to lessen the effect.

  He removed his hat.

  “Good day, my lady.”

  “Good day, Urisk.”

  Gabriel allowed himself the smile he had been resisting for days. He knew he was every sort of fool. He didn’t care.

  But he caught himself at a half smile. No need to be an utter fool when a partial fool would do.

  “So it’s to be Urisk now?” he said.

  “It suits the location. And you are no longer a sailor.” The sunshine illumining her face picked out every shade of cream and gold and pink, and made her eyes like gems. The roundness of girlhood had gone from her features, leaving the sleek, soft beauty of a woman. “Do you ride a black horse and wear black clothing to convince everybody that you are in fact the devil, or simply because you like the color?”

  “If it’s the former?” he said.

  “Then I should be terrified of you.”

  “Are you?”

  “I haven’t decided. But I have not yet seen the dungeons.”

  As he dismounted she watched him. To feel her watching him—again—after years—was like waking from an opium dream. He felt it beneath his skin.

  “If you intend these as guard dogs, they are not very good at it,” she said, bending to run her fingertips through the fur between a hound’s ears. Dappled sunlight from between the branches of trees only just beginning to bud dotted her skin, mingling with the riot of freckles across her nose and cheeks. “Do they usually help to keep away curious people?”

  “No’ this time, obviously.”

  “They are kittens. What are their names?”

  “Lucifer an’ Diablo.”

  She laughed. As though she had touched him, he felt it in his bollocks.

  “Really?” she said.

  “Aye.”

  “And your horse’s name?”

  “Beelzebub.”

  A smile lingered on her lips.

  “The dogs at Kallin were also ridiculously friendly,” she said. “The locked gates of the grounds, however, were not.” She lifted her gaze to him. “Last autumn I went there. I stayed at the Solstice Inn at the village. Not as a guest. I worked for the innkeeper, Mrs. Tarry. It was she who suggested to me that you are an urisk.”

  “Aye,” he said.

  Her fingers stilled in the hound’s fur.

  “I went to Kallin,” she enunciated very clearly.

  “Aye.”

  “You are not surprised.”

  “You have come here,” he said.

  “Twenty miles from Edinburgh. By invitation. Kallin is eighty miles of mountainous roads away.”

  She had intended to surprise him. He should now pretend to be surprised.

  “I knew you were there,” he said unwisely. But he could not lie to her. Let the entire world believe fantastical stories about him. To this woman alone he would never tell untruths.

  “You knew I was there. You knew it then. Last autumn?”

  “Aye.”

  For a stretched moment she simply stared at him.

  She walked away.

  He followed, leading his mount along the road toward the church. He reached her side and she did not break stride.

  “It was you,” she said. “On the roof.”

  “Aye.”

  “I thought it was you,” she said to the road ahead. “I assumed you had forgotten me.”

  “No.”

  “I see.”

  Probably not. Certainly not.

  “I walked up to the castle a number of times. Thrice weekly, in fact,” she said.

  “’Tis a distance from the village.”

  “Since speaking to you was my purpose in traveling to Kallin, that distance was immaterial. I was never admitted to the castle grounds. The place was thoroughly locked up. Yet you were apparently in residence the entire time?”

  “Aye.”

  “How exceptionally taciturn you have become.” She tucked her hands into her sleeves and moved with even, steady steps, just as she had when he had walked miles through cane fields and down dirt roads simply to remain at her side.

  “Have I?” he said.

  “I have been loath to believe the rumors of your reclusiveness,” she said. “But perhaps all of this isolation has had a deleterious effect on your ability to converse. Or perhaps you are simply reveling in solitude after sharing cramped ship’s quarters for years with so many others.”

  “Could be.” He bridled his smile yet again.

  “Yet now you have invited all of these people here. For a party, no less.”

  “You required it.”

  She halted. “I required it?”

  “Aye.”

  “You are the most—the most unusual man.” She shook her head and the sunlight danced in the fiery locks that peeked from beneath her hood. “Do not attempt to convince me that if not for what I said the other night in that reading room you would have not invited Mr. Tate here to discuss business or Libby to study your father’s collection. I won’t believe it.”

  “Then I’ll no’ attempt to convince you. ’Tis the truth, though.”

  She breathed very markedly for several inhalations, the clasp on her cloak glittering with the abrupt rise and fall of the most beautiful breasts in creation. Unlike five years ago, now he knew what it was to have that in his hand. Her.

  “I see,” she finally said, moving toward the church again. “Apparently you do in fact still enjoy teasing. I can only hope that you will be more forthcoming in answering my questions.”

  “Questions o’ the devil?”

  “I will ask the questions, Urisk. You will answer them.”

  “You’ve no respect for my consequence. I’m a duke now, you know.”

  “Yes, I had heard that somewhere.”

  “You’ll find no answers,” he made himself say.

  “Let us see if
that is true.” Halting again, she faced him and for the first time in five and a half years Gabriel wished the entire world away—everything but this woman. He had forgotten this pleasure, the acute pleasure of walking beside her, feeling her near, his senses filled with her voice and colors and the cadence of her movements. That simply trading words with another human being could forge a well of joy in his stomach seemed a miracle. He had forgotten this. He had made himself forget.

  “Last winter,” she said, “my friend Penny Baker left Kingston unexpectedly and alone. She took passage on a ship bound for Scotland. There was nothing left for me in Kingston, so I—”

  “Nothing?”

  “I am a widow. When my husband died, his mission passed to another man.”

  “Aye.”

  “We have returned to single syllables, it seems.”

  “I know you are a widow.”

  “You do?”

  He took a step closer and Amarantha willed herself to remain in place.

  “Do you imagine I would touch a married woman as I touched you?” His head bent a bit and an ebony lock dipped over one dark eye. She wanted to sweep it back with her fingers then explore—to touch him as he had once touched her. He was temptation and mystery at once.

  “I have no idea what you would or would not do.”

  “You went to Kallin to see me,” he said. “You came here to see me. You canna stay away from me.”

  “It is clear at least that your arrogance is as vigorous as ever.”

  “My appreciation for the obvious is as well, lass.”

  “I came here to learn what part you played in my friend’s death.”

  The amusement disappeared from his features.

  “When I disembarked in Leith, I searched for Penny. Her trail led toward Kallin. I found her in a farm cottage by the River Fyne. She was very ill. Shortly after my arrival, she was gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Passed away.”

  As though a shade had fallen over his eyes, she could not read the expression in them now.

  “You believe I’d something to do with it?” he said.

  “Why else would she have tried to travel to Kallin, despite the danger?”

  “The danger?”

  “Penny was not a planter’s daughter or a missionary. She was a freedwoman and half-sister to my husband. Yet she traveled without escort across a land considerably more vast than the island upon which she had always lived. But when I found her I discovered that she had not journeyed across the ocean entirely alone.”

  “Was there a man?”

  “In the cottage in which I found her, the day before I arrived Penny had brought another being into the world. A son. I found her minutes before she breathed her last. And the only words she spoke to me were your name.”

  Chapter 17

  Prayer, of a Sort

  For a moment he only stared at her. Then he turned away and scraped his hand over his face.

  “She sailed to Leith?” he said, his voice muffled against his palm. “Directly from Kingston?”

  “Yes. I questioned every sailor in port until I found evidence of the direction she had taken. Then I went after her. I did not come here to accuse you of evildoing.”

  “You’d no’ be the first.”

  “I came here to try to understand why, without friends or companions, and without telling anyone—without telling even me or her mother or sisters that she was with child—she traveled across an ocean to you.”

  Wind through the belfry high above made a hollow whistle.

  “Where is the child?” he finally said.

  This she had not expected. She supposed she should have.

  “He is with the farmer and his wife. The woman had only just weaned her own babe from the breast and took Penny’s child to nurse. When I told her I found this astonishing, she said that her father had helped found the abolitionist society in Glasgow, and that all of God’s children are brothers and sisters. She and her husband are good people. Penny’s son is safe.” She folded her hands.

  “He’s no’ mine.”

  “I did not suggest that he was, did I?”

  “I didna know her. I know nothing o’ her except what you’ve told me now.”

  “Fine.”

  “You believe it?”

  “I have no other word on the matter than yours, do I?”

  It was as though no time had passed, not a year, not a month, not a day. His gaze upon her was fixed, waiting, as though he knew she withheld her thoughts. It gave her the oddest, most unsettling sensation of wanting and wariness at once. Years ago, there had only been the wanting. And pleasure. And guilt.

  Now she had no guilt. Now she had purpose.

  “In fact, the child is fair,” she admitted. “He is like my husband and my husband’s father. Penny was not fair. And of course you are not.”

  “Babes are sometimes born fair, then turn dark later.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Perhaps my mother was fair,” he said, his eyes hooded. “Or my father.”

  “I know they were not.” She could not seem to look away from the thick muscle defined by the fabric of his coat sleeves tight over his arms. Foolish, heedless flesh. “Nor your grandparents.”

  “Aye?”

  “It was, of course, the first inquiry I made of you after Penny’s death.”

  “You’ve known it—”

  “Since last autumn. Moreover, I know you were not in Kingston last winter. I have, you see, done quite a lot of research.”

  His arms fell to his sides.

  “Then do you think, lass, you might’ve told me all o’ this the other night?”

  “At the assembly rooms?”

  “Aye.”

  “You did not give me the opportunity. And, admittedly, I was nervous. I was not expecting to see you. Not at that moment, anyway. It took me off guard.” As had his hand on her hip, then her buttocks, then her breast. But she needn’t admit that.

  “You’re no’ nervous now?”

  “A bit. You are obviously a little mad. Allowing everybody to believe you are some sort of depraved warlock is not the behavior of a sane man.” Her sweet lips were tight, as though repressing a smile. “Rather, encouraging people to believe it. I saw the book you were reading in the library that night.”

  “Aye, I’m probably mad.” Where this woman was concerned, definitely. And by God if it didn’t feel fantastically good to know she did not believe the rumors about him. “But no more mad than a woman who secretly searches for a missing friend for more than a year when she might ask any o’ her own friends to help, a woman who pretends to be a peasant in a tiny village in the middle o’ Scotland when she is the daughter o’ an earl. No?”

  “Do not presume to understand me,” she said, the pleasure gone from her eyes. “When I went to Jamaica I left behind everything that was dear to me. I was alone. Penny threw open her home and embraced me as a sister. She gave me another family. I have absolutely no interest in how you have spent the past five and a half years. I have long since put that curiosity behind me. I came here now to learn what Penny sought from you at Kallin, which I hoped would lead me to her son’s father, whom she was obviously searching for in Scotland. For that reason only.”

  I was alone.

  Judas, he’d been a fool.

  Then and now. A reckless fool.

  She had changed. The sincerity in her voice was the same as the girl that had driven him so mad—so irrevocably, desperately mad that it had altered the course of his life. That she was here now, standing before him, could not be real.

  But the light of deviltry in the cloverleaves was gone, the spontaneous flare of joy in her smile absent. Now emotions passed across her features coolly, cleanly. He could read those emotions as though they were drawn with a fine pencil tip upon paper.

  “Lass, I am sorry for your loss. Deeply sorry.”

  Her lips parted.

  He waited for her to speak.

  She pivoted and walked
into the church.

  Of sober gray stone and all simplicity without, within it was carved and mellowed and ancient, almost foreign. He had not entered it since he had been a boy, not since he and his cousin had shaken the dirt of Scotland from their boots and set off to sea, to war—and other horrors of their own making.

  A lamp burned before the sanctuary. In a side chapel votive candles flickered in the blue and red light filtering in through a window. He watched her walk toward the chapel, step into the colors cascading from the sky, and rest her fingertips upon the stone railing.

  Tying his horse, he hesitated in the doorway. The likelihood of erupting into flames if he crossed this threshold seemed fairly high. But, by God, she was here. Whatever the reason she had come, his damn heartbeats would not slow.

  He passed within. Sacred stillness coated him, bathing his ears with silence and curling into his nostrils. He walked toward her.

  She dropped to her knees on the floor, folded her hands neatly before her, and closed her eyes. Splashed with the rich rainbow, her skin was not comfortably creamy, but gold and crimson and blue. He took in the drape of her gown on the bare stone floor and the heels of her boots and the hint of ankle revealed, thirsty for these details of her after the desert of years.

  “Lass, there be kneeler cushions in the—”

  “Hush, Urisk. I am praying.”

  There was nothing for it but to go to his knees as well.

  “Judas—”

  “He is listening.” She glanced upward.

  “This floor is bloody cold an’ hard.”

  “Not unlike its overlord, I daresay.” She did not turn to him or open her eyes. He took his time studying her.

  “How do you endure it?” he said.

  “The cold, hard heart of its overlord? With patience and good manners.”

  “Praying on your knees, on the stone.”

  “Oh. This is nothing. I was married to a missionary for five years.”

  “Aye.” In his own ears the syllable sounded surly. “You were an unlikely candidate for that post.”

  Her face snapped toward his. The emeralds glittered with fire.

  “You’re no’ married now,” he said.