* * *
They came home flushed with the exercise and the beauty of the estate. Mrs. Hood had hot scones and tea waiting by the fire, and Joanna so forgot her dignity as to squat beside the flames and hold out a scone to toast it.
They then sorted through the boughs and branches they had brought in, and Helena proceeded to teach the girls how to make a kissing bough. After a couple of hours with wire and scissors, and the provision of red and green apples from the kitchen, the creation was complete.
“It looks like umbrella ribs made from branches,” Milly said.
They had woven holly and ivy over a wire frame, which a footman had bent into the correct hoop shape, then hung it with the apples and little stars and snowflakes cut from white paper. Joanna had taken charge of the stars and snowflakes—they were extraordinarily intricate and lovely—and hardly noticed that her dress was sprinkled with the clippings.
In the center, in pride of place, Helena attached a generous sprig of mistletoe complete with white berries, which Peter the stable boy had gathered at great risk to life and limb to the mixed delight and consternation of the maids.
“Now we must hang it,” Helena said.
“Oh, may I?” Milly begged. “Please?”
“If you will let us hold you, that’s an excellent notion.”
With much giggling and a blessed good-fellowship, the kissing bough was hoisted to the ceiling and suspended from the chandelier.
That evening over dinner, Helena found herself describing to her two youngest sisters-in-law the merry way Christmas had been celebrated at Friarswell and Trethaerin. To her delight, they were full of questions and determined immediately to share it all with Eleanor.
Milly stopped in the doorway as they left to go upstairs.
“Can you teach us to play all those games? Hot Cockles and Hunt the Slipper?”
“Of course!” Helena smiled. “Now Eleanor is waiting to hear all about your kissing bough.”
She went into the drawing room alone, carrying her teacup. She would let the sisters have some time together without her. The curtains had long been drawn against the evening dark, and a fire burned merrily in the grate beneath the swags of holly and green ivy.
She was arrested by the unexpected sound of music.
A dark-haired stranger was sitting at the pianoforte idly picking out a tune.
Her heart leaped to her throat. But he turned as she entered, and smiled with considerable charm.
“I hope I haven’t startled you, Lady Lenwood,” he said. “Your household seems to be in an uproar of hilarity, and I could get no one to show me in. Thus I have disgracefully made free with your drawing room.”
“I have no idea how to reply to that,” Helena said, clutching hard at her cup. “You seem to know my name and thus have the advantage of me. Should I call the footman to throw you out?”
He finished the piece with what Helena instantly recognized to be an uncommon skill, then stood and made her his bow.
“I hope not. I knew your husband in the Peninsula. My name is Charles de Dagonet.”
Richard began to think as he passed through High Wycombe and went up onto the rise of the Chilterns that he was heartily sick of riding about the countryside in winter. He missed the comfort of a decent bed and a warm chair beside the fire. He missed the feel of a good horse under him instead of a hired nag.
He missed—God help him—Helena.
It was also tiresome to keep mixing the black dye, so he had stopped bothering with it before he left France. His hat anyway covered his hair when he was traveling and the attacks on him had ceased. So he was allowing the gold to shine through at the roots.
If there had been any more hired assassins looking for a yellow-headed gentleman in London or in Paris, they had been foiled. He was no closer to discovering why the assaults had happened, in spite of extremely competent undercover work in both cities—which left him with nothing but his marriage to Helena and that stark word,
Trethaerin,
at the heart of the problem.
Surely there was some other explanation, something he had missed?
It took a long day of hard riding to get from London to Oxford, and it was well after dark when Richard arrived. He was wet to the skin. Harry was not at his lodgings.
In a dark mood, Richard left his brother a message, found a room at an inn, and turned in for the night.
* * *
“Good God!” a voice said in his ear. “You would seem to be piebald.”
Richard opened one eye. Lit by a brace of candles, Harry sat on a chair beside the bed.
“Landlord let me in. Not without some misgivings, mind you! I threatened him with your dire displeasure if he didn’t oblige, and you know that my charm is irresistible. Besides, he knows me. I hope it’s truly urgent, because it’s morning and I haven’t been to bed yet.”
“Harry, for God’s sake! It may be morning, but I rode some sixty miles yesterday and I’m damned if I want to be woken to the sight of your cheerful face at some time in the wee hours.”
“You needed wakening, old fellow. You’ve been moaning like a banshee.”
Richard slipped from the bed and splashed cold water over his face. One glance at his watch told him that by most definitions, morning was still some way off.
“A regrettable habit of mine. Why are you here so early?”
“Good Lord! You summoned and I came.”
“Like the genie? Very well! Why don’t you fetch us some hot liquid refreshment while I get dressed? Then I want to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“About my wife, as it happens.”
“Oh,” Harry said with a grin from the doorway. “I thought you were going to explain the delightful thing you have done to your hair.”
* * *
The teacup crashed to the ground. Dagonet knelt immediately to pick up the pieces.
“My humble apologies, ma’am. I didn’t mean to alarm you.”
“No! Oh, no, please tell me right away: Has something happened to Richard?”
“I left him in the best of health. Here, sit down. May I fetch you some more tea?”
“No, nothing! Where is he? Is he all right?”
Dagonet led her to a chair by the fire and watched the color slowly come back to her face. He had not expected to discover so quickly what he had come to find out, but the answer was very obvious.
Helena Trethaerin, now Lady Lenwood, could not be behind the attacks on her husband. She was very desperately in love with him.
“Lady Lenwood, I came only because Richard is a friend. He didn’t send me.”
She covered up her feelings instantly as she stood and went to a side table.
“Let me offer you some wine, Mr. de Dagonet. Has my husband returned from France?”
“He is safe in England.”
“You must think me a complete fool.” She smiled and calmly handed him a glass. The return of her self-control seemed effortless. “It was more than kind of you to drop in. I certainly didn’t mean to greet a stranger with hysterical theatrics and broken crockery.”
“No,
les crises de nerfs
isn’t your usual style, at all, is it? However, I know about the attempts on Richard’s life, though to my knowledge he hasn’t been attacked since October.”
“What is behind it, Mr. de Dagonet? You were with my husband in Spain, you said. Did he make enemies there?”
“No more than any of us.”
She sat down. “But something haunts him.”
Charles de Dagonet looked at her and made a decision. Richard would never tell her, but he could in general terms give her some clues to understanding her husband.
“We are all haunted, I suppose,” he said gently. “In one way or another. Richard and I and several others were part of a group that Wellington pleased to call his
jeunesse dorée
. We collected intelligence on enemy movements and ran liaison with the local partisans.”
“Golden youth?” Helena asked.
Dagonet gave her a wry smile. “Yes, a minor conceit of our great general. Not all of us were either gilded or rich. I’m afraid our work led us into other things besides battlefields, terrible though they are.”
“I feared as much,” she said.
He tried to keep his voice matter-of-fact, as if that might somehow soften the import of what he was saying. “More than once we came across the results of French reprisals against the Spanish peasants. Napoleon’s men were often starving and desperate toward the end. Unfortunately they didn’t hesitate to take it out on women and children.”
“I see,” Helena said.
Dagonet knew that she couldn’t possibly really understand, but perhaps he had said enough.
“We all have nightmares,” he said.
Helena looked away into the dancing flames in the hearth. “This doesn’t account, of course, for whatever my husband is involved in now, and it says nothing as to why someone wanted to kill him, but still I am grateful. Thank you for sharing that.”
Dagonet stood up and set down his glass. “We also learned to trust no one except each other.”
“So you think I should be patient with him?”
“If you love him as I believe you do. Though, as the fool said: ‘To say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days—’ ”
“—
the more the pity
,”
Helena finished with a wry smile.
* * *
“You do look haggard, Dickon,” Harry said. “I wish you would tell me all about it.”
“In due course. It’s your turn to spill the beans. When did you first meet Helena’s cousin, Nigel Garthwood? And why the hell didn’t you tell me about it at the time?”
Harry had the grace to color just a little.
“Because you were being so damned superior and bloody-minded, if you must know. I was going to tell you the day we were in the stable with Bayard, after he was shot with the darts, but you seemed to be so certain that you had everything under control. It was the reason, actually, that I came back to the house that night instead of going on to London as I had planned.”
“I thought you were going to Oxford when you left?”
“I do have a life of my own, you know. I had promised some of the fellows to fetch some particular wine.”
“Which you consumed and with which you put yourself into a drunken stupor?”
“Witness the encounter with Sir Lionel? Actually, no. I can’t quite figure that one out. I hadn’t drunk any more than usual, but I admit I was crapulous. And I never made it to London, obviously. I spent the afternoon with Mr. Garthwood at an inn. He doesn’t like you.”
“Did he say so?”
“Oh, no, not at all. But he wanted with great subtlety to engage my help to discover your interests and habits, which I trust I refrained from giving him.”
“Thank you,” Richard said dryly.
“All his concern is for Helena, of course. He implied that he was her greatest friend and confidant, her only blood relative left alive and all that. Yet I had the feeling that he wanted to enlist me in some nefarious scheme, if I would just once give him an opening. He also seemed rather more interested than was seemly in whether I would inherit if you met with an accident.”
“And what did you tell him?”
Would it be obvious that he had left everything to Helena if he died? Harry would become Earl of Acton in due course, but Acton Mead was Richard’s own to dispose of and so was his considerable private fortune. So how did Garthwood think to profit if Viscount Lenwood died? Surely, surely, Helena could not really be in league with him, whatever Garthwood claimed about her?
Harry took a swallow of wine. “I think I managed to leave him guessing about my real feelings and I’m sure I told him nothing of your private dispositions. It’s not exactly his business, is it? But I still had a rather insistent premonition of danger at the time.”
“So you returned to Acton Mead and followed us to the wood on Marrow Hill the next day. But you saw nothing?”
“Not a thing. But my premonition was right. Someone was dogging your footsteps with evil intent, weren’t they? It was my intention to keep an eye on you and effect the heroic rescue. Woeful failure, I’m afraid. That day and at the fair.”
“I did understand your motives, dear fellow,” Richard said gently. “I’m sorry if I seemed ungrateful.”
“It was only later that I wondered if Garthwood had followed me back and tried to take out his spleen on poor Bayard and the defenseless Behemoth. I did see him again, you see, on my way to Oxford. He was staying conveniently in the area.”
“Have you seen him recently?”
“When you disappeared from the face of the realm, he turned up here to see if I knew where you’d gone. Since I couldn’t help him, he went off to Cornwall, I believe. The man seemed in an oddly desperate case. He must want you dead very badly and when you didn’t oblige, he was like a mad dog.”
“It’s rather obvious, isn’t it?” Richard leaned back in his chair, his mood bleak. “I had no idea until now he had ever left Trethaerin, but from what you tell me, Garthwood has had the fortunate opportunity to be in the vicinity for each of the attacks on my precious existence. When his own amateur attempts met with such dismal failure, I suppose he decided to call in some professional help, thus the attack in London. And the description of the man who hired that unwelcome little company would fit him very well.”
“In London?”
Richard gave his brother a brief description of the attack that had very nearly succeeded.
“Look, Harry,” he went on. “When you were leaving Acton Mead that first time, you remember you asked me the cause of my latest falling out with Father. I told you that I had discovered something foul in Paris, and I’m afraid just to think of it put me in the filthiest temper. Well, I should have told you the whole or nothing. For that I apologize. I thought there was nothing you could do and I was right. There is nothing that I can do, either.”
Harry listened in silence as Richard described what he had found at Madame Relet’s
maison
in Paris.
“My interference has been so ineffective as to be grounds for laughter rather than murder,” Richard continued. “There is no possible reason, I am quite certain, for the Paris affair to be behind the attacks against me. I have no proof except a confused note left by a girl who decided to take her own life, but I’m certain Nigel Garthwood is involved in it. Yet even if he is, there’s no reason he should wish to harm me. I believe he does nothing except for money. No, my life is forfeit for some other reason that I cannot fathom.”