At Your Pleasure (11 page)

His eyes fixed on the glass, halfway to his mouth. His pupils were the size of pinpricks.

Now his gaze lifted to her. “Why, you . . .”

He collapsed like a puppet with cut strings, flopping face-first into his plate of rare beef.

She sprang up from the table and bolted all the doors save one—the entry to the servants’ passage.

A single lamp sat burning inside the narrow, windowless corridor. She lifted it and hurried down the spindly stairs into the coolness of the subterranean kitchens. A scullery maid and the cook shot out from a nearby door. The little maid looked frightened, her eyes huge in her pale face; she would not have been informed of the events in motion.

But the cook, Mrs. Fairfax, was calm, her hamhock arms folded beneath her bosom. “They’re locked in the larder,” she said.

Nora nodded. “How long?”

“Oh, for a quarter hour now, I’d say. Appetites like
pigs; I feared they’d take too much of it, so I held back with the next round of wine.”

“God bless you, Mrs. Fairfax.” Nora stepped past her, giving a tug to the larder door for her own comfort. The lock held, rattling reassuringly. “Where are Hooton and Montrose?”

Mrs. Fairfax snorted. “Those two were no help a’tall. Hooton’s abed with an ache in his bones, and Montrose is weeping in his room, praying no doubt for God to help him find the courage owed to a man.”

Hooton’s absence made sense; his health did not equip him for vigorous activity. But this timidity in Montrose worried her. When her brother was in residence, Montrose served as his secretary as well as his steward; alone of the staff, he knew the full details of David’s business. “He must stay in his rooms, then. I’ll go speak to him—”

“Don’t waste your time,” Mrs. Fairfax said. “Should he recover his spine, which well I doubt, he won’t stir far, I’ll see to that. And you, my lady, had best take to your rooms now, and turn the key behind you. Lord David’s friends will be honorable, but you’re looking very fine, and one mustn’t tempt a man without cause.”

Nora allowed herself a brief smile. “Very well, I will retire. But you—both of you—lock yourselves into your rooms as well.”

Her solar had a broad window that overlooked the front of the property. It was here she waited, watching the tree line, as Grizel read softly from
The Adventures of Rivella
.
But her eyes were not equal to the darkness outside, and when she noticed the first rider, he was nearly to the portico.

“There they are,” she said, coming to her feet.

Grizel came to join her. “I only see the one,” she said. “Surely it will be a larger party?”

To move the weaponry, yes, it would require several men and a cart.

“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, oh—”

That was not one of David’s men dismounting in the yard. That was
Rivenham
.

“There!” Grizel cried. She tapped the glass. “There are the rest of them—coming from Bleymouth way, they are.”

Nora slapped a hand to her mouth to cover her cry. Rivenham was turning: he could not miss sight of the party emerging from the trees.

For a moment he remained quite still—looking, listening; the cart they brought must make a distinct noise, impossible to miss in the stillness of the evening.

And then he drew his sword.

Nora pushed away from the window, racing through the next room to her closet. She knelt by a polished wood chest, fumbling with the lock.

Grizel chased after her. “What are you about, madam?”

The key finally turned. She opened the lid and lifted out the pistol. It was a handsome but clumsy weapon, not meant for a woman’s handling. Its aim, David had warned her, could not be trusted.

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

A
drian’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