The Guardian Duke: A Forgotten Castles Novel (4 page)

Hmmm, how old was she?

under the care of our dear servants and the village folk who are like family to me. I would absolutely, positively wilt to DEATH should you demand my presence in London. Of course, I will still need my monthly allowance to sustain us as my parents always left me
one
two hundred pounds a month for upkeep, food, and miscellaneous expenses.

Gabriel nearly choked. It was an outrageous sum. What was a woman in the backwaters of Northumberland doing with that kind of money?

In closing, I do pledge with all my heart to pray for you, sir. Your health, your well-being, your gout? I've heard most dukes do suffer from the gout. Be assured your name has been added to my bedtime prayers. I count it a blessing that the great Almighty has made me one of those in which sleep eludes them.

Your servant. (Botheration, how does one sign off to a duke? I have a bad feeling about that word servant. Let's pretend that's not there.) Oh dear, perhaps I should start this letter over. Paper is so rare here that we shall just have to pretend all the crossed-out words aren't there. Eh?

With
much, great,
enormous regard,

Alexandria Featherstone, Holy Island

Gabriel leaned back in his chair, a state of shocked numbness making his limbs feel leaden. Was this some kind of joke? Who was this creature and how had she existed on her own for so long?
Unfathomable
. Before he had time to voice his doubts, his gleeful—why was he so gleeful?—secretary slid the speaking book across to him. There were several pages in his neat, compact hand.

"This is the account of your shooting?"

Meade nodded.

Gabriel frowned. "How old is she?"

Meade shrugged and then flashed both hands twice.

"Around twenty?"

He turned one hand back and forth.

"Give or take." Gabriel pressed his fingertips together and puffed out a breath. Old enough to find her a suitor already. "What does she look like?"

Meade's eyes grew round. He shrugged again, a bigger, bolder move as if to say he hadn't paid much attention to that.

"Come now. Is she above average? Plain? Face like a horse?"

Meade pressed his lips together and then shrugged again. He pointed to his own brown hair. A medium, nondescript brown.

"She has brown hair?"

Meade nodded and then motioned for Gabriel to stand and follow him. Grumbling inside but curious, the duke followed him out of the library, down a long hall with vaulted ceilings and gilded woodwork, then into the blue salon, the color of the sky on a perfect day. It had been his grandmother's salon and was the most lavish room in the house. Every detail had been painstakingly purchased for it. It was a room fit for a queen. Meade walked over to the light- blue painted wall and pointed and then pointed to his eye.

"She has blue eyes?"

Meade nodded as though they had solved a great puzzle.

Wonderful. The best description his secretary could come up with was a twenty-or-so-year-old woman with dull brown hair and pale blue eyes. "Never mind." Gabriel turned and marched back to the library to read what was sure to become the most notorious account of Meade's shooting.

W
ell, you couldn't have messed that up any more if you had tried, Lady Alex. We're in a fine kettle of fish now," Ann muttered then threw her hands into the air for the third time.

"I know!" Alex wailed as she threw herself back onto the hard wooden bench that faced the enormous fireplace in the great hall. "I still can't believe I shot the duke's secretary! Do you think he'll ever forgive me? He must think me a complete addle brain."

"You should be on your knees giving thanks that the young man was so forgiving. I shudder to think what a man of another ilk would have done to you, to us, dragged us all off to London to face the duke, I daresay. You may thank your lucky stars—"

"Yes, yes, I have and am! Please stop haranguing me. I've pled forgiveness from Mr. Meade, the duke, and God. What more can I do?"

Ann opened her mouth to answer that and Alex threw a hand up. "No, no, I've heard enough on the subject. What we should be discussing is what's to be done next. I've sent the duke that letter, and as soon as the funds arrive I will start my search."

Ann's face transformed into the very picture of disapproving doom, but Alex hurried on before another lecture could commence.

"The last letter I received from my parents was from Ireland. The man who hired them said they would find the first clue there. But there is still the question of just where to start my search. I've no idea where to begin looking."

"How do you even know that much, I'd like to be knowin'? Your folks never let on where they were going, especially to you after that time you tried to follow them." Ann sat on the only chair in the cavernous room, shaking her gray head and tapering off into a mutter, ". . . treasure hunters and adventurers, saints a mercy. Just look where that's got them, the poor dears . . . poor us, I say! Leaving you alone much of the time, child. What were they thinking going off to the hindquarters of the earth—"

"Ann, you know they never meant to have children. I was an accident."

Alex looked away, remembering how her mother had assured her that they were quite happy to have her. She said it to reassure Alex, she knew, but it had somehow sounded more like her mother was trying to convince herself, a fact Alex never let herself dwell on. She was determined to believe the best in them, that they loved her despite living most of their lives without her. It was her fault if she was sometimes lonely, pining for their love and attention. She was blessed to have such daring and adventurous parents, blessed that God let "accidents" like her happen.

"I overheard them talking before they left, as you well know." Alex reminded Ann as she continued her planning. "They were going to take a ferry from Whitehaven. That's where I will go first and see if I can find out anything about where they went in Ireland. But I can't leave without that traveling money! I do hope the duke hurries with his response. Time is of the essence." A stab of very real fear threatened when Alex thought of her parents in trouble and needing her. If they weren't dead, and certainly they weren't, then something must be very wrong that the prince regent had appointed her a guardian.

"The old duke could have all manner of reactions, my lady. Why, he might think it's time you married. That would get you off his hands."

Alex sucked in a sudden breath. "He wouldn't dare."

"And why not, I ask you? It's past time you married, not that you'll find anyone around here. I've been harping on your mother for years that you need a London season, but she never got around to it."

It was an unspoken fact that her mother's mind was rarely concerned with her daughter or her future. Besides, Alex didn't want a London season, and she certainly didn't want to get married. She frowned. Ann's reminder of the duke's sudden power over her made her stomach flip over. "I don't need a husband. I intend to follow in my parents' footsteps and take on cases, just as soon as I can convince someone to give me one. I am twenty, for goodness' sake, and not a child."

"Just as I was sayin'." Ann nodded. "You may think the world runs different out here on Holy Island, and maybe it does, but that duke will have London ways on his mind, you mark my words."

"Oh, bother, do you always have to be so glum?" Alex turned her face away and sighed.

"Just speaking the truth, my lady."

Alex had heard quite enough of the truth for one afternoon and stood up to flee. "I believe I will go and check on Thomas William's knee. I do feel a mite responsible for his tumble from that tree."

Ann snickered. "He was spying on you again, was he?"

Heat filled her face. He and another boy had been trying to catch her swimming again. She'd only been wearing a shift, and it was wet and sticking to her . . . and well, she'd best find something that covered better or her swimming days just might be over.

Alex started to walk away but shot over her shoulder, brows raised, "Don't you have supper to start?"

Ann rubbed her knees and nodded. "Aye, that I do, mistress. You'll be home before dark to eat it, won't you?"

"Of course." It was the typical push and pull of their relationship. Alex threw back her shoulders and marched from the room. Why was it that Ann always harped at her about every little thing?

The crisp fall air cooled her cheeks as Alex walked down the steep hill called Beblowe where the castle seemed to grow right from the flat-topped outcropping of whinstone. She followed the dirt path that ran beside the shore of the North Sea toward the village. The path was rock and weed choked, but Alex knew every curve and obstacle, more familiar than her face in her bedchamber mirror. She kept her chin up as her gaze scanned the seemingly endless blue horizon that surrounded her from every angle. It was like being inside a dome, she thought with a whimsical smile. Her home. And for this time in its history—her island.

She thought back on its long and sometimes bloody history. Holy Island was a small plot of land on the eastern edge of Northumberland and near the Scottish border. In the seventh century the Irish monk St. Aidan founded the Benedictine monastery of Lindisfarne. It became the Christian base for centuries, allowing traveling monks to come and go as they spread the gospel to Northern England. Now the monastery was in ruins, but there was still a grand air about the place, as if it were holy ground, the way the sound of her voice echoed among the huge arches and towering columns of crumbling stones. She had played there countless hours, among the eerie tombstones, some tall Celtic crosses, imagining the monks going about their business.

Then there were the Lindisfarne Gospels, the famed manuscript she longed to see one day. An illustrated book of the first four Gospels of the New Testament and one of England's most treasured antiquities, it was said that the manuscript had been created right here at the monastery. Her parents had even seen it once, in the British Museum in London.

Scant centuries later the tale told that the Vikings raided one day. There had been signs, omens of evil tidings where the winds grew dark and swirling over the island, but none had been prepared for the heathens as they called them then. Wild men who raided up and down the coasts of England and here, where they murdered the monks who weren't fast or able enough to escape, where they burned down the old wooden parts of the priory and destroyed what they could of the stone.

Alex paused as the path skirted what had once been the monastery gardens, her gaze lingering on the broken-down walls to the gravestones beyond. She took a deep inhale and looked up at the piercing blue sky, thinking of God and heaven, shivering and wrapping her cloak more closely around her. When would her life begin so she could do something great for God? One thing she knew for certain—she would never accomplish what God had created her for if she lived in London as a married woman of the nobility. She belonged here on this wild and windswept isle. She could not let some duke change her life.

Hurrying now, Alex came into the island village. She was headed toward Thomas's house to check on the lad when a horse came pounding up the road. Mr. Winbleton! He would have the mail if there was any. Their village only received mail once a week and usually, in her haste to see if her parents had written, Alex would travel across the causeway, a path that was revealed only twice a day when the tide let out, to Beal, the closest mainland village of any size, to check for mail more often. What with Mr. Meade, the duke's secretary, only gone from them a little above two weeks, she had little hope there was a reply to her letter, but if Mr. Winbleton was here three days early! It just might be due to an important letter from London.

Alex picked up her dark green skirts and hurried across the street toward the town market. There were only two taverns that doubled as inns if the need arose, the church, an apothecary-doctor-dentist-undertaker's office, and the village shop, which sold everything from cloth to dry goods to fresh produce when the farmers supplied it. It was also the place to get news of life on and off the island. There was even a weekly newspaper brought in from London that made its rounds around the island. As lady of the castle, Alex was always offered the first chance to read it, an offer she usually resisted, waiting until it was well worn and the ink a little smeared, but when her parents had gone missing, everyone, including Alex, had gladly insisted she have the first news of any kind. "What would become of the little mistress without her parents?" she'd overheard them wonder more than once. Well, they'd not find out because she was going after them.

With that thought and a nod of her head, she entered the shop to the familiar sound of tinkling bells.

"What's to do, then?" someone was saying as she stepped inside, taking in the homey smells of fresh-baked bread and various spices for sale. It was Mrs. Peale, the shopkeeper's wife.

They all looked up and clamped their mouths together upon seeing her.

"Lady Alex! We were just wondering what to do with this letter for you. It's straight from London and a duke!"

Alex's heart sped up a notch and seemed to catch in her throat. Her steps rang too loud against the hollow wooden floor in her hurry. She reached out her hand and smiled at Mrs. Peale. "How fortuitous! I suppose you should give it to me, don't you think?"

Mrs. Peale nodded her head, brown curls bobbing. She wasn't much older than Alex, but her parents had given over their shop to her and her new husband when they married, and she enjoyed an elevated status around town, one that seemed very much to her liking. "Yes, of course, I was just saying that to Roman."

Her husband looked askance at his wife but remained quiet. The domestic tiff restored Alex's sense of normalcy and sent a calming wave through her spine, allowing her legs to work properly again. She gave them a tight smile, reached out again, and wiggled her fingers. "My letter, if you please."

Roman passed the thick vellum into her hands.