The Secret to Seduction (40 page)

“All right, Grantham. I owe you this much information. I did a desperate thing many years ago, knowing full well the consequences of what I did. I did it to help me and mine, and it seemed the only thing at the time. But it helped to ruin lives. And
then
…,” he added with gallows cheer, “I lied about it to Sabrina. Because that’s just the sort of man I am.”

Kit studied him with his own sharp blue eyes, looking for clues, for vulnerability, for a way into Rhys’s resolve. He found none.

“I know the sort of man you are, Rawden.”

“I don’t want to hear any ‘war hero’ nonsense, Grantham. We were all bloody heroes.”

“No,” Kit said quietly. “That isn’t true. And I will tell you something I would never admit to any other man. Do you know what I’ve learned, in part thanks to Susannah? The kind of man you are in love and war is truly the kind of man you are.”

Rhys gave a short bitter laugh. “I hope to God that isn’t true. Because if that’s the sort of man I am, then I bloody well can’t live with myself.”

“Tell me this, Rawden: What are you hoping for when you come to my home if what you did was unforgivable? If you know she won’t forgive you?”

It was a very good question. “To see her. Just to see her.”

And again, the very idea that he might never see Sabrina again seized Rhys by the throat. He squeezed his hand around the whiskey glass, so tempted to hurl it across the room, to hear it shatter the way his life had shattered. It was the sort of thing that would feed the gaping maw of curiosity of all these men in White’s who were pretending not to watch his pain.

The
ton
was laughing behind their fans, behind their newspapers. Imagine The Libertine brought low by a woman.

Rhys, as usual, didn’t care what anyone said. He began to lift his hand to signal the waiter for more whiskey.

And Kit slapped his hand down. “That’s enough,” he said quietly.

“What the devil—do you want a fist to the jaw, Grantham?”

Apparently Kit wasn’t terribly worried about the fist to the jaw; he closed his hand over Rhys’s wrist. “If you truly can’t ever make it right for her, maybe you can make it right for
yourself,
so that the rest of us might live with you. Make restitution, do penance, walk on your knees the length of London, wear a hair shirt, flay your skin, for God’s sake. And perhaps once you’ve flagellated yourself enough, you’ll find a way to win her back. Or find a way to live without her. You’ve lived through hell before, Rawden. More than once. You can do it again. You know how to do it.”

Rhys jerked his hand away from the other man, and glared at him.

Yes, he’d lived through hell. But then he’d always been able to imagine what the other side of hell would look like, and in imagining it he’d found strength. But now…he simply couldn’t imagine life without Sabrina. He couldn’t imagine life on the other side, if she wasn’t in it.

“I want to see her,” he demanded. Futilely, he knew.

“Seeing her is not an option,” Kit repeated calmly.

And Rhys realized that not seeing her ever again was also not an option. In fact, this Rhys knew more surely than he’d known anything in his life, and he almost laughed. How on earth could something like this have happened, so quickly? How on earth could he so willingly be at the mercy of another human being, when he’d never wanted to need anyone again?

“All right. Then tell me everything you know about Sabrina’s past, Grantham. Because I’m going to do what you have so far failed to do.”

He saw the flare of competition in Kit’s eyes; it satisfied him, somehow. He wanted anger, competition, something to brush up against.

“Really. So how are you going to find Anna Holt, Rawden?”

“Sheer bloody will, Grantham. Watch me.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

H
E HADN’T BEEN a spy, like Grantham. He wasn’t a gleeful taker of risks, like Shaughnessy, who had been ruined and rebuilt his life, too, into a roaring success. But he was a former soldier, a leader, a strategist, and possessed more determination than nearly any man on the planet.

Still, there was so very little to go by.

I’m going to do what you have so far failed to do.

Quite the boast.

Rhys also knew about art and beauty and collecting beautiful things.
And now they’re all you have,
his wife had flung at him. Art, beauty, war. He had those things, at least, in common with the murdered father of his wife.

And yet, as he took the collection of facts and impressions that Kit had given him and sifted through them repeatedly, he still hadn’t the faintest idea where to begin looking for Anna, or how any of them might help find her at all.

As Rhys was a poet—or had been once, though the words seemed to have deserted him now—he, like all poets, appreciated Richard’s amusement in the name Gorringe, the town named by a duke who had gone mad searching for a rhyme for orange. He knew Richard had left behind cryptic, clever clues to his killer in Gorringe along with the evidence proving his killer’s crimes—he’d in fact been more cryptic and clever than anyone would have preferred him to be—but in so doing he’d managed to protect for more than a decade the evidence that had eventually put Thaddeus Morley in the Tower for treason.

He knew that Richard Lockwood and Anna had spoken of going to Italy, because Kit had been told this. He couldn’t begin to imagine what that evening must have been like for her: the wrenching fear and loss, the frantic departure. And every time his mind touched on it, his thoughts shied away reflexively. Guilt would only slow his search. It was ballast he could do without.

He needed to think of one thing only: he needed to find Anna for Sabrina.

Kit had already reviewed the rolls of every ship departing in 1803, but of course no one by the name of Anna Holt had boarded a ship to anywhere that winter. And if she’d used an assumed name, it hadn’t been Anna Smith, the name she’d used in Gorringe.

Then again, she could have left at any time. She could have hidden
anywhere,
at any time. The hunt for her through England had been thorough and relentless after Lockwood’s murder, Rhys recalled, but there were tiny, tucked-away places where London papers might conceivably never have reached, where no one cared about scandals that would never affect them.

Places like Tinbury, for instance.

Running like a current through his thoughts of Anna and Sabrina was the idea that at any moment the scandal sheets might feature a story regarding the Earl of Rawden that, for a change, wouldn’t feature a married countess or a duel, but instead contain the seeds of his ruin. Thanks to his cousin Geoffrey.

And if the Rawden name was to be ruined, Rhys wanted to be the one to do it. He would find Anna first, and then confess everything publicly, to exonerate her once and for all.

Two weeks. And then three weeks. His friends had once been accustomed to seeing him nightly; he saw no one. He refused invitations. He vaguely recalled the arrival of Signora Licari at his town house, uninvited. And this was an extraordinary enough event to inspire him to go downstairs to see her. But then he’d found himself muttering something curt and perfunctory to her and turned to go back up the stairs of his town house, entirely unmoved, entirely distracted.

For the very first time in his life he’d seen astonishment on the soprano’s face.

He didn’t care.

He didn’t go to his club. He hardly ate. Instead he pressed Kit again for information, and he visited Daisy Jones, one of the few people who’d known what had happened that night, and pressed her for information. And learned nothing more.

He paid a visit to Mr. Edwin Avery-Finch, who owned a shop of antiquities and had, Kit had delicately told him, been close to Richard. He asked the one question of Mr. Avery-Finch that no one else had asked: Did he know whether Richard had been to Italy?

“Yes,” Mr. Finch had told him. He knew that Richard had once visited Italy. But he didn’t know
where
in Italy, or why he had gone.

And at last…well, perhaps it was the exhaustion. Perhaps fatigue had softened and altered Rhys’s mind in the way that strong drink sometimes did, for at last he’d ceased attempting to channel his thoughts because he’d all but lost the ability to do so, and instead let his thoughts have their way with him.

And this is when it occurred to Rhys: Richard had left so many clues to his killer’s identity behind, it was as though he was fully aware of the danger he’d been in, and what the outcome might be. He’d left clues to his killer; he’d left clues for his daughters.

And perhaps he would find a clue to the whereabouts of Richard’s lover, the wrongly accused Anna Holt, in the very same place Richard had left his other clues: Gorringe.

Two weeks, then three weeks, and Sabrina began to feel like a member of the Grantham household, and her heart, which had once seemed wholly her own, or wholly Rhys’s, seemed to have separate chambers for joy and for cold hurt and anger. There was joy in becoming acquainted with her sisters, in the moments both of ease and awkwardness, of laughter and irritation. Of a giddy, glorious sense of belonging she had never known, of being part of a family fabric that was her very own. And since Sabrina, Susannah, and Sylvie had all been so long without it, it would be quite some time before the novelty ebbed. For now, each moment carried the sharp delight of newness.

But neither Susannah nor Sylvie could quite persuade her to go out. They respected her silence on the subject of her husband and didn’t press her, though Sabrina suspected it was maddening for both of them. They were both so clearly happy in their own marriages that they suffered on her behalf.

Well, Sabrina supposed they could not have everything in common.

However, when Susannah arrived in her room one afternoon with a glint in her eye and a card in her hand, Sabrina looked up curiously.

“I thought I would bring her card in to you to let you decide what you’d like to say to her,” Susannah said solemnly. She extended the card and waited.

Sabrina took the card from her:
Signora Sophia Licari.

She stared at the name, trying to decide what she felt. She’d managed to cordon off the place in her mind that concerned Rhys, and found it hurt scarcely at all. She’d still a good deal of pride at her disposal. She considered shunning the beautiful, condescending soprano.

But it was pride that made her decision for her.

“I will see her,” Sabrina said.

When Sabrina appeared in the drawing room, Signora Sophia Licari rose to greet her and curtsied.

Had Rhys recently sought solace in the opera singer’s arms? Looking at Signora Licari, lush and golden in her russet-colored gown, Sabrina didn’t know why any sane man would not.

“To what,” Sabrina managed with an irony that would do her estranged husband proud, “do I owe the honor of this visit, Signora Licari?”

“He does not eat,” the soprano said, every consonant caressed, as usual.

Sabrina frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

“Your husband. He does not eat, he will not speak to anyone. He does not sleep.” Every bit of it sounded like accusation.

“And how do you know this?” Sabrina managed calmly. How would any woman know a man did not sleep unless she slept next to him herself? Still, anger made her righteous, and she felt she could hear whatever it was Sophia Licari had to say.

“Here,” Signora Licari said, and drew an eloquent mask with her fingers beneath her eyes. “It is purple. He is becoming thin. He does not go out to see his friends. And he is . . .” She made a very illustrative face. “Churlish, when he does speak.”

Churlish?
My goodness. What a fancy English word from the Italian woman. Though Sabrina knew full well Rhys was
capable
of being churlish.

“Does he see you?” Sabrina’s heart was knocking oddly.

There was a silence.

“He only wants one thing, Lady Rawden. And that is why I am here.”

It wasn’t an answer to her question.

Sabrina looked back at the beautiful woman, met those sable eyes evenly. And she thought she saw a flicker of entreaty in them.

“Why are you here?” Sabrina demanded.

“You should allow him to see you.” It sounded more like an order than a suggestion, and it sounded as though Signora Licari had every expectation it would be followed.

“Why?” Sabrina was incredulous. “To make it more pleasant for
you
when you do see him?”

“As I said, he does not see his friends.”

It struck Sabrina then: Does Signora Licari consider Rhys her
friend
? And if so, this meant that he would not see Signora Licari, either.

It was clear then that this proud, beautiful, enigmatic woman cared for Rhys, too. And it wasn’t pleasant to stand across from another woman who had touched and tasted her husband’s body, who might very well be hurting on behalf of the man Sabrina had once thought she loved.

Either that, or it was merely inconvenient for her to see Rhys unhappy, and Rhys had become something of a bore, had ceased to give her gifts, and all of these things had made Signora Licari willing to petition his wife to see him.

Sabrina didn’t think so.