The Secret to Seduction (41 page)

Odd to think that this woman might actually care for Rhys, this woman who seemed to possess the allegiance of a cat, and the substance of a ray of light.

Still, Sabrina drew little comfort from the fact that Rhys apparently wouldn’t see Signora Licari, either. That he was, quite clearly, suffering so much he was boring the soprano.

And yet he was a man. It was only a matter of time, she suspected, before he saw Sophia Licari again, and perhaps took her to bed.

“Your concern is quite moving, Signora Licari. But no. I will not see him. If you will excuse me?”

She curtsied—she made it shallow and quick, to make her point—and left the room.

He’d heard of Gorringe, of course. Every poet had, sympathizing with the legend of the duke who had gone mad searching for a rhyme for orange.

Orange made him think of lemon. And Yemen.

And Sabrina gravely pointing out his incorrigible behavior.

She’d stolen his breath, surprised him from the very first moment. It had taken weeks to realize it. And just a few minutes to ruin it.

Rhys made his way up the walk past the yard of tilting stones, pushed open the door, and entered silence.

A medieval church, small and modest, rows of empty pews. Somehow not lonely. There was an air about it that said it was a church well loved and well used, and that people had just left it or would return soon enough. Almost as if the ghost of music once played here lingered in the air.

Rhys settled into the pew and stared up at the chancel, imagining the vicar standing there delivering sermons—drifting, disjointed, if good-hearted sermons, Rhys thought, half smiling, remembering Kit’s description of the man. He imagined Vicar Fairleigh standing there when he was a curate so many years ago, never dreaming that the little girl he’d taken in out of goodness—when he could scarcely feed the family he had—was the daughter of a notorious woman, and would grow up to marry an earl.

Rhys didn’t think he’d search out the vicar just yet. He wasn’t certain he would look for him at all.

He closed his eyes. He didn’t precisely pray. He decided he would allow the hush of the church to wash over him, to filter through the tumult in his mind if only for a moment, to find brief relief from everything in quiet. He rested his hands on his knees and leaned against the pew.

Nothing stirred in the church while his eyes remained closed.

When Rhys opened his eyes again moments later, he glanced down at his hand and blinked: for an instant, it looked as though his fingers had gone…red and green?

And then he realized the sun was now beaming strongly through the church windows, and the reflection from the stained glass was floating over him. No dust danced in the beam of the light; clearly the church, old as it was, was tended carefully.

Rhys stood, and wandered over to the windows, peering at them closely. Light pushed through them and threw blurred outlines of three words down on the floor, the words Kit had told him about: Faith, Hope, and Charity.

And as he was a lover of beauty and a connoisseur of art, a collector of things, Rhys studied the windows, in the way Richard Lockwood no doubt had. They were lovely and simple, their colors brilliant and pure and distinctive, the design singular.

His breath caught.

Recognizably
singular.

And suddenly it was as though his heart had been yanked up from a deep hole into sunlight.

The windows were set deep into the wall, and though he was very tall, he couldn’t see the bottom of them from where he stood. He launched himself up onto a pew—it groaned a bit, taking his full weight—and he leaned forward, bracing himself against the wall of the church, prayed…and peered.

And there it was, at the bottom right corner of the window, the single word he’d hoped to see, and all the hairs rose on the back of his neck. Very few people in all of England would have known to look. Etched in rough tiny print, it read:
Santoro.

Santoro lived in Italy, in the village of Tre Sorelle.

In English: Three Sisters.

“I’m not an inconspicuous man, Mr. Gillray. You’ve requested to speak to me specifically and privately, and in honor of your family name, I have agreed to do so. But I’ve no patience with subterfuge and games, and I’m a busy man. What is it you cannot share with one of my employees? I imagine you’d like me to pay for it, whatever it is.”

Geoffrey had heard that Mr. Barnes was a bit of a poofter. He hadn’t expected this brisk man, his face gray and weary but his eyes sharp and clever, his mouth thin with taxed patience. Geoffrey doubted Mr. Barnes would dare speak to Rhys, the Earl of Rawden, quite so very briskly.

But the
Times
was the most respectable of the dozens of newspapers that littered London, which made Barnes a powerful man in his own right. He’d been editor for only three years or so, however, and no newspaper editor lacked ambition, or spent a moment without craving more sales. He would hear him out, regardless.

And once the words were out of his mouth Geoffrey knew he couldn’t retract them; he knew what he was about to do was irrevocable. But of course his birthright was of no value to him if his creditors intended to kill him at first opportunity, so it was all the same.

“Very well, Mr. Barnes. I have information linking a wealthy, powerful earl directly to a present-day scandal involving murder and treason.”

He said the words calmly.
Murder and treason.
It would have been a pleasure to deliver them with drama, but he thought perhaps Mr. Barnes would be more amenable to a sort of somber directness.

Mr. Barnes’s face barely registered the words, but Geoffrey saw the glint in his eyes sharpen immediately.

“Do you have any evidence supporting these allegations?”

“Yes.”

“Please continue to talk, Mr. Gillray. I’ll buy the brandy.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

J
OURNEYS ARE ALWAYS made longer by impatience and hope. Desperation made this particular journey seem an eternity. The melting sweetness of a dawning Italian spring scarcely penetrated Rhys’s awareness; he acknowledged it only with brief gratitude, knowing the mild weather would make the passage into the hills of Tre Sorelle go more swiftly. A hired carriage took him as far as the town of Fume Bello; he hired a horse to take him the rest of the way into the hills.

Santoro’s workshop was built beneath a stand of olive trees for shade, and olives had splattered the roof of it, turning it purple over the years.

Giovanni Santoro was short, round, and rude, and he spoke a fractured blend of Italian and English liberally sprinkled with epithets from other languages. Rhys had met him twice before on trips into the Italian mountains, and the man’s language, so matter-of-factly delivered, had all but singed his ears, even as the man’s artistry—the genius for color, the delicacy, the originality and purity of line of his designs—had awed him.

Sophia thought he was a cur because Santoro refused to give her a window outright. Santoro appreciated a pretty face—he was a florid and enthusiastic flirt who was on his third wife, having worn out one and driven away another with his excesses—but he was a businessman first. He knew what his work was worth, given that those who could afford the rare and precious and singular came from around the world to see him.

“Signore Rawden!” Forgetting that Rhys was an earl, and a lord. All men, by Santoro’s way of thinking, were signores. He did, however, sweep a deep bow.

Rhys hadn’t seen the man in two years, and he seemed even rounder now. Santoro noticed the glance at his belly.

“My wife, she feeds me well.” Santoro gave a pleased, hearty thump to his stomach, which echoed like a drum. His hands were surprisingly graceful, as if they’d been grafted from another body onto his sturdy one.

“How is she? Any more bambinos, Giovanni?”

“A new bambino, a boy. Enrico. Fat, also,” Giovanni said approvingly. “You are here for more windows, signore?”

“I am here on a more important mission, Giovanni. I’m looking for a woman.”

“You cannot get a woman in England, signore? What has happened? Have you had them all, then, and need to look abroad, out of boredom?”

Rhys’s reputation, and his poetry, had been translated into Italian, of course. The Italians considered it more of a manual of instruction than scandalous, however. “You need to be
più grasso
; the women, they will follow you everywhere,” Santoro suggested, and laughed heartily at his own joke.

“Perhaps I
do
need to be fatter,” Rhys agreed. “But I cannot eat again until I find one particular woman.”

Santoro looked horrified at the thought of not eating again, and then apparently decided Rhys was jesting.

“You think she is in our hills, this woman, Signore Rawden?” He waved a hand at the greenery outside. “A sturdy peasant girl to give you sons?”

“I have a wife,” Rhys said shortly.

Santoro almost comically drew his head back, then studied him shrewdly and in silence for a moment. “And she givva you trouble, your wife.”

Trouble.
That was one way to put it. Trust a man who’d had three wives to recognize wife trouble in the face of another man.

Rhys left the query unanswered.

“My wife resembles this woman.
Assomiglia a questa donna.
And this is the woman I seek.”

Rhys extended Sabrina’s miniature of Anna Holt. In her haste to flee her husband, Sabrina had left her most precious possession behind.

Santoro took it gently in his fingers, handling it with respect, the way any artist would handle another artist’s work.

“
È bella,
” Santoro grunted in approval, after a moment.

“Yes, she is.”

“Your wife, she is also…?”

“
Bella?
Of course,” Rhys said coolly. “But this image was painted about twenty years ago. The woman you see there might now be forty or so years old.”

Santoro cupped the miniature in one hand and stared down at it, rubbing his fingers against his scalp to perhaps help stimulate a memory.

“She is in Tre Sorelle, this woman?”

“She might be. I don’t know. I hope so.”

Santoro’s great furry brows met. He made thinking noises, clucking his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

Santoro squinted up at Rhys thoughtfully. “
È inglese?
Not Italian?”

“She is English,” Rhys confirmed. He kept his voice level; with effort, he gripped hope tightly, too, lest it swell beyond his control. It became unwieldy, hope, when it deflated.

“And when did she come to Tre Sorelle, Signore Rawden?”

“I don’t know precisely when she might have come, Giovanni. But it might have been as long as seventeen years ago.” Rhys knew the dates precisely, of course, of the murder that had set this course of events in motion. But when a ship might have taken Anna Holt here, he could not have said.

And then, all at once, something that looked like inspiration lit Santoro’s face, and the craftsman seized Rhys by the arm and drew him out of the workshop.

“There.” He pointed up, and, squinting in the sun, Rhys followed the direction of the man’s thick woolly arm.

“You take your horse up that road”—the artisan gestured into the hills, where Rhys saw a gold dirt ribbon of a road snaking up, weaving in and out of trees—“a woman, she lives in the villa at the end of the road.
È una vedova.
”

“Is she an
English
widow?”

“
Sì.
She has been here a long time, and she speaks Italian like she was born here, but she is
inglese.
My wife, she has been to her home. I have seen her but a few times. And she is
bella,
this woman.”

“But not young?”

“Does it matter, Signore Rawden, as long as they are
bella
?” He grinned at Rhys. “But no, she is not young.”

As far as Rhys was concerned: no, it did not matter.

“What is she like, this woman?”

“She is . . .” Santoro rubbed his chin between two fingers. “
È triste e calma.
”

Rhys took in these words:
sad and quiet.
She didn’t sound like her daughters, who were proud and passionate. Perhaps time and grief had worn away her pride and passion.

Rhys knew the restlessness he felt at this thought was his own guilt, his own desperation. He needed to go up that road. The past and his future depended upon a sad and quiet English widow.

“What is her name?”

“She is Signora Smith.”

Hope flared inside him then, brilliant as the sun; he couldn’t stop it. In the church records at Gorringe, Anna Holt had been listed as Anna Smith.

Of course, it could simply be another English widow wishing anonymity. Or the woman living up the mountain in a villa could simply, truly, be an English widow named Smith who had retreated from the English weather to Italian warmth. It was a common enough name, Smith.

And somehow he doubted every English widow retreating from a scandal would have found a home in the tiny town of Three Sisters.

He knew a moment of awe for Sabrina’s murdered father, Richard Lockwood, for leaving such a thorough trail of cryptic little clues, obvious to anyone who’d known him, or who’d thought to look.