The Secret to Seduction (44 page)

“What the hell do you suppose it means?” Kit rapped the sheet hard with the back of his hand.

“Possibly it’s just a ruse to sell seats in the chambers.” Tom didn’t sound confident about this.

Kit suspected otherwise, too. He’d known Morley too long. The man was resilient; his tentacles were everywhere. Kit wasn’t naive enough to believe that the shelter of the Tower had entirely curbed Morley’s reach.

And Rawden…He wondered what sort of secret Rawden harbored that his wife still steadfastly refused to divulge, and whether it was large enough to touch his own family.

Rawden was in Italy, he’d heard, information the man’s taciturn valet had finally divulged. Kit thought he knew the measure of the man. He hadn’t
fled
at all. And even while Kit had always hoped he’d be the one to do it, he prayed Rawden succeeded in his quest. There was so much more at stake for him.

Sabrina read the words printed before her on the scandal sheet, and the ground dropped from beneath her feet.

She took a deep breath, steadying herself. Then realized there was already a steadying arm beneath her elbow.

“Were we wrong to show you this?” Sylvie asked gently.

She began to guide Sabrina toward a chair, but Sabrina, impatient, frowned a little, which made her sisters smile. Stubborn bloody Holts. They suspected Sabrina was the most stubborn of all of them.

“Is he really out of the country?” Sabrina asked it faintly, almost speaking to herself. She thought she would have sensed it if Rhys were gone.

Oddly, she realized she hadn’t been afraid when she read those words. Her first reaction was…fury. Surely Geoffrey was the source. Geoffrey had betrayed her as surely as Rhys, and for reasons far more craven.

“Rawden’s valet told Wyndham that Rawden went to Italy. Wyndham told Tom.”

Tom Shaughnessy was another person who associated with all manner of men.

The three sisters exchanged looks, but none of them gave voice to their thoughts, because there was too much pain in the hope.

And Susannah and Sylvie knew by now not to ask Sabrina to share the secret she harbored about her husband. They only knew they should be with Sabrina no matter what occurred.

“Do you still want to come to the sentencing?” Sylvie asked.

She knew, suddenly, that if Morley intended to implicate Rhys, she wanted to be there.

“Of course.”

“Are you certain they want to see me?” Anna asked it, and then felt foolish, because it made her sound so hesitant, fearful. She’d been strong for so long.

But she’d forgotten in her absence what an assault on the senses London could be, the noise and crowds and smells and movement. She’d lived in the country, in Gorringe, and then she’d lived in further isolation in the hills of Italy, and now the clamor made her brace herself. And she’d longed for London for seventeen years, but all the while, London had somehow been the enemy, too, because London had hunted her. She still hardly felt the right to stand where she stood.

This is what I’ve wanted for seventeen years.

Ah, well: so she was uncertain, but she was no less strong. And it was best to do it all at once, she knew. So much easier to dive in than to wade in slowly.

“I want to see them now,” she said. “All of them.”

“Very well, then,” Rhys said. “I should think they are all in. It’s early yet, and I’ve heard they are seldom apart.”

He waited a bit with her, standing at her side next to the hackney as they looked up at the Grantham town house.

“How do I . . .” Anna hesitated, her hand rising up to her hair a moment, fussing with her bonnet.

“Look? Wonderful. Just like your daughter, in fact.”

She smiled a little. “Will you come with me?” She made it sound solicitous, but she was embarrassed for asking, mostly because she was partly afraid to do this alone.

“No. I don’t want Sabrina to feel obligated to see me just because I’ve brought you home. And I think you’re a big enough surprise on your own, Anna.” Wryly said. “Godspeed.”

Anna suddenly found it impossible to speak. He was an extraordinary man, her daughter’s husband. Strong and flawed. The sort of man every woman needed, because sometimes a man’s greatest strengths were merely the inverse of his greatest flaws. She found herself wishing he and Richard might have known each other.

Rhys kissed Anna’s hand.

She saw Rhys glance up once at the windows of the town house and inhale, squaring his shoulders. A poignant gesture.

And then he climbed into the hackney and left her to reclaim her life.

On Monday, the day before Morley’s sentencing, Susannah heard voices and pushed a curtain aside to peer out into the day. Clouds were moving in to obscure the sun. They might have a spring shower before long.

But it wasn’t the sky that riveted her.

“Sabrina, Sylvie…a hackney has left a woman at the foot of the stairs.”

Susannah’s voice was so odd the other girls immediately crowded around the window to see.

Each of them went perfectly still. No one seemed able to speak.

“My God,” Sabrina whispered at last, speaking for all of them. Her trembling hand went up to her mouth. “He’s done it. It’s her.”

Rhys had been home for all of five minutes when his valet informed him that Mr. Wyndham was at the door and wished to see him. Urgently.

Rhys had just yanked off his cravat, and was looking forward to yanking off his boots, bolting brandy, and soaking in a bath. But he supposed he could spare a moment for Wyndham, to whom he’d been nothing but rude for weeks.

“Send him up, I suppose.”

Moments later, Wyndham swept into the room. “Aside from the fact that you didn’t see fit to tell me you were leaving the country, have you seen the scandal sheets, Rawden? I thought you’d better have a look.”

“Odd way to greet a man, Wynd.”

But the look on Wyndham’s face was grim, and Rhys could not recall when he’d ever before seen Wyndham grim. So he looked at the page where Wyndham was pointing, and then seized the paper from him.

“Rumor has it that a certain earl has fled the country to avoid being implicated in one of the greatest scandals in English political history. All will be revealed on Tuesday in Westminster chambers.”

Tomorrow, in other words. When Rhys was silent, Wyndham finally spoke.

“Not what they normally say about you, Rawden. At least it’s a change of pace.” Careful, his words were. Inviting Rhys to speak.

Rhys couldn’t speak yet. So Geoffrey, bloody weak Geoffrey,
had
made good on his threat. And this wasn’t exactly the
Times,
it was only a scandal sheet, but it had gone as far as to imply that perhaps actual evidence highlighting his guilt would be presented at Morley’s trial. Perhaps Morley had kept records after all. Or perhaps he would merely make some sort of allegation aloud, which was damning in itself.

Rhys knew exactly where he would be tomorrow.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

L
ATER, NO ONE would remember who spoke first. Or who shed the first tear.

Later, it would all seem of a piece.

They waited, motionless, in silence, for her to come up to the door, and for Bale to bring her in to them. Almost as if she were an apparition, and they feared she would disappear if they moved, or all came at her at once.

Finally, Bale, unflappable Bale, entered the room. But even
he
was pale, and his eyes were lit with bemused wonder.

And when he spoke, his voice shook.

“Anna Holt,” he announced.

Some things, the most heartfelt things, can only be communicated with silence. And this was how it was for all of them for a minute or so. A moment of wonder. A moment somehow outside of time.

Someone reached out a hand to touch Anna. No one could remember whom. The hand drew back again. They began to crowd closer to her, then hung back once more, not wanting to overwhelm her.

They paused awkwardly, and once again there was nothing but silence as they all stared.

“My God…,” Anna finally faltered. “You’re all so
beautiful.
”

And for the rest of their lives, they would remember these words. For it was a voice Sabrina, Sylvie, and Susannah knew from a shared memory seventeen years old, of a dark frantic night, of tears, one another…and their mother.

And she’d arrived in time to go to court to watch the sentencing of the man who had ruined their lives so many years ago.

All the Holt girls were there, Morley noticed, three lovely, unmistakable, faces, pale and strained and resolute. Hoping to witness justice today. With them were their husbands: Morley’s downfall, the Viscount Grantham, no longer a boy, his blue eyes boring into him just as grimly as they had so many years ago. Next to him was his wife, Susannah, one of Anna Holt’s daughters, who’d proved impossible for Bob to kill, thanks to Grantham. There was the famous Mr. Tom Shaughhessy, gorgeous devil, former proprietor of The White Lily Theater, sitting with the woman who must be his wife, Sylvie. Lovely girl. Together Richard Lockwood and Anna Holt had created beautiful children.

Every eye in the courtroom that
wasn’t
trained on Morley was trained on the Earl of Rawden.

Imposing, handsome, the earl was, and his eyes were on Morley now, unblinking. Brilliant, fierce eyes. He was a formidable man now. He’d been a frightened boy at one time. Morley had seen how to make use of his fear, and it had served him well for seventeen years.

How very dramatic, how very appropriate, that the earl had managed to reappear just in time for Morley’s final appearance. And when he’d entered the courtroom boldly, there had been an instant hush and a near-audible swivel of heads. Followed by a rush of murmurs from the crowd, a sound like flame touched to dry branches.

Sabrina had then jerked her head away, and looked into her lap.

Ah, but he’d seen, and everyone had seen, the look in Rawden’s eyes. The man just didn’t care that everyone knew he was in love with his wife.

How funny fate was.

But now the earl sat apart from his entire family. Interesting. So perhaps they knew Rawden’s sordid little secret. What a pity for Rawden.

Morley’s eyes moved beyond the earl and then . . .

Well, Morley’s vision wasn’t what it once had been. But he thought he saw, there in the chambers…Anna Holt. He was surprised that his heart didn’t clench, causing him to gasp in pain. His heart wasn’t what it once had been, either, and the Tower had done nothing at all to bolster his health.

Perhaps she
was
a ghost. Perhaps he ought to spin his head about and look for Richard Lockwood, too. He almost smiled at the fanciful thought. With the dramatic earl present, no one seemed to have noticed her, bundled unobtrusively as she was in widow’s weeds. She was older; but she looked so much like her daughters she might simply have been another of them. Or a shadow of one of them.

Morley knew she wasn’t a ghost. He realized her presence was merely, again, the exquisite symmetry of the universe at work. It merely confirmed for him the rightness of what he was about to do.

He looked about for the final player and…oh, yes, there he was: Geoffrey Gillray. A shadow of his cousin in terms of looks and presence, thin, jumpy. Wealthier, now, perhaps, thanks to the combined efforts of Morley’s lawyer and the scandal sheets. It had been an impressive orchestrated effort. Young Gillray looked somehow both defiant and as if he’d like to shrink into his seat so that his cousin the earl wouldn’t gobble him alive.

Ah, but Mr. Duckworth was talking now, preparing to ask the final fateful question, and so Morley must listen.

“Mr. Morley, we’ve a question before we proceed with sentencing. Did you in fact pay anyone, as has been alleged, to lie to authorities in order to implicate Anna Holt in the matter of Richard Lockwood’s murder?”

Well, Mr. Duckworth couldn’t have put the question any more directly, could he?

Morley waited. He wanted every breath in that courtroom held before he spoke. He wanted every eye fixed upon him. He wanted his words quoted everywhere in London tomorrow, over dinner tables, in salons and clubs, in the papers. He wanted them to be unforgettable, unmistakable.

And then, oddly, he saw the daughter who looked so much like Anna Holt begin to stand. Almost as if she were preparing to speak.

He thought he best relieve the crowd of its anticipation before she
did
speak and ruin his moment.

And so in his best speech-to-the-House-of-Commons voice, Morley said, “No, Mr. Duckworth. I believe you may have been misled by Mr. Geoffrey Gillray, who seeks to taint the good name of his cousin, the Earl of Rawden, and thereby earn notoriety, not to mention a few thousand pounds, from my own unfortunate circumstances.”

Good heavens, but Morley enjoyed the gasp that went up.

All was uproar. People on their feet, fighting one another for a look at Morley, at Geoffrey, at the earl.

Mr. Geoffrey Gillray spun this way and that in his seat. Officers of the court moved ominously to guard the exits lest he attempt to flee.