The Wedding Escape (27 page)

“Here now,” Mrs. Quigley shouted suddenly from somewhere down the corridor, “stop at once or I'll send for the police!”

“Go ahead,” snarled a contemptuous voice.

“You can't go in there!” Edward's butler sounded far more frightened than resolute. “Stop!”

His bedroom door burst open as he grabbed his blankets and hastily tried to cover himself. The empty chamber pot rolled off the bed and smashed upon the floor.

“Forgive me, yer lordship,” whined Neil Dempsey, who was being held prisoner with a dirk to his throat by a tall, lean young man with coffee-colored hair and eyes of gray ice. “He's gone completely mad!”

“Sorry to disturb you so late, Lord Hutton,” bit out Jack sarcastically, “but I thought I would save you the trouble and expense of having Mr. Dempsey follow me and just pay you a visit myself. It seems a far more efficient way of finding out whatever it is you want to know, don't you think?”

Edward stared at Jack in shock.

“Drop yer dirk or I'll blast yer bloody head off!”

Edward's gaze snapped to the doorway, where his stable master stood pointing a rifle at Jack, with Mrs. Quigley, his butler, and a dozen or more vaguely familiar members of his staff huddled in fear behind him.

“Get out,” Edward commanded, glaring at them. “Now!”

The stable master looked at him in stupefaction, wondering if his employer had lost his mind. “Forgive me, yer lordship, but ye're in grave danger—”

“Get the hell out, I say!” he roared, “
before I fire the whole goddamn lot of you!
”

The bevy of servants hastily withdrew.

“You go, too, Dempsey. He doesn't need you any more.” Edward regarded Jack calmly.

Jack's eyes narrowed as he studied the shriveled old man lying helplessly on the bed before him. It was clear that Lord Hutton did not fear him. If anything, there seemed to be an air of anticipation to him, as if he had long expected this moment would come.

Abruptly, Jack released Neil Dempsey, who yelped with relief and dashed into the corridor.

“Close the door.” Edward steepled his fingers together as he studied Jack. “I don't want us to be disturbed.”

Jack sheathed his dirk in his boot and crossed the enormous bedchamber to slam the door shut.

“Sit down.” Lord Hutton indicated a gold-and-silk-covered chair beside his bed.

“I'll stand.”

Edward nodded. Feeling in need of fortification, he groped around behind his pillow to retrieve his silver flask.

“Brandy?” His hand trembled slightly as he held the flask out.

“No.”

He struggled with the top, unwilling to betray his feebleness by putting the damn thing in his mouth and twisting it off. After a moment of fruitless effort he paused, debating whether he should just shove the recalcitrant vessel back under the pillows, before he humiliated himself even further.

Jack strode over to the bed, removed the cap, and handed the flask back to him.

“Thank you.” Duly fortified after a couple of swallows, Edward lowered his drink and regarded Jack with interest. “So, you finally realized you were being watched, did you? I always knew Dempsey was too much of a fool not to be discovered eventually.”

Jack said nothing. Everything about Lord Hutton, from his sickly-smelling, garishly ornate bedchamber to his wan, brittle body huddled amidst the stifling crimson covers and draperies of his bed, bothered him. He had no desire to be in his company a second longer than necessary. As he dragged Dempsey through Lord Hutton's ancestral home, he had noted that it seemed opulent enough. Judging by the flock of servants who had scurried to his rescue, it seemed the old man was not wanting for help, either. Even so, Jack knew that somehow Hutton had made the connection between the missing Amelia Belford and the young American widow who had taken up residence in Jack's home.

Ten thousand pounds was a great deal of money to an impoverished aristocrat, as Percy Baring had made abundantly clear.

“What do you want from me, Hutton?”

The aged earl studied him a long moment. Jack had the distinct feeling that he was analyzing him. It was as if he were trying to see beneath Jack's clothes and stance and manner, beneath the years of education and polish. Jack glared back at him with naked contempt. He was heartily sick of being scrutinized by the men and women of Lord Hutton's class. If the old man lying before him thought he was in any way Jack's superior, if he dared to make even one disparaging comment—

“You've got your mother's eyes.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“I never make jokes,” Lord Hutton informed him. “I'm too tired and too close to death for such nonsense. I'm telling you that you have your mother's eyes because I believe you do.”

“You must have me confused with someone else.”

“Actually, I don't,” Lord Hutton retaliated, unperturbed by the intense hostility emanating from his guest. “You're Jack Kent, raised from the age of fourteen by the Marquess and Marchioness of Redmond. Lady Redmond discovered you when she was still Miss Genevieve MacPhail, in a squalid little prison cell in the town of Inveraray, where you had been jailed for stealing. While in prison you established a friendship with Lord Redmond, who at the time had been convicted of murder—”

“I don't have time for this,” Jack snarled, marching toward the door.

“Your mother was Sally Moffat, who worked as a lady's maid in the home of the Earl of Ramsay.”

He froze.

“Ye're Jack Moffat, my sweet lad,”
his mother would tell him, ruffling her fingers through his hair.
“An' when ye grow up all braw and fine, they'll be callin' ye Mr. Jack Moffat, and treatin' ye with respect, like the gentleman ye are.”

“You do remember her, don't you?” persisted Lord Hutton. “At least a little?”

Slowly, Jack turned to face him.

“Yes, I can see that you do,” Edward decided. “Perhaps not well, given how infrequent her visits to you were once she placed you with that foul couple after you were born. But well enough, I suspect, to have at least some memory of her before she died of syphilis.”

Outrage jerked him to the brink of violence. If not for Lord Hutton's frail condition, he would have hauled him up by his shoulders and thrown him across the room.

“Why?” Jack clenched his hands as he fought to control his fury. “Why are you doing this?”

Lord Hutton stared at him a long moment, taking in his anger and his pain. Then he shifted his gaze to stare at his portrait, which hung on the wall behind his enraged young guest.

“There was a time,” he began, his tone almost wistful, “when I was something like you. Young. Strong. Reasonably handsome. I had my whole life ahead of me. Somehow, in the arrogant idiocy of my youth, I thought that all I should do was enjoy myself as much as I possibly could. In the course of my relentless pursuit of pleasure I spent many a fortnight at the country estate of Lord Ramsay. Do you know him?”

“No.”

“A pity,” said Lord Hutton, shaking his head. “Ramsay was almost as much of an idiot as I was, but he did know how to throw the most glorious house parties.”

“How nice for you,” ground out Jack acridly.

“It was, actually,” Edward retaliated, suddenly weary of Jack's sneering attitude. “For it was at one of those parties, some thirty-seven years ago, that I met your mother.”

A sick sense of foreboding surged through Jack.
Jesus Christ,
he thought, as a maelstrom of dark emotions began to churn within him.

“She worked as a lady's maid to Ramsay's young wife,” Edward continued. “As I recall Miss Moffat was exceptionally pretty, and in spite of, or perhaps because of, her relative lack of education and worldliness, I found her very charming as well.” He regarded Jack steadily, his expression unapologetic, silently letting the import of that statement sink in.

Jack didn't want to hear any more. He was sure of it. And yet he remained where he was, his legs cemented to the floor, his hands coiled into helpless fists.

Shut up. Shut up before I smash my fist into your goddamn lying mouth.

“A few months later, your mother came to see me at my home,” Lord Hutton continued. “She had been dismissed from her position as Lady Ramsay's maid, because by then it was evident that Miss Moffat was with child. She claimed that I was the father, and asked me if I would help her. Of course there was no way of knowing whether I was actually the father of her unborn child or not,” he quickly pointed out. “That is both the advantage and the disadvantage we males have when it comes to the business of procreation. What is amazing, really, is how willing we are to indulge in pleasure when it suits us, but how reluctant we are to accept responsibility for the consequences. It is, I regret to say, one of the less admirable qualities of our sex.”

Jack had heard enough. He didn't know what Lord Hutton's motive was for making up this fantastic story, and he didn't care. He had to leave, before the urge to strangle the old bastard for delving into his past and playing these vile games with him was overwhelming.

“I don't know why you think any of this is of interest to me,” he snarled, desperate to escape the suffocating chamber and Lord Hutton's insane ramblings. “I don't give a damn about your sordid little affairs, Hutton. If you ever hire that weasel Dempsey or anyone else to follow me around again, I'll come back here and make you sorry you ever heard of me—is that clear?”

Without waiting for an answer, he spun toward the door.

And froze.

“As I said,” murmured Lord Hutton with quiet, almost melancholy resignation, “I believe you have your mother's eyes.”

Jack stared at the portrait in mesmerized horror, unable to speak. But for the eyes and the hair, which the young man in the painting wore in the longer, forward-brushed styling of some decades earlier, he might well have been looking at a picture of himself. The roughly chiseled features of the nose, jaw and chin were virtually identical, as was the fullness of the lips. In his youth Lord Hutton had been heavier-set than Jack, the result of a lifetime of rich food and taking exercise only when he wished it for pleasure. Beyond that, there was a smug self-satisfaction to his smiling expression with which Jack could not identify. In his own way Jack supposed he was arrogant, but it was a superiority born of a lifetime of being treated with disdain, except by the family Genevieve had so lovingly brought him into. Lord Hutton's conceit was the result of being born an earl, and therefore raised to believe that he was vastly superior to most of the population.

“Even though I couldn't be sure that I had been the cause of her condition, I decided I would help Miss Moffat,” Lord Hutton finally continued, breaking the strained silence. “I gave her sixty-five pounds, thinking that should keep her well enough for a year or so, and I advised her to go back to her parents' home and live with them. I was shockingly naive, of course. I imagined that she would return to some quaint and loving mother and father in the countryside, who would welcome her and agree to take on the responsibility of raising the child, should it survive, while Sally went and found work again at some comfortable estate. She was a bonny lass, and I thought she would eventually find some fine young man to marry her, and care for the child as his own. I assured myself that I had done all that could reasonably be expected of me, given that there was no way of knowing if the bairn was actually mine. I believed that it would all turn out well enough. After all, housemaids have been known to start swelling beneath their skirts for hundreds of years. I imagined that somehow they managed to get on.”

Of course they do,
thought Jack bitterly.
They turn to stealing and end up in prison, the way Jamie's mother did, or they sell the one thing they have left to sell. Either way, their lives are destroyed.

“So that was it?” He fought hard to keep his voice stripped of emotion. “Sixty-five pounds and you wished her well?”

“Actually, not quite. My wife had heard our voices, so she came to my study to see who had come to visit at such a late hour. When she saw Sally, she instantly recognized her condition.” His expression was appropriately discomfited as he added, “My wife was also expecting at the time.”

Jack did not bother to hide his disgust. “What did she do?”

“In a gesture that was completely in keeping with my wife's guileless nature, she accepted my explanation that Miss Moffat had been relieved of her position in Lord Ramsay's household, and had merely come to me for money so she could return home, where the father of her child was anxiously waiting to marry her. My wife was horrified by Ramsay's poor treatment of Sally, and insisted upon giving her a trunk full of clothes, including numerous outfits and blankets for her baby. All of this was packed up while Sally took tea in the kitchen. When it was ready it was loaded into one of my carriages, whereupon my wife instructed our coachman to take Sally to her parents' home, which was in the countryside south of here, about twenty-five miles from Inveraray. He returned a few days later, and assured us that she had arrived safely.”

Jack waited.

“I never heard from Sally Moffat again after that. I never knew whether the child she was carrying was born alive or dead, or whether she survived the ordeal of birth.” Lord Hutton's eyes became distant as he turned to look at the blackness of the summer night beyond his window. “Bringing a child into the world can be unspeakably difficult for some women,” he reflected quietly. “But at the time I didn't know that. It would be fair to say, upon reflection, that I didn't know much of anything at all.”

His remorseful attitude surprised Jack. Although he refused to acknowledge that any part of Lord Hutton's tale had anything to do with him, he asked, out of interest for the one person who evidently had taken pity on his mother, “Did Lady Hutton survive giving birth?”