Let Me Be The One Page 29

  "I was only taking you at your word, Elizabeth."

  She felt his hands rest lightly on her shoulders. His thumbs brushed the nape of her neck. "I want to go to Hampton Cross," she said on a thread of sound. "I want to leave London."

  Chapter 12

  North's eyes dropped away from Elizabeth's reflection and stared down at her bowed head. He removed his hands from under her hair and let them fall to his sides. "I should like nothing better than to go to Hampton Cross." Even though he was no longer touching her, her immediate relief was palpable. "But I cannot."

  Elizabeth's head came up quickly, her eyes stark. "Of course you can. Have you not been the one saying we should—" She stopped because he was shaking his head, his features implacably set. "Please."

  The single word was like a lash striking his skin. It cut him not to be able to do this thing for her, though he little understood her desire or urgency to have it done. "There are matters that keep me here."

  "The colonel's matters." When he did not answer immediately it was confirmation enough for Elizabeth."This thief has somehow become his concern and yours." Again North remained silent and let Elizabeth think what she would. Her laughter was brittle. "I thought it was only your Compass Club playing at some game. I didn't understand it was more than..." Her voice trailed off and her hands fell into her lap. "But it is no game at all, is it? This is not four Hambrick boys advancing on the Society of Bishops. God help us all, you are quite serious about apprehending that man."

  "Elizabeth."

  His calm sounded vaguely patronizing to Elizabeth. Her hands curled into fists. "I am writing to Blackwood in the morning. No, I am going to write to him now."

  North stepped back as she stood, but he caught her arm when she would have walked by him.

  Elizabeth looked pointedly at the hand on her elbow."Do you really mean to stop me?"

  "No, not if you are determined to spend your time on such a futile endeavor. I only wanted to make certain you know that's what it is. You can change nothing."

  She lifted one brow. "We shall see."

  * * *

  Colonel Blackwood's reply arrived in the afternoon post three days later. It was filled with details about his horses and his plans to refurbish his study. He wrote that cooler weather had provided relief for his illness and that he was in anticipation of no further weakness at this time. He recommended books to her from among the ones he'd recently read. There was an amusing account of his foray into painting landscapes and he ended with inquiries into her health and that of North's and a gentle request that she would correspond more often.

  Nowhere in the letter was there a reference to London's Gentleman Thief or any of the concerns Elizabeth had raised about her husband's involvement.

  She was grateful for North's silence on the matter. He knew of the letter's arrival and asked for no confirmation that he had been correct. Her silence let him know that he was.

  * * *

  Elizabeth was helped out of her redingote and bonnet as she entered the house. Raindrops had made spiked tufts in her fox muff and she brushed them out before she gave it to the housekeeper. "Where is my husband?" she asked. Even to her own ears her question sounded peremptory. Only she knew that it was weariness that made it so. Louise had been particularly contentious during this morning's visit. There was no reasoning with her, and even Battenburn could not calm her. The baroness had been in a mood to have her way in everything.

  "My husband?" she asked again, less imperiously this time.

  "In the library, my lady. He is in receipt of two letters delivered not one half hour ago. He asked not to be disturbed."

  "I am certain he did not mean to include me." Elizabeth had no idea if that was true or not. North had been cool toward her these last few days. His good manners kept him from being anything less than polite, but she felt his remoteness nonetheless. He had expressed no interest in making love to her since the night she wrote to Blackwood. She felt him slipping away from her, just as she had known he would someday. Knowing it would happen and living through it was not the same thing at all. "I will be with him," she told the housekeeper. "Please bring tea."

  Elizabeth entered the library quietly. North was slouched in his favorite reading chair. He looked up, acknowledged her presence with a slight nod, but made no attempt to stand. The letters, she noted, were not in evidence. A decanter of brandy was. "Are you foxed, my lord?" she asked. It was not at all what she had expected.

  A faint smiled edged his mouth. "I am. Have you some objection?"

  "No. None at all, though I am not accustomed to it. I have asked Mrs. Wallace to bring tea. Will that suit?"

  "I don't care what you drink."

  Elizabeth could see that North's mood was every bit a match for the one she'd encountered in Louise. She did not know if she had the patience for it. "May I enquire as to the reason you are drinking at this hour of the day? Mrs. Wallace mentioned a post."

  North nodded. "Marchman sent word 'round of his father's death. It was not entirely unexpected, though one is never properly prepared. The old bastard left a will that recognizes Marchman as his son. He would never publicly admit to it during his lifetime. It makes Marchman the elder, you see. The heir over his younger half-brother."

  Elizabeth sat down slowly. "Then Mr. Marchman is now..." She could not quite comprehend it. "Why, it is just as you said it would be. He has come into his name after all this time."

  North raised his glass, his eyes unfocused and vaguely slumberous. "Found his direction, if you will forgive the pun."

  She ignored this. "So he shall be the Duke of Westphal now. Poor West. I believe he has never wanted that."

  "Never." He drained his glass and set it beside the decanter. "West only ever wanted one thing from his father, and it was not his title." With none of his usual grace, North pushed himself to his feet. "Would you like a drink? No, that's right. You asked for tea." He walked to the fireplace, chose the poker from among the tools, and prodded the logs to give up more heat. "You will attend the services with me," he said.

  "Of course." Elizabeth was surprised he even mentioned it. A feeling of dread began to unfold in her stomach. She pressed her hands protectively against her midriff.

  "Afterwards..." North carefully leaned the poker against the marble jamb. He turned on Elizabeth, his gaze steadier than it had been minutes earlier. "If you want to go to Hampton Cross or to Rosemont, I will arrange it."

  "I don't—" A lump lodged in her throat, making speech impossible.

  "It will not cause much comment when I remain in town, especially if you visit your family."

  Elizabeth swallowed with difficulty. "Is this because of my letter to the colonel? Mrs. Wallace said you received two letters this morning. Was one from Blackwood?" She disliked brandy, had only tasted it a few times in her life, but just now it seemed very appealing.

  "One was not from the colonel." North reached into his pocket and withdrew a small brown bottle. Watching Elizabeth, he idly played with the stopper, removing the cork and replacing it. For a time the faint sound that action made seemed louder than the crackle of flames in the fireplace. North placed the bottle on the mantel with a delicacy usually reserved for porcelain. Elizabeth's stricken eyes were drawn to it, just as he'd known they would be. She did not want to look at it and she could not look away.

  "You recognize it," he said without inflection.

  "Yes."

  "I saw it for the first time the night you returned from the duchess's party. Do you recall? We were at your vanity. I was brushing your hair."

  It seemed a lifetime ago, and yet less than a week had passed. Elizabeth nodded faintly. She thought she would embarrass herself by being sick.

  "You lined your little jars and bottles up like soldiers, flanking the troops on either side of the mirror. This one stood out, so different from the rest. You pushed it to the rear. I thought it was because it was not as pretty as the others. It did not occur to me then to wonder what wa
s in it." He watched Elizabeth's head drop. "I wish to God it had not occurred to me later."

  A knock interrupted the silence that lay thickly between them. North went to the door because Elizabeth could not seem to move. He took the tray from Mrs. Wallace and declined her offer to serve. The cup and saucer trembled when he placed them in Elizabeth's hands.

  Taking neither tea nor brandy for himself, North returned to his chair across from Elizabeth."The letter I received was from the apothecary," he explained. "A formality, really. I knew what was in the bottle when I found it again. You hid it in your wardrobe. Is that where you usually kept it?"

  Her lips only moved around the word yes.

  "I sent only a sample for confirmation. I did not want you to miss the bottle. I took it again when Mr. Goodall's letter arrived." He glanced at the bottle on the mantel and then back at his wife. His face was pale, his voice taut. "Is it only my child you do not want, Elizabeth, or any man's?"

  Tea sloshed over the rim of her cup as her hands jerked. Her head came up. She thought it curious that her eyes were dry. The ache behind them, though, was almost intolerable. "I will only say it once, my lord. There is no one else."

  God help him, he knew it was true, had known it even as he asked. What he did not know was if it was better this way. Sorrow. Hurt. Disappointment. Frustration. Each emotion was forged hot and honed razor sharp with rage. He delivered it in the cutting edge of his voice. "Then you weren't in fear of presenting me with a bastard."

  Elizabeth merely stared at him, offering nothing else in her defense.

  North's arm shot out to the side, sweeping the brandy decanter and glass off the table. The glass shattered against the fireplace apron. The decanter thudded heavily and overturned. The glass stopper fell out and brandy spilled onto the carpet. "Leave it," North said when Elizabeth started to rise. He repeated the words more wearily a moment later. "Just leave it."

  The odor of the brandy soaking into the carpet made Elizabeth's stomach roil, and the simple act of lifting the teacup to her mouth did not seem possible. She held it between unsteady fingers and waited.

  "You do not want a child," North said flatly.

  "No."

  Northam wondered that he did not reel from the blow. "I once had a mistress who used the same thing. She soaked a sponge with it and placed the sponge inside her. Is that how you used it?"

  "Yes."

  "Yes, of course. It was an inane question." His half-smile was rife with self-mockery. "I find I do not know what to say to you. Perhaps I am too drunk to manage the thing properly."

  "I should leave."

  He nodded. "That would be best, I think."

  Elizabeth set the cup and saucer on the tray and stood. She took a tentative step in North's direction, but he quickly turned his head. It was not that action but what she glimpsed in his eyes that stopped Elizabeth cold. She pressed bloodless knuckles to her mouth to stifle her own sob and fled from the room before she heard his.

  * * *

  Elizabeth dreaded going to West's home to pay her respects. In her mind it brought her one hour closer to the time North would ask her to leave. There had been no mention of her going to Hampton Cross or Rosemont since he suggested it the first time. She doubted he had changed his mind. It was more to the point that he had spoken very little to her since the confrontation in his library. While she spent the afternoon and evening in her sitting room, he had gone to the club with Southerton and Eastlyn. She supposed the new Duke of Westphal met them there.

  He had come home none the worse for wear. He was quiet. Pensive. Elizabeth found herself wishing he had returned drunk and reeking of a whore's perfume. Instead he set the small brown bottle among the others on her vanity and disappeared into the dressing room to change. Elizabeth feigned sleep when he came to bed. He pretended to believe her.

  There were shadows under Elizabeth's eyes the next morning. North's own complexion had a gray cast. They both wore black, a color dictated by the occasion of the funeral and wholly suiting their mood. Her gown was bombazine and his double-breasted frock coat was wool. The dipping temperatures and icy rain forced them into heavy outerwear. North's caped greatcoat and Elizabeth's fur-trimmed pelisse shielded them from the elements and did nothing at all for the chill in their bones.

  Colonel Blackwood was not present at the service honoring the old duke, but he was at West's residence when a cadre of friends gathered there after the interment. Elizabeth knew she should have expected to see him. It said much about the state of her mind that she had never once considered crossing paths with him today.

  Unlike her wedding day, when, contrary to what she told North, Elizabeth had made a point not to be alone with the colonel, she sought him out now. She wheeled him down the hall and into West's empty study.

  "Am I to assume this is an abduction?" he asked.

  Since she had asked for a moment of his time in front of North and had taken him away in full view of West's invited guests, it was hardly that. "If it pleases you to call it such."

  "Butter does not melt in your mouth, Elizabeth." He pushed himself closer to the fireplace where a small fire had been laid. "Hand me that rug, please. It is too chilly in here, even for me."

  Elizabeth took the wool blanket that was folded over the back of a wing chair and opened it across the colonel's lap and legs. She stepped away quickly and turned to the fire herself, holding her hands out to warm them.

  "It pains you to look at my poor sticks," Blackwood said.

  "Yes."

  "More than it pains me, I think. I am used to it. You must not feel pity for me, Elizabeth. What is, is." He studied her profile. Her complexion glowed in the reflected heat of the fire. "Come. Do not stand there so. The price of begging a moment of my time is that you must look at me."

  Elizabeth knew he meant it. He would leave if she could not give him this one thing. She turned and faced him.

  In many ways he had been little changed by his illness. It was change made by the passage of time that she noted first: the shock of black hair that was thinning at the crown and seeded with gray throughout; the pronounced creases at the corners of his eyes; the way the line of his mouth was pulled down on the ends so that its relaxed state was also a faint frown; the gold-rimmed spectacles that rested below the bridge of his hawkish nose. Unchanged by illness or time was the clarity of his dark brown eyes and their challenging, appraising glance. Neither was he different in his attention to his clothing. Though he would have been shocked to hear her say so, he was as fastidious about his manner of dress as Battenburn and unlikely to accept the good-natured teasing about it that Southerton did.

  Elizabeth finally made herself acknowledge the more disturbing changes wrought by the colonel's wasting illness. Most obvious were the thin, flaccid legs that kept Blackwood in his chair when his desire was to be anywhere else. His shoulders and chest were no longer robust. The exercise forced on him by propelling his chair was insufficient to keep him broad and firm. His complexion was sallow, having long ago lost the healthy infusion of color that so much time out-of-doors had brought him. There was a tremor in his hands more often than not, and a gravity to his manner that was there by virtue of his slowing reflexes.

  He was but four years older than her own mother would have been had she lived, and he was her last link to that person she had loved so dearly. There were subtle reminders of Catherine Blackwood Penrose in the way he tilted his head at just a certain angle, the perceptiveness of his gaze, and in the gentleness of his smile when he offered it up.

  "You're very much like her, you know," the colonel said.

  Elizabeth gave a small start, surprised to hear her thoughts spoken by him. "I was thinking the same of you."

  "Me?" Blackwood snorted, the sound both derisive and amused. "I am nothing like Catherine."

  "You snort exactly like her."

  "Your mother never made a sound such as that in her life. Unladylike."

  Elizabeth snorted.

  T
he colonel chuckled appreciatively. "Tell me, your father and Isabel... how do they fare?"

  "All well."

  "And young Selden?"

  "Well also." Elizabeth gave him an account of her wedding trip to Rosemont, some of which she had written in previous letters. She knew that North had also corresponded with him, but she recognized the colonel's interest was genuine and answering him helped put her at her ease. She finally sat down, perching on the edge of her chair at first, then gradually sliding backward, pressing herself more deeply into the smooth, aromatic leather upholstery.

  "Would you like a glass of Madeira?" Blackwood asked when Elizabeth finished. "I know where West keeps it."

  "Nothing, thank you. May I get it for you?"

  "No."

  Elizabeth learned quickly that the colonel was not refusing libation, only her help. It required some effort for him to push his chair to the sideboard, but it was accomplished without her assistance. It was only when he had poured his drink that he realized he could not easily return without spilling it. Not permitting him to refuse her, Elizabeth got up and pushed the chair back. "So you will not ruin your fine cravat," she said."South would tease you mercilessly."

  The colonel smiled. "He would." He sipped his wine. "So what is it that has prompted this tete-a-tete?"

  "The question is beneath you, sir."

  "Ah. Then it is our last correspondence that you wish to discuss."

  "You answered none of my questions."

  "I will not answer them now, Elizabeth."

  To be turned down so out of hand took her breath away. She felt herself flush with embarrassment. "I... I do not understand."

  "Don't you?"

  Her fingers tightened on the curved arms of her chair. "No, I don't. Why can you not tell me if you are directing Northam to apprehend the Gentleman Thief?"

  The colonel remained silent.

  "You order all of them about," Elizabeth persisted. "The Compass Club. You are their commander."

  "Elizabeth," he said calmly, "nothing can come of this discussion."

  "But you do not deny it."