Unmasked

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“No,” Nick said. “On the other hand there must be others. Does Mrs. Osborne ride?”

Charles and John Teague exchanged a look. “Occasionally,” Charles said after a moment, “but she is a poor horsewoman.”

“Hester rides like a jockey,” Teague said, “but surely you are not suggesting that Cole’s cousin is a highwaywoman, Falconer? That’s outrageous!”

“I am not suggesting anything at the moment,” Nick said, unruffled. “I am merely asking.”

There was an awkward silence. “I’ve sometimes wondered about Mrs. Osborne,” Charles said suddenly.

“Oh, come now, Charles!” Teague had gone a little red in the face. “Just because she made her money in trade!”

“It isn’t that,” Charles said. He, too, had gone a little red. “I know Laura has taken her up and Hester likes her, but…” He stopped, looking uncomfortable.

“It is true that she is a little reserved,” Teague said gruffly, “but when one gets to know her…” He took a deep breath. “She has been the truest friend to Hester that one could ever ask for, and to Laura, too, if you would only admit it. Laura is lonely here in the country with you up in Town so often—” Teague stopped and cleared his throat as Charles shot him a less than friendly look. “They have a genuine mutual interest in the horticultural society,” he finished, a little lamely.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Charles snapped.

Nick said nothing. There were interesting undercurrents here, he thought. He had not realized that Charles left his wife in the country when he went up to London to take his seat in the Lords. He wondered why they spent so much time apart. And then there was Teague, who evidently was in love with Hester Berry. His defense of Mari Osborne might well spring from his loyalty to Hester. But what of his discomfort when the Glory Girls were mentioned? It could be that Nick was getting too close in his questions and that Teague knew it. Mari Osborne’s apparent lack of skill as a rider, for example, could be as much an elaborate ruse as her dowdy appearance. Whatever the case, it was clear where Teague’s sympathies lay and that made him a man worth watching, as well.

Nick stood up and stretched. “Thank you for your time, gentlemen, and for the brandy, Charles. If you will excuse me, I will seek my bed. It has been a long day.”

As he went out, Charles was offering John Teague another glass but in Nick’s view Teague’s thoughts did not appear to be on the excellence of his host’s cellar. He was gazing into the distance and the expression in his gray eyes was very bleak indeed.

MARI HAD FOUND a dark corner of the terrace where the honeysuckle twined around a pretty little arbor of her own design. She curled up on the cushioned seat, wrapping her arms around her knees, careless of crushing the silk of her gown. It was a warm night with a gentle breeze from the moors that carried with it the smell of gorse and bracken and, rather more agriculturally, sheep.

When she had walked away from Nick Falconer, her first instinct had been to run and hide until she had the chance to gather her thoughts. She knew, however, that for the sake of her charade, she had to appear utterly unconcerned by their encounter. Accordingly she had gone into the ballroom and had accepted the first offer to dance made to her, which had, unfortunately, been from Lord Henry Cole.

Mari detested Lord Henry. A big, bluff hunting man, he hid a vicious nature under an outward show of bonhomie. He reminded her of Rashleigh in too many ways. For some time now Henry had been pressing her to show him what he referred to as “kindnesses” and what Mari knew to be sexual favors, implying that her bed had been cold too long and he was just the man to fill it. When he had squeezed her in such a disgustingly familiar manner during the dance, she had felt horribly sick, his big, sweaty lustful hands reminding her of Rashleigh’s importunities. She knew that his liberties would only get worse. He seemed inordinately excited by her resistance, the kind of man who saw refusal as a challenge that simply has to be overcome by force.

Mari shuddered. To make matters worse, she knew that Nick Falconer had been watching her every move with that dark, implacable gaze of his. She thought that he had probably been the only one to see Lord Henry touch her, for he had started toward them as though he were about to intervene. He had looked positively thunderous. The realization that he had been coming to her aid made Mari feel very strange. She had felt a compound of relief and security and trust that she had never experienced in her life before. She wanted to throw herself into Nick’s arms and simply soak up the strength and protectiveness of him. It was an instantaneous and inexplicable reaction but more importantly, it was extremely dangerous because of course she could not trust Nicholas Falconer. He was the last man on earth she should allow close to her. He could expose the truth about her. She had the horrible thought that perhaps he was the author of the anonymous letter, the fate that was about to catch up with her.

“I know all about you. I know what you did…”

The panic threatened to overwhelm her, tight bands around her chest, the fluttery wings of a thousand butterflies in her stomach beating frantically to break out. She had been troubled by such attacks on and off since she had run away from Rashleigh. They happened whenever the past loomed too close, whenever it seemed that she could not escape. Because sometimes it seemed that she could never get away, never be free.

She dug her nails into the palms of her hands and tried desperately to calm her shaking. Breathe deeply. Distract yourself.

She thought about what she might do now that Nick Falconer was here. She could run away. She could start all over again. She had done it before. But if she did that, Rashleigh would have won again and she would not let that happen. She was too strong to let that happen.

The feeling of panic was passing now, the tightness in her chest easing, her breath coming more easily. She pressed her forehead against her knees and felt the cool silk of her skirts against her hot cheek. Suddenly she felt bone-weary. It had been a very long day.

There was a step on the terrace beside her and a swish of silk and Mari straightened up hastily, pushing her tumbled hair back from her face. Her turban—she hated it anyway, the ridiculous thing—lay discarded on the terrace beside her. She made a grab for it but then realized that the newcomer was only Hester so she relaxed again.

Hester sat on the balustrade beside her and passed her a glass of cold champagne. It felt smooth against Mari’s rough throat.

“Are you all right, Mari?” Hester’s voice was troubled. “What happened? I saw you leave the ballroom.”

“I am very well.” Mari gulped some more champagne. “Lord Henry annoyed me. I hate his importunities.”

“He molested you again.” Hester sounded disgusted. “I am so sorry, Mari. He is a blackguard to do so, especially when he knows you are an unprotected female. What can we do? Shall I get John Teague to call him out, or…I know—Glory can call him out!”

“No,” Mari said, feeling a little better. Hester’s suggestion had almost made her laugh. “I know John would do that for your sake, Hes, and I am sure it could only add to the luster of Glory’s reputation for her to fight a duel, but there is no need. It only upset me because it reminded me of Rashleigh. Most of the time I can shut out such thoughts but sometimes…” She shook her head. “Anyway, I stabbed Lord Henry with my fan and I think I bruised him.”

“Good,” Hester said, with satisfaction. “A pity you did not crack his ribs.” She swung her legs beneath her silken skirts but within a moment the movement had stilled. Her voice changed, became serious. “I have been asking some questions, Mari. About Major Falconer, I mean. He is a widower, heir to a Scottish Marquisate.”

“Lady Faye will be delighted,” Mari said dryly.

“I imagine so. But the rest is not so delightful,” Hester said. “He is Rashleigh’s cousin on his mother’s side, Mari, and when Rashleigh died without issue, he inherited everything that was not entailed.”

Mari almost dropped her champagne glass. Nick Falconer was Rashleigh’s cousin? Suddenly it felt illicit to have been attracted to him, shameful and wrong. Even if he were not cut from the same cloth as Rashleigh, they were related, tied by blood. And if he had inherited all of Rashleigh’s property then he might well have inherited her along with Rashleigh’s other possessions. She had run away but she had never been freed. She had been Rashleigh’s chattel, body and soul. She felt sick.

“Oh,” she whispered. She cleared her throat. “I did not know.” She put her glass down very carefully. “I knew it could be no coincidence that he was here! That must be why he was in the Hen and Vulture that night, Hes. He had gone to meet Rashleigh. Perhaps—” Her anxiety was rising again and she fought hard to control it. “Perhaps Rashleigh told his cousin about me,” she said. She looked at Hester and rubbed a hand across her brow, her head aching intolerably. Suddenly the past pressed frighteningly close. “Do you think that is why he has come here? Does he know I am his property? Does he intend to take up the blackmail where Rashleigh left off?”

Hester slid off the balustrade and came to sit beside her, passing a warm arm comfortingly around her shoulders. “Do not even think it, Mari!” she said sternly. “I am sure it is nothing of the sort. Rashleigh may have threatened to expose your past and reveal your links to the Glory Girls but I am sure he told no one else of his evil plans. That sort of scoundrel always keeps his secrets.”

“I hope that you are right,” Mari said, with a shudder. “It is true that whilst I was with him I never met any other member of his family and he never spoke of them so I imagine he cannot have been close to his cousin. But Major Falconer must know that the Earls of Rashleigh once owned serfs in Russia.”

Hester’s arm tightened. “What if he does know it? That is all in the past.”

“No, it is not,” Mari said, shivering. “You know that legally I was never given my freedom. I am still a serf.”

For one long, terrifying moment the memories crowded in and she was back in the study of the house in St. Petersburg, where she had lived for the first seventeen years of her life. Rashleigh’s father had taken her from her parents when she was a child and had educated her on a whim, instructing her in all the arts that an English lady would learn. He was an eccentric, an academic and a collector, and Mari had come to realize that in an odd sort of way she was part of his collection. He had wanted to see if he could take the child of Russian serfs and transform her into something approaching a lady.

But when his son had inherited her, he had had other ideas of the role of his father’s seventeen-year-old protégée. In her mind’s eye Mari could still see Robert Rashleigh strutting into the house and plundering it whilst his father’s body was not yet cold upstairs. He had lolled back in his father’s chair, appraising her with his insolent gaze.

How piquant of my father to try out such a foolish notion as to educate you and give you ideas above your station, girl! But never mind, all serfs are bred to be no more than bed warmers and soon you can take up your duties on your back.

He had leaned forward and pinned her with his icy-blue gaze.

You see, I have a proposition for you, my dear. An offer you cannot refuse. You and your family are serfs. You belong to me body and soul. So I am offering you a proposal—a rather piquant one, I think you’ll agree. If you give me your body to do with as I wish I will give your family their freedom, their souls, if you like…

She had accepted his proposition.

Of course she had, for how could she have refused, knowing that her family’s very freedom was at stake? She had had no real choice. She was trapped. So she had traded herself, her virginity, her innocence, her very life, for their freedom from slavery. She had become the Earl of Rashleigh’s mistress.

The only remarkable thing about it was that Rashleigh had kept his word, giving money for her sisters’ education, buying her father a small plot of land near Svartorsk and giving him grain and animals enough for him to forge a living from the soil. But then Mari had come to realize that it pleased Robert Rashleigh to be magnanimous sometimes, so that amidst the cruelty and avarice, he occasionally displayed a careless generosity that would surprise her. At first she had taken it as a sign of hope—that there was good in him after all. Later she came to realize that he did it precisely for that reason—to make people think there was hope in order to take a perverse pleasure in proving them utterly wrong. He had freed her family on whim because he wanted to prove he had the power to do so, the power of life and death, the power over freedom or slavery. And then he had set out to exact thorough and devastating payment from her, subjugating her body to his will.

With a shudder she pushed the memory back into the furthest recesses of her mind.

“Don’t think like that, Mari,” Hester said now, recalling her to the present. “You are not a possession. You belong to nobody but yourself. Legally—” she waved a hand around vaguely, with the kind of aristocratic disregard for convention that always made Mari laugh “—there may be some boring argument that someone could make against you, I suppose, but that will never happen.” She paused. “I think it is most likely that if Major Falconer does have a purpose in coming to Peacock Oak, it must be to solve his cousin’s murder.”

There was silence whilst they both thought about it.

“But how did he know to come here?” Mari spread her hands wide. “Unless Rashleigh told him where to find me…”

Hester was shaking her head. “I don’t know, Mari. But I think that until we find out, you must be very, very careful.”

Mari nodded. She felt frighteningly uncertain. From the questions he had asked her that evening she thought that Nick Falconer surely suspected her of Rashleigh’s murder. It could be no coincidence that he had come to Peacock Oak. She already knew he was strong and ruthless in his pursuit of what he wanted, and if his aim were justice, he would hunt her down. She refused to think of the other, even more frightening possibility that Rashleigh had told his cousin everything about her and that Nick was there to take up the blackmail where Rashleigh had left off. She tried not to think that he might have come there to claim her.

Hester was right. She had to be very careful indeed. Say nothing, admit nothing, show no fear….

“He cannot prove a thing,” Hester said now, “least of all that you killed Rashleigh, since you did not.”

“No,” Mari agreed.

“And even if you had,” Hester said, her voice as hard as iron now, “no one could condemn you, Mari. Not if they knew the truth. The man deserved to die horribly a thousand times over for what he did to you.”

There was a silence between them. At the beginning of their friendship, when Hester had suggested that they should share a home, Mari had decided to tell her all about her background. Hester and Laura Cole were the only people she had ever told, the only ones who knew that Mari had reinvented herself as Marina Osborne, respectable widow. Even then she had omitted the worst details of Robert Rashleigh’s vice, not wanting to either relive it or to inflict on her friends the horror of what she had experienced. Mari thought that she would never forget Hester’s appalled reaction and the look of utter shock on her face when she heard the tale. Hester, who had believed herself so outrageous, so worldly wise and cynical, had been shaken to the core by Mari’s disclosures.

She had heard Mari’s tale in silence and then she had squared her shoulders and told her that Robert Rashleigh was a despicable man who deserved to die for what he had done and that Mari must never, ever feel sad or ashamed or lonely ever again. Mari had appreciated her kindness and her generosity of spirit more than Hester could ever know, but even so there were things that she could never tell her friend, things she could never explain about the shackles that were on her mind if not her body. She had been a serf all her life. One of her earliest memories was trying to grasp after what it truly meant to be free. She had asked the old Earl to explain about serfdom but he had just laughed at her for what he called her philosophical interests. And when she was twelve and he had asked her what gift she would like for her birthday, she had asked for her freedom and he had given her instead a mouse made of spun sugar.

The old Earl of Rashleigh had treated her as a toy but it was his son who had made her his plaything, had taken away her self-respect and her innocence and sometimes she despaired that she could ever forget.

She finished the champagne and smiled wryly to think of the little serf from Russia sitting on a Duke’s terrace and drinking his champagne. How far she had climbed. How far she had to fall, if Nick Falconer should suspect her, if he had uncovered that she was his cousin’s runaway mistress, a slave, a thief and a criminal.

“He is a difficult man to deceive,” she said, thinking of Nick.

Hester looked at her sharply. “What do you mean?”

Mari swung her champagne glass thoughtfully between her fingers. “Only that he is clever, Hester, and ruthless and strong. I am so afraid that he will catch me out sooner or later.”

Now Hester looked horrified. “But, Mari, you cannot let him! You must lie to him and keep your nerve. Think of the consequences if you do not! You could bring us all down—”

“I know,” Mari said. She felt immensely weary. This, she thought, was hardly the moment to tell Hester how much Nick Falconer attracted her nor that she had a mad desire to trust him.

“Do not worry, Hester,” she said. “You have always cared for me. I will not let you all down.”

“All you have to do is to carry on as though nothing has happened,” Hester said, calming a little. “Besides, it could all be a hum. Major Falconer was at school with Charles. It might just be a coincidence that brings him here to Peacock Oak and nothing to do with Rashleigh at all.”

“As I said before, I don’t believe in coincidences,” Mari said bleakly. She put the empty glass down gently on the balustrade. “I think I shall retire. Laura will understand that I am tired after the day’s festivities.”

“I will come with you,” Hester said at once. She stood up and brushed down her skirts. “This ball bores me. It is the same old faces. I shall drop you at home and then travel on to Half Moon House.”

Mari’s shoulders slumped. “Oh, Hester!”

The light spilling from the ballroom windows was bright enough to illuminate Hester’s rueful expression.

“I know. You think me wanton.”

“It is not that,” Mari said. She struggled with her feelings for a moment. On the nights when Hester did not come back, she lay in her bed and fretted the night away as though she were Hester’s mother. “I worry about you, out on your own, in bad company. And then there is Lord Teague. If he knew…” She stopped.

Hester snapped her fingers. “John is my friend, nothing more.”

“But he wants to be more,” Mari argued. “He cares about you. He loves you, Hester!”

Hester slipped her hand through Mari’s arm. “Let us not quarrel,” she pleaded. “You are tired and anxious, and I am bored. You know how these events stifle me. So you will go to your bed and I will go—”

“To someone else’s,” Mari said dryly. She sighed as she spoke for there was no changing Hester. She and her husband, Jack Berry, had been as wild as each other, forever encouraging one another to new feats of madness. From things that Hester had said, Mari had understood that she and Jack had quarreled like cat and dog, and yet something had bound them together. In Jack’s case the madness had ended in an early death on the hunting field. In Hester’s, Mari was not sure where it would end.

They went back inside and Hester sent a footman to fetch their cloaks. As they crossed the hall to leave they saw Nick Falconer emerging from Charles Cole’s study. For one infinitely long, loaded moment his eyes met Mari’s and she stared, unable to look away. She thought of her own words and Hester’s response.

He is a difficult man to deceive….

You must lie to him! You could bring us all down….

It was true. If Nick Falconer knew her history, knew everything his cousin Rashleigh had known, then conceivably it might ruin all those whom she cared about the most. For herself, she sometimes felt so tired of the struggle to be free that she did not care. But she could never bring danger to Hester or Laura. They had shown her nothing but kindness and friendship. Even so, looking into Nick Falconer’s dark eyes and wondering what he wanted from her, Mari had a conviction that she could not escape their encounter unscathed.

CHAPTER FIVE

Witch Hazel—A spell is upon me

NICK AWOKE EARLY the morning after the ball and made his way downstairs. Streaks of silver dawn light were fading from the sky. The musicians, their faces drawn with tiredness, were packing up their cases. The servants were starting to scrub, polish and dust the house back into a state of tidiness. Nick knew it would be some time before his fellow guests rose from their beds, so he partook of an early breakfast and set off to walk a path that led up through the beech woods to the fells above.