Marriage Made in Hope(15)

* * *

White’s was busy when he reached it and a stiff brandy beckoned. Inside he found Adam Stevenage drinking. Without thought he slipped into the seat opposite the lone young man and simply sat there.

‘You want to know why I asked about Hutton’s Landing?’ Despite the liquor Stevenage had consumed, he still seemed in reasonably good shape.

‘The thought did cross my mind.’

‘The man who died with you, Seth Greenwood, was my cousin.’

‘I see.’

‘And I wanted to know exactly what happened, to be able to lay him to rest, so to speak.’

‘Surely you have heard the rumours?’

‘I have, but I also think there are some things left out, my lord. I knew him well, you see, and one thing I could have said of Seth was that he was not careless. I also knew Ralph Kennings.’

That name ripped across Francis’s composure, but he sat still and listened.

‘I went to Hutton’s Landing to visit my cousin’s grave. I tried to find you there, but you had left the town. Into the bush, they said, with your gun. Ralph Kennings’s body was found a few weeks later thrown into one of the many canyons and he’d been shot three times, twice in each kneecap and once in the head by a marksman. Had you not served in the British army in such a capacity, my lord?’

‘It’s a long way to Hutton’s Landing, Mr Stevenage, and a long time ago.’

‘Let me understand it, then. For Seth’s sake.’

Francis was amazed that this talk had not made him breathless as any mention of Hutton’s Landing usually did. Perhaps it was just the sheer overtness of Stevenage’s questions, his quest for the truth overcoming everything else. Or perhaps it was just that Francis’s body had already been once through the rigours of memory today and did not have the reserves to do so again. Whatever it was, he sat back and was once again on the banks of the Flint River in Georgia, the cooling of winter in the air and the southern edge of the Appalachians blue in the distance.

‘We’d made a claim for gold and found a rich seam, Seth and I, and then found another that needed looking into. We’d fashioned a belt to put the scrapings on, one that ran up onto the river bank and saved us a lot of back-breaking work. It was going well until Kennings turned up and wanted a piece of it.’

He could see the structure in his mind, the wood and the planks, the tailings of rocks and the glinting show of gold in the sieves after the water had sluiced the mud away. ‘He knew that the venture was beginning to be lucrative and Seth was not one to stay silent about any new find.’

Stevenage shook his head. ‘That sounds like my cousin. He was always an adventurer, seeking a life far from the ease of all that he had in England.’

Francis nodded. ‘We were on the dredge when the whole structure collapsed and the next moment there were gunshots across the water. One of the bullets hit Seth in the shoulder and as it had rained the tide was rising. I held him up against me until he stopped breathing.’

‘For most of the hours of the day, I heard.’

Francis didn’t answer him.

‘They told me you had paid for his gravestone, too. My family should be thanking you.’

Adam Stevenage had more than a small resemblance to Seth and Francis relaxed back into the seat as the other continued talking.

‘I was glad to see you today, Douglas, at the Wesley luncheon, for I had been wanting to talk to you and you’re damn hard to pin down. Lady Maria told me that her sister is to be married.’

‘Indeed, she is. To the next Duke of Winbury.’

‘I know that now. She just didn’t have the look of a woman in love. At least not in love with Allerly.’

‘I think you have probably said enough, Stevenage.’

The other lifted what was left in his glass and made a toast. ‘To gold then and to the truth.’

‘Gold and truth,’ Francis gave back and drank. They could both of them break you into tiny shattered pieces because the shades inside each held so many different meanings. Seth’s boasting. Kennings’s greed. His own retribution. There was a trick to getting away from the fever before it took your soul and none of them had mastered it. But Stevenage was not finished in his confidences.

‘Winslow’s father died earlier this afternoon, Douglas. Had you heard? He’s now the new Duke of Winbury. The ton has rules for it, you see, for loving and living and dying and Lady Sephora Connaught will be caught up in it like a small leaf in a strong breeze. Hard to get away and impossible to break free.’

‘You are drunk, Stevenage. Let me take you home.’

‘You’d do that for me?’ The younger man’s dark eyes were pained, his own undisguised ghosts dancing within them.

‘I would. Come on.’

‘I am supposing that meeting you tonight nullifies the appointment Wesley instructed me to keep tomorrow at your town house?’

‘It does.’

* * *

An hour later Francis arrived home to find a small pile of stones sitting in a careful order on the sideboard. Ordinary stones found in a garden or on any city street, each polished and arranged in size and colour. Had Anna placed them thus? He picked up the biggest one and rubbed the smoothness in his palm. He’d collected rocks, too, as a child and he wondered if he might be able to find the bags of his collections somewhere in the attics here. His cousin might enjoy them or she might well toss them back in his face.

He smiled at the thought and felt for the letter Sephora had sent him, liking it there in the warmth of his deep jacket pocket.

A surprising day of contrasts and truths. For the first time in a long while he looked forward to tomorrow, though the death of the Marquis of Winslow’s father worried him more than it ought to have given Stevenage’s prophecies. Would Sephora Connaught marry him out of pity? Or even duty? Outside the wind was strengthening.

A movement at the doorway had him looking up and there was Anna Sherborne, her hair tonight trimmed even shorter than he had seen it last week. She had been bathed, too, and dressed in her night attire she looked a lot younger than she usually did, although the scowl was ever present.

‘I liked your stones on the hall cabinet. Did you polish them yourself?’

The girl did not come further into the room, but stood there straddling the doorway, one foot in and one foot out ready to run, he thought, ready to flee.

His eyes glanced at the clock to one side of the room. ‘You are up very late?’

‘I never sleep very well.’ She offered this, tentatively.

‘Neither do I,’ he gave her back. ‘Sometimes I sit and just watch the moon and I find that helps.’

He leaned forward and found a jar of toffees he kept in his drawer, taking one for himself and opening the wrapper before putting it in his mouth. ‘Would you like one, too?’

He was careful in his offering, no importance at all attached to her acceptance or to her refusal. But she came forward and took a sweet, unwrapping it in exactly the same way that he had done and laying her paper down on the desk next to his.

‘There is a lot more food in this house than there ever was at my old one.’

He stayed silent.

‘Clive used to say that I was too expensive to keep and that if I had not been able to count well he would have put me out a long time ago.’

Francis stilled. ‘What did you count for him, Anna?’

‘His money. There was either a lot of it or none.’

‘And he couldn’t count it himself?’

‘Some people can’t. It doesn’t mean they are dumb, it just means their brains are better at other things.’

‘What was Clive better at?’

She didn’t answer for a long time and then changed the topic completely.

‘Clive said if you dug hard enough anyone could be buried. He said the old earl dug shallow holes.’

Blackmail, Francis thought. It came in the most unexpected ways and explained a lot about the many boxes the old earl had kept. His cousin had been the pawn in it, her whole life an extension of other people’s greed and shame. But not his.

‘I have my own collection of rocks, Anna.’ She looked up at his use of her Christian name and he saw a look he had not seen in her dark eyes before. Hope.

‘I shall find them tomorrow and you would be most welcome to have them. Some are valuable, but most are there because I like them.’

‘I do that. I collect what I like, too.’

A shout from further afield had her turning and his young cousin’s maid, looking less than happy, came into view.

‘I am sorry, my lord. I just saw her bed was empty and I have been looking everywhere...’

The servant looked as though she would burst into tears at any moment and his own expression was probably not helping either.

He wished he had had more moments of uninterrupted conversation with Anna. He wished she might have said more so that he could place the pieces of her life thus far with an added certainty into a pattern.

She liked counting. She enjoyed collecting rocks and he would bet his bottom dollar on the fact that she knew Clive Sherborne was being paid well to keep her. She had never once spoken of her mother and that omission in its own right was telling, too.

As the maid hurried her off Anna tipped her head at him before she turned and his heart warmed at the faint expression of acknowledgement and communication.