The Regency Redgraves: What an Earl Wants / What a Lady Needs / What a Gentleman Desires / What a Hero Dares. Kasey Michaels

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СКАЧАТЬ of the night, the conclusion being that he must have slipped on the rainwet deck and tumbled overboard.”

      “Both plausible conclusions,” Jessica said. “But there was another one?”

      “Yes, the one that finally aroused my suspicions. A few months later it was Baron Harden’s turn to be careless. He took a tumble down a dark flight of stairs after leaving his mistress. When I heard of your father’s accident just outside London, most especially the part about the coach lamps, I was already past believing all these accidents were a matter of coincidence. I immediately traveled to the estate, to view the bodies for myself before they were interred.”

      Jessica’s brown eyes widened. “That’s ghoulish. How could you even look at them?”

      He was in no mood to tread softly. “The bodies were in no fit condition to be laid out in the house, thankfully. So the answer to your how is, with a fat bribe to the groom guarding the remains in the stables until the interment, my extremely discreet physician brought along for his expertise, my valet, Gibbons, holding up a lantern for us, handkerchiefs tied around all our faces and wearing riding gloves we immediately consigned to the waste bin.”

      She folded her hands in her lap. “I believe I was asking a rhetorical question. But thank you for that explanation. You are a determined man, aren’t you?”

      “When I want answers, yes, I go after them. They actually didn’t die in the fire, Jessica. From what my physician could tell, admitting my own limited contact with dead bodies, they’d both sustained pistol shots to their skulls. Fire doesn’t melt bones, most of all, the skull. With a little prodding at the remains, the holes were not that difficult to spot.”

      Jessica had gone rather pale. “Shot. Not an accident at all. At least they didn’t burn, thank God.”

      “No, the fire was meant to obscure the wounds. The coachman, alas, was long gone, so I couldn’t question him.”

      “Had he shot them? Perhaps set the coach on fire to cover what he was about. A robbery, I would suppose?”

      Gideon shook his head, amazed at her sangfroid. She was shocked, but she showed no signs of subsiding into a swoon; her mind was ticking along in a rational fashion. “Anything’s possible. Am I being too suspicious, Jessica?”

      “No,” she said quietly. “My father was always tight with his purse, so the fact he’d hired a coach rather than bring his own cattle and servants to London isn’t surprising. Lord only knows who he hired. Their deaths could have been a result of a robbery, but when combined with the other supposed accidents? All of the men members of your father’s Society?”

      “They wore the rose. To me, that links them. Four accidents stretches coincidence a step too far.”

      “I only wonder why he and his wife were traveling to London at that time of year. No one can count on the roads being anything but snow-filled or quagmires. Did your sleuthing extend to finding an answer to that question?”

      “No, but you’re right, I should have thought of that. I was in London to settle some financial affairs for my former ward, turning them over to her bridegroom’s man of business, or else I wouldn’t have been in town myself.”

      “Lucky for you, I suppose, and your theories.”

      “Yes, I suppose so. Damn, why didn’t I think to ask myself that question?”

      “How lowering to discover one isn’t omnipotent, Gideon,” she said sweetly, so that he glared at her. She shrugged. “I was only thinking it would be interesting to know their reason for the journey. A fanciful mind might even consider the notion they were on their way to a meeting of the Society you’re so certain was dissolved two decades ago.”

      This wasn’t the first time she’d alluded to that possibility. He might as well tell her the rest.

      “We’ve had some curious happenings at Redgrave Manor in the past year. Glimpses of lit lanterns moving through the estate at night, strange holes appearing inside the greenhouse which, when investigated, seem very much to have been caused by the cave-in of some sort of tunnel being dug beneath it. Oh, yes, and my father’s crypt was broken into. His remains have gone missing.”

       “What?”

      Well, at last! He had begun to wonder if the woman was completely unflappable.

      “Yes, that was very much my reaction, as well. However, in the interests of full and honest disclosure, save for the rare sightings of curious lights at night this past month or more—possibly poachers—I can’t for certain say when the tunnel was dug, but only when that portion of it collapsed. As for the theft of my father’s body, that was only discovered when lightning struck a nearby tree and it fell, a large branch breaking one of the stained glass windows. We none of us enter the mausoleum unless it’s to shelve another Redgrave—we’ve got enough of them in there that we stack them up like bolts of cloth in a Bond Street shop, you see, and then wall them in. The stone used to wall up Barry was on the floor of the crypt, broken in two, the body gone. But again, the theft could have occurred any time in the past twenty years.”

      Jessica was quiet for some time, her hands twisting in her lap, before she looked at Gideon again. “Do…do you think perhaps they took him—your father, that is—almost immediately? To, um, to perform their own ceremony? Oh, Lord, that’s disgusting.”

      “And only one of several possibilities,” Gideon said, just voicing his thoughts of the past few months aloud easing his mind somewhat. “To whit—propping him up on some throne to overlook their activities? To grind up his bones into powder, mix that in with sheep’s blood or some such ridiculousness, and drink the man? To slice him up, as they did the saints of yore, with each member then blessed to carry a knucklebone as a memento, a holy relic? Don’t answer yet—I’ve had time to consider more than that. There’s one more. Did his followers, as my father was the acknowledged leader, believe the supposed treasure was interred with his bones, and come looking for it?”

      Jessica held up her hand to stop him. “Not that last one, surely. A treasure? Why would your family do that? And why would anyone take the body with them, whether there was some sort of treasure to be found there or not?”

      “I agree. It was only one of many possibilities, and a rather feeble one at that. However, I do believe, after years of not believing it, there may be some sort of treasure. Some precious gem perhaps, made a part of a larger golden rose, the symbol of the Society? Or something they prayed to—mayhap an enormous diamond stuck into the fat belly of a pagan idol?”

      Jessica tucked her legs up on the couch, as if prepared to stay there all night, until she’d somehow solved the problem that so confounded him. “But wouldn’t every member of the Society know the location of that sort of thing? They all gathered for their—I hate saying ceremonies. The word is too respectable for what they did.”

      “Drunken orgies?” Gideon offered. “Debaucheries? Deflowerings of whores paid handsomely to pretend they were intact innocents being offered up for some carefully orchestrated sacrifice? The open passing around of wives in some hope of alleviating the boredom of marital fidelity? Christ! Their own wives. Were they willing or unwilling, do you think?”

      She shot him a dark glance that made him want to know more of what had happened to have her run off with James Linden. “I’m not convinced the members cared. All done in praise of the devil.”

      “Devil СКАЧАТЬ