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“I’m aware of that,” she said. “Which is why I could not possibly steal it. I cannot believe the woman actually thought I would. But she is completely amoral, and I daresay the word ‘betrayal’ means nothing to her.”
“Yet you mean to take the icon if I do not do as you ask,” he said.
“I must. But I could not do so without telling you.”
He tilted her chin up with his knuckle and, bending his head, gave her a hard stare.
“Did it never occur to you, Mistress Logic, that I wouldn’t let you take it?”
“It occurred to me that you might try to stop me,” she said.
With a sigh he released her chin and turned his gaze upon the mountainous mass of granite. “And I should have about the same success, I collect, as I would in trying to persuade this rock to trot over to Dorset.”
Dain heard a low rumble in the distance, as though the heavens themselves agreed that the situation was hopeless.
He felt as bewildered and angry and helpless as he had in Paris, when another storm had been rolling toward him.
He could not even think about the loathsome thing he’d made with Charity Graves without becoming physically ill. How in Lucifer’s name was he to go to it and look at it and talk to it and touch it and take the thing into his keeping?
The Haytor storm followed them back to Athcourt. It pounded on the roof and beat at the windows and flashed demonic bolts that lit the house with blazing white light.
Those who heard His Lordship raging through the house might have easily believed that he was truly Beelzebub, whose wrath had stirred the very elements themselves.
But then, Jessica thought, Dain did not handle his emotional problems well. He had only three methods for dealing with “bother”: knock it down, frighten it away, or buy it off. When the methods didn’t work, he was at a loss. And so he had a tan-trum.
He raged at the servants because they weren’t quick enough in assisting his wife out of her wet outer garments, and then let everything drip on the marble floor of the vestibule—as though sodden garments weren’t bound to drip or muddy boots leave dirty footprints.
He was in fits because their baths had not been drawn and weren’t steaming and ready the instant they reached their apartments—as though anyone had any idea of the precise moment lord and lady would return. He bellowed because his boots were ruined—as though he hadn’t two dozen pairs at least.
Jessica heard his outraged voice rumbling through several walls while she took her bath and changed and wondered whether poor, abused Andrews would give notice at last.
But Dain’s own bath must have calmed him down a degree or two, for by the time he stalked into her chambers, the deafening outraged elephant roar had dropped to a growl, and the thunderous expression had softened to a surly glower.
He entered with his crippled arm in a sling. “Adjustments,” he said after Bridget had wisely fled without waiting to be chased out. “Marriage requires bloody adjustments. You want a sling, Jess, you get a sling.”
“It does not spoil the line of your coat,” she said, surveying him with a critical eye. “It looks rather dashing, actually.” She didn’t add that it also looked as though he were planning to go out, for he was dressed for riding.
“Don’t humor me,” he said. Then he stalked into her sitting room, took the portrait of his mother from the easel, and carried it out—and kept on walking out the door.
She followed him down the passage, down the south stairs, and into the dining room.
“You want Mama in the dining room,” he said. “Mama hangs in the dining room.”
He set the painting against a chair and pulled the bell rope. A footman instantly appeared.
“Tell Rodstock I want the bloody landscape down and the portrait in its place,” Dain said. “And tell him I want it done now.”
The footman instantly vanished.
Dain walked out of the dining room and across the short hall to his study.
Jessica hurried after him.
“The portrait will look very handsome over the mantel,” she said. “I found a lovely set of drapes in the North Tower. I’ll have them cleaned and hung in the dining room. They’ll complement the portrait better than what’s there.”
He had moved to his desk, but he didn’t sit down. He stood before it, half-turned from her. His jaw was set, his eyes hooded.
“I was eight years old,” he said tightly. “I sat there.” He nodded at the chair in front of the desk. “My father sat there.” He indicated his own usual place. “He told me my mother was Jezebel, that the dogs would eat her. He told me she was on her way to Hell. That was all the explanation he gave me of her departure.”
Jessica felt the blood draining from her face. She, too, had to turn away while she summoned her composure. That wasn’t easy.
She had guessed that his father had been harsh, unforgiving. She had never imagined that he—that any father—could be so brutally cruel…to a little boy…bewildered, frightened, grieving for his lost mother.
“Your father was angry and humiliated, no doubt,” she made herself say evenly. “But if he’d truly cared for her, he would have gone after her, instead of venting his spleen on you.”
“If you run away,” Dain said fiercely, “I shall hunt you down. I shall follow you to the ends of the earth.”
If she could manage not to topple over in shock when he had threatened to kill himself on her account, she could manage it now, she told herself.
“Yes, I know that,” she said. “But your fath
er was a miserable, bitter old man who married the wrong woman, and you are not. Obviously she was high-strung—and that’s where you get it from—and he made her wretched. But I am not in the least high-strung, and I would never permit you to make me wretched.”
“Just as you will not permit that bedamned female to take her Satan’s spawn to wicked London.”
Jessica nodded.
He leaned back against the desk and directed a glare at the carpet. “It does not occur to you, perhaps, that the child may not wish to leave its—his—mother. That such an event may…” He trailed off, his hand beating against the edge of the desk as he sought the words.
He didn’t have to finish. She knew he referred to his own case: that his mother’s desertion had devastated him…and he hadn’t altogether recovered yet.
“I know it will be traumatic,” Jessica said. “I asked his mother to try to prepare him. I suggested she explain that where she was going was much too dangerous for a little boy and it was better to leave him where he would be safe, and where she was sure he’d be provided for.”
He shot her one quick look. Then his gaze dropped again to the carpet.
“I wish it were true,” Jessica said. “If she truly loved him, she would never subject him to such a risk. She would put his welfare first—as your own mother did,” she dared to add. “She did not drag a little boy off on a dangerous sea voyage, with no assurance she could provide for him—if, that is, he managed to survive the journey. But her case was tragic, and one must grieve for her. Charity Graves…Ah, well, in some ways she is a child herself.”
“My mother is a tragic heroine and Charity Graves a child,” Dain said. He pushed away from the edge of the desk and moved behind it, not to the chair but to the window. He looked out.
The storm was abating, Jessica noticed.
“Charity wants pretty clothes and trinkets and the attention of all males in the vicinity,” she said. “With her looks and brains—and charm, for she has that, I admit—she might have been a famous London courtesan by now, but she is too lazy, too much a creature of the moment.”
