AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘I have explained to him that I have a obligation to you, that Lord Northam was poisoned and that the murderer is still at large. I cannot leave you and you cannot leave your houseguest, the new Lord Northam. Who, as my father so rightly pointed out, you should not be entertaining without a chaperone. You shouldn’t have me in the house without one, come to that.’
‘I know,’ Guin said, mock-mournful. ‘Look where that leads.’ She wriggled experimentally and was rewarded by a growl.
‘So we are all going to decamp to Ravenscar where you may be chaperoned by dear Bella and where Faith and Dover can insinuate themselves below stairs while Theo and I do whatever gentlemen do at house parties in the depths of Yorkshire.’
‘Haven’t you been to any house parties?’
‘Not conventional ones, no. At the only English one I have attended someone was killed by poison – an accident – and someone was shot. Also an accident of sorts, I am glad to say, and a non-lethal one.’
‘What a very exciting life you lead. But Theo? Aren’t we putting him in more danger?’
‘He’s an adult, he can look after himself and I need his help,’ Jared said, almost absently. He was off somewhere in his head, plotting and scheming, she could tell.
A woman should know when to surrender gracefully. Guin slid off the lean body and smiled to herself when his hands tightened possessively for a moment then relaxed.
‘I will go and tell everyone to pack their bags,’ she said as she poured water into the basin and began to restore her appearance to something as unlike a woman who has spent the afternoon enjoying the passionate attentions of her lover as possible.
Jared, his eyelids at half-mast hiding the thinking process, made a noise than she recognised, that vague masculine sound that means everything from, Of course that hat looks ravishing on you to I am sure your mother knows best, dear. It begged to be answered with something outrageous, just to see if it was repeated.
‘Did you know that there is a unicorn in the library?’ Guin asked, rolling on her stockings.
Jared opened one eye and grinned. ‘That’s nice. Be careful of the horn.’ He went back to brooding.
What am I going to do without you? She tightened her garter with a jerk. Manage just as I always have. Somehow.
Ravenscar was almost a castle, Guin thought, climbing down from the carriage four days later. For some reason the play Macbeth came to mind and she dismissed it with a shiver.
‘Welcome, Lady Northam, Lord Northam.’ The Earl of Huntingford stood at the top of the flight of steps just outside the great oak doors that had been thrown open in welcome. Behind him, in the shadows, a figure in black waited.
He is so clearly Jared’s father. She went up the steps and shook hands, smiled, said all the proper things. He was bulkier than Jared, but with muscle that had been built by tough country sports and riding his boundaries, whereas Jared’s physique was the long, lean muscle and sinew of the athlete. His face was lined, his eyes pouched with, she guessed, recent grief, but like his son, he could conceal deep feelings.
Theo was at her side, shaking hands too, smiling at the woman in mourning. Jared had told him something in confidence about the rift with his father and he already knew that Bella might be involved with his uncle’s murder, but none of that showed on his face. He was all charm, the young gentleman he had been before the deaths in his family:
cheerful, sociable and, one might think, not terribly bright except at the card table and in pursuit of a pretty woman. He was already subjecting Bella to a discreet but appreciative appraisal.
‘My daughter-in-law, Lady Ravenlaw. Bella, Lady Northam, Lord Northam and, of course, you know Jack.’
‘It is so long since I answered to that name that you had best call me Jared if you want a response,’ Jared said. ‘Bella. You have grown even more beautiful with the passing of time. It hardly seems possible.’
She was lovely, Guin admitted to herself, even though the heavy mourning black did not suit her pale skin and light brown hair. The thin line of her lips as she looked at Jared and the faint frown lines between her brows were not flattering either. Had the Earl confronted the couple when he realised that he had been tricked and Jared wrongly blamed or did she still believe she had escaped blame for the cruel deception?
Faint colour came up over her cheeks. Yes, she knew and knew that Jared was aware his father understood the truth as well. ‘You were always easily impressed as a boy,’ Bella said, with a sweet smile.
They were in the hall now, a place that seemed a cross between a medieval baronial stronghold and a comfortable entranceway. There were rather too many suits of armour in corners and animal heads on the wall for Guin’s taste, but she approved the large fire and the pile of hats on the side table and the bridle tossed over a chair-back and the paintings of landscapes and horses.
Bella took her upstairs, Faith at her heels. ‘You are all in the guest rooms in the main wing,’ she said as they climbed the first flight of stairs. The staircase rose in two stages up the height of the hallway, the panelling hung with portraits and a display of weaponry. ‘I assumed the Earl would wish to install Jack – Jared – in my late husband’s rooms, but he appears to have some delicacy about that. Or perhaps he assumed that you would want chambers close together.’ The look she slid towards Guin was slyly insinuating.
‘Absolutely,’ Guin said earnestly. ‘As close as possible. Mr Hunt – Lord Ravenlaw, I should say – is my bodyguard.’
‘Oh yes. A servant.’ She reached one of a row of doors in a wide corridor, opened it and swept in.
‘Lord Ravenlaw is too much a gentleman to sit around bemoaning the injustices of fate and sponging off others to live.’ Guin looked around the room with a perfectly genuine smile: it was, after all, charming. ‘He does what it takes to support himself honourably.’ She laid the faintest emphasis on the last word and saw it strike home. Yes, I know what you did. But she would not show any overt antagonism, that was not the plan that they had hammered out over three days of discussion, letter-writing and speculation.
Now she kept the smile in place, moderating it towards sympathy. ‘It must be very hard to have to entertain guests while you are in mourning. How long is it since your husband died?’
‘A month. I am amazed that Jac – Jared did not know of it.’ Bella moved around the room shifting the position of a vase of flowers, aligning the edges of the books on the bedside table.
‘I doubt he scours the death notices – or any others, for news of Yorkshire,’ Guin said. ‘It must all have seemed very remote to him.’ Nor had she seen anything and she thought she would have noticed news of a death so close to Allerton, even though she did not know the family. The accidental passing of the heir to an earl who lived quietly in the country with no political ambitions was hardly something that would attract great notice.
