Then, quite suddenly, the barn doors were flung open and brilliant sunlight streamed in.
Trevor, on top of Marcus at that instant, was blinded, and jerked back. It was all Marcus needed. He kicked him off and rolled away, coming up on his knees, raising the gun.
But the Duchess was faster. She raised the pitchfork over her head and brought it down with all her strength, striking Trevor squarely on the back of his head with the wooden handle, sending him sprawling on his face. He twitched once, then lay utterly still. She didn’t know whether or not she’d killed him and she didn’t care.
“Marcus!” She was beside him in an instant, not really aware that North, Badger, and Spears were standing over them.
32
BADGER PATTED HER back and clucked like a mother hen, feeling at once foolish at his display of emotion and so scared in his relief he wanted to yell with it.
“Chocolate!” he said against her hair, furious with himself. “Dear God, somehow that mangy bastard Trevor got laudanum into the chocolate I sent to you and his lordship. And like a fool I let Antonia carry it to you, never thinking—”
“But how did he manage it?” Marcus asked as Spears was examining his bloody knuckles and the bruises on his face. He looked over at his unconscious cousin, North beside him, feeling for his heart, as he spoke.
“I spoke to Antonia, just by chance really. Jesus, you can’t imagine how that fear was curdling my toes when I didn’t find either of you in bed where you should have been, all tight and cozy and tangled up together, like two ears of corn in a husk. The bed was empty and I don’t mind telling you, and Mr. Spears will agree, I was nearly frothing at the mouth with fear. It turns out that Antonia paused only a moment to speak to Fanny and the Twins went into the bedchamber for a moment.”
He didn’t tell them that Antonia had been plenty mad because Fanny, the wretched flirt who wanted Marcus for herself, had demanded that she, not Antonia, take the chocolate to the Duchess and Marcus. They’d argued until finally they’d both fetched a sovereign from Fanny’s bedchamber, then they’d tossed it to see who would carry the chocolate to the Duchess and the earl.
“The Twins evidently were arguing about something. And while they were carrying on, even going to one of their bedchambers, Trevor quite easily poured laudanum into the chocolate they’d conveniently left in the corridor.”
“Damnation,” Marcus said. “What if they hadn’t argued? What if Antonia alone had been carrying that chocolate unbothered by her twin? I think that Trevor would have hurt her, both of them if necessary, perhaps even killed them as swiftly and remorselessly as he would a fly. What are two twins, fifteen-year-old cousins to him, after all? How the bloody devil did he get into the house?”
It wasn’t all that hard, so no one said anything. It was all so frightening, it still made Badger’s tongue thick and dry, sticking to the roof of his mouth.
It had been close, too close, so close that even now his heart was pounding faster than when that sod of a nag Midnight Fleet had beaten all odds and won at Ascot just last week.
He stroked his hand over the Duchess’s back, crooning like a damned turkey all the while. She got a grip on herself and drew back to look up at him. “He wanted us to believe that you were in this with him.”
“I beg your pardon, Duchess?”
She grinned at the outrage in Spears’s voice. “Marcus and I knew Badger couldn’t be involved with him, Spears. Never for a moment did we doubt you, Badger, never. But it pleased Trevor to taunt us with it.”
“See that you never doubt me in the future either.”
“I agree. A most unworthy thought of a duchess and an earl,” Spears said. “Most unbefitting either of you. Mr. Badger is a man beyond men.”
“Amen,” said Marcus. He looked over again at North, who’d returned just two days before after visiting a military friend in Castleford, leaving only after he’d been certain that Marcus and the Duchess would be all right after they’d been shot. “Will he live, North?”
“Yes, I think so. The Duchess gave him a solid hit but his pulse is strong as is his heartbeat. If you like, Marcus, I’ll take him to Darlington and see that he’s put safely in the gaol. I’ll even hire guards to keep an eye on him around the clock.”
“I’ll go with you. I don’t want to let him out of my sight again until I know he’s safely locked behind some very sturdy bars. Yes, the guards are an excellent idea.”
“What happened, my lord?” Spears asked. “I mean, why is Mr. Trevor still alive?”
“I had the gun and I was ready to kill him. Then I realized who he was—my cousin, a Wyndham, my flesh—and I couldn’t do it. It was the chance he needed. He jumped on me.”
“That’s right, Marcus,” North said. “Don’t flail at yourself. I’m glad you won’t have his blood on your hands—either of your hands, for that matter. Have him deported to Botany Bay, a wonderful place I understand, savage as hell itself. Let him finish out his life there. I daresay he’ll make his way amongst all the other criminals. At least you’ll be safe from him then.”
“Yes,” Marcus said slowly, “Botany Bay. I do believe I could arrange that without too much difficulty. There’s no reason to have an ugly scandal if we can avoid it. Even though Aunt Wilhelmina deserves any and everything, Ursula and James don’t. I don’t want them hurt more than they have to be.”
“I agree,” Badger said. He saw that the Duchess was nodding also, then turned to Lord Chilton. At North’s nod, he added, “There, that’s all of us, my lord. Ah, I should add that Maggie was beside herself, let me tell you, screamed at Mr. Spears and me, even at poor Lord Chilton, who surely wasn’t to blame, cursing us that we wouldn’t bring her with us.”
“The picture painted with your words, Badger, quite boggles the mind,” Marcus said.
The Duchess managed to find a remnant of a smile, then said, “We won’t have to worry about him ever again. Thank God, Marcus, you’re safe. You’re what’s most important to any of us, and even if that’s not quite true, then you’re what’s most important to me, at the very least. Oh dear, I was so scared he would kill you, so very scared. Don’t you ever do something like that again.”
She pulled herself out of Badger’s comforting hold and walked straight to her husband. He pulled her close and just held her, silent for several moments. He raised his head finally, saying, “How did you find us?”
Badger said, “We went to the stables after I found Mr. Spears and told him you and his lordship were gone and what I suspected. Not that it was necessarily Mr. Trevor, you understand, just that there’d been foul play, as Mr. Kemble of Drury Lane calls it, and sure enough, both Stanley and Birdie were gone. Lambkin was fit to eat the horseshoe nails, my lord, utterly stammering he was with confusion and mental turmoil. Ah, yes, I tracked you here,” he added simply, as if it were the most common ability on earth.
Marcus looked from one of them to the other. “You tracked us here, Badger? This is beyond what you are supposed to be able to do. You are the Duchess’s valet. You are our cook. You know a lot about medicines. Now I hear that you tracked Stanley and Birdie here?”
“Well, my lord, it wasn’t all that difficult, truth be told. You see, Stanley has a strange shoe, put on by the Duchess’s father, some three years ago, a shoe in the shape of a star. Why, you might ask? I haven’t the foggiest notion. It wasn’t difficult, as I said, to follow you and find you here in old MacGuildy’s barn. Poor old man, dead now and no one cares that this barn is falling apart and that’s why Trevor Wyndham brought you here. He rode Clancy around the estate many, many hours as I recall.”
North shook his head. “All I had to do was follow orders, Marcus. These two had everything well in hand. I’m sorry I left, Marcus. Damnation, I knew that the danger wasn’t over by a long shot.”
“You, North, are just angry because you missed finding the treasure with us,” Marcus said, and punched his friend in the arm.
“Alas, that’s part of it, I fear.?
??
Spears said, “However, my lord, having you at our side gave us additional confidence. In your anger, you wore a dark, quite menacing look that would challenge the devil himself.”
There suddenly came a loud shriek from the barn door.
“Ho! I knew we’d find you! Damn you, Mr. Spears, and damn you even more, Mr. Badger, I knew we’d find you! Ah, and Lord Chilton, well damn you as well, you sneaking lordship! Oh, hell and the devil, all the fun’s over! It isn’t fair, I’ve missed all of it.”
The Duchess looked at Maggie, dragging a red-faced Sampson behind her, then looked up at her husband’s astonished face. “How,” she asked, giggling, her breath warm against his throat, “how could you ever imagine that Maggie would willingly miss any of the fun?”
“Ho! What’s this? Good God, it’s Mr. Trevor, and he’s sprawled in a very ungentlemanly fashion on the ground. Whatever has happened?”
Epilogue
IT WAS LATE that night, a night of warmth and closeness and lingering fear and the weight of staggering loss, that Marcus, the Duchess, and all their friends, who just happened to be their servants, were seated in the dining room, the earl having insisted that all of them dine together, at least this evening, despite Spears’s vehement and quite vocal disapproval.
Marcus’s mother, bless her heart, had hauled Aunt Gweneth and the Twins off to her own sitting room and told them that it was their own private banquet, that the earl was a man with odd notions that must be respected since he was the head of the Wyndham family, and thus they would conduct their own private party and leave the earl and the Duchess to theirs. She frowned at Fanny, who had the temerity to point out that Lord Chilton wasn’t a servant and he was allowed at their party.
When Badger’s smiling kitchen minions brought out the bottle of chilled champagne, Sampson, the Wyndham butler for fifteen years, a man of astute judgment, reserved demeanor and sober of mien, rose, cleared his throat and announced, “My lords, my lady, Mr. Badger and Mr. Spears, I should very much like to make an announcement. Miss Maggie will be remaining here with the Duchess as her personal maid. I will also be remaining at Chase Park as butler.”
He paused and Marcus frowned. “I should hope so, unless, naturally, you feel that there’s been too much impropriety, too much disorder and untidiness in a nobleman’s house.”
Sampson cleared his throat again. “That isn’t quite what I meant, my lord. Actually, what I meant to say and what I shall say now is that Miss Maggie has agreed to become Mrs. Glenroyale Sampson. That, my lord, er, is my given name.”
“Oh my,” the Duchess said. She rose from her chair and walked to Maggie, leaned down and hugged her. “Congratulations, my dear. It’s wonderful. Sampson is a very fine man. And that emerald necklace looks marvelous on you.”
Maggie, laughing, looking like a coquette while she batted her long eyelashes at the earl, said to the Duchess, “Well, he’s a man of great stability, you know, not given to haring off to mills to see those poor men pound each other to death with their fists, or drinking too much ale at that horried inn in Bramberly, or gambling away all his coin at the nest of vipers in Eglington. Yes, I’ve decided it’s better to permanently settle down with a stable man, one who also thinks with his head and not just with his—well, never mind that. In any case, I’ve decided not to return to the stage in London.”
“He is stable,” Badger said. “He does think with his head. He will be faithful. He will take good care of Maggie. He will be tolerant of her occasional flirtatious lapses. Mr. Spears assures me that Mr. Sampson is just what all of us will admire.”
“I, for one,” North said, “certainly admire his sang froid. I was witness to his dealings with an impertinent tradesman just yesterday, Marcus. The man was apologizing, ready to kiss Sampson’s highly polished boots before he left.”
“Good God,” Marcus said. “Duchess, what do you think of this?”
“I think,” she said, grinning around the earl’s huge table, “that Sampson is quite the luckiest man in the world.”
“That is most kind of you to say so, Duchess,” Sampson said, clearing his throat yet one more time, “but I beg you to consider that Maggie here is also a very lucky lady. She saved Mr. Badger’s life and look what wonderful things have transpired for her in reward for her outstanding good deed. She will have me as her husband and Mr. Spears and Mr. Badger as cohorts. Everyone needs cohorts in life, Duchess, everyone.”
“A husband isn’t a bad thing to have either,” the Duchess said.
“Hear, hear,” said Maggie, winking at the earl, “and his lordship here is shaping up quite nicely, don’t you think so, Mr. Spears?”
“Indeed, Maggie, indeed.”
The earl flung up his hands and yelled for another bottle of champagne. He turned to Lord Chilton, who was chewing on Badger’s fruit meringue on a sponge biscuit. “Well, North, does all this marital bliss warm your sinner’s heart? Make you want to consider some leg shackles yourself?”
North took his time swallowing. He looked around the table. He smiled at the Duchess. “Actually, Marcus, all this overflowing of mating euphoria quite makes me want to hare off to that mill Maggie spoke about. Tomorrow, I think. I want to put a good five miles between me and the rest of you by noon. I’ve done my visiting now and gotten my fill of excitement, jollity, and familial closeness. Now I want to go home to Cornwall and brood in solitude, hug my gloom close to my breast and no one else’s. In short, I will remain as I am, alone and quite happy with my own black cloud and seclusion. Yes, I’ll walk the moors with my dogs and be quite as somber in my thoughts as any good man should be.”
“We will see, North, we will see,” Marcus said, and raised his champagne for another toast. “To his lordship’s seclusion,” he said. “May it end in the not-too-distant future.”
“To his lordship’s imminent demise as a black-hearted, quite handsome bachelor,” Maggie said. “He’s not a man to be wasted on dogs or moors.”
“Hear, hear,” the Duchess said.
“Your mother was very concerned, my lord. Begging your pardon, Duchess, but I must move on now to other matters. Thus, I read everything I could find on this Botany Bay, and found that we were right. It’s a thoroughly nasty place, primitive as that area around the Ganges River. No one manages to escape this Botany Bay. I told this to your mother, my lord. She then stopped fretting about Mr. Trevor. I told her it was at the end of the earth and filled with venomous serpents. She was quite relieved. I don’t believe she’ll speak of it again, my lord.”
“Well,” Maggie said, tapping her fork against her champagne glass, “I wouldn’t be content to send him there, all whole-hided, no indeed. Poor Duchess—she just smacks him on his head. Men don’t get hurt when smacked on their heads. No, she should have taken that pitchfork and done him in then and there. I would have known what to do.”
“Botany Bay isn’t an easy place,” Badger said. “I agree with Mr. Spears. Master Trevor won’t be taking any trips away from there.”
“Still, you were all too kind, too easy on that devil. What matter if he was kin? He lost all his rights when he was so very wicked. Trying to kill the Duchess, trying to do away with both of you and he would have, that one. He wouldn’t have stopped and felt all kinds of guilt, no, he would have done away with both of you.”
“That is quite enough, my dear,” Sampson said kindly but with a certain sort of firmness that made the Duchess stare at him. “Surely the topic has been abused sufficiently. Mr. Trevor won’t escape that place. Everyone is safe. You have more than enough to think about now without the inclusion of that man who will shortly be gone from England.”
The Duchess grinned at the look of utter astonishment on Maggie’s face. “Is that you, Mr. Sampson? You said that to me?”
“Yes, indeed, dearest.”
“Well, well, the man is capable of surprising me. Me! I quite like that, Mr. Sampson, perhaps. Once in a while. Mayhap twice a week.”
“Hear, hear,”
the Duchess called out, looking toward her husband as she spoke. She was fingering the beautiful pearls that were looped about her neck, and she was smiling, a very soft smile.
“Twice a week?” Marcus said. “No, surely more than twice a week.”
“His lordship isn’t adhering to a gentleman’s code if you asked me,” Maggie said. “Not like Mr. Samp—, er, my dearest Glenroyale here.”
“Surprises are quite nice, aren’t they?” the Duchess said, still looking at her husband, still fingering those pearls.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Catherine Coulter, The Wyndham Legacy
(Series: Legacy # 1)
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