After a moment, he said, “I know you’re awake.”
A shard of ice blue showed beneath her lashes.
He smiled. “I could, oh so easily, kill you now, and save us all the bother of organizing to deliver you to the authorities, and then making our case against you. Of course, that would spare you the ordeal of being tossed in a cold, dank cell, labeled a merciless fiend without conscience or remorse, and therefore being subjected to all the indignities that, as sure as the seasons, will follow.”
He looked down at his hands, stretched his long fingers. Knew when her gaze shifted to them. He curled his fingers and hands. “Just one quick twist.” He mimicked the movement. “You wouldn’t feel a thing—not the slightest pain.”
He kept his gaze on his hands, as if debating, deliberating.
“So do it.” Her voice was deep for a woman, low, sultry, dark. When he glanced at her, she met his gaze. “Kill me now. You want to.” Her lips curved. “All those others—your puppets—want you to. I don’t know who you are, but I do know you’re powerful enough that no one will ever question or challenge you.”
When he didn’t react, she went on, “What are you waiting for? Me to ask for absolution?” She chuckled, a dry, humorless sound. “I have no regrets. As you said, no remorse. Such emotions are for weaklings and fools.”
He let his lips curve then. She’d answered the one question in his mind. “I’m Wolverstone. And I am very likely the one man in England who could kill you with impunity.” He allowed a second to elapse, then let his gaze, his expression harden. “There’s just one catch.”
He looked again at his hands. “These hands”—he held them up, long-fingered, strong, and lethal—“caress my wife, stroke my children’s heads.” He shifted his gaze to her eyes. “I couldn’t possibly sully them with the likes of you.”
Her eyes narrowed to shards, shards that glittered with unrelieved hate.
His smile deepened. “No. I rather think I’ll leave you to the dubious mercies of your jailers and the hangman.”
Smoothly he rose, looked down at her dispassionately, certain, now, that his decision was right. “If it’s any consolation, I daresay the crowd at your hanging will set a new record.”
With that, he turned and walked away—and left the Black Cobra, pale and weak, lying, helpless, on the cold floor.
Twenty-one
No one had anticipated the triumph of the day, so the gathering that evening was impromptu and informal, but the emotions underlying it—the relief, the triumph, the need to share—were no less heartfelt for that.
Royce looked down the fully extended table in his dining room, smiling as his gaze touched the faces, so many familiar. So many old friends.
All animated, all engaged. All as one.
The Cynster ladies and Chillingworth’s Francesca had arrived during the afternoon, drawn to share their waiting with Minerva, the Bastion Club members’ wives, and the three ladies who had themselves directly contributed to the Black Cobra’s downfall.
Each lady had been waiting in the forecourt, on the steps, or on the front porch to welcome her man when the combined party under his command had finally made its way back to Elveden.
Few homecomings had ever been so sweet. There’d been cuts and bruises, scrapes, and a slash or three to be tended; Charles got into trouble for trying to make light of his. That as a group they’d escaped with no substantial injuries was more a tribute to their comradeship, that they’d fought so determinedly shoulder to shoulder, each watching each other’s back, than to their undoubted skill with arms.
To a man, the assassins had not surrendered. They’d had to be killed, and not one man of their party had stepped back from that necessity. Royce was proud of them all.
Of course, once the bustle of their arrival had faded, Minerva had decreed that everyone should stay to dine.
As everyone had been eager to hear of Rafe’s journey and its triumphant conclusion, everyone had.
They’d foregathered in the drawing room. With every chair and perch occupied, Rafe had stood before the hearth and, with Loretta Michelmarsh seated in the armchair beside him, told their tale.
Loretta’s great-aunt Esme was known to Minerva, Honoria, Clarice, and Letitia as a friend of Lady Osbaldestone’s. Esme’s relief—her release from the threat that held her trapped in the convent at Bingen—had therefore been promptly organized. Rafe, together with Gabriel, assisted by Christian, and Tristan, had been delegated to deal with Sir Charles Manning.
The end of the tale—not just of Rafe’s journey but of Del’s, Gareth’s, and Logan’s, too—had held all the ladies enthralled.
When the final piece of the puzzle fell into place and the identity of the Black Cobra was revealed, Royce hadn’t been the only man smiling wrily, albeit very much to himself. To a woman, the ladies were so incensed that he was sincerely grateful none of them had been anywhere near the Laughing Trout Inn.
The female is infinitely deadlier than the male. Every man there knew that was true. All their wives were the kindest and gentlest of beings—unless someone threatened those they considered theirs, their husbands or their children. Woe betide any who didn’t appreciate the tigresses within.
“It occurs to me,” Royce said, catching Christian’s eye, “that the major mistake the Black Cobra made today was in not applying the principle she herself exploited. She didn’t treat Loretta as a potential threat. Didn’t think she might have a weapon to hand, so didn’t bother having her searched.”
Wineglass in hand, Christian nodded. “She didn’t imagine Loretta would react when she gave the order for their deaths, either, which was elementally foolish.”
“Do you think so?” Honoria, seated at Royce’s right, tipped her head in thought. “Actually, from everything we’ve recalled of her, Alexandra Campbell née Middleton has never been in love, has never had children, has never been touched by that particular emotion, so how would she know how a lady who loved would react?”
Put like that … Royce inclined his head. “Good point.”
“Indeed. And you might be interested in something else we ladies recalled.” Honoria leaned forward and looked down the table. Ignoring all formality—as they’d all been doing—she called to Letitia, further down the board. “Letitia, you put it best—about Shrewton and Alexandra.”
“About what might have driven her?” Letitia’s words had all the men about the table falling silent. She smiled and, with typical dramatic flair, with all conversation ceasing, claimed the floor. “Alexandra is the only child of Viscount and Viscountess Middleton, but she’s definitely Shrewton’s get. Indeed, she seems more like him in character and temperament than even Roderick was, and that’s almost certainly what sparked her campaign to use Roderick and Daniel Thurgood, Shrewton’s natural son, to advance her ends.”
Letitia spread her hands. “Consider, as the daughter of the Middletons, Alexandra was minor ton at best, relegated largely to the counties, with no ready supply of slavering sycophants to pander to her ego. Imagine, if you can, Shrewton himself in such a position—his temperament would never stand for it. Alexandra’s didn’t either. She had to get out. Marriage to George Campbell was presumably her first step. But she couldn’t control George, yet neither could he control her. He left her in his house in the north and spent all his time in London, gambling and otherwise enjoying himself. But Alexandra didn’t stay left. She came to London, too, and, we assume, sought out Roderick. We can assume Thurgood—who seems to have shared her manipulative skills to some degree, and probably also saw himself as being owed by the Ferrars—had already attached himself to Roderick.
“So there we have the three, all Ferrars together, but Alexandra would have quickly realized that she was the strongest.” Letitia paused and looked at Royce. “If you were to ask, and if Shrewton deigned to answer, I—indeed, all of us who know the Ferrars—would wager that were you to ask if he’d received a visit from Alexandra at some point while she was living in London,
before there was any talk of Roderick going to India, then Shrewton would answer in the affirmative. She would, almost certainly, have sought her father’s acknowledgment as the strongest, the most able and clever of his get. She would have craved that recognition—just as Shrewton himself is always so arrogantly insistent over having his own position recognized. And that position is about power. Just as he always demands that people acknowledge the power he’s accumulated, so Alexandra would have wanted his acknowledgment of the power she wielded, including over his two sons, Roderick and Daniel.”
Letitia shook her head. “But Shrewton wouldn’t have given her that—nothing like that. He most likely wouldn’t have given her the time of day.”
“Kilworth said something,” Royce said, “about Shrewton only focusing on his sons.”
“Precisely. He is … I would say a complete misogynist only he’s not even that. He doesn’t hate women. He’s simply utterly indifferent to us except as pawns or chattels.”
“Ah—I see,” Devil said. “Hence her comment about the female being deadlier than the male.”
“Indeed.” Letitia looked around the table. “What drove Alexandra Campbell to become the Black Cobra was all about striking back at her father—the father who would not, even privately, accord her the recognition that, by his lights as well as hers, was her due. So she took Roderick. She took Daniel. And she created an empire built on vicious, vindicitive, malicious arrogance above and beyond anything even Shrewton himself could achieve.” With her customary histrionic facility, Letitia paused, glanced around the table, then declared, “And that’s what the Black Cobra and her cult was all about.”
For an instant, silence reigned, then Gabriel Cynster shuddered, and reached for a decanter. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m glad it’s all over, that the cult is no more and the Black Cobra’s in jail, that the worst happened far from all our homes, and that our four returning colleagues”—he raised his refilled glass to the four: Del, Gareth, Logan, and Rafe—“succeeded in bringing it all to an end.”
“Hear, hear!” echoed around the table. Glasses were raised in a heartfelt toast.
Then someone suggested toasting all those not present who had assisted in the adventure.
That list was long. It commenced with a somber remembrance of James MacFarlane.
“No longer with us, yet never to be forgotten.” It was Rafe who said it. Standing, all the men raised their glasses and drank.
Royce noticed Minerva glance to right and left, then she grasped her wineglass and as one the ladies rose.
At Minerva’s nod, Emily Ensworth proposed, “To James MacFarlane—a true hero.”
Interspersed between their men, the ladies all drank, then, as one company again, everyone sat.
Royce felt his lips twist as, down the length of the table, his eyes met his wife’s. He, for one, hadn’t missed the message; when it came to matters such as this, not one of the men about the table would ever be alone.
They no longer fought alone, not in the wider sense.
The toasts continued in less formal vein, and soon real joy and laughter returned, sweeping away the lingering chill of the Black Cobra’s tale.
Four of Royce’s men had escorted Alexandra Campbell, sitting trussed in the back of a borrowed farm cart, to the jail in Bury St. Edmunds. She was now behind bars, guarded by a competent group drawn from Royce’s, Devil’s, and Demon’s households, assisted by the somewhat dazed, but frighteningly eager local constabulary. There were cultists still free—a pair here, a trio there—but Del had agreed that they were unlikely to regroup and, lacking all officerlike direction, were more likely to disperse than seek to free their secretive leader, whom the majority of the cult had never seen.
The lower ranks of cultists had never known their leader was a woman, and her gender made an attack by them to free her even less likely.
Rafe looked around the table at all the faces he hadn’t allowed himself to think about seeing. Not just Del’s, Gareth’s, and Logan’s, and all the Cynsters', but also their until now unknown wives'. Wolverstone’s, and all the rest. Even if he hadn’t known them personally, he still hadn’t let himself imagine meeting them. He hadn’t let himself think beyond the final moment of the Black Cobra’s reign.
But now he was there, beyond that moment, still living, more hale and whole than he’d expected to be.
Emotions raced through him, feeding a roiling cauldron of feelings. He couldn’t tell which was strongest—triumph and jubilation, remembrance and sorrow for those who’d passed, a tingling, scintillating sense of expectation, satisfaction, content, soaring joy, and immense relief.
He felt them all, a giddy whirl where one rose high, then fell back to be supplanted by the next. Like a rudderless ship on a storm-tossed ocean, he pitched and swung.
Then he glanced at Loretta, seated alongside him, and his inner sea calmed.
She felt his gaze, turned to meet it. And smiled.
He returned the gesture, felt his heart swell. Beneath the table, he found her hand, closed his around it, felt the gentle pressure of her fingers on his.
And knew.
Love was the strongest emotion of them all.
Even as she turned to answer some query, he felt his smile grow silly, besotted.
Didn’t care.
The Black Cobra was his past.
Loretta was his future.
And more—she was the reason he was there.
All the battles in his past, all the recent trials and tests, the hurdles of their adventure, he now saw with new eyes. He’d never previously viewed such events as having a higher purpose, not in terms of his life, but now he knew—they’d brought him there.
His past had brought him to the here and now, to this particular moment in time.
The moment when all became crystal clear, and his life took on a new direction, a deeper meaning.
Loretta held his hand, felt the strength of it enfolding hers, and rejoiced. She could barely contain her delight, her joy, her profound relief. She didn’t want to think about that moment in the inn’s parlor, a moment when fate had stared her in the face and asked her to choose. His life over another’s.
She still felt stunned by her utter lack of hesitation.
Still felt stunned by what she knew it meant.
If it hadn’t been for the ladies around her, for the way they, too, so transparently felt for their men, she’d be shaken, unsure, worried by herself.
Killing—even if she hadn’t, she’d intended to and knew it—wasn’t to be taken lightly.
But all she’d felt—the emotion that even now had her firmly in its grip—was so powerful it couldn’t be denied. Not then.
Not now. Not ever again.
Sliding out of the conversation, she glanced at Rafe. Found his gaze on her, and met it.
Let her smile say all she couldn’t yet say in words.
Then she briefly leaned his way, pressed her cheek to his shoulder. “Later,” she murmured.
And returned to the world—to the celebration of success, the triumph of good and right that encompassed and embraced all about that long board.
Later proved to be hours away, but eventually the long and often harrowing day caught up with everyone.
Their carriages were called and the Cynsters and Chillingworths left, taking Del and Deliah with them. All the others remained and, Loretta had learned, everyone was expected to stay and celebrate Christmas, now only three days away. As anyone glancing at the heavy sky could tell, there was more snow on the way. As she climbed the stairs with the other ladies, she was composing a note to her family; she was perfectly sure they’d be satisfied knowing that she was safe, and that she was spending the festive season in such august company.
Smiling, still giddy, she, Emily Ensworth, Linnet Trevission, and Minerva parted from the others at the top of the stairs. The ducal apartments lay at the end of a long wing. Closer to the stairs lay the bedchambers assigned to the three of them who
’d arrived unexpectedly with their respective men.
Loretta paused outside her door, smiled at Minerva. “I can’t thank you enough for this gown.” She spread the skirts of the magenta silk evening gown Minerva had lent her. “And all the other things, too.”
“Nonsense.” Minerva patted her arm. “It takes a certain fortitude to travel without luggage, and you’ve stood up to the rigors so wonderfully well the least I can do is assist you now.”
Linnet laughed. “You should take her at her word,” she advised Loretta, “if only to keep me company. I, too, own nothing I have on—only Emily and Deliah managed to arrive with gowns and actual luggage.”
The sound of male voices on the stairs had Minerva glancing back over her shoulder. “Indeed, but now it’s time we were all abed. Or,” she amended, a decided twinkle in her eye, “at least in our rooms. We all, after all, have our private celebrations to attend to. Good night, ladies.”
With a wave, she picked up her skirts and hurried down the corridor.
The three newcomers to the household watched the Duchess of Wolverstone reach her door and whisk through it.
“I’ve a suspicion we should take her advice to heart,” Linnet said.
Emily nodded. “Indeed. She probably qualifies as an expert.” She smiled brightly at Loretta. “Good night.”
“I was about to say sleep well, but perhaps you can do that later.” With a grin and a salute, Linnet headed after Emily.
Loretta opened her door, slowly stepped inside, and heard two doors down the corridor shut. Smiling, grinning, she shut her own door, and wondered.
Where, how—what should she do?
She’d barely formed the thought when the door opened again, and Rafe looked in. Seeing her standing dithering at the foot of the bed, he came in and shut the door.
A lamp had been left burning on a table between two windows and a fire was leaping in the grate. Between the two sources, there was light enough to see—to see that, as Rafe crossed the floor to her, his gaze, his attention, his entire being, was focused on her.