Axel, page 32
part #3 of Jaded Gentlemen Series
She feared he’d resist, and blather on about propriety, a widow’s good name, the late hour… Instead, he went uncomplaining to his fate, almost as if the thought of returning to Candlewick without her held no appeal.
When they’d made the journey to Stoneleigh Manor, and he’d escorted her to her bedroom, the disrobing was relaxed and unhurried, the climbing into bed the most mundane, profound comfort imaginable.
Axel took Abby in his arms, spooned himself around her, and then she was dreaming of gleaming spires, and of a gallant botanist, who galloped through golden snow to toss perfect roses at her balcony.
When she awoke in the morning, she was alone in the bed and had no evidence that she’d passed the entire night in Axel’s tender embrace.
* * *
Clemson’s epistle delicately suggested that a deanship for Axel was a strong possibility, provided the contents of Candlewick’s botanical library were entrusted to academic hands—preferably Clemson’s.
A few months ago, Axel would have been packing up his treasured books, thanking his lucky stars, and marveling at what a few letters from a deceased empress could do for a fellow’s academic aspirations.
Now, he simply missed Abigail. He’d written his report, though the gaps in it bothered him—was there a second safe? If so, what was in it? How had Stoneleigh amassed all that wealth—lucky investments? Chance wagers? Inherited wealth of which he’d kept Abigail in ignorance?
In the space of a week, pondering these questions had given Axel the ability to nearly stop time. The library clock had moved only twenty minutes past the hour of ten in the evening since he’d sat down to deal with correspondence that had been piling up for days.
Twenty-two minutes past the hour saw him sorting through letters, though only one caught his attention, from Nicholas, who’d taken up residence in London in anticipation of the Season.
If Nick had found a bride already…
Axel sat for a moment in a library into which he no longer bothered bringing cut roses. He’s sent a bouquet to Abigail days ago, after Sir Dewey’s difficult disclosures had been shared.
Axel had risen from a night of rest in Abigail’s arms, grateful that she was safe, but even more determined that her future remain her own to command. Since then, he’d had one note from her, thanking him for the flowers. She’d sent back all but two of the footmen, though every male on Axel’s staff was in a decline due to Hennessey’s departure.
“I am in a decline,” Axel informed the pile of correspondence.
He tended his roses, he made notes for his herbal, he dutifully corresponded with his sons, and had taken his nephews out for a meal. He’d even gone to services hoping to see Abigail, but she was trading on her bereavement—or out of charity with Weekes—and eschewing church.
Perhaps she’d been resting… or avoiding a man whose ambitions she’d greatly admired.
“Dratted ambition. May a blight, a smut, and black spot plague all academic ambitions.”
Though why shouldn’t Abigail admire Axel’s ambitions? He’d fed, watered, and tended them as if they were the last roses in his possession, though now, he’d give anything to be the blossom Abigail chose to take up to her bedroom at night.
“I’m growing daft.” Also lonely. Axel slit open Nick’s letter.
Greetings, Professor,
The accompanying parcel includes a sample of the goods Gregory Stoneleigh was importing for distribution to various establishments in London, some of those establishments quite disreputable. One understands why the estimable Sir Dewey would eschew such trade. You will please dissuade my Abigail from marrying such an honorable prig, by the way. If I’m to lose her to anybody, it had better be you.
Those responsible for handling Stoneleigh’s goods have become curiously unavailable for interviewing, and Gervaise Stoneleigh has no intention of continuing his late father’s commercial enterprise.
When you’ve realized that Oxford celibacy will be a curse compared to what you could have with Abigail, please do bring your new wife to visit the capital. My flirting skills grow apace, though I have only dear Buttercup’s company upon which to practice them. She, alas, is difficult to impress, but at least she has no designs on my freedom.
I remain, as ever, your very dearest,
Wee Nick
“Nicholas, I love you like a brother, but you are fool.” A fine opening statement for a long overdue lecture.
Axel uncapped the ink sitting on the standish, took out a sheet of paper, and trimmed the quill pen, for Nick’s note wanted answering.
Nick feared that any wife he chose would kidnap his every hour, commandeer his every moment, and begrudge him a quiet morning on horseback. As Matthew had pointed out, the right female, a sensible woman with a good heart and her own affairs to tend to, would never—
A queerish feeling settled over Axel. Not foreboding, and not the warm shivers, either. More of a dawning awareness, like prescience. An image came to his mind, of himself, pacing back and forth before the mounting block, insisting to a mulish Hennessey that Abigail Stoneleigh be given control over every detail over her life, every moment of her day.
“I am an idiot,” Axel announced to the room at large. “Abigail did not need anybody to vindicate her right to fashion a life of her own choosing. Abigail has a fine, if recently acquired, sense of her own preferences. I am the one who must work at both divining and expressing my needs and desires.”
Insight tumbled upon insight, as Axel recalled himself as the younger Belmont son, largely overlooked in the midst of his mother’s drama. He’d sought the quiet of the woods, where he’d wandered for hours, ostensibly collecting botanical specimens while he’d in truth searched for a sense of self-possession.
Then he’d been the youthful husband, nonplussed by his wife’s demanding personality. Then he’d become a widowed father with two boys to raise and every eligible woman in the shire determined to supervise him in that undertaking.
“I needed better thorns where the ladies were concerned,” he said, setting the quill down. “I needed better judgment… I needed…” All manner of metaphors came to mind, but they all pointed to the same conclusion—one Matthew had tried to drive home.
Abigail saw the real man and supported his dreams.
“I need Abigail.”
This admission lifted a great weight from Axel’s heart, and replaced it with a hope. His need for her was adult, measured, reasonable, and only slightly tinged with desperation. He would not fall to pieces without Abigail—she hadn’t fallen to pieces with him, clearly—but he’d be less than entirely happy without her.
Now there was an opening statement upon which a learned and smitten fellow might build the most important lecture he ever presented. Axel crossed to the sideboard, thinking to fortify himself with a tot of courage, when he noticed the parcel Nick had sent up from London.
Crafting a diatribe that would be part marriage proposal, part explanation, and part apology would require many drafts, and Nick’s parcel was a loose end, like botanical specimens yet to be catalogued and preserved.
Brown paper and plain twine wrapped about a box about two feet square.
“Best have a look.”
Axel used the penknife to slit the twine, tossed the twine into the fire, and did likewise with the paper. The box held a lovely peacock blue silk shawl, a pair of worked brass candlesticks, a fan bearing a painting of a crouching tiger, several unremarkable books of naughty sketches, and a sandalwood box.
That smaller box appeared at first to be filled with chopped straw, more fodder for the fire, until a length of cool, green jade fell into Axel’s hand.
“Hilarious, Nicholas. Disreputable establishments, indeed.”
The jade was shaped to emulate the erect phallus, its surface scored with a pattern of leaves, lotus blossoms, and vines. Axel set the box on the sideboard and brought the jade to the desk.
The carving was intricate, raising the piece to the level of erotic art. And yet, to a botanist’s eye, something was… off. The pattern was stylized, of course, but the weight… Jade was heavy, and this…
Axel took up a quizzing glass, peering at the looping, curving design, until he could make out one line scored more heavily than the others. That single carved line disrupted an otherwise consistent pattern of opposite, alternating leaves, and suggested…
A stout twist opened the jade into top and bottom, and a heap of fine white powder poured onto Axel’s desk blotter. He touched a finger to the powder, then to the tip of his tongue.
Bitterness came first, followed by a cool sensation that turned hot, then numb.
“God in heaven.”
The clock struck the half hour as Axel yanked the bell-pull.
“Have Ivan saddled,” he informed the footman who showed up with two buttons undone on his jacket. “And tell Wheeler to please hurry.”
Somewhere in Abigail’s house, Stoneleigh had very likely secreted a king’s ransom in opium. He’d not only been addicted to the stuff, he’d been trafficking in it, and the man who’d abetted the colonel’s smuggling was still in Abigail’s employment.
* * *
Colonel Brandon was not the stuff of a restless widow’s dreams. Mr. Darcy hadn’t been worth a second read, and Mrs. Radcliffe lacked… credibility. If only Abby had thought to ask for the loan of some of Axel’s herbals and treatises, she might be whiling away her evening tormenting herself in earnest.
A week had gone by, and she’d had… a polite note thanking her for the loan of Grandpapa’s journal. She’d all but run out of tasks for the Candlewick footmen to do. Gregory’s bedroom had been reduced to a cold empty space, the windows yet open because Abigail could order they be kept so.
Axel might have some ideas for what to do with that apartment, but the professor was apparently busy with his herbal and his roses. Hennessey had shared that much servants’ gossip from Candlewick, before Abby’s dignity had asserted itself.
Abby also refused to permit herself a few drops of the poppy to ease sleep nearer, because… just because. Another book would have to do until she could order Axel’s treatises by mail from one of the shops in town.
She’d spent fruitless hours searching for the second safe Gregory had secreted somewhere on the premises, though her sense of urgency about that task had ebbed given Sir Dewey’s explanations.
Not a confession, never that.
“I’ve thought about Mr. Belmont,” she informed her cat. She’d limited herself to two feline companions, for starters. Eros sat at the foot of her bed, looking white, fluffy, and inscrutable. “For an entire week I’ve thought about him. Pride be damned, I know what and who I want. If Axel Belmont must have his fellowships, then I’ll wish him the joy of them, provided he also makes me the merriest widow in the shire.”
Psyche hopped onto the bed, already purring. Abby had promoted them from the home farm because they resembled the cats in the paintings she’d slipped past Gregory’s guard all those years ago. Confident, dignified, luxuriously healthy, proud… everything Abigail had not been when she’d married Gregory. She loved these cats, loved allowing them onto her bed, or wherever she pleased to settle herself throughout the day.
A thought caught in the gears of her imagination, and insight flared up like a vigorous green shoot in a pot of rich earth.
“I know where that damned safe is,” Abby said, pushing off the bed and grabbing a night-robe. Her room was toasty—at all hours, her room was toasty—but the corridors were chilly, and Gregory’s apartments were downright frigid.
“I know where that safe is, and may Gregory burn in hell for abusing my sensibilities yet again.”
She was out the door, past the exhausted footman slumped in his chair at the end of the corridor, and crossing to the family wing when the recollection of her last encounter with Axel Belmont stopped her.
She knew where the safe was, but she also knew that even at this late hour, her surest ally and champion would come if she sought his aid. Abby roused the footman, gave him quiet instructions, then turned her steps toward the coldest corridor in the house.
* * *
All Axel could think as he rounded the top of the Stoneleigh Manor main stairs, was that Abigail had best be whole and hale, or more murder would be done under this roof. On the heels of that sentiment, he caught sight of something pale whipping around the first turning of the corridor to his right.
The hem of a nightgown? Stoneleigh’s ghost? In Axel’s present mood, he wasn’t above shooting a ghost, nor lecturing one right back to eternal perdition. He pursued as quickly as silence allowed, making the next turn only to see nightmares come back to life.
Abigail stood motionless, this time before the alcove outside Gregory’s apartments. A painting of a white cat asleep in the sun rested against the floor, while a man with his back to her once again emptied the contents of a safe.
Axel crept up behind Abigail, just as she took a noiseless step away from the intruder. She nearly bumped into Axel, but something—his scent perhaps?—warned her to look behind her. She stepped aside—the lady had the most wonderful inclination to common sense—and gave Axel a clear shot.
“Turn around, Mr. Ambers,” Axel said, “and explain yourself.”
Ambers complied slowly, his expression disdainful. “Well, if it isn’t the king’s buffoon and the charming widow. You can put the gun down, Mr. Belmont. I haven’t killed anybody, and you’ll never be able to prove otherwise.”
Axel brought the gun up. “A buffoon I may be, but you insult the lady at your peril. The use of force to apprehend a fleeing felon is well within my authority—deadly force, as it happens.”
“What a cheering thought,” Abigail said. “You’re trespassing, Mr. Ambers. I’d be very surprised if that safe doesn’t hold valuables, suggesting theft is also among your accomplishments. Insulting the man who will decide what you’re charged with doesn’t strike me as a very smart.”
Insulting the lady of the house in Axel’s hearing would be downright imbecilic.
“Careful Ambers,” Axel said. “If your temper is troubling you, please recall my gun is loaded. I can also charge you with conspiracy to commit murder.”
Ambers yanked down his waistcoat. “I have done nothing wrong, and when my father hears of this, you’ll regret it, Belmont.”
“This would be some fellow with a title?” Axel suggested. “A man who apparently paid for you to have a gentleman’s education? For you are well spoken, literate, can curse in French, have passable taste in clothing, and fine penmanship, all of which made you an ideal accomplice in smuggling endeavors. Oh, and I forgot—you also bother the maids, proof positive of titled antecedents.”
Axel had the fool’s attention now, and Abigail was looking positively impressed. Also a tad chilly, which meant the discussion needed to be brief.
“See here, Belmont. I am the son of no less person than Henry Ambers, eleventh Baron of—”
“Now, Ambers,” Axel chided. “His lordship will be very disappointed to learn that his son was involved in trafficking opium… smuggling being a hanging felony, of course. Though perhaps his lordship would be more upset to learn that you were procuring the poison that very nearly brought Mrs. Stoneleigh to her eternal reward. Accessory before the fact, or conspiracy, that is the question.”
Ambers’s air of bravado faltered, but Axel’s discourse wasn’t nearly concluded.
“Farleyer referred to you as a man of business,” he went on, “which I took for a reasonable error, given your airs and graces. I wondered why Stoneleigh granted his head groom the use of a lovely cottage. I should also have wondered why a glorified stable boy rode prime horseflesh, dressed to the nines, and swilled brandy at the Weasel rather than good English ale.”
“Excellent points,” Abigail said. “What I note now is that Ambers needs to be removed from the premises, Mr. Belmont.”
Hennessey, flanked by Mrs. Jensen, Heath, and Jeffries, all in evening dishabille, came up on Axel’s right.
“Reinforcements,” Axel said. “My thanks, Mrs. Stoneleigh.”
“Madam sent a summons below stairs,” Jeffries said. “Miss Hennessey grasped the situation when madam was not in her apartment. Heath and I are happy to assist, Mr. Belmont.”
“As am I,” Mrs. Jensen added, brandishing a skillet.
Hennessey said nothing, but her eyes promised a slow, painful demise to Stoneleigh’s familiar.
“Lock Mr. Ambers in a loose box stall,” Axel said. “Give him a blanket or two, water if he asks for it. Tomorrow, take him to the Weasel and he’ll be bound over for the assizes at the next parlor session.”
“You can’t prove anything,” Ambers said, taking a step back and bumping into the safe’s open door. “I wasn’t even in the house when Stoneleigh died. I can hardly pass over the threshold here without Mrs. Jensen having me followed by a footman, else I might have found this safe sooner. All I want is the sum Stoneleigh promised me for years of loyal service.”
Oh, right. Years of loyal service disregarding the law, the Commandments, and common decency.
“Heath, Jeffries, be careful,” Axel cautioned. “Ambers go peacefully, and consider writing a confession. You’re guilty of trespassing, attempted theft, possibly embezzlement, smuggling, collusion, obstructing a magistrate in the prosecution of his lawful duties… I might suggest the courts sentence you to transportation if you show remorse.”
That silenced the culprit, for when transportation loomed as a man’s best hope, the situation was dire indeed.
Heath and Jeffries escorted Ambers down the steps, Mrs. Jensen sniffing indignantly as they passed.
“I wondered why he was always in the house during madam’s absence,” Mrs. Jensen said. “For years, he took his meals at his own table, but once Shreve left, there’s Ambers, bothering my maids, and turning up at all hours where he ought not to be.”
