A Brazen Curiosity, page 2
part #1 of Beatrice Hyde-Clare Series
“I have never seen a shade of blue more flattering,” Flora said earnestly before realizing the comment gave credit for the felicitous arrangement to the wrong party. “I mean, I have never seen a complexion so willing to be flattered by blue as yours.”
Beatrice, observing the exchange, rolled her eyes and decided it was the most inane thing she’d ever witnessed. If she were inclined to mischief, she would have tried to focus their attention on the duke, who would no doubt find their admiration extremely irksome.
No, she thought as another idea occurred to her. She should make the duke the target of Aunt Vera’s and Mrs. Otley’s interest. Without question, he was a prize worthy of overturning thirty years of friendship to attain.
That would be far better than watching him pick quenelles of chicken with peas and fruit jelly out of his hair.
Beatrice, however, was not inclined to mischief, as she was a docile woman who had discovered by the age of seven that being dependent on the kindness of family was the same as being at their mercy. Her aunt and uncle, although indulgent with Flora and patient with Russell, expected immediate compliance from her, and being of a practical bent, she delivered it without complaint. Her ability to understand processes and to swiftly grasp the nature of problems made her an indispensable resource to all her relatives. If she sometimes resented their presumption, she was always grateful for the physical comforts they supplied. Her belly was always full and her bed was always soft and her clothes lagged behind the most fashionable trends by only a year or two, which struck her as reasonable.
If she wanted to, she could find things to be discontented about, for there was much injustice in the world, starting with her parents’ tragic drowning in a boating accident when she was five, but she saw no value in picking over circumstances she couldn’t change. It was simply easier to do what was required of her and then retreat into the privacy of her own thoughts, which she did now as Aunt Vera wrangled with her old friend and Flora worshipped her new one.
She would have preferred reading a book to examining her thoughts, but her evening gown did not have pockets for smuggling useful objects into dinner and the drawing room contained only fashion magazines. She knew there was a library on the first floor, across from the music room, for her ladyship had pointed it out when she’d shown them around the manor house soon after they arrived, but the pace of the tour had been too fast for browsing. Beatrice was moderately confident she could find it again and planned to do so at the earliest opportunity.
The gentlemen did not linger long over their port and joined them in a jovial mood, enthusiastically discussing the next day’s outing, for it seemed inconceivable to them that the rain could continue unabated.
“The wind is strong this evening,” Amersham explained, “and will almost certainly shoo away the clouds.”
Beatrice thought this observation revealed a deep misunderstanding of the way weather worked, but Lord Skeffington and his son agreed. Viscount Nuneaton speculated as to the ideal wind speed for scattering clouds, and Mr. Otley relayed the story of a river trip down the Ganges made unpleasant by strong gales.
The Duke of Kesgrave, who had refused to let even the most minor inaccuracy slip his notice during dinner that evening or tea that afternoon or breakfast that morning, said nothing. Rather than assume the infamously informed lord knew nothing about the elements, Beatrice attributed his silence to the distracted air he wore. His blue eyes, usually clear with purpose, appeared clouded with abstraction.
Maybe we’re boring him, Beatrice thought with amusement. It would serve him right, for being such a tedious pedant for so much of the day.
It was surprising to her that a man of his rank felt compelled to offer corrections at all. If she were a duchess, she would be so busy relishing the privileges of her station, she wouldn’t even notice other people. Indeed, she would spend her days doing all the things she enjoyed such as reading and playing the pianoforte and taking long walks and pestering the kitchen staff to make rout cakes and acquiring new skills, like perhaps learning how to drive a coach-and-four. She’d always admired an accomplished whipster’s touch with horses and could only assume that exerting such control was thrilling. Sadly, her own experience was limited to a sedate gambol on whatever old nag was grazing half-heartedly near the Hyde-Clare stable.
Obviously, Kesgrave, at two-and thirty, was so accustomed to advantage he didn’t notice it anymore, a development that further disgusted Beatrice.
Why was he even there? she thought in annoyance.
The other guests made sense, as Nuneaton was family and the Otleys hoped to become family. Amersham’s presence was contrived to tether the Skeffington heir to his estate, for no young man almost in possession of his majority wanted to rusticate in the country without an ally. Aunt Vera’s motives for bringing the lot of them to Cumbria were a combination of curiosity and avarice, and Beatrice didn’t doubt that her aunt was as interested in seeing her old friend’s country seat as she was in securing her fortune for Flora.
But there was no simple explanation to account for the duke’s attendance, and it felt to Beatrice as if he had been invited with the express purpose of bedeviling her.
Naturally, such a conclusion was outlandish folly, for Beatrice Hyde-Clare did not rise to the level of person one sought to bedevil, a fact that had the unfortunate effect of bedeviling her even more. Although such testiness was absurd for a woman who had long resigned herself to being a nonentity, she couldn’t quite smother it or her irritation with the duke and the rain.
No, she thought upon reconsideration, just the duke.
If she had a whole plate of saucisson de Lyon, she would fling rounds of sausage at him one at a time.
Not long after the gentlemen arrived, Lady Skeffington announced that she would retire, and Beatrice, grateful for the opportunity to end the evening, made her excuses as well. The uneventful day, with its interminable chatter and innumerable cups of tea, had exhausted her, and she expected to fall asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
And yet hours later, she was still awake.
After counting sheep, calculating complex mathematical equations in her head, and reviewing the plot of every Shakespeare play—comedies, tragedies and histories—Beatrice abandoned the effort. She climbed out of bed, lit a candle and considered her reading options, which were slight. The night before, she had finished a fascinating biography of Viscount Townshend, which had accomplished the seemingly impossible by making her want to farm turnips for the first time in her life. She’d also brought a novel with her, The Vicar of Wakefield, but was curiously uninterested in starting it.
Rather, she’d enjoyed the biography so much, she wanted another, preferably one that also addressed agricultural advances in Britain.
’Twas an arcane request, to be sure, but the extravagant library she’d seen, with its floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed with books, would certainly be able to meet it. Pensive, she climbed out of bed, lit a candle and carried it to the clock to see the time. Almost two. It seemed inconceivable to her that she had been trying to fall asleep for three hours, but there was her proof.
Clearly, a dire solution was needed.
As she slipped on her dressing gown, she tried to figure out who might still be awake in the house and come upon her suddenly. Mr. Skeffington and his friend Amersham, perhaps, as they’d been up late the night before, drinking brandy and playing cards. Russell, who considered the older men to be out-and-outers, might be with them, although he was under strict orders from his father not to gamble. If they were still playing piquet, then they would be firmly ensconced in the drawing room again, which was on another floor.
She was unlikely to bump into any of the Otleys either because all three members of the family considered a good night’s sleep to be essential to Emily’s beauty. Her mother provided a detailed account of their philosophy at breakfast that morning to explain why she and her husband had risen so late.
“We keep neither town hours nor country hours but only Otley hours,” she’d said as she dropped a third lump of sugar into her teacup.
That left only Nuneaton and Kesgrave, she thought as she opened her door and peered into the inky hallway with her candle, but all the single gentlemen were domiciled in another wing. The corridor was empty, of course, and the carpet pile seemed thick enough to muffle her footsteps. If anyone was still awake in his room, he would hear nothing.
Silently, she traversed the hallway to the staircase and scurried down the steps as quickly as possible in the darkness. At the bottom, she paused a moment to find her bearings. If she remembered the layout of the house correctly, she was at the north end of the hall and in close proximity to the music room, her ladyship’s sewing room, and library. There were also bedchambers on the first floor, but they were on the south side.
Beatrice held her candle before her to provide as much light as possible in the murky blackness and took several steps into the corridor. Enveloped by the gloom, she tried to recall what the passage had looked like in the bright light of day. Cheerful, she’d thought, with seafoam molding and a landscape painting of the park to the east.
She heard a floorboard creak, and her heart jumped in terror before she realized she was the cause of the noise.
“For God’s sake,” she muttered under her breath, “the hallway is deserted. Stop behaving as if you’ve never wandered around a strange house in pitch-blackness before.”
In truth, however, she never had. She’d wandered around Welldale House at night with a candle plenty of times, but there she knew every loose floorboard and crack in the wall.
This was different.
Even so, it wouldn’t do to let her imagination get away from her. Nothing was hiding in the corner of the hallway except tufts of dust the parlor maids missed in their ministrations.
She remembered that the room was somewhere in the middle of the hallway, so she paused halfway, raised her candle and walked to the nearest door, which, when opened, revealed the imposing shadow of the Skeffingtons’ magnificent pianoforte.
Excellent, she thought. I’ve found the music room.
That meant the library was across the hall.
Lifting her candle in the other direction, she noticed a door was already open and, stepping inside, quickly confirmed that she’d found the library. Weak light from the moon—perhaps the Earl of Amersham’s wind theory was correct after all—entered the sprawling room through a series of high, arching windows and illuminated the bookshelves, which lined the walls of the central space. In the middle of the floor, a pair of settees faced each other across a walnut pedestal table buffed to a high shine. To the left of the entrance, stairs led to a mezzanine with freestanding shelves and a cozy reading nook so inviting, she’d wanted to curl up in its armchair the moment she’d set eyes on it.
The sumptuousness of the space thrilled her, for it far surpassed the library at Welldale, which was really just another room for Aunt Vera to use to serve tea. It had books, of course, including several important first editions, but it lacked the munificence of Lakeview Hall. Indeed, its collection, a tepid selection of literature from the past one hundred years, seemed stingy by comparison, a glass of water measured against the sea.
She felt confident she’d find exactly what she was looking for here.
Now, where were the biographies?
The first section she examined contained novels from the eighteenth century, and although she was an admirer of Samuel Richardson and Jonathan Swift, she walked briskly to the next shelf. She read the spines: Paradise Lost…La Princesse de Clèves…Don Quixote.… Then John Donne, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Ben Jonson, Henry King.
Realizing the main floor was devoted entirely to fiction and poetry, she climbed the stairs to the second level and browsed the shelves: geography, religion, history. The deeper she went into the stacks, the greater the darkness, for the shelves blocked the light of the moon. She held the candle up to read the section marker—Egyptology—turned the corner and tripped on something so hard it bruised the arch of her foot through her slipper.
She gasped in surprise, the swift breath of air extinguishing her light.
Perfect, she thought, and bent down to retrieve the offending item. It was cold, hard, metallic, long.
A candlestick?
Truly?
Who would be so careless as to leave a candlestick lying in the middle of the floor? She could hardly believe Lady Skeffington would employ maids so slapdash.
As she wrapped her fingers around the stem, she felt something sticky. Some sort of jelly, perhaps? She tried to get a better look at the substance in the dimness. It was futile, however, with her candle snuffed and the moonlight too weak to extend into the aisle.
Distracted by the odd familiarity of the stickiness—maybe elderberry jam—Beatrice strode to the end of the stack where the large windows let in an iridescent glow, faint but lustrous. Once free of the shelves, she turned the corner and there, in the full light of the moon, his blond curls shining like gold and dipping onto his forehead as he looked down, was the Duke of Kesgrave.
And he was standing over the slain body of Mr. Otley.
CHAPTER TWO
Don’t scream. Don’t scream. Don’t scream.
Beatrice chanted the words silently to herself as, heart pounding like a dozen galloping horses, she stared at the dead man in the familiar emerald-green waistcoat. He was lying facedown, his nose pressed against the rug, the back of his head saturated with blood from the hole bashed into the back of his skull with a—
Oh, God.
The fingers holding the candlestick suddenly slackened in dawning horror, and she dropped the weapon that had ended the life of poor Mr. Otley. It landed on the floor with a thud, a loud, echoing, thumping clunk, she thought in dread, and the duke raised his head.
“You!” he gasped in shock.
Yes, me, she thought in terrified understanding, a witness to your villainy.
What would he do to her? Whack her on the head as he had the spice trader? Strangle her to death? Smother her with a book?
He could do anything he wanted, for he was almost a full head taller than she and finely muscled. All those afternoons sparring with Gentleman Jackson like a proper Corinthian had made him well suited to snuffing the life out of her.
What would he do with her body? Leave it in the library for one of the maids or footmen to discover? Bury it in the park? Throw it into the lake so that her family would never know what became of her? Would he forge a note in her hand announcing that she was leaving the Hyde-Clares forever and seeking her fortune on the Continent or in the Americas?
Would Aunt Vera believe such nonsense? Beatrice had certainly never demonstrated enough spirit in twenty years to make a tale like that plausible. The farthest she’d ever been on her own was the northern boundary of their Sussex estate and then only—
Run, you fool. Knock over shelves. Scream!
She knew she had to do something, but she remained there, frozen in fright, a willing lamb to the slaughter.
Goodbye, cruel world.
“Do not move an inch,” Kesgrave ordered.
Oh, the irony. Beatrice could have laughed.
But her terror was so pervasive she couldn’t manage even that measly response, she thought, disgusted by her own uselessness. Two decades under her aunt’s thumb had made her docile, yes, but surely when her life was on the line she could muster the mettle to respond.
One word of protest, for God’s sake!
And it was that sensation—a sense of sickening fear that the last emotion she would ever feel was loathing of her own insipid cowardice—that spurred her into action. She reached down quickly to retrieve the candlestick, held it at a threatening angle and said, “You don’t move an inch.”
How weak her voice sounded. If she were a murderous duke confronting her, she would cackle in delight before doing great damage to her person, and she raised the candlestick higher so that it gleamed in the moonlight.
“You will not kill me too,” she said, her voice reassuringly firm, and in that moment she not only meant it, she also felt it. She would not die there, in a deserted library in a quiet corner of Cumbria in the dead of night.
But the duke didn’t hear her, for he spoke at the exact same moment: “You’re going to kill me too?”
Although his words made no sense at all, she was struck more by his tone, by the mix of amusement and incredulousness lacing it. Plainly, he didn’t believe she was capable of wielding the instrument with the same effectiveness as he, a supposition that immediately made her bristle. His confidence was maddening. Why was he so sure? Because she was inferior in size and stature, a nonentity with no important acquaintances and few connections, and he was the large, commanding duke with every advantage one could possibly possess? Of all the conceited, smug, self-important notions in the—
And then she heard it: the meaning of his words, not just the tenor.
He’d said too.
What did he mean by that?
Who else had she killed?
She looked at the body of Mr. Otley, the blood still oozing over his ear, and then stared up at the duke with fresh horror.
He couldn’t possibly think that she had…that she could…
“I didn’t do it,” she said.
Again, they spoke at the same time, for Kesgrave issued his own denial that sounded very much like hers.
Beatrice knew at once it was a trick. He was trying to throw her off balance in an attempt to disarm her and gain the upper hand. Did he think her an utter ninny to fall for a ploy as facile as that?
She tightened her grip on the candlestick.
Seeing the movement, Kesgrave smiled wryly and shook his head. “I understand your caution, Miss Hyde-Clare, for the situation is as damning for you as it is for me. I discovered the body, but you discovered the weapon. You have no more reason to believe in my innocence than I have to believe in yours, but I’m a rational creature and can look at all the evidence and logically conclude you aren’t responsible for Otley’s unfortunate condition.” He spoke calmly and smoothly, as if determined not to upset the wild beasts in the Royal Menagerie. “I trust you are also a rational creature who will look at the evidence and likewise conclude that I’m not responsible either.”
