The Regency Redgraves: What an Earl Wants / What a Lady Needs / What a Gentleman Desires / What a Hero Dares

“Richard was correct in his assessment. You are your father’s son, aren’t you, Gideon? Does nothing save rutting occupy your mind for more than a minute?”

“You—” He withdrew his hands, closing his mouth on the word bitch, and buttoned her gown as impersonally as he’d pull on his own boots. He’d figure her out, there would come a day when he called the shots, when she would be rebuffed, left feeling like a pleading, bleating fool. But clearly, he told himself, not yet.

“Thank you,” she said as she lowered her hands, and her luxurious curls tumbled free past her shoulders. She then immediately sat down and looked up at him, clear-eyed and composed, as if they’d just come upstairs, and nothing had happened between them. “How do you know my father and Clarissa were murdered?”

That she’d traded her body for information was clear now. She’d let him have her so that they could get down to business. A cold woman.

Gideon took up his wineglass once more. He could play the game as coolly as she did, better. He’d had considerable practice. “I don’t know if your stepmother was deliberately killed. She may simply have had the misfortune to be in the coach. But Turner was definitely murdered. Their hired coach supposedly overturned at night, with the full, lit coach lanterns breaking, the oil spilling out and igniting. Trapped inside the coach, your father and his wife were burned to death.”

By now, Jessica had her hand to her mouth, finally shaken out of her reserve. “My God. I always believed he was destined for hellfire. But not while he was still aboveground. Yet, clearly an accident. Why did you question it?”

Gideon set down his wineglass. “I was already aware of other deaths, other members of the Society perishing in accidents. All, like your father, wearing the rose. Orford, last spring, shot by mistake by another hunter in his party—just whom, nobody could say, as they were all drunk, all shooting as fast as their bearers could load for them. Sir George Dunmore drowned six months ago after somehow toppling into the Channel from a friend’s yacht in the middle of the night, the conclusion being that he must have slipped on the rainwet deck and tumbled overboard.”

“Both plausible conclusions,” Jessica said. “But there was another one?”

“Yes, the one that finally aroused my suspicions. A few months later it was Baron Harden’s turn to be careless. He took a tumble down a dark flight of stairs after leaving his mistress. When I heard of your father’s accident just outside London, most especially the part about the coach lamps, I was already past believing all these accidents were a matter of coincidence. I immediately traveled to the estate, to view the bodies for myself before they were interred.”

Jessica’s brown eyes widened. “That’s ghoulish. How could you even look at them?”

He was in no mood to tread softly. “The bodies were in no fit condition to be laid out in the house, thankfully. So the answer to your how is, with a fat bribe to the groom guarding the remains in the stables until the interment, my extremely discreet physician brought along for his expertise, my valet, Gibbons, holding up a lantern for us, handkerchiefs tied around all our faces and wearing riding gloves we immediately consigned to the waste bin.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “I believe I was asking a rhetorical question. But thank you for that explanation. You are a determined man, aren’t you?”

“When I want answers, yes, I go after them. They actually didn’t die in the fire, Jessica. From what my physician could tell, admitting my own limited contact with dead bodies, they’d both sustained pistol shots to their skulls. Fire doesn’t melt bones, most of all, the skull. With a little prodding at the remains, the holes were not that difficult to spot.”

Jessica had gone rather pale. “Shot. Not an accident at all. At least they didn’t burn, thank God.”

“No, the fire was meant to obscure the wounds. The coachman, alas, was long gone, so I couldn’t question him.”

“Had he shot them? Perhaps set the coach on fire to cover what he was about. A robbery, I would suppose?”

Gideon shook his head, amazed at her sangfroid. She was shocked, but she showed no signs of subsiding into a swoon; her mind was ticking along in a rational fashion. “Anything’s possible. Am I being too suspicious, Jessica?”

“No,” she said quietly. “My father was always tight with his purse, so the fact he’d hired a coach rather than bring his own cattle and servants to London isn’t surprising. Lord only knows who he hired. Their deaths could have been a result of a robbery, but when combined with the other supposed accidents? All of the men members of your father’s Society?”

“They wore the rose. To me, that links them. Four accidents stretches coincidence a step too far.”

“I only wonder why he and his wife were traveling to London at that time of year. No one can count on the roads being anything but snow-filled or quagmires. Did your sleuthing extend to finding an answer to that question?”

“No, but you’re right, I should have thought of that. I was in London to settle some financial affairs for my former ward, turning them over to her bridegroom’s man of business, or else I wouldn’t have been in town myself.”

“Lucky for you, I suppose, and your theories.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Damn, why didn’t I think to ask myself that question?”

“How lowering to discover one isn’t omnipotent, Gideon,” she said sweetly, so that he glared at her. She shrugged. “I was only thinking it would be interesting to know their reason for the journey. A fanciful mind might even consider the notion they were on their way to a meeting of the Society you’re so certain was dissolved two decades ago.”

This wasn’t the first time she’d alluded to that possibility. He might as well tell her the rest.

“We’ve had some curious happenings at Redgrave Manor in the past year. Glimpses of lit lanterns moving through the estate at night, strange holes appearing inside the greenhouse which, when investigated, seem very much to have been caused by the cave-in of some sort of tunnel being dug beneath it. Oh, yes, and my father’s crypt was broken into. His remains have gone missing.”

“What?”

Well, at last! He had begun to wonder if the woman was completely unflappable.

“Yes, that was very much my reaction, as well. However, in the interests of full and honest disclosure, save for the rare sightings of curious lights at night this past month or more—possibly poachers—I can’t for certain say when the tunnel was dug, but only when that portion of it collapsed. As for the theft of my father’s body, that was only discovered when lightning struck a nearby tree and it fell, a large branch breaking one of the stained glass windows. We none of us enter the mausoleum unless it’s to shelve another Redgrave—we’ve got enough of them in there that we stack them up like bolts of cloth in a Bond Street shop, you see, and then wall them in. The stone used to wall up Barry was on the floor of the crypt, broken in two, the body gone. But again, the theft could have occurred any time in the past twenty years.”

Jessica was quiet for some time, her hands twisting in her lap, before she looked at Gideon again. “Do…do you think perhaps they took him—your father, that is—almost immediately? To, um, to perform their own ceremony? Oh, Lord, that’s disgusting.”

“And only one of several possibilities,” Gideon said, just voicing his thoughts of the past few months aloud easing his mind somewhat. “To whit—propping him up on some throne to overlook their activities? To grind up his bones into powder, mix that in with sheep’s blood or some such ridiculousness, and drink the man? To slice him up, as they did the saints of yore, with each member then blessed to carry a knucklebone as a memento, a holy relic? Don’t answer yet—I’ve had time to consider more than that. There’s one more. Did his followers, as my father was the acknowledged leader, believe the supposed treasure was interred with his bones, and come looking for it?”

Jessica held up her hand to stop him. “Not that last one, surely. A treasure? Why would your family do that? And why would anyone take the body with them, whether there was some sort of treasure to be found there or not?”

“I agree. It was only one of many possibilities, and a rather feeble one at that. However, I do believe, after years of not believing it, there may be some sort of treasure. Some precious gem perhaps, made a part of a larger golden rose, the symbol of the Society? Or something they prayed to—mayhap an enormous diamond stuck into the fat belly of a pagan idol?”

Jessica tucked her legs up on the couch, as if prepared to stay there all night, until she’d somehow solved the problem that so confounded him. “But wouldn’t every member of the Society know the location of that sort of thing? They all gathered for their—I hate saying ceremonies. The word is too respectable for what they did.”

“Drunken orgies?” Gideon offered. “Debaucheries? Deflowerings of whores paid handsomely to pretend they were intact innocents being offered up for some carefully orchestrated sacrifice? The open passing around of wives in some hope of alleviating the boredom of marital fidelity? Christ! Their own wives. Were they willing or unwilling, do you think?”

She shot him a dark glance that made him want to know more of what had happened to have her run off with James Linden. “I’m not convinced the members cared. All done in praise of the devil.”

“Devil worship. Imitators of Sir Francis Dashwood and his ilk, but without any cursory bow to a pretense of an interest in the intellectual. we’re back to that. I’d rather think them drunks and idiots. Otherwise I’d have to believe my father—my father!—discovered a way to make them all able to believe they were better than they were, acting in some higher purpose. Still, it’s possible. I don’t know how he’d have accomplished it, how any one person manages to twist minds to do his every bidding, no matter how vile, but he could have managed it.”

“Until his wife shot him in the back when he was about to duel down her lover,” Jessica said quietly. “I’m sorry. Was…the man one of the Society?”

“I can’t say anything for certain. I was only nine years old at the time. I thought he was my new tutor, a Frenchman who’d fled France immediately after the fall of the Bastille. He’d only been at the Manor for a few weeks before both he and my mother were gone.”

“Again, I’m sorry, Gideon. Not that your father was shot, I can’t honestly say that, but that you lost your mother. I’m certain she didn’t want to leave you. She must have felt she had no choice.”

“I wonder if she would have made that choice if she could have known she and her lover would be swept up in the Terror two years later and sent to the guillotine. As someone reminded me just today, in the end the bill must always be paid.”

For a moment, he could see his mother in his mind’s eye. Beautiful, loving, but sad. Her eyes had always been so sad. There had been times he could coax a smile from her, but those times had been seldom. He treasured those few good memories. Strangely, he remembered his father only through the painting of him as a young man that hung in the portrait gallery.

Damn, but this woman was getting to him. He never thought about the boy he’d been twenty years ago. He’d never spoken of any of this. Not with his siblings, not with his grandmother. He’d shut it all down, all he’d felt at the time, all he’d so carefully avoided since he’d been awakened to the news of what had happened just before dawn that long-ago morning. Max and Val had been too young, and Katherine only an infant. He’d been the only one to really understand what dead meant, what gone meant.

Jessica got to her feet. “So what bill has come due for the members of the Society?”

Gideon snapped himself back to attention.

“I can think of one theory. It’s not as if any of them could be proud of what they’ve done, and want it out in the world. The sins of relatively young men, trotted out for an airing twenty years later, could be more than embarrassing. Add even the whisper of devil worship to the mix, and the secret becomes dangerous. Your father sat in Parliament, remember. Someone may be blackmailing the others, or simply killing them off to silence them. I can’t even be sure how many of them there are. There could be some who no longer wear the rose.”

“Thirteen,” Jessica said quietly. “The devil’s dozen. At any time, there must be thirteen. James told me that much. One dies, two die, they must be replaced, or there can be no ceremonies. I promise you, they were still active five years ago. There could have been several new members since your father’s time. The usual method was to draw from the blood relatives of the members. And, of course, a member’s eldest son inherited his father’s position by right.”

Gideon looked at her curiously. One day they’d have to speak more of this James Linden. “No one has ever approached me.”

“You were a child when your father…died. As an adult, I doubt anyone would have dared. You’re a rather formidable man, Gideon.”

He looked at her in sudden realization. “Adam.”