Page 110 of The Captive
“Complicated how?”
Life had been so much easier when one’s enemies could be murdered outright.
“I must wait to get my hands on the personal estate until the lawyers have done with their fussing.”
“They should be able to turn loose enough money to maintain the estate,” Mercia said. “Bloody vultures. If you need funds, you have only to say.”
“Good of you.”
The words cost him, but Marcus fiddled with his horse’s mane in an effort to appear appropriately self-conscious.
“I can put in a word at the law offices for you if like. I might be going up to Town in the next few weeks, in any case.”
This was news. “For the opening session of the Lords?”
“Personal business. If I do go, I’d appreciate your spending some time at Severn in my absence.”
“Particularly if it’s during that exercise in manual labor, frustration, and sweat known as harvest, I can accommodate you. Does this have to do with our struggling countess?”
For whom Marcus did, in fact, have a few stirrings of genuine pity.
For the first time in that entire day, Mercia’s eyes looked bleak, lost even.
“Some misfortune has befallen her since Greendale’s death,” he said.
Delightful.“I heard the inquest grew unnecessarily nasty. Unfortunate, but it’s behind her now. If I’d been on hand, things might have gone differently.”
Verydifferently.
“I don’t believe she was ever truly under suspicion.” Mercia drew his horse up in the stable yard, and neither man nor beast looked the least bit fatigued, whereas Marcus had been spurring his gelding for the last three miles. “She’s had a string of accidents that haven’t struck me as accidents.”
What were cousins for, if not to confide in? “Somebody means her harm?”
“Somebody means her dead.”
In terse words, he recounted a coach wheel coming loose, a cut girth, and a near miss with poison, any one of which should have been adequate to end the countess’s life.
But they hadn’t been.
“I rather hope Gillian’s characterization of events is the accurate one,” Marcus said. “Accidents, or a jealous mistress cut out of Greendale’s will.”
“In which case, having run off the kitchen maid, Gilly is safe enough at Severn.”
Gilly?
“Where she can dote on Lady Lucille,” Marcus said, though anybody doting on the girl was not a sanguine thought. “Send word, and I will be only too happy to enjoy your hospitality for as long as you need me.” The words sounded sincere, because they were sincere. Perhaps the first sincere thing he’d said all day.
“I appreciate it.” The duke crossed his wrists over the pommel. “I meant what I said about a loan, Marcus. We’re family, you looked in on my family for me, looked after my horse, held the reins while I was rotting away on a French mountainside. I owe you.”
Marcus swung out of the saddle and handed the tired gelding off to a stableboy. Mercia’s thanks should have gratified, but they only enraged. “Guarding your back was my privilege, and a loan won’t be necessary.”
“Be stubborn then, it’s a family virtue.”
“Or a vice,” Marcus said, particularly when exhibited by a captive of the French. “Stubbornness can definitely be a vice.”
Mercia smiled and cantered off, looking handsome, happy, and too goddamned healthy for words. Stubbornness might be a vice, but it was one they shared. Marcus took himself up to the house and bellowed for his secretary. That worthy came scurrying up from the kitchen and bowed to his master.
“I need to write a letter to Robert Girard, St. Clair House, on Ambrose Court in Mayfair. Have it couriered, and you’re to forget every bloody word of it before you leave this room.”
