Badger said, “We went to the stables after I found Mr. Spears and told him you and his lordship were gone and what I suspected. Not that it was necessarily Mr. Trevor, you understand, just that there’d been foul play, as Mr. Kemble of Drury Lane calls it, and sure enough, both Stanley and Birdie were gone. Lambkin was fit to eat the horseshoe nails, my lord, utterly stammering he was with confusion and mental turmoil. Ah, yes, I tracked you here,” he added simply, as if it were the most common ability on earth.
Marcus looked from one of them to the other. “You tracked us here, Badger? This is beyond what you are supposed to be able to do. You are the Duchess’s valet. You are our cook. You know a lot about medicines. Now I hear that you tracked Stanley and Birdie here?”
“Well, my lord, it wasn’t all that difficult, truth be told. You see, Stanley has a strange shoe, put on by the Duchess’s father, some three years ago, a shoe in the shape of a star. Why, you might ask? I haven’t the foggiest notion. It wasn’t difficult, as I said, to follow you and find you here in old MacGuildy’s barn. Poor old man, dead now and no one cares that this barn is falling apart and that’s why Trevor Wyndham brought you here. He rode Clancy around the estate many, many hours as I recall.”
North shook his head. “All I had to do was follow orders, Marcus. These two had everything well in hand. I’m sorry I left, Marcus. Damnation, I knew that the danger wasn’t over by a long shot.”
“You, North, are just angry because you missed finding the treasure with us,” Marcus said, and punched his friend in the arm.
“Alas, that’s part of it, I fear.?
??
Spears said, “However, my lord, having you at our side gave us additional confidence. In your anger, you wore a dark, quite menacing look that would challenge the devil himself.”
There suddenly came a loud shriek from the barn door.
“Ho! I knew we’d find you! Damn you, Mr. Spears, and damn you even more, Mr. Badger, I knew we’d find you! Ah, and Lord Chilton, well damn you as well, you sneaking lordship! Oh, hell and the devil, all the fun’s over! It isn’t fair, I’ve missed all of it.”
The Duchess looked at Maggie, dragging a red-faced Sampson behind her, then looked up at her husband’s astonished face. “How,” she asked, giggling, her breath warm against his throat, “how could you ever imagine that Maggie would willingly miss any of the fun?”
“Ho! What’s this? Good God, it’s Mr. Trevor, and he’s sprawled in a very ungentlemanly fashion on the ground. Whatever has happened?”
Epilogue
IT WAS LATE that night, a night of warmth and closeness and lingering fear and the weight of staggering loss, that Marcus, the Duchess, and all their friends, who just happened to be their servants, were seated in the dining room, the earl having insisted that all of them dine together, at least this evening, despite Spears’s vehement and quite vocal disapproval.
Marcus’s mother, bless her heart, had hauled Aunt Gweneth and the Twins off to her own sitting room and told them that it was their own private banquet, that the earl was a man with odd notions that must be respected since he was the head of the Wyndham family, and thus they would conduct their own private party and leave the earl and the Duchess to theirs. She frowned at Fanny, who had the temerity to point out that Lord Chilton wasn’t a servant and he was allowed at their party.
When Badger’s smiling kitchen minions brought out the bottle of chilled champagne, Sampson, the Wyndham butler for fifteen years, a man of astute judgment, reserved demeanor and sober of mien, rose, cleared his throat and announced, “My lords, my lady, Mr. Badger and Mr. Spears, I should very much like to make an announcement. Miss Maggie will be remaining here with the Duchess as her personal maid. I will also be remaining at Chase Park as butler.”
He paused and Marcus frowned. “I should hope so, unless, naturally, you feel that there’s been too much impropriety, too much disorder and untidiness in a nobleman’s house.”
Sampson cleared his throat again. “That isn’t quite what I meant, my lord. Actually, what I meant to say and what I shall say now is that Miss Maggie has agreed to become Mrs. Glenroyale Sampson. That, my lord, er, is my given name.”
“Oh my,” the Duchess said. She rose from her chair and walked to Maggie, leaned down and hugged her. “Congratulations, my dear. It’s wonderful. Sampson is a very fine man. And that emerald necklace looks marvelous on you.”
Maggie, laughing, looking like a coquette while she batted her long eyelashes at the earl, said to the Duchess, “Well, he’s a man of great stability, you know, not given to haring off to mills to see those poor men pound each other to death with their fists, or drinking too much ale at that horried inn in Bramberly, or gambling away all his coin at the nest of vipers in Eglington. Yes, I’ve decided it’s better to permanently settle down with a stable man, one who also thinks with his head and not just with his—well, never mind that. In any case, I’ve decided not to return to the stage in London.”
“He is stable,” Badger said. “He does think with his head. He will be faithful. He will take good care of Maggie. He will be tolerant of her occasional flirtatious lapses. Mr. Spears assures me that Mr. Sampson is just what all of us will admire.”
“I, for one,” North said, “certainly admire his sang froid. I was witness to his dealings with an impertinent tradesman just yesterday, Marcus. The man was apologizing, ready to kiss Sampson’s highly polished boots before he left.”
“Good God,” Marcus said. “Duchess, what do you think of this?”
“I think,” she said, grinning around the earl’s huge table, “that Sampson is quite the luckiest man in the world.”
“That is most kind of you to say so, Duchess,” Sampson said, clearing his throat yet one more time, “but I beg you to consider that Maggie here is also a very lucky lady. She saved Mr. Badger’s life and look what wonderful things have transpired for her in reward for her outstanding good deed. She will have me as her husband and Mr. Spears and Mr. Badger as cohorts. Everyone needs cohorts in life, Duchess, everyone.”
“A husband isn’t a bad thing to have either,” the Duchess said.
“Hear, hear,” said Maggie, winking at the earl, “and his lordship here is shaping up quite nicely, don’t you think so, Mr. Spears?”
“Indeed, Maggie, indeed.”
The earl flung up his hands and yelled for another bottle of champagne. He turned to Lord Chilton, who was chewing on Badger’s fruit meringue on a sponge biscuit. “Well, North, does all this marital bliss warm your sinner’s heart? Make you want to consider some leg shackles yourself?”
North took his time swallowing. He looked around the table. He smiled at the Duchess. “Actually, Marcus, all this overflowing of mating euphoria quite makes me want to hare off to that mill Maggie spoke about. Tomorrow, I think. I want to put a good five miles between me and the rest of you by noon. I’ve done my visiting now and gotten my fill of excitement, jollity, and familial closeness. Now I want to go home to Cornwall and brood in solitude, hug my gloom close to my breast and no one else’s. In short, I will remain as I am, alone and quite happy with my own black cloud and seclusion. Yes, I’ll walk the moors with my dogs and be quite as somber in my thoughts as any good man should be.”