Lord of Scoundrels (Scoundrels 3)

She bent close to the thick glass. “Mrs. Ingleby,” she said sharply. “Come here and tell me what that is.”

The housekeeper hurried across the room to the west-facing window. She looked out. Then her hand went to her throat. “Mercy on us. That must be the little gatehouse, my lady. And it looks to be…on fire.”

The alarm was sounded immediately, and the house swiftly emptied as its inhabitants raced out to the gatehouse.

The small pepperbox structure guarded one of Athcourt’s lesser-used gates. Its gatekeeper normally spent Sunday evenings at a prayer meeting. If it burnt to the ground—which was likely, for the fire must rise high before anyone could see it—the loss would be no catastrophe.

However, His Lordship’s timber yard was not far from that gate. If the fire spread thither, the timber stacks would be lost, along with the sheds filled with sawyers’ tools. Since the timberyard supplied the lumber used to build and repair the homes of most of the estate’s dependents, the fire was a community concern, drawing every able-bodied man, woman, and child from the village as well.

Everything happened, in other words, just as Charity Graves had promised Vawtry it would.

All of the small world of Athton descended upon the blazing gatehouse. In the excitement, Vawtry had no difficulty slipping into Lord Dain’s house unnoticed.

It was not as easy, though, as it would have been a week hence, as originally planned. For one, Vawtry couldn’t pick his moment, but had to set the fire soon after a rainstorm. The wood and stone pepperbox was stubbornly slow to take fire at all, let alone blaze up to the heights necessary to be seen from miles around. Thanks to the damp, the blaze would also be slow to spread, which meant it would be under control a good deal more quickly than was comfortable for Mr. Vawtry.

Furthermore, the original scheme had required him only to make the conflagration. Charity had been responsible for getting into Athcourt and making off with the icon. Instead, Mr. Vawtry was obliged to play both roles, which meant a mad race from one end of the estate to the other—all the while praying the concealing darkness wouldn’t also conceal an obstacle that would cause him to break his neck.

Thirdly, Charity had been in the house several times and knew the general layout. Vawtry had been there once, for the previous marquess’s funeral, and one overnight stay was not enough to master the scores of stairways and passages of one of the largest houses in England.

The good news was that, as Charity had promised, no one had bothered to lock all the doors and windows before running off for firefighting heroics, and Mr. Vawtry got into the proper end of the house with no trouble.

The bad news was that he had to wander from one room to another before he discovered that the north backstairs route Charity had described lay behind a door disguised as part of a wall of well-preserved Tudor-era printed paneling.

Not until after he’d found it did he recall Charity’s laughing remark that all the servants’ exits “pretended to be something else, like there were no servants at all, and the big house run itself.”

Still, he managed to find it, and after that it was quick work to reach the second floor.

The door to Dain’s apartments was the first on the left. As Charity had assured him, one needed but a moment to slip in and another to cross the vast chamber and collect the icon. Most important, the icon was precisely where she’d said it would be.

Lord Dain kept the heathenish picture his wife had given him on his bedstand, Joseph the foot-man had told his younger brother…who had told his betrothed…who had told her brother…who happened to be one of Charity’s regular customers.

But never again, Vawtry vowed as he exited the bedchamber. After tonight, Charity would share her bed and stunning skills with only one man. That man was the daring, heroic Mr. Roland Vawtry, who would take her abroad, away from Dartmoor and its unwashed rustics. He’d show her the sophisticated world of Paris. The French capital would seem like fairyland to her, he thought as he hurried down the stairs, and he would be her knight in shining armor.

Lost in his fantasies, he pushed open a door, raced down a set of stairs…and found himself in a hallway he didn’t remember. He hurried to the end, which turned out to be the music room.

After going through half a dozen more doors, he ended up in the ballroom, from whose entrance he saw the massive main staircase. He started toward it, then paused, undecided whether to try to find the back stairs again.

But it’d be hours before he found it, he told himself, and the house was empty. He made for the stairway, hurried down and across the broad landing, round the corner…and stopped short.

A woman stood on the stairs, looking up at him…then down, at the icon clutched against his breast.

In that instant’s flicker of Lady Dain’s glance from his face to the precious object he held, Vawtry regained his wits—and the use of his limbs.

He ran down the stairs, but she lunged at him, and he dodged too late. She grabbed his coat sleeve and he stumbled. The icon flew from his hands. He regained his balance in the next instant, and pushed her out of his way.

He heard a crash, but didn’t heed it. His eyes on the picture at the foot of the carpeted stairs, he raced down and snatched it up.

Jessica’s head had struck the wall and, grabbing blindly for balance, she knocked a Chinese vase from its pedestal. It struck the railing and shattered.

Though the world was reeling perilously toward darkness, she dragged herself upright. Firmly grasping the railing, she hurried down, ignoring the colored lights dancing about her head.

As she reached the great hall, she heard a door slam, and masculine curses, then the hurried tap of boots upon stone. Her mind clearing, she realized that her prey must have been trying to escape by the back way and got himself lost in the pantry instead.

She dashed down the hall toward the screens passage and reached the pantry door as he was running out.

This time he dodged her successfully. But even as he was bolting for the vestibule, she had grabbed the nearest object at hand—a porcelain Chinese dog—and it was out of her hand almost in the same instant, hurtling toward him.

It struck the side of his head, and he staggered, then sank to his knees, still clutching the icon. As she ran toward him, she saw blood trickling from his face. Even so, the wretched man wouldn’t give up. He was crawling to the door and reaching for the handle. When she grabbed his collar, he twisted about and flung his arm up, knocking her away so violently that she lost her balance and fell over onto the tiles.

Jessica saw his fingers wrap around the handle, saw it move…and flung herself upon him. Grabbing a fistful of his hair, she slammed his head against the door.

He was pushing at her, screaming curses while he tried to twist free, but she was too furious to heed. The swine was trying to steal her husband’s precious Madonna, and he was not going to get away with it.

“You will not!” she gasped, slamming his head against the door again. “Never!” Slam. “Never!” Slam.

Vawtry let go of the door and the icon and rolled sideways to get her off him.

She wouldn’t be shaken loose. She dug her nails into his scalp, his face, his neck. He tried to roll on top of her. She thrust her knee into his groin. He jerked away and folded up onto his side, clutching his privates.

She had just grabbed his hair again, in order to dash his skull to pieces upon the marble tile, when she felt a pair of strong hands wrap around her waist and haul her up, off Vawtry, off the floor altogether.

“That’s enough, Jess.” Her husband’s sharp tone penetrated her mindless fury, and she left off struggling to take in the world about her.

She saw that the great door stood open and a crowd of servants stood frozen just within it. In front of the mob of statues was Phelps…and Dominick, who was holding the coachman’s hand and gazing up slack-jawed at Jessica.

That was all she saw, because Dain swiftly swung her up over his shoulder and marched through the screens pa

ssage and into the Great Hall.

“Rodstock,” he said, without pausing or looking back, “the vestibule is a disgrace. Have someone see to it. Now.”

Once his wife was safely in her bath, with Bridget tending her and two sturdy footmen posted at the entrance to her apartments, Dain returned to the ground floor.

Vawtry, or what was left of him, lay on a wooden table in the old schoolroom, with Phelps standing guard. Vawtry’s nose was broken and he’d lost a tooth and sprained a wrist. His face was caked with dried blood and one eye was swollen shut.

“All in all, you got off easy,” Dain said, after surveying the damage. “Lucky she hadn’t a pistol on her, aren’t you?”

By the time he’d carried Jessica to her room, Dain had figured out what had happened. He’d seen the icon lying on the vestibule floor. He’d heard about the fire as he rode up to the house. He could put two and two together.

He did not have to interrogate his son to understand that Vawtry and Charity Graves were partners in crime.

Dain did not bother to interrogate Vawtry now, either, but told him what had happened.

“You let a greedy strumpet with great, fat udders turn you into a blithering idiot,” Dain contemptuously summarized. “That’s obvious enough. What I want to know is where you got the idea the thing was worth twenty thousand pounds. Confound it, Vawtry, couldn’t you tell just by looking at it that it was worth five at most—and you know no pawnbroker would pay even half that.”