Griffin Stone:Duke Of Decadence

Complete deprivation of sight, sound and touch, along with a minimum of food and water, with the added threat of dying a painful death; it was a standard method of torture.

That those things had been done to this helpless young woman made Griffin feel positively murderous.

If her parents were both dead, then where was her guardian, her closest male relative? Someone, somewhere had surely been entrusted with the care of her after her parents’ deaths? Whoever they were they deserved to be shot for their negligence.

Of course young ladies did sometimes run away in the middle of the night during or after the London season, but usually they returned several days or weeks later, either in disgrace or with a husband!

There was always the possibility that her guardians believed she had eloped.

‘Bella—Beatrix?’ Griffin hesitated over the name.

‘Bea,’ she corrected flatly. ‘I believe my parents referred to me as Bea.’

Griffin did not miss the past tense in that statement, or the look of pained bewilderment in Bea’s eyes. A pained bewilderment that he perfectly understood if, in fact, her parents were both dead, as she had dreamt they were. ‘Do you remember them?’

‘Only in the dream,’ she answered dully. ‘And only that one instance, when I was dancing giddily with my mother.’

That was, Griffin now strongly suspected, because shock and fear were responsible for causing her amnesia. The memories were obviously returning to her, even if only subconsciously, but her imprisonment, the harshness of her treatment, meant it would probably take time for all of her memories from before her abduction to return to her completely.

He might have wished she could forget her imprisonment and torture too!

Griffin’s attempts today, to see if Bea belonged to a family in the area, had come to naught.

On his way out this afternoon he had instructed Reynolds, his estate manager, to check on any of the empty cottages and woodcutters’ sheds within the estate, in the hopes that he might find some sign of where Bea might have been held prisoner. Her flight through the woods the previous night surely meant that Bea could not have run far dressed as she was and without footwear.

Bea.

How strange that he had chosen a name for her not so far from her own.

Tears dampened her lashes as she pulled abruptly out of his arms before standing up. ‘I do not know how or when my parents died, but it must have been recently I think, because in my dream I attended their funeral, and I did not look so different then, except for the bruises, from how I am now.’ The tears fell unchecked down the pallor of her hollowed cheeks.

‘I am sorry for that, Bea,’ Griffin consoled as he stood up to go to her, taking a light grasp of her arms as he looked down at her. ‘I am so very sorry for your loss.’

‘I do not remember them.’ She shook her head sadly as she drew her bottom lip between her teeth in an effort to stop any more tears from falling. ‘I only know of them at all because I saw myself standing at their gravesides, and knew that I loved and grieved for them both.’

How Bea had survived, even as well as she had, after all that had recently been done to her, Griffin could not even begin to comprehend.

She might have survived physically, he corrected himself grimly, but emotionally it was a different matter. It appeared now that Bea’s mind had simply shut itself down and refused to remember.

Except in her dreams.

But the things that Bea had now recalled about herself in those dreams were something Griffin might use in order to further try and identify who she was. She was obviously well spoken and educated, which indicated that in all likelihood her parents had been also. A further adage to that was they had, in all probability, been members of society; there could not be too many couples in society who had both died at the same time, and recently, and with a daughter named Beatrix.

Being so far away from London himself, Griffin now knew he had no choice but to write to Aubrey Maystone and ask him to look into the matter for him.

‘Bea, I hate having to ask you to dwell on this any further just now, but...’

‘If I have the answer I will gladly give it,’ Bea assured him sadly, the grief, the dark oppression of her dreams, obviously still weighing her down.

He nodded. ‘The questions the man Jacob asked. What were they?’

‘They were the same two questions, over and over again. How much did I overhear? Who had I told?’ She frowned as she gave a shake of her head. ‘I did not know the answers then, and I do not know them now.’

Griffin realised that someone obviously believed that she knew something they would rather she did not.

And it was in all possibility something to do with the reason why Jacob Harker had left Northamptonshire so suddenly several weeks ago, and travelled up to Lancashire.