The Water Nymph: The Arboretti Family Saga - Book Two Read online

  “You know that is impossible, Lawrence,” she chided him as she kissed sugar from his lips.

  “Darling, you torture me. May I at least carry you to my bed and make love to you for the next ten hours?”

  She reached out her hand to stroke his cheek. “Soon, dearest. Very soon.” She rose from his lap and moved toward the staircase hidden behind the panel. “I wish I could stay tonight, but I really must be off. You know how they will talk at home.”

  After a few more entreaties and denials, Lawrence lapped the last grains of sugar from her cleavage and walked her down the stairs to her waiting litter. Ensconced there among the rich velvet pillows, each embossed in gold with her personal emblem, she looked like a goddess of love, the embodiment of wealth and privilege and beauty. The embodiment of all that Lawrence wanted in the world.

  Chapter Nine

  “You fool,” the golden-haired woman told Sophie. “You forsook my precepts, and look where it has gotten you.”

  “I am sorry,” Sophie said, bowing her head. “I did not mean to, Your Excellence.”

  “Your intention does not interest me. It is your actions. You allowed a man to touch you. You kissed him. You enjoyed it. What of the chastity that you swore to me in exchange for your strength?”

  “I do not know what happened,” Sophie pled to the angry goddess. “It was out of my control.”

  “You mean,” the goddess Diana went on from her golden throne, smirking, “you mean that you lost control. As I knew you would. As I always predicted.”

  The goddess’s voice changed now, becoming deeper and thinner, and her face and her throne were covered in shadow. It was as if a large hand had closed over them, obliterating them, but the new voice rang out clearly. “You were wicked. You were wicked and evil, just as I told you, just as—”

  “No,” Sophie interrupted.

  “We both know what happened that night, what you did,” the thin voice whispered in Sophie’s ear. “I will tell everyone.”

  “No,” Sophie begged. “No, please. I didn’t—”

  “Save your pathetic protests,” the voice went on. “No one will believe you. You are nothing, nothing at all. I hold your life in my hand.” Sophie felt a hand at the waist of her gown, where Octavia had made the secret pocket, and then saw a small, gold disk flash before her eyes. “I have this,” the voice went on. “It is all the proof I need. You cannot escape me. I love you.”

  “No,” Sophie cried again, this time stridently. “NO!” she shouted, shouted with so much force, so much strength, that she jolted herself awake, jolted herself out of her nightmare.

  It took her a moment to figure out where she was and what had happened. She shivered as she looked around her, the thin streak of dusty morning light that entered the cell barely adequate to illuminate its four rough walls and dirt floor. But it was enough to show that the space was empty, that Sophie was alone, that the voices had been part of a dream. Her breathing slowed as this thought seeped in, but her hand was unsteady as she reached for the small pocket in her gown.

  Her fingers slipped in and her heart stopped. The pocket was empty. The medal was gone.

  There had been someone in her cell with her after all. He had been there. The conversation was real. It was not a dream, not even a nightmare. It was much, much worse.

  “No,” she said aloud, her voice uneven. “No.” She steadied herself against the stone wall as she rose to her feet, horror overtaking the numbness that had filled her since the previous night. Indeed, she was so overwrought that she did not hear the soft thud of the medal falling from her skirt to the dirt floor. But from the corner of her eye she saw the gleam of gold as it landed on its edge in the anemic beam of sunlight, and she had retrieved it with unsteady fingers before it could settle in the dust. It lay in her palm, the goddess Diana, goddess of the moon, of the hunt, and of chastity, seated on a throne, with a hawk seated next to her. It was the only memento she had left of her past, the only reminder of her former life, her former self.

  She rarely let herself think about her life before the fire, before her parents died, before… before everything changed. She chose to blot out all memories of her past uniformly, in an effort to keep the horrible ones at bay. But as she stood in the dreary cell, feeling more alone than she had in years, recollections from her childhood came flooding back to her. Sophie recalled how her beautiful mother used to chastise—but not punish—her when, instead of paying attention to the details of household economy, she had buried herself in her brother Damon’s mathematical texts. A shudder went through Sophie as she remembered the happy hours she spent with her brother, teaching him the rudiments of algebra or the latest mathematical theories out of Italy, providing him with easy translations of famous Greek texts and simple explanations of complicated proofs, so he had more time to indulge in his real love, making foulsmelling, goopy substances in a shed he called his laboratory.

  But as interesting as the math texts were to Sophie, her father’s ledgers were even more fascinating. She remembered poring over them, trying to understand why prices fluctuated and how you could invest in a crop that would not exist for ten months and turn an enormous profit in five. When she was thirteen, she secretly instructed her father’s agent to use the hundred pounds she had been left by her grandmother for her dowry to buy shares in a mining company. The hundred turned to five hundred, then a thousand, and by the time of the fire, when she was fifteen, she had amassed a personal fortune of five thousand pounds, more than many a nobleman’s entire holdings.

  After the fire and the nightmare that followed it, the five thousand pounds in gold that Sophie had carefully buried in an iron box in the garden was all she had in the world, that and the medal of Diana. She opened her palm now to study it and was almost sure that Diana was smirking at her. You are a fool, the goddess seemed to be saying, as she had in the dream, and Sophie had to agree with her. Only a fool would have fallen for the Earl of Sandal. Only a fool would have trusted him.

  Sophie jammed the medal into the small opening at her waist, cursing the smirking goddess, cursing the Earl of Sandal, cursing, above all, herself. As she began pacing her small, bare cell, she tried to decide which was more unpleasant, the physical pain of hunger or the equally gut-wrenching emotional pain of betrayal. Not betrayal by Sandal, that would have been no match for hunger. No, what was making her suffer so forcefully was her betrayal of herself.

  In the dim light of her dismal cell, it was all so clear, the earl’s mockery and contempt, his trickery and deceit. There was no question that he had saved her as a prank and had been planning to turn her over to the Queen’s guards all along. They had said as much when they arrested her, quoting his words back to her, letting her hear them as if for the first time. It was then that she realized she had allowed herself, even willed herself, to be misled, then that she saw what she had resolutely overlooked, only then, when it was painfully clear that he had set her up.

  And she had played right into it. She had been grateful, damn it, absolutely grateful. All that time she had looked at him with new respect he was laughing at her, and sending her to her death. With this realization, Sophie felt her embarrassment give way to anger. She may have behaved like an utter brainless aphid, but he had no right to toy with her. Only someone with the heart of a bristlebug would treat a fellow being like that. It was inhumane, and cruel, and undeserved.

  “Bastard,” she said aloud, half wishing the numbness would return. The comments of the guards the night before about readying herself for a speedy visit to the gallows suggested that she had little time, but she would use what little remained. Her opponents had been thorough, very thorough, in their attempt to frame her for Richard Tottle’s murder, but there had to be some loose thread, someplace where their plan was likely to unravel. Something nagged at Sophie, and she cast her mind over the events at the Unicorn and at Sandal Hall afterward, until she found it.

  The gun. Her gun. It wa
s always kept in the library at Hen House, on a shelf with other gifts given to her in gratitude for her help. Surely it could not have been removed without someone—Octavia or Emme or Annie or Richards or one of the other servingwomen—noticing. With this thought, Sophie felt positively triumphant because she saw a way to foil her enemies. Whoever had stolen the gun either was, or knew who was, Tottle’s murderer. All Sophie had to do to learn that person’s identity was send a note to Hen House asking who had visited her library and what, if anything, they had taken.

  Which, she realized with a renewal of the sinking feeling, was tantamount to saying that all she had to do was find a way to walk through the wall, fly over the city of London, and spot the murderer by dint of some funny glow given off by his guilt. Because her cell did not contain so much as a chamber pot (which she sorely needed), let alone a scrap of paper, a dab of ink, or a messenger to carry a note. She knew that money could buy her all those things, but she had none, her purse having been lost in the pointless scuffle with the guards on Pickering’s Highway. Or, perhaps it had not been pointless. Perhaps that had been its point. In any event, she had nothing of value at all. Except the medal.

  Sophie once again placed it on the palm of her hand to study it. She had scrupulously carried it with her for eleven years, the only piece of her past she possessed. And now, it was also her only link to the future. Sophie ran her thumb over it once, lovingly, then moved to the solid plank door of her cell, put her mouth close to the seam where it joined the wall, and yelled, “Guard!”

  Sophie had some difficulty persuading the man to accept her commission. If he had known then what he discovered later that night when the tall man approached him at the tavern, that the strange medal with the naked woman and a bird was worth four hundred pounds in real gold, he would not have hesitated for a moment. As it was, he finally agreed, returning as the clock outside the prison chimed ten, with an ample basket of food, and a scrap of paper.

  Sophie read the note first, and immediately lost her appetite. “Lord Grosgrain borrowed your pistol,” the paper said. “There have been no other visitors to the library.”

  Crispin knew something was wrong long before he crossed the threshold of Pickering Hall at half past eleven that morning. His uneasiness had started much earlier, when he awoke after only three hours of troubled sleep. Sophie—what she knew, who she was—had taken over not only his waking thoughts but also his dreams. His mind kept revolving around Sophie, Sophie cheating at dice, Sophie smiling, Sophie frowning, Sophie arguing, Sophie speaking French, Sophie speaking Spanish, Sophie kissing him, Sophie in a mustache, Sophie with Lawrence, Sophie blackmailing her godfather. He wanted to go to her immediately, but he knew the longer he stayed away from her, the better off they would both be. Right now he could not think clearly about her at all, and clarity was what he required most. Constantia would provide the perfect antidote to all this, he knew, but somehow, despite his decision the previous night, he could not bring himself to go and see her.

  In his uneasiness he had resolved to skip his visit to Grosgrain Place, but before he had passed by its polished doors, he heard a heart-stopping shriek from inside and a sound like breaking glass. Dismounting in a hurry, he had rushed into the entrance hall, then mounted the stairs until he found the source of the screaming.

  Constantia, beautiful in a sapphire blue silk robe, was standing stiffly beside a fiery-orange divan, staring with horror at a collection of pastries scattered at her feet. A plate lay in shatters on the floor around the divan, and as Crispin reached the open door of the room, he saw Constantia stomp on one of the pastries, reducing it to crumbs.

  “I told you I never wanted to see these again, Nan,” she wailed at a trembling serving girl standing on her right.

  Nan bowed her head. “But cook says, ma’am, as how he don’t want to make any new cakes, since it would be a pity to waste all these beautiful meringues—”

  Constantia gave a kick and sent a meringue skidding across the floor into the far wall. “Tell the cook his opinion is of no interest to me. I instructed him to destroy these and I demand that it is done at once. At once!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Nan replied, bending to collect the offending pastries in her apron. “Yes, ma’am,” she repeated, brushing past Crispin and hurrying out the door.

  Having discovered that no one was being murdered, Crispin had decided to sneak away before he was recognized and proceed to Sophie, but he was too late. Constantia saw him standing in the doorway and appealed to him with outstretched arms.

  “Crispin, darling, when did you come in?” she said, her voice soft now, her face no longer a mask of fury.

  “I heard shouts from the street, and I feared for your life,” he explained, not moving from the threshold. “But now that I see you are all right—”

  Constantia ran to him and threw herself into his arms. “Crispin, I am nothing like all right. Milton’s death has completely destroyed me.” She pressed her face into the silver lining of his doublet, so that her golden hair tickled his chin. “Oh, Crispin, hold me, hold me like you used to. Let me lose myself, my grief, in your arms like I did before.”

  Crispin kept his eyes glued to the table clock behind Constantia, which said a quarter past ten, as she sobbed into his doublet. They were still standing like that, her pressed against him, him monitoring the hands of the clock, when a tall, fair young man burst into the room.

  “Tia,” he said with alarm. “Tia, what is it? What is wrong?”

  Constantia withdrew herself from Crispin and turned to the newcomer. “Basil, they did it again. They brought meringues again. And you know how they remind me of your father, of everything I have lost, of…” Constantia swallowed hard to keep back the tears that glittered in the corner of her sapphire eyes. Then, noticing the way Basil was eyeing her companion, she stepped forward to make introductions. “Basil, this is my dear friend and our neighbor, the Earl of Sandal.” She turned to Crispin. “Crispin, this is Basil, my stepson, now Lord Grosgrain.”

  The young man clearly did not like Crispin, but Crispin was delighted to see him, because it meant he could leave the comforting to someone else and get on with his business. Before he could take his leave, however, Constantia pled with him to stay “just a little longer” and steered him onto the orange divan next to her.

  Crispin’s eyes flickered in a continual relay between Constantia’s beautiful face and the face of the clock, ticking off the time, time he was not spending with Sophie. He did not initially notice how tightly Constantia was gripping his hand, or how closely she was pressed up against him, or how often she directed her comments, and her lovely smile, in his direction. When a constable was shown in at just before eleven, he tried to rise and leave, but almost instantly sank back down into the chaise. This was due not, as Constantia thought, to a certain pressure she was exerting on his thigh but rather to the constable’s announcement that he was there to ask questions about Miss Sophie Champion.

  Crispin’s preoccupation vanished. He listened with deep attention as the constable asked Constantia and Basil if they had been at home to see Sophie go out the night of Richard Tottle’s murder, an attention that was piqued by Basil’s reaction to the question, which included a complete loss of color and a series of strange choking noises. Basil appeared to be so overcome that it was Constantia who answered the constable, Constantia who explained that she and her stepson had been at home together that night, trying to select a new painting by Lyle, the famous artist, and had been too busy to notice anything going on outside. Basil was quite a connoisseur with a wonderful eye for beauty, Constantia leaned forward to confide—giving both the constable and Crispin a lovely view of her connoisseur-worthy décolletage—and she would not dare make a decision without him.

  The constable, whose eyes had grown huge, said, “If you would like, ma’am, I can stay here with you and protect Your Ladyships.” He rushed to correct himself, “I mean, Ladyship.”

  Constanti
a smiled warmly at him. “You are too kind, Constable—”

  “Call me Ralph, ma’am,” the constable put in, blushing.

  “You are too kind, Ralph,” Constantia said charmingly, “but I am sure I need no special protection.”

  Using all the ingenuity at his disposal, Ralph tried to argue but lost, and, with great reluctance, left. Crispin had just risen to do likewise, despite the protesting grip on his hand that suggested his company was not as dispensable as Ralph’s, when Basil caught his attention outright.

  “I think you should have accepted his offer of protection, Tia. I am the justice of the peace of this parish, you know, and I am far more knowledgeable about crime than you are. If Miss Champion killed once, she very well might come after you. You know I suspected all along that she had something to do with Father’s death.”

  “Basil, do not say such things!” Constantia commanded him. “Miss Champion is not a murderer.”

  “Anyone could become a murderer for an estate the size of Father’s,” Basil said, his cheeks flushed with indignation.

  “But, Basil, she gave it all back,” Constantia told him.

  Crispin, standing, was watching this exchange as if it were a championship game of tennis.

  “Hardly. She only gave us what was ours by right.” Basil now looked up at Crispin. “You see, my father left this house, his estate in Newcastle, and his entire company, Leverage Holdings, to Sophie Champion. And he left us nothing.”

  “And then,” Constantia picked up, “Miss Champion gave me Grosgrain Place and Basil the Newcastle property, Peacock Hall. What is more, she settled an annuity on each of us that far exceeds our wants.”

  “Bosh,” Basil put in, throwing his hands in the air and becoming pinker. “I am telling you, Tia, it was a cover. She used her generosity to keep us from asking questions about the will. She was blackmailing father, there is no doubt in my mind. How else would you explain the thousand pounds a month he paid her while he was alive? I think she learned of the terms of his will, learned that she would get everything, and killed him off.”