Something Wonderful by Judith McNaught
Fawkes nodded his agreement. “In the country, my men will be able to spot an unfamiliar person on the grounds of Hawthorne or loitering about the village. We can watch him.”
“Your primary job is to protect my wife,” the duke said curtly. “Once we’re all at Hawthorne, I’ll think of some plan to draw whoever is doing this out of hiding. Arrange for four of your men to ride guard around my coach tomorrow. With my own people, that will give us a total of twelve outriders.”
“Is it possible the person who shot at you tonight could have been your cousin?” Edward Fawkes asked. “You said he wasn’t at White’s or the Lindworthy ball tonight.”
Jordan wearily kneaded the knotted muscles at his nape. “It wasn’t him. The horseman was much smaller than my cousin. Moreover, as I told you, I’m not completely convinced my cousin is behind this.” Until today, when he learned old Grangerfield was dead, Jordan had hoped he was the one. After all, the first attempt had been made the night Jordan met Alexandra—only two days after he wounded Grangerfield in a duel. After tonight’s episode, however, Jordan could no longer hold on to that hope.
“The two most common motives for murder are revenge and personal gain,” Fawkes said carefully. “Your cousin has a great deal to gain from your death. More now even than before.”
Jordan didn’t ask what he meant; he already knew it was Alexandra. Alexandra—? His face paled as he recalled the vaguely familiar, slender figure who’d shot at him tonight. It could have been a woman . . .
“You’ve thought of something important?” the investigator said quickly, correctly assessing Jordan’s expression.
“No,” Jordan snapped and surged to his feet, abruptly concluding the meeting. The idea of Alexandra trying to kill him was ludicrous. Absurd. But the words she’d hurled at him this morning came back to haunt him: Whatever it takes, I’ll be free of this marriage.
“Just one more thing, your grace,” Fawkes said as he also arose. “Could the person who shot at you tonight have been the same one you thought you’d killed on the road near Morsham last spring—the one you left for dead? You described him as being of small stature.”
Jordan felt dizzy with relief. “It could have been. As I said, I couldn’t see his face tonight.”
When Fawkes left, Jordan climbed the stairs to his own chamber. Tired, angry, and frustrated at being the target of some unknown lunatic who wanted him dead, he sent his sleepy valet off to bed and slowly removed his shirt. Alexandra was in the next room, he thought, and his weariness began to dissipate as he visualized awakening her from sleep with a kiss.
Walking over to the connecting door, he strode through her dressing room and into the dark bedchamber. Moonlight sifted through the windows, casting a silvery beam across the perfectly smooth satin coverlet atop her bed.
Alexandra had not come home.
Striding swiftly into his own room, he jerked the bellrope.
Thirty minutes later, the entire sleepy-eyed household staff was lined up before him in the drawing room answering his questions—with the single notable exception of Penrose, Alexandra’s elderly servant. He, too, was mysteriously missing.
After intensive questioning, all Jordan had learned for certain was that his coachman had watched Alexandra walk up the front steps of the house and safely reach the door. Then she had waved him off—an action which the coachman confirmed was unprecedented.
“You may go back to bed,” he told all thirty-one servants but one old man with spectacles, whom Jordan identified as Alexandra’s footman, hung back looking worried and angry.
Jordan went over to the side table, poured the last of his port into a glass, and with a cursory glance at Filbert, instructed him to bring up another bottle. Negligently tossing down the liquid, he sank into a chair and stretched his legs out, trying to calm his rampaging fear. Somehow, he didn’t quite believe Alexandra had come to any harm, and he would not let himself consider that her absence incriminated her in the attempt on his life tonight.
The more he concentrated on that inexplicably bright smile she had given him when she promised to come directly home after the ball, the more convinced he became she’d simply gone somewhere else after tricking the coachman into believing she’d come inside. Before she actually left the ball, she’d undoubtedly asked some cicisbeo of hers to follow her home and then take her up. Since Jordan had threatened to beat some sense into her tonight, that wasn’t at all surprising, he thought. She had probably gone to his grandmother, Jordan decided as the port began to soothe his raw nerves.
“Bring the bottle over here,” he ordered, eyeing the sour-faced, elderly footman, with ill-concealed belligerence. “Tell me something,” he said shortly, addressing a servant on a personal matter for the first time in his life, “was she always like this—your mistress?”
The old footman stiffened resentfully, in the act of pouring port in the duke’s glass. “Miss Alex—” Filbert began, but Jordan interrupted him in a glacial voice: “You will refer to my wife properly,” he snapped. “She is the Duchess of Hawthorne!”
“And a lotta good it’s done her!” the servant flung back furiously.
“Just exactly what is that supposed to mean?” Jordan demanded, so taken aback by this unprecedented display of temper from a mere servant that he failed to react with the outrage one might have reasonably expected from a man of his temperament and rank.
“It means what it says,” Filbert snapped, slamming the bottle down on the table. “Bein’ the Duchess of Hawthorne ain’t never brought her nothing but heartbreak! Yer as bad as her pa was—no, yer worse! He only broke her heart, you broke her heart and now yer tryin’ to break her spirit!”
He was halfway across the room when Jordan’s voice boomed like a thunderclap. “Get back here!”
Filbert obeyed, but his gnarled hands were clenched into fists at his sides, and he glared resentfully at the man who had made Miss Alexandra’s life a misery from the day she met him.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Filbert’s jaw jutted belligerently. “If you think I’m gonna tell you things so’s you can use them agin’ Miss Alex, then yer in fer a shock, yer high holiness!”
Jordan opened his mouth to tell the incredibly insolent man to pack his bag and get out, but more than satisfaction, he wanted an explanation for the servant’s startling revelations. Reining in his temper with a supreme effort, Jordan said icily, “If you have anything to say that might soften my attitude toward your beloved mistress, then you’d be wise to speak out now.” The servant still looked balky. “In the mood I’m in,” Jordan warned him honestly, “when I get my hands on her, she’ll wish to God she’d stayed out of my sight.”
The old man paled and swallowed, but he remained mutinously silent. Sensing that Filbert was wavering but that intimidation alone would never get him to talk freely, Jordan poured some port into a glass and in an action that would have knocked Society onto its collective face, the Duke of Hawthorne held the glass toward a lowly footman and invited in a man-to-man voice, “Now then, since I apparently hurt your mistress—unintentionally—suppose you have a drink and tell me how I’m like her father. What did he do?”
Filbert’s suspicious gaze shifted from the duke’s face to the glass of port in his outstretched hand, then he slowly reached for it. “D’you mind if I sit whilst I drink?”
“By all means,” Jordan replied, straightfaced.
“Her father was the lowest scoundrel what ever lived,” Filbert began, oblivious to the way the duke’s brows shot up at this added insult. He paused to take a long, fortifying swallow of his drink, then he shuddered, glaring at the stuff in the glass with unhidden revulsion. “Gawd!” he uttered. “What is this?”
“Port—a special kind that is made exclusively for me.”
“Probably ain’t no call fer it from no one else,” Filbert replied, wholly unimpressed. “Vile stuff.”
“That opinion is shared by most people. I seem to be the only one w
“Do yer happen to have any ale about?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Whisky?” Filbert asked hopefully.
“Certainly. In the cabinet over there. Help yourself.”
It took six glasses of whisky and two hours to drag the story out of the reluctant footman. By the time Filbert was nearly finished, Jordan—who had felt challenged to switch to whisky and match him drink for drink—was slouched in his chair, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, trying to keep his head clear.
“And one day, about six, seven weeks after her pa dies,” Filbert was finishing, “this fine carriage pulls up and in it is this beauteous lady and her pretty yellow-haired daughter. I was there when Miss Alex opened the door and the lady— who weren’t no real lady—announces bald as you please that she’s Lawrence’s wife and the gel with her is his daughter!”
Jordan’s head jerked around. “He was a bigamist?”
“Yep. And you shoulda seen the helter-pelter argument atween the two Mrs. Lawrences. But Miss Alex, she doesn’t get mad. She jest looks at the yellow-haired girl and says in that sweet way o’ hers: ‘You’re very pretty.’
“The blond chit don’t say nothin’, she sticks her nose up in the air. Then the chit notices this tin locket, shaped like a heart, that Miss Alex was wearin’ round her neck. It was gived to Miss Alex by her pa on her birthday, and she treasured that locket like you wouldn’t believe—always touchin’ it whilst she wore it and worryin’ it’d get lost. The blond chit asks Miss Alex if her pa gived her that, and when Miss Alex said he had, the gel pulls out this gold chain hangin’ round her neck, and on the end o’ it is this beautiful gold locket in the shape o’ a heart.
“ ‘He gave me a valuable gold one,’ the chit says in a way that made my hand itch to slap her. ‘Yours is jest old tin.’ ”
Filbert paused to have another swallow of his whisky and smack his lips. “Miss Alex didn’t say a word, she jest lifts her chin—like she does when she’s tryin’ to be brave—but there’s so much pain in her eyes it would have made a grown man cry. I cried,” Filbert admitted hoarsely. “I went to my room, an’ I cried like a babe.”
Jordan swallowed against the unfamiliar aching lump in his throat. “Then what happened?”
“The next mornin’ Miss Alex comes down to breakfast, jest like always, and she smiles at me, jest like always. But for the first time since her pa gived it to her, she weren’t wearin’ that locket. She never wore it again.”
“And you think I’m like her father?” Jordan bit out furiously.
“Ain’t you?” Filbert said contemptuously. “Ye break her heart every time yer around, and then it’s left to me ’n’ Penrose to try to pick up the pieces.”
“What are you talking about?” Jordan insisted, clumsily splashing more whisky into his glass. Filbert stuck his empty glass forward and Jordan obediently filled it, too.
“I’m talkin’ about the way she cried when she thought you was dead. One day I come upon her standin’ in front o’ yer portrait at yer big country house. She used to spend hours jest lookin’ at you, and I think to myself she’s so thin you can see clean through her. She points to you and she says to me in that shaky little voice that means she’s tryin not to cry, ‘Look, Filbert. Wasn’t he beautiful?’ ” Filbert paused to sniff distasefully—an eloquent expression of his private opinion of Jordan’s looks.
Slightly pacified by the astounding news that Alexandra had apparently cared enough to grieve for him after all, Jordan overlooked the servant’s unflattering opinion of his face. “Go on,” he said.
Filbert’s eyes suddenly narrowed with anger as he warmed to his story: “You made her fall in love with you, then she comes to London an’ finds out you never meant to treat her like a proper wife. You only married her for pity! You meant to send her off to Devon, just like her papa done to her mama.”
“She knows about Devon?” Jordan said, stunned.
“She knows about all o’ it. Lord Anthony finally had t’ tell her the truth ’cause all your fancy London friends were laughin’ at her behind their hands for lovin’ you. They all knew how you felt about her, because you talked ’bout her to yer ladybird, and she talked to everyone else. You called it a marriage of inconvenience. Ye shamed Miss Alex and made her cry all over again. But you’ll not be able to hurt her again—she knows you for the lyin’ cad you be!”
Having said his piece, Filbert shoved to his feet, put down his glass, drew himself up to his full height, and said with great dignity, “I told her, an’ I’ll tell you: She shoulda let you die the night she found you!”
Jordan watched the old man march off without displaying any effects from the astonishing quantity of liquor he’d consumed.
He stared blindly at his empty glass, while the reasons for Alexandra’s complete change in attitude since his disappearance slowly began to crystallize. Filbert’s brief but eloquent description of a painfully thin Alexandra staring at his portrait at Hawthorne made his heart wrench. Across his mind paraded a vivid image of Alexandra coming to London wearing her heart on her sleeve—and then facing the cold disdain Elise had apparently instigated by repeating Jordan’s thoughtless, joking remark.
Leaning his head against the back of his chair, Jordan closed his eyes while regret and relief flooded through him. Alexandra had cared for him. The image he had cherished of the enchanting, artless girl who had loved him had not been false, and for that he was suddenly, profoundly overjoyed. The fact that he had wounded her in countless ways made him wince, but not for one moment was he willing to believe the damage was irreparable. Neither was he fool enough to think she’d believe any explanation he could make. Actions, not words, would be the only way to make her lower her guard and love him again.
A faint, preoccupied smile played about his lips as he contemplated his strategy.
* * *
Jordan was not smiling at nine o’clock the following morning, however, when a footman returned with the information that Alexandra had most assuredly not gone to his grandmother’s house; nor was he smiling a half hour later when the dowager duchess herself marched into his study to tell him that he was entirely to blame for Alex’s flight, and to deliver a stinging diatribe on Jordan’s lack of sensitivity, his high-handedness, and his lack of good sense.
Clad in her gown from the night before, Alexandra combed her fingers through her tousled hair, peeked into the upper hall, and then walked swiftly along the corridor and down the staircase to her own rooms.
If Jordan followed the same morning schedule as the previous two days, he would be locked away in his study with the men who came to discuss business with him in the mornings. Carefully considering ways to get herself, Filbert, and Penrose out of the house without being noticed, she walked over to the wardrobe and opened the door. The wardrobe was empty, save for a single traveling costume. Turning, Alexandra surveyed the room and noticed that all her perfumes had been cleared from the dressing table. The queer sensation that she was in the wrong room made her turn slowly round just as the door opened and a maid let out a stifled scream.
Before Alexandra could stop her, the servant turned on her heel and fled along the balcony. “Her grace is back!” she called over the balcony to Higgins.
So much for escaping without first encountering Jordan, Alexandra thought with a tremor of fear. She had not completely expected to avoid a confrontation with her husband—but she had rather hoped to do it. “Marie,” she called after the maid who was already rushing down the staircase to spread the glad tidings. “Where is the duke? I’ll announce my presence to him myself.”
“In the study, your grace.”
Raking his hands through his dark hair, Jordan paced the length of his huge, book-lined study like a caged tiger, waiting for Alexandra to appear from wherever she had spent the night, refusing to consider that she had come to harm, and unable to banish the gnawing fear that she had.
&n
Jordan jerked around, his emotions veering crazily from joy to relief to fury as he beheld her standing before him, her face fresh from a night’s sleep that he hadn’t had.
“Where in the hell have you been?” he demanded, striding to her. “Remind me never to take your ‘word’ again,” he added with blazing sarcasm.
Alexandra restrained the cowardly impulse to back away. “I kept my word, my lord. I came directly home and went to bed.”
A muscle jerked ominously in his taut cheek. “Don’t lie to me.”
“I slept in the governess’ room,” she clarified politely. “You did not, after all, order me to go to my own room.”
The desire to murder exploded in Jordan’s brain, followed instantaneously by the opposing urge to wrap his arms around her and shout with laughter at her incredibly ingenious defiance. She had been upstairs, blissfully asleep, the entire time he’d been prowling and drinking down here in an agony of uncertainty. “Tell me something,” he said irritably, “have you always been like this?”
“Like what?” Alexandra said warily, not certain of his mood.
“A blight on peace.”
“Wh-what do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you what I mean,” he drawled, and as he advanced upon her, Alexandra began cautiously retreating step for step. “In the last twelve hours, I have rudely walked out on my friends at White’s. I’ve been involved in a public quarrel on a dance floor, and I’ve been chastised by a footman, who incidentally can drink me under the table. I’ve had to listen to a lecture from my grandmother, who for the first time in her life so forgot herself as to raise her voice to what can only be described as a shout! Do you know,” he finished darkly while Alexandra fought to hide a wayward grin, “that I used to lead a reasonably well-ordered life before I laid eyes on you? But from that moment on, every time I turn around, something else—”