Beauty and the Duke Page 16

  Erik’s bedroom was cold and showed no sign that he had spent any of the last five nights in his room. “Do not mind my brother’s absence,” Becca said from Christine’s doorway. “I don’t think he spends much time in that room except to change his clothes. He rarely sleeps.”

  Christine turned as Erik’s sister swept into the room, looking pretty in white as she set a well-stocked tea service on the table beside Christine’s bed. The table had been there since Aunt Sophie dined with Christine a few days ago.

  She withdrew and shut the door behind her. It seemed as if her bridegroom was perfectly content to let his servants and family members care for her these past days, she considered, as she had not seen Erik since he had offended her cat, then put her to bed. Alone. The physician had been by to see her that afternoon, examined the bump, removed three stitches, and pronounced that she would live.

  “If you want to find him, I suggest that you go to the library in the mornings.” Becca poured tea into a cup. “He practically lives there when he is not at the levee site.”

  Christine returned to the bed and crawled beneath the covers to warm her feet, her back braced against the pillows. “He does a lot of reading?” she asked.

  “In a way, I suppose. Erik is an architectural engineer. Quite a fine one if I can say so myself. Much of this estate has seen the benefit of his skill. He has been working on designs for a library at St. Andrews, though still unfinished. His work gives him purpose, I suppose.” She sighed as she added a spot of cream to the tea and smiled warmly at Christine. “I am glad he has found someone who will love him. And who will love Erin and me…and everyone else at Sedgwick Castle…and all the tenants and the people of Sedgwick. I want you to love Scotland and never want to leave.”

  “Becca…”

  She handed Christine the hot tea. “I know I am being melodramatic.” Spooning sugar into her own cup, she smiled. “But I am merely happy, you see. I already feel as if you are my sister. I wish to become great friends.”

  Yesterday, Becca had also kept Christine company, the entire day. They had shared tea, lunch, and supper. Earlier in the week, Becca had introduced Christine to Mrs. Brown, the housekeeper, and many other servants, including the cook who braised fish for Beast. Despite Rebecca’s inexhaustible aptitude for conversation, Christine had been happy for the companionship if only because Erik’s sister gave Christine deeper insight into her brother.

  But only a sixteen-year-old with a romantic view of the world could believe that one meeting between Erik and Christine on the stairs of the museum had been nothing short of “spontaneous combustion between two lonely souls adrift in the universe” as Becca so aptly framed the words, something Christine was sure must be a quote from Byron. Electing not to ruin Becca’s biased view of marriage with the truth, Christine cradled the warm porcelain cup in her hands and said instead what was uppermost in her mind. “I was hoping to meet Erin.”

  Becca set a warm crumpet on a plate and laid it on Christine’s lap. “Not that Erin dislikes you. She has been around watching you.” Rebecca sipped her tea. “But it would do you no good to meet her until she’s ready. Erik would have to chase her down, and no doubt a scene would ensue.”

  “Is she…?”

  Becca laughed. “Normal? Mrs. Brown calls her Sedgwick’s fey child.”

  “I was told her grandfather lives in the manse across the lake.”

  Becca idly traced a fingernail around the teacup rim. “Yes. But only Lady Lara, Elizabeth’s older sister, is allowed here. She is the only one who would have anything to do with Erik after Lady Elizabeth vanished. Everyone was terribly cruel to him and still blames my brother for her disappearance. Lara didn’t. She visits on occasion to see Erin, but I think she comes here only to see Erik.”

  Before Christine could digest the comment, Becca set down the teacup with a clink. “He said you will hunt our beast.” Her voice was infused with excitement. “You should have Erik take you to the river. Though you must never go alone. The river is quite swollen and over its banks.”

  “Yes, he said he is attempting to reclaim farming land lost after the Western Railroad blew up part of the foothills leading into Sedgwick.”

  “Their actions changed the course of the river and have caused other problems. Erik has been livid over the entire ordeal. To make matters worse, he is having trouble among his laborers since two have vanished and strange fossils have been washing up on the riverbank since last year. Levee work has stopped. He hasn’t allowed me to return to the river since last summer. I’m hoping your presence here will change his mind.”

  Christine understood why Erik did not want his sister involved in this search, especially when the human remains washing up could end up being Elizabeth’s. What young woman would not be traumatized by seeing someone she once revered reduced to scarred bone?

  Early morning mists still clung to the ground when Christine awakened the next day with a gift set next to her pillow. It was a small child-like portraiture of her. She looked at he dead flower stalks on her nightstand. After Annie helped her dress, she finally left her bedroom in search of her elusive husband. She wandered down halls that seemed to have no coherent direction and ended up lost before a chambermaid directed her downstairs toward the dining room and to Boris.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she came face-to-face with a red firedrake displayed in the coat of arms hanging on the wall—a giant quadruped creature, wings and sharp claws extended, a flame spewing from his snout. The crest was also etched in stone above the entranceway.

  “They say the Sedgwick coat of arms comes from the Draco constellation, which wanders the sky over Fife in the wintertime,” Boris said from the doorway. He held a tea tray. “For centuries all Sedgwick dukes have carried the dragon into battle.”

  She was astonished not to have known. Erik did not ride with a standard flapping on a carriage when he traveled. He did not publicly boast his rank. He never had.

  “Mum?” Boris drew her around.

  “Is Lord Sedgwick in the library?” she asked when she had found her voice.

  “No, mum. He leaves for his morning ride just after dawn.”

  Nervously clutching the portraiture in her hands, she asked for directions to Erin’s chambers. Christine felt silly constantly asking for directions. With a bit of sleuthing and following toys like bread crumbs to the third floor, she found Erin’s apartments. Wooden toys and blocks littered the floor. Dolls perched prettily atop white shelves. Bright yellow-and-pink wallpaper covered the walls and met a pale pink carpet on the floor. Christine stepped gingerly over a jack-in-the-box and walked through an adjoining chamber and into a dressing room lined wall to wall with dresses, pinafores, petticoats, shoes, and ribbons. She stopped just inside the connecting door.

  “Boris informed me you were up here.”

  Erik’s voice startled her. She whirled. Her hand went to her heart. “Must you always sneak up on me?”

  He wore a dark blue waistcoat minus the jacket. His white shirtsleeves were rolled up to his forearms as if he’d been interrupted in whatever task he’d been doing. “Boris was mistaken,” he said. “I have not been riding this morning. I would have come to your chambers this morning to bring you up here. My apologies for neglecting you, but I have been somewhat busy.”

  It was not as if the rules of their contract stated he owed her his companionship, nor the courtesy of an inquiry about her health or an introduction to his fey daughter.

  “Nothing too serious, I hope.”

  “Everything these days is serious.” Then he shrugged sheepishly as if to apologize for his terseness. “This is summer, the height of estate repair work, including all my roads. My time is not my own.”

  Nor hers either, ’twould seem. “I received this on my pillow this morning.” She presented him the portraiture. “Quite an excellent depiction,” she said, thinking the artwork actually made her look pretty.

  His grin softened the grim set of his mouth and fairly set her
breath in her throat. Erik was unbelievably beautiful when he tossed away his mantle of somberness. He raised his eyes and found her staring. A strand of his dark hair brushed his brow. “Come,” he said.

  Erik walked past Christine into the adjoining bedroom. “Do not get up, Mrs. Whitman,” she heard him say to someone and, as Christine stepped into the bedroom, she saw a gray-haired woman sitting in a rocker reading, near the window. “Is she painting still?” she heard Erik ask the child’s nurse.

  “Yes, your grace.”

  Erik strode around the corner. Christine leaned forward slightly and glimpsed a white lace and pink velvet canopied bed against the back wall. He stopped just on the other side of an alcove set in the window that looked like a window seat. White curtains draped the window in a waterfall of fine Belgian lace, and sunlight found its way into the room everywhere. Unlike the rest of the castle she had seen this morning, there was an air of perpetual sunshine in this room.

  “There you are,” he said to someone who sat out of sight of Christine. “I think it is time to come out and greet the pretty lady, Erin.” He held out the small portraiture of Christine. “Did you paint this for her?”

  He must have received an answer, for he knelt. “She has been waiting to meet you. She wants to thank you for the gift. Don’t you think it is time you introduce yourself to her? Erin?” Her father tenderly bade his daughter forward.

  After a pause, a girl of about seven timidly appeared. Aunt Sophie had already told her Erik’s daughter was partially deaf. But Christine had not expected to meet someone so fragile, so breathtakingly beautiful, an image of the portrait Christine saw in the gallery on her way upstairs, which she now concluded was Lady Elizabeth. Erin wore an ankle-length pink calico and white pinafore. Her long blond hair had been swept from her tiny face and was tied neatly with a blue ribbon. Wide blue, furtive eyes stared back at Christine.

  “This is Lady Sedgwick.” Erik smiled encouragingly then looked up at Christine as he lifted Erin into his arms. “As you can see…” he thumbed a blue-and-pink smudge from her cheek…“She wants to be a great artist.”

  Like her mother, Christine thought, remembering the artwork on her own walls. This child was a prodigy. Christine approached and took the portraiture from Erik’s hand. “I have never received anything so wonderful,” she said. “I am glad to finally meet you, Erin.”

  It was a positive sign that the child did not turn away.

  Erik’s arm encompassed the room. “And this is the nursery. You are welcome here anytime.”

  “She is all alone in this wing?”

  A slight smile curved the corners of his mouth. “Only until she gets another brother or sister,” he said, pressing his lips against his daughter’s soft curls.

  Christine blushed at the carnal intonation in his voice. But strangely, the thought of having a child with him did not fill her with the same uncertainty she’d first had in London.

  The little girl said something in his ear. “Ask her yourself,” he encouraged.

  She shook her head and buried her face against his shoulder.

  Erik grinned. “I believe she has developed a tendre for a certain ugly-as-the-blazes cat.” He gave his daughter a wink.

  “Erik!” Christine said.

  “She wants to know if you will let her have Beast.”

  Christine shifted her attention to the little girl, suddenly nervous that she would spoil this meeting. “Beast doesn’t belong to anyone, Erin.” She kept her words slow and precise. “You can’t own him.”

  Her independent cat was rather like Erik in that respect.

  You can’t make him love you, an unfamiliar voice inside her said.

  “You have to be patient,” Christine added, keeping her eyes on the little girl’s. “But I understand he likes braised fish.” She made a wiggling motion with her hand. “Maybe you can bribe him.”

  A smile trembled on the girl’s lips. She cupped her mouth and said something else to her father. Erik grinned. “I believe she said that both she and he like Cook’s cream-filled crumpets.”

  Boris suddenly stood in the doorway. He held a note in his hand. “Mr. Bailey is here about the road, your grace.”

  “Tell him I will be down shortly,” Erik said.

  He looked over at the older woman now standing next to the rocking chair. The woman approached. “Come, Erin.” He shifted her in his arms. “Mrs. Whitman will need to clean you up before your lunch.”

  As Erin turned her attention to the approaching nurse, her small mouth tightened. “Erin. You are covered in paint. You need to wash up before lunch.”

  Erin wrapped her arms around her father’s neck and with her head on his shoulder, her eyes watched Christine as he followed Mrs. Whitman into an adjoining washroom. Whatever else the devil duke might be to the rest of Britain, his daughter obviously loved him unconditionally.

  A gust of wind swept through the treetops and fluttered the curtains. Christine walked over to the windows. She glanced out at the junipers and milkweed that blotted the wind-beaten landscape. Hardly a second passed when another gust of wind pushed against the window; then Erik was suddenly standing behind her. “I have business to attend. You’ll be able to occupy yourself today?”

  “I will try not to be bored, Erik.”

  Less than a half hour later, Christine was dressed for exploring. From Annie she’d learned there was an old drover’s trail that went up into the cliffs, but no one was allowed there anymore. She’d found Boris in the dining room preparing lunch for Aunt Sophie and asked if Lord Sedgwick had a topographical survey of the area surrounding the river that might have been commissioned for the levee work. A map? No one seemed to know.

  Maybe she didn’t need a map. Surely, someone other than Becca would know the place where she had found the first fossils.

  Carrying an old canvas knapsack filled with tools, Christine made her way down the hill to the stables.

  Two hours later, with a reluctant groom in tow, she reined in at the bottom of an old washed-out road that ended in the river. A cool breeze tugged at her hair. Behind her, the groom’s horse shifted. At least today wasn’t bone-chilling wet, she thought, as she adjusted the strap of her hard pith hat around her chin and patted her shaggy beast on the withers. She’d wanted a horse that looked experienced enough not to fall off a cliff. Miss Pippen had proven game thus far. Certainly more cooperative than the groom who had reluctantly agreed to bring her to the river. Thirty feet of swollen raging water might prevent her from crossing, but it did not end this outing.

  “We best not be going farther, mum,” the groomsman shouted over the noise.

  “Nonsense, Hampton. We’ve already been out here most of the morning.”

  She pulled out her compass and got her bearings, then removed the glasses from the canvas pack slung over her saddle and scanned the valley behind her. This entire area had been formed by a massive volcanic eruption an eon ago. Over the last millennium the elements had rounded the hills, and glaciers had carved a valley into the floor. Away from the domestic confines of Sedgwick Castle, the crags and windswept vales were a forbidding and lonely place. She eyed the escarpment a mile ahead. “That is where I want to go. We need to find a way to cross.”

  Hampton scrubbed a hand across his bristles. “He won’t like me taking you up there, mum. The riverbank where the fossils were found be this way.”

  “I have every intention of viewing that part of the river.” She pointed to the distant cliffs. “From up there.”

  Despite his reluctance, Hampton did as she bade. He took her another mile east, to a bridge that had not been washed out this past year—the only one left that crossed the river for miles. Until last summer, the river had been low enough in some places not to need a crossing. Now it was too dangerous, he’d told her. Leading the way, Hampton took her on the old drover’s trail that led into the foothills and then slowly snaked up the cliffs.

  The river’s roar funneled up the rock walls like thunder.
They stopped and ate lunch from a basket that Cook had given Hampton. After meandering along the trail another hour, Christine found the place where she wanted to stop and she dismounted. She handed Miss Pippen’s reins to Hampton and walked a goodly distance down the incline to the cliff’s edge, stirring rocks and sending some rolling over the side. Mounds of loose scree had washed down from the upper hills, and she knelt to study the talus. The ledge was as uneven as broken teeth and looked to have been slowly peeling away for decades.

  She knelt on one knee to study the rocks, then leaning slightly, she looked down at the white water churning in a large rock hollow below. She’d never possessed a fear of heights but she felt a shiver. By the look of the scattered tree limbs and bits and pieces of flotsam, some of which looked like the bleached wall of an old cottage, a great violence occurred here every time it rained. Nature’s fury at its most brutal.

  Sedgwick Castle sat in the distance like a moody mistress framed by the clouds. Looking at the stark and beautiful landscape, Christine contemplated all its untold secrets.

  Truly, she could fall in love with such a place, and found easy admiration for the man who had clearly preserved every stone of his heritage as if it had come to him encased in amber.

  She picked up a handful of talus and let it slide through her fingers. Somewhere out here her destiny awaited.

  Without turning, she asked the groom, “In which section of this ravine were the original fossils recovered?”

  “Fifty meters upstream,” a familiar voice replied, and it did not belong to the groomsman.

  Christine turned and rose abruptly. Erik stood above her on the hill. His cloak swirled about his ankles. The sun was behind him and so she could not make out his expression, though his tone was unmistakable. “Do you bloody mind coming away from the edge?” he said. “The entire face of this cliff is unstable.”