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London, 1814Many years ago, as a curly-headed youth on grand tour,
he had fallen madly in love with beauty and so had stopped
in Florence to take drafting lessons from a bonafide Italian
master. Starry-eyed and romantical, he had followed the
light-winged muses south to the Bay of Sorrento, where he
had first heard the ancient Italian proverb "Revenge is a
dish best served cold." He was an old man now, without illusions,
cold and canny as a scheming pope. Beauty had
betrayed him, but decades later, oddly enough, here on this
gray English day, the Sicilian proverb held true.
A neat, slight-framed man, James Breckinridge, the earl
of Coldfell, gripped the ivory head of his walking stick in
gnarled fingers that ached with the needling April rain. He
permitted his footman to assist him down from his luxurious
black town coach while another held an umbrella
over him.
The slumbrous quiet in this place was like a church, but
for the pattering of the rain. He turned slowly, looked past
the servants' blanked faces, past the jagged wrought-iron
fence, into St. George's Burying Ground on the Uxbridge
Road, just north of Hyde Park. Three weeks ago, he had
buried his young bride here. Under a chilly gray drizzle,
where the hill curved green, her marble monument rose
like an angry needle to the smoke-colored sky. Beneath it,
just where Coldfell had expected to find him, stood the
tall, powerful, brooding silhouette of a man; wind-blown
and lost, the wide shoulders slumped as the gusty rain
blew his black greatcoat around him.
Hawkscliffe.
Coldfell's mouth flattened into athin line. He took the
umbrella from the footman. "I shan't be long."
"Yes, my lord."
Leaning on his walking stick, he began the slow ascent
up the graveled path.
The thirty-five-year-old Robert Knight, ninth duke of
Hawkscliffe, appeared unaware of his approach, stony and
immobile as the monument. He stood in bleak granite stillness,
the rain plastering his wavy black hair to his forehead,
running in chilly rivulets down the stark planes of his cheeks,
and dripping off his rugged profile as he stared down at the
yellow daffodils that had been planted on her grave.
Coldfell winced at the ungentlemanly intrusion he was
about to make on the other man's grief. Hawkscliffe was,
after all, the only one of the younger generation he respected.
Some of the old-school pigtail Tories found the
young magnate's views alarmingly Whiggish, but none
could deny that Hawkscliffe was twice the man his weak-willed
father had been.
Why, Coldfell reflected as he hobbled up the path, he
had seen Robert become a duke at the age of seventeen,
managing three vast estates and raising four wild younger
brothers and a little sister practically single-handedly.
More recently, he had heard him deliver speeches in the
Lords with a cool force and eloquence that had brought the
whole house to its feet. Hawkscliffe's integrity was unquestioned;
his honor rang true as a bell of finest sterling.
Many of the younger set, like Coldfell's own idiot nephew
and heir, Sir Dolph Breckinridge, considered the so-called
paragon duke a rigid high stickler, but to wiser heads,
Hawkscliffe was, in a word, impeccable.
It was pitiful to see what Lucy's death had done to him.
Ah, well. Men would see in a woman what they wanted
to see.
Coldfell cleared his throat. Startled, Hawkscliffe jerked
at the noise and spun around. Tumultuous emotion blazed
in his dark eyes. Seeing Coldfell, his dazed expression of
pain took on a stab of guilt. With his honorable nature, it
had no doubt tormented the duke to have wanted an old
friend's wife. Himself, he had never been that chivalrous.
James nodded to him. "Hawkscliffe."
"Beg your pardon, my lord, I was just leaving," he
mumbled, lowering his head.
"Stay, Your Grace, by all means," Coldfell answered,
waving off the awkwardness. "Keep an old man company
on this dreary day."
"As you wish, sir." Narrowing his eyes against the rain,
Hawkscliffe looked away uncomfortably, surveying the
jagged horizon of tombstones.
Coldfell hobbled to the brim of the grave, cursing his
aching joints. When the weather was fine, he could hunt all
day without tiring. But he had not been energetic enough
for Lucy, had he?
Well, she had had her fashionable London burial, just as
she would have liked. Having died at his house just outside
London, she had a spot in the most exclusive cemetery in
the city, complete with a Flaxman funerary monument, the
height of good taste, sparing no expense. And well he should
have to pay for this most expensive mistake--an old man's
folly, he thought bitterly. Beauty indeed was his weakness.
With nothing to recommend her but a magnificent mane of
flame-colored hair and the most luscious thighs in Christendom,
the twenty-six-year-old Lucy O'Malley had been an
artist's model in Sheffield before she had bewitched him
into making her his second countess. He had sworn her to
keep quiet about her background, devising a false one for
her. At least she had given that pledge sincerely, eager as
she had been to join the ton.
Coldfell was merely glad he had not been forced to bury
Lucy next to Margaret, his first wife, who was reverently
enshrined at Seven Oaks, the ancestral pile in Leicestershire.
Ah, wise Margaret, his heart's mate, whose only
fault had been her failure to give him a son.
"I am--very sorry for your loss, my lord," Hawkscliffe
said stiffly, avoiding his gaze.
Coldfell slid a furtive glance at the duke, then sighed,
nodding. "It's hard to believe she's really gone. So young.
So full of life."
"What will you do now?"
"I leave for Leicestershire tomorrow. A few weeks in
the country will help, I warrant." A visit to Seven Oaks
would also take him out of the way of suspicion when this
man carried out the deed for him.
"I'm sure you will find it soothing," Hawkscliffe said--
polite, automatic.
They were both silent for a long moment, Hawkscliffe
brooding, Coldfell reflecting on the uneasiness of living
anymore in his elegant villa in South Kensington with its
four pretty acres of sculpted gardens--the site of Lucy's
death.
" 'Lay her in the earth. And from her fair and unpolluted
flesh may violets spring,' " Hawkscliffe quoted barely
audibly.
Coldfell looked at him in pity. "Laertes' speech on
Ophelia's grave."
The duke said nothing, merely stared at the carven letters
on the monument: Lucy's name, her date of birth and
death.
"I never touched her," he choked out abruptly, turning to
Coldfell in impetuous anguish. "You have my word as a
gentleman. She never betrayed you."
Evenly, Coldfell held his gaze, then nodded as though
satisfied, but of course he had already known.
"Ah, Robert," he said heavily after a long moment, "it is
so strange, the way they found her. She went out to our
pond every day to sketch the swans. How could she have
slipped? Perhaps my brain is muddled with grief, but it
makes no sense to me."
"She could never slip," he said vehemently. "She was
graceful . . . so graceful."
Coldfell was taken aback by his ferocity. This was going
to be easier than he'd hoped.
"Did your servants report anything strange that day, my
lord, if I may presume to ask?" pursued the duke.
"Nothing."
"Did anyone see anything? Hear anything? She was in
earshot of the house. Could they not hear her cries for
help?"
"Perhaps she had no time to cry out before she fell beneath
the water."
Hawkscliffe turned away again, his firm mouth grimly
pursed. "My lord, I have the blackest suspicions."
Coldfell paused, watching him. "I wish that I could put
your mind at ease, but I'm afraid that I, too, am haunted by
severe doubts."
Hawkscliffe turned and stared penetratingly at him. His
dark eyes glowed like hellfire. "Go on."
"It doesn't add up. There was no blood on the rock
where they said she . . . struck her head. What am I to do? I
am an old man. These sore limbs are weak. I haven't the
strength," he said slowly, emphatically, "to do what a husband
should."
"I do," vowed Hawkscliffe.
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