“I’m here to beg Your Grace to take action against this man.”
Nell wasn’t sure what she’d expected from the duke, but it wasn’t a cool and assessing inspection that made her feel beneath contempt. “Miss Trim, you can’t go around making wild accusations,” he said, the chill contrasting with his former kindness.
She raised her chin. She could do this. For Dorothy, who had deserved so much better. For all Leath’s victims. She didn’t count herself in that number. She’d invited her downfall. Unlike those other girls, she’d known what he was, yet she’d fallen as readily as a ripe plum from a tree.
“I have proof.” She battled to straighten her arm as again she held out the saddlebag. “You’ll see.”
He took the bag, mainly to save her from dropping it, she thought. “I’m sure there’s some mistake.”
Even through the storm in her head, a storm as violent as the one outside, a grim premonition arose that she’d made a mistake. This handsome, dark-haired man didn’t behave like someone who finally had his foe in his sights.
“No,” she croaked. “No mistake.”
“His lordship’s reputation—”
“Is a sham like his lordship,” she snapped, before reminding herself that she acted like a yahoo and that if she wasn’t careful, the duke would throw her out on her ear. If he did, where could she go to obtain vengeance? The marquess would squash any lesser man who came against him the way his boot squashed a bug.
The duke placed the bag on the floor and took her arm again. “You’re not well.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said in a rush, knowing that her legs wouldn’t support her much longer. “All that matters is that you stop him.”
“We’ll talk when you’re feeling more yourself.”
The duke’s voice echoed eerily. She’d felt so frozen when she came inside. Now the fire in the grate crawled along her skin like biting ants.
She dug her fingers into his sleeve. “Please,” she tried to whisper. Darkness edged her vision. “Please…”
The floor rose up to strike her.
In too much turmoil to sleep, Leath retreated to his library. He bitterly regretted quarreling with his mother. All his life, he’d been protective of her frail health. But making his peace with his mother meant sundering his connection with Eleanor. And he wasn’t willing to do that.
He threw himself into the leather chair behind his desk and watched John light the candles and set the fire. When he was alone, he glanced around this extravagant room that he’d always loved, and at last recognized that Alloway Chase was indeed haunted. Not by poor Lady Mary reputed to walk the battlements on windy nights, although God knew the night was windy enough to wake a hundred specters.
No, the ghost who haunted him was the woman he loved.
“Goddamn it,” he growled, slamming his hands on the leather blotter and upsetting a pile of mail.
He rose and gathered the letters, idly flicking through them. Reports from his various estates. Invitations he had no intention of accepting. Correspondence from his dwindling number of political allies. A letter from Berkshire that must report on the search for that blackmailing bastard Hector Greengrass.
Leath’s heart crashed to a stop and he ripped one particular letter from the rest. Hands shaking, he tore it open and moved closer to the fire to read it.
It was from the inquiry agent he’d engaged to check Miss Trim’s background. She’d arrived bearing impressive references from a Lady Bascombe of Willow House in Sussex. The agent had written several times saying that he was yet to locate the manor.
Urgently, Leath scanned the few lines. Far too few lines to convey much information, he quickly realized. Sykes had covered Sussex from top to bottom and side to side and he could categorically state that Willow House did not exist. Lady Bascombe was equally fictitious.
Feeling sick, Leath lowered the letter.
The knowledge that Eleanor had deceived him from the start made him crush the note into a ball. Yet while he was bewildered and angry, he wasn’t surprised. He’d always known that she wasn’t what she claimed. As his mother had said, Eleanor was a most unlikely housemaid. She hadn’t even tried to hide that she’d been educated beyond the level of most servants or that her proud spirit was unaccustomed to bowing to authority.
The problem now was that if Eleanor had fabricated her history, he had no idea where to
look for her. Was her name even Eleanor Trim?
Then he recalled her father’s war records. Whatever else was false, everything she’d told him about Sergeant Major Trim was true.
Her father had been a Kentish man. With sudden determination, Leath returned to the desk and wrote instructions to Sykes to continue the hunt in Kent. Now he sought Eleanor Trim, daughter of Sergeant Major Robert Trim, late of Wellington’s Army in Portugal. Leath included all the information he had, including the timing of her mother and her half-sister’s deaths, and prayed that it was enough.
Chapter Twenty-Four