The Wedding Night Read online

  A battle to the death with a thieving dragon. “My work,” Mairey said, turning to Anna to avoid Tattie’s glare. “Would you light the kettle for me, Anna, please? I haven’t eaten since noon.”

  “I’ll get the honey!” Caro said, dashing after her sister.

  Tattie persisted, both eyebrows arched, eyes narrowing their focus. “Going to London by yourself again?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?” Titania Winther had an unnerving genius for knowing when something was bothering one of her nieces. And, adult or no, Mairey was included in that incisive sweep.

  “I’ll be gone no more than a day,” Mairey answered, her toes crossed against the possibility of a white lie.

  “And a night?”

  “Possibly.” If she wasn’t put in jail for murder or mayhem, or both.

  “If I didn’t know you better, Mairey Faelyn, I’d swear you were skipping off to London to see a—” Tattie paused in her whispering and studied Poppy, whose nose was buried against Mairey’s neck. “A man,” Tattie finally mouthed.

  Mairey couldn’t help a belly laugh. How simple a bit of sinful cohabitation seemed in the light of Rushford’s infamy.

  “There’s no man in my life, Auntie. I’m skipping off after research material.” Mairey nuzzled her nose against Poppy’s. “Nothing more.”

  Anna and Caro were clattering dishes and whispering in the pantry. Poppy finally succumbed to the lure of conspiracy, flung herself out of Mairey’s arms, and followed after them.

  “You and your father, Mairey! I don’t know what drives you to wander so. Gone two weeks out of every month, from spring till fall.”

  Mairey sighed, and, as usual, her aunt heard every shade of her regret. “I don’t wander, Auntie; I collect stories and publish them in books. But it seems the girls change overnight. Another year and Anna will be a young lady. Poppy will be as tall as Caro. And Caro will be as wild as a country hare.”

  Tattie laughed. “An affront to every hare in the county, I think. Oh, dearie, I nearly forgot!” Tattie fingered through her recipe box, past the tattered, food-stained cards, finally handing Mairey an elegant, unadulterated envelope. “This came for you. I didn’t want to lose it.”

  The envelope bore a bristling crest emblazoned with an ornately decorated R.

  “Rushford,” Mairey said, a familiar uneasiness clutching at her heart. “Did he bring it here himself?”

  “What does ‘himself’ look like?”

  “Very tall, very dark, and very, very—” Mairey caught herself before she could utter the word handsome. He wasn’t at all. Not in the standard meaning. He was…compelling, coercive, insidious. Any one of those words would cause Aunt Tattie to bar the door against Mairey’s leaving for London; she had to speak carefully. Auntie’s eyes were blinking, at their most perceptive.

  “Very…insistent,” Mairey offered, hoping the word was bland enough.

  Tattie shook her head. “It wasn’t ‘himself’ then. Could have blown this one over with a sneeze. The letter came a week ago today. Sunday.”

  The woman hovered as Mairey stuck her finger into the flap, popped the sealing wax, and fumbled with the contents of the envelope.

  A railway ticket. And a note written in a strong script.

  Drakestone House. Monday, ten o’clock. Drakestone Crossing.

  “Who is this Rushford fellow? One of your father’s antiquarian friends?”

  “A collector.”

  “He’s the man you’re going to see in London?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  So did Mairey.

  “Welcome home, Mairey!” Anna was standing proudly at the pantry door, flanked by both of her grinning sisters. She held up a neatly arranged tray, its snug landscape complete with a steaming teapot, Mairey’s favorite cup and saucer, and a bread plate spilling over its edges with the honey that Caro must have soup-ladled onto the stack of three fat slices of bread.

  A poxing curse on you, Jackson Rushford.

  Chapter 4

  “I tell the tale as ’twas told to me.”

  Jack doubted that very much. Still, he leafed through Mairey Faelyn’s book of untidy scrawlings, barely making sense of the words, let alone their meaning. It seemed nothing more than a collection of falsehoods and gross exaggerations—which made him wonder again if he were placing his trust in a crackpot.

  Albeit a stunning crackpot—one who should have arrived here at Drakestone House hours ago. He shut the lid on the box of scrap paper and shelved it beside its corner-worn twin.

  Erasmus Faelyn’s name had been painstakingly inscribed in the ex libris of nearly every book Jack had removed from the open crate on his desk. He shook his head as he glanced around at the maze created by the one hundred and forty-three other crates he’d shipped to Drakestone House from that ramshackle library at Galcliffe. He’d only had time to open two. And they had only puzzled him more with their diagrams and drawings of rain-faded stone faces and crumbling ruins.

  Lunatic woman and her accursed hedging. He felt blind and extraneous, though he stood in the midst of his own vast library—one of the grandest in all Britain, with its two-storied arching windows and a mezzanine that ran three sides of the room; books, ladders, high-backed reading chairs, and a hearth that he could stand inside. Miss Faelyn’s entire library would fit into one corner of his—roof, windows, battered furniture, and all. Anyone else in the world would be pleased with the opportunity, but Jack had a strong suspicion that she would not.

  He lifted out another book—or what was left of its tattered binding and brittle pages. Ancient hands had been at work on the wood-bound manuscript, its ownership proclaimed in faded ink and a more florid script than today’s fashion. The next book and the next were inscribed with the same name, one Joshua Faelyn.

  A very odd legacy of scholarship, a bred-in-the-bone penchant for antiquities. There were years, ages of other Faelyns besides the prolific Erasmus and the very unpunctual Mairey.

  Even as Jack thought her name—fully prepared for that hot stirring of air in his chest whenever she danced blithely across his mind—the marble clock on the library mantel wound itself into a clanging frenzy of gongs. Four of them.

  “Devil take the woman!” Jack shoved another of the noteboxes onto the shelf and started for the foyer, only to find his butler standing rigidly at the partially open door.

  “Tell me, Sumner,” Jack said, tidying up his temper so he wouldn’t misuse it on the man’s wiry shoulders. “Tell me that you found Miss Faelyn at the station and that she’s waiting in the foyer.”

  Sumner cleared his throat and shifted his gaze to somewhere beyond Jack’s shoulder. “Miss Faelyn wasn’t on the 3:38, my lord.”

  “Great bloody hell! I explicitly instructed the woman to arrive this morning by ten. I told her personally, I sent her a ticket and a note—”

  “The rail lines are somewhat flexible in their timetables, my lord.”

  “Damn it, Sumner, you’ve met every train from Oxford since before ten o’clock; it’s past four now, and not a word from the woman!”

  “Perhaps I missed her, my lord.” Jack had known Sumner since they were both pitmen in Labrador, and the man’s abiding patience and even-toned voice had always been his most irritating flaw.

  “You could not possibly have missed her, Sumner. I have carefully cataloged Miss Faelyn’s most striking features three times before; I needn’t again.”

  “Silver-gold hair, you said, sir. And long, to the waist, if I recall. Gray eyes. Not quite clearing five feet and two inches.” Sumner blinked his attention back to Jack, his unsubtle opinion showing through his butling. “Shall I try again for the 4:57?”

  Silver-gold and long was a bland and truncated description of the woman’s hair. But Jack couldn’t very well ramble on about how its silky fragrance had roused him like an untried schoolboy, or how the trailing wildness of it had impelled him to wind his fingers through it. He’d be damned if he would g
ive the man an excuse to go sniffing at Miss Faelyn’s hair. Nor did he wish to detail the exact color of gray in her eyes: frosty, with flecks of blue and aqua, lamplight on silver.

  “My lord, the 4:57?”

  “Yes, all right. But this time I’ll go with you.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Sumner gave the stacks of crates and barrels a disdainful arch of his brow, then left the room, no doubt bound for his greenhouse and orchids.

  Jack went back to the bristling crate on his desk and shelved more of Mairey Faelyn’s books. Requisitioning her library had been a necessary maneuver, though she would likely denounce him as a thief. Which was exactly his plan. These books were more than paper and ink and desiccated leaves. They were her memories, all that she had left of her father.

  He knew how compelling memories could be. How they could rise up and become indistinguishable from one’s hopes.

  She would come to him. And she would stay. If he hadn’t been watching her so carefully, if her eyes hadn’t been so fascinating and gray-glinted, he might have missed the wonder in them and never have known her heart.

  He pried open the lid of another crate, then lifted the bowl end of a pot from the tangle of fine wood shavings.

  It was broken, most of it gone.

  “Damn!” This was a hell of a way to embark upon an alliance of trust with the woman. She would think him a careless clod. He rescued another broken piece from the shavings and tried to fit it to the ragged edge of the bowl.

  Not even close. The next piece fit—sort of. If he had a smaller wedge to put in the corner…

  Perhaps he could glue the bowl back together before Miss Faelyn arrived and set his ears afire. No need to add fuel to the conflagration. He gingerly sat the bowl on his desk, picked through the shards until he found a few promising pieces, then sat down on a stool to begin the puzzle.

  “Your pardon, my lord.”

  “Not yet, Sumner. Can’t be time.” Jack steadied one of the shards against the broken edge of the bowl, unable to spare the man a glance as he tried still another place. “Oh, and find me a Cement of Pompeii, will you? The kind with a brush in the stopper.”

  What he really needed was a shard that looked like a fish wearing a large derby.

  “She’s here, sir.”

  “Who is?”

  “Me.” The voice was silken and sultry, and fit for one hell of a fight.

  Jack looked up from the fractured bowl, across the maze of crates and stacked furniture, and directly into a pair of eyes that leveled him with their clarity.

  She had come. The redoubtable Miss Faelyn, framed by the tall, dark, mahogany doorway, and dangerously more beautiful than he’d remembered.

  Silver-gold. Yes, he’d been right about her hair, though just now its thick plait looked well-used by the wind. She was dressed simply, clutching her huge, sagging Gladstone in front of her, and glaring at him from beneath the slouching brim of her hat. Outrage sat high and pink upon her cheeks; her chest rose and fell rapidly beneath the green wool of her traveling jacket.

  “You’re late,” he said finally, swallowing hard as he stood up from his desk, unable to think of a single other greeting that wouldn’t have been taken for bluster or relief.

  “And you, Rushford, are a bloody thief.”

  The heat of her glare was a beam of summer sunlight focused through a magnifying glass. If he’d been a dung beetle, he’d surely have been charred to cinders by now. Sumner knew enough to vanish.

  “No, Miss Faelyn, I’m a businessman.” Jack tucked the evidence of the broken bowl into a cubby on his desk, then made his way toward the door. “The sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be.”

  “I know all that I need to know about your kind of business, Rushford. Consider yourself lucky that you haven’t yet unpacked my library. It’ll save you time sending the lot back to Oxford by morning. If it isn’t there by ten o’clock, I promise you, I’ll call in the authorities.”

  “I doubt that, Miss Faelyn.” Jack leaned an elbow idly against a crate and studied her.

  “You’re not above the law, Rushford. I don’t care who you know. You stole my library—”

  “I merely arranged for your books and papers to be packed and shipped here to Drakestone. It would have been done sooner or later, and the end result is the same. You are here; your library is here.”

  “Of all the arrogant toads!” She came two feet closer to him. “I told you, Rushford, I’m not interested in your project. I will never be!”

  Jack let her statement boil the air between them, delighting in the anticipation, in the awakening that would come when she learned of the bounty he could put into her hands.

  “Madam, have you ever read the Dyrgel Gofarian?”

  “The—” Jack felt her incensed huff more than he heard it, and the soft sound filled his gut with an unexpected heat. Her back was straight, and her chin, high, her head tilted slightly as though she were listening for an echo.

  “We’re talking about my library! Not some fanciful—”

  “Have you read it?”

  Her white teeth worked at her lower lip, sorting unthinkable decisions, it seemed, deepening the rose hue in the process. All the while charting his eyes, breathing as she might if he’d just kissed her and she was deciding whether or not she approved.

  “No,” she said finally, spitting with anger, dropping her bag to the floor and her hat onto the nearest crate, wishing him dead if her scowl meant anything at all. “No one has read the Dyrgel Gofarian. It’s the mythical writings of a fourth-century Welsh silversmith-turned-monk. But there is no such thing, Rushford.”

  “Are you sure, Mairey Faelyn?”

  She took another sharp, passion-heavy breath, too obviously battling her belief in wonders. “The book is a legend, sir. Any scholar of the Celts knows that.”

  Her face was haloed by flaxen curls that frayed from the plait hanging from her shoulder. She smelled of the outdoors, of the wisteria hedge that clung to the stone wall containing the grounds of Drakestone House. She must have come cross-country from the station, walking off her outrage or summoning it to its full-blown fury.

  He fought the urge to wind a strand around his finger and stuck his hand in his jacket pocket instead. “There are many ancient secrets kept from the secular world—or so I understand.”

  “Which has nothing at all to do with your absconding with my library.”

  “Oh, but it does, my dear. It has everything to do with it.”

  “How, Rushford?” She was a tight bundle of indignity: fuming, curious, prepared to deny that the winter sky could be quite blue at times.

  “The Gofarian, madam. Which, by the way, was at one time a scroll, but is now pressed flat between wooden covers to preserve it. Ordinarily kept in a vault in the minster at York.”

  He was close enough to see her pulse shifting just above the low-buttoned collar of her dark shirtwaist. She feathered a loose spiral of hair into place behind her ear.

  “I suppose you’ve seen it?” She tossed her head and the strand came loose.

  Jack shrugged for effect. He truly couldn’t fathom the value of the fragile, decaying artifacts he’d seen this past week, but he knew that antiquarians and scholars like Mairey Faelyn would have approached the minster’s vault in reverent awe.

  “I saw mildew-encrusted rolls of old lambskin: the Dyrgel Gofarian and other manuscripts in bad repair, kept just as secretly. They all looked alike to me—”

  “You’re lying.” He’d never seen such bright, beautiful intensity. So protective. So provocative.

  I have you, Mairey Faelyn, just where I want you.

  “I couldn’t read a word of its Latin, Miss Faelyn. Nor could I decipher its other scratchings.” The moment of truth, the crux of this unlikely partnership, had arrived. “But you can, my dear.”

  “Can?” Mairey felt as though Rushford had caught her up in a stumbling trance, tempting her with his impossibilities. “How?”

  “Come,”
he said, smiling in that sumptuous way. He held out his hand to her, his broad palm bare and exposed, dreadfully inviting, as though if she touched it he would lead her somewhere she shouldn’t go. She resisted, balling her fist into her skirts and standing her ground in his unparalleled library.

  His eyes brightened in his conceit, never shifting from hers as he left her for a small table near the soaring windows.

  “Vaults, madam, museums, the archbishop’s ear—just as I promised you.” Rushford swept aside the red velvet cloth, revealing a square-cornered object nestled in the center. “My credentials.”

  He was good, this mining baron, surprisingly theatrical. But she wouldn’t be swayed to his side—not even tempted.

  “You’re wasting my time, Rushford.”

  “I doubt that, Miss Faelyn. Come, see for yourself.”

  There was something deeply stirring about the object, about its weight as he lifted it to show her, and the faint ornamenting across its broad face.

  It wouldn’t hurt to look. Setting her heart and all her hopes against him, she indulged the wicked man and approached the table.

  In the next instant, the room began to reel.

  A legend come to life—the Dyrgel Gofarian; the secrets of the Celtic silversmiths. Most antiquarians doubted it had ever existed. And this marauding heathen had it here in his library! Mairey could hardly breathe, could barely hear for the maelstrom of hope and terror.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “It was delivered to me yesterday under guard from the archbishop of York, at the behest of the queen herself.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Nothing is impossible, Miss Faelyn.” He reached down to touch the page with his bare fingers.

  “Not that way!” Mairey caught his hand in hers, felt the glance of lightning in his fingers. “A kerchief, please.”

  Without a word Rushford set the book gently on the table, then proffered a kerchief from his breast pocket. “Madam.”

  Mairey whipped it from him, wanting more than anything to find the book fraudulent, an elaborate hoax to trick her into joining him.