The Wedding Night Page 7

  “As I have in you.”

  “Exactly. I am what is known in the world of British finance as a mining baron.”

  A devil. A dragon. “So I understand.”

  She hated them all and appreciated his reminder, but not the intensity of his dark gaze and all the shards of crystal color she could count there.

  “Investors and adventurers watch me closely in everything I do; they follow when my viewers appraise a coalfield. If my competitors or anyone else discovers that Viscount Jackson Rushford is looking for Celtic silver, every barrow and stone circle, every museum vault and private collection in the country, will be swarming with treasure-seekers. Holding my silver for ransom! Where would that leave us?”

  His silver. Mairey exhaled. She had never imagined this kind of threat to the glade and to her village. The vestiges of the Willowmoon legend were still whispered in the hills of the northern marches. Scavenging scholars like Arthur Brawlings would beat the woods for its mysteries. Rushford might just as well hire a circus parade and reporters from every rag in Fleet Street to tag along behind them.

  “If you’d left me in Oxford, where I could have continued my work in secret—”

  “In secret, Miss Faelyn? Where this collection of pot shards and rabbit pelts and untold treasure was housed behind a paper-thin door, which was hanging badly on pig-iron hinges and secured by a lock that had rusted open eons ago?”

  “We never once had so much as a bottle of ink stolen.” Yet she had never given much thought to thieves.

  “Until someone like me, with a large enough wad of bank notes, came along to tempt the impeccably ethical Dean Hayward and his trustees?”

  “You are the exception to every rule, my lord.”

  “Think what you will. If rumors should arise about our little enterprise, this library—bloody hell, this entire estate—will become a target for robbery. We need locks and we need privacy. I’m having a cupboard safe delivered tomorrow.”

  Rushford went to his desk, stripping out of his jacket—a wholly improper action, given the late hour and the fact that they were alone. But Mairey’s objection never made it past her admiration. The man’s shoulders were broad enough when bound by the sturdy seams of his jacket, but they grew massive and straining under the stark white of his shirt and silken waistcoat.

  She grabbed a breath. “A cupboard safe, for what?”

  “For locking up your notes when you’re not with them.” He studied her from under his brow as he unlinked his shirt cuffs and pocketed the studs. A thoroughly intimate sight, made of bedchambers and rumpled counterpanes…his male scent on her pillow, on her breast.

  “Rushford!” He’d rolled his sleeves to his elbows, past his corded forearms, and had taken up a pry bar. “What are you doing with that?”

  “Unpacking.” He thunked the bar into place under the lid of a crate and yanked downward. The nails came away with a squawk. “I’ll open and you can put things away.”

  Rather than fling herself across the crate and demand that he stop right there, Mairey smiled with as much gratitude as she could muster. “I’d rather unpack myself.”

  “And I’d rather help you. Here.” He eyed her pointedly and handed her a bristly armful of wood shavings out of a crate marked Desk Drawers. He nodded in the direction of the enormous hearth. “For the firebox.”

  The nosy beast was going to pick through everything. All her notes and private papers from her father, exposed to his questions. She deposited the wad of shavings. Erecting a fortress against the man was going to be more difficult than she had imagined.

  “I’ll take that, Rushford.” Mairey scooped the small desk drawer filled with letterhead and envelopes out of his hands.

  “And while you do, you can tell me how your father came to have such an interest in this Willowmoon Knot.”

  She’d already planned the answer for that most unanswerable of all possible questions.

  “He just fell into it, I suppose.” She fit the drawer into the desk and then scooted past him, on his way with two drawers stacked together. “He heard about it somewhere and liked the idea of finding a vast treasure of silver.”

  Knowing with complete certainty that her father would approve of her defaming his character in this instance, Mairey shoved the drawer into its place on the right side of the desk and noticed that the lock had been pried open with the point of a knife. Her life and her destiny had been exposed without her permission. Would the man search her laundry, as well?

  Rushford stood up from his muttering at the ill-fitting drawer full of pens and clips. Mairey backed up as he rose, but he was still as tall as the sky when he looked down his long, slightly crooked nose at her.

  Cedar and citrus, she thought absurdly.

  “Your father heard about the Willowmoon somewhere? From his own father, perhaps?”

  How could he know that? “Possibly.”

  What else could she say? The man was a mind reader! Mairey slid out from beneath his heady scent and returned to the open crate before Rushford could dig around in it. She hurried back to the desk with another drawer, careful to hide its cache of pocket notebooks that her father used in the field. He hadn’t been the neatest record-keeper, and she often found a stray note about the Knot in them.

  Rushford was waiting for her, and snagged one of the books as she was shoving in the drawer.

  “What are all these little books?” he asked, fanning the pages hard enough to ruffle the hair off his forehead. “You had one at the mill.”

  Mairey knew better than to grab it from him, though she dearly wanted to. “Field notes,” she said.

  He walked toward the lamp, blessedly distracted. “Yours?” he asked, frowning as he turned the pages. The book looked like a toy in his hands.

  “Mostly.” Mairey used his distraction to carry another drawer to its rightful place in this oh-so-wrong library.

  “What the devil is a ‘can-wall gorff’?”

  A harmless enough question. It would be good practice to answer him, if she was going to learn to dodge the man’s curiosity without him noticing.

  “Canwyll gorff,” she said. “A corpse candle.”

  Rushford raised a brow at her in reply.

  “A sourceless light that foretells a death. It’s a Welsh term. Also called a fetch-candle in Scotland.”

  “And Nekha lights by the people of the Mekong River.”

  Mairey couldn’t have been more surprised. “Truly?”

  He nodded lightly, looking vastly proud of himself. “Truly.”

  The ends of Mairey’s fingers began to itch to write it down. Nekha lights. Mekong River. She found a pencil and scribbled Rushford’s definition onto a stray shred of packing paper, folded it, and stuffed the piece into her bodice.

  She looked up and into Rushford’s stark curiosity.

  “What’s that you’ve written?” He came toward her, his gaze as warm as ladled honey on the place she’d just stuffed the note.

  Mairey covered her bodice and the gathering heat with her hand. “I wrote down your Nekha lights for my folk studies.”

  “Show me.” He seemed immovable.

  Mairey plucked the note from her bodice and unrolled it for him to read. “As I told you—it’s what I do when I’m not hunting treasure.”

  He took the note, read it twice, looked on the back, then drew the piece beneath his nose as though he were tasting her scent. “Most glad to be of service to your science, Miss Faelyn.”

  “Thank you.” Mairey took the note back, her ears surely flaming. But instead of replacing the paper in her bodice—a habit she’d have to break immediately—she stuffed it willy-nilly into the nearest notebox.

  When she turned back to her unpacking Rushford was leaning an elbow on a crate, chewing on a smile, all the drawers in place and Mairey feeling rifled from bodice to stockings.

  “Now, my dear, why don’t you enlighten me about the Willowmoon. Tell me all you know.”

  No, she thought, her heart thu
ndering high in her chest. “Well—” She would inundate the man with historical accuracies, bore him senseless with an austere lecture. “The item of antiquity known as the Willowmoon Knot was first recorded in a pamphlet published in 1589 by the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries.”

  “Published?” Rushford came toward her with quiet intensity, planting his hands on the partner’s desk. “Do you mean to tell me that those dust-witted scholars published a map to this pot of silver we’re after? For all to see?”

  “You needn’t worry on that count, Rushford.” Mairey stood fast against his bottled anger, relieved that he was standing safely on the other side of the desk, praying that he would stay there while she gathered her thoughts. “My fellow antiquaries in Elizabeth’s time knew nothing of the silver, knew nothing of the clue that the knot-work might reveal. As students of ancient history, they were interested only in the Willowmoon’s Celtic design.”

  “You’re certain of this?”

  “Positive.” She couldn’t very well tell him the full truth: that only one man had known of the silver in the glade at the time—Joshua Faelyn, the first of her family who had tried through the years to rescue the Knot. Unfortunately, Joshua hadn’t recognized the significance of the odd knot-work until it was too late to rescue it from the wrath of the king.

  Rushford looked unconvinced, but he cleared a spot on the desk and sat down on the edge, closer now and leaning toward her. “Continue.”

  Which wasn’t as simple as it had been when he was across the room, when she could better ignore his eyes and their constant seeking. She reached into a crate and pulled out an armload of note cases, which she began to sort on the shelf behind her desk.

  “It was next seen, or rather next described, among an inventory of other antiquities that were confiscated in 1614 by James the First.”

  “There, you see, madam! The king knew something of its worth! He wanted the silver!”

  “No, Rushford. King James knew nothing of the silver in the—” Dear God, she’d almost said “in the glade”! She steadied her thoughts. “In the time of his reign.”

  “If not for the silver, then what would a king want with a piece of ancient metalwork?”

  Mairey’s heart was still clinging to her ribs, but Rushford hadn’t seemed to notice her near slip. She turned from him and added another notebox to the row on the shelf.

  “The king took ‘a little mislike,’ as they termed it at the time, to the Society of Antiquaries, suspecting that it was a political organization conspiring with others to do mischief to his reign.” She turned from the shelves to fetch more boxes, but Rushford was there beside her, his arms loaded to his chin.

  “There’s a fool for you,” he said, setting the boxes on the desk, “to see a threat in a society of scholars.”

  Let him spout his prejudices; let him believe that she was as ineffectual as her predecessors.

  “Exactly, my lord.” Mairey slid the boxes one by one next to the others. She’d sort them later; build her walls against him while he wasn’t looking. “The king ignored the priceless stone axheads and bits of bone, but like any right-thinking pirate, he took the gold and silver into his personal treasury.”

  “And then?” Impatient, the man began to pry open the lid of crate after crate, as though he smelled treasure nearby. She watched him carefully.

  “The Knot next appeared in a royal inventory following the king’s death in 1625. It was recorded once again in 1642, when Charles the First went to war against Parliament. It was listed among the treasury items that left Windsor coffered and disguised in various carts, accompanied by a caravan of Cavaliers.”

  “On its way to where?”

  “To Charles’s queen, Henrietta, who had already sailed to Holland and was awaiting payment for arms. When the caravan arrived at the Aylmouth quay in Northumberland, one cart had disappeared. Stolen, or waylaid—history has been absolutely silent on the subject.”

  “And then?”

  Mairey sighed sharply, reminded of why she had agreed to his blackmail. “That, Rushford, is exactly the question we need to answer before we can take another step.”

  “What do you mean, madam?” He stopped his noisy work and stared at her.

  “I mean, that’s the last we know of the Willowmoon Knot.”

  “The last?” He dropped the pry bar on the crate lid, looking more a pirate scorned than a mining baron. “Hell and damn! Then how the devil do you know that the Knot still exists?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You—”

  “I made that perfectly clear to you from the first, my lord.”

  “Bleeding hell!”

  It did Mairey a world of good to watch him rake his fingers through his hair, watch it curl and then fall back into place, a little awry. The poor man was exasperated. Good. Excellent. Now he’d be better inclined to listen to anything she wanted to tell him, grab on to it with both hands, and call it truth.

  Which was exactly what she’d been telling him: the bare, untraceable truth, but fully in her control.

  “So, madam, this trail of silver goes stone cold way back in 1642?”

  “Not entirely cold, my lord.” His ears pricked, this wily dragon, and his gaze fixed on her as she braved the open crate nearest to him. “Many of the items which were cataloged in that wayward cart have reappeared over the years, returned to their rightful place in the royal treasury, or mentioned in probate inventories. So the Willowmoon Knot is out there somewhere.”

  “What does this knot thing look like? Was there a woodcut made or an engraving?”

  “Not even a sketch.” Here she would have to tread more lightly. “Only a vague description of the moon’s cycle and a knot-work of Celtic tracings.” Mountains and a serpentine river, a chevron of geese pointed northward, an arrow nocked and aimed directly at the heart of her village. “Meaningless to the modern age.”

  His eyes were on her, as though he’d discovered some truth of his own that he didn’t plan to share. “To anyone but a scholar of Celts.”

  “Hopefully.”

  “So where do you begin, Miss Faelyn?” He leaned close to her, peering into her eyes. “Which door do you wish me to open first?”

  Impossible man—improbable wizard. But oh, the vistas she could see from here!

  “Tell me what great sources are available to me, Rushford, and I’ll best know where to begin.”

  “The Gofarian, of course.” He nodded to the cloth-wrapped treasure on the worktable.

  “I’ll start it in the morning.”

  “And then report to me.”

  “That is the charter between us, Rushford.” But she expected to learn nothing from the miraculous manuscript beyond a hint at the Willowmoon’s history. Dear stuff, and heart-singing, but not helpful because it had been written too early, and she already knew it all. “What else can you show me?”

  Rushford nodded, unlocked his desk drawer, and pulled out a folder. “Beginning with the most obvious, the Royal Archives at Windsor; the Chapter House at Westminster Palace; the Court of King’s Bench at the Lord Chancellor’s Office. And, of course, the Public Records Office, which has begun moving a few documents from the Wakefield Tower. Deputy-Lieutenant de Ros and the Keeper of the Records have been notified that I may drop in.”

  Ah, yes. His commission from the queen. Her father had been a mere scholar, not a mining baron with a title that was probably as old as God’s and pockets as deep as the seas. No wonder he’d gotten nowhere.

  “What else have you in your arsenal, Lord Rushford?”

  He looked up from his page of miracles, dreams of silver plunder alive in his dark eyes. “Far too many to list, and I am no judge of their significance. Of all the resources of the Empire, which would you pursue first? What would be your fondest wish?”

  To be done with this business, she thought fiercely; to be free of the burden of the Willowmoon. It had become unbearably heavy in the last days, and more than a little confusing.

 
; “I would like to see the personal papers of Henrietta, Charles’s queen.”

  “Why?”

  His directness always startled her, made her stop short and weigh every word before she spoke it. “The queen’s personal guards would have supervised the shipment of her treasury under her express instructions.”

  “Of course. Done. I’ll look into the matter in the morning.”

  Just like that. The Faelyns had spent two hundred years knocking on locked doors, and Rushford was able to open them with a wave of his hand.

  “What the devil is this?” Rushford was staring into a wicker basket he’d pulled from a crate, his nose wrinkled. “Another of your mummified squirrels? Gad, woman, it reeks!”

  He stuck the basket and its fusty ripeness under her nose. The offending item was green and withered, and Mairey couldn’t help her laughter.

  “It’s a meat pie, my lord. Your cloven-hoofed pixies packed up the lunch I threw away three weeks ago and shipped it here to Drakestone House.”

  He looked so thoroughly disgusted that Mairey took the basket from him and set it outside the library door.

  They worked well into the small hours, stopping only to eat from the tray Sumner had set on Rushford’s desk. Like a boy at Christmastide, the blackguard opened every crate himself. Mairey had to run to keep up with him, nearly throwing the books into the shelves so that she could be back in time to keep him from reading too deeply.

  He seemed to be everywhere at once, and always with her; steadying her on the wobbling footstool, chiding her for risking her neck, and then bearing the task himself.

  Her father was there too, in everything she touched. His hand, his script, his philosophies. The Willowmoon and all it meant to him. His body was buried in the churchyard in her village, on the breast of the hill beside her mother. But he was also here in the library, in her heart, and so very much alive.

  His field notes rang with his voice, and she couldn’t help but turn the pages, remembering their travels through the countryside.

  Finally, in the deepest part of the night, when the shadows clung heaviest to the vaulting mahogany, Mairey’s yawns became noisy. She flopped in the chair at his desk, bone tired but unwilling to leave Rushford alone in the library with all of her research unguarded, and prepared to stay till dawn two days hence if the man was so inclined.