“I said I don’t—”
“Is it because of your leg? Are you not able to ride?”
Kit searched the man’s face for a sign of insult or insolence, but found only the same amused curiosity. “I can ride,” he said, which wasn’t quite a lie. He could ride, and he could walk, and he could climb stairs, as long as he didn’t mind pain and if one employed a fairly generous definition of ride, walk, and climb.
“Interesting. I thought there had to be a reason for a man with your storied past to live the way you do now.”
“Well, you’re wrong.”
Percy rose to his feet but didn’t turn toward the door. “Pity,” he said. “Could have been fun. You can’t tell me that a man with your skills and your history is content to stand in one place all day, warm and safe and terribly, terribly bored.” He adjusted the lace at his cuffs. “Could have been quite fun.”
Kit picked up the knife, allowing its blade to catch the candlelight, so Percy could be under no misapprehension as to what Kit meant. “No,” he repeated, putting his free hand flat on the desk, as if preparing to stand. “Get out.”
Percy left, and as Kit heard his near-silent progress down the stairs, he wondered how the stranger had known things he had hardly admitted to himself.
Chapter 4
Percy certainly hadn’t anticipated using his questionable powers of seduction to persuade the man, but if he could get that book from his father and also get into that highwayman’s breeches, he’d consider it time well spent. Not only did Webb have that jawline and those shoulders, but he spoke with a pleasantly rough growl of a voice. He would probably be as boring in bed as he was out of it, but when a man looked like that, one could lower one’s standards.
Buoyed along by this pleasant train of thought, he decided to perform a task he had been delaying.
“The book your father won’t let out of his sight,” Marian had murmured that morning while she and Percy once again sat for their portrait, “is bound in dark green morocco and has faded gold lettering embossed on the cover.”
Percy’s heart had given a thump, and he’d forced himself to remain very still and very calm so as to conceal any trace of his excitement. “So, it is my mother’s book,” he responded, equally low. Until this point, all Percy had known was that his father was taking great pains to guard and conceal a book he kept about his person at all times. That alone told Percy of the book’s value to the duke. If Percy could steal it, then he could force his father to pay for its return; that was reason enough to want the blasted thing. If the book had been his mother’s, however, that opened up a rather intriguing vista of possibilities.
Percy remembered his mother removing her little green book from the folds of her gown, sometimes running her finger down a page as if to remind herself of something, other times writing something inside. He had never seen its contents but was certain that she had used the book as a means to amass power, and that his father was now doing the same: gathering and hoarding power was the one thing Percy’s parents had in common.
Percy had known from his earliest days that his parents were engaged in a protracted domestic war that seemed to have originated some time before their marriage, and over a cause no more complicated than their long-standing hatred for one another. Percy often only learned of the individual skirmishes long after the fact, and from overheard whispers among servants; this was how he learned the duke locked the duchess in her rooms after the duchess caused the duke’s morning chocolate to be laced with what was either an emetic or arsenic, depending on who one believed. It was also how he learned the duke had his mistress housed in the east wing of Cheveril Castle, and also that the duchess, either in retaliation or in provocation, had sold a coronet and used the proceeds to build a Roman Catholic chapel on the grounds of that same estate.
During these years of civil war, Percy was well aware that his parents were equally matched adversaries, and that the only people who imagined the duchess to be an innocent victim were the same people who could not imagine a woman as conniving as his mother even existing. But none of that mattered: Percy was a partisan of the duchess, a fact as immutable as his yellow hair or his gray eyes.
The duchess had other partisans, of course, and Percy needed to visit one of them to confirm his suspicions about the book.
Lionel Redmond was a distant maternal cousin. He had been sent to seminary in France and was now a Roman Catholic priest in London. His mother’s family, the Percys, were an old family of Catholics. His father’s family, the Talbots, were emphatically Church of England. After decades upon decades of persecution, English Catholics could now, at least, be relatively certain that they could huddle in an alehouse or a cockpit for a makeshift mass without finding themselves burned at the stake, but that didn’t prevent Percy from looking repeatedly over his shoulder as he made his way from the carriage to the narrow little house where his cousin lived.
“Cousin Edward,” Lionel said when he saw Percy waiting in the parlor.
“Father,” Percy responded, getting to his feet and bowing his head.
“Have you come to tell me of your travels?” Lionel asked, and Percy realized his cousin probably imagined that Percy had dined with the pope or some such.
“You’re a kind man to invite me to bore you with my stories,” Percy said. “But in fact, I have a more sorrowful reason for my visit.”
“Oh dear,” Lionel said, and gestured for Percy to sit.
“As you know, I was in Florence when news of my mother’s death reached me during the summer of last year. The solicitor wrote to me about the portions of her marriage settlement that pertained to property left to me upon her death.” There had been startlingly little. The property that was his mother’s dowry passed into his father’s hands at the time of their marriage, with a nominal amount held back for the dowries of their future daughters.
“I hoped you could tell me what became of her personal property. When I returned last month, I discovered that her rooms were now occupied by the new duchess, and my mother’s little things—books and combs and so forth—were gone. My father claims to have distributed them among the servants, but I hope he sent you something as well.”
Lionel frowned. “Indeed, he did not. But, as you know, your father is hardly sympathetic to the true faith.”
Percy hummed in understanding. “I wish I had something of hers to remember her by,” he said. Which was the kind of truth he didn’t like to think about, so he uttered the words without letting them seep into his thoughts. “Do you remember that little green book she carried about? I’d pay a king’s ransom for the chance to even see it one more time.”
Percy didn’t know if it was his imagination or if something shifted in his cousin’s posture—a tilt of the head, a narrowing of the eyes, but suddenly the old man looked as shrewd as Percy’s mother.
“The only book I ever saw your mother with was her Bible,” Lionel said.
As far as lies went, that was a bad one, because there was no possibility Lionel had somehow escaped noticing that little book. An easily disproven falsehood is no better than a confession was one of the duchess’s lessons.