A Lord Apart Page 13

  “Ha. I see what you mean.” Whitfield took a penknife from his waistcoat pocket, unfolded it, and slit the buff lining.

  “Wait.” It was too late. The cloth gaped open, revealing a bit of dark leather. “I wanted to see how it had been put in there,” Penelope added.

  Whitfield shrugged. “Sorry.” He reached behind the lining and pulled out a slender notebook.

  It was an oblong the size of a piece of notepaper, bound in dark calf. The cover looked worn, as if it had been well used. There was nothing extraordinary about the object, except its hiding place and the fact that Whitfield was staring as if it might bite him. “Is something wrong?” Penelope asked.

  “My mother always had a notebook like this,” he replied in a distant voice. “Carried it everywhere. She bought a dozen at a time. I remember my father rushing off, on one of their visits to London, to pick up a fresh supply for her. Had to do that instead of having lunch with me. Obligatory, he said.”

  “A diary?”

  “I just realized that I’ve never found any of them since they died.” He tapped the cover. “Until this.” He looked around at the trunks of records. “What’s become of all the others?”

  “Perhaps she destroyed them?”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Well, if they were diaries, they might be private.”

  A spark lit his dark eyes. He grasped the cover.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t read it?”

  He gave her an incredulous look and opened the notebook, flipped a few pages, frowned.

  Penelope tried to restrain her curiosity and failed. “Is it a diary?”

  “I haven’t the least idea.” He handed it over.

  The pages were full. Lines of text covered them, written in a strong, distinctive hand. But there was no clear narrative. The words were more like notes, random jottings. There were scraps of sentences listing birds and weather and vegetation, little drawings in the margin, French phrases, whole lines of tiny doodles. None was unusual in itself; the odd thing was that they went on and on. Penelope flipped a few pages. The whole notebook was full of this…gibberish, remarkably repetitive. “There are dates and places,” she said, latching on to something she could identify. “This one is headed Jamaica.”

  Whitfield bent over her shoulder. She could feel his breath on her cheek. “It’s so disjointed.”

  Penelope nodded. “I wonder what she meant by it?”

  Daniel turned away. “You will never know.” He set his jaw. “As usual,” he muttered.

  But she heard him. “Usual?”

  “My mother was not a forthcoming person. She didn’t speak about…anything really.” Would he never learn? Daniel wondered. She’d had nothing to say to him in life. Why would death be different?

  “It’s certainly odd.” Miss Pendleton was practically rubbing her hands together. Clearly, she loved a puzzle. “I wonder if there are more.”

  They checked the other trunks and found eight similar notebooks, hidden in the same way and equally cryptic. When they were sure they had them all, they took the pile to the estate office.

  “Fascinating,” said Daniel’s lovely companion. They sat side by side at the desk looking over their finds.

  He’d never met anyone who was more so.

  “There are patterns.” Miss Pendleton glanced from one notebook to another. “Repeated phrases, but I can’t make any sense of them.” She closed the slim books and set them aside. “We must keep working, as tempting as these are.”

  Tempting? Daniel hadn’t fully understood the meaning of the word until he spent so much time with her. He longed to fold her in his arms. He wanted to keep her from all harm. Which was impossible, of course—the folding and the keeping. Yet he could think of little else.

  “Frithgerd is full of mysteries,” she said.

  “Like Rose Cottage.”

  “Precisely. You are right to keep me on track.”

  “I…to keep you?”

  “That is the advantage of a team.”

  Her smile ravished him. He hated to think of her in danger.

  “What is the matter?” she said.

  “Matter?”

  “You’ve been looking at me oddly today. And…hovering.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “You have. And you stare as if you’ve discovered I have a fatal disease.”

  “Nonsense.”

  She examined him. “Well, perhaps it’s more as if you have a guilty secret.”

  “Wanting to kiss you again,” he replied, a truth and a diversion in one.

  “Oh, that.”

  With one short word, Daniel was thrilled and bewildered. She’d sounded offhand, unperturbed. Because she felt the same?

  Miss Pendleton peered deep into his eyes. “I don’t think that’s it.”

  How strange. He liked the idea that she could see into him.

  “I wish you would tell me.”

  He couldn’t deny her, and the truth was, she deserved to know. Even though the news was not happy. “Macklin received replies to the inquiries he sent out.”

  She stiffened and moved a little away. “I see.”

  “I didn’t understand how dreadful it was for you. I wish—”

  “I don’t want to talk about the investigation,” she interrupted. “Yes, it was dreadful. But it’s over and done. I’m through with it.”

  “Yes.” The word escaped him because he so wanted it to be true.

  “Why do you say it that way?”

  “What way?”

  “As if you doubted me.” She turned away. “Ah, you do. That’s the way of these conversations.” Her voice trembled. “Can you believe I was never really doubted until my brother’s death? Not in any serious way. About anything important. I was considered a very honest person, a model of integrity.”

  “I do not doubt you.”

  “And then suddenly, overnight practically, everything I said was met with skepticism and contempt. As if I’d always been a liar. I couldn’t take it in at first. I kept thinking they’d see—”

  “I absolutely do not doubt you,” Daniel declared. “Not one iota.”

  Tears pooled in her blue eyes. She tried to blink them away, and Daniel couldn’t stand it. He pulled her into his arms. She was rigid and trembling. He thought she might pull away. But then she relaxed into his embrace, rested her head on his shoulder, and allowed herself to cry. He knew that was the proper phrase. He felt both her resistance and her capitulation. He held her; she wept. And Daniel didn’t feel the least bit reluctant or awkward. Indeed, he was sorry when she pulled away.

  “I don’t usually do that anymore.” She got a handkerchief from her reticule, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose.

  “Anymore.” He hadn’t meant to repeat the word. But the history it had evoked cut him to the heart.

  She didn’t look at him. “There was a time when I nearly despaired. But I endured, and now it’s in the past.”

  “The thing is…” Daniel didn’t want to tell her. He wanted to see happiness light her face, laughter rather than apprehension.

  “What?”

  “It may not be quite over.”

  Miss Pendleton shook her head. “No, I convinced them, finally. I was assured of that. They agreed that I had no hand in Philip’s activities.”

  He could see how much stock she put in the idea. He wanted to let the matter drop. But it would be worse if government agents showed up at Rose Cottage unexpectedly. He had to tell her. “One of Macklin’s correspondents suggested that you may be seen by the government as a…lure for rioters who are still at large. And a way to catch them if they come looking for help.”

  She went so still that he feared for her. Then she burst out, “I have tried very hard not to dislike my brother, but sometimes I am so angry!”
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  “He seems to have been reckless—”

  “Reckless? He was idiotically rash, uncaring, bumbling. He flailed about and shouted and accomplished nothing but his own death. Such a dreadful waste.” She gripped the inkwell as if she might throw it across the room, but she didn’t, though her fingers whitened with strain.

  Daniel put a hand over her free one. “Was he always so?”

  She shoved the inkwell away. “The truth is, I don’t know. He went off to school when I was seven years old, and he often spent his holidays with friends. He was my brother, but not my companion. Or my friend.” She sounded sad as well as angry now.

  Daniel knew something of distance from family members.

  “When he was home, he did talk about new inventions and change and poverty. But his talk was never systematic. He said nothing to predict what happened. He jumped from one topic to another. He seemed just a young man full of random enthusiasms.” She swallowed. “Papa didn’t like it when he criticized the government. They had one blazing row about that, and Papa forbade him to mention the topic again in his hearing. Philip complied. And stayed away from home even more often.

  “I told the agents all of this. I told them everything. Which was really nothing, because I knew nothing. I didn’t know Philip’s friends, if he had any. He must have had some, surely?” She looked at Daniel, her expression desolate. “But after that row with Papa, he would have told them his family wasn’t sympathetic. They would have no reason to apply to me.”

  But would the government know that? Daniel wondered. She wasn’t the problem; they were.

  “Philip saw me as Papa’s pet,” she continued. “He resented it. He did tell me that once. And I was with Mama much more than he was. She was an invalid. I was her daughter. I helped care for her.” She looked down at her now tightly folded hands. “Philip tired her out. She tried to hide it, but she wasn’t good at dissembling. She was glad when his visits were over, and I know he saw it.”

  In her face, Daniel saw a girl struggling to bridge an irredeemable gap that had opened in her family.

  “The sad truth is, I scarcely knew my brother. Do you think that can’t be? That I had to know? That’s what the agents believed,” she finished bitterly.

  “I’m well aware of what it is to be a stranger to your family,” Daniel said. “Ties of blood are meaningless if people ignore them.”

  Penelope turned, moved by the emotion in his voice. His eyes held sympathy and an understanding she’d never thought to encounter again.

  “Or if they refuse to reciprocate,” he added. “One can make all the overtures in the world, but if they’re ignored, there’s nothing to be done.”

  “Or repulsed, yes. After a while, Philip pushed me away. Can you really know how that is?”

  “All my life I was treated like an acquaintance by those most closely related to me.”

  “Your parents.” When he looked surprised, she added, “You said you were at odds with them.”

  “I did?”

  “When we began our search through the papers.” Her easy recollection seemed to startle and then to move him.

  “‘At odds’ is too strong a term. I shouldn’t have said that. It implies disputes. We didn’t dispute. We conversed. We chatted.”

  He said the last word as if it was unbearably offensive.

  “The last time they were home before their trip to India.” He glanced at her. “They were killed in a shipwreck on the way back.”

  “I remember.”

  “You do?”

  “I remember everything you’ve said to me.”

  He blinked as if she’d said something astonishing. He started to speak, then pressed his lips together and swallowed, obviously overcome by strong emotion.

  “I’m very sorry about your parents,” Penelope added. Fleetingly, she remembered Lord Macklin’s talk of grief.

  Whitfield nodded—more an acknowledgment than an acceptance of sympathy. He cleared his throat. “On that last visit—I didn’t know it was the last, of course. But I was determined that we should do better. We’d been a family for more than a quarter century. I hadn’t seen them in five months. I thought they must, in their hearts, want a closer connection as much as I did. I arranged for us to attend a lecture on African wildlife. It was the sort of thing they liked to do.”

  “And you don’t,” said Penelope.

  “How do you know?”

  “It was the way you said ‘lecture,’” she explained.

  He gazed at her as if she was an exotic creature herself. The hint of a smile tugged at his lips. “Well, I don’t, as a rule. I’d rather be doing than listening. But the joint outing was the point. The three of us went, and heard the fellow, and agreed that it had been a dashed informative talk. And then they said they had to go. I’d arranged dinner, which they knew quite well. But they said that an important engagement had come up, a man they had to meet.”

  “More important than—” Penelope broke off.

  “Important as opposed to not important at all. That was my impression. It was necessary for them to dine with this person. And entirely unnecessary to do so with their son.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I don’t believe they said. Which was typical. If they mentioned a name, I don’t recall. I was annoyed.”

  “I expect so!” How could anyone treat him that way? Penelope wondered. Let alone his parents. How could they not want to spend as much time with him as possible? She’d only known him a short time, and she wanted that.

  “People don’t call it cruel when others are simply…absent,” he added in an emptily even voice.

  Penelope nodded. “My mother’s illness made her selfish in later years. She was in pain and had no patience for other people.”

  “Pain is a terrible burden. One can’t help but sympathize. But my parents were not in pain.” Whitfield’s jaw tightened. He looked away. The fingers of his right hand, resting on the desktop next to Penelope’s left, tapped the wood in a nervous rhythm. The sound somehow felt like the drag of retreating waves, pulling everything in their path out to sea.

  Penelope leaned over and put an arm around him. Whitfield went still, like a man in the presence of some rare and breathtaking animal, who doesn’t dare move for fear it will bound away. Then, slowly, he bent his head until the side rested against hers.

  Temple to temple, shoulder to shoulder, they sat for several minutes. Penelope felt his chest rise and fall under her arm, along with a sense of kinship unmatched in her life till now. Gradually, his muscles eased.

  The atmosphere in the room shifted. Penelope’s hand on his coat sleeve went from comfort to caress.

  He turned a little toward her. “We can’t—”

  She put her other arm around his neck and pulled him closer.

  He kissed her. Or she kissed him. Both, Penelope decided, while she could still think. What did it matter?

  His arms slipped around her. She melted against him. Her heart pounded as the kisses multiplied in urgent bliss.

  And then his hands closed on her waist and moved her away from him. He scooted his chair back to increase the distance.

  “No,” said Penelope.

  “Yes,” said Daniel. His breath caught on a laugh. “There’s a reversal.” He was aching with desire, grasping the tatters of control.

  Miss Pendleton—Penelope—watched him. Her blue eyes were soft with longing. Her breath, coming fast, made the rise and fall of her bosom entrancing.

  “You should go.” If she stayed… She couldn’t stay. He wouldn’t be able to resist her. “I can’t be answerable,” murmured some pompous part of him.

  She gave him a startling smile. “And if I don’t wish you to be?”

  “What?”

  “Answerable.”

  “What?” he asked again. Didn’t she understand
that his good intentions were hanging by a thread? He wanted her so much.

  The inexplicable Miss Pendleton laughed. “May I take these with me?” she asked. Her hand—the one that had caressed the back of his neck moments ago—was now resting on his mother’s notebooks. “Perhaps I can decipher them.”

  Daniel frowned at the notebooks. His mother had cared for them as if they were the most precious things in her life. Far more precious than a son, for example. Miss Pendleton could throw them in the refuse heap for all he cared. “All right.”

  “I’ll keep them safe.”

  “Do as you like with them.” The statement came out harsh.

  She gave him another strange smile, as if she knew things he couldn’t imagine. And then she was up and gone before he could rise to bid her farewell.

  Daniel sank back into his chair, body aching with desire, mind whirling with confusion. He’d done the right thing. Why did it feel like he’d been a fool? And that Miss Penelope Pendleton had some lively plans for him? A riot of sensual pictures crowded his brain at the idea. But she hadn’t meant that. Of course she hadn’t. Couldn’t have. But the look on her face when she’d said she didn’t want him to be answerable! Daniel had difficulty breathing for a moment.

  She remembered everything he said. Daniel contemplated this admission for a while. The thought made his throat tight in a different way. His eyes felt hot, and he had to blink. Like a child unwrapping a gift and not daring to hope that it was the thing he really wanted, he thought. And what the deuce did that mean?

  He was still sitting at the desk and wondering twenty minutes later when Macklin appeared in the doorway. His tall, dark-haired houseguest looked about the room as he came in. “Has Miss Pendleton gone?” he asked.

  “She went home. I think. Yes, she must have.”

  Macklin glanced at him. Had he sounded wrung out? Daniel wondered. He certainly felt it. He stood.

  “I thought we could discuss inserting a few questions about newcomers into Tom’s rambles about the neighborhood,” said the earl.

  “I see no need for discussion. By all means, set him to asking. You say people have grown used to him.”