Game of Dukes, page 21
He found Celeste crouched on the floor, barely conscious, pale and muttering incoherently. Rufus licked her face, reviving her. Phin took her hand in his. It was as cold as ice and he rubbed it briskly between his own much larger hands. He felt relief flood through him when she looked up, albeit through unfocused eyes, and appeared to recognise him.
‘I…I saw a ghost,’ she muttered, shivering as a series of uncontrolled tremors rocked her body. ‘Frightened. Terrified.’
‘Hush, you’re safe now. Can you stand?’
‘Can you stand?’ mimicked a voice that was not hers. Phin’s head snapped round in its direction and he found himself glaring at a young woman in the process of removing a sheet from her shoulders. A woman whom he had never seen in his life before and who definitely should not have been in this building. Celeste had recovered and pushed herself to her feet, still trembling, leaning heavily on Phin for support. ‘How touching.’
‘Who are you?’ Phin asked, but he suspected that he already knew the answer to that question. He pulled a chair towards him as he spoke and helped Celeste into it. Rufus sat protectively at her side, a growl rumbling in his throat every time he looked at the woman whom Phin assumed must be his half-sister. She resembled his mother, apart from the manic look in her eye, her wild hair and fiercely aggressive posture. She appeared to have somehow lured Celeste into the west wing and then scared her half to death by shrouding herself in a sheet. The woman was clearly delusional, which made her dangerous and unpredictable.
‘Don’t you recognise me, big brother?’ she asked, placing a hand provocatively on one hip.
Phin pretended indifference. ‘What are you doing here, Beth?’
She seemed disconcerted when he failed to react to what was probably supposed to be an earth-shattering introduction. He had stolen her moment of glory by remaining unimpressed and addressing her by name. Clearly their mother had not passed on details of Phin’s visit. But if Phin was right and she had been living here more or less permanently since his return, their mother would not have known where to contact her. Her presence here explained why he had been unable to shake the feeling of being watched. She would have had a perfect view of the courtyard from this chamber, which is where he had been whenever he’d felt eyes upon him.
‘You know who I am?’ Her lower lipped jutted into a child’s sulk.
‘Evidently.’
‘Then you hardly need to ask why I am here.’ She struck a defiant pose. ‘I have the right to be here. More right than you. My father was a duke.’
‘Congratulations,’ Phin replied in a disinterested tone. ‘Be that as it may, you cannot remain here. I shall make immediate arrangements to have you returned to your mother’s care.’
‘Our mother, Phin, or had you conveniently forgotten that fact?’
Celeste’s fingers closing around Phin’s wrist prevented him from responding as acerbically as had been his intention. Celeste, despite her shock, was thinking more coherently than he was. Beth appeared to be dangerously unhinged and it would be a mistake to provoke her.
‘Our mother,’ he replied, inclining his head, even though the words stuck in his throat. ‘You cannot stay here,’ he repeated. ‘This wing isn’t safe.’
‘I shall tell everyone who I am!’ Her voice rose and there was a mad desperation in her tone.
Phin shrugged. ‘Be my guest. You are my uncle’s by-blow, and he is dead, so you will hardly create a scandal.’
‘But my mother’s identity very well might,’ she added, a scheming look in her eye.
‘It seems to me,’ Celeste said, speaking for the first time, ‘that if the old duke had wanted to acknowledge you, he had ample opportunity to do so before his death.’ She paused for emphasis. ‘He did not, but he did take care of your mother and you. Not all men of consequence take responsibility for their…well, their responsibilities. That shows a level of affection that ought to comfort you. I know for a fact that he showed you more attention than he did his legitimate children.’
She glowered at Celeste with an expression of unmitigated dislike. ‘Until your mother turned his head.’
Celeste glanced up at Phin. ‘You mistake the matter,’ she said, sounding commendably calm despite the fact that the hand he still held in his continued to tremble. ‘My mother cared for the duke when he became ill, which was what she was engaged to do. Nothing more.’
‘We would have cared for him. We are his blood relations. Who better? Mama begged him, but your mother had turned him against us and she failed to convince him.’
‘My uncle was acutely aware of his status,’ Phin said. ‘He knew what a scandal it would create if my mother suddenly rose from the dead. Besides, he could have been prosecuted for faking her death.’
‘Ha!’ She threw up her hands. ‘Excuses. I told Mama that you would defend him, rather than lending her your support.’
Another warning squeeze from Celeste prevented Phin from pointing out that his perfidious mother had forfeited any right to his loyalty by her actions sixteen years previously. He reminded himself that Beth was very young, still only seventeen, and bitter. She had clearly been spoiled and indulged to the point of madness, and seemed to think that she had some divine right to reside at the Abbey.
Phin glanced across the room. There was some sort of table set up beneath the window. Bread, cheese and ham were partially covered by a cloth, clearly filched from his kitchen. He wondered how Beth had managed to get in and out of the west wing when the door was kept locked. Perhaps his mother had retained a key and given it to her daughter. He was even more intrigued to know how she had managed to steal in and out of what was now a constantly occupied kitchen without being detected. Clearly the chit possessed the guile and determination of the truly deranged.
‘Why are you here, Beth? What is it that you want from me?’
‘I want you to restore this wing and allow Mama and me to live in it, of course,’ she said, making it sound like the most reasonable of suggestions. ‘You have more than enough funds. Funds that your father accrued and which, by rights, ought to be Mama’s. They were still married, of course.’ Phin shook his head at her twisted logic—further proof of her instability—but said nothing. ‘We will be no trouble. No one will even know that we are here.’
‘Is that what your father agreed to?’ Celeste asked, when Phin didn’t favour her ridiculous request with a response.
‘The stubborn fool refused to see reason. God alone knows I gave him opportunity enough, but he was besotted by your mother and didn’t want me or Mama anywhere near him, spoiling his peccadillos.’ She gave a high-pitched laugh, more of a scream, and lifted her shoulders as high as her ears. ‘I gave him every opportunity, so he only has himself to blame for the way things turned out.’
Celeste and Phin exchanged a prolonged look, the abject shock in Celeste’s expression, the manner in which her mouth fell open reflecting Phin’s total astonishment and feeling of inevitability. The thoughts that were filtering through his brain seemed as deranged as his half-sister clearly was.
Impossible. Unthinkable. But he knew that he had got it right.
‘You!’ He pointed an accusatory finger at her. ‘You killed them.’
Chapter Fourteen
Only Beth’s laughter broke the stultifying silence that filled the dilapidated bedchamber. Celeste struggled to regain her scattered wits, experiencing murderous feelings towards the madwoman who had robbed her of her beloved mother. Of Matthew, her confidante and friend, and of the old duke, too. Phin’s fingers slackened around her palm as an angry hiss slipped past his lips. He too must have been struggling to comprehend the enormity of what his half-sister had done, and it was her turn to give his hand a reassuring squeeze. The gesture appeared to restore his senses. He took a deep, calming breath and somehow managed not to strangle the girl with his bare hands.
‘I can see that you want us to know what happened,’ Phin said with commendable calm. ‘Why else would you be here?’
‘You need to know, that’s more to the point.’ She sounded reasonable, and very matter of fact. ‘I can say so with confidence since I overheard your touching heart to heart on the matter.’ She waved a hand towards the windows which looked directly over the courtyard to emphasise her point.
Celeste nodded, aware that the bench she and Phin had occupied upon his return from London was situated almost immediately below the window. Phin had said some bitter things about his mother, and Beth must have overheard them all. When neither Phin nor Celeste responded, Beth felt the need to fill the silence by crowing about her achievement.
‘It is the outside of enough!’ she cried. ‘First of all my father wanting her mother.’ She pointed a trembling finger at Celeste. ‘A duke and a housekeeper?’ She tossed her tangled mane and blew air through her lips. ‘The idea was insupportable.’
‘But a duke and his brother’s wife is not?’ Phin asked calmly.
‘Ha, you are no better. You have a duty, a position to maintain, but you feel the same way about the daughter.’
‘He does not…’
Phin gave her fingers a sharp squeeze and she abruptly stopped talking, aware that he would prefer for Beth to condemn herself with her own words. If she confessed to causing the accident that killed a duke, his heir and her mother, it would confirm her madness and probably save her from an appointment with the hangman. But Celeste privately thought that living the rest of her life in a lunatic asylum might be a worse fate. She blamed Phin’s mother and the old duke for creating such a selfish, self-absorbed creature with an overinflated opinion of her status.
‘I knew better than to come here and try to reason with my father when he stopped calling upon us in London. I saw how much it upset my mother. Not that she would admit it, but I knew. So I waited until one of the big race meetings in Newmarket that I knew he would attend and accosted him there. I thought he would be pleased to see me and realise how much he’d missed me. He never tired of telling me that I was his favourite child, you see.’ Beth threw up her hands. ‘Ha! He was furious, refused to listen to reason and sent me away. He told me never to bother him again. He said that he had done his best for me, had used his influence to find me a good position, and would not acknowledge me if I made a scene.
‘A scene?’ She paced up and down, avoiding the loose floorboards with a practised ease indicative of familiarity. ‘I was his daughter and he was too embarrassed to admit it publicly. I felt humiliated. Wronged.’ She scowled and kicked at the edge of a tatty rug. ‘But I also knew that he would not change his mind once it was made up. Mama had told me that he could be hard-hearted—cruel even—when challenged.’
Celeste wondered what purpose feeding such ideas into the head of an impressionable daughter who adored her father was supposed to have achieved. Had Beth’s mother been attempting to destroy her admiration for him or goad her into taking revenge? Cold fingers of fear trickled down Celeste’s spine along with her doubts. Could a mother really be that manipulative?
‘She knew you had been to the races?’ Phin asked.
‘No. She would never have approved. Our mother is very passive nowadays, so I must fight her battles for her.’ Not for much longer, Celeste thought but did not say. ‘I couldn’t accept being cast aside like a worn out shoe, so I decided to try one more time, convinced Papa would be missing my company by then. I went to the next race meeting but he had me turned away from his party before I reached them and wouldn’t even look at me.’ Tears trickled down her cheeks. ‘I knew then that it really was hopeless, but I couldn’t accept his betrayal. It ate away at me and I could think of nothing else. I had to be near him. I watched him from afar, your mother on his arm, laughing at something he’d said. And Matthew, the acknowledged child, strolling at his side and drawing the eye of every female at the meeting.’ She gave an angry hiss, her lovely features pinched with envy. ‘But I went unnoticed; an outsider with a family who failed to acknowledge me.
‘So I left ahead of the duke’s party and took the public coach back to the local village. I had to accept that it was all over for me. I had nothing left to live for.’ Celeste glanced anxiously at Phin, but he didn’t notice. He was watching his half-sister intently, gauging her every nuance and change of mood. ‘So I walked to the lane that I knew they would have to take to reach the Abbey and just…well, jumped out in front of the carriage and threw up my hands to scare the horses and make my father see what desperate straits he had reduced me to. I didn’t intend to kill anyone, except myself, you must believe that.’
‘I do,’ Phin said softly.
‘It’s Matthew’s fault that I failed,’ she said, as though Phin had not interrupted her. ‘The horses shied and he tried to steer them away from me, instead of allowing me to be trampled underfoot. In so doing the carriage swerved and toppled over.’ Tears streamed down her face. Tears of regret or of frustration? Celeste was unable to decide. ‘My family didn’t want to acknowledge me in life, yet they refused to let me die.’
She fell onto the bed and subsided into wracking sobs. Celeste glanced at Phin, feeling some sympathy for a situation that was not entirely the girl’s fault—she had been encouraged from the cradle to harbour grand expectations—and seeing the same emotions etched into his features. But the feeling did not abide. They seemed to recall simultaneously that Beth’s madness was responsible for the deaths of the people who had mattered to them the most, and their sympathy evaporated.
‘What now?’ Celeste asked.
‘This can’t be covered up,’ Phin replied grimly. ‘Help me get her into the main part of the house. We can lock her into a room she can’t escape from. Then we will require Sir Richard’s help.’
All the fight appeared to have drained out of Beth. Celeste supposed she had remained at the Abbey, not because she seriously imagined she would be able to take up residence there but because her conscious had troubled her, leaving her with a burning need to confess.
Between them they managed to help her down the stairs without any of them falling through a loose stair tread. Celeste unlocked the door to the main part of the house, wondering how Phin had got to her through a locked door when she screamed. Beth’s eyes were dull and she took no interest in the main house as she was ushered through it and up the stairs. Celeste was relieved when they were not accosted by any members of the family whose curiosity was bound to be piqued by the sight of the dishevelled young woman being almost dragged up the stairs. There was a small empty room at the end of the first floor corridor which they used as Beth’s temporary prison.
‘I will send for the local doctor to give her a sedative,’ Phin said in an undertone, watching his half-sister as she curled into a ball on the bed, docile and seemingly harmless. But appearances could be deceptive, Celeste thought, looking down on the jealous creature who had destroyed her world. It was clear from the change in Phin’s demeanour that he had not lost sight of what she was capable of, how scheming and destructive she could be, and wasn’t taking any chances. ‘Leave her be,’ he said, placing a hand on Celeste’s shoulder and steering her from the room. ‘I don’t want you to be alone with her.’
They left her and locked the door behind them. Phin again touched Celeste’s shoulder. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You’ve had a terrible shock. When I think what she could have done to you…’
‘We have both been shaken, but at least we now know what happened. It’s typical of Matthew that he tried to avoid killing her, and killed himself in the process. I really don’t think she meant for anyone to die, other than herself. She was angry and upset, and had lost all sense of reason.’
Their conversation had taken them to Phin’s library. He made Celeste sit in a chair and poured her a small measure of brandy. She sipped at it and spluttered as the fiery liquid hit the back of her throat.
‘When I heard you scream,’ he said softly, kneeling in front of her and taking her hand. ‘I thought that Darwin had…’ He shook his head. ‘Well, never mind what I thought. What the devil were you doing in the west wing?’
‘Curiosity got the better of me,’ she replied with a sad little shake of her head. ‘I felt increasingly drawn towards it.’ She managed a small smile. ‘Perhaps I have second sight,’ she added, flapping a hand to show that she was not being serious. ‘I can’t really explain why I went, but I have felt for some time that I was being watched.’
She expected him to laugh. Instead he merely nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I felt it too.’
Mr Kline entered the room in response to Phin’s earlier summons. He seemed stunned but commendably calm when Phin explained what had happened and took himself off to summon both the doctor and Sir Richard.
Things happened quickly after that. When the family gathered in the drawing room that evening, Phin explained to them what he had learned about his mother’s affair with the old duke and the fact that she was still alive. He waited for the exclamations of surprise to die down and the torrent of questions to slow before going to tell them about Beth’s existence.
‘So,’ he finished, taking a long sip of his whisky, ‘she tried to make a point by killing herself beneath the hooves of the team driven by Matthew, but is actually responsible for killing those in the carriage when Matthew tried to avoid her. She is quite deranged, of course. Sir Richard has arranged for her to be taken to a local asylum, where she will be examined. Her fate will be decided by the specialist doctors there.’
‘She will get away with it?’
It was Emma who spoke with bitterness into the brittle silence that ensued, surprising them all. Emma rarely showed much interest in anything and made a point of not putting herself forward.
