She would have to forgo her searching and be gone from Falder at the first possible opportunity. The map offered riches, but discovery could mean prison. She had failed in her quest and now there was little else to do but return home.
A tight feeling of absolute uncertainty engulfed her.
Ruby and Miriam.
How on earth could she protect them?
Asher roamed the hills above the ocean, cursing the note in his pocket, the note he had found beneath his door when he had returned to his room in the hours after dawn. Emma Seaton was gone.
Back to London.
Back to Jamaica.
Back to God knew where.
The horse beneath him whickered and pranced and he stilled her with a quiet whisper, hating the way his mind kept replaying the feel of Emma’s skin beneath his hands.
He wanted her. That much was plain. He wanted her like he had never wanted any woman before. Even with Melanie he had not experienced this white-hot flash of passion, this desperate uneasiness. And the way she responded to him…
‘Stop it.’ He said the words out loud, surprised by the gut-tearing anger in them. Emma Seaton was a thief and a liar and a threat to his family. He had given her a chance to trust him, after all. More than a chance. If it had been anyone else, she would have been thrown out after the night he had seen her dressed in the lad’s clothes in front of his dead wife’s picture.
Why had he not, then?
He knew the answer even as he posed the question.
Because he admired her. She was so unlike any other woman who had ever made his acquaintance that she threw him somewhat and he doused down the urge to place his hands around her neck and strangle the truth out of her.
Why would she not trust him?
What had she to hide?
He swore into the gathering wind and turned his horse for home.
Lucinda met him in the front portico and she did not look pleased.
‘Emmie is gone.’
‘Emmie?’ He had not heard her called that before.
‘She was my friend. She told me her friends called her Emmie. She said that I could too and now she has gone.’
‘Did she tell you why she went?’ He could barely keep the irritation from his voice.
‘No, she did not have time, though she did leave this note for me.’ She handed him a small piece of paper to read.
Miriam and I need to return to London. Thank you for letting me borrow the clothes and jewellery.
‘I do not think she went of her own free will, Asher. I think you were cross with her. I think she reminds you of a time when you used to laugh and enjoy life and so you frightened her off somehow…’
‘That’s enough.’ The whiplash of his words shook Lucinda visibly and she turned towards the stairs, but not before snatching her note back.
‘She may be gone from Falder, Asher, but you can’t forbid me to see her in London, for I like her, even though you are determined not to.’
He watched her as she flounced up the stairs, the letter tightly held in her hand and the promise of rebellion in the staunch set of her shoulders. Life had not burdened her yet, he thought as he made for the library, all her hopes and dreams still intact and possible.
So unlike his own.
Taris sat in the armchair by the window. Today he looked tired, and when he removed his glasses to clean them Asher saw that his right eye was strangely opaque.
‘Emma Seaton has gone?’ His brother’s tone had the same ring to it as Lucinda’s. Tired of defending his actions, Asher reached down and took a cigar from a box on the desk near the fireplace. Cutting it, he breathed in deeply before sitting on the leather sofa opposite his brother.
‘When Father died he made me promise on his death bed that I should never compromise Falder because a thousand years after our demise this pile of stones and mortar will still be here, and a thousand years past that thousand too. Custody. Tradition. Responsibility. Call it what you will, but I listened.’
‘Lord, you actually believe that she would compromise Falder? In what way?’
‘Rifling through the silverware at midnight would be one way I could mention.’
‘And did she steal anything?’
Asher shook his head. ‘Nothing I could determine, but I think there was something specific that she was after and she has not yet found it.’
‘Specific. Like what?’
‘God knows, for I don’t. Money, perhaps. Jewels. The combination lock on my safe had been tampered with.’
‘She had the skills to try to break open your safe? Who sent her, do you think?’
‘She wouldn’t say. I did ask.’
A moment went by as he watched Taris play with the tassel of a burgundy bookmark left on an open copy of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi.
‘She’s in trouble, Asher. You said as much yourself.’
‘And you think that it concerns me?’
‘I can hear it in your voice that you admire her, which leads me to conclude that, if you have any hopes of an heir to enjoy these hallowed halls, now might be the time to take action.’
Asher swore to himself and did not answer. Could not answer. Whatever it was that Emma Seaton inspired in him was irrelevant. Lust? Like? Love?
‘You would not think of providing heirs yourself, of course?’ His query after a moment or so was cynical.
‘Hard to catch a woman when you can barely make out their form.’
‘The Caribbean was kind to neither of us, Taris.’ He hated the way his brother’s face stiffened as the air around them creaked under the dead weight of regret, and the scars on his back smarted under memory as the shifting frames of time and place took him back to the pirates’ compound. The jangle of his broken chains in the run between sand and water. The silent ricochet of lead that ripped across Taris’s temple and dashed his sight into splinters: a bitter reward for the rescue he had orchestrated. The red of the froth on the waves and aching arms as Asher had dragged them out, out into the greenness of the deep with its blue-edged sky and its uncountable miles of nothingness. Out where the ocean currents were like a river and where letting go of fear was the only way to survive.
And survive they had. Barely. He looked down at his fingers and across at the glazed eyes of his brother.
And knew.
Knew that if he let go of Emma Seaton, even more of him would be lost.
‘I will leave for London tomorrow to see how Lady Emma fares.’ He frowned as he saw his brother’s smile and refilled his glass. With water. ‘Don’t read too much into the change of plan. It’s for peace of mind, that’s all.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘You haven’t been to town in years.’
‘Then it’s past time I was back there, isn’t it?’
‘You’re doing this for her?’
‘I am.’
Asher was astonished at Taris’s capitulation. And worried by it too. If the gossip about his sight was not kind, he wondered how it would affect his brother. Another problem, he thought, but one that could be minimised by a careful campaign. It would not be too