had all been for nothing, he concluded bitterly. Richard Seaborne had stayed away from his cousin’s nuptials and outfoxed him once again. Overcoming the need to lash out at something to relieve his frustration, he forced a mask of calm on to his face and strolled along as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Experience had taught him that the man who looked as if he didn’t care if he was seen or not was less noticeable than the one slinking along furtively with a guilty look.
It was time to take the fight to the enemy, he decided as he went. Three years waiting for Richard Seaborne to show his hand was more than enough patience for any man. Time to see how the elusive devil felt when everything he valued was under threat and an enemy held his fate in the palm of his hand.
Later that day Mr Marcus Seaborne was expecting to be on his way to heaven in the arms of his mistress, keen to shake the dust of Ashburton off his feet and get to that lovely armful as fast as a good horse would take him. He was three and twenty, vigorous, healthy and generally held to be a handsome, if currently rather unsteady, young gentleman with the world at his feet. He was almost as happy as he knew the bridegroom would be on this fine August evening, as he rode away from Ashburton with a picture of the beauty he was intending to bed tonight in his head.
His frivolous and sweetly rounded Clarice was no Jessica Pendle, of course. There was only one Jess, and if not for the fact she had grown up with him and he saw her as another sister, he might feel a twinge of jealousy for all she and his Cousin Jack had tonight. As it was, he blessed them both and whistled softly between his teeth as he rode towards his current love with the certainty he had plenty of time to find one to last for ever, when he was creeping up on thirty like poor Jack and called upon to take life seriously.
He wasn’t as intense about anything as his brother Rich either and growing up with the ducal succession at two removes hadn’t felt like a hardship to him, but he still felt smug about the fact Jack clearly couldn’t keep his eyes, or his hands, off his new wife. Soon there would be a pack of little Seabornes crowding the Ashburton nurseries and when he got to that solemn age himself there would be no need to search for his Mrs Seaborne with the driven urgency Jack had been pushed into earlier this summer. Marcus was free—not as free as he would be if Rich had stayed home and done his duty as well, he recalled with a frown, but free enough. With luck, Rich would come back now Jack was wed and would take his own responsibilities off his little brother’s shoulders.
None of them seemed to matter when lovely Clarice, with her inviting smile and tightly luscious curves, was waiting for him in the nearest town she considered remotely civilised. He dwelt on happy memories of her dancer’s body and the eager glow in her sloe-dark eyes when she slanted one of her come-and-get-me looks his way, and felt so on fire with desire he tightened his knees and urged his grey into a smooth canter and then a downright gallop. At this time of year daylight lingered long enough in the sky to get a lover to his lady before pitch dark, he decided with a cocky grin, as he calculated how much riding he had to do before sunset finally thickened into darkness.
‘Givage, wherever are you off to in such a mighty hurry?’ Persephone asked the morning after Jack’s wedding when she saw the usually dignified steward close to running towards her towards the main staircase.
‘Let me pass, Miss Persephone, I must speak with Lady Henry.’
‘My mother is very tired after the wedding and hasn’t left her bedchamber,’ she informed him briskly, refusing to step aside so he could hurry upstairs and worry her mother with some crisis Persephone could deal with just as well.
‘Then I really don’t know what to do,’ Givage said despairingly and Persephone’s heart began to thump with fear as she took in the white line about the man’s mouth and the look of despair in his eyes.
‘About what precisely?’ she asked abruptly.
‘This,’ he replied, holding out what should have been a jaunty beaver hat.
She stifled a horrified gasp as she took in the battered state of her second brother’s favourite headgear. It looked disturbingly as if someone had taken a cudgel to it whilst it was still on his head, or perhaps he’d taken a headlong tumble off his horse. That was a thought she hastily decided to ignore, since she doubted even her brother’s hard head could survive such a bruising fall without desperate injuries.
‘Where did you find it?’
‘Well, it was under the Three Sisters’ Oak first thing this morning. Joe Brandt brought it to me, since he didn’t know if her ladyship was aware Mr Marcus had left Ashburton after dinner last night and didn’t want to make bad worse, so to speak.’
‘Did he indeed?’ Persephone asked disapprovingly, having a very good idea why her brother would sneak off when the company were occupied with discussing the wedding and the business of everyday life Marcus always did his best to avoid.
‘Mr Marcus asked the stable boy who saddled his horse to keep the news of his departure to himself as long as he could.’
‘I dare say he would have done,’ she said absently, wondering if the opera dancer she suspected he had waiting for him nearby had any idea where he was now.
‘Joe said the hat was placed on the ground with this underneath it, Miss Persephone. Not even Mr Marcus would do such a thing as a prank,’ Givage said and delved in his waistcoat pocket to produce a heavy signet ring for her inspection.
Persephone looked at the distinctive stone with a fantastic sea creature resting on the waves engraved into its surface and gasped. Halfway between affectation and joke, with its pun on a sea-borne monster, it was her late father’s signet ring. Richard had reluctantly slipped it on his own finger after Lord Henry Seaborne’s funeral and that was the last time she had seen him or her father’s ring. Knowing a fine manor house and large estate were now his, Rich had ridden away from them all that day as if pursued by devils. Intent on going his own way as usual, Persephone reflected bitterly now, and had succeeded so well this was the first sign of him she’d seen from that day to this.
‘Please don’t tell my mother,’ she asked, her gaze hard on her old friend as she silently pleaded not to add to Lady Henry’s burdens.
‘How can I not?’ the ageing steward asked.
‘It will break her,’ Persephone said bleakly. ‘She’s borne enough since my father died and Richard went missing. She must not know that both her sons could be in danger until we’re certain this isn’t a mare’s nest.’
‘We can’t pretend nothing has occurred, Miss Persephone. Not when he could be in the power of some shameless rogue.’
‘Let me think about it properly before we make any over-hasty decisions,’ Persephone insisted and held out her hand for the hat and ring, her gaze steady on her old friend’s until he gave a faint shrug and passed both into her keeping.
She sighed in what should have been relief, but felt the heavy burden of what could be both her brothers’ safety on her shoulders. ‘Please speak to Joe and the stable lad, Givage. I’m sure you told them to be silent until you had spoken to Mama, but they must stay so until we know for certain what’s to do.’
‘I’ll do it, Miss Perry, but we can’t sit and do nothing about this for very long,’ he cautioned, slipping back into that childhood nickname.
‘We won’t have to, but someone clearly wants us to panic and I intend to plan our response rationally, if only to spite him.’
‘Please don’t delay until there’s no hope of us finding a trace
