Page 66 of Beneath the Devil’s Mask (The Hidden Hearts Collection #4)

Mandell stared at the old man, looking, almost hoping to perceive some change in him.

Surely murder must leave some mark upon a man.

His eyes did appear a little more sunk deep with weariness, but the brow was as ever untroubled, as smooth as marble.

It was like looking upon the face of a stranger.

But then His Grace had always been a stranger to Mandell.

The quill continued to scratch across the paper, the duke pausing only long enough to remark, “There was no need for you to have brought the pistol, Mandell. As you can see, I am making no effort to escape. Put that thing away.”

Mandell paced over and dropped the weapon upon the bed. He turned back, saying, “We managed to get Drummond off in the carriage. In case you are interested, I believe he will live.”

“Indeed?” The duke dipped his quill into the ink and resumed writing. “And your lady? I presume you have also whisked her out of harm’s way.”

Mandell nodded. The duke paused briefly. He frowned and said, “I do not know if it will much matter to you at this juncture, Mandell, but I did not begin with the intention of harming Lady Fairhaven. It was pure chance that she happened to be there when I finally chose to dispatch Sir Lucien.”

“I did not see you come rushing forward to clear her name. And if I had not arrived in time tonight, what would have happened to Anne?”

“She would be dead. That might have been a pity. She possessed more courage than I supposed. If not for her tendency to wear her heart on her sleeve, she might have made a tolerable marchioness after all.”

Mandell bit off a savage oath. The duke looked up at him with a cold smile. “What did you expect of me, Mandell? Some sign of remorse?”

“No, but an explanation would be appreciated. You have murdered three men. It would have been four if Briggs had died.”

“In another time, another era, no one would have dared to question me. The power of life and death would have been merely another of my rights as the duke of Windermere.”

“This is not another era. This is now, damn it! There are no more feudal lords, Your Grace. Even a duke is expected to account for the taking of a life.”

The lace at the duke’s cuffs brushed the desk as he indicated the paper with a graceful gesture.

“I am writing the confession of my actions even as we speak. All the details of time and place, how I managed the business of my disguise. Everything, in short, except for my motives. Those are no one else’s concern. ”

“Not even mine?”

“I could explain to you, but I doubt you will understand.”

“I beg you will attempt to do so,”

The duke merely compressed his lips and began to write again.

“You did not do it for robbery, that I know,” Mandell said. “The phantom in the cavalier hat is not, as everyone supposed, the Hook.”

“The duke of Windermere, a common footpad!” The duke gave a snort of laughter. “Hardly, but it was useful, my doings being confused with the Hook’s petty theft. While the constabulary searched thieves’ kitchens for a one-handed rogue, it kept them from interfering with me.”

“And so you are not a common thief. Only a common murderer.”

“Far from common, Mandell. A dispenser of justice, a killer of fools, a social arbiter perhaps. But never a common murderer.”

“What sort of justice was it that made you attack poor Briggs? He had never done any harm to you.”

The duke’s lip curled with contempt. “He was stupid enough to come and inform me of how he had injured my grandson and heir in the process of halting a drunken brawl.”

“Briggs was frightened that night. He came to you for help.”

“And he received it. The only possible help for such a simpleton, a yard of naked steel. He looked surprised when I ran him through. I rather believed I wounded his feelings as much as anything else.”

Mandell probed his grandfather’s eyes for some sign of madness. It would have been a comfort to think the old man mad. But his eyes remained remarkably clear with that same cold reason, that lack of compassion that had ever characterized the duke.

“Briggs was ... is my friend,” Mandell said. “His devotion to me—”

“The relationship was never a credit to you,” the duke interrupted.

“His devotion to me,” Mandell continued through clenched teeth, “was such that even after you had nearly killed him, he preferred to keep silent rather than expose you, for fear of giving me pain. When I forced him to tell me tonight, he wept like a babe.”

“How touching,” the duke said. “I could have spared you both the discomfort of such a maudlin scene had my hand been a little steadier that night.”

His Grace flexed his fingers. “My rheumatism, you know. It interferes with my capabilities. I am not the swordsman I once was as a younger man. That is why when I killed Sir Lucien, I decided that I had better be certain and employ a pistol at close range.”

He shot an ironic glance at Mandell. “You will not pretend to mourn his death, I trust?”

“No, but I would not have shot him down in cold blood, either.”

“He was a dog, not a man. A sniveling cur who presumed to attack one of my blood in a vulgar tavern. I derived a great deal of amusement from tormenting Sir Lucien first, stalking the coward until I believe I drove him quite mad. But in the end, there could only be one fitting payment for Fairhaven’s offenses, and that was death. ”

The duke gave a slight shrug as though already dismissing all thought of Sir Lucien from his mind.

“You have been committing these murders—” Mandell began.

“Executions,” the duke corrected.

“You performed these executions merely because certain people chanced to offend you?” Mandell asked in disbelieving accents. “What about that young man Keeler? He was little more than a boy.”

“A boy who presumed to sit down to play cards with a duke and attempted to cheat his betters. An upstart banker’s son.”

“And Albert Glossop?”

“Ah, Mr. Glossop. He was the one who showed me the possibilities of what a blade of steel could do when wielded by a man not afraid to use it to rid the world of inferior beings. It was so easy to cut Glossop down and vanish into the night. The braying ass!”

“That was how it all began? You had no other reason for killing Glossop than you thought him a fool?”

The duke frowned and did not answer him. His hand tightened about the quill and he resumed his writing with a vengeance. Mandell was left with the uneasy sensation that there was something more that his grandfather was not telling him. After so many other horrors, what else could there possibly be?

Mandell felt impervious to any further shock. He was determined to have the truth from the old man, all of it.

Splaying his hands upon the desk, he bent over the duke and repeated his question. “Why did you begin your night stalking with Albert Glossop, Your Grace?”

The duke flinched, but said, “Stand erect, Mandell. Do not lean upon my desk. You know I have always found that an annoying habit.”

When Mandell did not move, the old man flung down his quill. He stirred restlessly in his chair, his brow furrowing as he seemed to wrestle with some inner dilemma. He stared past Mandell toward the window, as though he expected to find the answer somewhere out there in the dark of the night.

At last, he sighed and murmured, “I suppose I may as well tell you the whole. It can make no difference now.”

He waited until Mandell removed his hands from the desk and straightened. Then the duke began slowly, “Glossop was indeed a fool, but that was not my main reason for eliminating him. The young idiot had recently acquired a friend from France who was acquainted with the de Valmieres.”

A tension shot through Mandell. He thought he was prepared to hear anything. But matters suddenly promised to take a direction he had never anticipated.

“My father?” he asked numbly.

“No, your father’s family. It seems the French king finally decided to overlook the de Valmieres questionable loyalty during the revolution and restored them to their estate.

This finally left them at leisure to send an envoy to make awkward inquiries.

An envoy that I sent back with false answers.

Mr. Glossop unfortunately became aware of this fact and threatened to tell you unless I paid him a considerable sum. Scarcely the action of a gentleman.”

“What was the nature of these inquiries, Your Grace?”

The duke stared down at his paper and fidgeted with his quill.

“The envoy was sent to ask about me, was he not?” Mandell prompted. “My father’s family was seeking to discover my whereabouts.”

“Yes, but mostly they were trying to find out what became of your father?”

“My father? Why would they come to you for —” Mandell broke off, stunned by sudden comprehension. “You know. You know where my father is.”

The duke rested his head against the back of the chair, his heavy-lidded eyes seeming weighted down by a great weariness.

“Yes, I have known. All this time. He came, journeying to my estate in the north, not long after you had been placed in my care, Mandell. De Valmiere expected to find both you and your mother awaiting him with open arms.”

“How could he have expected that? You told me my father abandoned my mother and me in Paris.”

“He may as well have done. He ordered Celine to take you and come to England. If the young fool could have got his head out of the clouds and away from his infernal music, he might have known my Celine better. She was not a woman to tamely accept such commands. She took you and went back to Paris to look for her husband, but he was gone.”

“Gone where?”

“To make certain his own family, his brother and sisters, got out of the country, when his first duty should have been to his wife and child.”

“But he assumed my mother and I were already safe.”

“He should have made sure.” The old man slammed his fist against the desk in a rare display of passion. “Instead, he comes jaunting to see me months after it was too late to save my beautiful Celine.”

The duke’s lips twisted with a bitter cruelty. “I took great satisfaction in informing the fool how his feeble efforts had gone awry. I described to him Celine’s death in vivid detail, and for added measure, I told him that you had perished, too.”

“You bastard!” Mandell said. “All these years, you permitted me to believe that my father had deserted me, that he was a coward.”

“And so he was. After I told him about your mother’s death, he still could not act the part of a man. He wept like a babe, with that vulgar Gallic emotion I find so repulsive. He sobbed until I could endure the sound no longer. I got down my sword.”

“No!” Mandell rasped. But his denial was to no avail.

The duke continued, “He was a coward to the last. When I approached him, sword drawn, he only looked at me. He made not one move to defend himself, profaning Celine’s name by whispering it with his last breath. It was but simple justice, his life in retribution for hers.”

“Oh, God!” Mandell groaned. After so many years of denying kinship with his father, he felt at one with the man, could fully understand the complete despair and agony of the young chevalier’s final moments, the way he must have welcomed the sword thrust that ended his life.

Mandell stared at his grandfather, the regal old man dwindling to become something twisted, evil, and hideous in Mandell’s eyes. His breath shallow and rapid, he stalked toward the duke, his hands clenching and unclenching.

The duke did not stir. Only his eyes shifted to regard Mandell with chilling understanding.

“Now you would like to kill me and you could do it swiftly and without mercy. You are not so very unlike me, Mandell, except that you are driven to act from passion, whereas I have always been ruled by cold logic.”

His words brought Mandell up short. He was horrified to realize the old man was right.

Gazing into the duke’s face was like staring into some demonic mirror, a reflection of the dark recesses of his heart.

Mandell glanced down at his hands, inches from reaching for the old man’s throat.

With great effort of will, he lowered them to his sides and stepped back.

“No, your grace,” he said dully. “You are not ruled by logic, but the bitter poison in your soul that drove you to destroy my father and that will destroy you as well.”

The duke said nothing. He reached for his quill and signed his name to the confession with a final flourish. Mandell paced a few steps away, striving to regain his composure before he could ask, “What did you do with my father after you killed him?”

“I concealed his body in a winding sheet and turned him over to the parish as a wandering vagrant who had died upon my lands. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in the cemetery of the little church near my estate.

I daresay the old vicar can point it out to you if you are sentimental enough to wish it. ”

After sanding the ink dry, the duke folded the vellum. Using the candle, he melted some red wax upon the closure and affixed his seal to it.

“Here,” he said, holding out the signed confession to Mandell. “This is yours. You may do as you like with it.”

Slowly, Mandell turned and came back to the desk. As he reached for the paper, the duke’s hand closed about Mandell’s wrist. The old man’s fingers were remarkably cold.

“After you mother died, Mandell,” the duke said, “I felt that you were all that was left to me. I both cared for you and hated you. Your physical resemblance to your father was pure torment to me, so much so that I would often gaze at you as you slept and think of taking up the pillow and suffocating the life from you.”

“After what I have learned tonight, I almost regret that you permitted me to live,” Mandell said. He stared pointedly at the duke’s fingers until the old man released him. Wrenching the confession out of His Grace’s hand, Mandell turned and stalked from the room.

Only when he was certain that Mandell was gone did the duke allow himself to murmur, “But I have never had any such regrets, my Mandell.”

The duke put away his ink, quill, and wax, clearing the desk as he had always done.

He could not tolerate disorder nor had he ever liked servants handling his private possessions.

He rose to his feet and went to peer at the surface of the bed with a smile of satisfaction.

Mandell had forgotten to take the pistol away with him. That simplified matters a great deal.

Going to the window, the duke forced open the casement, taking in a reviving breath of sharp cold air. Smoothing back the lace from his cuffs, he took up the pistol.

Moments later a shot rang out in the night as the duke of Windermere claimed his final victim.