Page 11 of The Duke of Swords (The Highwaymen #4)

THEY HAD BEEN nearly to Bath, and now they were going back the way they had come. They could not make it all the way to London without stopping.

Rae inquired of Rutchester if it would be two nights in inns or merely one, for she knew that they could just as easily stop and change out the horses and keep traveling if they wished to make good time.

He said it would be the latter. He said they would stop over at his estate of Andiley, in Rutchester itself, and there they would spend one night before getting up and traveling the rest of the way to London.

This first leg of the journey would be the longest. From Andiley, it was only about half-a-day’s journey into London.

They traveled into the dawn, through the morning, stopping for food and to change out horses here and there, through the afternoon, and into the evening. It was dark again when they arrived at Andiley.

She had never spent quite so long in a carriage, nor traveled so far in one day.

She could barely see what Andiley looked like, only that it was sprawling and ancient and that there was a wide lake directly in front of the place which reflected the image of the building (such as it was in the darkness), a perfect copy, only broken here and there by ripples in the water.

There was also a very old, very gnarled oak tree which stretched out over the drive, its branches hanging so low that they scraped against the top of the carriage as they went under it.

She felt, when they went under that oak, that it had just taken possession of them, and that it would not let them go until it was done with them.

She didn’t much like Andiley.

Something about the place gave her a creeping sensation.

She was exhausted, however, so she did not have the energy to be properly afraid.

A maid was dispatched to help her dress for bed, and food was served to her in the room where she was staying.

The room itself was a nice room, large, with high ceilings and beautiful paintings of still lifes on the walls.

The bed had velvet coverings on it. She ate little and climbed into bed to go directly to sleep.

At some point in the night, she woke up.

She knew not what had wakened her, but it was such that she sat up straight in bed as if something had seized her insides and squeezed them.

It was entirely silent.

Driven by some force she could not quite explain, she pushed aside the velvet covers and climbed out of bed. She put on a cloak over her nightclothes and stepped out into the hallway.

She went walking.

She did not truly wish to explore the place, but she felt driven to do so, the way a person might feel if they knew there was something dangerous lurking nearby. She needed to see the danger and confirm its existence so that she knew how to fight it.

The danger, she felt certain, was there.

She found little, of course. Many of the wings of the house were closed up tight, the doors leading into them bolted closed and shut with padlocks. She could not get into them, even if she liked. Many of the open wings had rooms with furniture covered in sheets, unused in some time.

She didn’t see anyone.

Not any servants, not Rutchester, no one.

She wasn’t even sure where Rutchester was sleeping.

She found herself in the grand entrance to the place, which was a vast area, two stories high, laying bare a two-sided curved staircase that led up to a railed balcony.

Between the two staircases was a fountain with a statue of Neptune in the midst of waves of the ocean, holding forth a trident.

There was no water in the fountain, however. It was dry.

The room was only barely lit by a few sconces on the walls.

Her bedchamber was in a wing below one of the curving staircases. She could have gone back there, she supposed. Instead, she climbed up one of the staircases and padded across the balcony. She stood at the top, holding the railing and looked down over the place, and she wondered at herself.

What? Do you think he’s going to make you his duchess and that this will be yours?

No, that was foolish.

Anyway, she wouldn’t want this place to be hers, she didn’t think. Something about it was off in a way she couldn’t quite understand. She didn’t like it here.

She padded across the balcony and through a doorway—no door here—that led to another wing. The doors of the wing were open on bedrooms, the beds shrouded in sheets like the other unused rooms. She peered into each, looking at the swathed furniture like ghosts in the gloomy darkness.

Then, she heard a noise.

It was coming from the end of the hallway, and she couldn’t see anything down there, because the sconces were all out. It was just pools of darkness and then…

The noise.

The noise was human, like a moan. It was high-pitched, though, like a woman’s voice.

She immediately thought that Rutchester was hurting some servant in the house. There weren’t a number of servants at this estate, but it was too large to be handled by only a few people, so there were more than ten, at least, and she knew that dukes sometimes did awful things to their servants.

Rutchester had told her he was monstrous, hadn’t he?

She’d rejected the notion, but now it was dark, and the noise was happening, and she knew she should have taken him at his word.

Run , she thought at herself.

But she had never run, never once, not during this entire ordeal, had she?

She simply froze in place, gazing into the darkness, listening to that awful moaning noise.

But the longer she listened, the less like a woman it started to sound. Now, it sounded almost inhuman, like an animal outside or the wind howling through the trees, or a banshee out on the moors.

Abruptly, it stopped.

She waited, thinking it would start again, but it didn’t.

Instead, a crack of light appeared at the end of the hallway. It took her a moment to realize it was a door opening and that someone behind the door was holding a lit candle.

“Who’s there?” came the voice of Rutchester. Then she realized that the person holding the candle was him. “Show yourself!” he said, but now his voice changed. It cracked.

She realized he’d been making that moaning noise.

It had been him .

She stepped closer. “It’s only me,” she said. “It’s Rae.”

He backed away from the door. “Go back to bed,” he said hoarsely.

“Were you…?” She started to walk towards him. “Are you all right?”

“I was dreaming,” he said. “Get out of here.”

“Dreaming about what?” she said, and then she thought she might know, and she wished she hadn’t said anything. She was at his door now. She pushed the door open and stepped into the room at the end of the hallway. It was the master suite.

But it was empty, almost entirely empty, except for a bed in the middle of the room, a bed that was unadorned—no head or foot or canopy. The walls were bare. There was no other furniture in here.

“It must have been a bad dream,” she whispered, looking all over, looking at all the bareness in the room. “I suppose it was his room before it was yours. I suppose everything in it must have reminded you of him. But why not put your own furniture in here now? Why not redecorate?”

“It’s not that way, exactly,” he said. “I break things. Much of the time.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I don’t mean to,” he muttered. “It just happens.”

She looked at him, his face illuminated by the candle.

He was not dressed. He was wearing a nightshirt and a pair of small clothes beneath, and his long dark hair was mussed and going every which way.

She could see a hint of his dark chest hair where his nightshirt gapped open.

If she had met him in the darkness, she might have screamed.

But she didn’t feel frightened of him now.

“It might happen to you, you know,” he said.

“What might?” she said.

“I might break you,” he said. “Maybe I have already.”

“I’m not broken,” she said.

“Are you not?”

“Well, if I am, so are you,” she said. And then she went to him and took the candle from him. She looked around for somewhere to set it, but there were no tables by the bed, no surfaces at all. She nodded at the bed. “Lie back down, Your Grace.”

“No,” he said. “Once I have the dreams, it’s impossible to think of anything else. I never get back to sleep. I just keep thinking about…”

“Dreams about him, then?”

He sighed. “Sometimes. Sometimes, it’s other things. People I’ve killed, begging me for mercy, things like that. It’s all… I shall not sleep tonight.”

“Perhaps if I read to you,” she said.

“I wouldn’t ask you to do that. Besides, there aren’t any books here.”

“I shall tell you a story.”

“No,” he said. “Go away. You don’t have to do anything else to service me, ever again.”

“No, I know,” she said, furrowing her brow. “I want to, though.”

“You don’t. You think I rescued you,” he said. “I see that grateful look you get in your eyes sometimes. I didn’t rescue you. I hurt you.”

“Well, I was doing a frightful job of rescuing myself, wasn’t I?” She let out a caustic laugh.

He didn’t say anything.

She nodded at the bed. “Lie down, Your Grace. I shall sing you to sleep.”

He sat down on the bed heavily. “It wasn’t my idea, you know? To kill our fathers? I didn’t bring it up. I can’t even remember who said it first now, but I know it wasn’t me. Then, when it came down to it, they were all hesitant, but I wasn’t. I acted. But afterward…”

She came closer.

He shook his head. “I can’t talk about this.”

“Perhaps it would be easier in the darkness,” she said and blew out the candle.

Immediately, it was pitch black. She groped to set the candle on the floor. While doing that, she collided with the bed. She ended up sitting down next to him, her thigh brushing his thigh. She left it there.

He moved his leg away. “I regretted it afterward.”

“Regretted…?”

“Killing him,” he said. “I regret it constantly. I wake up in the night after these dreams, and I think of what it has cost me, and I think of what I have become, and I think of—”