Chapter 27

M AIDEN'S B LUSH

M C C LAIREN'S I SLE

S EPTEMBER , 1766

T he flinty land-bridge connecting McClairen's Isle to the headland was in danger of being submerged by the rising tide. The hired chaise had gone only a third of the way across when the driver thought better of the proposition, no matter what the monetary incentive, and gave his passenger the option of turning back or going the rest of the way on foot.

Ronald Merrick, Earl of Carr, chose to go on. He emerged from the carriage and tossed the driver a coin and waited for the peasant to be gone.

He turned, one hand on his hip, the other poised on the silver knob of his walking cane, and regarded the great hulk of Maiden's Blush. Gray, monolithic, workers crawling over her surface like termites on a nest.

Lud, he loathed the place. Particularly as someone—presumably Thomas McClairen—was endeavoring to rebuild it in keeping with the deplorable style in which he'd originally found it. Perhaps, Carr thought, he would repossess it, particularly since he'd found it necessary to leave London for a while.

He began walking up the land-bridge, his countenance rippling with hatred, like worms beneath a thin silk glove. Not that he was destroyed. No! Not by a far cry. He still possessed damning evidence against many important and powerful people, and if since his return from France one or two—or perhaps more, why should he keep count?—had flown in the face of his wrath and exposed their little secrets themselves, well, not everyone develops balls so late in life.

He approached the base of the castle, careful to keep out of sight of the workers as he headed round back, toward the sea-facing facade, where he could enter the place unseen.

So what if his name was anathema and people who'd last month crept on their knees to petition him now crossed the street to avoid him? His malevolent gaze turned to the castle. He'd been told the wretched place had burned to ashes. All of it. Who would have foreseen that his second packet of materials would survive and be found by his darling youngest child?

Once more, hatred erupted like a boil on his features. With a deep steadying inhalation he brought himself under control. Fia and her paramour, Thomas McClairen, would pay, in spite of Tunbridge's efforts to thwart his revenge against the Scotsman.

Carr dug inside his jacket for the front page of the London Times newspaper, and reread the letter reproduced there.

I, James Wells, Lord Tunbridge, do hereby avow as my last act on earth the truth of the testimony provided herein. I, James Wells, Lord Tunbridge, in anticipating that Ronald Merrick, Earl of Carr, will denounce Thomas Donne and subsequently accuse him of being the traitor and deported criminal Thomas McClairen, offer incontrovertible proof that this man is not the aforementioned Thomas McClairen and that Lord Carr's enmity and spite have led him to make this accusation in the hopes of bringing about an innocent man's death .

I know Thomas Donne is not Thomas McClairen because I, James Wells, killed Thomas McClairen in cold blood at the behest of Ronald Merrick on February the 20, 1752, in a tavern in Kingston, on the island of Jamaica. I did this for no reason other than to fulfill Lord Carr's command, because of his long-standing hatred of the McClairens, just as I have killed others at his behest, including his butler, Rankle .

I can no longer live with my deeds and so now commit myself to God's mercy, swearing this and everything I have written herein to be true, as God is my judge. May He have mercy on my soul .

James Wells, Lord Tunbridge

Clever, Carr thought. Tunbridge actually had once been arrested in Kingston for the murder of "persons unknown." As to the rest … apparently Tunbridge had not placed much faith in his God's mercy, since he'd offered his eternal soul testifying to a lie just before severing his wrists.

But why? Carr lifted his hand, as though holding a silent exchange with another. Tunbridge must have hated McClairen for achieving what Tunbridge had spent years trying for, a way into Fia's bed.

"Because he hated you more than McClairen."

At the sound of that long-silent voice, Carr wheeled around, smiling.

"Ah, Janet. I knew you'd speak to me someday soon. Over your sulks, are you?"

Lud, she was lovely. Her dark eyes sparkled and her hair fell in rich, ebony waves. Her one-sided smile, so piquant, so enchanting, lit her white face. He truly had loved her.

She curtsyed, her lovely face alight with humor. "I might be."

"And perhaps you ‘might be' right about Tunbridge," he said magnanimously.

"I know I am. Why are you here, Ronald?"

He waved his cane in the air. "I've come to kill McClairen."

"Ah," she exhaled. "Why?"

"Poor, simple Janet. Because if I kill McClairen others will see that I am still a man to fear, a man to obey, a force to be reckoned with."

She laughed, the ghostly trill like sunlight dancing on water, and beckoned him closer.

"I don't think so," she said as he approached. She turned, floating above the flinty ground, as graceful as a feather on water. He followed her, mesmerized by her beauty, captivated as he'd been so many years ago by her freshness, her obvious adoration of him.

"Wait! What don't you think?"

She looked over her shoulder at him, gesturing for him to come with her. "I don't think that's the real reason you're here, Ronald."

How dare she question him!

"Really?" He invested the word with haughty intonation, but she only laughed again and moved on, and he hastened to follow her.

"I think you want to kill Thomas because as long as he lives, the McClairens will have won!" she whispered like a naughty child revealing a secret.

"They haven't won!"

"But they will." She finally stopped.

"Oh, yes, Ronald," an older feminine voice said.

He turned slowly. An old hag stood before him, bent beneath the weight of her gray dress, a black veil draped across half her face, leaving exposed a twisted and deformed countenance, a smashed nose, a drooping eye, a slack and malformed mouth.

"Who are you?" he demanded, angered that she should have interrupted his conversation with Janet.

"Gunna," she said.

He searched his memory. "You're Fia's nurse!"

"Aye."

He snorted. "Begad, does she keep such as you around still? Has she quite lost her faculties?" He laughed cruelly, glancing over his shoulder to see if Janet appreciated his wit. Her gaze was fixed on the deformed creature in front of him, clear recognition in her pretty black eyes.

"No. But methinks you have," Gunna said. There was something wrong. The way she spoke … His eyes widened. Where was the creature's thick, near unintelligible burr? Why did she suddenly sound like Janet?

"Who are you?"

"I told you," she said. "Gunna."

"No." He shook his head, violently aware as he did so that Janet was mimicking him, her spectral head shaking in increasing agitation as she mouthed the words, "No, no, no."

Gunna's mouth pleated into some semblance of a smile. "But there was a time, a long time ago, when I was someone else. Someone who no longer exists."

"Who's that?" he demanded, a little river of fear running through his bowels.

"Janet McClairen," she said softly.

He jerked his head around and met Janet's impish smile. She shrugged expressively. "Impossible," he said. "I killed you. I pitched you from—" He stopped abruptly and looked about as if coming out of a daze. Only then did he realize where he was, where she'd led him.

He stood on the cliff path beyond the old kitchen garden, above the rocks where Janet had died. In horror he stared as the surf below bludgeoned the shoreline.

"You're dead," he whispered.

"No. I was hurt, oh … very badly. But I still had my mind. I clung to a piece of driftwood. The riptide carried me far down the shore, where some passing fishermen found and rescued me."

He looked up, incomprehension clouding his beautiful blue eyes. The hag lifted her hand and pulled at the scarf. It dropped, revealing a Janus face, a horrifying amalgamation all the more disturbing because the ruined half melded with the half that was still lovely, the high curve of the cheekbone taut and smooth, the dark-lashed eye as dark as ink.

"Impossible." He backed away from her in horror.

"Difficult," the creature corrected in Janet's voice. "Years went by while I recuperated. Remember the night you killed me how I swore I would do anything to protect my children from you? I meant that, Ronald.

"I came back. With your loathing of ugliness and your love of good value, it was easy enough to convince you to hire me to take care of my own children. All I needed to do was stay out of your way and I could care for them, love them, but most of all do what I could to counterbalance your poisonous tutelage."

"They know?" he asked.

The smile curving half her mouth disappeared. "No," she said. "I could never reveal who I'd been for fear that one of them would let something slip and you would simply kill me anew. So I stayed Gunna, the nurse. In a very real sense you did kill me, Ronald, for I could never tell them now. How could they understand, and what to say? For though I was nurse, companion, servant, and tutor, I never again was their mother."

His head whipped back to stare at the beautiful Janet. She was gone. "Janet!"

"To whom do you speak, Ronald?" the half hag asked quietly.

"To Janet. To you. To …" He stopped, his gaze widening with terror. For how can a man be haunted by a living woman? And yet haunted he surely was and had been for years. He'd only to look—

"You are mad, Ronald," the monster Janet said calmly. "How can my spirit haunt you when I still own it, no matter how hard you tried to separate me from it? How else to account for the phantom you see? You are mad, Ronald. Haunted by your own evil."

"No!" he shouted frantically. "Get away from me. You are the phantom! You aren't real. You're not Janet! Janet is beautiful. Janet loves me. Janet—"

"Is here."

The beautiful side of her mouth curved into that perfect, three-corner smile while the other side of her mouth slackened, a hideous, toothless maw. He backed away, his hands thrust out before him.

"Monster!"

He was still crying out in terror when he plummeted to the rocks below.

It took the workmen fifteen minutes to get down to the cliffs. They'd heard the cry and some had even seen a man's figure flailing wildly just before disappearing over the cliff's flinty lip.

"Lord have mercy on him, poor bastard," Jamie Craigg said, peering down at the rocks below.

"Ye can lower me down to him," offered the boy Gordie, already tying a rope around his waist.

"Good." Jamie nodded his agreement. "But there's no hurry, lad. No one could survive a fall to those rocks. Eh, Gunna?" He looked sadly at the old, twisted woman who'd followed the small crowd out.

"Nay," she said calmly. "No one ever has."