The customs officer was merely frustrated, but that, Percy concluded, was probably his natural state. Chasing down smugglers when they were shrouded by a conspiracy of silence was not the most enviable of jobs.
Everyone in the house and neighborhood had been stirred up, but to no purpose. It all seemed pointless, except that perhaps the whole organization might fall apart if the leaders had been shaken badly enough. Might was the key word, though. Perhaps Ratchett was not the kingpin or Mawgan his right-hand man. And even if they were, they may well be setting up somewhere else without having lost any of their control over their followers.
Perhaps Imogen was still in danger. And perhaps Percy’s actions so far had merely made them more bent upon revenge. They knew very well that the worst thing they could do to him was to harm Imogen.
Devil take it, but he was desperate to get her away from here, preferably to London, where he knew a lot of people and perhaps she did too, where a gang of Cornish smugglers was unlikely to pursue her. And he was desperate to marry her so that he could keep her secure within his own home, surrounded by his own handpicked servants, and safe within his own arms both day and night.
He had thought she might agree. He really had. Oh, she had said she would never marry again, it was true, and he knew that a great deal more damage had been done her by the events of the past eight or nine years than she had admitted to him. He knew there was a gap in her story, and that knowing what was in that gap would explain everything. But . . . could she never let it go? He had thought—damn it all, he had known—that their affair had been more than sex to her, more than just sensual gratification. He had had affairs before. He knew the difference between those and this.
And goddammit all to hell, he had told her he loved her, prize ass that he was. He had not known he was going to say it—that was the trouble with him. He had not even known he meant it until the words were out. He had realized he was in love with her, but that was just a euphoric sort of emotion relying heavily upon sex. He had not fully realized he loved her until he told her. And there was the trouble with language again. Whose idea had it been to invent a single word—love—to cover a thousand and two meanings?
She had refused him, and—the unkindest cut of all, to quote somebody or other—she had told him she was fond of him. It was almost enough to make a man want to blow his brains out from both directions at once.
Would she ever be safe here again?
And would he ever be able to live here again even if she was? If she would not marry him, he was going to have to stay away. This was her home.
But, hell and damnation, it was his too. The funny thing was that though he had grown up at Castleford House and had had a happy boyhood there, he never thought of it now as home. It was his father’s home, and his mother’s, even if he was the owner. Hardford Hall—perish the thought!—felt like home. It felt like his own.
And he had messed everything up. If all this had been a horse-jumping course, he would have left every single fence in tatters behind him.
These thoughts and emotions rattled about his brain while he divided his time between his social obligations and meetings and interviews. With only two days left before his belated birthday ball, his mother and the aunts became almost feverish with anxiety lest they had forgotten something essential, like sending out the invitations. At the same time, the house, which had appeared clean and tidy to him from the moment he had first stepped over the threshold and looked around him for cobwebs, took on a shine and a gleam that almost forced one to wear an eye shade. It was not only the ballroom that was being overhauled and cleaned from stem to stern, it seemed.
Cousin Lavinia took to the pianoforte bench in the drawing room several times a day to play various dance tunes while the young cousins—and a few of the older ones too—practiced the steps. Cyril, whom Percy had sometimes accused of having two left feet, undertook to teach the steps of the waltz. That was an exercise that resulted in some progress and one spectacular crash to the floor when young Gregory got his feet hopelessly entangled with Eva’s—or when she got hers entangled with his, depending upon which of them was telling the tale. No bones were broken.
Two days before the ball, there was finally progress in another area too. Someone broke the silence. Paul Knorr, who had taken up residence in the steward’s office and disposed of most if not all of the dust and found homes for all but the current account books inside cupboards, sent Crutchley to the drawing room to request that his lordship come to see him.
“The room looks twice its size,” Percy said when he got there. “Finally I will enjoy spending time here myself. I suppose that was deliberate, though—making the room look like a place one did not want to be.”