On one humiliating occasion, Harriet had been obliged to convince an elderly crofter that the duchess hadnotagreed to warm his bed.
This was not London. Which was good and bad. Most of the good people of Falmouth had some sort of connection with their family, since the Dukes of Sidmouth had owned lands bordering the town for centuries. The forests were part of a hunting preserve surrounding the lodge to which Harriet had fled with her endangered son and her demented grandmother.
The goodwill of the people of the countryside had been sorely strained with Nana’s continuing escapades. The last time she’d been brought before Squire John Bosman, the elderly woman had actually tried to ply her sensuality on him. That had been the final act beyond which the poor man could not continue to make allowances, former duchess or not.
The coachman no longer needed instructions from Harriet. He knew by rote the taverns they would have to visit before the inevitable, shameful dragging away of her Nana.
In the distance, the glow of Falmouth’s street lanterns signaled they were nearing the humiliating commencement of parading their carriage with the family crest from one tavern to another. Harriet gave a deep sigh and pulled her heavy woolen cloak more tightly around her shoulders.
Two hours later, Harriet’s hopes sank. Nana was nowhere to be seen, in or around her usual haunts. An ocean-cold twinge of doubt and fear lapped at the middle of her back and flowed down to her nearly frozen toes in her thin slippers. What had her confused grandmother done this time? Was she ill, injured? Had she wandered off into the night with God knows who?
A particularly wicked wind blew off the harbor, making Harriet fear what might happen if her frail grandmother had decided to wander the treacherous paths stretching for miles beyond the Cornwall port.
The only remaining tavern, the Green Dolphin, sat at the far edge of Falmouth, along the harbor front. It was a seedy, unkempt establishment where Nana had never ventured before. And, frankly, Harriet had no desire to set foot there, either.
She sent the coachman in to see if anyone had sighted an old woman in witch regalia and took the flannel wrapping off the previously hot brick and curled her feet around the fading warmth. After five or ten minutes when the man hadn’t returned, Harriet wrenched open the coach door herself and dropped to the ground. She headed purposefully toward the soft glow of lanterns to either side of the tavern’s sturdy wooden door. Hopefully, the warmth of a fireside inside the inn would prevent her from freezing to death.
She nodded to the footman tending the horses and promised to bring him back a hot drink.
She knew it was a bad idea to enter such an establishment on her own, but she figured her family already had a reputation for eccentricity. Her late husband’s family was trying to destroy her. What did she have to lose?
The first thing to assail her ears after the smell of onions, garlic, and rancid ale nearly pushed her back outside, was the sound of an argument near the rear of the tavern. Her coachman was apparently in the midst of loud debate with the innkeeper.
“She nearly got the place shut down. She attacked two Royal Marines, didn’t she?” The woman paused long enough to transfer a small boy from one broad hip to the other. “They took her away to give her what for.”
“Where?” Harriet interrupted the woman’s indignant speech. She moved as close as she dared, and when the babe cried at the angry look on her face, she softened and took him in her arms to jiggle and chuck him under his chin.
The other woman softened a bit also. “He’s cuttin’ a wee tooth. None of us be gettin’ much sleep at night.”
“Did the Marines say where they were taking my grandmother?”
The other woman’s jaw fell open. “She be the old duchess?”
“She…she hasn’t been herself for quite some time. She seems to think she’s still an actress in London.” Harriet felt the need to confide in the other woman, as one mother to another, even though she regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth. But she still remembered the fierce times Nicholas had given her when he was struggling with new teeth and felt a sort of kinship with the woman.
“Maybe my Robbie remembers. He helped them drag her out of here to a hired carriage.”
Harriet sucked in a deep breath. Now she’d done it. All of the time she and her cousin, the duke, had worried about their grandmother, they knew how headstrong she could be…and dangerous. They’d both feared such a day might come.
Hera’s teeth, the Dowager Duchess of Sidmouth could at that moment be chained up in a Naval brig aboard one of the many ships at anchor in the harbor. Because whenever her grandmother escaped into her fantasy world, she never revealed her true identity. Many of Falmouth’s tavern keepers now knew her by sight and watched out for her, but she’d never ventured to this particular inn before.
2
Richard could swear the wind and cold were chewing straight through his bones to the marrow. What he could not fathom was how the fragile, porcelain-skinned, ancient actress across from him seemed immune to the foul October weather seeping easily into the drafty hired hack he’d procured to take her home.
After they’d escaped the howling fight at the tavern, he and his sergeant had assumed returning one helpless old, aristocratic woman to her family would have been as easy as dropping off an unwanted package.
They’d signaled the driver with her erratic directions the first several places she’d claimed to live. And then they began to hail random passersby to see if they knew where the stubborn “witch” lived. All the while, the elderly woman continued to stamp her walking stick against the floor of the carriage and sing off-color ditties that would embarrass most seasoned sailors he knew. Occasionally, she would break off mid-tune to deliver some of the most moving theatrical passages Richard had ever heard.
After two hours of aimless driving, Richard determined he’d find her a safe room at the inn where he and the sergeant were staying while completing recruitment for theBlack Condornow bobbing at anchor in the gusts out in the harbor.
When they finally arrived at their inn and gingerly extricated the mysterious witch, separating her from her walking stick, their driver leaned down to Richard and asked, “Would you like me to show you where the old harpy lives?”
Richard was tempted to plant the man a facer on his smug nose, but refrained in favor of finally getting the elderly lady completely out of his life. “Of course,” he answered the man through gritted teeth, and began the process of levering her back inside the carriage. He insisted his sergeant abandon the quixotic task and find his bed at the inn.
About a half hour down a road along a bluff above the harbor, the carriage slowed and turned onto a long, winding path. Thank God the hack had a lantern mounted on one side, because the darkness of the deep woods lining the narrow path sucked in any illuminations from the few stars who dared show their faces on a Cornwall October night.
At the end of the path, they emerged into a clearing with what looked like a fortress with crenellated towers, only in miniature. Every detail stood out in vivid relief since torches were lit along all the walls, and a scaled-down drawbridge reached across a small moat, long since dried out, probably at least since the previous century.
