“I think I can manage the friar.”
It was his increasing feelings for Rose with which he found difficulty reconciling himself. He had returned late last night exhausted only to pass her room on the way to his and stop. She and Mary were inside and Ruark had stood outside listening as Rose laughed at something his housekeeper had said. Jason told him that Lady Roselyn had behaved ever the gracious lady while recovering from her serious injury, sharing tea and sewing with hisstaff. Today he had planned to conduct a search of her quarters because he did not trust her complicity—no doubt she had knives, forks, and scissors stashed in every corner of her chambers—but last night it had taken all of his control not to open the door and go inside because, Lord ... he wanted to look at her. Now he wanted only not to hurt her.
She said nothing for a moment but the whitening of her knuckles revealed her tension. “Did people die? On that East Indiaman, I mean.”
He could lie, but decided she’d been lied to enough in her life. “The ship was destroyed somewhere off the coast of the Azores. Rumor was it vanished during a blow. A storm. No one would have doubted the story had some of the East Indiaman’s cargo not begun showing up two weeks later in various ports in Tripoli and Antwerp. And finally Rotterdam.”
Her eyes were wide, refusing to believe the horror of the worst. “But is it not possible the ship did go down in a storm?”
Pulled by the braided piece of silver warming his finger, Ruark leaned his head against the backboard and studied the ring. It seemed to absorb not only the sunlight but also the darkest edges of his thoughts, as if to bring them into the light and into his focus. And for a brief moment, he felt exposed and vulnerable to his sins.
“You can believe what you wish, Rose.” He curled his fingers into his palm as if that would make him less culpable for his own choices in life. “But that cargo was taken off that Indiaman before the storm.”
“You are so sure ... because you were there?” She looked at him closely. “Youwerethere,” she whispered, “Why? Because you were following my father or the East Indiaman?”
“We had been shadowing the East Indiaman for days. The letters of marque I carry gives me authority to aide and protect British economic interests. Before the ship passed the Cape, everyone within a thousand miles knew the real value of that Indiaman’s cargo. There had been other attacks on our vessels so we followed. Then a squall caught us while we were under full press of canvas and snapped our mainmast.
“When we finally caught up to the Indiaman two days later, there was nothing left of the ship but the burned-out debris to tell the tale. After plucking four survivors from shark-infested waters, we learned that a British naval vessel had been responsible for destroying the Indiaman, which carried a crew upward of two hundred souls. We learned that a large amount of cargo had been transferred from the British naval vessel to another ship. I followed it to the Dutch port of Rotterdam, where we both put in for refitting. Later, I impounded the cargo in the open sea.” He looked down at his hands. “The captain knew who I was when I boarded. He told us where the cargo had come from, then he hanged himself. Out of fear of retribution from me or Hereford, I will never know.”
“Surely you could have told the admiralty.”
“On that dead captain’s word?”
What Ruark did not tell her, what he could not tell her was that the ship he had boarded, the ship that had accepted the stolen cargo, belonged to Roxburghe Shipping. His own family’s fleet of trading vessels. He could not accuse Hereford without implicating his own family and casting the name of traitor to the Kerr name. He might despise his father, but he would not destroy Jamie or Julia. He did not know if his father was involved. He could find no proof.
“Without evidence, I had nothing. But I could bloodymake Hereford’s life hell on the sea. He never got hold of another ship after that.”
Now his father was dead and Jamie gone.
Her eyes swept to and fro from the floor to the wall. “And now in the past year my father retired from the admiralty to take his place as the English warden, your father is dead and your brother is a hostage.” She shook her head as if mulling over these same observations and then coming to the correct conclusions. “What was the value of that cargo?”
A fortune by even royal standards. Yet, he was compelled to tell her the truth. Why not? He had spared no detail yet. “Ninety thousand pounds.”
Rose’s disbelief came at him. “That is what my father wants from you in exchange for your brother. Payment for what you took from him.” She came abruptly to her feet, tension in every line of her body. “This has been your fight from the start? It is you personally he wants to destroy. Check and checkmate.”
She spun away, folding her arms across her chest. “Have your actions been any different from my father’s?” she cried, her voice distressed by emotion. “Are you not alike?”
He dragged the sheet off the bed as he stood and walked over to her. His mouth tight.
Ruark had told himself a thousand times he was not to blame for Hereford’s actions. That he was nothing like Hereford.
But his own silence condemned him.
He had brought this upon himself. He could not pretend to shortsightedness, because in the back of his mind he had been perfectly aware of the consequences of his actions and had not cared—until his father died and Duncan played right into Hereford’s hands and took good Kerr menacross the border, maybe to die as well. Now suddenly Jamie’s life was at stake.
And Rose had become the anchor around his neck threatening to drag him deeper into murky depths. Yet, it was not her worth in gold that caused him to inspect more closely his feelings, and why her presence in his life was bloody fooking with his internal moral compass.
He leaned his hand against the glass, so close to her he could smell the sunlight on her hair. “You tell me, Rose.” Ruark spoke softly but his words cut deep. “Am I like your father? Are we the same?”
“I think ...” She furiously scrubbed the heel of her hand across each cheek and turned bright eyes on him. She touched his face. “I think a man who can help Castleton and others survive a winter with smuggled goods at great peril to his own life, and someone whom Friar Tucker has clearly respected, cannot be malevolent,” she said, with such conviction it stopped his heart. “Now I understand. Without me, you do not have enough with which to bargain for your brother’s life.”
She blinked back tears, but it was not hate he saw in her eyes, and he was shocked that one look could undo him so completely. Then she said something else he did not expect. “Thank you for being honest with me.”
She turned and walked out of the room, leaving him with his palm pressed against the warm glass of the window, looking outside upon a rare sunny day and suddenly feeling much older than his thirty years.
Chapter 10
“Your solicitor arrived last night from Hawick,” Mary said from the doorway of Ruark’s bathing chamber.
