Darling Beast (Maiden Lane #7)(22)

She sniffed. “ ’Tisn’t sinister—especially now that he’s using most of it to store wine. Maximus is well, thank you for inquiring. He sends his regards.”

He gave her a look.

“He does!” She tried to appear convincing, but he merely shook his head at her. Had it not been for Artemis’s persuasion—and Wakefield’s regard for her—Apollo would still be languishing in Bedlam. Wakefield had certainly not freed him because he thought Apollo sane—or innocent.

Artemis heaved a sigh. “He’s not nearly as awful as you make him out to be—and I love him. For my sake, you ought to take a more charitable disposition toward my husband.”

Apollo privately wondered how many times Wakefield had heard the inverse of this little speech, but he nodded at his sister anyway. There really was no point in arguing the matter with her.

Her eyes narrowed for a moment as if she found his capitulation too easy, then she nodded in return. “Good. Someday I’d like you two to be friends, or,” she added hastily as he cocked an incredulous eyebrow, “at least polite to one another.”

He didn’t bother replying to that. Instead Apollo rummaged in the bundle of foodstuffs further. There was a big loaf of bread and he brought it out and set it on a piece of wood to slice.

“There’s actually another matter I needed to talk to you about,” his sister said, her voice unusually hesitant.

Apollo looked up.

She was turning an apple around and around in her fingers. “Maximus heard it from someone—I suspect Craven, because for a valet, he certainly seems to know everything about everyone. It’s just a rumor, of course, but I thought I should tell you anyway.”

He abandoned the bread and placed a fingertip under her chin to make her look at him.

He cocked his head in question.

“It’s the earl,” she said, meeting his eyes.

For a moment his mind went blank. What earl? Then, naturally, it came to him: the unsmiling old man in a black full-bottomed wig who’d come to see him once—only once—to inform him that as the man’s heir he was to be sent away to school. The old man had stunk of vinegar and lavender and he’d had the same eyes as Apollo.

Apollo had loathed him on sight.

He stared into his sister’s eyes—thankfully the dark gray of their mother’s—and waited.

She took both his hands, giving him strength as she said, “He’s dying.”

Chapter Five

The king saw what his wife had birthed and drew back his arm to kill the monster, but his priest stayed his hand. “It is rumored that the people of this island once worshipped a god in the shape of a great black bull. Better, my liege, to let this thing live than risk offending such an ancient power.”…

—From The Minotaur

Captain James Trevillion glanced at the small brass clock on the table next to his chair. Four fifteen. Time to return to his charge. Carefully he placed a lopsided cross-stitch bookmark between the pages of the book he was reading: The History of the Long Captivity and Adventures of Thomas Pellow. He picked up his two pistols and shoved them securely into the holsters of the wide leather bandoliers that crisscrossed his chest. Then he reached for the cane.

The damnable cane.

It was plain, made of hardwood, with a wide head. Trevillion leaned heavily on the cane, bracing his crippled right leg as he heaved himself to his feet. He paused a moment to adjust to standing, ignoring the ache that shot through the leg. The ache was bone-deep, which made sense, since it was a bone of that leg that’d been broken—not once, but twice, the second time catastrophically.

It was the second break that had cost him his army career in the dragoons. The Duke of Wakefield had offered him another job instead—although Trevillion still wasn’t entirely sure if he should be grateful for that offer or not.

He glanced out the window as he waited for the ache in his leg to die down. He could see several gardeners laboring over a crate in the back garden. As he watched, the top was pried off, revealing rows of what looked like sticks packed in straw.

Trevillion raised his brows.

He pivoted gingerly and limped out his door and into a hallway in Wakefield House—the duke’s London residence. His room was at the back of the house, at the end of one of the corridors. Not a servant’s room, certainly, but not a guest’s, either.

Trevillion’s mouth quirked. He lived in a strange limbo between.

It took him five excruciating minutes to negotiate the stairs down to the floor below. Just as well that the duke had been so generous with his living situation.

The servants had the topmost fifth floor of Wakefield House.

He could hear feminine laughter now as he laboriously approached the Achilles Salon. Quietly he pushed open the tall, pink-painted doors. Inside, three ladies sat close together, the ruins of a full tea service on the low table before them.

As he began limping toward them, the youngest, a pretty, plump, brown-haired girl, turned in his direction a full second before the other ladies looked up as well.

He marveled at how Lady Phoebe Batten was always the first to be aware of his presence. She was blind, after all.

“My warder comes for me,” she said lightly.

“Phoebe,” Lady Hero Reading whispered, chiding. She was the middle Wakefield sibling—younger sister of the duke, elder of Lady Phoebe—but the two women looked nothing alike. Lady Hero was taller than her sister, with a willowy figure and flame-colored hair. No doubt she thought he couldn’t hear her undertone, but alas, he could. Not that it mattered. He was fully aware of what his charge thought of him and his duties.