Loving The Lost Duke (Dangerous Deceptions #1)(73)

‘Just riding past. That’s a good flow of water you’ve got there. Had to divert the stream, I see.’

‘Aye, many years back. And what’s it to you?’ The man narrowed bloodshot eyes. ‘We’ve got rights for mining all over this hill.’

‘I don’t doubt it. Good day to you.’ Cal let the horse move off at a walk and she trotted up to ride beside him. The hostile gaze of the villagers felt like a physical pressure on her back. The stream emerged from the buddle and ran on, discoloured and sinister now. The horses splashed through liquid running down from some sheds to join the brook and Sophie gagged at the smell.

‘Cess pits and a pig sty, I imagine.’ Cal urged the horse into a trot until they were clear of the stench and round the corner out of sight of the village. ‘If this is our stream, the source of the spring, then it’s a wonder I was not dead after one mouthful. Look, it goes off down there.’

He dismounted, tossed the reins to Sophie and pushed his way through the bushes, emerging a few minutes later, hat in hand, with leaves in his hair and a long smear of mud down his sleeve. ‘I think that this is it.’ He took the packets of bluing from the saddlebag and went into the bushes again. When he came back he wiped his powder-dusted hands on the grass, leaving long blue streaks. ‘I do not fancy washing it off in that water.’ He looked faintly nauseous.

‘I am not surprised.’ Sophie found she was shivering with reaction. ‘That filth – and I suppose there is stuff in the ore that is poisonous as well.’

‘I imagine so. Certainly the fumes from lead are, and I have no idea what else gets washed off. I imagine that it has built up deposits all the way through the underground system over the years and that it is stronger now than it was in the beginning. No wonder it killed Ransome.’

‘But not you.’

‘I have picked up some pretty exotic things in my travels, been as sick as a dog in a lot of places, so have Flynn and Hunt. I think it toughens the system up. And I only had that one mouthful this time. Ransome was feeling pretty rough, I imagine, and must have downed most of the carafe before he realised how foul it tasted.’

‘Now what do we do?’

‘Meet the others who should be coming along this track from the opposite direction, go home and sort out a team of watchers for the spring. If it doesn’t flow blue in two days, then we’ve got the wrong stream, but the diversion is too much of a coincidence if that’s the case.’

They rode on in silence, Sophie in a muddle of relief, lingering horror over Jonathan’s death and growing concern for Cal who seemed lost in some dark daydream, his shoulders rigid, his face grim.

Finally, as they rode through a glade so utterly different from the grim little village that it seemed like another world, she could bear it no longer. ‘What is it? Why aren’t you relieved?’

‘I am,’ he said bleakly. ‘Relieved and feeling damnably guilty. How the hell can I apologise enough to my uncle and to Ralph without telling them what I believed for so long? And I can’t tell them and yet I cannot let go of the feeling that I should confess the whole damnable mess.’

‘Of course you must not tell them,’ Sophie said crisply. ‘You hurt them enough by leaving, you can’t salve your own conscience by confessing what you suspected – they would never recover from it. What you thought was understandable, given all the evidence and the fact that you were in no position to investigate further. You can feel regret that you were forced into the position of suspecting them, but wallowing in guilt is self-indulgent. And confessing would make everyone unhappy.’

‘Ouch. You can hit hard when you want to, Sophie. Have you been talking to Jared?’

‘To Hunt? No, why should I? I am not at all sure I like the man, although I believe he is utterly loyal to you.’

‘He thinks I am too prone to feeling guilty. I was stupid enough, in my cups, to wallow – as you so painfully put it – over my feelings for Madeleine and got a rollicking from him on the subject of misplaced guilt.’

‘What – Cal, what were your feelings for her if they made you feel so guilty?’

‘I could not love her. I tried, although I did not know what I was supposed to feel, what she expected of me. But she loved me. I thought at first she had trapped me because she wanted an English gentleman, thought I would take her to London, that I had grand connections and lots of money. And there might have been that at first – her father was certainly mercenary enough. But she managed to fall in love with me.

‘You were right, that first night when I overheard you up in the gallery with Sir Toby. Love is an illusion, a snare. It is never equal, never balanced. It leads to jealousies and misery and misunderstanding. Look what we have, Sophie – desire and friendship. That’s strong, that will last, a good basis for a marriage.’ He dropped his hands and let the horse walk on, then reined back when Sophie didn’t follow.

‘You do not think love might grow, after marriage?’

‘Why would you want it? What does it add? Heartache when it ends, that is all.’

Sophie felt ill again. Out of her own mouth she had condemned this marriage. ‘Cal, what was your parents’ marriage like? Were they in love?’

‘How did you guess?’

Sophie shrugged. ‘That was not the norm for aristocratic marriages in those days, even less than it is now.’