Langham held his pistol trained on Stannings, his arm steady as he watched his quarry startle at the interruption.
“What a spoilsport you are, Langham,” the magistrate said, rising slowly from where he’d been crouched beside the throne, arranging tinder. “I vow old Thaddeus would be disappointed beyond measure at your cowardice. Even I am not going so far as he would have done. I daresay he’d have fucked the chit before setting fire to her. Where are my thanks for sparing your beloved that indignity?”
Langham had been prepared for Stannings to taunt him, but even so it took all of his self-control to keep from reacting. He needed to get Poppy away from this madman, and he couldn’t do that if he let Stannings see the rage that was burning within him.
“You see, Stannings,” he said conversationally, never lowering his weapon, “I do not measure my worth based on the opinions of a man who’s been dead for a half century. I thought we’d agreed when we were sixteen that his society was little more than a weak man preying on his underlings in order to make himself feel strong. He was a pretender. Just like you.”
“There’s where you’re wrong, Langham.” Stannings’s brown eyes were almost black with fury. “I am more powerful than he was. And I haven’t had to pledge my soul to Satan in order to do it.”
“Perhaps not. But you pledged yourself—or at least your money—to Alistair Lovell. And I’m sure Lord Short enjoyed having the local magistrate under his thumb,” Langham said, hoping to draw a response from Stannings that would incriminate him as well as Lovell and Short. “It must have been quite a shock to be invited into their society, only to have them use it against you.”
“Short is a fool. It was my idea to resurrect the Lucifer Society and lure these idiotic yokels into participating. From there it was easy to convince them to invest in Short’s schemes. And if they suspected they’d been fleeced, it was easy enough to remind them that their involvement in the society would be delightful fodder for the press.” Stannings was clearly reveling in his accomplishments, and Langham wished nothing more than to knock the smug expression from the man’s face.
“He’d never bothered trying to keep his victims quiet when he’d conducted his schemes before,” Poppy interjected, and Langham wasn’t at all surprised to hear her voice was strong and steady.
“You have been away for some time, Miss Delamere,” the magistrate sneered. “Your stepfather isn’t as young as he once was. His wish is to remain in Little Kidding for the rest of his days.”
Before Poppy could respond, Stannings lifted her to her feet, and she cried out with what sounded like pain. As Langham watched, the viscount pulled her against him with his arm tight about her neck.
Langham had never wanted to kill a man, but at this very moment he could very well imagine using his bare hands to wring the life from Stannings. But as he watched, Poppy shook her head slightly, her gaze directed at his hands, which he hadn’t even realized he’d clenched into fists.
“Look at you, Langham,” jeered the magistrate. “One would think you actually loved the lady. You’re an even bigger fool than I thought. No man of sense would ally himself to a wife for any other reason than wealth or status. And pretty Poppy can bring you neither.”
“Let her go,” Langham said, his voice hoarse with emotion as he watched Poppy struggle against Stannings’s hold on her. “She’s done nothing to you. If you want to kill someone, take me.”
“Oh, I intend to,” Stannings said with a cold smile. “Make no mistake about that.”
Langham caught a glint of light at Poppy’s side, just where her right hand was clasped tight against herself.
What the devil?
To his astonishment, he saw that she was gripping a long knife by the hilt. He might have known that his clever, clever Poppy would have found a weapon to save herself.
As long as Stannings didn’t use the knife against her.
Thinking to distract the other man and buy Poppy some time to enact her plan, Langham called out to him. “You killed Lovell. Tell me how you managed it. You at least owe me that, in honor of our friendship all those years ago.”
Stannings looked annoyed. “Friendship. What sort of friendship is it where one boy has the whole world laid out before him and the other is reminded at every turn how inferior he is? Friendship, bah.”
“But you must surely have had a good reason for doing away with the man,” Langham went on in another attempt to draw a confession out of Stannings. He’d admitted his involvement with Lovell and Short, but it was his confession to killing Lovell that would free Violet. “From everything I’ve learned, Lovell was a criminal. He was blackmailing several men in the village. Were you one of them?”
“Of course,” Stannings said curtly. “But when Lovell tried his games on me, he didn’t realize he’d crossed the wrong man. He’d already made the mistake of threatening his father-in-law. And there was that trouble with Lord Twombley and some flunky in the Foreign Office that he’d dispatched. He really was getting very full of himself.”
While Stannings ranted, Langham saw on the periphery of his vision that Adrian, Val, and Eversham had begun creeping from the side tunnels and out along the edges of the main room toward the dais.
As they neared the center of the room, Poppy chose that moment to jam her knife into Stannings’s side. From that angle she couldn’t do much damage, but it was enough to startle him. When he cried out and instinctively let her go, she leapt from the dais to the floor.
Eversham and Val rushed forward and gripped a cursing Stannings by the arms. Adrian stood to the side, aiming a pistol at their captive.
“Love.” Langham knelt down beside her and scooped her into his arms. “Are you hurt?”
“I twisted my ankle when he threw me down the trapdoor,” she explained as she wrapped her arms around him. “That’s all. He didn’t harm me otherwise.”
“Thank God,” he whispered against her hair, more grateful than he’d ever been in his life to have her safe.
“I was afraid, Joshua,” she said against his neck, her voice trembling in a way that made him wish he could give Stannings the thrashing he deserved. “I thought…I thought I was going to die before you were able to find me. And I wouldn’t get the chance to tell you how much I love you.”
She pulled back and looked at him, her cornflower blue eyes shiny with tears. “Because I do, you see. I love you. I know it’s not convenient. You never mentioned anything about love when you proposed. Friendship, yes. But never—”
“I love you too,” Langham said, leaning his forehead against hers. “I should have said so when I made that damned botched proposal, but I thought you were too sensible to think of marrying me because of something as sentimental as love. But dear God, Poppy, I feel so much more for you than mere friendship.”
“Oh, I do too,” she said leaning in to kiss him.
But before their lips could touch, Eversham broke in. “I hate to interrupt your tête-à-tête, but we wanted to let you know that we are taking Stannings away now.”
Langham rose to his feet and then lifted Poppy into his arms. “We’ll come along. Poppy’s ankle needs to be seen by the physician.”
Stannings, who had his hands bound behind his back with his own neckcloth, looked disgusted at the sight of them. “Who would have guessed that the great-grandson of the great Thaddeus Fielding, first master of the Lucifer Society, would turn out to be such a conventional bore.”
“Darling,” Langham said to Poppy, “do me a favor and untie my neckcloth.”
Poppy gave him a questioning look but nevertheless reached up to unravel the cloth. When she was finished she asked, “Now what?”
“Hand it to my brother,” Langham instructed. “I believe Stannings is in need of a gag.”
“Gladly,” Adrian said taking the tie from Poppy and stuffing it into a protesting Stannings’s mouth.
But any silence they might have enjoyed with the villain gagged was interrupted by the arrival of Percy, who obviously held a grudge over the way Stannings had mistreated Poppy. Leaping at the magistrate, Percy sunk his teeth into the man’s trouser leg and refused to let go.
“Good boy, Percy,” Poppy crooned from her perch in Langham’s arms. “He deserves a beefsteak at least, Lord Adrian.”
Finally managing to unclench the little dog’s teeth from Stannings, who was shouting as well as one could with a gag in one’s mouth, Adrian gave Percy a good rubdown.
“I’ll make sure he gets one,” he told Poppy before disappearing up the stairs to remove him from the cave.
“There,” Langham said as he followed his brother toward the stairway. “Now, what were we talking about?”
“How you love me?” Poppy offered, nestling her head into the crook of his neck.
“Yes,” he said, appreciating the feel of her in his arms. “I think it must have been the way your eyes flashed when…”
And as he carried her out of the cave and then the folly, he enumerated all the ways in which he’d been falling in love with her bit by bit since she’d run into him in Paddington Station.
Poppy, whom he had always been convinced was the cleverest of ladies, didn’t utter a word of protest.
