Love's Tangle by Isabelle Goddard Page B

silly tale straight out of a romance—oh, but you don’t read them do you? If you think to hoodwink me, you will not succeed. I have never seen this miniature before and even if I had, what has it to do with you?”
    In answer she drew one half of a silver locket and chain from the depths of her pocket and placed it on the desk. “I think it has much to do with me. See, Your Grace, I have the matching portrait.”
    He gazed at the beautiful young woman depicted. The miniature was intricately wrought and faithful in every detail. It was an answering image of the locket Elinor had taken from the desk. He looked up. The cloud of dark hair and the misty green eyes of the painting were right there before him.
    “Who is this and why do you have it?” She knew he must already have the answer.
    “It is a picture of my mother and is the sole remembrance I have of her.” And suddenly the fortune teller’s words came flooding back. This was the woman she had been describing, the woman from over the sea, the woman Elinor was to save. Her own mother!
    “Your mother? What has she to do with this?”
    “She was a painter and specialized in miniatures. I believe she painted this image of herself and the one of your uncle.”
    “Then your mother was commissioned by my Uncle Charles? Is that what you’re saying?”
    She smiled at his simplicity. “Not exactly. The two halves of the locket belong together—see here.” And she slotted the small hinges one into the other without hindrance. “The strands of each chain fit together too.”
    He was frowning hard and she continued. “These are matching portraits. I think they must have been painted by one lover for another.”
    “That is ridiculous. What you’re suggesting is insane. My uncle’s wife was a Louisa Lovejoy and she stills lives—more’s the pity.”
    So there was no death or divorce, Elinor thought, remembering the fiercely scratched out name in the family bible. But a repudiation, a banishment? “I wasn’t talking about marriage,” she managed with difficulty.
    “An affair?” He was nothing if not candid. “Uncle Charles was whiter than white, but even if he had enjoyed a youthful dalliance with a stray artist, what has it to do with you?”
    His description of her mother hurt but she was too flustered to respond. The duke had hit on the very question she was struggling to answer.
    “There was a scandal, I believe,” she said falteringly. “A scandal that involved my mother. My father, too, perhaps.”
    “You divine all this from a broken locket?”
    Elinor refused to be deflected. “On her deathbed my mother urged me to come here. Why would she do so, if she had no connection to this place?”
    “You were to come here ?”
    “To Allingham,” she said firmly. “And seek out one who would help me, one who was rich and powerful. That could only be your uncle.”
    He stared blankly at her and she pushed her advantage. “He is the one my mother spoke of. He has to be. Eighteen years ago he was the only young man living here—the family Bible makes that clear.”
    “So that was the reason you were poking and prying in the library,” he said bullishly. “And I was almost taken in by Cicero!”
    “I had to know why my mother was so desperate for me to come to Allingham. I owed it to her.”
    “All you know,” he said flatly, “is that at some time in the past your mother painted my uncle.”
    “You have forgotten the nature of the portraits. They are painted in matching style and form two halves of a complete locket. It is the kind of object lovers exchange with each other. The locket has not been broken but deliberately sundered, so that each lover might keep their sweetheart’s image close to them.”
    A look of derision crossed his face. “Most affecting but highly unlikely. It is pure speculation, in fact wild speculation. Tell me this, if there had been such a love affair, where does your father fit in?”
    “I have no idea,” she said