A Bride by Moonlight (12 page)

The lady was introduced as Beatrice’s governess, Mrs. Jansen. She bobbed a curtsy, a wary eye still upon the footman. But by then Beatrice had already slipped her hand and come fully into the room, her gaze cutting shyly toward Miss Colburne.

“If you please, ma’am,” she said to Lady Hepplewood, making a dash of a curtsy that set her blonde ringlets bouncing, “I wish to meet the new lady.”

Lady Hepplewood again gave her regal nod, beckoned Mrs. Jansen to sit, and sent the footman scurrying for more china.

“A pleasure, Mrs. Jansen.” Miss Colburne shone her brilliant smile upon Beatrice. “How do you do, Miss Tarleton? May I call you Beatrice? Or even Bea, perhaps?”

“Oh, Bea is fine,” she said, scooting closer to the tea table. “Your hair is awfully red. Why is it so short?”

“Beatrice!” Mrs. Jansen colored furiously.

“That will do, Beatrice.” Lady Hepplewood punctuated the command with a hard thump of her stick.

But Miss Colburne merely widened her eyes ingenuously. “Why, we were just talking about my hair,” she said, passing a plate to the girl. “Are you by chance clairvoyant?”

“I don’t think so.” Beatrice paused for a minute, nibbled on a lemon biscuit, then looked up again. “But I was wondering—are you going to marry Saint-Bryce instead of Diana?”

Miss Colburne brightened her smile, if such a thing were possible. “Well, Diana has not asked me to marry her,” she teased. “But Saint-Bryce has. Shall I have him, do you suppose?”

Beatrice gazed at Miss Colburne very solemnly. “I daresay you ought,” said the girl. “Gwyneth says he’s a good catch now, and that Diana is a moon-eyed idiot.”

Napier heard Lady Hepplewood’s sharp intake of breath. “Beatrice, perhaps you and I might discuss this later?” he gently suggested, leaning forward in his chair. “Perhaps I might visit you in the schoolroom someday?”

“Really, Saint-Bryce, you mustn’t encourage impertinence,” chided Lady Hepplewood. “Beatrice must remember her place.”

Napier bit back his frustration. “Her
place
is in this house,” he said tightly. “Beatrice may lack tact but Burlingame is her home, and her father is but recently departed.”

Lady Hepplewood shot him a look that made plain she did not welcome correction. “And what, pray, has that to do with anything?”

“Children require certainty,” he replied, forcing a calm voice. “They have a right to understand what is happening around them, and
to
them. Their sense of well-being depends upon it.”

“How very insightful, my dear,” said Miss Colburne, who immediately struck up another superficial conversation, this time directed at Mrs. Jansen—something to do with her French governess.

Napier did not attend. Instead he let his gaze drift about the ostentation of the room and thought about Beatrice. Until recently, her father had been heir to all this, and her place in this house secure. Now, with both parents dead, her half sisters a dozen years older, and Lady Hepplewood thumping that damned black stick at every misstep, Beatrice probably felt uncertain of her position here. God knew he did.

Was it really possible all this would be his to steward into the next generation? And where was that next generation to come from?

Oh, he knew the answer to that one, and it gave him great pause. His eyes settling on the collection of gilt-framed landscapes that flanked the soaring marble chimneypiece, he decided no one could be more ill suited to the task.

On his initial visit to Burlingame a few months ago he had been immediately awestruck by its magnificence. And for the first time, it had sunk into him just what his father had given up, and how greatly his circumstances had been altered by the sacrifice.

The Honorable Mr. Nicholas Tarleton had been a child of great wealth and privilege. Had he imagined, in some fit of childish pique, that altering his name might embarrass this family? So far as Napier could see, the effect had been that of a mosquito bite—a minor annoyance to be complained of only in passing.

No, he sensed no humility here; the sheer hauteur and sense of privilege remained intact, unblemished by doubt. Already he’d seen it in his grandfather. But he had felt almost at once that a sort of darkness hung here, too. And yet he had found nothing—nothing save an old man already lost in a murky world of incoherence.

But Hepplewood had been in his sixties, arthritic and gouty. Saint-Bryce, on the other hand, had been perfectly well. Bea’s father had not been young, perhaps, but the coincidence still struck Napier as odd, and the strange sense of gloom he’d felt upon first entering this house still lingered, casting a pall that even he could feel.

Or perhaps that
only
he could feel?

Perhaps this was merely what it felt like to be an outsider?

Lady Hepplewood had made it plain at his very first visit that Napier was scarcely welcome. Even the fact that he had come, not to presume a family connection, but at her dying husband’s behest had not swayed the lady to warmth. In fact, it had seemed to irritate her.

But then Napier had been a nobody, for his uncle Saint-Bryce and his bride-to-be had been fully expected to do their duty. It had fallen to Diana Jeffers to place as many potential heirs between Napier and Burlingame Court as were physically possible to conceive.

But two women were already dead from trying to bear a son, and the third had not got her opportunity after all. He wondered if Miss Jeffers was angry, or just relieved.

He returned to the present when Beatrice set down her plate, and Lady Hepplewood rose from her chair. It seemed he had dropped a pall over the conversation that even the glib and glorious-haired Miss Colburne could not throw off. With a sense of relief that tea was over, Napier jerked to his feet and offered Lady Hepplewood his arm.

Grudgingly, she took it. “You will doubtless wish to rest before dinner,” she said as they strolled sedately along the wide swath of carpet that led to the massive, gilt-trimmed doors. “I’ve instructed Gwyneth to put you in the east pavilion, so that—”

But her intent was not revealed. Instead, in that instant, the salon doors were flung wide again and this time Miss Gwyneth Tarleton herself strode past the footman, with Diana Jeffers a dozen steps behind her.

Gwyneth was a tall, horsey female with few graces and a somewhat brusque manner. The lady flicked an assessing glance down his length as she drew up before him.

“Heavens, Saint-Bryce,” she barked. “We did not know to expect you today.”

“Yes, that point has been driven home to me,” he said dryly. “Perhaps my letter could have been more specific. How do you do, Miss Tarleton? Miss Jeffers?”

Miss Tarleton gave a tight smile. “You must call me Cousin Gwyneth now, I daresay,” she replied, looking as if it pained her.

It pained
him
not to point out that they had been cousins since her birth, and that she had heretofore suffered no impulse to call him anything save, he suspected,
that odious Mr. Napier
. But he resisted the petty impulse. He knew nothing of Gwyneth Tarleton, or what her life was like.

Moreover, he was not here to assuage his pride, or even to coddle hers. Instead, he simply introduced Miss Colburne.

Diana Jeffers was delicate and pretty, and if she found any discomfort in greeting to the woman who was ostensibly to replace her as Lady Saint-Bryce, one could not discern it. “Welcome to Burlingame,” she said, her voice warm, if a little vague.

“Shall I take Beatrice back up?” asked Mrs. Jansen, as if uncertain whose permission to ask.

“Yes,” said Gwyneth and Lady Hepplewood at once.

Lady Hepplewood’s glower darkened. “Gwyneth will take you to the east pavilion,” she continued to Napier. “Diana, you will return with me.”

“Shouldn’t I help Gwyneth settle them in?” suggested Miss Jeffers.

But Lady Hepplewood had already started in the opposite direction, her ebony stick clacking hollowly across the white marble of the vaulted entrance hall. “Gwyneth has no need of help,” she said, crooking her head to look back with obvious exasperation. “Now do come along, Diana. I cannot find my needlework. I’m quite sure you’ve mislaid it.”

Frustration sketched across Miss Jeffers’s face, but swiftly vanished. “Of course, Cousin Cordelia.” She turned to shoot Napier and Miss Colburne one last glance. “We keep apartments in the west end of the house. Do visit us there if we may be of some service.”

Napier thanked her, then turned to follow Gwyneth in the opposite direction.

“You must forgive Aunt Hepplewood’s presumption,” said Gwyneth as they walked.

“Must I?” said Napier.

“I suppose Uncle Hep’s death and Tony’s turning black sheep have left her a tad distraught,” said Gwyneth without a modicum of warmth.

Tony, Napier knew, was Hepplewood’s heir, and their only child. And if half what he’d heard in London was true, Lady Hepplewood had just cause for her concern. But Napier said nothing, for Tony’s moral failings were none of his business.

The trek from the formal salons of the main house was a long one, taking them through one ostentatious room into another until at last they reached one of the long passageways that connected Burlingame’s main house to the pavilions.

Here the soaring baroque arches appeared to once have been open but now were fitted with glazed windows that rose some twenty feet high. The passageway floor was laid with alternating tiles of sparkling black and white marble and the ceiling was vaulted on pairs of grand columns that he supposed were marble, too.

Miss Colburne, however, after commenting admiringly on the whole, called the columns
scagliola
and the passageway a
grand
colonnade
. Napier made a mental note to ask her what the differences were. She seemed a walking miscellany of obscure facts.

Gwyneth Tarleton nodded her approval, and kept moving. But having apparently decided that Miss Colburne just might
possibly
be worthy of her attention, the lady slowed her pace from time to time in order to point out further architectural details.

Once again Napier found himself grateful for Miss Colburne’s presence for she seemed to know just the right things to say and to ask. Oh, his gratitude would likely pass when next she tried his patience—something he expected was inevitable. And that sudden shaft of lust—not to mention the ripe swell of her breast beneath his hand—had been disconcerting.

But thus far, she was upholding her end of their bargain, and admirably so. It felt as if something had shifted between them in the train, and her eyes no longer held as much uneasy suspicion. Nor did his, perhaps. They were, by hook or crook, in this together, it seemed.

At the end of the colonnade, they entered what appeared to be an entirely different house, and one Napier had not previously visited. This, he understood, was where Lord Duncaster resided, and it looked far more like a gentleman’s well-worn country manor and less like an overwrought imitation of Versailles. Napier felt oddly better of his grandfather for preferring it.

After mounting a wide, circular staircase, he was shown into an airy bedchamber with a pair of massive windows overlooking a parterre garden rolling out into some sixteen symmetrical squares, and beyond that, a crescent-shaped ornamental lake set with a cupolated gazebo at the end of a little pier. The whole of it, he imagined, must have required a battalion of gardeners.

After confirming his satisfaction with the room, the efficient Gwyneth swept Miss Colburne further down the passageway, and Napier found himself alone. Jolley, it appeared, had been safety delivered from the station with their bags. Napier noted his dressing case already lay open upon an ancient barley-twist vanity, and his dressing gown hung on a hook by the door.

As to the valet himself, he was likely belowstairs sidling up to the cook. Jolley always kept an eye to the main chance. Left to his own devices, Napier headed toward the dressing room. There was no hope, he supposed, of a water tap in this ancient pile, but he glanced inside all the same.

Nothing. He turned around, intending to yank the bellpull so that he might wash the day’s dust away. But as he passed into his bedchamber, the door flew open and Miss Colburne darted in, slamming it shut behind, her odd green-blue eyes alight with what could only be described as burning curiosity.

“Well,” she said, leaning back to set her palms flat against the wood, “
who
do you think did it?”

Napier shot her a warning glance, and hoped she took it as such. “I’ve no idea who’s done what to whom,” he said, “but account yourself lucky I hadn’t stripped down to my drawers to contemplate it.”

“Napier, do be serious. You hadn’t time.” She paused to turn the lock with an efficient
snap!
and then followed him to the windows. “So far, I place my hope in Gwyneth Tarleton. I find her to be frightfully efficient—and the efficient are sometimes ruthless.”

For a long moment, Napier said nothing. Though his gaze was fixed upon the lake and the row of topiaried yews that lined its path, he could feel her warmth—her sheer vitality—hovering at his elbow. Her presence soothed him even as it oddly frustrated him. He did not wish to feel either—not where she was concerned.

But the undeniable truth was, from the moment he’d laid eyes on the woman those many months ago, there had been a physical attraction. A dangerous attraction. And though she seemed almost unaware of it, she had only grown more tempting with time.

“I don’t suppose there’s any point in telling you that you’ve no business in a gentleman’s bedchamber?” he finally said.

She gave a sound of exasperation. “Well, I’ve no business traveling with a man I scarcely know and certainly don’t mean to marry,” she said, “but that hasn’t stopped either of us, has it? Besides, we must have a place to speak privately if we’re to work together.”

“That is my very point.” Napier turned on his heel to look at her, and wished at once he had not. “We aren’t
working together.
You are merely to occupy yourself in distracting that maddening pack of females.”

He could hear her toe begin to tap beneath the elegant sweep of her velvet skirts; could see impatience sketch across her face. “Then you quite waste my investigative skills,” she blurted.