Amanda Scott (33 page)

“But Nigel owns Highgate,” Nell protested. “Perhaps I did not make the matter clear when I explained it—indeed, it is all very confusing—but even though Papa lost the wager he made with Reginald, Jarvis made only the one attempt after Reginald’s accident to claim Highgate. Then, after the duel, when Nigel was forced to flee the country, he said no more about it.”

“He will, my dear. Nigel is on the Continent, after all, and may even be dead by now for all you know. He does not write to you, does he?”

“No, but—”

“So few men do,” Lady Flavia said with a sigh.

“He is still the owner of Highgate.”

“If he should be found guilty of murder, he won’t be,” Lady Flavia said tartly, “and that is precisely what will happen if he has to stand his trial. It may become a matter for Parliament in the end—I know little about such things—but Jarvis Bradbourne stands next to inherit the barony, and his position in a Court of Chancery could only be strengthened if he were married to you. Like Henry the Seventh, that would be.”

“No more Tudors,” Nell said firmly.

“I meant only that your marriage to Jarvis would unite the two lines, much the same as when the seventh Henry married Elizabeth of York, and of course your son, if you had one—”

“I wouldn’t!” Nell exclaimed, revolted. “I would not marry Cousin Jarvis under any circumstance. Even if I liked him, which I do not, he is too old. I mean to marry a man my own age, not one who will precede me into senility by a dozen years. Jarvis simply must be brought to understand as much.”

“Men,” Lady Flavia said with an air of vast experience, “generally believe themselves to be not only infallible but irresistible. And, too, you know, he is a greedy man, so one must consider your inheritance.”

“But I have none,” Nell protested. “Papa meant me to have a proper dowry, of course, and I daresay that once the estate is running properly again there might be enough for a settlement of some sort or other, but—”

“I meant,” Lady Flavia interjected patiently, “the fortune that you will inherit from me, or—to put the matter more exactly—the fortune you are
expected
to inherit from me.”

“But you said there is no fortune.”

“I said nothing of the kind. To be sure, there is not nearly so much as people think, but my capital is intact, and at all events, Jarvis is no more aware of how matters stand with me than you were. Moreover, whatever else he may believe, you can depend upon it that his father will have told him that this house is a property worth owning, for indeed, my dear, it is.”

Nell smiled. “No doubt it is, ma’am, but I must tell you that since I never expected to inherit anything from you, I find it impossible to believe that Cousin Jarvis might expect me to do so. As to anyone else’s believing it, you must forgive me for telling you to your head that such a notion is absurd. No one could be sufficiently interested even to wonder about it.”

“Innocent, that’s what you are,” Lady Flavia said, shaking her head. “Only think, my dear, how quickly information flies about in a country village like Trowbridge. Then consider Bath.”

“I do not know what you mean, ma’am. To be sure, at home folk talk about their neighbors, but what else is there to talk about? And what can Bath know of me? ’Tis a very sleepy town, for all that it was used to be so fashionable. I know there are assemblies and concerts, and I should love to have the money to indulge myself in a visit to the shops in Milsom Street, for we have nothing like them at home, but that people should care—”

“That is just the point,” Lady Flavia said. “In Bath people live for gossip. No entertainment at the Pump Room or the Assembly Rooms can ever be as interesting as what one’s neighbor is doing, or means to do, or has had done to him. If, on any given day, there is not adequate grist for the rumor mill, people have been known to make things up, a fact that irritated the great Beau Nash fifty years ago, and would no doubt still irritate him today. Thankfully, with such a wealth of gossip as there is, such tactics are rarely necessary.”

Sighing, Nell said, “I do not doubt that what you say is true, ma’am, but it does not change my mind about what I must do. If I were a man, I would be working to prove Nigel innocent of the charge against him. Instead, as you say, I have run away from prattling tongues, knowing looks, and Jarvis, hoping to find sanctuary in Bath. If I cannot do that, at least I will not allow myself to become a burden upon you, and perhaps in time I will yet discover the truth about both Papa and Nigel.”

“The truth is already known,” Lady Flavia said in a gentler tone than any she had used before, “and you do no good, child, by deluding yourself to think otherwise. In Nigel’s case, there were witnesses, were there not? Indeed, there must have been.”

“All but Cousin Jarvis supposedly as drunk as Nigel,” Nell said bitterly. “And what with Jarvis’s having been the only reliable witness …” She shrugged and fell silent.

“’Tis as I said, then,” Lady Flavia declared, “and a pity it is that he was not the victim instead of that Mr. Bygrave, for no one would have caviled at that, and there would then have been no witness, so Nigel might have gone tamely home again. As it is, you can do nothing about his difficulty. Indeed, even if there might be more to the matter than we know, Nigel brought it on himself, for he is no pattern card, my dear, as well you know. And to be grieving over his problems instead of looking after yourself is quite foolish. You would be a great deal more sensible to be thinking of marriage.”

“Marriage! But I told you I would not even think—”

“Oh, not to Jarvis, for pity’s sake. And Bath, of course, is not precisely as full as it can hold of eligible young men,” she added, “though I suppose there must be some.”

“It cannot matter if there are,” Nell said, staring at her. “There is no possible way that—”

“Oh, but there is always a way, my dear,” Lady Flavia said placidly. “Now hush and let me think.”

“But, Aunt—”

“Hush, I said. This may take a moment or two.” And with that, the old lady leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.

Watching her, Nell was torn between equally strong urges to laugh and to cry. Certain that her aunt had, after the fashion of the elderly, merely decided to take a nap without admitting the need for one, she exerted herself to control both urges and turned to stare out of the window again instead.

A broad ray of sunlight had broken through the clouds, gilding the pale yellow Bath stone from which the houses were built, and making sparkles dance in the puddles dotting the quiet street. The sight was a pretty one, but Nell found little satisfaction in it, feeling irritation instead when the peaceful silence outside was broken by the clatter of iron-shod hooves and carriage wheels on the wet cobbles as a small brown post chaise, picked out in red and drawn by a pair of bay horses, rattled toward her from the north end of Great Pulteney Street.

T
HE CLATTER HAD DISTURBED
one of the three dozing occupants of the post chaise sufficiently to make him push his curly-brimmed beaver hat up off his eyes and peer out of the window, squinting against the glare of sunlight on the wet pavement.

“Yeller houses,” the Honorable Joseph Lasenby muttered thoughtfully to himself before the information, slowly processed by his awakening brain, brought him to a startling conclusion. “By Jove, Bran,” he said in a louder tone, looking past the gentleman gently snoring beside him to the opposite side of the street, and finding no cause in what he saw there to alter his reasoning, “I believe we’ve come to Bath! Dash it all, wasn’t it Bath where Halstead said you’d find that heiress, the one you said you’d be damned if you’d abduct, wager or no wager? Here, wake up! No, not you,” he added with dismay when the large, toffee-colored hound taking up most of the floor space stirred and raised its head from his once highly-polished boot, gathering itself as though it meant to get up. “Down, sir! Down, I say.” The hound sighed and dropped its head again to the booted foot.

Freeing his elbow sufficiently to gain some leverage in the close confines of the chaise, Mr. Lasenby jabbed the gentleman sprawled beside him. “I say, Bran, do wake up.” He jabbed again. “There must be some sort of a mistake. Tell the lad!”

Brandon Manningford grunted and tried to evade the annoying elbow, but Mr. Lasenby being determined to wake him and the chaise being entirely too small to allow him to move out of reach, it was not long before he opened his hazel eyes and gazed irritably at the other young man. “What the devil do you mean by jabbing a fellow, Sep? You’d be sorry if I retaliated in kind.”

“Dashed right,” Mr. Lasenby replied placidly. “You’re bigger than I am. Stronger, too, and you might take it into your head to call in all my vouchers—not that that would do you a lick of good. But look here, we’re in Bath, I tell you.”

Mr. Manningford continued to regard him with displeasure. “So? What if we are?”

“Dash it all, man, Miss Wembly might accuse me of having the worst memory in all England, but you ain’t the one cursed with a grandfather plaguing you to marry money, and I remember plain as day that you said you’d no interest in heiresses!”

“That is not at all what I said,” Mr. Manningford informed him testily. “I said I’d be damned if I’d abduct one merely to win another wager with Halstead.”

“Nothing mere about four thousand, Bran! Dash it, I’d know what to do with it. And it ain’t as though abducting an heiress is beyond your line. ’Tain’t nearly so bad as some things you’ve done. Why, you once rode a bear into a dinner party, and another time, you put that same bear to bed with a total stranger. And how about the time you told that fellow you was going to pay him some ridiculous sum for a horse he wanted to sell you, and that all he had to do was to take your note of hand to a certain banker? That poor toad ended in Bedlam or some such like place.”

“You never get that tale right,” Manningford complained, straightening in his seat and rubbing the place where a crease in his heavily starched neckcloth had irritated his throat. His hat had long since fallen to the floor, and as he bent to rescue it, he patted the dog’s head, adding, “Fellow tried to cheat me, so I gave him a note to a banker who happened to be guardian for a nearby insane asylum. Is it my fault the coper assumed the note requested payment when instead it said, ‘Admit bearer to your asylum?’ Served him right. But, Sep, that prank and the others with old Nolly are buried in my misspent youth, and at my worst I never abducted an heiress. Ill-bred thing to do, that is, not to mention its being a hanging offense. You surprise me.”

“Why?” Mr. Lasenby demanded. “The wager was Halstead’s notion, not mine. I thought the idea bacon-brained from the start, even if she is as rich as Croesus. Not that I’ve the least notion how rich that might be,” he added thoughtfully. “Didn’t know Croesus, did I?”

“I don’t suppose you did, or you’d have borrowed money from him,” his friend retorted. “But forget the heiress, will you? If you will exert that feeble brain of yours, you will recollect that Bath is also where my esteemed father resides.”

“So he does,” Mr. Lasenby acknowledged, much struck. Then, after another, visible mental struggle, he added, “You said years ago you didn’t mean to ask him for another groat, so I still can’t think why we’ve come to Bath unless you changed your mind about that heiress. Not that you could pull it off, of course.”

Manningford smiled, but the expression altered to a sharp wince when one wheel of the chaise struck a pothole. He looked out the window to see that they had passed from Laura Place into Argyle Street and were approaching Pulteney Bridge.

Spanning the River Avon and built end to end with small shops, the three-arched span was the only work in Bath by Robert Adam, once England’s leading architect, but just then Manningford remembered only that it was too narrow and was glad there was no traffic. As the chaise lurched over another hole, he pressed a hand against his aching head. “Blast. My brain feels like someone’s got loose inside with a hammer and anvil.”

“You drank the devil of a lot of brandy last night,” Mr. Lasenby pointed out. “Ought to have stuck with the port, just as you ought to have stuck to faro instead of turning to the wheel. It ain’t never been lucky for you, Bran.” Regarding Manningford curiously, he added, “You lost the devil of a lot of money last night. Dash it, after all you’ve lent to me, it must be low tide with you. You sure it ain’t going to be the heiress?”

“I’m sure,” Manningford said with a sigh. “I’m too old, Sep, and I hope I have gained sufficient wisdom with the years not to back myself anymore to win idiotic wagers.”

Mr. Lasenby looked doubtful. “You ain’t so old as all that, Bran. Same as me, ain’t you? Though you’ll turn twenty-nine in December, as I recall. Don’t hardly make us graybeards.”

Manningford shrugged. “Boredom ages a man, Sep. I fear I’ve become a sober citizen, tired of pranks and nonsense.”

“Certainly, you have.” Mr. Lasenby looked pointedly at the hound on the floor. “Perhaps the fact escaped you, but it has not before now been my habit to travel with damp canines in my post chaise. On the hunting field, I’ll grant you, or when one goes out shooting, one may without censure be accompanied by one’s dog, but not in one’s town carriage, my lad. Certainly not in a small, enclosed post chaise. Even Poodle Byng would scorn to do such a thing. You mightn’t have noticed it, Bran, but your friend there carries a certain odor with him—no doubt we do too, by now—and not one that will add to our welcome, wherever we’re bound. Not that I wish to complain, mind you, but—”

“Peace, Sep.” Manningford grinned at him. “The poor old fellow stinks like a polecat, but he can’t help it any more than he could stop the rain when we let him out to do his business. He’s the only thing I won last night that I didn’t manage to lose again, and I did not hear you make any suggestions about what I was to do with him if he didn’t come with us.”

“Well, you’re wrong there,” Mr. Lasenby said. “Miss Wembly was quite right about my lamentable memory, but I distinctly—”

“No acceptable suggestions,” Manningford retorted, laughing.