Barbara Metzger (3 page)

St. Cloud frowned, not at the familiarity but at the truth. Damn and blast, he was in no hurry to get to the Priory in Berkshire. He obligingly slowed the pace a fraction. “Now the Devil won’t have to run so hard.” Why should he, when hell was waiting up ahead?

Foley shook his grizzled head but relaxed a little. Now they were traveling at death-defying speed, not necessarily death-wishing, and there was no one he’d trust with the ribbons more than his master. If Lord St. Cloud didn’t have the lightest hands with the reins, aye, and the surest eye toward horseflesh, besides the truest aim with a pistol, the neatest right in the ring and the sharpest skill with the pasteboards of any gentleman in St. James’s Street, Foley would eat his hat. If it hadn’t blown off a mile outside London. Blister it, if Lord St. Cloud didn’t have his black moods like now, he’d well nigh be the best employer in London Town. He was fair and generous, not toplofty, and he didn’t truck with women.

Foley had no fondness for the female species; they only distracted a man from the important business in life, like war and wagering. What with their weeping and clinging and flirting and spending every groat of a chap’s income, they were more trouble than they were worth, by half. It was a good thing, in Foley’s opinion, that Lord St. Cloud was not in the petticoat line. Not that the silly geese wouldn’t be littering my lord’s doorstep if he smiled on them. With his wealth and title, the debutantes would be pawing each other aside to catch his attention. With his wealth and finely muscled frame, the demireps would be clawing one another’s eyes out. And with his dark, brooding looks and wellchiseled features, green eyes and cleft chin, every other female from sixteen to sixty would be gnawing on him like a bone, with or without his incredible wealth. If he smiled at them.

Luckily for Foley’s misogynistic peace of mind, Lord St. Cloud seldom smiled at anyone, and at women least of all. The groom spit over the downwind side of the careening carriage. Give him his horses anytime. Many years ago, when Foley was a jockey, a waitress at the Green Knight had run off with a linen draper’s assistant; the shop boy’s hands were clean, she said, and he didn’t smell of the stable. That’s why Foley frowned if a pretty gal looked his way. Foley never understood about his master’s dour expression and dark humors.

“I don’t see what’s got you in such a takin’,” he muttered now, hanging on for dear life as the earl dropped his hands for the grays to pass a mail coach. “After all, it’s Christmas and you’re goin’ home.”

Foley couldn’t see St. Cloud’s sneer from his position at the earl’s back, even if the groom’s eyes weren’t shut as they missed the coach by inches. Home, hah! Merritt Jordan had felt more at home on the French prison ship. At least there he’d had friends among the other captives. He’d only had to worry about disease, vermin, and hunger—not his relatives. Spending any holiday at St. Cloud Priory at Ayn-Jerome outside Thackford, much less Christmas and his birthday, was more like doing penance for being born.

They would all be there, all the vultures. His mother would see to that, filling the moldering old pile with relations, guests, and hangers-on, just so she did not have to face him alone. And they’d all want something of him, as always: money, favors, compliance with
their
standards for
his
behavior. Cousin Niles would have his usual sheaf of tailors’ bills and gambling debts to be paid, and Cousin Elsbeth would still be whining for a London Season. Lord Harmon Wilmott, their father and St. Cloud’s uncle, would shake his jowls and issue another lecture on St. Cloud’s duties and responsibilities. St. Cloud was the last of the Jordan line, Uncle Harmon would intone; he owed his ancestors a continuance. Mother’s brother undoubtedly meant that the earl should marry Elsbeth, saving Lord Harmon the expense and aggravation and keeping the wealth in the family, the Wilmott family, that was.

St. Cloud clenched his fists, and the horses took exception. When he had them back under his perfect control and Foley had quit muttering, he returned to his musings of what lay ahead. Grandmother, blind as a bat for the last five years, would be nagging at him that she wanted to see her great-grandchildren, and soon. And every female in the county who could scrape up an acquaintance would be calling, with hopes of becoming the next Countess St. Cloud, by come-hither hook or by compromising-situation crook. He dare not walk in his own shrubbery without an escort or sit at ease in his own library unless the door was locked. Hell and damnation, he thought, not for the first time. The Priory already had enough Lady St. Clouds, and those two did not even speak to each other, not without his grandmother, the dowager, shouting, or Lady Fanny, his mother and current countess until he married, weeping.

The closer his carriage got to the Priory, the more St. Cloud understood how a winded deer felt surrounded by wolves. But he was not defenseless, he reminded himself. He was no longer a child who had to abide by adult rules. He was a grown man, twenty-nine years of age, and Uncle Harmon was no longer his trustee or warder. St. Cloud had made that plain four years ago, the day he came into his majority, after waiting a young lifetime of oppression.

Merritt Jordan had, like most of his class, been raised by wet nurses, nannies, and nursemaids. He seldom saw his parents, his mother being too high-strung for the duties of motherhood and his father not being interested. Then came his father’s “accident,” as they called it, and subsequent death two years later, when St. Cloud was seven years old. Lady Fanny’s nerves deteriorated to such an extent that she could not bear to have her son near her. He was too noisy, too active. He might break something.

Her father took over the management of the estate since there were no male Jordan relatives. Lord Wilmott and Grandmother had such rows about raising the new tenth earl that Lady Fanny took to her bed for a year. Lord Wilmott moved his own family from Motthaven next door into the Priory, and the elder Lady St. Cloud moved to the dower house. Uncle Harmon took over the guardianship when he ascended to his father’s baronetcy and later brought his own motherless children to reside under the Jordan banner—and checkbook.

Niles and later Elsbeth could run wild over the estate; St. Cloud had to be groomed for his future dignities. Niles could go off to school at thirteen; St. Cloud at the same age was too delicate to jeopardize among the other sons of the upper ten thousand. Of course his life was precious to the Wilmotts. Without St. Cloud they would have to live on their own neglected property, within their own modest means, for the earldom reverted back to the Crown.

On the one hand, he was wrapped in cotton wool, given the fattest, most placid ponies to ride, kept away from guns and swords, swaddled like an infant prone to croup. On the other hand, he was force-fed a rigorous education by one sanctimonious, sadistic tutor after another. The last was a young curate, Mr. Forbush, who licked his lips when he birched the young earl at every excuse. Lady Fanny cried and did nothing. She was as in awe of her overbearing brother as she had been of her dictatorial father and her grim husband. Uncle Harmon saw nothing wrong with beating the impertinence out of a young boy who questioned his trustee’s cutting in the home woods, raising the tenants’ rents, or selling off the Thoroughbred stud farm. He approved of Mr. Forbush to such an extent that when St. Cloud finally went to university, Uncle Harmon kept the curate on as the family’s spiritual adviser. The hypocrite rained hellfire and brimstone down on the household every Sunday in the old Priory’s chapel of St. Jerome of the Clouds. Lady Fanny was confirmed in her belief that she would burn in purgatory, and Uncle Harmon was convinced his self-righteous sacrifices on his nephew’s behalf would be rewarded in the afterlife.

The earl enjoyed the partial freedom of university life. He excelled at his studies, but he also found outlets for the years of anger and neglect in athletic pursuits, honing his whip-tight muscles and deadly skills. None of the other lads was foolish enough to think St. Cloud was merely competing for fun. Fun did not seem to exist in the young peer’s vocabulary.

St. Cloud’s dream, when he came down from university, was to join the army like his deceased uncle George Jordan, whose name was never mentioned. The dowager ranted, Lady Fanny wept, Mr. Forbush prayed. And Uncle Harmon refused. Merritt Jordan was still the last St. Cloud. No Corsican upstart was going to capsize Wilmott’s gravy boat.

Defeated, St. Cloud threw himself into Town life like a sailor on shore after months at sea. He followed his frivolous cousin Niles into gaming dens and bawdy houses. He surpassed him in reckless wagers and heygo-mad stunts. He ran up debts and ran with light-skirts. He skirted the law with innumerable duels and became known as Satan St. Cloud, a deadly rakehell who took his pleasures seriously. Except that he found no pleasure in such an existence, beyond aggravating Uncle Harmon.

On his twenty-fifth birthday, St. Cloud waited until Mr. Forbush had given his Christmas sermon, not about the Holy Child and Peace on Earth, but about the sins of the fathers, blasphemy, adultery, murder. Forbush stared at St. Cloud and licked his lips.

One step outside the chapel doors, the curate found himself in an iron-hard grip, being dragged to the gatehouse, where the Earl of St. Cloud celebrated Christmas his own way, beating a man of the cloth to within an inch of his life, then tossing him over the gate like a sack of refuse.

St. Cloud strode back to the house and his astounded relatives with a look on his face that could have been a grimace on anyone else’s. London bucks would have recognized it as the St. Cloud smile and fled. The earl notified Uncle Harmon that his services were no longer required; a bailiff had been hired. With a green-eyed look that could stop molten lava in its course, St. Cloud informed him and Niles that the London solicitors were already advised to direct Wilmott bills to Motthaven, not the Priory. He told his mother that if she did not put off her blacks and cease the weeping after nearly twenty years, she could very well go live with Lady St. Cloud in the dower house.

Having turned the Priory nicely on its ear, the earl returned to London to purchase his own commission. Prinny himself refused the request, unless and until St. Cloud had assured the succession. He almost went to marry the first Covent Garden doxie he could find, out of spite, but not even Satan St. Cloud could go through with such an affront to his ancestors. Besides, in the nine months it would take to beget a son, Boney could be defeated. Or the child might be a girl.

Instead the earl took the offered position of liaison between the War Office and the quartermaster general. The Regent asked him to accept, to see why the troops were not properly outfitted, why ammunition did not reach Wellesley’s men in time. A request from the Regent was as good as a command, so St. Cloud became a paper merchant, by damn! He saw enough graft and corruption to disgust even a politician and ended by using some of his own blunt to expedite orders. Three months later he convinced his superior that the only way to see where deliveries were running afoul was in person—St. Cloud’s person.

With every intention of joining up with some regiment or other in Spain, St. Cloud boarded a convoy ship for the Peninsula. The ship was attacked and sunk. The earl was wounded and captured and imprisoned on a French barque, without ever touching Spanish soil. Whitehall was not best pleased to have to trade four French officers of high rank for his release, and St. Cloud was furious that part of his parole— negotiated by Uncle Harmon, indubitably—was his word as a gentleman not to take up arms against his captors again.

No longer in good odor at the War Office, St. Cloud took his seat in the Lords and did what he could there for the war effort, for the returning veterans. Fusty political pettifoggery satisfied him as little as bumbling bureaucracy, so he resumed his Town life, but with some new moderation. Merritt Jordan had nothing left to prove and only himself to aggravate with outrageous behavior, like now, when the headache he had from too much drink and too little sleep was pounding in his temples with each beat of the horses’ hooves. He should have known better than to start the journey so late. Hell, he thought, neatly turning the grays into the courtyard of the Rose and the Crown with inches to spare between them and an overladen departing carriage, he should have made some excuse to avoid the Priory altogether. He usually did.

While the grays were being changed for his lordship’s own matched chestnuts, sent ahead three days ago, St. Cloud was ushered into the inn’s best private parlor, also reserved. Over a steaming mug of the landlord’s renowned spiced punch, St. Cloud mused that no matter how much he struggled, some bonds never came undone. When Uncle Harmon tried to inflict his opinions on his nephew, St. Cloud could stare him into silence, without even hinting at irregularities in the trust’s bookkeeping. St. Cloud could control the wilder excesses of his basket-scrambling cousin Niles with pocketbook governance, and he could challenge any man whose loose tongue overcame his instincts for self-preservation enough to probe the St. Cloud family history. But he could not deal with his womenfolk at all.

He could not frown them into submission, for Grandmother was blind and Mother always had her eyes covered with a damp cloth or a lace-edged handkerchief, albeit not a black-bordered one any longer. He could not affect their behavior through the purse strings either, since both widows’ jointures were generous, and he could certainly not still their querulous demands with threats of physical violence. All he could do was stay away.

For two groats he’d have spent the holidays in London, where his latest mistress would have found some way of enlivening his birthday. Instead he was on the road to Berkshire to face the ghosts of his past, literally.

Tapping in the wainscoting, wailing through the chimneys, disappearing foodstuffs—the Priory ghosts were walking the halls. Murdered monks, squirrels in the secret passages, or bats in Lady Fanny’s belfry, his mother’s letters had gone from her usual vaporish complaints to hysterical gibberish about divine retribution. And company coming.