Between the Devil and Ian Eversea (2 page)

Chapter 2

P
OOR
G
IANCARLO.

It was now nearly midnight and Tansy couldn’t sleep. She shoved aside an explosively colorful flower arrangement—they seemed to be
everywhere
in this house, apparently thanks to Olivia Eversea—dominating a little table near the window.

She stepped out onto the little balcony into the star-strewn Sussex night. She tried to imagine him down on his knees on the green. He’d likely have been scarce more than a speck of white linen seen from the distance of the third floor window. Mother of God, what a terrible moment—sitting very still, beaming like a loon at the duke and duchess, while the words
bloody hell bloody hell bloody hell
clanged over and over in her head as realization set in. She’d never dreamed he’d
follow
her from the docks, let alone appear beneath the Duke of Falconbridge’s window to bellow things like “forsake,” of all words. Wherever had he
learned
it? His chief attraction, apart from his liquid brown eyes, had been his mellifluous murmured Italian (which he never suspected she mostly understood) interspersed with charmingly fractured English. He must have been reading English poets or some nonsense when he wasn’t romancing her on deck. She didn’t know how reading poetry could ever lead to anything good.

The Duke of Falconbridge had done little more than flick an eyebrow and—poof!—Giancarlo had somehow been spirited away. She’d been assured she would never have to worry about him again, and the duke and duchess (the duchess primarily) had gone on to talk about other things and other people, so very many people, all family members, in a voice of such warmth, and she’d been spared any queries about her association with Mr. Lucchesi. Because the duke was likely confident he’d ended it.

A speck, indeed. That was what Giancarlo was to someone like the duke.

The duke. She suspected the duke accomplished more with a flicked eyebrow than most men did in a lifetime of toil. He’d been polite, of course, welcoming, of course, but a bit . . . unyielding. A bit impervious to her attempts to charm. She’d felt a little winded after the conversation, as though she’d been attempting to scale a slippery wall for an hour only to do nothing but slide down again and again. It was probably best to nod and agree a good deal around him. Her father had known what he was about when he consigned her fate to the Duke of Falconbridge.

Tansy supposed he could be considered handsome, but he must be forty years old at
least
. So astonishing, given that his wife was so very pretty and was hardly older than she was, and she was twenty.

She recalled the glance they exchanged.

It had reminded her of looks exchanged between her parents. Those looks had always felt like a door ajar on a world she’d never be invited to visit.

She’d loved her parents very much and had been loved, too, she knew, but she also known precisely where she fell in the hierarchy of affection in her family.

She suspected the duke considered her a speck, too. A temporary problem to be handed off to another man, whose problem she would then become. A baton of sorts, in the eternal marriage relay.

So be it. She wrapped her arms around herself and gave a little shiver of anticipation. She
wanted
to be married. Imagine what all of her erstwhile friends in New York would say if she became the Duchess of this or the Countess of that. And if someone could find her a duke for a husband, surely it was another duke?

Likely she’d never see Giancarlo again.

She did feel a minute pang of regret. She’d never anticipated it would all reach such an . . . untidy . . . crescendo. It had begun with a variety of glances—fleeting and lingering, sidelong and direct—sent and intercepted. And then, experimentally, she’d timed a pretend slip on the foredeck just as he was passing; her hand had curled over his arm as he helped her to right herself, and as she stammered thanks, standing a bit too close, his pupils had gone huge.

This closeness had evolved into an invitation to stroll on the deck.

She understood enough Italian to know that Giancarlo (his bicep tightened beneath her grip when she accidentally-on-purpose breathed his name for the first time
—“Giancarlo”
—as he helped her to her feet again) was saying things no gentleman should say to any proper lady—reckless, stirring, often baffling things. He would like to kiss her. Her lips were like plums. Her lips were like roses. Her ass was like a peach. Her skin was like a lily. All manner of flora and fauna were represented in his compliments. He would like to do other things besides kiss her. She wasn’t familiar with Italian slang, more’s the pity, because she expected she’d have gotten quite an education.

She’d even mulled allowing him to do one or two of the things he professed to wanting to do. And with each passing day on the ship the lips of her hired companion, Mrs. Gorham, had gone thinner and thinner and thinner and her underbreath muttered warnings grew darker and darker. But Tansy couldn’t stop. She was a virtuoso of flirtation who’d been denied an opportunity to practice her art for far too long, and the whole episode had acquired the momentum of a driverless carriage rolling downhill.

It was probably a very good thing the ship had docked when it did.

She ventured out onto the little balcony outside her window and searched the English sky, but she couldn’t find the particular constellation she wanted to see. And though she knew it was ridiculous, it was this more than anything that made her feel bereft all over again, as if she were spiraling aimlessly through the heavens, like so much dandelion fluff, inconsequential, destined never to land.

Somewhere out there in the Sussex dark was the home she’d once known and loved fiercely as a little girl. Lilymont. Sold when her father had taken his family off to America. She wondered who owned it now. Her home in New York had been sold, too, as dictated by her father’s will, and though she missed it, in a peculiar way it was also a relief. After her parents died, nearly everything once familiar and beloved—from furniture to flowers in the garden—had seemed foreign, even a little sinister, like props in an abandoned theater.

She needed a home of her own. And she wouldn’t have a home, a
real
home, of her own again until she was married.

And now the silence seemed total and fraught, like the aftermath of a gunshot, and the dark outside wasn’t the dark of thick woods frilling the edges of the New York estate. Even the stars seemed strange and new viewed from this side of the Atlantic. They called the constellations by different names here in England, she recalled. The Big Dipper was called instead the Starry Plough. She was uncertain about the rest of them, but it wasn’t as though she’d learned the Queen’s English the way she’d learned Italian.

All she knew for certain was that she didn’t like the dark, and she didn’t like quiet, and she didn’t like to be alone.

She reached for a night robe, thrust her arms into it and tied up the bow at the neck, shoved her feet into a pair of satin slippers, seized her lit lamp and tiptoed down the long marble stairs.

Her surroundings were so unfamiliar it was like moving through a dream, and she liked it. It seemed to carry as little consequence; it seemed as though anything could happen, as though anyone or anything could appear, monsters, dragons, princes, ghosts. She almost wished something would appear, simply for novelty’s sake. She’d stopped being afraid some time ago.

She found herself in the kitchen by instinct, as if it was the heart of the house and she’d followed the sound of its beat. A slice of bread, perhaps a cup of something hot. She knew her way around a kitchen well enough to heat a kettle.

Unsurprisingly, a vase of flowers going limp from the heat of the kitchen was in the middle of the kitchen table. For heaven’s
sake.
She gave her head an imperious little toss. Not too long ago s
he’d
collected bouquets as effortlessly as she collected beaux.

A boy on the hearth snored softly, and stirred and muttered in his sleep. She supposed his job was to turn the grand haunch suspended on a spit over the fire. The haunch was near to being licked at by low flames. It would burn.

“Pssst,” she said.

He shot upward, all limbs flailing like an upturned spider for a moment until he righted himself, thrust his fists into his eyes and ground them a bit.

“Cor! I nearly pissed meself, ye scared me so.”

“I’m sorry.”

He stared at her for a moment. “Are ye an angel?” was his conclusion. He sounded almost accusatory.

“Far from it.”

“Was I asleep?”

“You were.”

“You be an angel then, m’lady, if you saved me from burning the haunch.”

She laughed softly at that. Something about him—the sense of barely repressed mischief, no doubt—reminded her of her brother, who had been everyone’s darling. “I imagine you need your rest, and if you give it a crank now it should be fine. I’m Miss Danforth, a guest in the house. I was feeling a bit peckish and—”

“Jordy! I
thought
I heard voices!”

Both the boy
and
Tansy jumped this time. The voice belonged to a small woman who looked as soft and plump and homey as a loaf of rising bread. Rust-colored curls sprang from the confines of her nightcap and were still shimmying on her forehead. Clearly she’d hurried to the kitchen.

“Oh, miss, ye must be Miss Danforth.” She curtsied, clutching her voluminous white night robe in her hands. “Mrs. Margaret deWitt at yer service, miss. I be the cook.”

“I
am
Miss Danforth, and a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. deWitt. I’m so sorry to disturb you! It’s just that I felt a bit peckish, and I—”

Miss deWitt lit up at those words. She
lived
to vanquish hunger and to fuss over young people. “Here now, Miss Danforth, you just sit down and I’ll make ye a cuppa and summat to eat. You’re a slip of a thing, ain’t ye? You ought to have rung and we’d have brought it up.”

She was kind. Tansy knew this instinctively; her face, her voice, belonged to a woman who knew her place and liked it well. She felt a temptation to lean toward it, like a flower into the sun. It somehow seemed a safer sort of kindness than the exquisite welcome of the duke and duchess.

“Oh, I couldn’t have rung. I didn’t want to disturb anyone and the house was so quiet and peaceful and—”

“ ’Tis no trouble at all to be awakened. Some of us are a bit restless nights, aye, like mice? Shame on ye, Jordy, for botherin’ Miss Danforth.”

Tansy smiled at that, imagining herself as a mouse, a nightcap perched on her head, a cup of tea in her hand, pacing in front of a tiny hearth in a tiny hole, sleepless. There were times, especially recently, she wouldn’t have minded living her life at the level of the baseboards and having a hole to return to.

When she wasn’t thoroughly relishing being the focal point of a given room, that was.

“Jordy didn’t bother me at all! He was just about to tell me where to find the bread.” She winked at the boy.

The boy beamed at her, enslaved for life.

Mrs. deWitt immediately performed what amounted to a ballet of competence, unwrapping a loaf of bread and a half wheel of cheese, hewing generous slices of each, sliding them onto a plate which she slid over to Tansy, along with the jam pot. She pumped water and heaved a kettle up onto the stove, and Tansy almost closed her eyes at the soothing, familiar, homely sound of water coming to a boil.

“Ye’re here to be wed now, ain’t ye?” Mrs. deWitt said brightly.

She wasn’t surprised the servants would know all about her. It was the nature of servants everywhere to know such things.

“I suppose I am.”

Mrs. deWitt nodded. “The duke, yer cousin, I believe, he be a fine man, the finest.”

And
the scariest,
Tansy was tempted to add.

“I would go to the ends of the earth for that man. The ends of the earth . . .”

She suspected the cook was trying to reassure her.

“. . . despite what some may say about him,” she added stoutly. “And don’t you believe a word of it.”

She
knew
it.

“What do they say?” she coaxed casually.

“And the duchess, our Miss Genevieve, well, she be an angel come to earth,” she said as if she hadn’t heard Tansy at all, which Tansy very much doubted. “A beautiful lady, and so kind and fair.”

Genevieve—the duchess—was, indeed, beautiful. Petite, black-haired, blue-eyed, radiating a calm intelligence and the serene confidence of one who is certain she is loved, certain she belonged, and who was a part of everything she saw here in Sussex.

Tansy fought back an irritable little twitch, as if someone had dragged a hand along her pelt in the wrong direction.

“The duchess is lovely and she’s been all that is amiable and welcoming,” she said. “I am blessed indeed in my relations.”

Mrs. deWitt beamed at her approvingly. “Tea . . . or . . .” She peered shrewdly at Tansy. “. . . would it be a bit o’ sippin’ chocolate, miss?”