Caprice: The Masqueraders Series - Book One (3 page)

As the coachman climbed down to do her bidding, she stepped into the coach, latched the door, pulled all the shades, and then fell back against the squabs.

“Dear Lord in heaven!” she exclaimed. Her pulse was galloping, her body throbbed in a dozen strange places. And all because of a stranger’s kiss. So this was desire! What a fool she had been to doubt it. How wise she had been to hide from it.

Belatedly she rearranged her veil. She had no one but herself to blame for what had occurred. She had made a complete fool of herself when a moment’s thought, the merest hesitation, would have saved her a great deal of trouble and humiliation. At least she could take comfort in the fact that he could not know what went through her mind. She was safe. She would forget the incident, put this new knowledge of herself and its implied possibilities right out of her mind. Very shortly it would be as if it had never happened.

So why did she feel as if he had stripped her naked?

Suddenly she knew what her father had had in mind when, years before, she had come to live with him. There were hundreds of soldiers at the post. Being a military man, he had frankly warned her against the frailty of a woman’s will in the face of the male animal. Until today she had never experienced it.

She squirmed uncomfortably against the cushions only to bolt upright as something poked her. Turning, she felt along the seat until she found a silver luggage tag. As she ran a finger over it in the dimness, she felt the embossed imprint of a royal crest.

“Impossible!” she whispered as she looked toward the closed shade that blocked her view of the docks. Someone else must have left it behind. Satisfied to have solved the mystery, she again leaned back and closed her eyes.

The moment she did, a pair of fiercely green eyes appeared in her mind’s eye, indelibly marked by amusement at her expense.

Summoned by a front doorbell which seldom rang, Potsman took his time in opening one of the pair of huge oak doors which formed the entrance to Dolick Hall. “Good even—why it’s Miss Clarie!” he cried, jolted out of his usual solemnity.

“Dear Potsman,” Clarissa greeted him in relief. “I regret the delay, but it’s been a beastly journey.”

This time Potsman permitted himself a mere lift of one brow. “Were we to expect you, miss—that is, milady?”

“Mrs. Willoughby,” Clarissa responded. It was not surprising that he could not recall her married name since she had been a widow longer than she was a bride. “No, you weren’t precisely expecting me, though I had supposed …” The thought trailed off as she realized her aunt might have been too ill to remind Potsman that she had been sent for. “I hope I’m not too late. Lady Arbuthnott hasn’t—?” She blinked back sudden tears and swallowed. “I hope I’m not too late.”

“You’re always welcome at Dolick,” he replied gravely then disgraced himself by smiling again. “Do come in.” As he stepped aside, she moved past him into the foyer of the house.

The floor was paved with tiles of red-and-black marble. The walls were tinted a delicate green. From a pure-white stucco ornamental ceiling hung an enormous chandelier containing one hundred fifty candles. Counterfeit yellow marble columns climbed the main stairway while bronze railing mounts circled the opposite side. The sight of Dolick’s flamboyant entrance prompted her to say, “I’m glad to see that some things never change.”

“As always, milady,” he answered with a resigned sigh. His mood altered as he noted her somber attire. “I—we—the staff, that is, were most distressed to learn of your loss.”

“You’re very kind,” Clarissa replied, dismissing the sensitive topic of her husband with a slight frown. Her frown deepened. “You may tell me the truth, Potsman. Aunt Heloise wrote to me of her condition, yet I know how she detests any hint of maudlin display. You must prepare me. She is—well, is she sensible?”

Since Lady Arbuthnott was never what some might call “sensible,” Potsman answered, “I believe you will find Lady Arbuthnott as usual.”

When he had helped her out of her pelisse, she said, “I will go up at once, though I’m stained from two days of travel.”

“As you wish,” he answered and, turning, led her through the entrance hall and up the main stairway toward Lady Arbuthnott’s rooms.

Well acquainted with her aunt’s eccentric mode of viewing the world and its customs, Clarissa did not suggest that she be formally announced. Any other time, Aunt Heloise would have heard the post chaise in the lane before Potsman became aware of it, and known not only who was arriving but exactly how long it should take her to make her way upstairs.

Potsman’s deferential knock at Lady Arbuthnott’s compartment door was instantly answered by the imperious cry, “Come in!”

“She sounds amazingly fit,” Clarissa noted in surprise as the butler opened the door.

“You’ve no idea,” said the majordomo, eyes rolling heavenward as he stepped aside.

Clarissa took two steps into the room before coming to an abrupt halt.

Lady Arbuthnott was seated on a chaise longue with her back to tall sunlit windows which highlighted her remarkable red-gold hair in a manner that suggested pure flame. Still strikingly handsome at that equivocal age known as the middle years, she wore a fashionable gown of pale-green silk whose high waist and low neckline showed to great advantage her once-celebrated bosom. Far from resembling a woman in the throes of mortal disease, she had rarely looked more lovely or alive.

Raising a tortoiseshell lorgnette to her eyes, she subjected her niece to a thorough quizzing before speaking. “So, you’ve arrived at last, Clarissa. What a very naughty disobedient child you are. I should not forgive you for your six-year absence, but I am old and weak, much too sentimental.”

Accustomed to her aunt’s sometimes stinging and unprovoked comments, Clarissa hurried across the room and threw loving arms about the older woman. “Oh, Aunt Heloise, I feared you were at death’s door!”

“I should say not!” she returned as she embraced her niece. “Never been in finer fettle.” Yet her voice trembled over those words, moved by the sight of her niece to a joy and relief she would not admit. “Oh, but you are too slight, my dear, much too slight! Have your in-laws been keeping you on bread and water?”

Smiling through her tears, Clarissa said, “For months I’ve had no appetite. No one has allowed me a moment’s impatience or anger. I must be all widow’s weeds and sighs. It’s been intolerable!”

“I thought as much,” Heloise answered. “That is why I sent for you. I’ve been neglected. Six years is too long an absence, Clarie.”

Clarissa drew back from her aunt. “You bamboozled me. I expected—” She searched her aunt’s seamless complexion for any sign of fatigue or lingering shadow of illness. “Your letter said you were ill.”

“It never did!”

“Then at least admit that it hinted at severe distress.”

“I
am
severely distressed.” Laying a slender arm along the back of her chaise, Heloise reclined in an elegant sprawl. “I’ve been consigned to the country this last year to mourn a man who’s likely to return at any hour, though I’ve given Potsman instructions not to receive your uncle when he arrives. Haven’t I?”

“Indeed, milady,” he answered, then offered Clarissa an arch glance. “Now that Miss Clarie is arrived, you shall have more pleasant things to occupy you.”

Clarissa studied her aunt with a puzzling frown. “Surely you don’t—that is, I was given to understand that Uncle Quentin was no longer … alive.” The final word was scarcely audible.

“He’ll not think himself blessed to be among the living when he dares show his face here, I can tell you! But that is not why I sent for you.” Heloise turned her head suddenly toward the door. “Are you still here, Potsman? Then make yourself useful. My niece would like her tea, while I’m in need of a sherry.”

“Two sherries, if you please,” Clarissa amended the request.

Heloise patted her hand. “That’s my gel. Two sherries, Potsman, and no fiddling with them. I detest watered spirits.”

“Very well, milady,” the put-upon majordomo murmured, though he never watered the sherry. She did.

When the door closed, Heloise reached out and grasped her niece’s hand tightly. “I intend to keep you with me a very long time, Clarie. Now begin at the beginning and tell me everything that has occurred since I last saw you. I want to know all.”

Clarissa did as her aunt requested, filling in the last years in such detail that candles had to be lit before she was done. She faltered only once, a spasm of pain crossing her features when she spoke of her father’s last days.

A campaigner of the old school, Major General the Honorable John Holton had stayed to command his forces on the Peninsula when Wellington would gladly have seen him honorably retired following a severe wounding that made it impossible for him to sit astride a horse. Yet his failing health had led him to seek security for Clarissa in the form of a husband. When Lieutenant Evelyn Willoughby transferred into his unit, he decided he had found the man.

“I could not refuse Father, ill as he was,” Clarissa admitted. “A month later they were both killed in battle,” she concluded a little forlornly. Hoping to evade her aunt’s sharp gaze, she reached out to break a tender crumb from one of the cake slices Potsman had brought in with the sherry.

Heloise listened carefully to her niece’s recitation and so did not miss what she had tried so carefully to disguise. Her father’s and husband’s deaths were not the only cause of Clarissa’s misery. “That marriage should never have taken place.” Her aunt’s forceful declaration brought Clarissa’s chin up. Heloise said more kindly, “I adored your papa, God rest his soul, but to marry you off without a thought to your desires? Pain must have addled his brain. Holtons don’t marry for protection, we’ve wealth enough to protect us. Neither do we wed for respectability. That we’ve never had. Holtons marry for love!”

Clarissa smiled, forbearing to mention that her aunt was a Holton only through marriage. Of course, the marriage formed yet another notorious episode in Holton history. Twenty-five years earlier the Viscount of Arbuthnott had plucked Heloise Cox, a parson’s daughter, off the operatic stage at London and wed her. The scandal had rocked Georgian London with delight.

“What do you propose to do now?” Heloise asked, watching her niece from beneath red-gold lashes.

“Three days ago I could not have said,” Clarissa admitted, “but during my journey a solution came to me. I shall take the money left me by my father and open a school for young ladies.”

“Fidget with other people’s children?” Heloise’s voice rose alarmingly. “My dear child, you’ve not the temperament for such a venture. Think of it. Any skill or pretense to manners you’re able to squeeze into their puddingheads will be accepted by their parents as no more than the influence of their birthright. The remaining defects—and there will be dozens—will be laid at your doorstep as examples of your incompetence.”

“ ’Tis plain you see very little credit to my abilities,” Clarissa said shortly. “What else is left a widow?”

“Marriage!” Heloise answered promptly, only to smile as she saw the famous Holton obstinacy enter Clarissa’s expression. “A man is exactly what you need. And not just any man. You need a Holton.”

Clarissa shook her head slightly. She had forgotten the strange twists and turns her aunt’s mind was likely to follow. “There are no more Holtons, Aunt, not even a Highland connection.”

“Are there not?” Heloise’s eyes grew round, but having once pounced on an idea, she could not easily be dissuaded from it. “Too bad, it would certainly simplify our search.”

She lifted her eyes to the dazzling man in the portrait above the mantel. Quite unexpectedly her eyes misted over. “Dear Quentin, it was the one regret of my life that I could not give him sons. He deserved them. If ever there was a man, that was Quentin.” She dabbed at the tears with a lace handkerchief drawn from her sleeve. “Find a man the equal of my Quentin, and not even the lack of sons will dim your memories.”

Clarissa gazed up at the portrait. Her earliest memories of her uncle Quentin were of a mostly absent personage of whom every other member of the family went in awe. A fearless traveler to exotic ports, he spent only a few short weeks of every year in England. When he was in residence, Dolick Hall came to life as never before. Peacocks strolled the lawns and parrots could be found winging their way through the chestnut trees. The roar of a lion, the fleet-footedness of ostriches, the chatter of monkeys, even the lumbering stride of an elephant had at one time or another all been witnessed in the parkland. The more unwieldy animals eventually found their way to the London menagerie, for Quentin Holton was never satisfied long with that which he possessed. Only in the matter of his wife did he seem constant. But even love could not sate his wanderlust.

“You will not credit it, but I thought I saw Uncle Quentin in Plymouth.” Her aunt’s startled exclamation brought Clarissa’s attention back to the present. “Forgive me. I meant only that I saw someone who reminded me of him.”

Heloise nodded briefly, pressing her lips together as she mopped the spilled sherry from her lap. “Tell me about him, dear.”

Clarissa felt herself blush. “There’s little to tell. He wore the Arabic garments Uncle Quentin often preferred.”

A secret smile eased the pinched pleats of Heloise’s mouth. “Quentin always did enjoy dressing up. I still possess the harem gowns he brought me. But what has that to do with your gentleman?”

“He was
not
a gentleman,” Clarissa replied crisply. Now that she had brought the subject up, she was eager to be done with it. “He seemed rather the inspiration for Lord Byron’s pagan corsair.”

“A very remarkable gentleman, our Lord Byron,” Lady Heloise responded. “Society never can abide an individual who thumbs his nose at them and still manages to live happily. But we stray, dear. Describe your pirate.”

Perhaps it was the reference to Lord Byron’s new work that colored her memory, but in searching for an appropriate description of the stranger, Clarissa found herself reciting lines from that most recently published work.

“‘… Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt, / From all affection and from all contempt …’”