His at Night (5 page)

Miss Beauchamp suddenly held up her hands. “Shhh. I think the gentlemen are here.”

With that, all the young ladies rushed to the windows, Miss Kingsley pulling Elissande along.

The open barouche had not yet reached the house, but already Elissande’s eyes were drawn to one passenger in particular—an outrageously good-looking man, with features of perfect strength, masculinity, and
symmetry. His head was tilted back slightly, to better take in the house. And then he turned to the gentleman next to him and smiled with evident affection.

For a moment, she forgot the impossible task that lay ahead of her. A bright pleasure such as she’d never known lit within her, a pleasure that derived from something as inconsequential as the way the afternoon sun fell across the brim of his hat, or the way his hands rested atop the walking stick balanced insouciantly between his knees.

“Come away now,” said Miss Kingsley, again pulling at Elissande’s sleeve. “We don’t want them to see us just standing here like a gaggle of silly schoolgirls.”

Elissande allowed Miss Kingsley to guide her to a seat. She had no doubt of his identity—
the handsomest one of them all
. Her heart raced with a burst of nerve-wracking happiness. He rescued young women from plagues of rats; he had lovely friends; he looked like a hero of classical antiquity.
And
he was a marquess, an important man who could shield her aunt and herself.

She felt it. The shift in the tide, the reversal of fortune, the inexplicable thrust of destiny gathering momentum.

This was it.
He
was it. Her three days began this minute.

The carriage drew up before a three-story stone edifice built in the Gothic Revival style that had been
still popular two decades ago. Ivy spread luxuriantly over the front of the house, lending it a greater air of authenticity and age. The windows were true lancets, rather than mere rectangular windows with a façade of pointed arches above. There were even grouted gargoyles to lead water off the steeply pitched roof.

The manor was more than respectable: It was grand. Yet despite its fine, geometric garden, there was something barren in its aspects.

An older country estate, such as the one Vere grew up in, was a hotbed of horticulture and animal husbandry. There was a walled garden that supplied fruits and vegetables for seventy people, a vinery that contributed hundreds of pounds of grapes, and half a dozen specialized hothouses that produced, among other luxuries, strawberries at Christmas and pineapples in January. And while the game park provided pleasure shooting, the duck pond, the henhouse, and the dovecote were entirely utilitarian.

Whereas Highgate Court was but a house and a severely manicured garden in the middle of nowhere. Truly nowhere: Shropshire was a rural and sparsely populated region and Highgate Court occupied one of the emptiest stretches within it.

He had a glimpse of the young ladies crowded around one large window before they quickly dispersed, like birds taking flight.

“I need to get myself a diamond mine,” said Wessex, who was always short on funds, in exasperated admiration as they walked into the manor.

“Diamonds are mined?” exclaimed Vere. “I thought they grew in oysters.”

“You are thinking of pearls, Penny,” said Freddie, patient as always.

“I was?” Vere scratched his head. “Anyway, nice place.”

“Everything is Louis the Fourteenth,” said Kingsley of the furniture in the spacious and elegant entry hall. And Kingsley knew about such things.

The walls and fixtures of the interior had yet to acquire the patina—indeed, the sensation—of age. But beyond that, one could not fault the sensitive taste of the master of the house, who had succumbed to none of the blatant displays of wealth and glitter Vere had expected of a man of such recent fortunes.

He quickly recalled the scant known facts of Edmund Douglas’s life. His father had been either a publican or a dockworker in Liverpool. He’d had two or three sisters, the birth of the last of whom had killed his mother. He had run away from home when he was fourteen, very fortunate timing, for influenza killed everyone else in the household soon thereafter. Eventually he had made his way to South Africa, established a reputation as a brawler, and profited handsomely from the discovery of diamonds.

Nothing Vere knew of Douglas suggested subtlety or restraint. In Kimberley, South Africa, people still remembered the wild, almost orgiastic festivities he’d mounted after becoming a very rich man overnight. Of course—Vere realized for the first time—nothing he
knew of Douglas suggested that the latter would become a recluse either.

He glanced once more at the entry hall, noting the passages that branched from it, and then followed the other gentlemen into the drawing room. Once Freddie moved out of his line of sight, he had a direct view of Miss Edgerton, in an eye-catching, buttercup yellow tea gown.

Lady Kingsley had said that she was pretty, with a tremendous smile. She was indeed very pretty, shining strawberry blond hair, light brown eyes—an unusual combination—and the soft, fine, almost melancholy features of a Bouguereau Madonna.

She seemed slightly overwhelmed by the sheer number of men piling into her drawing room, her eyes darting from one gentleman to the next. Then her gaze came to rest on him—and did not move again. After a moment, her lips, very soft, pliant lips, parted and curved, showing off a row of even and notably white teeth. Dimples next appeared, deep, round, charming. And finally, a blaze of giddy, impossible pleasure in her wide, wide eyes.

There were so many things to do when entering a drawing room for the first time. He had to estimate where he might take a spill that wouldn’t damage his knees, which curios he could “accidentally” knock over without breaking, and always, when he visited a house in a professional capacity, to mark a way out of any given room, just in case.

This time he forgot everything. He only stood and stared.

That smile. Christ, that smile. He recognized it by the wave of ecstatic joy that all but knocked him flat on his back.

Had he thought himself incapable of happiness on a sustained basis? He was wrong—and how. He could never have enough of this sweet elation. He wanted to splash in it, swim in it, drink it by the gallons, until nothing but bliss pulsed in his veins.

The girl of his dreams. He had met her at last.

Lady Kingsley came forward. “Miss Edgerton, may I present the Marquess of Vere. Lord Vere, Miss Edgerton.”

“I’m so pleased to meet you, my lord,” said the girl of his dreams, still smiling.

He could barely speak for his gladness. “The pleasure is all mine, Miss Edgerton.”

The pleasure, privilege, and stunning good fortune. All his.

He broke his long-standing policy that required him to establish his moronic bona fides immediately, and instead stood some ten feet from her and basked in her presence, saying little as tea and sandwiches were passed around.

But she noticed him even in his silence. Several times she glanced up at him and smiled. And every time she smiled, he felt it, the peace that had long eluded him no matter how many wrongs he’d helped unearth and punish.

All too soon it was time for the ladies to go up to their rooms to change for dinner.

“You are welcome to wander about the house as you wish,” Miss Edgerton said to the gentlemen as she rose. “But I would ask that you please do not enter my uncle’s study. It is his private sanctuary and he does not wish for it to be disturbed, even in his absence.”

Little registered on Vere but the smile she bestowed upon him—she was at the door and actually turned around halfway and smiled directly at him. He drifted from one end of the drawing room to the other, fluffing curtains, rearranging bric-a-brac, and brushing his fingers absentmindedly along mantels and tops of chairs.

Lady Kingsley had to personally come and escort him to Edmund Douglas’s study for him to perform a preliminary search. He went through the motions and discovered two hidden compartments in the desk: One of them held a revolver, the other hundreds of pounds in wrinkled, stained banknotes, both of which a man was perfectly at liberty to possess.

Documents crowded the study’s copious cabinets. One cabinet contained ledgers relating to the running of the estate. All the other cabinets were devoted to the filing of letters, telegrams, and reports from the managers of the diamond mine, a quarter century of records of the origin and continuance of Douglas’s wealth.

Lady Kingsley was waiting for him outside the study—she’d been standing guard. “Anything?”

“Excellent record keeping and completely above-board,” he said. “And have I mentioned that it is a pleasure to work with you, madam?”

She frowned. “Are you quite all right?”

“I’ve never been better,” he said, and sailed on past.

I
s it true that diamonds come from mines rather than oysters?” Vere asked his reflection above the washstand.

Bloody hell.

“Or is it that if you split open a pearl, you find a diamond inside?”

Bugger.

Everything was backward. This was the woman with whom he’d roved the coast of the West Country for more than a decade, the woman who understood his every mood and desire—his haven, his refuge. He didn’t care that her uncle was most likely a criminal. He didn’t mind that he must now conform his conduct to the limits Society found acceptable. But why, for God’s sake, must he meet her on a case, when he could not compromise his role?

As the highest ranking man present, he would be seated next to her at dinner. So they must converse.
Possibly at length. And he must play the part of the idiot, no matter how he wished otherwise.

He pushed his fingers through his hair, the jubilation of the past hour now a jumble of frayed nerves. There was no helping it: He was bound to disappoint her at first. He could only hope that it would be a mild disappointment, and that in her kindness she would overlook it and choose to appreciate his sweetness instead—he portrayed sweetness beautifully, copying it, as he did, from Freddie’s character.

When he’d finished dressing, he sat down and tried to compose a better line of inquiry: subtle stupidity, if such a thing were possible. But his mind kept drifting away, back to the cliffs, back to the moors, back to the stunning coasts of the West Country.

The sun was setting, the sky ablaze. The wind whipped her coat and the ribbons on her hat. As he placed his arm about her shoulder, she turned toward him. And how lovely she was, eyes the color of delicately brewed tea, a long, straight nose, lips as soft as a whisper.

Meeting her in person was, he realized with a renewed pang of anxiety, perhaps not quite the unmitigated good fortune he had first believed. She had a face now, a name, a history and identity of her own.

They’d been one for so long. Now they were separate entities, so separate she barely knew him. And it was up to him to return them to that seamless unity he’d loved so well.

In his idiot guise, no less.