In for a Penny (11 page)

Louisa visibly tensed with irritation, and Nev felt impatient himself. Did she not remember where Lord Bedlow’s management had gotten them all? He handed his mother his handkerchief. “Please, Mama, don’t take on so—”

“Thank you, Nev.” She smiled mistily at him. “My children are so good to me. I know I’m a dreadful trial to Louisa.” She waited.

There was a pause, and then Louisa said reluctantly, “Of course you aren’t, Mama.”

Nev, meeting Penelope’s mirthful eyes across the table, had to smother a smile. But Lady Bedlow beamed.

Louisa turned to Nev. “Would it be terribly improper for us to have a house party?” She sounded rather as if the world depended on his answer. “It will be unbearable here all summer and winter, else.”

Nev thought about feeding a dozen greedy mouths and entertaining a dozen jaded minds. “I don’t think we can afford a house party, Louisa. Perhaps one of your friends will invite you.” He tried to look apologetic.

“I’m sure I don’t know who Nate would invite that would be suitable company for
you
, Louisa,” Lady Bedlow said. “Of course it’s only a matter of time before Mr. Garrett’s son is lording it over me in my own home.”

Nev didn’t want to talk about it, not with his mother, but she was sure to find out eventually. “I won’t be inviting Percy or Thirkell, Mama. I told them that now I had responsibilities, I couldn’t—”

“Oh, Nate, you finally cut the connection!” His mother gave his hand a congratulatory pat; he held himself carefully still. “I’m so glad! That boy has always been a bad influence on you, ever since Bedlow hired his father.”

Louisa tapped her fork irritably against the edge of her plate. “Lord, Mama, I don’t know why you’re so hard on Percy. I always thought it was Nate who was a bad influence on him!”

Lady Bedlow put her nose in the air. “Unequal friendships never end well. It gave poor Percy aspirations above his station. How could he help but go wild?”

“I didn’t cut the connection, Mama. I just—” Nev stopped. He could protest that it hadn’t
been
an unequal friendship. Percy hadn’t been a bad influence on him, and he hadn’t been a bad influence on Percy. They egged each other on, that was all. But what was the use? That was how everyone would see it. That was how everyone had always seen it: Lord Nevinstoke and his low friend. Nev knew he had done the right thing, but he felt ashamed anyway—especially when he caught Penelope’s curious, sympathetic glance. “I wish Mr. Garrett were still alive,” he confessed, as a sort of compromise. “I didn’t much take to Captain Trelawney.”

“Oh, I never liked him either,” Lady Bedlow said. “There is something overfamiliar about him. He acted quite as if he were your father’s equal and not his servant.”

Nev sighed. “I’m not sure he realizes how bad things are for our people. Penelope and I visited some of the cottages today, and the families seemed really in distress. And so many men out of work or gone.”

“Yes.” It was nearly the first thing Penelope had said
all evening. “Do either of you know why Joe Cusher was transported?”

Louisa, reaching for a roll, drew her hand back. “Joe Cusher was one of the ringleaders in that riot three years ago,” she said tightly. “The vandals fired the barn with Papa’s threshing machine in it. We thought they would fire the house too. Sir Jasper and his friend sentenced him to transportation, of course. Agnes Cusher spat at my feet the next time I saw her. The way she looked at me—” She shivered.

“Louisa!” Lady Bedlow’s curls trembled anxiously. “You know I don’t like to talk about that time.”

Louisa opened her mouth, then closed it again with a tiny, frustrated sigh. “Yes, Mama.”

For perhaps another quarter of an hour, there was polite, strained conversation such as Nev never remembered when his father was alive. Then Lady Bedlow cleared her throat. “Penelope, dear, don’t you think it’s time we left Nate to his port?”

Penelope flushed. “Of course. How remiss of me.” She stood.

Nev stood too. “Let’s all go together. I’ve given up port.”

“Why, Nate,” Louisa said, laughing at him, “marriage has certainly changed you! Has Penelope converted you to Methodism too?”

Nev frowned. “Penelope isn’t a Methodist, Louisa.” The sudden, horrible thought struck him that perhaps she was, and he had just made a fool of himself. No—he would know, wouldn’t he?

He looked at Penelope. She remained perfectly civil despite his family’s rudeness; she would not say or do anything to make Nev feel her discomfort. And yet she could not feign ease or gaiety. She looked quiet and shut off. It inspired a curious tenderness in him.

Lady Bedlow led the way unthinkingly to the parlor, and
her look of consternation when she realized all the furniture was gone brought a glimmer of amusement back to Penelope’s face. She met Nev’s eyes, and the two of them were hard-pressed to stifle their laughter. The evening suddenly seemed much less dire.

Louisa looked embarrassed for all of them. “Let’s go to the music room. Will you play for us, Nev?”

“Penelope plays better than I do,” he told her.

“Oh, but I want you to sing us ‘The Ballad of Captain Kidd’!”

“I—I know ‘The Ballad of Captain Kidd,’” Penelope offered.

“Really?” Louisa didn’t bother to hide her surprise, but at least she was looking at Penelope.

Penelope nodded shyly. Soon enough the young people were all singing “I’d a Bible in my hand / By my father’s great command / And I sunk it in the sand / When I sailed!” Lady Bedlow watched them with affection and faint disapproval; she had learned long ago that nothing got between her children and Captain Kidd.

Nev tried to remember the last time he had spent a pleasant evening singing with his family, and couldn’t. Louisa was glowing, and Nev felt guilty. He’d barely seen them these past few years since he left university. The last time he’d talked to Louisa, really talked to her about anything that mattered, she’d been in the schoolroom.

Her enthusiasm for pirates, however, seemed undiminished. And to Nev’s surprise, Penelope sang with as much energy as any of them. Then it turned out that she knew “Mary Ambree” too, and Louisa was able to extract a promise to consider naming a daughter Mary (Louisa resented that her parents had callously deprived her of the chance to sing
And foremost in battle was Mary Ambree
and have it be about herself). By the time Penelope had sung several unfamiliar songs about girls joining the navy (Nev suspected they might be
old broadsides), Louisa had mostly forgotten that she had sworn to detest her new sister-in-law eternally.

Lady Bedlow, however, had not forgotten. She kept up a steady stream of sighs and theatrical yawns, and after an hour, she said, “I’m very tired. Louisa, it’s time to go home.”

Nev was not at all tired. Singing always made him feel awake and alive and full of energy. When they were gone, he said, “Louisa was impressed. You know an awful lot of songs about sailor maids.”

Penelope reseated herself on the piano bench and smiled. “She wanted to run away to sea when she was younger, didn’t she?”

Nev laughed. “I think she still does. Did you ever? That is, you do know all the songs.”

“Of course I did.” There was a touch of self-mockery in Penelope’s smile now. “I think every girl has dreams like that, until she realizes how foolish it is to rebel against something she cannot change.”

“What do you mean?”

She traced a pattern on the smooth surface of the bench. “It’s like wanting to be a soprano: I can want it all I like, but it won’t make me anything other than a contralto. It’s entirely more sensible to stop repining.”

“You wanted to be a soprano?”

She flushed. “I know it’s foolish, but…it always seemed so ordinary, being a contralto. So common. Just what a Miss Brown would be. I was very young; I got over it. It’s the same with wishing for a man’s freedom. When I was a girl I loved these songs.” She paused, and glanced at him. “This one in particular.” She struck up and sang,

“A merchant did in Bristol dwell,

As many people knew full well;

He had a daughter of beauty bright

In whom he placed his heart’s delight.

He had no child but only she;

Her father loved her tenderly.

Many to court her thither came,

Gallants of worth, birth and fame.

Yet notwithstanding all their love,

A young ship’s carpenter did prove

To be the master of her heart,

She often said, ‘We’ll never part’—”

She stopped abruptly, eyes fixed on her still hands. “There’s about a hundred more verses. Her father sends the true love to sea. And the girl follows and becomes the surgeon’s mate, and heroically nurses him through an illness, and the father regrets his unkindness, and everything turns out wonderfully.”

She smiled crookedly and raised her eyes to his face. “It’s about a merchant’s daughter, you see, and she’s brave and noble and saves her true love. My first year at school, I was very unhappy. I thought about running off and volunteering for the navy all the time.”

None of which explained her remorseful look, but he could guess. She had imagined the ship’s carpenter as Edward. He didn’t know what to say; he only knew that he was sorry, and painfully, irrationally jealous. “Did you ever try it?”

She shook her head, smiling up at him. “Even as a silly little girl I knew enough to know that things like that only happen to
beautiful
merchants’ daughters.”

“Who told you you weren’t beautiful?” The idea was absurd, and yet it made him feel obscurely triumphant. Surely Edward had deserved to lose her, if he hadn’t even told her she was beautiful.

“Oh, please don’t. I
have
got a mirror.”

He supposed she
wasn’t
beautiful, not like the women he
had had before. She was just a pretty girl; but Nev thought, suddenly, that those other women hadn’t been any prettier. They had painted their lips crimson and done up their hair and swept into rooms knowing that men’s heads would turn. That was all. Penelope was pretty and she had a sweet voice and the candlelight turned her skin an impossible gold, and Nev realized that he’d been wanting to kiss her all day.

He was just reassuring her, he told himself. Reassuring her, and making her forget about Edward. That was all; it would go no further than that. He sat on the bench beside her. “I think you’re beautiful,” he whispered, and kissed her.

She let him, and when he stopped she sighed softly and leaned against him. He could barely keep from deflowering her right there on the piano bench.

“I wasn’t fishing for a compliment, though,” she said. “You told me you would never feed me Spanish coin.”

“I’m
not
.” If she looked at the front of his breeches, she would see just how English his coin was, but of course a gentleman couldn’t say a thing like that to his wife.

She shrugged and went back to their previous conversation. “Besides, they have to press men for the navy; no one volunteers. So it seemed like I probably wouldn’t enjoy it.”

Nev wrapped his arms around her. “You were a very practical girl.”

She stiffened, but before she could speak, he bent and kissed her neck. She sighed again, a resigned little sound, and gave up on whatever she had been going to say. He thought of Penelope as a girl, miserable and excluded at some fancy finishing school, weighing the pros and cons of running off to join the navy. She had probably made a list. He was abruptly, fiercely glad that she hadn’t been practical about marrying him.

Penelope leaned back against her husband. His arms were warm around her. For a moment she wished she weren’t so
very practical and unfeminine, so she would know how to make him mean the things he had said, about her being beautiful. She wished, almost, that she were fool enough to take him at his word. But if he saw that she believed him, and it had been only a polite fiction—she shivered in humiliation at the mere thought.

“Penelope—I want—that is, I know I said I wouldn’t touch you, and I won’t, if you ask me not to.” She could feel his breath on her neck. “I won’t do anything that might hurt, not yet. But I want to make you feel good. Will you let me do that?”

It was like his proposal all over again. There was that note of wistfulness in his voice, and part of Penelope wanted to say yes to whatever he asked. “I—” she stammered.

If she said nothing, it would only be another kind of consent. She would forget herself when he touched her, and she would tell herself she had never
agreed
, he made her feel like that and there was nothing she could do—

If this was going to happen, Penelope intended to take responsibility. She pressed back against him. “Yes. I will.” It felt like an echo of her marriage vows.

Nev’s hands tightened on her arms. “Thank you. Come upstairs with me.” She followed him up the stairs, the shivery knot in her stomach growing with every step.

At last they were in her room. “Change into your night things,” Nev said. “I’ll start a fire in my room.”

“We don’t need a fire. It’s a waste of fuel, it’s summer—”

“Just this once,” he said, and left her.

Penelope could not help blushing the entire time Molly was helping her, as if Molly somehow knew what was about to happen. By the time she stepped into Nev’s room in her night rail and dressing gown, she was so overheated that the fire he had lit in the grate made her begin to sweat. She could not look at Nev.

“Take off your robe and come here,” he commanded gently.

Her hands trembled as she undid the knot and slid the dressing gown off her shoulders. She wished her night rail were more attractive.

It didn’t matter for long. Nev reached down and grasped her hem. He pulled it up slowly, and every inch of flesh tingled as air hit it. Then she was standing naked, and Nev took a step back to look at her.

How many women had he looked at like this? What did he see? She was thin and drab and brown; her bosom was disappointingly small. She fought not to try to cover herself with her hands—it would only make her feel more foolish.

“Mm,” Nev hummed, low in his throat. “Definitely worth the wait.”