Jayne Fresina (30 page)

“Many times did I get that man out of scrapes,” Lance explained, “so he owed me one. In fact, he owes me several.”

“He won’t tell father where you found me?”

“I’ve sworn him to secrecy.” He looked over her head. “You need a fire, Lucy. It’s damned cold in here. My teeth are chattering.”

She walked to the bed and sat, dropping like a stone. “I’d rather be cold,” she muttered peevishly. “The fires of Hell will get me soon enough.”

Hunkered down by the fireplace, Lance muttered, “This kindling is damp. I’ll have the maid bring up some dry from downstairs.”

“Leave the damn fire, Lance. I couldn’t care less.” It felt good to say ‘damn’ so she said it now as much as possible, in addition to other curse words she’d never used or heard before.

He flung a frown over his shoulder. “Stop being a desperate daisy. It won’t do anyone any good if you get ill, will it? Least of all your blessed farmer.”

“What about him? What does he matter? I’ll never see him again.”

“Precisely,” her brother replied curtly. “So what good will getting sick do, since he won’t know and no one else cares?” He stopped, straightened up and sighed. “Except me, of course.” Walking to her window he stood with his hands behind his back, gazing out at the dull day. “What exactly happened with you and your farmer?”

What was the point in lying now? “Everything you can imagine.”

Her brother shook his head, muttering under his breath, still staring out into the street.

“It wasn’t all his fault,” she added. “I know you’ll say women aren’t supposed to have those desires, but I did. At least I had the opportunity once before I die.”

“Oh? It was only once then?” He swiveled halfway round to look at her, a wry twist to his lips.

Despite the chill room, her cheeks were warm.

“Hmmm?” He raised an eyebrow.

“It was a few times.”

“I have to give it to you, Luce, you really did get your vengeance on father. Isn’t that why you did it?”

She grabbed the bolster from her bed and threw it at him, but he caught it, his reflexes too sharp. “No it is not!” she cried. “I did it for love, something you’ll never know because you think it might somehow make you less of a man!”

“Hush, little sister! Don’t raise your claws to me, I’m only here to help.” Now he was back to his usual patronizing self, knowing how to get her temper up.

“Help? How exactly?”

He carried the bolster back to her bed. “I’m going out tonight. Some wretched masked banquet the Countess of Swafford is holding for All Hallow’s Eve. Father wants me to go.”

“Aha!” Now it was her turn to mock. “He finally has the match within striking distance of his arrow. You and the savage buttock-biter, Lady Catherine Mallory, eldest daughter of the Earl and Countess of Swafford…”

“Quite. As much as it pains me to attend, I am in the Earl’s employ and…” replacing the bolster, he tidied her bed with his long, restless hands “…I’m also trying to keep father in a partially civilized temper for your good, little sister.”

“Well, don’t bother on my account.” She hugged the sturdy wooden post at the corner of her bed, watching him straighten the embroidered coverlet until it might possibly meet with his strict approval. “I’ll face my punishment,” she added gloomily. “After all, I did cause all this. I don’t suppose anything you can do is going to appease my father’s temper now.” She blew out a deep breath of unhappiness. “No, you’ve done enough to help me. Save yourself, Lance. Get out while you can and don’t let him plan your future.”

He laughed at her. “I was going to ask whether you wanted to come with me to the banquet. You’d like a little entertainment, surely.”

She was so surprised, it was lucky she had her arms around the bed post to keep her upright. “What about father? He’ll never agree to let me out.”

Lance walked around the bed and tweaked her freckled nose. “If I insist I won’t go without you, he’ll have to agree won’t he?”

Her brother, of course, had one very important advantage: he was their father’s only son and heir. He was a fine, faultless young man of impeccable standards and their father’s greatest hope for future grand alliances. There was Anne, but she would not keep the Collyer name once she married, so Lance was their father’s golden apple. Above anything, Sir Oliver wanted Lance to pay suit to the Earl’s daughter.

“If he wants me at the banquet tonight, it’ll have to be on my terms, with my sister at my side.”

She thought then of John, all those miles away, and her heart ached. “I can’t go out, Lance. I’d rather stay here.” She swallowed her tears, knowing her brother would not know what to do if she cried. It would embarrass them both.

“But you must come out, Luce. You can’t stay in this cold room all alone. It’s not healthy to mourn so.”

Mourn? Yes. That was what she did. She mourned for her love, her broken heart. “I wouldn’t be very good company, Lance.”

With a small sound of frustration he swirled away, his cape billowing out like great black wings, his boots creaking rapidly across the floorboards. Then he came back to her, just as swiftly, scratching his closely trimmed head the entire time. “Look, you must come. You must. I won’t hear another word of refusal.”

The idea of stepping out in public, facing the whispers and pointing fingers, made her sick to her stomach. In fact, she just might retch up her guts there and then, as she had done that morning. “I don’t want to go,” she murmured. “Besides, I’ve no costume to wear.”

Slowly he smiled. “As it happens, Anne was planning to attend, but finding herself out of sorts this evening has retired to bed already. Her gown will surely fit you.” Possessing considerable familiarity with the female form, he stepped back to run a critical eye over his sister. “It might be a little big and an inch or two long, but we’ll manage.”

Still she hesitated.

“What good will it do to pine away here for your farmer?” Lance exclaimed impatiently. He, of course, had no idea about love, didn’t want anything to do with it or with the messes entailed.

But he was right, she realized sorrowfully. She would never see John again. Somehow life, and all its absurdities, would go on. Besides, for all she knew, he could have married Alice by now and forgotten the woman he once loved in a last mad, indulgent, roguish moment.

She couldn’t blame him for forgetting her now.

Chapter 21

“How many times must I tell you to stand still and stop fidgeting?” the Countess demanded, hands on her waist, as she walked around her younger brother and oversaw the last-minute fitting of a new doublet in rich, darkest blue taffeta. The ungrateful object of her curt reminder had already made several sour remarks concerning this “fancy” set of clothes she’d ordered for him, but Lady Madolyn Mallory, Countess of Swafford, paid no attention to his sauce. “We’re going to make the most of your good looks tonight, John. For once you’ll stop hiding them.”

He ground his teeth, refusing to look in the long glass before him. “I only came here to find Lucy. I don’t need all this…damned fuss.”

Ignoring his complaints, his sister congratulated the tailor on his excellent and speedy work. The little man bowed to them both and left the chamber, a fat purse of coin in his hands.

“I’ll pay you back,” John muttered sternly, pulling on his new lace cuffs.

“Nonsense.” His sister reached up to ruffle his hair, annoying him further. “This is my gift to you. You so seldom bother to visit me…”

“I have a farm to run.”

“…When I do have the pleasure of seeing my darling brother, I like to spoil him.” She beamed that infamous smile which could and had dazzled the hardest heart. “Indulge me, John. What else could I do for my lovelorn brother?”

His sister thought it all very romantic. Nothing pleased her more, she said, than to see her little brother completely besotted, after so many years of artful avoidance when it came to affairs of the heart.

“What if she doesn’t want me?” he grumbled, brushing the front of his new doublet with uncertain, unsteady fingers.

“For pity’s sake, why wouldn’t she? She’d be mad not to.”

He’d like to agree, but Lucy had never hesitated to point out all his faults. She was no meek maid, easily impressed. His inherent Carver self-confidence was humbled by her. “What can I offer her? I’m just a simple farmer. I can’t ask her to leave her pampered life behind and run off to a life of sin with me.”

“Isn’t that exactly what she did before?”

He glared at his sister and she blinked her blue eyes, laughing at him.

“I very much doubt she regrets it,” she added. “When you meet her father, and Lord Winton, you’ll understand!”

“Oh, I’ve met Winton,” he grunted, frowning at his reflection in the mirror. His innards turned to ice, his fists clenched. Beat a woman, would he? Well, then the old cretin would soon find out what it was like to be on the receiving end for once.

“Now John,” his sister warned, “you promised to behave. Be civil at the banquet tonight. Be gentlemanly, chivalrous.”

His face grim, he snapped, “Don’t worry, I won’t embarrass you.”

She threw up her hands. “You know what I mean. No fighting. No bloodshed.”

He sulked. “Well, I’m not going to dance.”

“You like dancing.”

“Simple, country dances,” he blustered, striding to the nearest chair and falling into it with all the elegance of a bull with a grudge to bear. “When it doesn’t matter if you get the steps wrong, because everyone’s drunk anyway and you have an excuse to grab the woman round the waist and hold her close.” He waved a hand loosely. “All these dainty court dances are not for me. Stately traipsing up and down. I haven’t the patience.”

“Dancing is not simply an excuse to put your hands all over a woman.”

He raised his eyelashes, one corner of his lip quirking. “That’s what you think. Men know better.”

His sister was still reprimanding him for this comment when the chamber door swung open and a small, dark-haired cannon ball rushed in. “Uncle John! No one told me you were here. I only just heard!” the projectile shouted accusingly and crashed, full speed, into his chest, just as he got hastily to his feet.

“Catherine! When will you learn to enter a room with ladylike dignity? Go back out at once, get dressed, knock on the door politely, wait for my word, enter with a curtsey and greet your uncle in the proper way. I am quite hoarse from telling you how it is done.”

“Then save your breath, mother,” the girl replied, still hugging John tightly. “And save me the earache.”

“Catherine Elizabeth Mallory, you will not speak to me that way! And put your uncle down at once.”

John looked down at his niece, amazed by how much she’d grown since the last time he saw her. She was certainly no more a scrawny child. Good Lord! It seemed like only yesterday when he, a boy of eleven, struggling to hold his sister’s mewling, bad-tempered newborn in his arms, was suddenly struck with the idea of whistling and she ceased her wailing, much to everyone’s intense relief, opened a pair of bright blue eyes and gazed up at him in wonder. From then on, they’d had a special bond. He couldn’t help being fonder of her than he was of any other niece. Now here she was, all grown up and quite a beauty.

“I hear your father means to get you safely married off,” he teased, pulling her curly hair. “I pity the man. Who is he?”

“No one,” she declared with an unladylike snort to make her mother wince. “He hasn’t found anyone yet brave or stupid enough to take me on. Not that it stops him trying.”

“My daughter celebrates the fact most folk begin to call her a shrew,” the Countess explained. “She currently finds it amusing, but I daresay it won’t tickle her ribs quite as much when she is thirty and still unwed.”

“Mother, I’m nineteen!”

“And sending your father steadily grayer as each day passes.”

The girl turned her face up to his and pouted. “See, Uncle John? They can’t wait to be rid of me.”

He laughed. “Well, whoever the man is, he’d better treat you very well indeed, or he’ll have me to answer to.”

“Don’t worry,” she replied, glowering at her mother. “When I marry it will be for love and no other reason. And I don’t just mean my love, he’ll have to love me at least as much as I love him. And he’ll love me for all my faults. Little things won’t bother him and he won’t mind if I ride astride instead of side-saddle. And he won’t care how I wear my hair, or how loosely I lace my corset. And he won’t care if other people do call me a shrew.”

“That’s an awful lot of ‘ands,’ young lady,” her mother exclaimed, cutting them ruthlessly short. “Go and get dressed. For Heaven’s sake, your hair is wet! Why did you wash your hair tonight, of all nights? You can’t go out in winter with wet hair.”

But Catherine’s hair was already drying and curling as it did so, shooting out in all directions like the vapor of celebratory fireworks. “Mother,” she pronounced solemnly, “you’re becoming the most dreadful old scold.”

“And you’ll be a daughter with two very red slapped cheeks if you don’t go and get your lovely new gown on.”

“Oh, I’m not wearing that gown. I decided. Besides, I have other things to do before I go to the banquet tonight.”

As the discussion quickly descended into an argument, John retired to the safe distance of his chair. Amused to watch his sister do battle with her own image, he made a mental note to write to his mother. She would be glad to know her most troublesome daughter now received a little dose of her own bitter medicine. More than a little in fact.

Into this fray came the Earl of Swafford just a few minutes after it began and probably in time to prevent a black eye for at least one of the ladies. Scooping his daughter to the door by one hand around the collar of her shift, he sent her to get dressed without a single word uttered. The door closed again, he now calmly greeted his brother-in-law.

“My niece has gained some width, but not lost her high spirits,” John commented dryly.

“Some wenches,” the Earl replied with a grim smile at his wife, “are sent to try us.”

John couldn’t agree more.

* * * *

As soon as they entered the grand hall of the Mallory’s London house, Lucy caught a glimpse of Bess Percy, a notorious strumpet and one of her brother’s most persistent hunters. Bess carried a mask up to her face, but lowered it enough to flutter her long golden lashes at Lance, being sure he saw her there.