Joan Wolf (32 page)

“I can assure you, Lady Weston, that I have no intention of allowing myself to be seduced by Mr. Jack Grandville.”

I said mournfully, “I see I’ve regressed to being Lady Weston again.”

She didn’t smile.

“You don’t know what you look like when you’re with him,” I said. “You glow.”

She bit her lip.

“It’s a dangerous look,” I said. “A woman who looks like that is capable of doing all kinds of foolish things.”

“Are you saying that I look the way you look when you are with Mr. Stephen Grandville?” Eugenia asked politely.

I felt my lips twist into a wry smile. “Is it that obvious?” I asked.

“It is to me.”

“Then you should know that I know what I am talking about,” I said.

She looked a little bewildered by my syntax.

“I have done all kinds of foolish things in my time,” I clarified. “I wouldn’t recommend that you follow my example.”

Eugenia didn’t look at me but studiously traced a long scar in the tabletop with her forefinger. “What
do
you recommend for me, Annabelle?”

“You need a husband,” I said frankly, “and Jack isn’t going to come up to scratch.”

“He wants to marry me,” Eugenia said. Her eyes were still on the tabletop, and her face had gone very pale. “If he had a regular income, he would marry me.”

“Has he said that?” I demanded.

“Yes.”

“And you believe
him?”

She looked up and met my eyes. “Yes, I do.”

Her large brown eyes did not waver. I thought that perhaps Jack
was
more serious than I had thought him to be.

“What about Jasper?” I asked. “He has a decent income, and if you made an effort, I think you could attach him.”

“Oh, Annabelle,” she said with a smile. “Jasper is in love with
you.”

I frowned. “Nonsense. Jasper and I have been friends forever. You have mistaken the nature of his affection.”

“No, I have not.”

Her words upset me. “You are mistaken,” I repeated. “You must be.”

“It is as clear as glass to everyone but you,” she said. “Jack told me all about it. He said they were all in love with you when you were young, he and Jasper and Gerald, but that you never had a thought for anyone but Stephen. He said he didn’t think that it had ever occurred to you that the rest of them were flesh and blood.”

I stared at her, appalled. “I married Gerald,” I said finally.

“And were you happy?” she asked.

We gazed into each other’s eyes, two women who had quite suddenly and unexpectedly opened their hearts to each other. “No,” I said. “I was not.”

“Nor would I be happy, married to anyone but Jack. I love him. And what is more, I would be good for him.”

I exhaled a long, carefully controlled breath and said in a steady voice, “Then we shall just have to find Jack some sort of regular income.”

“I live in fear that he will try to win a stake at the gambling table,” Eugenia confessed. “The likelihood is far greater that he will lose Rudely altogether, and that would break him.”

The scratching made by dog nails on the uncarpeted passage floor came distinctly to our ears, and then we heard the pounding of Giles’s boots. A second later, boy and dogs erupted into the schoolroom.

“Merlin and Portia ate their supper, Mama!” he shouted. “And Cook gave me a piece of pie!”

“I am in the same room as you, Giles,” I pointed out kindly. “There is no need to shout at me.”

He moderated his voice. “I’m sorry, Mama. Will you play a game of spillikens with me? “

“I suppose so, darling,” I said. “Why don’t you set them out?”

Spillikens with Giles would help to keep at bay the terrible thought that had popped into my brain with Eugenia’s confession.

Was Jack’s love for Eugenia desperate enough to force
him to resort to murder in order to attain the means he needed to marry her?

Surely not, I told myself as I watched Giles returning to the table with his hands full of small wooden counters. Surely Jack wouldn’t want to be the next earl of Weston at such a terrible cost!

“Ready, Mama?” Giles asked.

I forced myself to focus on the game. “Ready, darling,” I said, and we began to play.

Chapter Twenty-two

At twelve o’clock, when Stephen still had not returned to Weston, I gave up waiting for him and went to bed. I slept restlessly, my mind filled with terrible fears and suspicions, and I woke with a start to the sound of someone knocking imperatively on my bedroom door. I just caught myself in time from calling, “Stephen?” and substituted instead a weak, “Come in.”

My son came catapulting into my bedroom. “Good morning, Mama!”

The dogs in the dressing room next door heard his voice and began to bark that they, too, wanted entrance into the inner sanctum. Giles went to open the connecting door, and Merlin and Portia thundered into the bedroom, woofing noisily. I sat up and stuffed a pillow behind my back.

“Good heavens, Giles,” I yawned. “What are you doing out of the nursery? “

“Genie said I could have a holiday this morning, and we’re going for a ride,” he said. “I came to invite you to come with us, Mama.” He gave me his most winning smile.

“Thank you, but I don’t think I will, darling.”

His face fell ludicrously. “Why not?”

I wanted to wait at the house to make certain that Stephen returned home safely, but I could hardly say that to Giles. “I just don’t feel like it this morning,” I said.

Giles hooted in disbelief. He clambered onto the bed and stared commandingly into my eyes. “You always feel like going for a ride, Mama.”

I pushed my long braid off my shoulder. “Well, I don’t this morning.”

His forehead puckered. “Do you have a headache?”

“No,” Then a nasty thought struck me. “Is anyone going with you and Genie? “

“Jack is going with us,” Giles said.

“I’ll come,” I said.

Giles beamed at me. “I knew you’d want to come, Mama! I’ll tell Genie and Jack to wait for you at the stable.” He jumped off my bed. “It’s no fun just going with the two of them,” he confided. “They talk to each other all the time and not to me!” He headed for the door.

I supposed I should be happy that my son found Jack boring and not frightening.

I called after him, “Take the dogs with you, Giles, and tell one of the footmen to let them out.”

“Yes, Mama.” Giles called the dogs’ names and the spaniels trotted after him, ready for their regular morning visit to the shrubbery.

Marianne helped me to get dressed, and she brushed my hair and replaited it as I drank a cup of coffee. I walked down to the stables with the dogs at my heels and found Jack and Eugenia and Giles standing horseless in the stableyard while Grimes talked to them. The head groom had a thunderous expression on his face, and I immediately wondered what catastrophe could have struck the stable overnight. As I approached, a groom came out from behind the carriage house leading Marlborough, one of my new hunters. His bright chestnut coat was patched with mud all down his right side. Grimes stopped the groom and ran an expert hand carefully down each of the horse’s four slender legs.

“Seems fine,” he grunted. “That’s the last of ‘em, then. Get him rubbed down and give him a bran mash.”

The groom moved toward the stable, and I said sharply, “What on earth is going on here, Grimes?”

Giles opened his mouth as if he would answer, shot one quick glance at Grimes, then closed it again.

With great deliberation Grimes said, “You may well ask, Miss Annabelle.”

I realized with relief that he was only put out and that none of the horses had been hurt. “What has happened?” I said in a more equable tone.

“His Lordship’s pony escaped from his box this mornin’,” Grimes said. He paused ominously.

“Cracker escaped?” My own voice was mild.

“Yes.” Grimes folded his arms across his chest.

“That was very bad of him,” I said.

Grimes gave me a jaundiced look. “Not bein’ happy with just the one success, didn’t Cracker set about openin’ the boxes of all the rest of the horses on his side of the stable?

My mouth dropped open. “He didn’t!”

“He did, Mama,” Giles said. His eyes were sparkling.

“The boxes’ outside doors?” I asked Grimes.

“The boxes’ outside doors, Miss Annabelle,” came the grim reply.

All of the horse boxes had outside double doors that opened directly into the stableyard as well as the inside door that opened into the center aisle of the stable. In the summer, the top part of the outside door was always left open. If the pony had opened the latches that closed the bottom doors, all of the horses would have been able to walk out of their stalls into the freedom of the yard.

I glanced at the big wooden gate that at night was always swung closed across the arched entrance into the stableyard. “They couldn’t have got far, Grimes. Wasn’t the gate closed?”

Grimes said in an awful voice, “It was closed, Miss Annabelle, but Georgie forgot to latch it.”

From the look on Grimes’s face, things did not bode well for Georgie’s future.

“The horses got out through the gate?” I asked.

“They got out.” He relented enough to give me the good news. “We’ve got ‘em all back, though, and it don’t seem as if any of ‘em took hurt.”

“Well,” I said. I glanced at Jack and Eugenia, but their faces were carefully expressionless. “Better do something about securing that pony more carefully, Grimes.”

“Never you worry. I shall put him under lock and key, Miss Annabelle,” Grimes assured me with awful calm.

As if on cue, a groom came out of the stable leading a bridled and saddled Cracker.

“You bad boy!” Giles said, and went up to pet his pony’s neck.

Cracker rolled his eyes in the direction of Grimes, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing.

“He was in the rose garden, Annabelle, when they caught up with him,” Jack said.

“You can smell them on his breath,” Grimes said sternly.

I turned aside to cough.

The clicking sound of shod feet rang in the stableyard as three grooms brought out three horses for Jack and Eugenia and me to ride. I let Grimes give me a leg up onto Elf.

“Don’t murder Georgie,” I said to him as he stepped back from the mare. “Think of how difficult it will be for me to explain his demise to his mother.”

“I’m not promising nothin’,” Grimes replied with an awful frown.

Jack said, “Ready, Annabelle?”

I nodded and asked Elf to go forward. Giles brought Cracker up to my side, the dogs trotted in front of us, and Jack and Eugenia fell in behind.

We rode in silence until we were safely out of earshot of the stableyard. Then Giles said in a gleeful voice, “Mama, isn’t Cracker
clever?”

Jack said, “Can’t you just picture that busy little pony going up and down the row of boxes, nosing back all the latches? “

We all started to laugh at the same time.

Cracker walked sedately along, looking like an angel.

I wiped my eyes when we reached the main drive and said to Jack, “Where were you planning to ride?”

“I thought we’d do the lake,” he said, and I nodded and turned Elf in the proper direction.

* * * *

When we reached the northern side of the lake, Giles thought he saw an unusual bird and we all dismounted and Eugenia went with him down to the shore to look for it. Jack and I sat side by side on a fallen tree trunk that flanked the ride, each of us holding two sets of horses’ reins as we watched Giles and Eugenia make their way through the undergrowth down to the shore of the lake.

When Jack finally spoke his voice was abrupt. “Eugenia told me she spoke to you about us.”

I glanced at him out of the side of my eyes. “Yes. She did.”

Jack’s profile looked hard and bleak against the blue of the sky. “I realize you must think I have a nerve making up to a girl like Eugenia,” he said. “I have nothing to offer her, I know that. I just want you to know that my intentions, laughable as they may be, are purely honorable.”

I rubbed my gloved right thumb back and forth across Elf’s leather rein. Giles looked back, saw me watching him, and waved. Eugenia looked around also and smiled.

“She really loves you, Jack,” I said. “Do you really love her?”

“Yes.” He paused, then added in a very different kind of voice, “I love her most damnably, Annabelle.”

Eugenia and Giles had reached the place where Giles had thought he saw the bird. Jack and I sat in silence, our eyes on the governess’s slender back and uncovered auburn hair. She was saying something to Giles, then they both sat on a rock and remained perfectly still.

“I hate to see her living this kind of life,” Jack said fiercely. “It’s not that you aren’t good to her, Annabelle, but she should not be anyone’s employee! She should have a house and children of her own!”

I turned a little so that I could watch him. “In order to have those things she needs a husband,” I said. “And since
she has informed me that the only husband she will accept is you, Jack, I have come to the conclusion that we must find some way for you to be able to afford to marry her.”

His mouth was set in a hard, straight line. “Do you deal in miracles, my dear Annabelle?”

“No, I deal in horses,” I said, “and lately I have been thinking of expanding my business. You could help me with that if you wanted to.”

Jack’s fingers must have closed suddenly on the reins he was holding, because Sentry looked up inquiringly from the leaf he was eating. Jack said curtly, “What do you mean, Annabelle? Do you want me to school hunters for you full-time?”

I said, “No, I have something else in mind.” I frowned a little, considering how best to broach my idea. Finally I said, “Have you ever thought, Jack, that no one actually
breeds
hunters in order to sell them?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw his head turn, and he looked at me for the first time since we had begun this conversation. “What do you mean?”

I returned his gaze. “I mean that all of the big stud farms are devoted to breeding racing Thoroughbreds, yet many more people buy horses to hunt than buy horses to race.”