Julia Justiss (20 page)

“Yes,” Jenna replied. “I found the landscapes striking, especially those by Mr. Turner.”

“Vernier was not importunate, I trust,” Lady Charlotte said, a trace of anxiety in her tone.

“Oh, no! Quite the gentleman. Would you have reason to suspect otherwise?”

“Not really, else I would never have allowed him to spirit you away. Though he is more Lord Riverton’s friend than mine, I have never heard of him going beyond what is courteous and attentive. Which he has certainly been to you. In fact, he has been so unusually attentive I felt I must assure you that I have not been playing matchmaker!”

Jenna gave her a look. “Have you not?”

“Only so far as to introduce him and then agree to include you in several entertainments we were to attend.”

“He did mention during our walk that he would like permission to call upon me, once he’s completed his mission in Vienna,” Jenna confessed. “When I am ready, he said. If I’m ever ready,” she added in an undertone.

Lady Charlotte pressed her hand. “I did wonder, now that the war was over, if he might decide ’twas time to seek a wife. But I understand your hesitance and shall be happy to help warn him away, if you wish.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary, but thank you.”

Lady Charlotte shook her head. “During my widowhood, I have been subjected to far too many matchmaking schemes by well-meaning friends and relations ever to indulge in such meddling myself.”

Lady Charlotte’s vehemence was convincing, if a bit surprising. “You have no desire to remarry?”

Lady Charlotte continued to adjust the pins in her golden hair, remaining silent for so long Jenna began to regret asking so personal a question. Finally she said softly, “I was an impetuous young girl when I married, convinced that my handsome husband and I should be eternally happy. But over the course of our marriage, I discovered that…that his desire for an heir was stronger than his affection for me.”

When Jenna murmured sympathetically, she added, “Of course, every man wants an heir, so I cannot really
fault him for growing bitter when we suffered disappointment after disappointment. Still, that young girl’s heart never recovered. I suppose I’ve become a coward, unwilling to trust that any vows of affection could withstand the trials time and adversity make upon marriage.”

Even Lord Riverton’s, Jenna heard the unspoken conclusion. Thanks to the loquacious Lady Montclare, she’d been told the full story of the duke’s lovely daughter who’d been courted by two rival suitors, one whom she married and the other who had swallowed his disappointment to remain her lifelong friend.

How sad, Jenna thought, recalling as they walked back to the parlor how often Riverton’s gaze lingered on Lady Charlotte, how he seemed ever ready to escort or assist her. Ready to be so much more.

Yet she could understand just how hard it was to risk the precarious peace one had painfully assembled out of the wreckage of one’s dream by daring to embrace another.

Which recalled to her Nelthorpe’s speculation that someone might have assisted in the wreckage of hers. He’d urged her to leave Fairchild House and seek refuge with Lady Charlotte.

While, for the reasons she’d given him, she had no intention of doing so at this moment, perhaps it would be wise to confide their suspicions to this lady who was highly-placed enough that, should something happen to Jenna, her demand for an inquiry into the affair would not be easily dismissed.

She
would
tell Lady Charlotte, Jenna decided—but not until after she’d called upon the Widow Owens and determined whether their conjecture about her accident had some validity or were as much a grief-stricken woman’s delusion as that lady’s accusations of her.

Whether by chance, or Lady Charlotte’s design in the
wake of their talk, the four of them took a single carriage home. Colonel Vernier walked her into the foyer, not releasing her arm until Manson took her cloak. Then, after gazing at her a long moment, he kissed just her fingertips.

Thoughtfully Jenna watched him depart. From his expression, she guessed he’d wanted to kiss more than her hand, but had not dared. Curious how she might have reacted to that, she was a bit sorry he’d refrained.

Nelthorpe would not have hesitated.

She sighed as she mounted the stairs to her room. Surely she didn’t really prefer the behavior of a presumptuous rogue like Anthony Nelthorpe to that of a true gentleman like Colonel Madison Vernier.

Near noon the next day, Tony returned to Fairchild House. Knowing Jenna would not receive him, he demanded instead to speak with Sancha.

Though Manson shook his head over Nelthorpe’s request, he did send for the maid. A few moments later, Sancha met him in the smallest of the downstairs parlors—a testament, Tony thought with grim humor, to how his worth had fallen in the eyes of the butler. Still, the pose of discarded swain, which was only too close to the truth, would serve them well as a cover for his snooping.

“I am happy, my lord, that you come. I feared you would not, now that my lady…”

“Has dismissed me?” he said bluntly. “I suppose she had cause, especially after—well, enough said. Whether or not she receives me, we must still find out what happened that morning in the park. Were you able to discover the groom’s direction?”

“He went to his sister’s house, Minter Cottage on the Leatherhead Road near Woodcote. Southwest of the city.”

Less than a day’s ride. Good, he would head there tomorrow.

“Excellent work! I shall visit there directly.” He paused at the door. “Thank you, Sancha. I hope your mistress appreciates you.”

She looked back unsmiling, sympathy on her face. “I hope my lady appreciates you.”

I
N LATE AFTERNOON THE NEXT
day, Tony rode into the small village of Woodcote, praising his Maker that the former groom’s sister had settled near a village off the main road and not in one down some farm track he would have had great difficulty finding in the fading dusk. From a small inn just ahead, a welcome blaze of light offered the tantalizing promise of a hot meal and a full tankard.

The modest hostelry didn’t cater to the gentry traveling on the main road to Guildford, so in the nondescript dark clothes into which he’d changed for the journey, Tony looked little different from the clerks and merchants seated in the busy taproom. As an outsider, he would immediately become the focus of all eyes, so, wishing neither to attract undue attention nor excite suspicion by appearing to want to avoid it, he took a seat and waved to the landlord, who hurried over to serve him.

By the time he’d bespoken a chamber for the night and partaken of an excellent roast chicken, he’d confided to his friendly fellow-diners that Anthony Hunsdon, late of Wellington’s forces, was traveling to his new position as estate agent for an Army toff under whom he’d served in Belgium. While en route, he’d promised to deliver a message to a comrade’s sister who lived near Woodcote.

Accepting the offer from a clerk and a merchant to join them for a round of cards, as he proceeded to lose the first hand, Tony asked if either of them knew the whereabouts of Mrs. Staines of Minter Cottage. After a brief
consultation, his opponents informed him that the former housekeeper lived with her unmarried daughter about a mile south of the village, just off the Leatherneck Road.

“Have you seen her brother about?” Tony asked casually. “I understand he was paying her a visit.”

“So he was, and used to come in here to heft a pint right regular. Paid in good coin, too,” the merchant said.

Working to keep his voice carefully even, Tony said, “You haven’t seen him recently?”

The cardplayers exchanged a look that made Tony straighten in his chair. “Not recently,” the clerk said at last. “Sorry if he be a friend of yourn, but we buried ol’ Nick two weeks ago. Shot through the heart, he was.”

As if a chill breeze had suddenly blown into the room, Tony felt the hair at the back of his neck prickle.

“Hunter’s stray bullet, the magistrate decided,” the merchant added, “though we didn’t never find anyone what claimed to be shooting near there that day.”

Hunting accidents were not that uncommon—even fatal ones. But the suspicion driving him could only be heightened at discovering that the principal witness to the events surrounding Jenna’s accident was now conveniently dead. Killed, it appeared, by a stray bullet—just as Jenna might have been at Richmond Hill, had he not thrown her to the ground.

Anxious as Tony was to learn more, there was no point alarming Mrs. Staines by appearing on her doorstep well after dark. But first thing tomorrow, he would pay a condolence call on the groom’s sister.

S
OON AFTER BREAKING HIS FAST
the next morning, Tony rode south on the Leatherneck Road, soon coming upon a neat thatch-roofed cottage. After tethering his mount, Tony limped to the front door, anticipation speeding his heart.

An older woman in the dark gown of a housekeeper, her graying hair topped by a white lace cap, answered his knock. “Good morning, ma’am,” he said, doffing his cap. “You are Mrs. Staines?”

After she nodded, her pale blue eyes watching him warily, he continued, “Anthony Hunsdon, ma’am. So sorry to hear of your loss. My army mate’s sister Maggy, cook at Fairchild House in London where your brother used to work, was concerned about him after the…trouble there. When she heard I was riding south to take up new employment, she asked if I would check about him on my way through. She’ll be devastated to hear of his accident.”

Was it only acute suspicion that made him think she flinched, her pale face growing paler still when he said he came from London?

“Thank you for your kind words, Mr. Hunsdon.”

“A hunting accident, it seems? I don’t wish to pry, but I’m sure Maggy would want to know as much about what happened to Nick as I can glean. She had a great…fondness for him,” he added, shamelessly embroidering on his story.

“My Nick, he was quite a devil with the ladies,” she began and then halted, a spasm of some strong emotion wiping the fondness from her face.

Grief? Or something else?

She certainly appeared nervous, though that might stem from being confronted on her doorstep by a strange man. Finally, after a long hesitation, she waved toward the interior of the cottage. “Would…would you like a glass of cider before you continue your journey?”

Tony tried to tamp down a thrill of exultation. After all, he’d learned exactly nothing yet that had not already been conveyed to him by the tavern patrons.

“That would be most kind, ma’am,” he said, following her into the cottage.

“Maud,” she called to a tall, thin girl tending the hearth, “pour up some cider for the gentleman and fetch some apples from the storehouse, please.”

The girl dutifully brought him a brimming mug and plodded out. As soon as the door closed, Mrs. Staines looked back at him, distress evident in her face.

“Be ye a Bow Street man?”

Surprise held him speechless for a moment. “No indeed! Why would you think so?”

“Well, you said there’d been some ‘trouble’ in London and my Nick, he never said nothing of trouble.”

“How did he explain his presence here?”

“He told me his old master had died and the new one brung in his own man. Said he’d paid Nick off right handsome, so he meant to take some time to visit here before he looked for another situation. But…but he never looked for nothing, and he acted so strangelike, keeping to himself during the day, going down to drink every night at the Ox and Cock.”

“Perhaps he was despondent at losing his position.”

Twisting her apron in her hands, Mrs. Staines shook her head. “Mebbe. Then after he was shot—he didn’t die right off, you know—he rambled in his head some. Kept saying as how he was sorry, that he wished he’d never listened to that lady, sweet as she seemed. At first I thought he meant the squire’s wife here, who told him he ought to take that job in London. But after he died, when I was going through his things to find a clean shirt to bury him in, I found—” she lowered her voice to a whisper “—a great lot of money.”

Tony’s pulse jumped, but he kept his voice even. “His severance pay, don’t you think?”

“Seemed far too much for that. How did he come to
have such a sum? Sir, if you know that my brother committed some…crime, please tell me, and I’ll turn the money over to the constable! I don’t want no lord out of London coming down here, seizing my house and throwing my poor girl and me onto the street!”

A sweet lady. A great deal of money.
Though his nerves hummed with excitement and alarm, Tony made himself concentrate on the harried face of the woman before him.

“Mrs. Staines, I’m sure you have nothing to fear. The Fairchilds are generous to their staff—” Garrett would have been, anyway “—so I’m certain the money you found represents wages honestly earned. As for his regrets about a lady, you should know that Maggy, whom your brother fancied, is about to marry. I suspect she felt guilty about causing your brother pain and was hoping I’d be able to write her that he had recovered from his disappointment.”
Tony, you’re a hopeless prevaricator.

Mrs. Staines let out a breath. “Be ye sure, sir?”

Offering a quick prayer that easing this woman’s anxiety would mitigate the sin of all the untruths he’d spun her, Tony nodded. “I’m certain. Keep the money your brother left without worry.”
The brother already paid dearly for it.

“How can I thank you?” Mrs. Staines cried, relief lightening all her features.

Tony shrugged, possessed of enough conscience to feel ashamed at deceiving her. “No need for thanks.”

“I’ve got fresh bread from this morning’s baking and ham in the larder. Let me make you up some for the road.”

Tony let himself be persuaded to accept that and another mug of cider, trying not to show his impatience to be gone, now that he’d obtained the news he sought.

It appeared his instincts had been right, he thought as
Mrs. Staines prosed on. Jenna’s fall had indeed been orchestrated. But by a mysterious lady, not her cousin.

The widow? The Countess of Doone? Causing the loss of Jenna’s child seemed to Tony the sort of spiteful thing a female might do. But he had a harder time reconciling the shot fired at them with a woman’s revenge. Still, the two must somehow be connected.

Finally able to break away, Tony directed his mount back to London. Somehow he must convince Jenna to receive him—and this time, talk her into leaving.

Knowing he’d look like a looby if he appeared at Fairchild House still covered in mud, Tony stopped briefly at North Audley Street to clean up, change and gulp down a hasty mug of ale. But he reached her house to be given the frustrating news that Lady Fairchild was out for the evening—in company with Colonel Vernier. Nearly gnashing his teeth, Tony called instead for Sancha.

After remarking delicately that gentlemen who were truly gentlemen accepted a lady’s decision without hectoring her, a disapproving Manson reluctantly summoned the maid. In an urgent undertone, Tony told her what he’d learned in Woodcote and asked her to arrange an immediate audience with Jenna.

“She must leave here, Sancha, as soon as possible. ’Tis foolish to risk further danger! Surely you see that!”

Sancha sighed. “I have urged her to leave, as strong as I dare. She will not go until she learns the truth, she says—so like her father she is! Also have I advised her to work with you, my lord. She says it was her child lost and her battle, not yours. That you—endanger each other.”

Tony felt himself flushing at the look Sancha leveled at him, but before he could decide what to reply, she continued, “You did not learn for certain who this lady
is, or whether the groom meant for the horse to throw my mistress?”

“No,” he admitted reluctantly.

“Then though I, too, see danger, I do not think I can make her leave—or meet you.”

Agitation and anxiety boiled in his veins. But short of tracking her to whatever entertainment Vernier had escorted her and hauling her off by force, Tony didn’t see what else he could do to protect her tonight.

“Speak to her anyway, please. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“I will try again, I swear it,” Sancha said. “And I will sleep in her room. I, too, my lord,” she said with a little smile, “am good with a knife.”

With that, Tony had to be content. He hauled his saddle-weary body into the hackney Sancha summoned, trying not to think that even at this moment, Jenna might be in Vernier’s arms, waltzing in secret on some balcony—letting him kiss her in the darkness. A furious hurt exploded through his fatigue at the thought of the colonel slipping with her into some deserted bedroom.

He mustn’t think, he reprimanded himself, that just because
he,
rake that he was, couldn’t be close to Jenna without thirsting to make love to her, that the proper colonel would be equally lost to propriety.

Idiot,
a voice answered.
He’s a man, isn’t he?
Jenna wasn’t some innocent ton virgin, beyond the touch of a gentleman of honor, but a mature woman who was mistress of her own conduct. Could any man who found her alluring—and Tony had seen lust in the gaze the colonel had rested on her—resist attempting to seduce her?

Resist, in the intimacy of some shadowed chamber, peeling down the scanty bodice of her evening gown, so much less an impediment to caresses than the traveling clothes she’d worn the morning of their tryst? Keep himself from baring her breasts, suckling the nipples Tony
hungered to tease, cushioning her against the accommodating surface of a real bed while he eased up her skirts and tasted her, unleashed that rapid, fierce response?

He fought to contain the images boiling out of his brain, an amalgam of fondest memory and bitterest imagining. Until just as the hackney turned into North Audley Street, out of the agony and envy evoked by those thoughts, a more selfless realization emerged.

He, who had been banished for good cause, might not be able to get close enough to protect Jenna. But Colonel Vernier certainly could.

If he met with Vernier and convinced
him
Jenna was in danger, the colonel had just as much skill and many more resources to provide her protection.

Even if by going to the colonel, Tony was thrusting the woman he loved straight into the arms of his rival.

For the duration of the hackney ride he remained irresolute, his last hopes of solving the mystery and perhaps winning her back warring with his growing fear that, unless she were moved soon to a place where she could be better protected, she might not survive long enough for the mystery to be solved.

He might be a glib prevaricator and a rake, but when his hopes and Jenna’s welfare were weighed in the balance, there was no choice about the outcome.

Swallowing the bitterest decision he’d ever had to make, Tony resolved to call upon Colonel Vernier in the morning.