Julia London (53 page)

A chorus of German voices drifted up toward the slate sky as Paul attempted to quicken his pace, but it was nearly impossible on the wet stone path. Another burst of laughter sent his heart pounding against his ribs, and he lunged toward the first door he could reach. Flinging it open, he gripped the jamb to steady himself.

He might as well have flung open the gates to the cemetery just outside the castle walls and selected his spot. Surrounded by a group of people, Lauren stood in the center of the room dressed in a plain brown gown, her dark chestnut hair tied simply at her nape and draped carelessly over one shoulder. In the corner, a man towered over the group, wearing an expression of pure tedium. Judging by the expensive cut of his clothes, Paul assumed he was the new Count Bergen. And Lauren was smiling brilliantly at him.

Just as Paul had feared, whatever was happening in this stuffy room centered on his sister. Damn the girl, but she was clearly enjoying it. Unnoticed, Paul dragged himself through the door. He had half-expected to find her outside the cold stone walls, anxiously awaiting her rescue.

But no. Not Lauren.

She was cheerfully saying her good-byes, and as he glanced around the room, he noticed that several looked piteously enamored of her. He could surmise from her rather lengthy German monologue only that she was very thoroughly explaining, to each person individually, that she was leaving.

Paul loudly cleared his throat and succeeded in gaining the room’s attention. Lauren paused in the delivery of her soliloquy and glanced over her shoulder. A bright smile instantly lit her face, and with a joyful cry, she pushed herself through the crowd, flinging herself into her brother’s arms.

“Oh Paul! I am so thankful you have come! Oh, you cannot imagine how I have
longed
for you! I have missed you terribly!” she cried and kissed him fervently on each cheek. “Oh Lord,
look
at you! How
handsome
you are!” she exclaimed.

The warm sting of a blush started to creep up Paul’s neck. He hastily grasped her arms and put her away from him as he warily eyed the crowd. “I have missed you, too. Are you quite finished here? The carriage is waiting,” he said under his breath.

Lauren’s laugh was musical. “Yes, just let me finish saying good-bye.” She turned back to the crowd, grinning. They all grinned back at her. Everyone except Magnus Bergen, that was, and the frown on his rugged face made Paul shudder. Good God, but he was huge, and with features that appeared chiseled from stone, he did not present himself a happy man.

“Who is this?” Bergen asked, his English twinged with only a faint hint of an accent.

“My brother Paul,” Lauren announced happily. For the benefit of the others, she added,
“Mein Bruder.”
A round of “ahs” went up; the crowd beamed at him.

“Come, Lauren,” Paul muttered. “A
hired
carriage is waiting.” He gripped her elbow, intending to propel her from that overcrowded room as swiftly as possible.

“Wait!” Lauren exclaimed. “I forgot Herr Bauer!” She pulled away from him and moved back into the middle of the crowd, where a gardener of some sort was rummaging through a coarse hemp sack. He spoke in rapid German; the small crowd leaned forward, straining to hear. In a flurry of movement, he extracted a very large potato from the sack and very gently offered it to her, his voice having fallen to something of a whisper. Lauren leaned forward with a look of great concentration, then suddenly straightened and smiled warmly at the man. Bergen groaned impatiently and folded his massive arms across his chest.

“Oh, Herr Bauer, danke shoen!”
she exclaimed, and affectionately patted his arm, causing the gardener to turn at least three shades of red.

So now Paul could add daft gardeners to the list of hopelessly besotted fools his sister attracted. Since blossoming into such a beauty, she attracted everyone. With thick, curly dark chestnut hair, unusual cobalt blue eyes that sparkled like sapphires, she had a smile that could easily disarm a man—yet she never seemed to notice the attention, and if she did, she was unaffected by it. Paul had never known her to primp, or to flutter her lashes, or to flirt in any way. Lauren was as exactly as one saw her, completely artless. So artless, she would accept a potato as a gift from a simpleton and think nothing of it. She was the most generous person he had ever known, completely accepting of everyone and everything.

God, how they needed her at Rosewood.

“Lauren!” Paul called impatiently. With a beguiling grin, and clutching the potato securely to her bosom, she obediently made her way to Paul’s side, waving and calling a cheerful
auf wiedersehen
and
leben Sie wohl
to the lot of them. The moment she was within reach, he grabbed her elbow and dragged her forward.

Bergen emerged from the dank, overcrowded cottage close on their heels, muttering something in nonsensical German as Paul half-dragged his sister toward the carriage. “That is hardly accurate!” Lauren exclaimed to something the Bavarian said, and tossed a half-smile, half-frown over her shoulder.

Paul attempted to quicken the pace.

But Lauren, bless her cheerful heart, stopped once they reached the courtyard and turned to face the man who had once threatened to toss her out on her ear. “Farewell Count Bergen! You’ve been quite generous considering the circumstance, and I would have you know I am very appreciative of it!” She sank into a respectful curtsy.

Bracing his massive legs apart, Bergen folded his arms across his chest. “So you intend to leave?” he asked, frowning. “I thought we had an agreement.”

Paul jerked a narrowed gaze to Lauren, fully prepared to do battle if he must. “An
agreement
?”

“Oh,
that
,” Lauren said with an airy wave of her hand. “Count Bergen has some maggot in his head that I should perhaps stay and oversee the household. I
did
agree to help him, but only until you came for me. And now, here you are, so my part of the bargain is fulfilled.” She smiled brightly at Magnus and nodded resolutely.

He snorted. “Bergenschloss suits you. Why would you return to that farm when you could oversee all of this as you see fit?” he doggedly continued, sweeping his arm across the old bailey and toward the main house.

Paul glared at Bergen. “You think to make my sister your
housekeeper
?”

“No, of course not!” the giant snapped. “Bergenschloss needs a mistress, and I am often away—”

“Magnus,” Lauren said gently, “you know it is impossible for me to stay.”

“Why?”
Bergen started angrily. He quickly checked himself, running a hand through his flaxen hair as he contemplated the ground for a moment. “I admit I have said some things I regret,” he added uneasily. “And I do not blame you for wanting to be away from here. But you have brought a measure of …
joy
to Bergenschloss, and I—
they
—want you to stay,” he said, tossing a frown over his shoulder at the huddled group of servants standing several feet behind him.

Lauren beamed. “That is so very
sweet
! But I cannot stay.”

Bergen fisted his hands on his waist. “You
can.
”

Incredibly, Lauren walked to where the giant stood. The German looked at her strangely—so strangely, that Paul stepped forward, gripping his cane tightly in case it was
needed. “My family needs me now, you know that,” Lauren murmured, and then, much to Paul’s amazement, she leaned up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. “But thank you for your kind words.”

Bergen looked as startled as Paul felt, and for one long moment, he did not respond. Slowly, his face began to darken as he stood contemplating her; a muscle in his cheek jumped erratically. Paul realized he was holding his breath, waiting for the explosion he was sure would come. But Bergen surprised him by suddenly shaking his head. “Perhaps you will visit,” he muttered, sighing heavily.

“I would like that very much,” Lauren agreed.

“We shall miss you,” he added irritably.

She peeked around his formidable frame and smiled at the servants. “I will miss everyone, too—even
you
, Count Bergen.” With a little laugh and a playful wink for him, she turned and walked to the carriage. “Are you quite ready, Paul?”

Oh yes,
very
ready. He pushed Lauren into the waiting carriage and banged hard on the side before Bergen could speak again. As the carriage lurched forward, Lauren leaned out the little window, waving and calling good-bye, laughing as the servants stumbled over themselves to shout their farewells. The last thing Paul saw as the carriage rattled across the bridge was Bergen glaring after them, his arms folded tightly across his chest.

When at last they had cleared the castle walls, Lauren shut the window and settled onto the cracked leather seat. She smiled brightly. “Oh Paul, I am so
thankful
you have come! I have missed you dreadfully, and you would simply not believe how
erratic
Magnus Bergen has become!”

Oh, he could believe it. Rocking along the almost impassable Bavarian road, Lauren very cheerfully chatted away about the last few months at Bergenschloss, as if she had not been completely mad to sign over every last penny of her inheritance. As if it was perfectly reasonable for Bergen to
go from threatening to hang her from the turrets to asking her to act as mistress of that monstrosity he called Bergenschloss.

“Count Bergen,” he interjected irritably at some point in her string of chatter, “is an ass. How you manage to attract them all is beyond me.”

“Count Bergen is
not
an ass. I think he is just rather lonely up here. He’s accustomed to the city, you know. And I do
not
, by the by, attract … well …
asses,
” she added disapprovingly. “You know, I think you’ve grown an inch or two,” she said, easily changing the subject.

Paul grinned sheepishly. “One and one quarter,” he admitted proudly.

“Surely Mrs. Peterman has had to alter all your shirts to fit your shoulders! You look very well.”

He blushed. “Well, I suppose I am a bit thicker than when you last saw me. I’ve taken to walking every day,” he said; and launched into an eager discourse of the last two years, repeating the very things he had told her in his innumerable letters. Relating all that he had been eager to share with his beloved older sister since the day she had left Rosewood.

   They could not reach Rosewood soon enough to suit Lauren. Having traveled for several days in stuffy mail coaches and a rickety old merchant ship, she was anxious to be home, to see the children again. “You are quite certain the children are all right?” she asked Paul for the second time as the post coach sped along a rutted highway snaking through the English countryside.

“Mrs. Peterman watches over those chicks like a mother hen. She would let nothing happen to them.”

“And Ethan? Mrs. Peterman wrote his gout is worse.”

“Gout!” Paul snorted disdainfully. “Ethan enjoys complaining, that is all.”

Lauren frowned, studying her brother. Although he insisted
things were fine, he had said enough for her to know that things were not so fine. He counted each coin in his purse every morning, and she did not have to be told his lack of appetite last evening was due to the lack of coin in his pocket.

She knew perfectly well that she had done the unthinkable when she had defied Ethan and had signed over her inheritance to Magnus. At the time it had seemed the noble thing to do, but she was beginning to think that perhaps her actions had been a bit impetuous. A wave of guilt began to creep through her, and she looked uncertainly at the tips of her worn boots. “I would imagine Ethan is rather angry—”

“What is done is done,” Paul said. He paused, sliding a curious gaze to her. “But why did you do it? Give it all to Bergen, that is?”

Why? Because her two-year marriage had been a sham, because the senile old count had never so much as touched her, because her so-called inheritance rightfully belonged to his family. To Magnus, to be precise. “It did not belong to me. Uncle Ethan made a bargain, and I did not fulfill my part.”

“Of course you did! You married him, did you not?”

Married him by proxy, yes. But the feeble old count had never understood who she was. “He was quite senile and never so much as touched me. He never really even knew me. My part of the bargain was to provide an heir, but I was never truly his wife. So, I did not fulfill my part.”

Paul colored slightly and looked away from her, out the window. “Did Bergen take your things? I saw a woman wearing your gown—”

“Oh, no! That was Helga, the scullery maid, and well, she admired my gown, and as she did not have a proper thing to wear to her brother’s wedding, I gave it to her. I really had no need for it.” She laughed. “I am hardly called upon to entertain at Rosewood!”

Paul did not smile. “And the locket?”

“Now
that,
” she smiled, “was unfortunately but fairly lost in a card game.” Her brother remained looking out the window, silent. Too silent. God, what had she done? The moment she had walked into Magnus’s study with the paper relinquishing her claim to the Bergen estate and fortune, she could almost hear Ethan’s bellows of protest from across the North Sea. Even Magnus had looked at her as if she were insane. Oh,
he
had understood the moment he had arrived from Switzerland what Ethan had done. The whole of Helmut’s estate in exchange for an heir—how preposterous! A senile old man well past his eightieth year, the old goat had mindlessly signed an agreement that effectively gave her everything in exchange for nothing. Magnus had despised her because of the sham marriage, and the two of them existed uncomfortably for many months before Helmut’s death.

When Helmut died, Magnus assumed the title and was finally free to say and do what he thought, and he heatedly accused Lauren of being a thief. Rightfully so, to her way of thinking. Ethan had taken horrid advantage of Helmut. She believed that so fiercely that she had made herself ignore Mrs. Peterman’s letters, all of which hinted at the deplorable conditions at Rosewood. She
had
to ignore them, because she could not, in good conscience, keep the Bergen inheritance. Magnus, naturally, had been the first to agree with her. All right, he had softened somewhat over the last few weeks, if one could assume a man with a heart of stone could soften, but it had not changed anything.