Regency Rumours/A Scandalous Mistress/Dishonour And Desire (36 page)

‘Do I?’

He turned to smile at her before giving his attention to the horses, as if he knew how she would have protested if she had not so wanted to fly up the hill in the sunshine behind a matched team with an expert whip at her side. She did not return his smile, but her glance told him he was not wrong, and that although she was nowhere near liking him, she would put up with him for such an adventure.

Caterina was thinking that she had never seen such skill, that the thrill of hurtling along in an over-powered light curricle was rather like being shot from a bow, flying, soaring on the breeze. Past the Roebuck they went, past the workhouse, the Wick and the Queen’s until Sir Chase slowed down to pass through Richmond Park Gate.

Then he pulled up. ‘Now you,’ he said. ‘First a trot, then we can try a turn or two.’

She took the reins, searching her mind for a middle way between a show of enthusiasm and her former disapproval. The park road was open to them, the horses responsive and keen, and she would have liked to let them go. But Sir Chase knew. ‘Keep them to a trot,’ he warned her. ‘They don’t break that rhythm until you tell them to. You’re in charge, not them.’

Her arm began to ache again, but it was exhilarating, exciting and completely engrossing, not allowing her mind to wander or to think over the disturbing events that had led to this, or about what might follow.

After a mile or so, Sir Chase took over once more to gallop the team at top speed through the park where
other drivers and riders stopped to watch. He was recognised by a group of the militia from the barracks at Kew who called and waved, while ladies out walking watched in admiration the lovely young woman with the flying red hair. He had no need to warn her to hold on when she swung and swayed into every turn, careering like a comet towards some distant target, bracing one foot between his on the footboard, the other on the top edge, not quite ladylike but alert, filled with a vitality so intense that it caught at her breath and tried to make her laugh. This was freedom. Escape. Sun, wind and speed. This was even better than the applause after a recital. Uncaring that she leaned on him as they took bends like a Roman chariot in the arena, or that her knee pressed his thigh, her enjoyment was heightened by his sheer skill, for not once did she feel the slightest danger with him in control.

He knew the tracks well, bringing them full circle back to the gate on top of Richmond Hill where he walked the team as far as the Terrace. From there, the view across the town and the wide silver-blue stretch of the Thames spread below them, a giant counterpane of new spring greens, and for some time they sat in silence like two eagles on a cliff, ready to take flight again whenever they pleased. Caterina felt no need to talk, and Sir Chase had no need to ask if she had enjoyed her liberty, having only to look at her to see the sparkle in her eyes, the pink in her cheeks, the wildly tumbling hair like dark fire.

‘Better move,’ he said. ‘They’re sweating.’

‘Yes.’

Without a smile, he looked intently at her. ‘Do you need to tuck your hair up before I take you home?’

There was something alarmingly conspiratorial
about the question in that deep gravelly voice that implied his awareness of her parents’ censure if they were to see her wind-blown state. Once more, she found herself wondering whether he had said similar things to the women he had known. With her shawl, she made a hood to cover her hair, wrapping the ends around her neck, tucking her feet neatly into one spot, pressing her knees together, sitting primly to await his approval.

Leaning his whip against his thigh, he pulled off one kid glove with his teeth and held it in his lips while brushing a speck of dust off her nose with his thumb, catching her eyes with the merest hint of amusement.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered, shocked by the tenderness of his skin, by the contact she had allowed, as if she’d taken a first step without moving.

Replacing his glove, he took up the whip and moved off at a walk down the hill. ‘That was more or less the route your brother and I took yesterday,’ he said. ‘But then it was muddy.’

Caterina frowned at him. ‘Four-in-hand against his pair?’

‘No! Of course not. We both had a pair, but we drove them in tandem.’

‘But Harry’s never driven tandem before. And how could he ever have passed you on that narrow track?’

‘He could if he’d been a better whip and if his team had been as good as mine. But he isn’t, and it wasn’t.’

‘I still don’t think you should have accepted his wager.’

‘And how do you think that would have been interpreted?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘It does to me. Look what I’d have missed by refusing it.’

It would have been easy enough to pursue that line, to be told how her brother’s stupidity had been turned to Sir Chase’s advantage in two ways, by money and association. But she preferred not to hear anything from him except regret for his relentless pursual of the debt, which she was quite sure he would never give up.

The drive had not only blown away her cobwebs, but it had also given her a glimpse of the fearlessness and sheer proficiency that had earned him his reputation for heroics. Yet she had felt something more significant than blind courage or audacity, more than daredevil antics or the masculine urge to impress a woman. She had felt completely safe and understood, and there had been moments when her dislike and resentment of him had dissolved in their silences, intensifying her awareness of him as a companion quite unlike any other man. She could never like him, of course, but nor could she suppress the regret that they could never truly be friends. She would tell those who had seen her driving his curricle and four that he was just an acquaintance. A friend of her father’s.

Stephen Chester was understandably taken aback to hear that Sir Chase Boston had already driven his daughter around Richmond without actually abducting her. Naturally, he did not expect to see her return full of smiles and approval; she certainly did not do that. But nor did she have much to say, either good or bad, about the experience, only about the means her father had used to pay back the debt.

Closing the study door quietly behind her, she took her father by the hand and sat him beside her on the window-seat in view of the garden. ‘He told me to ask you,’ she said, ‘obviously not thinking you’d tell me. But I
think you should, because I know what the debt amounts to and any demand for that kind of money is going to affect us all, not only you. We shall all have to share in any hardships it’s going to cause. Is it the house, Father? Have you decided to sell it? The other one, too?’

‘I’d like a little brandy, my dear, if you wouldn’t mind.’

‘You’ve already had one, Father. You know Hannah doesn’t like it.’

Father had had three, to be precise, and what Hannah didn’t know would hardly concern her. ‘Yes, dear, I know. Just a small one.’

Caterina obliged, sure that this would loosen his tongue, but dreading what she was about to hear. She had developed a love for this house on Paradise Road as great as that for their much larger home in Derbyshire, and the thought of losing them would be like losing two beloved friends. Gently, she removed the glass from his grasp and replaced it on the table. ‘Now, tell me the worst,’ she said. ‘I can bear it. We’re all in this together, remember, and we shall all have to do whatever is necessary to help. Harry will have to be recalled from Liverpool to start earning some money, and I shall go and see the manager at Covent Garden. He’s told me more than once that there’s a place for me with the company whenever—’

‘Caterina … stop! That’s not it. It’s not the house.’

‘
Not
the house?’ she said, blinking. ‘Well, what else
is
there?’

‘We … Sir Chase and I agreed not to say anything until your return from wherever you’re going this weekend.’

‘From Sevrington Hall? Why ever not? You mean,
before you know how much you can raise…. Father … what is it? What have you agreed to? What is it you don’t want me to hear immediately?’

His hand had retaken hers upon his thigh where his nervous fingers were dragging at her skin with an ungentle caress, too unfamiliar to be soothing. She drew her hand away, full of sudden misgivings and an awareness that the matter concerned her personally more than all of them, that her offers of help were about to fall with a thud at her feet. And as her father struggled to find a way of explaining, her own realisation grew that his long talk with Sir Chase, the latter’s air of satisfaction and his flippant ‘ask him,’ his interest in her reasons not to marry, his questions about dowries, his assurance that the debt had been settled ‘very amicably’ were all to do with her. Only her.

‘What have you done, Father?’ she said, breathless with foreboding. ‘This concerns me, doesn’t it? Tell me?’

‘Such a lot of money,’ he whispered. ‘I could never repay it, but it was not
my
suggestion, my dear, it came from—’

‘
Tell
me, Father,’ she snapped. ‘This agreement. What is it?’

‘You, Caterina. He wants you. He’s made me an offer for you.’

Like a sudden mountain mist, cold anger swirled around her, prickling every hair with a freezing, numbing indignation. ‘No, tell me the truth. It was a wager … a
wager,
wasn’t it? That’s not quite the same thing as a straightforward offer, is it, Father? He’s agreed to release you from Harry’s debt
in return for Harry’s sister,
hasn’t he? And if he doesn’t manage to get Harry’s sister, you’re going to have to pay up, aren’t
you? That’s the top and bottom of it, and that’s not an offer, but a wager. You see, I’m not the green girl I used to be; I do understand these things. But what
you
don’t appear to understand is that I shall not be marrying
anybody,
and if I ever changed my mind, that hell-rake of a man would be the very last person I would consider.’ Panting with fury and the torrent of words, she felt his betrayal as keenly as a sword wound. ‘How could you do this, Father?’ she said, standing upright before him. ‘Will you never see that I am a woman, not a thing to be bargained with? I can go out any day and earn a good living whenever I choose. In fact, when I return from Wiltshire next week, I shall make the necessary arrangements. Any father who can rid himself so easily of a daughter doesn’t deserve to have one.’

‘You said you’d do whatever you could to help, Caterina.’

‘So I did. But I didn’t offer myself in exchange, did I?
All I can do to help
doesn’t mean forfeiting my entire happiness single-handed so that Harry can carry on gambling with money he doesn’t have. Surely you can see that?’

‘That’s an exaggeration. If I had disapproved of Sir Chase, I would not have agreed to his generous offer.’

‘Nevertheless, since it didn’t occur to either of you to consult me about something that affects me so closely, you will now be obliged to refuse Sir Chase’s wager, and tell him that your daughter would rather be an opera singer than marry him.’

‘No … no! You cannot do that.’

‘Yes, I can, Father. That way, I get to choose who I go to bed with.’

The gasp of shock was audible, but the words that followed were cut off by the slam of the door and a loud
crash as the brass knob bounced across the polished oak floor like a pomegranate.

The door reopened with a grating sound, and there she stood, holding its partner in her hand with an extension protruding from it like a dagger. ‘I’ve had an idea,’ she said in a voice too sweet to be anything but sarcasm. ‘Why not sell Harry to the highest bidder? The problem is of his making, after all. It certainly isn’t mine.’ Placing the weapon carefully on the polished table, she turned away quickly before he could see how her eyes were flooding with tears. ‘Better have that repaired before you sell the house,’ she whispered.

Early on the next day, the journey to Sevrington Hall was undertaken in two stout travelling coaches, one of which belonged to Lady Dorna Elwick, Hannah’s sister-in-law, and the other to Lord Rayne’s elder brother. And since that one had the Elyot cypher and crest upon the doors, spaces for two large trunks, Venetian blinds with tassels, fringed cushions, carpets, straps to hold and pockets to put things in, that was the one occupied by Lady Dorna, Caterina and Sara, and Lord Seton Rayne, Lady Dorna’s younger brother. The two maids and one valet rode in the second carriage with two brindled greyhounds lying across their feet, and more luggage. Strapped to the fourth seat of that coach sat a harp in its leather cover, rocking gently over each bump in the road.

It was not long before both Lady Dorna and her brother noticed that Caterina had spoken only to answer questions, and then briefly, and that Sara was casting sympathetic glances at her sister as if she were ailing. Caterina was usually more than happy to accept invitations to sing when it provided a way of meeting established
friends and making new ones. Even better was the prospect of escaping for a few days from her harassed father and Hannah’s eternal carping about the duties of marriageable daughters.

Today, however, appeared to be an exception, for Caterina had not had time to recover from her father’s drastic solution to his problem, despite what she had said about sharing it. In her view, this was not sharing it but landing it on her, and her resentment had burned all night. Not that she had any intention of complying with his intolerable agreement, but there was no escaping the fact that she could expect some stormy weeks ahead before either her father or Sir Chase would acknowledge defeat. Since yesterday’s unhappy interview, she had not spoken to her father, all her meals having been taken in the room she shared with Sara. Surprisingly, Hannah had not tried to make contact with her, though she must by now have been told of the offer.

‘Headache, love?’ said Lady Dorna, laying her cream kid-gloved fingers upon Caterina’s knee. ‘Are you not looking forward to this weekend?’

‘More than ever,’ said Caterina. ‘No, not a headache. You know how it is at home these days. Even our dear Sara is glad to get away.’

Sara’s smile agreed with this, although her reasons were not quite what her sister had implied. Lord and Lady Ensdale had two very handsome and eligible sons.