Suzanne Robinson (12 page)

“I got to get me learning somehow. Missed it while you was pulling pranks at Eton and military school.”

“I’m an ass, Nick. How can I make it up to you?”

“You can’t.”

Jocelin gazed up at Nick’s set features and decided to change the subject to an innocuous one. He returned to his desk and shuffled through a pile of invitations.

“Father has been busy trumpeting that I’m for sale. I got a pile of invitations in the morning post.”

“Don’t get no invitations.”

Hearing the bite in those words, Jocelin grinned. “Would you like to?”

Nick gave him a disgusted look. “Your people wouldn’t have me in their barns, much less their houses.”

“They will if I want you there.”

“Jos, not even you can scrape the mud of St. Giles off me.”

“Then we’ll give you a new coat to cover it. We’ll give you a pedigree. Nothing elaborate. Perhaps a distant relation to some Scottish family that’s gone to America.”

Jocelin dropped his invitations on the desk and rummaged through them. “Here we are. Mr. Richard Elliot. A butcher’s son made good. Dying to get into Society. Elliot would let me bring a goat if I accepted his invitation to stay with him at his place in the country. Besides, he’s offered to be of use politically. What do you say?”

“Humph.”

“Come on, old boy.” Jocelin frowned at the invitation. “I’ll need support if I’m to make it through a whole month dodging the matrimonial traps of a financier and his solid and no doubt oafish daughter and do Asher some good at the same time.”

“The duke wants you to look at a butcher’s granddaughter?” Nick asked.

“Of course not. I’ve had a note from him warning me not to accept offers from anyone of less rank than an earl’s daughter.”

“So you’re going to go just to make him puke.”

“Want to come along?”

Nick’s froth and insolence returned, and he smiled. “Never could resist a jaunt, now could I?”

“And I’m going to teach my father the cost of trying to use me like a stud put out to breed.”

Shaking his head, Nick said, “ ‘Double, double, toil and trouble; / Fire burn and caldron bubble.’ ”

T
he procession that set out from the train station at Little Stratfield-on-Willow rivaled any that had been seen in the last thirty years. First came the grand Stratfield Court landau carriage, black and yellow, drawn by four matched grays, two of which were ridden by postilions. Then came another, lighter vehicle bearing two valets and light luggage, followed by mounted grooms leading two hunters. At a slower pace in the rear struggled a wagon loaded with trunks. Liveried outriders trotted in advance.

In the landau, sitting opposite each other with the top down in spite of the cold, sat Jocelin Marshall, Viscount Radcliffe, and his friend, Nick Ross. Nick
was facing forward and trying to keep his cheeks from turning red.

Above the noise of trotting horses and clattering wagons, he asked, “You always go visiting this way?”

“Of course not,” Jocelin said. He rested his ankle on his knee and waved a glove in the general direction of the retinue behind them. “Elliot wants the whole county to know who has deigned to stay with him. What use would I be if no one knew I was here? So word will spread. I’m counting on it.”

“So we’re giving up our jaunts so you can visit this gent and annoy Daddy.”

“Not quite. Dr. Lucius Sinclair lives nearby.”

“Sinclair. He’s on the list.”

Jocelin nodded.

Nick whistled softly. “What are you going to do about him?”

“Take steps, Nick old fellow. Take steps. Not as severe as what he deserves, but steps nonetheless. And of course, I must begin this business of hunting for a bride and talk to Elliot about old Ash.”

He didn’t mention that his efforts to find the mysterious Miss Gamp had so far failed. Frustration gnawed at him, for he kept smelling lemon fragrances when he first woke up, at his club, in his bath. He suffered from unsatisfied lust in a way he had never experienced. The torture made him short-tempered and restless. Only the prospect of keeping himself busy with courting Elliot’s political support had put him in a better mood.

He and Nick drove in companionable silence until they reached the gates of Stratfield Court. Wrought-iron grillwork swung open, and they drove through carefully preserved woodland. The train ride hadn’t been too long, less than four hours to Wiltshire,
but both men chafed at being confined to a railway carriage. Jocelin was gazing up at bare tree branches highlighted by weak afternoon sunlight when Nick made a strangling noise. He turned and glimpsed a monumental country house in the distance. As the trees gave way to an expanse of lawn, he understood Nick’s consternation. The place looked as large as Windsor Castle.

Nick was frowning, and he squinted at Stratfield Court. “What’s wrong with it?”

Jocelin’s lips curled.

“Could it be all that depressingly dark red brick?”

Nick gazed at the house in confusion.

Jocelin took pity on him. “Calm yourself, old boy. The thing’s part castle, part French château, and part cathedral. You’re unaccustomed to seeing them all thrown into one monstrous effusion. Old Elliot must not have been able to make up his mind what he wanted, so he used what he liked from five or six types of architecture.”

He pointed out the gables, the towers, the chimneys, the turrets and spires, the potpourri of roof types, the corbeling. Elaborate, asymmetrical, and irregular of plan, design, and decoration, the place seemed to crawl with gargoyles. They drove down the semicircle path to the carriage court.

“Jos,” Nick said faintly.

Jocelin glanced at the couple and their servants waiting beneath the columns that supported the roof of the carriage porch. “Don’t worry. It’s old Elliot and his wife.”

He descended from the carriage and urged Nick forward for introductions. Elliot wore an air of a lord of the manor greeting royalty on a state visit. He was one
of the few men Jocelin didn’t top in height, but the majesty of his frame suffered somewhat by the fact that he wore side-whiskers. These had turned gray before the hair on his head, thus giving him the appearance of having resorted to dyes. His mouth turned down at the corners, no doubt from his constant fits of pique.

His wife, Iphegenia Beaufort Elliot, suffered in comparison to her overwhelming spouse. Dressed in the bell-shaped and narrow-skirted fashion of the previous decade, she wore her fading blond hair in long ringlets to either side of her face and hardly ever finished her sentences. She didn’t have to, for her husband usually spoke for her or told her what she meant to say. He’d married her for her position as eldest daughter of one of the county’s oldest families, not for her mettle.

Jocelin fell into conversation with Elliot while Nick lent his arm to their hostess, and they all went inside. He saw Nick’s jaw drop slightly as they walked beneath soaring Gothic arches and between long rows of columns of marble. Conducted in state through the entry, past the medieval screen, and into the entrance hall, they proceeded up the main staircase. Walking beneath cavernous fan vaulting, he glanced at their reflections in a succession of huge trefoil mirrors.

He concealed a smile when Nick winced at the busy carving, the gilding that touched almost every surface, the cavernous magnitude of each succeeding room. Poor Nick had never been to a country house before. His friend disliked formal, drafty mansions. He himself preferred his own, much smaller, seventeenth-century house. It had never been improved after the last century and remained comfortably small. He left the palaces and castles to his father.

“So glad you could stay with us, Radcliffe,” Elliot was saying. “As I said, my girl took herself off with the guests to the pond for ice-skating. Ah, here’s Thurston-Coombes. Coombes, old man, you’re back.”

Jocelin greeted his friend and introduced Nick again.

“Yes, sir,” Thurston-Coombes said. “We all trooped back except Miss Elliot. She was going to visit one of the cottagers on the estate. Said she’d knitted the old lady mittens and a shawl.”

Elliot glanced meaningfully at Jocelin. “A good girl, my Elizabeth. Always doing right by our dependents. Takes my position seriously, of course. One’s Christian duty. She’ll be along soon. Coombes, I was just showing Radcliffe and Ross their rooms. They’re down from you.”

“If you don’t mind,” Jocelin said before Elliot could go on, “I’d like to take my hunter out for a bit. He gets restive after a long train ride. He hates the noise.”

Elliot gave him an expansive smile, rather like the grimace of a lion contemplating a zebra foal.

“Of course.” He nodded at his butler. “Kimberley will show you to the stable block.”

Jocelin glanced at Nick. “Come along, old fellow. Time for a short gallop before dinner.” He bowed to Iphegenia Elliot. “If Mrs. Elliot permits.”

“My pleasure, my lord. Dinner is at …”

“Eight,” finished Mr. Elliot.

With a few more proper expressions of delight in their accommodations, they were left to themselves. In half an hour they were mounted on their hunters and trotting out of the back gate. A bridle path had been cleared of snow, and they followed it down a hill. Riding quickly across the park surrounding Stratfield
Court, they entered a wood. The trees closed in, and they had to walk their horses single file.

The moment they’d cleared the stables Nick had dropped his carefully guarded accent. “Bleeding toff. ‘One’s Christian duty,’ he said. ‘Our dependents,’ he says.”

“A solid landed proprietor, is our Mr. Elliot,” Jocelin said with a glance back at Nick. “No doubt he wants to purchase a baronetcy.”

“He’s a butcher’s son. Common stock, just like me,” Nick said as he guided his hunter over a fallen log.

“He made his sovereigns by investing in railways when they first started building big. Now he’s got his fingers into a lot of pies—wool, tea, salt mines, guano.”

“Guano?”

“The excrement of seafowl, my dear man. Fertilizer.”

“He’s in birdshit?”

“Among other things.”

“Disgusting.”

“Lucrative.” Jocelin reined in. “What’s this? The pond?”

Nick pulled alongside him, and they gazed out at a snow-covered meadow that stretched to the edge of the wood. Several hundred yards away an ice-covered pond reflected the lowering sun’s rays. A coach was parked near its banks, the driver holding the horses. A maid was shoving what looked like a woman’s petticoats and hoop inside the vehicle. On the ice a woman in a voluminous crimson day dress and matching cape was skating.

Jocelin put his hand on Nick’s arm to stop him from speaking. He followed the skater with his gaze as
she sailed around the pond. All the ladies of his acquaintance skated, even his mother. This lady didn’t just skate, she flew. Unlike most of her kind, she pushed her legs rapidly, gaining speed until he was sure she would lose control of her body and crash. Instead she turned around and sailed backward, working up more speed. Suddenly she stepped on one foot and jumped in the air. Her legs parted, then came together. She landed, still sailing backward, on one foot.

“Dear God,” Jocelin said.

“The little fool’s going to kill herself.”

“Look!” Jocelin pointed at the woman.

Her brilliant skirts flying behind her, she now crossed her legs and stepped forward onto one foot, bringing her arms close to her body. Jocelin held his breath as she began to spin. Whirling faster and faster, her skirt billowed. Her bonnet flew off, and cascades of ash blond hair tumbled and fluttered. As suddenly as she’d begun, she slowed and stopped herself, then calmly set sail again.

She glided around the edge of the pond in a circle, then bent forward, lifted one leg in the air. She arched her back like a ballerina and drifted, a small, crimson sloop wafting across a glassy sea. Jocelin released Nick’s arm, but continued to stare at the woman on the ice.

“Have you ever seen anything like that?”

“I seen people running about on the ice before.”

“But not like that,” Jocelin said. “Not as if she were dancing on a ballroom floor. And women never, never jump, and certainly they never spin until their skirts whirl up and expose their legs.”

“Damned long legs. I’d like to—”

“Don’t,” Jocelin said.

Nick cast an irritated look at Jocelin. “Jesus, you’ve already picked her out for yourself.”

“You’ll be too busy distracting Miss Elizabeth Elliot for me.”

“I got better things to do than hold some old maid’s knitting. Damn it, Jos, the Elliot woman’s twenty-four, a spinster. Probably a wide, lumpy one too.”

At last Jocelin tore his gaze from the skating figure. “Come on, old chap. Be a good fellow and do this for me.” When Nick snorted, he wheedled some more. “Do it, and I’ll let you visit Miss Birch.”

“You brought her?”

“She’s promised to take rooms in Little Stratfield-on-Willow.”

Without waiting for Nick’s answer, he looked back at the object of his interest. She had left the ice to sit on a stump covered with a blanket. Removing her skates, she handed them to the maid and put on walking boots. Soon she had entered the waiting carriage, and the coachman had guided it out onto the path to the road that skirted the Elliot estate.