Swept Away (7 page)

Pamela's eyes shot fire. “No, I assure you it was not ‘physical infirmity' that kept me away. Indeed, I attend many soirees and balls, Miss Armiger.”

“Indeed? Why is it that we never see you, then?” Julia wrinkled her brow in puzzlement.

“Are you determined, then, to hear it?” Pamela snapped. Julia wondered if she realized how unattractive she looked like this, her features sharp and hawklike, her eyes narrowed, and her lips, never full, reduced to a mere line. “I do not go where you are received, as you no doubt know. No woman of any standing would.”

Varian's expression of shock and distaste as he looked at Pamela was precisely what Julia would have wished for. But all her satisfaction was wiped out when she heard Phoebe's sharp intake of breath and turned to see the hurt on her face at Pamela's verbal slap.

“Phoebe, I'm sorry,” Julia said softly, curling her arm around her sister-in-law's waist.

“Mrs. St. Leger!” Varian snapped. “Really! I am quite sure you did not mean that.” He glared at her significantly.

“Everyone knows it!” Pamela retorted defiantly, still too caught up in her anger to care that she looked mean and spiteful in front of her son's trustee.

“Phoebe, please, accept my apology,” Varian went on, turning abruptly from Pamela toward Phoebe. “I assure you that most people do not feel that way.”

Phoebe smiled at him. “You are most kind, Varian. I know that
you
do not.”

“Indeed not. I hope you will allow me the honor of calling upon you while you are in London.”

“Of course.”

He turned to Julia and made his apologies and goodbyes, adding that he trusted her to “take care of Lady Armiger.” Then he hustled Pamela away.

Julia turned to Phoebe. “Oh, Fee, I'm sorry. I should never have goaded her like that. I was so intent on forcing her to admit what a witch she is that I didn't even think about you. I should have known it would hurt you. It is simply that I am so thick-skinned, you see. No, please, don't cry.”

Phoebe shook her head, giving Julia a shaky little smile. Her eyes sparkled with sudden unshed tears. “No. It isn't that. It was your calling me ‘Fee.' Selby always used to call me that. Remember? He was so fond of pet names.”

“Yes, I remember.” Julia felt tears clogging up her own throat at the memory. Even Julia he had shortened to Julie, and he had almost never called Phoebe by her full name. “He called you ‘Fee' and ‘Delight.”'

A little noise escaped Phoebe at her words. “Oh, Julia! How can it still hurt after all this time?”

“I don't know.” Julia hugged the other woman tightly. “Sometimes I think that it will always hurt, at least a little.”

“I want to prove that Selby didn't do it,” Phoebe said in a fiercer voice than Julia had ever heard from her. “I want to prove that it was all Stonehaven's doing and make that dreadful woman eat every nasty word she's ever said about Selby or you or me!”

“We will,” Julia promised, setting her jaw. “We will.”

 

Julia was in the sitting room the next day, her fingers busy letting down the hem on another one of Phoebe's dresses so that she could wear it. Her mind was occupied with her plan to manipulate Lord Stonehaven into confessing to his crime. She knew that she could not allow herself to be distracted again, as she had been last time by his kiss. She had to be firm and in control, and she had decided that the best way to do that was to plan the things she would say and do to lead him to talk, down to every last word and gesture.

The housekeeper, a fussy, plump woman in a white mob cap and an equally snowy apron, was standing beside Phoebe while Phoebe went over the menus for the rest of the week. Phoebe was engaged in another of a seemingly unending series of struggles over what should be served.

“You see, Mrs. Willett,” Phoebe was saying now, “I don't really
like
duck.”

“But, my lady, duck was always one of the master's favorites.” Mrs. Willett had been used to ruling the London house largely unchecked for over thirty years. The butler might go back and forth from the country house in Kent to London with the family, but the housekeeper stayed in charge in London over the long months—and even years, lately—when the family was not there, running a skeleton staff to keep the house in shape. Her guiding rule in any situation was to do exactly as she had always done.

Julia glanced over at Phoebe, who was biting her lip and looking worried, and Julia knew that Phoebe was, as Mrs. Willett had intended, feeling like an unloving, ungrieving widow for not wanting to eat one of her dead husband's favorite dishes.

“Nonsense, Mrs. Willett,” Julia stuck in crisply. “You and I both know that duck was our
father's
favorite dish, and that is why you served it all Selby's life. Besides, it doesn't really matter whether Selby liked it or not. The point is that
Lady Armiger
does
not
like it. She does not want it on the menu, and I see no reason why it should be there, when your employer does not wish it. Do you?”

A look of hurt that would have crumpled Phoebe's opposition settled on the older woman's face. She pushed her spectacles back up her nose and said in a resigned voice, “Very well, Miss Julia—if you want it that way. I do work for your family, have done so for over thirty years.”

“Yes, I know, and an excellent housekeeper you are,” Julia agreed to soothe the woman's wounded feelings.

“My, yes,” Phoebe agreed eagerly, a tiny frown of concern creasing her forehead. “I did not mean to imply that there was anything wrong with the way you perform your duties.”

“Of course you didn't.” Julia jumped in before Phoebe could get carried away with her assurances and wind up telling the woman to leave the duck on the list. “I am sure Mrs. Willett understands that you merely want a change in the menu. It is the sort of problem at which she is quite adept, isn't it, Mrs. Willett?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Willett agreed, smiling. Julia knew that in a few more minutes the menu change would have become her own idea, and woe to any of the kitchen staff who objected to it.

At that moment, there was the rumble of carriage wheels coming to a stop in front of the house. Julia and Phoebe glanced at each other in surprise. A visitor to their house was a rare occurrence—they had had no callers since they came to London three weeks ago, except for young Thomas every now and then when he could sneak away from his tutor. Julia stood up and crossed over to the windows. A sporty curricle had stopped on the pavement, and as she watched, a lad in livery hopped down from the back and hurried forward to take the horse's head. A man, dressed elegantly and severely in black and white, was climbing down from the open vehicle. Julia's mouth opened in horror.

“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed, her hand flying to her throat. She stepped back quickly.

Phoebe was on her feet in an instant, hurrying toward her in concern. “What's wrong? Who is it?”

“Lord Stonehaven,” Julia croaked. “He's found out.”

“What?” Phoebe whirled and looked out the window, then turned back to Julia. “Oh, no! What shall we do?”

The sound of the front door knocker resounded through the house. Julia started toward the sitting room door, the only thought on her mind to tell the footman not to answer the door. But that efficient servant was already swinging open the front door, and Julia ducked back inside the room.

“Miss Julia, what is it?” the housekeeper asked, concerned by the look of fear on Julia's face.

“A visitor. Tell him we aren't home, Mrs. Willett,” Phoebe suggested, her face pleading.

How could he have found out who she was?
There had been no one at Madame Beauclaire's who knew her, except Geoffrey, and Geoffrey would never have told Stonehaven who she really was.

“He must—he must be coming to pay a call,” Julia stated, reason overcoming her initial spurt of fear. “Somehow he's found out that we are here. That's all, I'm sure.” But it would still be disaster if he saw her here!

She could hear the footman walking toward the door, Stonehaven's steps right behind him. In another few seconds he would be here. She glanced around wildly. There was no other way out of the room. Aside from slamming the door in his face, there was no way to avoid his seeing her. Julia's mind raced.

“Pardon me, Mrs. Willett,” she murmured as she reached over and pulled the woman's spectacles from her face, followed by her large mob cap. Grabbing her own shawl from the back of her chair, Julia dived behind the chair just as the footman stepped into the room.

“Lord Stonehaven, my lady,” he droned.

P
hoebe numbly turned toward the door, where Lord Stonehaven stood right behind the footman.

“My lord,” she said through bloodless lips, struggling not to look toward the chair where Julia had disappeared nor at her astonished housekeeper, who stood clutching at her disarranged hair and blinking.

At that moment Julia popped up from behind the chair like a jack-in-the-box. Phoebe let out a gasp, quickly smothered. Julia had wrapped the long shawl loosely around her, effectively hiding her figure. Atop her head she wore the housekeeper's outmoded mob cap, covering up every last strand of her distinctive red hair. The older woman's glasses were perched on her nose, turning her lovely blue eyes strangely large and swimming. To add to the disguise, she was frowning, her jaw set and her mouth narrowed into a thin line.

Stonehaven's brows rose slightly at the sudden appearance of this apparition, and he faltered in the midst of saying Phoebe's name. He added tentatively, “And, uh, Miss Armiger?”

“Yes!” Julia barked in a hoarse voice. “That is who I am—not that it's any concern of yours.”

“Julia…” Phoebe protested weakly. She disliked the man fully as much as Julia, but she could no more bring herself to be rude than she could jump off the top of the house.

“Well, 'tis true,” Julia snapped. Her heart was thundering inside her chest so loudly that she thought the others must hear it. She wished she could see Stonehaven's face, so that she could tell whether he recognized her in her disguise or not. But with Mrs. Willett's spectacles on, the entire room was a blur. Lord Stonehaven looked like nothing except a large smudge of black and white.

“Mrs. Willett, you may go now,” Julia said, turning in the woman's general direction. It was not really her place, but Phoebe's, to dismiss the servant, but Julia suspected that Phoebe was too stunned at the moment to remember to do so, and she wanted the housekeeper out of the room before she could make any remarks about her cap and glasses.

“Yes, miss.” The housekeeper, looking confused, sidled past Lord Stonehaven, feeling her way along the wall and out the door.

Julia, equally blind, edged around the chair, thinking that if she could just get around it and sit down, she would be all right despite the sorry state of her eyesight. However, she had forgotten the footstool sitting beside the chair, and she stumbled over it, sending the stool flying. She let out a cry as pain shot up her foot, and she staggered, bumping into the arm of a chair. That was all it took: the bump, combined with her swimming vision and the fact that she instinctively hopped off her hurt foot, made her lose her balance, and she tumbled ungracefully into the chair.

Phoebe let out a gasp, and both she and Lord Stonehaven started toward her. Julia quickly waved them away, blushing a fiery red.

“No!” She swung her legs down off the arm of the chair and sat up straight. In her embarrassment, her voice had slipped back into its normal register, but now she brought it back down to a gravelly growl. “I'm fine. Just fine. Sit down.”

Phoebe turned toward their visitor and tried to smile. It was not a successful effort. “Why—why don't you sit there on the sofa, my lord?” she said, her voice quavering a little, and gestured toward the low velvet sofa, which lay at some distance from where Julia sat.

Julia glared in the general direction of Stonehaven. Disconcertingly, her gaze lit somewhere in the general vicinity of his shoulder.

“What are you doing here?” Julia asked abruptly.

Stonehaven raised his eyebrows slightly at her rudeness, but said only, “I met St. Leger at my club yesterday evening, and he told me that you were in town. I came to pay a call.”

“I realize that,” Julia retorted, increasing her scowl. She wanted to get rid of this man before he could see past her disguise and realize who she was. Otherwise, their whole plan was ruined. She could think of no better way to do that than to drive him off with rudeness. Besides, she thought, it was quite refreshing to be rude to him, especially after having to hide her true feelings toward him the other night. “What I meant was, why would you come to call on us? We cannot benefit you in any way. I think that you have done the worst that you can do to my family. Surely you cannot think that we would wish to see you. So what purpose does your visit serve?”

“You are certainly a forthright young woman, Miss Armiger.”

“Yes, unlike some people.”

“Julia…” Phoebe blushed at her sister-in-law's bluntness.

“Why try to hide how we feel, Phoebe?” Julia asked. “I am sure that Lord Stonehaven must not be surprised to learn that we dislike him.”

“It does not surprise me, no,” he said, “though I must tell you that it does distress me. I hope you realize that I never meant either of you any ill.”

Anger blazed across Julia's face as she said acidly, “You certainly did us ill enough by accident, then.”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause. Finally Lord Stonehaven said, “Miss Armiger, I am not the one who brought dishonor to your family. Selby did that. I know that you loved your brother, but—”

“You're right. I did. I still do. And I don't know how you can have the nerve to come here today and force Phoebe and me to look at you, the man who ruined him!” She realized that the growl was slipping again in her agitation, and she stopped, clearing her throat.

“Please, Miss Armiger, do not distress yourself so much.”

“It is not
I
who is causing my distress!”

Lord Stonehaven sighed. “I am sorry. Obviously I should not have come. Please believe me when I say that I have no desire to cause either you or Lady Armiger pain. I—I had hoped to heal some of the rift that lies between us.”

“That will never happen.” Julia shot to her feet, glaring at him, her arms stiff at her sides. “Do you think that you can ruin my brother and then be forgiven?”

Stonehaven sighed, rising to his feet also. “No. I can see that that is too much to expect.” He turned toward Phoebe. “Lady Armiger, please accept my regards. I want you to know that if I can be of service to you in any way, you have only to call on me.”

Julia let out an inelegant snort. “She would as soon call on a snake for help.”

“I'm sorry, Lord Stonehaven.” Phoebe cast a nervous glance toward Julia. “But I think it would be best if you left now.”

“Yes, of course.” He bowed over Phoebe's hand formally, but, after a wary glance in Julia's direction, was wise enough not to approach her. “Good day, ladies.”

He turned and left the room. Phoebe and Julia stood frozen, listening to his receding footsteps upon the Carrera marble floor. There came the sound of the footman opening the massive front door, and a moment later it closed.

Julia ripped the mob cap off her head and slammed it down on the chair, following it with the spectacles. “Oh! I cannot believe the nerve of that man! How could he come here? How did he dare! Did he think that we would welcome him? That he could just waltz in and charm us into forgetting that he is the man responsible for Selby's—”

Phoebe let out a little inarticulate noise of distress, and Julia was instantly contrite, “I'm sorry, Phoebe. I should not have said that. It was upsetting enough for you to have to meet that man. I should not have added to your distress. It just makes me so angry.” She slammed one fist into the other hand. “Lord Stonehaven is utterly without feeling.”

Timidly Phoebe offered, “It was rather nice of him, I suppose, to call on us. No one else does. Most people just snub us. It would have been far easier for him not to come, and no one would have thought badly of him.”

“Nice!” Julia sneered. “There was nothing nice about it. Trust me. He merely came here to gloat. Or perhaps it suited him to appear to be magnanimous. No doubt he thought we would grovel in gratitude at his being so kind as to notice us. Well! He'd better think again!”

“I am sure he has—now,” Phoebe replied dryly.

Julia glanced at her sister-in-law in some surprise, then chuckled, much of her anger draining out. Julia let out an explosive gust of air and sank back into the chair, picking up the cap and spectacles and holding them in her lap. Now that it was all over and she was no longer consumed with rage, her legs were suddenly trembling, unable to hold her up any longer.

“Oh, my,” Phoebe said, also sitting down with a plop. “I cannot imagine how you pulled that off. I was terrified when he walked into the room.”

“Do you think he knew me?” Julia asked anxiously. “I couldn't see him. Did any expression of recognition cross his face?”

“No. He seemed only—well, appalled—whenever he looked at you. Oh, Julia!” Hysterical laughter bubbled up from Phoebe's throat. “Julia, you cannot imagine how you looked! Your eyes so huge and blurred, like a frog's.”

“Well, thank you very much,” Julia tried for an indignant tone, but laughter broke through.

“And that cap!” Phoebe let out a peal of laughter. “How did you ever think of it so quickly? I am sure he didn't know whether you were a housemaid or a—a—”

“Giant frog in a dress?” Julia suggested.

They both laughed, unable to restrain themselves, relief from the last few minutes' strain making them giddy. Phoebe described each expression that had chased across Lord Stonehaven's face at Julia's words, her imitations making Julia howl with laughter. It took some time before their hysteria died down into chuckles and then into sighs and, finally, silence.

“Well…” Julia said at last, rising. “I suppose I had better return these to Mrs. Willett and try to make amends with her.”

“I am sure the poor woman thinks you have gone quite mad.”

“No doubt. Ah, well, hopefully I will be able to think up an adequate story.” She stood up and started toward the door, but then stopped as a new thought hit her. “Oh, no! I daren't see him tonight, as I had planned. Not so soon after this.”

“No. You'd best give him a few days to forget Miss Armiger's features,” Phoebe agreed.

Julia sighed, a little surprised at how disappointed she felt. But then, she reminded herself, it was only natural—merely an indication of how eager she was to bring Lord Stonehaven to justice.

 

Julia let three days pass before she went again to Madame Beauclaire's, but she found it difficult to wait. By the time the evening came around, she was fairly champing at the bit, eager to go.

She was wearing another one of Phoebe's dresses tonight, again with a let-out hem and the modest fichu of lace at the neckline ripped out. It was a gauzy dress in a color the modiste had termed “sea foam green.” Though it did not have the tighter-fitting skirt of the dress she had worn the last time, its flowing lines clung to Julia's slender form, and the low neckline was enough, she thought, to spark any man's interest. Besides, it was a color that looked perfect with her auburn hair.

Tonight she returned to Madame Beauclaire's without her cousin's company. Geoffrey would balk, she knew, at escorting her a second time and would probably ask all sorts of awkward questions. Besides, having been there before, she did not need him now. As few women as she had seen there, she felt relatively sure that the doorman would recognize her as a customer.

Nor did she take her own carriage. It would have been handy, of course, to have Nunnelly waiting outside to take her home, but it might also interfere with her plans. Last week it had turned out very well when Lord Stonehaven had walked her out to find her a hackney. And there was always the danger that Nunnelly might balk at her going into a gaming house. Loyal as he was, he had known her since she was a toddler and had no hesitation about speaking his mind to her. He was also much too likely to give her orders, having grown accustomed to it, she thought, when he taught her to ride when she was a child. He was quite willing to break the law for her sake—he had never quailed at the thought of abducting Stonehaven—but she felt sure that he would refuse to let her put herself into a situation that might damage her reputation.

So she went to Madame Beauclaire's in a hackney, the nerves in her stomach tying themselves into an ever-expanding knot. As she had expected, the footman at the door let her in after one quick glance, bowing deeply. She suspected that he could have said with whom she had left the other night, as well. Plying her fan to hide her nerves, she strolled along the hall, glancing into the rooms on either side.

Lord Stonehaven was not there.

Disappointed, she strolled desultorily through the tables, stopping to observe a game now and then. At one of the tables, the name Stonehaven caught her ear, and she stopped short, every nerve alert.

“What?” one of the men at the table was saying, glancing toward one of his companions. “Oh, Stonehaven, yes—no, I haven't seen him tonight. Odd, he's been here every night this week, it seems.”

“Yes. I've never known him to be so gambling mad.”

Julia turned away, smiling to herself.
Gambling mad, was he?
She, too, knew that it was not his custom to attend Madame Beauclaire's or any other establishment that frequently. If he had been coming in every night, she could not help but believe that it had been because he was hoping to find her there. She had, after all, hinted that he could find her there when she had refused to give him her address.