The Clergyman's Daughter (12 page)

Jessica set aside her chocolate cup and said with stilted levity, “I enjoyed the refreshment, Graham. Before I go, was there anything else you required of me—other than satisfying your curiosity as to why I’m not spending more of your money?” She smiled archly and stood up, smoothing her skirt.

Lounging back in his chair, Raeburn massaged his square jaw as he watched her broodingly. Just when she shrugged her shawl tighter about her shoulders, her fingers working at the knot, and turned to go, he said, “There is one last thing, if you don’t mind….”

“Yes?” she murmured.

With deliberation he asked, biting off the words, “Tell me, Jess, just whom do you send packages to in Clerkenwell?”

For a long moment she could not speak, staring at him, her face unnaturally white and still. Only the flutter of long inky lashes vibrating over slanting green eyes showed her capable of movement. As Raeburn watched her intently he saw her lids dip shut for just a moment then open wide again. With an infinitesimal sigh she said quietly, “My congratulations, Graham. I underestimated your spy network.”

The rigid control she displayed was so out of character for Jessica that he wondered if she was deliberately trying to bait him, to make him lose his temper while she remained cool, her very composure an act of defiance. Since the first day he met her, she had been able to incite and infuriate him as no other…. In a tone matching her own, he replied, “I keep no spies, Jessica, There are only those who…appreciate how vitally concerned I am about the well-being of my family.”

“And naturally they hasten to report to you anything of interest?”

“On occasion.” He rose to his feet but did not approach her. He could sense in her slender body nervous tension leashed like a coiled spring, like a gazelle poised for flight, and he did not want to alarm her into running. He said with great precision, “Surely you must have realized that you could not use your maid to carry on a clandestine correspondence for any length of time without someone becoming aware of what was happening? The very fact of a domestic servant receiving letters is so outside the ordinary as to be quite remarkable. Even if Aunt Talmadge hadn’t—” He broke off abruptly, but too late.

Jessica nodded grimly. “I might have known Flora was behind this. She has always disliked me intensely.”

“She is devoted to this family,” Raeburn corrected, ignoring the conclusions he himself had drawn after his sister’s chaperon had left him earlier. “She wants no harm to come to any of its members. And you must admit that your furtive actions invite speculation…. Tell me, Jessica, are you in some kind of trouble? Why do you not—”

“I don’t have to tell you anything, Graham,” Jessica said rudely, small cracks appearing in her shell of icy calm, “You have no right—”

“I have every right, and you know it!” Raeburn exclaimed impatiently. “We have been through all that before. Now tell me, why—”

“No!” She glared at him, her green eyes wide and defiant, her rounded chin lifted in an attitude of rebellion that struck her, even as she posed, as perhaps just a trifle too artificial to be effective. With bitter self-examination she wondered what there was about Raeburn that always made her behave so melodramatically, why in his presence she tended to posture and rant like a simpering adolescent making her debut in amateur theatricals. Forcing herself to relax slightly, she repeated with iron control, “No, Graham, I will not tell you.”

He took a deep breath as if debating how to continue. After a moment he ventured, “You know, Jess, if you will not give me some explanation for your extraordinary behavior, I shall be forced to draw my own conclusions.”

She smiled ironically. “Since the first day we met, you have always drawn your own conclusions about me—and you have always been wrong.” With a shrug of resignation, she turned toward the door.

Raeburn winced. Quickly rising to his feet, he crossed the room to her before she could touch the knob and forestalled her by laying a gentle but irresistible hand on her shoulder. Jessica halted, glancing back in surprise, uncomfortably aware of the warmth radiating from his palm through the double thickness of shawl and dress to penetrate her smooth flesh. She looked down at his hand, then up to his face. He was regarding her seriously, his gray eyes almost—almost remorseful. As if picking his words with great care he said, “You’ve never forgiven me for that first day, have you, Jess? Despite all the time that has passed, all the things that have happened since then, you refuse to forget the way we met.”

“Did you really think that I would?” Jessica asked bluntly, raw anger stabbing her as memory came flooding back. “I was completely innocent, and without the slightest justification you humiliated me, you brutalized me, you threatened to—to rape me. I have never doubted that if you had encountered me in some more secluded spot, you would have carried out your threats.”

He shook his head fiercely, his blood hair catching the waning afternoon light. “No, Jess,” he said hoarsely, “no, I would never have hurt you. I do not hurt women. It’s just that I was drunk, I was…enraged. There had been…letters. I thought Andrew had fallen victim to—” He broke off abruptly, hesitating until Jessica quirked one fine black brow interrogatively. With a sigh he finished. “I had been told my brother had become enamored of a beautiful slut. It would not have been…unprecedented.”

Jessica blanched, chilly with indignation. She thought of the first nights she had spent with her husband, his eager but fumbling ineptness, his astonished delight at sensations that were obviously as new to him as they had been to her. Disdainfully she said, “Graham, you cannot hope to excuse your own behavior by accusing Andrew of—”

“I did not mean Andrew,” Raeburn said quietly. “I realize now that the boy was as untried as you when the pair of you eloped to Scotland. The Foxe I referred to who cherished the fatal propensity for unsuitable women was…our father.”

Jessica stared, eyes narrowing as she tried to recall what she knew personally of the fourth earl, who had died when she was eight years old. She could remember nothing of the man himself; rather she could call to mind only a gleaming crested carriage with drawn curtains that had rattled through the muddy principal street of the village one day, and her mother’s urgent admonition to “Curtsy, child, quickly, in case he should look out at us.” If villagers gossiped about the man, it had been outside Jessica’s hearing. Nor did she think Andrew had spoken over much of his father; his much older half brother seemed to have been the chief male influence in her husband’s pathetically short life….

At last she said helplessly, “I’m sorry, Graham, but I don’t understand.”

“I’m sure you don’t. Few people know the story.” Gently he guided Jessica away from the door. “Come, my dear, let us talk some more,” he urged as he settled her back into the puffy armchair. “There’s chocolate remaining in the pot that will go to waste if you don’t drink it…and I think it is time I trusted you with some of the family secrets.”

Jessica sipped her chocolate and waited with anxious expectation for Raeburn to begin his narrative. She was aware that he had decided to “trust” her with his confidence in the hope that she in turn would show a little faith in him, but her irritation at the obvious ploy seemed minor compared to her curiosity about what he intended to tell her. Silence stretched between them. Just when she thought Raeburn had changed his mind about confiding in her, he asked suddenly, his deep voice unnaturally resonant in the charged silence of the study, “Jess, just how much do you know about Andrew and Claire’s mother?”

The question startled her, for her mind had been intent on her husband’s father; she had assumed that when Raeburn said the man pursued “unsuitable” women, he had meant to
imply
that his predecessor had fallen victim to some avaricious lightskirt. Considering what Jessica knew of Raeburn’s own inclinations—and apart from the things Andrew had told her, during her year away from Renard Chase she had followed the earl’s adventures avidly in the society columns of the London gazettes—she could not help reflecting cynically that he showed no particular moral objection to the muslin company, only to those members of its dubious sisterhood who…aspired too high.

But what had all this to do with the late Countess of Raeburn?

Seeing that Raeburn awaited a response to his question, Jessica said, “I know almost nothing about your father’s second wife. I’ve never even seen a portrait of the woman. Claire did tell me, however, that her mother died when she was born.”

Raeburn’s eyes were dark gray and impenetrable, reminding Jessica of fog banks on the Channel, such as she had seen during her time in Brighton. When those cloudy masses appeared thick and threatening on the horizon, fisherfolk and landsmen alike scrambled for the safety of home and hearth, anxious to be indoors when the fog rolled through the deserted streets…. Raeburn said baldly, “Claire is mistaken. Her mother died when the daughter was six months old. She ingested a substantial quantity of the white lead that she had formerly used to paint her face.”

Jessica blinked, stunned. “A…an accident, you mean?”

“No, my dear,” Raeburn said quietly, shaking his head. “It was deliberate suicide, of a most excruciatingly slow and painful sort. The wretched woman would have done better to find some Prussian blue….”

Shuddering, Jessica set down her cup with trembling hands. “Graham, I don’t understand.”

“Neither did we, until after her funeral, when the moneylenders came forth like vermin from under a rock, demanding payment for her many debts.” He saw the confusion sitting awkwardly on Jessica’s lovely features, and he said, “Perhaps I ought to start at the beginning.”

He gulped down the dregs of his coffee and grimaced, the sour taste a feeble echo of the bitterness of his memories. As he forced his tongue to shape the words smoothly, it occurred to him that he was confiding in Jessica with a frankness he had never before used with any woman, except possibly his old nanny, long since gathered to the bosom of her ancestors. The women in his life had not been chosen for their talents at conversation; even glorious Lucinda, the opera singer, with her magnificent voice, had been little used for
talking
…. When Raeburn tried to imagine telling his stepmother’s unsavory tale to Daphne, he knew that his fiancée would refuse to listen, chiding him primly with the admonition that some secrets were better off buried with the dead. But now Jessica watched him patiently, attentively, the intelligence in her eyes belying the demureness of hands folded in her lap as she waited for him to begin.

With an effort Raeburn said, “My own mother did die in childbed when I was but a toddler. I don’t remember her at all, although in the London house there is a Gainsborough portrait painted at the time of her marriage. She was my father’s second cousin, blond and pretty, a most…appropriate bride, and although the match was arranged by my grandparents, by all accounts my parents dealt quite amicably together, until she died. After that I was raised by my nanny until I was of an age to be sent away to Eton. My father was not an especially affectionate father, and I saw him rarely, although he made a point of calling on me whenever he was in the vicinity, and he never forgot my birthday or Christmas. I’m not sure just what he did the rest of the time. I think he took his seat in Parliament now and then, no doubt because it was expected of him, but I don’t know that he ever spoke on any issue. In short, he was stolid, undemonstrative, and very, very correct…and no one could have been more stunned than I was when, just after my eleventh birthday, he called me home from school to introduce me to my new stepmother, the beautiful teenage daughter of a Gloucester innkeeper.”

“Good God,” Jessica said inadequately.

Raeburn looked skeptical. “Indeed? If there is a good God, I fear He sadly neglected that poor woman….”

He braided his long fingers together, absently toying with his signet ring as he said ruefully, “Looking back over a distance of more than two decades, I realize that the person most blameworthy in that debacle was my father, a man of some forty years lusting after a girl less than half his age. Apparently he had been touring the Cotswolds, and he suddenly took a fancy to look at Gloucester Cathedral; when he stopped at an inn just outside town and saw the host’s radiantly beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter…. He was so besotted that he offered marriage, and I suppose the girl’s parents can be excused for thinking they were doing well by her, forcing her to accept him, but surely someone ought to have realized how very…cruel it was. She looked like a countess, tall and slim and lovely, with vibrant red hair, but whenever she opened her mouth, her West Country accent betrayed her, and she had neither education nor native wit to help her cope with the vast changes in her station, her life. She tried hard enough—at first, but she was always making mistakes. The servants used to laugh at her behind her back.” Raeburn paused, grimacing. “God help me, so did I.”

Jessica heard the pain in his voice. “But you were just a child.”

“So was she,” Raeburn exclaimed impatiently. “When Andrew was born, she couldn’t have been any older than Claire is now. We became friends of a sort after she gave me my little brother, but I soon went back to school and she was left to manage alone.”

“Didn’t your father help her?”

Raeburn shrugged. “I think not, I doubt that he even realized the enormity of her distress. As I said, he was not by nature a demonstrative or insightful man. Once his infatuation with his young bride waned, they continued to cohabit after a fashion, but emotionally he abandoned her to her own devices in much the same way he had abandoned me. Unfortunately, because she was so utterly unsuited to the life and society in which she was compelled to live, she was easily led astray. The friends she made—or rather, people she erroneously thought were her friends—tended to be hangers-on eager to take advantage of her youth and inexperience. Aspiring cicisbeos, ivory turners….”

His gray eyes grew bleak, and when he spoke again he spit out the words as if they had a foul taste. “I remember vividly the last time I saw my stepmother…alive. It was just before I entered Oxford. I had been living in Town for some time, but in most respects I was still grass-green, and some of my cronies decided to drag me off to a gambling hell to…shall we say…further, my education. I was nervous, but eager enough to prove myself a man of the world, but when we stepped inside that…that establishment, the first thing I saw was my stepmother, holding the bank at the faro table. I was incredibly shocked to find her there, for until that moment I had had no idea of her…failing, but her appearance was even more upsetting. I had not seen her since paying a duty call when Claire was born, and in the intervening months she had aged years. She looked raddled, ill, so ill, in fact, that my friends did not recognize her, I remember with appalling clarity the look in her eyes, that wild, glazed expression you see sometimes in those for whom gaming has become a kind of—of disease. She refused to abandon the cards, even when the proprietor informed her that he could extend no more credit. Only when she saw me did she seem to come out of her spell.”