The Dangers Of Deceiving A Viscount (26 page)

The moment the door shut behind Joshua, Will had gone down on his haunches next to his father and implored him, “He does not mean what he says, Papa. He is troubled and afraid and he…” He is lost. “He does not mean what he says. You must believe me.”

His father’s eyes showed him nothing but pain.

And now Joshua was trying to get himself killed for reasons that Will could not fathom.

Looking at Phoebe, he felt ashamed of his family. “Thank you for coming,” he said sincerely. “I won’t be long.”

He turned, began to stride from the bedchamber.

“No, wait!” Phoebe cried. “Is there nothing more you would tell me?”

He took a quick look around. “There are some books on the table there,” he said. “Find one you would like to read. Good night, Phoebe. I shall return as soon as I am able.”

And with that, he rushed out the door, the sense of foreboding in him growing the longer he tarried.

Phoebe flinched at the sound the door made when it swung shut behind Will. He’d left so quickly she hadn’t yet moved an inch.

She looked down at her charge; she could see the pink of his scalp through the shock of white hair.

She saw the earl’s crooked index finger move and believed that was meant for her. “I beg your pardon, my lord, I am being rude,” she said.

He lifted the finger again.

“I…Would you like me to read to you?” she asked, and glanced around the room. Two chairs were pushed up against the wall farthest from the hearth. A round table was at the opposite end of the room and was stacked with a collection of books. She walked to the stack of books and selected one that didn’t seem as dry as the others: The Cremona Violin by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann.

She returned to the earl’s side and looked about for a place to bring the candle closer. There was only a single chair, pushed away from the hearth.

“This will never do, I’m afraid,” she said, and glanced again at her ward. “I rather imagine the furniture has been placed to allow you to move about freely, my lord, but I would suggest—gently, I beg you—that it makes for a rather unwelcoming room. If you will bear with me, I can make a few slight changes and then read to you for a time in a more comfortable setting.”

She waited for some sign that he heard her. A moment passed; he turned his head slightly, his gaze moving as high as it might—to her belly. And he lifted the index finger.

Phoebe grinned. “Marvelous. You will be very pleased when I am done, I am certain.”

Will eventually did return to the hall with Joshua, both of them covered with dirt, and Will’s knuckles bleeding from having fought off the two ruffians who were trying to rob his very drunken brother when Will found him.

But the fight had roused Joshua, and for the space of a quarter of an hour, the two brothers had fought side by side while Henry had gone for help.

When Henry returned with two friends, the ruffians took flight, Joshua slipped back into his inebriation, and it had taken all of Will and Henry and his friends to seat him on his horse. By the time he and Farley had put Joshua to bed, it was half past eleven o’clock. Cursing under his breath, Will strode to his father’s suite of rooms.

When he opened the door to the outer room, he was surprised by the sound of laughter and paused to listen.

“Oh, it was wretched of them!” she said, her voice lilting. “Can you imagine? The whole of London saw them! I thought my mother would faint with despair, but she laughed.”

Will tried his best to comb his hair with his fingers—his hat had been lost in the fight, unfortunately—and walked to the door of the sitting room. He could not say what surprised him more—that the furniture in the room had been rearranged or that Phoebe was sitting on the edge of her chair, animatedly relating some tale to his father.

“Well, my lord, I can assure you she was the only one who laughed. I firmly believed Miss Chadwick—Oh!” she said, noticing him standing in the door. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Please do go on with your tale—I am certain Papa would like to hear the end of it.”

“Oh,” she said, glancing nervously at the earl, “it was nothing more than a diversion, really, and I…” She stopped and squinted at Will. “I beg your pardon, but are you bleeding?”

“Am I?” he asked, and touched his face. His finger came away with blood on it. “I hadn’t realized.”

Phoebe was already on her feet, marching toward him. “You hadn’t realized? My lord, you are…you are covered in dirt, and…and look at your hands!” she exclaimed, taking one in her hand and lifting it.

“Ah,” he said, wincing when she touched the knuckle. It felt broken.

She frowned at him with the full weight of feminine disapproval. “Have you engaged in a fight, sir?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Your poor brother,” she said, looking at his knuckles again.

“No, no—my poor brother is asleep in his bed. This was done in defense of him.”

“These wounds should be cleaned,” she said sternly. “Is there a basin nearby?”

“My father’s bedchamber. I will go—”

“You can’t do it alone, not with both hands cut so badly,” she said, and gestured like a quartermaster toward the door that led into the bedchamber.

Will was not a fool—nor was he opposed to a little tender attention after what he’d endured this evening. “All right,” he conceded. “How is the earl?” he asked.

“Weary, I think,” Phoebe said, and as they passed him, she laid a hand comfortingly on his shoulder. It seemed to Will to be as natural an act of comfort toward his father as he’d ever seen.

He paused and put his hand on his father’s shoulder, too, in a much more feeble attempt to comfort him.

Phoebe was already at the basin when he entered the chamber, dipping a handkerchief in the water and wringing the excess from it.

He joined her and held out his right hand. She carefully began to clean the cuts and scrapes, her touch gentle, her head bent over his hand. “It must have been quite a fight.”

“Ouch!” He winced when she touched a particularly deep gash. “They were thieves, intent on divesting Joshua of his money…if not his life.”

“How terrible! Did they know him?”

“I don’t know. My friend seems to think that they did.” Personally, Will could think of any number of scenarios. Just thinking of his brother’s attempt to sell the horseflesh right out from under Wentworth Hall caused anger to surge through him all over again, and in a moment of weakness, he said, “I cannot fathom what makes him say or do the things he does. He knows very well that I cannot abide deceit in any form, for any reason.”

Phoebe suddenly dropped his hand and dipped the handkerchief in the soapy water.

“I cannot fathom any of my siblings, in truth,” he admitted further, and sighed heavenward. “I can’t seem to set it all to rights. I feel as if we are pieces of broken china—the large pieces have been put back together and sealed with the glue of a family…but there are little pieces chipped away from the whole, and I cannot seem to patch it together.”

Phoebe smiled thinly.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Not at all,” she said. “I suppose I am a bit tired, that’s all.”

“Of course you are. I have kept you too long. I can’t offer you enough of an apology—”

“Please, you mustn’t,” she said, looking up at him with eyes that looked like twin summer skies. “Your father and I have become friends. And I rather think he likes the room’s new arrangement.”

“Yes,” Will said, smiling, too. “I noticed.”

She laughed low, the sound of it almost a whisper as she gestured for his other hand. He dutifully brought that one up and looked at his cleaned fist as Phoebe ministered to the other. He watched the way her fingers moved on his. She was elegant in everything she did.

“Good Lord,” he said as a thought occurred to him. “The first guests for the house party will be arriving on Tuesday. To think I will be presenting my siblings to proper society!” The thought was almost overwhelming. “May I assume that the girls will be properly outfitted over the fortnight?”

“Of course,” she said. She was no longer looking at his hand as she cleaned his wounds, but at his face. “Frieda and I are putting the finishing touches on the ball gowns, which I hope to have finished by week’s end. We have completed the day dresses and morning gowns.”

He didn’t respond—he was looking at the way the candlelight played over her blond hair, making it shimmer in places. Her cleaning of his hand came to a stop. They stood looking at one another. She smiled; she was heart-stoppingly beautiful to him, and her smile warmed his heart.

“Well,” she said softly.

Will swallowed. “I must put my father to bed,” he forced himself to say.

She nodded. “There is one thing.” She reached into the pocket of her dress and withdrew the scarab, which she held up to him. “You left this behind…what is it?”

He smiled. “A scarab.” When Phoebe looked at him, he continued, “An amulet. The bloody merchant who took two pounds for it promised it was a charm to keep my physical desires at bay.” He smiled wryly, his gaze sweeping over her. “It is obviously worthless,” he murmured.

“But it is lovely. It is very unusual.”

“Then you must keep it,” he said, and folded her fingers over it. She opened her mouth to protest, but he shook his head. “I want you to have it,” he said, and squeezed her hand. “That is a decree.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you for tending to my wounds.” Yet he did not remove his hand or otherwise move.

She smiled as if she knew what she was doing to him. “Your father,” she reminded him.

“Yes.” He had to hold her in his arms again, to kiss the lips that smiled so enticingly at him now. But he only brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles before returning to the sitting room, to his father.

“I owe Madame Dupree a debt of thanks,” he said to his father. “She has been very kind to sit with you this evening.”

His father lifted his finger.

Phoebe came around on the other side of his chair and knelt down. “Good night, my lord. I promise to finish The Cremona Violin on my next visit.” She stood again and looked across the earl to Will. Her eyes were glistening in the candlelight, and Will could see the longing there, as deep as he felt it inside himself.

“Good night, my lord.”

“Sleep well, Madame Dupree. And thank you again.”

With another soft smile, she glided across the floor and disappeared through the door.

Will stood a moment, listening to the sound of her footfall. When he could no longer hear her, he looked at his father’s eyes. He could see the fatigue there, the worry for Joshua. “He’s all right, Papa,” he said. “He’s sleeping.”

He did not imagine the look of relief that filled his father’s eyes.

“Come on, then,” he said, rising up. “Let’s get you to bed. I will tell you of it all on the morrow.”

T he next morning, Will had a row with Alice, who was determined to go into Greenhill, even though there was no one to take her. He was expecting some tradesmen about some repairs that needed to be done to the house, Joshua was hardly in a condition to take her, and while Roger had offered, Will did not trust him in the least, because his youngest brother favored Alice over Jane.

Alice was furious with him for keeping her from town, but he had seen the way she had looked at the smithy last Sunday at church. “It is no use,” he told her. “I know what you want in Greenhill.”

That is when Alice began to sob and accused him of ruining her life. Will was not as hard-hearted as that—frankly, it was almost more than he could bear to see her so unhappy. But he also knew what was said about the young smithy, and he took his sobbing sister in his arms and said, “Whatever he has told you, darling, it is your fortune he courts. He is not an honorable man.”

With a shriek, Alice pushed against him. “You will say anything to keep me from him!” she cried, and fled the room.

He had listened to her slam the door, had heard her slippers against the marble foyer as she ran up to her rooms, and then sank onto a chair. He felt ridiculous in this role of father and brother and mother all tied up in one. He was hardly equipped for it—he had spent the last years of his life doing as he pleased, loving whom he pleased, consorting with whomever he pleased. He had been free.

Now, he felt like a prisoner in his own home. It was just as he’d blurted to Phoebe last night—he was hardly the person to guide them to any understanding of life. Yet he was all they had. What he wouldn’t give for a mother, a father—anyone—who understood them better than he.

It had been a trying couple of days, and he was hardly in the mood to sit idly and chat about the heat, but he had promised to call on the Fitzherberts. He would never be able to convince his siblings to adhere to proper decorum if he himself did not adhere to it, would he?

He arrived shortly after four o’clock, determined to carry on the course that he must follow in spite of his weariness. Caroline Fitzherbert received him as she always did, with a demure smile and an invitation to sit. Her mother was in attendance as well, her spirits high—she prattled on about the efforts of the household to catch a snake that had been discovered in the kitchen garden, the details of which sent Will into a near fit of slumber. His mind wandered horribly, through a jumbled disarray of thoughts about Joshua, about Phoebe, about the look in his father’s eyes when he had explained Joshua’s attempt to sell some of the horses, followed by his drunken binge.

But as tea wore on—or droned on, as it were—Will began to notice that Miss Fitzherbert was not her usual, attentive self. She seemed distracted, and kept glancing at a single rose in a vase on the end table near her chair.

When he invited her for a turn about the gardens before he took his leave, it seemed to him that she came along almost reluctantly. “Thank you for calling, my lord,” she said as they strolled past yellow daffodils and blue forget-me-nots. “We are always delighted with your company.” She smiled again and looked away.

“Your delight cannot possibly compare with my joy,” he said, the polite words coming to him from some place that was nowhere near his heart. He tried very hard to summon the same feelings of eager anticipation and warmth that he felt for Phoebe, but could not seem to find them. That made the situation even more preposterous, naturally, for Caroline Fitzherbert was a perfectly suitable candidate to be his wife. Phoebe was not.