The Mammoth Book of Regency Romance (67 page)

He was gazing at a gloomy hunting painting that belonged to Lord March, but turned at the sound of her steps on the stairs. His smile faded a little at the chill tone of her voice.

“Mr Quentin, how do you do?”

“Miss Howitt. I am interrupting. I am sorry to intrude upon you without an invitation. I felt the need to see you.”

He made it sound as if seeing her was somehow imperative, but she dared not imagine that was true.

Without answering, she showed him into the parlour and they were seated. “I cannot stay long,” she said. “My aunt is ill and the doctor is with her.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. Although your aunt did not seem to be an invalid when I met her at the Pump Room, and the first time we met you mentioned her penchant for imagining herself ill.” His look was quizzical.

“That is neither here nor there,” Clarinda said quietly. “I owe my aunt a debt. Without her Lucy and I would have been … well, I don’t know what would have happened to us.” Suddenly she looked at him, her eyes widening. “Oh.” A thought had occurred to her. He’d come to offer for Lucy! After one meeting he was hopelessly in love with her sister and wished to ask for her hand. Her emotions sank even lower but she tried to smile. “Lucy is out shopping with her friends. I am sure she will be sorry she missed you.”

His smile was gone. He was frowning almost furiously. “I didn’t come here to see Lucy, I came here to see you. I thought I made that perfectly clear, Clarinda?”

Puzzled, not daring to believe, she gazed into his eyes.

“Clarinda, let me make myself very clear. I have no interest in your sister whatsoever. It is you I am interested in.”

“I don’t understand,” she began, hoping for and yet dreading his answer.

“Mrs Russo informed me of your circumstances,” he said dryly. “An unpaid servant to your aunt. I have come to offer you a way out, Clarinda.”

“A way out?” she croaked, praying she was wrong, and yet hoping …

Lady March’s voice drifted down from upstairs. “Clarinda!”

Clarinda stood up, shaking.

Footsteps on the stairs and a white-faced maid poked her head around the door of the parlour. “Miss Clarinda, the doctor says can you come?”

Clarinda hesitated, torn between hearing what James Quentin had come to say and her duty to her aunt. “I must go.”

“Clarinda, please, I know I have put my question very badly. I should have said how much I admire you, how I dream of you, how ever since we met in the rain I have longed for your company.”

Her heart was thudding so hard she could barely hear herself think. “I must go,” she croaked, and with a gasp she fled the parlour.

In her brief absence Lady March’s bedchamber had turned into a bedlam. Servants were running back and forth with smelling salts and lavender-soaked cloths. Lady March was wailing on her bed, clutching her head and saying her brain was boiling.

The doctor was standing, watching her, a frown on his face. Clarinda, approaching the bed, caught sight of her aunt’s reading matter on the bedside table —
Strange and Unusual Diseases.

Her aunt opened one eye and, seeing that Clarinda was distracted, redoubled her wailing.

“Aunt, please, you are frightening us.”

Dr Moorcroft appeared at her shoulder. “She was perfectly all right until she heard you had a visitor downstairs,” he said. “A Mr Quentin?” His eyes searched her flushed face. “Your aunt seems to have taken it into her head that he is here to take you away from her.”

“Well, she is wrong,” Clarinda replied bleakly. “I know where my duty lies.”

His glance stayed on hers a moment more and then he squared his shoulders. “Right,” he said grimly. “How odd. I have just come from Mr Collingwood, who also possesses this book. Can there be a connection, do you think?”

“My aunt has recently made the acquaintance of Mr Collingwood,” Clarinda said cautiously.

Her aunt opened one eye, then closed it again quickly when she realized she was being observed. “Is Mr Collingwood as unwell as I?” she demanded in a surprisingly strong voice for one so ill. “I’m certain he cannot be.”

Dr Moorcroft considered her. “It may be necessary to quarantine you and Mr Collingwood, Lady March. To ensure this … this disease does not spread throughout Bath.”

Lady March looked quite thrilled at the prospect. By the time arrangements were made, and the doctor was leaving, she was sitting up drinking tea.

“She is lonely and bored,” Clarinda explained, knowing it was no excuse.

“All the more reason to find her a friend of similar mind,” the doctor said, with a twinkle in his eye. He paused at the head of the stairs, waiting until the servants had passed by and they were alone. “Has she reason to fear Mr Quentin, Clarinda?”

Clarinda looked away. “No. I cannot put my own happiness before that of my aunt, or Lucy.”

The doctor sighed, but said nothing.

It was not until he reached home that he allowed his anger to show. “It really is ridiculous,” he said, as he and Etta sat together in their handkerchief of a garden. “Clarinda obviously loves this fellow but is refusing to allow herself to accept him because of her wretched aunt.”

Etta, who wasn’t her usual smiling self, said softly, “And what is this fellow’s name, my love?”

“Quentin,” he told her, proud he’d remembered.

A moment later Etta was in tears.

“My darling, whatever is the matter? Etta, please tell me?”

Slowly, painfully, Etta allowed him to draw out the truth. Afterwards she was drained and he put her to bed and sat with her as she fell into a deep sleep. When she woke, he was still holding her hand. He bent over her, smiling, and kissed her lips.

“I love you,” he said. “I don’t care about the past. We have the future to look forward to, and I am forever grateful for it.”

Etta gazed at him with shining eyes.

“What are you going to do?” he asked, worriedly. “Whatever it is, you know I will stand by your decision.”

Etta sighed, and, after a moment, she told him.

The Assembly Rooms were lit by lamp and candlelight, the musicians busy playing their instruments as the dancers moved gracefully or gossiped in little groups by the walls. Clarinda, feeling like a shell of her former self, was only here because Lucy had insisted, and her aunt was visiting Mr Collingwood and his sister. They seemed to have so much in common that there was little else her aunt would speak of. Clarinda was bewildered by the change in her.

“You should be pleased,” Lucy said with a grin. “I am. Let her marry old Collingwood. They could be wheeled up the aisle in their chairs together, can you imagine it?”

“Lucy,” Clarinda murmured reprovingly.

Her thoughts were melancholy tonight. Mr James Quentin had asked her to marry him, or at least that was what he’d intended to do, and she had cut him rudely short and rushed away. How could he forgive her for that? He must think he had embarrassed her, or she didn’t return his feelings. How could he understand the conflicting demands that had been tearing her in two?

Of course he would never approach her again. She wouldn’t be the least surprised if he had left Bath altogether.

“Here is Etta,” Lucy whispered. “I will leave you. I see Isabella over by the potted palm.”

Her sister hurried away, eager to join her friends. Clarinda smiled as Etta approached. “I did not know if you would come,” she said.

Etta looked as pale as she had at the Pump Rooms, and there was something anxious about her, a sense of expectation.

“I have heard from my husband about your aunt’s new hobby,” she said, with a ghost of her old twinkle.

“Yes, my aunt and Mr Collingwood are very close.”

Etta glanced beyond her and stiffened. She bit her lip. “Oh dear,” she said in a wobbly voice.

The next moment she had hurried past Clarinda and grasped the hands of James Quentin who had been approaching, resplendent in formal evening wear. “James,” Etta said, as if the name meant everything to her.

Shocked, speechless, Clarinda stared. She tried to understand what this meant but nothing occurred. There was a sick sense of despair in the pit of her stomach, and something else — a feeling of furious jealousy.

She turned away, not knowing where she was going, not caring. She was almost at the door when Etta slipped her hand through Clarinda’s arm and turned her around. Her friend’s eyes were shining, her cheeks flushed. She looked like a woman in love, Clarinda decided bleakly.

She was so busy being miserable she didn’t at first take in the words Etta was saying to her.

“He is my brother! I … I was foolish enough to run off with someone totally unsuitable while James was away in the army. Our elder brother, Lord Hollingbury, disowned me, even when I begged to be allowed to come home.”

“Your … your brother?” Clarinda whispered.

“James came to Bath to find me.”

Clarinda looked up and found her eyes held and captured by those of James Quentin, and suddenly she realized how like Etta’s they were — both so dark and warm and dear.

“I had sworn I would find her and make all well again,” he said softly. “I had people searching and discovered she had married and was hiding in Bath, so I came to fetch her home.”

Etta laughed. “Only this is my home now.”

“But …” Clarinda looked from one to the other. “You do not mean Dr Moorcroft is the unsuitable man you …?”

“Oh no. I met him later, and fell in love. I have been very fortunate.”

As if her words had conjured him up, her doctor joined their little group. For a moment the emotion ran high, before Etta and her husband departed to the supper room.

“I made a bit of a hash of it, didn’t I?” James broke the silence between them. They had stepped into an ante-room, hidden from the crowd by draped curtains. He smiled, his eyes seeming to caress her and warm her.

“No,” she said, her voice trembling with passion, “it was my fault. I thought there was no hope and I couldn’t let myself believe. I couldn’t bear it. So I sent you away.” She lifted her head and gazed into his face. “Did you really come to Bath to find Etta?”

“Yes. But I found you, Clarinda. My darling, will you marry me? Will you be my Lady Hollingbury?”

Clarinda allowed her whirling thoughts to settle. There was her aunt, but she seemed to have found a new life. There was Lucy, but Lucy had a mind of her own it seemed and wasn’t going to fall in with Clarinda’s idea of her future. And that left Clarinda.

“Yes,” she said, and a wave of such happiness washed over her.

He took her into his arms. “I will never complain about Bath weather again,” he whispered against her lips, “because that is what brought us together.”

And then he kissed her.

He had caught gangs of murderers in the stews off Whitechapel High Street. Arrested opium dealers in seedy brothels near the Wapping docks. But in all the years he had worked for Bow Street as a Runner, Trevelyan Foxton had never been required to investigate in a more foreign and intimidating place.

He watched the shop from across the street, drawing smoke from his cheroot. Each time the door opened, the silver bell tinkled delicately, and he caught the faint scents of rose and lavender. Ladies flowed in and out continuously. Ladies of every age and every description — slender, giggling girls, with shining eyes, and their mamas, the formidable matrons of the ton. And from within, all he could hear was incessant feminine chatter.

Trevelyan glanced up at the name above the shop, proudly displayed on a large sign, painted in burgundy and ivory, glimmering with gilt.

No longer was she plain Sally Thomas. She was now Estelle Desjardins. He’d caught a glimpse of her when the door opened. She wore severe black and had pins stuck in her mouth. She had been pointing at a thin, sallow girl who looked miserable in an ivory dress. And, at the same time, she was lecturing the mother, a bosomy, grey-haired woman he recognized as the Duchess of St Ives.

Now that was the Sally he remembered.

She’d been the toughest, hardest and fiercest of their gang. All of the lads — the pickpockets, the mudlarks, the thieves — had been afraid of her. Except for him. He knew the one thing that frightened Sally. When he wanted her to shut her mouth, all he had to do was kiss her. Or show her he cared about her.

That had been a long time ago. Back in the days when he never would have dreamed he’d end up on the good side of the law as a Bow Street Runner. Back then he never would have pictured Sally in anything but a ragged dress, with her fists doubled and her point of a chin stuck out. Never would he have pictured her looking down her nose at grand ladies.

Trevelyan tossed away his cheroot and ground it into the cobblestones of the street.

Sally had done well for herself.

It was a shame he was going to have to destroy her.

Estelle froze. All thoughts of what exact shade of ivory the daughter of the Duke of St Ives should wear vanished from her head. It no longer mattered that the fashion was now for long sleeves. Or that it could be possible to make Lady Amelia’s bosom appear more ample, with strategic pleating and a lot of padding.

He
stood in the doorway, the proverbial bull in the china shop. At once her lavender sachets were overwhelmed by the rich, refined, masculine scent of him, of smoke, shaving soap, and sandalwood. His straight shoulders filled the doorway from side to side. His gaze — sharp, intelligent — glinted with an amusement that made her quake, and fastened immediately on her.

She had wondered if he would ever come and find her. It would be so easy for Trevelyan to get his revenge, which he surely must want.

All he had to do was tell every lady in her shop exactly where she had come from and who she really was.

A pin jabbed into her tongue. Estelle spat them into her hand. The attention of every woman in her salon riveted on him. He had to duck for the doorway, and he took off his beaver hat to clear it, revealing his striking coal-black hair and the one streak of white that began at his temple and followed the sweep of his unfashionably long hair to his shoulder.