The Mercenary Major (4 page)

She said nothing. She was looking at the floor.

“Damn. How could I pay Gilling?” he asked.

She looked up, and had there been the least hint of self-congratulation in her eyes, he would have left her house that moment, but there was only an unselfconscious practical concern. “I would pay the corporal, of course, and the tailor.”

“For how long?” Jack asked, picturing himself dressed in borrowed finery, going about among Lady Letitia’s friends.

“Through Christmas,” she countered.

“And Hengrave?”

“Well, I don’t know, but suppose we invite him to stay here as your guest while he looks for employment. It should relieve his worries about funds.”

“I should have let you rescue the elephant,” Jack said.

Letty’s step was particularly light as she made her way up the great stair.
Until Christmas
. She had months now in which to win Jack back to the Favertons and find him a bride.

The bathwater had become decidedly cool, too cool to allow Jack to linger another moment. Reluctantly he put his book aside. Lady Letitia’s library was another of the seductions his aunt was plying him with, and she had taken him to Lackington’s. But the books he read only confirmed what he had learned as an officer under Wellington— young Englishwomen measured the worth of potential husbands most carefully—a fact of life Lady Letitia seemed to dismiss. He stepped from the copper tub and, shivering, reached for the towel Gilling had laid out for him.

He buried his face in the towel, thick and faintly scented, another luxury. He wrapped it around his waist and turned toward his bedroom to see what clothes Gilling had selected for him this day. His friend had had no hesitation about spending Lady Letitia’s money on tailors, and Jack had to admit that Gilling had a knack for choosing clothes. Letitia insisted Jack would now rival the loungers in the bow window at White’s, but Jack knew that remark for Spanish coin. He refused to allow his jackets to be so tight as to restrict movement, nor would he wear shirt points high enough to slice his earlobes when he tried to turn his head.

At the door to his dressing room he found his path blocked by the corporal, a razor in one hand, a bowl of lather in the other.

“Beard and mustache have to go, sir,” said Gilling.

“No.” Jack stepped back involuntarily.

Gilling stood patiently, shaving implements in hand, clearly unwilling to be denied. There was a solidity of person about the corporal that could make him appear as immovable as a boulder.

“Now, sir, don’t be stubborn,” he said. “Think of our agreement. How am I to make my reputation as a gentleman’s gentleman unless I turn you out in proper style?”

“That’s blackmail, Gilling,” Jack protested.

“Got to show your face to the ladies, sir,” insisted Gilling, “or they won’t look twice.” He put the shaving things on the dressing table and pulled a chair up to it.

“That girl in the gardens looked twice last night.” Jack dared to grin at his sober friend.

“A minx! I’m sure you know her sort, sir,” said Gilling. “Weighing your purse she was, Bandit, not your charms.”

“They will all weigh my purse, my friend, and you know it. The young ladies my aunt has in mind will calculate my worth as carefully as any poor girl selling herself in the streets.”

“Now, sir, you’re a gentleman born—”

“Not a gentleman bred, however. I’m the Bandit. Lady Letitia must see that a fine coat hardly makes me eligible for a match of her making.”

Gilling gave Jack a solemn look. “Tell you what, sir,” he said quietly. “You let me shave you proper, and we’ll send the sergeant to tell her ladyship whatever tales you want her to hear.”

Jack eyed his friend. If anything could convince Lady Letitia that he had no place in the
ton
, it would be the stories these two men could tell. “Torres Vedras? Madrid?” he asked, naming the worst episodes.

Gilling nodded, his face grim. “As you wish, Major.” He patted the chair.

Jack stepped forward and seated himself. Before he could say another word, his face and neck were swathed in hot cloths. He closed his eyes.

“You know, sir,” said Gilling. Jack heard the clink of the brush against the bowl as Gilling whipped up the lather. “Torres Vedras, Madrid, not all you did for that black-eyed Spanish witch will change her ladyship’s opinion of you one jot.”

**** 4 ****

V
ictoria Carr stepped into her father’s library and shut the door quietly. Late-September sun, low in the sky, slanted its last rays through the west windows across a faded Aubusson carpet, peculiarly worn in a narrow path.
The last time
, she said to herself as she walked that stretch. She stopped in front of a half-moon table topped with a blue-and-white vase of Michaelmas daisies and sprays of goldenrod, the only color in the room. Taking a deep breath, she looked up.

Above her on the wall was a portrait of a lovely young woman, just Victoria’s age. The woman in the portrait was dressed in billowing white satin, a blue sash tied below her breasts. A straw bonnet trimmed in the same cornflower-blue dangled by its ribbons from her clasped hands. A basket over her arm held a profusion of cut roses. Her light-golden hair was drawn up in a knot of curls, and soft curls framed her delicately tinted cheeks. Her gentle eyes were as blue as the skies behind her. She seemed everything sweet and soft that a woman could be.

At thirty-one, after a quarrel with her husband, the woman in the picture had gone to the stables, taken his most mettlesome mount, and ridden to her death.

Victoria looked down, as dissatisfied as ever with the portrait of her mother that explained nothing. The skirts of her new muslin day dress caught and held her gaze. The color, a deep-red like the bryony and hawthorn berries in the lane, had decided her on the purchase. She would never again wear black or gray or lavender. And never blue.

She returned her gaze to the portrait and straightened her shoulders. Not for her that languorous curving posture. Not for her the soft curls framing the face or brushing an alabaster shoulder. Victoria touched the loose coil of hair at the back of her head. Her hair was more brown than Anne Carr’s had been, but it was the smooth style she’d adopted that really set her apart from her mother. If there was nothing to be done about the shape of her eyes, or the high wide cheekbones, or the dent in her chin that still proclaimed an overwhelming resemblance to Anne Carr, Victoria had done her best to look different.

She turned her back on the portrait and stared at the clock on the mantel, which clicked, cutting off each minute with unhurried mechanical precision. Victoria schooled herself to patience. What were a few minutes now? Within the hour she would be gone. London beckoned. She closed her eyes, picturing the gay whirl of dancers in a grand ballroom.

Then she heard her father’s footsteps on the stair, heard him pause to greet Evans in the entry and collect the day’s post, heard him put his hand to the knob of the library door. He entered, his incongruously white head bent, his eyes scanning the newspaper in his left hand, in his right a single yellow rose. On his sleeve was a mourning band faded nearly the gray of his coat. He reached the table under the painting and stopped. Without looking up, he raised the rose to his lips briefly and laid it on the polished wood. Only then did he lift his gaze from the paper.

“Tory, I didn’t see you.” His glance strayed to the portrait, completing the salute he’d begun with the rose, and then came back to Victoria.

“I know, Father.” She reached up and gave his cheek a quick kiss. In spite of his white hair or perhaps because of it, his face seemed boyish, lean and brown from many hours spent going about the estate. His figure was equally fine. Other gentlemen in the county were inclined to grow a decided belly by forty, but her father at three and forty was as slim as many a younger man. It was the grief of losing her mother that had turned his hair white in the first weeks after her death.

“I just came to remind you of my plans and tease you a bit for missing the chance to go to town,” she told him.

In the weeks since Victoria had first announced her decision to go to town, the bitterness of their quarrel had lessened. He smiled at her.

“Me in town? Never. Too dull for politics or the wits in the clubs, too old for the ladies.” He indicated his hair. He was looking at her now with a puzzled expression in his blue eyes. “You’ll do better with the Favertons.” He turned to his desk. She had interrupted his ritual, and seven years of habit were hard to break.

“Actually,” she watched him settle behind the desk, “the countess will be with us for little more than a fortnight. Then Katie and I will go to Lady Letitia.”

Her father’s head came up sharply. “Letitia Faverton?”

Victoria nodded. She’d disturbed him, and he was staring off into space, no doubt seeing some image from the past more real than her corporeal self. “How long will you be gone then?” he asked at last.

“Oh, for as long as Letty will have us, I imagine,” she said as lightly as she could. It was her one act of cowardice. She would not tell him she hoped to stay, to find a new life in London among people who would see her for herself.

With a little shake of his head he returned to the present. His gaze cleared. “You’ve put off mourning,” he said, as if she’d accomplished some mysterious sleight of hand.

“As should you,” she replied.

“Don’t. If I was wrong to hold you to it so long, I must keep my . . . observances.” His glance shifted from Victoria to the woman in the painting and back. “Your hair,” he said.

“I won’t be a living portrait, Father. I am not her.”

After a silence he said stiffly, “Of course not. I want you to enjoy the Season, Victoria.”

“Thank you, Father.” She could see he was not really listening. “Good-bye.”

“You’re going
now
?” He looked at her, looked at the painting, and back at her. Then he stood and came around the desk.

“The Favertons sent a cart for my trunk earlier,” she explained. “Reg will be here in the gig any minute to take me to the hall. We leave early tomorrow.”

“Then let me walk you out.” He offered his arm.

From the steps of Faverton Hall Victoria observed the scene in the drive below. Liveried footmen were loading two crested carriages, while eight horses steamed their restless breath into the chill morning air. Four outriders held their own horses, and the two coachmen stood apart laughing at some private joke. At the foot of the steps Stook, the Favertons’ butler, directed the placement of an enormous assortment of trunks, valises, and bandboxes. From time to time, Miss Goode, abigail to the lady of the house, offered curt suggestions to one of the men laboring under staggering burdens. Considering the style in which they were to travel, Victoria thought it no wonder that Lord Dorward had spent the evening before complaining of the cost of his family’s expedition to London.

An equally busy scene was taking place to Victoria’s right. The hall was undergoing one of the many renovations Lord Dorward had undertaken. Scaffolding had been erected along the east face of the building, and workmen were climbing up and down with tools and buckets to the accompaniment of hammers and chisels ringing on stone. Other men were conferring with the master carpenter, who had unrolled a set of plans on a makeshift workbench.

From above her came the voices of her friends descending the stair, and she turned to greet them. Lady Dorward, a plump brunette of the sweetest disposition and rosiest cheeks imaginable, had invited Victoria to join them in London for the Little Season. Lady Dorward’s daughter, Lady Katherine Faverton, was a shy girl of seventeen with all the prettiness of bouncing brown ringlets and wide blue eyes. Katie was Victoria’s dearest friend, and Reg Faverton, a tall young man with flaming carrot hair and a ruddy complexion, had from long acquaintance become something of a brother to Victoria.

“Excited, Tory?” Reg helped his mother down the stairs. “Not the thing to show it,” he warned her. “Katie’s scared,” he added with a glance at his sister.

“I am, of course,” Katie admitted. “That’s why I am glad you’re coming, Victoria.”

“You shall grow in courage every day, Katie,” Victoria assured her friend.

“How soon, Stook?” called Lady Dorward.

“Minutes, my lady,” the butler replied.

Just then the great door behind them burst open, and the Earl of Dorward came running down the wide stair. Walter Faverton, Lord Dorward, was a powerfully built, strong-featured man with bushy brows and erratic energies.

“See what comes of letting a single woman set up her own establishment,” he thundered. “Here is Letty, with no more sense than a green girl, taken in by some impostor.” The earl charged down on them, waving a letter in one hand as if brandishing a sword.

“What impostor do you mean, my dear?” asked Lady Dorward, clutching her son’s arm for support and following with her gaze the wild circles her husband was tracing in the air with the fragile piece of paper.

“Some fellow claiming to be Jack Amberly,” said the earl. “Can’t be, of course. The boy was killed along with my foolish sister and that fortune-hunting captain of hers. Stands to reason, don’t you know.” The burst of energy that had carried him down the steps now left him towering over his wife and children. Reg gave his father the heavy-lidded look of the terribly bored and flicked some imagined lint from his sleeve. The earl harrumphed and turned to his wife. He thrust the letter at her and stood, rocking impatiently toe to heel, heel to toe as she withdrew her hands from her muff, pulled her spectacles from her reticule, and scanned the paper.

Katie’s hands started plucking nervously at the folds of her skirt as if they had a will of their own, and she darted a glance at Victoria. The earl’s outbursts were as familiar to Victoria as they were to his own family, but she would not allow herself to be cowed by a man of his uncertain temper and excitable imagination. If only her friends had some champion to stand up to their papa. She smiled at Katie, encouraging her friend to be brave.