The Rambunctious Lady Royston (9 page)

"A pox on his lordship," Samantha returned airily, her green eyes—made even brighter by her gown—dancing about playfully as she showed all the signs of a delighted child who has somehow escaped her nanny. "Besides," she twinkled, "my new husband may be many things, but he is definitely not such a sobersides as to cut up stiff over his wife's choice of gown. At times, you know, Izzy, I almost begin to believe old Zachary somewhat human."

Knowing any suggestion that Samantha's future might be endured more comfortably if she endeavored to speak a bit more respectfully about and to her new husband would be laughed away, Aunt Loretta contented herself with complaining that all this watching of her niece as she flitted about the room was "most prodigiously fatiguing," and the aunt withdrew from the conversation to take up residence on a faraway sofa that looked a good spot for a short restorative nap. Within moments, her head was nodding.

"Good," Samantha pronounced, as her aunt's chin took up familiar acquaintance with the top of her pouter-pigeon breast, "now we can get down to cases. I imagine," she put forth baldly, "you're champing at the bit wondering why we are back in town so soon."

Isabella shelved any missish disclaimers that it was none of her business as she had been on pins and needles with curiosity ever since her sister's note had come round to Mount Street that morning, demanding her presence in Portman Square within the hour. "I admit it, Sammy, I am utterly shameless," she urged her sister on eagerly. "Please tell me All! Why are you here? What happened on your honeymoon? Where is Lord Royston?" Her agitated questions tumbled upon each other.

Samantha smiled a singularly suggestive smile, guaranteed to pique Izzy's interest to the limit. "Firstly, to answer your questions in the order they were presented, I am here because—if you'll but turn your mind to a certain ceremony that took place in Hanover Square some three days ago—I live here.

"Secondly, nothing and everything, or should I say everything but one particular thing, happened on that atrocious, oversized scow Zachary calls a yacht.

"Finally, I haven't the foggiest notion of the current whereabouts of my esteemed lord and master—not, never fear, that I shall go into a sad decline over his absence. In actual fact, the man could be in Jericho for all I should ever miss his odious presence."

Isabella's insides tingled deliriously as her virginal mind made a speedy inventory of the many and varied passages in her collection of Minerva Press novels depicting the plight of Young Innocence once in the clutches of Evil. "Was he such a brute?" she shuddered, quite fascinated.

Samantha moved slowly across the room to a cream striped-satin sofa, took up a reclining position with her feet tucked up on the cushion, draped one arm dramatically along its curved wooden back, pressed her other hand to her breast, tilted her head back against the side cushion, closed her eyes, and gave a soulful sigh. She maintained this pose, and her silence, until several furtive peeks at Isabella from beneath her effectively fluttering eyelids told her the girl promised to be a suitably responsive audience. Slowly she returned her head to an upright position, only to stare off into the middle distance as yet another deep sigh escaped her so far maddeningly silent lips. She was hard pressed not to laugh out loud, but willed herself to maintain her air of the aggrieved innocent.

In desperation, Isabella was forced to position herself on the floor beside Samantha—the pupil kneeling attentively at the fountain of knowledge. "Sammy. Sammy!" she pleaded earnestly. "Speak to me, dear sister, you must! Oh, how like you to laugh and joke and put up a brave front before others, but you have allowed me a glimpse of a hidden sadness, a secret despair, that is the direct result of some event on that yacht. You can tell me, dear Sammy, and even if it means telling all to Papa so that he agrees to return you to Mount Street and the bosom of your family, I will do so gladly for you, my sweet baby sister."

Isabella thought she could see some slight alteration in her sister's expression, a certain tightening of the lips as if to keep them from trembling, before the shutters were lowered once more over those vacantly staring emerald eyes. "The yacht, Samantha," Isabella prodded encouragingly, "I feel the roots of your anguish lie there. Tell me about the yacht. What was it like?"

With great effort, Samantha's lips trembled and then parted, and her voice—in a weak, ear-straining whisper—said the one word: "Bordello."

Isabella's so far limited but longing-to-be-expanded knowledge of the interaction between men and women in delicate situations was given a nasty jolt. Samantha had, with but a single word, pricked her sister's romantic vision of true love—hand-holding, tender kisses, and, in time to come, cuddly, chubby-cheeked children on her knee. She had always known that between the romantic interlude and the cherubic babies there lay a grey area she did not entirely comprehend.

Now, upon the hearing of one short word, that grey area became blindingly illuminated. Wives provided the same service as opera dancers and other fashionable (and not so fashionable) impures, but to be treated no better them one of the muslin company was an indignity no wife should be forced to endure. What if her husband, when she married (if, she adjusted frantically, she ever married), was as lacking in respect for the tender sensibilities that true ladies possess in such high degree?

But this was not the time to indulge in selfish concerns, for if Isabella interpreted Samantha's description correctly, the poor girl had been imprisoned for two days (and nights), aboard a floating house of ill repute.

The object of all this solicitude had, for the past few minutes, been close to choking on her suppressed mirth while watching so many disparate emotions come and go on her sister's face.

The poor dear must by now have me fighting to retain my unsullied innocence while Zachary sets scene after scene of wild debauchery in order to entrap me, Samantha decided happily. Perhaps she even envisions the brute becoming violent when he cannot bend me to his depraved will. Samantha had described the yacht as a bordello because of that so-outlandish bed, of course, and—as was her inclination—to see how much of a clunker of a tale her sister could be made to swallow. It appeared that Isabella had a healthy appetite for Sin.

"Samantha," Isabella at last commiserated sadly, "how totally awful for you," earnestly striving to hide that small, pleasurable titillation that can so easily be felt when the object of such base attack (as her sister must have been) is anyone other than oneself.

It was the sight of Isabella's respectability doing battle with her baser female instincts (and losing, sorry to say) that at last overpowered Samantha's control of her tragedy queen countenance. "Awful, dear, sweet, concerned big sister?" Samantha challenged with a hint of laughter in her once again strong, clear voice. She reached out and placed an admonishing finger on the tip of Isabella's tilt-tipped nose. "Not nearly so awful as your fevered little brain imagined it, if that maidenly blush is to be taken as evidence of your penny-dreadful version of my so unfortunate debauchment. Confess, Izzy: you had me all but sold into the white slave trade, didn't you?"

For a moment Isabella had remained at Samantha's feet, too stunned to react. Now she jumped up, and—in a move that expressed her degree of agitation more clearly than could any words—reached down and soundly boxed her sister's ears.

The two might have come to blows had it not been for Samantha's desire to keep her new gown out of harm's way and Isabella's belated recollection of her own consequence as a London debutante. They cried friends and as a peace offering Samantha described her honeymoon in elaborate detail—holding back nothing but her inexplicable (and, at times, almost wanton) reaction to her husband's attempts at lovemaking. Instead she centered her recitation on the infamous royal bed and its magically multiplying cushions, a stirring re-enactment of her role in dousing the blaze that threatened the ship, and a disturbingly graphic description of her bout of seasickness-cum-drunkenness.

Isabella cut this last bit short with an entreaty to Samantha to bring her story up to the present, including knowledge of the newlyweds' first night under the same roof on dry land—and the reason (just a teeny bit lurid, she hoped) that her sister seemed so thoroughly out of patience with St. John this very morning. "Hurry, do, for Aunt Loretta has already had one nap after breakfast and we cannot depend upon her sleeping much longer. Besides, you know as well as I that no matter how lost in slumber she may appear, her stomach wakes her within one minute of mealtime without fail."

So Samantha told Isabella of the events of the previous evening, sadly disappointing events that they were, being solely that his bride—exhausted from a long day's travel—was carried into the mansion fast asleep in her husband's arms. She remembered nothing more until she awakened to find herself all alone in a strange bed and was handed her morning chocolate and a note that read: "I have gone out. We are engaged for Lord Frazer's this evening. Plan accordingly. Z."

Really! thought Isabella, who had more experience in the care and feeding of her sister's volatile personality than she felt she either wanted or needed. If this is how the Earl intends to deal with Sammy, it's a long and stormy path he has chosen to trod. The surest way to set Samantha off hell-bent on mischief is to attempt to order her about like some child. Add to that his cavalier abandonment of his bride their first day back in London (and Samantha at her most dangerous when alone and feeling bored), and it seemed to Isabella that the man must harbor a death wish.

To pass the time before luncheon (and while waiting for Aunt Loretta to rise from her slumbers), Isabella decided to occupy Samantha's mind with thoughts of the latest fashions, and Samantha happily expanded on her plan to become a trendsetter in the fashionable world. "I wish to become an original," she told her sister candidly.

Her sister, experiencing one of her increasingly common flashes of independent judgment, declared, "But my dearest sister, you already are."

Samantha merely nodded, accepting this judgment not as praise but as a simple statement of fact. After all, she was not so naive as to be unaware of her talents, nor so hungry for adulation that she bothered to protest prettily her sister's words—an open invitation to Isabella to heap even more flattery on Samantha's head after each half-hearted disclaimer. No, she had scant time for such self-serving maneuvers, no more time than she had for portrayals of false modesty when she was tolerably well pleased with her appearance and brainpower. Some people—probably those less blessed—would call her vain or arrogant, but if she were guilty of anything it would have to be, as ever, her unsettling tendency to speak her mind with refreshing, if startling, candor.

And so it was no surprise that Samantha merely agreed with her sister's assessment of her probable establishment as an "original" of the ton before adding, attacking her subject realistically, "It's not enough to just stand out from the rest of the sheep. I must be their acknowledged leader—of the females at least, for a start. If I were, for example, to proclaim sackcloth and ashes all the rage, I would not be happy until Almack's was a sea of grubby-looking debutantes moving through a country dance while nobly ignoring an almost unbearable desire to relieve the discomfort of their rough garments by indulging in a veritable orgy of scratching."

Isabella's giggles went a long way towards lifting the dampening mood that had threatened to overwhelm Samantha during their discussion of Zachary—and the perplexing attitude of disinterest he had maintained ever since his so odiously condescending replies to her request to refresh her memory concerning the events of their last night aboard the Sea Devil

She had only just begun to believe there was a slight glimmer of hope that theirs could be an amiable, if not romantic, union before he had abruptly poured cold water all over her budding optimism. The journey from Margate had been an exercise in self-discipline as St. John remained motionless in his corner of the coach, hour after tedious hour—so very off-putting with his eyes hidden beneath the forward tilt of his curly-brimmed beaver hat.

How she had longed to knock the lean pantaloon encased leg supporting his relaxed frame from its place—propped against the facing seat—and see him tumble to the floor in an ungainly heap. For a few brief mad moments, she was even tempted to take target practice at the tassel swinging just above and to the right of Royston's head with one of the carriage pistols just to see how well he could continue to pretend he was unaware of her existence. In the end she had done nothing—nothing, that is, but sit and glare at the tip of one of his aristocratic ears, thinking dire thoughts until on the outskirts of London fatigue had at last claimed her.

Samantha brought herself back to her surroundings with a slight shake and tried to catch the tail end of her sister's question. "Isn't the dowager Countess due to arrive in town fairly soon, Samantha? I must say I would be dreading a visit from my husband's sole surviving relative—although I imagine that, as the Earl's grandmother, the good lady must be pretty well up in years and very frail."

"Izzy," her sister said blightingly, as she settled herself more comfortably in her chair, "it's a wonder you ever dare to set a foot out of bed, given the number of fears you harbor in your mind. Why on earth should the prospect of meeting Zachaiy's ancient grandmother overset me, let alone you?"

"Well, really, Sammy," Isabella argued defensively, "she is the dowager. What if she don't like you?"

Samantha shook her head disbelievingly and laughed, "A great whacking lot of good that would do her, Izzy. What would you have her do? Order St. John to seek a divorce?"

"Not a divorce, Sammy," Isabella blushed. "An annulment. Unless you aren't telling
all
about your honeymoon."

Samantha busied herself with the sleeve of her gown. "No, it was a near-run thing, I admit. But you're right, Izzy, at least for now. An annulment would serve just as well. Do you propose to let the dowager in on our little secret?" Isabella's fiery cheeks were her only answer, so Samantha went on to point out the fact that—if the dowager was too delicate to face traveling from the country over the muddy spring roads, even to be present for her only grandson's nuptials—it was likely many months yet before the St. Johns were blessed with the woman's presence. "By then I'll probably be with child, if Zachary has any say in the matter, and the question won't even arise."