To Seduce an Angel (18 page)

“Dav wants to fight in an open mill.”

“You have been training him for months.”

“It's just restlessness. He's not content with a court victory. What he really wants is a bleeding battle with the duke.”

“Are you afraid? Wenlocke's near ninety.”

“But still dangerous as ever, and there's Aubrey, the nephew. They'll strike at Dav the minute he leaves that house. If we let him go to that mill in East Thorndon or we let him take his seat in the Lords, Wenlocke and Aubrey will attack him.”

“You don't think the tutor comes from them, do you?”

“There's no link yet, but I don't like the lies.”

“I never told you who I was.” Her hand on his ribs sent distracting sensations coursing through him.

“But I could handle you.”

She flashed a smile of dispute. “You think your brother can't handle this woman?”

“He has little experience of women.”

“But a great deal of experience of the falseness of the world. If she's lying to him, he probably knows it.”

Will realized she was right. There was little around him that Dav did not notice. Dav was no fool, and he was capable of cold-blooded action. But Dav had never been in love. In the three years of Will's marriage to Helen of Troy—Will could never think of her as Marianne Rossdale, the bishop's daughter—Helen had taught him that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was not to be evaded. When the goddess summoned, the poor helpless sod obeyed.

Will recognized that summons now in his wife's gaze, but he wanted to get his brother out of his head first. He put down the brandy.

“What have you been writing?”

“Helen of Troy's advice to women. My father has published another collection of sermons on the duty of women to submit to men. Someone's got to offer women an alternative to submission.” She moved to lie on top of him.

“There are times when you enjoy submission.” He looked up at her thinking of the first time he had tied her to his bed. She smiled as if her thoughts followed his and dropped a lingering kiss on his mouth.

“Actually, I wrote an impassioned letter telling women how to free themselves from the tyranny of the male sex, but I scratched it out.” With an intriguingly bare arm, she showed him the pages of the little notebook with long slashes through the lines of writing. She tossed it aside and pressed against him, her lips hovering near his.

“I've come up with a new plan. I'm going to teach women to read. There is no reason that the Bread Street School should not admit girls. A little carpentry work, and we'll have a girls wing.”

“Teach girls to read? Your father's sermons?”

“Novels. And I'm going to write one.”

“You're going to write a novel?”

She pressed her lips to his ear. “
The Further Adventures of Helen of Troy
. What do you think?”

“I'm all for women having adventures.” He drew his hands down her spine and pulled her closer against him.

She drew back briefly on raised arms that lifted her breasts away from his chest. “But teaching women to read comes first. Helen could read. She's the only character in Homer's whole grand epic who could. They say she learned the skill from priests in Egypt. That's what empowered her, you know, and made her so fearless and determined to be herself.”

“Is it? I thought it was her bleeding capacity for turning a man into a besotted idiot over her.”

Much later Will held his wife's lax warm body in his arms and knew what to do about Dav. He brushed Helen's hair away from her brow.

“I'm going to send Harding to investigate Emma Portland's references further. Can you spare him for a few days?”

“I can.”

“And you'd best prepare to visit Daventry Hall.”

“You're going to bring the whole family down on him?”

“Not me. Our dear mamma has hatched a plan to introduce him to some of the eligible young ladies in the neighborhood.”

SOMETIME during the night the rain turned to snow. It snowed for two days until the hedges wore white robes on thin black branches and the paths were buried.

Emma thought of her bread and cheese in the tin in the yew hedge. She would have to begin again, but while the ground lay covered, she mounted a campaign to get her pin back. She announced an end to math and counting lessons. Every hour in the schoolroom was about the words they needed to know to finish the story. She worked them hard, but she put her hand to the empty place in her pocket a dozen times an hour, slumping and falling silent each time she touched the empty spot.

On the second day she made a paper medal for each boy for service to his mates above and beyond duty, and pinned them on the boys' shoulders with great ceremony. And she watched, for signs that anyone felt the least unease, the least remorse. Swallow and Robin and Finch cast questioning looks at Lark, but he gave no sign that he felt anything.

“Don't you need your day off to go to the village?” Lark asked on the second afternoon.

Emma whirled on him. “I do, but at the moment, Finch is on my mind. He's on the edge of a breakthrough, you see, and no one goes anywhere until he gets his chance. Finch?” She turned to the slight boy whose hand usually hid his mouth. She now understood why. He had a chaotic mouth of teeth that crossed over one another and pointed in odd directions. She watched his lips form the word on the slate, and nodded to him to speak.

His hand went up to cover his mouth, and he glanced around at his mates. When his uncertain gaze came back to Emma, she nodded again. “You've got it, Finch.”

He dropped his hand and traced the letters with his pencil as he read, “Courage.”

Emma let herself smile, and a broad grin split Finch's face before he remembered to bring his hand up again. The other boys crowded around him to look at his slate, and punch his arms and ruffle his hair, and pound him on the back.

“Is anyone else ready?”

Lark's glance quelled any volunteers, and Finch shrank in his seat, looking guilty for his triumph.

 

 

BY evening of the third day the skies had cleared. As Emma dressed for supper Ruth was full of excitement over the imminent arrival of Daventry's family. She told Emma of the intense preparations Mrs. Wardlow and her staff were making. Extra girls had been recruited from the village to prepare an elegant supper for a select group of Daventry's neighbors. One of his sisters-in-law, Lady Cleo Jones, had arranged the party.

“Why, we've not had a party here since I've come. I suppose it's not a proper ball, but it's ever so romantic. Girls from the neighborhood, coming to dance with His Lordship. I think they all want to catch his eye, his being such an eligible young man for a lady.”

“Yes, I imagine they're quite curious about him in the neighborhood.” Emma had not seen him since he had put her in the closet. She ate with the servants. No one noticed if she skipped the fish at the servants' table. Her silks hung in the wardrobe, and Adam stood guard in the hall at night.

“Are you fond of dancing, miss?”

“No, I don't care for it,” Emma lied.

“You should spy, miss.”

“Spy?”

“We're all going to take a peek. No harm in it. They'll be in the great hall, and well, we can look down on them from the chapel vestibule through the screen.”

“Does Daventry dance?”

“Why wouldn't he?”

Emma shrugged. “Didn't you tell me that he did not live a gentleman's life when he was young?”

Ruth frowned and paused. “Yer right, miss, I forgot.” She tried to puzzle it out. “He must have learned since.”

“Who are the musicians? Strangers?”

“Oh no, miss. We'll have the usual fiddlers the quality hereabouts have always had for assemblies and such. And Adam will look out for Daventry.”

Emma tried to tell herself that the party was no danger to him. His family had planned it. They would be present. The guests would be neighbors, known to each other. The musicians troubled her. She didn't like the idea of carriages coming and going with a noise and bustle that was bound to create confusion. Anyone could slip into the hall unnoticed amid the comings and goings. She told herself it was a foolish thought. The fiddlers would fiddle and the guests would dance.

 

 

EMMA headed for the stables on the afternoon of the family's arrival. The grooms were busy attending to the arriving carriages with their horses that needed tending and stabling.

Ned Begley, the head groom, touched his hat to her. “Off for a walk, miss?”

Emma nodded.

“Keep an eye out for that black spaniel of mine, Hector, will you? He's gone missing.”

Emma said she would, but the request sent a shiver down her spine. She had not visited the ponies since the snow. Her feet felt suddenly heavy, and she moved like an old woman until she heard Budge whicker. From the open door she could see the ponies leaning their heads over their stall gates. They gave her their usual greetings and demanded petting and a treat. She checked their feed and found nothing suspicious in its look or smell. She stroked Budge's forehead and rubbed behind his ears. She suspected that Wallop had done some evil thing to Ned's dog, but he had left the ponies alone.

She peeked from the stable doors at the hive of activity in the drive. As his brother Will had predicted, Daventry's family arrived in a parade of carriages with luggage strapped above and behind and outriders and servants and children. Emma watched them pull up before the front entry porches, where the staff was lined up and where the boys, groomed and impatient, broke rank to greet each new arrival.

Mrs. Creevey and her cheerful husband supervised grooms and footmen and maids handling horses and baskets and luggage.

Daventry emerged from the shadows to shake his brothers' hands and submit to kisses from his sisters-in-law and his mother. Again Emma's understanding of him shifted. He was not the angel warrior or the aloof lord, but a man connected to a large and loving family. She saw duty and responsibility in the way he noticed everyone and listened and gave orders. But detachment, too.

 

 

SOPHIE held her major's note as she looked out over the grounds of the hall.
Marry me.
It began.
Now or never.
He wanted an answer tomorrow. And deserved one. It had never been her intention to make a good man suffer. He was the most exasperatingly understanding and forgiving lover. She had never had a lover like him, not even Granville.

From the moment they'd met in Paris when she had stood below the great church on the banks of the Seine contemplating the thickness of the ice and the darkness of the water beneath it and wondering how swiftly the river would carry her away he had understood her. They called the church Notre Dame, our mother, the pure, good mother, while she, Sophie, had failed as a mother, had lost her sons or turned them against her and hampered them in their lives in spite of all her care.

Mademoiselle,
he'd called her, sharply but with shameless flattery. That had made her laugh, and he'd coaxed her away from the river's edge to a cafe and then coaxed her to laugh and to live again.

Within days she had begun writing to Xander, encouraging him, pouring out her own faith in Kit's survival, on pink pressed paper. Later when the ice on the Seine broke up, they strolled for hours on its banks or sat in the parks.

The first time he'd asked her to marry him had been a lovely spring day, the first of May, with flower girls on every street corner in Paris, selling their sweet bunches of
muguet
, lilies of the valley. She had explained that she could not marry him until she knew her youngest son's fate. And he'd understood and waited. And then such hopes they'd both had in the giddy days after Kit's recovery. He had come with her from Paris at the news that Xander had found Kit alive.

And when Kit had come home at last, she had filled her London house with his urchins and laughed every day, and her major had waited for her to look at him and say the word.

But Henry Norwood, their solicitor, had warned them with a sober face under his kindly white brows that the court case against Wenlocke meant that all her past would be raked up, all her follies and errors. Not only Candover who'd seduced her at fifteen and Oxley whom she'd pursued to avenge herself on Candover, but every man who'd courted her or dangled for her, even those whom she had rejected. Every indiscretion, every tempestuous outburst in an open carriage or a theater box, every extravagance would be a weapon in the duke's hands to use against her son. Henry did not say it, nor did he have to, that for Sophie to have a new lover would jeopardize her son's case.