Undesirable Liaison (12 page)

Embarrassed,
Flo made a business of removing her bonnet and gloves and setting
them down on a chair by the wall. Then she seated herself, keeping
her eyes off his. He waited for her to settle and took the chair
opposite. Trying to overcome a flurrying pulse, and fearful her
voice might shake if she spoke, she closed her lips together and
lifted her gaze, directing at him what she hoped was a look of
question.

‘I had thought
of giving you money. If you prefer it, I am perfectly ready to do
so.’

She could not
prevent the words from leaving her mouth.

‘I don’t want
your money!’

He gave one of
his lightning smiles. ‘That’s what I supposed.’

Flo’s heart
skipped a beat, and she had to clamp down on a rising patter in her
breast. She looked down.

‘I don’t need
repayment either.’

There was a
pause. His tone softened.

‘Need and want
can be two very different things, Florence Petrie.’

Her gaze flew
to meet his, and she answered without thought. ‘Yes. I can’t deny I
need money, but I am prepared to earn it, sir.’

‘And so you
shall.’ On impulse, Jerome reached out, laying his hand over her
clasped ones. ‘Yesterday you deemed yourself insulted. Don’t permit
pride to rule you over this. I mean you no disrespect, Florence—may
I call you Florence?’

A wry look
crossed her face. ‘I doubt if my refusing permission would stop
you, Lord Langriville.’

‘Probably not,’
he agreed on a laugh, releasing her hands, ‘but you see I am having
a touch at least at the manners expected of a gentleman.’

She smiled a
little, and he thought it improved her. His gaze strayed to the
dark crown of hair piled up on her head. It crossed his mind that
it must be lengthy and wondered what it might look like falling
about her shoulders.

Catching
question in her eye, he hurried into speech.

‘In short,
Florence, I am offering you a post.’

She looked
startled. ‘What sort of post?’

He spread his
hands. ‘What else but a companion?’

‘A companion?’
Flo repeated, bemused. ‘To
you
?’

Into the brown
of his eyes crept a singularly wicked look.

‘Tempting, Miss
Petrie, but no.’

Her cheeks grew
hot, and she flung up her hands to cover them. ‘I didn’t mean—you
know I had no notion of—oh, you are impossible!’

‘Don’t be
missish, Florence. All I meant was it might provide a deal of
entertainment to spar with you. No, I am thinking of my mother.’
The amusement died out of his face, leaving it sombre. ‘You met her
but briefly, and in the company of my aunt. Alone, she is prone to
melancholy. Not to put too fine a point on it—for you may as well
know the truth—she spends most of every day sunk in gloom. It has
been so for too long. Need I spell out the reason?’

Flo shook her
head. ‘I did notice it. I dare say the whole affair has been a
trial for her.’

‘A trial!’ He
pushed his chair away from the table and got up in a restless way.
He spoke jerkily, and the laceration within him was evident. ‘You
cannot imagine the effect of it—the whisperings, the pointed
looks.’

He strode to
the window and stood with his back to the room, looking out.
Florence was tempted to retort that she could well imagine it—only
too well, since she had lived the best part of her life in the
shadow of just such vulgar curiosity—but his distress stilled her
tongue. When he spoke again, it was in that voice of cool control,
but the hard set of his features gave away the continuing inner
disquiet.

‘My mother had
been recently widowed, and lacked my father’s support. We were out
of mourning, however, so there was no excuse to hide away. You
might suppose people would have the grace and decency to leave us
alone, but they are ghouls rather, eager for every scrap of sordid
detail they can come by. It became a nightmare for my mother. I
watched her withdraw into herself more and more. But I was in the
grip of my own emotions and—though I am ashamed to confess it—I
failed to help her. By the time I had command of myself, it was too
late. She had become, to all intents and purposes, a recluse. Where
I continued to go about, within the neighbourhood at least, she
would not. My Aunt Phoebe did, continues to do, what she can, but
she has a large family of her own and little time to spare.’

He fell silent,
and Florence, caught up in the tale, felt all the harrowing misery
of what he had left unsaid. Where her experience differed was in
the vast divergence of their stations. Bad enough in the little
village of Tarfield, where the dubious way of life of the vicar’s
cousin—arrived mysteriously from Italy with a young child to
inhabit an adjacent cottage—was ever a fruitful subject of gossip
and conjecture. Magnify that by position and status, and the
resulting social repercussions must have been cruelly hard to bear.
Flo felt fully equipped to be of use in such a case.

Brushing aside
all thought of what it could mean for herself, she felt almost
honour bound to accept of his lordship’s offer and do what she
might for the dowager. Only when he turned, what he said was so out
of context it threw her off.

‘What had you
intended to do about Belinda?’

Flo blinked.
‘My sister?’

‘How do you
mean to care for her? Are you planning to send her to school, or
what?’

Apprehension
seized her. Did he mean to insist she did so? She could not have
the child at a distance. That would make nonsense of all she had
fought to achieve. In sudden panic, she blurted out her plan.

‘Not a school,
no. It would be too expensive, and I don’t want her far from me. I
will find her a lodging nearby. It is what I intended all along.
She may continue her studies, and perhaps take on some small
employment—sewing perhaps. I cannot have her away from me, Lord
Langriville. Besides loving her too dearly, she is my
responsibility. There must be a village close enough? All she needs
is a room, and—’

‘Will you cease
fretting?’ he interrupted, coming back to the table. ‘Did you not
hear the child say I was expecting you both?’

Flo gazed at
him mutely for a moment, a flood of gratitude cascading into her
bosom.

‘But—are you
sure? There is no reason in the world why any employer should be
willing to house my sister as well as myself, only—’

‘No, and I have
a strong notion I shall regret it. However, it behoves me to make
some sort of sacrifice, or I shall lay myself open to every sort of
reprimand you care to throw at me.’

She burst into
laughter, and the sudden warmth in the odd-complexioned face was
abruptly echoed deep within him. A frisson of alarm ran through
Jerome, and the thought crossed his mind that he had made a fatal
mistake.

Chapter
Five

The
accommodation in which Florence found herself situated at Bedfont
Place was positively palatial in comparison with anything she had
previously enjoyed. Her chamber was on the second floor,
conveniently located next to the back stair leading down to the
dowager’s apartments on the floor below. More satisfactory, she had
only to exit by the other door and traverse a corridor or two to
arrive, through an unused playroom, at the quarters allocated to
Belinda.

‘It is not one
of the larger rooms,’ had said the housekeeper, ‘but I hope it may
be adequate.’

‘More than
adequate,’ Flo had replied. ‘Indeed it is a question whether I can
make sufficient use of it.’

The single
trunk into which the bulk of her own and Belinda’s belongings were
stuffed had been sent on ahead by carrier, and been discovered
reposing against the panelled interior wall next to a small
fireplace with a narrow mantel. The furniture matched little, but
was more than Flo could use. The four-poster dominated one side. At
the other was a press, which the clothing she possessed by no means
filled. Under the window, a walnut lowboy served for a dressing
table and washstand, set with a flower patterned basin and ewer.
There was besides a chest at the foot of the bed, a small mahogany
bedside cupboard, and—luxury indeed—a cheval mirror placed
conveniently to catch the light in the open space to one side of
the lowboy. It was possibly the first time in her life that
Florence had been able to check her appearance full figure before
leaving her room for the day.

By contrast,
and much to her well-voiced chagrin, Belinda was housed in a
child’s room. Though it was large, she had merely a couch bed,
without a canopy, a chest of drawers for her clothes with a simply
framed mirror on the wall above, and a bedside commode. A large
round tea table graced the centre of the room, with three chairs
grouped around it, and in the alcove of the half-round bay, where
long windows let in a deal of light and a seat had been fashioned
all around, was set a school desk with a plain deal chair before
it.

‘Just as if I
am expected to spend my whole life within this chamber,’ had
complained Bel in tones of bitter indignation.

‘You may count
yourself fortunate you are here at all,’ had chided Flo. ‘Had I
obtained a post elsewhere, you would have been lodged in a village
house, where I dare say a room but one quarter of this is all you
could have hoped for.’

‘Yes, but I am
not a schoolgirl, and this place is more suited to a child of five
or six. Have you seen the playroom next door? There’s a rocking
horse and a set of toy soldiers!’

‘Among other
things, I don’t doubt. What is that to the purpose?’

‘It just proves
I’m in the nursery,’ wailed Bel.

Flo was obliged
to suppress a bubble of amusement. It did not survive her sister’s
next comment.

‘I had thought
better of Lord Langriville, I must say. If this is how he meant to
treat me, I don’t know why he wanted me to come.’

‘Ungrateful
girl! Besides, I shouldn’t think Lord Langriville has the faintest
interest in where you are housed. I have no doubt the decision was
taken by Mrs Brumby, whose business it is to allocate
chambers.’

‘Then I shall
speak to Lord Langriville myself and ask him to order a
change.’

‘You will do no
such thing.’ Flo raised a finger of warning as her sister’s mouth
opened for further protest. ‘If you are minded to be stupidly rude,
and to have the impertinence to speak to his lordship with any sort
of complaint, I shall have no hesitation in turning you out of
doors myself.’

Belinda’s eyes
popped. ‘What, and leave me without a roof over my head?’

‘Of course
not.’ Flo sighed with exasperation. ‘But I may choose to arrange
your accommodation in the village, after all, so take heed.’

‘But, Flossie,
it isn’t fair! You’ve got such a nice room, and—’

‘That will do.
Bel, we are neither of us guests in this house. I am a paid
companion, remember. It is only due to Lord Langriville’s
generosity that I have been permitted to bring you with me.’

‘Oh, that’s
poppycock, Flo. If you hadn’t given him back the ruby, he wouldn’t
have been generous at all. He said he wanted to reward you, and
though I hoped he would give you lots of money, I believe this is a
much better outcome.’

‘Yes, but if I
had listened to you at the outset, we would not be in this
situation, would we?’

‘No, we’d be in
a better one, for you’d have got a thousand pounds for the ruby and
we could have got our own house and I could have had my own proper
room and been treated like a lady.’

Florence gave
it up. Short of taking a stick to Belinda—which she could
cheerfully have undertaken at that moment—there seemed to be no way
of getting her to understand the sensitivity of her position. She
had been in high gig from the moment Lord Langriville had made
known his intentions, and had driven Flo nearly demented through
the whirlwind preparations that followed, bringing them to Bedfont
Place within a few hectic days, and to a situation startlingly
different to anything Florence had imagined.

The Dowager
Lady Langriville was as bewildered as she was astonished, if Flo
was any judge, by the descent upon her household in the guise of
companion of the same female who had brought the news of her
daughter-in-law’s demise.

‘But I don’t
need a companion,’ she had quavered, shifting her hands one inside
the other in a pathetic sort of fashion. ‘I don’t know what Jerome
is thinking of.’

Her reaction
was understandable, when it was borne in upon Florence that Lord
Langriville had failed to apprise his mother of her advent. She had
not seen his lordship since the decision was made. Instead, the
arrangements had been undertaken by his man of business, who had
been detailed to have the Petrie sisters taken to Bedfont
Place.

His lordship
was still away, dealing with the aftermath of his wife’s death. A
brief note to his housekeeper, requesting her to install Lady
Langriville’s new companion and her sister in the house, had been
all the existing proof that any such offer of employment had been
made. Not unnaturally, Mrs Brumby had supposed her mistress to be
conversant with the matter. It was not her habit to consult Lady
Langriville’s wishes concerning domestic management, and it was
therefore only Flo’s arrival that brought the situation to light.
Small wonder the dowager was flustered.

To Flo’s
surprise, the
grande dame
who had previously treated her
with distant hauteur—and who had turned out to be the dowager’s
sister, Lady Painscastle—had championed the scheme.

‘While I cannot
approve of the lax manner of my nephew’s organisation, I am
inclined to approve his action. And at this juncture, I dare say he
might be forgiven a trifle of absent-mindedness.’

Not by
Florence, though she would not say so—except to his lordship.
Absent-mindedness, indeed. How dared he subject her to the
embarrassment of arriving unannounced? It was all of a piece. She
should never have allowed herself to be persuaded by the pitiful
word picture he had drawn of his mother’s condition.