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‘Very well, my lord. I vow to report faithfully what the servants are saying or not saying over breakfast. I hope that will be all?’
‘Not quite, I am also unreasonable enough to expect you to come to Farenze House tomorrow and tell me about it in person. Do not put anything in writing.’
‘I have work to do, my lord, but I dare say his Grace will spare me from it for an hour or so to take some air, if I ask him nicely,’ Colm said not quite humbly enough to be truly Mr Carter, who only wanted his bed and an end to this ridiculous situation.
‘Oh, come on, Papa. Leave the poor man be. Don’t forget someone I wish I had never set eyes on could be back in the ballroom by now and busily spreading rumours,’ Miss Winterley said with a pained look in the direction of the ballroom that said her ruin might be going on even as they dallied.
‘Even Derneley isn’t that stupid and I bloodied the nose of that someone else you are talking about. I doubt he’ll say anything for a while, let alone admit he was bested by a slip of a girl he thought to force himself on, then knocked out by her very irate father,’ Lord Farenze added matter of factly.
Colm went very still as he realised why Miss Winterley had really come in here to repair her gown. What a fool he was not to see the difference between a young woman dishevelled by her amorous beau and one attacked by a raddled old rake. His own convalescence in Brighton had given him the inside track on all the society gossip his breathless landlady gathered from friends who let out rooms or their houses for the Season. So he sorted through the guests he’d seen arrive tonight and came up with the ideal candidate. Sir Steven Scrumble was on the lookout for a wife with enough blue blood and powerful connections to drag him back to the heart of polite society. The man would pay generously for such a bride and Derneley must have sold him a perfect chance to rape Miss Winterley and force an April-and-December marriage on her. The very idea made his flesh crawl, so goodness knew what it did to hers. Scrumble was very rich, so selling a convenient accident to her gown and a neatly empty sewing room wouldn’t trouble Derneley’s conscience. He clearly didn’t have one. Then, with his ill-gotten gains and the money he got from the Duke for his father’s books, Derneley might have made it across the Channel and disappeared. Colm thought Derneley’s creditors would soon learn Lord Farenze wouldn’t lift a finger to save his one-time brother-in-law and they would foreclose. Serve the vicious sot right, Colm decided as the Viscount frowned as if he wished him a thousand miles away, then did his best to reassure his daughter.
‘I made it clear you won’t be marrying him if the whole world is baying for you to do so; I’ll kill him first,’ he told her.
‘I’m not dashing round the world evading justice even for you, Papa, and Chloe has had quite enough of living in shadows. What if he tells everyone anyway?’
‘And admit he was bested by a defenceless young lady? The man’s not that much of a fool.’ Lord Farenze went on with a sideways look at Colm that told him not to be one either, ‘Even in his cups he’ll remember what I threatened to do to him if he didn’t keep a still tongue in his head.’
Colm wanted to find the cur and add his fourpennyworth to the mix. He could hardly threaten to have the bastard drummed out of the clerks’ guild though, could he? Their inequality of power and rank would forbid the man fighting if Colm challenged him to meet at dawn, swords or pistols at the ready. Reminded how little he and Miss Winterley had in common, he used a trick he’d learnt in his youth and retreated into his thoughts until he was calm again. He went back to the table, realised Miss Winterley had put the candle back in the ideal place to highlight what he’d been reading before he got distracted and tried to slide Pamela’s journal under a sheaf of ancient letters.
‘Wait,’ Lord Farenze said sharply, catching that furtive movement as if he was the one who’d spent eight years sharpening his senses in the Rifles and not Colm. ‘What have you got there?’ he asked and came closer for a better look. ‘I’ve seen a notebook like that before and that looks like my late wife’s scrawl. Let me see.’
‘My employer paid a fair price for any item in this room he chose to take away, my lord,’ Colm protested half-heartedly.
‘And it pains me to see such a fine collection neglected, but if that’s truly a volume of my late wife’s scribbles then it isn’t Derneley’s to sell. As her husband I lay claim to it.’
‘Papa—’ Miss Winterley touched her father’s arm ‘—surely all her scandals are already out in the open by now? We really must go.’
‘I’ll not have them reawakened in the yellow press and we shall say you wanted to look at the portrait of your mother you knew Derneley had hidden away somewhere in this house. We can explain our absence to your stepmother when we return to the ballroom and the gossips will nod and whisper she has a great deal to bear, but I’m not leaving this room until you explain what you have there, Carter, and if there’s aught else I should know about in this musty old collection.’
‘I really couldn’t say, my lord. I only found the first Lady Farenze’s diaries hidden behind a shelf of sermons this afternoon.’
‘You have to admire her cheek, don’t you?’ he said to his daughter and Colm saw the man behind the stern mask before he sent Colm another challenging stare. ‘How much have you read?’ he asked menacingly, as if it was an intrusion he found hard to forgive.
‘Only this last one,’ he said, refusing to stand here like a schoolboy sent for punishment and say nothing in his own defence. ‘I certainly won’t tell her secrets to anyone else,’ he promised easily enough.
He had more reasons not to want them known than the Farenze family, and reading Pamela’s words really hadn’t got him any closer to his father. A woman that self-obsessed was hardly likely to waste pages describing her lover, was she? He would do better to put her and her entire family behind him forever the day he left this place and handing them over might help him do it. The sneaky thought that Pamela’s daughter was more difficult to forget nagged at him, but he did his best to ignore it.
‘Will you hand over anything else you happen upon before your work here is done?’ Miss Winterley asked as if she had caught her father’s distrust of him.
‘Anything that concerns you, yes,’ he said with a weary sigh.
‘Good, now we must leave the lad in peace, Eve,’ his lordship urged his daughter when she would have argued. ‘He can rehash this argument with me in the morning, but you’re right, it’s high time we returned to the ballroom.’
‘We can hardly carry a stack of my late mother’s diaries with us. Will you bring them to Farenze House for us, Mr Carter? I would be most grateful.’
Since she didn’t wheedle or make any attempt to charm him into doing her bidding, Colm saw no reason to object and delay their departure. ‘I suppose it’s easy enough for me to carry books in and out of here, so, yes, I’ll bring them when I call on your father tomorrow. Now please, will you both go? I don’t want to be caught up in the affairs of the great and the good any more than you want me to be.’
‘Thank you,’ she said and they were back to humble clerk and lady again.
‘Goodbye, miss, my lord,’ he said with a bow that would do a butler credit.
‘Goodbye, Carter,’ she replied with a dignified nod and took her father’s offered arm to be escorted back to civilisation.
He watched them go and wondered. How would it feel to stroll back into that ballroom with them, sauntering confidently at their side as an equal in birth and fortune? For a moment he thought wistfully of all he once had and didn’t regret it as much as he thought. The polite world looked bright and glittering and sophisticated from the outside, but he didn’t think it gave the Miss Winterleys of this world much joy. He had grown accustomed to a life where worth and courage counted for more than birth and fortune. When you were all hungry and cold and miserable, on the retreat through harsh country already ravished by French troops, birth and privilege didn’t count for much.
As for knowing young ladies like Miss Winterley outside the charmed circle of the ton, that was clearly impossible. He put the very idea behind him, limped back up those stairs one last time and packed the eight volumes he had found into a handy little box, stowed it under his arm and was glad neither Winterley was waiting below to see him descend on his clerkly behind as he needed one hand and his good leg to get him down again without disaster. Confound his weak leg and the suspicions Lord Farenze had put into his head about his fellow servants. They were probably too busy to search for such scandalous gems in the library their master had sold off tonight, but Colm turned the key in the lock and pocketed it when he left the library all the same.
* * *
‘So are you going to let me read my mother’s journals, Papa?’ Eve asked her father as soon as they were safely out of earshot.
‘Certainly not.’
‘You do know you can’t protect me from her sins for ever, don’t you?’
‘Yes, but please don’t expect me not to try. Even when we’re both old and grey, I shall still be your father and convinced it’s my role to keep my daughter safe.’
‘Nobody could guard me as carefully as you have done, Papa, but I am an adult now in the eyes of the law.’
‘I know that too well,’ he admitted with a frown that spoke volumes of his concern for her peace and future happiness.
Eve had to live with her mother’s many scandals hanging over her, but the world must deal with her as she was, not as they expected from her mother’s wild ride through life. ‘I do love you, Papa, and Chloe and Verity and the boys, but I need to live my own life.’
‘Your stepmother has told me time and again not to follow you about like a mastiff and glare at any young idiot who notices you are a woman. Don’t ever fool yourself, I like watching you hurt yourself on briars that aren’t of your setting though, my Eve.’
‘If I am to live any sort of life I must find my own way through them, though.’
‘I suppose so, but not right now. It’s high time we got back to indifferent wine and weak lemonade and rescued your stepmother since not even she and Polly Mantaigne could keep the curious at bay for the amount of time we have been gone. The poor girl will have talked herself into a headache again by now.’
‘You are a fine and remembering sort of husband; I do love you, Papa.’
‘Don’t try to wheedle your way round me with soft words, minx; I’m still not letting you read Pamela’s selfish outpourings.’
‘Spoilsport,’ Eve pronounced him and took a look at herself in one of the long mirrors placed at strategic points even along this dimly lit and seldom-visited corridor. She looked remarkably unscathed. ‘Aunt Derneley is the vainest woman I have ever encountered,’ she said after she twitched a frill back into place and brushed a piece of lint from her skirt.
‘Only because you didn’t know your mother,’ Lord Farenze said as he removed a cobweb from his daughter’s dark hair. They re-entered the ballroom to run up against a clever scold from Chloe for avoiding their social obligations and a frown of concern for the headache Eve didn’t know she had until now.
Chapter Four (#u2a598184-6cc4-5b72-97b8-edc28f85bc62)
‘What’s he like then, Eve?’ Miss Verity Revereux demanded the next morning as she bounced on to Eve’s bed before staring wistfully at herself in the mirror across the room and wondering out loud if she was developing a spot.
‘What was who like? And it seems unlikely since you were blessed by far too many good fairies at your birth and never had a single blemish I know of,’ Eve said.
Then she remembered what a grim situation her honorary sister was born into. Her mother died as she gulped in her first lungful of air and poor Chloe was left with a newborn to care for at the tender age of seventeen as her twin sister died in childbirth. Eve groped about for a rapid change of subject and hit on the least welcome one to hand. ‘Whomever can you mean anyway?’
‘The man you met last night from the dreamy look on your face.’
Eve frowned and did her best to avoid the apparently guileless blue eyes Verity had inherited from her father. Neither Captain Revereux nor his beloved daughter were the innocents they appeared, so Eve hardened her heart against the plea in her best friend’s eyes and turned to her lady’s maid instead.
‘You were right, Bran, this colour looks better on me this morning,’ she said with her head on one side as she studied the choice of morning gowns on offer. ‘I’m not sure which sash to wear,’ she added, hoping to divert Verity with fripperies. She ought to know better, she supposed. Verity might look like an angel sent to humble lesser beings with her golden beauty, but looks could be deceptive. When her father was at sea they were all inclined to spoil her and Eve wished the gallant captain would hurry home and check his beloved child’s wilder starts before they got her into real trouble.
‘I can stay here all day if I have to, Eve dear,’ Verity told her. ‘Miss Stainforth has agreed to go and see a dentist at last, so I have all the time in the world to plague you until she is feeling better.’ Verity lounged back on the bed to prove it. ‘I loved it at school, but I’m so glad Papa insisted on hiring Miss Stainforth to teach me instead. Now I can be with you and Aunt Chloe and Uncle Luke all the time when he has to be out of the country and you can’t lie to me at a distance. I can’t see why you treat me like some artless child who must be kept in ignorance of the important things in life, Cousin dear. I preferred you before you made your curtsy to society and became so terribly worldly wise.’
‘No doubt your governess left you plenty to do, Miss Verity, and you ought to be doing it right now,’ Bran said sternly.
‘She was in so much pain she forgot and why should I have my head stuffed with more facts and figures that I shall be expected to forget the moment I set foot in my first ballroom?’
‘Our sex makes up half the world, Verity, and if we were all wilfully ignorant it would fall apart. You should be worrying about the poor lady’s pain and suffering, not gloating over your freedom like some horrid schoolboy let off his lessons,’ Eve tried to scold. Verity looked unimpressed and went on sorting Eve’s sashes.
‘Lady Chloe will find you something useful to do since your poor governess was in too much pain to bother, young lady,’ Bran added with a look at Eve that said her disturbed night was showing on her face.
‘No, don’t bother her at this hour of the morning,’ Eve intervened. Chloe was in the early stages of pregnancy yet again and if this one went like the last two, her stepmother would not be ready to deal with her wayward niece for another hour or two yet. ‘You can take a stroll with me to Green Park among the nursemaids and governesses. I need some fresh air and you will be working too hard this afternoon and poor Miss Stainforth won’t be well enough to accompany you out anyway.’
‘Sourpuss, but I’m not put off that easily. You didn’t answer my question, Eve Winterley. Are you quite sure you didn’t meet the man of your dreams last night?’ Verity asked, being of an age when fairy tales weren’t quite impossible and beckoning womanhood whispered how wonderful if they happened to her.
‘I never had those sorts of dreams, but, no, I did not,’ Eve said firmly, pushing a mental picture of the gruff, wounded and annoyingly unforgettable Mr Carter out of her mind. ‘If Betty comes with us to the park, will you stay and make some of your peppermint tea for Lady Chloe, Bran?’ she asked once Verity was fully occupied with finding her pelisse and muff, then dragging her favourite maid away from her duties as well as the second footman. Verity loved a romance and as Eve refused to live one for her, she must have decided to promote that one instead.
‘Of course I will. You have a good heart under those stubborn ways, haven’t you, my chick?’
Eve eyed her own reflection in the mirror and saw an almost perfect lady of fashion staring back at her. She almost expected a magical image of Mr Carter to peer into the glass behind her and smile mockingly, so she turned away with a sigh. Hadn’t she had just told Verity she didn’t have daydreams and here was the least comfortable hero she had ever encountered intruding into them?
‘I’m too old to be anyone’s chick now,’ she replied to Bran’s question lightly enough before she left the room.
‘You’ll never be too old for that, my love,’ Bran whispered as she watched the almost sisters join up on the wide landing, then go downstairs for their walk. ‘And perhaps I’ve good reason to worry about the dark circles under your eyes and stubborn set to your chin this morning.’
* * *
‘Ah, now don’t remind me, I’m determined to recall your name for myself, sir. There now, I knew it would come to me if I thought about it hard enough. You’re Mr Carter, are you not? I dare say you have been calling on my father?’ Miss Winterley’s pleasing contralto voice asked Colm as if they had met at some fashionable soirée.
Damnation, Colm thought darkly; he thought he was safe out here, trying to get some air into his lungs before making his way back to Derneley House. Lord Farenze’s daughter wasn’t as indolent as most of her kind and fate wasn’t on his side this morning either.
‘Good morning, Miss Winterley,’ he managed dourly.
‘It is, isn’t it?’ she replied brightly, as if his failure to sneak past her unnoticed made it a lot better for some reason.
‘We should not linger together in public or private, ma’am,’ he told her in an undertone he hoped he’d pitched too low to carry to the ears of a nearby knot of overgrown schoolgirls giggling over something best known to themselves.
‘We should not linger anywhere, then? You are very unsociable, Mr Carter, and the title ma’am is reserved for ladies with considerably more years in their dish than I have.’
‘Forgive my ignorance, Miss Winterley. It’s as well I have no inclination for high society and it has none for me,’ he said with an odd pang at his exile from the polite world that felt nothing like the burning resentment he had once struggled with.
A Mr Carter had to shape his life around his work, so Colm tried hard not to meet Miss Winterley’s challenging gaze with one of his own and wondered how it would feel to have the wealth and status his father took for granted back right now. Perhaps then he could meet her gaze for gaze and it wouldn’t matter that his father once ran off with her mother. With all that noble blood and nabob wealth at his back Colm Hancourt might have challenged Miss Winterley back and...
No, there was no and...for them and there never would be. Even when he was under his uncle’s roof and being himself again he wouldn’t have much more than a rifle and a tiny annuity. Mr Hancourt worked for his uncle and most of his salary would go on being the Duke of Linaire’s nephew. He must have better clothes and a sturdy horse and anything else could go into a small dowry for his sister. He and Miss Winterley would still not meet as equals and she would probably hate him for who he was when she found out. So he hoped she would tire of such a stiff-necked block and dismiss him before he said something disastrous.
‘You go off into a world of your own at the drop of a hat, don’t you, Mr Carter? That could get you into all sorts of trouble at Derneley House,’ she warned lightly.
‘I beg your pardon, Miss Winterley,’ he said. ‘I’ll go about my business and leave you to enjoy the sunshine.’
‘Please don’t go,’ she protested impulsively. ‘My cousin has met some old school friends and is catching up on all she’s missed since they last met.’
The three of them were standing a few yards away, so absorbed in excited conversation they might as well be the only people in the park. ‘I thought your cousins were still in the nursery,’ Colm said, revealing he knew more about her family than he wanted to admit.
‘Uncle James’s various chicks are, but Verity is my stepmama’s niece. I’m surprised you haven’t heard the story yet; it caused a sensation five years ago when my father married Lady Chloe Thessaly and the truth had to come out.’
‘I have spent the last eight years in the army. The sayings and doings of the great and the good passed us by for most of that time.’
‘I suppose you had more important things to think about than gossip and scandal, but you must have been little more than a boy when you took up your commission to have been in the army for so long, Mr Carter.’
‘A compliment, Miss Winterley?’
‘An observation,’ she said with a slight flush on her high cheekbones that told him she thought it might have been as well.
‘I was sixteen,’ he said, his eldest uncle’s brusque dismissal of his hopes and dreams of being a writer and scholar one day like his determinedly absent Uncle Horace sharp in his voice. He heard the gruff sound of it, shrugged rather helplessly and met her gaze with a rueful smile. ‘I thought myself the devil of a fellow in my smart green uniform,’ he admitted and suddenly wished he’d known her back then.
He’d felt so alone under his boyish swagger the day he entered Shorncliffe Camp and began the transformation from scared boy to scarred Rifleman. Mr Carter came into being in a regiment where officers won their rank largely by merit and gallantry in battle. Colm wanted a plain name to go with his dashing uniform mainly because he wanted to fit in and the Hancourts wanted nothing to do with him and Nell. Eight years on he must be Carter for a little longer, but at least nobody was trying to kill him.
‘Were you a Rifleman, then?’ she asked and he supposed he must have looked bewildered. ‘Since you wore a green uniform it seems a strong possibility,’ she added logically.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘some folk call us the Grasshoppers because of it.’
‘To survive eight years as a Rifleman you must be brave as well as fortunate, whatever they called you,’ Eve managed to reply lightly enough.
Instinct warned her not to let him know how she pitied a boy who began his dangerous career so young. What if he was born rich and well connected instead? Would she have met a rather dazzling young gentleman in an expensive drawing room when she came out and fallen for his easy charm? Or would she have thought him as shallow and unformed as the other young men who paid court to her with an air of fashionable boredom she didn’t find in the least bit flattering? She could have found the way his thick honey-brown hair curled despite his efforts to tame it fascinating. His gold-flecked eyes might have danced with merriment and lured a discerning young lady into falling in love and his scarred forehead would be unmarred. As for that lame leg—that would be as long and strong and lithe as the rest of him. That charmed and charming man would laugh and smile with her, then grow serious long enough to look deep into her eyes with his soul alive and clear in his own. And then he would kiss her.
Her breath caught in heady anticipation in the much less magical here and now and she almost gave her thoughts away by moving a little closer to him and behaving like a besotted ninny. A dreamer deep inside her whispered it would be almost unbearably glorious, whichever version of him did the kissing, but that might be Pamela’s daughter speaking and Eve didn’t want to listen to her. Carter certainly didn’t adore her and he was the Duke of Linaire’s clerk and librarian, for goodness’ sake.
‘I was just lucky, I suppose,’ he said with a self-deprecating shrug as if nothing else could account for it.
Eve shivered at the thought of a stray bullet or sabre slash that might have ended his life and refused to think of the number he must have survived right now. ‘I doubt any officer could survive long on luck in a regiment like yours,’ she challenged.
‘You would be surprised and at least I had enough of it to know when it ran out. This summer I was at the end of it and sold out as soon as I recovered enough to sign my name after Waterloo.’
‘You seem determined to make light of your experiences.’
‘A limping man stands little chance of surviving a forced march or fighting retreat, but let’s not speak of such horrors on a day like today. Didn’t you promise me a fine story about your cousin by marriage and your stepmama just now?’
‘Did I?’ Drat the man, having a conversation with him was like trying to hold a slippery trout wet from the river. Last night he seemed almost too dashing to be an upper servant, today he carried his shallow dark hat as if itching to have it back on his head and go before someone caught him speaking to a lady. ‘It’s no secret now, so you might as well hear it from me. Lady Chloe and Verity’s mama were twins, Mr Carter. At much the same age as you joined the army, Lady Daphne Thessaly wed a young naval lieutenant to avoid an arranged marriage. Her father was furious at being robbed of what he saw as his right to sell his daughter to a rich old man so he had her husband pressed, then left his twin daughters to birth her baby in such dire conditions it’s a miracle Verity and her aunt survived, but Lady Daphne died in childbed. Lady Chloe spent the next decade acting as Verity’s mother and became a housekeeper, then my father spent most of it trying not to be in love with her.’
‘And when he couldn’t resist any longer they told each other their secrets and seized the day?’
‘I don’t recall it being that simple, but the end result is they are very happily wed and Verity lives with us when her father is at sea,’ she said and wondered why she hadn’t let him go in the first place. It was that bland mask of the onlooker on life that did it, she supposed. For some reason she itched to rip it off and show the world a real man stood here, despite the repressive black garb and his fiercely guarded aloofness. Now she waited for his stiff farewell and told herself to let him go this time.
‘Would my sister had had an aunt like your stepmother to love and protect her when I was sent off to school by our uncle,’ he said instead and why was she this glad he hadn’t mumbled a hasty farewell and limped away?
‘What happened to her?’ she said with all the horror stories of girls sent out as apprentices by their cruel relatives in her mind as she saw him frown.
‘Oh, nothing very awful, she was put in the care of a governess until she was old enough to go to school and our family could forget us. My wicked uncle still found her useful as a stick to beat me with; if I ran away from school or tried to argue with the career he had in mind, my sister would be apprenticed to a milliner. I’m sure you know what happens to most girls bound to that trade, Miss Winterley. Even at eight years old I knew I must be a pattern card to save her from such a fate.’
