Without hesitation she hauled on the velvet cord that hung next to her bed. The marchioness was not one to disturb the servants unnecessarily in the middle of the night, but she also had the firmest belief in her ability to sleep soundly (the gift, she frequently announced with a sapient look at her husband, of a pure conscience). If she had awakened, then there was reason for it. She had heard a gasp, and a cry. She was sure of that. Perhaps a gentleman was being robbed on the street in front of the house; if so, it was their duty to go to the poor soul’s aid. She rang the bell again.
Finally her maid appeared, dazed and disheveled looking. She curtsied in a remarkably slovenly fashion, to Eloise’s mind, and said, “Yes, my lady?”
“I heard a noise,” Eloise snapped. “Have Carroll check the front walk immediately.”
Her maid curtsied again and disappeared. Eloise lay stiffly, staring at the blush-rose canopy that covered her old-fashioned tent bed. An awful thought had crept into her mind. What if her husband had taken to sneaking women into Brandenburg House? It sounded like a woman’s voice, now that her mind was clear and wide awake. Yes, she had heard a woman gasp. In fact, it reminded her of the time when the second housemaid went into labor, right in the parlor, without a word of warning. No matter how much the housekeeper had wrung her hands later and assured Eloise that everyone simply thought the girl was a tad large for her age, Eloise still remembered the scene with a stab of pure rage. The Duchess of Beaumont had come to take tea, and the mortification! Eloise would remember it to her dying day.
Thinking of the Duchess of Beaumont reminded her of Braddon Chatwin, because weren’t they related somehow? Eloise fancied that the duchess was dear Braddon’s godmother. He was a nicely mannered young fellow, Eloise thought. A dunce, of course, but what man wasn’t? And he came with a pretty set of relatives. It would be very pleasant to be related to the Duchess of Beaumont.
There was a sound of slippers running down the hallway, and Eloise’s maid slipped back into the room.
“Oh, my lady, there’s such a stir! Carroll has found a ladder in the back garden, and it’s set up right against the house.” She paused, native intuition telling her that the fact that the ladder was perched against Lady Sophie’s bedroom window was information better conveyed by the butler than by herself.
Eloise clambered out of bed and firmly tied her bedrobe around her. Without a word she marched through the connecting door to her dressing room and from there to her husband’s bedchamber. She had absolute confidence about the location of the ladder—directly to her husband’s window, no doubt about it. Things had come to a pretty pass when her husband had to import women up a ladder, like a spendthrift sneaking into a brothel.
Thus it was with a profound sense of surprise that she flung open George’s bedchamber door to find the marquis peacefully asleep and quite alone. What’s more, his windows were shut tight, and from the way he was snoring, he’d probably drunk more than was good for him before going to bed and wasn’t expecting visitors.
Eloise darted to her husband’s bed and grabbed his upper arm, shaking it vigorously. “Robbers, George, robbers!” She didn’t notice in her excitement that she was calling her husband by his Christian name, a courtesy she hadn’t granted him in years.
“Eh? What is it? Robbers?” The marquis sat up, his hair falling ludicrously over one eye. Eloise almost gasped in surprise. Had George grown old then, behind her back, as it were? His dark hair was speckled with white. He looked like a tired old man, peering at her blurrily. But his legs were still strong and muscled as he swung them out of bed and grabbed a robe. It seemed that George still slept without a nightshirt.
Eloise followed him out the door almost wistfully. The memory of the first few months of their marriage was hardly dimmed by the intervening twenty years. How much fun it had been when the marquis—George—had twinkled at her from the doorway connecting their rooms and strode into bed, naked as the day he was born.
Nostalgia, however, was the last thing on George’s mind as he charged down the front stairs. He was barreling toward the back garden when Carroll caught him by the elbow.
“My lord.” Something in Carroll’s tone chilled George’s blood. “The ladder has addressed itself to the window of the young lady’s chamber, my lord.”
“The ladder has addressed itself,” George repeated, puzzling over it. “Addressed itself? Why the hell can’t you speak English like the rest of the human race, Carroll?”
Carroll restrained a retort along the lines of a reminder of his French nationality, and simply said, stolidly, “The top of the ladder is leaning into Lady Sophie’s bedroom, my lord. And,” he added with some satisfaction, “her window is open.”
George gaped at him. “Her window is open,” he repeated.
“Open.” Carroll nodded, almost genially. “It appears that she has eloped, my lord.”
“Eloped.”
Carroll contented himself with nodding. He saw the marchioness walking swiftly down the hallway toward the marquis’s back, and he wanted nothing to do with her once she knew this pretty piece of news.
“You might check her room for a note, my lord.” With that advice, Carroll faded back through the servants’ door.
He was just in time to quell a rising wave of hilarity in the servants’ quarter. Eloise was starchy enough about personal matters that her employees were hysterical with laughter to hear that her daughter had run off to Gretna Green.
Carroll delivered a stern lecture about not talking of the family disgrace (little chance of that!) and sent them all off to bed, inconspicuously counting to make sure that every one of his seventeen footmen were in bed where they should be. Footmen, he knew well, were an eternal lure to young ladies, and he’d never get over the shame if Lady Sophie had set her eye on one of his lads.
Meanwhile, the Marquis of Brandenburg stayed exactly where he was, staring at the pieced Italian marble that adorned the front hallway.
His wife arrived silently, lighted taper in hand. She wasn’t the kind of woman who wore fluttery negligees over her nightdress; she was swathed in a sturdy piece of blue linsey wool that covered her from neck to toe.
“Well?” Eloise asked rather belligerently. And then, much more urgently: “George, George, what is it?”
Her husband raised his head and looked at her. “She’s gone. Carroll says that Sophie has eloped, our little Sophie.”
Eloise’s mouth fell inelegantly open, for perhaps the first and last time in her life.
“No!”
“The ladder’s at her window and the window’s open,” George said miserably. “I suppose there’s no way to hush this up, is there?”
Eloise snapped her jaws shut. “It’s impossible,” she whispered. “She would never do such a thing to me, to us. The shame … a daughter who eloped …”
“I don’t think we were too lenient with her, do you?” George’s face was pinched. “I thought a few times of saying something ‘bout her gowns, but I thought it was just me getting old and outmoded in my notions.”
“Nonsense,” Eloise said uncertainly.
She turned about and started down the hall. Then she swiveled and looked back at her motionless husband. “Come on, George. We must see if she left a note. Perhaps she hasn’t gone very far. If so, we must catch up with them tonight.”
Obediently George fell in behind her as they climbed the stairs again. Husband and wife made their way down the hallway shoulder to shoulder, neither aware that it was the first time they had walked so closely in exactly twenty years.
Eloise paused, then pushed open the door to her daughter’s bedchamber. To be sure, the window was open, and the delicate muslin curtains were billowing slightly in the night breeze. The room was dark, but Eloise could just barely see two black points poking above the windowsill—obviously the top of a ladder.
“Do you see a note?” George stood behind her, peering into the room.
Eloise held up the taper she carried in her hand and w
alked to the dressing table. There was nothing. No note perched on the marble fireplace either. She was just turning about to survey the room as a whole when George loomed up at her shoulder. Eloise stifled a scream. George huffed, and the candle burned out, leaving them in nearly pitch darkness. The only light was a flickering glow from the hallway sconces, which Eloise had lit on her way down the hallway.
“Eloise, we need to go after them as soon as possible!” George’s voice had a queer, hurried tone to it. He grabbed her shoulders and hustled her toward the door. Eloise felt as if she were an awkward bundle of laundry, particularly when George knocked her against the door frame in his eagerness to get out.
In the hallway she pulled her arm out of his grip. “What on earth has possessed you, my lord?”
George sighed. That was it for “George.” Clearly, the state of armed warfare had descended again.
“We must get dressed and into a carriage immediately, Eloise. If we leave now, we have a decent chance of catching them either tonight or tomorrow, before they reach the border. You know it takes at least two days to get to Scotland.”
“But who is he?” Eloise asked, somewhat pitifully. “I never told Sophie she couldn’t marry anyone she pleased. Why would she need to elope? Why wouldn’t she leave me a note? She must have left me a note!” Eloise started back to the door of Sophie’s bedroom.
George grabbed her arm again, his grip like steel. “We don’t have time for the note, Eloise. You need to get dressed. If we catch up with them in time, we can pretend that we are simply returning from a late ball.” He half marched his wife to her bedroom and pushed her in the door before him.
“Here, put this on!” George pulled a dress at random from the wardrobe. Eloise looked wildly at the saffron-colored ball gown.
“I can’t.”
Although his wife was one of the most stiff-rumped ladies in London, George thought, one might almost think she was near tears.
“Yes you can.” He caught the tie to her robe and pulled it off. Eloise instinctively clutched the front of her nightdress.
“You have five minutes,” George said very slowly, but his tone left no room for interpretation. “I shall order up the carriage. I’ll return in five minutes and I want you dressed and ready to go.”
Eloise nodded numbly. When he appeared at her door again she was wearing a neat walking dress of blue serge, rather than the ball gown. It gaped at the back where Eloise had been unable to hook it herself.
“No! You have to wear a ball gown.” And, in answer to her silent question: “It’s only one-thirty in the morning, Eloise. We must look as if we were returning from a ball.”
Eloise nodded. George briskly pulled the walking dress down over her shoulders, exposing the creamy white expanse of Eloise’s chest. Eloise backed up.
“You leave and I’ll get dressed,” she said hoarsely.
Her husband stepped back, a sardonic smile lurking at the edge of his mouth. “Do you know, Eloise, I haven’t been in this room since you gave birth to Sophie? I was invited in to see the new child—five minutes, I think—and never darkened the door again.”
Their eyes met for a moment and George walked back to his room.
Eloise put on the ball gown and tumbled her hair into some sort of order. Then she ran through her dressing room to the adjoining bedroom. George fastened up the back of the dress without a word, and they made their way downstairs. Carroll emerged from the shadows of the back hallway.
“The marchioness and I are attending a late engagement,” George announced. “You’ll be glad to know, Carroll, that your suspicions were for naught. Lady Sophie is safely in her bed, with no thoughts of elopement.”
Carroll bowed and murmured his delight at the news. He held the door open as the marquis and marchioness clambered with unseemly haste into their waiting carriage.
“And where are you off to in the middle of the night, if not the post road leading to Gretna Greene?” Carroll liked to ask himself the questions that he could never address to his master. “And what shall I do about that ladder? And are you really telling me that Lady Sophie will ring her bell for hot chocolate, without a hair out of place, at seven in the morning?”
Well, one question could be answered. Without further ado, Carroll ordered Philippe to remove the ladder in the back garden.
Up in Sophie’s bedroom, Patrick was leaning on one elbow, looking down at Braddon’s—no, his future wife. As he watched, Sophie opened her eyes and looked up at him, eyes midnight blue in the dusky light.
Patrick ran a finger over her lower lip. “We’re going to have to find Braddon another wife, you know. We can’t just leave him in the lurch. What a pity that you don’t have a sister, my love!”
“Or you,” Sophie said impishly. A telltale blush was rising up her neck. She was in bed, unclothed (at least she seemed to have a sheet over herself), talking to Patrick, whom she was going to marry, and with whom she had just—
“Your parents were in here just now,” Patrick said. His grin widened. “You were sleeping like a baby.”
“What?” It emerged from her mouth like a half-strangled shriek.
The finger which Patrick had been rubbing over her lip began to wander down her neck. “Your mother didn’t see us. Your father did, though. He practically threw your mother back out into the hallway. Apparently she thinks you’ve eloped, because she was looking for a note.” His finger wandered below the sheet.
Sophie fastened her eyes on Patrick’s face, trying to ignore all nonverbal communications. “Are you saying that my father saw you and said nothing?”
Patrick nodded.
“But why?” Sophie’s eyes were as round as robin’s eggs. “Why on earth wouldn’t he challenge you, or stop and call me a doxy, or do something?”
“A doxy?” Patrick looked at her quizzically. “Where did you get that outmoded term, my love?”
Sophie blushed. “It’s … that’s what my mother calls some women.”
“Humph.” Patrick rolled one of his legs over on top of Sophie’s. She turned even pinker. “I think he was giving me a chance to get out of here,” Patrick said.
“Oh!” Sophie gasped. The blood was rushing to her head.
Patrick shifted his weight and suddenly every nerve in her body was clamoring. He bent his head and brushed his lips across hers, but at that moment there was a scraping noise and the top of the ladder bobbed, fell back against the house once, then silently swung away into the air.
“Alas,” Patrick murmured against Sophie’s lips. “Discovery appears to be imminent.”
Sophie didn’t reply. Her hands were discovering the smooth planes of Patrick’s back as his mouth plunged and took, sending a stroking heat down all her trembling limbs.
Reluctantly Patrick pulled away and sat up, running his hands through his hair. “My love, I had better be off.” He looked down at Sophie, who lay quietly. Slowly he reached out and rubbed her cheek with the back of his hand.
“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he said huskily.
A smile flickered on Sophie’s lips. “When I refused to marry you, last month, you looked profoundly relieved.”
“Really?” Patrick laughed. “I felt rather piqued, if the truth be known.”
“Oh.” Sophie nodded. That explained why Patrick had come up the ladder instead of Braddon. She didn’t quite like the idea of her future being decided due to a childish rivalry between two men, but she felt too happy at the moment to worry about it.
“So why did you reject me?” Patrick asked.
A shadow passed Sophie’s eyes. “It wasn’t you, my lord.” A blush mounted in her cheeks. “I was quite—well,” she shifted direction quickly, “I just wasn’t thinking about the way the world is. I thought … I don’t know what I thought.” She started once again. “I was being very cowardly, I realize that.”
Patrick was pulling on his breeches and shirt, but he turned and looked at Sophie in surprise. Cowardly? Just as h
e opened his mouth, she asked a question.
“How are you going to leave? I think the ladder is gone.”
“Down the front stairs, naturally.” Patrick’s face took on a momentary hauteur lent to him by generations of aristocratic ancestors. “I should be very surprised if your butler questioned my presence in the house.”
“Where do you suppose my parents went?”
“I expect your father will direct the coachman to drive out the post road for a time, then order the horses home again.” Patrick’s voice was muffled for a moment as he cast the great cloak over his head. “You should expect a good deal of conversation in the morning, sweetheart. I think your mother will be particularly annoyed with your father.”
“She’s frequently annoyed with him,” Sophie observed.
Patrick cast her an inquiring glance.
“He sleeps with too many women,” she obligingly explained.
Patrick sat down on the edge of the bed, fully swathed in Braddon’s theatrical cloak once again.
Sophie looked up at him, her eyes heavy lidded. “My mama is very irritable about the whole subject of mistresses. But you needn’t worry; I shall be accommodating.”
Patrick smiled a bit tightly. “I hope you won’t have anything to accommodate.”
Sophie was clearly drifting off to sleep again. “It’s quite all right, Patrick. I am not the sort of woman who will make a fuss. Now that I’m going to marry you, I won’t whimper about it.” Her eyes closed.
Patrick’s eyes narrowed as he watched Sophie’s face relax into dreams. It was not without a frisson of shock that he realized her complete lack of belief in his ability to stay away from other women. As he watched she turned a bit, nestling her face against her hand.