He swooped. Josie held her breath. That’s what he would do, of course. He would sweep Sylvie into his embrace, and she would melt against him, just the way all the heroines of the Minerva novels did. Then Sylvie leapt back into her view.
Her voice was colder than a February Sunday in Lent. “How dare you! How dare you maul me in such a fashion, Lord Mayne!”
Kiss her again, Josie thought. She wants to be seduced. You were too fast. Or she’s too shy.
“It seems we must clarify our relations,” Sylvie stated, her voice frigid. “I am never to be approached, or mauled, in any fashion.”
It’s because she’s French, Josie thought. An Englishwoman could never resist Mayne. Oh God, if only he would speak to her with half the longing he poured into one word to Sylvie, she—she—
“I am fond of you, and I shall certainly allow you your marital rights.”
Josie instinctively gasped and then clapped her hand over her mouth.
“Did you hear me?” Sylvie asked impatiently. “I wish to make certain that you understand me, Mayne. I realize that you have lived in England, and have absorbed some regrettable customs here. But I must ask you to give me every consideration that you would give your own mother.”
“My mother,” Mayne said, finally.
Josie’s heart sunk. He didn’t have that liquid note of happiness in his voice anymore.
“Of course!” Sylvie replied. “Surely I needn’t tell you that the most important women in your life, those deserving of the most respect, are your mother and your wife. Pooh! This conversation is quite foolish, is it not?”
“I think it is remarkably interesting.”
“I do not believe for a moment that you would treat your mother with anything less than the most delicate and filial respect. She is a holy sister of the Church, is she not? I fail to see why you should treat me with any less courtesy.”
“My mother did indeed retire to a convent,” Mayne said. “But you, Sylvie, are no nun.”
“I deserve precisely the same courtesy,” Sylvie said. “A lack of decorum led to the downfall of the French monarchy.”
“I meant you no discourtesy.”
There was a moment of silence and then Sylvie said, painstakingly, “I find this subject rather distasteful, but I have always believed that it is better to be quite clear in matters such as these.”
Josie was gripping the edge of the hayloft opening so hard that her fingers were white.
“I agree,” Mayne said.
Of course, she shouldn’t be listening. No one should listen to this. For Sylvie was explaining in her ravishing French accent that she would dislike it of all things if Mayne took it in his head to manhandle her whenever he felt the wish. In fact, she would prefer that perhaps an amicable schedule could be—
Josie had to bite her lip. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to laugh or snort. Annabel would die laughing when she heard this.
Not that she would ever disclose that she had done such an ill-mannered thing as listen to a private conversation of this nature. She edged a bit farther away, and some strands of hay fell onto Gigue’s back.
“Sylvie,” Mayne said, interrupting her lecture. “Darling, you simply don’t understand how things are between a man and a woman, chérie.”
“I assure you—” Sylvie said. From where she was, Josie could just see the curve of Mayne’s cheek as he cupped Sylvie’s face in his hands. His fingers were long and strong. He leaned toward Sylvie and Josie almost gulped. He had the longest eyelashes she could imagine on a man. No wonder—
No wonder Sylvie was silent in his arms. Josie felt pricks in her eyes again, and now she really felt ill-mannered, watching. They were so clearly in love, so beautiful together. Mayne would persuade Sylvie to kiss him, and years from now they would laugh at her reluctance. Laugh surrounded by their children.
Josie shut her eyes tightly so that she couldn’t see his bent head, the tenderness in his fingers, the passion in the way his shoulders bent toward Sylvie. She never would be a woman like Sylvie, a woman whom a man like Mayne would worship, the way he did Sylvie. Tears slid hotly over her fingers. She was the sort of woman whom a man felt he could maul with impunity. She was the sort of woman who ended up behind the stables, being pushed against the wood, while Sylvie, delicate, beautiful Sylvie, was adored by Mayne.
Her body was rocking with sobs now, but she didn’t make a sound, just pressed her hands over her mouth.
All the exhilaration of watching Thurman’s face disappear behind brown sludge was evaporating. How was she to get home? How could she bear to—
Her eyes flew open.
The slap startled Gigue too, and she kicked the wall in protest.
24
From The Earl of Hellgate,
Chapter the Nineteenth
I know no better name to give her than that of Shakespeare’s fierce Amazon queen, Hippolyta. In mourning because the lovely Peasblossom had flown back to her little nest, I wandered down the streets of London, scarce knowing where I was. This particular day I had visited Hampton Court, and although drained by sorrow, I had been to King Henry VIII’s tennis court and taken three very fair sets from a certain gentleman of my acquaintance…
It’s rather disconcerting to bring a woman to my house,” Darlington said as the hackney slowed to a close.
He couldn’t be as disconcerted as Griselda was. After a lifetime of appropriate behavior, she was throwing all caution to the winds and actually entering a gentleman’s house? And yet…
She looked at Darlington’s strong, lean body and his unsettling beauty. She was going to his house. She would think about propriety, spouses, and other unpleasant topics tomorrow.
“Aren’t all young bachelors accustomed to bringing females into their dwellings?” she asked, shaking off the sense that she was like one of those women, who were for hire, presumably.
“I don’t think so. My mother visits occasionally, but she sends a footman to fetch me to her carriage rather than enter the house herself.”
“Why doesn’t she enter? Or request that you visit her?” Griselda asked.
“Have you met the duchess?”
“We have been presented.”
Darlington grinned at her. “Then you know that my mother is charmingly irresolute.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know her well enough to make that judgment.”
“My father ordered the entire family to avoid me at all costs, at least until I had set myself up in a decent marriage.”
“How very—very—” But she couldn’t think what to say.
He didn’t seem to mind. “My mother is fond of me and so she comes to visit, nimbly making her way around my father’s commandment. He knows, but turns a blind eye.”
“I’m sure you are a trial to him.”
“He despairs, he despairs.” The door to the carriage swung open.
Darlington lived in a small house on Portman Square. Griselda didn’t know what she expected: an apartment, probably. After all, he was the third son of a duke, and penniless, by all accounts. But it was a sweet little house with an elaborately carved arch over a black walnut door. It wasn’t as large as her own house, but it was more charming.
As they walked up the path, an elderly man with stern eyes opened the door and bowed stiffly.
“Thank you, Clarke,” Darlington said, taking Griselda’s pelisse himself and handing it to the butler.
Griselda felt more and more confused. Did young bachelors have butlers? Apparently so.
“We’ll have tea in my study,” Darlington told Clarke.
Did young bachelors serve tea to women who had entered their house for a less than respectable purpose? Apparently they did, because she found herself walking sedately before Darlington, for all the world as if she were going to tea with a duchess.
The walls of Darlington’s study were painted a dark crimson color. There were no pictures on the walls, for the simple reason that every wall was covered with books. Grisel
da’s mouth almost fell open. Of course, she’d seen books. Rafe had a reasonable number of books in his study, though she’d never seen him actually reading one. And certainly there were books in her house. But here books lined the walls, and stacks sat on the floor. There were books on the large desk and books on the armchairs.
“I gather that you are a great reader?” she asked.
“’Tis one of my faults,” Darlington said.
Griselda trailed a gloved finger over the spines of the books closest to her. They weren’t the sort of books she would have expected. Rafe had rows of classics in his study, all bound up in leather and dating back a few centuries, if the dust that fell from them was any indication.
Darlington had rows and rows of…how to put it? Books that the servants read. Books that she read with secret pleasure. Books from lending libraries. The kind that had titles like Nocturnal Revels and the Malefactors’ Bloody Register. Books about murder. His desk had stacks of the same. She picked one up.
“I read this,” she said, glancing over her shoulder as she opened the flyleaf of Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness. “A most affecting story. All those letters between Martha Ray and her murderer.”
“Cross made them up,” Darlington said, coming to her shoulder.
“That’s hardly the point, is it? Of course the author made up the letters. But they were so affecting.”
“How so?”
Griselda tucked herself into a chair. He was standing entirely too close to her, and it made her pulse race. “The argument that the murderer—what was his name?”
“James Hackman.”
“That’s right. When he was trying to convince Martha to leave her lover, the Earl of Sandwich, he was remarkably convincing in saying that she wasn’t Sandwich’s property. Of course,” she added hastily, “it’s all remarkably scandalous and she was a loose woman.”
Darlington came over and leaned on the back of her chair. She felt him pick up a strand of her hair. “Loose women,” he said dreamily. “How we love them. Of course, Hackman fell so much in love that he grew to hate her.”
“You imply that he killed her from hatred,” Griselda said. “I think he killed her because he couldn’t bear to have her in the world, and himself not in a room next to her. I think he simply couldn’t countenance their separation any longer.”
“You have a romantic soul.”
“No. But I have spent a great deal of time watching people in the ton create indiscretions.”
“While creating none such yourself.”
Until today, Griselda thought, wondering again at herself. She tilted back her head and looked up at him. There he was: all tawny masculinity, that lean face and eyes that looked older than he was. “People make fools of themselves when they’re in love—or in passion.”
“Are you?”
“That’s a blunt question. I do not consider myself a fool.”
“Thus you are not in love.”
She almost shut her eyes against his beauty. “Certainly not!”
“I begin to believe that I am.”
Griselda blinked at him. “You are—”
“In love. With you. Not that you need fear that I shall take a pistol to your heart as poor Hackman did.”
“You are as mad as Hackman, then,” Griselda said. He bent over the chair, and his hair fell over his brow. She couldn’t stop herself and reached a hand up to his cheek.
“Do you know what Martha looked like?” he asked.
“No.”
“Not like you. She was a member of the demimonde, the notorious mistress of an earl. She had a cleft chin.”
“I don’t.”
He tapped a finger on her chin. “No, you don’t. That’s a perfectly round little chin that I see before me. And Martha had dark hair.”
Griselda couldn’t help smiling. It was an odd thing to know that the gentleman before you was as aware as you were that your hair was fair by nature…because it was fair all over her body.
“It’s said that she had bright, smiling eyes and a warm, open countenance.”
“Who said that?” Griselda asked.
“Westminster Magazine. April of 1779.”
“How on earth—”
“Would you believe me if I told you I was a scholar?”
“Not for a moment,” Griselda said, smiling at him. She knew scholars. Why, Rafe’s own brother was a scholar, and a Cambridge professor at that. “Can you read ancient Aramaic?”
“What’s that?”
“I believe it’s the language the Bible was written in,” Griselda said.
“I had the sort of education that leads me to believe the Bible was written by an Englishman, in an Englishman’s language.” He dropped her hair and was just sliding a warm hand down her arm when the door opened and his butler arrived with a tea tray.
“It feels odd to be serving tea to you,” Griselda said a few seconds later. “Rather as if I am a maiden aunt on a visit.” They were sitting opposite each other, and she was pouring from an exquisite blue teapot.
He bellowed with laughter at that. “You don’t look like a maiden aunt of my acquaintance,” he said wolfishly.
She felt herself turning pink, but still had to say it. “Yet I’m so much older than you are.” She put a lump of sugar in his cup and handed it to him. “I truly feel as if my age makes this both remarkably improper and, in some odd way, more proper. After all, I am far too old to be having an impetuous affair.”
“With a younger man,” he said, his eyes teasing her over his teacup.
“One hates to think what people would say about me.” It was a relief to say it, rather than have the niggling silent shame of it under her breastbone.
“I expect they’d say you were desperate.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Distasteful.”
“Desperate, with an appetite for beauty.”
Griselda put down her teacup a bit sharply. “Worse and worse.”
“Oh, I can do better than that,” he said. “This is like Martha and Hackman, you know. He was much younger than she.”
“I begin to feel as if I should flee this house to save my life,” Griselda said, making a rather vain attempt to change the subject.
“Seven years they had between them,” Darlington said, putting his teacup to the side.
If he was fishing for her age, she certainly was not going to tell him. In fact, she really ought to leave now. All that exuberant impetuosity she felt earlier had disappeared.
“How surprising that you know so much of that ancient murder case,” she said.
“I know about any number of curious old stories,” he said, not seeming to notice the little froideur in her voice. “But tell me, Griselda, what do you find most surprising about Martha’s love affair with Hackman? That he was younger, or that he killed her?”
“Murders are alarmingly commonplace,” Griselda observed.
There was a little smile at the corner of his lips that made her take a lemon biscuit, although she wasn’t in the least hungry.
“So you would find their age difference to be the most interesting aspect of the case?”
“Surely we can talk of something else?” she asked. “I do think we have said all there is to say on the subject.”
“Indeed, I would like to show you the disposition of my house,” he said, rising when she did.
Griselda had already made up her mind that she wasn’t going upstairs. True, she had had wild thoughts earlier…but they were quite quelled now, and she had returned to her senses. “Is it your house? I’m certain that someone told me you were penniless. Do you live here on your father’s sufferance, then?”
He took her arm. “Getting your own back, are you?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. This is a charming room,” Griselda said, pausing on the threshold to a small dining room. The furniture was excellent, old comfortable pieces in black walnut. She waved her hand at the paper, which was a light gold color, marked with small bi
rds: masculine yet delightful. “Did your mother choose this?”
“No, my sister Betsy.”
“Oh, of course.” And then, as he was opening the door to a small sitting room, “But you haven’t a sister Betsy! Your father has three sons.”
He grinned at her. “Perhaps you looked me up in Debrett’s? Before sleeping with me, I mean. Surely every matron makes sure that bloodlines are in order before skipping off to a hotel.”
“You, sir, are a terrible conversationalist,” Griselda said tartly. “Do you always say precisely what comes into your mind?”
“I am known for being an uncomfortable companion for that very reason,” he said.
“So who is Betsy?”
“There is no Betsy.”
She turned to look, and he was leaning against the doorjamb, looking at her in that oddly intense manner of his. “I told you. The only woman who has entered my house is my mother, and that rarely.”
“So…”
“I chose the paper myself. I am used to taking care of myself. And I think that you are much the same, are you not? Who takes care of you, Lady Griselda? As I understand it, your mother lives a retired life, does she not?”
“I have no need of anyone to take care of me. But if I have need of something, my brother has always sufficed.”
“Mayne?”
“He’s the only brother I have, and unlike Betsy, he actually exists.”
“Mayne does not strike me as a particularly caring person.”
Griselda’s eyes narrowed. No one insulted her brother—unless, of course, that person was discussing adultery. “He has always watched out for me. And now, I really must be going.”
“You haven’t seen the upstairs yet.”
“That would be quite improper.”
“All the more reason,” he said, smiling at her. “I think, Lady Griselda, that you need someone to take care of you.”
“I—”
Two seconds later he had scooped her into his arms, as if she were nothing more than a fainting heroine. “You’re making a practice of this,” she said, not struggling to get free, as that would be inelegant.
“I hope to,” he said, carrying her up the stairs.