“Out!”
Lowe left, clutching a sheaf of papers to his chest, bowing reflexively as he went. He felt ill. The whole house knew (thanks to Keating) just how perfidious his master’s first wife had been, and they knew quite well that he didn’t have any problems with his “rapper,” given the satisfied ladies—well, women—who had occasionally graced the master’s bed since his wife left. Although there haven’t been any in England, Lowe thought.
Meanwhile Alex leaned against the mantelpiece in the library, his face savage with rage. God damn her, God damn her! Maria, with her soft wails and shrieking complaints … he shook with disgust even thinking of her.
Finally he took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down. After all, his ex-wife was hardly responsible for insolent verses printed in a London scandal sheet. He could easily have refused the annulment if he wished. It had seemed a heaven-sent way out of a horrible situation, Alex thought, his mind drawn back to feverish nights in Rome during which Maria would scream incomprehensibly and regularly throw objects at his head. In a period of two months he had had the windows in their bedroom replaced four times, to the great amusement of the household servants.
He still remembered the awed sense of joy he felt when Maria confessed—in a moment of calmness—that she was in love with a priest and wanted to annul their marriage. He had, in fact, been on the verge of volunteering for the dragoon guards, even given his position as heir to the earldom. Hang his father! Patrick would make a better earl than he, any day. He would have done anything, anything to get away from his Italian wife.
Alex flung himself into a big armchair next to the fire, thinking moodily of his first meeting with Maria. He had been in Italy for barely a week, and he attended a concerto at the Palazzo Barberini with some count; he could barely remember his name now. Count Rossi-Ferrini, he thought. And there she was. She looked exactly like the girl he had met in the gardens of Stuart Hall, the girl he had spent fruitless weeks searching for. True, she didn’t have red hair, and he was certain that the garden girl, as he had taken to calling her in his head, did. And she didn’t smell as sweetly clean and innocent as that girl did. Odd, given that Maria was a well-born Italian maiden and that girl was training to be a prostitute. But their faces were the same shape, a delicate triangle, and they both had intriguingly full lower lips.
Fool that he was, he assumed that Maria and he would share the same passion that he and the garden girl had … what an absolute jackass, Alex thought, his lips twisting cynically. Once married, Maria had to be compelled to any sort of physical intimacy. When they finally did share a bed it was abundantly clear that far from being the innocent, convent-raised girl her family had represented her to be, she was no virgin. After that the marriage rapidly disintegrated, spiraling into a series of screaming tirades on her part and longer and longer absences on his part. He took trips into the Italian countryside, stopping at any taverna he saw, drinking local wine until he fell off the bench. By the end of a year his Italian was fluent and his tolerance for alcohol (never slight) had doubled.
But he was miserable. He was going to the dogs and he knew it. Then, just as he was on the verge of joining the Third Dragoon Guards, the papers signed and the only task remaining to inform his wife, Maria came to him and begged him to release her from the marriage. Release her! He would have done anything to wipe out their wedding. Oddly enough, they made love that night for the first time in months, rather tenderly, as he remembered. Unfortunately, it was also the night that Pippa was conceived.
Within a month her powerful family had arranged everything. Alex had one sticky and uncomfortable interview with three black-gowned bishops who asked him politely: “Lei avrebbe per caso un problema?’
“Sì, sì,” he responded earnestly. He may not have had the problem they thought he had, but he had no trouble labeling Maria a problem. And he was free. Maria set off with her priest, now ex-priest he supposed, carrying with her all the household silver, jewelry, and every piece of furniture she could put her hands on. She even took a miniature of his mother, presumably to sell it since she could have no attachment to the picture.
In the first joyful breath of liberty he didn’t care, thinking that the marriage was over and he would never again have to wake up to Maria Colonna in his bedchamber. But in fact he was still not entirely free. The debris from that dreadful marriage kept washing up on the shores of his life. The miniature of his mother showed up in a secondhand store in Naples. At one point Maria’s feckless brother tried to blackmail him. And now ribald verses. Personally, he didn’t give a hang what the papers printed about him. But Charlotte’s father, the Duke of Calverstill—that would be another story. To tell the truth, he himself would never allow Pippa to marry a man with a reputation like his own.
His thoughts were broken by the sound he was unconsciously waiting for. Little footsteps padded down the stairs, stumbling slightly but recovering, he knew, because Keating tightly held Pippa’s hand.
“Papa!” her little voice shouted a greeting as Keating pushed open the heavy double doors to the library. “Papa!”
Alex stood up and walked around from the back of the armchair, crouching down on his heels and opening his arms for a huge hug. Pippa toddled as fast as she could toward him, leaving Keating standing at the library door. As Alex scooped her little body into his arms, his heart melted. So what if he couldn’t have Charlotte? He had Pippa. He’d try harder to find a proper nanny. Miss Virginia had left after three days. She was the first nanny who hadn’t quit; Alex’s housekeeper had fired her. Apparently she became very close to two of the footmen in the week she spent in Sheffield House, and that intimacy resulted, naturally enough, in a whole brace of footmen sporting black eyes.
“Papa, fwore,” Pippa shouted. Shouting seemed to be Pippa’s normal mode of speech. Fwore mean fuori: outside, Alex translated. Pippa had only ten words that he had been able to decipher, and he couldn’t afford to ignore the ones she spoke in Italian. But she was adding them every day. Yesterday she said kiss very clearly, and this morning (before breakfast), cake.
“All right, pumpkin,” Alex said, the corners of his mouth curling upward. “Let’s go to the park.” He banished the fleeting image of Charlotte’s tight riding costume from his mind—but he did scoop up Pippa and stride quickly toward the hallway, shouting to Keating to have Bucephalus, his horse, readied once again. Keating handed Pippa up to him once he was seated on the massive stallion. Mrs. Turnpike, his housekeeper, emerged from the house looking anxious. She hated these excursions to the park with Pippa balanced on a great prancing horse. She wrung her hands in her apron, but stopped herself from saying anything. There was no telling with the earl. One day he was right as sunshine, and the next he would snap your head off.
Alex and Pippa paced gravely up and down the aisles of Hyde Park. Now that he had read the scandal sheet, he was able to see a clear influence in people’s demeanor. No one would ever snub him; he was an earl, after all. But older women bowed more stiffly than they were wont to, and men bent a sympathetic eye on him. The sapskulls! Alex’s chiseled face became even more forbidding. To tell the truth, some of his acquaintances avoided him, not due to the scandal, but from pure fear.
But more looked curiously at Pippa and then whispered behind their hands. Alexander Foakes’s daughter was his mirror image. In fact, if Pippa hadn’t been wearing a lemon-yellow dress she would look quite simply like a younger version of the earl. More than one member of the ton circled around the walks in order to drive a carriage past the pair again, or turned carelessly at the head of a walk to return toward them. Who was she? Who ever heard of an annulled marriage that produced children?
“The only annulment I ever heard of,” reported Lady Skiffing, “came about when young Lord Sybthorpe was married practically at birth to his father’s second cousin’s daughter, or some such relation like that, and then it was clear by a few years later that the bride was wrong in the upper story. So she had to be removed to an
asylum, and he ended up marrying that consummate tart—what was her name? Barbara Cullerson, I think. Out of the frying pan, into the fire!” she finished triumphantly. “There were no children from that marriage either,” she added, “not that it signifies, of course.”
“Well, I know that when Miss Filibert—you must remember her, dearest Lady Skiffing, she was the one with such horribly gaping teeth—at any rate, when Miss Filibert eloped with her music teacher, or was it with her dance instructor? I vow, I have quite forgotten. At any rate Lord Filibert had that one annulled. They had only spent three hours alone together, and so …” Lady Prestlefield trailed off suggestively.
“The real question is,” Lady Skiffing said in lowered tones, “who is that child?”
“Yes.” Lady Prestlefield pursed her lips thoughtfully. The two ladies were sitting in a barouche, barely wide enough for them and their petticoats. They could hardly ask the Earl of Sheffield and Downes to join them, not that he would ever join two old ladies anyway.
Suddenly Sarah Prestlefield laid a hand on her friend’s whip, signaling her to bring the barouche to a stop. “Look!” she breathed through scarcely opened lips.
At the top of the drive Alexander Foakes had encountered the two reigning beauties of the London ton, Charlotte Daicheston and Sophie York, and Lady Charlotte seemed to be scolding the earl. It was hideously vexing to be so close and not be able to hear. Lady Skiffing coaxed her horses to a slow amble and they drew closer without the three young people noticing.
“It is not a question of convenience,” they heard Charlotte say as they got close enough. Her eyes were flashing magnificently; she really was a lovely girl, Lady Skiffing thought. “That child is not safe!” Lady Charlotte continued.
Well, there all of London agreed with her, of course. The two ladies exchanged significant glances. They had both given their spouses an appropriate number of children who were housed and cared for out of sight. Out of sight and out of danger, one might add. It chilled the bones to see a young thing perched on top of a great beast like that black monster of the earl’s.
Charlotte had no thought about the proprieties of children in the park. The sight of a smiling Pippa wiggling vigorously within her father’s arm and drumming her heels on the back of a jittery stallion awakened all the maternal feelings she had buried three years ago. She slipped off her own horse, Jamaica, handing the reins to her groom.
“Give her to me,” she said, standing close to Bucephalus’s hugely muscled shoulder.
Alex looked down at her in amazement. What the devil? Pippa was perfectly safe with him.
“Bucephalus is very sedate, Lady Charlotte,” he said with just a slight edge to his tone. “He’s as calm as a cow, I assure you.”
“Nevertheless,” Charlotte replied, “Pippa is not safe. I shall walk to your house holding Pippa and you may follow. It’s not far.”
Alex’s eyes crinkled with amusement. His girl had revealed she knew where he lived. She remembered Pippa’s name. She was showing maternal feelings. No matter that it made him feel like a bear with a sore head to have his decisions about Pippa questioned.
He shrugged. “You do remember what she’s like with women?”
“She will be fine,” Charlotte said firmly. She reached up her arms, and Alex dropped his daughter straight into them.
Pippa took one look at Charlotte’s face and opened her mouth to emit a titanic scream. Charlotte immediately put her down at the edge of the walk. Then she waited for a few seconds. When Pippa took a breath, Charlotte said, “I’m the not-nanny, Pippa. Don’t you remember me? I’m not a nanny.”
Pippa’s mouth closed as she thought about that. “My name is Charlotte—the not-nanny,” Charlotte hastily repeated. “Now, I am going to pick you up and carry you so that you can see your father on his horse, would that be all right?”
Pippa didn’t say anything, but she didn’t scream either. Charlotte swiftly gathered up the little girl and held her against her shoulder, so she faced backward and could see her father. Pippa gurgled approvingly. Charlotte started walking.
Sophie was still sitting on her horse, stunned. One minute they had been on their way home and the next Charlotte was biting at the man she might well marry, and then she was carrying off his brat. Sophie slid off her own horse, giving Alex an admonishing look. He looked like the devil himself, about to burst out laughing.
When Sophie caught up with Charlotte, she peered about the baby’s round bottom and many petticoats. To her relief, Charlotte didn’t look furious anymore, just amused.
“Have you had anything to do with babies?” Charlotte asked, quietly enough so that Alexander Foakes, pacing behind them on Bucephalus, couldn’t hear her.
“Never,” Sophie said. “I’m an only child, you know.”
“Well, this one is rather wet,” Charlotte said. “And she’s much heavier than she looks.”
“It’s only about four more streets,” Sophie said encouragingly. “Why don’t I take her for a while?”
“She won’t agree.” Charlotte grimaced. “Pippa is terrified of women.”
Sophie cast her a sidelong glance. Charlotte was reflexively cuddling the child, her hand smoothing the soft curls at the nape of Pippa’s neck. Sophie smiled to herself.
They left the bronze gates of Hyde Park behind them and set off down Hurston Street. Alex lived in Grosvenor Square, only three streets from the entrance to the park. Sophie held up her skirts as they picked their way through rubbish and crowds of people, the odd little band of grooms, horses, and one earl, still mounted, attracting not a little attention.
“Well, Charlotte,” Sophie said, sotto voce, “if you don’t marry Alexander Foakes after this, the gossips will probably have an apoplexy.”
“Whatever do you mean?” Charlotte raised her head. She had been rubbing her cheek on the baby’s round head and whispering nonsense to her, and Pippa seemed to like it, since she was giggling.
“Lady Skiffing’s barouche just drove by and believe me she didn’t miss a single detail. You’re holding Foakes’s child, and he is on a horse behind you, with a face like thunder. And she had Sarah Prestlefield with her, and even my mama, who claims Lady Prestlefield as a close friend, says she’s the most fiendish gossip in London. Lady Prestlefield always announces that whatever tattle she knows is certainly untrue, and then she repeats it. You should have seen her bonnet peeking out from the side of the carriage, Charlotte!”
Charlotte didn’t know what to think, so she just concentrated on crossing the street. Alex, riding in the street next to the sidewalk, had also seen Lady Prestlefield’s bonnet emerging gracelessly from a barouche. He grinned, the last fragments of his ill humor disappearing. Perhaps gossip and Charlotte’s soft heart would take care of his marriage problem for him.
At that moment one of London’s many street sweepers, a little boy of about nine years old, darted into the street just before Bucephalus’s foreleg. The boy alone would never have upset his horse, Alex later thought, but he was followed by a burly fruit seller from whom he had just snatched an apple. The boy slipped in front of Bucephalus; the fruit seller directly collided with his shoulder. And just to his left a hackney coach driver narrowly missed the fleeing boy by jerking up the reins of his two poorly fed, irritable horses. They both reared in the air to a tremendous jangling of reins and hardware.
It was too much for Bucephalus. He and his master had been out twice today and so far he had been given no opportunity to stretch his legs. And he had had a very uncomfortable walk as Pippa drummed her feet and pulled his mane. He trumpeted loudly and reared straight in the air, his front hooves pawing the air.
“What the devil!” Alex said furiously. He reflexively shortened the reins and leaned forward with his other hand to grab Bucephalus’s bridle. Bucephalus, a well-trained horse, thudded back down to the ground immediately. But Alex straightened only to meet the amused eyes of his beloved, who had paused on the sidewalk to watch.
Alex stared at h
er for an instant. He knew she would be wild in his arms; he sensed it when he kissed her in the park. But now she looked as demure as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. His mouth twisted in a rueful grin and he jumped off Bucephalus, throwing the reins to Charlotte’s groom.
“Let me take that plump pullet,” he said easily, when he reached Charlotte and Sophie on the sidewalk.
Charlotte had been very pleasantly thinking that she must be getting used to Alex, because her heart was beating normally, and she felt absolutely like herself. But when he reached out his arms and took the child, his eyes twinkled down at her in such a way that all her newly found calm fell to pieces and she felt a blush creeping up her cheekbones.
Sophie, never one to miss an opportunity, nipped back and signaled to her groom to toss her back up on her horse. “Au revoir,” she said gaily. “I must return to my maman now. No, no, I’ll be perfectly all right with Philippe. Charlotte, I will see you tonight.” She bowed her head politely to Alex and edged off into the crowded street, followed by her groom.
At first Charlotte felt paralyzed with shyness, walking next to Alex with all of London doubtlessly watching them. But Pippa, who spent the time on Charlotte’s shoulder trying to get Alex’s attention, now turned her head, laid it lovingly on her papa’s shoulder, and proceeded to flirt wildly with Charlotte. Charlotte laughed out loud. Alex remained prudently silent.
They walked past the road to Grosvenor Square and into Albemarle Square, where Charlotte lived, before she really even noticed. At her step she held out her hand coolly.
“Sir.”
Alex inclined his head. “Forgive me for not bowing. I’m afraid if I bow the wet patch on my shoulder will become apparent.”
Charlotte giggled despite herself. Alex caught her wrist in his free hand, pulling her hand up to his mouth. Rather than kiss the back he put her palm to his lips. Charlotte paled. The joyful glow she felt in her belly that morning spread tinglingly through her body.