Imogen took a sip of her lemonade before she bothered to answer him. Then she swept him a sideways glance from under her eyelashes. “I am a widow,” she noted.
“Your husband taught you to talk about his rod?” Rafe said. “I don’t think so. Maitland was the sort to rootle about under the covers in the dark, with the least explanation the better.”
He couldn’t tell from Imogen’s cool gaze whether that description was accurate or not. But fury drove him on. How dare she suggest that his rod was less than the reliable weapon it had always been? That, the whiskey, and her infernal composure drove him straight to the unsayable: “In my estimation, Maitland would have waved his rod about only when he’d hired the help, if you take my meaning.”
Griselda was rising, fussing with her reticule and shawl, preparing to retire for tea. “It seems you have made it through dinner without swooning,” Imogen said. “How fortunate. I take it you are suggesting that Draven would have waved his rod about in the open air when he was with a whore, but kept it in the dark in my presence.”
“Something like that,” Rafe said, feeling that victory—in this conversation, at least—was surely slipping away from him. There was something about her gaze…
“You are likely right. We were, in retrospect, a remarkably prudish couple. But I expect that has something to do with the fact that we were married a mere two weeks. The one thing I can assure you, Rafe, since you seem so distressed about my marital memories, is that the instrument in question was in fine working order.”
A smile touched her eyes but not her mouth. The very suggestion that she might be remembering Maitland with pleasure made Rafe feel half-blind with—with something.
“Now,” she said softly, “can you assure me of the same?”
“Are you requesting my services?” he asked, dropping a note of acid sarcasm into his voice.
She didn’t even flinch, just met his eyes square on. “Does that seem likely to you?”
“Who knows?” he asked. “You might get tired of haring after my brother. And Mayne seems to have fallen by the wayside.” He narrowed his eyes. “It was Mayne who taught you this talk of rods, wasn’t it?” And then, suddenly struck: “He only pretended not to have succumbed to your charms, as a sop to my conscience as your guardian!”
Again he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “Did he?” Rafe demanded.
Imogen leaned forward. “A man whose privy counselor means less to him than a glass of Tobermary will never be of interest.”
“His privy—”
But she was gone, rustling after Griselda, leaving behind nothing but an infuriating whiff of perfume. She smelled like lemons.
Rafe sat for a moment, staring at the table. His heart was thumping with rage at the idea of Mayne lying to him. That was all there was to it, of course. He didn’t really care if Imogen slept with half the known world. As she so frequently pointed out, he ceased to be her legal guardian the moment she married Maitland.
He was brought to himself by the solicitous tone of his butler, Brinkley, asking if he would care for a little port. He looked at the jewel red liquid with some loathing, and shook his head.
How dare Imogen suggest that his privy counselor wouldn’t be up for any sort of engagement?
“You appeared to be having a lively conversation with Lady Maitland,” Gabe said, moving to a seat next to Rafe since the ladies had left the room.
But Rafe was desperately trying to think when he last hired a whore. It wasn’t last year because he’d been in London with his wards and of course he didn’t do anything so debauched when they were about, and before that—before that—
“What did you say?” he asked.
Gabe shot him an amused glance. “Apparently Lady Maitland left you with much to think about.” He took up an apple and began to peel it.
Rafe considered the apples but remembered that his hands generally shook too much to make a pretty job of it, at least after four glasses of whiskey. Or was it five? “She’s demented,” he said, which felt like a fair sum-up.
“She is a remarkably beautiful woman,” Gabe said.
Rafe shot him a quick glance. Of course, his little brother (for so Gabe seemed, even given that they were born days apart)—his little brother would be capable of defending himself from Imogen about as well as straw touched by flame. He could do something about that later, when he felt more clearheaded. He searched about for something more civil and less complicated to talk about.
“When is Mary arriving?” he asked, gulping down another glass of barley water. “Didn’t you say that she was finally weaned from that nurse of hers?”
“Actually, I found her a new wet nurse, since her first could not travel and the theater is taking so much longer to repair than we originally thought. I didn’t care to have her living in Cambridge with merely servants to care for her any longer.”
“Excellent,” Rafe said heartily.
“I did tell you last night that Mary and her nanny had arrived,” his brother said. “The new wet nurse is in residence as well.”
Rafe felt a dull red flush mount his cheekbones. Dammit, he did remember that. Perhaps.
“They didn’t arrive until after dinner,” Gabe said, and there wasn’t even a touch of reproach in his voice. “I’m afraid that I interrupted your studies.”
“I wasn’t studying,” Rafe said, his voice dull and his insides rumbling with a volcanic upheaval. “I was drunken. Sodden drunk, although I do remember your coming to the study now you bring it up. After Griselda and the rest arrived from Scotland, Brinkley had my valet take me up the servants’ stairs so that Imogen and Griselda wouldn’t see me drunk.”
There was a moment’s silence and then: “They saw you tonight,” Gabe said.
The words struck at Rafe’s heart. “I’d better stop drinking,” he said dully.
“Yes.”
Rafe drank the glass of water that Brinkley had refilled, wondering at its pallid emptiness, its lack of pleasure. Drink nothing but water for the rest of his days?
“She’ll never take you while you’re drinking,” Gabe said.
Rafe squinted at him. “What the devil are you talking about?”
“Lady Maitland. Imogen, if you prefer.”
Rafe gave a short laugh. “She doesn’t want me, you fool. She wants you. Couldn’t you tell from the way she looked at you?”
“She looked at me with some desire,” Gabe said with his usual scholarly objectivity.
Rafe considered fratricide.
“But she looks at you with rage, and I judge that the stronger emotion.”
“You’re a fool. She’d never take me.”
“Why?”
“Worthless,” Rafe said shortly. “If I were Peter, it might be different. You met Peter. You must have noticed what a great fellow he was. He kept the estate going, you know. Even when he was a mere boy, he negotiated between my parents. When they were fighting, which was often, he was the only one who could speak to both of them. He was…rather wonderful.”
“Ah.”
“Naturally, Peter never drank to excess.”
“It must have been difficult to follow in his footsteps,” Gabe said.
Rafe laughed shortly. “I think my father put it best. He said I’d make a dog’s breakfast of the business, and he was right. I made the same of this guardianship.” His fingers clenched on his glass. “Though that’s less my fault. What the devil was Brydone doing, leaving his daughters in the care of a person he’d met only once? If he hadn’t taken a ride on a half-broken stallion, all four of the Essexes would still be safely living in Scotland.”
And if that were the case, he added silently to himself, Imogen would be sharpening her tongue on some poor Scotsman rather than flaying him as her daily pastime.
One had to suppose that if she were looking at Gabe with desire, she’d be interested in trying out his rod soon. Or the performance thereof.
Gabe had finished his apple. “I expect Brydone
thought to live forever. It’s a common human condition.”
Rafe felt the opposite himself, but the subject didn’t interest him, so he started brooding over Imogen again. Nothing along the lines of an ethical argument would stop her. She and Mayne had probably spent every free moment on the trip to Scotland in the bedchamber. Of course Mayne had lied to him when he swore that he was staying out of Imogen’s bed. No sane man would do that.
What’s more, Gabe was eminently sane. A touch of ice slid down his neck. Gabe would presumably see no reason not to avail himself of Imogen’s eminently available charms.
“She’s not as composed as she appears,” he said abruptly. “She truly loved Maitland, you know. They weren’t married long enough for disillusionment to set in.”
“What sort of man was he?” Gabe said, beginning to peel another apple.
“A bounder. Passionate about his horseflesh and little else. A man for a wager. He lost his life when he rode a horse that his jockey had refused to mount. Thought he could win the race. Instead he smashed his head into a post before his wife’s very eyes.”
“Poor Lady Maitland.”
“She chose him,” Rafe said, knowing his voice was just a growl. “She came into this house already in love with that excuse for a man. She sat at this table and stared at him as if he were the Christ Child come straight from heaven. And that was Maitland she was staring at!”
He raised his head and stared unbelievingly at Gabe. “You wouldn’t countenance it if you’d met him. A finer specimen of village idiot was hardly to be found throughout England. And he was engaged at the time. But Imogen didn’t give a fig. She simply marched over to his house—well, rode, actually—and before we knew it, she’d eloped with the man.”
“A decisive young woman,” Gabe said, placing the apple before him.
Rafe blinked at it.
“Go on, I peeled it for you.”
Their eyes met, and for a moment Rafe felt an embarrassing wave of emotion. “Thanks.” And then: “Imogen flung herself from her horse on purpose, you see, and injured her ankle. That got her into Maitland’s house, and of course the man had no chance, once she had him in close quarters.”
Gabe didn’t seem to take in the veiled warning Rafe was giving him. “And was Maitland relieved to be rid of his fiancée, or otherwise?”
“Didn’t know what hit him,” Rafe said, eating a piece of apple. He rarely ate after the first course, preferring not to complicate the taste of whiskey with that of food. But the apple tasted clean and good.
“Was it a happy marriage?”
“Can’t have been,” Rafe said. “She’s—well, you’ve met Imogen. And he was a buffoon. Addicted to the track, most happy when he was mounting a horse, not a woman. One look at him and anyone could tell that he thought of his rod with about as much delicacy as a pump handle. Wouldn’t have been capable of giving a woman pleasure.”
Gabe placed the silver knife with which he had peeled the apple precisely in the middle of his plate. “If you want to stop drinking,” he said, “I believe the best way to do so is simply to give it up altogether.”
Rafe managed a grunt.
“I have heard that attempts to cut down one’s consumption are doomed to failure.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Rafe said, responding to a nervous spasm at the thought. “I’m sure I could just reduce my consumption to a more suitable level.”
“It’s certainly worth a try,” Gabe said.
It must be something about a scholar’s exactitude. Rafe could tell without even thinking twice that his brother was correct about the inadvisability of cutting down as opposed to giving up spirits altogether. Gabriel Spenser was likely very often correct in his judgments.
“How did you get to be a professor, given as you’re a by-blow of my father’s?” he asked suddenly.
His brother had a sweet, crooked smile. “I’m quite good at what I do.”
“I know that. I suppose you took a tripos in mathematics first?”
“Indeed. For a time I wasn’t sure whether I would continue in mathematics, but I found the lure of ancient history to be strong.”
“I don’t care if you were bloody Peter and Paul come back to earth in one body,” Rafe said. “Everything I know about Oxford—and I assume that Cambridge is much the same—implies that ability can only take one so far.”
Gabe’s crooked smile had a great deal of candor in it. Rafe found himself glad that Imogen had left the room. Who could resist a smile like that?
“Your father helped,” Gabe said.
“Our father,” Rafe corrected him. “I’m getting sick of correcting you on that point. What the hell did Holbrook do?” And found himself waiting with genuine curiosity. To the best of his knowledge, his father had never shown the slightest interest in how Rafe sent himself to the devil. He certainly would not have put himself out, had Rafe made a choice of career that required parental support.
“He endowed the college,” Gabe said.
“What?”
“He gave Emmanuel College a sum of money.” And then, responding to Rafe’s lifted eyebrow, “something in the neighborhood of forty thousand pounds. The money undoubtedly came from your estate,” he said, his eyes troubled. “I have long felt the guilt of having taken that money from you and yours.”
Rafe snapped his mouth shut. At least the whiskey seemed to have retreated enough that he was understanding the conversation. “Damn me pink,” he said.
“I’m afraid that the money cannot be—”
Rafe waved his hand. “Our father, for all he kept his real family in secret, would never have endangered the estate. We could endow three such colleges, and not feel more than a pinch.”
“That is some consolation.”
Rafe narrowed his eyes and saw precisely what the problem was. “Holbrook couldn’t have bought you a place, if you hadn’t been the very best there was,” he said roughly.
Gabe nodded.
Rafe searched around for another topic. “What did Griselda say to the story of your dead wife?” he asked.
“She accepted it,” Gabe said. “I told her that my wife’s name was Mary and that she died in childbirth. I dislike telling lies.”
“This is an important one,” Rafe said. “There’s no amount of money that I could give as dowry for young Mary that could make her a marriageable parti if the truth were known. As it is, we’ll have to throw the entire weight of the Holbrook name behind her. But that—” he added with a grin—“is quite formidable.”
“Not,” his brother responded, with no smile, “if the duke has succumbed to a liver complaint by the time Mary comes of age.”
Rafe swallowed.
“You have no wife in the wings,” Gabe said. “So who is the heir to the estate?”
He tried to remember.
“There must be an heir?”
“Of course there is! My cousin Roderick. Twice removed and a bit of a prig, but he’ll make a decent duke.”
“He may be the most estimable of men,” Gabe said, turning his silver fruit knife over and over in his hand, “but he will not throw the weight of the Holbrook name behind an illegitimate niece’s marriage. My Mary, in other words.”
In his happiness at finding a brother, Rafe had forgotten that family entailed more than pleasure. But even when drunk, he had never failed to recognize the truth when it was presented to him.
“I’ll give it up,” he said grimly.
“I would be most grateful.” Gabe looked at him, and it was like glimpsing himself in a mirror. “Not just for Mary and her future. For myself.”
For a horrifying second Rafe felt as if tears might be coming to his eyes. He rose from the table so quickly that he had to catch the edge so as not to topple over. “You haven’t introduced me to my niece. Shall we?”
“Lady Maitland expressed a wish to meet her as well.”
“Then let’s collect the ladies,” Rafe said. He was on his feet with barely a wobble in his knees. Sti
ll, he made a mental note not to hold the child. The last thing he wanted to do was drop his niece to the floor.
8
In Which Miss Mary Spenser is Introduced to the Party at Large
Gabriel Spenser was accustomed to making quick and sure decisions. The moment he first saw Aramaic script, he knew that he wanted to read it. And the moment he first saw his daughter Mary, he knew that he would have moved a mountain—or married Loretta—in order to be near her. She was his, from the top of her anxious little face to the bottom of her enchanting little toes.
“She is such a sweet baby,” Imogen was saying. Mary was smiling now, but when they entered the nursery, the baby had been standing up, holding on to the bars of her crib and crying for attention.
The fact that her nurse had been peacefully sitting by the fire and paying no attention had been duly noted by her father. Gabe meant to have a word with that nurse on the morrow, but now he just scooped up his daughter. She started dimpling and smiling at him. Obviously she was lonely. He had missed her sorely in the last few months. So much that he’d finally scooped her away from her wet nurse in Cambridge and brought her to Rafe’s house.
He held her a little closer. So far he was ignoring Griselda’s and Imogen’s pleas to hold her.
“I’ve never seen such enchanting curls,” Griselda said. “Did your wife have those red curls?”
Gabe spared a moment’s thanks for the fact that Loretta had golden hair. With luck, no one would ever see a resemblance. “Mary is the image of her mother.” Not that it was true. Loretta was pretty enough, but to him Mary was beautiful. She had a face like a tiny triangle, and cap of soft curls the color of new roses. Her mouth was a tiny, curved rosebud.
“Did your wife see her before she died?” Imogen said, looking up at him.
Gabe froze, unsure what to say. He and Rafe hadn’t worked out the details of his supposed wife’s death, merely hammered out the agreement that the solicitor put in front of Loretta, swearing her to secrecy about her motherhood. Not that Loretta had shown the faintest interest in acknowledging the role.