Читать книгу Lady Lyte's Little Secret - Deborah Hale, Deborah Hale - Страница 10

If she thought she could get rid of him that easily, Lady Lyte had better think again!

As Thorn Greenwood rounded The Circus, he cast a glowering glance at the darkened windows of the New Assembly Rooms, long since deserted of ball-goers. After the mauling his pride had taken over the past two days, he was tempted to curse the place where he’d first set eyes on his troublesome mistress.

Where would he and his sister be now, Thorn wondered, if he hadn’t let Ivy coax him out to that first ball of the Season?

If some magical being from a nursery tale had suddenly materialized and offered him the chance to go back and relive the past two months differently, Thorn wasn’t certain whether he would accept or refuse.

True, it had vastly complicated his life and it had all ended on a sour note. While his affair with Felicity Lyte lasted, though, it had been very sweet indeed.

“Quit your mooning, man,” Thorn muttered to himself. He must think about raising the blunt he’d require for a journey—all the way to Scotland if need be.

His steps slowed from the indignant stride that had carried him away from Royal Crescent. A mild night breeze wafted up the gracious hills of Bath from the River Avon. It carried the aromas of fine cooking from the kitchen windows of many a fashionable town house, as well as the music and laughter from a number of private parties winding to a close. The air of conviviality and careless wealth mocked Thorn’s predicament.

Refusing to entertain regrets, he studied the problem with the same resolve he’d brought to bear on the calamity of his family’s fallen fortunes. If one thought hard enough and ruled out no potential solution as too difficult or distasteful, almost any dilemma admitted of a solution. Thorn had more experience than most men of his age and class in learning how to salvage something satisfactory from the bleakest of prospects.

As he wandered down Gay Street and turned onto George, Thorn mulled over the problem in his deliberate, methodical way. Raising one possible solution after another, he weighed each in turn, discarding the unworkable, then proceeding to the next.

He still had a few items of value he could part with to finance his journey, though most would be worth far more to him in sentiment than to a prospective buyer in gold. As his footsteps echoed on the cobbles of Milsome Street, Thorn cast that idea aside. The pawnshops on this busiest of commercial thoroughfares would be locked up as tight as all the other places of business. If he did manage to rouse some broker at this hour, the man would hardly be disposed to cooperate.

Reason counseled Thorn to go home, assemble his valuables, get what sleep he could wrest from the night then set out in the morning. The thought of Ivy and young Armitage gaining a greater lead spurred him to action now, as did the notion of Felicity trundling along dark and deserted highways in a fine carriage with only an ancient driver and a juvenile footman for protection.

Thorn cast his mind upon another prospect.

“Of course.” He chuckled to himself when it finally occurred to him.

He might be short of cash, but he was still comparatively wealthy in a man’s most precious asset—friends. If only he could get word to his brother-in-law. Merritt Temple had horses, carriages and funds he would have put at Thorn’s disposal in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately Merritt’s country estate lay many miles to the east. A detour in that direction would result in an even worse delay than waiting for the pawnbrokers to open in the morning.

Surely there must be a friend in Bath to whom he could appeal.

Weston St. Just! If any man owed Thorn assistance in his present entanglement, surely it was the fellow who had introduced him to Lady Lyte in the first place. Thorn’s stride picked up speed and purpose.

Finding himself near his own doorstep, he ducked inside long enough to scribble a note to their housekeeper saying he and Ivy had been called out of town and might not return for several days. When he emerged once again onto the dark stillness of the street, he turned south toward Sydney Gardens. St. Just kept elegant premises nearby.

Thorn had no worry of waking his old schoolmate at such a time. On the contrary, his concern was whether such a notorious night owl as Weston St. Just might not return home for several more hours. Fortunately, a light burned in the sitting room window and a young footman wasted no time answering Thorn’s knock.

When the boy ushered Thorn into his friend’s presence, St. Just looked mildly surprised to see him. Perhaps mildly amused, as well. “What ho, Greenwood? Has the beauteous Lady Lyte put the boots to you so soon?”

“I’m surprised she hasn’t told you.” Thorn knew all too well of St. Just’s insatiable appetite for gossip. “I received my marching orders from her two days ago.”

“The little minx!” His host gestured for Thorn to take a seat. “I must say, though, I envy you even a few weeks of her company.”

St. Just lifted his snifter of tawny liquid and nodded toward a side table arrayed with a decanter and more glasses. “Care to drown your sorrows?”

After his unsettling confrontation with Felicity, the offer tempted Thorn sorely. Perching himself on the settee opposite his host, Thorn shook his head. “I daren’t.”

St. Just cast him an indulgent look. “Of course, you never drown your troubles, or run away from them, or any other such cowardice, do you? Always look ’em squarely in the face and soldier on.”

“Tiresome, isn’t it?” Thorn wondered how the pair of them had remained civil, let alone friendly, all these years with such contrary temperaments.

Felicity might have done better to take St. Just as her lover, instead of merely using him as a go-between to approach his less suitable chum. Besides the classical masculine beauty of a Greek statue come to life, Weston St. Just had an easy agreeable way with women that made them flock to him like bees to a tall fragrant flower.

“Tiresome? On the contrary, dear fellow.” St. Just lounged back in his upholstered armchair and sipped his drink. “I tire of most people in no time, for the majority of them are like me—duplicitous, idle, selfish. Salt of the earth folk like you baffle me at every turn. I live in constant anticipation that you may slip from the straight and narrow into some diverting orgy of wickedness.”

“I thought I had.”

“With Lady Lyte, you mean?” St. Just shrugged. “A tantalizing little stumble to keep me on my toes, but far too discreet to tarnish your honor. Now, do tell me what brings you here at this hour? In the case of ninety-nine men out of a hundred, I could guess at once, but you persist in confounding me.”

“It’s my sister, Ivy. She’s taken it into her head to elope with young Armitage—Lady Lyte’s nephew.”

“Has she, by George?” St. Just sat up a little straighter, his dark languid eyes glittering with something like interest. “I wish I had a scapegrace little sister to get up to all kinds of mischief and keep me productively occupied rescuing her bacon from the fire.”

“I’d offer to lend you mine,” growled Thorn, “but I wouldn’t trust you within a mile of Ivy.”

He related the rest of his predicament. How Felicity had insisted on pursuing the young lovers without him. His desperate need to get ahold of a good horse and some money to finance his journey.

Whenever he was tempted to resent St. Just’s ironic amusement over the whole situation, Thorn did his best to conceal it. If he wanted to be on his way tonight, this man was his most promising source of assistance.

“I suppose you’ll expect me to keep all this lovely gossip to myself, now that you’ve confided in me.” St. Just drained his glass and rose from his chair none too steadily.

Thorn leaped to his feet. “It wouldn’t do me much good to fetch Ivy back from Gretna only to have her reputation ruined by word of all this leaking out. Then I’d be obliged to wed her off to Armitage in order to satisfy honor. For all you prattle on, Wes, you’ve always been a good friend in the pinch. What do you say? Can I count on your discretion and your assistance?”

“As to the first,” St. Just raised his hand, “I swear on my rather dubious honor.”

“As to the second,” he turned out his pockets, “I’ve just come from a monstrous night at the tables. I won’t tell you how much I lost or you’d be scandalized. Enough, I fear, that I couldn’t lend you a brass farthing until I have an opportunity to meet with my banker upon the morrow.”

“Damn!” The word was hardly out of his mouth before Thorn started to cudgel his brains for someone else who could help him.

Weston St. Just pressed the tips of his fingers together. “Unless…”

“Unless?” prompted Thorn. The word had a hopeful sound, but the tone in which his friend had said it made him uneasy somehow.

“Got anything on you of value?” St. Just cast a glance at Thorn’s signet ring as if appraising how much it might fetch.

“This.” Thorn twisted the ring back and forth on his finger, a sensation he’d always found curiously comforting. “And my grandfather’s gold watch and fob. It’s no good, though. I thought of that already. The pawnshops are all locked up tight as drums until morning.”

“I don’t mean you to hock them, old fellow.” St. Just stretched his long graceful limbs as though he’d recently woken from a refreshing night’s sleep. “But how would you feel about wagering them?”

Thorn opened his mouth to protest, but his host cut him off. “One good hand at the game I left behind and you’d have blunt aplenty to see you to Gretna and back. Three good hands and you could probably finance a Grand Tour.” He ushered Thorn toward the sitting room door.

“I’ve never been a gambler.” Thorn protested. “You know that as well as anybody.”

In a sense, he’d taken a flutter on his liaison with Felicity Lyte—hoping to win a jackpot of pleasure. He’d dealt himself a hand believing he had everything to gain and nothing to lose. Too late he had come to realize that he’d bet on his ability to bed a woman without falling in love with her.

The stakes had been nothing less than his heart. And he had lost it.

Weston St. John paused at the doorway and regarded his friend. “You may try as hard as you like to play it safe, old fellow, but life is a gamble any way you look at it. You’re welcome to stay here the night, then roust me out at some uncivilized hour of the morning to see my banker. Or, if you’re determined to be on your way before sunrise, you can come along with me and risk your invaluables on the turn of a few cards. Which will it be?”

Rubbing the face of his signet ring, Thorn struggled with his decision. The watch was so old it showed only the hour, which limited its use in all but the most leisurely time keeping. The signet ring was older still. Both had passed down, father to son, through the Greenwood line to him.

He had slight reservations about leaving his watch and ring as security against a loan, to be redeemed at the earliest opportunity. To run the risk of losing them altogether…

Of course he would still be head of the family without these ancestral badges of authority. Yet somehow, deep in his heart, it felt otherwise.

Reason assured Felicity Lyte she was following the only sensible course of action open to her. Her heart warned her otherwise, but she had learned long ago to place no trust in that capricious organ. Not even when her coachman agreed with it.

“Are you sure this journey of yours can’t wait until morning, ma’am?” Even Mr. Hixon’s massive hand could not stifle the great yawn that threatened to tear his face in two.

“I regret having to drag you out of bed at this time of night.” Keeping her tone polite yet insistent, Felicity resisted the urge to yawn in reply as Hetty helped her on with her cloak.

Even in May, the nights could be chilly, particularly when one would be sitting in an unheated carriage for many hours.

“I’m afraid this cannot wait. Is the carriage ready to go?”

“Aye, ma’am.” The coachman turned his old-fashioned tricorn hat around in his hands as he nodded toward the front door. “Where are we bound, if I may ask?”

“I hope to be in Tewkesbury by tomorrow evening.” Felicity made a few quick calculations, guessing when Oliver and Miss Greenwood might have left Bath.

She prayed her nephew had hired a post chaise, rather than relying on the faster stage coaches or, worse yet, The Royal Mail. “I hope we shan’t have to venture much farther than that before we can return.”

The coachman nodded, as evident eagerness to be out on the open road battled his fatigue. “At least we’ve clear weather and a good moon.”

He opened the door and held it for his mistress as she emerged onto the moonlit street. “What with leaving now, we’ll be through Bristol before even the market traffic. If we make good time, we should be able to stop at The King’s Arms in Newport for breakfast.”

“A capital suggestion, Mr. Hixon.” Felicity descended the front steps of her town house and climbed into her carriage.

They nearly always stayed at that clean, well-run inn on their way to or from Bath. If Oliver had hired a coach and spirited Miss Greenwood away some time after noon, they would almost certainly have spent their first night at The King’s Arms. Felicity could catch news of them there, perhaps even intercept them if they did not get back on the road at too early an hour.

The coachman scrambled up to his perch, and, a moment later, Lady Lyte’s elegant traveling carriage rolled off toward Bristol Road. Inside, Felicity smiled to herself in the darkness. She could picture the astonished look on Thorn’s face when she arrived back in Bath tomorrow evening with his chastened little sister in tow.

When she tried to stop picturing Thorn’s face, however, she encountered considerable difficulty.

Unbidden images of him plagued her. Thorn appearing at her bedroom door in search of his sister, his dishevelled state rather endearing. Thorn hovering over her when she’d stirred from her foolish swoon, a warm air of concern radiating from him. Thorn, angrier than she had ever seen him, full dark brows brooding like thunderheads on the horizon. No sooner did Felicity banish one memory of Thorn Greenwood than another rose to take its place.

Perhaps it was just as well she’d been forced to make this break with him now, before the unsettling influence he exerted upon her grew stronger.

As the horses settled into a steady, mile-eating trot, Felicity pulled her cloak tighter and wedged herself into one corner of the carriage. Resting her head against the smooth fabric of the upholstered seat, she tried to elude all thoughts of Thorn Greenwood by fleeing into dreams.

When that didn’t work, she decided to concentrate her mind on one subject sure to divert her from anything else.

Her baby.

Under her cloak, Felicity passed a hand over her flat belly in a gesture at once tender and fiercely protective. Despite all evidence, she still had trouble believing there could be a baby growing inside her.

How many times, during the early years of her marriage, had she prayed for this very thing, only to be cruelly disappointed again and again? Meanwhile, Percy’s tribe of merry-begotten offspring had grown apace. Each one an added insult, proof of his virility, to be cared for and educated by the bounty of her fortune.

How many odious cures had she endured for her barrenness? Sometimes downright painful, always humiliating.

Year after year, she had watched the lack of an heir eat away at her husband and at her marriage. Until she could no longer bear to look him in the face because she knew what he must be thinking. Why had he married this tradesman’s daughter, to refill the empty coffers of his noble family with her fortune, when she could not produce a child to inherit what he’d sacrificed so much to restore?

As Lady Lyte’s carriage drove through the tranquil shadowy countryside of Sommerset, a queer sound like the bastard spawn of a sigh and a bitter chuckle echoed within, too quiet for either the driver or the footman to hear from their outside perches.

Who had been the more gullible goose, Felicity asked herself—she or Percy? How could neither of them have suspected his mistresses might’ve had other lovers to sire their children? Foisting their maintenance off upon him because he had the wealth to provide for them and because he was so pitifully eager to prove his virility by claiming them as his own.

Now here she was, with child at last. By a man she had no intention of marrying.

Would Thorn Greenwood ever have consented to become her lover if he’d thought there was any danger of her conceiving? Felicity knew the answer to that, for Thorn had raised the question himself when she first approached him with her scandalous proposition.

He’d blushed and stammered with an awkwardness she’d found endearing in such a consummate gentleman. It had taken two or three tries before he could frame his query in blunt enough terms for her to understand what he was asking.

She had almost abandoned the whole undertaking then and there, rather than expose her painful past. Then some baffling compulsion, deeper than her embarrassment and self-pity, had made her confess the truth.

“Don’t trouble yourself on that account, sir. While we were married, my husband sired several children—none of them by me.”

To forestall any word or look of pity, she had forced herself to laugh. “So you see I am as free as a man to take my pleasure.”

Perhaps those words had tempted fate to play her for a fool. She would have the last and best laugh, though. Her fortune and her widowhood would make it possible for her to enjoy the pleasures of motherhood without the bothersome encumbrance of a husband.

Her conscience protested her thinking of Thorn Greenwood as an encumbrance, but Felicity turned a deaf ear. Even if she had been willing to risk marriage again for the sake of propriety, she’d gauge a husband’s suitability on a different scale than the one she’d used to pick a lover. Thorn would have been far down on her list of candidates.

“Perhaps I should have brought Hetty along, after all,” Felicity grumbled to herself. “At least her tiresome prattle might have distracted me from thinking about that man.”

Mustering more of the desperate resolution she’d employed to lock Thorn out of her bedchamber and order him out of her house, Felicity tried once again to evict him from her thoughts. She concentrated on making plans for herself and her baby once this troublesome business with her nephew and Ivy Greenwood was settled.

First, she would retire to the country for her confinement. Somewhere quiet, with a healthy climate. Far away from Bath and equally far away from the Lyte family seat in Staffordshire. Somewhere in Kent might do quite nicely. Except…

Did Thorn have a country estate in Kent? Felicity rummaged her memory, but could not recall. Had they ever talked about it?

No. They’d seldom spoken of anything beyond immediate trivialities, perhaps out of fear that it might lead to a deeper attachment on one side or the other.

“You’re thinking about him again,” she scolded herself.

If she wanted to know his home county, she should save her questions and put them to Miss Ivy on the drive back to Bath.

That sensible idea hit upon, Felicity settled herself to imagine the quiet, cosy household she would fashion for her family of two. She scarcely noticed her breath slowing to keep time with the gentle bounce and sway of the carriage.

Some while later, she roused slightly as the sound and tempo of the ride altered. Awake only enough to tell herself they must be traveling over the cobbled city streets of Bristol, she sank back into slumber.

She woke next in a sudden, disorienting manner as the carriage slowed abruptly, sending her hurtling forward onto the opposite seat. Darkness still wrapped the landscape outside. How long had she been asleep? Where were they?

High skittish whinnies from the horses penetrated the interior of the carriage as it came to a full stop. Felicity regained her seat, then reached up to rap her knuckles on the ceiling and demand an accounting from Mr. Hixon. The next sound from outside made her hand freeze in midair and her stomach churn in a way that had nothing to do with her pregnancy.

“Stand and deliver!”

Could someone be playing a tasteless prank? Felicity wondered as she scooped her reticule from the floor to hide in the folds of her cloak. Surely highwaymen were a fixture of the last century, not this one.

Or had travelers become more cautious about venturing over deserted stretches of road after dark? Thorn’s prudent warning echoed in her thoughts. It will be a difficult journey—perhaps even dangerous.

She’d been so anxious to distance herself from him and so impatient with his attempts to take control of the situation. What had she expected? Thorn Greenwood was a man, after all, not a lapdog.

“Give us leave to pass,” shouted the coachman. “What do ye want, anyway?”

“Wha’ d’yer think?” came the reply, followed by harsh laughter that made Felicity break out in gooseflesh. “Nice lookin’ rig like this, bound to have good pickin’s, eh? Let’s take a look.”

Felicity wedged herself into the corner farthest from the carriage door as she heard a rider dismount and footsteps approach.

“I’ve got a pistol cocked and I ain’t afraid to use it,” called the highwayman for the benefit of anyone inside the carriage.

Felicity fumbled in her reticule, extracting several pound notes from the large number inside. This knight of the road would never miss them. Though her pulse throbbed in her ears, she lunged for the carriage door and threw it open.

“Here.” She thrust her reticule toward a man-shaped shadow. “Take it and let us be on our way. I must get to Gloucester by morning—my mother is very ill.”

If such nefarious creatures had hearts, that story together with her ready cooperation might save her from being molested further.

Or perhaps not.

“I’m right sorry to ’ear that, ma’am,” the highwayman replied.

He shook the reticule. Several golden guineas at the bottom jingled. “Thanks for this little gift. But don’t be in too big a hurry to get on your way again. Those prads of yours sound a bit winded to me.” He referred to the horses.

When he took a step nearer, Felicity retreated into the depths of the carriage.

“Are ye as pretty as ye sound, I wonder?” A gloved hand reached in and groped toward her.

“I’m not at all pretty, and…” Felicity floundered for anything she could say that might deter this criminal from doing what he appeared intent on. “…and…I have the pox!”

Felicity heard a dull thud, then the highwayman pitched into the carriage. The scream she’d been choking back for some minutes ripped from her throat.