Читать книгу The Regency Season: Scandalous Awakening: The Viscount's Frozen Heart / The Marquis's Awakening - Elizabeth Beacon - Страница 12

Chapter Five

The January twilight was already all but over when Luke stumped up the elegant staircase. He rang for the bath he needed as soon as he reached his bedchamber and heard hot water carried in within minutes, so there was no excuse to sack the housekeeper on the spot and end this torture. As he relaxed into the tub images of the dratted woman slid slyly into his head.

Why her? Why was it Chloe Wheaton he seemed doomed to want every time he set eyes on her? She was a fine-looking woman, despite the deplorable gowns and concealing cap, but he’d met other fine-looking women and some of them diamonds of the first water. No other woman on this fair earth could get him in a stew of frustrated yearning with one distrustful glance and how he wished it otherwise.

If only it was merely the thought of a fine female body in his bed that made him want her so badly. He ached with the frustration of not having her as his lover. There was something unique about her that even ten years of trying couldn’t expunge from his senses. He recalled a fateful day that summer when they first met; he’d come upon her playing with her little girl in the woods above the house and just stood and watched where neither could see him.

At last the heat of the day drained the child’s energy and Chloe had sung softly to calm her, then rocked little Verity to sleep in her arms. Luke recalled envy eating at him like acid as he wanted such love and tenderness for the babes they could bring into the world together, if only everything was different.

Instead it had been Wheaton who recklessly married a schoolgirl and got a baby on her, or so she had once told him. Luke felt his fists tighten at the thought of Wheaton exposing the woman he was supposed to love to such a hard, narrow life as she’d had to lead since.

He had been about to turn away when the June sunlight picked out the trail of tears on Chloe’s face as she gazed down at her sleeping babe. Even now he felt the jar of it as his heart thudded at the memory. Back then he had had to clamp down on the need to stride over to her and take her in his arms so hard he discovered afterwards he’d clenched his fists until the blood flowed.

He left the next day, all his wild schemes for somehow making it easier for her to be his mistress by getting her to act the quietly respectable wife, whose reclusive husband sailed the seven seas, then wanted no company but hers whenever he was home, shattered. He couldn’t do that to her, or little Verity or any other babies they might make between them. It was a half-life and he couldn’t offer her so little.

Curse it; he wouldn’t let passion waft him along as if he had no free will now either. Yet when he conjured a picture of his late wife ranting at him that he was a stern, unlovable stick to correct his obsession, the fantasy of his great-aunt’s housekeeper naked and eager in the great bed next door blotted her out. Luke felt heat roar through him at the very idea and the physical evidence of his arousal with nothing between him and civilisation made him a fool.

Chloe only had to be in the same county for him to want her and from the moment he saw her at Virginia’s window today he’d barely been able to conceal his ridiculous state from the world. Idiot body! Hadn’t marriage taught it anything at all?

His response to Pamela’s challenge to his manhood when she refused to let him bed her again after they returned from their bride trip slotted into his memory and reminded him how easy it was to need a woman without liking her. He relived his distaste at himself and his wife when she enjoyed his furious promise to seduce her into taking him until she screamed for more as she never had during his gentle lovemaking. The fulfilment of that vow excited her and left him at odds with himself.

Their marriage limped on for six months, Pamela blowing hot and cold as Luke grew sick of her and himself. How typical that she announced her pregnancy the day she finally left him. Her letter from her sister’s London address saying she’d been brought to bed of a daughter and he’d better come and get her arrived on his twentieth birthday. To this day Luke couldn’t recall the journey and it took Eve to blast through his rage as the real innocent in the whole wretched business.

‘You’re welcome to the squalling brat,’ his wife had shouted when he dodged past her to reach the attic where, the butler informed him, his daughter had been banished for crying a little too loudly. Pamela scurried after him; ‘Pushing it out nigh killed me and I never want to see it again.’

‘Don’t you feel the need to raise a heroine in your own tawdry image?’

‘Not one of your get, not that I’m sure she is yours. You’re not the only Winterley ready to rut like a hog,’ she said smugly.

His bellow of fury woke the baby and made her furious nurse run out of the bare attic bedroom he wouldn’t wish on a foundling to upbraid them.

‘If you two ’ave a mite of pity in your black hearts, you’ll be quiet,’ she barked in a hoarse voice that sounded as if its skinny owner spent most of her years on this earth bellowing to be heard and had worn it out in the process.

A smile replaced Luke’s frown as he recalled his shock at being addressed so sharply by a tiny female who looked as if she’d dashed in off the street to feed his child out of the kindness of her weary heart. She hardly reached his elbow and her face had the wizened yet somehow ageless look of one used to hardship since birth.

‘Whose get is she then?’ he’d asked his wife more quietly, as the furious girl-woman was still barring his way like a flea-bitten terrier confronting an angry bear.

‘Oh, she’s a Winterley all right; which is probably why I can’t endure to have her near me.’

‘Then she’s mine.’

‘There are other vultures crouched in the branches of your family tree, hoping their seed will carry off the family honours under your long nose, Luke Winterley.’

It wasn’t the unlikely idea of his already ailing father laying hands on his wife that made Luke feel as if the finest Toledo blade had sliced into his heart. A terrible possibility dawned as he stood there and mentally crossed all his male relatives off the list but one. His stepmother resented the fact he was heir to the Farenze titles and always had done her best to make the half-brothers hate each other. Luke thought a gruff affection bound him and James even so, until that moment.

Would even Pamela stoop to seduce a seventeen-year-old boy? Yes, he’d decided with bitter sickness threatening to choke him. To take a twisted revenge on Luke for marrying her without adoring her slavishly she would, and enjoy every moment of her betrayal. Young enough to hurt to his very soul, he felt as if sharing a city with her a moment longer would surely suffocate him.

‘Bring the child, we’re leaving,’ he’d snapped at the street urchin wet-nurse.

‘Not ’til I’m sure she’s better off with you than the ragman,’ she said, appearing at the nursery door with Eve wrapped in a worn shawl that had to be her own since Pamela wouldn’t even give it to her maid.

‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ Pamela said spitefully.

‘How can you say such terrible things, dearest?’ her sister, Alexandra, Lady Derneley, protested faintly from behind her. ‘She’s your own dear baby.’

‘I’d prefer to house a ferret or a weasel than that squalling brat. Has James visited me once while I was fat and lumbering like a cow because of a girl they got on me between them? You know he hasn’t, Lexie; he promised undying devotion when he seduced me behind his brother’s back and look how long it lasted. I’d hate her for ruining my figure, then chasing dear Blasedon away with her wailing and whining, even if she wasn’t a Winterley. I’ll be happy never to set eyes on the whelp again as long as I live, she can go to hell along with him and the sooner the better.’

Lady Derneley turned chalk white as her little sister’s true nature hit home and fainted to avoid it.

‘To hell with you, you unnatural bitch,’ Luke roared.

‘To ’ell with both of you,’ the street urchin’s voice somehow rose above the uproar. ‘This poor babe ain’t ’ad time to do wrong, whatever the rest of you ’ave been up to and you be quiet,’ she ordered Pamela, who gaped at her open-mouthed. ‘If you’ve a spot of pity use it on an ’elpless mite who din’t ask to come into this world instead of yourself for once. Mister, you can take us both away from ’ere afore the poor little thing dies of cold and ’unger, or missus ’ere murders ’er while I’m asleep, never mind if you’re ’er pa or no.’

It was then Luke made the life-transforming error of looking at the tiny little being in the girl’s bony arms and realised she was right. Almost as frightened by the quiet as by the shouting, the baby screwed her tiny face up to wail her woes to the world. He put out a finger, more by instinct than in hope his touch would soothe her. Eve paused, opened her eyes wide and seemed to focus on him as if she’d been waiting for him to come since the day she was born. She made him her father, whatever the facts, by latching on to his finger and refusing to let go.

Somehow he managed to hide that fact while convincing Pamela he would stop her allowance and sue for divorce, instead of legal separation, if word got out Eve might not be his. The journey to Darkmere with Eve and Brandy Brown in tow was a nightmare he shuddered to think of now, but they all survived it somehow and Eve grew up free of a mother who hated her for being a Winterley.

Luke made himself ignore news of Pamela cavorting round any bits of the Continent free of revolutionary wars with a succession of lovers. He didn’t care if the generous allowance he paid her kept her and her latest love in luxury and when news of his wife’s death reached Darkmere three years later he hadn’t enough hypocrisy left to mourn.

Now Lord Farenze might seem harsh and indifferent as the moors in sight of his castle towards the wider world, but he truly loved his daughter. A sneaky voice whispered it was safe to love Eve. If remembering his wife kept Chloe Wheaton and the danger of feeling more than he ought to for her at arm’s length, then he would dwell on the last time he let a woman walk into his life and rearrange it for however long it took to put him off the idea.

Resolved to do so often over the next few days, he was dressed before he found out dinner had been put back an hour. Eve had been informed, however, and was discussing which black gown was better suited to the occasion with Chloe and Bran. He could see little difference and left the room as if the devil was on his tail as soon as he saw the housekeeper lurking in the darkest corner of the room. Feeling thoroughly out of sorts with the world, Luke went downstairs like a guest arriving too early for a party.

* * *

Chloe was consulting Cook about the number of entrées Mrs Winterley thought fashionable to serve at dinner and agreeing this wasn’t the time for excess, even if they could find half-a-dozen more dishes at the drop of a hat, when the sound of a late arrival surprised them all. The terse announcement she was needed outside made her scurry in the head groom’s wake to the stable yard.

‘Verity, oh, my love!’ she cried as she saw her daughter blink against the flare of the stable lads’ lanterns when she stepped down from the coach.

‘Oh, Mama, I’m so glad to see you,’ Verity said with a wobbly smile that made Chloe want to cry, instead she hugged her as if they’d been parted for months.

‘But how did this come about?’ Chloe asked as Lord Farenze’s coachman nodded tersely at her and she could only marvel at his endurance.

‘His lordship ordered it soon as he heard little miss here was waiting to come home,’ Birtkin said as if he drove all the way to Bath and back after enduring the long drive here from Northumberland at least once a week.

‘I’m very grateful to you,’ she replied with a warm smile of gratitude.

‘Not my doing, ma’am, you should thank his lordship,’ Birtkin mumbled as if trying to reclaim his dour reputation.

‘You and your men were the ones who drove through twilight, then darkness, on Verity’s behalf, so I’m grateful to you, whether you like it or not.’

‘We was doing our duty, ma’am.’

‘I will stop saying thank you, since it seems to trouble you, but I’ll ask Cook to send plenty of the food left from feeding his lordship’s guests to the servants’ hall for dinner. You and your men need good food and some cheer on such a night.’

‘My thanks, ma’am, we’ll settle the beasts and see we’re clean and tidy before we comes in.’

‘See that you do,’ Chloe said and led Verity into the house.

She could afford time away from her duties; Oakham would supervise the dining room while Cook organised the footmen behind the scenes with dire threats of retribution if they dropped even a teaspoon of her food.

‘I should scold you for telling your teachers I need you here when I wanted to spare you this, my love, but I’m far too pleased to see you for that,’ she said as she urged Verity upstairs, guessing she’d slept very little since the day Chloe made that sad trip to Bath to tell her daughter Lady Virginia was dead. ‘But now you are here you must go straight to bed,’

‘Oh, Mama, why? I’m not in the least bit tired.’

‘I can see that, but I suppose you will just have to humour me, now you have got your way in everything else,’ Chloe said with a wry smile.

How hard it was not to spoil this wilful, clever little conundrum of hers and how right Virginia had been to insist Verity went to Miss Thibett’s very good school. Her daughter needed to learn the self-discipline and all the other disciplines that Miss Thibett considered made up a well-rounded human being who happened to have been born female. Chloe and her sister had never had a governess, let alone gone to school, and look where that lack of any learning but what they happened to light on in their maternal grandfather’s long-neglected library landed them.

Verity’s room was in the nursery wing the late Lord and Lady Farenze had built in hope of a family of their own, then used for other people’s children, such as Verity and Lord Mantaigne and the current master of the house and his half-brother when they were boys. Chloe had been sleeping within call of Lady Virginia’s room and she didn’t want to move back and risk Verity hearing the terrifying nightmares that were plaguing her again.

When Verity was a baby her night terrors had returned again and again and Chloe had been glad to be up here where nobody else could hear. Her daughter would no longer sleep through any screams and shouts Chloe let out though and she wished there was a way of stopping them. She suppressed a weary sigh at the very thought of trying to relax and pretend all was well on the eve of Virginia’s funeral with Viscount Farenze sleeping under the same roof.

‘I’m still in the Triangle room; you will remember where I am if you wake up and want me, won’t you, love?’ she asked as she helped Verity undress.

‘Very well, Mama, but I won’t,’ her child said as she held up her arms to accept her nightgown being slipped over her head as if she was much younger than the self-sufficient young lady she was now. ‘I’m so glad to be home I know I shall sleep well tonight. Can I really eat supper in bed?’

‘I’ll be hurt if you don’t, I had to coax the cook to make it for you and she is very busy,’ Chloe said.

She undid the plaits constraining Verity’s unruly golden hair and brushed it as gently as she could while her daughter tried to do justice to the chicken soup, dainty sandwich and apple flummery brought up by the shy little scullery maid.

‘There, I think that’s all the knots out at last,’ Chloe murmured as she began to re-plait it into a thick tail in a ritual that reminded her poignantly of doing so for her sister at Verity’s age.

‘I do love you, Mama,’ Verity assured her with sleepy seriousness. ‘I shall always miss Lady Virginia, but you’re my mother and I won’t let you leave me,’ she said so seriously Chloe knew she was feeling the loss of her best and oldest friend in this world even more deeply than a mother had to hope she would.

‘I can’t imagine anything nicer than being with you as long as you need me and becoming a sad charge on you when I am old and grey and a little bit disgraceful, love,’ she said with a deliberately comical grimace. ‘For now it’s time you went to sleep and I made sure all is ready when the family and guests retire as well.’

‘Goodnight then, Mama,’ Verity murmured sleepily as Chloe pulled the covers up and checked the nightlight was safe.

‘Goodnight, my darling,’ Chloe said softly and Verity fell fast asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

Taking the tray and her own candle, Chloe allowed herself a long look at her sleeping child before returning to her duties. This was what her life was truly about. Verity’s arrival was a timely reminder why she was housekeeper at Farenze Lodge and would be one somewhere else for as long as Verity needed her to be. She refused to consider the day her daughter left school to a world where a young lady with a mother who worked for a living might find her a liability. By then she might be able to afford the cottage by the sea she’d promised herself when even housekeepers with daughters to raise alone needed dreams to distract them from harsh reality.

* * *

‘I wished to thank you, Lord Farenze,’ the cool voice he’d been doing his best not to hear in his head all evening informed Luke when he sought a few moments’ peace and quiet in the library after dinner.

‘Did you? I doubt it,’ he replied dourly.

‘You believe me so ill mannered I wouldn’t say a simple “thank you” that you ordered my daughter to be fetched from school tonight?’ Chloe Wheaton asked and surely that wasn’t hurt in her necessarily soft tones as they murmured in the corridor where anyone might overhear them?

‘I wasn’t casting aspersions on your manners, but on your pride, madam,’ he said shortly, secretly shocked he was being so disagreeable yet not quite able to stop himself being so somehow.

‘You believe housekeepers are not entitled to that commodity, my lord?’

‘I believe you have a superfluity of it, entitled or not.’

‘How revolutionary of me,’ she said blandly and turned to go, presumably before she said something she regretted.

‘Stop, I’m sorry. That was ill-mannered of me and now I owe you another apology,’ he said and grasped her hand to stop her leaving then felt as if he’d been struck down by lightning from the mere feel of her bare wrist under his hand.

‘You owe me nothing,’ she said stiffly and glared at him before wrenching her hand away then stalking off as if she could imagine nothing more repulsive.

He entered the study he still considered the domain of his predecessor and glared moodily into the fire. Just when he had been feeling calmer and altogether more able to resist the charms of women who clearly didn’t like him, she loomed out of the semi-darkness to throw him into turmoil. It wasn’t as if it cost him anything to order Virginia’s coachman to fetch the housekeeper’s daughter. Her manners were better than his today and he only just muffled an impatient groan when someone else loomed out of the shadows to disturb his evening.

‘What is it, man?’ he demanded as he met his own coachman’s sharp gaze.

‘Just thought you ought to know, m’lord,’ the man said stoically.

‘Know what?’

‘I drove the carriage to Bath and back.’

Luke cursed as he would never dream of doing in front of a lady and felt no better. ‘What the devil for? I ordered Binns out, as you drove here from Northumberland.’

‘He don’t see well in the dark,’ Josiah admitted uncomfortably and Luke wondered if the old coachman could see much at all. Josiah wasn’t a man to betray any man’s secrets lightly, though, and Luke sensed there was more to come.

‘It’s high time I pensioned him off, he must be nigh seventy,’ he said anyway.

‘Likely a bit more if you ask me, but that ain’t what I came to tell you.’

‘What was it then? That you’re a disobedient ruffian who should be abed rather than dashing about the countryside? The head groom could have gone, man, he’s no top sawyer, but even he could keep Lady Virginia’s ancient team up to their bridles.’

‘I knew it would be black dark long before they could stumble home, so I ordered the bays harnessed instead. I couldn’t have Miss Verity careering about the country with a whipster holding the reins.’

Luke struggled to be fair. Chloe would hate him if her precious child was involved in a carriage accident because he had an urge to please her and he deserved censure for not thinking his impulsive scheme out better, not Josiah.

‘You did the right thing,’ he conceded reluctantly. ‘I should have told you to wait until morning for all the difference it will make.’

‘The little wench was that happy to know she wasn’t forgotten I’d go twice as far in the dark to see her face light up when she realised I was there to fetch her home.’

Since he was about to evict her from that home, Luke felt the goad of his own weakness bite. ‘Then what did you want to say?’ he asked brusquely.

‘That we was followed back,’ Josiah told him with a straight look that told his master there was no point saying he might have imagined it.

‘Who by and why the devil would anyone trail you home?’

‘Don’t know, m’lord, all I cared about was if he had a gun and if we was about to be held up.’

‘Why didn’t you inform the authorities in Bath?’

‘Because he wasn’t nowhere in sight when I got there. Nearly caught us up about a mile this side of Bath, then stayed on our tail all the way back.’

‘Why didn’t you challenge him then?’

‘Because he never got close enough to answer me, nor take a clean shot. I drove as fast as I dared and Miss Verity thought it was a great lark to go like the devil was on our tail.’

‘She’s well plucked?’

‘Game for any lark going if you ask me,’ Josiah agreed with a grin that told Luke to be glad Eve was five or six years older than Verity Wheaton, or they might set the countryside by the ears with misdeeds.

‘Do your best to keep an eye on her over the next few days for me then, Josh. I don’t like the idea of anyone wasting time in such a fashion and he’s more likely to have a grudge against me than a child from a Bath seminary, but it won’t hurt to make sure the girl’s kept safe. We’ve trouble enough without the girl tumbling into more.’

‘You think she’s like Miss Eve was at her age, m’lord?’

‘Very like from the sound of things. You know as well as I do what mischief a reckless girl can find if left to her own devices too often.’

‘Aye, well, girls will be girls,’ the coachman said with a reminiscent grin. ‘I’ll keep an eye on her when she’s out, or get young Seth to if I’m busy. When she’s in the house you’re far better placed to keep watch over her than me, my lord.’

Josiah’s tone was so bland Luke wondered if the old villain knew how much he needed to avoid the girl’s mother over the next few days. He truly hoped not.

‘Oakham will tell me if anyone breathes on her the wrong way,’ Luke informed his childhood ally in the hope he’d stop making bricks without straw.

‘Then we don’t need to worry ourselves, do we?’

‘I’d still like to know who our curious stranger is, though,’ Luke mused and at least it gave him a problem to consider for the rest of the evening, instead of wondering how he’d get through the next days and weeks without disaster befalling himself and Mrs Chloe Wheaton.