Читать книгу The Regency Season Collection: Part Two - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 22

Chapter Thirteen

‘Marry me anyway,’ Luke asked, stubbornness in his intent eyes.

‘You don’t even know who I am,’ Chloe objected even as joy sang in her heart and a flock of butterflies seemed to take up permanent residence in her fluttering stomach, then fly lower to whisper of delights unmapped and infinitely pleasurable.

‘I know you’re Chloe; Verity’s aunt and mother in all but giving birth to her. I know you would give everything for someone you love, let alone your sister’s child, a girl you love deeply for her own sake. I’d be a fool to try and part you from her. How can I not want that for our children, Chloe? How can you refuse it to the red-headed, mule-tempered brats we could have between us, if only you would let go of your pride and allow them to live?’

‘Who I am would come back to bite you and our black-haired, dark-eyed wild things, the ones we can’t make because of me,’ she argued sadly, feeling the air chill between them. They sat upright on the graceful little seduction of a chaise, designed for two lovers to while away a long winter evening together.

‘Don’t I deserve to even know why not, Chloe?’

Of course he did, even though he would know she was right as soon as she told him. She had no reason to prolong the sweet moment when she might reach out and grab her wildest dreams, if only she loved him less.

She delved in the pocket no fashionable lady would have permitted to spoil the line of her high-waisted gown and silently held out the letter, addressed in Virginia’s elegant sloping hand to Lady Chloe Thessaly.

Watching him read those three damning words, she waited to see all she dreaded cloud his face and make him frown with revulsion, but there was only mild interest in his eyes. Hadn’t he heard her family name under all the notoriety her father and brother heaped on the title until it stank like three-week-old fish?

‘My father was Lord Crowdale,’ she made herself admit.

‘Mine was a fool, but it doesn’t prevent us marrying,’ he insisted.

She was shocked into meeting his gaze and saw anger deep in the silver-and-gold-rayed irises and clear black pupils; besotted Chloe mused how she might lose herself in such complication for hours on end, if only she dared and he’d let her.

‘Don’t you realise what a scandal my resurrection from whatever early death they made up to account for losing two daughters would be? Far better for Verity to remain the daughter of an obscure housekeeper who might or might not have been widowed tragically young. Nobody will care enough to argue the birth of a girl of the middling sort as they would about Lady Daphne Thessaly’s child.’

‘And you would narrow all her choices to that? Being a nondescript girl of the middling sort? Oh, no, Lady Chloe Thessaly, you can’t make a nonentity out of a girl who carries all the promise of being as inconveniently beautiful as Virginia once was. Haven’t you noticed she has the fine bones, character and colouring that will take the world by storm in a few years’ time? Foolish of you if you haven’t, but as the child of a mere housekeeper she is going to have a terrible time without a father to protect her from the storm her looks and grace will bring down on both of you as soon as she’s old enough to attract the wolves to your door.’

‘I...’ Chloe ground to a halt and wondered if he was right.

‘Yes, you...?’ he insisted mercilessly, temper now sparking in his grey eyes and knitting his brows in a formidable frown.

It made her want to love him even more. His fury was part on Verity’s behalf and part because he seemed, wonder of wonders, to want to be her daughter’s father.

‘I can’t simply change my mind and say yes because it suits me to have a noble husband, that wouldn’t be right.’

‘Oh, Chloe,’ he said on a choke of unwilling laughter that chased the thunder clouds from his stormy gaze. ‘My Chloe,’ he said as if nothing would ever change that fact, whatever she did to argue him out of it, ‘I would say never change, but I’m not quite sure I could mean it when you’re keeping us apart with such idiocies. I promise to cherish your daughter as if she is truly my Eve’s little sister. Please accept me and admit we’ll never stop wanting each other this side of the grave. I vow I’ll do my best to track down your Verity’s father and make him honour his obligations towards her, if he still lives. She is a Thessaly when all is said and done, Chloe, and that means something to me, if only because you are one too.’

Chloe would have argued, but he shook his head.

‘No, don’t insist on reeling off a list of your father’s and now your brothers’ sins to blight both your lives with. Yours is still an old and loyal name and the title was won by better men than the current holder or your father. Thessaly women have defended castles and led soldiers in their husbands’ absence; tramped across battlefields to find loved ones and guarded fortunes so their sons wouldn’t have to go to the devil in their father’s footsteps. Stay in hiding and you will oblige your brothers even more than you have already by staying away, as well as robbing your Verity of her heritage and all the fierce warrior ladies she has a right to know about.’

‘No,’ she denied. ‘How can you sit there and condemn me for doing what was right? Are you accusing me of being less than all those rash and outrageous Thessaly women, because I ran instead of letting them put Verity out to freeze to death in the depths of winter?’

‘I don’t need to, you’ve done it to yourself,’ he said so quietly she stopped in mid-rage and stared up at him with her mouth open. ‘And now you’re doing it to me and both our daughters as well,’ he added ruthlessly.

‘No, whatever happens they will be safe from harm.’

‘That’s not true, Chloe. Unjust as it may be, they could still suffer for the sins of their fathers,’ he said bleakly and how could he call himself a sinner when he had been so desperately young when he became a father himself?

A boy of twenty seemed unlikely to have a pocketful of sins to carry around, let alone the vast burden he looked as if he had on his shoulders as he said it with a heavy sigh that spoke of mysteries and secrets she wasn’t sure she even wanted to think about right now.

‘And their mothers?’ she said, thinking of Daphne dying in agony as she strove desperately to give her child life. ‘Birthing them ought to wipe out all of them in one blow,’ she said with a shudder.

‘Would that it did,’ he rasped as memory seemed to suck him back into the past as well. ‘Not that your sister had time to bank many sins in her short life,’ he added, as if forcing himself to slam the door on whatever his wife had done before she met her end in a carriage accident in a far-off country, too many miles and years away from her husband and daughter to matter in their lives any more by then.

‘No, and I refuse to believe Daphne died as a punishment for what she did to bring Verity into the world. I can’t pretend many wouldn’t say that was so, then go on to blame Verity for being born the wrong side of the blanket. We must think of her, Luke. I might not like it, but there’s no point pretending the world won’t point the finger and speculate endlessly who her father is if the truth comes out,’ she said gently, his name openly on her lips for the first time and would it wasn’t to find another way of saying no to him. How she wished for the right to squirm back into his arms and forget the past in loving him now.

‘Aye,’ he said with a heavy sigh, ‘so it might, but if we have each other it won’t touch us. That’s what I’ve learnt from being Eve’s father and you need to learn it as well. As long as there is love and strength inside our home the evil and pettiness outside can only touch us if we let it.’

‘You can’t stay shut away in that bleak castle of yours for ever though, my lord,’ she half-teased and half-warned him, wondering how he would cope with the fuss and attention of Eve’s début in a couple of years’ time, if he had a stepdaughter with no apparent father and a wife who had sensationally returned from the dead with an orphaned niece at her side to make them all a seven-day wonder.

‘It’s not enough any more, thanks to you,’ he said dourly.

‘There’s no need to sound quite so cross about it.’

‘Why not? I was almost happy living with what I could have if I didn’t think too hard about what I truly wanted, until I learnt to hope. You’re the one who taught me, Chloe, so do you really think you have any right to take it away from us now I’ve learnt the trick of it at last?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Then be sure, be so certain you could carve it into rock and display it in the Strand, Lady Chloe Thessaly, because until you can, I won’t give up.’

‘Can you imagine it in the announcement, my lord? Lady Chloe Thessaly, whom the world thought dead a decade ago, is to marry Viscount Farenze, who deserves our profound sympathy.’

‘And can you imagine what the world had to say about me and mine when my wife dragged my name through every muddy puddle she could find and the odd boggy swamp or two along the way? I don’t care what they say; the people who matter to me will know the truth and those who don’t can do as they please. It’s of no consequence to me what the wider world thinks.’

‘But it is to me.’

‘That is your cross to bear, don’t make it mine as well.’

She met the challenge in his straight gaze once again and nodded to admit it was a problem she must worry at until she knew if she could accept such notoriety for them all or not. Wasn’t it asking too much of any man to take her and Verity on, but could she and Luke endure not to take that risk? Could she live without him; wait every day to read of his marriage to another woman; the birth of his children and not hers? Wouldn’t it drive her mad to stay in her narrow little existence as housekeeper in some house she didn’t want to learn like she knew this one and long uselessly and bitterly for my Lord Farenze for the rest of her life?

‘I have a set of tasks to carry out, whatever you and I could be, Lord Farenze,’ she reminded him and rose to her feet.

‘So Lady Chloe Thessaly puts her disguise back on to be Mrs Wheaton again. I’d be more impressed by that if you didn’t look so thoroughly kissed and rumpled, madam. I suggest you rearrange the housekeeper if you want her to be taken seriously,’ he said with a look that admitted he was being harsh. ‘Go on then, leave me with Virginia’s missive to soothe my pride. Rebuild your defences for me to knock down again, because I will find the weak points in them and tear them away.’

Not sure if it was a threat or a promise, she shook her head and felt the unfamiliar weight of her hair about her shoulders with a distracted frown. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said numbly then gathered up her scattered hairpins and discarded cap. The words I love you almost got on to her tongue and into the evening air, but it would be unfair to say it and walk away, so she bit her lip and went.

* * *

‘Read your letter,’ she’d said. Luke opened his last missive from Virginia with less reverence than he would have half an hour ago, then held it unseeingly instead of reading.

How could he take in Virginia’s words as if nothing much had happened? Impossible to let her words glide into meaning now, instead of dancing across the page as if written in code. All he could think of was her—Lady Chloe Thessaly; Mrs Wheaton; the woman who kissed him like a heated dream. The dream he’d refused to have for so long.

He wondered what life would be like if he wasn’t a coward. Pamela had treated him like a wooden effigy without feelings, but why had he let her spoil so much that could be good and right about his life once she was no more than a bitter memory? If he’d forced his way through Chloe’s barriers when she was young and wild and daring, they could have been happy together for years.

Instead of seizing the happiness he could have, he’d clung to his wrongs. Pamela said he was a cold-hearted martinet, so he’d become one—not with his daughter, but to the world outside the castle walls. He was nineteen when he made that disastrous marriage, twenty when Pamela taunted him with what she’d done and walked away. His hands fisted involuntarily, but he made himself open them, then laid Virginia’s precious last letter aside until he was fit to read it again.

It had come to him when he kissed Chloe that his future felt right with her in it and those wasted years weighed heavy. He might have had Chloe at his side, could have seen his second wife flourish and flower as their closeness grew, if he wasn’t such a fool. Even when she eyed him hungrily as a half-starved wildcat at a banquet ten years ago, he had not taken his advantage.

He’d been such a boy, that unformed youth Pamela took in lieu of the rich, titled and sophisticated man of the world she’d really wanted. The hurting youth she made of him went on lashing out every time his precious isolation was in danger. It really was high time he grew up, he decided, with a wry smile to admit to himself that he’d left it a little late.

‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ he told the small and exquisite marriage portrait of Virginia and Virgil that hung in their favourite room, ‘and any other cliché I can think of to get me where you two sat so smugly contented with each other all those years ago.’

For a moment it seemed as if the lovers took their love-locked gazes off each other, focused on him with mocking approval and whispered, ‘About time.’

‘Must be more tired than I thought,’ he muttered as he blinked and looked again.

No, they were as they’d always been, so absorbed in each other he could imagine the exasperated artist demanding they look outwards and let him do what he was here for time after time, until he gave up and painted what he saw instead of what they did. Of course they were still lost in each other’s eyes, every idea in their heads focused on one another, painted lovers caught in an endless moment of loving and wanting each other.

‘A trick of the firelight,’ he assured himself and his great-uncle and aunt’s painted likenesses, then bent down to light a taper from the glowing fire to light a branch of candles. ‘You’ll have to do better than that if it wasn’t,’ he told the oblivious lovers, glad Chloe had closed the door behind her so there was no risk of being overheard talking to a picture.

‘She might not have me anyway,’ he argued with a stretched canvas and a few layers of expensive paint. ‘Little wonder if she’s curious about what she missed and responds to me like a man’s wildest fantasy. Maybe she wants to know what her sister risked so much for.’

He could feel a huge gap opening up inside him at the very idea he might love Lady Chloe and she could not love him back. He shook his head to try to reason it away, or accept the full echoing emptiness of that future.

‘You could give me a clue,’ he told the youthful image of Virginia with so little of her attention on the world beyond her lover’s gaze.

It seemed to his tired mind Virgil spoke this time, ‘You did tell the boy to read that letter, not use it to line his hat with, didn’t you, love?’

Since he’d be a fool not to, he did as he might have been bid, if his conversation with two dead lovers wasn’t impossible.

* * *

‘Lady Farenze was very specific, my lord,’ the portly little lawyer said a few minutes later and took off his spectacles to peer at Luke with apparently mild eyes. ‘We went over her will in minute detail six months ago and I can confirm that her ladyship was of sound mind and very clear about her wishes.’

‘I dare say, but this scheme of hers is ridiculous. No, it’s beyond ridiculous. You must find a way to set this part of Lady Virginia’s will aside and allow me administer the estate instead of Lady Chloe.’

‘Lady Virginia was very specific—either the whole of her will is proved and enacted or none of it. Naturally you will receive this house and the Farenze Lodge Estate under the terms of your great-uncle’s will, but the rest of the provisions of her ladyship’s will must be rendered null and void. Her personal fortune will then go to her blood kin as her legal heirs. By the time it has been fought over and split between all the DeMayes and the Revereux family entitled to a share it will do little good to anyone, but if you fight this document, that is what must happen.’

Luke swore as he paced the room angrily, raging at the devil over the few words Virginia left him to fume over echoing about in his head.

Darling Luke,

Your task for the next few months is to track down Verity Thessaly’s father. I only wish for your happiness, my dear boy, but I suggest you start out by visiting Crowdale’s Scottish estates to look for clues to the man’s identity.

All my love,

Great-Aunt Virginia