Читать книгу The Regency Season Collection: Part Two - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 24

Chapter Fifteen

‘I need to speak with you privately, Mrs Wheaton. Meet me in the Winter Garden in half an hour if you please,’ Luke demanded when he tracked down his housekeeper to the linen room, where she seemed to be having an urgent consultation with the head housemaid about torn sheets, of all things.

From the flash of temper in her magnificent eyes at his order he felt lucky he hadn’t come across her alone and she had to keep to her role in front of the maids. He smiled like a besotted idiot as he ran down the backstairs, as if it was what a viscount did, and went out to the stables to speak to Josiah Birtkin about travel arrangements and how this place could be kept safe and cautious whilst he was away. The thought of being parted from Chloe, Verity and Eve while he carried out Virginia’s quest added a bite of nerves to his elation as he finished his conversation and went to seek a far more crucial one.

* * *

It could be another clear morning, if only the mist would clear. Instead it hung about this sheltered valley and he wondered if he should have asked Chloe to meet him outside on a day when frost seemed to hang in the very air, waiting to crystallise their breath. The wintery statue at the heart of the place was still staring into the distance, but Luke resisted the urge to confide his thoughts to his unresponsive stone ears. Some things were so private they should only be said to the person concerned.

‘There you are,’ Chloe’s pleasantly husky voice observed from so close it made him start and her frown turned to a satisfied smile.

‘As you say,’ he drawled as annoyingly as he could manage and from the flags of colour burning across her cheeks he’d succeeded a bit too well in rousing her temper this time.

‘How dare you order me to meet you out here in the middle of my duties like this? What do you imagine the household will make of such a hole-and-corner encounter, Lord Farenze?’

‘That I wish to speak to you in private and can hardly do so inside with so many eager ears tuned to our every move, I expect,’ he replied with a shrug part of him knew was wrong when he was master and she was playing the upper servant.

‘Why would you need to be private with me?’ she demanded haughtily and Luke took a deep breath of frosty air and prepared to tell her.

‘So I may ask you to marry me again, of course,’ he managed to say casually, as if it was what viscounts always did of a foggy morning, when they employed housekeepers as magnificent as this one.

‘Just like that?’ she demanded and he wondered if he’d miscalculated by stirring her into enough fury to be her true self instead of Mrs Wheaton.

‘No, not just like that,’ he said with a stern frown of his own. ‘After a decade of denial and deception—’ he heard her draw breath to annihilate him with negatives ‘—I’m done with pretending it doesn’t matter that we wasted ten years because I was too stupid to see past your disguise and my wife’s shoddy little love affairs to the woman you truly are, Chloe Thessaly.’

‘You can’t call me that here,’ she argued with a shocked look about in case old Winter at the centre of the garden might pass her identity on.

‘Nobody is in earshot and there are eight-foot-high hedges all about us, but are you ashamed of me then, my lady?’

‘Never that, my lord,’ she shot back so urgently he had to hide a satisfied grin.

‘Then when do you intend telling the world who you truly are?’

‘When the time seems right,’ she muttered crossly and shifted under his steady gaze. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she admitted with a heavy sigh. ‘Soon,’ she added as he continued to watch her as annoyingly as he could manage when all he really wanted to do was kiss her speechless and a lot more it was as well not to go into right now.

‘When Verity is of age, or has run off with the boot boy perhaps? Or when hell freezes over and I’m so old and grey even you don’t want me any longer?’

‘I shall always want you,’ she said unwarily and he couldn’t help his broad grin at the declaration he most wanted to hear on her lips.

‘Marry me, then,’ he managed to say before he could launch himself at her like a lovestruck maniac.

‘You could do so much better,’ she said, avoiding his eyes as she watched the stony statue as if he fascinated her and Luke found he could even be jealous of inanimate objects now.

‘I could ask nobody better suited to be my wife,’ he assured her as he cupped large hands about her face, so she had to look up and let him see the doubts and questions in her amazing violet-blue gaze, as well as the heat and longing that made his heartbeat thunder with exhilaration and desire. ‘I never met a woman I honoured so much or wanted so badly, Chloe,’ he told her shakily and hoped he had managed to put all he was feeling into his own gaze, for once. ‘You’ve made me into me again,’ he said and grimaced as all the words he couldn’t put together clogged up in his head. ‘I don’t have the right words. I’ve been trying not to admit it for a decade, but I love you and I won’t stop doing it, even if you walk away.’

‘I can’t marry you, Luke.’

* * *

Chloe let herself gaze up into his fascinatingly hot grey eyes and saw pain and anger there before he decided No wasn’t enough this time. It felt as if the frantic beat of her heart might choke her as she gazed up into all she’d ever wanted and had to say it anyway. Love was there in the flare of gold about his irises, the hidden depths of green at the heart of his gaze that looked back at her.

Luke, Lord Farenze, was finally showing her the tender places in his heart, the hopes and dreams in his complex mind and she was hurting him all over again. Tears swam in her eyes as she thought of the young man he’d been—scarred so badly when his dreams were trampled in the dust by his shrew of a wife. He needed her to love him back, and love him back she truly did, but it didn’t mean she could let him marry her and make Verity into a bastard again.

‘Why not?’ he breathed, so close she wondered how she could still be so cold.

‘I have a daughter,’ she said sadly.

The blighted hopes and dreams young Chloe once wept over so bitterly while missing stubborn, noble, infuriating Lord Farenze in her bed seemed as nothing, now she had to renounce everything mature Chloe wanted to give her lover.

‘Oh, Luke, don’t frown at me and shake your head. I know you’re a good man and I’m a coward, but I can’t let Verity grow up with Lady Daphne Thessaly’s shame blighting her life. You need a pristine wife with an innocent heart, not me.’

‘Why would I want a tame little tabby kitten when I can have a lioness who’d fight for our cubs with her last breath?’ he said with a refusal to be fobbed off that made temptation tug so powerfully she had to look away.

‘I am fighting for one of them now.’

‘No, you’re denying we could fight the world for her together. I won’t accept this as your final answer, Chloe Thessaly,’ he said with a determination that made her knees wobble and her breath come short. She loved him so much she felt herself weakening and turned to watch the foggy garden to stop herself admitting she would only ever be half-alive without him.

‘Virginia’s quest for me is to find out who Verity’s father was. I will do my best to do so, but after that I’ll wed you, whoever he turns out to be,’ he told her.

It sounded as much a threat as a promise, until he ran an impatient hand through his sable pelt of hair and let out a heartfelt sigh. ‘Lord above, but you’re a proud and stubborn wench, Lady Chloe Thessaly,’ he informed her with exasperation.

Chloe sighed at the angry intimacy of them here in this foggy garden and longed for a forever after to spend with him. She spared a thought for Virgil, begging Virginia to wed him rather than be his scandalous lover as she would have offered to be. They must have realised after two previous marriages bore no fruit there was a strong chance she was barren, but even that didn’t seem as huge a barrier to love and marriage as Verity’s future happiness was to her.

‘I’ll wed you or nobody,’ Luke told her so stubbornly she almost believed him and her unhappiness seemed about to double. ‘Although heaven only knows why I’d saddle myself with such a steely female for life,’ he grumbled.

‘How charming. You look very much like a grumpy mastiff denied a juicy bone right now, my Lord Farenze.’

‘What a sad pair we are then; you look like a queen about to have her head cut off,’ he replied, eyebrows raised and a challenge to deny it in his sharp look.

‘Nobody else would want us if they knew what a sorry pair we are,’ she agreed.

‘They’d better not want you, but if we’re not to be united in marital disharmony, I suppose I’d best be off about Virginia’s business,’ he told her with a look that said it was her fault. They could be married inside the week and have a wedding night before he went, if not a honeymoon on the way.

‘Wait for a better day,’ she urged, all the imaginings of a woman terrified that her lover might never come back taking shape in her mind.

‘If I wait out one more night under the same roof as you, Lady Chloe, I shall either run mad or break down your door from sheer frustration. I need to be gone, but first you have to tell me everything you can remember about your sister’s visit to Scotland all those years ago.’

‘I don’t know much, she never told me.’

‘Tell me what you do know, then, for it is sure to be more than I do.’

‘Daphne went off to our father’s Scottish estate to stay there with his sister while her husband was in Ireland, supposedly to be instructed how to go on in polite company, then make a début of some kind in Edinburgh society. My father was deep in debt by that time and had secretly agreed to marry her off to a pox-ridden but very wealthy old duke as soon as they could fool the world she chose such a fate of her own free will.

‘Papa was furious when his plan went awry and the old man wanted his money back and Daphne was sent home in disgrace. We were sent away so she could have Verity at a remote and tumbledown property on Bodmin Moor that my father had won in a card game and couldn’t sell, but Daphne still refused to tell me who her lover was. She said it was best I didn’t know, then I wouldn’t be embarrassed when I was presented and had to meet his relatives.’

‘He must come from a gently bred family at the very least then; she could have met one of the neighbours during her time on your father’s estate, I suppose, properly out or no,’ he said with a preoccupied frown.

Chloe thought fascination with his quest was already overtaking his frustration that she’d refused to marry him, but she put that grief aside for later and did her best to help him with what was probably an impossible task.

‘Daphne was desperate to escape marriage to that dreadful old reprobate, but she had always dreamt of a gallant hero who would come and rescue her from the lonely lives we lived at Carraway Court. I wouldn›t be surprised if she took any lover happy to have a sixteen-year-old girl in his bed in a desperate attempt to get herself with child and escape marriage to such a man.’

‘She was no older than my Eve when your father tried to sell his own child to the highest bidder, then? What sort of a father would consign his own child to a life of such misery and frustration?’

‘The Thessaly sort,’ Chloe said sadly, regretting the gaps in hers and Daphne’s lives and contrasting them with my Lord Farenze’s fierce love for his only child. ‘He was no sort of father at all and only wed my mother because she was heiress to the Carraway fortune. I don’t suppose he was faithful to her, or even particularly kind. Such a hard-hearted man can do a fearsome amount of damage to his children, so Daphne and I ought to have been grateful he favoured our brothers and despised us as mere girls, I suppose.’

‘He was your father and ought to have been proud of his spirited and beautiful daughters. But why did he send her to Scotland with his sister and not you?’

‘Because I was openly rebellious and Daphne always chose the course of least resistance, then did as she wanted to as soon as his back was turned. He thought she was meek and tractable and would do as he told her, in so far as he thought of either of us as beings and not his chattels to be disposed of as he chose.’

‘Miserable old fool.’

Somehow his round condemnation of her late father made her smile, even if it wobbled and flattened at the thought of all that cold idiocy had cost the Thessaly twins.

‘He was, but you can see why Daphne longed so desperately for a lover when she had so little affection from anyone other than me in her life, can you not?’

It came out more as a plea than a demand he understood her twin and she was grateful for the warmth of his hands as he folded her cold ones in his and watched her with a mix of admiration and exasperation in his intent gaze.

‘And what of Lady Chloe Thessaly? Was she supposed to stand alone and become the prop for her weaker sister whenever a lover let her down? You must have felt so alone, my love, so forsaken, when your sister and companion was bundled away like that.’

‘I always knew that one day we would be parted. Daphne needed to be loved and supported and I had to hope she would meet a man strong enough to do both, until Papa came up with his plan to wed her to a monster. Every day we were apart I was scared she’d do something dreadful to evade what he had in mind for her.’

There, she had almost admitted it for the first time in her life. She had been terrified her sister would find the prospect of that marriage so impossible to endure she would choose death over it.

‘It was almost a relief to me when she returned to Carraway Court unwed and with child by a lover she refused to identify even to me,’ she added, because he might as well know all her secrets now the worst one was out in the open.

‘Oh, my love,’ he said, everything she longed for and couldn’t have in his dear eyes as he watched her without condemnation. ‘What a heavy burden your wretched family made you carry when you were too young to bear even half of it.’

‘I grew up very quickly,’ she said with a would-be careless shrug, but he drew her closer instead of letting her stand further off and clasped their hands between them as if he never intended letting her go for very long.

‘No wonder you thought me such a paltry creature when I made you that dishonourable proposition ten years ago,’ he almost managed to joke, despite the pain of that driven declaration spiky between them even now.

‘I didn’t, Luke, I thought you were the only man I might ever love enough to accept it. Then I thought of Verity and had to say no for all of us.’

‘Aye, and you were right to do so, but if only I’d let myself delve deeper then, looked a little harder at Mrs Chloe Wheaton and all the witchy secrets you didn’t know and I thought you did.’

‘I wouldn’t have told you anything back then.’

‘Probably not, but it would be good to remember that I tried.’

‘I think you did,’ she almost whispered and somehow it sounded so loud on the freezing air she looked about and wondered how they must look to a casual observer, this potent lord and his encroaching housekeeper.

‘Whereas I think I was a fool until very recently. Now stop distracting me with might have been and let me get this confounded quest over and done with, before I decide to consign it to the devil and stay here and lay siege to you until you finally agree to wed me after all, my Chloe.’

‘None of it will go away,’ she warned.

‘Maybe not, but life and hope must win out over history and gossip. I have to believe it and so ought you, my darling. Coming to terms with our future will keep you out of mischief while I am away.’

‘As if I need any sort of occupation with your house to spring clean and put back in order for you,’ she said brusquely, but suddenly all the barely hidden energy of nature in January felt as alive in her as it was in the bulbs pushing through the cold earth even here, in the frozen realm of Winter.

‘I’ll return to you,’ he promised, all that life and promise in his dear eyes as he held their clasped hands up to show her they were pledged on a level even she couldn’t deny,

‘To us?’ she offered as a sort of compromise, since they agreed Eve should stay here while he was away and Verity would become a weekly boarder for now and it felt as if a family was forming between them whether she wanted it to or not. ‘Will that do?’

‘For now, and that brings me back to my quest—what sort of lover would your sister have favoured?’

‘A young Adonis, such as my Lord Mantaigne might have been ten years ago, if he was less cynical, which I doubt,’ she said after thinking clearly about that lover for the first time since she realised her twin was with child by him.

‘He was never so and had better keep away from this Thessaly twin if he wants to keep a whole skin,’ Luke said crossly and she smiled.

‘I prefer dark and brooding Border raiders.’

‘Stop trying to hold me here with half-promises, woman. I’m off to find this idol of your sister’s with his feet of clay. After I confront him and beat him to a pulp, I shall be able to come back and wed you at long last.’

‘As if that will solve anything. I said no and I’ve got work to do,’ she told him huffily and pulled out of his arms to walk away with the sound of his surprised laughter echoing in her ears.

‘Insufferable, stubborn, impossible man,’ she muttered as she marched inside, then darted into the flower room when she thought she heard someone coming downstairs.

Chloe splashed frigid water from a jug waiting to warm up enough to be used to refresh the few vases of flowers available at this time of year and gasped in a deep breath. The impossibility of it all threatened to suck the elation and hope out of her, but this time it wouldn’t go. That had been her last no and they both knew it. He was a risk she had to take when he got back from Scotland, whatever the result of his quest might be. She was going to take that risk on love Daphne warned her against with her dying breath. Risk or not, she was going to have to jump right into it and trust him not to let them both drown.

* * *

She felt a little less convinced he’d manage it when she came down the elegant front stairs of Farenze Lodge on a fine spring morning six weeks later, ready to begin the grand clear out of hatchments, black veiling and all the other trappings of mourning Virginia had ordered must take place as soon as possible after her death. Chloe knew she should be as happy as she ever could be here without her beloved employer and mentor, but somehow knowing she was a coward took the joy out of the spring sunshine and dulled the sight of a flurry of primroses and violets brightening the edge of the still-leafless woods.

She still hadn’t found the courage to tell Verity who she really was. She felt weighed down by her own folly as she helped the maids take down the dark veiling from gilt mirrors and statues and open the blinds in all the rooms kept half-dark until today. Holland covers were removed from the furniture in Virginia’s splendid boudoir and the last bequests were matched to the list Mr Poulson left, ready to be sent to new owners with a note or a personal visit from Eve, her father or the housekeeper to hand over a memento of a much-loved lady.

Life was going relentlessly on all round her and Chloe felt the past threaten her happiness like a pall. She looked the same soberly correct housekeeper she’d been for so long, but felt nowhere near as serene and composed as she appeared while she awaited Luke’s return and the end of his quest to find Verity’s father.

Luckily, none of the neighbours knew Luke enclosed long letters to her with the sealed packet he sent to his daughter every week. Eve always handed them over with a lack of expression that said more than Chloe wanted anyone to know about her relationship with the girl’s father. Yet with Eve’s middle-aged governess here now to keep her pupil busy and all of them respectably chaperoned, Chloe knew Luke was making her own continuing presence here as unremarkable as possible and could only love him all the more for it.

‘He’s courting you,’ Bran had pointed out when the latest letter came and Chloe hastily hid it in her pocket to read as soon as she could make an excuse to be alone.

When she did, she sat pouring over every word and could almost imagine he was here, telling her who he’d met and what he thought of the part of Scotland where Daphne stayed at first, then some sharp observations about her paternal aunt, Lady Hamming, that the lady would certainly not enjoy if she read them.

‘His lordship is keeping me informed of some business he undertook for me whilst he is in Scotland,’ she had retorted as briskly as she could when Bran made that accusation, knowing her blush was giving her away so badly they both wondered why she was bothering.

‘His lordship is a good man, but not so good he’d write at such length to someone he was doing a favour, Mrs Wheaton,’ the shrewd little woman told her.

‘He can’t court me, I’m a servant,’ Chloe said numbly.

‘Are you now?’

‘Of course I am.’

‘The nobility and gentry might see what they expect to when they look through any of us as doesn’t slop their bathwater or knock over the silver, but you won’t fool the rest of us that easy, my dear.’

‘For all that, I’m still a housekeeper.’

‘And a very good one you are, too, but it’s not what you’re born to.’

‘As if most ladies of birth and expectations are not brought up to keep house, when they’re not too busy bearing heirs. Even if I was born a lady, why would I want to become a brood mare for some chilly lord?’

‘Because he’s a man in every sense of the word and would be whether he was born a lord or a labourer, perhaps? Don’t you go judging Lord Farenze by any other noble devils you’ve come across, Mrs Chloe. He suffered enough grief from a woman who wouldn’t see he’s got a good heart under that abrupt manner of his. Why don’t you ask yourself if he’d grumble and glare at those as wants to poke about in his life to pass the time if he hadn’t a wild, romantic yearning inside him to protect? He needs you, my girl, so are you going to make him happy or kick him aside like that heartless young madam he married when he was too young to know any better did, as if he was nothing?’

‘You’d trust me with the happiness of such a good man? I’m not sure I would. I come from bad blood, Bran, best for him if he has no more to do with me.’

‘Your girl’s bad then, is she?’

‘No, she’s as sweet as a nut all the way through, which makes her almost a miracle considering the nest of vipers I hail from,’ Chloe replied with a shrug.

‘Speaking for myself, I don’t judge a book by what’s next to it and you should try looking in the mirror sometimes.’

‘I do. How else can I be sure I look neat and tidy every morning?’

‘Look closer and you’ll see a stranger looking back—bad blood indeed.’

‘I’m not worthy of him, Bran,’ Chloe whispered as if to say it aloud admitted Lord Farenze really was courting his great-aunt’s companion housekeeper.

‘You won’t be if you cower behind that cap and your blacks for ever and won’t see what could be if you was to let it. He deserves better.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m telling you.’

‘No, you’ve come up with a cartload of reasons why not, when he’s set his heart on you. He deserves a woman who’ll say yes to him and damn the devil.’

‘I have a daughter to consider,’ she argued stubbornly.

‘And he doesn’t? Don’t you trust him to be a good father to your Verity?’

‘Of course I do,’ Chloe admitted, then sighed with relief when Eve came to find out why it was taking them so long to count napkins and write down an order for more and saved her from even more uncomfortable questions.

Looking at herself from where Bran stood, Chloe wondered why anyone would believe she’d been the bold, bad Thessaly twin, who defied anyone who stood in the way of what she or Daphne wanted or needed now. When her father decided to sell off his more tractable daughter, she recalled how cleverly he’d whisked Daphne away so Chloe had no idea where she was and found she wanted to lash out at him as fiercely now as she had then. How that fiery young Chloe would stare at the subdued woman she’d become. She had kept herself and Verity safe by refusing to live fully and love Luke for years and it was time to let that pent-up fury go and learn to live without it.

Lady Chloe Thessaly learnt young that love was a snare. It left Daphne dead and her with a child to bring up. Little wonder if she refused to trust her feral longings for my Lord Farenze a decade ago. He’d been gruff and hurt then and must have resented wanting her until he glowered at her more often than he smiled. The battered and cynical aristocrat he pretended to be back then was so unlike the ardently romantic young lover she’d once dreamed of that it was little wonder she’d been horrified to discover he roused passions in her she’d thought stone dead.