Читать книгу Regency Rumours - Louise Allen - Страница 10

‘DINNER IS SERVED, my lady.’ There was a general stir as the butler made his announcement from the doorway and the party rose. Giles made a hasty calculation about seating plans and realised that ignoring Lady Isobel might be harder than he had thought.

‘We are a most unbalanced table, I am afraid,’ the countess observed. ‘Mr Soane—shall we?’ He went to take her arm and the earl offered his to Lady Isobel. Giles partnered Lady Anne, Philip, grinning, offered his arm to fifteen-year-old Catherine and Lizzie was left to bring up the rear. When they were all seated Giles found himself between Lady Isobel and Lizzie, facing the remaining Yorke siblings and Mr Soane. Conversation was inevitable if they were not to draw attention to themselves.

Lizzie, under her mother’s eagle eye, was on her best behaviour all through the first remove, almost unable to speak to him with the effort of remembering all the things that she must and must not do. Giles concluded it would be kinder not to confuse her with conversation, which left him with no choice but to turn and proffer a ragout to Lady Isobel.

‘Thank you.’ After a moment she said, ‘Do you work with Mr Soane often?’ Her tone suggested an utter lack of interest. The question, it was obvious, was the merest dinner-table conversation that good breeding required her to make. After his disastrous overheard comments she would like to tip the dish over his head, that was quite clear, but she was going to go through the motions of civility if it killed her.

‘Yes.’ Damn it, now he was sounding sulky. Or guilty. Giles pulled himself together. ‘I worked in his drawing office when I first began to study architecture after leaving university. It was a quite incredible experience—the office is in his house, you may know—like finding oneself in the midst of Aladdin’s cave and never knowing whether one is going to bump into an Old Master painting, trip over an Egyptian sarcophagus or wander into a Gothic monk’s parlour!

‘I am now building my own practice, but I collaborate with Soane if I can be of assistance. He is a busy man and I owe him a great deal.’

Lady Isobel made a sound that might be interpreted, by the wildly optimistic, as encouragement to expand on that statement.

‘He employed me when I had no experience and, for all he knew, might prove to be useless.’

‘And you are not useless?’ She sounded sceptical.

‘No.’ Hell, sulky again. ‘I am not.’ Deciding what to do with his future during that last year at Oxford had not been easy. It would have been very simple to hang on his mother’s purse strings—even her notorious extravagances had not compromised the wealth she had inherited from her father, nor her widow’s portion.

Somehow the Dowager Marchioness of Faversham kept the bon ton’s acceptance despite breaking every rule in the book, including producing an illegitimate child by her head gardener’s irresistibly handsome soldier son, ten months after the death of her indulgent and elderly husband. She was so scandalous, so charming, that Giles believed she was regarded almost as an exotic, not quite human creature, one that could be indulged and permitted its antics.

‘I work for my living, Lady Isobel, and do it well. And I do not relish indolence,’ he added to his curt rejoinder. He would have little trouble maintaining a very full, and equally scandalous, social life at the Widow’s side, but he was not prepared to follow in her footsteps as a social butterfly. Society would have to accept him as himself, and on his own terms, or go hang if they found him too confusing to pigeonhole.

‘You had an education that fitted you for this work, then?’ Lady Isobel asked, her tone still inquisitorial, as though she was interviewing him for a post as a secretary. Her hands were white, her fingers long and slender. She ran one fingertip along the back of the knife lying by her plate and Giles felt a jolt of heat cut through his rising annoyance with her, and with himself for allowing her to bait him.

Stop it, there is nothing special about her. Just far more sensuality than any respectable virgin ought to exude. ‘Yes. Harrow. Oxford. And a good drawing master.’

Lady Isobel sent him a flickering look that encompassed, and was probably valuing, his evening attire—from his coat, to his linen, to the stick-pin in his cravat and the antique ruby cabochon ring on his finger. Her own gown and jewellery spoke of good taste and the resources to buy the best.

‘What decided you on architecture?’ she asked. ‘Is it a family tradition?’

No, she quite certainly did not know who he was or she would never have asked that. ‘Not so far as I am aware. My father was a soldier,’ Giles explained. ‘I did not realise at first where my talents, if I had any, might lie. Then it occurred to me that many of the drawings in my sketchbooks were buildings, interiors or landscapes. I found I was interested in design, in how spaces are used.’ His enthusiasm was showing, he realised and concluded, before he could betray anything more of his inner self, ‘I wrote to Mr Soane and he took me on as an assistant.’ He lowered his voice with a glance down the table. ‘He is generous to young men in the profession—I think his own sons disappoint him with their lack of interest.’

And now, of course, many of his commissions came from men he met socially, who appreciated his work, liked the fact that he was ‘one of them’ and yet was sufficiently different for it not to be an embarrassment to pay his account. Giles was very well aware that his bills were met with considerably more speed than if he had been, in their eyes, a mere tradesman. And in return, he stayed well clear of their wives and daughters, whatever the provocation.

‘So, have you built your own house, Mr Harker?’

‘I have. Were you thinking of viewing it, Lady Isobel?’

‘Now you are being deliberately provocative, Mr Harker.’ Her dark brows drew together and the tight social smile vanished. ‘I am thinking no such thing, as you know perfectly well. This is called making polite conversation, in case you are unfamiliar with the activity. You are supposed to inform me where your house is and tell me of some interesting or amusing feature, not make suggestive remarks.’

‘Are you always this outspoken, Lady Isobel?’ He found, unexpectedly, that his ill temper had vanished, although not all his guilt. He was enjoying her prickles—it was a novelty to be fenced with over dinner.

‘I am practising,’ she said as she sat back to allow the servants to clear for the second remove. ‘My rather belated New Year resolution is to say what I mean. Scream it, if necessary,’ she added in a murmur. ‘I believe I should say what I think to people to their faces, not behind their backs.’

Ouch. There was nothing for it. ‘I am sorry that you may have overheard some ill-judged remarks I made to Mr Soane earlier, Lady Isobel. That is a matter for regret.’

‘I am sure it is,’ she said with a smile that banished any trace of ease that he was beginning to feel in her presence. If she could cut with a smile, he hated to think what she might do with a frown.

‘However, I do not feel that any good will be served by rehearsing the reason you hold such…ill-judged opinions.’ Giles took a firm grip on his knife and resisted the urge to retaliate. He had been in the wrong—not to feel what he did, but to risk saying it where he might be overheard. Now he must give his head for a washing. He braced himself for her next barb. ‘You were telling me about your house.’

Excellent tactics, he thought grimly. Get me off balance while you work out how to knife me again. ‘My house is situated on a small estate in Norfolk. My paternal grandfather lives there and manages it for me in my absence.’ It was also close enough for him to keep an eye on his mother on those occasions she descended on the Dower House of Westley Hall for one of her outrageous parties, causing acute annoyance and embarrassment to the current marquess and his wife and scandalised interest in the village. When she was in one of her wild moods he was the only person who could manage her.

‘Your father—’

‘He died before I was born.’ It had taken some persuasion to extract his grandfather from the head gardener’s cottage at Westley and persuade him that he would not be a laughing stock if he took up residence in his grandson’s new country house. ‘My grandfather lives with me. His health is not as robust as it once was.’ Stubborn old Joe had resisted every inch of the way, despite being racked with rheumatism and pains in his back from years of manual labour. But now he had turned himself into a country squire of the old-fashioned kind, despite grumbling about rattling around in a house with ten bedchambers. Thinking about the old man relaxed him a little.

‘How pleasant for you,’ Lady Isobel said, accepting a slice of salmon tart. ‘I wish I had known my grandfathers. And does your mama reside with you?’

‘She lives independently. Very independently.’ Things were relatively stable at the moment: his mother had a lover who was a year older than Giles. Friends thought he should be embarrassed by this liaison, but Giles was merely grateful that Jack had the knack of keeping her happy even if he had not a hope of restraining her wilder starts. To give the man his due, he did try.

‘She is a trifle eccentric, perhaps?’

‘Yes, I think you could say that,’ Giles agreed. How quickly Lady Isobel picked up the undertones in what he said—No wonder she was able to slip under his guard with such ease when she chose.

‘My goodness, you look almost human when you grin, Mr Harker.’ She produced a sweet smile and turned to join in the discussion about the Irish language the earl was having with his eldest daughter.

You little cat! Giles almost said it out loud.

He had succeeded—far more brutally than he had intended—in ensuring he was not going to be fending off a hand on his thigh under the dinner table, or finding an unwelcome guest in his bedchamber, but at the expense of making an enemy of a close friend of the family. Now he had to maintain an appearance of civility so the Yorkes did not notice anything amiss. He could do without this—the tasks he had accepted to help Soane were going to be as nothing compared with the challenge of keeping his hands from Lady Isobel’s slender throat if she continued to be quite so provocative.

She was idly sliding her fingers up and down the stem of her wine glass as she talked. The provocation was not simply to his temper, he feared.

Giles took a reviving sip of wine and listened to young Lizzie lecturing John Soane on the embellishments she considered would make the castle folly on the distant hill even more romantic than it already was.

That was one possibility, of course: wall up Lady Isobel in the tower and leave her for some knight in shining armour to rescue. Which was a very amusing thought, if it were not for the fact that he had a sneaking suspicion that through sheer perversity she would never wait around for some man to come to her aid. She would fashion the furniture into a ladder, climb out of the window and then come after him with a battleaxe.

She laughed and he turned to look at her, the wine glass halfway to his lips. That laugh seemed to belong to another woman altogether: a carefree, charming, innocent creature. As if feeling his regard, she turned and caught his eye and for a long moment their glances interlocked. Giles saw her lips part, her eyes darken as though something of significance had been exchanged.

A stab of arousal made him shift in his chair and the moment was lost. Lady Isobel turned away, her expression more puzzled than annoyed, as though she did not understand what had just happened.

Giles drank his wine. He knew exactly what had occurred; two virtual strangers had discovered that they were physically attracted to each other, even if one of them might not realise it and both of them would go to any lengths to deny it.

There were people in her bedroom. Voices, too low to make out, a tug on the covers as someone bumped into the foot of the bed. Isobel opened her eyes to dim daylight and a view of lace-trimmed pillow. With every muscle tensed, she rolled over and sat up, ready to scream, her heart contracting with alarm.

There was no sign of the party of rowdy bucks who had haunted her dreams. Instead, three pairs of wide eyes observed her from the foot of the bed, one pair so low that they seemed on a level with the covers. Children. Isobel let out a long breath and found a smile, restraining the impulse to scoot down the bed and gather up the barely visible smallest child and inhale the warm powdered scent of sleepy infant. ‘Good morning. Would one of you be kind enough to draw the curtains?’

‘Good morning, Cousin Isobel,’ Lizzie said. ‘I knew it would be all right to wake you up. Mama said you should sleep in and eat your breakfast in your room, but I thought you would like to have it with us in the nursery.’

The contrast between her own dreams of drunken, frightening bucks invading her bedroom, of the presence of Giles Harker somewhere in the mists of the nightmare, and the wide, innocent gaze of the children made her feel as though she was still not properly awake.

‘That would be delightful. Thank you for the invitation.’ Isobel rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and regarded the other two children as they came round the side of the bed. ‘You must be Caroline and Charles. I am very pleased to meet you.’

Charles, who was four, if she remembered correctly, regarded her solemnly over the top of his fist. His thumb was firmly in his mouth. He shuffled shyly round the bed to observe her more closely. Isobel put out one hand and touched the rosy cheek and he chuckled. She fisted her hands in the bed sheets. He was so sweet and she wanted…

Caroline beamed and dragged the wrapper off the end of the bed. ‘You’ll need to put this on because the passageways are draughty. But there is a fire in the nursery.’

The children waited while she slid out of bed, put on the robe, ran a brush through her hair and retied it into a tail with the ribbon before donning her slippers. ‘I’m ready now.’

‘We can go this way, then we will not disturb Mama.’ Lady Caroline led her out of the door on the far side of the bedchamber, through the small dressing room and out of another door on to what seemed to be the back stairs. ‘We just go through there and up the stairs to the attic—’

There was the sound of whistling and the soft slap of backless leather slippers on carpet. Across the landing a shadow slid over the head of the short flight of stairs that must lead to the suites at the back of the house. Someone was coming. A male someone. Trapped in the doorway, with a chattering seven-year-old in front of her, a small boy hanging on to her skirts and Lizzie bringing up the rear, Isobel just had time to clutch the neck of her wrapper together as Mr Harker appeared.

He stopped dead at the sight of them, his long brocade robe swinging around his bare ankles. His face was shadowed with his unshaven morning beard, his hair was tousled and an indecent amount of chest was showing in the vee of the loosely tied garment. He must be naked beneath it. ‘Good morning, Lady Isobel, Lady Lizzie, Lady Caroline, Master Charles. I hope you do not represent a bathing party.’

Cousin Elizabeth had said something about a plunge bath in this area, so that was presumably where he was going. He might have had the decency to have turned on his heel the moment he saw them, Isobel thought, resentment mingling with sensations she tried hard not to acknowledge. Now she was in the position of having to exchange words with a scarcely clad man while she was in her nightwear. The fact that her wrapper was both practical and all-enveloping was neither here nor there.

‘We are going to the nursery for breakfast,’ she said, her gaze, after one glimpse of hair-roughened chest, fixed a foot over his head. ‘Lead the way, please, Caroline.’

‘Good morning, Mr Harker,’ the children chorused. Isobel scooped up little Charles as a shield and they trooped across the landing, past the architect and through into the sanctuary of the door to the attic stairs. She was furiously aware that she was peony-pink and acting like a flustered governess. All her anger-fuelled defiance of him over dinner was lost in embarrassment.

They climbed the stairs and Caroline took them around the corner and on to a landing with a skylight overhead and a void, edged with rails and panelled boards, in the centre. As she tried to orientate herself Isobel realised it must be above the inner hallway her room opened on to, with the snob-boards to prevent the servants looking down on their employers.

‘Papa had Mr Soane make him a plunge bath in the old courtyard that used to be behind the main stairs.’ Lizzie waved a hand in the general direction. ‘I think it would be great fun to learn to swim in it, but Mama says it is for Papa to relax in, not for us to splash about.’

Now I have the mental picture of Mr Harker floating naked in the warm water…Thank you so much, Lizzie.

‘Here we are. This is where Caroline and I sleep, and here is Charles’s room and here is the nursery. Nora, we have brought Lady Isobel, I told you she would like to have breakfast with us.’

A skinny maid bobbed a curtsy. ‘Oh, Lady Lizzie! I do hope it is all right, my lady, I said you’d be wanting to rest, but off they went…’

‘That is quite all right. I would love to have breakfast here.’ The children and their staff appeared to occupy this entire range of south-facing rooms with wonderful views over the long avenue and the park towards Royston. A pair of footmen carried in trays. Charles twisted in her arms and she made herself put him down.

‘I told them to bring lots of food because we had a special guest. Those are my designs for the tower—Mr Soane says I show a flair for the dramatic,’ Lizzie pronounced, pointing at a series of paintings pinned on the wall. ‘I expect I get that from Mama. She writes plays, you know and sometimes when we have a house party they are acted in the Gallery. Papa says she is a veritable blue-stocking. We will go for a walk this morning and I will show you the tower.’ Lizzie finally ran out of breath, or perhaps it was the smell of bacon that distracted her.

‘That would be very pleasant, provided your mama does not need me.’ Isobel sat down at the table. ‘It would be wonderful to get out in the fresh air and it looks as though the morning will be sunny, which is such a relief after yesterday’s drizzle.’ And there was the added advantage that if she was out of the house she would be at a safe distance from Mr Harker’s disturbing presence.

While she ate she contemplated just how maddening he was. He was arrogant, self-opinionated, far too aware of his own good looks, shockingly outspoken and did not do his robe up properly. He was, in fact, just like the drunken bucks at the house party, only sober, which was no excuse, for that meant he should know better. He also made her feel strangely unsettled in a way she had almost forgotten she could feel. There was no doubting that his relaxed, elegant body would strip to perfection, that his skin would feel—

Isobel bit savagely into a slice of toast and black-currant conserve. What was the use of men except to make women’s lives miserable? She contemplated Master Charles, chubby-cheeked, slightly sticky already, full of blue-eyed innocence. Little boys were lovely. She felt a pang at the thought of what she was missing.

Kind fathers and husbands like her own papa, or Lord Hardwicke, were obviously good men. Lucas had been almost perfect. But how on earth was one to tell what a candidate for one’s hand would turn out to be like? Most males, by the time they turned eighteen, appeared to be rakehells, seducers, drinkers, gamblers…

Perhaps she could become an Anglican nun. They did have them, she was sure, and it sounded safe and peaceful. A mental image of Mr Harker, laughing himself sick at the sight of her in a wimple, intruded. She would look ridiculous and she would be quite unsuited to the life. Besides, she would not be free to travel, to visit Jane and the children. An eccentric spinster then. She had enough money.

Only she did not want to be a spinster. She would rather like to fall in love again with a good man and marry. Her daydream stuttered to a halt: he would doubtless want children. But where did she find one she could trust with her heart and all that was most precious to her? And even if she did find this paragon, was he going to want her when he knew the truth about her?