Читать книгу Regency High Society Vol 2: Sparhawk's Lady / The Earl's Intended Wife / Lord Calthorpe's Promise / The Society Catch - Louise Allen, Miranda Jarrett - Страница 8

Caro’s feet skidded on the slippery grass, and the oath was already halfway from her lips before she swallowed it back. She hadn’t sworn like that in years; swearing had been one of the first bad habits that Frederick had convinced her to abandon. Ladies didn’t swear, and she was a lady, a countess, wife to a peer of the realm.

But ladies didn’t let strange men kiss them, either, and for the first time the magnitude of what she’d done swept over her. She’d crept into the bedchamber of a man she didn’t know, a foreigner, with a question that she’d finally been too fainthearted to ask, and instead she’d smiled and laughed and behaved as commonly as the barkeep’s daughter he’d accused her of being.

It didn’t matter that she’d gone there with the best intentions in the world. The truth remained that Frederick deserved better from her. He’d cherished her and loved her and educated her far beyond her station, and then, finally, had raised her up to his own by giving her his name and his title. There could be nothing finer for her than to be the wife of a man so endlessly kind and generous, and in return she loved him more than she’d ever loved anyone else. Because he’d told her so, she’d always believed that that love alone would be enough to redeem her.

And dear Lord, it wasn’t, not now that she’d finally been tested. It wasn’t even close.

The carriage loomed before her in the shadows, the Byfield crest barely visible on the side. The horses had been loosened to graze, but there was no sign of her coachman or the footman, either.

“Ralston?” she called uneasily. She touched one of her bracelets, recalling what Captain Sparhawk had said. She didn’t believe that the grounds of an admiral’s house would harbor footpads and cutthroats, but here on the Portsmouth Road she wasn’t as sure. “Ralston, where are you?”

“And where have you been, my dear aunt?” drawled the young man who stepped from behind the coach. “I don’t want to tell you how long I’ve been waiting.”

“What a pity you’ve waited in vain, George,” said Caro sharply, inching around him to reach the coach’s door. “I’ve no more to say to you here than I do anywhere else. If you insist on your rude and impertinent questions, then I must refer you to Lord Byfield’s solicitor.”

“A solicitor, Auntie?” said the young man as he lounged back against the coach and stretched his legs before him to block her way. He wore a tall-brimmed hat cocked forward that hid his eyes, but for Caro his insolent smile was more than enough. “That’s deuced uncharitable, even for you.”

“Then perhaps I should call on Mr. Perkins myself, and arrange for charges to be brought against you,” she answered, her irritation growing. “Surely there must be laws against your kind of vile harassment.”

“So unkind, Auntie, so cruel!” He clucked his tongue in mock dismay. “And what of the laws against adultery, eh? Laws to protect husbands from a set of cuckold’s horns from their slatternly wives?”

She gasped. “How dare you defame Frederick and me that way!”

“Dare I? Dare you, more’s the point.” His smile widened as he crossed his hands over his chest, the moonlight reflecting off the twin rows of polished buttons on his coat. “Oh, I’ll vow you’ve been most discreet. These past months there’s never been a hint of scandal about you. Until tonight, of course. Your slippers in your hand, your legs bare, your headpiece askew—what gossip I’ll have to whisper over cards at Lady Carstairs’s tomorrow night, eh? I didn’t think you’d be enough to tempt gallant Admiral Lord Jack, but then his wife’s breeding again, and to my own joy, you’ve never shown much inclination that way.”

With an incoherent shriek, Caro dropped her slippers and flew at George’s smirking face, determined to hurt him as much as he’d hurt her. It was bad enough for him to believe she was Jack Herendon’s mistress, but to be taunted about her childlessness cut her to her heart.

But George’s reflexes were unclouded by anger, and he deftly caught her wrists before her fingers reached his eyes. In the next instant he twisted and shoved her back against the side of the carriage, pinning her hands over her head and trapping her with his body.

“A widow’s portion’s not such a bad thing, Caro,” he said, breathing hard as she struggled against him. “Once you’re the dowager Lady Byfield the world will expect you to take lovers. Say the word, and it’s done. So simple for you to have your freedom, and be rid of the old bastard for good.”

“You’re the bastard, George, not Frederick!” Furiously she fought against him. “Ralston!”

“Save your breath, Caro. I sent them off with a bottle of rum so we could talk in private.”

She glared at him. “You’ve no right to do that! They’re my men, not yours!”

“But for how long, eh?” He pressed closer, near enough that she could smell the same rum on his breath. “Dowager or not, Auntie, you’re not so old I couldn’t oblige you myself, and keep it all in the family. It’s time you had a taste of a man young enough to remember what a woman desires most.”

Caro stared at him, too stunned by what he was suggesting to answer.

He smiled, taking her silence as acquiescence, and leaned his mouth closer to her lips. “Simply say the word, my dear, and please us both. You’ll find I’m generous with both my gold and my company.”

“You’re despicable.” She practically spat out the words, forcing him to draw back. “Let me go at once!”

“Not yet, Caro, not before—”

“You heard the lady,” said Jeremiah, his voice unmistakable to Caro. “Let her go. And do it now.”

George twisted around, searching the shadows for the man who’d spoken. “What the devil—”

Jeremiah stepped forward. In the moonlight he looked to Caro like some wild forest giant, his size accentuated by the shadows around him, his face sharply planed and his thick black hair loose to his shoulders. He stood with his legs widespread and his whole body so tensed and ready to fight that the primed pistol in his hand seemed almost superfluous. In her small, sheltered world she’d never known a man like this one, and she flushed at the memory of how she’d let him kiss her, how much she’d enjoyed it before the shame had stopped her. And oh, what sorrowful mischief George would make for her if he ever learned what she’d done!

“Look here now,” blustered George. “This is a private matter between Caro and me, and it don’t concern you, whoever you are.”

“I told you to let the lady go,” said Jeremiah again, his voice rumbling deep. “I’m not a patient man, and I’m accustomed to having my way.”

“Mind him, George,” whispered Caro loud enough for Jeremiah to hear. “He has a gun, and I’ve no wish to be shot to death by some highwayman on account of your stubbornness. Lord knows we’re probably already surrounded by his confederates in the trees.”

A highwayman? thought Jeremiah, frowning. Confederates in the trees? What the devil was she up to now?

“A highwayman!” George’s voice squeaked upward as he let Caro go, his eyes still turned toward Jeremiah. “Damn it all, Caro, you would be wearing those diamond cuffs, too! They must be worth a thousand guineas if they’re worth a penny.”

“They’re worth ten times that if they’ll save my life.” She turned bravely toward Jeremiah as she slid the bracelets from her wrists. “Here, sir, they’re yours, and my earrings, too, if you wish them. I know you’d take them by force anyway, but I pray because I’ve been so accommodating you’ll spare me and my—my companion.”

“Hear, hear,” echoed George faintly, staring at the pistol.

Jeremiah’s frown deepened. Here he’d thought he’d saved her from some ruffian’s attack, yet instead the man had some sort of claim to her, enough that she’d protect him like this. Not that he was worth it, in Jeremiah’s estimation: a fancy-dressed little Englishman so cowardly he’d let a woman defend him. But what was all this nonsense about highwaymen and bracelets?

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he began, “but I don’t—”

“Oh, please, sir, please!” she begged, clutching her hands piteously before her. “Don’t be so hasty in your judgment!”

Jeremiah shook his head in bewilderment. Whatever he’d blundered into belonged on a London stage, not here on the high road to Portsmouth. He glanced toward a rustling in the bushes and saw two wide-eyed men in livery cowering in the shadows, and curtly he waved at them to join the others. No matter what the woman intended, she hadn’t really left him any choice but to go along with her game, at least for now.

George sniffed derisively at the two servants. “Is this how you display your loyalty to Lady Byfield, leaving her alone to be accosted like this?”

“But sir,” protested Ralston, “that be what you wanted o’ us!”

“None of your bickering, you silly fools,” snapped Caro, her glance darting from George to Ralston and back again as exasperation temporarily overcame her show of terror, “else I’ll leave you all as hostages.”

George sniffed again. “You shouldn’t bargain with ruffians like this, Caro. It ain’t decent.”

“I’ll do what I must.” With her jewelry cupped in her hands, she walked slowly to Jeremiah, her bare feet silent on the grass.

“Here you are,” she said softly, her eyes so beseeching Jeremiah knew now he wouldn’t give her away before the others. “I pray it’s enough to ensure our safety.”

He scooped the jewelry from her hand and stuffed it into his pocket with what he hoped was a proper highwayman’s nonchalance. He’d been a great many things in his life, but this was the first time he’d been a thief, and he wasn’t quite certain how it was done. “The gentleman has a purse, doesn’t he?” he asked gruffly. “And that cut-stone ring there, on his little finger.”

George opened his mouth to argue but Caro glared at him, her open hand outstretched. “Give it up, George, and consider it cheaply done. If you hadn’t followed me here and interfered, none of this would have happened.”

Glumly he handed his purse and ring to Caro, who brought them back to Jeremiah. “I fear that’s everything, sir,” she said sadly. “Oh, please, please, say it’s sufficient to let us go!”

Though her words were meant to sway the hardest heart, there was still an impish gleam in her upturned eyes, meant for Jeremiah alone. She’d protected this man George, true, but she’d also enjoyed taking his purse. Jeremiah was glad, for the man was both a fool and a bully.

“If there’s anything else you want,” she continued when he didn’t answer, “anything else that could sway your decision, so that we might be on our way.”

Jeremiah looked down at her, struggling to appear as if he were weighing her plea instead of wondering if she’d intended a double meaning to her words. What else did he want? He wanted to send the three men on their way, and keep her here with him so she could explain. And kiss her again. Oh, aye, he wanted that very much, even if the reasons against it seemed even stronger after this silly masquerade. Her upswept hair had slipped further to one side, the egret’s feather now bent at a jaunty angle over one eye as she looked up at him through her lashes. She was a charming, bewildering creature, no mistake, but with a start he realized she’d made him forget his own miseries, however briefly, for the first time since he’d been brought to England.

Her diamonds sat heavily in his pocket, a lump against his thigh. At least now he had a decent reason to see her again, if only long enough to return her jewelry, and knowing that made it easier to let her go.

Over her head he motioned to the coachman. “You heard the countess. She’s ready to clear for home. And you, Master Georgie, you leave the lady alone, or you’ll answer to me.”

Even in the moonlight, Jeremiah could have sworn the other man paled. “See here now,” he said weakly. “You can’t threaten me like that. I’ll see you hung, see if I don’t.”

“If you catch me first,” said Jeremiah, and though he smiled, not even George could miss the threat in his voice. “But if I hear you’ve mistreated this lady again, I’ll hunt you down. And God help your cowardly hide, when I find you you’ll wish I hadn’t.”

He bowed his head briefly to Caro, still watching the other man. “Good night, ma’am. Sleep well.”

She grinned swiftly at Jeremiah from beneath the feather, more than enough thanks to please him, before she turned and ran to her coach. He didn’t wait to see her leave, not knowing whether or not the coachman might carry a gun beneath his box, but as he retreated back up toward the gate he could hear her adamantly refusing George a place in the carriage, with Ralston agreeing.

He uncocked his pistol and slipped it into his coat pocket on top of the diamonds as he retrieved the lantern from the lawn where he’d left it earlier. He still didn’t know why she’d come to his bedchamber to see him, let alone why she’d let him rob her. He thought of her neat pink toes beneath the dew-marked white silk, and the way she grinned at him like a fellow conspirator. Behind him he heard her voice raised again, this time over the noise of her carriage, as she called George a name more usually found in the vocabularies of seamen.

No, Caroline, Lady Byfield, wasn’t like anyone’s idea of a countess.

And for the first time since he’d lost the Chanticleer, Jeremiah laughed out loud.

“Go on, lad, it’s yours if you like raspberries.” Jeremiah held the jam cake out in the palm of his hand, coaxing his nephew, Johnny, to take it. “Myself, I’d choose the apple, but your mama does them both blessed well.”

The little boy stared seriously at the cake, his lips pursed with a four-year-old’s intensity and his hands clasped behind his waist in imitation of his father, the admiral. But that was the sum of his father that showed, for with his green eyes and dark hair, Johnny was all Sparhawk. If he’d ever stayed in one place long enough to father a son himself, thought Jeremiah with a little pang of regret, his boy would look like this one.

“Take it, lad. I swear it’s not poisoned.” Still the boy hesitated, looking back over his shoulder to his nursemaid for reassurance. Not that Jeremiah blamed him. He hadn’t much experience as an uncle, and this was the first time, quite by accident, that he’d been alone with the boy without Desire to ease the awkwardness. “Be bold now, Johnny. If you see a prize you want, why, you must seize it and make it your own.”

Johnny frowned, considering, and grabbed the cake and stuffed it into his mouth in one messy bite. Then he smiled at his uncle, displaying teeth so covered with crumbs and bits of raspberry jam that Jeremiah, appalled, found it very hard to smile back.

“Oh, Johnny, you know you’re not supposed to bother your uncle!” cried Desire as she hurried into the breakfast room as quickly as she could with her second child, Charlotte, clutching onto her skirts.

“No bother, Des, I swear,” said Jeremiah with more relief than he’d intended. “I thought he still seemed hungry, that’s all.”

“He’s always hungry for sweets.” She plucked a napkin from the table and bent down to scrub at the boy’s face while he squirmed and Charlotte gloated. “But that doesn’t mean the little rogue has to come begging to you.”

“He didn’t beg. I offered.”

“Truly, Jere?” She was slow to straighten, one hand on her back to balance the weight of the third child she carried within her, due in June. But still a beauty, thought Jeremiah proudly, the kind of tall, comely American woman that put all the little whey-faced English ladies to shame. “I’ve told him you’ve been ill, but children don’t always understand.”

“Stop fussing, Des. I’m as well now as I’ll ever be, and the boy did no harm.” He slipped his hand around his sister’s shoulder and guided her to her chair at the head of the table as the nursemaid herded the two children from the room. “You’re doing well enough by him, that’s clear. One look at him and you know he’s a sight more Sparhawk than Herendon.”

“Don’t forget whose roof you’re under,” Desire scolded, reaching out to smack his hand with her teaspoon. “No matter if it’s true, Jack will have your head if he hears you say it.”

“Hear you say what?” asked her husband as he came to stand behind her chair. His blond hair glinting in the morning sun, Admiral Lord John Herendon was the model of an English gentleman and officer, tall and handsome in the white and navy uniform he seemed born to wear. Desire smiled as she turned her face up toward him, her cheeks coloring with pleasure, and he rested his hand gently on the swell of her belly as he bent to kiss her.

The warm intimacy of the gesture made Jeremiah look down at his plate. If any two people in this world loved each other, it was Desire and Jack, and despite Jeremiah’s own misgivings about his sister’s choice of a husband, he had to admit that the marriage had brought her happiness and contentment.

He raised his gaze long enough to see them still wrapped in one another, his sister’s eyes blissfully closed. Though married for nearly five years, they behaved as shamelessly as newlyweds, perhaps because so much of that time they’d spent apart. For the first year, Desire had sailed with Jack on his flagship while the British Admiralty had benignly looked the other way, and Johnny had been born at sea in the admiral’s cabin and Charlotte begotten there. But then the war with France had worsened, and Desire had been forced to make a safer home alone on land for their children until the Treaty of Amiens last spring had brought Jack back to Portsmouth and the Channel Fleet.

Self-consciously buttering toast he had no real interest in eating, Jeremiah considered the dangers of loving as completely as Jack and Desire did, of placing all hope for joy and happiness in a single other person. He’d never known that kind of love himself, or particularly wanted it. Why should he? For him life seemed too uncertain for such unconditional devotion, and he’d been hurt enough by all he’d lost too soon—his mother, his father, his brother, friends and comrades—to willingly risk more.

Besides, he’d be thirty-seven his next birthday, far past the age for sentimental follies. He enjoyed women well enough—he thought again, pleasantly, of Lady Byfield— but he’d never found one worth giving up his freedom for, or would any of them, he thought wryly, consider him much of a bargain as a husband.

He looked up from the toast to his sister and brother-in-law in time to see them exchange one final kiss before Jack went to his own chair at the opposite end of the table, one more moment of such wordless tenderness that Jeremiah again looked hastily away with the same unfamiliar pang of regret he’d felt with little Johnny. What must it be like to love, and be loved, that much?

“You’re looking well this morning, Jeremiah,” declared Jack heartily, unaware of Jeremiah’s thoughts. “Though Desire was ready to give you up, I knew it would take more than that single sword swipe to finish a man like you.”

“I never gave him up!” said Desire indignantly. “I knew he wouldn’t die. Jere’s too ornery, even if that ‘single sword swipe’ was a gash as long as your arm, and then there was the infection on top of that, and floating in the sea for days on end.”

“It wasn’t quite that bad, Des,” said Jeremiah uncomfortably, wishing they’d find something else to bicker over. He was feeling better this morning, well enough that for the first time he’d dressed in the new clothes his sister had ordered for him when his own were lost. A fop’s rags, he grumbled as he’d looked in the mirror, but still he’d admitted to himself that the dark green coat looked handsome enough, and he’d taken extra care with how he’d tied his neckcloth and brushed his hair. The world seemed a more promising place this morning, and he didn’t want to be reminded about how close he’d come to dying. “Though I suppose I should be grateful for your confidence in my orneriness.”

“Orneriness be damned,” said Jack as he cut into the ham and poached eggs that the servant had placed before him. “If Jeremiah’s looking well this morning, I’m more willing to credit it to his own constitution and a good night’s sleep.”

“I wasn’t much for sleep last night. No time.” Jeremiah pulled Caro’s bracelets and earrings from his coat pocket where he’d left it for safekeeping and shoved them across the polished mahogany toward Jack.

Desire gasped, and Jack frowned and lay down his knife and fork.

“I had a visitor,” continued Jeremiah. “A lady who first found her way to my bedchamber and then tricked me into cozening some old sweetheart of hers into believing I was a highwayman. Gave me her jewels to prove it, too, as well as the man’s purse.”

Jack groaned. “Caro Moncrief.”

“Caro Moncrief?” repeated Desire incredulously. “In my house? In my brother’s bedchamber?”

“Aye, in my bedchamber.” Jeremiah was enjoying the sight of his usually unruffled brother-in-law squirming a bit, though for Desire’s sake he hoped the woman wasn’t yet another of the admiral’s former sweethearts. “Now, Jack, maybe you can explain how she came to be there. She said she’d told you all about it, which is a sight more than she ever bothered telling me.”

Jack sighed as he toyed with the fork on the plate before him. “She didn’t tell me everything. Caro never does.”

“Oh, honestly, Jack, if you’re not going to tell my brother about her, then I will,” said Desire. “The Countess of Byfield is even more lowborn than we poor Americans are, Jere. Her mother was an expensive woman of the town who actually sold her daughter to Byfield when she was scarcely more than a child. You can imagine the talk when the old earl married her.”

“Is he that much older?” Jeremiah remembered the stiff, startled way Caro had responded when he’d first kissed her. No wonder, with that kind of experience.

“Oh, Byfield’s vastly older!” said Desire with relish. “You’d take him to be her father at the very least, maybe even her grandfather. They almost never go out in society, but when they do it’s clear enough that they’re both, well, a bit peculiar. Goodness only knows what they do together in private. He makes her dress all in white, sometimes in classical dress all the way down to sandals on her bare feet and leaves in her hair, and he encourages her to do and say whatever she pleases as if she were some child brought down from the schoolroom to act clever for company. And then, of course, there is the dragon-of-a-dowager countess.”

“Desire, love,” said Jack mildly. “You’re gossiping.”

Desire rolled her eyes with mock dismay. “I’m not gossiping, Jack, I’m merely warning my brother before he becomes too enchanted with the creature.”

“To protect my virtue from a fallen woman?” asked Jeremiah with amusement.

“No, you great idiot, to keep you out of the courts! She’s never given the earl any children, so the heir is his nephew, and when the poor old man was lost at sea two years ago—”

“You mean she’s a widow?” That surprised Jeremiah; from the way Caro had spoken of her husband he’d assumed the man was snoring safely in his bed at home.

Desire shrugged. “Well, that’s what the world assumes. But Lady Byfield refuses to believe it and have her husband declared dead, and you can imagine what the nephew says about her to anyone who’ll listen. He’ll seize on any chance he gets to discredit her—what he’d make of her meeting a lover in our woods!—and I’d rather you didn’t get yourself tangled in the middle of it.”

“And I think your warning comes too late, sister mine,” said Jeremiah smugly as he swept the jewelry from the table and into his hand. A widow, and a baseborn one at that. His spirits rose a little higher. Maybe Caro Byfield tumbling into his path was a sign that at last his luck was changing. Lord knows it couldn’t get much worse, but she’d be a first-rate way to improve it. “Her being a widow changes everything, doesn’t it? You know I’ve always had a special fondness for consoling widows.”

Desire’s brow puckered with concern. “Oh, Jere, please don’t! This isn’t some whalerman’s merry lady that you can dally with for a week and then leave behind.”

“Two weeks, Des, two weeks.” His smile widened as he rose from the table. “Then I swear I’ll put the whole Atlantic Ocean between me and the pretty little countess. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

“Jeremiah, wait.” Jack’s expression was troubled as he, too, rose to his feet, the heavy damask napkin in his fist. “She didn’t ask you, did she?”

“To come to call? Nay, she didn’t, not in so many words, but I’d think her tossing her diamonds at me was invitation enough.”

“Not that, Jeremiah. She means to ask you about Hamil Al-Ameer.”

Jeremiah stopped, frozen with his hands gripping the back of his chair. She meant to ask him about Hamil. Hamil Al-Ameer: the man who’d robbed him of his ship, his crew, his friends. The heathen bastard who’d destroyed his peace, made him a shaking coward, kicked him bleeding from his own deck to die in the black waters of the night.

Blindly he stared past Jack and his sister, struggling to find something, anything, to make himself forget. Outside the window, Johnny and Charlotte were playing with a small, fat dog with pointed ears that jumped into the air for the ball they tossed. Desperately Jeremiah tried to focus on them: the two laughing children dressed in white, the green lawn still glittering with dew, the fat little dog jumping and twisting again and again for the red ball, innocence and sunshine and laughter.

But not for him. God help him, never again for him.