Authors: Mary Balogh
“Oh, dear, no,” their fond mother assured her. “Mary favors me, you know. She is very delicate. Dr. Plaidy feared for her life and still pays daily visits to her bedside. And Dickie’s fever will not come down if you cannot keep him quiet, Alice, especially now that Jarvis is home. Dickie worships Jarvis, you know.”
Alice ascended the stairs behind her sister-in-law, resigned to a day spent in a study sickroom with two peevish patients.
Piers, she thought. Piers and Amanda. Oh, no, never in a million Sundays. He would devour the poor girl for breakfast.
Piers attending London balls during the Season? And dancing? Piers looking around him for a new bride?
She shook off the strange images that the thoughts aroused and smiled as Phoebe opened the door into the darkened nursery.
***
Alice was writing a letter the following morning in the small library that her husband had used as his study whenever they were in town. She was informing Andrea Potter that the situation at Portman Square was not by any means as desperate as it had been made to seem in her brother’s letter. Mary merely needed someone to sit with her and sympathize with her and listen to her complaints. Richard, though still spotty, was roaring back to health and merely needed activity.
The day before, after Phoebe had taken Amanda on an afternoon of visiting, and Bruce, in great relief, had taken himself off to one of his clubs, she had pulled back some of the heavy curtains in the nursery and even opened a window despite Mary’s complaints and Richard’s sniggering claim that his mama would have the vapors. And having ascertained from the doctor that neither child was any longer infectious and from Jarvis that he had had the measles years before anyway, she had allowed the older brother to visit the younger on condition that he did not entertain Richard with all the details of the escapade that had resulted in his being sent down from Oxford.
He had told her, with great enthusiasm and righteous indignation at the harshness of the punishment, that he and three cronies had smuggled two females of doubtful virtue into their dormitory and been caught when one of the females had proved to be an inveterate giggler. All four young men had been sent down for the rest of the year.
Alice did not confide any of those details to her Bath friend. She folded the letter and got to her feet, intending to order the carriage to take her to Portman Square for the rest of the day. But a brief tap on the door forestalled her. She looked up to find, not her manservant bowing with deference before divulging his message, but a cheerfully smiling London gentleman.
He was fashionably dressed, from the slightly disheveled cut of his fair hair to the white tassels on his Hessian boots. Yet he wore his clothes with an easy, almost careless air. He appeared equally unabsorbed by his tall, muscular frame and handsome face. He was a gentleman past his youth and yet clearly in his prime. He had opened the door himself and entered the library unannounced.
“Allie!” he said, coming purposefully toward her with outstretched arms. “Why did you not write to say you were coming?” He enfolded her in a hearty hug and kissed her on the cheek before releasing her.
“Piers,” she said, laughing up at him. “Looking the complete town gentleman.”
He held his arms out to the sides and looked down at himself in some amusement. “Splendid, am I not?” he said. “But do you not think the haircut the coup de grace, Allie? I was persuaded that I would be quite top-of-the-trees with it styled this way. It is called a Brutus, by the way. And before you think to frown and wonder why I do not comb it more neatly, I beg leave to inform you that it is meant to be disheveled. It is fashionable thus.”
She laughed again. “I am rendered quite speechless with admiration,” she said.
“And so you should be.” He took both her hands in his own and squeezed them. “Why did you not write to me?”
”I came away in a hurry,” she said, “Bruce wrote, and nothing would do but I must come immediately or sooner if at all possible. Besides, you have your own life and do not need to be forever at my beck and call.”
“What?” he said. “I am supposed to show no interest at all when my dearest friend comes to town? Shall we sit?”
“For a few minutes,” she said, taking a wing chair facing into the room and watching him settle his long limbs into a chair beside her. “I promised to be in Portman Square before luncheon.”
“The children are ill,” he said. “Your sister-in-law told me so several days ago, though she did not mention that Bruce had sent for you. And so you have been summoned as nurse because a mother and father and older sister and brother and a houseful of servants including a nurse employed for the job are not enough. Allie, you are being put upon again.”
“Never say so,” she said with a smile. “What else are single aunts for?”
“For getting on with their own lives, that is what,” he said.
"I was coming down to Bath to visit you after Christmas, you know, but those infernal relatives of mine decided to get themselves lolled both together and catapulted me into the dizzying position of being heir to a bona fide baron. I had to go into Bedfordshire to pay homage to his lordship instead of going to Bath.”
“Piers!” she said, laughing despite herself. “Those poor young men. And they were your relatives. Have you no feeling at all for their deaths? And you are not wearing mourning?”
“Good Lord, no,” he said. “They were nothing to me, Allie. I never saw them in my life, and they were very distant relatives, you know. Dozens of seconds and thirds and removes involved in the relationship. They were not even the direct descendants of the present Lord Berringer, merely a little more closely related than I. A few less removes, I gather. There are enough occasions in life when one must grieve. One does not need to take the burdens of the world on one’s shoulders.”
“So,” Alice said, “I may one day expect to have to address you as ‘my lord,’ may I?”
“The devil!” he said. “Don’t you ever dare, my girl. How is Bath treating you? You are looking very fine and not at all provincial.”
“It suits me,” she said. “It must be the most beautiful city in England, Piers.”
“Granted,” he said. “But full of octogenarians, I hear. I don’t at all like the thought of your living there. I suppose you have dozens of aged and retired generals and whatnot ogling you and wanting to hire you on as nursemaid for their old age at the cost of a marriage license.”
Alice was laughing. “Oh, not dozens,” she said. “You exaggerate. No more than half a dozen.”
“Well,” he said, “I wish you had not left home, Allie. I have no reason to spend time at Westhaven Park any longer. First Web dying two years ago and then you purchasing a house in Bath last summer and taking yourself off. It’s deuced lonely at home without either of you.”
“Is it?” she said. “But I did not have a great deal of choice once Web’s cousin decided last year to move into Chandlos after all. The house belonged to him. And I am not complaining. It was the only one of Web’s possessions that did not come to me, and he would have left me that, too, if he could. Oh, I could have taken a house in the village, Piers, but I did not think it fair to stay in the neighborhood. There are those who would have said I had been forced from my own home, and that would not have been fair at all. It was better to move right away.”
“But it
was
your home,” he said, “all your life. Oh, not Chandlos until you married Web, but the village. Your father was rector there even before you were born.”
“Yes,” she said. “But I had to leave, Piers. There was no one left—Papa gone, Web gone, y—. Well.” She smiled. “It was better to begin a new life altogether. How did you know I was here?”
“Met your sister-in-law at the opera last evening,” he said. “I’m sorry, Allie. Have I upset you, reminding you of Web?”
“No, not at all,” she said. “After two years I can both think of him and speak of him without dissolving into the vapors, you know.”
“You did from the start,” he said. “You never did collapse. Only your eyes showed what was going on inside. Well, he was a damned fool for going out shooting in the rain when he was still recovering from the influenza, and I would have told him so, too, if I had been home at the time. I would have wrestled him back into his bed for you, Allie. Anyway, enough of that. You would never guess what is going on in my life.”
“Perhaps I could, too,” she said. “I have been hearing strange things of you, Piers. You have been attending balls and dancing, too, which is a very strange combination indeed. And attending the opera last evening? And of course, there are the elegant clothes and the, ah, Brutus hairdo. I think perhaps you are losing your grip on your sanity.”
He threw back his head and shouted with laughter. “Perhaps I am, too,” he said. “Though if you were to talk to Mama she would tell you that I am just being restored to my senses after a very long time, for apparently I have been in a long decline since Harriet’s death, from which sad fate only my recent promotion to Berringer’s heir has awakened me. I am looking for a leg-shackle, Allie. I am looking to be a tenant-for-life again. Though I was not quite that the first time as it turned out, was I? Poor Harriet. It lasted less than two years.”
“Surely you cannot be as careless about the matter as you appear to be,” Alice said. “Have you met the lady, Piers? And can you like her and even love her?”
“Romantic Allie,” he said, chuckling. “Oh, no, my dear, not all marriages can be as perfect as yours was, you know. You and Web were companions and lovers. It is a rare combination, I would have you know, my fair innocent. I do not see many such marriages around me. My own was not by any means ideal, though Harriet was quite blameless and I was fond of her. Marriages when you are about to be catapulted into the nobility are definitely not made in heaven.”
“Oh,” she said, “you cannot be so cynical, Piers. You would hate a marriage that did not bring you companionship.”
“Would I?” he said, his eyes twinkling at her. “I think not. It seems I need a breeder. Don’t look so shocked, Allie—you are not a miss from the schoolroom. I need a dozen sons so that Bingamen Hall will be in no danger of reverting to someone with even more removes to his relationship than mine.”
“As if you cared for titles and property,” she said scornfully. “You have Westhaven Park and a vast fortune besides.”
He laughed. “But one becomes public property when one is in danger of taking on a title,” he said. “At least, one becomes one’s mama’s property. She is vastly impressed with my new status, Allie, and quite insistent that I give up my widowed state. I will have to choose a sweet young thing, someone who can breed for me for the next twenty years or so. I am bound to find someone this spring. The city is positively bursting at the seams with them.”
“Piers!”Alice scolded.
“Oh, have no fear,” he said. “I shall treat her well, Allie, once I have made her Mrs. Westhaven with the carrot of becoming Lady Berringer dangling in front of her nose. I always treated Harriet well.”
“Yes, you did,” she agreed.
He uncrossed his ankles and stood up abruptly. “Apart from the small matter that I killed her,” he said.
Alice rose, too, and set a hand on his arm. “No,” she said. “I thought you had long ago put such a nonsensical idea behind you. Of course you did not kill her. Many women die in childbed, Piers. It is a fact of our existence.”
“Well,” he said. “It was my child that killed her, was it not? I was not aware that she was sleeping with anyone else.”
“Nonsense!” she said. “You must not start doing this again. Web is no longer here to deal with you. Is it because you are thinking of marrying again? And having children again?”
He laughed. “When I have a dozen sons and half a dozen daughters,” he said, “will you come and nurse them when they fall sick with measles or influenza or ill-nature Allie?”
“Goodness,” she said, horrified. “Of course I will not. I will not be their aunt and will owe them no attention at all.”
“No, you won’t, will you?” he said regretfully. “But if I fall sick of bad temper from having so many bawling infants around me, will you come and nurse me, Allie?”
“Not at all,” she said. “You will have a wife to perform that office. I shall merely write you a letter to tell you that it serves you right.”
“Will you?” he said. “How unkind of you. You need not order your carriage, Allie. I brought the curricle, guessing that you would be on your way to Portman Square. I will drive you there as soon as you have put on your bonnet. You must not let Bruce and your sister-in-law or those children monopolize your time, by the way. I demand some of it. I shall take you to the theater, and drive you about London. I need some sensible companionship occasionally.”
“If you wish to impress some sweet young thing,” she said, “you will not wish to be seen with me.”
“Oh, you are quite out there,” he said. “They are already falling all over themselves, you know, not to mention their mamas. It would quite go to my head, Allie, if the same females had not almost ignored me just five months ago.”
“I shall fetch my bonnet,” Alice said.
Chapter 2
DURING the afternoon of the same day in another part of London, a post chaise was setting down two weary travelers outside a handsome town house on Russell Square. Though two servants hurried immediately down the steps in order to unload their baggage and carry it inside, the master of this house did not stand on ceremony or think it beneath his dignity to run down the steps himself, despite his considerable bulk, in order to catch up first one of the female travelers in his arms and then the other. He kissed both loudly and was seen to be beaming with goodwill.
“Lucinda!” he said to the older lady. “Come on inside and have some tea and cakes. There is nothing to wear one down more, is there, than two nights spent at inns. Did you bring your own bed linen as I advised you to do?” But he turned to the younger lady without waiting for an answer. “Cassie!” he said. “Looking as fine as fivepence and good enough to eat. Come to town looking for a husband, have you? Trust your uncle to find you the finest one to be had.”