Gabriel: Lord of Regrets (22 page)

God help her, God help her. Simply for something to do, she reached for a sip of his cold tea, then set the cup down with a clatter.

“Nasty. Did somebody boil the leaves?”

“I doubt it.” Gabriel got off the bed and crossed to the tea service to sniff the tea in his cup. “Why do you ask?”

“Your tea tastes awful.” Polly passed him the cup. “It’s off.”

He sniffed again. “It wasn’t as obvious when it was hot.”

“This has… something in it.” Polly dipped her finger in the tea, only to find Gabriel’s hand closing over hers.

“No more of that. God knows what the something might be.”

“Poppy syrup, I’d wager.” Polly sniffed again. “Something ghastly sweet and laced with spirits.”

Gabriel took a cautious whiff as well, then set the cup down. “I’d have to agree, and now we’re left with who in the kitchen would disobey my direct orders?”

“You’re full of direct orders. Which one was this?”

“No damned laudanum,” Gabriel growled. “I’ve been clear enough about that.”

Polly sniffed the teapot. “It wasn’t the kitchen. They couldn’t know which cup you’d use, nor would they have sent up a cup with poppy syrup sloshing about in the bottom.”

“Suppose not.” He sat on the edge of the bed and held out a hand to her. “That leaves George.”

“George Wendover?” Polly sat beside him and kept her hand in his.

“What could he have been about? What’s in that cup won’t kill me. It probably won’t even get me to sleep.”

“Maybe he was trying to ease your suffering.” But George would have known better, wouldn’t he? Being drugged wouldn’t have eased Gabriel’s suffering, not in any meaningful sense.

“I must discuss this with Aaron. George is softhearted, at least with beasts in pain, but he’s also in my employ, at least for the present. This will take some explaining.”

The half-full cup was pretty, delicate, and impractical as hell, like much art.

“Maybe there is no acceptable explanation. You didn’t drink much of that tea, Gabriel. Perhaps George was hoping you’d down the lot of it, or even a couple of social cups with him, and then he could ease your suffering permanently.”

“Something like that was tried in Spain,” Gabriel said, his voice holding no emotion save resignation. “I can’t like this, Polonaise.”

She positively hated the notion somebody was trying to do him harm. “Hear George out and warn Aaron of your suspicions. George was alone in here with you, Gabriel, and for all he knew, you’ve been very sick. He could have tried something, and he didn’t.”

“George is not one to take a risk,” Gabriel countered. “He’s a good steward because he’s cautious and methodical.”

“I leave it to you, then.” Polly brought his knuckles to her lips and planted a kiss there. “Please, for the love of God, be careful.”

“You remind me of a dilemma, Polonaise.”

She stayed where she was, stroking his hand with her fingers.

“I’ve granted permission for you to paint Aaron’s portrait, because this seems to mean something to his lady wife, whom he is motivated to please, but now we have George skulking about the house, up to God knows what, and you running tame through the halls besides.”

She knew what was coming. “Marjorie’s painting is almost done. I can be gone by week’s end.”

“Is that what you want?” Again, he gave nothing away in his voice, and abruptly, Polly wanted to hear a spate of his fantastically romantic whispered blather. As lavish and foolish as it was, it lifted a weight from her soul when he spoke to her like that. Every woman should hear such pretty, impractical words, even if only in the course of the flummery of a dalliance.

“I do not want to leave.”

“Then you are going to have to abide by some rules, Polonaise.”

She nodded, it being all she could do to keep the words behind her teeth:
Don’t send me away, please not yet. Not before…

“You will be careful,” Gabriel said. “You will not be alone, except with me, of course. You will have two footmen attending while you paint, so one might fetch and carry, and the other remain on guard. You will obey me without question if I tell you to quit a room or come to me, and you will do nothing, not one thing, to encourage George’s notice.”

“Not one thing. You’ll let me paint Aaron?”

“I am concerned for my life now,” Gabriel said. “Did I deny Marjorie this immortalizing of her swain, that life would not be worth a farthing. Either she or Aaron would see to it I suffered the torments of the damned for denying them this gift to each other. And sending you away abruptly, your commission only half-discharged, would signal to the household something was afoot.”

“You were always a perceptive man. I don’t suppose you’d let me paint you?”

“Some privileges should be reserved for a more permanent association, Polonaise.” He hadn’t teased back: he’d spoken with a hint of remonstrance in his tone. He softened the rebuke by guiding her head to his shoulder. “But then, if you asked me to pose nude for you, my resolve might falter.”

And if she begged him to pose nude? “You’d do that?”

“You’ll have to ask, won’t you?”

“Rotten man.” Polly rose, grateful the mood had lightened. “How much longer will you be recovering?”

“Several days,” he said, rising as well and shrugging into a dressing gown. “Aaron prowls the corridors in the east wing with me at night, and that’s enough to keep me from qualifying for admission to Bedlam. I’m rather enjoying the respite, though it pains me to admit it.”

Except he did admit it—to her. “You haven’t had a respite since I’ve known you. Learning how to rest again takes time, or it did for me. I got up in time to bake the bread for weeks after Lolly took over the cooking. I started doing Allie’s chores with her in the morning.”

“She’ll wake you up, that child will. Never stops chattering.”

And why had she brought up Allie? “I don’t think she chatters as much as she used to. I’d love to know what she’s painting now.”

“You must write and ask her,” Gabriel suggested, going to the door to the sitting room and opening it. “Perhaps you might do that, while I reply to the latest spate of good wishes from former associates in Town?”

She complied because it was a pretext to stay near him, then abandoned her task ten minutes later and started in sketching him again, mentally trying various poses that would flatter him when he wore not a single stitch of clothing.

George glared down at Pillington’s ruddy-faced, bandy-legged, pot-bellied form. “If you put adequate fodder out for your damned sheep, they’d be on their side of the wall, wouldn’t they?”

“If you’d put up some decent board fence,” Pillington retorted, “then they wouldn’t be hopping over to trim your weeds.”

“This is timothy and clover,” George shot back. “Weeds, indeed, and this stone wall has served both Hesketh and Tamarack for nigh a century, because no steward worth the name is stupid enough to think stone will keep sheep from food when they have none.”

“So you’ll put up board fence?”

“Move your bloody, bleating, cursed sheep, man!”

“We’re moving them”—Pillington’s glower transformed to a grin—“as much as they’ll be moved.”

The sheep, rather than respect the stone wall running between two pastures, were vaulting onto the damned thing, trotting about, then hopping down on the Hesketh side, which, as George had said, boasted a lush carpet of fall grass. Several boys tried to herd the sheep back onto the Tamarack side of the boundary, but the sheep were having more fun chasing the boys than conversely.

“You lot!” George bellowed at the boys. “Hold up.” He let out a long, piercing whistle, and two black-and-white collies that had been sitting at the edge of the mayhem sprang into action. Between them, with George giving the occasional subtle cue, the sheep were soon leaping the wall and heading for home pastures.

“And that,” George snapped at Pillington, “is how it’s done. Tell your lady to expect a call from me.”

“You tell her.” Pillington sneered. “I’ll be too busy having fodder put out so these sheep can fatten for winter.”

“See that you do.” George whistled for his dogs and stalked off.

“Of all the bloody nerve,” George muttered to his companions. “Purposely setting the beasts over the fence, for the love of God. The old earl is no doubt spinning in his grave, and the present countess will answer for this.”

He cooled down somewhat as he dropped the dogs off at the kennel in the back of his own small stable and walked on to Tamarack. He could call on Lady Hartle. He was not specifically required to use his hands in his employment, and was thus nominally a gentleman.

Except he liked using his hands, his back, his muscle. He wasn’t meant to sit on a fine horse and give orders from a tidy distance. Working the land meant working, in George’s view, and so he scythed weeds from the drainage ditches, poulticed the sore hocks on the plow horses, took his turn at foal watches and shearings, and had brawn, stamina, and a fine sense of accomplishment at the end of the day.

Still, he wasn’t committing a social faux pas by calling on Lady Hartle—merely taking his common sense in both hands and pitching it over his left shoulder.

“My lady will see you, Wendover.”

“That’s
Mister
Wendover to you, Soames,” George murmured. “One would think you’d observe some courtesy when introducing a fellow who’s spent two years as the heir to a marquess.”

Soames’s eyebrows rose to his shining bald pate, but he said nothing, and George felt a stab of irritation with himself. Aaron was the marquess only until all those legal fellows in Town got matters straightened out.

“Mr. Wendover?” Lady Hartle’s smile was gracious, if a trifle wary. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“We?” George looked around her elegant pink, white, and blue parlor. “Is the Regent lurking in your closet, that the royal pronouns are appropriate? Has he perhaps made you an offer, my lady?”

“Still without a hint of manners.” Lady Hartle’s smile became the more familiar frown. “Really, Mr. Wendover, was there a reason you called, or are you simply spreading ill will and bad feeling?”

“That is your province,” George countered. “But I am remiss.” He took her hand and bowed over it most cordially, then—because he’d caught her without gloves—he kissed her knuckles.

Not the air above her knuckles, which would have been cheeky enough, but her actual, smooth, neroli-scented flesh.

“Mr. Wendover!” She snatched back her hand, but not before George had seen the hint of distress in her blue eyes, and it cheered him, that hint. He’d go sometimes for years without seeing it and forget how gratifying it was to behold.

“I am pained to recall what a lovely woman you are,” George drawled. “Particularly when it’s your legal maneuvering I behold and not your charming countenance.”

“You flatter only to insult, sir.” Lady Hartle inhaled through a less-than-dainty nose, but she was a good head shorter than George, despite being tall for a woman, so her imperiousness lacked effect. Her children had gotten their height from both parental antecedents, though their lovely golden hair and fine features were her gift to them. “If you’ve no business to state, then please be on your way.”

“What?” George crossed the room to study a portrait of her ladyship as a young countess. Even then, she’d carried a subtle air of worry about her. “No tea and crumpets for a neighbor, my lady? Your sheep were certainly helping themselves to at least that much in my home farm’s south pasture.”

“Take it up with Pillington. I am not a farmer, and you waste my time with these details.”

“You think it a detail?” George sauntered off on a tour of her parlor, which might have been their parlor, had matters taken a different turn. “I would be within my rights to butcher the lot of them, my lady. I would also be within my rights to put up a high board fence in place of the stone wall, and then see how all your foxhunting friends would howl when they had to stop and go through a gate—assuming I’d install a gate for that harebrained pack of titles you trot around with.”

“But Hesketh has never begrudged us a good run!”

Her disdain slipped, as George had known it would when her standing among the local foxhunters was threatened. Harriette Hartle no longer rode in the first flight herself—few woman did—but back in her day, before she’d taken up the dubious sport of countessing, she’d been a bruising rider.

“Hesketh is up to its elbows in stupid legal machinations, thanks to your hen-witted attempts to put wrong what’s finally coming right,” George said, stepping close to glare right down into her blue, blue eyes. “What are you about, my lady, to make a trollop of your daughter?”

“How dare you!” She cracked him a good one right across the cheek, but George only smiled at her, because Harry had ever been fond of her dramatics.

“You know how I dare,” he replied, rubbing the sting from his jaw. “What I can’t fathom, Lady Hartle, is how a mother can be so blind to her daughter’s happiness. Marjorie is
happy
with Aaron, she’s always preferred him, and he’s showing every evidence of finally appreciating his good fortune. Then you go and ruin it in the most public fashion possible.”

“My daughter is owed a title.” Lady Hartle seethed as she rubbed her hand. “She’ll have it if I have to beggar this estate to make it so.”

“What she is owed,” George said softly, “is a little happiness in this life, which Aaron Wendover will see to. She is also owed respect as an intelligent adult, one who can make her own choices. She isn’t like you, Harry. No matter how you bully her, or wheedle, or threaten, or beg, she knows her own mind and knows whom she wants for her spouse.”

He’d gone a bit far with that last, but she’d struck first, so to speak.

“Get out,” Lady Hartle whispered, the shock in her eyes genuine. “You have no right to speak to me thus, and I’ll not put up with it under my own roof.”

“The roof,” George said evenly, “you share with seven children, who will not understand when you beggar them for the sake of a title their sister doesn’t even want.”

He stepped back, unable to stand the hurt in Lady Hartle’s eyes any longer. This made no sense, not when they’d been hurting each other for years, almost out of habit.

“I thought you, of all people, George, would understand my motivations.”

She’d called him George for the first time in years, and he sensed she had not done it to cause him pain.

“Of all people,” George replied, “I understand Marjorie’s motivations. She loves her husband, Harry. Loves him. Can’t you just leave it?”

“I’ll not leave it, as you put it, while I have breath in my body.”

He studied her, saw the monumental determination he’d first admired about her nearly a quarter century past, and shook his head.

“Harry, my dear, while you’re on this silly quest to mate your firstborn to whomever ends up with the title, Pillington is slacking, cutting corners, wasting your coin and your resources while he wears on the nerves of all your neighbors. You need to rein him in, or you won’t have much of an estate to beggar. Good day.”

He showed himself out, because he’d run tame through Tamarack as a lad, having been friends of a sort with the late earl.

Only of a sort, though the man’s taste in countesses was above reproach. Lady Hartle was younger than George, a couple of years past forty, but she was maturing like a good vintage, growing only more attractive with time. Her fine blue eyes had laugh lines at the corners, and her gaze held knowledge of life’s up and downs, as well as patience, humor, and relentless determination.

And he hadn’t seen her at such close range in months. She was damned pretty, regardless of her age, was Harriette. Her figure was still trim and lithe as a girl’s—George had noticed that too.

But she was as stubborn as a goat once her mind was fixed on a goal. Thank God Marjorie had some of her father’s even temperament, else God knew how the girl had put up with Lady Harry’s nonsense.

***

“It’s in Gabriel North’s handwriting,” Sara Haddonfield said, “but it’s franked by the Marquess of Hesketh.” She handed the sealed missive to her husband.

“Hesketh?” It rang a bell, an ominous, low tolling sort of bell in the back of Beckman Haddonfield’s mind.

“Marquess of. The estate is a few hours’ ride to the west of us. Will you read it?”

“I haven’t my spectacles,” Beck said, because he’d been measuring a hallway for the addition of a dumb waiter. “You read it to me.”

They sat hip to hip halfway up the main staircase while Sara carefully broke the seal.

Beckman (I assume you will plant me a facer do I embellish my salutation with honorables and endearments),

I have resumed my role at Hesketh, but whom should I find ensconced in my household but one P. Hunt, portraitist, hell-bent on immortalizing my younger brother and his wife on canvas. To the extent that the hand of Fate was attached to the body of Beckman Haddonfield, you are warned I will someday get even with you for this little joke. Rest assured your dear Polly is thriving, in as much as she can without her family about her. She pines particularly for her Allemande, and wonders what the child is painting and how she fares. I trust you are keeping my assistant steward locked in a garret, living on bread and water, and allowing her only the association of that minor planet known as Heifer for company.

You will give my regards to little Hildegard and my other familiars at Three Springs, and were you so inclined to pay a visit here, I would be inclined to welcome you. I think.

Though formerly North, I will end this epistle as merely, yours,

Gabriel

“He sounds in fine spirits,” Sara remarked as she refolded the letter. “Will you go?”

“He does sound like himself.” Which implied a certain fatigue and dissatisfaction with life, still. “Allie will be relieved to know we’ve heard from him.”

Sara leaned against her husband, which Beck took as an effort to comfort him rather than any neediness on the part of his wife. “We could hold a contest. Who is fretting more about whom? Allie keeps staring down the driveway as if she could will Polly to reappear, and now we learn Polly fares no better, though she’s once again sharing a roof with Gabriel.”

And Sara fretted for the lot of them. “It’s hard for Allie to understand why Polly had to go.”

“It’s hard for me to understand,” Sara said. “I’m her sister, and I tried to talk her into staying here, but she muttered things about life changing and married couples needing privacy, and there being some memories she needed distance from.”

Beck slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Have you ever considered Allie might rather be with Polly now?” Because
he
considered it as the child became more withdrawn with each passing day.

Sara nodded, her face pressed against Beck’s shoulder.

“It’s a puzzle,” she said. “I thought I’d be hurting now for Polly, who left our household and essentially turned her back on Allie, but I hurt terribly for both of them. Allie was more attached to Polly than I knew, and I’m attached to them both as well.”

“You hurt for them both,” Beck said, kissing her temple. “What about for you?”

“Allie is not my daughter, and I have always known she was more or less on loan to me,” Sara said slowly. “I love her as much as if she were mine, but now…” Her hand slipped over her womb. “It’s different, now, Beckman. I’m expecting our child, and I can see all the things I missed with Allie because I am not her mother.”

Beck’s hand covered hers where it rested low on her abdomen. “But Polly hasn’t been a mother to her either.” And he was certainly too late an addition to the child’s life to be a father.

“I used to tell myself that. Now I’m not so sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“Polly was sixteen when she gave birth. What woman at that age, much less one who has to share a household with the man who seduced her, would be perfectly sanguine? Childbirth was hard for Polly, and she took a long time to recover, but she nursed that child without hesitation whenever Allie cried, fussed, or simply wanted comforting.”

Beckman loved his wife, but the depths and twists of her reasoning still had the ability to surprise him. “Do you think you sabotaged Polly as a mother?”

“That’s an ugly word, though I might have, in small ways. I wanted a child so much, and yet I’d never consider allowing my husband into my bed, not after the way he treated Polly.”

“I know you,” Beck said. “I know you would not have betrayed your sister in any conscious way. Had she fought you, you would not have taken on the role of Allie’s mother.”