She did not answer him but stared at him as if speech and movement had become impossible to her for the moment. And he could think of nothing else to say. He caught a whiff of her soap smell and realized something suddenly—an explanation for his inability to put her from his mind and put Lady Gullis there instead.
He still felt a strong sexual yearning for Sophie Armitage.
He might have kissed her, he thought with some embarrassment later, if two things had not happened to save him. She spoke, and he caught a flutter of movement from the doorway beyond her.
“Excuse me, please, sir,” Sophie said in her calm, placid voice.
Lavinia was with her.
“I do beg your pardon,” he said, stepping smartly to one side to allow them both to pass. A few seconds had passed between the near collision and her speaking. A few seconds of eternity that he hoped had passed with their usual speed and lack of significance to the two ladies.
It was time, he thought as he went back into the drawing room and responded to Lady Houghton’s beckoning hand from the direction of the card tables, that he bedded Lady Gullis. If she could not drown out all other sexual cravings, then his was a hopeless case indeed.
Lavinia was up a little earlier than usual the next morning. Nathaniel looked up in some surprise from reading his steward’s report, newly arrived from Bowood, as she came through the door of his study after knocking but not waiting for an answer. He got to his feet.
“Good,” she said, waving him back to his chair and seating herself uninvited on a chair across the desk from him, “you have returned from your ride but have not gone back out. It is difficult to find you at home in the mornings, Nathaniel.”
“If I had thought my absence distressed you, Lavinia,” he said, sitting down again, “I would have made more of an effort to be available to you.”
Her lips twitched. “Heaven forbid!” she said, to which remark Nathaniel only just stopped himself from adding a fervent amen.
“What may I do for you?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.
“I am worried about Sophie,” she said. It was characteristic of Lavinia never to waste time discussing the weather or her own or her listener’s health when there were more important matters at hand.
But there were some topics he did not wish to discuss and Sophie was one of them.
“Indeed?” he said. “I am afraid I no longer have an acquaintance with Mrs. Armitage and am therefore quite unable to discuss the matter with you.”
“Nat,” she said scornfully, “do try not to be ridiculous.”
He merely raised his eyebrows.
“Mrs. Armitage!”
she said, rolling her eyes. “At least have the grace to call her Sophie.”
He remembered his impression that Sophie’s face was thinner, her eyes brighter. “Why are you worried?” he asked.
“She behaved last evening as if you did not exist,” Lavinia said, “or Catherine or Lord Rawleigh either. When she did run almost head-on into you outside the drawing room, she called you ‘sir,’ just as you now called her ‘Mrs. Armitage,’ and she would not talk about it afterward even when I tried to make a joke of it. She merely turned the conversation. Have I missed something, Nat? You were a little rude to her on that evening when you whisked me away—well, perhaps more than just a little. She has a friend whom you dislike. But why was that incident of such huge significance that she has broken all connection with you—and with Lord and Lady Rawleigh, Lord and Lady Haverford, and Lord Pelham too? She was so
fond
of you all.”
Nathaniel sighed. “Sometimes seemingly small incidents are merely the tip of an iceberg, Lavinia,” he said. “I suggest you not worry about it. I have not tried to cut off
your
friendship with her, have I?”
“Nat.” She leaned forward in her chair and set both hands flat on the desk. “Don’t treat me like a child.”
“If I were doing that,” he said, “I would have packed you back to Bowood by now. Perhaps she prefers Pinter to us, Lavinia.”
“But she does not even
like
him,” she said. “She told me as much when I said she might present me to him at any time if she wished. She told me he was not her friend.”
He rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and steep-led his fingers beneath his chin. He had
known
that. But Sophie had taken away from him—from all of them—the right to pursue the reasons for her behavior.
“Then perhaps,” he said, “she merely wished to teach us a lesson, Lavinia. We were trying to protect her from him that evening—all four of us were, even though she had expressly told me, at least, that I had no business trying to tell her whom she might befriend or receive. We chose to interfere anyway and she was furious. You of all people should be able to identify with that.” He smiled ruefully at her.
But she was frowning down at the hands she had spread on the desk. “I could understand and even applaud her ripping up at you, Nat,” she said. “Indeed I urged her to do it before she told me she had already done so. But to completely break off all those friendships—and even with Catherine and Moira? And she is so miserable, Nat.”
“Miserable?” He drew a slow breath.
“She smiled and talked last evening just as if she were in the most comfortable of moods,” Lavinia said, “but she so very obviously would not look at or speak of either you or Lord Rawleigh or Catherine that it was clear she was very uncomfortable and unhappy. What hold does Mr. Pinter have over her?”
There, it had been put into words—the very obvious idea that he and his friends had skirted about in conversation together and that his mind had shied away from. Pinter had some hold over Sophie. Nathaniel’s eyes met Lavinia’s and held them, and for the first time he looked at her as an equal, as someone who cared enough for a mutual friend to wish to help her.
“I do not know, Lavinia,” he said.
“How can we find out?” she asked him.
“I have no right,” he told her. “She does not want me to know.”
“Perhaps she does,” she said. “Perhaps she has been told that she is not to solicit your help.”
He closed his eyes and pressed his chin down onto his fingertips. He had thought of that too—and had avoided the thought.
“You are her friend, Nat,” Lavinia said, “as much as I am. Perhaps more so. You have known her longer, and I know you are fond of her. Fonder than the others are.”
He opened his eyes and looked into hers. He pursed his lips. She saw too damned much. But for once he did not feel annoyed with her.
“You think he has threatened her, then?” he asked. “Is that too Gothic an interpretation, Lavinia? Too melodramatic?”
“When I called on her three days ago,” she said, “—I
did
take a maid, Nat—we heard someone knocking on the door below. She turned terribly pale and jumped to her feet and rushed to the window and said she must send me up to her dressing room as it was too late for me to leave without being seen. But before she could push me out through the door—she really was
pushing
—her butler came up to announce her friend Gertrude. We all sat down for tea and neither Sophie nor I referred to the strange incident again. Nat, who did she
think
it was?”
It seemed hardly a question that needed answering.
“Was it just that she wished to oblige you by not presenting me to him?” Lavinia asked.
“Or was trying to bundle you upstairs too excessive for that?” he said more to himself than to her.
“Nat,” she said, “we have to help her.”
“We?” He looked more closely at her, but he held up a hand, palm out, before she could reply. “Yes, we, Lavinia. Pardon me for being about to exclude you. Thank you for coming to me. You have forced me to face what I have been avoiding for longer than a week. Sophie is my friend even if I am not hers.”
“Oh, you are,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “Tell me about Mr. Pinter, Nat. Not just that he was an unpleasant officer in the Peninsula. Tell me all you know of him.”
He certainly would not have said anything more than that to his sisters, he thought, looking consideringly at her. But Lavinia was different—a massive understatement. And he owed her his confidence.
“He enjoyed power,” he said. “He used it cruelly. He seemed to spend much of his time trapping his men into committing small, insignificant misdemeanors and then ordering punishment for them.”
“Punishment?” she said.
“Whippings mostly,” he said. “Formal affairs conducted while the rest of the regiment stood on parade, watching. The offender would be stripped and tied to a punishment triangle to have his back flailed. We all used to hate it.”
“Except Mr. Pinter?” she asked.
He nodded. Kenneth had used to say that Pinter derived a sexual thrill from watching a whipping. Nathaniel was not about to say
that
to Lavinia. But he did not need to.
“I daresay,” she said, “it was his substitute for whores.”
He jumped to his feet. “Lavinia!” he said, his eyes blazing.
“Oh, Nat,” she said, looking decidedly cross, “do try not to be ridiculous. Did he like whores too?”
He sat down again, set one elbow on the desk, and propped his face against his hand. “I
cannot,”
he said, “continue this conversation any further.”
“I am sorry,” she said. “I have embarrassed you. But I would wager he did not. I believe we should find out as much more as we can about him, though, Nat. I shall ask Lord Pelham. He will sputter and poker up just as much as you, of course, and mutter darkly again that I am no true lady, but perhaps he will remember more. What you have said is very revealing, though.”
“Lavinia,” he said, “you must leave this to me—
please.
Poor Ede already thinks someone should have given you a good walloping when you were younger.”
“He would,” she said, sounding bored. “I suppose a heavy hand on the rear end scrambles the brains and causes a girl to grow into a suitably featherbrained lady. How convenient for men.”
“You can do something for me, though,” he said, drumming his fingertips on the desktop. He did not know quite where the idea had sprung from, but he supposed it must have been forming for some time in that deep part of his mind of which he was unaware. “You can come shopping with me—for a pearl necklace and a wedding ring.”
One of the first things he had noticed about Sophie the evening before had been the continued absence of her pearls and her wedding ring. He did not know quite why he had noticed or why their absence had taken on such significance to him.
“Why, Nat,” Lavinia said, “I did not know you cared.” But despite the levity of her words, she was looking keenly at him.
“Sophie’s are missing,” he said. “Until a week ago I had never seen her without her ring. And I had never seen her at a social function without her pearls. On the night of that soiree they were both suddenly missing.” The ring had been missing the night before too, but he was not going to explain that meeting.
“Lost?” she said. “Stolen?”
“Or pawned,” he said. His mind had still not verbalized the final ugly word, but it did so now with crashing though silent clarity.
Blackmail.
But what the devil could she have
done?
“You want to try to find them?” Lavinia asked.
“It might be a wild-goose chase,” he said. “And we will have to look somewhat impoverished, Lavinia, if we are to shop for a wedding ring at a pawnbroker’s. Or perhaps at one of the lesser jeweler‘s, people who buy jewelry to resell. Pawnshops first, though—I do not believe she would sell her wedding ring. I could go alone, of course.”
But Lavinia had brightened considerably. She looked flushed and happy. Her eyes were shining as she leaned across the desk toward him.
“Oh, darling Nat,” she startled him by saying, “I adore you so very much, my love, that I would take you even without a ring or a wedding gift of pearls. And
of course
I will forgive you for gambling away all your fortune. I
know
you will never do it again. The power of my love will transform you into a nobler being.”
He chuckled. “Minx!” he said. “But you might have to act out the part for a number of days, and even then we may find nothing.”
“For you, darling,” she said, batting her eyelashes at him, “anything.” And then she looked like her old brisk, no-nonsense self again. “And for Sophie too.”
But devil take it, Nathaniel thought, he did not know what the recovery of Sophie’s property would do to help. All it would do was prove that she had needed money quite desperately.
She had
told
him not to interfere.
Apart from a few walks in the park with Lass at times of the day when she was unlikely to meet any acquaintances, and one visit to and one from Gertrude, and a couple of calls from Lavinia, Sophia had stayed home alone for almost two weeks—apart from that one evening at her brother-in-law‘s, of course.
It had been no grand ton entertainment, and she had allowed herself to go for that reason and because Beatrice had asked her especially to come. Foolishly, because she had been told it was to be an intimate gathering of family and friends, she had not expected to see any of the Four Horsemen there. She had forgotten the young people and their attachments.
Foolishly too she had expected the misery of the evening to be her only punishment. And it
had
been miserable—utterly so. Rex had carefully avoided her—to save her from embarrassment, she guessed. Catherine had glanced at her a few times and had looked hurt. And he—Nathaniel... She could still shudder, five days later, at the realization that, outside the drawing room, she had come very close indeed to taking that one step forward that would have buried her face against his neckcloth, against the warm, familiar, safe smell of him.
It had been pure agony to see him again and to know—she had
seen
them in the park, though they had not seen her—that he had been with Lady Gullis for longer than a week.