“Are you certain?” Lady Elizabeth, Countess of Carhill, put up a hand and nervously touched the blond curls tumbling at her neck. “He is marrying the Acton girl? I can hardly believe it. What a devilish dark horse he is, to be sure!”
Her companion leaned forward to pour more tea into a dainty gold-rimmed dish. She spoke with a soft accent, hard to trace.
“The rumor is that he’s been forced into the match, a little gothic for this day and age, but she’s quite a catch. A great-uncle settled a fortune on her recently. So in addition to the dowry that Acton will give her as his daughter, she’s an heiress in her own right.”
“Is that what he’s after? Her fortune?”
The other lady laughed. “One would think he had enough of his own. Yet I hear Tarrant is at daggers drawn with Lord Lenwood, her eldest brother. Meanwhile, Lady Pander insists that Quentin Mountfitchet tried to run away with her. Do you suppose that Tarrant will first be cuckolded by his own brother, or slaughtered by hers?”
Lady Elizabeth took a cup and stared into the swirling liquid.
“From what you told me, Lady Joanna Acton can hardly be much of a match for such a man. She is barely a schoolgirl, while he—”
“Exactly!”
“Do you suppose the wedding will make any difference?”
“I shouldn’t think so, except that he misses Lady Kettering’s ball this Friday. There will have to be some small punishment for that.”
The teapot remained suspended for a moment in one smooth, faintly olive-toned hand. The silver surface reflected an unusual ring on her third finger, diamonds surrounding a large sapphire.
“What punishment?”
“Enough. Do you mind so very much, my dear? He’s quite delectable, isn’t he? The man certainly sends shivers down my spine. I’ve never made any pretense to you about that. So why did it not go according to plan last Friday? They say he cannot resist a lovely woman. I thought you’d have made him your slave very easily.”
“I did as I promised. I couldn’t have done more.”
“Ah, no, I’m sure you could not. Indeed, Lizzie dear, I hear you set up the most shameful public flirt with him. And it was not only because I planned it for you, was it?” The teapot settled without a sound onto its matching silver tray. “What did he say to you? Exactly now! There, you are quite put to the blush. He’s so very witty, isn’t he? Can’t you share any of it with me?”
Lady Elizabeth glanced at her companion. “He was not witty. He was devastating. He defied me without difficulty. If you thought that I would be able to humble or manipulate him, you were very wrong.”
The gleaming silver reflected the ladies’ faces. The curved surface distorted them into two grotesque little caricatures, one dark, one fair, mocking both style and beauty.
“Never mind, my dear. Your failure demands only a small forfeit. May I have a little of your hair?”
“My hair? Why?”
“Why not? Then your debt to me is discharged.”
“Very well.” Lady Elizabeth took a small pair of scissors from her reticule and snipped off a blond curl. “And now I must go.”
The lady with the diamond-and-sapphire ring waited until the countess had left the room before she rose and stared at herself in the mirror above the fireplace.
“So Fitzroy Mountfitchet still makes fools of women,” she said aloud. “Thus he did not have to face his precious sister and see her devastation that he was discovered in his hostess’s bed while his brother eloped.
Dios!
I’ll see him shattered yet.”
* * *
Joanna shut herself in her room. She would not, could not go through with this marriage.
The chorus of the old child’s song echoed without meaning in her head.
All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing when they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin . . .
She spent the best part of the evening pacing, trying to think through the alternatives. She was an heiress, but none of the money was accessible to her. If she ran away, her father would hunt her down. If he decided to lock her in her room for the rest of her days, there was nothing that anyone could do about it, not even her mother.
An appeal to Richard and Helena would only bring down the wrath of her father—even the power of the law—on their loving, peaceful household at Acton Mead, and very probably on the foolish Quentin.
No, she had trapped herself. And worse, she had trapped Fitzroy Monteith Mountfitchet, the devastating Lord Tarrant.
No wonder he was angry, but how was she to cope if he didn’t keep his word?
She asked for supper on a tray, pleading the headache. Yet she felt maddened by the close confines of her room after spending the last few days cramped in a carriage.
A small folly lay in the woods beyond the formal gardens, with a view across the lake. A place of peace. A place that had served as a retreat throughout her childhood, whenever she had raged against the confines of being raised as an earl’s daughter.
Joanna waited until she knew that everyone else would be in the great dining room, before slipping down the stairs and into the garden.
The pillars of the folly shone a pale, ghostly white against the night sky. It was a replica in miniature of the Parthenon.
As she walked rapidly down the path between the hornbeams, the columns seemed to float in a thin mist that curled up off the water.
Joanna wondered with a strange sense of precognition why she should not be surprised that Lord Tarrant was standing there in the mist, gazing out across the lake.
She stopped, her heart thudding uncomfortably against her ribs, and watched him.
Power and elegance defined every line of his figure. It was the quality she had tried to capture in her drawing of the horses—a pure, animal beauty—but this time the beauty of a man, relaxed and easy in the strength of his youth.
Joanna forced herself to face it with a painful honesty.
She did not want the man, but she wanted that beauty. It had entranced her from the first moment she had seen him, turning with feral, athletic grace to look up at her from the yard at the Swan Inn. She was fascinated by it, and her very fascination made her afraid, for it gave him power over her.
“‘The world is too much with us,’” he quoted softly, although he did not turn to face her. “‘Late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: / Little we see in Nature that is ours—’ Your mother said you might come here.”
“My mother?”
“It did not seem politic to impose my disruptive presence on either you or your brother Richard for the evening meal. I made my excuses to the countess, only to find that you had already made your excuses, as well.”
“I did not want to face them all over the dining table. Do you think it would be pleasant for me to make small talk with Quentin, or your father?”
Darkness flowed around her like a protective shield. Why was it easier to talk to a stranger in the dark, when it was hard to read expressions, or see those revealing changes in the eyes?
He turned, leaning his back against one of the pillars to gaze up at the frieze overhead.
“Why do you suppose in our age of enlightenment and reason that we build replicas of pagan temples and visit them in moonlight? As we conquer Nature with our roads and canals and new factories, at the same time we worship her. It doesn’t make much sense.”
Joanna felt lost, out of her depth. There was a cool remoteness to his voice, entirely without hostility.
“Do you worship Nature?”
“No, but you do. You’re a pagan, Lady Joanna, whether you know it or not. That is why, when it is so abhorrent to you, I won’t take part in forcing you into this marriage any longer. Why should you care for convention?”
“What about Quentin?”
“I shall get him out of the country.”
“Where would he go?”
He laughed. The ironic, bitter edge had returned, revealing no merriment at all.
“To the devil, no doubt. It’s what I’ve been afraid of for years, but this marriage is a sorry answer, isn’t it?”
Joanna looked away. She felt embarrassed to face him. Perhaps she wanted the marriage, but only if she could trust him to give her the freedom he had promised.
“Not really,” she said. “I don’t mind so very much. I shan’t impinge in any way on your life. And I’ve thought about what you said. You’re giving me what I’ve always wanted, the chance at a life of my own, with the time and means to paint. It’s you who’s getting nothing in return.”
He folded his arms across his chest.
“No, I prefer it to the alternatives, if you are indeed willing. I shall have my father off my back, and Quentin close enough that I can still reach him. The rest doesn’t matter.”
“Yet you hesitate?”
“I have nothing to offer of what young ladies usually want in a husband. You won’t get my attention, or my interest. I shan’t be available to you, or supportive of you. I shall try to keep up appearances in public, but in private I shall always be preoccupied with other concerns that I will not share with you. Is that what you want?”
“I shall be in my studio. I don’t care what you do. I might as well ask if you care that I won’t give you anything that a wife usually gives a husband. You men are so very one sided in your assumptions, aren’t you?”
The weak moonlight caressed his profile, casting his bones into strong relief in shades of indigo and ivory.
Joanna wished she had her sketchbook and charcoal. She would like to draw him like this, in bold, strong strokes that would express as much of her own anger and distrust as reveal any truth about him.
“No doubt. Very well, then, we do understand each other.”
“And you will not kiss me like that again?” Joanna asked. “How can I trust anything you say? What you have demonstrated so far is that your word means nothing.”
He dropped his head and looked at her. The dim light shadowed his strong features and hid the intensity of his dark eyes, but she could see the wild humor that made him so very attractive curling the corners of his lips.
“Have I? I said that I would not act in lust. I will not and did not. I kissed you in your room, because you were unhappy and I thought I could comfort you. I did not mean it to become anything else. It was arrogant and foolish of me, and I’m sorry, and so I have learned my lesson.”
“So it ends there?”
Humor colored his voice again, a little mocking. “You will be my wife. I shall have every legal right to force myself on you if I wish. Yet on my honor I swear without reservation that I will never do so. Apart from any other consideration, I am in pursuit right now of some very lovely ladies, each of whom is only too eager to slake my baser male needs. Be reassured, Joanna. My word means a great deal.”
“Then I take the bargain,” Joanna said. “Because it’s all I shall ever have. And if this is your assurance that you will not take out your resentment and your rancor on me, then it’s good enough. It’s not my fault if I look like your first wife and bring back painful memories.”
“No,” he replied calmly. “It’s not that. Indeed, you are nothing like her.”
“Though I would like to know why Richard hates you.”
Only the tiniest hesitation betrayed him. “You must ask him.”
“I have. He said it made no difference now, so he wouldn’t tell me. Nevertheless, I will marry you tomorrow. Good night, Lord Tarrant.”
Joanna returned to the house and flung herself onto her bed fully clothed, pulling a pillow over her head.
Yet she could not bury or deny this appalling, unlooked-for, meaningless sense of desolation.
I thought I could comfort you.
How dare he!
* * *
Fitzroy dressed for his wedding with a quiet and unhurried deliberation. He soaked in a copper tub of hot water and allowed his valet to shave him, the blade of the razor moving with a gentle, firm touch over his jaw and upper lip, and the exposed, upturned curve of his throat.
What a great deal of trust to put into the hands of another human being!
And what greater trust the valet placed in his master, that he would not move suddenly and deliberately thrust his own noble jugular into the wicked blade—
‘Who’ll be chief mourner?’ ‘I,’ said the Dove, ‘I mourn for my love, I’ll be chief mourner.’
He dried himself and stood for a moment before the mirror. He still saw the honed, athletic body of a soldier, vibrant with power and masculine strength, like a pagan warrior in the insolence of nakedness.
Yet a ragged discoloration ran down one thigh, the trace of a saber cut. He had been lucky not to lose the leg. Another scar marked his back, only inches from the heart, as close as he ever wanted to come to death.
Now the warrior had to be transformed once again into a gentleman. An English gentleman in the second decade of the nineteenth century, going to his wedding.
Fitzroy’s mouth twisted into a small grimace. His valet stood at his elbow with his clothes draped over one arm.
Step One: Pull on the linen drawers and shrug the shirt over one’s head: a shirt of cambric, delicately stitched with small ruffles and insets of needlepoint lace.
Two: Slide into the stockings and silk knee breeches, buttoned up each side to fit snugly, then the flat-heeled black shoes.
Three: Don the white waistcoat and have one’s valet help one into a coat cut so tight that it would be impossible to get across the shoulders without tearing out the seams, unless that help was provided.
Lastly: Lift one’s chin like a child, while the faithful valet tied collar and cravat and arranged one’s hair, since the jacket prevented a man from lifting his arms above his waist.
Fitzroy had a sudden fierce longing for the simpler days of the Peninsula. But of course, the last two years there had not been simple. Juanita had seen to that.
Someone scraped at the door. A footman came in with a tray.
“A message for you, my lord, delivered by hand. The man waits for a reply.”
Fitzroy recognized the seal and the signature. Lord Grantley. He tore open the note. It was curt and to the point.
“Drop everything. Return to London immediately. Another man has been killed.”
“Is there a reply, my lord?”