One Little Sin (21 page)

He watched her warily for a moment. “But what does it mean to you, Esmée?” he asked, dropping his voice a degree. “I am just curious, you see. And it
is
my business, since whoever you marry will become, by extension, a part of Sorcha’s life.”

Esmée wished to quarrel with his logic—and wished to slap the mocking smile from his lips—but she could not quite find grounds for either. Instead, she sprang from her chair and began to pace the room. “You know that I would never wed a man who did not feel an affection for Sorcha,” she insisted, her voice quiet with rage. “Not after all I have been through, so do not dare imply otherwise.”

Alasdair had risen, of course, when she did. He stood now, broad and immutable, by his chair, watching her pace toward him. He no longer looked the part of the handsome, charming
bon vivant.
His eyes were hard and weary. His mouth was tight, his jaw so firm the muscle in it twitched faintly. At last, he gave a terse nod. “My apologies.”

Too angry to face him, she turned away and crossed the room again. “And yes, I think I ought to be married,” she went on. “You said as much yourself, if you will recall.”

“Ought?” echoed Alasdair, ignoring her remark. “That sounds grim.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and stared blindly through the window at the wrought-iron fence below. “I mean only that I wish to be settled,” she answered, forcing her voice to sound calm. “I don’t want to be like my mother. I don’t wish for excitement or drama. I just want a life and a family of my own, Alasdair. I wish to
belong
somewhere, and I never really have. Can you not understand?”

At last, he seemed to hear her; to look beyond himself and his petty frustrations. “I would like to understand,” he said quietly.

Without turning from the window, Esmée lifted her hands. “I have always lived in someone else’s home,” she whispered. “In someone else’s
life.
I have always lived under the protection of one stepfather after another, in situations where I was tolerated—sometimes even welcomed—but ’tis not the same thing as truly
belonging
somewhere. You can have no notion, Alasdair, what that is like. It feels as if you are an extra carriage wheel. A dusty corner in an unused room. Useless. And I am sick to death of it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, so close she jumped.

Esmée set her fingertips to her lips, willing herself not to say something even more pathetically stupid. She could feel the heat radiating off his body, he stood so close behind her. She drew in her breath when he set his hand on her shoulder. His touch was heavy, warm, and infinitely comforting, though she knew she should take no comfort from him.

“I am sorry,” he said again. “Perhaps, Esmée, I understand more than you think.”

She gave a sharp, bitter laugh. “Oh, I doubt it.”

For a long moment, he was silent. “Esmée, you can feel useless, I have learned, even when you are living your own life,” he finally said. “And living in a place you do, ostensibly, belong.”

Her chin came up, and she looked at his faint reflection in the window. “What is that supposed to mean?”

He lifted one shoulder, and dropped his gaze. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I remember, occasionally, my boyhood in Scotland. I sometimes think that I never belonged there.”

“But you had a home and a family.”

“Oh, to be sure,” he admitted. “But feeling as if one belongs is not so simple as that, Esmée. It is…it is so much more. And bloody hard to explain.”

“I would like to understand,” she pressed, echoing his own words.

Alasdair looked as if he wished he had not spoken. “It is just that I wasn’t like anyone else in my family,” he said quietly. “Scots are a sober, serious-minded lot, as you well know, and my family was more serious and sober than most. But I…well, I was neither. I was full of myself—and full of mischief and adventure, too. Full of the devil, Granny MacGregor used to say. I could never be serious two minutes running. I drank and gambled my way through school, and went on to worse when I got out. My father was deeply disappointed in me, so I came here to London and stayed out of his sight. It seemed to suit all concerned.”

“Aye, but why?” she asked. “Young men must sow a few wild oats, and you were intelligent enough, I’ll wager.”

“I had a head for numbers,” he admitted. “A gift which I refused to cultivate, save at the gaming tables. But beyond that, I had no special talent, unless one counts charm and good looks. My father certainly didn’t. He spent his every waking moment wondering aloud why I couldn’t be more like my brother Merrick.”

“He wished you to be like
Merrick?”
Esmée was appalled.

“My father thought Merrick perfect,” he said quietly. “He was everything that I was not. He was not just intelligent, he was brilliant. Not just hardworking, but driven. He was the smart one. I was the charming one. In a family filled with brilliant, accomplished achievers, I definitely did not fit in.”

Again, Esmée thought of the arcane books filled with complex computations which she’d found in his old smoking parlor. They had been well thumbed, and heavily dog-eared. They had not even been written in English, but rather in French, and perhaps Dutch or German. Yet someone had read them; studied them almost obsessively, and she was relatively certain it wasn’t Merrick MacLachlan.

“Sometimes, Alasdair, I believe you take pains to appear charming and facile,” she remarked. “Sometimes, I think you try hard
not
to try hard.”

He looked at her ruefully. “I’m just making a point,” he said. “I spent the first fifteen years of my life convinced I’d been deposited on my parents’ doorstep by Gypsies or some such nonsense. Until Granny MacGregor informed me she’d delivered me herself, which shot my lovely little fantasy straight to hell.”

Esmée’s shoulders sagged. “Och, that sounds sad!” she said. “Sad for both you and your brother.”

“For both of us, indeed,” said Alasdair. “Merrick was never a child, whilst I was rarely anything else. I would not trade places with him. No, not even now.”

“Aye, you never go home to Scotland, do you?” she mused. “Someone—Wellings, perhaps—once told me that.”

He let his hand slip from her shoulder. “No, almost never,” he agreed. “I have never missed it. Not until…well, very recently. And now I wonder if there weren’t some aspects of that dutiful, industrious life which I might miss just a little, if I would but let myself. Indeed, it no longer seems so grim as I once thought it.”

There was a catch in his voice which Esmée had not heard before. She turned to face him, setting her back to the draperies, expecting that he would step away. But he did not. Instead he held her gaze intently with his golden eyes; eyes which had never looked more serious. Or more wounded. He did not touch her, though the strange heat between them made her wonder if he might. She held her breath, and waited.

He did not touch her. Instead, he set his hand against the wall behind her and leaned into her. “Tell me something,” he finally said, his voice oddly thick. “Are you happy here? Are you content, Esmée, with your choice?”

Her hand fisted in the drapery behind her. “With
my
choice—?” Somehow, she choked out the words. “But I did not have a choice, Alasdair. Don’t you remember? No one asked me what I wanted. No one ever does. And I am growing just a little tired of everyone else deciding what is best for me. I think you know what I mean.”

Alasdair opened his mouth, then shut it again. He held her gaze warily for a long moment, his hand still braced beyond her shoulder. Esmée willed him to speak—then willed herself to break the silence—but no words came.

Her choice?
What a joke that was.
He
was her choice, though the realization brought her no joy. She burned to kiss him, or to slap him, or just to tell him to burn in hell. But she did neither. Instead, Sorcha saved her by shrieking with glee and sending a stack of blocks tumbling across the floor.

It was as if a spell had been broken. Alasdair dropped his gaze and drew away. “I am sorry, Esmée,” he said again. But this time, she hardly knew what he was apologizing for. For wanting her? For
not
wanting her? Or something else entirely? Despite all her grand talk of wanting a life of her own, Esmée suddenly felt very young, and very inexperienced.

Alasdair had crossed the room to survey the damage. “Well done, minx!” he said, his voice composed. “How many did you have? Shall I count them?”

“Count dem,” Sorcha agreed, pointing imperiously at the disarray.

He counted aloud, Sorcha repeating the numbers after him. “Eleven!” he finished as he restacked them. “What a great many blocks that is! And what a clever girl you are.”

“Clever!” said Sorcha, knocking them down again.

Alasdair lifted her chin with one finger and swiftly kissed her atop the head. Then he stood and held Esmée’s gaze, his expression guarded now. “I must go,” he murmured. “Indeed, I did not mean to stay at all. May I return for Sorcha in two hours’ time?”

Esmée focused her gaze on a point somewhere beyond his shoulder. “Yes, of course,” she agreed. “Whatever is convenient.”

He picked up his hat and stick, which he’d left beside the chair. “In two hours, then,” he said with a curt bow. “Thank you. I shall let myself out.”

And before she could think of anything haughty and dismissive to say, he had vanished.

Sir Alasdair MacLachlan stormed out of Lady Tatton’s house and down the street without any explanation to his coachman, who stood by his horses’ heads, watching his master’s backside as he strode off in the direction of Piccadilly.

Along the streets, the morning’s costermongers were departing with their carts and barrows, giving way to the press of carriages which conveyed the aristocracy to their morning calls, and the shouts of newsboys as they hawked their lurid tales. A stabbing in Southwark. Rumors of Wellington’s resignation. Another damned riot some damned place. Alasdair ignored it all.

Damn it, how dare she! How dare that mere chit of a girl make him question his own judgment! How dare she make him fear he’d made such a stupid, revocable decision! And how dare she look so damned beautiful and so damned angry, all in the same breath?

To his left, down an alley, someone tossed a bucket of water from a garret window. Somewhere, church bells were ringing. A disheveled young blade in a half-buttoned waistcoat lifted his top hat, greeting Alasdair by name as they brushed past one another. Alasdair pressed on, oblivious to the grind of daily life even as he shouldered through it.

Yes, damn and damn and damn her! Esmée Hamilton had become the bane of his existence; an existence he’d once thought comfortable and uncomplicated. Well, by God, it was neither now. Perhaps it never had been. And now that the scales had been lifted from his eyes; now that he began to comprehend the sheer triviality of the life he’d been living, he had to do something—for Sorcha’s sake, if not his own. He had to think about the future and stop obliterating life’s nothingness with cheap pleasure and costly improvidence. It was going to require an awful lot of effort, something Alasdair did not normally exert.

At the corner of Mount Street, he turned on impulse toward Hyde Park, hunching his shoulders against the sharp autumn air. He had not thought to bring his greatcoat. Indeed, he had not
thought
at all. If he had considered for one moment the folly of his errand to Grosvenor Square, he would have sent someone else. Wellings. Hawes. Anyone could have accompanied Sorcha in the carriage.

It was a short walk in an ill wind, but he ignored the blasts which kept gusting down his coat collar. Indeed, it felt almost invigorating to be cold. He felt as if he’d been caught in a hot, emotional rush for weeks now. Ever since Esmée Hamilton, damn her, had inveigled her way into his home and his heart. A curricle came tooling down Park Lane, harnesses jangling. He jerked back onto the pavement and watched it roll past, its wheels flinging up bits of mud and manure. It was not an especially close call, but it reminded him yet again of the hazards which seemingly surrounded him.

Once inside the park, he headed directly to the bench near the Serpentine; the very bench where he and Esmée had sat on the dreadful day of Sorcha’s accident. The day everything had changed. And nothing had changed. Absently, he prodded at the turf with his shoe, and to his shock, saw a pearl in the matted grass beneath. It was filthy. He picked it up, rolled it between his fingers, then dropped it into his pocket anyway. A keepsake. A reminder, perhaps, that he’d best be keeping his wits about him.

No, he’d had no business going to Lady Tatton’s. But damn it, he had wanted to see those pearls around Esmée’s neck. He had wanted her to wear them every evening as she was wined and dined by the highest of the
haut monde.
He had wanted to take a secret pleasure in knowing that it was his gift which encircled her throat, even as other men drank in her quiet beauty. It was a small, pathetic thing, to be sure. But he had wished it nonetheless.

Well, it did not matter. She was not going to wear them. For whatever reason. He watched dispassionately as a gull wheeled over the Serpentine, piercing the air with its forlorn cry. The bird had likely been blown about by last night’s squall and was now just a little lost. Alasdair knew the feeling. He thrust his hand into his pocket, and felt about for the comfort of his little pearl.

Esmée was sorry when Alasdair’s coachman rang the bell two hours later and asked for Sorcha. He carried the child down to the waiting carriage and handed her through the open door. From the gloomy depths, Alasdair reached forward to take her, the familiar signet ring on his left hand catching the midday sun as he did so.

He did not acknowledge Esmée’s presence in any way. Indeed, he did not even lean forward far enough to reveal his face. She felt the warm weight of tears behind her eyes and spun around, ruthlessly shutting the door. The situation felt suddenly so ugly to her, as if she and Alasdair were some miserable married couple trotting a beloved child back and forth because they were too antagonistic to live beneath the same roof.

After brooding on it for a time, she was mercifully distracted by an afternoon filled with surprises, some more pleasant than others. The first was a bouquet of yellow roses from Mr. Nowell, along with a note asking her to drive with him in the park the following afternoon. The second was an invitation from Miss Smathers to accompany her and her brother to an exhibit of new landscapes at the Royal Academy.

She was penning acceptances to both when her aunt returned from Madame Panaut’s with a bandbox containing a beautiful dress of dark, bronze-colored satin.

“It perfectly matches your hair!” her aunt declared. “Oh, I knew it would! I asked
Madame
to make it up as a surprise.”

Esmée fingered the exquisite fabric. “Aunt, you are too kind.”

But Lady Tatton brushed aside the remark. “Now, we have only to get it fitted, and you may wear it to the theater next Wednesday.”

“To the theater?”

Lady Tatton smiled knowingly. “We have been invited to share Lady Kirton’s box,” she said. “And I am most keen to go. She has invited Lady Wynwood and her son. I wish to see what that young man is made of.”

“But the theater?” said Esmée again.

“Well, it is not as if we’re to see a farce,” said her aunt. “We’re to see
The Wicket Gate,
an adaptation of
The Pilgrim’s Progress,
a most upright and edifying work.”

Esmée thought it sounded deadly dull. She was also reluctant to spend an evening with Wynwood and his mother. Even the ten minutes she had spent strolling on his arm after dinner in Lady Gravenel’s withdrawing room had severely taxed her conversational skills. She had been unable to keep from imagining what Alasdair might have told Wynwood about her. Then there was that embarrassing memory of her outburst in the dining room not so many weeks ago.

Dear heaven. She had called Mr. MacLachlan a midge-brained maundrel, and told Lord Wynwood he had the manners of pig. The latter had not been true. He had been the only one of the three gentlemen
not
to behave as if she and Sorcha were pieces of furniture, to be discussed, and even quarreled over, as if they had no feelings of their own. And afterward, he had been perfectly pleasant. Why did it trouble her now?

At Lady Gravenel’s, Wynwood had tried to entertain her. He had asked after Sorcha, and told her a funny story about his boyhood in Buckinghamshire, and about some of his less scandalous adventures with the jaded-looking Lord Devellyn and the brothers MacLachlan. But just when Esmée felt she might grow at ease in his company, she had noticed the way Lady Wynwood’s keen eyes kept following the two of them around the room.

“Why, Esmée!” Lady Tatton’s voice jerked her back to the present. “What have you here?”

She turned to see her aunt standing by the writing desk. “Oh, invitations,” she answered. “I thought I should accept both.”

Lady Tatton fanned Miss Smathers’s card back and forth. “Now, why do I wonder if this invitation was sent at someone else’s behest?” she teased. “Perhaps
Mr.
Smathers?”

Esmée smiled. “I daresay you are right,” she admitted. “At least poor Mr. Nowell had the nerve to send his own.”

Lady Tatton plucked it from the desk. “Riding in the park with Nowell!” she chirped. “I think you should accept, my dear. He’s too monotonous to marry, but the connection cannot hurt.”

Just then, the butler entered, carrying a silver salver with two cards. “A lady and a gentleman to see you, ma’am.”

Lady Tatton tossed down the invitation and snatched up the cards. “Oh, lud, ’tis Wynwood! And his mother!” Her head jerked up. “Quick! We must receive them in the drawing room!”

At Esmée’s confused hesitation, Lady Tatton seized her by the elbow and dragged her toward the door. “In two minutes, Grimond! Oh, dear, Esmée! Is that a smudge on your dress? Here, take my handkerchief. Dust it off. Quick! Quick! Now, stand very straight, if you please. Height becomes you.”

Esmée followed her into the parlor and stood very straight. “But why are they here
now,
if we are to go to the theater together on Wednesday?”

She did not have to wonder long. Lady Wynwood, a tall, slender reed of a woman, hastened into the drawing room in a rustle of silk and kissed Lady Tatton’s cheeks. Lord Wynwood made his bow to Esmée, a bemused half smile on his face.

“Oh, Rowena!” said Lady Wynwood, clasping her chest. “The most dreadful thing! Cook has come down with that quinsy which is going round!”

“Oh! Oh, my poor dear!” Lady Tatton seized her hand and patted it.

“You don’t know the half!” she wailed. “I’ve a dinner party set for Monday! Oh,
will
you give me the instructions for that poultice you mentioned last night?”

“The boiled onion wrapped about the throat? But of course.” Lady Tatton went to a small desk in the corner, and Lady Wynwood followed. “Now, it must be very hot,” said the former, pulling out a sheet of letter paper. “Hot enough to draw the poison, mind! But not hot enough to blister.”

Esmée smiled at Lord Wynwood and motioned toward the chairs which flanked the hearth. “Will you sit down, my lord, whilst this terrible tragedy is averted?”

Wynwood’s blue eyes flashed with merriment. “Miss Hamilton, I do like your sense of humor,” he said. “I think it was the first thing I noticed about you.”

Esmée tossed him a skeptical glance. “How perfectly astonishing,” she remarked. “I should have thought it was my habit of having histrionic outbursts in front of people I hardly know.”

He threw his head back and laughed again. The two ladies at the writing desk turned round to stare. “I think you make my point, Miss Hamilton,” he answered. “Your sense of humor is perfectly irrepressible, even when you’re in a temper.”

“Oh, I was very angry that day,” she admitted.

“It is not the norm for you, I am sure,” he went on. “I think you are probably a very good-natured person at heart. God knows Merrick could provoke a saint, and Alasdair is almost as bad.”

“I try to maintain a positive outlook, Lord Wynwood,” she said. “Though it has been hard of late.”

His face fell. “You miss your sister, do you not?” he answered. “I can understand that. She is such a little angel.”

“Actually, she is an utter hellion.” Esmée smiled tightly. “But I miss her anyway. Desperately. Until now, I have never been away from her. It has been harder than I expected.”

“Ah, my sympathies, Miss Hamilton,” said Wynwood. “Your predicament is a difficult one. Perhaps I can help take your mind off your troubles for one evening. I understand Lady Kirton has invited you and your aunt to attend the theater with us on Wednesday. Dare I hope that you will join us?”

“Yes, I believe we mean to,” she said. “Though I confess an unfamiliarity with the play.”

Wynwood smiled dryly.
“The Wicket Gate?”
he said. “I believe it is designed to elevate our morals. I only hope that mine do not crack under the pressure.”

Just then, Lady Tatton closed the desk drawer and began folding the paper. Lord Wynwood rose. “I must go,” he said. “Mamma is having one of her fragile days. I have offered her my arm for the afternoon.”

“How good of you,” said Esmée.

Again, he flashed his bemused smile. “Sometimes a man must own his responsibilities,” he said. “Whether he wishes to or not.”

In a few short moments, Lord and Lady Wynwood were saying their good-byes and promising to see them on Wednesday. “There!” said Lady Tatton, as Grimond pulled shut the drawing room door. “I thought that went very well.”

“You thought what went very well?”

Lady Tatton drew back a pace. “Oh, you do not for one moment believe that nonsense about the onion, do you?”

Esmée blinked. “Should I not?”

Her aunt patted her gently on the arm. “Ten to one, the cook has nothing but a sniffle,” she said. “Did you not see how Lady Wynwood eyed your attire? My draperies and decor? Even the cut of poor Grimond’s coat? Next she’ll be rubbing my silver to see if it’s plated. No, she wished to catch us off guard. Lady Wynwood is beginning the vetting process.”

Esmée was aghast. “The
vetting
process?”

“Oh, indeed,” said Lady Tatton. “She wishes to reassure herself that you—indeed, that
we
—are good enough for her son.”