The Scarred Earl (16 page)

He grinned as he thought of his fair gaoler passing the pot from the ancient commode they had at least allowed him to the unseen presence outside, as if he deserved it, and wondered if the man remained whilst she
shaved the prisoner, then solemnly passed razor and whiskery water out of the door for her confederate to dispose of as well. This odd business had removed him from the frenetic round his life in town had become. How astonished a younger Marcus Seaborne might be, he decided from the vantage point of three and twenty, at how the amusements of a leisured gentleman could pall once he’d sampled most of the pleasures high society had to offer him.

Of course, his ladybird could always be relied on to relieve the tedium and he frowned at the thought of Clary waiting in vain for him at the neat house he’d installed her in while he was out of town. He wondered if she’d gone back to her native city to find a more reliable keeper and realised he wouldn’t mind that much if she had. She was a sweet little armful, but he was struggling by now to recall if she was a blonde or a brunette. He was jolted out of his reverie by the sound of the key in the door and jumped to his feet, determined not to be discovered lying abed.

‘What hold does he have over you?’ he asked softly, in case the man was still close
enough to hear him speak and might come back to eavesdrop.

‘I’ve brought you dinner,’ she told him, as if he hadn’t spoken.

‘And are you intending to dispose of me horribly if some demand is not met?’ he made himself ask lightly.

‘I have no idea,’ she responded as if bored by the whole unsavoury affair, but he saw unease in her dark eyes before she turned away.

‘Then at least have the kindness to tell me what day it is?’

‘Friday,’ she replied shortly, setting the covered plate down.

‘And my family have still not found me? How remiss of them,’ he said as if it was only a matter of time.

‘Indeed,’ she said coolly.

‘I wager local society flock to listen to your eloquent banter.’

‘They hardly know I exist.’

‘Their loss,’ he told her as if under some obligation to make her feel better.

‘And my gain,’ she snapped back.

‘Undoubtedly,’ he agreed genially.

‘You have all the choices of how to spend
your time a gentleman of your privileged birth can rejoice in, do you not?’

‘I don’t aspire to be part of Prinny’s inner circle or take up politicking.’

‘You could take any path through life, but you do nothing?’

‘I have a formidably capable cousin and a restless elder brother. They did and, on the part of my cousin Jack, still do, all the putting the world to rights one family will ever need,’ he told her with a would-be lightness he no longer quite felt.

‘So while they work, you worry about the pattern on your waistcoats, the cut of your coat and the polish on your topboots? How profligate.’

‘At least I do no harm to anyone else. You kidnap gentlemen who never did you harm and flower unseen in the social wilderness, then twit
me
on a wasted life, Miss Morality?’

‘Who says I’m a miss?’

‘This does,’ he replied with a careless flick of his index finger across her generous mouth. ‘And as such, you should never be left alone with a rake like me,’ he warned in a voice even he could hear had dropped an octave at the thought of her lips under
his. He held her fathomless gaze for a moment, but something more than curiosity in her eyes made her seem too vulnerable.

‘I know,’ she agreed absently.

‘Yet still you keep coming back,’ he made himself almost accuse her.

‘Eat your dinner,’ she ordered abruptly and shouted for release.

Marcus leant against the rough-hewn wall nearest to him and made himself look indifferent. Truth was, he realised, he spent every hour in this dreary hole dreaming of the next time she would enliven his life for a few moments.

Chapter Eleven

‘T
here’s no news, is there?’ Persephone asked Alex as soon as they could escape Corisande and the more conventional chaperons and talk privately once the fuss and furor over their sudden engagement had died down and their guests had resorted to their rooms to frantically write letters to all their friends.

‘No more than there was yesterday,’ he returned grimly and she still found it almost impossible to meet his eyes and see how trapped he felt by the marriage about to be forced on him because he’d tried to find Marcus for her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said with a feeble attempt at a smile.

‘So am I, but how is it your fault he is missing?’

‘You know very well that’s not what I meant.’

‘Then so am I, but if wed I must, better if I wed you than any other female I ever came across,’ he told her with that crooked smile she had learned to look for so attentively over the last few weeks and months without even noticing she did so until today.

‘Well, that’s something at least,’ she said as lightly as she could manage after a sleepless night and too many hours of self-recrimination.

‘No doubt you can think of many more worthy gentlemen than I to call husband, but you seem to have yourself promised to an unworthy one without ever saying yea or nay to the idea. It is I who must be sorry for that, Persephone.’

‘Then don’t be, I’m well content,’ she said, meeting his eyes at last and finding them quizzical and impossible to read, as if he’d somehow closed himself off to her again after the scorching intimacy of last night, and she did her best not to feel bitterly disappointed.

‘Then it will be both my job as your husband and my pleasure as your lover to keep you so once we are wed, my dear,’ he told
her with the sort of wolfish look she felt he expected her prospective bridegroom to send her.

She supposed he must have learnt to conceal his deepest feelings long before he left for the army, then India, after a childhood such as the one he must have endured without a mother and with an indifferent father and a jealous half-brother to blight it. After he was captured, he seemed to have turned that self-sufficiency into a steely barrier to conceal his emotions from the world, however hard his captors tried to force them out of him, and it felt as formidable between them now as a seven-foot wall.

‘What do you expect of your wife in return then, Alex?’

‘Whatever you want to give me, Persephone. I expect you to let our marriage lie lightly on you, so it doesn’t become the trap so many ladies of breeding and expectation seem to find their marriages, once they finally achieve the end they have spent their whole lives preparing for. Although nobody could accuse you of being a husband hunter, I hate the idea of my lady feeling she’s been caught and catalogued under the label “wife” and must endure my husbandly attentions
until the requisite heir and a spare inhabit the nurseries in all sorts of antiquated old houses we will have to try to bring up to date somehow. It is to be hoped you have more talent for making ancient old barns into homes for us than I do, by the way, for you will have a fair few of them to civilise if you and our future family are ever to be comfortable.’

‘We shall soon find out, shall we not?’ she said, thinking that her future accommodation seemed like the least of her problems at the moment.

‘I suppose you must be more worried about your brother’s whereabouts than you are about enduring the discomforts of my more ancient possessions?’

‘Of course,’ she said on a weary sigh, for he seemed to read her as easily as a chap book while his deepest thoughts and fears were unknown to his future wife.

‘Then I’m ready to admit we are going to need help in tracking him down. I can hardly keep disappearing from your life as I did last week now I’m openly declared to be your deeply besotted fiancé. Mrs Beddington will watch us like a hawk from now on, in the hope of seeing estrangement where
we assured her there was only the most irresistible of passions.’

‘And how she would love to spread scandal about us, so I dare say you’re right,’ she agreed as if she was already a meek little spouse and saw from his frown how little he liked the idea. ‘I’m very tired,’ she said with a shrug as if that might explain her unusual docility.

‘Your mother proposes we meet her by the lake after you have had luncheon, and house guests like Mrs Beddington, who simply refuse to be tactful and finally leave us to plan our wedding in peace, can look after themselves for once. Apparently she knows a way there they are all ignorant of and hinted you would show it to me if I asked nicely. An afternoon spent resting or doing nothing in particular in Lady Henry’s good company sounds an ideal antidote to intense passion and drama to me. I’m told I can fish whilst you and your mama doze or plan the best ways of making a September wedding memorable, if still a little hasty.’

‘She doesn’t mean to be bossy,’ Persephone explained feebly.

‘It’s more a sort of motherly inevitability so far as I can see,’ he said with an affectionate
smile she dearly wished she could win from him herself, instead of the guarded one he had greeted her with this morning, as if she had been added to the list of people he had to hold at a distance from his inner aristocrat.

‘That’s Mama exactly,’ she agreed, wishing her mother could soothe away all her troubles as easily as she had when Persephone was a little girl.

‘Your cousin’s new wife promises to have the trick of it herself before long. I suppose it comes from being a great lady with large responsibilities.’

‘Probably,’ she agreed with a hollow feeling in her belly that being compared to Jess and found wanting might teach her new depths of human frailty.

‘So you and your best friend will be able to compare notes on how it can most graciously be done, without either of your husbands becoming aware they live under an iron hand in a very velvety glove.’

‘Then you think I am about to become a great lady?’

‘I know you’re about to be my Countess and I could not have chosen a finer one if I searched the length and breadth of the British
Isles for her. As to the great lady part of the equation, I would argue you are one of those already, my Persephone,’ he told her with a whimsical smile that let her a little closer and affirmed their marriage could lie lightly on both of them, if she would only let it and not yearn for anything more.

‘Then I shall be content to wed a great gentleman. We can congratulate ourselves on our mutual splendour and greatness every morning at breakfast, to make sure our households realise how lucky they are to have us ruling over them.’

‘That should do it,’ he said as if already practising the art.

‘Persephone!’ her little sister Penelope interrupted and any chance to discuss the intimacies and traps their marriage promised to throw at them was lost as both her sisters came to exclaim over her news and reproach her for not telling them about it herself a lot sooner.

‘Happy, my love?’ Lady Henry asked her eldest daughter as they watched Alex strip off his splendid waistcoat so he could fish in his shirtsleeves and teach Penelope to cast a line more fluidly.

‘I will be,’ Persephone replied with a weary smile.

‘If only Corisande had not chosen to interfere, I suspect you would have worked your way towards it in your own time. She always was searingly jealous of you, love, so I suppose a chance at putting you on the wrong side of the line for once instead of being there on her own seemed irresistible to her. I doubt she knows how hard Jack and Marcus and your Alex will watch her from now on after that particular piece of spite. She wouldn’t look half as smug about the prospect of you having to wed at her instigation if she had the intelligence to see what she has done to herself by interfering.’

‘There’s no point taking petty revenge on her,’ Persephone said and found she genuinely meant it, although she would never have chosen such a way to find her husband—the one she was going to marry could hardly suit her better. ‘Lord Calvercombe and I will rub along perfectly well together and that will be revenge enough on Corisande, who never contrived to live in contentment with any man for more than a week as far as I can see.’

‘I would have you aim for a little more
than contentment in your married life, my love,’ her mother said gently and Persephone found Alex’s powerful figure was blurring in front of her as her tired eyes threatened to fill with tears.

Blinking them back firmly and telling herself not to be such a widgeon, she let herself remember how it felt to be almost loved by him last night. It had been wondrous and she couldn’t wait to be completely and totally his in every way there was between lovers. That would be quite enough urgency to get her to the wedding and beyond it into the marriage bed with him and, if Alexander was content to take her as his wife, she was very happy to be so taken and not think any deeper until she had to.

‘More will be up to us when we get there,’ she said with her gaze steady on her future as she made up her mind to put every effort she had into it once they were wed, so they both had to be happy or waste so much promise of it as would seem criminal. ‘It could be wonderful to be Lady Calvercombe, once Alexander gets used to sharing his life and at least some of his thoughts with me. I can’t imagine how his family set him so low that they didn’t value the fine, honourable
and happy man he has it in him to be, Mama. How could his father and brother have been so heartless and careless of his feelings that he went off to India to get away from them until he was of an age to take possession of his inheritance from his grandfather?’

‘It’s in the nature of heartless, careless and shallow men to hate their opposite when it is in front of them every day. Little Alex Forthin was forever before Walter and Farrant Forthin as an example of all they were not. He gets that fine integrity and absolute determination from his grandfather, as well as a passionate nature and what he would probably hate me for calling the soul of a poet from his mother—even if she did leave him for an actual one and betray it. There is very little of the Forthins in the lad, for all he takes his height and those blue eyes from his father’s line. Only think how galling it must have been for Farrant to watch his much younger brother grow into someone far more like a young god than any Forthin before him.’