Authors: Grace Burrowes
He downed his tea in one gulp, then shuddered. “Knitting. You are a paragon of domestic virtue, Miss Danforth, and as such, I pronounce you entitled to apply that jam to your tart. You’ve been staring at it with shameless longing, you know.”
No, she had not. She’d been thinking of an afternoon in the library with shameless longing. “Yes, my lord.”
Her response was the most innocuous ever manufactured on a pretty English morning, and yet, St. Clair narrowed his eyes at her.
“You have been good for
Tante
. She’s laughed more in the past fortnight than in the previous season. She flirts with the help, and she dwells less on me and my endless shortcomings, matrimonial or otherwise.” He came to an internal conclusion. “She
worries
less. I am in your debt, Miss Danforth.”
He was not an easy man to spend time with, but he knew how to give a sincere compliment. The occasion was so rare for Milly, a blush rose up, along with a pleasant warmth in her middle.
“Thank you, my lord. One wants to be useful in this life.” One also wanted a decent place to sleep and some food, too, and the St. Clair household provided that in generous abundance, along with a tidy bit of coin.
Aunt Hyacinth had been right. A good position could be far better than the crusts and criticism handed out among one’s own family.
“One does want to be useful.” He slid the jam pot closer to her plate and rose. “If you will excuse me, madam. Like my aunt, I have correspondence that demands my attention, though your company has been a delight.”
He might have bowed to her, but Milly was staring at the jam, trying to ignore his meaningless flattery. She heard him move off toward the door, and reached for the preserves.
“Miss Danforth?”
He’d stopped by the door, a big, elegant man who could carry off lace at his throat and wrists even in riding attire.
“Sir?”
“You must not begrudge yourself that rainy day in the library. Nobody can be a paragon all the time.”
And then he strode off, while Milly dipped her knife into the jam, and wished—and wished and wished and wished—she might someday have that afternoon with Mrs. Radcliffe.
***
Though Sebastian wished it were not so, another infernal duel was brewing. He could feel it, could sense it in the way the members of his club barely met his eye when he nodded to them across the reading room.
They would not speak to him if they could avoid it. That he even had membership was only because the Benevolent Society for the Furtherance of Agrarian Science had been too unsophisticated to realize that Sebastian St. Clair was the Traitor Baron himself. By the time they’d become aware of their blunder, Sebastian had made a contribution of unignorable proportions to their experimental farm out in Chelsea.
He’d spent those precious funds because a man needed the company of his fellows, even if it was silent, nervous company lured close with coin, and tacit acceptance of the fact that he was merely tolerated in their midst.
“Ah, there you are!”
Tante
came fluttering into his study without knocking, a gleam in her eyes Sebastian had learned to respect. “You look quite intellectual, St. Clair. Those spectacles are deceiving.”
“The spectacles are necessary if I’m to make sense of your figures, madam.” Years of figures that she’d kept meticulously in the absence of husband, son, nephew, or grandson.
She settled into a chair opposite his desk, a sparrow coming to light. “I wear them too, when I’m at my correspondence, but spectacles become no one. Will you accompany Miss Danforth and me to the Levien musicale?”
No, he would not. “When is it?”
“Next Tuesday. Tuesday evenings are when all the best events take place. I’m having some new gowns made up for Milly, and the woman adores music. There’s a pianist on offer, a single gentleman who’s the son of a duke. I think he might do for your cousin Fern, or perhaps Ivy, though not Iris. The girl can’t carry a tune, tipsy or sober.”
God help the pianist.
Tante
would set loose an entire flower bed of eligible young ladies on him before his recital was complete.
“I’m afraid I must attend a meeting at the club Tuesday evening. I’m trying to convince the members that peaches are worth investing in.”
They were not, particularly. Peaches liked a sheltered location, a good lot of sunshine, and a mild but discernible winter—exactly what half the valleys in Provence offered, but not quite the English climate.
“Peaches.” Aunt rose, a wealth of scorn in one word. “You would rather take up breeding peaches than pursue your own succession. The war is over, Sebastian. You’ve been pardoned for your errors, and life moves on. You were just a boy when the Corsican resumed his nonsense, and you can’t be held responsible for your family making an unfortunately timed visit to relatives in France.”
How did one breed a peach? Sebastian set that conundrum aside and prepared to deal with being The Despair of the House of St. Clair, as his aunt would no doubt term it in the next five minutes.
Tante
did not lack for accuracy in her scolds.
“I beg your pardon.”
The paid companion stood at the door, which would normally have been a pleasant sight. She diverted
Tante
from pestering Sebastian for the most part, and she was a pretty little thing in a not-very-English way.
“Miss Danforth, you must join us.
Tante
is preparing to deliver one of her more rousing sermons, and such eloquence deserves an audience.” Though Freddy would pull in her horns about the succession if a damsel were present—Sebastian hoped.
The young lady remained in the doorway, her hand on the jamb as if for support—which put Sebastian’s instincts on alert. Her mouth, a full, often-smiling mouth, was grim at the corners, and her eyes…
“Come, sit, Miss Danforth. You are upset.” Sebastian had no intention of being in the vicinity when her upset got the better of her. She would not appreciate him witnessing any loss of composure, and he would not like her for subjecting him to such a display. “I’ll find a footman to bring the teapot. I’m sure whatever troubles you,
Tante
will want to know of it.”
He escaped with all dispatch and closed the door behind him, sending the tweenie trotting down the steps for the ubiquitous pot of tea. Rather than a scepter and orb, King George ought to rule the empire with a teapot and sugar tongs.
Sebastian was about to call for his horse—the morning was pretty enough to inspire riding out both before and after breakfast—when Freddy emerged from the study.
“There you are. Summon the phaeton, Sebastian, and prepare to drive Miss Danforth to Chelsea.”
This was an order. Freddy enjoyed giving orders, but Sebastian could not oblige her.
“I’ll have the coach brought around instead, the weather being unpredictable. The press of business is such that—”
Tante
advanced on him, hands on her hips. A line of Shakespeare flitted through his head, about the lady being small but fierce.
“She has lost her only friend, Sebastian. Miss Danforth’s aunt, her only supporter in this world, has gone to her reward, and the girl buried her other aunt only three months past. She is
alone
, but for what kindness we can show her.”
An aunt.
Merde.
It would be an aunt. “John Coachman knows the roads—”
She jabbed him in the sternum with a bony, surprisingly painful finger. “
You
are competent to get the girl to Chelsea. John Coachman’s gout is acting up, and the undercoachman takes a half day today, along with the footmen. Call. For. Your. Phaeton.”
Four more jabs right to the sternum. Sebastian had never had any call to jab a man in the breastbone before, but if he were still in the interrogation business, he would have added it to his repertoire of torments.
“Perhaps she should wait a day,
Tante
. Her composure will benefit from waiting a day.” And the undercoachman would be back from swilling his wages or spending them on a pretty little tart.
She smoothed a hand down the lace of his jabot. “Coward.”
Ruthless
besom.
“Such an endearment will surely addle my wits.” Though her epithet was not strictly fair, unless she referred to his unwillingness to take his own life.
“Please, Sebastian? She says if she doesn’t retrieve a few mementos from her aunt’s cottage, her cousins will sell them all, and there’s some elderly fellow who was sweet on the aunt. Milly is desperate to look in on him.”
Milly. He’d forgotten that was her name—put it from his mind the way he could put entire years of his life from his mind—and he was
not
a coward.
He was a dutiful nephew and a gentleman. In this case, it mattered not whether he was a French gentleman or an English gentleman. Either doomed him to surrender.
“Have a hamper packed for the bereaved old fellow—a bottle of spirits to ease his loss, a decent blanket against the winter cold, comestibles, sweets, that sort of thing—and tell Miss Danforth to be ready in half an hour.”
In half an hour, he hoped the English weather might oblige him for once and produce a steady downpour.
Alas, that hope, like most of Sebastian’s hopes to date, was not to be realized.
***
Milly did not want to tool out to Chelsea in the baron’s smart phaeton. She did not want to sit beside him in all his understated elegance, while she presented as the dowdy poor relation she was, an insult to the glorious, sunny day in her drab brown. Most of all, she did not want to risk her cousins catching sight of her.
The neighbors had not sent word of Aunt Hyacinth’s death until Milly had no chance of attending the services or the wake, which was likely a mercy, but one Milly bitterly resented.
“Do you have need of my handkerchief, Miss Danforth?”
The baron posed his softly accented question as he clucked the horses into a relaxed trot. His manner suggested that a few blocks past Grosvenor Square, they might turn into the park, their outing no more than a lark.
“I have my own, thank you.” Her reply was ungracious, but that too—like every one of her disgruntlements—was a symptom of the anger that so poorly disguised grief.
They trotted along in silence, until his lordship turned the vehicle south on Park Lane.
“I would be lost if Freddy were to abandon me for the celestial realm.” His tone was contemplative, as if he were only now acknowledging the truth he’d admitted. “I would have nobody to scold me, nobody to hold me accountable for my numerous small lapses, nobody to look upon me as if I were a particularly exquisite arrangement of roses, when I am nothing but a man who scratches and swears and wears his muddy boots into the parlor on occasion.”
For the baron, this was a speech, and also a bit of a eulogy for a woman not yet dead.
“She is formidable, your aunt. My aunt was too, but in a much quieter way.”
They both had been, Hyacinth and Millicent. They’d protected Milly as long as they could, and made the world think Milly was the one looking after them.
“When Aunt Millicent died, Aunt Hyacinth began planning my escape into service. I would have been prey for my cousins without Aunt chiding and encouraging and plotting.”
Mostly chiding.
“You were named for your aunt?”
She was pleased he would remind her of this. “Yes. I have her red hair.”
“Auburn. I am certain your hair is auburn, in proper light. Tell me about your Aunt Hyacinth.” He was being kind, and the magnitude of Milly’s loss was such that all she could do was appreciate his compassion.
“I call her—I
called
her—Aunt Hy. Everybody did, and that was a shame. Hyacinth is a lovely name.”
Traffic was moving along, like it would not at the fashionable hour. The spring breeze brought the pungent scent of Tattersall’s. Life, as both aunts had said often, goes on.
“You do not want to talk about your loved one,” the baron said. “As if that somehow makes them more deceased. Soldiers do not reminisce about fallen comrades easily at first.”
She’d forgotten he’d served. Forgotten he would know a great deal about loss and about life going on.
“Aunt Mil loved laughter, Aunt Hy loved beauty. Ours was a happy household. Aunt Hy could hardly see toward the end—I felt like a traitor for leaving her—but she said she could still feel the beauty with her hands, still smell it with her nose, still taste it in a perfect cup of tea.”
“You did not feel like a traitor for leaving,” the baron said, slowing the team to let an enormous traveling coach lumber past. “You felt like an orphan, an angry orphan with no good choices and nobody whose guidance you could trust, because nobody had trod the path you faced. Your aunts had not been in service; they had not been married. They could suggest, but they could not
know
.”
As the phaeton rolled along the park’s pretty green perimeter, the most fashionable addresses in the world on their left, Milly realized the baron was speaking from experience.
She would rather talk of his experiences than her loss—much rather. “You felt that way. You’re English, and you ended up in the French army. You had to have felt that way.”
He wrinkled his grand nose, the gesture Gallic, and Milly’s observation clearly unwelcome. She expected he’d absorb himself in managing his horses, though he drove with the instinctive ease of a born whip.
“I was a boy when the Peace of Amiens came about, and my mother was desperate to visit her relations in France. I spent the summer in Provence, at my grandparents’ château, and I had no concept that the Corsican and old George both were merely regrouping for another decade of war. When the truce ended, my father, of course, had to leave or face internment. Getting him out of the country was a difficult proposition. My mother would not leave me behind, but we could not safely travel with Papa. Very soon, we could not safely travel at all. Mother died that winter, without ever seeing her husband again. She was my first experience with the casualties of war, for I believe she died of a broken heart, not a simple ague.”