Face of greed, p.14
A Gentleman Far From Home, page 14
part #1 of Book Eleven Series
“I’m fine,” I said, and the longer I held her, the finer I felt. “Atticus was swilling mulled cider and stuffing himself with biscuits thirty minutes after his mishap. He’ll come right in no time.”
“I will not come right for the next hundred years. I saw you purposely trying to break that ice, knew what you meant to do, and wanted to cover my eyes. I could not look away.”
“The grooms would have pulled Atticus out. Water that cold is a danger in its own right, though, and Atticus could not swim.” I would see that he and Leander learned that skill come summer, for safety as well as enjoyment.
Hyperia eased back and led me by the hand to the sofa, then tugged me down beside her. Being engaged did have a few wonderful, delightful privileges.
“The grooms might not have sorted matters in time, Jules. They are unlikely to be good swimmers, and once ice breaks, the cracks can spread in any direction. Your deeds will become the stuff of local legend.”
“They already have, though not in the sense you mean.” I explained that I’d been thoroughly dressed down by Miss Quiggan, more gently admonished by Algernon, and even warned regarding my own safety by Bryson himself.
“That didn’t take long,” Hyperia said as a soft rap sounded on the door.
I took the tray from the footman, who seemed surprised to see me. He then adopted a scowl that was becoming familiar.
“Thank you,” I said. “Miss West and I will serve ourselves.” I closed the door with my foot. “The kitchen at least is not offering me short shrift. The butler was reduced to quoting Pope.”
“‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’?”
“‘Fools rush in…’ Your panegyric about the day’s earlier adventures was gratifyingly timed. The old boy was taken quite by surprise.” As I had been, though Miss Quiggan clearly did not view my dip in the pond as any sort of heroism. “Have you noticed anybody particularly offended by my inquiries?”
Hyperia poured the tea, adding a dash of honey to mine. “No, but I am your fiancée, and Her Grace has ensured that news has made the rounds. Not even Philomel Delaplane would criticize you in my hearing.”
“Has she criticized me elsewhere? My most plausible theory for Bryson’s banishment is that another bachelor wants him kept out of the courting lists. Perhaps one of the local belles fancies Bryson or resents Philomel and doesn’t want him to come home and court her for the second-largest portion of the settlements.”
Hyperia stirred her tea. “If some lady has set her cap for Bryson, then exiling him to Surrey to ensure other women don’t get their paws on him is a Pyrrhic tactic.”
“Bryson won’t marry in Surrey,” I said, turning possibilities over in my mind. “He would have to meet a lady he could fall in love with, and of all the stations in rural life, the gamekeeper is a fairly isolated fellow of necessity.”
I filled a plate with ham-and-cheese tarts, mentally blessing Lady Clotilda’s cook. I’d missed lunch and done a fair amount of tromping and riding about since breakfast. Hyperia was correct that I forgot to eat when preoccupied, but if food was put before me, my appetite returned with a vengeance.
“Would one lady exile Bryson to get even with another lady?” I asked, thinking aloud between bites.
“I grant you,” Hyperia said, “people in love can behave unpredictably, and a woman scorned, or easily overlooked, could get up to mischief, but we lack a candidate for the post.”
“Philomel,” I said, her name bringing together facts, possibilities, and observations in my mind. “If Bryson offered for her, she’d have to accept him. She’s getting long in the tooth by bridal standards, and the shire has apparently decreed that Wren cannot marry until Philomel lands a husband. If Philomel has set her cap for Algernon, she’ll want Bryson kept out of the running.”
As the oldest, she’d regard herself as entitled to marry the heir. She was more of an age with Algernon than were Wren and Miss Quiggan, and Philomel certainly ran tame about the Keep, probably with an eye toward becoming lady of the manor one fine day.
“A logical suggestion,” Hyperia said, putting another tart on my empty plate, “but as a culprit, intuitively farfetched. Philomel lacks guile.”
Threatening letters took little enough of that, and yet, I agreed with Hyperia. Philomel lacked subtlety, discretion, cunning… Philomel could not be ruled out, but her style leaned more toward parlor dramas and churchyard gossip.
I finished my extra tart. “The whole courting-bachelors theory also assumes we have swains clearly intent on marriage. Algernon appears in no hurry to take a wife, Sandy will have more options if his uncle dies without legitimate male issue, and Bryson isn’t situated to make any offers.”
“And yet, by agreement of all local parties, you are not to ask questions or pry into the past,” Hyperia murmured. “Some sort of mischief is afoot.”
“Speaking of those who pry, Her Grace wants us to set a wedding date.” I heard myself say the words and tried to pretend they were a casual half-jocular complaint. Speaking of mischief…
Hyperia set down her plate of tarts. “You want us to set a date, don’t you, Jules?”
“Of course I do. I realize certain issues remain unresolved between us, but my love and esteem for you aren’t among the matters requiring further discussion. You have agreed to marry me, and I would like to turn that agreement into a happy union sooner rather than later.”
She tried sipping from her tea cup, which was empty. “I love and esteem you as well.”
“And yet, a recitation of those sentiments apparently makes you sad, Perry. You’ve said you don’t want to cry off, but I must put the question to you again. We have been engaged for more than a year. I know my mind and my heart and see no impediment to creating a joyous marriage with you.”
She sat back and stared at the carpet. “I should have known you wouldn’t.”
What on earth, on any heavenly sphere, could Hyperia mean?
“We need not set a date now,” I said, “but I wanted you to be aware that the duchess has grown politely insistent. She cares for the happiness of her offspring. She would not be a duchess if she did not also wish to see the succession secured.”
“We cannot blame her for that.”
We could. I did. A little. I rose, lest the conversation devolve into a parting of the ways, which I would do nothing to invite.
“Give the matter of a date some thought, Hyperia. We can always set a date to appease Her Grace and then move the date back.” A prevarication, which suited me ill. Losing Hyperia altogether suited me not at all.
But did I even have her? I helped myself to another pair of tarts, thinking to wrap them in my handkerchief for Atticus, and only when I went to secret them in my pocket did I recall Duquette’s letter.
I passed it over. “Whether or not you intended it, you appear to have another admirer.”
She took one look at the direction, set the letter aside as if it were a live serpent, and wrapped her arms about her waist.
“I wish you hadn’t seen that, Julian. Why on earth did you have to see that?”
The soldier in me urged retreat. I could make no further advance on any worthwhile objective, given that Hyperia had wanted to keep her correspondence with Duquette private, and private from me.
“Is he an impediment to our happy union? I will quit the field if that’s what you wish, Hyperia.” Honor was a damnable burden, but also a source of clarity in an increasingly muddled—tangled—situation.
“He is an impediment to my happiness,” Hyperia said. “I will be doubly damned if I let him be an impediment to yours.”
I was still on my feet, and she remained sitting, hunched over as if exhausted from carrying a great burden.
We would never have an opportunity to sort ourselves out in a situation that was convenient, relaxed, and comfortable. A soldier marched over whatever terrain lay before him and took up arms when the enemy was sighted. Convenience did not come into it.
I took a place on the sofa a good foot away from her. “Hyperia, can you explain?”
“You must not call him out, Julian. I forbid it.”
I would shoot to wound, I hoped. “I will not call him out, then.” He might challenge me, though, and I would accept.
“You promise?”
Her insistence smothered the last hope I’d cherished that a misunderstanding or minor scandal lay at the heart of the situation.
“I give you my word as a gentleman that I will not take his life or purposely put him at risk of harm over what you are about to say.”
“I give you my word as a lady that I won’t kill him either, but, Julian, I want to. I honestly, absolutely want to wipe him from my life and from polite society altogether.”
That might actually be arranged. “What does he know, or think he knows, that he’s emboldened enough to pester you here in the shires when you’re keeping company with a duchess and, indirectly, with your intended?”
The look Hyperia gave me was purely exasperated. “How do you reach the conclusion that Duquette has knowledge that troubles me?”
“You would not play me false, Perry, not with him, not now. If he is among your former amours, then marry me and let him bleat his calumny to the heavens. He’ll be smearing the name of a possible future duchess and earning the enmity of a possible future duke. That will reflect poorly on him, to say nothing of what the present duke and duchess will make of Duquette’s behavior.”
Hyperia seemed to grow smaller. She was diminutive in terms of height, but so substantial in her person that to see her looking and acting diminished made me truly angry.
“Julian, your defense of me is more precious than you can know, but it isn’t Society’s opinion of me that I value most.”
She was trying to convey information, trying to give me a clue. Whose opinion…? Mine?
What could possibly lower Hyperia West in my eyes? What could she have done, said, failed to do…? With whom might she have disported such that even she feared to tell me…
I went cold from the middle out, colder than I’d been in the stupid, icy pond. If there was one person whose name provoked Hyperia to impatience and distaste, that person was my late brother.
“This has to do with Harry, doesn’t it?” I spoke evenly, but my heart was hammering again, and the urge to destroy every stick of furniture in the room nigh overwhelmed me.
She nodded and curled in on herself more tightly. A shuddery movement of her shoulders betrayed that she was in tears without making a sound.
I hated Harry for that. I wished he was alive simply so I could beat him to flinders for making Hyperia cry. Then I’d beat him to flinders all over again for trifling with her, then I’d beat him a third time because he’d had the bad form to die and escape retribution for his transgressions.
“Julian, I’m s-sorry. I wish… I’ve wished a thousand times…”
I passed her my handkerchief and cast around for what to say, what not to say. What to do. My inspiration came from the brother who was yet extant. Arthur would be pragmatic, leaving the furniture and the dignity of all concerned—not least of all his own—intact.
The coldness took a stranglehold of my heart. “You owe me an apology, Hyperia, not for sharing your favors wherever you pleased to—I certainly have done likewise—but for accepting my proposal without disclosing a former liaison with my own brother.”
Damn Harry to blazes for his conscienceless charm. Damn the war. Just damn everything.
“Julian, I honestly hoped an encounter with Harry would not matter, but then… your situation changed, and you want and deserve intimacies with your wife, and my conscience would not be silent. It wasn’t a liaison.”
“Whatever the relationship was, the whole business troubles you enormously, and that is why we ought to have discussed it sooner.” I was troubled nigh to rage. and the phrase ‘dying of a broken heart’ would never again be poetic exaggeration to me.
Hyperia dabbed at her eyes. “You don’t mind that Harry and I were intimate?”
“I mind terribly.” Especially when she was bent on denying me the same privilege she’d apparently granted my brother. “You say it was not a liaison. What was it?”
She sat up. Her eyes were sheened with tears, her cheeks rosy, and her usually composed features vacant with sadness. “Have you ever had absinthe?”
Eternal perdition was too good for Lord Harry Caldicott. “Once. I vowed not to repeat that folly. Stuff made me violently ill and parted me from accurate perceptions of my surroundings. Much like hashish, I’m told, but with full-on hallucinations and gaps and waking dreams.”
“I tried it once too.” She was assembling her composure moment by moment, and her composure meant a great deal to me. I was disappointed in Hyperia for reasons having to do with broken trust and surprise, but more significantly, I was also furious on her behalf.
Her father had expected her to manage without assistance when her mama had died, and Hyperia herself had been little more than a schoolgirl. Her brother expected her to not only contend with life more or less on her own, but also to pull him out of his endless scrapes and stupidities.
Logic insisted that Harry had taken advantage of her. Yes, Hyperia was independent, an adult, and in every way a capable person—every way but one. When it came to self-indulgence and excess, Harry had been an accomplished adept.
Hyperia had been innocent, and he’d amused himself at her expense.
“You tried absinthe once and at Harry’s urging. Tell me the rest of it.” If we were to move forward in any sort of charity, much less as an engaged couple, we needed to move forward honestly.
And bedamned to the late Lord Harry Caldicott and his nasty little games.
“You never came home on leave,” Hyperia said. “I missed you.” She was offering an explanation rather than an accusation.
“I missed you too.” I had not even carried her likeness with me. That would have been too dangerous when I was supposed to be a tinker’s Portuguese apprentice, shepherd, or itinerant farrier.
“You did not come home,” she said, “and you did not write, and you refused to engage yourself to me, and I felt a very great fool. I understand now that you had your reasons, and they were valid reasons, but I learned the larger context of your situation after it would have done any good.”
Said every sadder, wiser person ever. “I should have written to Healy, at least. Go on.”
“There was Harry, who understood my frustration, and who could make me laugh, and who… He is like you in some ways. He knows how to let a silence speak—knew how. He could be charming, though I well understood that Harry exerted his charm strategically.”
Harry had never been the sort of brother to break my favorite toy while I watched, but he’d taken my pony out a time or two without my permission and returned the beast covered in mud and with a tail full of burrs.
My grandmother had given me a little chapbook of nursery rhymes written in her own hand, some in French, some in English. Long after her passing, I would read the verses over and think of her.
Harry had accidentally spilled tea on my memento. He hadn’t ruined it, but he’d left it permanently stained.
His regret for having hurt me was always genuine, and I eventually forgave him, only to find he’d borrowed my favorite boots and left them half wrecked too.
Blasted weather. So sorry, old thing. Didn’t think you’d mind. The boot-boy will curse me into next week.
Wrecking his boots in retaliation would have afforded me no satisfaction whatsoever and might have given him a pretext for escalating the whole business.
“You were at a house party,” I said, trying to think as Harry would have. “The second week. Everybody a bit bored, plenty of libation on hand, the rules relaxed, the chaperones easing their vigilance. Harry was sympathetic and available. Duquette was among the other bachelors.”
Hyperia poured herself more tea and forgot to add either cream or honey. “Harry bitterly envied you the deductive powers you enjoy in such abundance. In hindsight, I think he decided to make a game of seducing me. Set a challenge for himself. I made a game of leading him on, but then one very late night, after a bit too much brandy, he poured us each a glass of absinthe. I am honestly not clear on what happened next.”
I knew all too well what Harry would have done. He’d boasted of his seductions among the Spanish and Portuguese ladies, to my disgust. Harry seemed oblivious to the notion that one of those ladies might have been seducing the handsome English officer for the benefit of her French contacts.
“What do you recall, Hyperia?” I asked the question for her benefit, not because I sought to torment myself with details. She was making a confession, despite the fact that I had no qualifications as a confessor. I knew, though, that telling the whole tale was necessary if she was to move past it.
“I woke in my chemise, in his bed. He was entirely cast away, wearing nothing but breeches. When I realized where I was and with whom, my belly went into full revolt. Whether shame or absinthe was upsetting my digestion, I do not know. I have been tipsy, Julian, but on that occasion, I was not myself in a very odd way.”
She sipped the tea, which had to be tepid. “I had the thought: ‘He snores like a bovine,’ and before my eyes, while he slept on, all unawares, he seemed to grow cow ears and horns, and the vision was real at the time.”
“You were hallucinating. The absinthe might have been doctored with some other potion.”
“I have no recollection of getting out of my clothes or getting into that bed, and I wasn’t about to waken Harry and ask him what we’d got up to. I could not bear the sight of him, though our paths did cross a few times thereafter. He seemed contrite, which impressed me not at all. He left the house party the next day, and I hope that was out of deference to my sensibilities.”
Harry had self-preservation instincts, give him that. “Where does Duquette come into this?”
“He was at the house party, and lately, I’ve been running into him too often. He always brings up what good friends he and Harry were, and when last I encountered him, he mentioned that you would be very surprised to know how close Harry and I had been while you were kicking your heels in Spain. Either Harry was indiscreet, or Duquette saw me leaving Harry’s room.”
