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Regency High Society Vol 2: Sparhawk's Lady / The Earl's Intended Wife / Lord Calthorpe's Promise / The Society Catch
“If you catch me first,” said Jeremiah, and though he smiled, not even George could miss the threat in his voice. “But if I hear you’ve mistreated this lady again, I’ll hunt you down. And God help your cowardly hide, when I find you you’ll wish I hadn’t.”
He bowed his head briefly to Caro, still watching the other man. “Good night, ma’am. Sleep well.”
She grinned swiftly at Jeremiah from beneath the feather, more than enough thanks to please him, before she turned and ran to her coach. He didn’t wait to see her leave, not knowing whether or not the coachman might carry a gun beneath his box, but as he retreated back up toward the gate he could hear her adamantly refusing George a place in the carriage, with Ralston agreeing.
He uncocked his pistol and slipped it into his coat pocket on top of the diamonds as he retrieved the lantern from the lawn where he’d left it earlier. He still didn’t know why she’d come to his bedchamber to see him, let alone why she’d let him rob her. He thought of her neat pink toes beneath the dew-marked white silk, and the way she grinned at him like a fellow conspirator. Behind him he heard her voice raised again, this time over the noise of her carriage, as she called George a name more usually found in the vocabularies of seamen.
No, Caroline, Lady Byfield, wasn’t like anyone’s idea of a countess.
And for the first time since he’d lost the Chanticleer, Jeremiah laughed out loud.
“Go on, lad, it’s yours if you like raspberries.” Jeremiah held the jam cake out in the palm of his hand, coaxing his nephew, Johnny, to take it. “Myself, I’d choose the apple, but your mama does them both blessed well.”
The little boy stared seriously at the cake, his lips pursed with a four-year-old’s intensity and his hands clasped behind his waist in imitation of his father, the admiral. But that was the sum of his father that showed, for with his green eyes and dark hair, Johnny was all Sparhawk. If he’d ever stayed in one place long enough to father a son himself, thought Jeremiah with a little pang of regret, his boy would look like this one.
“Take it, lad. I swear it’s not poisoned.” Still the boy hesitated, looking back over his shoulder to his nursemaid for reassurance. Not that Jeremiah blamed him. He hadn’t much experience as an uncle, and this was the first time, quite by accident, that he’d been alone with the boy without Desire to ease the awkwardness. “Be bold now, Johnny. If you see a prize you want, why, you must seize it and make it your own.”
Johnny frowned, considering, and grabbed the cake and stuffed it into his mouth in one messy bite. Then he smiled at his uncle, displaying teeth so covered with crumbs and bits of raspberry jam that Jeremiah, appalled, found it very hard to smile back.
“Oh, Johnny, you know you’re not supposed to bother your uncle!” cried Desire as she hurried into the breakfast room as quickly as she could with her second child, Charlotte, clutching onto her skirts.
“No bother, Des, I swear,” said Jeremiah with more relief than he’d intended. “I thought he still seemed hungry, that’s all.”
“He’s always hungry for sweets.” She plucked a napkin from the table and bent down to scrub at the boy’s face while he squirmed and Charlotte gloated. “But that doesn’t mean the little rogue has to come begging to you.”
“He didn’t beg. I offered.”
“Truly, Jere?” She was slow to straighten, one hand on her back to balance the weight of the third child she carried within her, due in June. But still a beauty, thought Jeremiah proudly, the kind of tall, comely American woman that put all the little whey-faced English ladies to shame. “I’ve told him you’ve been ill, but children don’t always understand.”
“Stop fussing, Des. I’m as well now as I’ll ever be, and the boy did no harm.” He slipped his hand around his sister’s shoulder and guided her to her chair at the head of the table as the nursemaid herded the two children from the room. “You’re doing well enough by him, that’s clear. One look at him and you know he’s a sight more Sparhawk than Herendon.”
“Don’t forget whose roof you’re under,” Desire scolded, reaching out to smack his hand with her teaspoon. “No matter if it’s true, Jack will have your head if he hears you say it.”
“Hear you say what?” asked her husband as he came to stand behind her chair. His blond hair glinting in the morning sun, Admiral Lord John Herendon was the model of an English gentleman and officer, tall and handsome in the white and navy uniform he seemed born to wear. Desire smiled as she turned her face up toward him, her cheeks coloring with pleasure, and he rested his hand gently on the swell of her belly as he bent to kiss her.
The warm intimacy of the gesture made Jeremiah look down at his plate. If any two people in this world loved each other, it was Desire and Jack, and despite Jeremiah’s own misgivings about his sister’s choice of a husband, he had to admit that the marriage had brought her happiness and contentment.
He raised his gaze long enough to see them still wrapped in one another, his sister’s eyes blissfully closed. Though married for nearly five years, they behaved as shamelessly as newlyweds, perhaps because so much of that time they’d spent apart. For the first year, Desire had sailed with Jack on his flagship while the British Admiralty had benignly looked the other way, and Johnny had been born at sea in the admiral’s cabin and Charlotte begotten there. But then the war with France had worsened, and Desire had been forced to make a safer home alone on land for their children until the Treaty of Amiens last spring had brought Jack back to Portsmouth and the Channel Fleet.
Self-consciously buttering toast he had no real interest in eating, Jeremiah considered the dangers of loving as completely as Jack and Desire did, of placing all hope for joy and happiness in a single other person. He’d never known that kind of love himself, or particularly wanted it. Why should he? For him life seemed too uncertain for such unconditional devotion, and he’d been hurt enough by all he’d lost too soon—his mother, his father, his brother, friends and comrades—to willingly risk more.
Besides, he’d be thirty-seven his next birthday, far past the age for sentimental follies. He enjoyed women well enough—he thought again, pleasantly, of Lady Byfield— but he’d never found one worth giving up his freedom for, or would any of them, he thought wryly, consider him much of a bargain as a husband.
He looked up from the toast to his sister and brother-in-law in time to see them exchange one final kiss before Jack went to his own chair at the opposite end of the table, one more moment of such wordless tenderness that Jeremiah again looked hastily away with the same unfamiliar pang of regret he’d felt with little Johnny. What must it be like to love, and be loved, that much?
“You’re looking well this morning, Jeremiah,” declared Jack heartily, unaware of Jeremiah’s thoughts. “Though Desire was ready to give you up, I knew it would take more than that single sword swipe to finish a man like you.”
“I never gave him up!” said Desire indignantly. “I knew he wouldn’t die. Jere’s too ornery, even if that ‘single sword swipe’ was a gash as long as your arm, and then there was the infection on top of that, and floating in the sea for days on end.”
“It wasn’t quite that bad, Des,” said Jeremiah uncomfortably, wishing they’d find something else to bicker over. He was feeling better this morning, well enough that for the first time he’d dressed in the new clothes his sister had ordered for him when his own were lost. A fop’s rags, he grumbled as he’d looked in the mirror, but still he’d admitted to himself that the dark green coat looked handsome enough, and he’d taken extra care with how he’d tied his neckcloth and brushed his hair. The world seemed a more promising place this morning, and he didn’t want to be reminded about how close he’d come to dying. “Though I suppose I should be grateful for your confidence in my orneriness.”
“Orneriness be damned,” said Jack as he cut into the ham and poached eggs that the servant had placed before him. “If Jeremiah’s looking well this morning, I’m more willing to credit it to his own constitution and a good night’s sleep.”
“I wasn’t much for sleep last night. No time.” Jeremiah pulled Caro’s bracelets and earrings from his coat pocket where he’d left it for safekeeping and shoved them across the polished mahogany toward Jack.
Desire gasped, and Jack frowned and lay down his knife and fork.
“I had a visitor,” continued Jeremiah. “A lady who first found her way to my bedchamber and then tricked me into cozening some old sweetheart of hers into believing I was a highwayman. Gave me her jewels to prove it, too, as well as the man’s purse.”
Jack groaned. “Caro Moncrief.”
“Caro Moncrief?” repeated Desire incredulously. “In my house? In my brother’s bedchamber?”
“Aye, in my bedchamber.” Jeremiah was enjoying the sight of his usually unruffled brother-in-law squirming a bit, though for Desire’s sake he hoped the woman wasn’t yet another of the admiral’s former sweethearts. “Now, Jack, maybe you can explain how she came to be there. She said she’d told you all about it, which is a sight more than she ever bothered telling me.”
Jack sighed as he toyed with the fork on the plate before him. “She didn’t tell me everything. Caro never does.”
“Oh, honestly, Jack, if you’re not going to tell my brother about her, then I will,” said Desire. “The Countess of Byfield is even more lowborn than we poor Americans are, Jere. Her mother was an expensive woman of the town who actually sold her daughter to Byfield when she was scarcely more than a child. You can imagine the talk when the old earl married her.”
“Is he that much older?” Jeremiah remembered the stiff, startled way Caro had responded when he’d first kissed her. No wonder, with that kind of experience.
“Oh, Byfield’s vastly older!” said Desire with relish. “You’d take him to be her father at the very least, maybe even her grandfather. They almost never go out in society, but when they do it’s clear enough that they’re both, well, a bit peculiar. Goodness only knows what they do together in private. He makes her dress all in white, sometimes in classical dress all the way down to sandals on her bare feet and leaves in her hair, and he encourages her to do and say whatever she pleases as if she were some child brought down from the schoolroom to act clever for company. And then, of course, there is the dragon-of-a-dowager countess.”
“Desire, love,” said Jack mildly. “You’re gossiping.”
Desire rolled her eyes with mock dismay. “I’m not gossiping, Jack, I’m merely warning my brother before he becomes too enchanted with the creature.”
“To protect my virtue from a fallen woman?” asked Jeremiah with amusement.
“No, you great idiot, to keep you out of the courts! She’s never given the earl any children, so the heir is his nephew, and when the poor old man was lost at sea two years ago—”
“You mean she’s a widow?” That surprised Jeremiah; from the way Caro had spoken of her husband he’d assumed the man was snoring safely in his bed at home.
Desire shrugged. “Well, that’s what the world assumes. But Lady Byfield refuses to believe it and have her husband declared dead, and you can imagine what the nephew says about her to anyone who’ll listen. He’ll seize on any chance he gets to discredit her—what he’d make of her meeting a lover in our woods!—and I’d rather you didn’t get yourself tangled in the middle of it.”
“And I think your warning comes too late, sister mine,” said Jeremiah smugly as he swept the jewelry from the table and into his hand. A widow, and a baseborn one at that. His spirits rose a little higher. Maybe Caro Byfield tumbling into his path was a sign that at last his luck was changing. Lord knows it couldn’t get much worse, but she’d be a first-rate way to improve it. “Her being a widow changes everything, doesn’t it? You know I’ve always had a special fondness for consoling widows.”
Desire’s brow puckered with concern. “Oh, Jere, please don’t! This isn’t some whalerman’s merry lady that you can dally with for a week and then leave behind.”
“Two weeks, Des, two weeks.” His smile widened as he rose from the table. “Then I swear I’ll put the whole Atlantic Ocean between me and the pretty little countess. Now if you’ll excuse me—”
“Jeremiah, wait.” Jack’s expression was troubled as he, too, rose to his feet, the heavy damask napkin in his fist. “She didn’t ask you, did she?”
“To come to call? Nay, she didn’t, not in so many words, but I’d think her tossing her diamonds at me was invitation enough.”
“Not that, Jeremiah. She means to ask you about Hamil Al-Ameer.”
Jeremiah stopped, frozen with his hands gripping the back of his chair. She meant to ask him about Hamil. Hamil Al-Ameer: the man who’d robbed him of his ship, his crew, his friends. The heathen bastard who’d destroyed his peace, made him a shaking coward, kicked him bleeding from his own deck to die in the black waters of the night.
Blindly he stared past Jack and his sister, struggling to find something, anything, to make himself forget. Outside the window, Johnny and Charlotte were playing with a small, fat dog with pointed ears that jumped into the air for the ball they tossed. Desperately Jeremiah tried to focus on them: the two laughing children dressed in white, the green lawn still glittering with dew, the fat little dog jumping and twisting again and again for the red ball, innocence and sunshine and laughter.
But not for him. God help him, never again for him.
Chapter Three
Blackstone House, home to the last six earls of Byfield, was much as Jeremiah expected. Larger than his sister’s house, surrounded by far more land, Blackstone House was an elegant jumble of architectural fashions, from the oldest, sprawling wing of Elizabethan brick to the front facade of pale green limestone, a model of Palladian order, and arches with Doric pilasters that rose the full three stories high to the roof.
But nary a black stone in sight, thought Jeremiah wryly as he walked his horse down the long gravel drive. He didn’t like these ancient, overgrown English houses, reeking of endless capital and family histories so much older than his own country. As Desire explained it, Lord Byfield was only a middling sort of nobleman, yet his home was more grand than any to be found in New England, and Jeremiah thought of what a fool he’d been to babble on to Caro about his grandfather’s plantation house on Aquidneck Island. Crescent Hill would fit into the stables of Blackstone House and not be missed, but at least Caro Byfield would never have to know that. No, once he returned her jewelry, she wouldn’t learn another word about him.
As he climbed from his horse, a groom came running to take the reins, and slowly Jeremiah began up the long flight of steps to the door. He took his time, telling himself he wouldn’t wish to be winded before the countess, but reluctance slowed his steps far more than any exertion. If the diamonds hadn’t been so valuable, he could have sent them back with a messenger and been done with it, and with her.
His jaw tightened as he remembered what Jack had told him. Why would any lady want to speak of Hamil? Damn her, he wouldn’t talk of what he’d been through for her cheap amusement! Jack and Desire had pieced together the barest details from what the men who’d rescued him had said and from his own delirious ravings, but he’d refused to tell them anything more. Even if he could, what was the use of it? Better to forget. It was done, finished, and all the yammering in the world wouldn’t bring back the men who’d been slaughtered. Men who would still be alive if he hadn’t been so—
“Good day, sir.” The eight-paneled door swung open and a butler nearly as tall as Jeremiah himself gravely met his eye. “Your name, sir?”
“Captain Sparhawk, but it doesn’t signify since I’m not staying.” Still on the step, he held out the small flannel bag—Desire’s contribution—that held Caro’s jewelry. “Give this to your mistress, and be quick about it. Go on, man, take it, don’t keep her waiting!”
“Why Captain Sparhawk, how splendid to see you again so soon!” Caro poked her head around the butler’s arm, crowding him in the doorway. “Do show him in, Weldon. He’s quite an agreeable man, for all he’s glowering fit to burst at present.”
Stiffly Weldon stepped aside, bowing his powdered head as slightly as he could.
But Jeremiah chose not to enter. “Thank you, ma’am, but no,” he said as he handed her the little bag. “I’ve only come to return your property, and that done, I’ll wish you good day.”
“Oh, fah, don’t be so pompous!” Impulsively Caro seized him by the sleeve and tugged. “Why else did you dress yourself so handsomely if you didn’t mean to call on me?”
“I cannot, ma’am.” Jeremiah tried to disentangle his arm while she laughed and clung to him and Weldon’s disapproval grew more and more apparent. The devil take the woman for making him feel like such a fool! “My sister expects me to return shortly.”
“I’ll vow a man like you has never answered to a woman in his life, let alone his sister,” said Caro, her tone shrewd as she released his arm. She smiled gleefully. “But then I should remember that myself, shouldn’t I?”
“Aye, ma’am, perhaps you should.” Jeremiah tried to look stern. Here in the morning sun he could see she wore no paint nor powder on her face, and little gold freckles that matched her lashes were scattered beguilingly across the bridge of her nose. Her cropped hair was simply dressed with a white ribbon across the brow, and only a narrow band of white work decorated the hem of her muslin dress.
She drew herself straight, folding her hands neatly before her as she carefully composed her expression. To Jeremiah’s surprise, she succeeded, for though nothing else had changed she suddenly looked every inch an imperious, aristocratic countess. Frederick, wherever he was, would be proud.
“If you would be so kind as to favor me with your company, Captain,” she said, her smile now no more than the merest genteel curve, “I would be quite honored. For a moment, that is all I beg of you. Only long enough so that I might thank you properly for your—your services last night.”
The butler sniffed, and inwardly Jeremiah groaned, guessing too well what services the man was imagining. At least if they went indoors they’d be free from Weldon. “Very well, then. But mind, not long.”
Jeremiah followed her down a long hall with a marble floor like a checkerboard. Lining the hallway on either side were life-size statues raised up on half-column pedestals. Some of the statues were men, some women, and all were mostly naked, and worldly though he considered himself, Jeremiah’s pace slowed as he passed beneath the line of sightless marble eyes. He’d been in his twenties before he’d seen a statue like these, in an expensive Jamaican fancy house, and he and his mates had marveled over the ancient goddess’s marble breasts and bottom for days afterward. What must it be like, especially for a lady, to live with such things every day?
As if she read his thoughts, Caro turned to face him, running her fingers lightly along the knee of young man with a kind of shawl draped over one shoulder and not a stitch more.
“He looks rather bashful, don’t you think? Almost shy,” she said. “Not very good for a warrior, which is what Frederick says he’s supposed to be. I never remember his true name, something ancient and foreign, so I call him Bartholomew instead. Bart’s one of my favorites.”
Jeremiah made a noncommittal sound between a grunt and a cough. “He doesn’t look like any Bart I’ve ever known.”
“Ah well, he’ll always be Bart to me.” She patted the statue’s muscular thigh with a fond familiarity that unsettled Jeremiah. She glanced up at him archly. “But then, of course, you’d prefer the ladies. Gentlemen do.”
She laughed merrily as she walked away from him. At the end of the hallway was a tall arched window, and the sunlight filtered through the sheer muslin of her gown, silhouetting the curves of her body as plainly as the statues that flanked her. Jeremiah swallowed, unable to draw his eyes away though he knew he must. For her to be ignorant of how much the sunlight revealed was bad enough, but what if she knew the effect, what if she’d planned it to entice him?
“Ma’am.” He looked down, away from her and away from the statues, and was surprised to see his hands clenched in tight fists at his sides. “Ma’am, I told you before I didn’t have much time.”
“Then it’s just as well we’re here,” she said as she reached the end of the hallway and threw open the double doors to the right. “This is the Yellow Room. My sitting room. Not even Frederick can enter without knocking. He calls it my—oh, what was it?—my ‘sanctuary.”
He would have known this place was hers even if she’d said nothing. Unlike the chilly formality of the rest of the house, this room was warm with color and cheerfully cluttered. The paneled walls were white with gilded trim, each centered with a painting of overblown roses spilling from baskets. More flowers formed the design of the soft wool carpet underfoot, and real ones—daffodils, hyacinths, Dutch tulips that filled the air with their scent—in Chinese porcelain vases clustered along the mantelpiece and table-tops among figurines of commedia dell’arte characters and sly-faced cats. The hangings and upholstery were all of yellow silk damask, and piled in the chairs and sofa were plump down-filled cushions with gold tassels.
Caro dropped into one of these, propped her feet up on a gilded stool as she carelessly tossed the bag with her bracelets and earrings onto the table beside her. She waved her hand airily for him to sit in the chair opposite hers. As if, thought Jeremiah, they were the oldest of friends; as if he hadn’t come here intending never to see her again.
“I really must thank you for saving me last night, Captain Sparhawk. Not that George would have done me any genuine harm, but your arrival was quite fortuitous. And, oh my, to see how he squirmed before you as a highwayman!” She clapped her hands with the fingers spread so only the palms touched. “I trust you won’t return his purse and ring to him, too. He’d only squander it on gaming, and besides, if he learned to do without then he might stop badgering me for more.”
Still standing, Jeremiah frowned, not liking the sound of a man who badgered a woman for money. “I dropped them both in the poor box at the seamen’s chapel in Portsmouth.”
“How perfect! Most likely it’s the first time he’s ever given a farthing to anyone other than his tailor.” She tugged on one of the ringlets held back by the ribbon, twisting the hair around her finger, and though she smiled, it seemed to Jeremiah that some of her merriment had slipped away. “You were very good to come to my rescue, especially since you’d just sent me on my way for trespassing. You were quite right, of course. I’d no business being there in your room that way without any reason, good or bad.”
He didn’t answer at first, and beneath the weight of his silence her cheeks slowly flushed. “You had a reason,” he said, wishing she’d told him the truth. “At least that’s what Jack told me.”
“I thought he might.” She pulled a daffodil from the vase beside her, pretending to study it to avoid meeting Jeremiah’s gaze. “He’s been so good to me through this, you know, always telling me whatever he could from the admiralty, but even he can’t perform miracles.”
She looked at him wistfully, her eyes bright with tears. “I thought you might be like that, too, for no other reason than that I wished it so. More likely you judge me as great a fool as the rest of the world, but I won’t believe that Frederick’s truly gone. I can’t believe it. That’s why I couldn’t let you kiss me, you see. You’re a very nice man, and a handsome one, too, but I love Frederick, and he’s my husband. If I’d kissed you, that would be as much as admitting that he wasn’t coming back. And God help me, I can’t do that.”