Hadrian (42 page)

“I’ll take the best care of her, Fen, and do my utmost to make her happy.” For in the ways that mattered, Fenwick was the one relinquishing Avie into Hadrian’s arms.

“See that you do. Now what has troubled your febrile imagination?”

“I wrote to Avie when I was off to Oxford all those years ago. What happened to that letter?”

The breeze stirred the leaves twittering on the birches, a current of not quite cool air laden with the scent of dying undergrowth.

“Lily was not on hand to steal any letters twelve years ago,” Fen said. “Avis wasn’t on hand either. She told me she was off to her Aunt’s for some time with Lady Alex immediately following Collins’s assault.”

“I sent my first letters to her here at Blessings. Let’s say they went astray, or Vim held them for her and forgot about them—or perhaps they passed those letters to Lily. What I want to know, though, is happened to the letter I sent
less than seven years ago
, before I married Rue?”

Fen uncrossed his ankles and sat up. “You think because Lily Prentiss dealt in notes, she might also have been tampering with correspondence?”

Hadrian knew it, the way he’d known, two minutes into a sermon on marriage, which of his flock had been straying.

“I want my letters, Fen. Lily Prentiss was sly, conniving and not quite rational, and she coveted everything Avis was owed, everything Avis was. It makes sense Ben or Vim would might have given her the early letters to pass along to Avis at an appropriate moment, but what of the most recent one? I want your help searching Lily’s quarters.”

Fen stood, and shadows cast by the birches danced over his features, giving his countenance a fey, whimsical quality. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t allow Avie to burn all of Lily’s effects. Come along, Bothwell, lest the footmen find your maudlin prose and read it to the maids.”

Hadrian rose and fell in step beside Fen, whose pace was brisk indeed.

“Do I take it you haven’t inventoried Lily’s effects yet yourself?”

“Not successfully.”

Ah, well. “Two heads are better than one,” Hadrian said, “though one appreciates loyalty and initiative in one’s friends.”

Fen paused, his hand on the door to a side entrance. “Good to know, Bothwell. One appreciates a tolerant nature as well.”

“You can’t help it that your singing voice is abominable. Get moving.”

Avis had spent half the morning reading and rereading two of Hadrian’s letters, which Lily—may she end her days scrubbing chamberpots in her mother’s pokey little cottage—had secreted in her sewing basket.

“Come along, my dear, or we’ll be late.” A tanned, bearded, and smiling version of Harold, Viscount Landover, waited in the doorway to Avis’s private parlor. “Hadrian will suffer apoplexies if I deliver you to the church even one minute past the appointed hour.”

Avis rose, for she did not want to be even one second late. “Will I do, Harold?” She turned for him, enjoying the swish and sway of a soft green dress she’d been saving for a special occasion.

“You are a vision, a happy one, I think.”

“I am happy, and by the end of the day, I expect to be happier.”

Avis took his arm, and let him escort her to his coach. She wished her siblings might have attended the wedding, but in their absence—Alexandra’s letter was late this month for some reason—Harold was the nearest thing she had to family.

Then too, delaying the wedding another few weeks to allow her siblings to travel to Blessings had no appeal whatsoever.

“Are you nervous, Avis?”

“Of course, not. People get married all the time. A small ceremony on a pretty morning shouldn’t be an occasion for nerves.”

“Very sensible of you.” Harold looked so much like Hadrian when he smiled.

“If Fenwick were here, he’d threaten to turn you over his knee for smirking like that, Harold Bothwell.”

“Fenwick is at the church, ensuring a certain brother of mine is present for this small ceremony.”

Hadrian would be at the church, of that, Avis had no doubt. Twelve years ago, he’d written to Avis not to ask for her hand, but to ask her permission to wait for her until she was ready to hear a proposal of marriage.

Seven years ago, he’d written again, to ask if there were any hope of paying her his addresses, for she’d remained dear to him, and was daily in his prayers. Avis had needed those prayers desperately, and would thank Hadrian for them after the ceremony.

“That is not the look of a woman anticipating holy matrimony with her adored swain,” Harold said. “Shall I turn the coach around?”

“Don’t you dare, Harold. I was thinking that if Lily’s sole transgression were to steal a certain letter Hadrian wrote to me seven years ago, I’d still wish Lily to the Antipodes.”

“And rightly so, but I can assure you, East Bogmore is a worse fate than the Antipodes. I made inquires, Avis, and neither Mr. Prentiss nor his wife is possessed of a sweet temper. Lily will step and fetch for both of them as well as for her mother’s older sisters, and have the cold pity of the entire parish.”

“Fitting, considering how lavishly she pitied me.” That pity would devastate Lily, and was probably the most arduous penance that could be inflicted on her.

The carriage slowed, and despite Avis’s brave lies to Harold, butterflies leapt in her middle. The ceremony would be very quiet, and yet, it would be at the church. Avis had avoided the church and nearly all gatherings with her neighbors for years.

“Courage,” Harold said at the coachman halted the team. “Hadrian is arse over teakettle for you, and he has paid many, many calls this week in anticipation of your nuptials.”

This was news to Avis, who’d assumed Hadrian had spent his time overseeing the harvest, enjoying the final days of Harold’s visit, and readying Landover to receive the next lady of the manor.

“I would have paid those calls with him, Harold,” Avis said, though she would not have enjoyed them.

“There’s something you need to know, Avis, something I’m sure Hadrian plans to tell you after the ceremony, so please contrive to be surprised when you hear this news.”

Harold’s gaze reflected no merriment, but they were at the church, so surely his news could not be entirely bad.

“Tell me,” she said, “for in less than a minute, I intend to dash up that church aisle and become Mrs. Hadrian Bothwell.”

“Benjamin sent a pigeon with the news that Hart Collins has died in riding accident. Lady Alex was apparently in the vicinity at the time, though Ben has yet to provide the details. Alex is fine, Ben is fine. You will be fine too.”

He climbed out of the coach, while Avis anticipated some sense of relief, some change,
something
as a result of Collins’s departure from the earthly realm.

All she felt was impatience, and a burning urgency to speak her vows. Hart Collins could indeed, well and truly, finally, be laid to rest. She would be grateful for that realization just as soon as she was married to Hadrian, and had celebrated the blessings of the wedded state at length and enthusiastically.

Avis climbed out of the carriage, into a church yard as crowded with vehicles as it might have been on Easter morning.

“Harold, what are all of these coaches doing here?”

“I haven’t a clue,” Harold said, leading her up the steps to the church doorway. “Hadrian’s inside, Avis, his heart in his throat, his gaze glued to the doors he hopes you’ll come through any moment. Fen’s ready to drag you up the aisle if you don’t go willingly, and James and I will abet him.”

Harold was smiling. He was also in deadly earnest. Avis put her gloved hand on his arm and two liveried footmen swung the doors wide.

A moment later Avis approached the altar and saw Hadrian, her friend, her fiancé, her lover, her every wish, dream, and hope come true. He stood at the altar beside a smiling Fenwick, his hand extended to her for all to see. Flute music filled her ears, soaring and sweet, while the entire congregation rose in a show of respect and goodwill.

Hadrian had done this—filled the church with nearly every soul in the shire, some of whom Avis barely knew, but each of whom she’d be happy to get to know in the churchyard, at the assemblies, at market, and as Landover’s lady.

No bride ever received a more precious or appreciated wedding gift from her groom. When Hadrian kissed his wife shortly thereafter, the applause shook the rafters of the little church.

Ashton Justician Bothwell was born exactly eight and a half months after the wedding, and his christening was attended by his family’s Danish contingent, the entire shire, and his godfather, the newly belted Earl of Kilkenney.

He was soon blessed with siblings a-plenty, not a one of whom showed a vocation for the church, and all of whom—including his sisters—had a sorry tendency to practice their archery in the Landover portrait gallery.

“Your Grace, you have a caller.”

Christian had been at his London town house for three days and nights, and still his entire household, from butler to boot boy, seemed helpless not to beam at him.

He’d been tortured, repeatedly, for months, and they were grinning like dolts. To see them happy, to feel the weight of the entire household smiling at him around every turn made him furious, and that—his unabating, irrational reaction—made him anxious.

Even Carlton House had sent an invitation, and Christian’s court attire would hang on him like some ridiculous shroud.

The butler cleared his throat.

Right. A caller. “This late?”

“She says her business is urgent.”

By the standards of London in springtime, nine in the evening was one of the more pleasant hours, but by no means did one receive calls at such an hour.

“Who is she?”

Meems crossed the study, a silver tray in his hand bearing a single card on cream vellum.

“I do not recall a Lady Greendale.” Though a Greendale estate lay several hours ride from Severn. Lord Greendale was a pompous old curmudgeon forever going on in the Lords about proper respect and decent society. An embossed black band crossed one corner of the card, indicating the woman was a widow, perhaps still in mourning.

“I’m seeing no callers, Meems. You know that.”

“Yes, quite, Your Grace, as you’re recovering. Quite. She says she’s family.” Behind the smile Meems barely contained lurked a worse offense yet: hope. The old fellow hoped His Grace might admit somebody past the threshold of Mercia House besides a man of business or running footman.

Christian ran his fingertip over the crisp edge of the card. Gillian, Countess of Greendale, begged the favor of a call. Some elderly cousin of his departed parents, perhaps. His memory was not to be relied upon in any case.

Duty came in strange doses. Like the need to sign dozens of papers simply so the coin earned by the duchy could be used to pay the expenses incurred by the duchy. Learning to sign his name with his right hand had been a frustrating exercise in duty. Christian had limited himself to balling up papers and tossing them into the grate rather than pitching the ink pot.

“Show her into the family parlor.”

“There will be no need for that.” A small blond woman brushed past Meems and marched up to Christian’s desk. “Good evening, Your Grace. Gillian, Lady Greendale.”

She bobbed a miniscule curtsy suggesting a miniscule grasp of the deference due his rank, much less of Meems’s responsibility for announcing guests. “We have family business to discuss.”

No, Christian silently amended, she had no grasp whatsoever, and based on her widow’s weeds, no husband to correct the lack.

And yet, this lady was in mourning, and around her mouth were brackets of fatigue. She was not in any sense smiling, and looked as if she might have forgotten how.

A welcome divergence from the servants’ expressions.

“Meems, a tray, and please close the door as you leave.”

Christian rose from his desk, intent on shifting to stand near the fire, but the lady twitched a jacket from her shoulders and handed it to him. Her garment was a gorgeous black silk business, embroidered with aubergine thread along its hems. The feel of the material was sumptuous in Christian’s hands, soft, sleek, luxurious, and warm from her body heat. He wanted to hold it—simply to hold it—and to bring it to his nose, for it bore the soft floral scent of not a woman, but a lady.

The reminders he suffered of his recent deprivations increased rather than decreased with time.

“Now, then,” she said, sweeping the room with her gaze.

He was curious enough at her presumption that he folded her jacket, draped it over a chair, and let a silence build for several slow ticks of the mantel clock.

“Now, then,” he said, more quietly than she, “if you’d care to have a seat, Lady Greendale?”

She had to be a May-December confection gobbled up in Lord Greendale’s dotage. The woman wasn’t thirty years old, and she had a curvy little figure that caught a man’s eye. Or it would catch a man’s eye, had he not been more preoccupied with how he’d deal with tea-tray inanities when he couldn’t stomach tea.

She took a seat on the sofa facing the fire, which was fortunate, because it allowed Christian his desired proximity to the heat. He propped an elbow on the mantel and wished, once again, that he’d tarried at Severn.

“My lady, you have me at a loss. You claim a family connection, and yet memory doesn’t reveal it to me.”

“That’s certainly to the point.” By the firelight, her hair looked like antique gold, not merely blond. Her tidy bun held coppery highlights, and her eyebrows looked even more reddish. Still, her appearance did not tickle a memory, and he preferred willowy blonds in any case.

Had preferred them.

“I thought we’d chitchat until the help is done eavesdropping, Your Grace. Perhaps exchange condolences. You have mine, by the way. Very sincerely.”

Her piquant features softened with her words, her sympathy clear in her blue eyes, though it took Christian a moment to puzzle out for what.