The Earl's Untouched Bride (28 page)

'But I do not have a portfolio to show you. It was lost...' Well, at least most of it was 'lost', burnt, actually '... when I left France.'

'Oh, how disappointing,' drawled Lady Danvers sarcastically. 'I am sure we have missed a rare treat.' She exchanged a knowing smile with Lady Masterson.

Heloise gasped. The woman was accusing her of being a liar to her face!

Lydia Bentinck, one of a trio of elderly spinsters, sniffed loudly before saying, 'There is more to being a lady of quality than being able to draw, or play the piano, or ride a horse. I have always held that good manners are an absolute prerequisite.' She looked pointedly at Lady Danvers. 'So sadly lacking in many these days.'

Lady Danvers' eyes snapped with fury. While she struggled to find a suitably cutting come back, Diana Bentinck turned to Heloise and enquired, 'What sort of drawings do you do?'

'People. I do sketches of people.'

'Oh, how charming. Would you do a sketch of me and my sisters? I should love to have a likeness. Or would it take too long?'

She was on the point of refusing, out of deference to Charles' views, when she caught sight of Lady Danvers' lip curling in derision.

'I would be glad to sketch you,' she declared defiantly. 'Please to take seats close together, while I find some materials.'

By this time one of the other ladies, a Mrs Goulding, had taken a seat at the piano, and while Heloise unearthed some sheets of writing paper from a desk drawer she began to pick out the bare bones of a Haydn sonata. From her reticule, Heloise produced the sliver of charcoal which she was never without. While the Bentinck sisters fluttered about the three chairs they had decided to pose on, arguing as to which order they should sit, either by age or by size, and whether one should stand behind the other two to make an interesting group, Heloise's nimble fingers flew across the page. By the time they were settled she was able to walk over to them, holding out her finished work.

'Why,' exclaimed Lydia, 'this is quite remarkable!'

Three grey heads bent to examine the sparse lines on the creamy vellum. They could see Lydia standing over her two seated siblings. Diana was holding out her hand, palm upwards, while Grace had her head tilted to one side, a pensive frown knitting her brows. Though each pose denoted a certain amount of conflict, each woman was also expressing a strong affection for the other two, so that the overall impression was one of harmony.

'I cannot believe you did that so quickly!' Diana Bentinck cried.

'It was not so quick.' They had been bickering gently for several minutes, and she had always found it a simple matter to reproduce an accurate physical likeness.

'I am sorry that it is only on writing paper...' she began.

But, 'Oh, no!' the three sisters cried simultaneously. 'This paper has the Walton crest on it. What a lovely reminder it will be to us of a delightful evening spent at Wycke!'

The vicar's wife had now sidled up to her. 'Oh, I should love to have a sketch drawn by you, Lady Walton,' she gushed.

'As you wish,' Heloise replied, picking up her charcoal.

Fortunately, she had not had time to study these people too closely, and so link them inextricably in her mind with some member of the animal kingdom. So she managed, with some application, to repress her imagination and stick to a strictly literal likeness of her next subject. The resultant sketch was exclaimed over, passed round, and generated such excitement that several other ladies asked if she would do their portraits too.

She became so deeply absorbed that she noticed neither the passage of time nor the arrival in the music room of the gentlemen. All she did see, when she handed Miss Masterson her finished sketch, was the smile which lit up her face.

'Do I really look like that?' the girl exclaimed, running a finger wonderingly over the smudged lines of her portrait. Her face clouded. 'I think you must have been flattering me.'

'Not in the least,' Charles said, startling Heloise. She'd had no idea he was standing behind her chair. 'My wife never flatters her sitters. She has the knack, though, of putting something of the subject's personality in beyond the physical likeness. Perhaps that is what you recognise in your own portrait, Miss Masterson?'

Heloise did not know what to make of this remark. Perhaps his oblique reference to the way she habitually portrayed people as the animals they reminded her of was a warning to behave herself?

'You must do my son,' Lady Masterson said. 'Now that you have managed to make my stepdaughter look so fetching.'

Heloise hesitated. She would have been thrilled at winning over one of her major opponents so easily, were she not so scared of offending Charles. Warily, she looked to him for guidance. But his expression gave her no clues.

She pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the drawer of the writing desk as young Thomas Masterson took the seat his older sister had just vacated.

Why did she never think about the consequences before acting? she berated herself. It had been just the same in that stupid card game. Only tonight it had been Lady Danvers who had goaded her into losing her temper and acting in a way that was guaranteed to displease Charles. Gripping the charcoal tightly, she paused to examine the young man's features for a moment or two before setting to work.

Charles watched in fascination as her fingers flew across the paper. He had never seen her drawing before. She had pitched her work this evening in a way that was guaranteed to please their guests. His heart swelled with pride. She could so easily have taken revenge for the various snubs she had borne earlier, by accentuating the uglier aspects of her neighbours. Instead, she brought out the best in them. She had even managed to make the dreary Miss Masterson look interesting, transforming her habitually vacant stare into the dreamy reverie of a
savant
.

She was so talented. He ached to tell her so. He pondered how best to word the compliment, savouring the knowledge that it was the very one he could pay her that would please her.

And while they were on the subject he must ask her pardon for forcing her to burn that sketchbook. If she could forgive him that one transgression... His heart-rate picked up dramatically. Had he finally found the key that might unlock his wife's heart?

He could hardly wait for the last of his tedious guests to leave so that he could make his declaration.

'I am sorry you did not have an easy time of it this evening,' he began, his expression sobering as he recalled Colonel Masterson's rudeness, and imagined the barbed comments he was sure the spiteful Lady Danvers must have let fly. 'But I believe most of our guests went away having been tolerably well entertained.'

His words struck at her like a blow from a fist. Though she had very nearly disgraced him, he seemed to be saying, his neighbours had been gracious enough to overlook all her inadequacies.

'Then may I go to my room, now?'

'Very well,' he conceded, battening down his eagerness to put his new plan of action in train. He followed her into the hall and watched her ascend the stairs. He would give her a few minutes before following her, and then...

'A word, if you please, Walton!'

Robert's harsh voice abruptly shattered his fantasies. He turned to see his half-brother emerge from the shadows beneath the bend in the great staircase.

'Ashamed of me, are you?' Robert began, with no preamble.

'I beg your pardon?' Why did he have to pick such an inappropriate moment to pick a quarrel? 'You'd better come into my study.'

Striding past his brother, he flung open the door and went in. He was not going to participate in any kind of a scene in the hall, where angry words would echo up to the rafters.

'What is it?' he said with impatience, going from habit to the side table on which rested a decanter of fine cognac and several glasses.

'I want to know why you excluded me tonight,' Robert began, stumping angrily along in his wake. 'Why the devil drag me down here if all you do is shut me away like some...?'

Abruptly his words petered out as he caught sight of the portrait that hung above Charles' desk.

'That's my mother!' he exclaimed in indignation. 'Why have you got a picture of my mother in your study? Why isn't she up in the gallery with all the reputable Waltons?'

'When have
you
been up in the picture gallery?'

Robert looked a little discomforted, but did not admit that he had bribed Finch to show him round at times when he knew neither Giddings nor Mrs Lanyon nor Charles would discover he had done so.

'Well, I am glad you have been exploring your home, though had I known you wished to do so I would gladly have been your guide...'

'Oh, would you?' he sneered. 'When you hide me away from your neighbours as though you are ashamed of owning such a brother!'

'I have done no such thing! I had nothing to do with the arrangements. Heloise...' He frowned. She had left the whole thing to Mrs Lanyon. Did the housekeeper have a problem with Robert's presence in the house? Might she even have some lingering loyalties to the Lamptons?

'Oh, hell,' said Robert, casting himself into a chair and easing the position of his wooden leg with his good hand. 'My cursed temper! I've upset her. I wondered at the time...though normally when I rip up at her she gives it me back threefold.'

'Here.' Charles pressed a glass of cognac into his hand and settled behind the desk.

'I wish you wouldn't be so damned reasonable all the time,' Robert grumbled. 'If only you would shout back at me just once in a while, instead of being so... icily polite, I shouldn't feel so...so...'

Charles shrugged one shoulder. 'My guardians did a sterling job of raising me after the pattern of my own mother's irreproachable forebears. Although...' he swivelled in his chair to gaze at the portrait that hung there '...when I gaze upon your mother's face I can remember a time when things were very different here at Wycke. It was only from the day they ousted her it became this cold, inhospitable mausoleum. They told me she had abandoned me.' He took a large gulp of the cognac. 'I was eight years old. She was the only mother I had ever known. She had always seemed warm and loving, to both me and my father. Suddenly it was as if I had never known her at all. How could a woman turn her back on a child who had just lost his father?'

'She didn't!' Robert defended her. 'They sent her back to her family and then threw all their weight into crushing her spirit!'

'For which crime I shall never be able to forgive them.'

His eyes grew so cold that Robert took a swig of his cognac to counteract the chill that pervaded the whole room.

'You should have grown up here, with me. We should have climbed trees, fished in the lake, and played at Knights and Saracens in the ruined tower. If your mother had been here she would have made sure I went to school rather than being walled up here with a succession of tutors.'

'I never appreciated you may have felt like this.' Robert frowned into his glass. 'I always assumed that the quarrel you started with the Lamptons when you came of age was to do with money...'

'Money! Oh, no. They were always scrupulously honest when it came to my finances. It was something far more valuable they robbed me of.' His eyes returned to the portrait of the dark-haired woman smiling down at her boys. 'Something irreplaceable. My childhood.'

After an awkward pause, Robert managed to mumble, 'Grown up in the habit of hating you, but I have to concede of late you have been very generous to me... '

Charles made a dismissive gesture with his hand. 'I have done nothing but restore what should always have been yours. How our father managed to make such a botch of his will...'

It was the opening he had longed for since the day he'd discovered he had a brother. As the level in the brandy bottle steadily dropped, the two men managed to discuss, for the most part relatively cordially, the woman they had both called mother, and the events that had led up to her tragic demise.

By the time Charles went upstairs and softly entered his wife's room she was fast asleep.

'Oh, my darling,' he murmured, bending to kiss her sleep flushed cheek. 'Thanks to you, my brother has been restored to me.'

Gently, he brushed one stray lock of hair from her forehead, before retreating to his own room. If she did not come down for breakfast in the morning he would send a note, requesting she join him in his study as soon as she was awake. He had learned a valuable lesson from his long, and painful interview with Robert. His brother had attributed nefarious motives to all his actions. It was not until he had spelled out exactly why he had taken what steps he had that Robert had finally managed to let go of years of resentment.

He needed to have just such a conversation with his wife.

Heloise stared at the curt little note she held in her hand with a sinking heart. Charles requested her presence in his study as soon as she woke. Pushing her breakfast tray to one side, she swung her legs out of bed. He must be so angry with her for flouting his wishes the night before. She did not wish to make him any angrier by keeping him waiting. She went straight to her washroom, pulling off her nightgown and tossing it aside in her haste to begin her toilette.