The Marsh Hawk (2 page)

Jenna would have been much happier at Thistle Hollow, her own family estate near Launceston. That was certainly what should be, according to etiquette, but when Lady Marner approached Jenna's mother with the alternative of Moorhaven, the dowager jumped at the chance. Though the long year of mourning for her husband was over, Lady Hollingsworth welcomed yet another opportunity to prolong the sympathetic attention she'd so enjoyed—milked to the limit as Jenna viewed it—as long as she possibly could.

Truth be told, she would have preferred not to have the celebration at all, or the wedding either, come to that. She had no desire to marry anyone—least of all Rupert of the Vacant Eyes, as she had dubbed him. Not that he wasn't handsome; quite the contrary. But he was also affected and, as rumor had it, promiscuous. Nevertheless, to join their houses with the union was what her father had wanted, what she owed his memory. Besides, independence was impossible now. After what she'd done, she needed protection. Not the insipid protection of the twenty-nine-year-old tedious bore that was her husband-to-be, but of his house. The Marners were respected aristocrats. No one would dare accuse the viscount's wife of anything, and sins did have a way of surfacing after all. Hadn't Lord Fordenbridge's scandalous alliance with wreckers along the coast come out two whole years after the fact? Albeit in self-defense, as it turned out, and not at all what she had intended, she had done
murder
.

Just what she would have done if the highwayman hadn't attempted to draw that pistol, she feared to wonder; she hadn't thought beyond her passion for vengeance at the time. Murder, however, was never a part of the plan. She was determined to do what the law would not: bring a guilty man to justice. Even if she hadn't been recognized, she had been seen. It was like a nightmare, except that she was wide-awake, and the horror was real. Rupert was insurance, nothing more. The marriage was a smart move . . . only that. She'd almost convinced herself.

Carriages of every type had been arriving all afternoon—the high-perch and low-perch phaetons of close neighbors, twoseater broughams, coupes, curricles, cabriolets, with their leather hoods folded back to take advantage of the beaming sun, and chaises in every conceivable color and description. They congested the circular drive. She'd wondered how the carriage house would ever accommodate them all, until Emily, her lady's maid, told her she'd overheard one of the footmen say that the overflow would go to the posting house in the village. How the posting house would ever manage such an influx, she couldn't imagine, as still more vehicles flooded the drive.

“Jenna, come away from there!” Lady Hollingsworth scolded, close in her ear. She lurched at the sound of her mother's voice and spun to face her. The dowager gave a start herself and tottered backward. “You mustn't gawk like a common scullion,” she said. “Someone might see you. What can you be thinking?”

“Isn't that why they've all come,” Jenna asked tersely. “To size me up?”

“Don't be impertinent. There's never an occasion for it, dear. What ails you? I've never seen you in such a taking as you have been lately.”

Jenna couldn't reply to that. She couldn't very well tell her mother she'd killed a man on the old Lamorna Road one dark night on the cusp of spring. It had only been two months, but it seemed like a lifetime ago.

There was no question that her conscience was bothering her. Twenty-two-year-old young ladies of quality did not go around committing black murder in the dead of night. And she was regretting her betrothal to Rupert before it had even officially begun. She would never have bent to her mother's will over that if there had been no murder and she were in her right mind. She would never have agreed to the match if her father were still living, even if it was his greatest wish. She could have charmed him out of it if the Marsh Hawk hadn't killed him and robbed her of the chance to try.

“There! You see?” her mother said, jarring her back to the present. “You haven't heard one word I've said.”

“I've heard you, Mother,” she replied, emptying her lungs on a gusty sigh. She turned back to the window and gestured toward the mullioned panes. “I'm looking for familiar faces. Thus far I've seen none.”

“You will, dear,” her mother soothed. Peering over her shoulder, she craned her neck for a closer look below. “There—the Markhams, and Lady Chester-White, and there . . . the Warrenfords and their two daughters. You remember? The oldest girl had her come-out last season. What is her name . . . Rowena . . . Regina?”

“Rosemary, Mother.”

“There, beside the garden wall—the Ecclestons' brougham. See?” Lady Hollingsworth wagged a thick, wrinkled finger, encumbered by an enormous emerald, toward the drive. “Before the masque is over you'll not only have been reunited with old friends, you'll have made new ones—important ones for you and Rupert, dear.” She glanced around the room and craned her neck again, this time in the direction of Jenna's open bedchamber door across the way. “Has Emily unpacked your costume?”

“Not yet,” she replied. She had elected to attend the masque costumed as a swan. The celebrated French modiste, Marie Flaubert, whose Bond Street salon in London was the talk of society—generally referred to as the ton—had designed her a silk gown completely covered in white feathers, with a graceful cape to match that attached to her arms on silk bands simulating wings. It featured a lifelike, feathered cowl, complete with beak that covered her head like a second skin. Thinking of the costume crammed into her portmanteau with her dinner gowns, daytime and afternoon frocks, and riding habit, she could almost hear the modiste's shrill
“mon Dieu”
after carefully stitching each one of those feathers in place by hand.

“I'll fetch the bird-witted gel at once!” Lady Elizabeth shrilled. She sucked in a hasty breath. “She'll have to steam those feathers—or whatever one does with feathers to put them into shape; I have no idea. Meanwhile, go down and eat something, Jenna. You're nearly a married lady. I shouldn't have to tell you these things. Where is your head, girl?”

An elaborate buffet had been set up in the dining hall downstairs: assorted cold meats and cheeses, and an endless assortment of hot entrees kept warm in chafing dishes, since the guests would be straggling in throughout the day. There were delectable desserts as well, an entire table devoted to them, along with bowls of champagne punch, and ratafia, as well as silver pots of tea for those so inclined, kept hot by liveried footmen decked out in green and gold, who also managed to keep the food in good supply. This would continue throughout the evening, so that the guests could slip in from the masque, held in the Grand Ballroom across the hall, and avail themselves of the fare whenever they wished.

Jenna wasn't particularly hungry. She wasn't opposed to a tray in her room, but she certainly didn't want to pick at food in the dining hall among fawning, gawking strangers. She wanted to preserve anonymity as long as was possible. That meant keeping to herself until the masque. But Lady Elizabeth was just as determined to display her as she was to hide, and with a firm grip on her arm, the dowager steered her into the hall and propelled her toward the landing.

Halfway down the carpeted stairs and still protesting, Jenna froze on the step. A gentleman was watching their descent from the terrazzo floor below. Others were milling around him, but he appeared to be alone, a striking figure of a man, whom she assessed to be in his midthirties, with the most astonishing eyes she had ever gazed into. Long, dark lashes wreathed them, lashes that any woman would have envied; they gave him a dreamy, suggestive look. He was standing beneath a candle sconce, and the flames ignited the deep-set eyes behind those sweeping lashes, making them bluer than they had any right to be. His chestnut hair curled rakishly from a provocative widow's peak. It was pulled back in a queue behind the stand-up collar on the dark gray cutaway coat of superfine that made him appear very tall. The embroidered white waistcoat, black pantaloons, Hessian boots, and meticulously tied neckcloth that completed him were no more than a blur in the shadow of those eyes. Everything else paled before the primal expression in them that almost caused her to lose her footing.

Something stirred inside her, something she wasn't prepared for. Her mother was tugging at her arm, still carping about the importance of good eating habits and the danger of falling down in dead faints for lack of them. Jenna scarcely noticed; those eyes watching her seemed to have charged the air between them and paralyzed her where she stood.

“Who is that?” she breathed, aware now of the man's broad jawline and sideburns framing straight lips that almost seemed as if they wanted to smile, but didn't.

As she spoke, a man and woman joined him. The woman, young and attractive, wearing blue organdy with a bonnet trimmed to match that complemented her blondness, put herself between the two men, looping one of her arms through each of theirs, and all three turned away. The subject of Jenna's attention walked with a slight limp that in no way diminished his stature.

“Who, dear? Where?” her mother said, her head oscillating ridiculously.

“There,” Jenna whispered, nodding. “The one with the long hair.” The new short men's hairstyles that had come into fashion and were all the rage in Town had not entirely taken the coast by storm. Some men still wore their hair rather long, as he did, drawn back loosely at the nape of the neck and tied with a silk ribbon, but that was the exception, not the rule, and an oddity among the aristocracy.

“Why, it's Simon Rutherford, Earl of Kevernwood,” Lady Hollingsworth said. She narrowed her eyes and honed in on her target with all the aplomb of a ferret. “I didn't know he'd returned.”

Jenna looked over in confusion.

“He's been abroad, dear, since the navy invalided him out. He served under Nelson, you know. I heard he was wounded at Copenhagen. See there, he's limping.”

“How is it that we've never received him?”

“Lord Kevernwood doesn't spend much time on the coast, dear. He has a town house that he prefers to Kevernwood Hall. I'm surprised to see him here, actually. He usually keeps to himself. There's some sort of scandal connected with that family . . . something to do with Simon's older brother, who died in India. Their father disinherited him, money-wise, long before he was killed out there—cut him off without a cent of allowance. It was something indelicate, dear, very hush, hush.” She pointed. “Look, Simon's valet. See there?”

Jenna followed her mother's finger to a tall, slender, grayhaired man hurrying after the earl and his companions.

“Simon must be staying the weekend,” Lady Hollingsworth chattered on. “How odd. He so rarely socializes. I'm sure Lady Marner will have a good deal to say about that. You know how she does go on.”

The earl did not look back. The trio seemed to be heading for the dining hall, and Jenna dug in her heels.

“I'm not going down, Mother,” she said. “I'm going back to my room and unpack. By the time you locate Emily, my feathers will be beyond repair. She has an eye for one of the footmen. There's something you might want to address, before we have to hear all about that from Lady Marner.”

Lady Hollingsworth bristled and spluttered, but Jenna paid no attention. She took advantage of her mother's incredulity to escape and return to her chamber. The earl's liquid sapphire eyes haunted her. Why had that look disarmed her so? And why should she be so distressed that he had witnessed her having a disagreement with her mother? She didn't know, but her embarrassment was unshakable and deep nonetheless.

That odd, unsettling thrill she'd experienced as those eyes impaled her came again, and a rush of heat sped to her cheeks as she unpacked her costume. She was prone to blushing. It had always been an embarrassment: the curse of her coloring. She wondered if she had done so earlier, and her heart leapt at the thought that she might have, and that he might have noticed.

“Thank God it's a masked ball,” she thought out loud, slapping at a few bent feathers on her gown.

Moments later, one of the chambermaids appeared with a tray, and Emily followed on her heels wearing flushed cheeks herself. Jenna couldn't tell if the girl's color was result of an encounter with her footman, or an affray with her mother, since the latter seemed to be the order of the day.

Emily disappeared with the costume, and Jenna pulled a Chippendale chair up to the gateleg table, where the maid had set the tray, and lifted the silver cover from a well-rounded plate of rook pie, braised vegetables, and an assortment of bread tidbits and cheeses. She poured herself a cup of tea from the service that accompanied the meal, and nibbled at some of the bread and Stilton. The butterflies in her stomach would not abide rook pie.

Her costume returned no worse for wear, and two footmen arrived with a hipbath, which they set up in the dressing room off her bedchamber. Once the chambermaids had filled it, they left Jenna with Emily, who would assist with her toilette.

The water was heavenly, silkened with oil of lavender, and rosemary. She sponged it all over her body, luxuriating in the fragrant warmth caressing her. She closed her eyes, but when she did, the earl's image popped into her mind, and a hot surge revived the thrill he'd caused earlier and drove it up a notch. There was something excruciatingly exciting, and not a little frightening, about experiencing such a sensation naked in a tub of steamy, perfumed water. That it was the earl's liquid sapphire eyes that triggered it and not Rupert's dull hazel ones was disturbing. So disturbing that she fled the tub.

Emily's cheeks had returned to their normal color by the time she'd dried Jenna's hair and helped her into the costume. Jenna was seated at the vanity trying to decide how to dress her long strawberry-blond mane in order to make it fit beneath the cowl, when her mother, costumed as well, entered from the adjoining suite. Lady Hollingsworth was supposed to be Helen of Troy, but looked more like she had forgotten to put a dress on over her slip, Jenna decided. The dowager was much too short and heavyset to carry the costume well, and the formidable divorce corset underneath that radically divided her ample bosom only made matters worse, propelling the overflow sideways.