A Fresh Perspective, A Regency Romance (3 page)

“I am pleased to see you looking well, mother,” Reed leaned over the grumbling dog to salute her raised cheek with the kiss expected of him.

“Well?” she repeated with icy disdain. “I am not at all well. I have suffered the melancholia these last three months. Dr. Roberts has given me three different potions to drink, all vile, a pill to swallow at bedtime and a highly restricted diet. My life is a misery. You are cruel to think me looking well.”

“Beg pardon.”

“I do not know that I can forgive you, Reed, when you are so unnatural a son as to prefer spending your first moments home from a long year’s absence, not in ascertaining the well-being of your mother, but in the company of that Breech girl.”

“Have I kept you waiting? I do apologize.”

“Unruly girl! Always laughing out loud in the common fashion. Never still. I was amazed to hear she received an offer from Burnham’s eldest. What can his parents be thinking to allow him to make such a proposal? I am immensely relieved you have never taken it into your head to fall in love with her.”

“Fall in love with Megan?” The notion gave him pause. Megan was the sister he had never had. To regard her any other way, especially on this day full of unwanted changes, held no appeal whatsoever.

“Preposterous, I know. But, you always flout my wishes where she is concerned. It pains me to think she has undue influence over the heir to the Talcott fortune.”

“I hope she does not accept Burnham’s offer. I do not think she loves him.”

“Love? You would encourage a girl without dowry and no better than average looks to marry for love’s sake? You do your friend an injustice.”

“I am sorry you think so.” Reed knew his affection for Megan spawned his mother’s animosity. What she considered best for Megan was always a matter to be questioned. “Father has not seen fit to send the funds necessary to repair the road?”

“Your father is a rude, selfish creature with neither love nor money enough with which to endow his excess of loved ones.”

She referred to his father’s unending line of mistresses, on whom he lavished a great deal of his time, attention and liquid assets. So many had there been, so varied their backgrounds, that the women had begun to be referred to, by the less tactful among the beau monde, as Talcott’s harem. Reed had no intention to discuss his father’s indiscretions with his mother. His father, after all, was not the only one to entertain companions who required payments of one kind or another. Reed concentrated on the subject at hand, the road. “I mean to fix the road now that I have come into my majority.”

Her brows rose. Tidbit growled in her arms.

“Father has given me management of our finances. Perhaps I can see to it that our affairs are placed in better order.”

“Finances?” She frowned. “How tedious of your father to waste your time with matters better left to his solicitor. How is my husband?” There was acid in the question.

“He seemed well enough,” he lied. His father’s color had been too high, his breath too short and his waist too wide.

She pouted, an expression that might have been charming when Clarissa Talcott was younger, but now seemed nothing more than petulance. “What a pity.”

Tidbit grumbled again.

“He sends you his regards.”

“Hah!” She knew better. “He wishes me to the devil. You need not pretend otherwise. Nor should you try to convince me you do not try to curry favor with him, though why you bother I will never understand.”

“I brought up the poor condition of the road.”

“Did you?” For the first time since his return, she seemed keenly interested in what he had to say.

Reed frowned. His father’s reaction to the complaint puzzled him as much as his mother’s interest.

“The road you say?” he had roared. “She’ll not wring another bloody cent out of me for that blasted road. Here!” It was then he had thrust the stack of ledgers at Reed. “You look after the damned road. I wash my hands of all of it, and of her!

“He said I might take care of it, if I was of a mind.”

“Did he?” Her interest waned. “You must go and change, Reed, before you tell me any more. I will not have you to table in all your road filth.”

She sounded, Reed thought, far more motherly than usual.

Megan did not like Talcott Keep. Crenelated towers, like gapped teeth against the sky, it was too magnificent in a dour, brooding way. Overawed by the place as a child, the castle and its keep seemed too huge, its size doubled by the reflection of itself in the moat. Dark and windowless, there was little to offer light, only tall, squinting, arrow-slit portcullises and murder holes through which boiling pitch might once have been poured. Yet, today her heart sang as she topped the rise that led steeply to the Keep. Reed was home at last after his interminable absence! 

Long standing habit, borne in her childhood--when children were neither to be seen nor heard in Talcott Keep--took Megan in by way of the servant’s entrance. The buttery always smelled pleasantly of food rather than of the bee’s wax and oiled armaments odor that permeated the castle’s heart. She passed into the butler’s pantry. The high, glass-fronted cabinets dazzled her as much now as when she was a child confronted for the first time with tiered shelves crammed cheek-by-jowl with Courtauld silver. The crowning piece, in her opinion, was a beautifully wrought garden scene centerpiece, about a foot long, complete with bridges, temples and follies. The rest of the castle might be draped with valuable tapestries, paintings, rugs and draperies, but the sight of so much glittering, taxable plate had convinced Megan in an instant that Reed Talcott’s family possessed more wealth locked away in a pantry than she would see in a lifetime.

Today, the familiar odor of silver polish was overpowered by a particularly noxious French perfume. Lady Talcott lay in wait at the door to the butler’s pantry. She and the music master, a Monsieur Vincennes, were seated at the long, oak dining table, dwarfed by its terrific size, whispers echoing from the white-washed walls and vaulted, oak-beamed ceiling. Vincennes excused himself with a scraping of chair legs on the flagstone floor. He was on his way before Megan accustomed her eyes to the candle lit darkness.

“My dear Miss Breech, how good to see you again. How very grown up you are looking. You are here to see Reed?” Lady Talcott was not a tall woman, nor was she plump, or big of bone, and yet she always struck Megan as a figure of such power that she filled far more space than her slight form accounted for. Her manners, her speech, her welcoming ways were flawless. She was gracious in the extreme--always had been--and yet, Megan was struck, whenever they shared a polite exchange--and their exchanges were always polite--that beneath the polished veneer Lady Talcott was a cold person who did not care for the things and people she claimed to adore. She certainly did not care for Megan. The dogs she carried--and there had always been a dog, none favored for more than a year or two--seemed more honest than she in the expression of their feelings. They had all been of the sharp-eyed, gruff-voiced, shrilly barking variety.

“You must be as pleased as I, that Reed is returned to us again,” Megan said.

“Not for long, I fear.”

“No?” Megan’s hopes rose. Perhaps this meant Reed had informed his mother he meant to join her in the Lake District.

Lady Talcott smiled indulgently and linked their arms, as if they shared a common bond. The dog growled very low at the intrusion of Megan’s hand on his territory. Megan feared for the safety of her fingers, but Lady Talcott ignored the animal and patted her hand, as though it were as much her pet as the Pomeranian.

“Reed must soon leave both of us bereft of his company, my dear Miss Breech. He will marry, snatched from both our affections by the charms of some well-endowed female of his acquaintance, just as you are soon to be snatched from the loving bosom of your family and friends. I understand felicitations are in order!”

“Felicitations?”

Lady Talcott stroked the pricked ears of her current favorite. The dog seemed anything but soothed by her attentions. He looked more inclined to snap at Megan than before.

“On your approaching nuptials.”

Megan was surprised that Lady Talcott should have heard of Harold Burnham’s proposal, much less remembered the matter long enough to congratulate her. “I have been made an offer of marriage, it is true, my lady, but you are too hasty with felicitations. I have yet to accept the proposal.”

“Surely it is far too propitious an offer to be refused. Burnham is both titled and well-heeled. What more do you require?”

Megan smiled. “I like Harold. I am flattered by his proposal, but I would be sure his affections are firmly fixed and not of a fleeting nature.”

“Wise of you, my dear. I have known many a man’s interest to be all too transient in nature.”

“Perhaps even more important,” Megan had to admit, “I would be convinced that my own affections are drawn to no other.”

“Is there another from whom you hope to receive an offer?”

“There you are!” Reed’s familiar voice was like balm to Megan’s strained nerves.

“Here I am,” she agreed, impressed with his timing.

He looked, as always, the perfect gentleman. No matter where he went, no matter what he did, Megan believed Reed Talcott was never mistaken for anything other than a gentleman of quality and means. Clothing, posture, stance and gaze, all bespoke the unruffled, English gentleman.

His was a face carefully schooled to hide emotion, in an expression of serious reserve and tight-lipped control. Understated, Reed did not call attention to his features in any way until he smiled. Then the carefully controlled gentleman disappeared and the light-hearted boy of Megan’s youth briefly made happy the serious cast of his eyes. A gentle sadness about Reed’s mouth and eyes carried a depth of loneliness that smiles diminished but never quite erased.

“I am commiserating with your mother over how little time we have left to spend in one another’s company.”

“Been telling her about your upcoming Season, have you?”

Megan smiled. Dear Reed.

“We speak of weddings,” Lady Talcott informed him.

“Ah!” His brows rose. He pinned a vaguely worried look on Megan. “Who’s to be married?”

“You.”

“Am I?” The idea confused.

“Some day.”

“Ah! So I am. Not today. Today I have plans only to amaze you with my new bronzes. You will excuse us, mother?”

He gently extricated Megan’s hand.

“You mean to take Miss Breech to your private chambers?”

“She cannot see the bronzes, else.”

“My dear Reed, you must remember that Miss Breech is no longer a little girl. Her reputation could suffer were it widely known that she spent any length of time in a gentleman’s private chambers.”

“Nonsense, mother. Everyone knows we are the best of friends and I am a pillar of respectability. I promise you I’ve no designs on Megan’s virtue. Do you fear I mean to ravish you, Nutmeg?” He looked genuinely concerned.

“Reed! You must refrain from such vulgar questions.”

Megan sighed. She would have liked to answer otherwise, but it was true. Reed would never dream of ravishing her. His only passion was in his art and his maps.

“No fear whatsoever,” she said.

Chapter Four

M
egan said nothing more until they were halfway up the stairs that Reed had lined with his impressive collection of landscapes; four Claudes, a Watteau, a Fragonard, three Rosas, a Ruisdael, two Constables, three Gainsboroughs and a Turner.
“A breath of the outdoors to lighten the dark closeness of the walls,”
he called them.

“Your mother is right, you know.” Her voice echoed against cold stone.

Reed kept climbing. “Mother is always right. In what respect is she so accurate that you feel compelled to point it out to me?”

“It is inappropriate for you to whisk me away into your private tower, without so much as another female companion.”

He laughed, the sound warm and radiant in the chill dimness. “Do not stand on form with me, Nutmeg. I cannot bear that that, too, must change between us.” He turned unexpectedly on the step above her and leaned in close to her face when she bumped into him. “Unless, of course, you think me so changed by my travels that you fear, after all, that I shall molest you in some manner.”

There lurked an unfamiliar intensity in his expression. Megan’s heart beat faster. He leered at her in ludicrous lampoon of what he believed a rake must look like and then laughed. She shoved at him.

“Would Burnham call me out if I did?”

She was not amused. “To make fun about such a thing does not become you.”

“Can I no longer make you laugh?” he teased. He grasped her arm when she refused to so much as smile, expression concerned. “Do you think I have such designs in mind? Perhaps you do me the dishonor of confusing me with my father? For a moment you appeared to take me seriously.”

“Nonsense!” She stared at his hand on her arm. Did he feel nothing of the charged heat his touch sent racing across her flesh? She could not look him in the eye. Of course he had no lurid intention in mind. She was not now, nor had she ever been an object of his desire, much to her regret. The love between them was completely one-sided. She had passed her youth with hope clasped to her heart--the hope that one day he would recognize the depth of her affections, would, in fact, reciprocate those feelings. In his absence, she had realized, when her aunt had promised her a London Season, that her hopes were futile. Even if Reed Talcott did return her love for him, her world and his were forever separate. She lived at the bottom of the hill, he at the top. Megan Breech would never be mistress of Talcott Keep--not while Lady Talcott had any say in it.

How could he look at her so blandly when they stood so close? Had he not the slightest notion how fast her pulse raced to have him home again and all to herself? There were no questions in his eyes when he looked at her, only the bland, unruffled acceptance that nothing was changed--no matter that time, and life, passed between them. Megan’s heart felt heavy—hopeless. She was more determined than ever to go to the Lakes.