Almost Heaven (40 page)

“Good day, my lord,” the doctor said. Turning to the duke’s sisters, who’d been hovering worriedly in the hall, he tipped his hat. “Ladies,” he said, and he departed.

“I’ll just go up and look in on him,” Hortense announced. Turning to Charity, she said sternly, “Do not bore Ian with too much chatter,” she admonished, already climbing the stairs. In an odd, dire voice, she added, “and do
not
meddle.”

For the next hour Ian paced the floor, with Charity watching him with great interest. The one thing he did not have was time, and time was what he was losing. At this rate Elizabeth would be giving birth to her first child before he got back to London. And before he could go to her uncle with his suit he had to deal with the unpleasant task of breaking off nuptial negotiations with Christina’s father.

“You aren’t really going to leave today, are you, dear boy?” Charity piped up suddenly.

Stifling a sigh of impatience, Ian bowed. “I’m afraid I must, ma’am.”

“He’ll be heartbroken.”  

Suppressing the urge to inform the elderly lady that Ian doubted the duke had a heart to break, he said curtly, “He’d survive.”

She watched him so intently after that that Ian began to wonder if she was addled or trying to read his mind. Addled, he decided when she suddenly stood up and insisted he ought to see a drawing of some peacocks his father had made as a boy. “Another time, perhaps,” he declined.

“I really think,” she said, tipping her head to the side in her funny birdlike way, “it ought to be
now.”

Silently wishing her to perdition, Ian started to decline and then changed his mind and relented. It might help the time to pass more quickly. She took him down a hall and into a room that appeared to be his grandfather’s private study. Once inside she put her finger to her lips, thinking. “Now
where
was that drawing?” she wondered aloud, looking innocent and confused. “Oh, yes,” she brightened, “I remember.” Tripping over to the desk, she searched under the drawer for some sort of concealed lock. “You will adore it, I’m sure. Now where can that lock be?” she continued in the same vague, chatty manner of a confused elderly lady. “Here it is!” she cried, and the left-hand drawer slid open.

“You’ll find it right in there,” she said, pointing to the large open drawer. “Just rummage through those papers and you’ll see it, I’m sure.”

Ian refused to invade another man’s desk, but Charity had no such compunction. Reaching her arms in to the elbows, she brought up a large stack of thick paper and dumped it on the desk. “Now which one am I looking for?” she mused aloud as she separated them. “My eyes are not what they once were. Do you see a bird among these, dear Ian?”

Ian dragged his impatient gaze from the clock to the littered desktop and then froze. Looking back at him in a hundred poses were sketches of himself. There were detailed sketches of Ian standing at the helm of the first ship of his fleet . . . Ian walking past the village church in Scotland with one of the village girls laughing up at him . . . Ian as a solemn six-year-old. riding his pony . . . Ian at seven and eight and nine and ten . . . In addition to the sketches, there were dozens of lengthy, written reports about Ian, some current, others dating all the way back to his youth.

“Is there a bird among them, dear boy?” Charity asked innocently, peering not at the things on the desk, but at his face, noting the muscle beginning to twitch at Ian’s tense jaw.

“No.”

“Then they must be in the schoolroom! Of course,” she said cheerfully, “that’s it. How like me, Hortense would say, to have made such a
silly
mistake.”

Ian dragged his eyes from the proof that his grandfather had been keeping track of him almost from the day of his birth – certainly from the day when he was able to leave the cottage on his own two legs – to her face and said mockingly, “Hortense isn’t very perceptive. I would say you are as wily as a fox.”

She gave him a little knowing smile and pressed her finger to her lips. “Don’t tell her, will you? She does so enjoy thinking
she
is the clever one.”

“How did he manage to have these drawn?” Ian asked, stopping her as she turned away.

“A woman in the village near your home drew many of them. Later he hired an artist when he knew you were going to be somewhere at a specific time. I’ll just leave you here where it’s nice and quiet.” She was leaving him, Ian knew, to look through the items on the desk. For a long moment he hesitated, and then he slowly sat down in the chair, looking over the confidential reports on himself. They were all written by one Mr. Edgar Norwich, and as Ian began scanning the thick stack of pages, his anger at his grandfather for this outrageous invasion of his privacy slowly became amusement. For one thing, nearly every letter from the investigator began with phrases that made it clear the duke had chastised him for not reporting in enough detail. The top letter began,

I apologize, Your Grace, for my unintentional laxness in failing to mention that indeed Mr. Thornton enjoys an occasional cheroot . . .

The next one opened with,

I did not realize, Your Grace, that you would wish to know how fast his horse ran in the race
–
in addition to knowing that he won.

From the creases and folds in the hundreds of reports it was obvious to Ian that they’d been handled and read repeatedly, and it was equally obvious from some of the investigator’s casual comments that his grandfather had apparently expressed his personal pride to him:

You will be pleased to know, Your Grace, that young Ian is a fine whip, just as you expected . . .

I quite agree with you, as do many others, that Mr. Thornton is undoubtedly a genius . . .

I assure you, Your Grace, that your concern over that duel is unfounded. It was a flesh wound in the arm, nothing more.

Ian flipped through them at random, unaware that the barricade he’d erected against his grandfather was beginning to crack very slightly.

“Your Grace,” the investigator had written in a rare fit of exasperation when Ian was eleven, “the suggestion that I should be able to find a physician who might secretly look at young Ian’s sore throat is beyond all bounds of reason. Even if I could find one who was willing to pretend to be a lost traveler, I really cannot see how he could contrive to have a peek at the boy’s throat without causing suspicion!”

The minutes became an hour, and Ian’s disbelief increased as he scanned the entire history of his life, from his achievements to his peccadilloes. His gambling gains and losses appeared regularly; each ship he added to his fleet had been described, and sketches forwarded separately; his financial progress had been reported in minute and glowing detail.

Slowly Ian opened the drawer and shoved the papers into it, then he left the study, closing the door behind him. He was on his way to the drawing room when Ormsley found him to say the duke wished to visit with him now.

His grandfather was sitting in a chair near the fireplace, garbed in a dressing robe, when Ian walked in, and he looked surprisingly strong. “You look” – Ian hesitated, irritated with the relief he felt – “recovered,” he finished curtly.

“I’ve rarely felt better in my life,” the duke averred, and whether he meant it or was only exerting the will his doctor admired, Ian wasn’t certain. “The papers are ready,” he continued. “I’ve already signed them. I – er – took the liberty of ordering a meal sent up here, in hopes you’d share it with me before you leave. You’ll have to eat somewhere, you know.”

Ian hesitated, then nodded, and the tension seemed to leave the duke’s body.

“Excellent!” He beamed and handed Ian the papers and a quill. He watched with inner satisfaction as Ian signed them without bothering to read them – and in so doing unwittingly accepted not only his father’s title but all the wealth that went with it. “Now, where were we when our conversation had to be abandoned downstairs?” he said when Ian handed the papers back to him.

Ian’s thoughts were still in the study, where a desk was filled with his likenesses and carefully maintained reports of every facet of his life, and for a moment he looked blankly at the older man.

“Ah, yes,” the duke prodded as Ian sat down across from him, “we were discussing your future wife. Who is the fortunate young woman?”

Propping his ankle atop the opposite knee, Ian leaned back in his chair and regarded him in casual, speculative silence, one dark brow lifted in amused mockery. “Don’t you know?” he asked dryly.
“I’ve
known for five days. Or is Mr. Norwich behind in his correspondence again?”

His grandfather stiffened and then seemed to age in his chair. “Charity,” he said quietly. With a ragged sigh he lifted his eyes to Ian’s, his gaze proud and beseeching at the same time. “Are you angry?”

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to say ‘I’m sorry’?”

“Don’t say it,” Ian said curtly.

His grandfather drew a long breath and nodded again, accepting Ian’s answer. “Well, then, can we talk? For just a little while?”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Your future wife, for one thing,” he said warmly. “Who is she?”

“Elizabeth Cameron.”

The duke gave a start. “Really? I thought you had done with that messy affair two years ago.” Ian suppressed a grim smile at his phrasing and his gall. “I shall send her my congratulations at once,” his grandfather announced.

“They’d be extremely premature,” Ian said flatly. Yet over the next hour, soothed by brandy and lulled by exhaustion and his grandfather’s perceptive, ceaseless questions, he reluctantly related the situation with Elizabeth’s uncle. To his grim surprise, he did not need to explain about the ugly gossip that surrounded Elizabeth, or the fact that her reputation was in tatters. Even his grandfather was aware of it, as was, apparently, the entire
ton,
exactly as Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones had claimed.

“If you think,” the duke warned him, “that society will forgive and forget and accept her merely because you’re now prepared to marry her, Ian, you’re quite wrong, I assure you. They’ll ignore your part in the nasty affair, as they already have, because you are a man – and a rich one, not to mention that you’re now the Marquess of Kensington. When you make Lady Cameron your marchioness, however, they’ll tolerate her because they have no choice, but they’ll cut her dead whenever the opportunity arises. It’s going to take a show of force from some persons of great consequence to make society realize they must accept her. Otherwise they’ll treat her like a pariah.”

For himself Ian would have calmly and unhesitatingly told society to go to hell, but they’d already put Elizabeth through hell, and he wanted somehow to make it right for her again. He was idly considering how to go about it when his grandfather said firmly, “I shall go to London and be there when your betrothal is announced.”

“No,” Ian said, his jaw tightening in anger. It was one thing to relinquish his hatred for the man, but it was another entirely to allow him to insinuate himself into Ian’s life as an ally or to accept help from him.

“I realize,” his grandfather said calmly, “why you were so quick to reject my offer. However, I did not make it for my gratification alone. There are two other sound reasons: It will benefit Lady Elizabeth tremendously if society sees that
I
am fully willing to accept her as my granddaughter-in-law. I am the only one who has a prayer of swaying them. Second,” the duke continued, pressing his advantage while he had one to press, “until society sees you and me together and in complete accord at least once, the gossip about your questionable parentage and our relationship will continue. In other words, you can call yourself my heir, but until they see that I regard you as such, they won’t entirely believe what you say or what the newspapers print. Now then, if you want Lady Elizabeth treated with the respect due the Marchioness of Kensington, the
ton
will first have to accept you as Marquess of Kensington. The two things are tied together. It must be done
slowly,
” he emphasized, “one step at a time. Handled in that way, no one will dare to oppose me or to defy you, and they will then have to accept Lady Elizabeth and let the gossip be laid to rest.”

Ian hesitated, a thousand emotions warring in his heart and mind. “I’ll think about it,” he agreed curtly.

“I understand,” the duke said quietly. “In the event you decide to call upon my support, I will leave for London in the morn and stay at my town house.”

Ian got up to leave, and his grandfather also arose. Awkwardly, the older man held out his hand, and hesitantly, Ian took it. His grandfather’s grip was surprisingly strong, and it lasted a long time. “Ian,” he said suddenly and desperately, “if I could undo what I did thirty-two years ago, I would do it. I swear to you.”

“I’m sure you would,” Ian said in a noncommittal tone.

“Do you think,” he continued in a ragged voice, “that someday you might forgive me completely?”

Ian answered him honestly. “I don’t know.”

He nodded and took his hand away. “I shall be in London within the week. When do you plan to be there?”

“That depends on how long it takes to deal with Christina’s father and Elizabeth’s uncle and to explain things to Elizabeth. All things considered, I ought to be in London by the fifteenth.”