Barbara Metzger (24 page)

Newt was quick to pipe up, “Oh, no, my lord, we were only supposed to tell Cla—Juneclaire not to come home again, ever. But if things were all right and tight, we were to invite you back to Stanton Hall.”

“Hell will freeze over before I—” Then he noticed Juneclaire’s scarlet mortification. “I am sorry, my dear, that you had to be witness to this.” To the boys, he said, “You may tell your parents that Miss Beaumont is respectably established.”

Root did not think such a bang-up Corinthian would shoot a fellow for doing his duty. He knew his mother would have his hide for not. “Don’t see no chaperon,” he stated. “Don’t see no ring.”

“If you want to see your next birthday, you’ll—”

“With your permission, my lord, I’ll introduce my cousins to Lady Fanny and the others in the morning room. Perhaps Mr. Hilloughby, the
curate,
will be there, Root.”

 

The boys were in love, Root with St. Cloud’s pastry chef and Newt with Niles Wilmott’s hummingbirdembroidered waistcoat. Add to that heady mix tales of ghosts, secret passages, and lurking strangers, to say nothing of being able to tell their friends they were on intimate terms with Satan St. Cloud himself, and the Stanton boys would have sold their mother for a chance to stay at the Priory. Then Elsbeth walked in.

Miss Wilmott had been feeling sorely used, neglected, put upon, and cast in the shade. Her cousin was not going to marry her, and her father was not going to take her to London. Ordinarily two rustics barely her own age would not hold the young beauty’s interest, but the Stantons treated Miss Beaumont with the greatest indifference and called Sydelle Pomeroy “ma’am,” the same as Aunt Fanny! Elsbeth’s Cupid’s bow lips smiled at the brothers, and anyone in the room could hear two hearts fall at her feet.

 

“Please, Clarry—Juneclaire, ask him if we can stay. We are worried about you, really, no matter what Mama said.”

“And it’s snowing. You don’t want us to have to ride out there in that, back to dreary old Stanton Hall, not while there’s such jolly times here. Please ask him, and we will give Mama any story you want about how you got here.”

His brother kicked him. “Not blackmail, cuz. Stick by you anyway.”

Juneclaire had taken her cousins apart from the others. Aunt Florrie wanted to count their teeth. Now she had to laugh at their earnest entreaties. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

Newt stammered, “He’s not an . . . ah . . . easy man, Juneclaire. One look from him and I feel like checking my buttons. And his reputation ain’t one to let a fellow rest easy if St. Cloud imagines some insult. Aren’t you afraid of him?”

She smiled. “No, he’s just a bear with a sore foot sometimes, especially when it comes to things like honor and family.” And me, she thought fondly.

Root looked at her with respect for the first time in her memory. “Brave for a girl, Juneclaire. Proud to be kin.”

So she walked the earl over to the window to note the heavy snowfall. “I know they’re not much,” she admitted, “but they are mine. And perhaps you’ll be a good influence on them.”

“Heaven help them.” St. Cloud looked over to where the others sat, the two halflings vying with each other to bring a giddy Elsbeth the choicest tidbits. He smiled. “On the other hand, perhaps Uncle Harmon will have an apoplexy.”

 

It snowed for two days and nights. There were no visits from neighbors, no mail in or out, and no Uncle George. St. Cloud put the Stanton sprigs to work in the library, looking for a hidden latch to the trick door. The proximity to so much learning might have had an effect if Elsbeth hadn’t insisted on helping, for lack of anything better to do. Her father suddenly insisted Elsbeth get some fresh air, so all of the young people went on sleigh rides and indulged in snowball fights, even St. Cloud. Then Harmon thought Elsbeth should practice her needlework more, so the mooncalves sat at her feet, sorting yarns and making up absurd poems to her lips, her ears, her flaxen curls. Uncle Harmon was tearing his hair out, and it looked as if Elsbeth was getting to London after all, anything to get her out of the reach of the nimwit brothers.

At night there were card games with the dowager, charades, children’s games of jackstraws and lotteries that turned into hilarious shouting matches, caroling round the piano. St. Cloud was enjoying every minute of his uncle’s distress and every moment of the light-hearted games. Even if he did not participate, or when he made up a table for the dowager’s whist, he watched Juneclaire and listened for her laughter. He imagined other holidays, real children playing at jackstraws and hide-and-seek in the mazelike Priory—their children. He smiled.

The third night he suggested dancing. He wanted to hold her in his arms. Between Root and Newt, the dowager and his own mother, the earl was finding it deuced hard to be alone with Juneclaire. The dowager, Harmon, and Mr. Hilloughby were at the deal table with Talbot, the butler, who had been drafted to make a fourth. Lady Fanny sat with her needlework behind her mother-in-law to call out the shown cards for Lady St. Cloud. This was the closest the two women had sat to each other since the former earl’s funeral.

Aunt Florrie was playing the pianoforte, erratically but energetically. Niles danced with Sydelle, St. Cloud finally got to hold Juneclaire, and the Stantons took turns with Miss Wilmott. The other brother turned Aunt Florrie’s pages, although she never seemed to be playing the same song as in front of her. Elsbeth begged for a waltz, and Root, the odd man that set, picked up Pansy, who was dressed for the occasion in diamond ear bobs and pearl choker. Everyone was laughing and gay, even Lady Pomeroy, for once, when a shrill scream rent the air.

“What is the meaning of this?” A sharp-featured woman pushed into the room, dragging a portly gentleman in a bagwig behind her past the inexperienced footman who’d been left holding the door. Rupert said, “Mama,” and Juneclaire’s face lost its pretty flush. Aunt Florrie kept playing.

Aunt Marta took a better look around, dripping snow on the carpet. There was a blind woman playing cards, one of her sons was dancing with a tousled hoyden, the other with a pig wearing jewels. Her niece was in the arms of the worst rake in England—with no ring on her finger! “I demand to know,” she screeched, “just what is going on!”

St. Cloud bowed. He pulled Juneclaire closer to him with one hand and used the other to encompass the room. “Obviously an orgy, ma’am,” he drawled. “You know, swine, women, and song.”

“
F
or your information, Lady Stanton, I have never seduced a female in my care, be she houseguest or housemaid.” The earl chose not to recall that was before what almost happened in the attics. He had also never struck a female, but that was before meeting Aunt Marta. This was the outside of enough, being taken to task by an evil-minded old skinflint who never prized her niece in the first place and likely only wanted to wrest a healthy marriage settlement out of him. First she’d sent her husband, Avery, for a “man-to-man” talk. Avery got as far as “Nice gal, my niece. Want the best for her,” before St. Cloud’s frosty stare had him switching to a discussion of crop rotation. Lady Stanton was not so easily intimidated.

“We’ll stay till Twelfth Night since the countess invited us. Then I am taking Claire home.”

“Miss Juneclaire stays as long as she wishes, with the dowager’s blessings.”

“Humph. We’ll see about that. What future does the gal have here, I’d like to know?”

“What future did she have at Stanton Hall? Mother to someone else’s brats, or your unpaid servant? She is a valued guest here, better dressed, in more congenial company, and with far fewer demands on her time, Lady Stanton. Is her happiness worth nothing?”

“Not as much as the banns being called, and I don’t care who you are! Lord Stanton is still her legal guardian, and
we’ll
see where Claire goes and with whom.”

St. Cloud was not worried about the harpy’s threats as much as the idea that she might stay past Twelfth Night, three very long days away. No, Avery Stanton was not going to challenge St. Cloud. Not even that mouse of a man was so foolish. What concerned the earl more was Juneclaire’s feelings.

After luncheon he asked her to visit Lady St. Cloud with him, knowing full well his grandmother was napping. Nutley made the perfect chaperon, sewing in the dowager’s sitting room; she was busy and she was deaf.

Juneclaire sat on a brocade divan near the fireplace with the kitten on her lap playing with—Drat, so there’s where his tassel had disappeared to. She looked the picture of innocence in a high-waisted sprigged muslin, a soft glow on her cheeks from the fire’s warmth. He knew she was also a woman of great spirit and caring. He thought she was even coming to care for him. He did not want to hurt her, ever.

“Miss Beaumont, Junco, I, ah . . .” She looked up at him with those doe eyes, her dark brows raised in expectation. “Blasted expectations!” he muttered, pacing the width of the room.

“Oh, dear. I suppose Aunt Marta’s been filling your head with her flummery, my lord. Believe me, I do not expect—”

“Well, you should, and it’s not flummery! I should have offered for you in form days ago. I should have asked your uncle’s permission the minute they stepped through the door.”

“But you did offer. You were everything honorable, and so I told Aunt Marta. There was no need—”

“There was every need, and more every day you spend under my roof even if you are too green to see it. Now it’s too late.”

“Too late?” Her heart must have stopped because suddenly she could not breathe. Now that he’d seen her family, he realized how impossible an alliance was. Now that she was convinced she had to marry him for whatever reasons he chose to give if she was to be a whole person ever again, he had changed his mind. He was withdrawing his offer.

“Yes, and it’s all that dastard George’s fault! How can I offer you my name when it may not be an honorable one? How can I discuss marriage settlements when I don’t know if I’ll have a roof over my head?”

“I don’t understand, but none of that matters.” She was perilously close to tears. He hated vaporish women.

“Of course it doesn’t matter to you, Junco. You’d live in a cow byre with your goats and pigs and sheep—only you’d starve to death because you’d never eat any of them! It matters to me that I can provide for you, that you can take your place in society with your head high, not stay hidden away like my mother.”

She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “Uncle George?”

“Uncle George. I didn’t tell you the whole, that day in the cemetery. You’ll find out soon enough, if the cad has come back. I’m just surprised your aunt hasn’t filled your ears with the tale. It’s common knowledge.” He kept pacing, not looking at her. “George came home from the wars injured, remember? My parents stayed away the whole time, until the holidays. I don’t recall if they spoke then. I was in the nursery most of the time, of course, and there were other houseguests. I was brought down for luncheon that day. It was Christmas, you know, and my birthday. You have to realize that I was small for my age, and Uncle George had never been around children before. He said ‘Merry Christmas, Merry. Happy fourth birthday.’ And everyone laughed, because it was my fifth birthday. And then he must have counted back—I remember him mumbling while I waited for my cake. Suddenly he shouted, ‘If he’s five, he’s mine!’ and he lunged at my father, knocking him down. In front of forty
belle monde
busybodies. I have carried a certain unsavory stigma throughout my life, as you can imagine.”

“But your—the earl acknowledged you.”

“Who knows what he would have done if there had been another son? But he was paralyzed that day, and George was dead. I was the last Jordan. Until now. You, at least, are convinced that I am not. If George is alive,
he
is the earl.”

“No,” Juneclaire insisted. “You were baptized as Robert’s son and reared as Robert’s son. And Uncle George would never make that kind of trouble. I know he wouldn’t.”

“How do you know what he will and will not do? He left my father there to die, Juneclaire.”

“No! Hawkins was to have gone for help. Uncle George has as much honor as you do! That’s why he hasn’t come back, Merry, because his past isn’t quite . . . suitable.”

Merry stopped pacing. “Pray tell, Miss Beaumont,” he drawled in that slow, deadly tone he used to frighten lesser mortals, “precisely how . . . unsuitable is Uncle George’s past? Where has he been all these years?”

“At sea.”

“It could be worse. Other Jordans have gone into the navy, although I suppose he signed on as a common seaman.”

“Not the navy,” Juneclaire croaked.

“Then a merchant marine. Better still. Perhaps he joined the East India company and made his fortune.”

“I believe he made his fortune,” she said, barely above a whisper. “Have you ever heard of . . . Captain Cleft?”

“Oh, God, we’re all ruined. You’ll go home with your aunt. Uncle Harmon will have to find Elsbeth a husband before . . . and Mother. Hell and damnation, Mother.”

 

Now it was even more important that they find Uncle George.

Luckily the company made a short evening of it so they could look. The dowager refused to join “those toadeaters” downstairs, and Lady Fanny had taken to her bed under Aunt Marta’s aspersions that the countess was not a proper chaperon for a young girl. Uncle Harmon was closeted with vinegar water and digestive biscuits, and Aunt Florrie was busy writing a letter to her dear friend Richard. The Lion-Hearted.

Sydelle had excused herself after dinner. She was leaving in the morning, despite Niles Wilmott’s fervent, nay, desperate, pleas. Lady Pomeroy saw no reason to stay. With that battle-ax of an aunt in the house, St. Cloud could never wriggle out of an engagement, and Lady Pomeroy was not cooling her heels until Twelfth Night, just to see a parcel of peasant urchins dress up as Magi and go around begging gifts. She’d had enough of those bucolic entertainments, thank you, and was anxious to get back to London, even if it was thin of company. So
la belle
Pomeroy used her packing as an excuse to avoid the gathering of puerile Stantons and lost-cause St. Clouds.