Dair Devil (19 page)

“You think putting yourself in harm’s way it is a laughing matter? Have you not been listening? You have an obligation, if not to yourself, then to others, to live up to your potential. No! Do not speak again. I have a few more words to say to you. Do not try and feed to me that ridiculous nonsense about
you
being a traitor because me I do not believe it in the least! And do not tell me this treason, which you did not commit, came from a need for funds. That, also, I do not believe. You would never sell your country for pecuniary gain. So that, too, is a big fat lie, and I am guessing from the mouth of Shrewsbury, who thinks me of little brain and himself as a modern day Machiavelli…”

This impassioned speech drew from Dair a reluctant laugh, and he found himself apologizing for his behavior rather than defending it, which had been his intention. Such an unexpected turn-around also surprised him and made it all the more difficult to put his request to her, particularly when it meant disclosing that he was again about to put his life in danger, and in a far more perilous way than a scrap at an artist’s studio. So it was with an accompanying bashful smile that he withdrew a sealed packet and a small leather purse of guineas from an inner frock coat pocket.

“Do I have your permission to speak now, your Grace?” he asked quietly, looking down at her from the fourth step, and thus from a great height, because he had shot to his feet the moment she had. When she nodded and waved for him to sit again, she sitting on the step beside him, he placed the sealed packet and small leather purse between them and continued. “I would not have lied to you had you asked me outright about the allegations of treason. And thank you—thank you for believing in me… But it makes my request that much more difficult to ask. This,” he said holding up the sealed packet, “I want you to keep in a safe place. You may never have to break the seal, but in the event of my death—”

Antonia sat up tall. “Your death? Alisdair, what—”

“Please, your Grace, I need to get through this without interruption. The packet contains my last will and testament, which is self-explanatory. Once my demise is made generally known, I want you to give it to your son. Roxton will know what to do with it.” He put the packet back on the step and held up the leather purse. “For the boy’s birthday. It’s in a month, but I might not make it back—back in time. There should be sufficient guineas for a fine family feast and his gift.” He smiled self-consciously. “No idea what he wants. Last time he wrote, it was a musket or a microscope. A soldier or a physician. He can’t decide. But at ten years of age, what boy truly knows what he wants to do with his future? At that age I wanted to be a pirate. Ha! At least he doesn’t have the weight of birth on his thin shoulders, and is able to tread a path of his own choosing.” He glanced at Antonia then said, “If it were my choice, I wouldn’t have him follow in my bootsteps. His mother says he has a fine head on his shoulders, so I am hoping he chooses the microscope. But in the event you think the only place for him is the army. So be it.”

Antonia blinked. “You are giving Jamie to me?”

“If anything were to happen to me, yes. Guardianship until his twenty-fifth birthday, when he will get the bulk of his inheritance, such as it is at the present. Were I in my father’s shoes, and earl, I’d have considerably more say in the distribution of the largesse… If you and your new duke would keep an eye on him as he grows, I’d be eternally grateful.” Dair gave a lopsided grin. “You’re the only two people I know who won’t look down on him because of his birth.”

“Alisdair… Julian he, too, would never look down on your child, any child, and perhaps he is a more fitting guardian, yes?”

“No. We are barely on speaking terms. And who can blame him for that after what happened at the regatta? His son almost drowned and I was distracted with the finish line at any cost… Jesu! What must he—you—think of me…?” He inhaled on his cheroot and blew smoke across his shoulder, away from Antonia. When she remained silent his mouth twitched into a crooked smile. “Thank you for not asking… Perhaps I’ll tell you one day…” He rallied and added, “Even if we were on the best of terms, he and Deborah have enough of a brood, and another on the way. Besides, after all those years on the sub-continent as a merchant, your new duke is far more open-minded to possibilities and potential. I watched him around Roxton’s boys; Frederick idolizes him.” Dair frowned on a sudden thought. “But if you would prefer that I not—”

“No! No! Of course we will do as you ask,” Antonia replied, holding back tears. She laid her fingers over her cousin’s large hand. “Jonathon, he will agree with me. It will be an honor. Truly.” She sniffed and smiled when Dair drew up her hand and kissed it. “But it will not come to that because you will return to us from wherever it is you are going, and Jamie he will be able to thank his papa for the microscope in person when next he sees you.”

“I hope that you are proved right, Cousin Duchess. And thank you. My mind can rest easy now.”

He stubbed the smoldering end of the cheroot on the sole of his boot, and dropped the butt onto a silver tray a quick-thinking footman held out to him. After helping Antonia to her feet, he gave her the sealed packet and the purse. She slipped these under the first layer of her satin gown, into one of two embroidered long pockets, tied about her waist between the layers of her petticoats.

“As far as the rest of London is concerned, I’m spending the next month in the Tower. You and Kinross may know it’s Portugal for me. You’ll be pleased that it’s not a country we are presently at war with—a nice change. Shrewsbury tells me we have a trade agreement with the Portuguese and import barrels and barrels of port…”

“But you are not going for the port.”

“No. And that’s all I can tell you,” he apologized. “I’ll bring your new Duke and Roxton back a dozen bottles or a crate, whatever I can manage.”

“Be safe,
mon cher
.”

Dair bowed over her hand, and because she was looking up at him with such worry he impetuously kissed her cheek. “I will do my absolute best to remain alive,
ma chère cousine
. Promise.”

Antonia put her arm through his and walked with him a little way up the entrance foyer, turning a shoulder at the sudden burst of noise, of conversation and laughter, coming from the drawing room when the door was flung wide. Her younger son, Lord Henri-Antoine sauntered out, saw his mother and came up and grabbed her hand, a nod to Dair, who was buckling his sword sash.

“Fitzstuart! No one told us you were here. Zounds! But that bruise is a shiner; and your lip… Come tell us how it happened. I’ll wager it was one heck of a mill. We’re about to start a round of charades before nuncheon and you’re just the fourth we need. Maman, you don’t mind if Fitzstuart takes your place—”

“Henri, please to be quiet. I think you have drunk too much of the marriage punch. Attend me. Alisdair he is leaving now and you will please forget you have seen him. Not a word. Not to Jack or anyone.
N’est-ce pas
?”

“If you wouldn’t mind keeping it to yourself, Harry, I’d be much obliged,” Dair said, a wink at his young cousin as he was shrugged into his greatcoat by the under butler. “His Majesty’s business. You understand…”

Lord Henri-Antoine’s dark eyes went wide as he watched his cousin take his hat and gloves from a footman. He tapped his long nose. “Understood. Not a word.” He kissed his mother’s cheek and put an arm about her shoulders. “Then it is you, Maman, who is stuck with me, Jack, and the Reverend J—”

“Henri?
Jenkins?
Incroyable
! I leave the room for five minutes and me I am lumped with the chaplain?” Antonia was affronted. “Was that your brother’s doing? He is a terrible player of charades, but Jenkins he is worse…” She allowed herself to be led back to the drawing room. “I have no idea as to what it is he is pretending to be! And me I cannot stop laughing behind my fan because he looks like a gasping
poisson
. It is most undignified.”

“Who looks like a fish out of water, sweetheart?” Jonathon asked, putting a champagne flute into her hand. “Roxton wants to make a toast.”

“The Reverend Fish,” Lord Henri-Antoine whispered loudly, and skittered away before his mother could grab his arm. He blew her a kiss from the safety of the other side of the room.

Antonia smiled and blew a kiss back. A glance over her shoulder, just as the liveried footmen were closing the drawing room doors, and she saw the under butler securing the front door. Dair Fitzstuart had left the house.

T
WELVE

R 
ORY
SPENT
A
FORTNIGHT
campaigning her sister-in-law to accompany her to the Chelsea Physic Garden. She even co-opted her grandfather and Mr. Watkins to her cause. Both agreed fresh air, a picnic and different surroundings would lift Lady Grasby’s spirits. Rory even tried to bore her witless, in the hope that incessant talk of pineapple propagation and the need for Crawford to consult with the gardeners at the Physic Garden would be enough to force Silla to say
yes
to the excursion. Lady Grasby remained implacable.

Rory’s last line of attack was guilt. The visit to the Physic Garden had to be within the next three weeks. Rory and her grandfather were then off on their annual holiday to Hampshire, to the Duke of Roxton’s estate, Treat. They would be away for a month. How could she leave her precious pineapple plants solely in Crawford’s care if he had not been to visit the physic gardeners to know how to properly tend them?

Perhaps her grandfather would have to go to Treat without her this year? Although, this year was to be special because instead of staying up at the big house, the Duke and Duchess were giving them the use of the Gatehouse Lodge on the other side of the lake. The Lodge was at the end of the gravel drive up to the dower house, her godmother’s delightful Elizabethan manor on the shores of the lake. She had been so looking forward to the swimming and the angling…

Lady Grasby would not be drawn out of her self-absorption, nor could she be made to have the slightest twinge of guilt. She took to having supper in her rooms, so as to avoid not only Rory’s enthusiastic conversations, but also the conversations of the males of the household. All seemed to have forgotten not only the incident in question, but also the utter humiliation she had suffered at Romney’s studio. Her humiliation was so great she was unable to venture beyond Talbot House for fear of being ridiculed. As for returning to the studio for the final sittings of her full-length portrait, that was now out of the question.

At the end of a fortnight not even her brother William, her stalwart defender, remained sympathetic. He grew weary of her continual need to relive the incident, and he went so far as to suggest that as an unmarried innocent, Miss Talbot’s distress was far greater than what she had suffered. Lady Grasby had gaped at him, called him an unfeeling brute, and ordered him to leave her to her misery.

Lord Shrewsbury, who had little time for his grandson’s wife as an individual, but valued her importance in the dynastic preservation of the Talbot line and the Shrewsbury earldom, took it upon himself to lecture her. He told her that exhibiting moral outrage because her husband cavorted with dancing girls was mundane in the extreme. It reeked of the behavior of the worst sort of Billingsgate fishwife. As the wife of a nobleman, she needed to get on with her only purpose in life: Producing an heir. Married almost three years and there was still no sign of a pregnancy, so what was wrong with her? His lordship’s lecture was interrupted with the news his carriage awaited to take him to St. James’s Palace. Which was just as well. Lord Shrewsbury fled his own book room to the sound of Lady Grasby’s howling sobs.

The only member of the household who seemed unaffected by Lady Grasby’s behavior was her husband. Aside from his altered sleeping arrangements, Grasby carried on with life as if the Romney Studio incident had never occurred. He spent time at White’s. He dined out with Mr. Cedric Pleasant. He had meetings with his man of business, with his steward, and he was fitted for a new suit by his tailor. He knew his wife was being shamelessly self-centered and childish and it gave him pause to remember why he had married her in the first place: Not because he fell in love with her but because his grandfather said that with a dowry of fifty thousand pounds, she was the one he should marry. That she was beautiful certainly helped make up his mind. Part of him was flattered she was distraught by his behavior, it showed she cared. But he was as determined as ever not to give in to her demands to end his friendship with Major Lord Fitzstuart. That his best friend was languishing in the Tower accused of treason was of far more concern than his marital troubles. So was the fact his wife refused to accompany his sister to the Physic Garden, even though she knew Rory could not go without a female companion to an invitation-only all-male place of work and study.

But Grasby knew how to get his wife to bend to his will. Three years of marriage had taught him that much. While taking her supper alone, Grasby sauntered into his wife’s presence and told her flatly that she was not to worry herself about being imposed upon to go anywhere. He would be taking his sister to the Physic Garden on the morrow, and her presence was neither required nor wanted, because the lovely Maria Hibbert-Baker had kindly agreed to be Rory’s chaperone. If she wished the carriage, it was hers for the day, because he and his little party would be traveling by barge, an added treat for Rory and Maria.

His ruse worked. Drusilla instantly took exception to Maria Hibbert-Baker taking her place, as he knew she would. Had Grasby not married Drusilla Watkins, Maria was next in line to be asked. Later that same evening, Lady Grasby told Rory a leisurely sail down the Thames would be just the tonic she needed to clear her head. Perhaps while they were at the Physic Garden one of the apothecaries would be good enough to offer up the latest in herbal remedies for megrim.

Rory couldn’t be happier the excursion was finally going ahead as planned. And because she was happy, so, too, was Grasby, William Watkins, and Lord Shrewsbury. For the time being at least, the Talbot household was at peace. And then it rained. There were unusual summer thunderstorms, and it continued to rain heavily all week. When next the sun shone brightly, ten days had elapsed and it was the day before Rory and her grandfather were due to set out for Hampshire.