How To Rescue A Rake (Book Club Belles Society 3) (20 page)

He longed for her to speak up again, as she had the first night he was there at Wollaford. What had changed her back into the solemn woman afraid to smile?

He’d played the fool before in an effort to make her laugh. He’d teased her to try and raise a reaction. The only thing he had not done, Nathaniel realized now, was pay proper court to her.

After so many years of deliberate misbehavior, he wasn’t sure he knew how.

And why should he want to?

Her opinion of him was clearly not much altered, but while she was there without her mother whispering in her ear, perhaps he had a chance to change her view of him. There was hope. That first dinner, when her face had shone and she’d conversed freely, had granted them both a fresh beginning.

There would be a certain amount of satisfaction in proving her mother wrong and showing Diana Makepiece that he wasn’t the unmitigated scoundrel she still thought him. He could be a gentleman. He could make her look at him with something other than scorn.

Perhaps he could get Diana to put her book aside without sighing as if it was a great annoyance to face life itself.

“Miss Makepiece,” he called out to her, “Miss Daisy Plumtre continues to draw me with a monstrous great nose. I think she makes me look like Punch the puppet. Do come and help us.”

Diana hesitated, slowly looking up again over the edge of her book. “How might I help?”

“He won’t sit still!” Daisy protested.

“I shall sit still if Miss Makepiece comes here and reads her book aloud to me. I know she doesn’t want to give over reading, but she might at least share the pleasure with us.”

Diana looked around the room. Her cousin was preoccupied with arguing over the cards, accusing her husband of cheating. Since no one else was paying attention, Diana got up and took a chair closer to where he sat. “I can read to you, Captain, but do not ask me to explain the story up until now, because it is too long and involved and I’m sure you have not the patience for it.”

“No matter.” He smiled a little. “The sound of your voice will be satisfying enough.”

She looked askance.

“I find it has…soothing qualities,” he added. “It is the sort of voice a man cannot tire of.” Just having her seated nearby was pleasing. He reached forward, turned her book over, and read the title. “Ah, yes, I remember the gist of it. A lady named Anne has broken the heart of a sailor by rejecting his proposal. Is that not so?”

“You are familiar with
Persuasion
, Captain?” Diana asked.

Nathaniel stared at her pursed lips and suffered the uncomfortable urge to claim them. “Someone I knew once before was reading it.”

“Oh, do read aloud, Miss Makepiece,” Daisy cried. “Anything to make him sit still. He is the world’s worst model. If I was sculpting in clay he would have a dozen limbs by now.”

So Diana began to read aloud.

“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago.”

He watched her mouth, following the gentle bow of her top lip and then the lower. Those lips he had kissed.

“Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.”

Nathaniel felt her words fall over him like invisible kisses. Incredible that her voice should still have such an effect on him, after once being so unkind to him. But the speech she read might have come from his own lips.

“For you alone I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes?”

Because of her, he had changed his life. Yet Diana was unaware of the part she’d played in his success. He studied her face while she read on, and he imagined kissing the tip of her nose. Licking those naughty eyebrows. Making his way back down to her soft mouth, the color of strawberry flesh and just as sweet.

“You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others.”

She was interrupted, her reading drowned out by a loud mazurka suddenly played on the pianoforte by Lady Plumtre, who had given up on cards and evidently did not share her cousin’s love of novels.

Diana was about to close her book. Nathaniel reached over again and placed his hand on the page to prevent it.

“Read on,” he insisted. “
I
hear you.”

She looked down at his hand spread upon her page.

“I am listening,” he told her earnestly. “To you.”

He thought Daisy Plumtre might have dropped her charcoal, but he didn’t know for sure. He knew of nothing but Diana’s fingertips hesitantly brushing across his knuckles, easing his hand aside so she might continue reading.

However loud her cousin played, the two of them were in their own world in that moment, and nothing could interrupt it.

Few people ever listened to Diana, he realized. Even when they thought they listened, they did not hear her. But he would listen because he understood the value of what she said. He knew how her words had changed his life once before.

He didn’t want to miss another sigh from her lips.

Fortunately for all the ladies, Captain Sherringham had decided to stay a while in Bath, in some lodgings he had apparently rented before, near Sydney Gardens. He and Jonty were soon fast friends, being of similar social nature and affable character, and thus he was invited frequently on the Plumtres’ outings. Even when he was not expected or had said he was not certain if he could join them, he invariably turned up. And usually he brought Mrs. Sayles too, much to Elizabeth’s disgust.

Diana learned that Mrs. Ashby was a good friend of Jonty’s mother, and as such she was a fixture at manor house dinners.

“My dear old friend has fallen on difficult times,” Mrs. Plumtre explained, “and I must look after her. She has no one else, you know”—she lowered her voice—“just that curious niece, Caroline. Well…the less said about her, the better. Oh dear.” A rumble of laughter shook her well-padded frame. “She is a handful, isn’t she? But she might at least be company for my friend, might bring her out of herself.”

Seated beside Mrs. Ashby one evening, Diana listened patiently to her tales of the angelic Eleanor, apparently a woman of more goodness and accomplishments than anybody else who ever lived. Indeed she was so perfect, her mother explained, that it was no wonder God took her up to heaven at a young age.

“The bond between a mother and her only daughter is great indeed. Nothing can break it. Even death,” the lady explained drearily. “I have naught else to live for now and wait only for the day when I can join my sweet angel.”

Diana thought of her own mother in similar circumstances to Mrs. Ashby—an impoverished, genteel lady with a scattering of relatives who apparently did not care about her and had left her to struggle alone since the death of her only daughter. If Diana were gone, her mother would be all alone too, she thought sadly. But her mother did not have friends like the Plumtres on her side.

“I know it must be very hard to miss your daughter,” she replied gently to the lady, “but I must say, I would never want my own mother to give up on life without me. Like Eleanor, I am an only daughter. I would want my mother to make the most of life, if I could not. Indeed, if I could look down from heaven and advise her, I’d urge her to be happy, to live
for
me.”

Mrs. Ashby considered this quietly and seemed to take some comfort from it. After that she often sought Diana’s side in the evenings, and over time her conversation became a little more cheerful. “Captain Sherringham said I should listen to your advice, my dear,” Mrs. Ashby said one evening. “He said you have a steady, serene way about you, and he was quite right.”

Diana felt her cheeks warm. She happened, at that moment, to glance over and catch Nathaniel watching her while pretending to peruse a shelf of books. He looked away at once, pursing his lips in an idle whistle, hands behind his back.
Very nice thighs
, she thought suddenly. And immediately cursed herself, remembering that she was not Daisy Plumtre and ought to have more on her mind than a man’s thighs, however splendid.

Caroline Sayles took advantage of her aunt’s welcome at Wollaford and the Plumtres’ generous hospitality, trailing along to dinner at the manor and eating and drinking as much as she could—even in her advanced state of infirmity, for she continued to be a lady of many ailments. The suffering and tending of these varied maladies made up most of her conversation.

Diana tried to sympathize with the lady and listen to her problems, but they were numerous. The only other person who took any interest in Caroline’s illnesses was George Plumtre who, having lost his fiancée to a sudden and virulent fever, considered no discomfort too small to be taken seriously, no pain or symptom too slight to be ignored.

“One must take precautions,” he said, hovering on the edge of his seat. “One should never overlook these things. They can soon become much worse.” A moment of faintness, he assured the wide-eyed Mrs. Sayles, could strike a person down within hours.

Elizabeth despised the woman, considering her “common,” an uninvited intruder. “Caroline Sayles ought to be on the stage,” she muttered. “I have never known a creature so desperate for attention.”

Diana was amazed, as always, by her cousin’s utter lack of self-awareness.

She felt sorry for Elizabeth. Her cousin would never realize how she left herself open for mockery, but there was no way to help her. Unfortunately, Elizabeth would never acquire the ability to laugh at herself. That, it seemed, was a Clarendon failing. And surrounded by the rowdy Plumtre family—her opposites in many ways—she was quite out of her depth. It made her more bitter than usual, her nerves stretched thin.

On the other hand, Diana enjoyed her merry hosts and found herself fitting in more than she had expected. She was still able, however, to stand apart and observe their quirks, to study them from a little distance without becoming too attached, too quickly. It was not in Diana’s character to throw herself into a friendship without caution, but once her trust was fully earned, her loyalty formed, the connection could never be broken.

She liked Susanna and Daisy and found them very entertaining, but they were indeed wild and somewhat unpredictable. She proceeded warily with that friendship, yielding a little more each day to their rambunctious spirits. Their mother was easier to endure from the beginning. Nothing seemed to trouble the lady unduly, and her soft voice was never raised except in happy exclamation.

As much as the Plumtre girls and their mother clearly celebrated having an appreciative guest to show around Bath, the uncomplicated pleasure they found in each other’s company when home together doing nothing much was touching. The Plumtres were not afraid to show their affection and to laugh with—and sometimes
at
—one another, but never viciously. It saddened Diana when she compared their relationship to the difficult one she had with her tightly bound mother.

The sisters were enthusiastic about everything, except for lessons that required them to sit still, and their mother appeared to have no wish to discipline. Her laughter could often be heard encouraging the girls in their misbehavior, even when she later chided them in a halfhearted, ineffectual way.

When the cook at Wollaford Park had her day off, Mrs. Fanny Plumtre and her daughters spent time in the kitchen together, and Diana was invited to join them. Surprised as she was to see a lady of Mrs. Plumtre’s consequence donning a pinafore and putting herself to work in her own kitchen, Diana learned it was an event to which the lady looked forward.

“I know I shall not have my girls with me forever,” she whispered in Diana’s ear, her eyes glittering with bright, unshed tears, “and I must make the most of the time we have together. Perhaps I can teach them something at least, the way my mama taught me. I may not know how to play a harp and I can’t dance with elegance, alas, but I can cook! My girls will never go hungry, wherever they are in the world.”

Diana then observed an extravagant use of flour, sugar, and all manner of exotic spices. Some of which, when she found it later in her hair, caused her to panic that she had suddenly sprouted gray.

For the first time in her life, she enjoyed cooking and learned that it did not have to be a chore. A recipe did not have to be followed exactly, she realized. It could meander off a little. Like a tune when one hummed it to oneself.

Mrs. Plumtre showed Diana around the kitchen, larder, and distillery with great pride. Nothing in that place, she noted, went unused. Nothing was saved for a “special occasion,” possibly because the lady approached every day as if it was an event. Diana thought of her own mother pushing precious ingredients to the back of the shelf, never allowing them to be opened. Almost as if she punished herself by keeping them there, yet denying her tongue the joy of tasting those luxurious or exotic spices.

Did her mother not think herself worthy of pleasure?

Well, Diana would not be that way. From now on she refused to live in a world without tasting it. All of it.

Especially proud of her gooseberry wine, Mrs. Plumtre insisted upon Diana sampling a large cupful. The brew had the curious effect of making her tongue and her feet feel soft at the same time, and although the first sip made her wince, she had soon grown accustomed to the sting. The kind lady was so delighted by Diana’s response that she insisted on pouring them both a second cup, and then a third. About that time, Sir Jonty, his brother, and Nathaniel arrived on the scene.

Out for a ride that day, the three gentlemen had come across a large elm in which a favorite old bonnet belonging to Mrs. Plumtre had sat weathering storms for several years. Apparently it had blown off her head in a gale, landed in the tree, and never been retrieved. Nathaniel was instantly taken with the desire to rescue it. George had assured him that the tree was too high and treacherous, that no one could climb it. Naturally this only made the captain more eager to perform the deed, and when Sir Jonty added the inducement of a wager, it could not be resisted another moment.

The gentlemen had returned to the house, ostensibly to find a stick of some sort, but Diana suspected Nathaniel wanted to gather an audience of gasping young ladies who might applaud his daring deed.

Entirely at the mercy of Mrs. Plumtre’s gooseberry wine, she decided to join the others, despite the fact that this was what he wanted and she was, in effect, letting him think she cared. Diana trekked across the grass with them to watch the foolishness as it played out. The show-off would not be content until he cracked his head open, she thought crossly, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand.

“Oh, do be cautious,” Mrs. Plumtre cried. “It was a good hat, indeed. A very good sort of hat. But I confess I had quite given up on it and managed these past two years without it. I would not want the captain to suffer injury just for a hat I had forgotten and not bothered about for such a time! It is quite pulled about by the weather by now and that tree is a great height to climb. Should we not persuade him to give up the mission, Miss Makepiece? Perhaps you, in your gentle way, could put him off the idea. He listens to you.”

“I wouldn’t dare try to persuade
him
to do anything.” Diana swallowed a hiccup.

The sun was very warm that day and the fresh air, combined with the effects of the gooseberry wine, made her extremely dizzy. As she stood swaying under the tree and watching Nathaniel strip down to his shirtsleeves, she felt the heat more than ever and wished she had a fan.

All for a wager, she mused scornfully. He had not given up all his old habits, it seemed.

He glanced over at her as he rolled up his sleeves to expose two broad forearms. “Miss Makepiece, do you too doubt my ability to climb this tree?”

She shrugged, struggled to curb another hiccup, and exclaimed, “It seems an extreme measure to rescue a hat.”

“Extreme measures are sometimes necessary.”

Even if you fall
, she thought,
I’m sure you’ll look wonderful doing it.

Alas.

With a broken broom handle held in his mouth, Nathaniel swung himself up the wide trunk and began his agile climb. The ladies held their breath and Jonty looked on in admiration. George was unimpressed and made certain everybody knew it.

“I would have climbed that tree if not for the anxiety it might cause my mother,” he assured Diana. “And you too, of course, Miss Makepiece.”

Nathaniel continued his ascent into the branches and Daisy ran to the foot of the tree. “I can climb too. It doesn’t look very difficult. I am not afraid.”

Her sister told her to come away and not to be so foolish. “Ladies do not climb trees. Do they, Miss Makepiece?”

“Certainly not,” Diana managed, trying not to care that Nathaniel’s riding boot had just slipped off a branch and caused her heart to plummet the same distance as she had, in that second, envisioned his body falling. “I cannot imagine a lady would ever have cause to do so.”

The branch that held the lost bonnet ransom was finally reached. Nathaniel now stretched across it, using the stick to dislodge his prey from its knotted perch. It tumbled down and Daisy caught it with a shout of triumph.

Accompanied by cheers and applause, the rescuer descended slowly until he was a few feet from the ground and then he leaped, causing Diana’s pulse to race recklessly yet again. The Plumtre sisters circled him in excitement, Susanna holding his discarded riding jacket. “There. I have won my wager,” he said, glancing over at Diana, breathing hard, and looking for praise.

Oh, he had surely caught her looking at him with admiration for there was a sunny sparkle of surprise in those azure eyes, and then he blinked and drew his hand back through the gilded hair that had fallen onto his brow as he jumped. The gesture made her think suddenly of his muscular form naked. What it might look like.

She swallowed hard and tasted the wine on her tongue.

“What a pity I didn’t make the ladies wager too,” he said, half laughing and not looking at her.

“Oh, I knew you’d manage it,” Daisy replied confidently. “I had no fear.”

But Diana had. When she thought he might fall she was besieged with apprehension, and in that moment, she knew she would have flown to wherever he lay wounded. And all her secrets would have exploded into the warm spring air. All her passions would have been exposed. All her embarrassing fancies.

She’d better blame it on the gooseberry wine.

“
I could climb that tree
,” shouted Daisy. “Who dares me?”

“Girls can’t climb,” Nathaniel assured her, laughing and tweaking her nose. “Girls really can’t do much of anything.”

“Ha! You’ll see, Captain. I’ll show you.”

“Don’t pay heed to him, Daisy,” said Diana cockily. “He only means to goad you. Everybody knows women are the superior gender.”

He spun around to survey her carefully, eyes narrowed against the bright sun. “And how do you reach that conclusion, Miss Makepiece?”

“Because we do not really need men. What good are they? Whenever there is anything difficult to be done, anything requiring great internal strength, it is left to the women. Men get out of it whenever they can.”