Jane Feather - [V Series] (42 page)

Tamsyn was still an exotic flower in this country backwater, but if she didn’t talk too much and kept herself in the background, she should be able to muddle through an evening with Lucy and himself to steer her.

It was interesting that she and Lucy had become such good friends, the constraint of that first evening vanished. Gareth still attempted some heavy-handed flirtation, but Tamsyn skillfully turned it aside and Lucy no longer seemed troubled by it. In fact, she seemed happier altogether. It was one less thing to worry about. But it wasn’t enough to lift his depression.

He knew perfectly well that he was depressed because he was stuck here while his friends and his men were enduring the broiling heat of the summer campaign. Unless some miracle happened, he would stay stuck until October, when he would leave Tamsyn to whatever life she’d made for herself here and sail back to Lisbon, hopefully rejoining the army before they went into winter quarters.

But dwelling on that prospect didn’t lift his spirits either, and he knew why. He was not looking forward
to bringing his liaison with the brigand to a close. In the dark reaches of the night, when she slept beside him, curled like an exhausted puppy against his chest, he had allowed himself to imagine going back to Spain with her. Setting her up as his established mistress. She would have no trouble following the drum; campaigning was in her blood. But he’d have to persuade her to give up this plan to find her mother’s family, and what would he be offering in its place? A liaison for an indeterminate length of time, trailing after the army over a country ravaged by war. And when the war was over, he’d have to come back here, take himself a wife, and set about building a dynasty.

It wasn’t fair to ask her, and Tamsyn showed no signs of suggesting such a thing herself.

In a small parlor at the rear of the house, Lucy drew a sheet of paper toward her. “I’ll make a list of all the people we should invite. I’ll explain who they are to you as I do it, so you’ll learn who are the really important families.”

Tamsyn sat down beside her. “How many are you going to invite?”

Lucy tapped her teeth with her quill. “We really have to invite everyone,” she said. “Unless it’s to be a very small, intimate gathering.”

“Which it isn’t going to be.”

“No,” Lucy said with a chuckle. “What’s the point of going to all this trouble just for twenty people? Julian won’t mind so long as we don’t trouble him with any of the arrangements.” She began to scribble a list of names, rattling through a description and tidbits of gossip attached to various people as she compiled the list.

“There, now.” She sat back, shaking her wrist at the
end of fifteen minutes of busy scribbling. “I think that’s everyone who is anyone, from as far away as Truro. A few of them won’t come, of course, but they’d be bitterly offended if they didn’t receive an invitation.”

Tamsyn scanned the list of over a hundred names. She’d been waiting for Lucy to mention the Penhallans, but the name didn’t appear anywhere.

“Gabriel mentioned a very prominent family called Penhallan,” she said with an air of mild curiosity. “He’d heard talk of them in the taverns in Fowey.”

“Viscount Penhallan,” Lucy said. “He’s very important, but he doesn’t go into local society. He’s very powerful in the government, I think. I’ve only met him twice, in London.” She frowned down at the list, saying absently, “I didn’t like him. He’s very intimidating.”

“Does your brother know him?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Lucy said, still distracted. “But there was some scandal about his nephews, and no one receives them anymore.… I don’t know what it was, and don’t say anything to Julian, because he’ll accuse me of gossiping and then he’ll be very toplofty and uncomfortable.”

“Shouldn’t you invite Viscount Penhallan if everyone else is invited?” Tamsyn asked carelessly, helping herself to an apple from the fruit bowl on the table and polishing it busily against her skirt.

“Oh, he won’t care to come,” Lucy said confidently.

“But you said other people wouldn’t come, but they had to be invited nevertheless.”

“Oh, yes, but they’re different. Lord Penhallan is a
very
important person, and he wouldn’t expect to be invited to a little reception like this.”

“A hundred guests isn’t that little.” She scrunched into her apple. “It seems like half the county to me. At
least if you invite him, he can’t possibly be offended. Better to be safe than sorry, I always say.”

Lucy contemplated the list with a frown. “I suppose it might be considered a slight to leave him out.”

“I will write the invitation,” Tamsyn said, drawing a sheet of paper toward her with a businesslike air. “Shall I do the second half of the list and you do the top?”

Would he come? If he was curious about her, then he would come. She was convinced he hadn’t set the twins to attack her—it was too clumsy an act for someone as clever and devious as she knew her uncle to be. But neither had it been random. The twins had taken their uncle’s business into their own vile, clumsy hands.

Cedric Penhallan was definitely curious about her, and he would come.

The invitation arrived with Cedric’s breakfast the next morning. He read it twice, a slight smile curving the fleshy mouth. The handwriting was bold, the strokes heavily inked—not an overtly feminine hand. Certainly not the hand of Lucy Fortescue. Somehow he knew it had been written by the girl he’d seen on the stairs, the girl with the violet eyes who rode that milk-white Arabian. He scrutinized the missive, looking for some link to Celia. There was nothing, and yet he could scent the challenge rising from the heavy vellum. The invitation was an opening move.

But where in the name of grace did Julian St. Simon fit into all this?

“I
SHALL WEAR THE RUBIES TO THIS PARTY
,” T
AMSYN
announced, sitting cross-legged in the middle of Julian’s bed. She was as usual naked, and she was watching him undress with close attention.

“No, you won’t,” the colonel said, bending to splash water on his face from the ewer.

Tamsyn hungrily absorbed the clean lines of his back, the lovely, taut buttocks, the long, muscular length of thigh. “Why not?”

He turned and she lost interest in the answer to the question, jumping off the bed with a little predatory whoop like a huntsman on the track of the fox.…

“Why won’t I wear the rubies?” she asked some considerable time later. “They will go beautifully with the gown that Josefa is making for me. It’s silver lace, opening over a half slip of cream silk, with a demitrain. I haven’t the faintest idea how I’m to manage the train—it catches in one’s feet most dreadfully. I shall probably trip down the stairs, or fall flat on my backside in the middle of a dance.”

Julian blew away a tickling strand of silver hair from his nose. “I doubt that, buttercup. You seem to be a natural dancer.”

“It’s my Spanish blood,” she said. “You should see me dance at fiesta, all swirling skirts and castanets and a lot of bare leg.”

“Very appropriate for a small reception in a sleepy Cornish village,” he observed.

Tamsyn wondered if he knew just how big this small party was going to be. He’d evinced no interest in the details at all.

“Anyway,” he said, reverting to the original topic. “You may not wear the rubies because young unmarried girls wear only pearls, turquoise, garnets, or topaz. Anything more serious would be considered vulgar.”

“How stuffy!”

“Very,” he agreed. “And the other thing you must remember is that ingenues do not put themselves forward in any way. You may not dance unless a partner has been properly introduced to you, and you may dance only once with each partner. When you’re not dancing, you must sit by the wall with the chaperons.”

“You are not being serious?” Tamsyn pushed herself up against his chest and stared down at him in the dim light behind the bed curtains.

“Never more so,” he said, grinning at her dismayed expression. “But this is the part you wish to play, remember.”

“And you really enjoy rubbing it in, don’t you?” She glared at him, but her eyes were still glowing from their loving.

“Maybe,” he said, still grinning. “However, you may dance more than once with me, since I’m your guardian … oh, and it would be perfectly acceptable for you to dance several times with Gareth.”

“Thank you. What an entrancing prospect.” She flopped down beside him again. “Oh, I meant to
say …” She bounced upright again. “I don’t know how much this is all costing you, but since it’s all part of my plan to make my debut, of course I expect to pay for it. So if you would give me an accounting …”

“Oh, a ruby will probably cover it,” he said carelessly. His throat suddenly tightened as he remembered the Aladdin’s cave in Elvas, when she’d offered him her treasure and he’d misunderstood and been wild with fury at the thought that she would pay him as if he were some hired lackey. But what she was offering him were the glorious treasures of her body and her wonderfully inventive imagination.

“What is it?” Tamsyn saw the tautness of his features, the grim set of his jaw when a minute before he’d been laughing, his eyes heavy with sensual pleasure, his expression soft and amused in the way she loved.

He didn’t answer, merely pulled her down to him again, rolling her beneath him. Tamsyn was still puzzled by the strange change in him, by the roughness of his body on hers, the urgency of this suddenly rekindled hunger. But she allowed herself to be swept up in his passion, to adapt the contours of her body to the hard one above her, to take him within herself, to lose herself in the rhythm of his body because the weeks were galloping by and Cedric Penhallan was approaching her net … and it would all too soon be over.

“Goodness me,” Tamsyn murmured, examining herself in the cheval glass the following Saturday. She’d become accustomed to seeing herself in gowns, but the light cambrics and muslins she’d worn hitherto hadn’t prepared her for this image. The gown left her shoulders and arms bare, and was cut low across her bosom, revealing
both the upper swell of her breasts and the deep valley between them.

She rarely gave her body more than a passing thought and was as comfortable in her skin as she was clothed, but drawing attention to parts of her anatomy in this way struck her as almost indecent. She remembered Cecile describing some of the gowns she’d worn as a debutante, cut so low that her nipples were barely covered. And she remembered how Cecile had laughed, her violet eyes mischievous as she’d demonstrated with her fan how she used to draw attention to her bosom while seeming modestly to hide it.

Tamsyn swallowed the lump in her throat and turned to Josefa. “So what do you think, Josefa? Do I look at all like Cecile?”

Josefa’s bright black eyes darted up and down the slender figure. “To the life,
queridita
,” she pronounced, and her own eyes misted; then she smiled and bustled over, bending to smooth down the skirt and adjust the train.

There was a tap at the door. “May I come in?” Lucy popped her head around. “Oh, Tamsyn,” she said, coming fully into the room. “How beautiful you are.”

“Nonsense,” Tamsyn said, blushing slightly. “I’m thin and brown-skinned, and my hair’s unfashionably short.”

“No,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “You’re quite wrong. You look wonderful. Different … but lovely.” She turned to examine herself critically in the mirror. “I quite liked this gown a minute ago, but now it seems dull and boring compared with yours.”

“Nonsense,” Tamsyn said, laughing. “You’re fishing for compliments. Shame on you, Lucy.”

Lucy laughed self-consciously and patted a ringlet
into place. She knew she looked both pretty and elegant. However, she thought, examining Tamsyn’s image in the mirror, Tamsyn’s appearance took one’s breath away … perhaps because she was so unusual.

“Well, if you’re ready, let us go down. I’m sure Julian and Gareth are already downstairs.”

“You go on,” Tamsyn said, suddenly needing to gather her thoughts. “I’ll follow in a few minutes.”

Lucy hesitated, then went off with an equable shrug of her creamy round shoulders.

Tamsyn went to the window, drawing aside the curtain, gazing out across the lawn to the sea. It was a delightful summer evening, a crescent moon swinging low on the horizon, the first pale glimmer of starlight against the darkening sky.

Cecile had once described her favorite gown. It had been of silver lace and cream silk. Tonight her daughter would appear to Cedric Penhallan in the same colors. A vastly different style of dress, of course. Where Cecile had worn swaying side panniers and a tightly corseted bodice, her daughter wore a slip of a gown that glided like gossamer over her figure. But her violet eyes were as deep and luminous as her mother’s, and they glowed against the pale shimmer of her gown. Her hair was the same burnished silver, and her frame was as slight and slender.

Would Cedric Penhallan see his sister?

She touched the locket at her throat, drawing strength and determination from the images of Cecile and the baron smiling beneath the delicate filigree silver. Then she went to the door, her step vigorous, the energy of purpose coursing through her veins.

Julian was in the hall, waiting for her at the bottom of the staircase with a degree of impatience. The first
guests could arrive at any minute, and he wanted to be certain Tamsyn hadn’t committed any serious solecisms, like smothering herself in rubies and diamonds. He saw her in the shadows at the top of the stairs and called up to her. “Hurry, Tamsyn, people will be arriving at any minute.”

She came running down the stairs toward him with her usual impetuous vitality, one hand carelessly holding up her skirt, her half train swishing behind her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you waiting.” She jumped the last step and flashed him a smile, tilting her head to one side in her robin imitation. “So what do you think, milord colonel? Will I pass muster?”

“Good God,” he said softly.

“Is something wrong?” Her smile faltered.

“Yes,” he said. “Ladies don’t hurtle down the stairs as if all the devils in hell were on their heels. Go back and come down properly.”