Lord of Secrets (16 page)

“This is the first I’ve heard of it.” Though the episode was more than two decades in the past, David felt a stir of indignation. “Who sent you away—one of the servants?”

“No, it was your uncle, Lord Frederick. He said visitors would only distress you. I had the impression he was rather embarrassed to deliver the message, though he was very much on his dignity.”

David didn’t even trouble to hide his dissatisfaction. “My uncle may have meant well, but he didn’t speak for me. I had no notion you’d come—in fact, I felt decidedly abandoned by all the neighbors here, when it became evident my family had been cut out of local society.”

“Cut out?” Melton gaped at him. “My mother and I were far from the only callers who went to Lyningthorp to pay their respects. Everyone in the neighborhood called, and everyone was told the same thing, that you wished only to be left alone.”

David was tempted to dismiss the story as mere invention, but Melton’s tone was too aggrieved. “I can assure you, I was never informed. Rather, I had the impression everyone was too put off by the circumstances of my father’s death to want anything to do with us.”

“Good God, what an awful thing to think.” Melton grimaced. “It was no such thing. The entire neighborhood felt for you. Your father was both liked and respected in these parts—’the good marquess,’ I’ve always heard him called, to distinguish him from the colder specimens who came before.”

“And came after?” David said, a hint of bitterness creeping into his tone.

Melton flushed. “I won’t lie to you, Deal. We did think you considered yourself too good for the rest of us. Certainly Lord Frederick always carried himself as if he were of that opinion. But I begin to think you and I might both have been laboring under a misapprehension.”

David shook his head, wondering if the more than twenty years he’d believed himself scorned by the society around Lyningthorp could really have been little more than a misunderstanding. It seemed incredible to him his uncle would have turned away all their neighbors, and without even informing him. But then, he’d been only a child at the time, and his uncle Frederick had never been comfortable with expressions of sympathy. He’d categorically rejected the notion that a Linney could be in any way pitiable.

David’s brows drew down in a thoughtful frown. “My uncle was a proud man, with me as much as with anyone else. If he turned you away, and if you sensed embarrassment on his part, I can only assume it was because the circumstances of my father’s death shamed and distressed him. It was something he could hardly bring himself to speak of, even within the family. He considered it a blot on the Linney name that my father should have taken his own life.”

“What a foolishly self-important way to view such a tragedy.” Melton waved a hand in a vaguely apologetic gesture. “But I have no wish to speak ill of the dead. I read of your uncle’s passing several years ago.”

David nodded, still reeling from the discovery he might have been mistaken about his neighbors’ reaction to the suicide. “Yes, he died in Yorkshire, managing one of my properties there.”

“He didn’t much care for these parts, did he? He left almost the instant you reached your majority.”

“He went at my request, actually—as a favor to me, to see to the Yorkshire estate.” A feeling of disquiet crept over David as he spoke the half-truths. He still questioned whether he’d done the right thing, sending his uncle away so precipitously, but at the time it had seemed his only choice. “The house had been much neglected.”

“Ah. And Lady Frederick? Is she still living?”

David’s disquiet was full-blown unease now. “She remarried almost two years ago—a French naval officer. She lives on the Continent now.”

“Does she? Well, I hope she’s happy. I never really knew her, I admit, but on those rare occasions when I saw her out and about, she always struck me as something of a lost soul. It can’t have been easy, being married to a stickler like your uncle—er, no offense, Deal.”

David nodded and pretended to brush a speck of dust from his coat, determined that the tension welling up inside him shouldn’t show. “She was well when I last had report of her.”

He heard footsteps, and looked up as the two ladies reappeared at the top of the stairs. Rosalie no sooner glanced down at him than her eyes widened.

On swift feet, she hurried down the stairs to his side. “My, what beautiful children you have, Mr. Melton!” she said brightly, taking David’s arm. “And on what a memorable evening we’ve come, for it appears your elder son has just lost his first tooth.” To David’s surprise, she quickly and surreptitiously gave his biceps a squeeze.

Melton laughed. “Has it finally come out, then? He’s been wiggling and worrying that tooth for the better part of a week. Nothing would do but that he had to show every Tom, Dick and Harry how it was only hanging on by a thread.”

Mrs. Melton beamed, her smile lending her rather plain face a gentle beauty. “He’s thrilled to have lost it at last. We made a ceremony out of throwing it into the fire so no witches could get it.”

“Those old superstitions...” Melton shook his head. “I remember my grandmother had me do the same thing when I was a boy—though she was of a generation that might really have believed in the witches.”

“He has a charming gap now in his smile,” Rosalie said. “He can even stick his tongue through it, at least part of the way. His sister is quite envious.”

Melton laughed. “I can believe that. Ellie is always determined to be the center of attention.”

They went on chattering around David, and gradually he relaxed. He had the impression that when Rosalie reappeared she’d sensed the strain he was under, and she was intentionally giving him the breathing room he needed to regain his equilibrium.
Your
face
changes
when
you
talk
about
it
, she’d told him once, when he’d referred obliquely to his past. He hoped the change hadn’t been as obvious to the Meltons.

After another minute or two of desultory small talk, the four of them went in to Radcombe Priory’s cozy dining room and sat down to eat. It was a good meal even if it was clear the Meltons hadn’t really been expecting them. Mr. and Mrs. Melton proved to be warm and friendly people, clearly a loving couple as well as doting parents.

Rosalie recounted several stories of her travels, winning laughs from the Meltons with a tale of her trip to Egypt and her encounter there with a particularly irritable camel. She finished with her recent trip to America, touching briefly on her father’s death and the role it had played in her engagement. David added his own version of the story, offering an observation or two on America.

“The people there think us exceedingly stuffy and outmoded,” he said in answer to a question from Mrs. Melton, “while they pride themselves on their own forward thinking and modernity. The sports writer for the newspaper I owned in New York told me he could never understand why England prizes Chaucer and Shakespeare when he could make himself understood twice as well as they could, and neither poet had anything useful to say about boxing.”

Melton smiled. “I’ve met a few Americans, and they seemed a friendly lot.”

“They’re certainly that. They strike up acquaintanceships at the drop of a hat, and think of the whole world as one small brotherhood. One coachman asked me with the greatest familiarity if my accent meant I was an Englishman, and when I confirmed I was, he exclaimed, ‘Why, then, you must know young Joe, the boy who mucks out the stables. He comes from England, too!’”

Melton chuckled.

“I was recommended to a greengrocer and a dancing master for the same reason. I began to think I should deny being an Englishman, and speak Italian everywhere I went.”

“Deal is a great student of language,” Rosalie said.

“Not a
great
student.”

Mrs. Melton smiled at his disavowal. “But it’s one of your interests, Lord Deal?”

“It is. Did you know the Americans have retained a number of meanings Shakespeare would have recognized, but which we no longer use?
Mad
can mean
angry
there, for example, and
homely
means
ill
-
favored
.”

Rosalie beamed. “There, do you see? I told you he was a great student of language. He knows a good deal of Shakespeare, too, whereas most of my knowledge in that quarter comes from the puns my father loved to make.”

“Your father loved puns about Shakespeare?” Melton asked.

Rosalie broke into an impish grin. “My father loved puns about
everything
. For example, who is the greatest chicken killer in Shakespeare’s plays?”

Mrs. Melton obliged her. “Who?”

“Hamlet’s uncle,” Rosalie said with a twinkle, “because he did murder most fowl.”

Oh
,
gad
. David groaned along with the Meltons—a chorus so resounding and unanimous, they ended up laughing in spite of themselves.

For the next five minutes, all four of them vied to outdo the late Lord Whitwell with their store of execrable puns. By the end of the contest, Mrs. Melton was wiping tears of laughter from her eyes, and both David and the Meltons were forced to acknowledge that Rosalie and her father deserved the palm.

Or perhaps just Rosalie, given the mischievous glint with which she’d delivered every line. Now that David thought about it, he’d first begun to fall in love with her on the
Neptune’s
Fancy
when she’d told him that dreadful pun about the goat and the buttonhole. It wasn’t the pun itself, though as a lover of language, he supposed he was susceptible to even the most unfunny wordplay. No, it was more the optimism lurking behind her joke, her blind faith in its silly humor and his own willingness to laugh at it, despite his thirty-one years and his often chilly manner. Someday when she was forty-five and other women her age were swanning about in turbans and an air of world-weary sophistication, she would still be laughing her musical laugh, still finding the absurdity and the goodwill in the people around her.

Too soon, the meal drew to a close. As a footman cleared away the plates, Mrs. Melton offered David a shy smile. “I must confess something to you, Lord Deal. I’ve been much mistaken in my opinion of your character. The few times we crossed paths before today, I was quite awed by you. In fact, I thought you terribly haughty. I’d heard talk to that effect from several of our neighbors, too. But you’re so different from what I expected, so much friendlier and more amusing, I wish we’d invited you here years ago.”

Rosalie nodded. “I thought the same thing when I was just coming to know him, Mrs. Melton—that he was nothing like my first impression of him, and quite different from his reputation.”

“While we’re making our confessions,” Melton said, “I fear I owe you
both
an apology. When I received your note canceling our original dinner plans, I didn’t believe Lady Deal was truly unwell. I thought it merely a convenient fiction to justify canceling the engagement.” He begged her indulgence with a lift of one shoulder. “Forgive me, Lady Deal, but we had met only that morning, and you seemed hale enough at the time.”

“But then we spoke with Mr. Cousins after church on Sunday,” Mrs. Melton said. “Imagine our embarrassment when he informed us Lady Deal was very ill indeed.”

David looked down into his wineglass. “Yet you seemed surprised to see us when we arrived tonight.”

“Yes.” Melton’s tone was penitent. “I assumed that even if the excuse you’d sent was real, you’d still be reluctant to come. I see now how uncharitable that was of me.”

David felt deeply gratified—and a bit ashamed of himself, too, remembering the poor grace with which he’d penned his regrets on the night Rosalie fell ill. He
had
been reluctant, and he’d done a poor job of hiding it.

Melton smiled at him. “We mustn’t be such strangers in the future. I’m glad Lady Deal forced the issue.”

“Yes, let’s hope this is only the first of many such dinners together,” his wife said.

David looked from one to the other. He was used to thinking of the Meltons as part of
them
, the gentry around Lyningthorp who’d judged him unworthy of their society, turning their backs on him when he was only a boy. He’d told himself they were tiresome and narrow-minded and he wouldn’t care for their company anyway. He’d almost made himself believe it. Now, it felt strange to be accepted and possibly even—he was almost afraid to think the word—to be
liked
.

Riding home in the coach with Rosalie half an hour later, David wondered if it was only the amount of wine he’d drunk that accounted for his strange feeling of elation, as if the twilight sky were twice as starry as usual and nothing from his past could touch him any longer.

Beside him, Rosalie looked bright-eyed and lovely. He smiled at her. “I believe the Meltons took quite a liking to you, my dear.”

“And to you, too, David.”

Impulsively, he took her hand in his. She glanced down at their laced fingers, then raised her eyes to his, her lips half-parted in surprise.