Love on a Midsummer Night (Shakespeare in Love #2) (2 page)

“I will come for you on the morrow and see you off in my own coach. Sadly, I cannot make the journey with you. I must stay in London and see to estate affairs. There is much to be done.”

He left Arabella then, closing the door quietly behind him. The room around her was unchanged, her own quiet haven on the first floor of her husband’s house. The rose-colored settee was still drawn close to the fire, her mother’s antique lace still graced the sideboard.

She remembered the flowers he had left lying on the table by the door. She approached the cluster of blossoms slowly as if they were an adder that might rise to strike. No soft irises lay waiting for her, but deep purple belladonna, deadly nightshade—flowers that brought nothing but death.

Though it was May, it was cold in her husband’s house. A small fire burned in the grate. Arabella lifted the spray of poisonous flowers and cast them into the flames. The fire flared and then continued to burn as if nothing had happened, as if the new Duke of Hawthorne had never been there at all.

Arabella carefully drew off her black cotton gloves and tossed them into the fire. She poured the last of the orange water over her hands, then dried her fingers with her handkerchief. Her husband’s initials were embroidered on the linen, along with her own.

Gerald had been sixty when they wed, seventy when he died. He had not loved her or she him, but he had protected her from the evils of the world. She saw now that she would have to learn to protect herself.

She felt a jolt of unaccustomed longing as Raymond’s face rose before her. She wished she might return to him and right the wrongs that had come between them. But too many years had passed. It was already too late.

She stared at her reflection in the looking glass above the sideboard. Her honey-colored hair was tucked away beneath her widow’s bonnet, the black dyed straw leeching every hint of color from her face. The ice blue of her eyes was the only color left to her, the color she had been born with. Duchess for ten years, she would take little else with her when she left this place.

Arabella gave her maid strict instructions to throw out the remaining orange water at once, not into the garden, but down the privy. Maude’s soft blue eyes looked surprised, but she promised faithfully to do as her mistress said. The girl had not managed to close the door behind her when Stevens appeared.

“Forgive me, Your Grace, but there is a visitor.”

Raymond Olivier burst into the room behind her husband’s butler. His eyes pierced her like a blade, and for a moment she lost her breath. She thought of the woman he had brought to her husband’s funeral. She tried to force her anger to rise, but instead, she felt an unexpected joy at the sight of him.

Stevens stood in the doorway, frowning like thunder. Raymond brought the scent of the outdoors with him, but the clean smell of spring was almost covered over by the scent of brandy.

“Thank you, Stevens. You may leave us.”

Her husband’s butler hesitated. He no doubt feared to cross the orders left by Hawthorne. But she would never turn Raymond Olivier away.

“I will ring if I have need of you,” Arabella said.

Stevens bowed low, giving Lord Pembroke an evil look as he closed the door behind him.

“Stevens is very strict,” Arabella said. “And I am not supposed to receive anyone. The duke felt it inappropriate for me to entertain company while I am in mourning.”

“And your lover? Will he be turned away?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Who is he?”

Raymond stepped close, but she did not feel threatened as she had with Hawthorne. She took in the scent of cinnamon on his skin, the sweet flavor that had not changed, mingling with the scent of brandy on his breath. She trembled and took one step back.

“I have no lover, my lord.”

“Don’t toy with me, Arabella. Tell me who he is. Or is there more than one?”

His eyes were even redder than they had been hours before. Brandy seemed to leach from his pores as if he had not just drunk it, but bathed in it. She should feel repulsed. The scent of the brandy reminded her of her father in his cups. But Arabella did not feel revulsion. All she felt was sorrow, and the certain knowledge that she could do nothing to help him. She had thrown away her rights to his good graces long ago. She had written to him, not long after her marriage, explaining all that had happened, but she had never received a reply. He had disowned her and no doubt had wished her to the devil. No doubt he still did. She could see no evidence of the boy she had loved in this man’s face, save for the dark blue of his eyes.

“They speak of you at my club as if you are a common whore.”

Arabella flinched as if he had struck her. She thought of the few
ton
parties she had attended, the darting eyes of all she had seen there, their false smiles and malicious whispers. Those people fed on rumors and innuendo. Could it be that now that her husband was dead, they had turned to feed on her? She sat down before her knees gave way.

Raymond pushed his dark blond hair out of his eyes. He stood over her, his gaze roving across her body, just as Hawthorne’s had not half an hour before. But this time, in spite of the madness of his words, she felt a warm flush rise over her cheeks, heat flooding her throat and the tops of her breasts beneath her gown. He sat down beside her, taking her hand in his.

His hand was so much larger than her own that his palm engulfed hers. That at least had not changed. Nor had his warmth or the strength of his touch. Drink had not taken that from him. Arabella almost lost herself in that moment, in spite of the brandy on his clothes, in spite of the insults he had just moments before offered her. No matter what he said, this man was Raymond Olivier. Before he had inherited his title, when he had been a castoff of his father’s, he had been her one refuge in a hostile world. She could not bring herself to forget.

“I’ve come to offer you my protection,” Pembroke said. “You look as if you need it.”

Arabella could not understand him. But then he raised her bare hand to his lips and pressed his tongue into the center of her palm.

Pleasure shot through her until she almost shook with it. She had not been touched so intimately in years, if ever. Her breath caught in her throat, any words of protest lodged behind it. She could not speak or move, but sat still, bound as tight as a coney in a snare.

“I know you’re Hawthorne’s now. I’m no duke, but I think I can offer you more pleasure than he can.”

Arabella watched his fingers as they played over hers. His hand was gentle on hers, his touch soothing even as it enflamed. She had never felt such desire before, not even when she was seventeen. She had always thought desire and all that came with it the province of men. She wondered now if she had been wrong.

“If you’re looking to change lovers, I will take you up. You’ll need new clothes, and you’ll have to leave off your mourning, but that can’t be any worse than sleeping with Hawthorne.”

“Get out.” Her voice was hoarse, and she swallowed hard. She felt as if her mouth had gone dry, as if her tongue would not work properly. All she could take in was the scent of his skin and the heat of his hand on hers. She tried to pull away.

Lord Pembroke looked at her as if she were a morsel of marzipan that he might take upon his tongue. He let go of her hand, slowly, as if to say he knew he did not have to relinquish it but did so only because it pleased him. He did not rise to leave, but lounged back against her settee as if the room and all in it belonged to him.

“You won’t even offer me a drop of sherry before I go?”

“You’ve had quite enough to drink already.”

Pembroke laughed at that, and for a moment it was as if the years had dropped away. It seemed to her that she heard a hint of the boy he had been in the depths of that laughter, rusty and dissipated as it was. The sounds drew her toward him on the settee, but he was already on his feet, moving toward the door.

He turned to look back at her, his hand on the knob. “When you tire of Hawthorne’s bed, come to me.”

She felt a frisson of heat pass between them across the length of her sitting room. He was gone then, and she sat alone staring into the dying fire. The heat on her skin vanished as soon as he was gone.

For a long moment there was no sound in the room but the ticking of the Dresden clock on the mantel. Shepherdesses frolicked with their lambs, frozen in porcelain as they danced around the clock’s face for eternity. She got to her feet and picked up that hideous piece of china and dropped it into the fireplace, where it shattered on the stone tiles.

She shook with anger and leftover desire. She had no business feeling lust for any man, much less Pembroke. Whatever he had once been, whatever they had once been to each other, he was a different man now, and she was a different woman.

She blinked back tears of frustration. She was sick of tears. She had spent her entire life weeping in helplessness. No longer. She was her own woman now, and neither Pembroke nor Hawthorne nor the entire
ton
would keep her from living her life as she saw fit. Let them spread evil tidings all around her. She was going home. They would never find her there.

Her father’s money had come from the slave trade. To be a tradesman was bad enough in the eyes of the nobility, but to trade in human flesh and misery was the lowest a man could stoop. Her father had stooped that low, and gladly. Her mother had been the youngest daughter of an earl caught up in debts. Her father had bought her mother, paying the earl’s gambling debts. Her mother had not lived long, but even her gentle breeding had not afforded Mr. Swanson the entrée into Society that he had hoped for, and he had never let her forget it.

The thought of her mother brought real tears to her eyes. Sometimes she still woke with the touch of her mother’s hand on her hair in her dreams, the phantom woman whose face she could no longer remember. No one in the
ton
knew of her father’s house in Derbyshire, save Pembroke and Angelique, and they would never tell. She would go to her father’s estate and hide herself away, and forget that London Society had ever existed.

As she wiped her tears and blew her nose with her black-edged handkerchief, Angelique Beauchamp, Countess of Devereaux, burst into the room in a swirl of royal blue silk.

“You’ve been weeping.”

Angelique moved with the same graceful elegance wherever she was, in a ballroom, in her own house, and now as she stepped into Arabella’s sitting room. Her dark curls brushed her shoulders as she tossed her cloak onto a nearby chair.

“Don’t tell me that you’re crying for the old man? I would not have thought it possible.”

Arabella laughed in spite of herself, the humor in her friend’s eyes warming her like a good fire in winter. No one ever looked past Angelique’s beauty to see the woman who lived beneath it. The countess was the loneliest woman Arabella knew, save for herself.

“You must take some tea,” Angelique said, ringing for the maid. She wrapped one slender arm around Arabella’s waist and led her back to the settee. “I saw that vulture Hawthorne leave. I drove around the square and waited until he had gone to knock on your door.”

Maude brought in a tray of tea and biscuits, then knelt to throw coal on the fire. Angelique drew a cushion from another chair to place behind Arabella’s back, then poured a cup as Arabella liked it, with a touch of milk and no sugar. She tucked a biscuit onto the saucer, iced gingerbread still warm from the oven.

“I can eat nothing,” Arabella said.

“You will eat that,” Angelique answered. “You need more sweetness in your life.”

Angelique watched with the eyes of a hawk as Arabella took a bite of the biscuit and a fortifying sip of tea. The warmth and sweetness suffused her with a sense of well-being.

Satisfied with watching Arabella eat, Angelique poured her own tea, adding no sugar and no milk. She did not touch the gingerbread herself, but set another biscuit on her friend’s saucer.

“I have bad news,” Angelique said. “I came at once, because you need to hear it.”

“More bad news?” Arabella asked. She thought of the rumors, and of the bizarre sight of lust in Hawthorne’s
cold gray eyes. It was almost as if she could smell the poisoned flowers he had left for her, and
she shuddered.

“‘Trouble comes not in single spies, but in battalions,’” Angelique quipped.

Arabella smiled. “
Hamlet
. Your favorite.”

“
Macbeth
is my favorite and you know it. But to come to the point, Hawthorne is putting it about that you are a loose woman who played your husband false. That all the years of your marriage, you pretended to be a quiet, biddable wife when all along you have been the whore of Babylon.”

Hawthorne was hemming her in, closing off all means of escape, leaving nothing to chance.

“He wants to make sure you stay isolated. He has put it about that you are leaving for Yorkshire in the morning in disgrace, that he has discovered your affairs and has taken a firm hand.”

“Affairs? I have never touched another man but Gerald.”

“I know that. And you know that. But a quiet wife who in secret has been a whore for years makes a much better story than a virtuous widow.”

Arabella’s tea had grown cold in her hands. She set the cup aside. “He is forcing me to marry him.”

“He’ll keep your widow’s portion.”

“Yes. And he wants me.” Arabella shuddered.

Angelique could not mask her disgust. She was on her feet then, circling like a caged tigress who could find no way out of her prison. “You cannot marry that man. You need a protector. Before, I would have gone to Anthony. He would know what to do.”

No one else would have heard a change in the melodious tones of her friend’s voice when she spoke her old lover’s name, but Arabella could. Her friend’s heart had been broken, and it would not mend.

“You cannot go to Anthony Carrington.”

“I would, for you. But he is in Shropshire with his wife. They left yesterday, after the christening of their son.”

“I could contact Gerald’s solicitor. He might help me.”

“Mr. Brooks is not Gerald’s solicitor; he is the solicitor for the Duke of Hawthorne.”

Arabella knew what that meant, and she knew that Angelique was right. She had no money and no recourse under the law. She had five pounds left from her quarter allowance, barely enough to trim a new bonnet, much less to start a new life.

Gerald had protected her widow’s portion. He had kept her as safe as he knew how, but she had no way of protecting herself from his heir.

“Pembroke is in the city,” Angelique said.

“I know. He was here just before you were.”

“Pembroke would protect you,” Angelique said.

“No,” Arabella said. “He offered to make me his mistress…”

“Perfect!”

Arabella laughed at the outlandishness of it, her friend pushing her into the arms of any man. She set her empty cup down and took up another biscuit. “I will be no man’s mistress,” she said. “Nor will I marry again.”

“What will you do?” Angelique said. “I’ve got a bit of cash on hand, but not enough to hide you until my ship comes into port. You might come to Shropshire with me.”

“I am going to hire a carriage and go home to Derbyshire.”

Angelique sat down as if her knees had given way. “Won’t Hawthorne follow you?”

“My father’s house has been all but abandoned. No sane person would go there. And Hawthorne doesn’t know it exists.”

“He knows you didn’t spring fully formed from under a rock.”

Arabella laughed again. “True enough. But my father has never been mentioned among the
ton
. It was my mother Gerald always spoke of, and her connection with the Earl of Amesbury. Swanson House might as well have never existed.”

“I’d rather you came to Shropshire. Hawthorne might know more than you think.”

Arabella wondered if he had spent years watching her, waiting for her husband to die before he closed in. The thought made her nauseous. “I am sure there are a few retainers left at my father’s house. I could never live there again, but I remember where he hid his gold. He would never list that money in his will, or anywhere else, so Gerald may not have found it. It won’t be much, but it will be enough to start my own life.”