Miss Truelove Beckons (Classic Regency Romances Book 12) (3 page)

“Still,” Drake said, unfazed, staring at the young lady, “I think the name suits her down to her slippers, wouldn’t you say?” He politely included Miss Swinley in his glance, and noted two sharp vertical lines between her arched brows, before she quickly smoothed her face to a pleasant calmness.

“I agree with his lordship, the earl,” she said, with just a trace of petulance in her melodic voice. “It would be most unseemly if that was her name, Lord Drake. What
would
the gentlemen make of it?”

“Nothing if they were truly gentlemen, Miss Swinley,” Drake returned, his rich voice cool with reproof. Normally he would not think of disagreeing with a lady, but really, who did she think she was to say such a thing?

True, uncomfortable under the scrutiny of the gathered company, wished she could just sink into the floor. She stared down at the figured Turkish rug, memorizing the intricate swirls and stylized flowers until she could have drawn it from memory. It was only when she heard the conversation resume, as Lady Swinley and Arabella were invited to sit—oh, and of course Miss Becket, too, someone added—that she dared raise her eyes. Another gentleman, Lord Percy Conroy, a friend of Lord Drake’s, joined them, and was introduced to Lady Swinley and Arabella. True took a seat, too, but a little away and back of the main group.

How mortifying that was! To be stared at and talked over as if she was not there! And yet,
he
had come to her rescue, like a knight errant from the old romances . . . She turned her gaze back to Lord Drake. He was tall and slim, but one got the impression that he had not always been thin, for his shoulders were broad and his legs muscular. Despite the cane, his movements were elegant, his mien noble. Her first impression of a young Galahad was not far from the mark. Voice, looks, character: all were of a knightly cast, despite a certain carelessness of dress and hair that True found endearing in so elevated a nobleman.

It was not that he was slovenly, but his hair was longer than fashion decreed, a tumble of golden curls that made her long to touch them, and he was not clothed in high shirtpoints, nor was his jacket so tight as to require aid to don it. He used no quizzing glass, as Lord Conroy did to great affect, nor were there fobs dangling from his waistcoat. He either had no valet or did not attend to the commands of the one he did have.

Her confusion when he gazed upon her and uttered what he thought was her name had not come merely from being the center of attention, but from the strange feelings that had coursed through her when she had first gazed deeply into his eyes. They were amber, almost caramel, and they glowed with a tawny light. There had been laughter and sweetness deep within them and . . . and
hope
. Hope? Yes, it was the only word to describe the way they flared, as if a lamp had been lit within them.

She sighed. It was her failing in life to see things in people’s eyes and expressions. It was as if all of their hopes and dreams and wishes were alive in them, vibrating
through
them, and she picked up on emanations that expressed all of those deep feelings. Those about her often appeared to submerge their inner emotions under a veneer of civilized
ennui
, but their eyes did not lie, or at least she didn’t think they did. Lady Swinley concealed a streak of vanity that came out in the haughty light in her frigid gray eyes. Arabella was unsure of herself far more often than her outer calm would ever reveal; it was there in the flick of her eyelid and contraction of her pupils.

And Lord Drake? He had felt something like a surge of hope, she had thought from a glimmer in his golden eyes, but as the minutes passed, she lost confidence in that initial perception. Perhaps she did not know him well enough to interpret, though in past she had noted that her first impressions were sometimes more reliable than those gained when she became acquainted with someone, and somehow was coaxed into believing the façade they wished to present to the world.

Her gaze returned to Lord Drake. At first he had joined in the lively conversation with his friend and the others, but now he was gazing out the window, and his gaunt face had harsh shadows; his eyes had gone from golden and glowing to a muddy brown. What was bothering him, she wondered, watching pain flit across his face. Was it his leg? He had been wounded in the battle at Waterloo, she had heard from Arabella, who thought it a most romantic thing that he was a wounded war hero. He had attained the rank of major-general two and a half years before at the stunningly young age of thirty, and had been commended by Wellington for his bravery, Arabella confided, after a letter had arrived confirming the long-standing invitation to Lea Park.

Pain could perhaps do that, etch those lines on his face and turn his bright eyes to dark. Her father, a vicar still active when able, was severely tested by his gout. When in the midst of a bad spell, his sweet, cherubic face became twisted with the pain and he laughed that the devil was prodding him with hot pokers. His laughter did not hide the agony. Perhaps Lord Drake felt the same and bore it just as bravely.

His gaze was fixed on the distant river visible, glistening, through the long windows of the saloon, but she didn’t think he saw it at all. While Lord Conroy flirted and teased Arabella, who was glowing and beautiful under the skillful attention of the viscount’s friend, Lord Drake pondered some painful thoughts.

• • •

Painful, but not new. Drake had become inured to the flow of polite conversation around him, and instead of the lovely scenery, he stared in despair into one of the many faces that haunted him day and night, the face of a Frenchman he had had no choice—or at least he had thought he had no choice—but to kill. It was many years ago now, on the Peninsula. Drake, a raw lieutenant with little actual battle experience—for until then he had been stationed in England—had been out foraging for the small game that would supplement his meager dinner, when up over the hilltop had come a young French officer. Drake saw the man’s weapon and the glaze of desperation in the fellow’s eyes, and had shot.

When he had checked his victim, it was to find that the poor sot had no ammunition. He was unarmed, in truth, though he carried a rifle. He carried, too, in his breast pocket, right above the red flower of blood that signaled Drake’s deadly shot, a miniature of a young woman and a baby. His own? Likely. The woman was lovely, with elongated brown eyes and red-tinged chestnut tresses, and she held a baby of about one year on her lap.

Drake had sat down on the dusty hill and stared at the miniature for hours by the body of his first kill, a man not more than thirty and probably younger, a lieutenant like himself but with a family to support. What was the fellow doing unarmed away from his regiment? Deserting maybe? Or had he become detached from his regiment, lost in the unfamiliar Spanish wilderness? It did not matter. He was dead, and his wife and child would likely never know what happened to him. His body would rot in the blazing sunshine until scavengers pulled it apart.

Drake sighed as he came back to the present and gazed out the window toward the gardens. That poor lieutenant’s was just one of the faces that haunted him, just one of the crimes he laid at his own door, made worse by the fact that when he remembered back he was almost certain the fellow shouted
“Ne tirez pas!”
just before falling.
“Don’t shoot!”
Would it have made a difference if Drake had understood or caught what he said? Could he have taken the chance that a Frenchman with a gun really would not—or
could
not—shoot him?

He shrugged and turned away from the window, trying to recapture the thread of the conversation. They were speaking of London, and the little Season just starting. Conroy, his dark Byronic locks falling over his forehead in studied grace—
his
valet was a genius who considered his master his work of art—was performing his magic again, and Miss Swinley was laughing, her lovely face and green eyes alight with pleasure. She cast him a mischievous glance and made some remark that set Conroy into the whoops, but Drake didn’t catch what it was. He had a headache coming on, the usual outcome of too much socializing. He would never survive a London ball at this rate, and did not intend to be bullied into going down to London for the little Season, or any other Season, until he felt like it.

What a gloomy Gus he had become, he thought, shifting and trying to ease the ache in his leg with a surreptitious rub. He was truly not fit for polite society. Horace had given it as his opinion that it was the lack of sleep that was making him a surly beast. Maybe, but maybe it was a thousand faces of the dead haunting him, from the first death he saw, a young man from an artillery regiment whose rifle exploded in his face, to young Lewis, the last body he had seen before passing out at Waterloo.

His obsession with death was not healthy. He must find some way to get over the war, to get past all the men he had killed and seen killed. His mother worried, and he knew that she was anxious for him to move on with his life now that the wars were over. Arabella Swinley had been invited with the express intention of making a match with him. He vaguely remembered that in the brief break, while Napoleon was incarcerated at Elba and he was given leave to visit his parents in May of the previous year, Arabella had seemed a pleasant enough diversion. She was lovely and witty and good company for an evening’s flirtation. Had he raised expectations during that visit that he could not fulfill? He could not remember. Everything before Waterloo seemed like a hazy dream.

She glanced at him again and cast him a flirtatious look, eyes downcast, and then slowly rising to meet his. There was a sweet expression of innocence and softness there, an invitation, a submission to his will. He
should
feel his blood race, his heart pound. The chase was on, and the doe was a willing victim. She was, as much as a young lady could, inviting him to pursue her. However, instead of the thrill of the hunt, all he felt was a vague distaste and the blooming of incipient dislike.

It wasn’t fair to her. He was sure she was a very nice young lady, but . . . and there was that deadly “but” again.
But
he could not like her.
But
her voice made him cringe.
But
her actions were so calculated as to leave him cold.
But
she seemed as fraudulent and superficial as his “hero’s” welcome home had been in the streets of London. Perhaps he was manufacturing reasons to dislike her. If so, he could not help himself.

And he . . . well, he was not what she thought. If she only knew! He was no hero, he was a killer.

His roving gaze wandered the room and lit on Miss Truelove Becket, sitting just behind the others, in a shadow. She, too, was looking his way, but her eyes were calm and serious, with a hint of sweet understanding. There was no demand there, no expectation, nothing for him to live up to. Blessed relief! He moved to a chair next to hers, and she observed him gravely.

“I hope you will be comfortable here at Lea Park, Miss Becket,” he said.

She smiled. “Oh, I shall make the attempt,” she said. “With a mere eighty or so rooms, three dozen servants or more, no doubt, gardens to enjoy, a park to wander, a river . . . I shall
try
to be satisfied with that after the luxurious accommodation afforded me as the vicar’s daughter in a very small Cornish village.”

He laughed out loud at her droll comment and sober delivery, and felt the others’ gaze collectively fasten on him. He nodded politely in their direction, but then bent his head toward Miss Becket, anxious to hear her lovely voice again. He had not expected from her slight stature that it would be so low, nor so achingly sweet. “When I first got back from a field hospital in Belgium and stayed briefly in our London house, I was almost overwhelmed by the opulence of my surroundings. I had been on the march for so long, and it seemed
obscene
how well-provisioned the average English aristocrat is.”

“I can imagine that,” Miss Becket said, her head on one side. “But the contrast is even more absurd when one realizes the chasm that yawns between the aristocracy and their own people, the people of England.”

“Perhaps I have been used to taking that for granted. But at least our people have not had to deal with their homeland being invaded by marauding bands of foreign armies, all poorly provisioned, and so scavenging from the land anything they can take. I’m afraid the country folk of Belgium will have little in the way of harvest this year, after the trampling we gave their crops.”

Her brilliant eyes regarded him with interest. “I had been thinking, my lord, that I should like to learn more about your experiences in the war, but then I thought that was impertinent, to ask you to bring out stories that must be harrowing for you to remember, and merely for my edification.”

“I have not spoken of it much. Too many people do not want the truth when they ask, and I will only ever tell the truth.” He spoke from bitter experience. Conroy, his best friend, the companion of his youth, was a willing audience when Drake first arrived home. But he did not really want the truth, he wanted stories of valor and glory, a major-general borne from the field of battle after a glorious victory. Conroy had stopped asking after the first ruthless tale of blood and misery. Drake was afraid he had lost forever the ability to make small talk. He was not fit for the drawing room, nor for polite company.

“That is ever the way of people though, my lord. In my village many of the gentry wish to help the poor, but they want it to be the picturesque poor, in rags, but
clean
rags, you see, despite the lack of firewood to heat the water to clean the clothes. They want to see clean, pretty children with bare feet and round rosy cheeks, not the half-starved babies of the abandoned wife, or the gin-soaked farm laborer who beats his family on Sunday, or the dirty little heathens children become when insufficient attention is paid to their upbringing.” She sighed with a wry grimace. “To gain their help for the poor I must sometimes dress the truth, as well as the children, in prettier clothing.”