Seducing Mr. Heywood (2 page)

“Beg pardon, my lady,” Charles sputtered, even as Sophia’s generous curves cushioned and caressed his torso. The lady reared up, pushing the astonished clergyman off her, and against the fireplace hearth. A dull thump registered the meeting of Charles’s head with the hard marble surround. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he lay unconscious.

Bromley, the butler, had heard the impact even as he scratched on the door to ask if her ladyship required tea. He saw his mistress lying on her back on the thick, bunched-up rug, her torn dress exposing her bosom, her skirts riding up her limbs. She was breathing hard. He discreetly backed out the door and closed it quietly. Like all well-trained
ton
retainers, he was schooled never to show emotion, and he did not disgrace himself now. Everything he had heard about the baroness—gossip brought back to the Hall by the Rowleys’ town servants—seemed as though it might be true. But, the vicar! Bromley rolled his eyes disbelieving what he’d seen with his own two eyes. He had thought much better of that good young man.

Enraged and breathing hard, Lady Sophia scrambled to her feet, one shaky hand holding the shreds of her dress and her dignity, the other reaching for the bell pull to alert her servants. This fool! This clumsy, stupid oaf! Sophia swore. She’d learned a number of strong barnyard oaths from her first husband before he met his demise in a fall from his horse, and now she muttered her favorites, even as one of the housemaids ran to answer her summons.

“You! Fetch Bewley, now!” The girl looked puzzled. Sophia raised her voice. “The butler, girl, what is the matter with you? Get Bewley and hurry!” The maidservant ran to do her mistress’s bidding, even as Bromley reappeared in the hallway.

“Mistress says to fetch ye,” the girl stammered, then snickered, “Mr.
Bewley
!”

“None of your cheek, Lizzie, or this house will see the last of you! What has transpired here?” Bromley stepped into the doorway as Lizzie, suitably chastised, lowered her eyes and shuffled away. The butler frowned. The other servants, though they resented it, seemed at the same time to think it a great joke that the mistress did not know their names, but he did not join in the general hilarity. Baron Rowley had known all of his staff by name, their correct names. Lady Rowley, however, was perhaps more typical of her class; Bromley had served an earl in London before joining the baron’s staff and knew this to be so.

“My lady?” Bromley inquired, his face free of emotion as he viewed the bizarre tableau of the unconscious vicar lying on the floor of the drawing room.

“Do something!” Lady Sophia’s contralto voice rose to a shriek. “He has passed out.”

Bromley dropped to one knee and attempted to shake the vicar awake. He frowned, rose, and addressed his mistress. “We shall have to send someone for the doctor, my lady,” he suggested.

“Do it, then! See to it, Brimley, and get this…this…man out of my house.” She turned in a flounce of skirts, her head held high, her shoulders square.

“Yes, madam,” Bromley nodded, a muscle at the side of his mouth twitching in displeasure. Brimley!

Charles Heywood moaned. Bromley knelt beside him. “Sir?” He took the vicar’s hands and chafed them in his. “Sir? Are you all right?”

The vicar opened his eyes slowly. Bromley took a glass from the sideboard and poured him another sherry. “Sip this slowly, sir,” he suggested, lowering the glass to the vicar’s lips.

Between sips, Charles winced. “What happened? My head…”

“You appear to have fallen, sir,” Bromley ventured. Charles gazed at the disordered rug and the glistening pieces of broken glass. He winced again. “How…?”

“Do not move, sir,” Bromley told him. “I shall send for Mr. Alcott.”

In her bedroom, Sophia called for Joan, her abigail, and began to undress, muttering and strewing her clothes all over the floor. Her beautiful new gown was ruined, stained and torn.

Joan was aghast. Her fastidious mistress had been out of sorts these last few months, but never had she seen her so discombobulated. “My lady! What has happened?” she asked.

“Hot water, please, and hurry! I am all over sticky.” Sophia discarded her dress, not waiting for the maid’s assistance. Her fine, low-cut silk chemise was soaked through from the liqueur.

As Joan moved to do her mistress’s bidding, Sophia abruptly put out a hand and stopped her, demanding, “What is wrong with that vicar? Is he deranged?”

Joan seemed perplexed. “The vicar, my lady? Oh, but everyone says he is a lovely man.…”

Sophia’s oath turned the maidservant’s ears pink. Joan exited quickly to carry up the water for her mistress’s bath.

Lady Rowley peeled off her chemise and took down her hair. Several more epithets warmed the rafters of her dressing room as she stomped about. In the hallway, one of the footmen raised an inquiring eyebrow as the noise level rose. Joan shrugged her shoulders, shook her mop of red curls, and scurried away.

Sharing her news in the kitchen with one of the housemaids, her friend Sarah, Joan was overheard by Mrs. Mathew, the cook, who snorted rudely. “If the madam wore black mourning clothes as she ought, by all that is right and holy, that wine stain would not have ruined her fine new dress, I wager.”

“Don’t you remember? ’Twas in the baron’s will he didn’t want her to wear mourning for him,” Joan turned on the cook and defended her mistress. “He said she’d worn too much black in her life already.”

Mrs. Mathew snorted louder. “She’s bad luck, that one! Three husbands dead, and her still a young woman! There’s something wrong with her, mark my words. Worse than the Regent’s doxy, that Mrs. Fitzherbert! And she’s not through yet. She’ll kill all and every one of them that’s foolish enough to—”

Bromley was horrified to catch the end of this unseemly, heated exchange among the female work staff as he appeared in the kitchen carrying the broken pieces of wineglass on a silver tray. “That is enough!” he scolded them, waggling his index finger in disapproval. “’Tis not up to you to judge your betters! I do not want to hear any more of this loose talk! Mrs. Mathew, you have dinner to prepare. Sarah, there is laundry to sort. Joan, your mistress is waiting! Hurry now, girl, and make haste. Her ladyship does not like to be kept waiting.”

“You won’t die, Charles, not yet.” Lewis Alcott assured his patient as he checked the large bump, the size of a goose egg, at the back of Charles’s skull. Lewis laughed.

“It may be vastly amusing to you, Lewis.” Charles Heywood grimaced as his friend touched the grotesque swelling. “But it is hardly cause for such raucous laughter.”

“Tell me again how you came to be the object of the beauteous widow’s wrath, Charles,” Lewis urged, a wicked gleam showing through his wire-rimmed spectacles.

Charles glared at the burly, sandy-haired physician, who looked more like a coachman or a farm laborer than the excellent surgeon he was in truth. “I knew that I would regret detailing those unfortunate circumstances to you! I do hope you have the discretion to keep this embarrassing business to yourself.”

Lewis adjusted his eyeglasses. “I never betray a patient’s confidences, Charles, you know that.” He continued to grin, nonetheless, enjoying the vicar’s discomfiture, for all that he was a good friend. Jovial Lewis could not resist teasing, and he especially could not resist teasing the more sober-tempered Charles Heywood.

Charles groaned, running his long fingers through his
tousled hair, a nervous habit from childhood that he had never overcome. “How can I ever apologize? Lady Sophia will not want to see my face again.”

“Ah, but, Charles,” Lewis teased, “it is such a nice, handsome face. Rumor has it that the wicked baroness is partial to handsome faces.”

“Most unchristian of you, Lewis, those remarks. Very uncharitable, unworthy in a man of your profession. Lady Sophia is hardly wicked, and as for your allusion to her…er…habits—” Charles shook his head, unable to go on, then groaned at the discomfort the slight movement caused him. He might not have cracked his skull, as Lewis had assured him, but it certainly felt as though he had.

“At any rate,” Lewis continued blithely, “you shall have to face the lovely Lady Sophia again. You are now, per the will of your late mentor, Baron Rowley, the legal guardian to her two sons. You have become part of the family.” He squeezed his good friend’s shoulder in close, comradely fashion and chuckled, ignoring the murderous glare the vicar sent his way.

Lady Sophia’s breakfast of eggs and ham lay cold and congealed on the delicate blue tracery of the Wedgwood plate. She took a tentative sip of lukewarm China tea and frowned, pondering her future. Her grim future; she would rusticate forever at Rowley Hall in the wilds of north Yorkshire, which was not at all as she had planned.

The baron’s death was not unexpected; he’d been ailing for a long time. The Rowleys were not a long-lived family, and all of his cousins had died years before. No, the surprise had been the defection of her lover, Sir Isaac Rebow. The betting books at White’s and Brooks’ had been overturned. Overturned as she had been overturned, bested by a slip of a country girl, Isaac’s young ward, Mary. He had fallen madly, inappropriately in love and had cast Sophia aside without a moment’s hesitation. Isaac and she had been together a very long time. She swallowed. The strong black tea was bitter in her mouth.

She had wanted Isaac Rebow as she had never wanted any of her three husbands. Her father, a dissolute earl addicted to gambling, had traded her youth and beauty three times for money. The first husband spent more
time with his horses than he did with his bride, a blessing, for when he was with her, he was a crude and brutal sort; how ironic that one of his cosseted horses had given him the coup de grace. He’d died with his boots on, hunting the fox unto eternity.

Her second husband, though not brutish, was phlegmatic and sickly. He had taken it into his head to visit one of his country estates in Scotland during February and had caught cold and died within a fortnight. They’d been married scarcely two months. She’d had little time, with either match, to provide her husband with an heir.

The third time around the Marriage Mart, men were looking askance at her. Though Sophia was more beautiful at eighteen than she had been at fifteen, prospective husbands were not forming a queue to become husband number three. Only dear George, Baron Rowley, had been brave enough to risk the curse. His long-barren wife had recently died, and George was desperate to secure an heir. He was the last of his line, a line that went back to the time of the first King Harry.

A deal was struck: an heir, perhaps two, and Sophia would be free. Wise old George recognized Sophia’s robust health and fertility. He settled a yearly sum on her errant father, pronounced that he would be unwelcome in their home, and concluded a generous financial arrangement for Sophia, payable upon production of said heirs to the Rowley name and fortune.

Dear George! He’d understood her so well. After the birth of their sons he was content in Yorkshire, while she dazzled the
ton
in London with her beauty, wealth, and elegance, finding virile young men to amuse her. Though she did not have the number of lovers that the
ton
attributed to her, she found that her wild reputation grew no matter what she did or did not do in fact. Her beauty was a magnet for gossip and lies; much as it drew men, it also drew malicious rumors. Society enjoyed painting her as a frivolous lightskirt.

Scurrilous
on-dits
were out of her control. It was the way of the
beau monde.
Sophia preferred to ignore the
rumors than to waste her time denying them. If it amused the
beau monde
to label her promiscuous, no protest from her could alter that fiction.

It was an extremely satisfactory marital arrangement, hers and the baron’s. It worried her that George would hear, and perhaps heed, the gossip, but he never chastised her behavior, save to suggest that she should visit the boys more often than was her wont. That she had ignored her sons these last few years—though she visited them regularly when they were toddlers—brought her twinges of guilt and discomfort. She no longer had a husband who insisted on controlling her behavior, much less one who abused her, but she had been remiss in her maternal duties. She had become mired in an endless round of pleasure, a dizzying tune she called, from country house to town, spa, and back again, and she told herself she was content.

Until she met Isaac and suddenly, unexpectedly, wanted something more. For the first time ever in her young life, she wondered what it would be like to be the wife of a man she passionately loved, someone she, herself, had chosen. To be, perhaps, Lady Isaac Rebow. After George died, she’d been so certain it would happen. Everyone had thought so! Until that country chit, all big dark eyes and in the full bloom of youth, had appeared on the scene.

How the
ton
had laughed! It was so very amusing, such rich fodder for
on-dits
! The worldly Lady Sophia trumped by a mere country girl. It had been unbearable. Her world had come tumbling down like the fragile house of cards it was. Isaac had become remote, untouchable. She could not persuade him to come back to her bed. Her practiced charms, her honeyed tongue, had failed her. Sophia could not return now to London after Isaac’s public spurning. How could she ever hold her head high again?

She was condemned to spend the rest of her life in north Yorkshire, at Rowley Hall. She had no friends or acquaintances in the immediate area and little knowledge of tiny, rustic Rowley Village. In her heart she harbored
the bitter knowledge that London’s
on-dits
had traveled north by the fastest stagecoach route, so that, even here at the edge of nowhere, all moor and high country, people smirked and laughed at the rare bumblebroth Lady Sophia Rowley had made of her life. Too many husbands, rumors of many lovers, and no love ever in her life, not really, despite the gossip of those who believed they knew the story of her life and loves. No one knew her; and, most of the time, she had to acknowledge that she barely knew herself.