The Charmer (5 page)

The ship clearly turned, commanding her attention. With a start she saw that the land loomed far closer than she expected.

That confused her. How long had they been connected by that naked gaze? The ship's progress suggested it had been much longer than she thought.

“England,” she said, narrowing her eyes on the buildings and ships growing with each moment.

“Home,” he said softly.

“That home was my prison, Mister Burchard. Do not expect me to meekly surrender to its chains again.”

chapter
6

H
e created a mild disturbance wherever he walked. Like a pebble skimming the surface of a placid lake, his stroll around the periphery of the guests caused ripples of attention.

Even men glanced his way, but the women actually repositioned themselves to get a better view. Several trailed behind him at a distance, as if hooked on invisible lines that he had cast their way.

Sophia watched from the highest terrace at Marleigh, Everdon's country estate. Below her two more landings stepped down to where the garden spread out in its spring splendor. Officially the guests were not here for entertainment. That would be unthinkable with the recent demise of the duke, not to mention the month left in the year of mourning for the last king. All the same, despite their somber colors, the throng of notables drinking punch bore a remarkable resemblance to a garden party.

They had called
en masse
to welcome her return and to express their sympathies. Their collective descent on Marleigh had been arranged by Celine, her father's second wife and widow. A house cramped with curious aristocrats was the last thing that Sophia wanted to endure. She suspected that Celine had planned it specifically to discomfort her.

This should have occurred four days after her return, but demonstrating mobs had necessitated a circuitous route from Portsmouth, so she had only arrived last night. Despite such hazards of travel, it looked as if half of the House of Lords and their ladies had made the trek to Devon. They probably thought the danger and inconvenience well worth it. After all, the King had come, Sophia promised to be grist for the rumor mill, and this was the closest thing to a decent assembly to occur in almost a year.

She knew that the real point of the day was not to welcome her home. The lords' interest and the royal favor had a purpose. Time was of the essence. It was imperative to cajole the sacrificial lamb to the altar.

Recognizing one's fate does not mean that one must run to it with open arms. Sophia had slept late, dawdled in dressing, and delayed making her entrance. Upon finally emerging from her chambers, dressed in a black gown that was ten years old, she had looked for the one man who was not a stranger. It had not been difficult to locate him in the crowd.

He did not seem to realize how women reacted. Secretly watching him, Sophia marveled at how oblivious he appeared to most of it, and how indifferent he was to what he did see.

“He is a bit too dramatic-looking, don't you think?” a voice asked. Celine stepped up close and tilted her black parasol at an angle over her blonde curls, providing a bit of shade for Sophia too. Anyone watching would think they were old friends seeking solace in their grief, which was hardly the case. Although Celine was actually a year younger than Sophia and might indeed have become a friend, the two had never liked each other.

“Of whom do you speak?”

“As if you do not know. The stallion down there, creating so much heat in the herd, of course. Your escort, Burchard.”

“Is he dramatic-looking? I had not noticed.” She actually said it with a straight face.

Celine gave a sardonic smirk, as opposed to one of her other ones. She had perfected a whole repertoire of them. One of the great beauties of society since she had left the schoolroom, she assumed that her reactions should be of interest to everyone. Her face left men stammering in ways no one had ever reacted to Sophia, and Sophia admitted that her dislike of Celine contained a big dose of jealousy. Right now she thought it highly unfair that even black crepe flattered the young dowager duchess.

Celine's eyes narrowed as she examined the strolling Adrian. “What do you think? Italian? I have a friend who says Persian. He is a mongrel bastard, of course. It is so embarrassingly obvious, and to his credit that he does not try to grasp for full acceptance. You would think that if the Countess of Dincaster was going to bolt the corral, that she would at least have picked up with one of her own.”

Perhaps it was exhaustion from the trip, but this critique of Adrian incited a vivid flash of anger. “Is that how it is done, Celine? Discretion now means choosing a man with the same nationality and coloring as your husband? Perhaps Lady Dincaster's heart did not understand the rules governing infidelity as well as you do.”

Celine's lids lowered. “I can see that you have not changed much, Sophia.”

Actually I have changed a lot. So much that I do not belong here anymore. So much that sometimes I do not even know who I am.

Her presence on the terrace had unfortunately been noticed. A footman wearing royal livery began the long climb up the stone stairs toward her.

Celine watched resentfully. The royal welcome waiting inside would change her life as surely as Sophia's. “You are glad that he is dead, aren't you? You have been waiting for it.”

“I am not glad, Celine. He was my father. Nor do I want what his death brings me.”

“Liar. It is all yours, despite your willfulness and disobedience. It sickened him to know that it would all go to you, after everything you had done.”

“I do not know why you speak as though I am to blame. You were the one who was supposed to guarantee that this day never came to pass.”

Celine flushed. “The least you can do is finally respect his wishes.”

“I was counting on your solving the problem for us all by providing him with another son to replace my brother Brandon. Now the only wishes that I intend to respect are my own.”

The footman had reached their level. Sophia listened to the formal request for her presence by King William. She stared Celine down until the dowager duchess retreated. Then she stepped closer to the footman and gave him new instructions.

Adrian strolled through the copse of trees bordering the water garden, wondering how the duchess was managing. Their delayed arrival meant she had not had much time to rest before this ordeal. The ride from Portsmouth had been slow and tiring, with him sitting with pistols at the ready atop the carriage. The extreme tension in England rarely exploded into deadly violence, but it only took one radical or one displaced farmer to hurt a woman.

She had grown quiet upon their landing. Her withdrawal had troubled him. She did not castigate or accuse, she barely seemed to notice him at all, but by the time he had deposited her here at Marleigh last night, he had begun to feel guilty for crimes unnamed.

A crunch on the path behind him broke through his thoughts. A delicate cough demanded his attention. He pretended he had not heard either announcement. The Dowager Duchess of Everdon had been stalking him all day. In a manner of speaking, she had been stalking him for years.

As an unmarried ingenue named Miss Celine Lacey, the duchess had not given serious consideration to the Earl of Dincaster's third son. The vain mind inside her pretty head did not seem to grasp that she had insulted him later by offering her favors in adultery. Nor had it ever concerned her that he was beholden to her husband in ways that would make an affair especially dishonorable.

Still, some men might have ruthlessly accepted the opportunity. He had strongly suspected, however, that no matter what his motivations in bedding the willing Celine, he would have ended up feeling like an exotic animal permitted into the lady's boudoir, to be petted and admired as a trophy.

A bit like the animals in Sophia Raughley's menagerie, come to think of it.

Speaking of Sophia Raughley . . . He glanced through the trees to the terraces rising up against the beautiful classical palace. Things must be underway now.

The crunches sounded closer and faster. Adrian quickened his pace and cut toward the garden. His brother Colin and his Aunt Dorothy rounded the pond and hailed him just as he exited the copse.

“There you are. Everyone is singing your praises in getting the duchess back so quickly,” Colin said.

Adrian greeted his brother and kissed Dorothy Burchard, the earl's maiden sister. With his mother dead, she and Colin were the only two people whom he really considered family. “Good to see you, Dot. It has been some weeks.”

Colin glanced slyly to his left, where Celine had retreated to study some new buds on a bush. “Thought you looked on the run and could use a rescue, although why you would ignore her I'll never know. The duke won't mind now.”

Dorothy swatted Colin with her fan. “Disgraceful, that's what it is. The man is barely cold and she is casting enough lines to empty the Thames of fish.”

“Dowager duchesses are not for me, Colin, any more than the Celine Laceys were,” Adrian said.

“This dowager does not want to marry you, Adrian,” Colin said, only to get swatted by Dorothy's fan again.

Precisely.

Colin kicked up gravel with his casual gait. “Is Gavin in with Father?”

“Yes, Gavin is with the earl and the King. So is half of the House of Lords.”

“Not very sporting of them,” Dorothy said. “She is only one woman.”

“I was just thinking the same thing. One would assume that Wellington could defeat her with only the King and one or two earls to help.”

“What is she like? There have been rumors about her life in Paris. Did you find the den of decadence that some whisper about?”

“Is that what is said, Dot? I wish you had told me. I would have girded myself with more moral outrage in preparation.”

They had circled the small pond. Celine had not and now awaited his approach.

He had kissed her once over ten years ago during her first season. It had been a long embrace on a dark terrace the night before she became engaged to the Duke of Everdon. There had been others like her, girls who stuck one toe into the lake of audacity by permitting him small liberties.

Later the liberties became less small and the females less innocent, but the game remained the same. Eventually he had refused to play the role of the safely English foreigner whom every sophisticated girl should try at least once.

He acknowledged Celine as blandly as possible, but it looked as though he would not escape. Dorothy separated from their group, bore down on Celine with outstretched arms, and engaged the widow in effusive expressions of sorrow. Spared by the generous diversion, Adrian and Colin continued toward the great house.

“So, what is the duchess like?” Colin prodded.

“Trouble.”

“Is she? What fun.”

“I know that you have no interest in politics, but this is no laughing matter.”

Colin frowned. “She isn't going to boot you out of your Commons seat, is she?”

“She may withhold the nomination just to get back at me. She truly did not want to return to England.”

“Any problems there?”

“When it came down to it she refused to budge and I had to make good on an earlier threat and carry her out of her house, slung over my shoulder.”

Colin cocked an eyebrow and half a smile. “You jest.”

“Damned if I do. She wears at least ten petticoats, and all I could think was that if a strong wind should whip under her skirt, we might both take to flight like one of those big air balloons.”

Colin laughed. “With all the revolutions on the Continent, who knows where you might have been shot down. Then to find all of that trouble on the road from Portsmouth.”

“I have exaggerated that somewhat. Part of our delay came when we landed in Portsmouth itself. The monkey climbed to the top of the ship's main mast and it took half a day to get him down. I am sure that she deliberately let Prinny out of his cage.”

“Prinny? She named a monkey after the late king?”

“He was alive when she named her monkey after him. It gets worse. She and I had an interesting conversation during the crossing. We discussed last summer's
petite revolution
in France, and the deposition of King Charles in favor of Louis Philippe. The duchess thought it a splendid drama. Her exact words, and I quote, were ‘helping the citizens of Paris man the ramparts last July was the most exciting and worthwhile thing I have ever done in my life.' ”

“Now, that
is
trouble. Have you told Wellington about this?”

“Do I look like a man who wants to die?”

They had reached the second terrace. Their reflections sparkled sharply in the new plate glass that had recently been installed in the windows and French doors. All over England the great houses were embracing the new, costly, large planes, and all over England mobs were smashing them. Even Wellington's Apsley House in London had seen all of its new glass destroyed a month earlier by a rampaging mob after dissolution of the last Parliament had killed the first Reform Bill.

The glass produced an eerie effect that was very different from deliberately gazing in a mirror. It caught casual vignettes and poses and showed one in the world as others saw one. Now it displayed the contradictory appearance of Adrian and his brother. Colin was all fair and blond, with an angelic face of perfect features. Adrian looked like night to his day, Satan to his saint.

He did not resemble the earl or Gavin, either, but the contrast was greatest with Colin. Colin never seemed to have noticed, or at least acted as if he had not, except during those fights at school when he had stood by Adrian's shoulder to defend the honor of their mother. Gavin always seemed to be away on the playing field whenever that happened.