The Duke's Wager (18 page)

“I suppose, basically,” she said, “no one of us really changes. Have you, Jason?”

“No,” he said lightly. “No, basically, I haven’t.”

*

“Rest easy,” Lady Burden caroled from the threshold, sweeping off her cloak and handing it to her maid. “For the foul beast has left his lair.”

“Shh!” St. John hissed irritably. “For I’m about to put the poor girl in my debt for, I’d estimate, at least ninety-seven years. Your bid, Lady Berry, but have
a
care, for you owe me a king’s ransom already.”

“No,” Regina laughed, putting her cards face up on the table, “I know when I’m beaten. But what ‘beast,’ Amelia? And why do you look so jubilant?”

“Bidding with such cards in your hand, Regina? Oh, you’ll never make a Captain Sharp with this sort of play. I thought I’d taught you better. Well,” Lady Burden said, plumping herself inelegantly down on a couch, “I’ve just come from a spirited visit to the Squire’s, and lo! it’s a house filled with lamentation. It seems all the chaos there, owing to their preparation for the ball, quite chased their honored guest away. Torquay just up and left them in the lurch, giving them some sort of nonsense about looking in on his daughter at Grace Hall. Which is a rare bouncer, if ever I heard one, for everyone knows he hasn’t clapped an eye on his offspring since she appeared in the world. And Grace Hall has seen nothing but his heels since that day. He promised to be back for the ball, but much faith they have in his promise, and they are exceedingly distraught at his escape.”

“Why should they be lamenting his departure?” Regina wondered, for she thought all polite society reacted as St. John did when he heard the Duke’s name, with a slight moue of distaste.

“Why? Heavens, girl,” Amelia laughed. “What sort of ball will it be with just a trumpery Marquis and a lady or two in attendance? A proper duke got away. Or rather an improper one, but still, he got clean away.”

“I should think,” St. John said, rising and walking the length of the table in the card room, “that they would be relieved for their daughters’ sake.”

“Oh come, come, Sinjin,” Amelia gurgled, “not everyone is as circumspect as you are. Why the Squire quite fancied having a noble son-in-law for himself, to say nothing of his wife’s being quite giddy from such a close encounter with such a sizeable fortune. Even the maids are sighing, for he has such a heavenly countenance, my dear.”

“To hide a satanic heart,” St. John muttered.

“Why, you sound quite priggish, my dear,” Amelia countered, gaily, but keeping her eyes steadily on the Marquis’s pacing figure.

“Can you have forgotten,” St. John said earnestly, “what Torquay’s machinations have caused Regina? Can you possibly have simply obliterated her flight from your mind? You seem to stand Torquay’s defender. Why don’t you just drop him a note and tell him to come around and pick Regina up this evening? You might pack for her while you are at it.”

Lady Amelia flushed and sat quietly for a moment. Then she rose and straightened her skirt. “No,” she said thoughtfully, “I had not forgotten. And I do know his reputation. But you do not have to suggest that I am acting as his pander either, Sinjin.”

“Amelia!” St. John wheeled angrily upon her. “You go too far.”

“No,” Amelia said quietly, “I don’t think so. You have said that Jason has designs upon Regina. I don’t find that unusual, for Regina is an unusually lovely girl, who, as you have said, at the moment does not enjoy the protection of her family. I make no doubt that Jason is unscrupulous. But he is not, Sinjin, some unearthly demon from hell. He is, after all, only a spoiled, decadent Englishman, and Nobleman at that. He is not some muttering madman. He is still accepted in a wide circle of our acquaintance, and as yet, he has only badly frightened Regina with words. Or so you have told me. And as far as having a ‘satanic heart’ goes, Sinjin, I am a full-grown woman, and although his reputation is bad, I know of gentlemen with much the same proclivities as his. You may detest him for your own reasons, but do not turn upon me as though I were some sort of heartless monster because I choose to make light of the situation, Sinjin. I swear I deserve better than that from you.”

St. John moved swiftly to her, and grasped her hands in his. He looked steadily at her, and she could not tell, for once, whether he was as usual staring fixedly at the bridge of her nose, or at last, looking deep into her poor besotted eyes.

“Amelia, forgive me. I did not mean it as it sounded. It is only that I detest the man, and it seems, cannot take anything about him in a light vein.”

Regina sat at the card table and watched them. Somehow, she thought, the two of them, standing so closely together, seemed rightfully matched. Both tall and straight, gifted and landed and fortuned, they seemed a true pair. Not for the first time, she thought herself an uncomfortable intruder in their own special world.

“Why do you detest him so, Sinjin?” Amelia asked. “You are no prude, my dear. Many times I have heard you laugh at adventurers far more lost to reason than he is.”

His eyes wavered and he released her hands. He strode back and seemed to stare at the leaded panes of the frosted windows.

“It is only that I know what sort of fellow he really is, and it irks me to see him go scot-free, when a fellow of lesser rank would be rotting in Newgate for the same crimes.”

It sounded weak enough, even to his own ears. Worse, he thought with chagrin, it sounded unlike him. Sanctimonious, priggish, even puritanical. Amelia, who had her ear to the social ground, had picked up the false note immediately, he realized. She looked puzzled. As well she might be, he thought viciously, for he was as well. The whole situation was damnable. There sat that lovely girl. All white and soft and compliant. All rounded and swelling, naive and ripe for him, and they were just friends. For these past weeks, he had had to play at being some stupid mythical fellow. Brotherly, fatherlike, everything but loverlike. She was homeless and friendless, she liked and respected him. How easily he could have moved her that one necessary step further into his life, had he been able. With little whispers, soft breaths, slight embraces, light kisses, and lighter promises, she could have been his by now; in gratitude, in pleasure, in love. But he had been thwarted, chaperoned and hedged in by circumstance. Forced to be natural and easy with Amelia, distantly friendly with Regina, and wary, always, of Torquay. Torquay, again Torquay. Small wonder he detested the man.

How easily Torquay could carry off a female, how simple he made the process. He had only to widen his china eyes and stare at some female of the demimonde and she was his. He had only to slightly court some light lady of Society and she closed her doors to all others. And, what was maddening, the stench of his reputation only seemed to enhance his desirability. And always, always, where he encountered St. John, there would be those light words, that little aside, that knowing smile, as if to say, “See, this is how it is with me. With you as well. You are no better, only, dear boy, far less successful.” He seemed to amuse himself at St. John’s expense, that was intolerable. And now, in this damnable affair with Regina, he saw himself in the role he played through her eyes: earnest, prim, and dull. While the absent Duke, by comparison, was all fire, all impulse. He did not want Amelia feeding any subterranean illusions Regina might have about Torquay. He did not want to lose her to Torquay, as he had lost others. Not this time. Not this woman. It was not fair. She had fallen, as if by fate, into his hands. And there he would see she would stay.

“At any rate,” he managed to smile, “it’s not important now, is it? If he is gone, then Regina’s road will be all the clearer, and her freedom achieved sooner, as well. Come, let’s forget the fellow, we all make too much of him. Let’s play at cards, and be friends again.”

“Very well,” Amelia laughed, but the laughter was brittle.

“You must teach me better, Sinjin,” Regina said sadly, “before I owe you my very soul.”

I will own that, and more, St. John promised her with a quick look, and soon, sooner now than I thought.

And Lady Amelia forced herself to look down quickly at her cards, and commanded her hands not to shake.

And Regina, looking up into his warm gray eyes smiling at her, thought only of how fortunate she was in her friends, and how undeserving she was of their concern.

XI

I vow,” the Duke said, smiling down at the company from his observation post at the head of the table, “I do not know how any of you good ladies can manage to keep your eyes open during the day, after a succession of riotous evenings such as this.”

“Unkind, Jason,” Miss Pickett commented sharply as she spooned her soup, not missing a drop in the delicate rhythm she had established to clear the bowl.

Miss Barrow stiffened at the familiar tone the other lady had used, and straightened herself further in her chair. Little Lady Lucinda seemed unaware of the adults at the table, and merely edged a carrot in her bowl closer to a navy bean and appeared to admire her artwork.

They sat formally at the long damasked table, with footmen poised behind their chairs, alert to the immediate remove of each successfully accomplished course, and they sat for the most part silently, as they had for five successive evenings. Occasionally the Duke and Miss Pickett would rouse enough to involve themselves in what Miss Barrow regarded as highly improper banter, with Miss Pickett, she felt, too often forgetting her position, and His Grace never remembering his. But, she felt strongly, she did not wonder at his careless attitude toward his rank, and not even at half the tales she had heard of him, if that farouche, indelicate female opposite her had indeed been in sole charge of his early upbringing. For her part, she was determined to show by her impassive, but tangible disapproval, that his daughter’s governess, at least, would spare this child such a slipshod education.

She had seen not only a slight, almost imperceptible although definite, to her hawklike vision, change in her charge’s demeanor since the Duke’s arrival. But a definite change, and not for the better, since Miss Pickett’s appearance. That woman insisted on trying to draw Lady Lucinda into conversation at the most inappropriate times, with the most inappropriate questions. At an art lesson yesterday, for example, Miss Pickett had carelessly ambled, yes ambled, into the nursery and asked Lady Lucinda why she only put one blossom on her watercolor of a tree. And the child had answered, rightfully and dutifully, laying aside her brush, that it was to give the tree a proper modest balance with the rest of the landscape, and to avoid a vulgar blotch of colors. “Oh I don’t know,” Miss Pickett had replied. “My favorite trees in spring are those that are the most vulgar, the most positively garish in their display of color, aren’t yours?” And when the child had tentatively, at first, and then with Miss Pickett’s approval begun eagerly to overlay the tree with great conflicting stabs of color, horrendous blobs of color, Miss Pickett had almost cried out with delight, and Miss Lucinda, emboldened by the creature, forgot herself so much as to dissolve into giggles, all the while darting little sly looks at her outraged governess.

And that, coupled with the incident at the reading lesson, the contretemps on the nature walk, and the common display at the pianoforte, had put Miss Barrow on guard, and made each successive evening at the great dinner table more uncomfortable. And why she and her charge should be summoned to the dinner table with His Grace and that creature every night, instead of dining modestly in the nursery as usual, was a puzzlement. Miss Barrow glowered down at her rack of lamb with such force, that had it been a sensible thing, it would have cringed. She would wait them out. The Duke could not content himself with pastoral pleasures for long, she felt, and whatever freak of temper had sent him posting back to Grace Hall to disrupt his daughter’s life would soon pass. She was only grateful that this shocking ex-governess was the only company he had summoned, and that he had not filled the Hall with the even more disreputable of his fell companions.

“Why don’t you eat your potatoes, child?” Miss Pickett now asked, noting how Lady Lucinda was poking each parsleyed marble-shaped little orb into a corner of her plate.

“I don’t care for them,” Lady Lucinda replied carefully, and then with a glance at her governess, “at least not tonight, thank you m’am.”

“I should think you’d prefer some nice fluffy potatoes,” Miss Pickett decided, and was about to signal to a footman when Lady Lucinda hastily said, “Oh no, m’am, I’m not allowed them.”

“Reasons of health?” Miss Pickett frowned.

“Reasons of manners, Miss Pickett,” Miss Barrow stated ominously. “M’lady was prone to dauble in them. She would—and here all lectures were to no avail—continually play with them at table, making quite a revolting mess of her plate, so she has been forbidden them till she can make a more reasonable effort at the table.”

“Play with them?” Miss Pickett smiled. “Why what on earth did you do with them, My Lady? Shy them at the butler? Lob them at the chandelier?” And Lady Lucinda gave a little gulping, half concealed giggle, but no further answer. “Well,” continued Miss Pickett in ringing tones, “I can distinctly remember being more circumspect myself. I was fond of sculpting mountains in them, and your father, I recall, had a decided partiality for creating opposing continental armies, with a river of gravy separating the warring factions.”

“Castles,” Lady Lucinda replied unexpectedly, “and sometimes mountains, too.”

“I do not find this amusing,” Miss Barrow said dangerously. “I do not find the improper manners of a child a source of amusement, or a proper topic of discussion before her.”