The Sum of All Kisses (3 page)

“Didn’t think of that, did you?” his father taunted. “That bullet hit an artery. It’s a miracle you didn’t bleed to death. The doctor thinks your leg got enough blood to survive, but God only knows about the rest of you.” He yanked the door open and tossed his last statement over his shoulder. “Winstead has ruined my life. I can bloody well ruin his.”

T
he full extent of Hugh’s injuries would not become known for several months. His femur healed. Somewhat.

His muscle slowly knit back together. What was left of it.

On the bright side, all signs pointed toward his still being able to father a child.

Not that he wanted to. Or perhaps more to the point, not that he’d been presented with an opportunity.

But when his father inquired . . . or, rather, demanded . . . or, rather, yanked off the bedsheets in the presence of some German doctor Hugh would not have wanted to come across in a dark alley . . .

Hugh pulled the covers right back up, feigned mortal embarrassment, and let his father think he’d been irreparably damaged.

And the whole time, throughout the entire excruciating recuperation, Hugh was confined to his father’s house, trapped in bed, and forced to endure daily ministrations from a nurse whose special brand of care brought to mind Attila the Hun.

She looked like him, too. Or at least she had a face that Hugh imagined would be at home on Attila. The truth was, the comparison wasn’t very complimentary.

To Attila.

But Attila the nurse, however rough and crude she might be, was still preferable to Hugh’s father, who came by every day at four in the afternoon, brandy in hand (just one; none for Hugh), with the latest news on his hunt for Daniel Smythe-Smith.

And every day, at four-oh-one in the afternoon, Hugh asked his father to stop.

Just stop.

But of course he didn’t. Lord Ramsgate vowed to hunt Daniel until one of them was dead.

Eventually Hugh was well enough to leave Ramsgate House. He didn’t have much money—just his gambling winnings from back when he gambled—but he had enough to hire a valet and take a small apartment in The Albany, which was well known as the premier building in London for gentlemen of exceptional birth and unexceptional fortune.

He taught himself to walk again. He needed a cane for any real distance, but he could make it the length of a ballroom on his own two feet.

Not that he visited ballrooms.

He learned to live with pain, the constant ache of a badly set bone, the pulsing throb of a twisted muscle.

And he forced himself to visit his father, to try to reason with him, to tell him to stop hunting Daniel Smythe-Smith. But nothing worked. His father clung to his fury with pinched white fingers. He would never have a grandson now, he fumed, and it was all the fault of the Earl of Winstead.

It did not matter when Hugh pointed out that Freddie was healthy and could still surprise them and get married. Lots of men who would rather have remained unwed took wives. The marquess just spat. He literally spat on the floor and said that even if Freddie took a bride, he would never manage to sire a son. And if he did—if by some miracle he did—it wouldn’t be any child worthy of their name.

No, it was Winstead’s fault. Hugh was supposed to have provided the Ramsgate heir, and now look at him. He was a useless cripple. Who probably couldn’t sire a son, either.

Lord Ramsgate would never forgive Daniel Smythe-Smith, the once dashing and popular Earl of Winstead. Never.

And Hugh, whose one constant in life had been his ability to look at a problem from all angles and sort out the most logical solution, had no idea what to do. More than once he’d thought about getting married himself, but despite the fact that he
seemed
to be in working order, there was always the chance that the bullet had indeed done him some damage. Plus, he thought as he looked down at the ruin of his leg, what woman would have him?

And then one day, something sparked in his memory—a fleeting moment from that conversation with Freddie, right after the duel.

Freddie had said that he hadn’t tried to reason with the marquess, and Hugh had said, “Of course not,” and then he’d thought,
Because who reasons with a madman?

He finally knew the answer.

Only another madman.

Chapter One

Fensmore

nr. Chatteris

Cambridgeshire

Autumn 1824

L
ady Sarah Pleinsworth, veteran of three unsuccessful seasons in London, looked about her soon-to-be cousin’s drawing room and announced, “I am plagued by weddings.”

Her companions were her younger sisters, Harriet, Elizabeth, and Frances, who—at sixteen, fourteen, and eleven—were not of an age to worry about matrimonial prospects. Still, one might think they would offer a bit of sympathy.

One might, if one was not familiar with the Pleinsworth girls.

“You’re being melodramatic,” Harriet replied, sparing Sarah a fleeting glance before dipping her pen in ink and resuming her scribbles at the writing desk.

Sarah turned slowly in her direction. “You’re writing a play about Henry VIII and a unicorn and you’re calling
me
melodramatic?”

“It’s a satire,” Harriet replied.

“What’s a satire?” Frances cut in. “Is it the same as a satyr?”

Elizabeth’s eyes widened with wicked delight. “Yes!” she exclaimed.

“Elizabeth!” Harriet scolded.

Frances narrowed her eyes at Elizabeth. “It’s not, is it?”

“It ought to be,” Elizabeth retorted, “given that you’ve made her put a bloody unicorn in the story.”

“Elizabeth!” Sarah didn’t really care that her sister had cursed, but as the oldest in the family, she knew she ought to care. Or at the very least, make a pretense of caring.

“I wasn’t cursing,” Elizabeth protested. “It was wishful thinking.”

This was met with confused silence.

“If the unicorn is bleeding,” Elizabeth explained, “then the play has at least a chance of being interesting.”

Frances gasped. “Oh, Harriet! You’re not going to injure the unicorn, are you?”

Harriet slid a hand over her writing. “Well, not very much.”

Frances’s gasp whooshed into a choke of terror. “Harriet!”

“Is it even possible to
have
a plague of weddings?” Harriet said loudly, turning back to Sarah. “And if so, would two qualify?”

“They would,” Sarah replied darkly, “
if
they were occurring just one week apart,
and
if one happened to be related to one of the brides and one of the grooms, and
especially
if one was forced to be the maid of honor at a wedding in which—”

“You only have to be maid of honor once,” Elizabeth cut in.

“Once is enough,” Sarah muttered. No one should have to walk down a church aisle with a bouquet of flowers unless she was the bride, already had been the bride, or was too young to be the bride. Otherwise, it was just cruel.

“I think it’s divine that Honoria asked you to be the maid of honor,” Frances gushed. “It’s so romantic. Maybe you can write a scene like this in your play, Harriet.”

“That’s a good idea,” Harriet replied. “I could introduce a new character. I’ll have her look just like Sarah.”

Sarah didn’t even bother to turn in her direction. “Please don’t.”

“No, it will be great fun,” Harriet insisted. “A special little tidbit just for the three of us.”

“There are four of us,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, right. Sorry, I think I was forgetting Sarah, actually.”

Sarah deemed this unworthy of comment, but she did curl her lip.

“My point,” Harriet continued, “is that we will always remember that we were right here together when we thought of it.”

“You could make her look like me,” Frances said hopefully.

“No, no,” Harriet said, waving her off. “It’s too late to change now. I’ve already got it fixed in my head. The new character must look like Sarah. Let me see . . .” She started scribbling madly. “Thick, dark hair with just the slightest tendency to curl.”

“Dark, bottomless eyes,” Frances put in breathlessly. “They must be bottomless.”

“With a hint of madness,” Elizabeth said.

Sarah whipped around to face her.

“I’m just doing my part,” Elizabeth demurred. “And I certainly see that hint of madness now.”

“I should think so,” Sarah retorted.

“Not too tall, not too short,” Harriet said, still writing.

Elizabeth grinned and joined in the singsong. “Not too thin, not too fat.”

“Oh oh oh, I have one!” Frances exclaimed, practically bouncing along the sofa. “Not too pink, not too green.”

That
stopped the conversation cold. “I beg your pardon?” Sarah finally managed.

“You don’t embarrass easily,” Frances explained, “so you very rarely blush. And I’ve only ever seen you cast up your accounts once, and that was when we all had that bad fish in Brighton.”

“Hence the green,” Harriet said approvingly. “Well done, Frances. That’s very clever. People really do turn greenish when they are queasy. I wonder why that is.”

“Bile,” Elizabeth said.

“Must we have this conversation?” Sarah wondered.

“I don’t see why you’re in such a bad mood,” Harriet said.

“I’m not in a bad mood.”

“You’re not in a
good
mood.”

Sarah did not bother to contradict.

“If I were you,” Harriet said, “I would be walking on air. You get to walk down the aisle.”

“I
know.
” Sarah flopped back onto the sofa, the wail of her final syllable apparently too strong for her to remain upright.

Frances stood and came over to her side, peering down over the sofa back. “Don’t you want to walk down the aisle?” She looked a bit like a concerned little sparrow, her head tilting to one side and then the other with sharp little birdlike movements.

“Not particularly,” Sarah replied. At least, not unless it was at her own wedding. But it was difficult to talk to her sisters about this; there was such a gap in their ages, and there were some things one could not share with an eleven-year-old.

Their mother had lost three babies between Sarah and Harriet—two as miscarriages and one when Sarah’s younger brother, the only boy to have been born to Lord and Lady Pleinsworth, died in his cradle before he was three months old. Sarah was sure that her parents were disappointed not to have a living son, but to their credit, they never complained. When they mentioned the title going to Sarah’s cousin William, they did not grumble. They just seemed to accept it as the way it was. There had been some talk of Sarah marrying William, to keep things “neat and tidy and all in the family” (as her mother had put it), but William was three years younger than Sarah. At eighteen, he’d only just started at Oxford, and he surely wasn’t going to marry within the next five years.

And there was not a chance that Sarah was going to wait five years. Not an inch of a chance. Not a fraction of a fraction of an inch of a—

“Sarah!”

She looked up. And just in time. Elizabeth appeared to be aiming a volume of poetry in her direction.

“Don’t,” Sarah warned.

Elizabeth gave a little frown of disappointment and lowered the book. “I was asking,” she (apparently) repeated, “if you knew if all of the guests had arrived.”

“I think so,” Sarah replied, although truthfully she had no idea. “I really couldn’t say about the ones who are staying in the village.” Their cousin Honoria Smythe-Smith was marrying the Earl of Chatteris the following morning. The ceremony was to be held here at Fensmore, the ancestral Chatteris home in northern Cambridgeshire. But even Lord Chatteris’s grand home could not hold all of the guests who were coming up from London; quite a few had been forced to take rooms at the local inns.

As family, the Pleinsworths had been the first to be allotted rooms at Fensmore, and they had arrived nearly a week ahead of time to help with the preparations. Or perhaps more accurately, their mother was helping with the preparations. Sarah had been tasked with the job of keeping her sisters out of trouble.

Which wasn’t easy.

Normally, the girls would have been watched over by their governess, allowing Sarah to attend to her duties as Honoria’s maid of honor, but as it happened, their (now former) governess was getting married the next fortnight.

To Honoria’s brother.

Which meant that once the Chatteris-Smythe-Smith nuptials were completed, Sarah (along with half of London, it seemed) would take to the roads and travel from Fensmore down to Whipple Hill, in Berkshire, to attend the wedding of Daniel Smythe-Smith and Miss Anne Wynter. As Daniel was also an earl, it was going to be a huge affair.

Much as Honoria’s wedding was going to be a huge affair.

Two huge affairs. Two grand opportunities for Sarah to dance and frolic and be made painfully aware that
she
was not one of the brides.

She just wanted to get married. Was that so pathetic?

No, she thought, straightening her spine (but not so much that she had to actually sit up), it wasn’t. Finding a husband and being a wife was all she’d been trained to do, aside from playing the pianoforte in the infamous Smythe-Smith Quartet.

Which, come to think of it, was part of the reason she was so desperate to be married.

Every year, like clockwork, the four eldest unmarried Smythe-Smith cousins were forced to gather their nonexistent musical talents and play together in a quartet.

And perform.

In front of actual people. Who were not deaf.

It was hell. Sarah couldn’t think of a better word to describe it. She was fairly certain the appropriate word had not yet been invented.

The noise that came forth from the Smythe-Smith instruments could also be described only by words yet to be invented. But for some reason, all of the Smythe-Smith mothers (including Sarah’s, who had been born a Smythe-Smith, even if she was now a Pleinsworth) sat in the front row with beatific smiles on their faces, secure in their mad knowledge that their daughters were musical prodigies. And the rest of the audience . . .

That
was the mystery.

Why
was
there a “rest of the audience”? Sarah never could figure that out. Surely one had to attend only once to realize that nothing good could ever come of a Smythe-Smith musicale. But Sarah had examined the guest lists; there were people who came every single year. What were they thinking? They had to know that they were subjecting themselves to what could only be termed auditory torture.

Apparently there
had
been a word invented for that.

The only way for a Smythe-Smith cousin to be released from the Smythe-Smith Quartet was marriage. Well, that and feigning a desperate illness, but Sarah had already done that once, and she didn’t think it would work a second time.

Or one could have been born a boy.
They
didn’t have to learn to play instruments and sacrifice their dignity upon an altar of public humiliation.

It was really quite unfair.

But back to marriage. Her three seasons in London had not been complete failures. Just this past summer, two gentlemen had asked for her hand in marriage. And even though she’d known she was probably consigning herself to another year at the sacrificial pianoforte, she’d refused them both.

She didn’t need a mad, bad passion. She was far too practical to believe that everyone found her true love—or even that everyone
had
a true love. But a lady of one-and-twenty shouldn’t have to marry a man of sixty-three.

As for the other proposal . . . Sarah sighed. The gentleman had been an uncommonly affable fellow, but every time he counted to twenty (and he seemed to do so with strange frequency), he skipped the number twelve.

Sarah didn’t need to wed a genius, but was it really too much to hope for a husband who could count?

“Marriage,” she said to herself.

“What was that?” Frances asked, still peering at her from above the back of the sofa. Harriet and Elizabeth were busy with their own pursuits, which was just as well, because Sarah didn’t really need an audience beyond an eleven-year-old when she announced:

“I have
got
to get married this year. If I don’t, I do believe I will simply die.”

H
ugh Prentice paused briefly at the doorway to the drawing room, then shook his head and moved on. Sarah Pleinsworth, if his ears were correct, and they usually were.

Yet another reason he hadn’t wanted to attend this wedding.

Hugh had always been a solitary soul, and there were very few people whose company he deliberately sought. But at the same time, there weren’t many people he avoided, either.

His father, of course.

Convicted murderers.

And Lady Sarah Pleinsworth.

Even if their first meeting hadn’t been a mind-numbingly mad disaster, they would never have been friends. Sarah Pleinsworth was one of those dramatic females given to hyperbole and grand announcements. Hugh did not normally study the speech patterns of others, but when Lady Sarah spoke, it was difficult to ignore her.

She used far too many adverbs. And exclamation points.

Plus, she despised him. This was not conjecture on his part. He had heard her utter the words. Not that this bothered him; he didn’t much care for her, either. He just wished she’d learn to be quiet.