A Properly Conducted Sham (Most Imprudent Matches #5)

Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen

BENNET HALL, SURREY - JUNE 23, 1816

CHARLOTTE

“—truly will not join me at the bonfire tonight?” a lilting feminine voice questioned, disappointment lacing the words.

“You know I would love nothing more. But I cannot abandon him,” a honeyed baritone answered.

I was nearly certain it was Brigsby and Eliza, one of the maids. Their overdramatic flirtation was a source of much amusement for me. She was a pretty thing, with dark hair and eyes and full lips. Truthfully, she could do far better than Brigsby, but his attentions must have held some appeal because she always encouraged them.

I had returned to the breakfast room only to fetch the book I had forgotten earlier. But the overloud-loud whispers out in the hall were far too intriguing to interrupt. Silently, I pressed closer to the door, striving to hear.

“He has a wife now. Surely she can look after him.”

Lee. They were discussing Lee and me. There was no doubt now.

“Eliza… Please understand. If there were any way—” What does that mean?

“If there were any way, you would be with me. Yes, yes. But you only have yourself to blame if I become chilled at the celebration and allow Tommy Higgins to warm me.”

“You wouldn’t…”

“I suppose you will never know. Because you’ll be here. With him. And I’ll be there. With Tommy Higgins.”

“Eliza,” Brigsby warned. “You know Tommy Higgins cannot kiss you the way I do.”

“I know no such thing,” she insisted.

“You don’t want Tommy Higgins,” Brigsby’s voice dipped into a growl.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that. I know that very well. Because Tommy Higgins is a boy barely out of leading strings and you, you require a man.”

I had to bite my lip to hold back my laughter. It was quite possibly the worst line I’d ever heard.

Eliza seemed to agree with me because she huffed, retorting, “You’re right, I do. But I do not see any here.” Her slippers stomped down the hall, irritation ringing in every step.

Brigsby sighed, and I waited, listening for a second set of footsteps.

Instead, the knob by my hip turned. Startled, I leaped back as Brigsby opened the door.

For a second, we both stared wide-eyed at each other. Then, he began, “My lady, how long have you?—”

“Longer than you would have wished,” I offered, still biting back a smile.

“Right. And I do not suppose I can persuade you to forget you heard any of that.”

I shook my head, allowing the grin to bloom slowly.

He cursed before straightening, a worried gaze shooting to mine. It was the precise moment I lost control of the giggles that threatened to overtake me.

“‘A man ...’” I quoted between bubbles of laughter.

His hand found his eyes and pressed there as his head hinged back.

After some minutes, my laughter quieted to a manageable chuckle every few seconds. “So that went well.”

“Indeed, spectacular. They’ll be reading the banns any day now.”

I shot him a look. “Come now, you have no serious designs on that girl. And she’s not truly considering you either.”

“It’s just nice. A bit of flirtation with a pretty girl to break up the day.”

“That better be all it is. If I find out that you’ve compromised the girl?—”

He raised his hands in surrender. “I haven’t. I swear it.”

“Good. See that it stays that way. Now, what is tonight?”

Finally confident he wasn’t about to see his employment terminated, Brigsby leaned a hip against the doorframe and crossed one arm across his chest as he wrapped a hand around the opposite bicep.

“It’s a festival. Down in the village. For St. John’s Eve.”

“Oh, yes, I forgot. Imogen had mentioned that. It seems like a jolly good time. Why can you not go?”

His free hand reached up to scratch the back of his neck as he straightened. “I— I have duties to attend to. Lord Champaign?—”

“Will survive for a few hours without your manly assistance.”

He winced. “It will be quite some time before you forget that, yes?”

“Oh, years, if ever.”

“Perfect… But no, thank you. I could not possibly?—”

“I have given Imogen the eve off. Surely Lee can spare you. In fact, I was considering asking him to attend with?—”

“No!” He’d started toward me, his hands grabbing my upper arms. Brigsby realized his position at the precise moment I did because he released me at once, stepping back. “I beg your pardon, my lady, but no,” he insisted, calmer.

“Why?” I demanded.

“That is not really?—”

“I will forgive the impertinence of the scene you just caused if you tell me why. Why can I not ask my husband to accompany me to a festival in the village? Why can you not leave him?”

I could see the entirety of his thought process. Right up until the moment when he spun to the door and peered into the hall. Satisfied we were alone, he pulled the door shut.

He sighed and urged me to my usual place at the breakfast table before taking Lee’s seat. His lips pursed as he considered me.

“Well…” I demanded, gesturing for him to get on with it.

“Lord Champaign—he has not told you of his scars, I assume?”

I considered lying. It was almost certainly the sort of a thing a wife ought to know about her husband. But he was not truly asking. He knew. So I nodded.

“He is—it was a fire.” In retrospect, that was surely obvious to anyone with sense. His scars were clearly from a burn. Why I had not considered it, I did not know.

“It took some time, months, before he could even abide a fire in the grate. That was a cold autumn. But he managed it. Though, in truth the alternative was to freeze to death in this glacial house so it was not much of a choice.”

“But a bonfire…” I continued for him.

Brigsby nodded. “A bonfire is too wild, too uncontained. And tonight—it is not a good night for Lord Champaign.”

“Because of the fires?”

I watched the indecision cross his face before he leaned forward. “The combination of the many bonfires—the smell of smoke in the air...”

“Thank you for telling me.” He nodded, though he wore an expression of guilt, as though he had betrayed my husband’s confidence. “I think you should go tonight. To the festival. With Eliza. She is right—Lee has a wife now.”

“My lady, I do not think that?—”

“You should bring her flowers too. Might have a warmer reception.”

His mouth was downturned and his eyes guarded when he asked, “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” I buried the uncertainty down deep. “Yes.”

I searched the study, the library, his bedroom, and the observatory without any sign of my husband after supper.

The meal itself had been stilted—more so than it had since we clarified our arrangement at any rate. Lee ate little, if anything, and contributed nothing but one-word answers to my attempts at conversation.

It was a very good thing Brigsby had informed me, or I probably would have been cross with my husband.

No sooner had I set my fork down than Lee shot from his seat and disappeared into the bowels of the house without a word.

I set out a few moments later to the observatory—expecting that to be his likely haunt—only to find it dark and shuttered in the balmy night. The fires in the nearby village left an orange cast on the horizon and acrid smoke was thick on my tongue. Brigsby hadn’t undersold the scent.

Crawford and Mrs. Fitzroy were all that remained of the staff. The rest had been given leave to laugh and dance and flirt in the village until the fires burned low. It was the first time Jack, the youngest of the footmen, had been allowed to join. He was now six and ten and his excitement had been palpable.

Crawford opened the door for me with his usual obsequious, overdone bow. Each time he did it, my annoyance lessened and it became more of an amusement.

I left him in the entry and forged ahead in my fruitless search for my husband.

Room after empty room, I wandered until all that was left was the guest wing. Crawford had—to my astonishment—been willing to leave this off the tour. Instead, he simply stated that it was a mirror of the family wing. Upon setting foot at the top of the steps, it became clear that the only significant difference was a muggy damp in the air and a dearth of light.

The candlestick in my hand chased away the dark—that and a semicircle of light spilling underneath a door—nearly the last in the hall. The one that, if I was oriented correctly, matched my own.

Outside the door, I wavered in my conviction. Whether to knock or simply enter or abandon him to his musings—questions much more fraught than they had been at the other end of the corridor.

Desperate for insight, I pressed my ear to the door in an entirely unladylike fashion, but I was met with nothing but silence.

With a bracing inhale, I turned the knob and took a single step inside.

Feminine, with light olives and slate blues accented with burnished steel rather than her favorite creams, Amelia Bennet’s bedroom was elegant in a way I’d begun to picture the lady herself. And I was certain that this was her bedroom—not the room I had been given.

Sheer curtains draped elegantly in front of the massive windows in the same way I’d considered for my own chamber. The bed was a large four poster that should have looked bulky, but the carvings on the headboard and the posts were so intricate and delicate it was astonishing it managed to support the canopy. The bed coverings looked as soft as a cloud but were the dark blue-gray shade the clouds grew just before a storm.

Those details, however, were secondary to the scarred profile of my husband, plopped on a rug the color of fresh rosemary with his back leaning against the foot of the bed. Either he hadn’t heard my entrance or hadn’t cared because he didn’t turn to face me. Instead, he stared straight ahead, unblinking, at the unlit fireplace grate. One long leg was sprawled straight in front of him, the other bent at the knee. He rested a forearm on the knee, and between two fingers, he twisted a long silver chain. A ring spun from the end of the chain, glinting as it twisted back and forth in the light of the candle beside him. Next to the candle, a half-empty bottle of a clear liquor was clasped in his loose fist.

Gooseflesh rose on my arms and the back of my neck despite the tepid, clammy state of the room. “Lee?” I whispered.

I caught a flinch—nearly imperceptible—of his lip. The candlelight at his side caught on the edges of his scars, sketched captivating and intimidating lines and crevices along the blade of his cheek. His heavy hand closed around the bottle and dragged it to his lips for a lazy swig before dropping back to the floor. I received no other reply.

He wasn’t drunk. I’d found Ralph collapsed drunk on the floor or the settee or the staircase more than once, and this wasn’t that. But Lee wasn’t here either. And I didn’t know what to do.

Slowly, with the trepidation of approaching a wildcat in a trap, I stepped toward him. When I received no protest, I knelt next to him and set my candlestick beside his.

“Lee,” I tried again, suddenly hoarse.

His throat bobbed but he didn’t turn. “Shouldn’t be here,” he rasped out.

“But…” I began with no notion of what to follow the protestation with.

“You should go.” The words were crisp and clear, without the slur of drink, but the usual warm notes of his baritone were absent. And for the first time ever, they smelled nothing of peppermint.

“I think I should help you back to your chambers.”

He shook his head, eyes never leaving the fireplace even as he continued to twirl the ring—a pretty, dainty thing, with an amethyst stone.

Something glinted off his cheek and it took an embarrassingly long time for me to work out that it was a tear, dipping in and out of the divots of his skin in its trek down his face.

It was as though I was watching someone else, but it was my hand that reached for Lee’s cheek, to brush the tear away.

His head shot back and he nearly fell in his attempt to get away.

The candlesticks knocked into each other as he kicked out instinctively to right himself. Both dropped to the floor in an echoing clatter and went out, casting the room into night.

“Get out!” His cold growl echoed, his gin-soaked breath harsh and ragged in the darkness.

With all the grace I could muster, I rose and strode from the room in but three purposeful steps. I followed the hall, down the steps, and out the front entry without a word to anyone.

I would not beg a man—not ever again.