Chapter 9
The breakfast room rang like silver bells.
Glass chimed and laughter tinkled. The orchestra in the adjoining salon kept its cheerfulness at a conversational murmur.
Ravenscroft Hall, opened fully for the first time since his father’s funeral, wore its mood of celebration with military neatness.
Flowers massed along the mantel, white and green.
Footmen moved in lines precise as drill.
It had been arranged as if victory could be staged.
Edward moved through it with Isla at his side. He found the performance easy. The habit of command made him a passable groom.
“Lady Grey,” he said, presenting his wife to an influential matron who was an infamous gossip, “may I make you known to Her Grace the Duchess of Wexford.”
Isla beamed and held onto Edward’s arm. He patted her hand and smiled down at her. The doting husband and the adoring wife. To Sir Thomas Kingsbury, who owned a newspaper and Lady Margaret Shaftesbury. The perfect couple. Smiles. Touches. Eyes lit.
Edward felt the glow from her. Felt it through his gloves when he rested his hand upon hers. Felt it when their eyes met. It melted him when he had considered himself impenetrable. Granite should not melt without intense heat. A pair of pretty eyes should not provide that heat.
He steered her gently when needed, released her when a circle of ladies wanted the bride to themselves, retrieved her again.
“We tell the tale well, don’t we?” Isla said after one of those excursions.
She held a glass of ruby red wine. Edward ran a hand through his hair, gloves discarded and a glass of wine of his own, half consumed.
“We do. I have overheard the whispers.”
“About what a fine match we make?”
“The very same,” Edward found himself smiling. “I did not think it would be this easy.”
“To fool everybody?” Isla asked, sweetly.
It was a cold bucket of water. Edward frowned.
“I did not need to be reminded of our arrangement,” he said.
Why would she remind me if her objective is to trap me?
She behaved as if she had read the manual and chosen not to fight it. She smiled when addressed, answering what was asked with a poise she did not over-do. More than once, as he guided her hand to a guest, he saw the faint white line on her third finger. Broken glass. The whisky they had shared.
God, the idiocy of that night!
She had bled and none of it made sense outside his skull but the guilty heat of it still flickered.
“Your Grace?” a footman murmured at his elbow, proffering an embossed card on a tray. Edward read the names and felt his mouth go hard.
The Duke of Glenmore and his son the Marquis of Morlich.
He lifted his eyes to the doorway and there they were, exactly on time.
Father and son. The elder was handsome in the severe way of men who have spent a lifetime arranging their faces to forbid laughter.
Morlich, with the glossy arrogance of a horse that has never been asked to work. They wore civility like armor.
I would not have invited such men had the choice been purely mine. They are not the kind of company I enjoy.
His mother had sent the invitation without asking him.
Of course she had. If she could not unmake the marriage, she would chisel the guest list to carve her own story into the day.
Edward made a point of turning away, feigning absorption in a duchess’s anecdote.
He felt Morlich’s glance search the room and slide off him.
A moment later the young man’s laugh, too bright by half, cut across the conversation.
Hyde Park came back, sharp as a thrown stone. The buck who had baited Isla. The way she had taken the line and beaten him at his own joke. Edward shifted his position so that the nearest pillar put Morlich inadequately but symbolically out of sight.
“Your Grace.” The Dowager Duchess had materialized at his shoulder, taking advantage of Isla being diverted into conversation with her friend, Lady Victoria. “Do greet the Duke of Glenmore.”
“The room is large,” he said without looking at her, “he will find a corner he likes.”
“You are not a sulky boy,” she said, “do not play at it.”
“And you are not the master of this hall.” He kept his tone mild for the sake of his mother. “Do not pretend you are.”
She left him with a glance that promised a later engagement. He exhaled and returned to the only useful task at hand, being the man whose name his wife now carried.
They moved on. Alistair Drummond had cached himself at the far buffet with two peers and a decanter; he was in easy spirits and climbing.
Color rode his cheekbones; his laugh arrived before he did.
He caught Isla’s gaze across the room and lifted his glass in a toast that wobbled just enough to be seen.
She gave him a look that might once have hauled him out of a river by the ear. He winked, happy. Edward had the sudden foreknowledge of later trouble and the old tiredness that came of anticipating another man’s hangover.
“Wexford,” a voice said behind him, warm as a remembered hearth, “You’ve managed it, then.”
He turned with his first genuine smile of the day. “Henry!”
Captain Henry Ashford had not changed since their last meeting in Porto.
He was brown-haired, clean as if the sea had washed him permanently, hazel eyes that made most people tell him the truth without quite intending to.
He wore a coat that had been well cared for rather than often replaced and carried contentment like a light pack even when it was heavy.
“You came,” Edward said, “god be thanked.”
“I would not miss the entertainment,” Henry said, deadpan, then leaned nearer. “You look as if you mean it.”
“I mean to try,” Edward said.
“Good.” Henry’s glance flicked briefly to Isla, then away with exquisite tact. “She has courage,” he added.
“Meaning she needs courage?” Edward asked in a bantering tone.
“My dear chap, I couldn’t possibly say yes, of course.” Henry replied blandly.
They exchanged the nonsense of men who have spent years saying difficult things to one another and now find themselves in a place where nothing needs be said. Edward felt more relaxed in the presence of his old friend.
Perhaps Isla could be prevailed upon to help find him a suitable wife. He can’t be a bachelor all his life.
When he looked for her, Edward saw Isla with her brother. They sat at a table, heads together. Several empty glasses surrounded Alistair. Isla was speaking to him earnestly. Her head turned as though aware of his attention.
She does that. A preternatural skill, to sense the attention of others.
This time though, she looked away almost immediately, lowering her head more, speaking more intently. Edward frowned. It looked like two conspirators.
Or a loyal sister trying to persuade a drunken brother that breakfast is not the time for indulgence in drink.
But doubt was a worm that gnawed at him. Henry nudged him toward the corridor that led to a small morning room. It was a pocket of privacy where one could hear oneself think.
“I’ll be quick,” Henry said, closing the door. He looked suddenly less at ease. “There’s talk.”
“There is always talk.”
“This kind will not die.”
Edward’s mouth thinned. “Say it, then.”
Henry’s jaw flexed. “There’s a story I have heard whispered.
Chewed over, you know how the old cows grind the cud of gossip.
Says that a year ago your lady and her brother tried to fix an earl …
Dorset … no, Devon … one of the D’s anyway, into marriage to smother some local scandal.
The story goes that they failed and the man escaped north with his virtue intact and his purse lighter. ”
The room did not move. A clock ticked. Sound seemed to step backward, to make space for the air which expanded with tension.
Edward looked past Henry to the small watercolor his mother had hung here thirty years ago, a coastal scene framed by driftwood, a thing his father had called sentimental and she had kept anyway.
“Do you believe it?” Edward asked.
“I do not like it,” Henry said carefully, “and I do not like the mouths that savor it. But I cannot pretend I did not hear it. I cannot pretend you oughtn’t.”
“Who carries it?”
“A pair of Bellingham’s friends, and men who want to be thought his friends,” Henry said. “The tone was wrong though, too pleased with itself. It made me think they were not the original authors of the rumor. Only its common copyists.”
Edward could not fault him and did not try.
Anger rose, not at Henry, but at the sick satisfaction of the invisible choir.
That included his mother, who had seeded the room with enemies and called it society, and at himself, because doubt found a place too easily in a mind trained to test every spar for rot.
He thought of Isla on the terrace, steady under the Dowager’s knife. He thought of Hyde Park and the way she had not preened when she won. He thought of the kiss that had felt like decision. He thought of Alistair laughing with a decanter at his elbow.
“You see why I came,” Henry said softly.
“I see.” Edward’s voice was dry, “and I am grateful.”
“I would rather lose your favor than leave you ignorant,” Henry said, “but I would rather keep both.”
“Do you remember any more of the name?” Edward asked.
“Devonshire, I think.” Henry grimaced. “No! It was Deverell. Yes, Deverell. The name had too many vowels.”
“I will have it looked into. If Deverell was north last spring, he will have paid for rooms and stables or been entertained by someone who keeps books. We will cut gossip with fact.”
***
Edward opened the door and stepped back into noise.
The corridor’s little eddy of quiet released him into the main current.
Someone seized his hand, someone else called his name, and a child in ill-tied shoes ran under his arm with a cake.
He caught sight of Glenmore speaking to his mother with intimate gravity and looked away before the glare burst through the civility at his temples.