Chapter Twenty-Three
G ran was overjoyed as was Maman. Jackie could tell Pol had conflicting feelings. She drew him into the corner for a private conversation while the two older ladies were excitedly making plans for a wedding at Riese Hall. “It is good news, is it not?” she asked. “And we do not have to fall in with their plans, if you want a quiet wedding, or one in town…” She tried to meet his eyes, but he was gazing out of the window. “We have announced nothing, if this changes matters for you.”
That drew his attention. He faced her and cupped her cheek with a gentle hand. “It does not change how I feel about you in the least, my love. I am having trouble seeing myself as a viscount, but at least I will have you at my side. I will, will I not? You won’t condemn me to take up this role without you?”
“I love you, Pol,” Jackie told him. “Steward, secretary, viscount? It doesn’t matter to me, as long as I am with you. You will be a superb viscount, I am certain. You already know the Riese Hall estate, and you will quickly learn about all the other properties you own.”
Pol grimaced. “The dinners this week have brought it home to me that I know nothing about the social and political side of the role, though.”
Nor did Jackie, but such things could surely be learned. “We will learn together,” she said, with more confidence than she felt.
Perhaps he saw the uncertainty she was trying to hide. “If I am a gentleman, beloved, then you are certainly a lady in every sense that matters. We will learn together.” He grinned. “At least I do not have to go hunting around the employment agencies for a job.”
Maman and Gran had fallen silent, and when Jackie turned to look, they were watching. “A wedding at Riese Hall, then?” Maman asked. “It is your wedding, mes enfants . What would you prefer?”
“A wedding by license within the week, so no one can take Jackie away from me,” Pol replied. He grimaced, even as Jackie was about to agree. “But… there is much to be said for a wedding as a good way to start our life at Riese Hall as its viscount and viscountess. It will mark a sea change—a new start, not just for us but for our neighbors and our tenants.”
Pol was better at this politics business than he thought. As soon as she heard him, Jackie knew he was right. “How long will it take to confirm the viscountcy?” she asked. “For I do not want to wait longer than the time it takes for the banns to be called. If that.”
“Come with me to see the solicitor and my father’s friend, Lord Fuller,” Pol suggested. “They may be able to tell us what happens next.”
“The duke may know,” said Maman. “He had to prove his right to be duke when his father died, for there was another challenger.”
But Gran did not agree. “His place was not questioned, Eloise. His enemies wanted to deny the legitimacy of his children, but he was able to provide all the evidence needed to show that he and his first wife had been married by an ordained minister of the Church of England.”
“Mr. Fortescue will be able to advise us,” Pol said.
“Fortescue,” corrected Maman. “You are a viscount, Pol. You do not need to call him mister. He is not your equal.”
“I will continue to treat others with respect,” Pol said firmly. And that attitude and determination was one of the many reasons why Jackie loved him.
*
A footman found Pol in the sitting room Gran shared with Madame de Haricot du Charmont. “Lord Riese, you have visitors.” He held out a salver, with two cards.
Pol held them so Jackie could read. Giuseppi Allegro, Patrizio, said one. Tobias Carver, Viscount Fuller, the other. “My uncle and his friend,” Pol said, unnecessarily. They must have come over as soon as they received Pol’s note.
“Do you wish me to come with you?” Jackie asked.
He nodded. “Please.” He had the sense he was stepping off a cliff into the unknown, but Jackie would anchor him.
The two gentlemen who stood when Pol and Jackie entered the Chinese parlor were both familiar, though Uncle Giuseppi had changed more than Uncle Toby. But then Pol had not seen Uncle Giuseppi since he left Italy sixteen years ago, and Uncle Toby had continued to visit until he was eighteen.
Both were tall, elegantly dressed, and had dark eyes and dark curly hair that was going grey over the ears. Until seeing him again, Pol had forgotten Uncle Toby, like Pol, had had an Italian mother.
In the next moment, Uncle Giuseppe strode forward and flung his arms around Pol. “Apollo, mio nipote .”
Pol found himself hugging the man back, disoriented by the sense that time had rolled backward, and he was safe again in the arms of his mother’s brother. “ Zio Giuseppe.” His uncle still used the same shaving water—cedar and an array of spices, but though the smell was right, the dimensions were wrong. His uncle had broadened with the passing of time, and Pol was ten inches taller and at least sixty pounds heavier than the nine-year-old who had left Tuscany.
Uncle Giuseppe rattled off a sentence in Italian. Pol blinked. He’d caught a word or two of the language he’d been raised in. “I have not spoken Italian in many years, Zio ,” he apologized. “That was too fast for me.”
“You did not write, Apollo,” his uncle complained. “Your aunt and your cousins—we have all missed you.”
“I missed you,” Pol replied. What an understatement! He had yearned for his family and his home and had written long letters that Lady Riese grudgingly agreed to post. “I wrote,” he said. “No one ever replied. In the end, I gave up.” How could he have believed he had been sent away and forgotten? But how could he have thought anything else?
Uncle Giuseppe jumped to the same conclusion as Pol. “This aunt, your uncle’s wife. The one who stole your title. She took your letters, and those we wrote to you.”
“That would be my guess,” Pol said.
“I suppose,” said Uncle Toby, “that you did not write to me when you were eighteen to tell me I no longer needed to visit you.”
“That is why you stopped visiting?” Pol asked.
“No,” answered Uncle Toby. “It was the follow-up letter that stopped my visits. It said you had fallen in a hunt and broken your neck.”
Pol turned to exchange glances with Jackie, who was still standing just inside the door. “It should not surprise me,” he told her.
“Nothing that evil woman is accused of would surprise me,” Jackie replied, “but to keep his family’s letters from a grieving boy! How cruel!”
The two gentlemen were regarding Jackie with interest and appreciation. Pol realized he had been rude. “I apologize for my lapse in manners, my love,” he said. “Please allow me to make known to you my uncles, Patrizio Giuseppe Allegro, my mother’s brother, and Lord Fuller, my father’s dearest friend. Gentlemen, this beautiful lady is my betrothed, Mademoiselle Jacqueline de Haricot du Charmont.”
“I shall ring for tea,” Jackie announced, when the greetings and compliments were over. “Or would you gentlemen prefer coffee? Or a glass of wine?”
“The coffee is exceptional,” Pol offered.
With a servant dispatched to see to refreshments, Jackie invited them all to sit, for all the world as if she played hostess to a viscount and an Italian noble every day of the week. Pol could not have been prouder.
Tea and coffee were served while Pol was explaining about his life at Riese Hall, as an unwanted and illegitimate cousin. Uncle Giuseppe kept swearing in Italian and then apologizing to Jackie. Uncle Toby repeated, over and over, “I had no idea.”
“Why did you not say something when I visited?” he asked at one point.
“I did not know you would care,” Pol pointed out. “Lady Riese—Mrs. Riese, I suppose I should call her—assured me you were only carrying out an obligation and were only too happy to wash your hands of me. Complaining would do me no good, and she would punish me, besides.”
More swearing from Uncle Giuseppe. Italian was feeling more familiar to Pol by the minute.
And so was the long-buried history of his childhood, as Uncle Giuseppe’s presence aroused flashes of memory. Meals with the whole family, Uncle Giuseppe at the head of the table, Aunt Margurita at the foot. Outings in a cavalcade of carriages. Sitting up beside Uncle Giuseppe and learning to drive—with his cousin Marco. How could he have forgotten Marco? They had been the best of friends, only a year apart in age and inseparable.
Once his story was up to the present, he said, “Now tell me about my cousins, and Zia Margurita and the other aunts.”
“It can hardly be of interest to Signorita de Haricot,” Uncle Giuseppe demurred.
“Call me Jackie, please,” his beloved replied, “and yes, please tell us how the years have treated your family. They shall be my family, too, one day soon.”
How was it she always knew the right thing to say? Pol smiled at her and squeezed her hand.
The cousins were mostly grown and many of them were married with children of their own. In Pol’s memory they were still children, and it was odd to think of, for example, Francesca, who was perennially seven in his mind’s eye, having three babies of her own.
Pol had never felt the lack of brothers and sisters until he left Italy, for he had grown up as just another boy in a pack of boys and girls. Uncle Giuseppe was the patriarch of a family of brothers and sisters, all of who were married with children and all of who lived on the Allegro estate or in the nearby town of Volterra. To hear their names and little anecdotes about them was to be immersed again in the love of a large family. His head was spinning.
Another surprise was that Uncle Toby had married Pol’s youngest aunt, his mother’s sister Maria. All this time he believed himself to be alone in the world except for the aunt and cousin who despised him, the Fullers had been living here in England and grieving him as dead.
Marco was also here in England, traveling with his father. “He is eager to meet you again,” Uncle Giuseppe said as the two men were leaving.
“Will you and Jackie come to dinner tonight?” Uncle Toby asked. “Come early, and you can meet your youngest cousins in the nursery.”
Pol and Jackie escorted the pair to the door, where Pol was engulfed in another Italian hug, and Jackie, too. “I thank the good God for bringing you back to us, mio nipote ,” Uncle Giuseppe said.
By the time Pol and Jackie had seen their guests out, Gran had shared the news of Wakefield’s findings with the Duchess of Winshire. Since she had, from the first, insisted on the Winshire household addressing Pol as “Lord Riese”, she took in her stride the confirmation that he was the true viscount.
“Perhaps it is time for Society to meet the true Lord Riese,” she suggested.
Jackie pointed out that Wakefield had warned them to keep a low profile. The duchess felt the time for secrecy was past. Pol was in two minds. On the one hand, something in him was jumping with glee at the idea of confronting the two people who had done their best to make his youth miserable. On the other, he was reluctant to test his social skills in public.
“Talk to your solicitor, Apollo,” said the duchess. “See what he thinks.”
*
The cat was already out of the bag, as Jackie and Pol discovered at the Fullers’s that evening. Marco had had an encounter with Oscar the previous night, after Wakefield’s visit to Uncle Giuseppe the previous day.
“I’m sorry, ‘Pollo,” he said. “He was just so annoying. A blaggard and a cheat. When I pointed out the card up his sleeve, he told the others at the table that he was an Englishman and a viscount, and that I was an Italian liar.”
“So, my son informed him that he was not a viscount at all, but just a thief who had stolen his cousin’s title,” Uncle Giuseppe explained, with a sigh.
“It is true,” Marco sighed. “He made me so cross, cugino . I told the other men there that I was Marco Allegro, and that my cousin Apollo Riese had been robbed of his place by this piece of rubbish, but he was taking it back!”
Done was done. Pol told Marco that it had to happen soon, in any case. “I wonder what Oscar and his mother will do in response,” he said to Jackie.
The answer came the next day. He and Jackie arrived back at Winshire House after visiting the solicitor to discover they had missed an obnoxious visitor.
“Your neighbor, Baron Barton, arrived with your cousin and two constables,” Drew told them. “They demanded to see you, and when informed you were not in, refused to believe it. They demanded that our servants hand you over, as you were both felons. Among other things, you are accused of kidnapping Clara Lady Riese.”
“What rubbish!” Jackie said.
“Indeed. That is very close to what Lady Riese told them. She informed the constables that she had been rescued, not kidnapped, for her daughter-in-law had been poisoning her, and charges would soon be laid to that effect. She told your cousin that he was a disgrace to the name Riese, that his accusations against you, Pol, were false, and that you would soon be taking your proper place as viscount. Aunt Eleanor then informed Barton that his warrant was not valid in London and would be suspect anywhere else in England, since the entire country would be informed of his illicit relationship with the widow Riese if he attempted to execute the warrant.”
Jackie chuckled. “The widow Riese,” she repeated. “I doubt she will enjoy that.”
The duchess dismissed Barton and Oscar with a few choice words. “Stupid men. They have no power in my London and are too ignorant to know it. Apollo, you and your betrothed shall attend the Campion ball this evening. It is time for Society to meet the true Lord Riese.”
“Tonight?” Pol asked, quailing at the thought of all those eyes. And judgmental minds. “We do not have invitations.”
“But you do,” Her Grace insisted. “I have been in touch with Sally, Lady Campion, and she has sent invitations for all four of you, Clara and Eloise, too. Your aunt Louella and cousin Oscar will also be guests tonight. You will attend as members of my party—mine and the duke’s, if he is home from Lords in time.”
Pol’s first instinct was to refuse, to hide. That is what you have been doing for sixteen years , he scolded himself. No more hiding . Wakefield had said that, if the Rieses tried to have them arrested, they should allow the duchess to introduce them to the Ton.
“We will have to see them sooner or later,” he said to Jackie.
Her smile did not touch her eyes, but she said, “Tonight, then.” She curtseyed to the duchess. “Thank you, Your Grace.”