Chapter 6 #2
“Behaving herself, Lord Fitzroy. At least as best we can judge,” Thorne answered. “She is with the Russian delegation, and for now, she’s content knowing she is causing a great deal of consternation.”
Perry tapped his fingers against the sheath of his smallsword. Good behaviour surely wouldn’t last.
“We mustn’t linger together,” said Ravenscroft. “I must get back to Prinny. Canary, your sister is catching up with some of last year’s debutantes in the blue room. Lady Normanby, darling, would you like to keep the Regent from pulling his hair?”
“Not today, I think.” Selina looked thoughtful.
“It would be wiser if perhaps the Duchess and I paid a call at the Pulteney tomorrow. I managed to secure an invitation to visit from an old friend.” She glanced at Charity for approval of this plan.
And then her eyes lingered more speculatively on Sir Nathaniel. “I may have another idea.”
“I like the way your mind works, Marchioness,” Ravenscroft drawled in amusement. “Yes, that might be just the role for our budding spy.”
Thorne blinked at them. “What exactly do you want me to do?”
“To flirt with the Grand Duchess, Sir Chivalrous.” Selina took Thorne’s forearm between both hands. “Let us go introduce you. I suspect she will like your company, and it will be excellent practice.”
“Er,” Thorne stammered, flushing a deep red. But he let Selina lead him away, and Ravenscroft wriggled his eyebrows suggestively as he, too, left.
Charity bit her lip to keep from laughing. “Do you suppose the knight might require rescuing this time?”
Perry pretended to consider, distracted by the sensation of Charity’s smallest finger stroking along the side of his hand. “Hmmm. No. This will build character,” he finally managed. Then he winked at her and strode away, seeking the blue room and Lark.
Hopefully, the Cresswells would not track Charity down again immediately.
Lines of demarcation had formed despite the crowd.
Middle-ranking British military men were clustered together, but to one side of that group, the allied generals from the visiting delegations were mingling, talking of war.
The same had happened with the members of Parliament.
Lower MPs grouped like sheep, and men like Liverpool and Castlereagh conversed with the London diplomats like the von Lievens.
The Austrians. The Prussians. The Russians. Great powers with the most present delegates, they formed islands in the swirling masses. The Germanic states made another. The smaller presences banded together in a more motley assortment—Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and the Dutch, mostly.
At last, Peregrine found what he was searching for. Lark was in a rather small knot of young women from the British peerage, chatting. Lark’s expression was distracted, as if she was only half-listening, but her hazel eyes met Perry’s, and she appraised her brother coolly as he approached them.
Lark turned to the other two ladies and politely excused herself before Perry got within speaking distance.
“Sister,” Peregrine greeted her carefully.
“Brother.” Lark tilted her chin, her face unreadable.
“I hope I did not interrupt your discussion.”
“It was not much of a discussion. They were filling me in on gossip I missed.” Lark fanned herself idly. “Was there something you wanted?”
Perry had a pang of regret. Their age difference kept them from being too close, but the gulf had, it seemed, widened in the past year. He had no idea what his mother would have told her.
What had Marian explained to her daughter about why the two of them had packed and left without notice on the ship bound for Copenhagen, leaving him behind?
Or of the ruby dagger that had been stolen and returned?
What did his sister believe about Charity’s kidnapping last year? Of his mother’s former black empire?
Did Lark know that their mother tried to kill him? He couldn’t tell.
“I wished to make sure you were… well,” he said softly. To make sure she was safe. To see if there was something he might be able to do.
As if they both realised they had been staring, something ineffable showed on Lark’s face, and she lifted the fan to disguise it. “This is hardly a place to talk, Perry.”
Lark was only nineteen, and still so young. But he could see signs of his mother’s hands on her, like the trace of unhappy nervousness that peeked through her calm. The attempt at studied nonchalance.
He gave her a ghost of a smile. “Perhaps I might persuade you to go for a ride with me tomorrow? It will give us the chance to catch up.”
Whatever she had been told, Peregrine was sure she held him to blame for their situation now. Lark had left behind everyone she had ever known—even her lady’s maid. They had been living in exile. Her friends had married and moved on with their lives.
“Mama did say you would likely try to talk to me alone,” she admitted.
Perry closed his eyes briefly and wondered if the well was already poisoned. He would have to be careful in extracting information from his sister. So careful. “And? Did she say that you should not?”
“No.” His sister looked unhappy. “She suggested that I ought to. But I don’t know if I want to.”
It made him nervous that his mother wanted them to speak; that made it more likely that Marian intended to use her daughter against him.
And it made it less likely that Lark knew anything of importance at all.
If she knew little—and he told her the truth about their mother—it might put her in jeopardy.
Still, he had to try. To feel out whether she could be extracted from a dangerous situation. “Please.” He gave her a beseeching look.
Lark’s eyes dropped to the floor for a moment. “All right, Perry. I will tell Mama I have said yes.”
Gooseflesh crawled on the back of Perry’s neck. Marian would know exactly where to find him and when. But he nodded. “I will pick you up from the Pulteney at four o’clock?”
“Tomorrow, then,” Lark said, showing him her back. The conversation was finished.
A preternatural prickling across his senses had him turning around. Another familiar bright-blonde head was weaving through the crowd purposefully, away from him. His mother was bound on some mission, paying him no mind.
Perry had a premonition of disaster, and that spurred him into following. When he spotted the entire Cresswell family in her path, he edged his way through the crowd as quickly as he could.
Marian Fitzroy bore down on them with the grace of a hungry predator before he could intercept her.
“—how very fine the pair of you look tonight,” his mother said with a brilliant smile.
“Vanessa, my dear, seeing the two of you side by side, it astonishes me how uncanny the resemblance is between your daughter and the way you looked at her age. I wonder if she inherited more than just your cheekbones.”
“Mother,” Peregrine began in a low, warning tone, and Marian Fitzroy lifted a finger in a bid for patience.
Charity’s face was pale, but she stayed serene. Lord and Lady Cresswell, however, looked anything but.
“Yes, well, we all hope our children take the best of us, don’t we, Marian?” Lady Cresswell said acidly, her eyes flicking towards Perry. “But the best of what some parents have to offer might still bear the stench of ruin. We should endeavour that our children have better lives than we do.”
“It is quite all right,” Marian murmured over her shoulder to him when he took a breath to object. “There is no need to make a scene. I couldn’t agree more with Lady Charity’s mother. Oh! Forgive me. It is Her Grace now, isn’t it?”
That his mother knew Charity’s status gave him pause. How much information had Cameron and her cronies given her over the year of her absence? But he bit his tongue, because Marian Fitzroy was right; they were already attracting a great deal of attention.
His mother met Vanessa Cresswell’s eyes again. “Private feuds do not need to be aired in front of the ton—unless, of course, someone insists on hanging out laundry before them.”
Lord Cresswell’s jowls quivered slightly, and Charity’s face creased in confusion. Cresswell bodily put his wife’s hand upon his arm and began to tug her away, towards the door, leaving Charity rooted in place.
With a casual flick to open her fan, Lady Fitzroy followed them, her pace less of a saunter and more of a leisurely stalk.
With a glancing plea for assistance at Peregrine, Charity turned to hurry after them. “Do you know what is happening?” she asked him.
“She’s forcing them to retreat to someplace more private,” he gritted at her side, in as low a voice as he could. The Cresswells knew that Marian Fitzroy held an armoury of weapons to be wielded against them. They were armed with nothing save baseless accusations.
“Mother!” Perry barked again in a harsh whisper behind her, as the Cresswells huddled in the dubious privacy of a niche. “This is not the time or place.”
Lady Fitzroy turned on a heel to study her son, rolling her head on her neck in a careless stretch. And she traced a line in the air over the very spot on his torso that he had been stabbed, which made his knees wobble.
“Perry, my love, not everything is about you.” Lady Fitzroy turned to Charity and said in a playful voice, “I know a secret about your mother, Your Grace. Would you like to guess it?”
“Tell me that you wouldn’t have done the same, if our places were reversed, you witch,” Lady Cresswell hissed, half hiding behind her husband. “You nearly ruined my daughter!”
“Why would I steal another’s betrothed by staging an attack on my own virtue, Lady Cresswell?” Marian asked, her eyes glittering. “Or, are we speaking of your own effort to ensure my son died in the muck like a common soldier?”
Charity and Cresswell’s sharp intakes of breath were loud, and Perry resisted the urge to sigh.
“Was that not common knowledge?” Lady Fitzroy asked disingenuously. “Oh, Vanessa, I am so sorry. I thought you had told them already.”
“What did you do?” Cresswell asked her in a low, furious tone, and Lady Cresswell blanched.
Charity, too, gave her mother a blank stare. “You were the one who made sure that Perry was sent to war?”
Lord Cresswell’s face was a study of uncertainty, anger, and regret as he locked eyes with Peregrine. “Vanessa, we need to leave. Now.” He dragged his wife past them, and Marian let them go, her face devoid of humanity once more.
Seeing Death wearing his mother’s skin, Perry caught Charity around the waist and pulled her farther away from the woman. Gossip be damned; he would take no chances with Charity’s life. Not when it came to his mother.
But Charity had been maddened enough by the exchange to attack the monster. “Why are you bothering us? It seems odd that you would care what my mother did, given what you did to your own son.”
“Odd?” Lady Fitzroy echoed. “Why is it odd? I care because he is mine.” She took a menacing step closer to Charity, and Perry bared his teeth at his mother in an unspoken threat.
Madness was dancing in her eyes. “Peregrine’s love—his loyalty—his life.
It is mine to break or burn, as I see fit.
Not Vanessa Cresswell’s. And most certainly not yours. ”
Charity twitched in his arms. “That is not how you should treat someone you claim to love, Lady Fitzroy.” His duchess was practically spitting, she was so angry. “He is a person! Not your possession.”
The abrupt change from angry monster to amused mask was jolting. “How quaint. Love and marriage have always been tools of possession, Your Grace. You should know this. Or did the old duke decline to take your dowry before he took you to his bed?”
“The dowry, yes. For some, that may be the way they consider marriage, but—”
“I see. Tell me, Your Grace,” Lady Fitzroy asked coquettishly, “how many rights do you have now without coverture?”
Charity sullenly didn’t answer, and Lady Fitzroy continued. “My son was loved exactly as much as was necessary to mould him into what I needed him to be. Just as your parents did for you.”
Perry could feel Charity shaking her head. The barest back and forth of disbelief. “Why will you not just leave us alone?” she whispered, resisting as Peregrine urged her backwards.
Lady Fitzroy was eerily still. “Because I do not wish to. Is that not enough?”
“We all know better. You never do things for one reason only, Mother,” Perry fired at her.
“Are you casting the blame upon me? The trouble that has happened to you these past two years is of your own making.” She tilted her head, blinking slowly. “All of it.”
Charity squirmed again, and he tightened his grip, sweat growing cold in the small of his back. “Don’t,” he murmured suddenly into Charity’s ear. “Don’t fight me, or her.”
Their exchange had given him new clarity. A thought that he could barely even articulate to himself.
Somehow, somewhen, a year and more ago, he had met a girl and had been moved by the sound of her laugh.
She gave him something for nothing. A moment of delight without expectation.
Without demands. Without ill intentions or aspirations of what she would be able to extort from him.
That had given him a reason to live. To fight.
That had been what had made him defy Marian. To reclaim his dented soul for himself.
His mother was punishing them because Charity had set him free.
“You had best get back to the Drawing Room, Mother.” His voice was steady, even if he was certain Charity could feel how rapidly his heart was beating against her back. Charity wove her fingers into his hand clasped around her waist.
He wasn’t quite sure what expression was on his face, but whatever it was, Lady Fitzroy inclined her head and walked away.
“We will talk another day, Perry,” she said as she passed them by.