Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I must have a word with Mrs. Shorer,” Thaddeus Singleton said, rising.
“You young people stroll about the terrace and talk philosophy or whatever the fashionable affectation is these days. My lord, thank you for a fine meal. Alice, don’t lecture the man in my absence.
He will have his blasted mill wheel, and there’s an end to it.
I’m sure the baron will be happy to see you home on such a fine evening if Mrs. Shorer takes me captive in her herbal. ”
Grandpapa stalked from the dining room, leaving the baron on his feet and Alice beyond mortified.
“He’s matchmaking again,” she said, whisking her napkin from her lap and slapping it down beside her plate. “That stubborn, ridiculous, bald-faced…” Dear, dear old man.
“At least somebody besides me favors the notion of you becoming the Hall’s baroness,” Cam said. “Shall we enjoy the evening air despite the implications?”
The meal had been scrumptious. A spicy gazpacho followed by grilled trout, then a roast of beef done to a turn, the kitchen’s signature sour cream mashed potatoes, and all manner of garden bounty, followed by raspberry fool.
“Grandpapa still has a good appetite,” Alice said, allowing the baron to assist her to her feet. “When he goes off his feed, I truly worry.”
“You didn’t eat much.” The baron offered his arm and moved with Alice toward the door.
“I ate plenty.” As much as her tentative stomach would allow. The meal had been served early—six p.m.—and two hours later, the sky was still full of light. “Where has Mr. St. Didier got off to?”
“York. I’ve asked him to look into a few matters for me.”
Alice stopped as she and her escort gained the soaring main foyer. “You wanted him out from underfoot so you could woo me in peace. Does he think I’m not good enough for you?” Pointless question. In the eyes of Society, she was far from fit to become Cam’s baroness.
“Boot’s on the other foot,” Cam said. “He warns me on pain of ruination that I must not trifle with you, to the point that I wonder if he’s not a bit smitten himself.”
“He isn’t. We’ve barely exchanged two words.” What did St. Didier know and to whom would he disclose it? How could he know anything?
“You’re quiet, Alice. What troubles you?
” His lordship had waited to pose his question until they were on the terrace, alone but for the evening sky and the sun turning the western horizon golden.
An avian chorus drifted from the direction of the home wood, and a sliver of moon had already risen to the east.
A lovely night, and the automatic rejoinder—I’m fine, thank you—simply would not do.
Alice was not fine. She was angry and hopeful and all in a muddle, and she was exceedingly unfond of muddles.
The last time she’d felt this way had ended very, very badly, though she would never regret being Gabriella’s mother.
The baron would see through any attempt at dissembling, unlike most of the local swains. Alice decided upon a course of half truths, though even that undertaking daunted her.
“Have you ever been taken advantage of in business?” she asked.
“A few times. The experience makes an impression. Shortly after I mustered out, a former fellow officer suggested we partner on a shipment of rifle barrels. I wasn’t keen on dealing in arms, but in the tropics, those barrels rust to uselessness in little over a year.
He had secured the inventory at a bargain price.
I paid the supplier, with the understanding that my partner’s half of the payment would come out of our vast profits. ”
“There were no profits?”
“The inventory had been allowed to sit on the docks for months. The barrels were already rusted, and my erstwhile partner had been handsomely paid to swindle me out of my coin. I could prove nothing. I had the agreed upon rifle barrels delivered at the agreed upon date and time. I could do nothing at the time.”
“You didn’t inspect the inventory before purchasing it?”
“I looked over the few cases that weren’t nailed shut. More fool, I. I haven’t made the same mistake again.”
“I have felt like that too,” Alice said. “A complete, hopeless fool. I don’t care for it.”
They strolled along the balustrade, the walled garden in deepening shadows at the bottom of the terrace steps. Crickets sang slowly, a sign of summer’s passing, and an owl hooted mournfully.
“Alice, I would like to marry you. I mean that sincerely. I will return to London fairly soon, but I won’t disappear from your life. You need not fear that I will play you false.”
“Said every handsome bounder to his gullible sweetheart.” Alice took the steps, though she ought by rights to have called for her bonnet and shawl and marched off across the park in the direction of home.
The baron was in the mood for plain speaking, though—something she usually admired about him—and Alice was resolved to oblige him.
“May I tell you a story?” she asked. She’d paused halfway down the steps, her escort remaining at the top.
The waning light weathered his features and cast shadows around his eyes, giving her a glimpse of the older man he’d become.
More formidable, more imposing, more… attractive, which ought not to be possible.
He came down the steps and gestured along the crushed-shell walkway. “I gather this story does not end happily.”
“The story could have ended disastrously.” But it hadn’t.
Not yet. “Let’s sit.” Alice chose a bench on the western side of the garden, one already in shadow.
“Once upon time…” Alice had not meant to make these disclosures, but neither could she keep them hidden.
Significant decisions could be like this, taking up every available iota of the imagination, and then, without warning, a fait accompli.
“Once upon a time,” the baron said, “there dwelled in the bucolic purlieus of Yorkshire a young lady. We will call her—”
“We won’t give her a name. She was lonely, this young lady.” But the loneliness had followed so closely on a load of grief, she hadn’t known it by name. “She was also quite honestly bored, keeping house for one distracted and somewhat crochety old relation.”
Cam took Alice’s hand, and she allowed it.
“A grandfather,” Cam said.
“An uncle. In this story, he’s an uncle.” Alice focused on the shadow slipping up the opposite wall. “She was bored and lonely, and one summer, along came a winsome fellow. He was a friend of one of the local young men, a bit older than our protagonist, and a lot more worldly.”
“The winsome cad ruined her.” Cam loaded that short statement with loathing.
“He… Well, he broke her heart and went upon his way. She learned that her judgment regarding men is not to be trusted and that moments of pleasure can have unimaginable consequences.”
“Who was he, Alice? You cannot inflict this tale upon me without realizing that I’ll pummel him flat, at least financially, if I ever get the chance.”
“You are angry with him?”
“As I hope you are, or were. He disgraced himself in his treatment of you.”
The words were simple enough, but the direction of them—disgrace aimed at the marquess’s darling boy, not at the foolish rusticating girl who’d allowed him liberties—left Alice feeling somehow more tense, more at sea.
Lady Josephine had taken a very different view of matters, and after years of pondering, Alice had reasoned that Lady Josephine was judgmental, manipulative, and untrustworthy, but she hadn’t been wrong: Alice, despite her complete lack of experience, truly should have known better.
A marquess’s worldly spare did not plight his troth with a steward’s granddaughter.
I’ll write. I’ll write soon, darling Alice, and let you know when I’ll return.
“A French cannonball pummeled him into the hereafter,” she said. “I did not know what to feel about that either.”
Candles were being lit in the windows of the Hall’s lower floors. Time to finish this discussion and quite possibly bid his lordship farewell.
“You don’t have to feel anything,” Cam said, curling his free hand around Alice’s fingers. “He abused your trust and left without a fare-thee-well, proving not that you lack judgment, but that he was a very good liar who lacked honor. Fortunately, his fate did not affect you.”
Oh, but it had.
“I have forgiven myself,” Alice said, which was true in part.
“I’ve seen how hopelessly young I was at going-on-seventeen, how little I knew, how much I still missed my parents and a life I’d loved.
Keeping house for Grandpapa was not how the headmaster’s daughter saw her future turning out.
I thought myself very much put upon because the closest thing to literature in Grandpapa’s library was a pamphlet extolling the virtues of various types of manure. ”
Cam snorted, and even Alice had to smile. She’d read that pamphlet, the better to discuss the topic when Grandpapa had next grown testy.
“You were hardly as put upon as I was,” Cam said. “I could not leave this place soon enough nor make a fortune fast enough. Alexander lent me fifty pounds to get started. I paid him back with interest in less than a year.”
The last of the sunbeams slipped over the opposite wall. “I should be getting home.”
“You say that a lot.” Cam rose and offered Alice his hand. “If you think that a bounder dallying with you years ago makes you any less attractive to me, you’re daft. Are you less attracted to me because I bought rusty gun barrels?”
Alice rose and kept hold of his hand. “Not the same thing at all, my lord.”
“Of course not. I lost a substantial sum because I trusted the wrong party while making a foray into a market I prefer to avoid. A minor sort of betrayal. You got your bereaved heart broken, and you are now entitled to hold at least one late aristocrat in abiding contempt. We are both older and wiser, and we do not give our hearts away easily.”
Tell him the rest. Tell him about Gabriella and be done with this.