Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Dante was on edge before he found the two unfamiliar coaches blocking the rear of Suffolk House when he returned on the horse that Andover had loaned him for the day. He was not accustomed to the riding of horses, and it chafed him to share control with an animal.
Worse, he had been able to accomplish nothing of note at the house that day, not before Cerys came and not after she left.
His mind kept sliding away from measurements of brick and stone to skim the dimensions of Cerys’s presence in his life, the proportions of her slender perfect body, the play of light and shadow across her expressive face.
He had opened his heart to her and made his pledge, and she had stepped away without giving him an answer. That meant her answer would be no.
He couldn’t bear it. He’d go drown himself in the River Chelt before he’d stand there and let her squeeze his heart in her fist.
No, he decided as he swung down from the horse. He wouldn’t flinch. He wouldn’t beg or try to coerce. He’d take the blows like a man, and he’d bury the loneliness of the rest of his life in drink and work, just as his father had done.
Servants scrambled out of the coaches and heaved at the luggage strapped to the roofs and rear. They spoke English, but in an accent he’d never heard. How like Andover to invite more guests and not inform the ones he was already hosting.
No matter; Dante would avoid them. He had to avoid Cerys anyway, at least until he gathered the courage to look her in the eye as she dismantled his heart and his hopes for the future.
He would leave the final touches the Countess of Suffolk wanted in the hands of the butler to oversee.
Buckle was capable. Dante wasn’t needed.
With the path to the back entrance clogged, he walked around the house to discover two more coaches standing in the dirt-packed lane, lined up along the shrubbery.
Andover and Dutton stood on the front walk, conversing with two gentlemen.
He knew their status by the quality of their coats, the fashion of their hats, the way they held themselves as if they deserved, had earned, all the honor and reverence the world gave them for the mere accident of their birth.
Dante wondered how he was going to get inside while evading their notice, what with having to wade through the tangle of children running about and women and nurses standing and scolding the children.
“Manelli!” Andover hailed him. “He’ll know,” he said to the gentlemen. “He and Miss Evans have an understanding, if you take my meaning.”
“I don’t.” One of the strange gentlemen turned to Dante with a frown. He looked a few years older than Dante, arrogant and large, as tall if not as broad. He wore a buff-colored greatcoat and Hessian boots with tassels, as if he’d been driving.
The second man, more rough-hewn of feature, wore a dark wool riding coat and striped trousers tucked into his tall boots. His frown resembled the first’s. “But perhaps we should.”
“You brought Miss Evans with you, then?” Dutton asked. “This is her friends and family asking.”
Dante stopped as if gripped in a vise. “Cerys returned with the others. The women. In your coach, Andover.”
Andover furrowed his brow. “The coach arrived hours ago. Miss Evans wasn’t with them. They stopped at Barrett’s Spa and Lady Baeccon took Miss Evans away with her.”
“Bathsheba?” The vise tightened. “Why would she go with Bathsheba?”
“They must have gone off to some entertainment,” Dutton said.
“But Cerys would send word if she’d made other plans for the evening.” Mame joined them, drawn out of the house no doubt by curiosity at the new arrivals, and why they were all standing about outside, enjoying the sunset. “She wouldn’t leave us to worry.”
“Did you say Lady Baeccon?” One of the women came to stand beside the lord in the greatcoat.
Dante pegged him as a lord, or a lord’s heir, by his air of casual command, much like Andover’s but more developed.
She was a lovely woman, fashionably attired, with cinnamon-brown hair tucked beneath her hat.
The lilt in her voice matched that of the servants behind the house.
“Her ladyship wrote that they were in Cheltenham for the season.”
Dante watched her apprehensively. If this lady were a friend to Bathsheba, then she might be a foe to them all.
“I know Bacon,” said Greatcoat with a grim set to his mouth. “He’s an arse.”
“Pen,” chided the woman with reddish hair. She studied Dante. “Perhaps his lady is a better sort.”
“She isn’t.” Dante felt the contraction of his brow, the glower Cerys had accused him of wearing all too often. “If Bathsheba wanted Cerys, it’s for mischief, I can guarantee.”
The woman’s brows rose. “Cerys to you, is she?”
“An understanding.” Andover nodded.
“Perhaps you might make the introductions, Andover,” Greatcoat said with a thread of steel in his voice. Dante watched him warily. He knew a brawler when he met one, whether he wore a lord’s coat or no.
“Oh, right you are. Penrydd, this is Mr. Dante Manelli of London, architect. He built this house for m’father.” Andover jerked his chin to indicate the building behind them.
“Architect.” Greatcoat narrowed his eyes. “Italian?”
“My father was the sculptor Andrea Manelli. My mother is the daughter of the Bishop of Gloucester. I call myself of Cheltenham, lately. Cerys came today to see the house I am building out by Charleton Park.” He’d slipped and used her given name again. This did not escape Penrydd’s lady.
“Gentleman?” Penrydd inquired, his voice clipped.
This was the question, wasn’t it? The question that determined whether or not he was worthy of Cerys, would be allowed even to woo her. Of course it would be the first thing about him her friends would want to know. The only thing.
“I’d like to think I am worthy of being so,” Dante said, his voice just as cool.
“As good as.” Andover nodded again. “For the rest. Manelli, this is the Viscount Penrydd and his viscountess, Lady Penrydd. This—” He turned to the other man. “I beg your pardon, my brain is a soup until I get my dinner.”
“Sir Hewitt Vaughn of Greenfield, Newport.” Dutton leapt into the breach, eager to be of service. “That is his wife, Lady Vaughn, over by the hedge. And this is, ah…” He trailed off as another couple left the cavorting children and came forward.
This must be Cerys’s mother. She was a stunning woman, with a regal set to her head and no sign of her age but a pair of lines set either side of her mouth, which pressed into a line as she regarded Dante.
“So this is the architect?” Her question was directed at Lady Penrydd.
“It would seem so,” Lady Penrydd replied. “He doesn’t know where she is, either.”
“She can be a goose, but she isn’t careless,” Cerys’s mother said. “Do you know where she might have gone, sir?”
“Allow me to dispense with the courtesies, Dovey bach,” said Lady Penrydd. “This is Mr. Dante Manelli, gentleman, or so we are told. Mr. Manelli, this is Mrs. Van Der Welle Evans.”
Dante extended his hand. “She looks very much like you,” he couldn’t stop himself saying. “Save for those eyes.”
Was he daft? This was not the way to address the mother of his beloved when he was meeting her for the first time. A vague and growing alarm had soaked his brain. Where was Cerys?
“And her hair.” Mrs. Evans smiled. “And this would be Mr. Evans,” she said of the man who joined her.
He was dressed more plainly than the others, in a riding coat with brass buttons and a pair of buckskin breeches.
The empty sleeve of his coat lay pinned against his shoulder.
He leaned on his crutch and extended his arm, and his grip was firm and strong.
His steel-gray hair was pulled back in a queue, and his lined face spoke of years of worry and weather, but his gaze was steady and clear.
Dante knew he was being measured, and from this man, more than the titled others, he wanted a good report.
“So we simply wait?” Mrs. Evans asked. “Until our Cerys decides to return?”
“Or we go looking for her,” Dante said. He turned to Mame. “Tell me what you know.”
He’d studied what was known in Cheltenham as the Great House, built decades earlier by Lady Stapleton, a dowager left widowed and wealthy by her prosperous husbands and her own sugar plantations in the Caribbean isles.
The house was an imposing affair of red brick and rigid lines, leaning more toward the Jacobean style than the English Baroque.
An enterprising man called Fisher, near Dante’s age, had taken over management of the place and was likely to make a going concern of it if the owners didn’t go bankrupt.
The Duke of Gloucester had graced the Great House with a visit from his royal person, and the town fathers were enormously pleased that the Duchesse of Angoulême, daughter of the French king beheaded in the Revolution, was staying for the season with her husband, le Duc.
No doubt Bathsheba was enormously pleased, too, and was making every effort to ingratiate herself with French royalty, even if the woman was in exile.
Baeccon was in the drawing room when Dante pounded on the door of their apartments. His lordship rose with an expression first annoyed at the intrusion, then alarmed when he saw Dante’s face.
“Fetch your wife,” Dante said tersely.
“Devil it,” his lordship exclaimed, then caught himself when Penrydd loomed in the doorway behind Dante. “What’s she done now?”
Her ladyship sent word via her lady’s maid that she was at her toilette and could not be bothered. When Sir Hewitt shouldered his way into the drawing room, with Andover in his wake and Dutton pushing in behind, Baeccon decided his ladyship could be bothered.