Chapter 7 #2
She stood still for a moment before leaving the room and closing the door behind her. She drew in deep lungfuls of air before proceeding on her way up to her room.
LORD brOCKLEHURST SENT HIS card up to one of the rooms at the Pulteney Hotel and paced the lobby impatiently.
It was a stroke of raw luck, he knew, despite the fact that the Bow Street Runner had reported the detail to him the day before with puffed chest and important air, as if he had manufactured the whole thing with his superior police skills.
The list of guests for Willoughby Hall had been disappointing.
Only two of them he knew even vaguely. There would have been no realistic chance of striking up a close enough friendship with either of them that he could have invited himself along to the house.
Besides, all except one couple, with whom he had no acquaintance at all, had left London already.
He would have had to do things the way he did not want to do them. He would have had to go down to Dorsetshire in his capacity as a justice of the peace to arrest Isabella and bring her home for trial. He did not want his hand to be so forced. He did not want all his options to be cut.
Dammit, he did not want to see that lovely neck ringed by a noose.
But only one day after delivering the list and declaring that Lord Thomas Kent was nowhere in Britain, and after having had his bill paid, Snedburg had come bustling back, puffed with importance, to announce that his lordship had that morning set foot on English soil from the deck of an East India Company ship.
“Of course, sir,” he had said, “I know from experience that when the nobility disappear from our shores, it is often to take employment with one of the companies. It was a simple, though time-consuming matter, you will understand, to make inquiries. What could have been more fortunate than to discover not only that his lordship had indeed taken himself to India but also that he was bringing himself back again?” He had coughed with self-satisfaction.
Lord Brocklehurst had paid the man more generously than he ought, he felt. Living in town was deuced expensive.
An employee of the hotel bowed in front of him and informed him that Lord Thomas Kent would receive him in his suite. Lord Brocklehurst turned to the staircase.
Lord Thomas Kent was a few years younger than he. The two men had never been very close friends, merely friendly acquaintances who had frequented the same gaming hells and taverns many years before.
Lord Thomas was in his sitting room, dressed in a long brocade dressing gown, when Lord Brocklehurst was admitted by a servant. He had grown more handsome with the passing of early youth, the latter noticed: bronzed, dark-haired, slim, a man of a little above average height.
“Bradshaw,” he said, extending his right hand, his teeth very white against his sun-browned face. “I hardly recognized you from the title on your card. Your father passed on, did he?”
“Five years ago,” Lord Brocklehurst said. “You are looking well, Kent.”
“I’ve never felt better,” the other said. “I thought not a soul knew of my return. I thought I would have to do the rounds of all the clubs today and leave my card at every door in Mayfair. This is a pleasant surprise.”
“I heard in passing,” Lord Brocklehurst said. “Been gone long, have you, Kent?”
“For well over five years,” the other said. “Ever since that debacle over the dukedom. I went running with my tail between my legs. Doubtless you heard.”
“Yes.” Lord Brocklehurst coughed delicately. “A nasty business, Kent. You have my sympathy.”
Lord Thomas shrugged. “I am not sure the sedentary life would have suited me after all,” he said. “Or the married life. Too confining by half. Are the ladies as lovely as they used to be, Bradshaw? And as willing? I must say I am starved for an English beauty or two—or twenty.”
“And just as expensive as they ever were,” Lord Brocklehurst said, “if not more so. You are going home?”
“To Willoughby?” The other laughed aloud.
“I think that would be the unwisest move of my life, considering some of the things that were said when I left. It can’t be a comfortable thing to have someone who once wore your title breathing down your neck, I suppose—and someone who was once betrothed to your wife.
Though it might be worth everything just to see the look on Ridgeway’s face. ”
“Old wounds heal fast,” Lord Brocklehurst said, “especially within families. He would probably be delighted to see you.”
“The prodigal’s return and the fatted calf?” Lord Thomas said. “I think not. I’m deuced hungry and hate eating at hotels. Is White’s still standing where it used to stand?”
“I’ll be delighted to buy you luncheon there,” Lord Brocklehurst said.
“Will you?” Lord Thomas laughed again. “The Heron property is good to you, Bradshaw? I can remember the time when neither one of us had a feather to fly with. Luncheon it is, then, and perhaps tonight we can go in search of wine, women, and cards together, though I might be persuaded to dispense with the cards. Let my man pour you a drink while I dress.”
Lord Brocklehurst sipped on his drink a few minutes later and stared thoughtfully at the door through which Lord Thomas had disappeared.
SIXTEEN GUESTS ARRIVED TO STAY at Willoughby Hall, all on the same day. The Duke of Ridgeway stood beside his wife in the great hall to receive them and circulated among them during tea in the saloon late in the afternoon.
They were not quite the crowd he would have chosen to consort with, given the choice, he reflected, but Sybil was happy and looking quite glowingly lovely, and he supposed she was entitled to some happiness.
Indeed, he was glad to see her enjoying herself.
It seemed to have been beyond his power to give her any enjoyment since their marriage.
And he was getting mortally tired of sharing a dining table with her, one at the head, the other at the foot, making labored conversation across its empty length.
“Good hunting do you have here, Ridgeway?” Sir Ambrose Marvell asked him as they sipped on their tea.
“My gamekeeper tells me that the deer are increasing at an interesting rate,” he replied.
“And the fishing?” Mr. Morley Treadwell asked.
It was easy to see already whom Sybil had invited as her cher ami—there would have to be someone, of course, as there always was on such occasions.
Sir Philip Shaw, he had heard, scarcely needed to keep a home of his own, spending all his time moving about among the homes of his numerous flirts and mistresses.
And the current joke had it that one need not assign a guest bedchamber to Shaw—he would cheerfully share with one of the ladies, usually his hostess.
His indolent, almost effeminate manner and graceful person and permanently sleepy eyes were apparently irresistible to the ladies.
And Sybil was already sparkling up at him, one slim white hand on his arm.
Where the devil had she met him? But of course she sometimes took herself off on visits without him—she never asked, and he never resented not being asked.
Most recently she had spent two weeks at her sister’s, apparently in company with other select guests.
The duke sighed inwardly. He hoped he was not going to have to go through that ridiculous farce again of playing the icy husband guarding his conjugal rights.
It was so very tedious—and not a little humiliating.
And of course it forever enhanced her image of him as humorless tyrant.
Perhaps he was just that. He was coming almost to believe it himself.
When could he decently escape? he wondered.
And where could he escape to? The lessons abovestairs were doubtless finished for the day.
He was glad at least that Miss Hamilton had done her practicing early that morning, when he had been able to listen to her at his leisure.
He had opened the door between the library and the music room and sat at his desk and listened.
But he had made sure that she saw him. He did not wish to give the impression that he was spying on her.
She really did have talent. Music that he had only ever been able to produce with competence she brought alive and warm and flowing. The hour he had spent listening to her had soothed him far more than the ride he had planned.
He had not entered the room at all, or stood in the doorway to watch her.
He would have had to be blind not to have noticed the deep revulsion in her eyes whenever she looked at him.
But it did not matter. He was not looking for any sort of relationship with her.
He merely hoped she would be good for Pamela. And he liked her music.
“Adam, my dear man.” The voice was low, the perfume seductive.
Lady Victoria Underwood, widow, who had decided during the Season the year before that they were close enough friends that they could drop the cumbersome formality of using titles, smiled up at him from beneath artfully darkened eyelashes.
“What a very splendid home you have. Why have you not invited me here before?”
She was leaning slightly toward him. For some reason she had never found his scar repulsive.
“It makes you quite the most attractive man of my acquaintance,” she said to him the year before on one of the many nights when she had failed to entice him into her bed.
He often wondered why he had never given in. She was not beautiful, but there was a seductive sexuality about her. Coupling with her would have been a somewhat more sensual experience than the one he had had with Fleur Hamilton.
But he wished he had not had that thought.
He had been unconsciously trying to divorce in his mind the Miss Hamilton who wanted to teach and care for Pamela and who made of Mozart and Beethoven haunting experiences of the soul from the thin and pale and lusterless prostitute he had taken with such quick lust in a cheap tavern room a month before.