Chapter Five
An event stopped being a laughing matter when it sent the most tenacious woman he knew fleeing from a room, gasping for breath.
Alistair saw nothing humorous about the surprise engagement—hell, he’d call it what it was: the arranged marriage—Sir Thomas had publicly announced in front of his friends at supper.
Had it just been a few hours ago he’d been upstairs in his room telling himself his situation was not too bad?
It wasn’t a marriage, after all. Now the remark just seemed horridly ironic.
Alistair had been genuinely concerned for Ismay in those moments. What she’d experienced had been more than a fit of the vapours. She sat down beside him, shivering, the night having brought coolness at last. He shrugged out of his jacket and draped it about her shoulders.
‘Thank you. I am feeling better now.’ She gave a little laugh tinged with self-deprecation. ‘It must have been pretty bad back there. I don’t recall you ever being nice to me before.’
‘That’s not true. I was nice to you this afternoon.
I kept your secret.’ Alistair offered a wry grin, glad to see her spirits restoring.
‘You’re welcome, although you made me out to be an ogre in the process of thanking me.
’ Ismay never had liked being vulnerable.
Beyond them, the moon rose over the bay, outlining the mountain in the distance, a reminder that beauty and danger lived cheek by jowl in Naples just as it did at Thomas Rose’s dinner table.
‘Shall we talk about what happened in there?’
‘They don’t happen very often, only when I get extraordinarily upset. I didn’t used to get them. They started after—’
‘No, that’s not what I meant.’ He’d interrupted to save her the need to explain the fit, but his curiosity would have preferred she’d had the chance to finish the sentence.
After what? ‘I meant your father’s announcement.
I meant the engagement. Am I to understand that we are both equally shocked?
He never hinted at anything of this nature to you? ’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing at all.’ She tugged his jacket closer and fixed him with a considering stare.
‘Aren’t you angry? Or is the promise of the business enough to buy your acquiescence?
I do think you are the one who comes out ahead here.
’ There was suspicion in her tone as if she didn’t quite trust him despite his gallantry or perhaps because of his gallantry.
‘Of course I am angry, Ismay. In the span of five hours, I’ve discovered my father has plotted out the rest of my life for me, what I am to do, who I am to marry, and all of it done without my knowledge or consent years ago.
’ He’d just reconciled himself to the artefacts trade, and now this had happened. It certainly elevated the stakes.
‘Well,’ she offered wryly, ‘it is rather hard for a four-year-old to give informed consent to anything.’ Ismay must be feeling better. Her tongue was getting sharper.
‘There was plenty of time later to tell me,’ Alistair insisted. But he already knew why it hadn’t been brought up. His father had hoped there’d be no need, that he would find his direction at last.
‘Plenty of time for you to rebel if you knew,’ Ismay countered. ‘Perhaps you would have done something precipitous just to break the pact and ended up unhappy. Or in your haste to avoid the pact, you would have missed finding your true calling.’
‘Whose side are you on?’ Alistair scoffed.
‘My true calling is not exporting artefacts for aristocrats looking to take a piece of the Grand Tour home with them.’ He’d had time to find that calling, and he’d failed to do so.
This was his penance, like Faust having to pay his due after a lifetime of worldly pleasure.
‘Certainly not your side if you’re going to insult my father’s business.
It is far more than what you make it out to be.
I would give quite a lot to be in your position,’ Ismay snapped.
She felt betrayed, Alistair realised. She resented him for getting what she coveted for herself.
Perhaps it was a double dose of hurt for her to recognise it had been given away to someone who did not value it as she did.
‘My apologies. That was poorly done of me.’ But not of her.
She might be angry at her parents, but she was loyal.
Impressively so for the second time today.
‘I did not know you had hopes in that direction.’ He felt like a thief now.
Sir Thomas had presented the situation as if there was no one at all to take over.
‘How could you know? You’ve been here for all of five hours,’ Ismay struck back. ‘For the record, I don’t wish to marry you. In fact, I do not wish to marry at all. Men are a rather doltish species, and I want nothing to do with them.’
‘Well, I am glad it’s not just myself you’re opposed to.
’ Alistair stood and started to pace as he racked his brain for an idea.
‘How do you propose we get out of this engagement now that your father has made it public?’ Surely, she understood that was the very reason her father had announced it.
Sir Thomas hoped the embarrassment of crying off after a public celebration and a public acknowledgement of the pact would be too much to take on, that the two of them would not want to cause a loss of face to either family.
Sir Thomas was banking on that very loyalty Ismay had just displayed, along with their shared desire not to disappoint their parents.
Honour could be a damnably sharp sword on occasion.
Ismay was silent for a moment. ‘The way I see it, our fathers made this pact thinking that we would suit one another as well as their larger interests. We need to show them that we do not suit. Our parents do not want us to be unhappy. If we can show them how unhappy we are together, then they will call it off and say they’ve reconsidered.
We just have to be ourselves with each other, which shouldn’t be hard. ’
‘Given your behaviour at dinner,’ Alistair put in.
‘Given your behaviour at dinner,’ she retorted. ‘You were the one kicking a defenceless woman in silk slippers.’
‘You? Defenceless? You can’t sell that, Ismay.
You started it. You should have come to dinner better armed before you engaged in a kicking war beneath the table.
’ There was a long pause before they both laughed.
‘This feels better. Normal, even.’ Alistair smiled.
They knew how to fight, how to argue with each other.
The shock of Sir Thomas’s plan had worn away, and in its wake, they had formed their own plan to show the Roses how unsuited they were for one another. It just might work.
‘The plan only solves half of our problem, though,’ he began, unwilling to disrupt the accord they’d reached. ‘It can stop the marriage, but it won’t give you your father’s company.’
‘Not yet, but perhaps later. What matters right now is that we live to fight another day and all that.’ She stood and handed him back his jacket.
‘For now I will be free, and that is enough.’ Spoken like someone who had been hurt.
Coupled with her other remarks about men, it did make him wonder what had transpired that had left a lovely heiress unwed at the age of twenty-eight.
It could not have been for lack of suitors.
Ismay would never go unnoticed in any room even without her father’s money.
But he could not recall any mention of such things from Sir Thomas’s letters to his father.
If such news had been shared, his father had not passed it on when he read the letters out loud at dinners.
He shrugged back into his jacket. ‘Free to do what, Ismay?’
‘To do my work.’ She smoothed her skirts in preparation for going back inside or perhaps it was out of habit.
‘Is that the work you stole away to do this afternoon?’ Didn’t she realise that the more she obfuscated, the more determined he was to find out her secrets?
She fixed him with a sharp glance. He’d irritated her.
Fair was fair. She’d been irritating him for years.
‘Yes, and now if we’re done with the inquisition, we need to return inside and put our plan in motion.
We can start by not being seen together.
I’ll go in first, and don’t you dare come and join me. ’
‘Of course not. I wouldn’t dream of giving them any hint that we’re in on this together,’ he teased.
She tossed him a smile over her shoulder as she left, perhaps realising the irony of working together after a history of working against each other.
He would do his part to ensure her plan worked.
He didn’t want this marriage any more than she did.
Alistair lingered in the darkness, letting the evening air cool his emotions, which were definitely running hot, anger, resentment and even betrayal churning through his veins.
He’d write to his father immediately and lodge an official protest. It was all he could do at this distance.
Arranging a career was one thing—he could empathise with his father there—but he drew the line at having his marriage arranged for him.
That was not to be tolerated, and to Ismay Rose of all people, the last person on earth he wanted to be married to.
Marriage and a life path were the two biggest decisions a man would make, and his father had taken them away from him. What had he been thinking?
As if on cue, a footman approached, salver in hand. ‘A letter for you, sir. Sir Thomas Rose wished you to have it now.’
Alistair took the letter and the footman departed.
Even in the moonlight, he recognised his father’s handwriting.
He turned it over and slid a thumb beneath the seal.
So this too had been in the packet. No doubt it was meant to soften and justify the blow.
He unfolded the page and moved to catch the light from the house to read.
My dearest son,