by Edith Layton
They chose a neat inn, the Rampant Rose, and settled the ladies and their maid in it. And as soon as the two gentlemen cleared the dirt of travel from their clothes and faces so they could see their friends with only a single coating of road dust upon them, they rode to the Duke of Peterstow’s ancestral home.
Arden whistled as they came up the long drive to the estate. “He inherited more than a title,” he said after they’d announced themselves to the gatekeeper.
“But see how he remembers all his old and indigent friends,” Julian jested after the gatekeeper got word of their welcome and permitted them entry to the road up to the great house.
“Well,” Arden said thoughtfully as they rode alongside green and freshly scythed lawns to the sprawling gray castle, “if he changes his mind, he can always pour boiling oil on us from one of his parapets.”
When they arrived at the front door to the great house, they saw a tall, lean figure running lightly down the steps. And so soon as he could, Julian leapt from his horse, and flinging its reins to a stableboy, walked to the gentleman and found himself clasped by the hand, and then by the arm, and then, with a shout of joy, the two men embraced each other and hugged each other hard.
“By all that’s holy, it’s grand to see you, Warwick,” Julian said at last, when he could.
But he spoke to air, for a second later his friend grasped Arden by both shoulders and then those two grinned hard at each other, as well.
The duke was a tall, slender, high-nosed young gentleman with olive skin and nut-brown hair and an arresting face remarkable for its leanness and high cheekbones, and a grandly imposing nose. But withal, it was his heavily lidded knowing sapphire eyes which overrode all else in that elegant countenance, and they were wide and lit with real warmth and delight as he looked upon both of his friends again.
And then he drawled, with all the insouciance and boredom of a man speaking from the depths of his favorite chair at his club, rather than one who’d just danced wildly about his castle courtyard with a friend, “Just in time for dinner. How fine your timing still is, Julian. Come, Arden, we’ll slay a fatted calf or two dozen for you.”
“Ah, well,” Julian said hesitantly, dusting off his knee with his riding gloves so that he could avoid Warwick’s eyes, “it’s early yet, we’re used to Continental hours, can’t possibly have dinner until ten. At any rate,” he said in heartier accents, “we’ve only just come to talk, you see.”
The duke nodded, and then looked his question to Arden.
“’Ere, yer grace,” Arden explained in the most bucolic of his accents as he shuffled his booted feet and turned his fashionable hat in huge hands, becoming an oafish yokel to the limit, “’e’s left ‘is fancy-piece at t’inn, y’see, and she’ll ’ave ’is pretty ears on a plate if ’e don’t set down to ’is mutton wiv ’er tunnight. So, if it’s all the same to you, yer grace, we’ll ’ave a bit of a chat-up and we’re off, and no one’s sensitivities will be knackered, do y’see?”
“Unless he plans to have her for dinner, and on my tabletop at that, I do not see. Go fetch her, idiot,” Warwick ordered imperiously.
“But Susannah…” Julian protested, and at that Warwick’s midnight-blue eyes grew a softened expression, and for a scant second that Arden alone didn’t miss, there was a flash of dismay and deep pity to be seen for his blond friend there.
“Never blame the lad,” Arden spoke up in his rumbling voice, to dispel that look and that impression, “it was my idea. I thought now you’re wed, it wouldn’t be at all the thing for us to bring the…ah, lady, here.”
“Unless she refuses to wear clothes, I don’t see why not,” Warwick said testily, “and even then, it might be enlivening. My lady’s bored to pieces sitting here waiting to hatch out a new duke or duke’s daughter, and if she discovered you’d refused dinner with us due to her supposed sensibilities, she’d slay me. Come, come…go, go. Turn round and don’t dare return until you’ve got ‘the…ah, lady’ in tow.”
“Two ladies: one ‘ah’ and one a baron’s daughter,” Arden corrected him.
“Two? In such charity with one another that they’ll dine together? Lord, Julian,” Warwick said with great admiration, “you have acquired Continental manners.”
*
Roxanne trailed into Francesca’s room without so much as knocking, but then, Francesca thought, watching the maid they’d acquired in Paris shaking out her gowns, the door had been left ajar. And Roxanne was the most casual female she’d ever met. But she’d actually never met a woman who was carrying on an illicit relationship with a gentleman, she realized, and was so enormously proud of her own exquisitely casual handling of it that she often bent over backward to excuse all of Roxie’s other faux pas and nonsexual misdeeds so the sportive widow wouldn’t think her snobbish or prudish or not liberal. She was, of course, deeply shocked by everything she imagined Roxie doing with Julian, but it made her feel extremely worldly not to show it, even to herself.
“If you’ve time on your hands, Marie,” Roxanne said to the maid, “you can give my gowns a good shake-out too. Oh, and an iron run over the red one wouldn’t go amiss either. Servants,” she sighed, shaking her curly blond head as the maid hastened to her room to do her bidding. “If you don’t tell them what they already know, they’d sleep all day and blame you for it, don’t you know?”
But Francesca didn’t, so she flushed and bit her lip and bent her head over the sundries bag she was unpacking. The girls didn’t have personal maids at school, and her father, being a bachelor gentleman, had never had her home long enough to think to hire a lady’s maid for her. And by the time he’d realized she was old enough for one, she was either gone back to school or his money had run out.
“I’m not accustomed to servants,” she said honestly, when she saw Roxie watching her unpack her toilet items. “Father…you know. But did you have many when you were young?” she asked, and then was very sorry she had, for it wasn’t likely, she thought, that a woman who’d do what Roxie did would have come from comfortable beginnings.
“Lud, yes,” Roxanne laughed. “Ooo, just look at your face! You’d be as bad a gamester as your father! Did you think I was brought up by savages? No, Fancy, I had a grand house and a staff of servants, and that’s no rumgudgeon I’m pitching you, it’s plain truth. My paw had money, he was no less than a squire, we’d a snug house and a good many acres with it, on the Isle of Wight, as I said. Pretty place, and I lived high. But Gawd, after I was fourteen it was a dead bore. Not too much liveliness there, I can tell you. Teas and tame socials and a church dinner and dance every fortnight, need it or not. My father wouldn’t let me go to the dances they had up-island for the naval staff based there, he thought them a ramshackle crew who’d not have much respect for an island girl, however well-off she was. He was a regular old tartar. I had to sneak out many’s the night.” She laughed. “Lucky thing I had friends whose folks were free traders. We could drift down the road like wraiths and they knew every back track so I could be home without being missed, by dawn…if I wanted to be,” she said with a wink.
“But the old man was right in that, at least,” she sighed. “It wasn’t marriage they were interested in, no matter how interesting they found me. My father wanted me to marry a neighbor’s boy, all teeth and red hair and talk about cows and barley, with turnips thrown in if he felt lively. I don’t know what would have happened to me if we’d had to wed. He expected a good, calm, cow of a wife, and I’d already got a taste of the high life. Our wedding night would’ve been a shock to him right off, if you take my meaning.”
Francesca thought she did, and tried to look as amused as she was supposed to be, while all along she was staggered by Roxie’s calm admission. The result, which she caught a glance of in the mirror, made her look as though she’d swallowed something nasty she was trying to proclaim delicious, and she was glad Roxie had a far-off look in her eye, so that she could compose herself again.
“Lucky for me I met Jamie, my da
shing Captain Cobb, when he visited with a cousin who was my neighbor. We hit it off like that”—she snapped her fingers. “What a lark! He was as ripe for mischief as I was. A dark little chap, never such a beauty as our Julian, but well enough in his way, and he understood me down to the ground. I married him to get off-island and he wed me to keep his family quiet about his wild ways and to have a wife who wouldn’t hang on his sleeve or cut up his peace. We’d a modern marriage: I had my fun, and he his, and we never let it interfere with our fun together, neither,” she vowed, as Francesca’s eyes widened to huge dark windows of amazed titillation. “Lud! What times! An officer’s wife don’t see the fighting, unless it’s to keep some gent she don’t fancy away from her dance card, and at that, Jamie saw more gaming rooms and assembly halls and bedrooms than he did battlefields, I’ll wager. He was a real parlor general.” She chuckled reminiscently.
“And so we would’ve gone on,” she sighed, “if he hadn’t caught a bit of shrapnel fire one day. At least, it was over fast, they said.” Roxanne went on after what might have been a second’s pause for regret, “And I was just about fed to the teeth with a double-dealing friend of his in Belgium I’d hooked up with when I ran into your papa and his offer of a job of work. Luck’s always been with me,” she said happily, looking to Francesca again.
Francesca waited. For all she’d known Roxie these past weeks, they’d never spoken so long about personal matters until now, and liberal as she wished to be, still she wondered if this sudden chattiness was brought on by the other woman’s loneliness or the fact that she wanted something from her. She might not have been out in the world very long, but the girls from school came from that outer world, and so for all her past cloistered life, she knew females very well. It was plain Roxie didn’t care for women too much—it was not so much dislike as disinterest—and so, Francesca reasoned, this sudden interest must have a purpose. She waited.
“Has Arden ever talked about me?” Roxanne asked, seizing up a nail file from Francesca’s bag and attending to one perfect oval of nail with great concentration.
“Actually, no,” Francesca answered, realizing this was so; the only mention Arden had ever made of Roxie was about her experience and situation, but as neither was done in a spirit of censure or praise, it was hard to remember any precise words he’d spoken about her.
“I mean…you don’t think he don’t like me, do you?” Roxanne asked, frowning at the supposedly offending fingernail as she sawed at the side of it. “That is to say…ah, might as well come clean,” she said, putting down the file before she’d done a damage to her manicure. “I fancy our viscount, you know. And I’ve certain plans. But the gentlemen place great stock in what their friends say, even the best of them do. So I’d like to know what Arden thinks of me.”
“I don’t know, really, Roxie,” Francesca admitted. “Do you want me to ask him for you?”
“Gawd, no.” The blond woman shivered. “He’d know in a second if you did. He’s up to all the rigs. If you want to know the truth, that’s why I never looked at him twice, not that I’d the heart to after I clapped eyes on Julian. But Arden always makes me feel naked, and not in the nicest way,” she added on an uncomfortable laugh. “Not that he isn’t an attractive gent in his own way, and I can see what you see in him, but better you than me, Fancy. Don’t worry, I’ll never try to catch his eye—I don’t like having a man know what I’m up to every minute.”
Roxanne cut off Francesca’s stammered denials of her interest with an amused, “Oh, yes, and the cat’s not a bit interested in the cream neither—have it your way. It’s no skin off my nose, just let me know if you ever hear something interesting, will you?”
As Roxie prepared to leave, Francesca couldn’t help staying her for a moment. She’d not had a close girlfriend to talk with in months, and this rare moment of honesty with Roxie had showed her how much she missed such companionship. She felt bound to try to save the other woman distress. The petite widow’s aim might be good, but her target, Francesca thought worriedly, was surely too high. Julian Dylan, Viscount Hazelton, was not a madcap army officer. He was a nobleman, obviously adrift at the moment, but just as obviously used to a far better life.
“Roxie,” she said hesitantly, trying to think of a neat way to put it, “I…I don’t think Julian’s very serious. Indeed, I think the reason they left us here now is so they wouldn’t have to introduce either of us to their friends. After all, a duke and a duchess! I’m sure Arden wants to spare my feelings if they refuse me the house room he says he’s after for me, and Julian, I expect, wants to prevent you from being similarly snubbed,” she concluded, pleased with the clever way she’d hidden the fact that no gentleman she’d ever heard of would dream of taking his mistress into respectable society.
“Of course he’s not serious,” Roxanne laughed, “and of course, no real well-bred English gent would take his bit o’ muslin to meet his decent friends in the ton. But I wasn’t always his mistress, and I come from a good background too. And he’s at a turning point now, and well I know it. Stranger things have happened. Dukes as near to the king as his elbow have wed actresses, taking them right from the stage to the altar at St. George’s in London, and earls have brought their housekeepers from their beds to the church. It’s not too much to hope a viscount will do as much, believe me. It’s their sense of honor, you see,” she mused, as though to herself, “that’s the key.”
She’d thought of it early, and she’d thought on it often. She’d wanted Julian Dylan from the moment she’d seen him, even when she’d thought him only a poor dupe for the old villain of an uncle Arden portrayed. She liked his style, his manner, his easy grace, and his ways in and out of bed. And his looks, of course. Gawd, she thought, those looks of his! It was as well he was used to being watched, for he didn’t seem to notice how she feasted her eyes upon him, but then, she was careful about it. She didn’t have to gape at him in public; then she could see him by reflection, in the eyes of all the other woman looking at her with envy. And in private she looked her fill when he least expected her to be watching him.
Even at his supreme moments during their bedwork, even then, when most men didn’t, he pleased her eye. For he didn’t frown or knot up his face, or grow a tight grin, or look angry or in pain as other men did when they struggled to achieve their final interior glory. No, even then, he managed to look even handsomer, for he’d throw back his head and, dazed, look glorified and ennobled, becoming something like pictures she’d seen of saints undergoing religious experiences, dazzling in his pleasure, never looking foolish or ugly. Those were her best moments as well, even when they weren’t, and all for the look of him.
She wanted him badly. He mightn’t want her now, indeed, she might tire of him in time too—constancy was something she expected of no one, least of all herself. But there was a world of amusement waiting for her off-island, just as she’d always imagined, and Julian Dylan, Viscount Hazelton, would be the perfect companion as she went through it. She didn’t know him entirely, she accepted that she might never, for there was, for all his courtliness and charm, a certain coldness at his core, a barrier she always found at the center of his soul. But that was no problem, she didn’t ask for his soul; his corporal person, and his name, would be enough for her.
There were more beautiful women, she knew it, but didn’t think it vanity to appreciate that few attracted and then pleased men as she did; she considered it her talent. Many other men wanted her, and titled ones too. Even in the hotel they’d just left, there’d been an impressionable young Bavarian Graf who’d followed her from Brussels and vowed to follow her to the ends of the earth, and had actually gone so far as the dock at Dieppe to see her off, sullen and cheated by her refusal.
But a Germanic lordlet was never her goal. She’d set her sights high. Julian mightn’t want her now, but she’d a plan and a purpose, and so far in her life she’d come far, and would, she vowed, go further. As far as she dreamed. For she believed she sailed throug
h life beneath a lucky star. She’d have Julian as her constant companion and ensure it by becoming his wife. And as to being a viscountess? She grinned at the thought. She’d always liked an extra sprinkle of sugar on her dessert plate.
“Don’t worry for me,” she told Francesca brightly now. Poor Fancy, she thought, who had so much and didn’t have a clue how to use it. “If you care, let me know what you hear. I can fight any enemy I know,” she said. “And here,” she added generously, “want to borrow that red thing I wear? Marie can let the hem down in a trice.”
Francesca searched for words of polite denial, not for the gown, but for Roxie’s own sake. She doubted anything but sorrow would come of her obvious plans for Julian. But even as she tried to frame the correct way of putting it so as to spare Roxanne present annoyance with her as well as future heartbreak from Julian, she heard familiar voices calling her and Roxanne. And then a thunder on the stair in the quiet inn translated to the vibrant figures of Arden and Julian, coming to a halt, both winded and both grinning, at her door.