“Alicia hasn’t been in to tell you everything with much drama and a few musicians?” Rain accepted an offer of tea and sat down to force the duke to do the same.
“Word is that she’s writing an opera.” The duke’s voice was dry enough to roast chestnuts. “Could we have Bell summon your mother’s spirit and ask if Alicia is really mine?”
Rain knew his father was being facetious. The duchess had doted on him and died bearing Alicia. His youngest sister had been spoiled since birth as a consequence. “Our mother’s side of the family includes an aunt who traveled alone to Egypt and an uncle who composed music for Vauxhall. She’s one of us without a doubt. Alicia has very little purpose for her gift of persuasion and merely seeks creative outlets.”
The duke hmphed and nibbled a scone placed on the tray to tempt him. “If they’re all avoiding me, then something happened.”
“Teddy’s intended confessed to pushing Bell downstairs and may have confessed to murder. I think that may top my intended running off with the steward.”
His father raised a graying eyebrow and waited.
Rain sighed and settled in for questioning. “Teddy and Ives are taking Pamela to the authorities in York. I am praying your mother’s ghost is satisfied and will go back to her grave. Anything else?”
“The whole story, please. I have nothing better to do but listen. Although I’d rather have Bell tell it. I assume my mother used her for the drama? Where is she? Is she all right?”
Good question, one Rain didn’t feel qualified to answer. “I don’t believe I have the whole story yet. Bell was tired last night after dealing with Her Grace. I assume she’s in her office this morning. I’ve had no word otherwise.”
And he was trying very hard not to go down and see. He didn’t wish to risk being thrown out again. He needed time to think and plan.
“Damn, you’re a cold-blooded sort. Good to have a clear head, I suppose, but you’ll never marry this way. Give me the story.” The duke sat back and sipped his tea, looking regal even in his dressing gown.
Coldness was in the bones, Rain decided. Strong jaw, square chin. . . like his own and that of his knightly antecedents. They’d been bred to be strong and command with authority—not to talk about feelings. “I learned from the best. You’re interrogating me instead of showing concern for how Teddy is faring or how the other guests and family are taking the drama. They saw a ghost speak through Bell, swing a chandelier, blow out the lights, and knock over a suit of armor. I arrested a lady, one of our guests, and you want me to narrate a news report?”
His father glared at him over the teacup. “Were you intending to tell me how they reacted? Have you asked how I feel about my mother haunting the house?”
“Have you ever shown an iota of interest in revealing how you feel about us?”
The duke narrowed his eyes but conceded the point. “We’re a pair, I suppose. Never really had time to be irresponsible like Teddy. I proposed to your mother after having danced with her twice and taken her for a carriage ride through the park with her chaperone in tow. We didn’t know each other. She was only eighteen, and I was the catch of the season. I didn’t have any doubt of her acceptance.”
“You were a cold, arrogant bastard, just like you call me, and she still adored you. You were fortunate.” That was essentially what Rain had done with Araminta. Except his father had chosen a woman with more backbone. And modern women had more freedom.
“I’d not be duke if I was a bastard,” his father said in amusement. “And I learned to adore your mother. It takes respect to build a marriage. If a haunted countess does not suit, find someone else. Just marry and get it out of the way, as I did. It’s not as if we’re the sort to moon about over unsuitable females. If I’m not dying yet, you have time. Go. Marry one. Be done with it. Who is next on your list? I know you have one.”
Rain had thrown out the list the day Bell had entered his life. She didn’t meet any of the requirements on it. She was a Malcolm and unlikely to give him a son. She was as barmy as all his relations. And she hadn’t any wealth to hold the family together if Teddy ultimately inherited the trust, as he would, if Rain didn’t have a son.
Nothing had changed—except him. He wanted Bell and no other, proving he was as irresponsible and mad as everyone else. He wasn’t prepared to admit it to his father yet.
How did he break down and tell Bell how he felt? And would she even care? She didn’t need him. She had no family or society with expectations to fulfill. Unlike his father, Rain had every reason to expect she’d reject him.
He was pretty certain he’d reject himself if he were in her shoes. He needed a plan.
“What kind of food would a lady from Scotland like?” Rain asked his patient later that morning. A farrier from Edinburgh who had stabbed himself with a hoof knife when the horse had kicked at him, the man needed distraction. Using his soothing voice, Rain cleaned and wrapped the wound. “And music? Surely a Scottish lady won’t need bagpipes for a romantic dinner?”
“Dinnae know what a lady likes,” the farrier admitted. “Been fur too long since I been home or courted. Don’ recommend the haggis though.”
“Dancing,” Rain decided, continuing to talk in hopes it healed the wound faster. He did feel a bit of heat as he dressed it. “She likes dancing. A musician who can play a waltz. A special dessert that requires being set on fire. And wine. Lots of wine. She thinks too much, like me. I need her to stop thinking for a while.”
His next patient was a housewife who’d scalded her foot dropping a kettle of boiling water. Applying the unguent and hoping he was doing some good with his voice, Rain continued speaking his problem aloud. “She doesn’t wear much jewelry so I don’t know what she likes. But I should offer her something when I propose. It should show I’m thinking of her.”
“A ring,” his patient suggested. “A woman likes a nice ring.”
He’d never really talked to his patients before. No wonder he hadn’t healed. “I have my mother’s and grandmother’s rings—but would she want a ring from the duchess who haunts her? I don’t know. I don’t know anything! I need more time.”
He was losing his soothing tone. Rain took a deep breath and decided he’d find every ring in the safe.
“Love makes you a nicer gentleman,” the patient decided as Rain finished wrapping her bandage. “Or maybe love makes you talk nicer.”
Love. He wanted to heal, but maybe what he was doing was offering love for his fellow humans? Could Bell love him back? Did love multiply and grow? Overwhelmed, he stuck to his first goal.
“How does one propose?” he asked the governess who brought one of his nephews down to be examined after he’d fallen off the furniture playing pirate. “Do I go down on one knee after we dance? Or at a candlelit table over her favorite dessert?”
“If you’re speaking of the countess, you might have to do it over a set of books and with a hot cup of tea in hand.”
The governess had a point. But Bell had accused him of not being romantic. He had to be romantic. Begging didn’t sound romantic. Neither did being rejected because she thought he wanted a son.
Love had provided the answer to the Malcolm argument—he’d tell her he would find Teddy a sensible wife who would produce sensible heirs they could all raise—sensibly. It would work out. Somehow. Sharing his responsibilities made sense if it gave him time to woo the countess.
He gave his nephew—Estelle’s son, he thought—a stethoscope to listen into while he worked on the boy’s knee, and talked, letting his pent-up love grow into his voice.
“How is Drucilla?” He needed to speak with Lady Dalrymple, who had yet to ask him to look at her daughter. He had to heal the brilliant child who had so bravely helped Bell. Noticing the children around him added to his duty roster, but if he wanted to heal. . . Then he had to have enough love to notice them. A clinic was good. Healing was better.
The governess cuddled his nephew. “Dru is doing remarkably well, considering. She�
�s regaling the nursery with her tale of ghosts.”
As Rain patted the boy’s bruised knee and offered him a licorice, Alicia burst into his clinic. “She’s leaving, Rain! You can’t let her leave. Do something!”
Drawn from his intense concentration, Rain stared at his sister for half a minute, waiting for the rest of the sentence.
“Go,” the governess urged. “As long as the bone isn’t broken, the boy will be fine.”
“Who’s leaving?” he asked, washing his hands, trying to make sense of Alicia’s ranting.
“Bell! Bell is leaving! She’s looking for you to say farewell! She’s going with her sister. They’re meeting the earl at the train station and leaving! The chandeliers are swinging and the monkeys are out of their cage, and she thinks the ghost is telling her to leave, so she is.”
Panic struck his heart. Before Alicia finished, Rain was already halfway up the stairs and shouting orders. “Find someone to play a pretty waltz! Have the cook make a pudding to light on fire. I have to fetch the jewel box. Don’t let her out of the door!”
Clasping her gloved hands and fighting tears, Bell left the duke’s suite and glanced hopefully at Rain’s sister. “Did you find him?”
“Alicia is looking. You don’t have to leave today, you know. We can avoid the chandeliers for another day or so, perhaps have the workmen take them down.” Estelle blocked her path to the stairs.
Bell shook her head. “You need to help Rainford find a bride. I’m a distraction, and your grandmother is telling me so. I hadn’t realized. . . I never meant. . .” She sighed, unable to admit that the marquess might actually be distracted by her and that people were noticing. But Lady Pamela had noticed and now everyone knew. Bell dodged around Estelle and headed for the main stairs.
“Pamela is an hysteric. You can’t let her drive you away.” Estelle ran after her.
“Your guests want more séances,” Bell argued sadly. “They’re sending me notes, asking if I might speak with their loved ones. I cannot do that.”
“I will tell them all to go home, that you only work with our ghosts,” Estelle argued staunchly.
Bell appreciated that argument. Alicia might persuade people of such a ridiculousness. But she continued downward, holding tightly to the railing.
Estelle didn’t have to hurry to keep up. “Rain still needs a steward.”
“He had a perfectly fine one. Davis was as honest and careful as it is possible for a man to be, and he’s family. He has a wife now. He could use the position and the house. Rainford simply needs to get over his snit. I’m needed at Wystan, not here.” Bell avoided walking directly under the chandelier swaying dangerously over the entry hall.
“Rain doesn’t have snits,” Estelle argued. “How can he trust a man who stole his fiancée?”
“Araminta wasn’t his fiancée. He is not heartbroken. It is a snit. Your brother isn’t an Ice King. He lives inside his head for a very good reason, but he is not made of ice. What is that music?” Bell hesitated on the lower step.
A piano and violin playing a waltz echoed through the marble entrance—a decent waltz and not Alicia’s painful pounding.
Iona waited with their bags near the door. Bell’s twin studied the swinging chandelier worriedly and looked relieved once Bell reached the ground floor.
Salina joined Estelle. “We are arranging a musicale for the evening. Some of our guests are more talented than Alicia. Really, you could stay. The footmen almost have the monkeys trapped.”
The parrot flew overhead, squawking and dropping a red feather.
“I really hoped to say my farewells to Rainford in person. Is he in the gymnasium? Might I be allowed down there?” Bell knew she was being presumptuous, but she simply could not abandon Rainford so callously. It would almost be like Araminta running away.
She wanted to make it clear that she wasn’t Araminta. She wasn’t running from Rain. She was letting him go back to the life he had before he thought the duke was dying. He didn’t need to marry now, not soon, anyway. She didn’t want him feeling obligated to marry her.
A footman wheeled a tea trolley from the back hall. On it rested the most splendiferous plum pudding Bell had ever seen, complete with a blue flame flickering across the top like magic fire. An awesome spectacle like that belonged at the end of a pleasant evening of wining and dining in good company.
“How? Why. . . ?” Bell stuttered, unable to blame this new oddity on ghosts, although eccentricity certainly had to be involved. Plum puddings took a long time to make and shouldn’t be wasted rolling around midday with no one to observe.
“His Grace likes plum pudding on his birthday. It’s a little early, but Rainford said to light it anyway.” Victoria appeared behind the trolley along with her husband. “You could stay for the duke’s birthday, you know. We have you to thank for letting him live to see it.”
“No, I did nothing. Rain—”
The musicians struck up a merrier tune, burying her protest.
Drawn by the pudding and the music, guests began to join them. Bell felt as if she were the center of a circus and didn’t know what act she was expected to perform. Nervously, she eased toward Iona.
“Don’t go yet!” Rainford’s voice echoed down from above. “Give me a minute.”
Puzzled, not knowing if she should be alarmed, Bell searched the shadows at the top of the stairs. Her heart pounded a little harder in anticipation of seeing Rain again. She hoped she did not drop like a rock before she had a chance to say farewell.
“Now, Dru, drop them now.” The echoing reverberations of the entryway picked up the male whisper.
A shower of fragrant pink and white blossoms tumbled over the upstairs railing. The parrot squawked happily and flew through them, scattering petals onto the flaming pudding. The delicate blue flared into a bonfire flinging out sparks. To the gasps and shrieks of guests, the footman hastily poured tea over the cook’s work of art.
Heart thumping, Bell scoured the upper hall for the mad marquess. What in the name of the goddess was he doing?
A moment later, wearing a top hat, an unfastened tailed evening coat and starched collar, the breath-takingly striking, normally blasé, Marquess of Rainford dashed down the stairs, under the swinging chandelier, carrying Drucilla. Bell feared she might faint simply at the sheer magnificence of the sight. He was stunningly handsome in his black and white, but many men were handsome.
Not every man would think to carry a lame child who gave every appearance of having the time of her life. Bell wasn’t entirely certain why he was carrying her, but the sight made her want to cry anyway. She had hoped that together they might heal Dru just a little, but he’d never mentioned it.
The chandelier rocked a little harder as Rainford reached the ground floor and immediately dropped to one knee, still holding Dru. “Show her, Dru,” he whispered. “Open the box.”
By now, every guest and servant in the house, and possibly every person who lived on the estate, was spilling into the huge circular entry. They pushed and shoved for a better sight of the Ice King on his knees. Covering her mouth, Bell froze, uncertain of what was expected of her.
“Don’t go, Lady C,” Dru said, holding up a velvet box. “I can’t open it.”
Laughter tittered around the room.
Rain juggled child and box and managed to open the top to reveal a collection of brilliant jewels. “I didn’t have time to choose the one best suited to you. Sapphires and diamonds and pearls seemed right, but then I remembered how lovely you look in gold, and I just threw in everything.”
Tears crept down Bell’s cheeks. “I don’t know. . . I’m. . . I just. . .” Shattered by the restrained marquess making a passionate spectacle of himself in front of friends and family, she couldn’t speak.
“Marry me, Lady Isobel Craigmore, be my marchioness, be my wife and mother of my children, please. I love you madly, obviously, because I’ve gone utterly barmy and can’t seem to find the words. . . Help me, please!” On the
tongue of a polished gentleman—a lord—as educated and experienced as Rainford, the desperate plea was astonishing and heartrending.
Weeping openly, Bell dropped to her knees in front of him. She closed the jewelry box and wrapped Dru’s hands tightly around it. “Take these to the pudding table, please, can you do that?”
“I can.” Dru stood, and holding the velvet box on both of her small arms, proudly hobbled away.
“I love you, Bell,” Rainford whispered. With both hands free, he caught her cheeks and kissed her in front of all his family and guests. “Marry me, please. The duke thinks a wife might learn to love me. I’ll do whatever it takes to make you love me, I promise. I don’t want to make the mistake of waiting any longer.”
She wanted this man so much. . . so very much. She’d tried so hard to shield herself from this kind of pain. She. . .
She blinked in realization. “I didn’t faint. You threw flowers at me, and I didn’t faint. You’ve shocked me to my very core, and I didn’t faint.”
“I’ll throw flowers at you every day. I’ll shower you in jewels. You can not faint as much as you like.” He stood and pulled her to her feet. “Just tell me what you want, make me understand, because you don’t talk any better than I do. I think it may be love that heals. If so, I can try to heal your weak heart. Together, we might heal Dru. Would you like that? Or we can go to Sommersville and disturb the ghosts there. Hold exorcisms, if you like. Have plum pudding every day. Only tell me what you need to be happy, and you shall have it.”
Her heart pounded so hard, she thought the feeble organ might turn inside out from the ferocity. She so seldom spoke of what she felt or what she wanted. . . He was right. Rainford didn’t show his feelings because he had so much responsibility, he had to keep his own counsel at all times.
But she didn’t speak—because she was afraid.
She had lived her entire life in fear—of poverty, of her stepfather, of the ghosts that threatened to possess her. They were very real fears, but she’d been trapped by them.
Captivating the Countess Page 25