Someone to Romance

by Balogh, Mary

  She flashed that smile at him again, and he smiled back at her.

  “It is permitted,” he said, “to play at a tempo slightly above that of a tortoise crawling across a beach.”

  “Oh, is it, indeed?” she said.

  And she changed the tempo so suddenly that he had to scramble to keep up. And then she sped it up again. They played for a minute or two in perfect time with each other until she missed a note, exclaimed with dismay, tried to correct herself, and got hopelessly entangled with wrong keys, lost rhythm, and wayward fingers.

  She bent her head over the keys and laughed. Actually, it was more like a peal of giggles while he ended his contrived melody with a grand flourish and laughed with her.

  There was a ripple of laughter and applause from the rest of the room, but they both ignored it.

  “Thumbs,” she said. “All thumbs. Indeed, at the end I would swear there were six of them just on my left hand. It must have borrowed from my right.”

  And he wondered how he could ever have thought she was all cold hauteur. Oh, she could be that and often was, but it was not her to the exclusion of all else. Perhaps these flushed cheeks and bright eyes and gleeful laughter were not her either. But how foolish of him to have assumed that anyone was one or two things and nothing else. He was far more than just a successful businessman and Earl of Lyndale. Far more. Labels helped identify a person, perhaps, but they did not define him. Or her.

  What she had said or tried to say at Richmond suddenly made all the sense in the world.

  “Tell me about Lady Jessica Archer,” he said.

  Her smile faded, but it left her eyes softer than they usually were, and it left the flush of color in her cheeks.

  “That is a request that always has the effect of completely tying my tongue,” she said.

  “Tell me about your childhood, then,” he said. “What about your father?”

  “I was fourteen when he died,” she said, in a quiet voice. “He was very different from Avery. He was the sort of man to whom children are the mother’s domain. I did not see a great deal of him. He was never unkind when I did, but he took no real interest in my upbringing or in me. I have always believed that when he married my mother he hoped for another son. A spare, so to speak. Though he never expressed open disappointment. Not in my hearing, at least. And there were no more children after me.”

  “You did not complain to him about your music teacher?” he asked.

  “Oh good heavens, no,” she said. “I would not even have dreamed of it. I am not complaining about him. It never occurred to me that a father could be affectionate or that he might wish to spend time with his children until I saw Avery with his—the three girls as well as the lone boy. If he feels any disappointment that he has only the one son so far, he has certainly never shown it. And indeed, I do not believe he does. He adores them all. One would not suspect it from looking at him, would one?”

  Gabriel glanced about the room until he spotted Netherby, immaculately elegant despite the rings on almost every finger of both hands and the jewels that winked from the folds of his neckcloth and the handle of the quizzing glass he wore on a black ribbon about his neck. The expression on his face suggested slight boredom, though he was actively involved in a conversation with Dirkson and the Countess of Riverdale. No. One could not quite imagine him adoring his children. Or anyone else for that matter. Yet his duchess seemed a warm, happy woman.

  “I had a contented enough childhood,” Lady Jessica said. “It was rather solitary, but there were children in the neighborhood of Morland Abbey with whom I was allowed to play quite often. And I was always close to my mother. I lived for the times, though, when I could stay with my cousins or they came to stay with me.”

  “Are they here tonight?” he asked her.

  “Boris and Peter are,” she said, “two of my aunt Mildred’s sons. The third, Ivan, is at university. They are all quite a bit younger than I, though. They were fun and full of mischief and I loved them, but I never had a particularly close friendship with them. The other three cousins were Aunt Viola’s. She is here. She is the Marchioness of Dorchester now. Estelle and Bertrand Lamarr are her stepchildren, though they were already very close to adulthood when she married their father. Harry, my cousin, Aunt Viola’s son, was very briefly the Earl of Riverdale after his father, my uncle Humphrey, died. I adore him—Harry, I mean. He was three years older than I and always my hero. It was devastating for him when the discovery was made soon after Uncle Humphrey’s death that his marriage to Aunt Viola had always been a bigamous one. His first wife, whom no one even knew about, was still alive when he married for the second time, and his daughter—his legitimate daughter—was put into an orphanage, where she remained until the truth was discovered when she was already grown up.”

  “What happened to her?” he asked.

  “Oh,” she said. “She is here too. She is Anna. My sister-in-law. Avery’s wife.”

  Gabriel could only imagine the drama this family must have lived through after that discovery was made only to be followed by that marriage.

  “My cousin Camille was older than Harry,” Lady Jessica told him. “Abigail was younger, just a year older than me. We were more like sisters than cousins. We were the very best of friends. We shared dreams for our future. I suppose it would be very wrong of me to claim that I suffered as much as she did when she lost everything, including her very legitimacy, just before she was to make her come-out here in London. But . . . I suffered. I wanted to die. Foolish, was it not? I was seventeen. One’s emotions tend to be very raw at that age.”

  “What happened to her?” he asked. “And to her older sister?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Camille surprised everyone by marrying an artist and schoolmaster who grew up at the same orphanage as Anna. They live in a big house in the hills above Bath, and they have a large family. Some of the children are their own and some are adopted. They use the house as a sort of artists’ school or gathering place. One could never have predicted it of Camille. She was so very . . . correct, so very stiff and humorless. She was betrothed to a man no one liked, including her, I do not doubt. I am not sure many people liked her. Then, at least. But she’s a different person now. She is very happy. No one seeing her could doubt that.”

  It was strange, Gabriel thought, how one could look at an aristocratic family and assume that their lives were lived on an even keel with no significant troubles. With the Westcott and Archer families, it seemed nothing could be further from the truth.

  “And Abigail?” he asked.

  “For several years,” she told him, “she retired within herself. There is no other way of putting it. She was quiet, dignified, withdrawn. She would not allow anyone in the family to help her. She would not allow me to suffer with her. And then two years ago she met and married a lieutenant colonel who had brought Harry home from an officers’ convalescent home in Paris, where he had been since the Battle of Waterloo. She married him privately, with no one else but Harry present. No one even knew she liked Gil. She certainly did not at first. They live now in Gloucestershire with their two children—Gil already had a daughter by a previous marriage. And she is happy. She did not settle for anything less. She is happy.”

  A possibility struck him. “Is she why you have never married?” he asked her.

  She sat straighter on the bench, though her fingers rested on the keys of the pianoforte. Some of the haughtiness had returned to her manner. “I have not married, Mr. Thorne,” she said, “because I have not chosen to do so.”

  “Did you feel somehow betrayed,” he asked her, “by the sudden marriage of your cousin?”

  She turned her face toward him. “I am happy for her, Mr. Thorne,” she said. “More happy than I can say.”

  Which did not answer his question.

  “I am sure you are,” he said, and he moved his left hand across the keyboard until his little finger overlapped hers. He rubbed the pad of it lightly over the back of her finger.
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  He fully expected that she would snatch her hand away. Instead she looked at their hands and he thought he heard her swallow.

  “A single rose,” she said softly. “The touch of a single finger. Is this your idea of romancing me, Mr. Thorne?”

  It would be a bit pathetic if it were true.

  “If you expect grand gestures,” he said, his voice low to match hers, “perhaps it is Rochford whose attentions you ought to encourage.”

  Her eyes came slowly to his and held there for a moment. And Lord, he thought, if he had a knife he would surely be able to cut through the air between them. It seemed like a tangible thing, fairly throbbing with tension. Then she sighed softly.

  “And perhaps, Mr. Thorne,” she said, “it is time we mingled with the other guests. I am going to see if there is anything my grandmother needs. Or my great-aunt.”

  She got to her feet, walked behind the stool, and made her way across the drawing room toward the Dowager Countess of Riverdale. Anthony Rochford met her halfway there, and they approached the dowager together.

  Gabriel lowered the cover over the keys, got to his feet, and looked around before moving toward the closest group. Strangely, he had not even been thinking of romance when he had caressed the back of her finger.

  He had only been feeling it.

  Ten

  There was a letter among the usual invitations beside Gabriel’s plate when he sat down to breakfast the following morning. It was a report from Simon Norton at Brierley. Gabriel read it while he sipped his coffee.

  Manley Rochford was spending lavishly on new furniture and draperies inside the house and on new arbors and follies and other new ventures in the park. These included a wilderness walk over the hills behind the house and a lake in the southwest corner of the park.

  Gabriel’s eyes paused there. The southwest corner was where Mary had her cottage.

  Manley and his wife were entertaining on a grand scale—teas and dinners and evening parties. There were plans in the making for a grand outdoor fete and evening ball during the summer, after their return from London as the Earl and Countess of Lyndale.

  All the money that was being spent, Norton had discovered, had been borrowed on the expectation of the fortune Mr. Rochford was about to inherit. That was something, at least, Gabriel thought. Manley had obviously not been able to get his hands on the fortune that was not yet officially his.

  The next section of the letter was more disturbing, especially to a man who had made a bit of a name for himself in Boston for treating every last one of his employees well. There was some distress in the neighborhood affecting those servants who had lost their positions to the men Manley had brought with him to Brierley. In some instances their homes had also been confiscated and given to the new staff. Some of the dismissed servants had families, a fact that multiplied the suffering.

  A few had been hired and accommodated elsewhere in the neighborhood. Others, notably those who were young and unattached, had moved away to look for work elsewhere. A few had been rehired at Brierley as farm laborers—at a wage not only below what they had earned in their previous positions but also below what the other farm laborers doing comparable work were earning. Some had found no work at all. Rumor had it, though Norton had not been able to substantiate it, that all wages were to go down once Manley became the earl. And, incidentally, Norton’s own wages were lower than those of any of the other gardeners, though he was not complaining, he had added, since Mr. Thorne paid him well indeed for the steward’s job he was not yet doing.

  Norton had discovered that the newly installed steward, the one Manley had brought with him, had paid a call upon Miss Beck and, without a by-your-leave, had tramped through her cottage, upstairs and down, in muddy boots, peering into every room and cupboard and nook and cranny while ignoring her completely and kicking one of her cats out of his way and cuffing one of her dogs, which had been yapping at his heels. He had informed Miss Beck that she must clear out all her junk and get rid of all the strays without further delay. The cottage was to be converted into a rustic shelter to add a picturesque touch to an island that would stand in the middle of the new lake.

  Mary.

  Gabriel slammed one hand down on the report, closed his eyes, and concentrated upon breathing through the fury that tempted him to sweep all the unoffending dishes off the table around him for the mere satisfaction of hearing them smash on the floor.

  And not just Mary. Innocent servants and their families had lost their employment for no just cause. Some of them were now homeless. Yet they were his. His people. Good God, they were his responsibility. For perhaps the first time he understood the selfishness of his own behavior in remaining in America for six years after learning that he had inherited the title, just because he was happy there and did not wish to upend his own life by returning to England. Yet sometimes duty ought to outweigh inclination. He should have known—and surely he had deep down—that Mary was not the only one who had suffered from his absence.

  He was greatly to blame for the way things were.

  There was one more section in the report. It contained information Norton had gathered while imbibing pints of ale at the village tavern during the evenings—painfully slowly, sir, because I did not want to be too obvious with my questions and arouse suspicion.

  Mr. and Mrs. Ginsberg, once tenants on a farm owned by the late Earl of Lyndale, had moved away with their daughter, Miss Penelope Ginsberg, soon after the death of their son.

  It was said by someone who knew someone who knew someone else . . . You know how gossip works, sir, Norton had written, that Mrs. Ginsberg died of grief not long after and that Miss Ginsberg has since married a man by the name of Clark. The couple is said to be living with her father and Mrs. Clark’s son, now twelve years old, to whom she gave birth before her marriage.

  Norton could not vouch for the truth of the story, he admitted, since he had not yet had a chance to check it out for himself. He was a new employee at Brierley and could hardly ask for a three-day leave so soon. It would probably take him that long to get to Lilyvale, where they supposedly lived, do his investigation, and get back. The village was at least thirty miles from Brierley.

  It is generally, though not universally, believed by those who drink regularly at the tavern, Norton had gone on to report, that Gabriel Rochford—you, sir—is the father of the twelve-year-old boy. You were believed to be stepping out with the mother at the relevant time. There is much less agreement among the locals upon how Orson Ginsberg, the young lady’s brother, came to his death. A duel gone wrong? Accident? They all have their proponents. The only thing everyone seems agreed upon is that young Ginsberg was shot in the back the same day Miss Ginsberg confessed to her parents that she was with child. There is also disagreement about who fired the fatal shot even though two men claimed to have witnessed you doing it, sir. Everyone I talked to, without exception, was adamant in his belief that if it was you, it was an accident and not murder. You just did not have it in you, one old-timer assured me, and there were plenty of other assenting voices. It is believed by almost all, sir, that you fled Brierley in order to avoid the hangman’s noose, but opinion is divided upon whether it was an act of cowardice or prudence. There are a few—pardon me for mentioning it, sir, but you did direct me to give you the full truth—who say you fled more to avoid taking responsibility for what you had done to Miss Ginsberg than out of fear of a noose.

  Gabriel folded the pages and set them aside. They left him with much to think about and a far greater sense of urgency than he had felt thus far. Also a new sense of guilt. How could he possibly have assumed that Mary was the only one who faced hardship and suffering from Manley Rochford?

  He glanced through the small pile of invitations—another ball, a concert featuring a famed contralto, a garden party, an evening at Vauxhall with a party being put together by the Marquess and Marchioness of Dorchester. He paused over that last one. Dorchester was Lady Estelle Lamarr’s father. Was there st
ill a push on, then, to match her with him? It was surprising, if it was true, since she had made it clear she was not interested in him—or in any other man. Who else would be in the Vauxhall party? Lady Jessica Archer? It seemed a distinct possibility.

  He thought about the evening before, particularly about the half hour or so he had spent virtually alone with her at the pianoforte. Something had happened in that short time. Something had changed. He was still determined to marry her, and still for the same reasons. But he had been thrown a bit off balance by the glimpses of humanity she had shown him—her flashing smiles, her laughter, her helpless giggles when she completely bungled their duet. And he had been oddly disturbed by that finger-touching incident. It was absurd enough to be embarrassing that that incident alone had kept him awake for at least an hour after he lay down last night. It was not, after all, as though he had stolen a kiss or fondled her in inappropriate places.

  He had touched her finger, and for a few moments—not even long enough to allow him to catch the thought that had flitted into his mind and on out again—he had come close to understanding what romance was.

  And perhaps what lay beyond romance.

  Would she be at Vauxhall? Would Rochford? Gabriel’s jaw tightened. That man, his second cousin once removed, was ambitious as well as conceited. His behavior was larded with false charm. Conceited men were often merely shallow, with nothing specifically vicious about them. Anthony Rochford was a malicious liar. And like a true coward, last night he had directed his malice at a man he supposed dead and unable to speak up for himself.