The Passionate Prude

by Elizabeth Thornton

  The steady beat of the rain soothed her tumultuous thoughts. She concentrated on its rhythm as it drummed on the slate roof and coursed its way to overflow the guttering which ran the length of the stone parapet. A gust of wind rattled the windowpanes. Deirdre pulled herself to a sitting position and her unbound hair tumbled loosely around her face and shoulders. Her erratic breathing slowed by degrees to a more regular pace.

  A childhood memory, long suppressed, beat against the fringes of her mind like the breakwaters of the rising tide, blotting out her awareness of her surroundings, swamping her senses with the vivid imprint of forgotten fragments of her nightmare. Rain, she could almost feel it still, the force, the pungent smell of the driving rain drenching them as her mother paid off the hackney which had conveyed them to the unfamiliar street, to some godforsaken tenement in the slums of London. Deirdre was all of eight years old, yet she had clung to her little brother as if she would protect him from the worse storm that she sensed was to follow.

  She touched her tongue to her lips as if she could still taste the rain fresh in her mouth, and vestiges of her dream came rushing back. Sounds—a woman sobbing; words—her mother pleading; curses—her stepfather shouting; and finally the heady scent of the other woman as she entered the room to gloat over the deserted family.

  A long, involuntary shudder convulsed her body. After an interval of forced quiet, she gave up the attempt to control the bleak misery that had been the aftermath of her dream. With impatient fingers, she threw off the bedcovers and groped on the bedside chair for her dressing gown. She shrugged into it, belting it tightly at the waist, taking some comfort in the warmth of its voluminous folds. Her fingers found a sliver of a match on her bedside table. She carefully dipped it into its companion bottle of acid, and the acrid fumes of sulphur assailed her nostrils. Shading the flickering flame with one hand, she lit the candle which stood on the rosewood table inlaid with ivory. The soft glow reassured her as the shadows receded.

  After a few desultory paces around the room, she crossed to the undraped window to gaze out at the velvet black of the dark night. She watched the faint outline of the trees as they swayed grotesquely in the force of the gale, then she rested her face against one of the small windowpanes which had misted over with the outpouring of her warm breath as she had dreamed the night away. The cool touch beneath her feverish brow was oddly comforting.

  What had brought that painful memory to mind? What ungodly catalyst had invoked that demon of her childhood to stalk her dreams? She knew the answer before the question was fully formed on her mind. Rathbourne! He had stirred the dregs of long-forgotten memories to rouse this slumbering nightmare.

  She flung the window wide and kneeled on the bare floorboards, her face turned up to meet the wind and rain as if in accepting the fury of the elements as they beat against her, she could somehow confront the specters of her lost childhood and forever lay them to rest. She allowed the familiar emotions to wash over her, dragging her into their irresistible eddies, and she took a quick, indrawn breath of air as if she would save herself from drowning in the flood of remembered pain.

  The child that she once was quivered with mingled fear and shame as she climbed the interminable stairs behind her mother to the top floor of the foul-smelling tenement, her hand securely clasped in Armand’s. Some primitive sense had given Deirdre wisdom beyond her years. To Armand, at four years old, the outing was a strange adventure and, blessedly, soon to be forgotten. But Deirdre understood the significance of her mother’s tears; she knew instinctively that Armand was the bait to lure her mother’s errant husband from the arms of a new love. And she was afraid.

  And then—the confrontation. Bitterness rose like bile in her gorge as Deirdre remembered, as if it were yesterday, how she and Armand had been subjected to the most intimate details of their parents’ lives, hearing things in that passionate quarrel that children ought never to hear.

  The fury of a woman scorned was a sad fiction, as Deirdre had discovered. The picture of her mother, pathetic, like a whipped dog, as she begged the man she loved not to desert his wife and child rose in her mind, burning her with the intensity of the impression, filling her with a revulsion she could no longer hide from herself.

  Deirdre felt her skin cold and clammy under her drenched night attire. She rose to her feet and stepped out of her robe, leaving it in a sodden heap on the floor. There was little letup in the storm. She slammed the window shut and turned back into the room, gliding toward the washstand to find a towel to dry the dew of mingled perspiration and rain from her skin. She sat on the edge of the bed, becoming involved in the simple task, her thoughts still sifting through the flotsam of childhood memories.

  The year that had followed her stepfather’s elopement with his mistress was not a time that Deirdre cared to remember. The deserted family had become the object of their neighbors’ pity—a cruelty harder to endure than open ridicule, even for a child—those hushed conversations and covert glances which seemed to follow her as she trailed her mother in the village shops or sat in their pew in the parish church. Only Armand had been blissfully ignorant of the pall of suffocating pity that had enshrouded them. And Deirdre had watched helplessly as her sensitive mother had become a poor, spiritless creature under the crushing weight of tendered sympathy.

  And then her mother had become a respectable widow when St. Jean was carried off the following year by one of the frequent outbreaks of typhoid in London. The news should have made her happy, but Deirdre could still remember the emptiness that had filled her heart, and with her child’s logic, she had blamed her stepfather for this final desertion also.

  He had left his wife destitute, and only the interest from Deirdre’s small portion left to her by her own father stood between the small family and utter ruin. Her guardian had managed her affairs, supplementing their small income with gifts from his own purse, although he had an extensive family of his own to provide for and had yet to ascend to the higher reaches of his chosen profession.

  Then, out of the blue, when Deirdre was thirteen years old, the fates had smiled on them. A small competence and the house and farm of Marcliff had been left to her by some maiden aunt, a distant relation she scarcely knew. It provided a roof over their heads and a livelihood for their future. By the terms of the will, she was also left an amount sufficient to pay for a seminary education and a Season in town when she reached the age of eighteen. There was no doubt in her mind that the object of the latter was to enable her to make a suitable alliance.

  Her mind shied away from the direction memory had taken her. She crawled into the tester bed and resolutely pulled the covers up to her chin. But thoughts of Rathbourne were not to be so easily repressed.

  She was not her mother, she reminded herself sternly. She would never be an object of pity again. She leaned over and blew out the candle on her bedside table, and lay with unblinking eyes for a long moment.

  Damn men! Damn Rathbourne! And damn her woman’s heart for being so susceptible to his potent charm!

  The tip of the cigar glowed red in the darkened room. The man who smoked the cigar, still in evening clothes, lay full length on top of the covers of the bed and listened absently as the storm raged outside the window. His night’s work, he reflected, had gone quite well. He inhaled deeply. Things looked to be coming to a head—a word here, a word there, was all that was necessary. But it wouldn’t do to get overconfident. Rathbourne was a slippery fellow.

  He stubbed out the cigar in the brass ashtray on the bedside table, and he drank back the dregs of the brandy from the glass in his hand. It was bad luck really, he mused, that the war had ended before a French assassin’s hand could do the deed for him. Still, there was more than one way of skinning a cat. And this cat, he thought smugly, had come to the last of his nine lives.

  Chapter Eleven

  My Lord Rathbourne looked up from his absent perusal of the front page of his daily Times and gave his full though somewhat guarded attention to
Mr. Guy Landron as that gentleman struggled out of his greatcoat and threw it with unaccustomed violence over a shield-backed, brocade side chair at the door.

  “It’s done?” queried the Earl.

  “Right and tight.” A note of grim displeasure threaded Landron’s words.

  The Earl stretched out his hand and grasped a slim document which his secretary had thrust under his nose.

  “She has no suspicions?”

  “None whatsoever. Why should she? My references are impeccable. Miss Fenton took one look at my honest face and decided I was to be trusted.” He threw himself down on a wing-back armchair and winced as a pain went shooting through his leg. “Damn! That was stupid. I keep forgetting about this gammy leg.”

  The Earl filled a crystal glass from a decanter on the console table by his elbow and reached it across to his companion.

  “Here, drink this. Perhaps it will improve your temper.”

  Landron, who had been carefully massaging his lame leg, looked up and accepted the proffered glass. After a moment’s appraisal of Rathbourne’s impassive features he remarked, “You’ll make money on this venture, Gareth, if you let it ride. Miss Fenton knows what she is about.”

  Rathbourne’s amber eyes regarded his friend with lazy interest. “I don’t doubt it. I have every respect for Deirdre’s capacity to make a success of whatever she undertakes.”

  “As long as scoundrels like us don’t send her to the roustabouts!” The quiet words were challenging and slightly contemptuous.

  “My, my, your opinion of ‘the Fenton bitch,’ as I remember you were used to call Deirdre, has undergone a drastic change, has it not?” Rathbourne folded the newspaper in his hands with a snap and threw it carelessly on the table. “May I be permitted to know the reason for this turnabout?”

  “To know the lady is to love her,” said Landron with blatant provocation.

  “Indeed? I cannot quarrel with you on that score.”

  There was a thoughtful pause, then Landron cleared his throat. “Gareth, I wish you would take me into your confidence.”

  “Do you?”

  “You cannot mean to ruin the girl, surely?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “You do intend to offer marriage?”

  “Can you doubt it?”

  Landron’s intelligent brown eyes rested thoughtfully on the Earl. “I don’t trust you,” he said baldly.

  Rathbourne’s features relaxed into the ghost of a smile. “I give you my word, Guy, that I shall approach Deirdre in the ordinary way. Does that satisfy your sense of fair play?”

  “Then why this elaborate plot?”

  “I don’t know what you infer. To invest five thousand pounds in the girl’s enterprise is hardly a plot merely because I choose to remain anonymous.”

  Rathbourne took a pinch of snuff and offered his box to Mr. Landron, who declined the invitation and sat pensively chewing on his bottom lip. After a moment Landron began with unaccustomed vigor, “There are things about Miss Fenton you know nothing about.”

  “Pray continue.”

  “She is a misanthrope.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She hates men. Oh not milk and water fops who pose no kind of threat to her, nor indeed those, such as myself, whom she regards in an avuncular light. But let any man worth his salt try to breach that glacial shield of civility and she immediately takes flight. No doubt, you’ve noticed that she holds our gender in low esteem.”

  “With the exception of Armand St. Jean.”

  “Naturally. St. Jean is her brother, and a younger one at that. He evokes only Deirdre’s mothering instinct. A suitor—now that is a horse of a different color.”

  “I think I get the drift of what you are saying.” The Earl crossed one booted foot over the other and drawled, “You haven’t told me anything I don’t know already.”

  Landron took his time as he savored the mellow taste of his employer’s fine sherry. “Excellent,” he murmured appreciatively. “You always did like the best, Gareth, which brings me back to Miss Fenton. Did you know that Deirdre’s antipathy to men can be laid at the door of one particular man?” He leaned back in his chair with a satisfied grin when he observed that Rathbourne’s habitual expression of indifference had fled.

  “Who?”

  “Her stepfather.”

  There was an electrified silence. Mr. Landron gazed at his friend’s startled face with shocked comprehension. “Good God, Gareth, it’s not what you are thinking! You mistake my meaning! I meant only that her stepfather was a wastrel. Deirdre was a mere child when he ran off with some woman and left her mother to fend for herself and two infants. That’s why Deirdre mistrusts our sex. And from what I can gather, her mother, until her death, confirmed every vile opinion of men that Deirdre ever entertained.”

  Rathbourne relaxed his grip on the slender stem of his sherry glass. “That piece of information is highly enlightening. No wonder Uxbridge…never mind. It’s of no consequence. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.”

  “Don’t be so sure of yourself. You’re not dealing with an impressionable girl. Deirdre is not like other women. You read the dossier I prepared? Well then, you must understand that she is used to ruling the roost. By God, if she hadn’t, I don’t know where that family would be today. She grew up in a hurry, what with an improvident stepfather, a mother who took to her bed at every minor crisis, and a brother who depended on her support and protection from the time he was in leading strings. That small farm and competence which was left to her was a godsend. One wonders how she would have contrived otherwise. I daresay she would have become a governess or some such thing. Who knows? She is a resourceful girl. She might have turned her hand to any number of things.”

  The Earl rifled through some papers he had taken from a drawer. “Isn’t there some sort of allowance that goes to St. Jean from his father’s estate?”

  “Merely an appearance of it. The money comes from Deirdre’s own purse. Armand was told nothing of the circumstances surrounding his father’s desertion. As far as he knows, the elder St. Jean left a small competence to provide for his schooling and a moderate allowance until he reaches his majority. He’s been a drain on Deirdre for years. I believe she wanted to protect him from the ugliness of the economies she has been forced to endure. One must give the girl credit for what she has done.”

  “Can you doubt that I do?”

  Landron drained the last of his sherry. “And I don’t doubt that you’d like to shoulder her burden to boot.”

  “And if I do?” Rathbourne’s look was questioning.

  “The price might be too high,” explained Landron. “I think Miss Fenton is a confirmed spinster or close enough that makes no difference.”

  For the first time since Landron had entered the room, Rathbourne permitted himself a genuine smile. “You’ve done your part well, Guy, and I thank you. I have every confidence that I can handle things from here on.” When Landron said nothing, the Earl spoke with growing impatience. “Don’t waste your sympathies on Deirdre. I have already told you that I mean her no harm. Now leave it be. In a month from now, you’ll look back at this and laugh at your scruples.”

  Landron looked doubtful. “I take leave to tell you, Gareth, that I’d far rather face Boney’s armies than face Deirdre if you make use of the weapon I’ve just put into your hands. Dammit all, the girl trusts me!”

  “Well, of course she does. Doesn’t everybody? That’s why you made such an excellent agent. Now stop worrying. What have I done that’s so reprehensible? I repeat, I’ve merely invested five thousand pounds in Deirdre’s horse breeding venture. The next move is up to her.”

  “How much does St. Jean owe you?”

  “His vowels amount to five thousand, give or take a pound or two.”

  The confrontation with Armand St. Jean had been one that Rathbourne had relished. He had set up the boy quite shamelessly, knowing how the arrogant young cub prided himself on his invincibility at th
e gaming tables. He had prevailed upon the services of his cousin, Tony Cavanaugh, to gain admittance for himself and St. Jean at Watiers where the stakes were notoriously high. Armand had been none too pleased when late on in the evening Rathbourne had insinuated himself into the game, but pride had kept the boy riveted to his place. When only the two of them remained at play, and Armand had begun to lose to the older man rather heavily, it was the same pride that compelled him to continue and finally accept his immense losses with a nonchalance that did not deceive the Earl for one minute.

  There was a discrete knock on the door and at Rathbourne’s command a liveried footman bearing a tray with a gilt-edged visiting card upon it entered and impassively presented it to his master. The Earl read the name on the card and a satisfied smile that came very close to gloating spread over his handsome face.

  “Where is Mr. St. Jean?”

  “I had him wait in the blue room, your lordship, as you instructed.”

  “Thank you.”

  When the lackey had departed, Rathbourne stretched like some jungle feline and slowly eased himself to his feet.

  Landron gave a slight shake of his head. “I didn’t think she’d be fool enough to give him the money.”

  “Oh didn’t you?” drawled Rathbourne. “Haven’t you learned yet that Armand St. Jean is Deirdre’s Achilles’ heel?” As he reached the door, he turned slightly and said over his shoulder, “You’ll conduct that other business for me? Thank you. I don’t think Giles St. Jean will be too hard to persuade. A man like that always has his price. I shouldn’t wonder if he’d be glad to be shot of young St. Jean. Deirdre said that as a guardian the man was useless.”

  When Rathbourne entered the blue room, he was met by a very frigid and stiffly correct young man who was obviously ill at ease.

  “Sit down, St. Jean, and make yourself comfortable. I really hadn’t expected to see you this soon.”