“Explain to me,” Beth said, fixing him with a sapient look as they were once again being jarred to pieces in the ill-sprung carriage, “why you and Hugh must be constantly at each other’s throats?”
That was after the brief nuncheon break on the second day, when Hugh had inquired for what must have been the dozenth time of Beth, as she was mounting again into the carriage, if she was sure she would not like either him or Nick to ride inside with the pair of them. Beth replied, as she had each time before, that she was perfectly fine with being left alone with Neil. Neil, already inside the carriage, as his breaks were of necessity of much shorter duration than Beth’s, with a view to keeping him concealed whenever possible, held out his hand to her to assist her over the threshold, smiled at Hugh over her head, and assured him that he had no thought of harming his new bride yet.
In Neil’s estimation, Hugh’s fuming expression was almost worth the glare Beth shot him.
“He doesn’t like to see me with you,” Neil answered. He was seated across from her, in the backward-facing seat because he was too inured to discomfort to be bothered particularly by it and because he had no wish to add to her misery by crowding her on the other seat. Honesty compelled him to add, “I don’t blame him. Were I in his shoes and he in mine, I wouldn’t like it either.”
“But you were friends once.”
“At Eton.” He had already told her, when she had asked how he knew Hugh, that they had been at school together, with the older boy, Hugh, sometimes stepping in to protect the more belligerent, younger one, Neil, from the consequences of his hasty tongue and ready fists. “He stopped a few fights, interceded with a few prefects on my behalf. I was usually grateful—once my temper cooled, that is. But after I left—all right, ran away from—Eton, I didn’t see him again until we encountered each other in our professional capacities during the course of the war. As each of us was operating under an assumed identity at the time, our renewed relationship did not flourish. In fact, he probably felt as uneasy about my existence as I felt about his. Either of us could have exposed the other for who he really was at any time. Neither of us ever did, though, and I suppose, since his continued silence has made it possible for me to hope to be able to pick up the threads of my old life, I owe him one. I expect I will tell him so, one of these days, when he is a little less ready to believe I mean to ill-treat you.”
“He regards me as his sister, you know,” Beth said excusingly. “He has done so much for us. Indeed, I tremble to think what would have happened to Claire had she not met him. We all—Gabby and I, and Claire most of all—love him devotedly.”
Neil made a face at her. “I don’t doubt it. Richmond was always most heroic. The last time I saw him, on the field at Waterloo, he was leading a charge into an almost overwhelming sea of Frogs, pluck to the backbone all the way. I should say, the last time I saw him before yesterday.”
“You were at Waterloo?”
He nodded. “Every military man who could get there must have fought on that day. I served under Wellington’s command. I have no great opinion of him, but by God he turned Boney back! It was a near run thing, I can tell you, with the very future of England at stake.”
“But that makes you a hero, too!”
The pride in her eyes both surprised and touched him, but he gave a derisive laugh and shook his head. “Not I, my girl. I leave the heroics to those of Richmond’s stamp.”
She smiled at him, clearly unconvinced, and he found the smile disturbing enough on many levels to cause him to change the subject.
It was not until the following day that she came back to it. By this time the novelty of being confined for long hours in a stuffy, poorly sprung carriage, existing on bad food and little sleep, had completely waned. Not even the riders were in a good humor, and they at least had the felicity of being out in the open air. Beth had been lying back against the seat for an hour or more with her eyes closed, having complained of a headache after quarreling with him again over what she termed his obstinate refusal to be conciliating with Richmond. The landscape outside the window—he had parted the curtains a little, despite having been straightly charged not to do so—was dull, and so he occupied himself with looking at her.
He studied the resplendent waves of her hair, which had been twisted up in the most ladylike of fashions when they had begun their journey that dawn, only to have devolved into a precarious knot that let many delightful tendrils escape to curl against her creamy skin as the day wore on. His eyes traced the slim black brows that had, when she had last looked at him, signaled her displeasure at him by slanting to almost meet above her nose. The dark fans of her lashes lay still against her cheeks, making him think she truly was asleep and not just avoiding conversation. He took in the slender length of her nose, the square lines of her jaw and high cheekbones, the lush curve of her lips.
Beautiful was the first thought that came into his head. His second, close on its heels, was a fierce Mine.
“What I don’t understand,” she said, opening her eyes to catch him staring, causing him to flush a little, as though she could somehow divine the tenor of his thoughts, “is how you came to be at Eton in the first place.”
“My father sent me there.” He recovered from his surprise with aplomb.
“But I thought your mother took you with her to France.” He had already told her that his parents had separated when he was very young, with his aristocratic French mother fleeing with Isobel and himself to her native country.
“She did. We lived with her widowed mother, most happily, until at the height of the Terror a servant appeared and whisked me away. Stole me away, rather, leaving a message for my mother to tell her that His Grace the Duke of Wychester did not care for his heir to be exposed to the danger that was France and would henceforth care for him in England.”
“That must have been terrible. How old were you?”
“Not quite eight.”
“Poor little boy!”
“Indeed, I thought so. I hated my father for taking me. He was a cold, cruel man in any case, not one to endear himself to children. My mother came once to try to beseech him into letting her have me again, but he threw her out on her ear. My emotions when I was forcefully detached from her on this occasion were violent enough to persuade him to send me away to school. I threatened to kill him, I believe.”
“Anyone might have done so!”
He smiled at her. “You are determined to see me in the best possible light, aren’t you?”
“You are determined to see yourself in the worst!” She shook her head at him. “But continue. You were sent to school. Did you not then have any more contact with your mama until—” There she broke off delicately.
“She wrote to me at school. She and Isobel were most faithful correspondents. When I ran away from Eton—I was on the verge of being kicked out for fighting, and had no wish to be sent back to my father’s tender care, which was what they were threatening to do—it was with the intention of making my way to them in France. I ended up working for Mr. Creed at the White Swan in an attempt to raise the ready. The rest you know.”
“Yes.” She looked thoughtful. “But what I don’t know is how you wound up becoming an assassin. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing one could just fall into.”
He laughed, and as he did so he realized that he had never in his life thought that he could laugh about such a topic. But she was so ridiculously matter-of-fact about something that should by rights have had her shuddering with revulsion that he couldn’t help it.
“What’s funny?” She regarded him so suspiciously that he laughed again.
“You, Madame Roux.” When she gave him her quick frown he was conscious of a strong urge to shift to the seat beside her, wrap her in his arms, and kiss her breathless, but given the exigencies of the situation he most nobly refrained. Instead, he chose to answer her question. “After my mother and sister were killed, I went, I admit it, a little mad for a while. I thirsted for vengeance,
and I took it as best I could. My tribute to them was to kill everyone I could get to who I felt was responsible for their deaths, from the prison guards who took my bribes but did nothing to help them, to the farmer in Dijon who sold the whereabouts of their hiding place to the soldiers who sought them. In the course of this bloody rampage, I encountered someone else who was bent more or less on the same job, except he was being paid by the British government to do it. He recognized in me a like-minded soul who he judged suitable to be trained as an assassin, and passed the word up the chain. I was approached, accepted, trained, and sent out. As Richmond told you, I became the best at what I do. I was even proud of how good I was at it.”
She looked at him with trouble in her eyes. Then, to his great surprise, she slipped from her seat to his, put her arms around his neck, and pressed her warm, soft lips to his cheek.
“It’s over,” she said softly. “You don’t need to ever think about it again.”
After that, he couldn’t help it. There was simply nothing else to do. He kissed her. The sweetness of her lips made him dizzy, and the soft warmth of her invited his hands. He pulled her onto his lap, leaned her back over his arm, and kissed her until he ached with wanting her; she was sighing and yielding and kissing him back with an abandon that set his blood to boiling and made him think that a closed carriage might not, after all, be such a bad place to continue his bride’s education. In fact, had it not been for a most inopportune banging on the roof—the coachman’s way of announcing an impending stop—he might have lost his head to the point of taking her right there in the carriage.
But the coachman did bang, and she pulled her mouth away from his, sitting up on his lap and blinking at him for a moment in the most adorable confusion. Leaning back against the squabs, grabbing hold of his willpower with both hands against the effort it cost to let her go, he managed a lazy smile for her and had the pleasure of seeing her cheeks turn crimson.
Then the carriage started to slow, and she scrambled up off his lap and back to her seat, hastily trying to put her hair and dress to rights as she went.
Again he counseled himself to patience. Shortly they would have all the time in the world.
Along with dinner, which was carried to him in the coach while she went in to dine at the inn, which was busier than any they had stopped at so far, came the intelligence that they could shortly expect to reach London.
“Hugh sent a message on ahead, so Claire and Gabby will be expecting us,” Beth told him when the carriage was under way again. She was excited, happy at the prospect of being reunited with her sisters and being once more at home, while he was conscious of a most unfamiliar sensation. It took him a while to work it out, but finally he did: he was, he realized to his own disgust, increasingly nervous about what was to come. Meeting her sisters, reentering society, becoming part of the world again—the prospect made his gut tighten in a way it hadn’t done since he was a boy.
It was past nine o’clock and dark except for the occasional flaring street light that flashed past the crack in the curtains by the time the carriage wheels clattered onto London’s cobblestone streets. On the opposite seat, Beth peeped out the window, remarked on the sights they passed, and chattered blithely on about her sisters while he listened with half an ear. Absolutely fearless in the face of physical danger, so hardened to the prospect of pain or deprivation that he barely noticed either, he found he could not face this change in his circumstances with anything other than the most profound misgiving.
He was a creature of the dark, not the light.
“At least, I had not thought—I’m not entirely sure how it works, but Hugh has been kind enough to provide me with a considerable portion, and perhaps . . .”
That slightly disjointed statement, tacked onto some comment about how pleasant he would find it to live in Richmond House, caught his attention.
“We won’t need to rely on any funds from Richmond,” he said crisply, pulling himself together to focus on what she was saying to him. “Or to live in his house, either. I inherited a great deal of money from my mother, and I am Wychester’s heir as well.”
“Are you saying you’re rich?” Beth regarded him with open delight.
He had to laugh. “Are you glad of it?”
“Extremely. I’ve been poor, you know, and I don’t care for it a bit.”
He laughed again, and felt the better for it. Moments later, the carriage rocked to a stop. With Richmond and DeVane following as grimly as a pair of damned guards, they were ushered into the magnificence that was Richmond House, not through the front door but through the mews, and the back garden, and along a narrow corridor, up a set of back stairs, and into a grand hall until finally a stately butler—Graham, Beth called him as he welcomed her home—flung open the doors to a warmly lit saloon.
“They are here, Your Grace.”
Chapter Thirty
“BETH!”
As the new arrivals entered, two slender young women rose from chairs by the fire to fly toward Beth, who embraced both with a laughing fervor that left Neil in no doubt that he beheld her much-talked-about sisters. The raving beauty he had no trouble in identifying as Claire, who of course belonged to Richmond. The older sister, who possessed her own quiet loveliness, was Gabby, and belonged to DeVane. Two much older women, one a tall, mannish-looking battle-ax with a crown of iron gray braids who was undoubtedly a lady by birth, the other also tall but spare, with silvery hair confined primly at her nape and the look of an upper servant about her, were then hugged by Beth in turn. The resultant jumble of conversation amongst the women proved impossible to keep up with, and he did not try. Instead, he watched Beth and her sisters with idle appreciation for a trio of beauteous females while the chatter rose in volume until, as abruptly as the clap of a pair of hands, it stopped. Every female eye in the room then fastened on him as one.
Neil barely managed not to blanch.
“Beth, pray tell me I cannot have heard you correctly,” the battle-ax said in an unpleasantly piercing voice that matched the look she was giving him. “Even you cannot have done anything so shocking as to contract a Gretna Green marriage!”
“Well, I did,” Beth said, unrepentant, and came forward to slide a hand around his arm and draw him—most unwillingly, though he hoped he had more bottom than to let it show—into what he could only regard as the arena. With, of course, the quartet of more or less obviously appalled ladies cast as lions. “This is Neil Severin. The—the Marquis of Durham. Neil, this is my sister Claire, Duchess of Richmond, my sister Gabby, Mrs. DeVane, my aunt Augusta, Lady Salcombe, and our own dear Miss Twindlesham, who has taken care of Claire and me since our birth.”
It had been many years since he’d had cause to engage in the ordinary social conventions of his class, but as he found himself thus put on the spot, the way of it instantly came back to him. He stepped forward and, with a most insincere murmur of pleasure on his lips, shook hands all around.
“We owe you a great deal of thanks for your kindness to Beth,” Gabby said, and smiled at him, which made him realize that she had a deal more beauty than he had at first supposed.
“Oh, and for rescuing her,” Claire added, with a warmth in her eyes that put him in mind of Beth’s engaging twinkle. Neil thought that, save for Beth, he had never seen a more ravishing female. He would have shot a purely male congratulatory glance at the husband standing so protectively behind her, had the man been any other than Richmond, who was observing his discomfiture with a sardonic expression that awoke in Neil the quite unworthy desire to plant him a facer. DeVane, having embraced his wife, had retreated to stand near the fireplace, making it clear from his expression and posture that whatever occurred, his intention was to stay well out of it.
The battle-ax—Lady Salcombe—still glared at him. “Marquis or no—and from all I ever heard, Wychester’s heir has been dead these many years—a Gretna Green marriage will not do!” She transferred that glare to Beth. “Your credit won’t stand any more sc
andal, as you certainly should know. And as for you”—that blistering look once more fell on Neil—“you should have known better than to have helped her to it! A fine bumble-bath this is! When word of this gets out, every door will be closed to you, Miss Sauce-mouth, and the pity of it is however well deserved such a catastrophe may be, we shall all be tainted by it!”
“The fault is entirely mine, Lady Salcombe.” Neil stepped gamely into the breach in an attempt to draw the lady’s fire from Beth.
Shameless Page 32