The Secret Lover

by Julia London

  She complained nonetheless that it was drab and passé.

  Caleb emerged in a pair of buckskin trousers, a lawn shirt, and waistcoat that accentuated his trim waist. His hair was combed back in long waves that brushed his collar. He had never seemed quite as virile as he did then, striding down the corridor of Kettering Hall, a smile on his face.

  As for Sophie, well, the clothes she had packed in the small portmanteau were soiled—Miss Brillhart took them and in their place, gave Sophie a plain black skirt and white blouse that buttoned up primly to the throat. Sophie recognized the skirt—it was one she had often worn eight years ago, was so very much like the old Sophie, plain and austere. But without petticoats, the fabric draped her frame; she fastened her hair up in a twist, and left the tiny little row of buttons unfastened from her sternum and up. At least, she tried to console herself, she didn’t look quite the schoolmistress.

  It was her idea to prepare a feast. After several days of trailing after Lord Hamilton, she was firmly convinced they needed a respite, a moment in time to feel normal again and replenish their strength. But Caleb was restless; he wanted to move on, before anyone found them there. “Miss Brillhart is bound to send word to Kettering,” he warned her.

  “Perhaps,” Sophie shrugged. “But he won’t come tonight. We should rest, Caleb. We should think carefully about what we will do if we are to leave again.”

  “Hamilton will have the whole of England looking for her,” he said, fingering the lace of Sophie’s collar. “And me.”

  “He’ll not look here, I’d wager. He’ll think we’ve run to Scotland, to your home.”

  Caleb nodded thoughtfully. “I suppose you are right. But I don’t like this, sitting idle. It makes us quite vulnerable.”

  She smiled, cupped his jaw in her palm, and winked. “We’ll not sit idle, sir, if you take my meaning.”

  Gathering her in his arms, Caleb kissed her neck. “You have my rapt attention, madam. You look rather fetching in your prim little costume, but Lord, that glimpse of flesh just there”—he brushed his finger along her chest where she had left her blouse unbuttoned—“is enough to drive a man to great distraction.”

  “Indeed?” she asked, and glanced covertly around the corridor as she stroked his thigh suggestively. “I think you are rather distracting yourself, sir,” she said coyly.

  Caleb laughed again. “My God, how I love you, Sophie Dane. It doesn’t seem real at times, any of this.”

  “It is real,” she assured him. “From the bottom of my heart, it is real, all of it.”

  She made him follow her to the kitchens then, before he had her right there, on the carpet. In the kitchen, when he attempted to feel her breast, she made him roll up his sleeves and help her. He was still grumbling good-naturedly when Honorine wandered in, a bottle of French wine in one hand. Sophie did not bother to ask where she might have found it.

  Much to Miss Brillhart’s apparent surprise, she found all three of them in the massive kitchen of Kettering Hall, Honorine sitting at the long wooden table in the center of the room, sipping a glass of wine. Caleb stood across from her, with an apron tied around his chest, chopping carrots with all the finesse of a mule. And at the far end of the table stood Sophie, preparing a sauce for the meat roasting on a spit.

  “Miss Brillhart,” she called cheerfully. “Will you join us?”

  “Oui, oui,” Honorine said, waving her over. “It is not good to drink the wine alone.”

  Miss Brillhart faltered; her pudgy fingers fluttered to her throat. “I…I don’t know if I ought, Lady Sophie. It doesn’t seem right.”

  As if anything were right with their world at present. Poor Miss Brillhart—she had no idea what they had been through these last few days. The very thought of explaining it made Sophie laugh; she put down her spoon, walked to where the housekeeper stood, and put her arm around her shoulders, urging her forward. “I can assure you, Miss Brillhart, that nothing seems right any longer. You might as well join us.”

  Reluctantly, she positioned herself on the stool and accepted a glass of wine. Honorine lifted her glass in mock toast to Miss Brillhart. “Salut,” she said gravely, then sipped.

  So did Miss Brillhart.

  After several sips, she was laughing with the rest of them, her face very rosy.

  After two glasses of wine, Honorine began to tell them the story of Lord Hamilton, beginning with the moment she had met him at Regent’s Park. Honorine was adamant that with very little effort on her part, Lord Hamilton had begun to improve immediately. She told them that she suspected something was not quite right with Trevor from the beginning, for every improvement Will made, he seemed to suffer a bit of a setback after returning home. Nonetheless, he had improved rapidly, transforming from the man in the wheeled chair she had met in the park to one who could move about, who was beginning to remember things. To the man she had fallen in love with.

  Yet in spite of those improvements, there was something bothering the viscount, she said, something he could not seem to grasp from the boarded up well of his memory. Something about Caleb that he could not articulate.

  That piqued Caleb’s interest; he questioned her anxiously about his father’s state, what he remembered, what he did not. But Honorine could say no more than what she had, except that he had wanted to go home so badly that she could not refuse to take him.

  When Sophie asked why she had left without a word, Honorine was surprised. Ian knew it, of course, but she had also left a note for Roland and Fabrice, which, they deduced after much discussion, had been caught up in the general cleaning after the ball and tossed aside as rubbish.

  Honorine spoke fancifully about their languid, carefree journey north, of the sights they had seen, the things they had done. The viscount was, she insisted, quite lucid and feeling better with each day, in spite of what Trevor would have them all believe.

  “This, Monsieur Darby will say is so,” she said emphatically. He was walking well on his own, speaking better than she had ever heard him, and grasping many more pieces of the memory that had been lost to him.

  But when Trevor arrived—crazed and irrational, according to Honorine—everything changed. He locked his father away from her, threatened to do the same with her until the sheriff arrived. Darby had shown her where she might hide. And from that hiding place, she had watched Trevor go in and out of the salon where he kept his father, her fear of what was happening confirmed when she had bolted for the salon that afternoon while Trevor was occupied with Caleb.

  “This medicine, it makes us believe he is unaware. Trevor poisons him!”

  “Poison?” Caleb asked, his disbelief apparent. “But for what purpose? Why should he want his own father to be so incapacitated?”

  Honorine stared miserably into her empty glass. “I do not know the answer to that. But he is an evil man.”

  “I never thought him evil,” Sophie offered. “But I thought there was something rather insincere about him. Nothing I could put my finger on, exactly.”

  Miss Brillhart, particularly pliable at the moment, put her wineglass down and squinted at Sophie. “Who is evil?” she demanded.

  “Mr. Trevor Hamilton of Nottinghamshire. You wouldn’t know him, I should think.”

  “Indeed I do,” she said, bracing her hands against her knees. “He enjoys rather a sordid reputation in these parts.”

  The room stilled; Caleb, Sophie, and Honorine all looked at Miss Brillhart. The poor woman immediately blushed and waved her hand as if to dismiss what she had just said. “Well, from what I hear, that is to say.”

  “What have you heard?” Sophie asked.

  She turned even redder. “Just that he’s a bit of a gambler. Actually, he’s quite the gambler. His departed wife hailed from nearby, and it is said he owes rather a lot of money to men in these parts.”

  “Ah,” said Caleb thoughtfully. “That would at least explain the sudden excursion to Beaconsfield.”

  “Beaconsfield?” Honorine asked.
/>   Caleb put aside the knife he was holding and wiped his hands on the apron. “Do you recall the afternoon I did not come to the park?” he asked Sophie. “The afternoon of the Hamilton supper party. It was because I had followed Trevor. I had a suspicion—nothing, really, except that his behavior toward me had been too vehement. I had made no claim to Father’s fortune; I merely wanted to see him. When I saw Trevor leaving Bedford Square that morning, his manner seemed rather odd, as if he were attempting to hide. I acted on instinct and followed him. He went to Beaconsfield and spent the day betting on the horse races there, then returned in time to prepare for the soiree. I really thought nothing of it, until now.”

  “Oh yes, that sounds like our Mr. Hamilton,” Miss Brillhart said authoritatively. “Never misses a race, to hear it told.”

  Caleb, Sophie, and Honorine looked at one another. “Do you think that perhaps…?” Caleb asked.

  “Yes,” Sophie responded authoritatively. “Yet I don’t understand why he would keep his own father so incapacitated.”

  “He is evil, this is why,” Honorine insisted, pouring herself another glass of wine. “And we leave Will there!”

  “We must notify someone,” Sophie said to Caleb. “I am not sure how that might be done, what with the suspicion cast on all of us as it is—”

  “I’ll tell them!” Miss Brillhart announced, fortified by wine and puffing her chest. “I’ve no patience for the likes of him, I don’t. I’ll just pay a call to the parish constable on the morrow, and tell him all about our poor Lord Hamilton.”

  “The constable?” Sophie asked, surprised. “Perhaps Caleb should accompany you.”

  “There is no need for that,” Miss Brillhart said proudly.

  “You know him, then?”

  Miss Brillhart suddenly blushed and hastily picked up her wineglass. “You might say the constable is…a very old friend of mine,” she said, and quickly drank what was left of her wine.

  “Ooh, how convenient to keep these old friends about!” Honorine exclaimed, and with a bawdy chuckle, she cuffed Miss Brillhart on the shoulder, almost toppling the housekeeper right off her stool.

  Caleb questioned Miss Brillhart further, and was finally satisfied it was indeed the best way to have someone look into the immediate care of Lord Hamilton. It did not, however, resolve their dilemma.

  That conversation moved out onto the terrace with supper, continued over a delicious, candlelit meal of roasted beef in a port wine sauce, sweetbread au jus, asparagus in crème sauce, and steamed vegetables. But the meal could not alleviate the gravity of their collective situation, and the conversation slowly died from fatigue and a lack of clear solutions.

  It was Sophie who broke the somber mood by producing a meringue à la crème she had learned from Lucie Cowplain that had Honorine and Caleb swooning, and Miss Brillhart looking at Sophie with great surprise.

  “Dear me, I cannot say I am not quite curious, my lady!” she exclaimed as she leaned back, fully sated after her meal. “You never seemed the type, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “Really?” drawled Caleb. “What type did she seem, Miss Brillhart?”

  “Oh my,” she said, laughing. “Sophie was such a darling child. But spoiled! The earl, he could never refuse her.”

  “Spoiled?” Sophie snorted at that. “My recollection is a bit different, Miss Brillhart—he could refuse me quite easily!”

  “Oh no, he could not,” the housekeeper loudly disagreed, straightening her posture to better address Caleb and Honorine. “Sophie was the youngest of them all, you know. She was always following them about, begging to be allowed to play in their games. Eugenie and Valerie, they were horrible to the younger girls. If they determined they would play knights and damsels, poor Sophie was always the black knight and would inevitably be slain in the opening scene of their drama. I daresay Ann did not fare much better, but she seemed to last a bit longer than our Sophie.”

  Sophie had forgotten knights and damsels, but the memory came back clearly—she laughed softly. “It’s true,” she admitted. “They would march me out into the center of the bowling lawn and have me stand there, while they ran around me with those wooden swords Julian made. One tap, I was gravely injured and was to lay dying. Two taps, and I could dispense with the acting altogether, for I was dead.”

  Miss Brillhart laughed. “And do you recall the ghosts?”

  Sophie couldn’t help herself—she laughed fully at the memory. “Of course! Did you think I would ever forget? I still have wretched dreams!”

  “What ghost?” Caleb insisted.

  “Eugenie and Claudia—Julian’s wife—they thought it would be great fun one night to act out a scary story rather than tell one. Eugenie, very dramatically, of course, told the story of the ghost of Kettering Hall. Some ancient ancestor or some such thing. I was too young to notice, I suppose, but Claudia was nowhere to be seen. Ann and Valerie and I hung on Eugenie’s every word, and at one point, we were convinced that we had heard the ghost walking overhead. Well…” Sophie paused, leaned forward as Miss Brillhart put her hand over her mouth to quell the laughter. “Wouldn’t you know, that after we had gone to bed, I felt something tickle my foot. When I opened my eyes, there was a ghost standing at the foot of my bed.”

  “You’ve never heard such a bloodcurdling scream in your life!” Miss Brillhart interjected. “Oh my, we all heard it, all through the servants’ floor. I went running down the stairs just in time to see little Sophie flying down the corridor to the earl’s rooms, screaming all the way. And who should walk out of her rooms? Miss Claudia, draped in a sheet, two big holes cut for the eyes!” she cried, laughing.

  “I slept with Julian for a week!”

  “Two!” howled Miss Brillhart.

  The four of them laughed well into the night, relieved with the respite from their troubles if only for a space, recalling various memories from their respective childhoods, reminiscing of days long gone. It was particularly poignant to Sophie that Caleb’s memories of his childhood seemed so lonely. Although he laughed at some of his antics, his cheerful telling of it did not banish the image of a lonely boy who had no playmates, apparently shunned because of his birth. It truly amazed her in moments like this that he had become the proud man that he was. Instead of falling victim to his circumstance as so many would do, he grew from it, garnered strength from it. Made himself a man from it.

  She loved him. Loved him to the point of devastation.

  Which was why, when she later lay in her old bed, staring up at the frieze ceiling of angels she had memorized so many years ago, her heart leapt with hope when she heard the creak of the door.

  Rising up on her elbow, she watched as Caleb slipped into her room, taking care to shut the door quietly behind him. Then he turned, fairly flew across the thick carpet, and fell on her, smothering her with kisses.

  Sophie laughed; he silenced her with another kiss. “Ssshh,” he warned her. “Miss Brillhart may be a jolly good girl, but I rather imagine she’ll not appreciate finding a rogue in your bed.”

  “What would she do, do you think?” Sophie asked playfully. “I rather imagine she’d have a fit of apoplexy and keel over, right where she stands.”

  Caleb nuzzled her neck. “Then let’s give her no cause for alarm,” he said, and lifted his head. The playful smile was gone; his gaze searched her face as he brushed his knuckles across her cheek, then her lips. “Let us marry as soon as possible, Sophie. Let us obtain license on the morrow and marry straightaway. I can’t go on like this, loving you, making love to you, and not having you wholly mine, in truth and in name.”

  Instantly, Sophie sobered. She slowly pushed herself up so that she was leaning against the headboard. Looking apprehensive, Caleb braced himself against the bed with one arm across her body.

  How peculiar, Sophie thought, that she should come full circle, come back to the place she had heard similar words before and acted upon them.

  “I want it with all my heart, Sophie.” />
  She wanted it, too. But her family would never forgive her. If she thought she had been an outcast before, she would certainly be so now. They could perhaps, in time, come to accept Caleb, in spite of his lack of name. But they would not forgive her for scandalizing them a second time. They would believe her to be the same childish girl who had run away with William Stanwood, would want her out of their lives. Perhaps permanently

  But it was her life to ruin. It was her life to live. She could no more make this choice for them than she could for Caleb. It had to be for her, and her alone.

  Caleb stroked her cheek again; his hand trailed down her neck, her chest, to her lap. “Sophie,” he murmured.

  She smiled, reached for his hand, and pressed it against her heart. “Yes,” she whispered. “We will obtain a license tomorrow.”

  A range of emotion scudded across his eyes; he stared in disbelief. His gaze dropped to his hand pressed against her heart, and then suddenly heavenward, to the frieze of cherubs and angels on her ceiling. “Thank you, God,” he said low. “I will not squander this chance, I vow it.”

  Whatever he might have meant by that was lost to her as he came over her then, kissing her with all the emotion she felt.

  At Hamilton Hall that same night, Will waited until Trevor had left his bedroom, then spit out the whiskey and what he was now certain was a very strong dose of opiate. He lay in his bed for several minutes, waiting, straining to hear, uncertain if Trevor might choose to return. He rather thought not. It seemed, in the course of the last forty-eight hours, that he was too intent on drinking. That was rather odd, actually—Trevor had never been one to drink to excess.