The Chaperone's Secret

by Donna Lea Simpson

  “Count on me.” Pierson launched himself out of his chair. “Then I am off. I have much to do, including letting poor Rupert do all of the things I have not allowed, such as a proper haircut.”

  “You are forsaking the sheepdog look?”

  “I am,” Pierson said with a sudden grin, tugging on one long, loose curl that drooped down on his forehead. “And,” he said, more soberly, “I am going to write to my solicitor and ask him to take the search for the absconded Mr. Lincoln in hand. It’s possible that there will be some money to recover for my poor serving staff at Delacorte.”

  “I heartily approve,” Bainbridge said, rising too. “If you need advice, my land agent will be happy to consult with you.”

  “I appreciate the offer, Bain.” He clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Send me a note about tonight, then.”

  Bainbridge sat back down in the club chair after his friend left and remained for a while just sipping brandy and staring into the distance. Pierson’s affairs were in such a tangle and his estate in such a bad way that even the marquess was not sure how he could ever recover. He had been lucky in his own life that his paternal line had always been exquisitely careful of the Bainbridge name and holdings. If he had had Pierson’s life he might have ended up the same, drinking himself into a stupor every night at the sheer hopelessness of it.

  But Pierson was not only impulsive and good-hearted at the core, he was also an optimist. If there was any way to recover the estate, Pierson was likely the one who could do it, given the right helpmeet and encouragement. If he should marry wrong, though, it would be the end of any hope for order and recovery in his life, just as if he should marry the right lady, it could well be the making of him. Bainbridge did not subscribe to the notion that one should interfere in a friend’s life for his own good, but surely in this one case it behooved him to be sure that Lady Rowena Revington was all she appeared to be.

  But what if she wasn’t? What then?

  He wouldn’t worry about that for now. He would handle that problem if it cropped up. For surely Lady Rowena, daughter of a duke and well-raised young lady of the ton, could not be so disastrous a match for Pierson? After all, she was certain to be well-dowered, and money never went amiss. The real fear was she was not truly interested in Pierson the way he was in her.

  But judging from the blush on her face and the looks she had cast him, there was the beginning of a preference there. He would keep his eye on things, though, for sure. Friends looked out for friends.

  Seven

  Amy, her stomach quivering with anticipation, stood outside the duke’s library and patted her hair down, coiling the one curl she allowed herself around her finger and then taking a deep breath. She had been summoned to His Grace’s presence, an event that occurred about every other day, but she still had not become accustomed to it. He was a duke, after all, and she had never in her life expected to have to deal with such a lofty creature as that. Added to the natural intimidation one would feel in the presence of such a man was the dismay engendered by the Duke of Sylverton’s haughty and imperious manner and infamous temper.

  She pushed the heavy door and it swung open effortlessly, just as everything worked in this perfectly managed household. Everything except the relationship between the fearsome duke and his headstrong daughter.

  The library was enormous and dark and now, with the sun setting outside, the curtains were drawn, making the interior even more gloomy. At one end of the room the walls were entirely covered with calf-bound, gilt-edged books, oak shelves reaching up so far she could not see the highest shelf in the dim light. At the other end was the duke’s massive desk, so big one could waltz on the surface. Lining the walls were glass-fronted bookcases and a folio table, with maps spread out and weighted with polished brass cannons and other military decorations. The duke had been involved, from a government standpoint, in the war, now over almost four years, and one had the sense from his library’s decoration that he mourned the end of the war rather than celebrated it.

  She walked down the long open area, her feet silent on the lush carpet. On the desk facing her—pointed directly at her, in fact—was a military cannon replica larger than the brass one on the folio table. Mounted on the wall behind the desk were a selection of edge weapons and firearms, a valuable collection, she had been told, and a lethal one. She approached the desk but the duke, his head bent over his work, either did not know she was there or chose to ignore her.

  Amy remembered just three months before, meeting him for the first time. She had been frightened but at first the duke had been so kindly, almost fatherly. He had complimented her pretty manners, told her about his poor daughter, so ill right then, and just that she needed a chaperone for the Season. Amy had demurred that she was not really “in” society and had never participated in the London Season, but looking back, she didn’t think the duke had been listening, for he then started questioning her about Bridget Donegal.

  Yes, Amy had admitted, Miss Donegal had oft stated her intention of never marrying, and yes, she had been quite adamant on the subject. Was she a weak character? he asked. No, Bridget was generally accounted to be a very intelligent, strong-minded young lady. Pressed even closer, she admitted that yes, Bridget had a reputation as a termagant.

  Had she ever refused an offer of marriage? Yes, she had, Amy stated, many. She was about to add that the offers she had previously received had not really done honor to her standing in the community, since the Donegals were the foremost family of their small Irish town. That accounted, in Amy’s opinion, for Bridget’s quick about-face when presented with the startlingly handsome—and very wealthy—young Englishman who was now her husband. But the duke had cut her off exactly then with an offer so rich and temping that even if she had not been compelled to accept for lack of any other position, she would have likely accepted. If she succeeded, she’d never need to be a chaperone again.

  If she succeeded. She now knew how dim her prospects for that were, but she hadn’t then.

  His transformation into the irritable, acrimonious, irascible man she now dealt with had occurred after Rowena’s recovery. Amy soon found that she had on her hands a father and daughter so much alike that there was no hope of peace in the ducal manse.

  “Your Grace?” she said finally, tiring of standing to attention and awaiting his pleasure.

  He looked up. “What is it?”

  “You asked Martinson to tell me to see you?”

  “Ah, yes, that is correct.”

  He didn’t ask her to sit. He never asked her to sit. He glared up at her over his spectacles. “Ball tonight?”

  “The Parkinsons’, your Grace.”

  “How is it going? Any potential beaux?”

  Amy thought of Lord Pierson and the look in his golden eyes when he gazed at Rowena. “Well, yes, there are many gentlemen interested in Lady Rowena. Everywhere she is acknowledged as the foremost diamond of this Season and every other.”

  “But is she interested in any of them?”

  “Yes,” Amy said reluctantly, again thinking of Lord Pierson. Lady Rowena had done nothing but talk of him all afternoon, and was closely planning her toilette that very moment with her maid.

  “Good. It is just March. You have almost three months to accomplish your task. Should be easy. I expect a son-in-law by June.”

  And he looked back down at his work, that being all the dismissal she would get from the duke. Taking a deep breath, she gave a smart salute and whirled on her heel.

  As she exited she heard him say behind her, “I saw that, Miss Corbett. Your impertinence has been noted.”

  She leaned against the door as she closed it behind her and said, “Infuriating man!”

  It echoed loudly. A footman, polishing a sword-wielding armored knight in the great hall, gazed at her in surprise and she shrugged.

  Returning to her room, she knelt on the floor by her bed and petted Puss, as the foundling cat had become. Though the housekeeper had raised a fuss
and put her nose in the air, claiming that cats were dirty creatures and spread disease, Amy had been adamant. Puss was staying. She would keep her in her own room, but Puss was staying.

  In the end the housekeeper herself had been the one to bring a dish of milk, and to coo over the young cat’s pretty manners. Amy felt blessed that the duke’s staff had readily accepted her, due mostly, she thought, to the desperate failings of the last two chaperones. As a result they had been unusually kind to someone in her difficult position, neither servant nor family, but inhabiting a dreary netherworld in between. Of her treatment at the hands of the ducal staff she could not complain, if only she could say as much for her employer and her charge.

  “What am I going to do, Puss? If Lady Rowena does not deign to marry by the end of the Season, the Duke will not only dismiss me, I’m certain he will ensure that I never receive another position. He has, I’m afraid, a resentful temper, and will make sure no other family of any consequence will ever hire me.”

  The cat purred and stretched, too full of chicken and milk to care.

  “How I wish I could be like you and never worry as long as my belly is full. But I have been too close to destitution.” Amy laid her head against the cat’s side and felt the vibration of its purring. It was soothing, but nothing could relieve her anxiety for the future. She had been, in her life, very close to penury on several occasions. So far another position had always come right at the moment she needed it, but this time, she feared, there would be no miraculous intervention. Once the duke had vented his ire, no one would dare help her.

  She plucked at the figured pattern on her bedspread. Her Aunt Marabelle would welcome her with open arms, but that poor woman was sixty and mired in poverty herself. She would never turn away her brother’s only child, but to take her in was to suffer herself, for a pittance split between two was not enough to subsist on.

  No. She would make it on her own. And no spoiled heiress was going to destroy her life. Amy stood and paced to the window, gazing out over the walled gardens of the neighboring London homes. The sun was setting and reflecting golden off mellow stone.

  She had to hold on to the knowledge of how very fortunate she was in her life. Just gazing over the roofs reminded her of that, for her view included chimneys, puffs of smoke emanating, and that reminded her of all the little chimney sweeps, tiny boys and girls of six and seven, driven to do their work by pins prodding their calloused feet. And the sound of a maid moving out in the hall reminded her that those poor girls worked from sunup to sundown with little respite, and still considered themselves more fortunate than the scullery maids and pot boys, who slept on the floor under the work tables in the kitchen at night, not afforded the luxury even of a bed.

  Turning her back on the window, she gazed at her beautiful room. Puss looked up at her sleepily and mewed.

  Amy straightened her shoulders and spine. All there was to do was find Lady Rowena a husband to her taste, one that she could not resist. He must be titled, elegant, handsome, witty and willing to be completely captivated by Rowena’s beauty, so much so he would not look beneath the surface to the hellcat underneath. And then, the girl must be convinced to marry him. That was the most difficult task of all.

  Hitherto she had been willing to give that quest up as impossible. And yet, there must still be hope! She would not be so spineless as to give up. Rowena might be determined, but determination faced with desperation must give way, and Amy was desperate. If she succeeded, the duke had promised her such a bountiful wage as would set her up for a good long time, maybe forever, and even allow her to help her Aunt Marabelle. In Lord Pierson she had seen sufficient dazzlement to promise that he might be amenable to a swift courtship, and if it pained her just a little to think of the viscount wed to Rowena, it was just a passing qualm, surely. Lady Rowena was intrigued by his reputation in the ton, and that was a problem as well. Would the duke allow her to marry such a man, if he could be enticed into making an offer?

  “I need some knowledgeable advice, Puss, from someone who will advise me. I will not give up this fight.” She would go to her mentor, Mrs. Bower, and ask some questions. She would start her campaign that very night.

  • • •

  “What do you think, Rupert?” Lord Pierson stood in front of the mirror in his suite and gazed at his elegant reflection.

  “I have never seen you look so . . . presentable, my lord.”

  “Presentable? Is that the best you can say?”

  “If you will allow me, my lord.” The valet faced his employer and poked and prodded his neckcloth into more precise folds, then flicked a minute speck of dust from his jacket and finally knelt and buffed one spot on his black leather ballroom shoes. When he stood it was with a restrained smile on his face. “My lord, you are now perfect.”

  “Glad to hear it, Rupert.” The strain of three days of sobriety was making him fanciful, Pierson feared, for when he looked into the mirror and saw his perfect reflection accompanied by that of his valet, he would have sworn he saw a tear in Rupert’s eye, sparkling in the candlelight. It must be a trick of the light. “Have you received a note from Lord Bainbridge yet?” he asked.

  Smiling, the valet whipped a monogrammed square of parchment out of his jacket. “This came while you were in your bath, my lord.”

  Taking in a deep breath, knowing this determined whether he would see his fair angel that night, Pierson read it. It was brief, and very Bainbridge. Success. See you there. B.

  “Now it is up to me,” Pierson murmured. “I must haul out and dust off my company manners, Rupert, in order to make an impression on a young lady. Do you think I can do it?”

  “Of course, my lord. You can do anything you set your mind to.”

  Pierson met his valet’s gaze in the mirror. “I have the idea that you intend by that praise more than I even asked. However, that is not for tonight. If I am to make my reformation, I must start somewhere, and I will start where my heart leads, to the Parkinson ball.”

  It had been some time since he had graced the ballroom of a respectable member of society. Lately the only balls he was invited to were those with risqué undertones, held by fringe members of society who looked to any title to bring their gathering cachet.

  But to court a society belle of Lady Rowena Revington’s standing, he needed to frequent those held by the cream of society. As his hired carriage approached and queued outside of the Parkinson London house, he remembered that brief moment nights before, the first time he saw Lady Rowena’s face gazing out of her carriage. He was not a complete idiot. He had wondered if it was just the affect of his drunkenness and misery that had made him vulnerable to her perfection. But seeing her again, her shy smile, her retiring manner, her gentle demeanor, he knew he was right. She was all a man could hope for and more in a future wife.

  He hadn’t cared for anything or anyone for so very long that he felt fragile, like glass under pressure, and yet he was going to put himself in the way of being shattered. Could she learn to care for him? Her manner toward him had been, in front of the shop earlier that day, as encouraging as a young lady’s could be. Could he coax that flicker of warmth into a flame?

  Urgency coursed through him, a dread fear that her heart was already claimed, or would be if he did not make an immediate impression. He could not believe his luck that she was not already betrothed. His coach pulled ahead and stopped at the foot of the steps up to the Parkinson residence. He descended from the carriage and gazed up at the house, the windows ablaze with light, a thousand candles glowing.

  “There is my future,” he said out loud, as his conveyance pulled away and another disgorged its passengers behind him.

  “Then go to it, man, and don’t just stand there.”

  “Bain!” Pierson cried as he turned.

  And indeed it was his friend accompanied by his sister, Lady Harriet.

  “And the lovely Lady Harriet,” he continued, bowing over her gloved hand. “My lady, you are sure to be the most enc
hanting of ladies at the ball tonight.”

  “Would that you were sincere, my lord,” the lady said archly, her cheeks glowing pink.

  They ascended the steps together, but Lady Harriet was claimed by friends immediately, so Bainbridge and Pierson strolled in, greeted the host—who looked askance at the viscount but nodded politely enough at his greeting—and entered the fray. They ambled around the perimeter of the rapidly filling ballroom, the chatter of a hundred voices at once making every conversation private.

  “It has been an age since I met with such polite society, and yet I see many of the same faces as I would at a ball of a lesser sort,” Pierson said, bemused. “There is Lady Merkley; I saw her at the Villeneuve fete just last week on the arm of that foreign prince, the notorious one who is reputed to have a legion of lovers.”

  “But tonight she is with her husband, the earl. That is their agreement, I have heard, that she be circumspect and parade with her lovers only at places like the Villeneuve affair, and he will do the same.”

  “How cynical is our world,” Pierson said, watching the lady, all that was demure and matronly on the arm of her husband, when at the fete she had disappeared with the foreign prince for hours. And her behavior even before that vanishing act had been lacking in discretion, to say the least, not to mention how scandalous her revealing gown had been. But this night, at the Parkinsons’ eminently proper ball, she was attired in a gloriously respectable gown. “And what frauds so many are, pretending to be chaste and decorous in public while consorting in private with the denizens of the most depraved entertainments.”

  Bainbridge shrugged. “And what is wrong with that? It is what will allow people to forget about your . . . ah, adventures, if you comport yourself with propriety from now on in public. You can disport in whatever manner you choose in private, just don’t ride your horse through any more Venetian breakfasts, or at least not those of the ton.”