The Carfax Intrigue

by Tracy Grant

  As he recalled the past, Julien moved among his guests. Stopping to accept the good wishes of friends of his father who had known him as a boy, to greet parliamentary colleagues Malcolm had introduced him to in recent weeks, to welcome the few personal friends among the throng. Not to mention smiling at a number of enemies. He could do it all with one eye peeled for George Dalton while his mind dwelled on the past of the family that had got him to this point. And then an unexpectedly apt comment cut through his recollections.

  "I've heard about you, Carfax. You're the abolitionist."

  Julien stared at the man before him. Lord Wharton. A Whig politician, according to Malcolm more known for the quality of the port in his cellar, funded by his wife's generous dowry, than for his political convictions. "Among other things," Julien said with an easy smile.

  Wharton sneezed and snapped his snuff box shut. "Not a good way to go on, speaking on abolition when the Whigs hadn't decided it was time to bring it up."

  "The Whigs didn't bring it up. I did. I don't go in for high-flown rhetoric, but I believe the party believes in individual conscience."

  "Ha. Never confuse rhetoric with the reality on the ground."

  "And I believe I've read certain words about being created equal and the dignity and freedom of the individual."

  "Is that what you were doing all these years you were gone? Becoming a Jacobin?"

  "I didn't need to leave Britain to know that the color of a person's skin shouldn't render him or her subservient to another. "

  Wharton frowned at Julien as though examining something under a microscope. "You're an intellectual."

  "Hardly. But I did read John Locke one summer when I was bored. Also Paine. Also Cugoano, who should certainly understand slavery, having been a slave."

  "We all—well, the Whigs and a lot of the Tories—agree slavery's a bad thing. It's the timing of getting rid of it."

  "It seemed timely to me. I'd just affirmed the freedom of the slaves on the Carfax estates in Barbados. Which was long overdue."

  "You mean you freed your slaves."

  "They were never legitimately enslaved. But yes, I made it clear their freedom was legally affirmed."

  "You'll never get an income from the estates now."

  "You'll have to ask the former slaves about that. I turned the estates over to them."

  Wharton spluttered champagne over his cravat. "You did what?"

  "If anyone knows how to manage the estates, they do. And it keeps the estates in the family. After all, a number of the former slaves are my cousins."

  "You're a fool, Carfax."

  Odd how the name still hit him like a blast of scalding water. "Quite possibly."

  "You'll lose your investment."

  "I already have. As I said, I signed it over to the people who had been working it. So it's not my concern anymore, strictly speaking. But for their sakes, I hope they can make a go of it."

  "They'll be run out of Barbados."

  "I don't think so. Not with the extra funding I've provided. One thing I've learned in my time in numerous parts of the globe is that money has a way of talking."

  "Is this how you're thinking of making a name for yourself?"

  "By helping former slaves achieve freedom? There are far worse things to be known for."

  "Abolition." Wharton drew out the word. "If you make it your topic when the party's not ready, you won't get far. Even Radicals need to learn to play the game. Look at Brougham."

  "Difficult not to look at him just now." Julien glanced across the ballroom at Henry Brougham, who was waltzing with Cordelia. "He has a way of putting himself center stage. We certainly agree on a number of a number of issues. Very much including abolition. And believe me, I know rather a bit about how to play any number of games."

  "Have you given thought to what you're unleashing? There's no denying slaves are capable of great violence. Even Wilberforce tempered his approach after Bussa's rebellion. Look at the number who died."

  Bussa's rebellion had come some twenty years after the Unicorn rebellion Julien had helped arm. The results had arguably been far more tragic. But then, the aim of the Unicorn rebels had been to escape Barbados, which they had managed to accomplish. Far easier, perhaps, than taking control of the whole island. "Surely that would only reinforce the idea that if they were free, they'd have no need to rebel to gain their freedom."

  "You're placing a lot of faith in reason. That sort isn't rational."

  "What sort would that be?" Julien inquired. "You must forgive me, I may not be rational enough to understand."

  "I had no wish to imply—of course, your own case is quite different."

  "I don't see how. Plenty of slaves have three-quarters or seven-eighths European blood. If my grandfather had made my grandmother his concubine and not freed her, my mother would have been born a slave, and if my father had gone to Barbados and made her his mistress, I'd be a slave myself."

  "But you're not—"

  "Violent? Many would disagree with you. Even now, I could be quite violent in pursuit of my freedom and the freedom of my family. Or are you saying the difference is that I'm educated? In which case, the solution would seem to be to send every slave to Harrow and Oxford. Not that I got to Oxford, I left the country first."

  "You're very amusing, Carfax."

  "Believe me," Julien said, for once with perfect truth, "I don't find it amusing at all."

  5

  Nan Lucan sank down on a settee in a columned embrasure, gripping her champagne glass as though it held a precious elixir. "Didn't show too much ankle, did I?" she asked, smoothing her blue sarcenet skirt. "Funny to worry about showing too much ankle. In the old days in St. Giles we could buy our supper by showing as much as we could."

  "Don't worry." Bet Simcox sat beside her sister. "A lot of the ladies here have made flashing a bit of ankle into an art. Why else do you think they embroider such pretty clocks on silk stockings?"

  Nan choked on her champagne. "I don't know how you do it, Betty."

  Bet twisted her fan on its silk string round her wrist and let her shawl slither about her. "I don't that much, not really. I mean, I'm not invited a lot of places Sandy is." She cast a glance round the ballroom. It had grown more crowded just in the short time it had taken her and Nan to make a half circuit round the edge. "His parents are supposed to be here tonight. I don't want them to cut me in front of him and embarrass him."

  Nan frowned. She had always had dramatic brows, and she'd plucked them with extra care for tonight, into an arch many of the great ladies present would envy. "You're a proper lady now."

  "Not really." Bet smoothed a fold of her lace overdress. Mélanie Rannoch had taken her to order the gown, ivory lace over blush-colored satin, from her modiste, Marthe. "I've just learned to talk differently. It doesn't change who I am on the inside."

  "Oh, well." Nan took a drink of champagne. "Nothing does that. Not even for people like Mr. St. Juste. He's still the same even though he's Lord Carfax."

  "Funny. I hadn't thought of it that way." Mostly what she'd thought was how happy Kitty and Julien were and what marriage obviously meant to them both, though they wouldn't admit it. "But I think it has been difficult for them. I don't know that they'd have chosen this life. Still, they were born to it, so that makes a difference. No one questions that they belong."

  "I'm not so sure about that. She's Spanish. Sam would tell you people don't forget that, fine lady or no. And his mother wasn't one of them either." Nan looked at the crowd swirling before them in a blur of airy skirts, glossy ringlets, flashing jewels, sweeping coattails, and gleaming cravats. "Seems like there are a lot of outsiders here, one way and another."

  "Yes, that's true. Perhaps it's what makes Mr. St. Ju—Lord Carf—Julien sympathetic to us." Bet frowned, because it was odd to think of Julien's being unsure about anything. And certainly, circling the room now, he seemed supremely confident, as Kitty had when she'd greeted them at the head of the stairs. Yet she'd seen
them enough to recognize their acting skills. "I do hope tonight goes well."

  Nan cast a sidelong glance at her. "You're worried about Sam and me causing trouble."

  "No!" Bet gripped her sister's hand, tightly because she couldn't bear to say that Nan's words were closer to the mark than she'd admit. "I'm glad you're here. Truly. I just don't like to make things awkward for Sandy. It's an odd world."

  "You're more comfortable in that world than you realize, Bet."

  Bet pulled her shawl about her shoulders. It was a pink-flowered silk Sandy had given her shortly after she moved into his rooms. From Italy. Funny, the beau monde prized things from faraway places, but they tended to look askance at people who hadn't come from within their midst for generations. Whether that meant being born in Spain, or Barbados, or St. Giles. Which probably seemed even further away than the first two to most of those present tonight. She didn't feel comfortable in this world. Sandy's world. And yet—she no longer wondered which fork or knife to use with which course. She understood the order of introductions, when to take off her bonnet and gloves. She could receive callers and pour tea. She knew the steps of fashionable dances and not to dance more than twice with the same gentleman. She'd learned a smattering of French and a bit of Italian. When she was included in invitations, she knew how to respond to them, and how to pen a thank-you note. Sometimes she was so focused on all the ways she didn't belong that she lost sight of how much had changed.

  "I'll always be an outsider. As long as—" As long as her relationship with Sandy lasted. She had been living in Sandy's flat for a year and a half and she still couldn't answer how long the arrangement would last. It wasn't unusual for a young man in Sandy's situation to keep a mistress. It was unusual for them to share the same lodgings. She had moved in with Sandy because she'd been in danger and Sandy had insisted on protecting her. She had stayed because his brother had been sent off in disgrace and Sandy had needed her. Almost eighteen months later she was still there. But somehow, at some point, something was going to change.

  Nan sent her a shrewd look. "He loves you, Betty. And it's not just calf love."

  Bet clasped her hands together, gripping the opal ring Sandy had given her beneath her glove. "You know it's not about love, Nan."

  "Well, not just about love, maybe. But that's part of it. How often did I swear I'd never get married?"

  "That's different. You and Sam are the same."

  "Ha. We're like oil and water sometimes."

  "You're the same in the ways that matter."

  "What are the ways that matter?"

  Bet pleated a fold of her skirt between her fingers. The lace felt rough through her gloves. "The people who love you aren't trying to pull you apart."

  "I don't think the people who really love you and Sandy would do that either."

  "His parents love him. I've never properly met them, but I've heard enough to know that."

  "The regent—the king—married a princess. Can't get much more suitable than that, and look how it turned out. Seems like trying to push them to make a proper marriage had all sorts of bad effects."

  "Lord Carfax." Sylvie St. Ives's voice stopped Julien as he crossed the ballroom. There was only one reason Sylvie would have been found unengaged in a ballroom since she'd turned sixteen. Because she wanted private conversation. And not just to catch up with an old friend. Assuming the term even applied to them. Of all the people in the ballroom who might want the papers Uncle Hubert was buying from George Dalton, Sylvie was certainly high on the list.

  "Lady St. Ives," Julien said. "Thank you for coming."

  Sylvie opened her eyes very wide. They were the same clear, deep blue they had been when Julien first met her in childhood. That blue gaze had been every bit as deceptive then as now. "You can't have thought I'd miss it. I suppose I should thank you for inviting me. But then, I expect you wanted to see how I would behave."

  "Yes," Julien said. "I did."

  Sylvie tilted her head to one side. "I never thought I'd see you come to this. Even when you were lolling on a picnic blanket with the children and looking at Kitty Ashford with a sickeningly sweet expression."

  "I'm glad I can still surprise you."

  She smoothed her fan as though it were a knife. The sticks were polished steel. Knowing Sylvie, he wouldn't be surprised if one was a stiletto. He'd once had a similar fan he'd used when masquerading as a woman. "I should have known you'd want it back," she said. "Difficult to give up power. And difficult to escape Carfax's control."

  "Aren't those two in contradiction?"

  Sylvie unfurled the fan. "Tell me you aren't doing precisely what Carfax wants right now."

  It was, Julien had to admit, a fair point. One that occasionally troubled him. "Let's say our interests have aligned in some things. For the moment."

  "Fascinating how he always manages to win."

  Beneath her light, brittle voice was the bitterness of the teenager who had been Hubert Mallinson's creature. In part because she'd helped Julien. "Sylvie—" A debt he'd never be able to repay, no matter what he thought of Sylvie now, hung between them. "I haven't come close to forgiving him."

  "But you've made peace with him."

  "Let's say we've reached a truce. For now."

  "You're fond of him."

  The moment he and Uncle Hubert had agreed to Julien's taking over the title flashed into Julien's mind. "My feelings for Uncle Hubert have always been—complicated."

  Sylvie wielded her fan, gesturing about the ballroom where his friends and enemies swirled on the dance floor and sipped champagne. Somehow the languid motion was as if she'd held a dagger point to his throat. "Do you think this will make you happy?"

  "What? Being Carfax? Living here? Hosting a ball? Being married to Kitty and a father? Yes to the last. For the others—I think I can be happy with them, which is a bit different."

  She shook her head. "You never used to even talk about happiness."

  He dug his shoulder into the cold marble of a column. "I know."

  She snapped the fan closed. "I told you it would bore you, with time. I still think it will."

  "I don't think so. But we won't know until time passes."

  Sylvie's gaze locked on his own, less antagonist now than friend trying to get a point across. "It's not that one falls out of love. It's that love isn't enough."

  "For whom? The lover or the beloved?"

  "Both."

  "I can't answer for Kitty. I wouldn't burden her with expecting her to find me enough to build her life on. And I don't expect to build my life round her. That would be a burden as well. The jury's still out on what sort of husband I'll make, but I'd have made a damnable one until lately, when I learned to live with myself. But I also know I don't want to live without her. And I flatter myself she doesn't want to live without me."

  Sylvie regarded him for a moment, head tilted to the side, the blonde ringlets he'd often threaded through his fingers falling against her cheek. "Even knowing you as well as I do, I can't decide."

  "What?"

  "If you really are besotted or if this is an elaborate pose. I can read the way you look at her. I've never seen you look at a woman that way before. But you're good enough to be able to counterfeit that for the right reason."

  "What would that be?" Julien inquired.

  "I don't know. To make us all complacent, perhaps." She watched him for a moment, like a commander scouting familiar terrain where the enemy may be lying concealed. "You're a creature of the jungle, Julien. As I am. Even more than your marriage, what I can't make out is what you were doing with your speech in Parliament."

  "Really? I thought it was fairly coherent."

  "Oh, it was, on the surface. But I haven't the least idea what you were trying to accomplish."

  "I'll admit emancipation still seems in the future, but you know I relish a challenge."

  "Julien, for heaven's sake, the one thing you were always free of was sentimentality. It's not as though you helped th
e Unicorn rebels to strike a blow for freedom."

  Julien's actions in the Unicorn rebellion had sent him into exile for a quarter century. "Didn't I?"

  Sylvie regarded him over the edge of her fan as though he'd suddenly transformed into a satyr. "Next you'll be joining the Sons of Africa."

  "It's not a bad idea. If they'd have me."

  She lifted her brows. "You've hardly been fighting for freedom for anyone all these years. And now you want to expend all your energy on black slaves?"

  "We pick our fights. This one strikes me as rather important."

  Her gaze shot over his face. "It mattered to you, didn't it? All those years ago. I thought you were just striking a blow at your father. But you thought you were striking one for freedom too."

  He felt the bones of his shoulder boring into the Carrara marble of the column. "Is that so surprising?"

  "It is of the man I thought you were."

  He smiled and felt the tang of regret as much as the sting of bitterness. "It would hardly be the first time either of us was mistaken in the other."

  "Carfax speaks well." The Hon. William Barrington, Whig MP, took a drink of port. "The new Carfax, that is. More of a flair for it than his uncle."

  "Yes, he has a way with words," Malcolm agreed.

  "So he does. Also quite a style of delivery." Barrington regarded Malcolm. "Thought I detected something of your tone in his abolition speech."

  "I may have reviewed a draft. So may Mélanie. But the crafting of the speech was his."