Anne followed her betrothed to the servant door. “You mean to give it to his lordship?”
“Yes, my dear. Have no fear, when the time is right, his lordship will be provided with all the evidence required to know his cousin is an extremely wicked and treacherous woman.” He lightly kissed Anne’s reddened cheek. “Be brave, dearest Anne. The Countess needs our support now more than ever.”
Anne smiled shyly but said fearfully, “Be careful, Rufus. Lady St. John is capable of hurting whoever stands in her way; she is so blinded with love for his lordship.”
“Yes,” Willis agreed. “But Lady St. John is not in love with his lordship, my dear. She is obsessed with him. That makes the situation far more perilous for those he cares about, and even more dangerous for Lady Salt now she is with child.”
Jane would have been greatly surprised but oddly comforted to know Willis’s opinion of the Lady St. John because it so matched her own feelings of apprehension, for herself, her husband and most importantly for the new life she was now carrying. She dared not confide to a soul that she was with child. Not until she had told the Earl. She was so happy to think they were to have a child, but the fear of losing this baby as she had the first, and of her husband’s incredulous reaction to the news, made her wary and hesitant. First she had to break him of the stubborn belief that he was infertile.
She had considered confiding in Sir Antony to whom she had become close since he had been appointed to watch over her. She had teased him several times about his new role and he had insisted that he much preferred to be in her company than return to Paris. If the truth be told, shopping in Oxford Street and attending readings of Hilary Wraxton’s absurdly odd poetry while the poet sported an iron wig were vastly more entertaining than listening to the monologues of the parsimonious Duke of Bedford. Besides, the longer he remained in London the more likely the chance he would be invited to Salt Hall for the Easter break, and there see the Lady Caroline Sinclair. Of course, this hope he kept secret until he found himself confiding his muddled feelings for Salt’s sister to Jane.
“Salt doesn’t want Caroline to have her come out until next Season,” explained Sir Antony, stretched out on the chaise longue in Jane’s pretty sitting room. He was watching her seated in the window seat, head bent over her needlepoint. “That’s understandable given she don’t turn eighteen until the summer. He thinks her too young.”
“What do you think?”
Sir Antony gave an involuntary laugh. He still found Jane’s blunt questions disconcerting, though refreshing. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”
Jane glanced up at that, needle and thread suspended. “But if you love Lady Caroline it matters a great deal, doesn’t it?”
“It’s not that simple, my dear,” said Sir Antony and sat up, dropping his stockinged legs to the floor and disrupting Viscount Fourpaws in the process, who had been curled up asleep on a cushion at his feet. When Jane smiled he confessed hesitantly, “I am in love with Caroline. But I don’t know if she is in love with me. She thinks she is but she is young and lived a sheltered life at Salt Hall. I cannot be certain that her feelings are fixed. Salt’s very protective; treats her like a daughter. Well, that’s to be expected given old Salt up and died when Caroline was still in swaddling. She was barely six years old when her mother passed away. So Salt’s the only parent she’s ever had.” Sir Antony was suddenly bashful and scooped up Viscount Fourpaws, who had been brushing up against his stockinged leg, to absently scratch his ears. “Salt’s in the right, regardless of Caroline’s protests to the contrary. She should have her Season in London, go out in Society, meet gentlemen, dance at assemblies and balls and have young bucks falling at her feet. She needs to discover where her true heart lies.”
“And while she is having her Season, you will wait in the wings hoping she will grow up a little and, in the end, choose you?”
“Yes. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? I think I will go away. Take a posting to the Hague or St. Petersburg.”
“Will I like Caroline?”
Sir Antony smiled. “I hope so. In many ways she’s much like her peers. Loves a party, adores clothes, knows how to use her feminine charm to wrap a gentleman round her little finger; Salt in particular. But in other respects she different from other females, but that may be a consequence of her sheltered upbringing. She loves nothing better than to have her dogs to heel and go mucking about on the estate or galloping off around the countryside with her brother. Between you and me, I believe Salt encourages her boyish pursuits. Wants to keep her reined in for as long as possible before he unleashes her on the unsuspecting male populace.” He smiled at a memory and added, “No two siblings could be so different and yet have greater affection for each other. Whereas Salt is serious and hard working, one would think on first meeting Caroline that she is feather-headed and indolent. But they do share a quick brain and she’s just as conscientious as Salt about the tenants’ welfare and those who rely on the Sinclair largesse. And they both have kind hearts.”
He put Viscount Fourpaws back on the chaise longue and leaned forward, still rapt in his topic.
“She informed me only last summer that she wants to travel and that my chosen career as a diplomat will suit us both perfectly; the managing baggage!” he added lovingly and sat back with a huff of laughter. “Hasn’t stepped outside Wiltshire but already has our passage booked for the Bosphorus! Have you ever heard the like?”
Jane had not and if Sir Antony’s extolling of the Lady Caroline’s virtues were to the life then Jane couldn’t wait to meet this fascinating girl. She finished a stitch and wove her needle lightly into the fabric to hold it in place for another day. “So Salt is prepared to allow Caroline to choose her husband?” she asked with practiced indifference. “I thought, perhaps, she being a great heiress, he might consider an arranged marriage. One of those political matches between two wealthy noble houses.”
“Ha! Now that’s the sort of cold-blooded union Diana encourages Salt to make for his sister. But not Salt. Deep beneath our Earl’s wide noble chest beats the heart of a hopeless romantic. Not that he lets on. Besides,” added Sir Antony, oblivious to the ready blush to Jane’s cheeks, “Caroline wouldn’t be party to such a union, even if Salt threatened to beat her into submission. Not that he ever would; but you get my meaning.”
“Does…does Salt know about Caroline’s plans to marry her diplomat?”
“Know? He has a fair notion of my feelings,” Sir Antony confessed. “But as to knowing Caroline’s wishes… I dread Caroline falling in love with someone else, but in many respects I dread the day I ask Salt for Caroline’s hand in marriage. He and Caroline are as close as father and daughter, and like the stern, protective father, he’ll be reluctant to give her hand to me, despite me being one of his closest friends.”
“Every father is apprehensive about giving his daughter into the care of another man. That’s to be expected. But he’ll recover.”
“I’m eight years her senior, my dear.”
Jane laid aside her needlepoint. “Twelve years separate Salt and I, and never once did I contemplate age as a barrier to falling in love with him. Neither should it bother you, if you truly love Caroline, and she you.”
Sir Antony threw up a lace-ruffled wrist with a huff of disbelief. “That’s all very easy for you to say, but I vividly recall Salt citing the age difference between the two of you, and the fact you lived a sheltered existence at Despard Park and never had a London Season, as prime examples of why you baulked at marrying him all those years ago, and why he is determined Caroline must have a London Season. He will not permit her to marry until she is one and twenty, and thus is old enough to know her mind well and truly. I’m prepared to wait out those three years, if it means she has well and truly settled her affections on me.”
“For a gentleman who professes to being a diplomat, you are woefully tactless. By the by, even at eighteen years of age I well and truly knew Salt was the only man for me. So the argument
about age does not wash.”
Sir Antony’s jaw swung wide and in two strides he was beside Jane on the window seat and holding her hands.
“God, I’m an unthinking ass. Forgive me. I should be stripped of my sinecures and made to walk the diplomatic plank for—”
“—speaking candidly? Not by me. But I suppose frank speech is not seen as part of the diplomatic armory, is it?”
“No, for upsetting you, my dear. The last thing I wish to do on this earth is distress you.” He kissed her hands and pressed them gently and would not let them go. “I should not have been so flippant with your feelings. We have been enough in each other’s company now that I feel we have become good friends.” He smiled into her blue eyes. “And I know that you truly do love my cousin. I see that love reflected in your face every time he walks into a room. If one day I receive but a thimbleful of such emotion from my wife I will be a contented man. No. Don’t hang your head. I want to offer you my help. Perhaps if you would allow me to understand what went wrong between you and Salt all those years ago we could put our heads together and clear the mire…”
Jane took a few moments to find her composure, Sir Antony’s kind words drying her throat, but she wasn’t given the opportunity to respond because the sitting room door opened and in walked her husband dressed magnificently in a dark blue velvet frockcoat with silver lacings. His hair was powdered and tied with a black ribbon and across his chest was the blue riband of the Most Noble Order of the Garter; a number of lesser orders and decorations pinned to the breast of his silver embroidered waistcoat. He looked up from the flat rectangular box in his hand and frowned as Sir Antony and Jane sprang apart and were uncomfortable; Sir Antony on his feet and Jane to pick up her discarded needlepoint.
“You’re not wearing powder,” he stated, an eye on his wife’s simply dressed hair, swept up off her lovely neck and affixed with many pins and a couple of strategically placed diamond encrusted clasps, a weight of dark curls falling about her shoulders.
“No, it does not agree with me or my complexion,” she replied simply. She poked her small, silk clad foot out from under yards of soft blue watered silk. “But I am wearing shoes with a two inch heel so I can at least stand beside you and look the part. Although, I doubt I shall be noticed beside such a wall of decoration.”
“Blinding, ain’t they?” commented Sir Antony with seeming irreverence for his best friend’s noble orders. He brushed down the sleeves of his frockcoat and stretched his white stockinged legs. He too was dressed in his best silks and wore hair powder to attend the Richmond ball, the quantity of lace at his wrists and throat compensation for his lack of noble orders. “Poor Andrews must’ve bloodied his thumbs pinning all that lot on. Or does he wear gloves to catch the drips before they splatter the noble chest?”
“That Florentine green frockcoat becomes you better than you know, Tony,” Salt said with a crooked smile and handed Jane the velvet-covered box. “Those petticoats are very fetching,” he commented, an understatement given Jane could only be described as breathtakingly beautiful in a low, square cut bodice with tight sleeves and matching silk petticoats that accentuated her slim arms and back. He smiled down at her; a smile Sir Antony had come to notice the Earl kept exclusively for his wife. “Your choice will compliment the locket very well.”
“Locket?” Jane heard herself say, heart thudding against her chest as she stared at the flat box now in her hand. “What locket is that, my lord?”
“The Sinclair locket.”
Returning this family heirloom surely signified he had traveled a long way down the path to putting their past behind them, and was now prepared to go forward with her into the future. It brought tears of happiness and memories of the last time he had given it to her, in the summerhouse, when he had proposed to her.
“Where… Where did it come from?” she asked, slightly dazed, and hesitated to prize open the lid.
“From the family vault. Where else?”
“No. Before it was put back in the vault. After—”
“Sir Felix returned it,” he interrupted quietly.
Jane was nonplussed. “My father? I do not understand.”
“Sir Felix returned it at my request.”
“At your request? You requested it be returned? Why?”
The Earl was uncomfortable. He glanced fleetingly at Sir Antony, who was pretending an inordinate interest in the manicured nails of his right hand, before meeting Jane’s open look. “I thought it right and proper after I received word from Jacob Allenby that you had ended our engagement and were living under his protection.”
Jane’s gaze never wavered from his handsome face. “I did not end our engagement, my lord, nor could Mr. Allenby tell you any such thing.”
Salt put up his brows, half incredulous. “Why do you say so, my lady?”
“Because I told no one we were engaged. You asked that I keep our engagement to myself until your return. And so I told no one.”
“Then I wonder how Mr. Allenby came by such vital news?”
“I wonder at that too, my lord. He wrote to you?”
“No.”
“Then may I know by what method he communicated my supposed wishes?”
He inclined his powdered head, unperturbed by her bluntness. “Through a family intermediary.”
Jane swallowed. “Family intermediary?” she repeated softly, up on her heels, a shaking hand to her bare throat. But she knew whose name he would utter even before she asked. “May I know the name of this family intermediary?”
“Diana received the locket from your father—What is it? Are you unwell?” Salt asked, taking a step forward.
Jane blinked up at him, the enormity of what he had just told her making her skin crawl cold and hot at one and the same time. She glanced over at Sir Antony and saw that he was staring fixedly at her; her husband was doing likewise. What could she say? How was she to be believed over Diana St. John who was Sir Antony’s sister and who had known Salt all her life? Still, she could not let the matter rest when she knew the truth of the lie.
“My father knew nothing about the locket. He was kept in ignorance of our engagement. I-I waited as long as I could and then when you did not return I sent the locket with a note as you had instructed me to do as soon as I realized I was… When I knew about the… When I—” She faltered, too overcome to continue, and pushed the box back at Salt and scurried into her dressing room with a shaking hand covering her mouth to stop a sob.
Anne dropped the pile of linen she had scooped up into her arms and quickly helped Jane to her dressing stool. Without a word, she poured her out a glass of lemon water and held it to her mouth because the Countess’s hands were shaking. After a few sips and a couple of deep breaths Jane was more herself. Holding her hands tightly in her lap and with her back straight, she tried to compose herself and collect her thoughts.
She now knew Salt had not received the locket, sent to him when she was two months with child. She reasoned that Diana St. John must have taken delivery of the locket upon its arrival at the Arlington Street townhouse. And she was certain that Diana St. John would have known about the secret compartment just as she had made it her business to know everything there was to know about the Earl of Salt Hendon.
And the more she thought on it, the more convinced she was that it was Diana St. John who, knowing about the secret compartment, had read her note, and conveyed its message, not to its rightful recipient but to Sir Felix. She had always wondered how her father had discovered her pregnancy, now she was almost certain who had told him. How Lady St. John had managed to convey the news without divulging that Salt was the father of her child was something Jane was sure took all the woman’s cunning, for had Sir Felix ever suspected it was the Earl of Salt Hendon who had seduced and impregnated her he would have gone hot foot to London and demanded the nobleman marry her.
It was years later, when she was living under the protection of Jacob Allenby and her father was dying, that Sir Fe
lix learned the appalling nature of what he had done. In what Jane thought was a most cruel act, Jacob Allenby told her father: that the unborn child he had ordered destroyed was not of indeterminate lineage but in fact belonged to Lord Salt. He had murdered the Earl of Salt Hendon’s heir, and Jacob Allenby hoped Sir Felix burned in hell for his crime.
Jane did not doubt that Diana St. John would have removed and destroyed the little scrap of paper informing Salt of her pregnancy before returning the locket to its rightful owner. The evidence she needed to convince her husband he was capable of fathering a child, that she had been pregnant before, was lost forever.
“Jane? Jane, are you perfectly well?” the Earl asked, coming through to the dressing room. He saw the maid hovering over his wife and laid the box aside on the cluttered dressing table. “If I’d known the family bauble would affect you so, I’d not have brought it out.” He took hold of her hand and found it cold, yet when he gently touched her forehead she was burning up, despite her face being deathly pale. He went down on his haunches before her. “Perhaps it would be for the best if you stayed home, what with the unseasonably cold weather—”
“No! I want to accompany you to the ball,” she answered and took a deep breath. She forced herself to look at him with a bright smile. “I’ll be fine. Truly. I’ll wear that lovely fur cloak you gave me just last week. That should keep me warm. It’s just…” She couldn’t finish the sentence and was glad when her maid jumped in with an excuse, which instantly alerted Jane that Anne knew about her pregnancy.
“Her corset, my lord!” Anne blurted out in explanation as she dropped into a curtsey and kept her eyes to the floorboards. “I’ve been lacing her ladyship’s corsets too tightly of late. That would account for her dizzy spells and-and paleness. It will only take a moment to set it to rights.”
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