Salt’s eyebrows drew sharply over the bridge his long thin nose, Jane’s compliment evoking an echo of her words that first night together as man and wife. Words he now realized he in his guilt had totally misconstrued. His face grew hot. “Ruined? Spoiled. Indulged. That’s what you mean,” he said gruffly, shame making him sound harsh.
“Yes. Yes, of course,” she replied with a start, wondering why he was suddenly ill at ease by her honest confession about his prowess as a lover. She impulsively kissed his cheek. “It was a compliment, silly. Now tell me about Caroline—”
“Jane, I—”
“—and her connection to the Allenbys.”
“No one sees what you see because it is too fantastical to be believed. The Allenbys and the Sinclairs have not spoken or socialized these past eighteen years, despite living on neighboring estates. Yet, Caro’s resemblance to the Allenbys is strong enough that Tony, who met your stepmother on only one occasion, asked me if he had met her before. Who could have foreseen at her birth that she would take after the Allenbys in form and the Sinclairs in coloring?”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“No. It doesn’t. Do you want to hazard a guess?”
Jane shook her mane of hair. “No, because the answer I give might be the right one and I don’t want it to be true. And because it is a sordid tale, and not one either family is proud to own, is it? Caroline’s true birth has been concealed to protect her, perhaps her parents, too, and thus she has been presented to the world as your sister.”
The Earl smiled crookedly and pulled a lock of his wife’s hair. “Not too wide of the mark, my clever girl.”
“Jacob Allenby had two female relatives,” she said, mind ticking over with possibilities and arithmetical equations. “There was Rachel, my stepmother, Jacob Allenby’s sister, but given Caroline is almost eighteen and eighteen years ago Rachel was already married to my father there would be no need for her to give up a child had she been unfaithful because she could have easily passed it off as belonging to her husband. And then there was Jacob Allenby’s only daughter Abby – Abigail – but she died of consumption when just fifteen years old…” Jane frowned and softly bit her lower lip in thought. “Unless your father was a complete reprobate, I cannot imagine he seduced Abigail…”
“My father was a proud, cold man but a reprobate he was not. He married late in life to a young wife, which was not exceptional amongst his peers, but he was devoted to my mother, which was unusual. Ah, here is your morning chocolate, my lady.”
Jane’s maid came through from the dressing room carrying a tray which had upon it a brandy for his lordship and a mug of hot chocolate and a couple of dry biscuits on a plate for her ladyship. She silently placed the tray on the table by the sofa, bobbed a curtsey, quickly scooped up the smashed pieces of tea dish and saucer and scurried away.
Salt gratefully savored his brandy, a questioning eyebrow lifted at Jane as she nibbled on a dry biscuit.
“If this is how you sustain yourself, you will fade away. If you’re hungry, what you need is a good wedge of venison pie or big bowl of pea soup. Not a few crumbs on a plate.”
“Oh, please, no! Just the thought of pea soup makes me green,” Jane pleaded. She warmed her hands about the mug of hot chocolate, unsure if the beverage would make her ill or not. She didn’t much feel like drinking milk. Another dish of black tea with a slice of lemon was what she craved. But the biscuits were welcome. Suddenly she was struck with the most awful thought. Looking at the Earl, she could barely speak. “Not-not Jacob Allenby and-and your mother…”
Again he laughed out loud. “You have the most refreshingly wicked thoughts, my darling!” He shook his head. “Most definitely not my mother.” He put aside the brandy, took the mug of chocolate from her hands and set it aside too then possessed himself of both her hands. His gaze never left her blue eyes.
“Abigail Allenby was Caro’s mother. Abby, St. John and I were all just fifteen when Caro was conceived. Just children ourselves… Before the rift, before Caro’s conception, when St. John and I came home from Eton for the holidays, we would roam the countryside: St. John and myself, Abby and a couple of the younger village girls and boys, much like Robin Hood’s merry band. Tony was too young and Diana too Lady High-and-Mighty, even at that young age, to lower herself to muck about in haylofts and up trees. She teased St. John and I mercilessly about our preference for the company of tenant farmers’ brats and children from the local village. She was forever finding excuses to rat on us to my father. The Sinclairs and the Allenbys would not have mixed in the same social circles in London or Bath, or Bristol for that matter, but in the country, as you know, it is quite usual for county families high and low to socialize at local events, the hunt, fairs and the like.”
“Is-is that where Caroline was conceived… in a hay loft?”
His smile was grim. “And here was I wondering how best to tell you! I guess that’s where it happened. I don’t rightly know. The last time St. John and I saw Abby was just before we returned to Eton at Michaelmas. She must have been at least three perhaps four months pregnant then, but she didn’t say a word to us. At Christmastime, Father came up to London without my mother with the startling news I had a baby sister. St. John and I didn’t think anything of it, boys don’t, but then… then my father thrashed me within an inch of my life for bringing the family name into disrepute. He never laid a hand on St. John. He never did.
“St. John was not the most robust of fellows. So I took the whipping for both of us. I didn’t mind. It was possibly worse for St. John because my father made him watch while I was flayed. I suppose Father expected a confession. Neither of us said a word because we didn’t know what we had done to enrage him. Well, I certainly had no idea then. Father left St. John to deal with my bruised and bloodied carcass and with the crude pronouncement that I could sow as many wild oats as I pleased with any whore that took my fancy, but be damned if he was going to shelter any more ill-begotten bastards.”
“And Abby? What of her? Did she die of consumption?”
Salt smiled crookedly and looked down at Jane’s soft hands in his.
“Abby turned to your stepmother, her aunt, for help when she realized she was pregnant. Jacob Allenby ordered Abby to say nothing about the child until a date had been set for the wedding.” Salt gave a huff of angry embarrassment. “Rachel and Jacob Allenby used Abby’s pregnancy and the threat of exposure to force my father to agree to a hasty marriage between us. They had no idea who they were dealing with. Father didn’t take kindly to threats. He threw Allenby out of his house and off his lands.”
“And Abby? What happened to Abby?”
“What do you think a toad like Jacob Allenby did with an unmarried daughter who was with child? Conscienceless prig disowned her! What use was she to him when the Earl of Salt Hendon refused to make an honorable woman of her by marrying her into his family? He cast her out of the family home to fend for herself. She, a gently bred young girl of fifteen with nowhere to turn! She went to her aunt, hoping she would take her in. Not your stepmother! Lady Despard also turned her back on the poor girl. Abby ended up on our doorstep. Against my father’s orders, my mother took her in and cared for her. Abby died three days after Caro’s birth. Needless to say it was my mother’s idea to make Caro my sister. I don’t know how she won over my father to her scheme, but she did.”
Jane dropped her gaze to their hands, to his long, tapered fingers with their perfectly manicured nails, and she knew she was crying. She could not stop. She was crying for Abby, and for Caroline because she had never known her real mother, and for herself, because she wished she had had someone as kind and as understanding as Salt’s mother to take her in and protect her and her unborn child when she had found herself pregnant four years ago. Never in her wildest imaginings did she think her father would have her unborn child destroyed.
Before she realized what was happening, she was in Salt’s arms and he was tenderly wiping
her face dry of tears with his white handkerchief. But she didn’t want him to hold her at that moment. She wasn’t sure how she felt about his affair with Abby Allenby and the part he had played in keeping from Caroline her true parentage. So she pulled out of his embrace and took the handkerchief to wipe her flushed face dry before staring at him resolutely.
“Did you never think that the child growing up as your sister might not be your sister at all? Didn’t you think to do the sums? Did you never wonder why Caroline had the coloring of a Sinclair but the looks of an Allenby?”
“No,” he answered simply. “Why would it occur to me?”
“I should hazard a guess that the possibility of impregnating your lovers has never occurred to you!”
“Jane, I do not understand why you are upsetting yourself over this. I grant the tale is a sordid one and Abby’s death a tragedy, but Caro has never suffered for being my sister, ever. My mother loved her as her own. I love her as any brother would love his sister. She wants for nothing. God, even Jacob Allenby showed he had a conscience in the end when he had the audacity to leave his only grandchild ten thousand pounds in his will; the dowry he had stripped from Abby when he disowned her.
“Believe me or not, but I was five and twenty before I figured out for myself that Caro was not my sister. I’d come down to Salt Hall for Caro’s ninth birthday. She was running up the drive to greet me, as she always did, with her arms outstretched playing at being a swallow or robin red breast or some such bird that had taken her fancy at the time. Her copper curls were bouncing about her thin shoulders and she was so happy to see me. And then it hit me, literally in the chest. The breath was knocked out of me. She was the image of Abigail Allenby. And then I knew: my parents were not Caroline’s parents. Abby was Caro’s mother.” He gently touched Jane’s hair. “I just want you to understand—”
She shifted out of his reach, along the chaise longue, not wanting the touch of him, white handkerchief twisted up in her hands. “What? That you learned your lesson with Abby Allenby’s ruin? That you took the advice your father beat into you and henceforth confined your whoring to women of your own class and paid courtesans who knew how to keep themselves from falling with your bastards?” She gave a little sob that broke in the middle. “How ironic that the one and only other time you allowed lust to rule good sense you again impregnated a gently bred girl from the counties! Though you quickly came to your noble senses. You weren’t fifteen anymore and you were the Earl, and once returned to London and your life here, Wiltshire could well have been the Americas for all you cared, so it would have been easy to forget me—”
He came to life at that. He had been staring hard at her, trying to make sense of her emotionally charged denunciation, knowing she was over reacting but not knowing why. She was so pale and shivered in the thin chemise and dressing gown that he wondered if she had caught a chill the night before from the breeze blowing off the icy waters of the Thames. He heard her accuse him of not only impregnating Abigail Allenby but also impregnating her, and it was such an astonishing accusation that he was incapable of absorbing it there and then. So he seized on the one fact he could deal with and his anger extinguished all thoughts and consideration for her welfare.
“For God’s sake, Jane!” he growled in frustration. “Abby wasn’t the Allenby I was rutting in that hayloft. It was your bloody stepmother Rachel!” He gave a huff of embarrassment as he took a turn about the room, stopped at the fireplace and set another log atop the burning embers for want of something to cover his mortification at blurting out such a confession. “Truth told, Abby wasn’t the only one to lose her innocence in that hayloft…”
There was a long awkward silence between them; the only sound, the crackling of the log as the fire leapt into new life. Jane stood beside him and lifted her palms to the radiant warmth. She stated what he had not.
“St. John is Caroline’s father.”
“Yes.” He looked down at her then. His smile was sad. “As a boy, St. John had a mop of red curls. Caroline has such a mop… and she has his eyes.”
“Did he know he had a daughter?”
“Like me, he figured it out for himself much later. We made a promise never to tell anyone, never to tell Caroline. Now I have told you.”
Jane nodded, as if it did not need to be said that she too would never divulge Caroline’s paternity.
“So my stepmother knew you were not Caroline’s father, and yet she colluded with Jacob Allenby to try and force your father to have you marry Abby?”
“Yes.”
“And when that scheme did not work out, she and Allenby disowned Abby?”
“Yes.”
“I do not wonder why you detest her. Poor Abby.”
She saw Salt give a start and turn his shoulder and realized they were not alone, that her maid stood in the doorway, eyes cast to the floorboards.
“What is it, Anne?”
“Lady Sedley’s carriage will be here on the hour, my lady.”
“Oh!” Jane turned to the Earl. “I must bathe and dress or I will be late for our excursion to the Strand. Lady Elisabeth is taking me to view the Society’s picture exhibition. She tells me I must see the Death of General Wolfe, a piece by a new painter George… George Rom-Romney, as she thinks him such a prodigiously fine master of the brush and that I should sit to him.” When her husband frowned she added with a frown of her own, “Surely you cannot object to your wife being seen in the company of a married daughter of your political rival? After all, wives and daughters are above petty politics, surely?”
Salt inclined his head. “As to that, my wife is certainly above anything petty.”
Jane blushed at the compliment, adding with a smile as she sat before her looking glass and began to brush her hair, “I am told in confidence that Lord Bute is tired unto death of the slights against him when all he wants is what is best for the King—”. She paused at Salt’s huff of disbelief “—and what is best for the country. Elisabeth believes it to be so and who am I to disabuse her? She is loyal to her father, which is as it should be. Caroline would defend you to her dying breath, would she not?”
“Just so, my lady.”
“Elisabeth also confided that her father is done with politics. Lord Bute means to resign all his commissions come April.”
Salt lifted his brows in surprise. “Is that so, my lady? Then you have managed to discover what I and others on both sides of the political fence have been trying to do for months.”
Jane stopped in mid-brush stroke and smiled sweetly at his reflection. “Perhaps his lordship should spend more time in the nursery.”
He pulled aside the weight of hair from her neck and stooped to kiss her nape, murmuring, “Believe me, Jane, I would like nothing better in this world than to spend my time with you in the nursery.”
Jane decided the moment had come to tell him about their baby and was about to do so when she caught sight of her maid’s reflection in the looking glass. Anne was still standing behind them, nervously wringing her hands and looking miserable. She was staring at the Earl and although her mouth was moving as if in speech, no words were audible. Jane realized she was rehearsing a monologue, so turned on her dressing stool, a warning glance up at her husband.
Salt beckoned the woman forward, wondering what his wife’s maid could possibly have to say to him that could not be discussed with his butler or his housekeeper, or with her mistress the Countess.
“My lord, I must speak with you,” Anne announced nervously and bobbed a curtsey before launching headlong into her speech for fear that if she drew breath or looked up into the Earl’s face again, she would lose her way and not be able to deliver her very important message. The fear that Lady St. John was, at any moment, on her way to Grosvenor Square to find out if she had carried out her orders made her resolute. She could not take another interrogation by that evil woman, and as she had not administered the contents of the small bottle to the Countess’s dish of tea as ordered, but given i
t unopened to Mr. Willis, Anne knew the time to act was now.
“My lord, Mr. Willis craved an audience with you today and was told by Mr. Ellis that there was no possibility of Mr. Willis being admitted to your lordship’s bookroom, because your lordship had a prior engagement with the Russian ambassador and then her ladyship’s brother, Mr. Allenby, is to come to play at tennis and to stay to dinner. And what with the Lady Caroline come to stay so unexpectedly and putting the servants in a minor commotion on account of finding places for the Wiltshire servants, Mr. Ellis advised Mr. Willis to take the matter to Mr. Jenkins, who as butler is the right and proper person to be admitted to your lordship’s bookroom to discuss servant matters. But as Mr. Willis explained to Mr. Ellis, the matter was not only urgent but was most certainly not for the ears of Mr. Jenkins or for that matter any servants’ ears, but only for your lordship’s ears.
“Whereupon Mr. Ellis ordered Mr. Willis to tell him his business. Mr. Willis resolutely refused to do such a thing because, with all due respect to Mr. Ellis’s position as your lordship’s secretary, to divulge the matter to Mr. Ellis or any other person save your lordship would not be right and proper on account of the matter being of such a particularly delicate nature. So you see, my lord, it is very, very important that Mr. Willis speaks with you today.”
Anne loudly drew breath and bobbed another curtsey and dared to bravely look up into the handsome impassive face above her before dropping her gaze again, wringing her hands and with her heart beating so hard against her ribs that the blood drummed in her ears. She wondered if it was a flicker of a smile the Earl displayed, or the beginnings of a frown; either way, she had managed to get his attention, which was all that mattered.
“Well—Anne,” Salt replied, a quick glance over at Jane to see if he had correctly remembered the woman’s name, “if Willis is of the opinion that the matter is of such a particularly delicate nature that it cannot be dealt with by Jenkins or Mr. Ellis but is for my ears only, and that the matter is of some urgency then see Willis I must. Be good enough to tell Willis to present himself at my bookroom at once, before the Russian Ambassador arrives, and he will find me alone and at leisure to speak with him.”
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