Marquesses at the Masquerade

by Emily Greenwood

  “Being useful is a worthy goal,” he said. “Compassion and service should figure prominently in any meaningful life, but what of joy? What of pleasure, dreams, hopes, and wishes? Children grow up, Miss Fletcher, and devoting yourself to their well-being while ignoring your own is a scheme that will leave you old and lonely. Fond memories are some compensation for decades of your life, but you deserve more than that.”

  Thor would have admonished her thus, and at that moment, Lord Tyne put Lucy in mind of her Norse god.

  “What were you about to say to me in the garden, my lord?”

  “In the—? Ah, that. I’m not sure those sentiments are relevant now. Perhaps after Captain Throckmorton has returned to the wonders of Portugal, I might recall what point I was trying to make.”

  I will kill Giles. “Whatever you have to say is of interest to me, sir. Your happiness matters to me too.”

  His brows rose. “A cheering revelation. I’ll see you at dinner, Miss Fletcher.”

  He leaned down to brush a kiss to her cheek and strode out, closing the door softly behind him.

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  Lucy heard not a word of Vicar’s sermon, so preoccupied was she trying to sort out emotions, options, and innuendos.

  Lord Tyne had kissed her cheek, which for him amounted to a bold declaration, but of what? Good wishes on a venture in Portugal? Support for Lucy’s ability to choose a course? His attachment to her as a member of the household?

  Something more?

  She should ask him, she meant to ask him, except that he’d again become the remote, reticent man whom she’d met when she’d first joined his household. The children must have sensed his mood, for they didn’t exchange a single whisper during the service.

  After church, his lordship took the children for Sunday dinner at Lady Eleanor’s house, leaving Lucy to begin and then tear up three different letters to her oldest brother’s wife. What was Giles about? What had shifted in his lordship’s regard for his children’s governess?

  And what was Lucy to do about Tuesday night’s assignation with Thor?

  About her Tuesday afternoon meeting with Giles?

  The life of an adventuress is complicated. Freya would have known that. Lucy was making a fourth attempt at correspondence when she heard the jingle and clatter of the coach in the mews. Curiosity had her setting aside her pen and capping the ink, because the children hadn’t been gone long enough to enjoy a Sunday meal with family.

  “Manda is sick,” Sylvie announced before Lucy had untied the child’s bonnet ribbons. “Papa said I might get sick too, but when I asked him if he could get sick, he didn’t answer me.” Sylvie gave her father a half-hopeful, half-peevish look.

  “Your father has a very strong constitution,” Lucy said. “Illness befalls us all, but his lordship appears to enjoy great good health. Amanda, what’s amiss?”

  “Her throat hurts,” his lordship replied. “She’s congested, she aches. Every symptom of the blasted flu, in other words.”

  Illness terrified this household, and for good reason. The marchioness had been well one day and at death’s door a fortnight later. The best physicians, the most fervent prayers, had been useless against the sickness that had befallen her.

  Lucy put her hand against Amanda’s forehead. “No sign of fever. Your eyes lack the characteristic shine of one battling influenza.” She aimed a glower at the marquess. “Amanda has very likely caught a spring cold or taken some blooming flower into dislike. Come upstairs, and we’ll cosset you with willow bark tea, lemon drops, and card games.”

  “I’ve sent for the physician,” the marquess said, joining Lucy and her charges on the stair.

  “I don’t want to see a doctor,” Amanda retorted. “I have a cold. You heard Miss Fletcher, Papa.”

  “A cold or a hay fever,” Lucy said. “Neither one should inconvenience you for more than a few days. Sylvie, you will write a story to amuse your sister during her convalescence. Your lordship will inform the physician that his services are not needed, and I will see the patient settled in her bed.”

  Lucy put an arm around Amanda’s shoulders—the girl was growing so tall—and spared his lordship a quelling glance.

  Steady on, sir. We’ve dealt with this before.

  Sylvie had come down with chicken pox a month after Lucy joined the household, and Amanda had had colds in both spring and fall. Illnesses happened, and with good care and luck, most children recovered. The blow to a parent’s confidence likely did permanent injury.

  Lord Tyne paused at the top of the steps. “I don’t see the harm in having Dr. Garner drop around—”

  “Today is the Sabbath,” Lucy said. “Leave the poor man one day of peace. Amanda has a sniffle, possibly a cold. She has no serious injury, no signs of infection, no fever. She will be well in no time.”

  Lucy continued with Amanda into the girl’s bedroom, leaving Tyne and Sylvie holding hands at the end of the corridor. The picture they made, father and daughter, equally worried, equally brave, made Lucy’s heart ache, but what they needed was her calm and good sense.

  So, calm and sensible she would be.

  “Are you truly ill, Amanda?” Lucy asked when the door was closed. The first time Amanda’s courses had befallen her, she’d been practicing duets at the home of a cousin. Because Lucy had instructed the girl regarding contingencies, Amanda had known to plead a megrim and always have cloths in her reticule. She’d been returned posthaste to Lucy’s care.

  Lord Tyne had paced outside his daughter’s bedroom for nearly an hour before Lucy had been able to explain the situation to him. His reaction had been relief rather than embarrassment. He’d observed that the late marchioness had been known to use the poppy on occasion to ease the same indisposition.

  That conversation had given Lucy the first hint that his lordship not only worried for his children, he also loved them—desperately.

  “I’m sick,” Amanda said. “A cold, as you say. My head aches, my throat itches, and I sneezed three times in a row.”

  “Is that what had your papa summoning the physician?”

  “Yes, but how can one not sneeze?”

  “Into bed with you. Prepare to be spoiled and pampered out of your sneezes. We’ll get you a pile of old handkerchiefs, because they are the softest, and some peppermint tea to help clear your head.”

  Amanda yawned. “Do I have to take the willow bark tea too?”

  “That will ease your headache and any soreness of your limbs,” Lucy said, starting on the hooks at the back of Amanda’s dress. “Change into your nightgown, and I’ll be back to redo your braids more loosely.”

  “Papa is worried.” Amanda sounded more forlorn than anxious. “Will you stay with me? He’ll fret, and then Sylvie will have nightmares, and it will all be my fault, because I sneezed.”

  Lucy hugged the girl. “Nobody can help sneezing, and of course I will stay with you.” She kept the embrace brief, because Amanda had also inherited a certain dignity from her father.

  Amanda hugged her back. “You won’t leave us, will you?”

  Oh, dear. Lucy stepped away. “I beg your pardon?”

  “That man who called on you yesterday, the friend from your girlhood. Mr. Drummond told Cook that your caller is a widower living in an exotic land, and he might be trying to entice you away from us. I shouldn’t like that, and Sylvie—”

  “Will have nightmares,” Lucy said. “All children have nightmares, Amanda, but nobody has offered me a post in a far-off land, so we needn’t discuss this.”

  “Good.”

  Lucy fetched the book of Norse fairy tales and read to Amanda until the child dozed off. The evening was spent in the same manner, with a break to marvel over Sylvie’s tale of Her Grace of Dumpwhistle’s public altercation with Mr. Hamchop-who-doesn’t-like-anybody. Several times, Lucy heard Amanda’s bedroom door opening and closing. She didn’t have to look up to know Lord Tyne was peeking in on his daughter—and fretting. />
  Lucy fell asleep in the chair beside Amanda’s bed, the book of fairy tales in her lap. When Monday morning came, Lucy was in her own bed, with only a vague notion of how she’d arrived there.

  She’d been carried in a pair of strong arms, laid gently on the mattress. Her slippers had been eased off, then she’d been covered with not one but two quilts. The fairy tales were on her bedside table, and her slippers were by the side of the bed.

  She recalled a soft kiss to her forehead, and she recalled—with embarrassing clarity—returning that kiss with a desperately heartfelt embrace that she’d never wanted to end.

  * * *

  “For God’s sake, are you a horse or an overexcited puppy?”

  Attila kicked out behind, hopped left, and propped on his back legs. Because Tyne had been up too late Sunday night worrying over Amanda, Attila hadn’t left his stall since Friday. By Tuesday morning, the gelding was an unruly ball of unspent energy.

  “Then let’s run,” Tyne said, aiming his horse at an empty stretch of bridle path. The park was more than three hundred acres all told, but none of the paths afforded the miles and miles of open country that Tyne and his mount needed to truly gallop off the fidgets.

  This was all Miss Fletcher’s fault. Tyne had thought to press a good-night kiss to her forehead, and mayhem had ensued. The happiest, most unexpected, inconvenient… She had lifted herself into his embrace and held him for a long, aching moment in the night shadows.

  And then, her kiss, ye gods her kiss. As if he’d been slumbering in some fairytale castle of old, her kiss had wakened desire and determination in equal measure. Freya’s parting gesture had been intriguing; Lucy Fletcher’s sleepy passion was riveting. She’d held nothing back, had clung to him as if her dearest secret longings could be fulfilled only by him. Tyne had hung over her recumbent form, returning her passion and longing to do more… Except that lady had clearly been exhausted, and very likely she’d been kissing a phantasm from a dream.

  I want to be the lover of her dreams and the man at her side when she wakens.

  The emotions that had coursed through him as he’d shared that fervent embrace with her had been wonderful—joy, hope, desire, affection—and terrible—uncertainty, loss, despair. And while Tyne abhorred drama, that embrace had answered one question for him: He was very much alive, very much still human, and that was a good, if painful, gift.

  In the morning, Miss Fletcher made no mention of what had passed between them the previous night. She hadn’t so much as hesitated at the door of the breakfast parlor.

  Perhaps she had no recollection of that heated embrace, but Tyne was haunted by it.

  “That will do for now,” he said, bringing Attila down to the walk. The horse’s sides were heaving, but one short burst of speed wouldn’t be enough for him, just as one heartfelt embrace wasn’t enough for Tyne.

  “But was she clinging to me, to some conjured shadow from her imagination, or to Throckmorton, may God rot him straight to the bottom of the river Douro?”

  Tyne’s mind was made up on one point: Two weeks ago, he’d kissed a stranger on a darkened front porch. The encounter had been sweet and unexpected. That passing delight could not in any way compare to the depth of his regard for Miss Fletcher. She had seen him and his children through many difficulties, from illness, to grief, to adolescent awkwardness.

  “She’s loyal, loving, resourceful, and she won’t let me slack as a papa. I suspect she wouldn’t let me slack as a husband either.” Or as a lover.

  Attila snorted.

  “You’re a gelding. Your opinion on the matter is uninformed.”

  Tyne set the horse to cantering back up the path and spent another half hour humoring his mount’s high spirits. By the time the horse was clip-clopping up the alley to the mews, the creature was sweaty and docile, not a buck or a hop left in him.

  “My attachment to Miss Fletcher is beyond doubt,” Tyne concluded as the stable came into view. “But have I engaged her affections?”

  Attila sighed, a big, horsey, side-heaving exhalation.

  “You are telling me I’m making this too complicated, and as usual, you are right, my friend. I must risk losing the woman my children adore—the woman I adore—and plainly state my intentions. She’ll either laugh and decamp to Portugal, or she’ll become my marchioness.”

  For there could be no un-saying a declaration of intentions, no battling those words back into a sealed box, never to be recalled. No un-leaping over the precipice once honest emotions had been disclosed.

  “Tomorrow,” Tyne said, patting Attila’s sweaty shoulder. “I’m expected at Eleanor’s for dinner this evening, and choosing the proper words requires some thought. Freya might wait for me briefly tonight, but I suspect she’s already come to her senses as well. A future isn’t built on a single kiss, no matter how lovely or adventurous that kiss might be.”

  Tyne’s logic was sound, his mind made up. Now all he needed were the right words and endless courage. He could forgive himself for forming an unreciprocated attachment, but his daughters would never pardon him for driving Miss Fletcher away to dratted Portugal.

  * * *

  Amanda’s cold had done as colds did and given her a passing inconvenience. By noon Tuesday, she was back to bickering with Sylvie, and Lucy was more than ready to pitch the pair of them into the garden fountain.

  “I am going out this afternoon,” she said, coming upon her charges by the garden fountain. “I suggest you ladies spend the hours between now and supper in neutral corners.”

  “What are neutered corners?” Sylvie asked.

  “Neutral,” Amanda said, punching the air. “Like when pugilists rest between rounds of a fight.”

  “What are pew… puganists?”

  “Pugilists,” Lucy said. “Combatants, bare-knuckle fighters. You and Amanda are cross with each other today, and I cannot bide here to referee your verbal sparring. I’ll be back well before supper.”

  “Where are you going?” Sylvie asked.

  “Don’t be rude, Syl.”

  “I’m not being rude. I’m being curious. Miss Fletcher says a curious mind is a gift from God.”

  Miss Fletcher is sometimes an idiot. “Sylvie, I have a few errands to see to, and that’s what half days are for. If you truly wanted to impress me, the two of you might consider working on your duet.”

  Older and younger sister wore identical expressions of distaste.

  “I’m off,” Lucy said. “Behave, please.”

  “Yes, Miss Fletcher.” They spoke in unison, and Lucy hurried through the garden gate. She turned to drape the latch string over the top and saw two girls, holding hands, regarding her departure with forlorn gazes.

  A movement in an upstairs window caught her eye. Lord Tyne had pulled back the curtains in his study and stood at the window watching the tableau in the garden. Lucy waved to him—he’d been excruciatingly proper since Sunday night—and he nodded in response.

  Lucy took that nod as acknowledgment that she and the marquess had unfinished business. He was having dinner with his sister’s family tonight—thank heavens—and Lucy had matters to tidy up with Giles and with a certain Norse god. Then, by heaven, she and Lord Tyne would finish the discussion they’d begun in the garden on Saturday.

  And—if she was brave and he was willing—they’d resume the kiss that had haunted her dreams since Monday morning.

  As she made her way to Berkeley Square, Lucy gave up wondering what his lordship had been about to say and embarked on the fraught exercise of determining what she wanted to say. Instead, a list grew of admissions she was reluctant to make:

  I have become that pathetic cliché, the governess in love with her employer.

  I am still young enough to give him sons, truly I am. I hope.

  One can be lonely in a house full of people.

  I desire Lord Tyne. I want a future as his wife and as step-mother to Sylvie and Amanda.

  All too soon, she was in front of Gunter’s
and approaching Giles, who lounged on a shaded bench across the street. He rose and tipped his hat as Lucy came up the walkway.

  “My dear, lovely to see you.”

  She was not his dear. “Good day, Giles. Shall we order our ices?”

  He offered his arm. “I suppose the proprieties require it.”

  Lucy’s predilection for barberry-flavored treats required it. “What is your favorite flavor?”

  “The offerings here are all so much cold sweetness,” Giles said, patting her fingers. “Gunter’s is an excuse to profit from a clientele that seeks to mingle with members of the opposite sex. Lemon will do for me.”

  Giles could be blunt. Lucy had forgotten that. He wasn’t entirely wrong, but neither was he correct. “I bring the children here often, and I dearly hope amatory matters have not yet caught their fancy.”

  “So you’re a nursemaid as well as a governess?”

  Good gracious, he’d left his manners in Portugal. “Lord Tyne accompanied us on our last outing. Is he also a nursemaid?”

  “He’s something of a bore, if you ask me. Does he interrogate every person who calls upon you?”

  “He did not interrogate you. Perhaps you’d best place our orders, Giles.”

  Except Giles hadn’t asked her what flavor she wanted. He came back from the counter with two lemon ices and carried both across the street, then settled himself beside Lucy on a bench.

  The moment put Lucy in mind of their youthful encounters. Giles had strutted about, making pronouncements that were supposed to paint him as a worldly, sophisticated man-about-town, while Lucy had wondered if her company meant anything to him. Then he’d turn up flirtatious just as she was about to leave him to his self-importance, and she’d—

  “I have missed you, Lucy Fletcher.” He drew his spoon from his mouth slowly, his lashes lowered.

  Lucy used her spoon to swirl the letter T into the top of her ice. “Thank you. I have also thought of you over the years. Is there something in particular you want to discuss with me, Giles?”

  A few people loitered around the square or strolled beneath the maples, but the conversation would not be overheard. Lucy wanted this appointment concluded, and she wanted her late-evening appointment with Thor over with as well…