Wifely duty in the bedchamber was what he was thinking. Up until last night as he lay beside her in that ridiculous nightshirt, he had had every intention of bedding and then banishing Jane to Salt Hall as soon as he could make arrangements to have her and her new wardrobe packed up and bundled into his traveling coach. Then they had made love, and now he didn’t know what he wanted to do with her, apart from get her into his bed again at the earliest opportunity.
“Do you think her capable of carry it off, being Countess of Salt Hendon, playing hostess at your dinners, accompanying you to balls and routs and the like?” Sir Antony asked, peering intently at the Earl, who was sipping from his glass and seemingly miles away with his thoughts. “From what I gleaned from her brother, your wife hasn’t stepped outside the confines of her little garden in Wiltshire in nigh on four years.” He coughed into his hand, embarrassed. “Jacob Allenby was very possessive. Kept her locked up. Feared attracting stray dogs. Not an unreasonable assumption. You must admit, she does have an unworldly quality about her, and that coupled with her undeniable beauty and gentleness, well that’s—”
“—an irresistible combination for stray dogs! I appreciate the warning.”
“Listen, Salt. I didn’t mean anything by it. To tell you a truth, I find her and her brother delightfully frank and unpretentious, which is a refreshing change when you and I breathe air thick with cynicism and flattery. Just think you should keep a wary eye on her, that’s all. Though how you are to do so when you have all those Parliamentary obligations…”
“Or appoint a guard dog to do it for me. Perhaps I’ll appoint you. In fact, consider it done.”
“Salt, be reasonable! You can’t make me.”
“Yes, I can. As you say, I have far too much to do, and you’ve nothing better to do while you’re in London. Bedford won’t send for you until I say so.” He put a hand on Sir Antony’s shoulder. “Besides, you’re the only man I can entrust to help Jane through the emotional wasteland that is Polite Society. Ah! Here’s Willis now. Have you seen Lady Salt? Lady St. John mentioned that my wife had wandered in here some time ago?”
“Lady Salt was here, my lord,” the under-butler said truthfully. “And it was some time ago…”
“And Master Ron and Miss Magna? Have you seen them?”
Merry’s burst of the giggles and Ron’s furious whispered hush saved the under-butler from any further distress. Salt dismissed him with a jerk of his head and turned to Sir Antony with a finger to his lips before saying casually,
“Not only has Lady Salt vanished, but so too have those wretched brats, Ron and Merry. I ask you, Tony, were there two more annoying children in all of London?”
“Oh, surely not only London?” suggested Sir Antony, playing right along and nodding when the Earl signaled at the table. “I’d go so far as to say that they would put the French to shame. I’ve seen French children. Mere harmless gnats by comparison to our Ron and Merry.”
There was another stifled giggle and another hush and scrape of a chair as Merry pushed her brother sideways for pulling a face at her. Jane tried to calm them both and they settled again. But Salt had heard them and seen the chair move near where Jane sat hunched, so thought he knew the children’s exact location.
“Gnats, you say, Tony?” Salt answered, shifting to the left and ready to pounce. “If French children are gnats,” he announced loudly as he ducked, lowered a shoulder and thrust a hand under the table and made a grab for a child, “then Ron and Merry St. John must be rats for taking up residence under my table. And lousy rats at that for being so easily caught! Come on out and receive justifiable punishment, rats!”
This pronouncement was accompanied by loud squeals of delight and much thrashing about and movement of furniture. Ron and Merry watched with delight as Jane was caught about the ankle. They were well out of Salt’s reach, but still they scampered away to the other side of the table with shouts that no rats by the names of Merry and Ron were to be had in this particular dining room.
Sir Antony joined in the fray, running around to the other side of the table to head off an escape, much to the fascination of the liveried servants and those curious guests who had spilled in from the Yellow Saloon at the sounds of chairs being knocked over, and much squealing and shouting.
“Two rats here, my lord!” Sir Antony shouted out, thrusting aside two chairs and going down on his haunches to peer under the table. “Egad! Two very big rats in residence indeed, and only a cat the size of a Tower Zoo lion would be able to catch ’em. Come out, rats! Come out before the lion of Grosvenor Square makes a meal of you both!”
There were more squeals of delight when Sir Antony made a lunge for Merry, who shrieked so loud Ron clapped his hands over his ears. Shielding his ears made him slow to escape and he managed to get himself caught by his Uncle Tony, who grabbed him by the sleeve of his velvet frock coat, only to have Merry pulling Ron by his right upturned cuff to try and break their uncle’s grip. But Sir Antony tugged harder and suddenly there was the ominous sound of ripping cloth as he tore a rent in the stitching at the shoulder of Ron’s frock coat. With nothing to hold on to, Sir Antony shot backwards and skidded on his backside across the polished wood floor. Ron was free, and he and Merry laughed to see their uncle in such an undignified pose; stockinged legs in the air and sprawled out in the middle of the floor at the feet of the startled under-butler.
“Aha! Caught!” Salt announced with satisfaction, and firmed his grip on his rat’s ankle, while looking over the top of the table between two elaborately decorated epergnes to see what all the fuss was about. More than a dozen guests and as many servants were gawking at the high-jinks in his lordship’s dining room. “Tony? Tony, do you have the other rat?” he called out with a laugh as his rat kept wriggling and wasn’t about to give up the fight. “I hope so! Or my rat gets tickled to death until his fellow capitulates! Tony? Where are you? It may be a very long torture indeed,” he said with mock menace to his rat as he tightened his hold on a slim ankle, “if you, my dear rat, don’t let go of that chair leg and come quietly!”
He pulled his prisoner by the stockinged ankle swiftly toward him, caught up a bunch of her petticoats and hauled her out from under the table and up over his shoulder in a smooth and easy operation. Shoeless and kicking, her stockinged feet and slim ankles on display to the world, he demanded she stop struggling, and to keep her legs from kicking and her silk petticoats from billowing out, he placed an arm under her bottom and held her to his shoulder. This also stopped her from slipping completely over his shoulder and onto her head.
There wasn’t much fight in his rat now because she was laughing and protesting at one and the same time. She beat at his back with her fists and told him, while upside down and voice muffled into his velvet frock coat, that he was a brute and a fiend and she wouldn’t give in, whatever tortures he inflicted. Rats stuck together! All this did was make him laugh harder, and he so far forgot himself that he smacked his rat’s bottom in mock anger and said he would go on meting out due punishment until she gave up the whereabouts of her fellow rats.
“Salt, put me down!” Jane pleaded, though she was enjoying herself hugely. “My head is spinning and I feel faint!”
There was more squealing and laughter from the other side of the table when two heads appeared and they saw the Earl with his Countess up over his shoulder, giving her a mock thrashing. They jumped up and ran round the table, ignoring their governess, their tutor and even their mother, who broke from the crowd of stunned onlookers to go after her children, demanding that they stop all this nonsense at once and act the well-bred gentleman and young lady they had been brought up to be. But Merry and Ron were too caught up in the moment and were intent on freeing their fellow rat from the Earl’s imprisonment. Sir Antony, too, who was now on his feet and recovered his dignity, brushed down his silk breeches and adjusted his lace cravat, then came across to join his niece and nephew, his sister ignored.
By the time they reached th
e Earl, Salt had slid Jane to her stockinged feet and let her go, once he was certain she had regained her balance. As for her dignity, seeing the mute faces of their audience, she wasn’t at all certain that would make a recover any time soon, and she turned away to pin up her mussed hair. Her fichu needed adjusting again, her petticoats were crumpled, she had no idea where her satin slippers were, and she couldn’t hold her head up because her face was flushed with embarrassment.
What Jane was doing under the table, Salt could hazard a guess, looking at his mischievous niece and nephew. He knew the moment he had a good grip on her ankle and pulled her towards him out from under the table that it was his wife in his arms, but he was too caught up in the moment to give two testers who saw them.
“You didn’t catch us at all, Uncle Salt!” Merry announced proudly, coming to stand before the Earl and staring up into his flushed face. “Ron and I were too quick for you and Uncle Tony, weren’t we?”
Salt smiled down into her upturned smiling face and pinched her small pointed chin. “Much too quick, Merry.”
“And it was a good hiding place wasn’t it?” Ron asked anxiously, a look over his shoulder at his mother and the two servants bearing down on them. “You’d no idea we were there under your feet all the time, did you, Uncle Salt?”
“No idea at all. One of the best hiding places you’ve found, without doubt,” Salt assured him. “And you were so very quiet.” He glanced at Jane. “All three of you.”
“We were as quiet as rats!” Merry announced, and looked about for approval at her cleverness.
“Aubrey and Magna Sinclair St. John!” Diana St. John announced, sweeping up to her children. “I am very disappointed in you both,” she said sullenly. “Where have your manners flown? Did I not tell you about Mamma’s sick headache? And here you are running about your uncle’s dining room like a couple of street urchins. You will go with Clary and Taylor to that room upstairs where you usually eat, and you will conduct yourself in a manner befitting a Sinclair. That is all. No. I don’t want to hear your excuses. Go.”
“Yes, Mamma. Of course, Mamma,” both children mumbled in unison, a fearful glance up at their mother. But just as the tutor and governess stepped forward, Merry broke from her brother’s side and ran to the Earl and caught his hand and pointed at Jane.
“She said we could have dinner here with you.”
“Merry,” her brother whispered, “it’s not she, it’s Lady Salt.”
“But I want to call her Aunt Jane,” Merry counted. “She said I could!”
“Magna! Aubrey! How dare you carry on like rabble! Give your uncle the proper respect and do as you are bid and say goodnight!” Diana St. John ordered, and signaled again to the governess and the tutor to take her children in hand. “You know very well you don’t eat in the dining room when we have guests, and that’s the end of it!”
Obediently, Merry curtsied and Ron bowed to the Earl, their gaze cast to the floorboards. But Merry did not let go of the Earl’s hand and was somewhat comforted by the fact that he did not let go of her hand either. It was then that Jane stepped forward and calmly addressed their mother.
“I told Merry and Ron they could eat their dinner here with us.” She looked at the Earl and then at Diana St. John’s marble countenance. “It’s just that it must be very lonely eating alone in the nursery. And cold, too, if I know anything of this house.”
“What could you possibly know about this house? You’ve only been in it five minutes!” Diana St. John whispered viciously in Jane’s face, self-control lost for the briefest of moments, then masked instantly by cool-indifference. She added haughtily, and loud enough for the assembled guests to hear, “I do not appreciate interference in my children’s welfare, my lady. I am their mother. I know what is best for them.”
Yet the brief loss of control, and the fact her children feared her, provided Jane with a glimpse behind the woman’s mask. It made her inwardly shudder. If Diana St. John put her mind to it, she was capable of wielding more than a political dagger to get what she wanted. Jane decided it was time to be brave for the two little eager faces that looked at her expectantly.
“I’m so pleased you no longer have the headache that called out a physician in the middle of last night,” Jane said pleasantly, looking Diana St. John in the eye. “Then again, watching the tennis match could not have helped…?”
Lady St. John’s hazel eyes opened wide, then narrowed to slits and her painted mouth twisted up in a smile. “You may think yourself very clever—”
“Let it be, Di,” Sir Antony hissed under his breath. “Don’t make a fool of yourself.”
Diana St. John smiled sweetly at her brother and tapped his sleeve with the sticks of her ivory fan. “Foolish boy! Trust you to trip over your flat feet for a pretty face.”
Salt smiled encouragingly at his godchildren, who were staring up at him in anxious expectation, then turned wearily to their mother. “Diana, take Tony’s advice. I see no harm in the children being present. And as Lady Salt has kindly given Ron and Merry permission to sit at the table with the adults, they may do so. But they must be on their best behavior,” he added, a mock frown down at the two now suddenly happy children, who nodded up at him enthusiastically, “and do as Lady Salt bids them, or they will find themselves consigned to the nursery.”
“I won’t allow it!” Diana St. John blurted out before she could stop herself. “Clary! Taylor! Take—”
“But as this is my house and my table,” Salt said very quietly, “it is not your place to say otherwise.”
“But they are my children,” Diana St. John stated, and in a show of defiance, pulled her son and daughter from their uncle’s side and gathered them to her petticoats. “I will do with them as I see fit.”
Salt inclined his head to her with excessive politeness but there was ice in his voice. “I suggest we not mince words, my dear. St. John left his children in my sole custody.”
Lady St. John blanched and instantly let go of Merry and Ron, who, after a small hesitation, ran to the Earl and hugged him. She was on the verge of tears of rage as she watched her children go hand-in-hand with Salt to the foot of the table, but force of personality kept her temper in check. Before retreating to take her place at the table, just as the butler announced dinner was served, she said very quietly to Jane, “You are nothing but a hiccup in his life. Annoyingly present, but eventually hiccups disappear, by whatever means necessary, and then one can’t remember ever having had them.”
NINE
‘DON’T WORRY ABOUT DIANA” Sir Antony assured Jane over the pea soup. “Salt’s marriage has given her a severe shock, I won’t deny that. But she’ll adjust. She has to. She has no alternative.”
But Diana St. John believed she did have alternatives. As she sat through the long dinner seated just a few places away from the Earl at the head of the table, surrounded by the titled and politically powerful, she had the satisfaction of seeing the new Countess of Salt Hendon consigned to the furthest end of the table, where obedient wives sat and played hostess to the nobodies: The old, the young and the politically insignificant. Why her brother chose to play the chivalrous idiot by sitting himself on the Countess’s left amongst the worms, Diana knew not, but thought perhaps he hoped to gain the Earl’s favor by keeping the little wife company. But as Salt did not once look his wife’s way, and spent the evening talking politics with Diana and their mutual group of friends, she decided that her brother’s little ploy had gone awry.
And while she was chatting and laughing and fluttering her fan very prettily, and holding court amongst the politically influential, she learnt an interesting piece of information from Lady Porter, whose favorite pastime was being up on all the gossip involving Westminster’s upper-servants. Diana had recently lost a very good upstairs maid by the name of Anne Springer to Jenny Dalrymple, and it just so happened that the elder sister of this Anne Springer was Lady Porter’s dresser. But it was Lady Porter’s adamant belief that Diana’s ve
ry good upstairs maid had not gone to Jenny Dalrymple at all, but was here in this very house, newly employed as the Countess of Salt Hendon’s personal maid, to be closer to her betrothed, one Rufus Willis, under-butler to Lord Salt. Lady Porter was insistent. After all, her source, Anne Springer’s sister Janet, was impeccable.
Come time for the ladies to retire to the Long Gallery to sip tea, leaving the gentlemen to their port, Diana St. John disappeared for half an hour. She found her way through the public rooms to the labyrinth of dimly-lit passageways that led to the very private rooms occupied by the Earl and Countess one floor above. Here, in the freshly painted and prettily furnished rooms that were the Countess of Salt Hendon’s apartments, she discovered her very good upstairs maid Anne.
The young woman was in amongst a plethora of exquisitely embroidered petticoats in a variety of rich fabrics and colors. A dozen pairs of shoes in matching fabrics were lined up along the polished wood floor, and on the sofa were neatly stacked piles of stockings and all manner of female fripperies. She was humming to herself and busily hanging, folding and putting away her ladyship’s extensive new wardrobe. With her were two dressmakers and a milliner. They sat huddled together with needle and thread, under the light of a branch of candles by the warmth of the fireplace, putting the finishing touches to a couple of bonnets and bodices.
Diana St. John screwed up her mouth at such overindulgent spending on a creature who in her eyes wasn’t worth her housekeeper’s cast-offs, and summarily dismissed the dressmakers and milliner to a back closet with threats of their bills remaining unpaid if ever they opened their mouths to her presence. When her very good upstairs maid Anne dropped into a respectful curtsy, she was delighted to see real fear in the woman’s eyes.
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