Jane blinked and wondered if she were witness to an apparition. The girl was not much younger than she, and although she possessed the Sinclair coloring, her pretty features had more in common with an Allenby than a Sinclair.
“What the devil are you doing in London?” Salt growled and suffered the girl to throw her arms around his neck. “I hope you dragged the long-suffering Dawson with you and half my laborers as outriders?”
“Of course!” she announced cheerfully and released him. “Dawson refused at first to accompany me, but I told her I’d come up to town without her anyway and now she’s quaking in my rooms convinced you mean to dismiss her. Of course I told her that’s rot.” She stepped back and ran her wide-eyed gaze over the Earl, from bare feet to dressed hair, and cocked her head in mock disapproval. “You went to the Richmond Ball with your hair powdered but without your stockings and shoes?”
“Don’t be vile, Caroline!” Salt snapped in embarrassment.
Jane muffled a giggle into the Earl’s shoulder, instantly warming her to the girl, and clutched the fur-lined cloak more tightly about her naked body.
“He calls me Caroline in that pompous way when he’s uncomfortable,” Lady Caroline confided with a smile, then had the temerity to wrinkle up her little nose with its dusting of freckles to brazenly appraise the half-concealed Jane from tumble of dark hair to small bare feet. “You’re much shorter than I remember, possibly because I’ve grown, but you’re still utterly lovely,” she remarked, as if they were known to one another. “You’re quite the loveliest garden sprite to have lived at the bottom of our garden, isn’t she, Salt? When I say our garden, of course I mean Salt’s vast seat in Wiltshire; but you know that. Did you ever see us, on the hill overlooking your quaint little cottage? We were on horseback under the stand of old oaks. We’d rest our mounts there. But that was just an excuse so Salt could catch a glimpse of his garden fairy—that’s you, by the way—tending your garden—”
“Caroline! For pity’s sake!”
Lady Caroline rolled her eyes, not at all abashed at making the Earl’s ears go very red. She made her curtsy to Jane and said matter-of-factly, “I’m Caroline Sinclair. Salt’s long-suffering sister. You can call me Caro. Even Salt calls me that when he’s being pleasant. Which isn’t often enough, let me tell you!”
“Call you impossible, insufferable, and intolerable!” he retorted, face ablaze with color at the public revelation of details he’d rather leave unsaid. He quickly introduced Jane, adding wearily, “Caro, you really have chosen the most awkward time to land on my doorstep, not to mention the fact you disobeyed me in coming to London.”
“I’m truly sorry, Salt, but my news couldn’t wait,” she said, not at all apologetic. “Besides, now you’re married it makes all the more sense. By the by,” she said, changing tack, “how did you manage to pry the Sinclair locket from Cousin Diana’s talons?”
Jane put a hand to her throat. “This is paste.”
Salt’s head snapped round at Jane, and then almost at once looked back at his sister when she said coolly,
“I didn’t think she’d give it up without a fight.”
“I beg your pardon? Will someone tell me what you are talking about?”
Both women exchanged a look. It was enough to make them firm friends.
“I believe your sister knows more about the Sinclair locket than we do, my lord.”
Salt frowned and waited for Caroline to explain.
“Diana keeps the Sinclair locket under her pillow. She has done so for years. I know, because once I stole it from its hiding place, if you can call taking back what is rightfully yours stealing, and got whipped for my troubles.”
“She hit you?”
Caroline shook her head at her brother. “No. She had her lady’s maid do that for her.”
Salt was aghast. He looked at Jane and seemed to read her mind. He lifted the sapphire with one finger. “No secret compartment in this one…”
Jane swallowed and shook her head.
“But in the other one, the real one, you placed a note in the secret compartment for me.”
She did not trust herself to speak. Her blue eyes filled with tears and he had his answer.
Gently, he brushed a strand of hair from her flushed cheek. “I want to ask you… But perhaps in the morning, when we’ve both had a good night’s sleep, we will be better able to discuss the past…”
Jane nodded.
Intuitively, Lady Caroline knew this quiet exchange between her brother and his wife was a momentous one. Yet she was still young and selfish enough to believe her news was so important that it could not wait. After all, she had come all the way from Wiltshire to tell her brother, and she wasn’t about to go off to bed again, having been woken at three in the morning, so she just blurted out what he needed to know sooner rather than later.
“Salt! Do you want to know why I came up to London?”
“Do I?” the Earl responded with a tired sigh, turning to look down at her. “Could it not wait until morning?”
Lady Caroline beamed mischievously. “I came to tell you that Captain Beresford has asked for my hand in marriage and I have accepted him.”
Salt stared at her in utter disbelief. And if Jane hadn’t been stunned by Lady Caroline’s smile of absolute confidence, that the Earl must accept this news as a fait accompli, she would have enjoyed her husband’s hot-headed response.
“Captain Barefaced-Cheek can ask for the whole of your damned spoiled carcass, for all I bloody well care, but he won’t get a hair on your head!” Salt exploded angrily. “And for this you disobeyed me and came up to London? I have a mind to whip some sense into you!”
“It won’t do you any good. I’m no longer a child!” Lady Caroline pouted with her chin high in the air, adding for dramatic effect, “I am a woman.”
“Ha! You’re a child until I say otherwise.”
Lady Caroline rolled her eyes and crossed her arms, not at all intimidated, nor did she seem to think he meant what he said. Jane had to admire her pluck.
“You’re as beastly and as prejudiced as Tony,” Lady Caroline said without heat, which surprised and alerted Jane, who expected a tearful tantrum at the very least. “Just because Beresford is a penniless war hero, you dismiss him out of hand. And it’s not as if you know him. He only moved into the neighborhood two years ago.”
“Whether I know the Captain or not is inconsequential; more important is that I know you,” Salt countered and would have said more except for Jane’s fingers on his crumpled shirt sleeve.
“Perhaps it would be best to continue this engaging discussion over breakfast?” she suggested quietly at his shoulder and couldn’t suppress a shy smile. “You will never win an argument, however sound your case, in your present state of undress.”
Her calm reasoning instantly soothed Salt and he smiled down at her before turning back to Lady Caroline with a weary sigh. “Her ladyship is quite right, Caro. This discussion can wait. I’m very pleased to see you here safe. But go to bed and, for God’s sake, wake up in the morning with some common sense.”
Lady Caroline took the Earl’s stern directive in her stride and gave his stubbled cheek a perfunctory kiss. “I’ve missed you too, glum chops.”
“Glum chops? How dare you knock me off my pedestal in front of my wife with that old nursery nickname,” he responded with a huff of embarrassed laughter. “You haven’t called me that in years.”
“Pedestal?” Lady Caroline frowned in puzzlement at Jane, who couldn’t meet her gaze, then said to the Earl with guilty pleasure and a wide, impish grin, “Well, not to your face.”
“You little viper!” Salt retorted and pinched her cheek a little too hard, goading her with, “Glum always wins, remember?” before bounding barefoot up the stairs ahead of her.
Lady Caroline took the bait, and with a squeal of delight turned tail and fled up the staircase after him, pink dressing gown trailing behind like a cloak, nightcap outrageously askew. Sal
t stopped on the first landing and lay in wait. Jane watched him grab his sister about the waist and effortlessly lift her up and spin her about, she squealing and he laughing, before putting her down, whereupon there was a friendly exchange of words before he kissed her goodnight. Caroline gave Jane a friendly wave over the balustrade before disappearing from view.
Jane came up the wide stairs at a more leisurely pace, clutching the fur-lined cloak tightly about her slim form, mind whirling with possibilities as to how it came to be that the Lady Caroline Sinclair resembled the females of the Allenby family. It certainly made her wonder anew, as she drifted off into a deep sleep snuggled in her husband’s arms, at the feud between neighbors merchant and noble, and at the bequest left to Caroline in Jacob Allenby’s will.
WHEN SHE WOKE next morning there was only one question about the Lady Caroline Sinclair she wanted answered, but she woke very late and to the novel experience of being alone in her bed. Usually she was up and dressed and ready for the day well before her husband stirred, a consequence of Jacob Allenby’s edicts on how she must live while under his protection: Early to bed and early to rise, plain food, few creature comforts and plenty of industry to keep mind and body occupied. A thriving herb and vegetable garden, a storeroom full of jars of pickling and preserves, and enough hard-wearing stockings sewn to warm the legs of an army of poorhouse women were testament to her benefactor.
As she sipped her dish of black tea and nibbled on the dry biscuit Anne customarily left on a silver tray on the bedside table, she had a vague memory of her husband’s warmth curled around her in the big four-poster bed, only for him to be up and gone in the next instance, or so it seemed to Jane in her half-waking state: Loud whispered conversation and being told to go back to sleep, and something about a note from Diana St. John and Salt off to South Audley Street to Ron’s bedside yet again.
Finishing her tea, and with her nausea more settled, Jane felt better able to face the day, and after washing her face and hands with the tepid water in the porcelain bowl beside her bed, she went through to the dressing room in search of her maid to help her bathe and dress for the day. What she found was the startling sight of Sir Antony sprawled out on the chaise longue by the French windows, a silken arm across his face to shield his eyes from the light, and with Viscount Fourpaws curled up asleep on his stomach. He was dressed in the rich clothes and powdered wig he had worn the night before to the Richmond Ball. Given the crumpled state of his cravat, the deep creases to his black silk breeches, and the fact he was unshaven, Jane knew he had not been to bed since leaving the ball.
Taking his presence in the second most intimate of her rooms in her stride, she threw an embroidered silk dressing gown over her thin nightshift and sat before her dressing table looking glass to brush her waist-length hair free of tangles. She wondered if Sir Antony was asleep and guessed he was not. That he was spread-eagled across the chaise longue and avoiding daylight simply meant that he had drunk too much the night before, and this, coupled with lack of sleep, had given him an excruciating headache. She knew this to be so when the silver-backed hairbrush caught on a knot in her hair and fell with a clatter amongst the clutter on the dressing table. Sir Antony’s body convulsed, sending the kitten fleeing to the safety of Jane’s lap.
He groaned loudly and shifted amongst the cushions to sit up, wig outrageously askew. It was an effort and when he was upright he leaned his elbows on his knees and put his unshaven face in his hands, feeling bilious. Finally, he managed to lift his head and smile weakly.
“You see me at my most damnable, my lady. I can sink no lower,” he announced. “Forgive me, but I had nowhere to go. Well, nowhere else I preferred to lay my weary and battle-scarred carcass.”
“You could do with a dish of black tea,” Jane said cheerfully and rang the little handbell on her dressing table that summoned her maid. “It helps me better able to face the day when I am feeling green.”
“I doubt it will help me. I am not green. I am purple, yellow and puce, a sort of slime. But I am willing to try anything, particularly if it has the power to restore my dignity.”
Anne came and went, and if Jane had not been attending to Sir Antony she would have detained Anne because the woman was miserable. Her face was blotchy and she kept her eyes lowered. That her maid’s misery was compounded by the fact her mistress was entertaining a man other than her husband in her rooms never occurred to Jane.
“The tea has helped, thank you,” Sir Antony said gratefully, balancing the delicate porcelain dish and saucer on his silken knee.
Feeling more himself, he noticed Jane for the first time. His unshaven cheeks burned hot and his mouth went dry finding her sitting before the looking glass in a flimsy silk dressing gown with her thick, raven-black hair tumbled to her waist; a delectably arousing sight normally reserved for a husband’s eyes only. He put his thudding head in his hand and felt an even greater fool. He would never be offered another diplomatic posting, least of all rise to ambassadorial rank, if he didn’t pull himself together, mentally as well as physically.
But he wouldn’t even get a Channel crossing if he didn’t make it through the day without Salt discovering him in the Countess’s dressing room. He shouldn’t have invited himself in, but he felt he had to see her. Hers was the voice of calm reason, and he needed calmness and reason in his life at that very moment. He certainly couldn’t speak to Salt about his sister Caroline’s shock announcement she was engaged to be married. He knew Jane would understand. Yet, when Jane made a light remark about the Lady Caroline, he forgot he was on the brink of being called out by the Earl for matrimonial trespass and ground his teeth.
“I was introduced to Lady Caroline earlier this morning,” Jane announced casually, brushing her hair forward over one shoulder in preparation for braiding. “You were quite right. I liked her on sight. She’s full of life and, it would seem, surprises.”
“Surprises be damned!” Sir Antony growled. “She has the nerve to send round a note to the Richmond turnout telling me she’s in London and to come at once, which I did. Throws herself in my arms telling me how much she’s missed me, then announces in the next breath that Captain Bossy Boots Beresford has asked her to marry him!”
“And you took the news badly?”
“Of course I took the news badly!”
“And you permitted Caroline to see that you took the news badly?”
“I told her precisely what I thought of such an intemperate match—”
“She would have enjoyed that,” Jane murmured.
“—and what I thought of her so-called suitor.”
“Even better.”
“I ask you: The man has a limp, a war injury from the Hanover campaign, and struts about the county—if one can limp and strut at the same time—six years after he was pensioned off, still playing the war hero!” Sir Antony retorted, frustrated rage making him oblivious to Jane’s pointed remarks. “He has less than two thousand a year to live on, with only limited prospects of inheriting a very healthy aunt’s modest estate in Somerset, if and when she drops off the mortal coil, which won’t be any decade soon. Caroline is worth in excess of fifty thousand pounds, and lives in a Jacobean palace a Continental prince wouldn’t turn his nose up at. Whatever she asks for, Salt provides. Her idea of economy is to buy only two-dozen pair of new silk stockings on any given day instead of three! Does that sound like a match made in heaven?”
Jane hid her smile and said calmly in mid-brushstroke, “But, as you said yourself, she does love dogs and horses and mucking about the farm. That would seem to suit Captain Beresford?”
“Of course it suits Beresford, but what he fails to understand is that once Caroline turns eighteen and is launched into her first Season, dogs, and horses and farm muck don’t stand a chance!”
“But if they are in love…”
Sir Antony was instantly on his feet. The empty dish and its saucer balanced precariously on his silken knee crashed to the floor and smashed unnoticed. Vi
scount Fourpaws sprang from the comfort and warmth of Jane’s lap and beat a retreat into the next room to take refuge amongst the bank of feather pillows on the big four-poster bed, his usual resting place.
“In love? She isn’t in love with him!”
“No, she isn’t in love with him,” Jane agreed.
Sir Antony’s anger burst like a soap bubble. Totally deflated, he sat down, blinking. “She isn’t?”
Jane wondered at the workings of the male mind. She did not have to wonder about Caroline’s thought processes. She reasoned the girl was young after all, and if anything like Jane’s stepmother, the only other female Allenby of Jane’s acquaintance, then she would have woken up this morning very proud of herself for the damage she had wrought the night before. She had gained her objectives. She had discovered the true nature of Sir Antony’s feelings for her, and the Earl had flatly refused her engagement to Captain Beresford. Jane did not doubt the existence of the good Captain, or the fact he might have designs on marrying an heiress, he may even have feelings for Caroline, but she doubted very much if he had asked her to marry him. And if he had, then he truly was a fortune hunter and Salt would deal with him very swiftly.
“How do you know she isn’t in love with Beresford?” Sir Antony asked in wonderment. “You only met for the first time last night.” When Jane smiled and continued brushing her hair, he perched forward on the chaise longue and said hopefully, “She confided in you. She’s had second thoughts about the Captain.”
“No. As you said, I only met her for the first time last evening. Naturally, Salt was furious and told her in no uncertain terms that he would not countenance a union with the Captain. Caroline took this in her stride and wasn’t to be dissuaded.”
“As only she would! But if she isn’t in love with Beresford, why is she putting me through this-this torture?”
So much for Sir Antony calmly telling her he would wait until Caroline had had her Season before declaring himself. Jane smiled to herself. Poor Tony, he had best take himself off to St. Petersburg, or ask Caroline to marry him immediately, or develop an armor-plated sensibility to see him through Caroline’s flirtatious Season amongst the young bloods and fortune hunters who would court her. She would surely flaunt each and every one of her suitors in his face, all to get his reaction. And if he did react, then woe betide him ever gaining the upper hand in that union.
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