The memory sent a jolt of pain through him. Did she think a scar or two would stop him from wanting her? No, the problem lay in the wantonness of his wanting.
With an effort, he resisted the urge to hang his head in shame and grind the heels of his hands into his eyes until the ache behind them turned into pain so great it would blot out all thought and feeling.
Instead, he looked each officer in the eye. “I will not again go into the kind of danger I endured last spring.” He turned so he could look Lord Bainbridge in the eye the longest and hardest. “Until I set up my nursery. I as yet have no heirs.”
A tic pulsed at the corner of Bainbridge’s jaw, and a light flashed through his dark eyes, eyes so like Cassandra’s that looking at them hurt, but he said nothing.
“You have an uncle and cousins,” the other officer pointed out. “An heir and a spare.”
Whittaker stared at the man as though he had suddenly started foaming at the mouth. “My uncle has expressed no liking for the title and estate, and my cousins are only twelve and ten.”
“But they are heirs in the direct family line,” the officer persisted.
“We would not even suggest you help us again,” Crawford finished. “We value the continuation of our best families as much as you seem to do.”
“Which is why I intend to marry,” Whittaker began.
“You will have protection,” Crawford added.
Bainbridge snorted.
Whittaker realized the older man had wedged him between himself and the wall, making escape impossible. He could not even vault over the back of the banquette, something he might have considered regardless of how foolish he would look, had it not abutted a wall as well. Outmaneuvered. Outsmarted. He was no match for experienced officers and a wily politician like Bainbridge. At the same time, in the social sense he outranked two military officers and a baron, even if he was younger than all three. They could force him to do nothing.
In the spring, they had asked. With Cassandra having doubts about their marriage, he had agreed. He needed an outlet for his frustration and pain. Now, however, he feared being away from her. Being away from her in May had carried her into friendship with those two men who led her into the lunacy of aeronautics.
Flight, indeed! Whittaker could tolerate, even understand, her interest in Homer and Virgil, and even some of the less respectable Greeks and Romans. But wanting to leave the ground? He did not like looking out windows more than three floors up, let alone thinking of nothing beneath him but air. She was going to get herself killed if he did not go back to Whittaker Hall to watch over her movements and stop her from trying to fly with nothing more substantial than a gas-filled bag of silk and an oversized basket. Not to mention the fire. One would think the chit would be afraid of the fire needed to keep the balloon filled with hot air. But not Cassandra. In the name of science, she would overcome her fear.
Which was one reason he loved her so much.
He set his shoulders back and his chin firmly. “If you gentlemen will excuse me for being vulgar enough to say so, you cannot force a peer of the realm to take on a role he does not wish to shoulder.”
Silence. At least at the table. The rest of the taproom had grown crowded and noisy with farmers and carters, stable hands and herders, who had carried the sweat of their toil to mingle with the smoke and ale.
As he watched the three men exchange glances, the stench of the room added its discomfort to the pain of Cassandra’s rejection, and his guts roiled. He’d rarely been ill a day in his life and never been jug-bit from intoxication, so this discomfort sat on him with the force of a roof beam. He feared he would disgrace himself in front of these older, wiser men and the hard-working country folk, when he needed to behave like the member of the House of Lords he was, like the leader he was supposed to be.
But his love, his lady, had sent him away, and that took the stuffing right out of the middle of a man.
He took a deep breath to fill himself with something other than anguish. “In the event you are forgetting, I do outrank all of you, and you are not in a position to force me to do anything.”
“Oh yes, but we are.” Bainbridge spoke in an undertone barely audible amidst the hubbub of the room, a murmur that sent a chill racing up Whittaker’s spine.
He kept his face blank and arched his brows. “Indeed, my lord.”
“Indeed.” Bainbridge’s face also was expressionless. “We have information regarding your mother.”
Whittaker’s breath snagged in his throat. His hands balled into fists on his thighs. He said nothing for fear he would give away a trace of emotion. But they had to be lying. His mother was a Christian lady, devout in her faith, if a bit too involved with dissenters for the liking of the local gentry. Even so, that was nothing anyone did not already know, and Mama did not care that they either knew or disapproved. He should not fear knowledge these men might have.
“Regarding the paternity of your brother,” said one of the officers, the younger of the two, with a salacious glint in his eye. “It could not have been your father.”
“You are accusing my mother of being unfaithful to my father?” Whittaker managed a credibly scoffing laugh. “What a faradiddle.”
“We know,” Bainbridge said, “we have witnesses to the fact that your father, the seventh earl, was not home for eleven months, at the end of which your brother was born.”
“Even if I believed you—” Whittaker had to pause to swallow against a dry mouth. “Which I do not, the law says that a child born in wedlock is presumed that of the husband. So you would have a difficult time making anyone believe such a tale about my mother.”
“Not particularly.” Crawford drew a cheroot from an inside pocket of his scarlet coat and lit it from the candle.
“The child is presumed legitimate unless the father is out of the country—or, as in this case, away from the estate, which the wife did not leave—for more than ten months.” Bainbridge waved a hand in front of his face. “And put that thing out.”
“I beg your pardon.” The officer stubbed out the cheroot at once.
Though smoke still swirled around the low ceiling beams of the taproom, the cloud over their table dissipated.
“You cannot possibly know that thirty years later.” The calmness of his tone pleased Whittaker.
“But we can.” Bainbridge’s complacence wasn’t feigned. No one could be that good an actor. “Your father was on a diplomatic mission with France thirty years ago.”
“But my brother and I look—” Whittaker stopped, but the damage was done.
He and his brother looked alike because they took after their dark-haired, brown-eyed mother, not their blond-haired, blue-eyed father. They possessed her curved brows and solitary dimple when they smiled. John’s height and breadth of shoulders could have come from anywhere, anyone.
Mama an adulterer, though? It wasn’t possible.
“But you do not dare test whether or not we are bluffing,” Bainbridge said.
“You know I do not.” Whittaker did not care how it appeared. He scrubbed his hands over his face, wishing he could scrub his entire body with harsh soap to eliminate the filth about his mother they had just poured over him. She was a new creature in Christ. God had forgiven her sins.
But Society would not, however old they were. They did not like being duped, and they would feel so. It would spill over into her present life. Even some church friends would shun her.
And Cassandra by being there.
So that was why the Bainbridges insisted Cassandra accept Mama’s invitation, even though they now objected to the marriage. No wonder they objected to the marriage.
Whittaker managed to hold his head up and keep his voice steady as he asked, “What do you want me to do this time?”
They spent an hour telling him. By the time the taproom began to quiet as the patrons drifted out in ones and twos or groups, Whittaker learned what role they needed him to play in the game to stop, or at least damage, the
Luddite rebellion in the northern counties. He was young enough to appear genuinely involved with men who had already demonstrated they would not hesitate to kill. And if he got in the way of a pistol ball or a knife, his uncle would inherit title and lands.
“Have you not considered that people will recognize me in Lancashire?” He tried to dissuade them at one point with utter logic.
“How often have you been there since you were eight years old?” Bainbridge returned.
A direct hit. He had been sent to school at eight years, then went to university, then was either in London or in the Dale or, for a few weeks before he learned of his brother’s death, in Devonshire. Yes, he resembled his mother, but that could be disguised easily for men who were not necessarily Lancashire men, or even locals who saw what they expected to see.
What they would expect to see would be the earl dressed like a gentleman, clean-shaven and young. A dusting of powder in the hair, a few days’ growth of beard, and rough garments, and even he admitted it was unlikely for anyone to know him.
Once the men finished giving him his instructions, they too slipped out of the taproom—the two soldiers, then Lord Bainbridge. Whittaker remained staring into the untouched glass before him until the candle guttered on its chipped saucer of a holder and the barkeep began to give him glances of annoyance. Then he rose and walked into the damp and chilly September night and paused beneath the gallery, allowing the mist to wash away some of the smoke stench from his clothes and hair. Nothing would wash the stain of family dishonor from his heart.
Above him, someone paced along the boards, a hesitant, dragging step accompanied by a thud. An old person with rheumatic joints keeping them awake, or someone with an injured—
His head jerked back. “Cassandra?”
He headed for the steps. She was outside. She was alone. If he could talk to her when she was by herself, look into her beautiful eyes—
A hand landed on his arm, an elegantly gloved hand with a firm grip. “You are not going up there,” Lord Bainbridge said.
“Unhand me.” Whittaker pulled his arm free but held his ground. “I should call you out for what you said about my mother, but you are more than twice my age.”
And it was most certainly not the Christian action to take.
Bainbridge chuckled. “I would not take the challenge.”
Above, the footfalls had ceased. Because Cassandra had gone into her room at the sound of voices, or because she was listening? He prayed for the latter. To know she still cared enough to listen helped ease the pain of losing her.
“I will be rather good with pistol and rapier if I continue to practice,” Whittaker pointed out. “Father saw me well-taught in the event I chose the military life.”
Above, a footfall dragged. A door opened and closed. Cassandra gone inside beyond earshot.
Whittaker turned on the older man. Though his voice remained low, his tone held savagery. “How dare you blackmail me into risking my life? If I thought I did any good in the spring, I’d have gone willingly without you fouling my mother’s good name.”
“Not such a good name, is it? And you have done worse than that to my daughter. She is practically a cripple and in constant pain because of your actions.”
She hadn’t been protesting his advances in the carriage. On the contrary. But he would not blame her. He would take full responsibility.
“I am still willing—” He stopped, realizing how bad that sounded. “I still want to marry her.”
“And a fine dowry your estate and mills will need if you do not stop the Luddites from assaulting your property and destroying it further.”
“Keep the dowry if that’s what it takes to prove to both of you I want her beyond anything else.” Whittaker swallowed. “Or is it my mother’s past that stops you from wanting the marriage now?”
“Not at all. I’ve always known. I was with your father on that mission as an extremely junior attaché about your age. I know how long he was gone. But he pretended a journey home so as not to dishonor her, and I assume the bloodline wasn’t corrupted all that much.”
The bloodline, the first mention of the identity. Whittaker should have wondered. He’d been too stunned to consider the identity of his brother’s true father. He did not want to know but now suspected the man might have been his uncle. Mama had been with her brother-in-law and his wife around that time, and they were close in age. But surely Whittaker’s uncle would not cuckold his own brother.
No wonder Mama encouraged him to marry young. She must have seen how he felt about Cassandra, that irresistible pull to be close and closer still.
His eyes burned. His throat closed. He stood like a mute beneath the gallery, the mist swirling around him like his sins creeping through his bones to conquer his very soul.
“Then why?” he managed to choke out. “Why do you come between us now?”
“You both blame yourselves for her injuries. That’s no way to start a marriage. If I do not keep you apart, you will never grow beyond that blame and your marriage will be poisoned from the start.” Bainbridge’s tone softened. “I let my first daughter marry unwisely the first time and had to watch her suffer for years. I will not allow that to happen to Cassandra.” He touched Whittaker’s shoulder, a comforting, fatherly gesture this time. “You both need to find someone with whom your passions do not run so high. And if I keep you apart, you will.”
“Cassandra may, but I never will.” As he spun on his heel and strode off for the stable to awaken a sleepy hostler to saddle his horse, he heard Lord Bainbridge laughing like a man with a secret he enjoyed keeping to himself.
6
Though Cassandra closed the door loudly enough for the men below to hear the latch click, she opened it again with a gentleness only someone close at hand would recognize as being other than the normal night sounds of a settling wooden building or the whisper of a cat slipping through the night. Behind her, everyone slept. Below her, Father and Whittaker talked in low voices that nonetheless drifted upward on the swirling mist, taut with anger on Whittaker’s part, scornful on Father’s. She missed a few words here and there, but not enough to miss the gist of the dialogue.
Father believed she and Whittaker could never be happy together because their passions ran too high. They were both quiet people, comfortable with silences between them, yet never lacking in conversation when they chose. But always that fire blazed between them, a rope of fire insisting they touch a hand or a cheek, a look that promised so much more. More and more they succumbed to temptation until a fire in fact stopped them from committing the ultimate act of betrayal to their upbringing and faith. Now she bore the scars of her folly. Father was right, and Whittaker must have agreed or he would not have walked away with such determination.
He strode out of her life like he could not wait to get away, ultimate proof that he was glad to be rid of her without a fight about promises broken. She was now free of him and his disapproval of her aeronautics.
So why did her chest ache like someone had removed her heart by force?
She slumped onto a chair. It bore no cushion, and one of her not yet wholly healed burns rubbed the edge. She sucked in her breath to stifle a cry of pain that would awaken everyone. They’d spent enough sleepless nights because of her, certain for the first week that she would have to have both legs amputated. “Let me die if you must,” she had pleaded with the physicians. “I’d be better off dead.”
They hadn’t amputated, though the pain and wounds grew worse. She figured they agreed with her—she would be better off dead than a lady without legs. She could not imagine life spent in a bath chair or being carried when the chair would not fit through doorways or go up steps.
She had healed, though, thanks to a young physician Father called in, who insisted on cleansing tinctures that burned with their high content of spirits, then the burning soothed with applications of cold compresses. Ice compresses. The apothecary and other physicians told him he was beyond his reason and h
er death would be on his head. But she lived. The burns healed. Her life returned.
But not to normal. Normal would be marriage and children. Not for Cassandra now. She would have books and balloons. Those gave her a reason to live—the prospect of flying especially now that walking was painful still.
“I will fly from the Dale to York,” she vowed in a murmur. “I will view York Cathedral from above.”
If the wind wasn’t fickle and sent her across the Irish Sea to Belfast instead.
She smiled at the notion and made her way to bed. She would think of aeronautics instead of Whittaker. In time, as Father predicted, he would forget her in favor of another girl, a pretty, vapid girl who would make him an excellent countess and a mother to his heir and a spare.
Her mind drifted like a balloon on a summer breeze, but sleep eluded her. Her legs itched and burned. Barbara snored. Honore kept murmuring an incomprehensible name in her sleep, probably the name of the man who had come too close to ruining her in the spring. Poor child. To think she had loved a man with a pretty face and some charm, who used her for his own ends and—
The outer door closed, then the one into the room Father shared with Mama. Cassandra endured the need to lie still in the broad bed for another quarter hour, according to the chiming of a distant church tower clock, and then rose, donned her dressing gown, and entered the parlor. One candle still guttered in the candelabra on the table. Hearing nothing from her parents’ room, Cassandra lit the other candles and carried the branch of lights to a small desk in the corner, where pens, ink, and paper lay for the convenience of the best guests who could afford to purchase a set of rooms for the night.
She drew one sheet to her, checked the trim of a pen, and opened the bottle of ink. She did not have Lydia’s skill with drawing likenesses of people or even the scenery around her. Cassandra drew machinery, things that coiled through her brain like those electricity machines. Or her brain worked through formulas like recipes poured out of that pretty little cook who had graced Bainbridge House for several weeks in the spring. She was an artist. Cassandra was a chemist. They’d once discussed how the two weren’t all that different. Only the ingredients changed.
Laurie Alice Eakes - [Daughters of Bainbridge House 02] Page 5