by Juliana Gray
“Tragically, no. But you must be accustomed to such heartbreak, working at an inn, isn’t it so?” Abigail’s gaze fell upon the corner, where an enormous lumpy pile stood covered by a series of thick wool blankets. “Why, what the devil’s this?” she asked, in English.
“This?” he replied, in despondent Italian. “Why, it is only the machine left by the English gentleman.”
“English gentleman? Here?”
“Why, yes. They arrived not an hour before your party, three of them, great English lords, and left this . . . this . . .” Words failed him. He gestured extravagantly. “Signorina, you will not stay?” he pleaded.
“No, no.” She took a few paces toward the pile. “What is it, do you think?”
“This? What does it matter, next to my poor heart?”
“Your heart will recover with great promise, I am certain. The season for foreign travelers has hardly begun.” Abigail took hold of the corner of one blanket and lifted it.
A sob wracked the air behind her.
“Well, well,” she breathed, in English. “What have we here?”
* * *
The Duke of Wallingford’s temper, never the docile sort, began to growl about his ears like an awakened terrier. No, no, not a terrier. Like a dragon, a fine fire-breathing dragon, a much more suitable beast for a duke.
Bad enough that the train from Paris to Milan should have no accommodation for his private car, forcing the three of them to travel in a common first-class carriage with decidedly coarse company and execrable sherry. Bad enough that the hotel in Florence should have sprung a leak in its old roof, requiring them to change suites in the middle of the night, to a floor altogether too close to the milling streets below. Bad enough that the final leg of the journey from Florence to the Castel sant’Agata should be awash with rain, the bridge ahead swimming, so they should be forced to put up in this . . . this inn of the worst rustic sort, filled with stinking travelers and flat ale and—the final insult, which no merciful God should dare deliver—the forever-damned Dowager Marchioness of Morley and her suite of assorted relatives.
Demanding his own private rooms for her party, no less.
The Marchioness of Morley. Wallingford had kissed her once, he remembered, on a long-ago London balcony, when she was a debutante and ought to have known better than to find herself in a shaded corner with a notorious duke. Or perhaps she had known better. She had certainly looked up at him with a rather knowing eye for a nineteen-year-old.
She was looking up at him now, with those same warm brown eyes, turned up at the ends like those of a particularly smug cat, doing her best to look beseeching. Her hands wrung away in front of her immaculate waist. “Look here, Wallingford, I really must throw myself on your mercy. Surely you see our little dilemma. Your rooms are ever so much larger, palatial, really, and two of them! You can’t possibly, in all conscience . . .” She paused and cast a speculative glance at Wallingford’s brother. “My dear Penhallow. Think of poor Lilibet, sleeping in . . . in a chair, quite possibly . . . with all these strangers . . .”
Just like Lady Morley, to play on poor Roland’s schoolboy affection for her cousin Elizabeth, now the Countess of Somerton: that peach-cheeked beauty, that siren of sirens. The devil’s own luck, that Lord Roland Penhallow’s long-lost love should lurk in this godforsaken Italian innyard, waiting to launch herself back into his tender heart.
If indeed it was mere luck.
Next to Wallingford, Burke seemed to sense the threat. He cleared his throat with an ominous rumble before Roland could answer. “Did it not, perhaps, occur to you, Lady Morley, to reserve rooms in advance?”
Lady Morley turned to him with the full force of her cat-eyed glare. She had to look upward, and upward, until at last she found his face. “As a matter of fact, it did, Mr. . . .” She made a terrifying rise of those eyebrows, which could lay waste to all fashionable London. “I’m so terribly sorry, sir. I don’t quite believe I caught your name.”
Wallingford smiled. “I beg your pardon, Lady Morley. How remiss of me. I have the great honor to present to you—perhaps you may have come across his name, in your philosophical studies—Mr. Phineas Fitzwilliam Burke, of the Royal Society.”
“Your servant, madam,” Burke said. His voice betrayed no intimidation of any kind. A rock, old Burke, despite his shock of ginger hair and his unnatural height. He stood there, in the bustling common room of the inn, as if he were still in his workshop, surrounded by machine parts, lord and master of all he surrounded.
It was the Olympia in him, Wallingford thought with pride.
“Burke,” Lady Morley said, and then her eyes widened an instant. “Phineas Burke. Of course. The Royal Society. Yes, of course. Everybody knows of Mr. Burke. I found . . . the Times, last month . . . your remarks on electrical . . . that new sort of . . .” She gathered herself. “That is to say, of course we reserved rooms. I sent the wire days ago, if memory serves. But we were delayed in Milan. The boy’s nursemaid took ill, you see, and I expect our message did not reach our host in time.” She turned her displeased gaze toward the landlord, who cowered nearby.
Wallingford opened his mouth to deliver a thundering ducal set-down, but before he could gather his words into the appropriate mixture of irony and authority, the warm voice of his brother Roland intruded, rich with the full measure of its damned puppylike friendliness, cheerfully surrendering the fort even before Lady Somerton had appeared for battle.
“Look here,” said Lord Roland Penhallow, a golden joy shining through his words to match the gleaming golden brown of his hair. “Enough of this rubbish. We shouldn’t dream of causing any inconvenience to you and your friends, Lady Morley. Not for an instant. Should we, Wallingford?”
Wallingford folded his arms. They were sunk. “No, damn it.”
“Burke?”
“Bloody hell,” muttered Burke. He knew it, too.
Roland flashed his hazel eyes in that ridiculous way of his, the way the entire idiot female half of humanity found unaccountably irresistible. “You see, Lady Morley? All quite willing and happy and so on. I daresay Burke can take the little room upstairs, as he’s such a tiresome, misanthropic old chap, and my brother and I shall be quite happy to . . .”—he swept his arm to take in the dark depths of the common room—“make ourselves comfortable downstairs. Will that suit?”
Lady Morley clasped her elegant gloved hands together. “Darling Penhallow. I knew you’d oblige us. Thanks so awfully, my dear; you can’t imagine how thankful I am for your generosity.” She turned to the landlord. “Do you understand? Comprendo? You may remove His Grace’s luggage from the rooms upstairs and bring up our trunks at once. Ah! Cousin Lilibet! There you are at last. Have you sorted out the trunks?”
Wallingford turned.
There she stood in the doorway, the source of their trouble, the dear and virtuous and terribly beautiful Countess of Somerton. Did it matter that she was married to that beast Somerton? Did it matter that her scrap of a son clung to her hand, visible proof of her sexual congress with that same earl? It did not. Roland turned his besotted gaze toward her, and everything fell into shambles, the entire plan, a year of hiding away in the Tuscan hills beyond rumor, beyond the reach of the Duke of Olympia. Roland would make a fool of himself, and the tale would reach London, and within a week Olympia would be pounding on the door of the Castel sant’Agata, no doubt dragging Wallingford’s intended bride by the hand.
Lady Somerton unbuttoned the boy’s coat and said something to Lady Morley about the luggage. She rose in a lithe movement and began to unfasten her own coat.
Roland stood transfixed. A breath of air escaped him, rather like a pant.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” muttered Wallingford.
“I take it they know each other?” asked Burke, in his driest voice.
Wallingford gave Roland a sharp poke in his ribs. “Keep your tongue in your mouth, you dog,” he began, and stopped short, because an apparition had just appeared behind t
he prim dark wool shoulder of Lady Somerton.
Wallingford could not say, afterward, why the young lady should have struck him so. He could not have said whether she was beautiful or not. She danced into view, her delicate features sparkling with rain, her eyes and face alight: a sprite of some kind, a fairy, full of some mysterious energy that seemed to burst from her skin.
Wallingford stood immobile. The buzz of voices hollowed out around him.
The apparition hovered for an instant next to Lady Somerton and gave her head a little shake. A fine spray of rain scattered from the brim of her hat. She cast about, and for an inexplicable and boundless instant Wallingford felt that she was looking for him, that this strange fairy had entered a remote Italian inn for the express purpose of discovering his soul.
But her gaze did not meet his. She instead found an object to his left, and her face, if possible, lit further. She darted forward, right up to Lady Morley, and said, in a voice of purely human excitement: “Alex, darling, you won’t believe what I’ve found in the stables!”
Alex, darling?
The words snapped Wallingford back to consciousness. He started. He stared at Lady Morley. He stared at the girl. Lady Morley was wrinkling her nose, saying something about the stables, unbuttoning the girl’s coat, calling her Abigail in a voice of deep familiarity. They stood in profile to him, outlined by the golden glow of the fire, and he could trace the two straight noses, the two firm little chins, in exact replica of each other. Lady Morley removed the girl’s hat, and out sprang a nest of unruly chestnut hair, the same shade as her own.
Alex, darling.
Burke’s hand landed on his shoulder. Burke’s voice said something about sitting down to dinner. Wallingford said, “Yes, of course,” and dropped upon the bench. His brain was burning.
Lady Morley’s sister. This dainty fairy, this sweet apparition, like nothing he had ever seen before, was Lady Morley’s little sister.
He was damned.
* * *
Abigail Harewood sat in a hideous bile green paisley armchair in the corner of the bedroom, her feet tucked up under her dress, and contemplated her sketchbook.
Not that she meant to sketch anything. Not, in fact, that she had sketched much at all during the voyage to Italy, despite her best intentions, which had loosely imagined a portfolio bursting with atmospheric depictions of towering Swiss peaks and rough-hewn peasant faces. No, the sketchbook lay in her lap with nearly all of its sheets still blank, except for an abandoned pencil drawing of the Milan cathedral (defeated by the gargoyles) and the pristine paper before her, which contained two words: La stalla.
“Philip, darling,” said Lilibet, from across the room, “do stop unbuttoning your pajamas and get into bed.”
Her voice was strained. Philip, who had been penned all day in a jostling coach, its windows streaming with rain, showed no particular inclination for sleep just yet. He leapt atop the mattress and began to jump. “Look, I’m an acrobat, Mama! Abigail, look!” His unbuttoned pajama shirt flopped against his lean five-year-old chest.
“Very credible, Philip,” called out Abigail. “Let’s see a somersault.”
“Oh, jolly fun,” said Philip.
“No!” Lilibet reached out and secured his arms with her hands, just as the boy bent his knees for a particularly bold and somersault-inducing jump. “Abigail, really. You know he does whatever you tell him.”
“My mistake, Philip,” said Abigail contritely. “No somersaults, unless your mother is quite out of the room.”
“Abigail.”
She stretched out her toes to the nearby fire, simmering with intense and comforting heat in its nest of charcoal ash, and returned to the paper in front of her.
The Duke of Wallingford. She had never met him before. He had never come around any of Alexandra’s salons and parties, and Abigail rarely went out in society. Conventional society, that is. When Abigail had vowed not to marry all those years ago, she had not stopped short at a mere negative promise. (Abigail, as a rule, did not stop short anywhere.) She had not been satisfied with resolving not to make a conventional marriage; she had vowed, in fact, to do her utmost to live the least conventional life available to her.
It had not been easy. In the early days, most of her allowance went to bribing the footmen and the housemaids: losses that she attempted to recoup through gambling, to mixed success. She was generally hopeless at cards, for she could not attempt to hide her emotions behind the appropriate mask of expressionless indifference, but eventually she found a reliable bookmaker and discovered she had a talent for picking horses.
Still, between the bribery and the hackney fares, the rounds of pints to keep the drunks at her local happy, and the occasional spectacular loss when her horses failed to gallop home in the correct order, she lived on the constant edge of bankruptcy. And then, occasionally, her sister Alexandra would remember her existence and call upon her to attend some shopping expedition or private dinner party, and she had to scramble to cancel her low engagements, and dress in the required white dress and pearls, and remember not to swagger or to profane the Lord’s name or to discuss tomorrow’s card at Newmarket.
Dukes, therefore, had not often appeared at her right hand and sat down to dinner with her. They were generally glimpsed from afar, and were generally of the white-haired, weak-chinned, short-and-stooping variety, cane handles hooked over their arms, silk top hats shining in the Ascot sun.
Wallingford was not short, nor did he stoop. He had not exactly invited her to dinner, either; that was his brother’s doing, that darling Lord Roland with the golden brown hair and melting hazel eyes, who was evidently dying for love of her beautiful cousin Lilibet. (Not that Abigail could fault him for that.)
No, Wallingford was a different sort of duke altogether, a duke of the old order, tall and dark-haired and fierce-eyed, crackling with power and magnificently disagreeable. She had troubled him for the salt, and he had glowered at her with all the thunderous astonishment of a feudal lord addressed unexpectedly by his serving wench.
Oh, the shivers.
He was the one. There was no question that the Duke of Wallingford should be her first lover. Physically, he possessed every possible advantage: she particularly admired his lush dark hair, which would twine very handsomely around her fingers during the act of love, to say nothing of the uncompromising width of his shoulders, which might prove useful should he be forced, for example, to carry her across a raging river at some point in their liaison.
Moreover, Wallingford undoubtedly had the experience to pull off the affair in a most satisfactory fashion. Abigail had made considerable research into erotic literature—an astonishing amount of it in circulation; staggering, really—and concluded that a man of experience was infinitely more master of the task at hand than some sweet but green young fellow, who would almost certainly become overexcited and make a short-lived mess of things.
Abigail could not conceive of the Duke of Wallingford in a state of overexcitement.
The air split with the sound of Philip’s voice, raised in a series of hooting calls. Abigail looked up and found him racing around the room, pajama shirt flapping, Lilibet in helpless pursuit. His hand beat against his mouth, creating the hooting call.
Abigail stuck out her leg and brought him to a halt. “Philip, what on earth are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m a wild Indian!” he shouted, straining against her leg.
“Oh! Of course you are. Carry on, then.” She retracted her leg and set him free, just as Lilibet swooped in to capture him.
“Abigail!” Lilibet said desperately.
Abigail fiddled her lead sketching pencil around her fingers. “Lilibet, dear, he’s been stuck in a carriage all day. You ought to have made him run laps around the innyard, directly when we arrived. He wants a little exercise, that’s all.”
“I shall remember this, Abigail, when you have children of your own.” Lilibet gave up and sat on the bed in a great tangle of petticoats
and heavy dark blue wool, watching Philip circle around her.
Abigail looked down at the paper before her. The trouble, of course, was that the duke and his party only meant to stay here the one night, before trudging off through the dank late-winter gloom to whatever oasis of pleasure awaited them. One night was certainly not enough. Brazen she might be, but Abigail still required a little wooing to get things off on the proper footing, and besides, she wanted a real love affair: a matter of several months, full of passion and pleasure and clandestine arrangements, before it came to a dramatic end when she caught him in some infidelity, or when he was forced to marry and breed more dukes, at the exact moment when all that passion and pleasure began to fade into routine. She would throw a few vases at his head, he would grasp her by the shoulders and kiss her one last desperate time, and she would order him from the room and weep for days, or at least hours.
It would be perfect.
But damned difficult to arrange, when she was on her way to a year’s exile in the Tuscan hills.
Well, what was the point of anything, without a little challenge to keep one on one’s toes?
Abigail chewed thoughtfully on the end of her pencil, considering various scenarios, constructing mental images of a naked Wallingford in various attitudes, and at last scribbled a single Italian sentence on the paper. (The duke, she knew, would be much more inclined to accept an amorous invitation from an Italian serving maid than from the maiden sister of the Dowager Marchioness of Morley.) She folded the paper, placed it in her pocket, and rose from her chair, just as Philip shot by on his way to the door.
She caught him in her arms and rubbed his taut little belly with her nose. “Naughty boy,” she said, laughing. “Naughty, wicked, despicable boy.”
“Abigail, you’ll overexcite him,” said Lilibet, looking indescribably weary.
Poor Lilibet. If Abigail needed any further persuasion that she should never marry, she had only to look at her cousin: betrayed and belittled and God knew what else by a promiscuous husband who regarded her with rather less interest than the cut of meat for his dinner. All this, despite her beauty and charm and good nature, despite her implacable virtue. Lilibet’s faithless beast of a husband was the very reason they were fleeing to Italy in the first place.