Alec Mackenzie's Art of Seduction: Mackenzies (Mackenzies Series Book 9)

by Jennifer Ashley

  It was such a different thing to travel as a married woman, Celia realized. She’d always been rather an appendage when she journeyed in her father’s coach, her father and brother being the most important members of the family.

  At the turnpike inn and now the inn at Stanford, the landlady assumed Celia would make all the important decisions—what was to be done with the baggage, what food would she like brought, and what sort of chambers did she wish to take?

  Mrs. Reynolds slid into her relegated position as lesser person without fuss, and remained silent as Celia answered the landlady’s questions. Alec again became the hearty if dim country squire, deferring all decisions to Celia. He was masterful at puckering up his face as though thinking hard and then shrugging and saying, “You must ask my wife. Yes, she will know what to do.”

  “You’re horrible,” Celia said when they lay in bed under the eaves. She poked him playfully in the chest. “I’ve never had to give such commands before. I’m terrified I’ll choose wrong.”

  “I’m not.” Alec gave her a smile that fired her blood. “You’ve a wise head on your shoulders. You can look after your doltish husband with no trouble.”

  “They pity me, I think. I see the landlady’s sympathy when you clutch your head and walk away. You’re enjoying it.”

  “Aye, a bit of playacting is a welcome diversion. And it keeps them from asking questions.”

  He had a point. “But you refused to dress up as Pierrot in the gardens,” she reminded him.

  Alec gave her a long-suffering look. “There are limits, my wife. It was hard enough putting on the uniform of a Scot whose job it is to put down other Scots.”

  Celia regarded him in puzzlement. “I thought you said the man was a friend of yours.”

  “He is. But he’s fighting Frenchies and their allies on the Continent, not striding about the Highlands. Hence, we became friends. He lent me the uniform in case I needed to be a Scot while in England, but not a feared one.”

  “You are a complex man, my Lord Alec.” Celia traced designs on his bare chest, enjoying the planes and curves of him.

  “Not really. But I’ll present whatever face I have to.” He nuzzled her. “With you, I can be the real Alec. Thank you for giving me that, lass.”

  Celia kissed him. “I like the real Alec. Do you like the real Celia, I wonder?”

  “I have all this time.” Alec ended the conversation by rolling her onto her back and sliding inside her, loving her in swift silence.

  In the morning, Alec woke with Celia’s warm hair spread across his shoulder, and his protectiveness surged. The thought of taking her close to the house they’d explore today, possibly putting her near soldiers, a pack of restless young men away from home, made every misgiving rise. If they were guarding prisoners and spotted and arrested Alec, what would they do to Celia?

  “Stay behind today,” he said as Celia blinked open her eyes. “Hide away here, and let the landlady look after you. Mrs. Reynolds and I will explore and return.”

  “Absolute nonsense,” she said at once.

  The heat of her defiance didn’t really surprise him. “It will be dangerous, love.” And if he lost her, no words would describe the incredible emptiness and grief that would be Alec Mackenzie. He’d already lost enough.

  Celia sat up, the covers falling enticingly from her body. “I have already told you. I am here to help you. I will, no matter how small my assistance might be. I want you to find your brother. Besides, leaving me here is no guarantee of my safety. Plenty of dangerous people come to inns and taprooms. Who knows if the landlord can be trusted to guard me?”

  Alec’s rumble of anger shook the bed, but he realized their argument would quickly escalate to a shouting match, for which he didn’t have time, and conceded.

  He took in her flushed face, flashing eyes, and clenched fists and decided that later he might enjoy continuing the row. Even her triumph as Alec growled that she might as well accompany them made him want to kiss her. A full-blown argument would probably have an even better ending.

  Celia scrambled into the coach when they went down after breakfast, as though worried he’d tell the coachman to rush off and leave her behind. Alec said nothing, only helped Mrs. Reynolds in and took his seat, and they were off.

  The house the coach bumped toward was south of Stanhope near the village of Mucking, which ran along a creek emptying into the Thames. Farms spread from one side of the village, lush and green, and marshes, gray tinged with green, lay on the other.

  Closer to the river, on the road to Tilbury, the coach creaked onto a tiny lane scarcely wide enough for the vehicle. Lined with brush that slapped against the wheels, it ran alongside the creek. The roof of a large house appeared over the brush, but this road skirted rather than approached it.

  “Is this the house?” Celia asked as Alec tensed. “I know this place. It is Lord Spalding’s estate.”

  Alec nodded. “Aye. The second possible prison is just beyond this.”

  Chapter 22

  Celia leaned forward to take in the stone chimneys rising above the close-growing trees. “Lord Spalding and my father don’t get on. Lord Spalding is obdurate in the question of banning slavery completely, even in the colonies. They quarrel about it endlessly.”

  Alec said nothing as he studied the house, committing every stone of it to memory.

  The road curved past the house and headed toward fields, which were sprouting whatever Englishmen planted in this part of the country. A wall separated the grounds from the lane, and beyond the wall was a smaller building, long and low, one story high, that stretched across the bottom of the garden. Alec knocked on the roof of the carriage and asked the coachman to stop.

  “The orangery,” Celia said, looking out with him. “Very lovely inside, with lavish rooms where Lord Spalding holds banquets when the fit takes him. He keeps his orange trees in there too, but they are incidental.”

  Alec huffed a laugh as he ran his gaze over the arched, many-paned windows on the orangery’s ground floor. The foundation bore small windows, which presumably opened to a kitchen and other storage rooms.

  “As deathly quiet as the house in Cambridge,” Alec observed. The building was meant to be festive, but under the leaden skies it was drab and forbidding.

  “Most families are in London still.” The scent of rosewater Celia had bathed her face in that morning touched Alec as she leaned to him. “There will be a few more grand balls in the city, then we’ll start heading to estates for summer fetes and house parties, and when it gets colder, hunting and shooting.”

  “Not much different from what we do in Scotland,” Alec said. “Summer and fall is for growing and harvesting, January for swanning to Edinburgh, putting on silk stockings, and pretending to be dandies.”

  “I look forward to that,” Celia said in a light voice.

  Alec liked that she assumed all would be well sooner or later, that normal life could resume for him. Alec was skeptical, but having her optimism about him was refreshing.

  “Shall we drive on?” Mrs. Reynolds asked in impatience from where she sat on the cushioned seat. “In case they have guards?”

  Alec knocked on the roof, and their journey resumed. They continued the drive, pretending to be nothing more than an idle family traipsing about the country, reveling in its natural beauty—a popular pastime—before they returned to Stanhope to sleep.

  The next morning they headed south. A ferry at Tilbury took them with the carriage across the river to Gravesend, and in a village not far south of that, they crossed an ancient road that had lain here for seventeen centuries.

  “This is the road that took pilgrims to Canterbury in the days of Mr. Chaucer, my brother told me,” Celia said, indicating the large, flat stones with grass growing up between them. “And the Roman legions marched over it from the sea to London—Londinium—and back again.”

  Alec gazed down the faint line of stones, placed there by men of the Roman army nearly two millennia ago.
His brother, Malcolm, had a fascination for history and antiquities—the discovery of the ancient city of Herculaneum near Naples excited Mal to no end. Only business at the distillery and then the Jacobite Uprising had kept him from rushing there and burrowing into the earth himself. He’d do it one day soon, no doubt.

  Alec took his notebook from his pocket, opened to a blank page, and quickly sketched the road. He’d fill in more later from memory—the vast gray sky, the contrast of the very English farm village around it, the ghostly auras of the legionnaires as they tramped after their commanders.

  Their coach left the road behind and turned south and west, moving slowly through farmlands interspersed with wild country. Alec hadn’t been in this part of England before and wondered at the odd, squat houses with brick roofs topped with large, conical chimneys that rose from the grasses from time to time.

  “Oast houses,” Celia said, noting his puzzlement. “For drying hops, which many farmers grow in Kent. They spread the hops on a drying floor, and heat comes up through cracks beneath and disperses through the chimneys.”

  “Hops, eh?” Alec asked. “Are you a brewer?”

  Celia dimpled in amusement. “Of course not. But farmers on my father’s land grow hops, and I am curious by nature. My brother and I made nuisances of ourselves when we were younger, and the oast house workers showed us everything, likely to keep an eye on us.”

  And a good landlord knew exactly what his tenants grew and how it was processed and when crops were good or bad. The same way a good laird helped when times were hard and shared the rewards with his men when times were easy.

  Alec sharply missed the life at Kilmorgan, when he and his brothers worked alongside their tenants and celebrated when the work was done. They would have that back, Alec vowed. One day.

  They traveled a dozen miles in total, spending the night at Wrotham, which was near Celia’s father’s estate and not far from Sevenoaks. Celia went to their private chamber quickly, Alec noted, now worried she’d be recognized.

  They kept to their chambers for meals and sleep, and left again in the morning, heading for the last house on Mrs. Reynolds’s list. This was a castle, or an imitation one, near Shoreham.

  They entered another turnpike road, and the coachman handed over the shilling and sixpence for their coach and four horses. Wits in London liked to say that while highwaymen robbed you only once, turnpikes kept on robbing you, sanctioned by Acts of Parliament.

  Plans were in motion to extend turnpikes and wider roads up into Scotland, another attempt to tame the Highlanders. They’d tried this with the Wade roads after the 1715 uprising, but this time, Alec reflected, they wouldn’t stop until the Highlands were paved and its inhabitants beggared or driven out.

  They came upon the ruin of a real castle, now a lump of stone with one tower still standing. Alec was surprised to see even that, as local men would have absconded with the stones—why leave perfectly good building material to disintegrate in the rain?

  The man who’d built the manor house just south of this must have tried to emulate the castle—the house was red brick and rambling, with false turrets here and there poking up over the wall around it.

  “Home of the Tate family,” Celia said. “The Earl of Chesfield, one of my father’s friends. The earl has strong anti-Jacobite feelings and helped my father fund his regiment.”

  “A good candidate for holding Scotsmen prisoner, then,” Alec said, tasting sourness.

  Mrs. Reynolds calmly watched the brick crenellations of the walls flow by. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. Careful observation will help us at present.”

  “I won’t go bursting in waving my claymore, if that’s your worry,” Alec said. “But if I find out they’re holding Will, I’ll get him out of there, whatever it takes.”

  “I am certain you will,” Mrs. Reynolds said in cool tones.

  He noted Celia’s look, which held understanding. In that moment, Alec realized he was no longer alone. The emptiness of his existence since Angus and Duncan had died began to fill again.

  The road went past the house to the lands behind it. The Earl of Chesfield’s estate didn’t have a grand orangery or ornate gardens, but it did have an extensive park and woods that ran to the end of the property. At the edge of these woods was an older house, possibly the original manor before the current earl had built his monstrosity.

  The old house had two floors, the ground floor with small windows closed by heavy shutters, a relic of the times when a home was a fortress against one’s neighbors. The upper floor contained a row of dormer windows, also shuttered.

  The mists that wound through the trees, blurring the light brick and black roof, was picturesque to an artist, disquieting to a passerby. To Alec, the house was merely a pile of stones that might hide his brother.

  Alec opened his sketchbook to a blank page and drew the scene in quick, bold lines, adding in the trees that grew up to its walls. The house must have once lain in a clearing, but time and neglect had let the woods return and overrun it. All the better for secrecy?

  He did not like the feeling he got from the place, a miasma of isolation and uneasiness. Difficult to believe they were a mere twenty-five miles or so from London, and very few miles from the thriving spa at Tunbridge Wells. This place was eerie, lonely.

  When they emerged from the woods, the narrow road ran down a short hill to a chapel that lay in ruins, its roof gaping to the sky. Most likely it was a remnant of a monastery or nunnery that had been closed and gutted by Henry the Eighth when he’d had his tiff with the Catholic Church. Again, most of the stones had been carried away by locals, but enough remained of the abandoned chapel to add to the forlorn note of this part of the journey.

  They circled back south to Shorham, where they put up at yet another inn.

  Celia and Mrs. Reynolds descended and Alec moved to speak to the coachman, at the same time a man in a scarlet coat, a soldier of some regiment, came out of the taproom and into the yard, settling his hat as he made swiftly for the gate.

  Celia’s eyes widened and she swung around, quickly bowing her head and staring fixedly at the coach’s wheels. The man gave them an uninterested glance as he went past, finding no significance in the travelers.

  Alec had begun to relax when the soldier halted. The man remained in place, his back to them, as though thinking something over, and then he swung around. He was young, with hair the same color as Celia’s, a frown creasing his face as he looked her over.

  “Celia?” he said with incredulity. He strode to her before Alec could get between him and her, and swung her around. “What the devil are you doing here?”

  Chapter 23

  Celia stared in dismay at her brother, Edward Fotheringhay, Captain in the Duke of Crenshaw’s Brigade, who gazed down at her in bafflement.

  His expression held no outrage, she realized in the next heartbeat. He must not have heard of her elopement.

  “What are you doing here?” she countered. “I thought your regiment was in France.”

  “On leave,” Edward said quickly, but his eyes flickered.

  Edward had always been bad at lying. Something was not right. “Then why not stay at the house?” Celia asked. “Or is the ale tastier among villagers?”

  She put a teasing note in her voice, and Edward looked relieved. Celia perceived that Edward was more disconcerted that she’d seen him than that he’d seen her.

  “As you say,” Edward answered, but distractedly. He caught sight of Mrs. Reynolds and frowned anew. “Why is Mrs. Reynolds chaperoning you? Is Lady Flora here?” He looked about more swiftly, nervously, as though ready to flee on a moment’s notice.

  “London was growing too hot and close,” Celia said, waving her hand. “I wanted to come home for some air.”

  Again, Edward looked relieved, and nodded. “Mother is very angry with you.” He spoke offhand, as though searching for something to say.

  “So are you—I thought.”

  “I was. I mean, I am.
” Edward dragged forth a scowl, but he seemed preoccupied. “You were too hasty and obstinate. I have forgiven you, because I’m so fond of you, Ceil, but you know you ruined your chances. All you can do now is wait upon Father and Mother, or hope that a steady gentleman someday will overlook the incident and take you on.”

  Celia was sharply aware of Alec, who’d kept himself near the coachman, his back turned. But he listened, his stance tense, boots planted firmly on the yard’s dusty stones.

  Mrs. Reynolds said nothing at all, fading politely back a few steps, as would be expected of a mere companion. No help would be forthcoming from her.

  Celia could put Edward off and hope he went about his business, whatever it was, but if he was on his way to Hungerford Park, he’d be puzzled if she didn’t accompany him. He would also discover, sooner or later, that Celia had run off with Mr. Finn—a letter might be heading to him even now.

  Might as well get it over with. “Edward, I’m married,” Celia blurted.

  Edward blinked, as though this were the last thing he’d expected her to tell him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I married. A few nights ago. To a drawing master.” Celia gestured to Alec who was now patting the horses, every line of his back rigid.

  “A drawing master?” Edward’s eyes widened, and his distracted air fled. “Have you run completely mad? Really, Celia, you have gone too far. Papa will annul this marriage right away—if he refuses, I will insist.”

  Edward’s hazel eyes, so like Celia’s, blazed, his chest puffing out with indignation.

  “You will do no such thing,” Celia said hotly. “It is a legal marriage. Mr. Finn is a gentleman, and none of the conditions of annulment can be met.” She flushed as she spoke the last.

  A marriage could be annulled upon one of three conditions—if a man were already married, or if the couple were too closely related, or if the man were impotent. Alec had proved fairly often the last few nights that he was not the latter.