by Gaelen Foley
She sensed him stiffen, but his tone was dry. “I wasn’t aware you had noticed.”
“Of course I did.” She held her cool smile in place, staring straight ahead. “We didn’t even get a chance to talk.”
“And what is there to talk about, exactly?”
At his dull tone, Mara eyed him in question.
“Let’s be honest. You didn’t want me to come to Mrs. Staunton’s in the first place. You said it was a bad idea.” He glanced casually at his horse. “I should’ve listened. You were right.”
“So you did not enjoy yourself at all?”
He turned and looked at her for a long moment. “I did not go to the party to enjoy myself, Mara. I went to see you.”
She was not sure how to take that.
The ducks clacked in the background while Thomas laughed, guarded over by the ever-vigilant Mrs. Busby.
“For your part, it was rather plain you almost didn’t come, knowing I’d be there,” he pointed out.
“But I did come,” she protested softly. “Just a little late.”
When he raised a knowing eyebrow, she gave up her effort to seem nonchalant. “Very well, I admit it. Seeing you at Christie’s was a-a bit unnerving after all this time. But I changed my mind and came so that I could see you.” Searching his face, she shrugged. “Then you barely spoke to anyone and slipped out at the first opportunity.”
His lips flattened to a narrow line; he, too, kept his gaze fixed watchfully on Thomas. “Well, I apologize for my lack of conversation. But if you had really wanted to chat, you should not have surrounded yourself with half a dozen other men. Did you expect me to fight my way through the crowd for the privilege of speaking to you? Just like old times, eh?”
She was taken aback by the edge under his smooth voice, but she checked her anger. “Gracious, if I didn’t know better, I would say that you sound jealous.”
“Well, my dear, that was your intention, was it not?” he replied. “You must have forgotten, I never played those games, even when we were young. You, on the other hand, used to take great delight, as I recall, in inspiring all manner of wild reactions in all the poor, stupid males around you.”
She stared hard into his gleaming eyes. “That was a long time ago,” she informed him, but he would not give an inch.
“It was just a few nights ago, actually,” he answered with a cool smile.
She scowled. “What girl isn’t a bit of a flirt at seventeen?” she exclaimed. “I might have encouraged a few of my beaux, but it’s a jolly good thing I did! Because, clearly, I couldn’t count on you.”
He winced and scoffed softly but shook his head and avoided her gaze.
Mara glared at him. “At any rate, we both know making you jealous is beyond my power, my lord. You made it plain long ago that you couldn’t care less if I live or die.”
He snorted quietly, looking at the water. “If you say so.”
His cool detachment rattled her. She fought to hold her tongue, but as she shook her head, the resentful words spilled from her. “If you cared, you would not have left like that the other night—but that’s what you do, isn’t it, Jordan? You judge someone not worth the bother, then walk away without a backward glance.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he informed her in a lower tone, glancing into her eyes.
“Then tell me! Whatever it is you have to say to me, by all means, let me hear it! I’ve waited twelve years for some kind of an explanation from you!”
“You’ve waited?” he bit back, keeping his voice low, for Thomas’s sake. “I left—Mara—to fulfill my duty, hoping in my absence you might leave off playing the coquette and grow the hell up! I thought perhaps when I returned, you and I could’ve—” His words broke off in frustration. He dropped his gaze. “But it was not to be. You married good old Tom while I was away.”
She searched his face, unsure how much store to put by these words. “Then—you did care for me?”
“If you can doubt it, then I don’t know which of us is the greater fool.”
“But you were gone so long!”
“Gracious, one whole year,” he mocked her softly.
“You never even wrote to me!”
He narrowed his eyes with a withering look. “I was a little busy.”
She dropped her jaw, outraged. “Busy?” Had he no idea how many times she’d cried herself to sleep? “Too busy to spare me one little line to let me know if there was hope for us or not? How, how could you do that to me?”
He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He shut it again.
Mara shook her head, trembling. “No. I don’t believe you. You never meant to return for me. That cannot be true.”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“You forgot all about me. That’s why you didn’t write! I meant nothing to you.”
“You can believe that if it makes you feel better.”
“How could that possibly make me feel better?” she cried, shaking by then.
“Because the truth is worse,” he answered grimly. “The time’s lost, and it was all for nothing.”
She stared at him with a lump in her throat.
Then she turned away. She had to blink back the threat of tears before she could speak. “Very well, is that why you never came back, then? You were angry at me because I married Tom?”
“I did come back, actually, Mara, I just didn’t come back to you. For, you see, unlike the rest of this town, I don’t dally with other men’s wives.”
She narrowed her eyes, outraged once more at his frosty insolence. “You assume I’d have been willing!”
He shrugged. “No offense, darling, but I’ve never quite thought of you as the model of virtue. Besides”—he sent her a searing glance—“it’s not as if it matters anymore.”
“No, of course. You’re right. It’s in the past,” she said. “Where it will stay!”
He dropped his gaze, the set of his wide shoulders stiff and formal. “I could not agree more. Good day, Lady Pierson. I shall not trouble you again. Congratulations on your child,” he added, but he could not seem to resist one last barb as he began walking away. “Do try not to turn him into a vain, selfish schemer like his mother!”
“How dare you?” She stepped after him in fury.
“What are you going to do, send your lover’s army to arrest me?” he shot back.
My…lover’s army?
Her eyes widened with sudden understanding.
The rumor!
So, that’s why he’s being so horrid!
“You think the prince and I—”
“Please, spare me the particulars!” he said vehemently, holding up his hand. “I heard quite enough the other night, believe me. Frankly, I don’t care what you do with whom. I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“Oh, really?” She folded her arms across her chest and glared at him.
“Be careful, Mara,” he said, still as supremely arrogant of his superior judgment and wisdom as he had been when they were young. “I’ve spent enough time in royal courts to know how easy it is to get in over your head in that environment. Mind you don’t unwittingly become a pawn in other people’s schemes.”
She shook her head at him. He really must take me for a fool. Well, if he was so very eager to believe the worst of her, if even he thought she was the Regent’s mistress, then who was she to bother him with the truth? To hell with him. “Thank you so much for your sage advice, Lord Falconridge.”
His eyes narrowed at her sarcasm. “Anytime,” he replied in kind. “Enjoy your place of privilege while it lasts, my dear. Just don’t come crawling to me when you’re cast aside for the next royal trinket!” he growled.
“My God, Jordan, what has happened to you?” she exclaimed, bewildered by this sharp edge in the man who had once been the very flower of chivalry. “What is this cold and bitter thing you have become?”
His lips twisted. “Believe me, you don’t want to know.” He offered a
rather rude bow, pivoted, and stalked back to his horse, swinging up into the saddle.
The parting glance he shot her seethed with rage and a world of buried hurt. Then he wheeled his towering horse around and rode off at a restless canter.
He had even forgotten to take his hat.
Mara stared after him until tears blurred her vision.
She covered her lips with her fingers to stifle a small sob as she watched him riding away, exiting her life yet again and dissolving her hopes before they had even taken shape. Would she never know love? Right there in the middle of Hyde Park, her composure was suddenly hanging by a thread.
Somehow she managed to find her voice to summon her servants back to the carriage. “Jack! Mrs. Busby!” She swallowed hard, steadying herself. “We must be going! Thomas needs his nap.”
“Aye, ma’am.” Her coachman got the door and lowered the metal step.
Thomas waved good-bye to the ducks at Mrs. Busby’s prompting, then the sturdy old woman carried her charge back to the coach. Mara waited for them there. Jack handed them up, then went and retrieved Jordan’s hat. He started to ask if she wanted it in the carriage, but when he saw her face, he swallowed his question and simply went and put it in the boot. They could return it to Jordan later.
She had fallen silent, in fact, was fighting not to cry in front of her child. If she did that, it would be only minutes until Thomas was bawling with her, and once the tears started flowing, she feared they’d never stop.
As soon as Thomas and his nurse were seated safely across from her, Jack resumed his place on the driver’s box, and the coach rolled into motion.
With a lump in her throat, Mara barely listened to Thomas’s cheerful babbling, determined to hold on to her composure until the sting of Jordan’s words abated.
Mrs. Busby looked at her in questioning worry. Mara shook her head discreetly, then looked out the window, counting the minutes as Jack headed the carriage homeward by the usual route.
Traveling along the Ring, the neat main carriage road through Hyde Park, they would exit at the northeast corner gate, just as they had a hundred times before.
There were several stately, wrought-iron gates that gave access to the hundreds of acres that made up the sprawling greenery of Hyde Park.
The nearest one to her home let out onto busy Oxford Street—but as they neared it, an unexpected obstacle ahead forced Jack to slow the carriage.
“Oh, not again,” Mara murmured, frowning out the window at the crowd that had assembled all around the northeast corner of the park.
It was becoming a favorite spot for the lower orders to gather in protest against the government’s various policies. These unlicensed demonstrations had grown more frequent since the end of the war. England had won, but as the dust settled, they realized the twenty-year war had left them nearly bankrupt.
Throughout England, unrest was on the rise: Riots over the Corn Laws, another round of taxes on foodstuffs casting the poor into desperate fear of starvation.
Then there was the Navy’s failure to pay many thousands of sailors, now understandably angry over months of wages being held in arrears. Luddites breaking machines in the factories up north. Radical broadsheets circulating, making wild accusations against the government and giving rise to a new wave of fears among the citizenry that there might indeed be Jacobins lurking in their midst, not off in France, but right here on English soil, trying to whip up their own version of a bloody revolution.
The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, threatened suspension of habeas corpus if things did not settle down.
Though ladies of Quality were not expected to have opinions on such things, it did not seem to Mara, well, quite English to be able to lock a person up without certain cause or explanation. Still, they weren’t Frenchmen, she thought as she gazed nervously out the window at the unruly crowd.
How ever angry he might be, John Bull could speak his piece without resorting to violence. She gathered her son closer in her arms and tried not to think about aristocrats and guillotines.
At present, a few hundred citizens had gathered to cheer yet another fiery orator bellowing the people’s list of grievances.
Usually, these impromptu rallies were quickly dispersed without incident by a contingent of the Household Cavalry from the garrison at the southern edge of Hyde Park. So far, the elite dragoons had not yet arrived, but Jack did his best to steer her carriage slowly through the crowd.
“Who does ’e think ’e is, our fine Lord Liverpool? Threatenin’ to take away our rights? The mass of men in want of bread, and what do they give us? More taxes!”
The orator ranted on against the Prime Minister and all Parliament, the Exchequer, the Admiralty, and “that brute” Lord Sidmouth in the Home Office, as well—but the name that drew the crowd’s fiercest hisses and boos was that of the Prince Regent.
Mara gulped.
“As for His Royal Highness, he grows fat while these poor children starve!”
Mara furrowed her brow, irked by the hyperbole.
Of course, they were within their rights to complain, but did they not know how little power the Regent actually wielded these days?
England’s stand-in ruler was surrounded by advisors with dubious agendas of their own, and if he attempted to do more than obediently sign his name on the bottom line of some new bill or policy, as his ministers instructed, he was chided with oily lectures and told he did not quite grasp the finer points of statesmanship, as if he were some giant baby. They insisted His Royal Highness was still too inexperienced to make the big decisions. And, of course, they were fond of reminding him that, so long as his mad old sire remained alive, he was not yet the real king. Those were the words that could always make him back down from challenging his counselors.
It was not in Prinny’s nature to put up a fight, and his own self-doubt allowed his advisors to convince him they knew best. So their dilettante-artist prince went along with his ministers’ wishes—but somehow, he was always the one who ended up taking the blame.
Unfortunately, his royal blood made him too proud to attempt to defend himself in public or to blame somebody else. Stoically, he just took it but withdrew from his people ever more pronouncedly. The populace then thought him indifferent; in reality, he was merely hurt by their complete misunderstanding of his nature and rather at his wits’ end about how to make his people like him.
His estranged wife’s constant scandals in the papers did not help his cause. Caroline of Brunswick had a talent for gleefully making her husband look even worse.
The royal cuckold, some of the satirists called him. How can he manage a kingdom if he can’t even control his own wife?
Mara felt for him. From his boyhood, the prince had been surrounded by false friends, toadies, and all manner of people he knew he couldn’t trust. And now demagogues like this, popping up out of their holes to make firebrand speeches bordering on sedition.
She feared that such dangerous talk could one day lead to her royal friend making his own terrible march up the bloodied stairs to the guillotine, just like his fellow king across the Channel more than twenty years ago.
“Rabid dogs,” Mrs. Busby scolded under breath. “Where are the soldiers? Surely this has gone on long enough.”
Mara sent her a grim look. Meanwhile, she could hear Jack shouting at people to get out of the way so he could bring the carriage through.
Unfortunately, the crowd was in no mood to be told what to do by a liveried coachman at the helm of an elegant town coach with an aristocratic coat of arms emblazoned on the door.
The speaker’s audience was milling about in disorderly fashion, choking the road and only moving aside after casting her coachman surly looks. They inched forward by fits and starts until a few lads decided to challenge him.
“Why should we move for you? Go round the other way!”
“Step aside!” Jack thundered.
“Don’t worry, we’re almost to the gates,” Mara murmured in reassu
rance to Mrs. Busby, but Thomas looked frightened, so she cupped his head against her chest and softly whispered nothings in his ear.
In truth, her heart was pounding; at least having her son in her arms, she could protect him.
All of a sudden, someone in the crowd must have recognized the Pierson coat of arms.
“’Hoy! Look! It’s the Regent’s doxy!”
Mara turned white.
Out the window, scores and scores of ordinary Londoners turned to gawk at her. The speaker heard the announcement and made a rude jest at her expense. She could not make out his words, but the crowd roared with mocking laughter. She suddenly found herself being pointed at and jeered by some two or three hundred people.
“Pardon, Your Ladyship!” the orator cried in raucous hilarity. “Won’t you deliver a message for us to your royal lover?”
She did not hear the words the orator wanted her to convey to the Regent, but the sentiment was plain as the jeering crowd swarmed around her carriage.
Jack cracked the whip to drive the people out of the way so he could bring the coach through while the throng went on mocking her as the Regent’s mistress.
She was too terrified to be humiliated at the moment, sensing a menacing ugliness beneath their air of fun.
She stifled a shriek as several low ruffians, goaded on by the ugly cheers, jumped up on her carriage and began rocking it violently, laughing, their dirty faces leering at her through the window.
Thomas began wailing.
“You got the Regent’s by-blow there, ma’am?”
“Get off my coach! How dare you?” she shouted.
“The House o’ Lords is parasites!” one man bellowed.
Thomas bawled louder, but the coach had now come to a halt except for its wild bouncing on its springs.
Mara clutched the boy to her chest, while up on the driver’s box, someone hurled a stone at Jack and knocked his hat off. He responded with a furious lash from his long driving whip.
Mrs. Busby, ashen-faced, pulled down the carriage shades, then looked over at her mistress in terror.