by Edith Layton
Julia did not reply for a moment, then she raised her head and said very carefully, in an attempt to match his coolness, “You leave me no option but to accompany you, but that does not mean that I have to listen to your unpleasant ruminations as well. And I shall not. Now please tell me where Robin is, when I am to speak with him, and when I can expect to return home. I assume that if I do as you say, I shall receive some blameless commendation from my false employer?” she added a bit more anxiously.
“Why yes,” the baron said mildly, “of course you shall. When our business is concluded. But I find your other questions less easy to answer. You see, part of the difficulty lies in the fact that I do not know precisely where Robin is to be found just now.”
As Julia gaped at him, he went on to say somewhat crossly. “All of Europe is in upheaval now, borders are being changed with the tides, places forbidden to the English are opened to them again. The expatriot set which took up residence in Greece during the war seem to be pouring into Italy and, France. Robin was snugly ensconced on some little Greek island for months, but now I have some reports that he was seen in Brussels, and yet others state that he is on the move toward Paris. But no matter. That is where we had decided to go in any case,” the baron said with finality.
“We?” Julia asked in confusion.
“Yes,” he answered perfunctorily, “you and I, of course, and my valet.”
“Just the three of us?” Julia asked, widening her eyes.
He observed her closely and then added negligently, “Oh yes, I see. Well, I imagine we can make room for an abigail for you as well. It should be a simple matter to obtain the services of one here.”
“I don’t need a lady’s maid,” Julia said quickly, “for I never had one and don’t need one now. But,” she paused and then plunged on, “I certainly shall not countenance traveling with you without a chaperone. I am surprised that with all the care you’ve taken with your scheme, you didn’t think of that.”
“A chaperone?” the baron asked in genuine surprise. Then his handsome face lit with real humor. “Here’s a flight! A chaperone for you?” he asked again, before subsiding into peals of laughter. He was laughing much too hard to see the transformation that had come over his audience. Julia’s cheeks showed twin spots of high color and her eyes lightened until they seemed to positively glow in her otherwise pale face.
She waited for him to be done with his amusement and then controlled her voice only by great effort.
“If you consider me as a candidate for wife to your nephew, I should think you would not wish there to be any gossip about me,” she said simply.
“As to that,” the baron replied, sobering, “I doubt you will meet many people who will wonder about you. I’m sorry, my dear, but this is to be no whirl of pleasure for you. I shall not run the risk of funding your merry adventures. I’d be several sorts of a fool if I brought you to balls and routs so that you might find a better protector and then loped off with some wealthy gent in tow. Oh no, my dear, you shall travel quite inconspicuously and I’ll take care to see that there will be no one who will note or care to note your presence.
“Don’t think hard of me,” the baron went on, more kindly, “for it will all be to your own benefit. If it transpires that Robin is willing to forgive and forget, it will be better that no one knows that I brought you to his side. And again, if you wish to make the most of that glowing commendation from Lady Cunningham, it is wiser if no one notes you’ve been traveling about with me instead of her.”
Julia drew in her breath and then said, with all the courage she could muster, “You don’t understand at all. It is that I cannot travel alone, with only a strange gentleman as escort.” He looked at her in surprise. Then it seemed as though he drew himself up and addressed his next words to her as though he spoke from a great height.
“Can you be serious? Do you think I might be tempted to attempt your honor?” he asked icily.
She could only bow her head in confusion at the sneer in both his face and his words.
“Well then, Miss Hastings,” he said, “content yourself. I should sooner think of coupling with a serpent than of having a try at you. One fool per family is quite enough, don’t you think? I’ll admit that you are very lovely, but I’m sorry, you are not in my style at all,” he went on, “for I never cared for secondhand experiences.”
He caught her hand quickly, before it struck his cheek, even before she knew she had swung it at him. She was so astounded that he could have anticipated an action that she had never taken in the whole of her life, that she scarcely took in his next utterance.
“Now, now,” he said with a curious sort of elation, “I did say you were lovely, didn’t I? No need to show your claws simply because I refuse your bed. You must become used to admiration from afar if you aspire to our family.”
“I don’t aspire to your family!” Julia shouted, struggling with him only to regain her hand, which he had taken in a firm and hurtful grip. “I never did.”
“Oh, I believe you once did,” he said though clenched teeth, drawing her so close by pulling upon her captive hand that she could see the knotted muscles in his lean jaw, “at least until you decided that Robin was nothing without his title and legacy. Only then did you decide against allying yourself with us. And what a difficult decision it must have been for you, coming so late, on what was to have been your very wedding night. Tell me,” he said harshly, releasing her suddenly and flinging her away so that she stumbled before she stood, shaking, staring at him, “precisely how did you put it to him? For he never told us that. And I have often wondered. It must have been well said to have influenced him so. Did you say, ‘Oh don’t be a fool, Robin, what is love without money?’ Or were you cruel, saying that only a plentitude of funds could make up for such a paucity of carnal expertise? Perhaps you were more discreet, saying only ‘You are very young, Robin, I shall have you when you have grown in years, and annuities.’ ”
“I never refused him!” Julia cried out, in her extremity speaking of that which she had vowed never to speak. “It was he who rejected me.”
“Yes,” breathed her antagonist, “of course. He carried you halfway across the kingdom with him and simply tossed you away.”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“How very disappointing,” the baron said coolly, although he was breathing raggedly and glaring at her as though she were a fiend incarnate, “I had expected a better story.”
“It is true,” Julia said, shaking her head as she attempted to discover some way to convince him of her honesty.
“And with no reason given?” he said relentlessly.
“He said he loved another,” she said woodenly.
“Ah, the tale gets better. And you believed that?” he asked.
“No,” she admitted softly.
“Then why do you imagine he deserted you, and left you all forlorn?” he asked in a travesty of sympathy, with the air of a man who is leading an idiot on.
“I do not know,” Julia answered. For she had asked herself that question so many times that it now was as if she were speaking to herself again, as she had in so many of the long nights of her short life.
“Come, come. You can do better than that. You have no idea? You tell me young Lochinvar bore you off on his white horse and then abandoned you, and you have no answer for it? Come, Miss Hastings, I expect more of you. This is poor stuff indeed, coming from such an inventive young woman,” he persevered.
But now Julia raised her head. Her white-gold hair had come loose from its pins in the violence of her encounter with the baron and now some of it spilled against her pale cheeks. Her eyes were wild and she spoke with violence. The shocks of the day, the incessant and callous questioning, the very helplessness of her situation now made her speak as she had never done before.
“I do not know,” she cried, her voice so thin and shrill that it was unrecognizable to her own ears. “I never knew. Perhaps it is he who is the demented one in
your vile family. Perhaps I disgusted him. Perhaps he hates those of my sex as much as you do and finds the same perverse pleasures in our pain as you do.”
It was then that he struck her.
6
An enormous silence filled the small room. It was the sort of shocked, fearful silence which descends after an act of violence. The pale and wide-eyed young woman stood and held her hand against her cheek. The gentleman remained motionless as well, seemingly appalled and stricken as the young woman who faced him. He had not slapped her with much force, but her delicate skin immediately showed a red weal where the blow had fallen. For though she now turned her head from him, he could see that her delicately made hand was too small to hide the flaming stain of his anger.
Then the gentleman broke from his immobility. He held up his own shaking hand and examined it as though it were an alien thing.
“I have never done such a thing before,” he said in wonderment, “never. Only a brute would strike a woman. Whatever the cause, no man can do such a thing and not feel shame. I can scarcely believe it of myself. I would never call such a man friend, yet now it transpires that I am such a man. There can be no excuse. Forgive me,” he said earnestly, “for I had no right. It was not right to do, and I am deeply ashamed.”
She looked at him and then lowered her own hand so that the red mark upon her cheek was clearly visible. There was a small flicker of light in her eyes as she saw him wince.
“No,” she said clearly, “I shall not.”
“But I offer you my sincerest apologies,” he said in bewilderment, “it ought never to have happened. Please understand that such deeds are repugnant to me.”
“I understand that,” Julia replied steadily, “but I do not accept your apology. For it was not given to me, sir. It was, instead, given solely to yourself. You are deeply shamed,” she went on with cold mockery, “you cannot believe it of yourself. You find such deeds repugnant to yourself. That is no apology to me. Forgive yourself, then, if you can, but I cannot.
“But how can you even beg my pardon?” she asked, “when you do not know me? And what can that pardon be worth when you clearly hold me in such low esteem? I am only some insensate creature you have procured for your own purposes. If you could so readily deceive me, manipulate my future, and attempt to ruin my name, why should you stick at manhandling me? It is all of a piece,” she concluded bitterly. “I see no incongruity in your actions, my lord.”
He dropped his hand to his side and shrugged his shoulders in an inchoate gesture of futility. Now, for the first time since she had met him, the baron did not seem so implacable, such a relentless figure of authority. For without his armor of surety and cynicism, he seemed somehow both more youthful and more human. Julia decided to put what seemed to be a momentary lapse upon his part to the test.
“Lord Stafford ... my lord,” she said softly, “may I go home now?”
He hardly seemed to attend her words. But then he spoke. “Ah,” he sighed heavily, “I wish you could. But, no, no, you may not. I would wish,” he said quietly, “that Robin had fixed his attention upon any other female as earnestly as you do. But he did not. And so, while I know I have begun what, believe me, I hope will be a very brief association, upon the wrong foot, I cannot end it as yet. No, you must stay. But for what it is worth, I promise you no further injury. Indeed,” he said with a bit more of his former manner, as a skewed smile appeared on his lips, “you may have my word that if I forget myself so much again as to attempt you any harm, you may then leave immediately, at whatever time it may be, or wherever we may happen to be at that time. But more than that, I cannot give you.”
“Now,” he said more briskly, “I suggest you go to your own room. I will have you shown there, I believe it is a pleasant chamber. It’s been a long journey for you, and I imagine that you will be pleased to have luncheon alone in your room and then get some deserved rest.”
Before Julia could think he was exhibiting uncharacteristic kindness, he added, “I shall expect you at dinner, however. We will dine together at eight, as we have travel plans to discuss. I expect you precisely at eight, Miss Hastings. Your failure to be there will, of course, result in my notifying my agents in England to take certain actions, just as I stated before.”
Julia nodded, and without speaking one other word, went to the door that he held open politely for her to pass through.
It was a bright, clear day and he had thought to accomplish many small chores before evening arrived. But Lord Nicholas Daventry, Baron Stafford, instead paced within a close, closed parlor on the ground floor of Quillack’s Hotel and covered almost as many miles within those snug boundaries as he might have done if he had been out upon the busy streets of Calais.
He needed time to order his thoughts and he was unused to lengthy bouts of self-criticism. He was not known by any of his many friends or acquaintances for being given to intense, prolonged periods of introspection. Indeed, had any of them chanced to see him as he paced the narrow parlor, his actions and demeanor would have been as unrecognizable to them as they were to himself now. But then he had not, he admitted, been himself in any fashion since the onset of his acquaintance with Miss Hastings.
If she had been ceaselessly acting a part since they had met, he thought with a fierce frown, then so had he. But it was harder for him, he thought with displeasure, his face taking on an even deeper expression of gloom, for he was unused to such charades. Oh, he had, in his time, been required to simulate certain emotions and enthusiasms above the common; if one were to occasionally act as courier or gatherer of information in the services of one’s country, then that was inevitable. But even his superiors never thought to ask him to perform more dire, clandestine deeds. For though it would come as a great shock to Miss Hastings, the Baron Stafford was popularly known as a pleasant, witty, and amiable fellow. Devious fellows like the Marquess of Bessacarr or the Viscount North would do for deeds requiring stealth, but Lord Stafford had such charming, easy ways it was generally agreed that he clearly had more of the makings of a diplomat than of a spy.
Before he had met Julia, the only time he had inspired terror in a feminine heart was when his observer thought he might not chance to notice her presence. If the sight of his physical person was the stuff of her nightmares, it was the heady stuff of rather more exciting dreams of the numerous other females who came within his orbit. And if he had behaved in a sarcastic, cold, and brutal manner toward Julia, then she at least had the signal honor of being the first female he had ever treated so.
For Nicholas Daventry had been surrounded by females since the moment of his birth, and he liked them very well. As an only son, arriving long after the birth of four daughters and shortly before the death of his father, his life had always seemed to be filled with caring women. Having all that constant, loving attention lavished upon him, plus the advantages of being heir to handsome looks and fortune, he might well have grown up to be the sort of self-satisfied fellow who expects devotion from women, rather than appreciating it.
It was only the happy fact that his mother remarried when he was four years of age, he often thought gratefully, and married a wise and patient man, that saved him from drowning in self-esteem. For his stepfather, a thoughtful man, had taught him to understand that love, unlike money, was more enjoyable if it was earned and returned and not simply taken and spent. It was his stepfather who had also gently prized him away from his adoring mother and sisters and arranged that he be educated at school, so that he might learn how to act in the company of men as well as women.
But there was one small, smug vanity that his wise stepfather did not think to save him from. For Nicholas came to young manhood secure in the belief that he knew womankind very well. He was firm in his absolute trust and faith in the essential goodness of their entire gender. It was a conviction that was to cost him dearly and change the course of his orderly life.
Had he disliked women or even felt superior to them as so many of his classmates did, th
en his stepfather would have no doubt corrected him in his fault. But the usually sagacious gentleman never thought to explain that it made little difference whether one judged any class of people innately superior or inferior to oneself, since such blanket judgments are always wrong. Young Nicholas respected and admired women, but in his indiscriminate affection for them he made the fatal error of forgetting that they were no better than his fellow men and were subject to the same human frailties.
And so, when at nineteen years of age, he met up with Miss Ivy Foster, he quite naturally made a complete fool of himself.
Ivy was an adorable madcap. From the moment he met her quite by chance while idling about town with some of his schoolmates, he was enraptured by her. However, he believed that he harbored few illusions about her. Since she agreed to walk out with him without a proper introduction, never permitted him to meet her parents, and never hesitated to meet him alone, he assumed she had no place in society and little care for its proprieties. In this, he was quite right.
And when their relationship went speedily from innocent diversions upon the streets of the town to far more worldly occupations upon the sheets of a rented bed, he assumed that she was a child of nature who gave freely when love was given. In this, he was absolutely wrong.
It was not that he was blinded by her charms, although he was decidedly enthralled by them. For at nineteen, he thought himself fairly sophisticated in that area. Before he had ever met her, his schoolmates had helpfully advised him as to how to supplement his formal education. Like so many other noble young gentleman, he had been taken on a few excursions to certain houses of a certain nature to learn some practical lessons in human biology. These private sessions had afforded him the opportunity to make a delicious discovery: that females were even more wondrous creatures than he had first realized. Not only could they provide a fellow with company and care, as he knew so well, but they had this other delightful ability to provide the most exquisite pleasure with their own physical persons.