A Reckless Desire

by Isabella Bradford

  “Hawkesmoor,” he corrected from habit. “Nicholas Hawkesmoor.”

  She laughed, the merry sound like Heaven to him. “Oh, Rivers, you cannot help yourself, can you? Show me the places where you and your brothers were wicked, and I shall be a thousand times more content than if I learned what joiners put the windows in place.”

  He smiled sheepishly, realizing that he, too, had not smiled much today before now. Hawkesmoor had been a lofty and legendary architect, not a humble joiner, but Rivers would not give her the satisfaction of being a schoolmaster again by pointing out the difference. And she was right: it didn’t matter. He still wasn’t entirely sure why he was bringing her to Breconridge Hall, but he knew it wasn’t for an architectural lecture.

  “Then I shall show you the picture gallery where we ran races with our dogs when it rained,” he said instead, “and the marble statue of a Roman goddess whose toe we knocked off with a cricket bat. We lived in fear that Father would notice, but I doubt he ever has.”

  She laughed again, and he laughed with her: not because the goddess’s broken toe was that funny, but because laughing with her was one of the things he most liked doing with her.

  “I promise I won’t be the one to tell your father,” she said, “though I’d like very much to see the poor goddess.”

  “Father won’t be there, in any event,” he said. “No one will, not with Parliament in session and the Court in town until the end of the summer. The house will be empty except for the servants. We shall have the place to ourselves.”

  “Truly?” she asked curiously. “None of your family?”

  “Not a one,” he said. Their absence was so obvious to him that he hadn’t considered that she might have wished to meet them. “I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Oh, I am not disappointed,” she exclaimed. “I am relieved. I do not think I could be presented to Mr. McGraw and His Grace the Duke of Breconridge in the same day. Dio buono, I would perish from too much magnificence.”

  She smiled, full of her old impish charm. Yet the fact that she’d fallen back into that little bit of Italian—she’d nearly abandoned it entirely along with her old accent for the sake of Mrs. Willow—proved that her true feelings were likely as unsettled as his own. Had she expected him to introduce her to his family?

  He loved Lucia, loved her more than he’d ever loved any other woman. Yet to introduce her to his father, in his father’s house, was so unthinkable that he hadn’t even thought it, and he didn’t like himself for doing—or not doing—so. In fact, as he looked at her lovely, trusting face as she smiled up at him, he felt shamefully unworthy, and a coward in the bargain.

  “Perishing from magnificence is entirely possible where my father is concerned,” he said, striving to continue the jest. “I suspect there have been more than a few people at Court who have felt that way in his presence. Here we are.”

  The carriage had stopped before the door on the West Front, the wheels crunching on the white stone that was raked daily. This wasn’t the main entrance to the house—that would be the even more formal South Front—but this was the closest to the Lodge, and the door by which Rivers usually entered. It was a mark of just how large the house was that it even had three separate fronts and formal entrances, each added by a different generation of dukes, and each, too, calculated to be more imposing. The West Front had been built by the second duke, Rivers’s great-uncle, and it was still sufficiently grand to leave most visitors awestruck.

  It definitely had that affect on Lucia. He’d stepped out of the carriage as soon as the footman had opened the door, and now he stood waiting to hand her down, yet she remained half-standing in the door, her mouth open as she tipped her head back to stare up at the curving double staircase and the large house it led to.

  “Madre di Dio,” she murmured faintly. “Non ho parole.”

  I have no words. Perhaps Father should be here after all, thought Rivers, because he would have relished her reaction.

  “I warned you,” he said, thankful they hadn’t gone around to the South Front. “The Hall can be daunting from the drive.”

  Still she didn’t move. “It didn’t seem nearly this big from the Lodge.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he agreed. “But from the Lodge’s roof, the Hall is a good two miles away.”

  “That’s true.” At last she recalled herself and took his hand to step down. She flipped the hood to her cloak over her hair, looked up at the skies, and then flipped it back. “And at least the rain has stopped.”

  “In your honor, madam,” he said gallantly, leading her up the curving stairs. He usually took the steps two at a time, but on account of her shorter stride and because she was openly gaping up at the front of the house, he kept to a more leisurely pace with her on his arm. Besides, he liked having her beside him, with her little hand in the crook of his arm and her silk skirts blowing against his legs in the breeze. “I’ve arranged the weather entirely to your liking.”

  Skeptical, she glanced up at him from beneath her lashes, and found an appropriate quote from Hamlet. “ ‘How is it that the clouds still hang on you?’ ”

  He laughed as they reached the door. “Because I’ve taken them away from your head to hang over my own, entirely for your benefit.”

  The door was opened by a young footman that Rivers didn’t recognize. This wasn’t surprising; the butler, Mr. Maitland, usually stood guard at the primary door, and left the other entrances to lesser servants, especially when the family was not in residence.

  “My—my lord, good day,” the young man stammered, bowing repeatedly as he held the door wide.

  “Good day to you, too,” Rivers said, striving to sound as kind and unassuming as possible. “You’re new, aren’t you?”

  “Since Michaelmas,” the footman said. From his downy cheeks to the livery coat inherited from a much larger predecessor, he could not be more than fifteen. “I’m Tomlin, my lord.”

  “Welcome to Breconridge Hall, Tomlin,” Rivers said as he ushered Lucia inside the house. “I trust you’ll serve my father well for many years to come.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Tomlin said, carefully closing and latching the door as he’d been trained. “Mr. Maitland didn’t say you was expected.”

  “That’s because I wasn’t,” Rivers said. “I’m here on a whim, for a brief ramble about the house, that is all.”

  The footman glanced at Lucia, flushed, and swallowed hard. “Will you be requiring tea, my lord, with the ah, the, ah—”

  “My friend,” Rivers said with gentle emphasis. “This is Mrs. Willow, Tomlin, and she is a dear friend of mine. And no, we shall not stay for tea. I would not dream of distressing the kitchen staff by appearing without any warning.”

  “Very well, my lord,” the footman said, bowing one last time and to spare him further embarrassment Rivers hurried Lucia across the patterned marble floor, past a pair of gilded crouching lions, and up the staircase.

  “Poor Tomlin,” Lucia said when they were out of the footman’s hearing. “You were very kind to him. Many gentlemen wouldn’t be.”

  Her genuine sympathy reminded Rivers of how often she herself must have been treated rudely by gentlemen in the tiring room. She had changed so much in these last weeks that it was hard to realize she’d still been working there less than a month before.

  “At least you’ve been spared being greeted by Mr. Maitland,” he said as they turned down another grand hallway. Because his father was in London, the halls and rooms were all empty, and without the usual small army of servants bustling about and standing guard outside rooms. “He is the Hall’s butler, and never was there a more fierce Cerberus to guard our doors than Mr. Maitland. He has the unique ability to approach without a sound, and catch small boys in the very act of willful misbehavior.”

  “I’m sure all three of you were quite willful,” Lucia said, gazing around her. “Poor Mr. Maitland must have had his hands full when you were home. Rivers, I have never seen so many paint
ings!”

  “We Fitzroys do seem to have a weakness for them,” he admitted. She was right: every spare wall was hung with at least one large canvas, framed with a heavy gilded frame, something he took for granted. “I never gave it much thought, really. My cousin Hawk is the true connoisseur. He’s advised Father on buying new pictures, as well as suggesting which other ones might be better retired to the attic.”

  She glanced at him curiously. “You have a cousin who’s named Hawk? Like Hawkesmoor?”

  He chuckled. “It’s not his Christian name,” he said. “Not that I can recall exactly what that is. Most likely John or George or somesuch. And it’s not Hawkesmoor like the architect, but Hawkesworth for his ducal title, which we shorten to Hawk. The same applies to my older brother Harry, who isn’t really a Henry or Harold, but Earl of Hargreave.”

  She paused, running her fingers lightly over the polished edge of a long satinwood sideboard while she considered. “So your true name isn’t Rivers after all?”

  “No, it is,” he said, a little sheepishly. Most of the greater world went through life without any honorific whatsoever, but since his family was so riddled with titles of every degree, being a younger son had always been something just short of an embarrassment. “Being the third son, I have neither title nor name beyond Lord Rivers Fitzroy, and Rivers is what they poured over my forehead when I was baptized, or so goes the old family jest. Hah, here is wounded Juno, and still not mended.”

  He stopped before a nearly life-sized marble statue of the Roman goddess, standing on a black pedestal between two tall arched windows. Juno stood with her weight on one foot with the other coyly bent, and it was this foot that had suffered the long-ago loss of a toe to the Fitzroy brothers. And it was still broken, awkwardly snapped off where Harry’s cricket bat had struck.

  Rivers patted the statue familiarly on the knee. “I cannot believe no one has noticed it,” he said. “Nor, apparently, has the lady herself complained over the last decade.”

  “She should have kicked you at the very least,” Lucia said, coming to stand on the other side of the statue. “What became of her toe?”

  Rivers tried to look solemn. “I regret to admit that I do not know. My dog—a wicked small terrier named Scrap—seized it as a prize and ran off, and for all I know it’s now buried beside some prized mutton bone. So while it was Harry’s bat that dealt the blow, it was my dog that completed the crime, and so I am every bit as much at fault.”

  She laughed, her head tipped to one side and the pale sun from one of the windows lightly gilding her cheek. Her beauty struck him once again, a kind of glorious enchantment that only she possessed, but this time there was something more, something amazing, that took him by stunned surprise.

  Standing there with the arch over her head like a kind of halo, her blue flowered gown an extension of the now-blue sky through the window and her profile a twin to the marble goddess’s, she looked as if she’d as much a place here as Juno herself. She looked as if she belonged here, as if she’d spent her entire life at a house such as this. The realization jolted him, and he swiftly tried to control it with reason: it was the dress, the sunlight, her smile, together conspiring to make the playhouse tiring-girl look at ease in the country house of the Duke of Breconridge.

  “And thus I have seen the deity’s toe, Rivers, or the absence of it,” she said playfully, unaware of his thoughts. “Show me more of you as a boy, if you please.”

  Forcibly he pulled himself back to the present, the way she always wished him to be. He took her hand to lead her down the hall, trying to think of something else to show her in the vast house that was part of him. Absently he glanced at the large painting to his left, and smiled.

  “Here’s another,” he said. “This is a portrait of me with my brothers, though we’re so young that you’d never recognize us from this now.”

  Frowning with concentration, she studied the painting. “I wouldn’t know them anyway. I don’t believe your brothers ever came with you back among the dancers, did they?”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” he said absently. “They’re both too occupied with their wives and children to bother with actresses or dancers now.”

  He’d forgotten all about this painting. He and his brothers had been very young, but at least Harry and Geoffrey had been old enough to have been breeched, both of them dressed like little gentlemen in miniature with their dark hair curled and clubbed to resemble wigs. He himself was still in a young child’s long gown with a satin sash, and his pale blond hair in wispy ringlets to his shoulders. His brothers had teased him about those ringlets, he remembered that, just as he remembered posing for the artist in a makeshift studio in one of the guest bedchambers, and not beneath the shady tree shown in the finished picture.

  “You don’t look as if you belong with them,” Lucia said. “You look different.”

  “That’s because I was added in afterward, by a different artist,” he said. “I suppose I was considered too young when my brothers were first painted.”

  It made sense to him, but not to her. “Why are you waving your arms about like that? Are you trying to get their attention?”

  “I’m holding my hands out because I was still unsteady on my feet,” he explained patiently, but clearly she wasn’t going to believe him. “Here, I’ll show you a place where we used to dare one another to go.”

  “A dare?” she asked, intrigued and perking up with interest as they turned down another hall. “Is it a frightening place?”

  “No, but it was strictly forbidden,” he said, trying to sound mysterious. “We were never to go inside, let alone touch anything. No one was permitted there, yet still we did, and never were caught.”

  He threw open the last door with a flourish and she hung back in the doorway, uncertain of what she’d see.

  “It’s the King’s Bedchamber,” he said with family pride. To have a bedchamber reserved for royalty meant that a family was important enough to have the king visit their home. “Only to be used by His Majesty when he comes calling, and never anyone else.”

  Tentatively she stepped inside the shadowy room. The curtains were drawn against fading from the sun, and the furniture was shrouded in drop cloths, but still the state bed rose in all its gilded glory, with a towering canopy and carved mahogany unicorns and lions supporting the bedposts.

  “Does His Majesty visit often?” she asked in a respectful whisper.

  “He has been here three times in my memory,” he said, tugging one of the curtains open to let in a splash of sunlight across the patterned carpet. It also lit the portrait on the wall of his father, sternly imposing in the red velvet and white ermine of his Garter robes.

  “That must be your father,” Lucia asked, following his gaze. “You’re fair where he is dark, but I can see your face in his.”

  “Then you’re seeing a resemblance that few others find,” Rivers said, considering the picture beside her. “You see how he’s glowering, reminding you that it’s treasonous for anyone other than royalty to be in this room. Why, if it were up to him, you’d be locked away in the Tower.”

  Her eyes widened even as she laughed. “It is not treason to be here!”

  “High treason.” He folded his arms over his chest and scowled ominously, trying to emulate his father. “The highest. Should you care to test me, madam?”

  She grinned, then crossed the room and hopped up squarely into the middle of the enormous state bed.

  “Test me, my lord,” she said, patting the coverlet beside her in invitation. “I dare you.”

  Her audacity shocked him. Not even his brothers would have taken that dare as boys. For all his teasing, the state bed was sacrosanct and untouchable, and always had been.

  Until now. Until Lucia.

  “Dare accepted,” he said, jumping onto the bed beside her. Delighted, she turned her head and kissed him, and he thought of how this was the best possible dare in his entire life.

  “Before, with the footman, you
called me your friend,” she said, her voice a husky whisper. “Your dear friend. You didn’t have to do that, but you did.”

  “Because it was the truth,” he said, brushing a stray curl back from her forehead. “I said the same to McGraw today, before you joined us.”

  Her smiled tightened, and she glanced down. “He believes I’m your whore.”

  “I told him you were my dearest friend,” he said firmly, “and that I hold you in the highest respect and regard.”

  Her eyes fluttered up. “You did?”

  “I did,” he said, leaving no doubt, “because it is God’s own truth. I also informed him that if he ever dares treat you in any fashion unworthy of you, he shall answer to me.”

  “Oh, Rivers,” she murmured, the slight catch in her voice betraying her emotion. “That is why you were so—so short with Mr. McGraw this morning, wasn’t it? You were challenging him on my behalf?”

  “I was defending you, sweetheart,” he said, leaning closer to kiss her again. “Because you deserve defending. Because—”

  “Rivers?” said a woman behind him. “Heavens, Rivers, that is you.”

  Instantly he whipped about, shielding Lucia with his body. The woman behind him wasn’t just a woman, but a duchess: Her Grace the Duchess of Breconridge, his stepmother, Celia.

  Nor was she alone. In the doorway with her were not only Mr. Maitland the butler and Tomlin the callow footman, but his two sisters-in-law, Harry’s wife, Gus, Countess of Hargreave, and Geoffrey’s wife, Serena, Lady Geoffrey Fitzroy. They were staring with various reactions—dismay, horror, amusement, and most of all, surprise—but none of that could match the mortification he felt there with Lucia beside him. Damnation, why hadn’t anyone told him the ladies were here?

  But all his ever-gracious stepmother did was smile warmly, a smile that included Lucia as well.