chapter 13
Vergil crossed his arms and stared out the dining-room window into the wet, black night.
If Bianca had any sense at all, she would never leave that chamber upstairs.
She was a virgin. Of course she was. He had known that almost for certain. However, the simmer had encouraged enough doubt so that he could ignore his better judgment and speculate on the possibilities that her arrival presented. Maybe she wasn’t and then what he contemplated would be a bit less unconscionable. Perhaps, if he were to make love to her and do it well enough, then hopefully she . . .
Only you.
Two words had demolished all the “maybes” and “possiblys” and probably any “hopefullys.”
He shook his head with a quiet laugh. Just his luck, and wonderfully ironic. He never thought he’d see the day when he regretted learning that the woman he had decided to marry was an innocent.
She would make a splendid wife. Bright and interesting and, in her exasperating way, unpredictable. The kind of wife one looked forward to spending time with and did not merely tolerate. The sort of woman who enlivened one’s existence beyond the bed where you joined her for pleasure and procreation, although his determination to have her there played no small part in his attraction.
A perfect wife for him in other ways too. Not only because she would bring forty-five percent of the mill with her, although that would be convenient. The best part was that he would not have to hide his double life. She came from a country where men of business were not scorned. She already knew his secret and there would be no need to keep it from her.
That the woman whom he wanted should also be the only woman he could risk marrying struck him as a generous gift from Fate. It was during the coach ride that he had realized how her discovery had freed him to pursue her.
The Rossini aria that she had sung in the ruins began filling his head. He imagined the body that he knew better than he should, stretched out naked on that bed upstairs. She rested on her stomach, shoulders raised and weight propped on her forearms. The sheet hid her lower body to the middle of her bottom, the way the lake’s water had. She watched his approach with teasing blue eyes that managed to combine worldliness with innocence. His hand caressed down her soft skin and his mouth found her lips . . .
Only you. After playing out such a long and elaborate act of worldly experience, she had to go and admit that tonight.
“You are already grinning and you haven’t even seen me yet,” her voice said. “Did you catch my reflection in the window?”
He turned and choked down a laugh.
The frock coat dropped off her shoulders and its sleeves buried her hands. The trousers were so long that she had rolled up their bottoms into thick, clumsy cuffs. The whole ensemble immersed her in an ocean of cloth out of which her head bobbed and in which her body swam.
She stretched out her arms and flapped the coat’s sleeves. “I feel like a little child dressed in my father’s clothes. I must look bizarre.”
He thought that she looked adorable. “The blue of the coat becomes you.”
She held up her arm and tried to scrunch down the sleeve so her hand could emerge. “It may be impossible to eat supper, and I am very hungry.”
“Then I will have to feed you.” A delightful thought. “Or, we could build up the fire and you could remove the coat.” That was an alluring notion as well.
“Would you? The fire, that is.”
He got it to a high inferno just as Morton arrived with some soup.
“This should help warm you, Miss Kenwood, but I am sorry that the rest of the meal is a cold platter. We eat plainly here in the evenings. I will do better tomorrow night,” Morton explained.
“I would not lay in stores, Morton. I expect to be on the road tomorrow night.”
Morton shot him a look such as an officer would give a soldier who was shirking his duty.
“Why don’t you bring the rest now, Morton. Miss Kenwood will forgive our informality.”
“Certainly, sir.”
Bianca shrugged off the frock coat and laid it on a chair. Her dark gray waistcoat also hung loosely, but its lines and fabric could not totally obscure her form. Vergil beckoned her to a place set at a right angle to his own at the end of the banquet table. Morton had made her place as close as possible without appearing too obvious. Certainly within easy reach.
She looked around at the mirrors and inset paintings and gold leaf that glimmered in the light of hearth and candles. “This is an odd room to find in such a manor.”
“My maternal great-grandmother loathed this house for the primitive place it was, but her husband insisted on coming here. She decided that they would at least eat as civilized people, and she had this room done in the current fashion. He permitted it, but only for this chamber and her own.”
She dug into her soup. Her full lips parted delicately to accept the warm broth, and the tip of her tongue swiped an errant drip. Her mouth mesmerized him, spoonful after spoonful.
This was going to be a very long night. A paragon’s purgatory.
He guessed that she hadn’t eaten a decent meal since leaving London. Rectifying the problem absorbed her attention for a while. When Morton brought the ham, she methodically tucked hers away. Vergil speared another slice and placed it on her plate.
She flushed a color that looked incredibly lovely in the candle glow. “I am being rude.”
“You are being human. We should have fed you before you went upstairs.”
She looked down at her garments and grinned. “Do I get port when we are done?”
“You do not drink strong spirits, and tonight is not the time to start.”
“If I am dressed like this, I think that one glass of port is almost obligatory.”
“If you insist, but only one very small glass. I do not want you accusing me of getting you inebriated.”
She looked to her ham with a peculiar smile. “I am sure that you would never do that.”
Oh, wouldn’t he?
A small roll and a slice of ham later, she finally stalled. He practically saw her mind snap back to attention regarding the matter at hand.
“How did it happen? You and the mill?”
“It was another responsibility that I inherited from my brother. He, in turn, got involved in response to a dare.”
“A dare?”
“From your grandfather. Adam Kenwood and Milton formed a strong friendship, despite their disparate ages, backgrounds, and politics. Milton found him an interesting man with a mind as sharp as a honed sword. Very ambitious and very clever. You have a lot of him in you, by the way. Milton once said he found Adam a wonderful contrast to the philosophical abstractions that had filled his own life.”
“So Milton left the manor to work in the factory?”
“Four years ago there was a demonstration in Manchester that turned bloody, one that has been dubbed Peterloo. The deaths of those people shook my brother badly. Milton was not so much of the tower that he could not see that the country was changing profoundly. Adam and he got into terrific rows about the moralities of what was happening in the new industries. Milton believed that the problem was the character of the men running them. Better men, less absorbed by greed, would mean better conditions and less unrest among the people. Adam challenged him to face the same risks and choices and see what he would do. He dared Milton to throw in with him on a new mill.”
“It sounds like a very sly, and very expensive dare. However, I can almost picture the two of them, worlds apart, sparring over such things, and others as well. The influence went both ways, I think. Your brother convinced my grandfather of the error of his early trade, and Adam made your brother see how impractical some of his ideas were.”
Her expression softened as she referred to her grandfather’s slave trade. The way she looked in his eyes conveyed her gratitude for being informed that Adam had expiated that sin, and that her inheritance could be kept.
“It was foolhar
dy for my brother to agree to the dare. The family finances were already a disaster. Adam stood him to a large part of the financing, and offered to advise him, but it would be my brother’s business. No doubt Milton saw it as a grand experiment, but also counted on Adam’s business acumen to keep it from failing.”
“Perhaps Milton thought it was not foolhardy, but a way to save the family.”
“If so, he was correct. It turned out to be the only sensible decision about money that he ever made, and, with Adam’s help, he made the mill profitable. He was the first Mr. Clark, you see. I think when he donned that identity, he literally became another man.”
“Then when Milton died, Mr. Clark’s brother, which was you, inherited his share. Did your double life begin then? Have you been managing that mill ever since?”
“With my brother’s death, I began traveling north, relying heavily on your grandfather’s advice while I learned what to do. Eventually the decisions became mine. It was essential that I manage it closely. The income from the mill had kept us from financial ruin.”
It had also been useful to spend time in the north as Mr. Clark. Mr. Clark could go places and hear things that the Viscount Laclere never could. Mr. Clark could try to learn if the answer to Milton’s suicide could be found somewhere in Manchester, where Milton also visited, and among the political radicals whose ideas Milton had supported.
He realized that he wanted to tell her about that, too, and regretted that he could not.
She inclined forward with her elbow propped on the table and her chin resting on her hand. He could see Adam Kenwood’s shrewd mind working behind the thoughtful expression in her eyes.
“You said it scraped you through some bad years. Why don’t you sell out now? The offer from Mr. Johnston and Mr. Kennedy is waiting. You could be free of this deception.”
“Johnston and Kennedy run the worst mill in Leeds. Ours is paradise by comparison, even if it is still a hard life. If I sell the mill, I also sell any chance for a halfway decent future for the people who work there.”
Morton had found some little cakes to present with the meal. She reached for one. Her small white teeth bit carefully, but some sugar topping smeared her lips anyway. Still thoughtful, she seemed unaware that her tongue snuck out to wipe up the sweet grains. She missed a few and they glistened against the pink swells, like an invitation for him to finish the job.
“You could sell to someone else. There must be other mill owners who are decent.”
“That is true. I could probably do that.”
“But you do not want to.”
Perceptive woman. Delightfully so. Dangerously so.
“No.”
She sat back and absorbed that. He wondered what the admission would cost him.
She smiled as if she had learned what she needed to know. “Can I have my port now?”
“I keep it in the library.”
She walked beside him through the hall to the library. He noticed that she had cinched the trousers to her waist with a cord from the bedchamber’s drapes. The white sleeves of his shirt floated around her arms and the collarless neckline showed a fair amount of skin despite the waistcoat.
He pictured her in nothing at all but that shirt hanging loosely from her shoulders and breasts, skimming her body with soft fabric, revealing naked thighs and legs.
Morton had built up the library fire. She sank into a corner of the settee and accepted the port he offered her.
He sat in the chair across from her, wondering when she would get around to negotiations. It was why she had come down for supper, after all.
Not yet, it seemed. She popped up and began perusing the volumes in the bookcases flanking the hearth. Her brow puckered. She reached for a candlestick on the mantel, lit it off the hearth flames, and held the light to the bindings.
“There are some volumes here by Edmund Duclairc. Was that your father?”
“Yes. The fat red one is his epic about Alexander’s march to the Indus River. The brown one is an Anglo-Saxon view of the Battle of Hastings. Milton’s literary efforts are in that blue folio on the bottom shelf. Unpublished, since he did not have the chance to finish them. Not poems. He was writing a comparative analysis of your country’s revolution and that of the French.”
She had pulled out the brown volume. “It all sounds very erudite. Do you also pen great works?”
“My interests have been in other things, to my father’s dismay.”
“You were at odds with your father? Somehow I cannot picture you as less than dutiful.”
“Like all youths I had my own ideas about my future. I wanted to join the army. Not the cavalry, which would be acceptable, but the engineers. Machines, buildings, earthworks, those things fascinated me. As a child I loitered around the carriages, not the horses. My request to have a commission was soundly rejected by my father. Off to Oxford for me, to study the poets and philosophers.”
“Were you miserable?” Her face showed genuine concern.
“No young man is miserable at university. It is a free and privileged life. Those poets and philosophers had a thing or two to teach me. The experience influenced my thoughts, but not my natural inclinations. Your grandfather recognized that, I think. He and I became more familiar after my brother died. On occasion I went with him to see some of the new machines being built. I watched my first working steam engine with your grandfather by my side. When we left, he spoke his mind. ‘Your world is dying,’ he said. ‘It will never be the same again.’ ”
“It sounds to me that he enjoyed your company.” She slid the book back onto its shelf. “I think he was impressed by your interest in machines and how things work. It was unfair of your father to interfere with that.”
Clever, clever girl. Subtly laying the foundations before she began constructing her argument.
She strolled back to the settee and perched herself carefully in the corner again. She appeared vulnerable and desirable in her baggy clothes and simply bound hair. The firelight broke her form into lovely glows and mysterious shadows.
He looked at her and she looked right back. Innocent wariness flickered despite her falsely carefree smile. Only a saint could ignore the anticipation pulsing through the air, and he was hardly that where she was concerned.
He found himself swimming against an incoming tide of indifference to notions of honor. The exhaustive effort began to seem increasingly futile.
Yes, she should have never left that chamber.
He kept looking at her. Directly. Intently. As if he waited for something. She suspected that he knew what his prolonged attention was doing to her and drew it out deliberately. Maybe he heard that physical hum drumming louder.
The silence became dangerous. Her skin flushed and her mouth dried. She kept expecting him to get up and come over and . . . but he just sat there. Waiting.
This would never do. Besides, they had business to settle. It was why she was here, wasn’t it? She forced some semblance of composure.
“Well, Laclere, what are we going to do about this?”
He favored her with a small smile: “I would say that is up to you. What do you want to do about it?”
“I think that any understanding that we reach should be a mutual one.”
“I am at a disadvantage here, and we both know it. Any resolution of the situation must be your initiative.”
“The course is obvious, I think. It is unfair of you to demand that I spell it out.”
“I suppose that it is, but I am incapable of stating a rational case for myself, because there isn’t one. The only thing I want right now, the only obvious course that I can see, is to take you to bed and trust that a mutual understanding can be reached tomorrow.”
Her heart skipped and then rose to her throat. “You misunder . . . That is not . . . We are speaking about the mill.”
“No, we are not.”
“I am.”
“Are you? My apologies.” He rose and paced to the hearth. She would have pr
eferred he remain seated. He gazed into those flames for a while before turning. “Fine, let us discuss the mill and your discovery first.”
First?
“My disadvantage in that matter is even more acute than in the other.”
“I have already said that I will tell no one.”
“I thank you for that. Now, what will it cost me?”
“Nothing that is not already mine. What is my income from the mill?”
“This year, at least four thousand pounds.”
“Goodness. You must be a very good manager, Laclere.”
“Thank you. However, since it grew to that amount two years ago, neither Adam nor Mr. Clark took it all out. We have been reinvesting in an expansion. If you demand the whole sum, I have no choice but to give it to you, however.”
“How much did you reinvest?”
“Half.”
“That still leaves quite a lot. More than enough.”
“More than enough for what?”
“For me to live in Milan, of course.”
“So the true cost of your silence is that I permit you to pursue this rash plan. If I refuse, you will announce to the world that I am Mr. Clark.”
“I did not say that.”
“No, you did not. Your blackmail was more clever than that. You will keep my secret, but if I do not agree to your terms, you will sell your interest when you are of age.”
It would help her to concentrate if he didn’t keep pacing around the settee. Circling, circling. It reminded her of that morning in the guardroom of the castle. So did his manner, and his eyes.
“The problem, as I see it, is that you cannot guarantee your side of the bargain,” he said.
“Do you doubt my word?”
“I doubt your ability to foretell the future. If you marry, the decision whether to sell or hold that investment will cease to be yours.”
“I will not be getting married.”
He paused behind her. “You think not now.”
“I know not, ever.” She twisted and looked up at him. “You yourself pointed out that no decent man would want me if I performed. Besides, a woman cannot be a wife and mother and also an opera singer, no matter what society will permit. With babies, the career must end.”
The Saint Page 19