The Marsh Hawk

by Dawn MacTavish

  Her interview with Rupert did not go quite so smoothly. He appeared at the picnic late in the afternoon, exchanged amenities with the Warrenford girls, took Jenna’s arm and steered her toward the orchard.

  The earl put in an appearance at about the same time. His limp was more pronounced now than it had been earlier, yet his movements were elegant in spite of it. He strolled straight to Lady Evelyn’s side, offered his hand, and helped her up from the picnic cloth she occupied with several young people whom Jenna did not recognize. She deliberately navigated her course with Rupert to pass directly in front of them. Then, snuggling closer to her betrothed, she flashed him her most disarming smile, ignoring the earl altogether as they sailed past. That would teach his lordship to keep his advice to himself.

  Rupert studied her with a skeptical eye through his quizzing glass. He was tall and slender, with close-cropped hair the color of wheat swept toward his face in the latest à la Brutus style. Whether the occasion was casual or formal, she could not fault him. His toilette was always up-to-the-minute, and correct.

  “You’re feeling better I see,” he said.

  “Much better, thank you. And what of you? Are you in a more agreeable temper after your shoot?”

  “I heard you had a rendezvous with Kevernwood this morning,” he replied, his avoidance of the question obvious.

  “I’d hardly call it a ‘rendezvous,’ Rupert. He apologized for last night and I accepted him. It was all quite proper.”

  “Mmm,” Rupert said, tucking the quizzing glass back into his waistcoat pocket.

  “Who told you?”

  “You should have,” he flashed. “I shouldn’t have to hear such on-dits from my servants.”

  “We aren’t married yet, Rupert. I do not have to account to you for every second of my time. At least he had the good manners to apologize.”

  “I want you to stay away from him, Jenna,” he said. They had reached the orchard, and he turned her toward him. “I mean this. The man’s a Jackanapes. Just look at the cut of him. He knows long hair went out ages ago, and yet he will insist upon wearing that ridiculous queue. He does it for attention.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I rather think it’s quite attractive.”

  Rupert’s jaw dropped and an incredulous grunt escaped his throat. “That whole business last night was a put-down,” he said. “One simply does not cut his hosts in that way.”

  “He didn’t know about Father, Rupert.”

  “But he knew that costume was in bad taste. He wore it apurpose.”

  “I’ve accepted his apology.”

  “Yes, yes, so you’ve said. Now let that be the end of it. Leave him to the St. Johns. Let them ruin their reputation aligning with him.”

  “You act as if I dragged them here. You invited them, Rupert.”

  “Not actually. Mother invited him. He took it upon himself to bring the St. Johns, those hangers-on he’s entertaining. Colossal cheek, by God!”

  “Did he ask permission to bring them?”

  “What does that matter?”

  “Did he, or didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did, but he shouldn’t have; we aren’t acquainted.”

  “Well, we are now, aren’t we?” She couldn’t believe that she was actually defending the St. Johns—defending the earl’s right to include them, of all things. She wished she’d never set eyes on any of them.

  “I beat him in the shoot, you know.”

  “You? Rupert, you are terrible with a pistol.”

  “Exactly!”

  “He must have let you win.”

  “He did not! He’s a lousy shot I say, for all his bragging about holding a record at Manton’s Gallery. It’s a good thing Nelson got him and not Wellington. It’s sure as check, the blighter’d need to make use of a ship’s cannon to hit anything.”

  “Rupert, this pettiness is beneath you.”

  “All right.” His impeccable posture collapsed and he breathed a nasal sigh. “Let’s not quarrel,” he said in an undertone.

  “Is that supposed to be an apology?”

  He gave a start and blurted, “You were expecting one?”

  “Don’t answer a question with a question, Rupert. You do that a lot, you know, and it’s such bad form. And, yes, I was expecting an apology. You behaved like a boor last night and embarrassed me in front of everyone.”

  “I’ve been expecting an apology from you!” was his incredulous reply.

  “For what? For passing out at the sight of someone looking the part of my father’s murderer?”

  “No, for swooning for lack of nourishment when this house is packed to the rafters with enough to feed Wellington’s army!”

  “You’ve been listening to Mother.”

  “She’s concerned about you, Jenna.” “She’s concerned that I might break the engagement and ruin her social standing.”

  Rupert stared.

  Why was there nothing in those empty hazel eyes? Why didn’t they quicken her heart and turn her knees to water?

  “Is that what you’re of a mind to do?” he asked, gravel voiced. “I love you, Jenna.”

  “Then I would suggest that you rethink who needs to apologize to whom before this weekend is over. What I have ‘a mind to do’ depends upon it.”

  The rest of the afternoon was uneventful. Jenna returned to her suite to rest and change for dinner, which was to be held at eight. Lady Hollingsworth insisted she wear her embroidered dinner gown of sage green patterned silk, citing that it tinted her silver-gray eyes the color of seawater. Jenna would have preferred her burgundy voile, with the rosebud trim, but she allowed the green to avoid an argument. It was to be her first dinner à la russe since she had come out of mourning, and it was a treat to wear any color at a formal affair after a dismal year of paramatta, black bombazine, and crepe.

  She was seated between Crispin St. John and Rupert. Kevernwood sat diagonally across the table from her, flanked by Lady Evelyn and Rosemary Warrenford. Jenna tried not to look in the earl’s direction, but his eyes, like magnets, drew her own.

  Liveried footmen served the courses from food laid out on the sideboard. Menus were posted at every third place on porcelain menu plates. There would be multiple courses, beginning with Soup à la Reine, followed by turbot, salmon, and trout, all appropriately sauced. There would then be game hens, roast saddle of mutton, ham, braised beef, and spring chicken. Fruit compote, apple charlotte, and Neapolitans would be served for dessert along with the usual assortment of sweet dessert wines.

  To Jenna, it all tasted like sawdust.

  The table was spread with elegant damask linens, fine crystal, and flowers: pink and lavender sweet peas overflowing round silver bowls. She studied her distorted reflection in the bowl between herself and the earl. To her dismay, her face was deeply flushed, and she’d hardly touched any wine.

  Lady Evelyn chattered incessantly. Nobody seemed to mind. It was plain that the gentlemen all found her quite charming in her rose-colored silk gown and coronet of matching silk ribbon rosebuds. Lady Hollingsworth had chosen a pale green plume for Jenna’s hair ornament, insisting that it was exquisite against her strawberry blond hair, but she felt like a circus horse straight out of Astley’s Amphitheatre in it. Why had she settled for the green? Why hadn’t she dug in her heels and held out for the burgundy?

  The dinner went well until after the third course. The footmen had removed everything on the table, including the tablecloth, and the butler began setting out the ratafia and sweet wines, while the under-butler and maids busied themselves laying down the dessert plates and silver at each diner’s place. It was when the footmen began to serve the desserts that the conversation became dangerously political.

  The earl and Sir Gerald Markham were discussing the economy. Much was being made of the economic decline amongst the upper and lower classes since the war with the Colonies.

  “Since the postage rates went up again, my tenants can’t afford it,” Sir Gerald said. “They come begging to
me, when their letters arrive, to pay the post. And arrive they do. The lower classes breed like rabbits. They have relations scattered all over the Empire. I myself do not receive such a quantity of mail. And as if that isn’t enough, they steal from me. How do you deal with your cottagers, Kevernwood? You’re an absentee landlord for the most part. How do you keep your tenants from poaching and robbing you blind? I’ve had to set out mantraps and spring guns, and hire overseers myself.”

  “My tenants do not steal because they do not have to,” the earl replied succinctly, almost smiling.

  “There’s wisdom in that somewhere I suppose,” Rupert chided.

  “There is,” the earl agreed. He did smile then, but it was a cold smile that chilled Jenna to the bone. “Cottagers become unruly when they are forced to live in the squalor and cramped quarters of unsympathetic landlords. If one is sensitive to one’s tenants’ needs and gives them no cause to harbor ill will, they would have no inclination to steal. Consequently there would be no necessity for going to the expense of hiring overseers to maim or kill poachers with traps.”

  “You don’t share a like mind with your father, m’boy,” Sir Gerald observed. “Now, there was a true nobleman. He kept his cottagers in line. No cosseting in that camp, by God!”

  “We live in different times, sir,” the earl said, expanding his posture until the chair creaked beneath him. “They call for different tactics and more liberal minds. Had such existed in my father’s day, we would not be in the state we are at present.”

  “You actually believe that drivel, then, do you?” said Rupert.

  “My tenants will testify that I have proven the point.”

  “Come now, Kevernwood,” Rupert taunted through a guttural chuckle. “The lower classes hate the aristocracy.”

  “With good cause,” the earl replied. “We condone pouring good money after bad in the Colonies—at their expense, mind you—and then lose the war.” He made a hand gesture. “Look around you. Who has suffered? Certainly not we, the almighty aristocracy; we thrive. Good, loyal men, a vast number conscripted, mind, who fought for this country—men whose wounds have seen them cashiered out—are come home to properties that we have meanwhile confiscated for unpaid taxes in their absence, and they are begging in the streets of London, sir, while we languish on their lands in style.”

  “If you ask me, the forgers are at fault for the state of the economy,” the Marquess of Roxbury interjected dryly. “Forged notes have been flooding the market since ’ninety-seven. Whatever became of all those suggestions for a solution that the people were supposed to have submitted years back? It seems to me that if the lower classes are so concerned with the economy, they should take an active part in improving it. But there it is, they haven’t the intelligence. That’s why it’s left to the aristocracy.”

  “It’s easy enough to lay the blame anywhere but where it belongs”—the earl said, setting his fork down, “—upon ourselves.”

  “Just what do you propose we do about it, Kevernwood?” Rupert said with raised voice. “Open our coffers and make them all as rich as Croesus? That sort of rubbish smacks of colonialism. It belongs amongst the savages in America, not in civilized England.”

  At the far end of the table, Lady Marner cleared her voice, rousing her husband, who had begun to nod off.

  “Hear, hear!” he hooted, bolting upright in his chair.

  “Do be still, Archibald,” his wife said in an aside, dosing him with a baleful glance then centering her attention on the diners. “Can we not save this sort of conversation until the ladies have retired? It is hardly proper table discourse, Rupert, dear.”

  “No. I want him to answer,” Rupert insisted, raising his hand in a gesture to stay her.

  “The colonists do have ground to stand on,” the earl replied. “After all, they did win the war.”

  “Take care, Kevernwood, you go too far,” Rupert warned.

  “Unless the aristocracy take an interest in the dilemma of the lower classes, we could see revolution,” the earl opined. “You can only push the hungry so far. Look to France for her example. Have we learned nothing from her mistake? Our king wanders in and out of madness. His heir, whom we have just made Regent, God help us, is a gambler, a philanderer, and a notorious elbow bender. Imagine that? The man can’t even manage a marriage. How fit is he to rule the British Empire?”

  “You speak treason, sir!” Rupert shouted, vaulting out of his chair.

  “I speak truth.”

  “Rupert!” Lady Marner shrilled. “His lordship is our guest.”

  “He is your guest, Mother, not mine.”

  “Her ladyship was right earlier,” the earl said, rising from the table. “This is hardly the forum for such a discussion. We gentlemen shall take it up amongst ourselves at another time.”

  “We shall take it up on the dueling ground,” Rupert decreed, tossing down his serviette. “You leave me no choice but to call you out, sir. You have cut this house too many times these past two days for me to stand for treason spoken under its roof to boot! Since it is customary to postpone arrangements for such things until daytime hours, I would appreciate it if you would remain in residence until my second visits you in the morning.”

  “Your servant, sir,” said the earl, offering a crisp bow.

  Jenna’s eyes oscillated between Kevernwood and Rupert. Her cheeks were on fire. She wanted to run from the dining hall, but her legs betrayed her. She couldn’t move. Around her the gathering had become a milling mass of confusion. The women’s cries and murmurings reached an ugly crescendo of sound that made her head swim. The men were rising from the table, their rumbling monotone impossible to translate. Across the way, Lady Evelyn had risen. She had thrown herself into the earl’s arms and begun to cry. Her brother skirted the table and went to her side. Kevernwood’s eyes met Jenna’s. She couldn’t read their message, but that molten, blue-steel gaze held her relentlessly, pierced her to the core before moving on to impale Rupert. She was numb. It was a numbness Rupert’s cold fingers couldn’t penetrate as they clamped around her arm. She was paralyzed, caught between the crossed swords of the two men’s glaring eyes, as Rupert spirited her away.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jenna scarcely had time to exchange her dinner gown for the frilly ecru negligee that Emily had laid out for her, when an assault on her sitting room door sent a shiver along her spine. She was alone. Emily was closeted with her mother, who had nearly collapsed in the dining hall, a circumstance that Jenna attributed more to the divorce corset she’d poured herself into than any genuine malaise over the duel.

  The knock came again—rapid, urgent, almost desperate—and she threw the door open to Lady Evelyn St. John.

  For a moment, they stared at one another across the threshold.

  “Please, my lady . . . ?” the girl murmured. Her eyes were red and swollen, and she was trembling.

  “It’s late, Lady Evelyn,” Jenna said, stepping aside to let her enter, “and we have all had an unpleasant evening. I was just about to retire.”

  “How can you sleep? They’re going to kill each other! Don’t you care, my lady?”

  “What can I possibly do?”

  “You can reason with the viscount. There is no necessity for this.”

  “It’s far too late for that.”

  “You really don’t care, do you?” Lady Evelyn accused, discovery lifting her voice. “How will you feel when one of them lies dead, knowing that you might have prevented it?”

  “You credit me with much too much. Why don’t you speak to his lordship?”

  “It was your betrothed who challenged Simon, my lady. Simon tried to avoid this—you heard him down there. Now he cannot back down from the challenge. He is a gentleman. He will die in that duel first, albeit against the law. I cannot let that happen. The viscount must withdraw.”

  “You don’t know Rupert, Lady Evelyn. He would never.”

  “Then we are lost. Someone will die. I shan’t be able to bear
it if Simon . . .”

  Jenna couldn’t bring herself to inquire about the obvious. She wanted no details. Why did her heart feel as though this woebegone creature before her had just pierced it through with a dagger? She stared at the girl. So this was what love was like. This was what she should be feeling for Rupert. But it was not Rupert that she was thinking of. She wasn’t ready to delve deeper into the recesses of her wounded heart to uncover more of that, however—not then. It was enough of a shock realizing what love wasn’t.

  Jenna had never felt so alone as she did in that moment, an unwilling spectator looking into the breaking heart this desperate girl had laid bare before her.

  “I’m sorry, Lady Evelyn,” she murmured. “I don’t know what sort of relationship you presume that I have with Rupert, but I assure you, he is his own man. Right or wrong, lawful or not, nothing I could possibly say would alter anything.”

  Lady Evelyn nodded her lowered head in defeat.

  Jenna stared toward the girl’s collapsed posture. She almost pitied her. Did the earl know she’d come? No. Kevernwood impressed her as being his own man, as well—certainly not the type to let a woman fight his battles for him. Poor girl. Jenna did pity her. This duel wasn’t about the fragile state of the British economy, or the tenant farmers, or the poor king’s madness. It was Rupert’s jealousy that threw down the gauntlet.

  “Go and get some rest,” she said, turning the girl toward the door. “There’s nothing to be done now but pray that they have the good sense not to go through with this insanity.”

  Jenna sank down on the edge of the four-poster. It was long past midnight and she was too overset to sleep. She went to the window and looked down toward the garden wall. A tall, sculptured hedgerow all but prevented her from seeing the cluster of French lilac trees burgeoning just beyond the arbor. She opened the window, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply, inhaling the exquisite perfume living in the still night air. These lilacs were a more delicate variety than the ones in her own gardens at Thistle Hollow, deep amethyst in color, and a thousand times more fragrant, if that could be.