If only she would waken and look at him with recognition in her beautiful wide eyes. If only she would waken whole, with all her memories intact. He would let her go then, knowing she would be all right. He didn’t deserve her love, and wouldn’t press his suit anymore.
He stood sightlessly staring down into the fireplace at the second wanton destruction of his father’s crystal in two days, then gave a short, self-mocking laugh. “Who do I think I’m kidding? I can’t do that. I won’t do that.”
“Prattling to yourself, my son?” André said from the doorway. “Bad sign, that. Perhaps your time would be better spent in prayer.”
Pierre turned to face his father, looking at him from beneath half-closed lids, his dark eyes unfathomable, his face an emotionless mask. “Prayer? You’re becoming damned moral, Father. It doesn’t suit you.”
“Just as the sackcloth and ashes you’re wearing fit you extremely ill,” André responded, causing his son to wince. “I asked for a softening tint of humanness, a smidgeon of humility. I did not ask for maudlin self-pity. Poor Victoria has just stumbled off to her bed near tears, unable to reconcile herself to your lack of fighting spirit. You’ve been a bitter disappointment to her, you understand, as she had begun to think of you as unflappable.”
A tic began to work in Pierre’s cheek. “Enjoying yourself, Father?”
André sat down behind his desk, crossing his legs. “Oddly, Pierre, I’m not. I believe I like your deliberate arrogance much more than this uncharacteristic sentimental self-condemnation. It certainly isn’t doing Catherine much good, and on top of everything else, it’s dashed boring to watch.”
Catherine. Mention of her name brought Pierre’s head up, and he stared at his father, who was looking back at him levelly, a small smile on his lips, his brows raised a fraction, as if waiting for his son to speak. “Father, I—”
“Yes, mon fils?” the older man purred.
The corners of Pierre’s mouth slowly curved upward as, with a deep, flourishing bow to his sire, he threw off his despondency. “My congratulations. You’re still the master, mon pére. Now, if you’ll be so kind as to excuse me, I have a pressing matter to attend to before our expected visitor descends on us.”
“You’re going to Catherine?” André questioned softly as his son walked toward the door. “I’m very pleased.”
Pierre stopped, his hand on the latch, but did not face his father. “I don’t give a tinker’s curse for your pleasure, Father. Between us, pleasing ourselves has led to more heartache than happiness. It’s my salvation I seek now.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HE USED HIS KEY to enter Catherine’s darkened bedchamber, locking the door behind him while consigning any thoughts of impropriety to the devil. This time was his, his and Catherine’s. He would brook no intrusions from the outside world.
Walking over to the bed, he looked down at her sleeping form. She looked totally at peace, with the world and herself, a slight smile curving her lips as if she were dreaming of some fond memory.
Was it a memory of him? He doubted it.
Pierre frowned, noticing the white powder that still marred the perfection of her beloved features. It was another reminder of his stupidity, and he felt an overwhelming urge to have it gone. He extracted his handkerchief and sat down on the edge of the bed, using the clean linen to softly wipe away the traces of powder.
This was love. For the first time in his life he understood why his father had been so happy, and why he had retired from society when his beloved wife had died. He understood Patrick’s desperation when confronted with Victoria’s plan to ferret out Quennel Quinton’s murderer, for the need to protect one’s beloved was an all but overpowering emotion.
And how Pierre loved his Catherine. His love had stripped him of all arrogance, all confidence, and even, for a time, all common sense. His father had been wrong. Completing a good deed would not make Pierre human. Only love could do that.
So intent was he on the performance of his task, so involved was he with his thoughts, that Catherine took him completely by surprise when she opened her eyes and looked directly up into his tear-streaked face.
“Pierre,” she whispered, her own eyes filling with tears. “Please don’t cry.”
“Catherine!” he breathed hoarsely as she reached to pull him down to her. “You remember me. Oh, thank God! My dearest love! You remember me.”
“I love you, Pierre,” she said simply, those four words, spoken so matter-of-factly, thawing once and forever all the ice that had for so long surrounded his heart.
IT WAS TEN o’clock in the morning, and they were all gathered around a heavily laden tea tray in the drawing room, Mrs. Merrydell having earlier been securely locked in a storage room by Pierre, who had kept his resolution not to play at conspirator any longer. Now he sat beside his beloved on the settee, dressed in his impeccable black and white, looking well rested and ready for action.
“Grandfather Halliford had been ill for a long time, not that I wasn’t devastated by his death,” Catherine told her interested audience. “It was his greatest wish that I have a Season in London, which is why he hired Mrs. Merrydell as my chaperone and mentor although, as we’ve already established, Grandfather and I knew her as Agatha Terwilliger.
“I disliked her on sight, and really didn’t wish for a Season, but Grandfather was adamant. He may have been naught but a simple, successful manufacturer of shoes—a rich upstart with machine oil beneath his fingernails, as he described himself—but his granddaughter was a full two generations from the smell of the shop! He was quite a man, my grandfather, and the reason my language is, as you all have noticed, sometimes unladylike.”
“Never unladylike,” André interrupted from his position against the mantelpiece. “Your grandfather’s generation, male and female both, were much freer with their speech than people of polite upbringing are supposed to be today. For myself, I find your lapses honest and refreshing. But I must be quiet. Please continue with your story, Catherine, my dear.”
Catherine thanked him for his kind words and went on, “You can imagine my distress when I learned Mrs. Ter—Mrs. Merrydell was to be my guardian. We had no living relatives and I suppose Grandfather, knowing I was soon to reach my majority, saw no harm in it.”
Victoria set down her empty teacup and leaned forward slightly in her chair, the better to see Catherine, for she had purposely left her spectacles on her dresser that morning. “You must have been terribly overset. But your grandfather sounds to have been a wonderful man, and I am happy to hear you do not hold his ill judgment against him. How was he to know the Merrydells’ dastardly plans for you?”
Catherine grimaced. “Marriage to Ursley had been their first intention, but I wasn’t having it. I was walking in the gardens when I overheard them discussing the proper way to dispose of me,” she told Victoria as Pierre reached over to squeeze her hand.
“I had removed my slippers so that I could creep closer and hear everything without giving myself away with my footsteps, when I stepped on a dry branch—and the race was on.” She chuckled, remembering the way she had run barefoot into the forest, Ursley doing his best to follow her in his ridiculous high-heeled shoes. “I lost him easily enough, but I had no money, no shoes, no idea where I was, and no one to turn to for assistance. In the end, Ursley found me again, and I would have been well and truly caught if Pierre hadn’t come along. Of course, I rather wish I hadn’t been so clumsy as to trip over a rock and hit my head in my effort to capture his coachman’s attention. All I could think about was getting back to Abbey House. Even now, it isn’t a pleasant memory.”
“Many a man would have broken under such strain,” André assured her. “I don’t wish to press you further, Catherine, but one thing still troubles me. How did you come by the cloak?”
Catherine turned to grin at Pierre, who grinned back, having already heard the story as the two of them, lying side by side on her bed, had talked through the night. “I stole it
, of course,” she quipped. “Somewhere there is a gentleman who will never again leave his cloak behind in his curricle when he visits a country inn for luncheon. The only thing I feel sorry for is stealing that lovely pie from some good farm wife’s windowsill. But I did have to eat, didn’t I?”
Victoria got up and went to squint through the window overlooking the drive at the front of the house, her third visit to the window in the past half hour. “I’m just happy it has all turned out so well, especially after that little scare you gave us last night, Catherine. First you lost your past, then you misplaced your present—it is good to have all of you with us this morning.”
“Hear, hear!” André echoed, lifting his teacup in a toast. “Still looking for my man to return here from faraway Leicester, Victoria?” he asked as he replaced the cup on the mantel. “Perhaps if you sent a maid for your spectacles.”
The young matron flushed becomingly and shot André a quelling look, just as the sound of a horse approaching the house at a rapid clip filled the room. She pushed aside the thin draperies to look out over the drive, gave a small girlish squeal, and ran for the foyer.
Catherine looked after her friend, frowning in confusion. “What on earth—”
Pierre gently pushed her against the settee. “My wits have been dulled, have they not, Father, that I haven’t guessed before now? Your man, the one who was to make the final confirmation of Catherine’s identity, is none other than my good friend, Patrick Sherbourne. I should have known he wouldn’t allow estate business to keep his aristocratic nose out of my affairs. He’s waited too long for some well-earned revenge.”
A few moments later, the Earl of Wickford and his countess entered the drawing room arm-in-arm, and Pierre and Catherine rose to greet them as André, looking pleased with himself, watched from a distance.
“Pierre, you sly old dog!” Patrick called, extending a hand to his friend. “What’s this I hear about cupid’s arrow having got you at last? It couldn’t happen to a more deserving man. And this is Catherine,” he continued as Pierre took his hand and shook it. “Such a little thing to cause such a great upheaval. You have my deepest thanks, Miss Halliford. I understand from my wife that you have succeeded in penetrating this fellow’s dark soul and bringing it into the sunlight. Heaven knows I’ve tried and failed a dozen times or more.”
“Perhaps you didn’t possess the correct tools, my lord,” Catherine answered, coloring under Patrick’s interested scrutiny.
Patrick threw back his head and laughed out loud. “She’s witty as well as beautiful, Pierre,” he told his friend. “The question remains, however—what are you, a confirmed bachelor, going to do about it?”
Slipping an arm around Catherine’s shoulders so that he could pull her close to him, Pierre answered, “As I once told you, my friend, understanding the workings of a woman’s mind is a lifelong study. I begin to believe that I shall enjoy that study, and all that goes with it, immensely.”
André, having heard another horse approaching up the drive, cleared his throat as he pushed himself away from the mantelpiece. “I hesitate to interrupt this heart-warming, truly affecting reunion, gentlemen, but it appears we are about to have another visitor.”
“Ursley,” Catherine said at once, one hand involuntarily going to her throat. She looked up at Pierre, her eyes wide. “I can almost forgive him, for he was naught but his mother’s tool, but do I have to see him, Pierre? It’s silly, I know, but his face will bring back so many unpleasant memories.”
Pierre’s expression hardened, his dark eyes going strangely flat and colorless. He had promised her he would capture the man with as little fuss as possible and have him carted off to gaol with his murderous mother. He had promised, but now seeing the fear on Catherine’s face, he regretted that promise.
Catherine saw the reluctance in his face, correctly interpreting how he felt. Pierre was unused to following orders, as he had been forced to do throughout most of this strange adventure, and his every instinct cried out for him to finish the project by marking its conclusion with his own, very individual stamp.
She bit her bottom lip, realizing that, although she loved him when he was open and vulnerable, as he had appeared to her a few moments last night when his tears had betrayed his deepest emotions, and she loved him excessively when he was being tender, as he had been with her all through the night, she loved him best of all when he was being arrogant, self-assured, and totally in control of a situation he had, in his own inimitable way, engineered.
She didn’t say a word, but he knew what she was thinking. His left eyebrow, the one she alternately despised and adored, rose almost imperceptibly as he looked down on her and breathed quietly, “Caro?”
Catherine smiled brilliantly, then slipped from beneath his encircling arm to grab Victoria’s hand and lead her toward the door to the morning room. “Come, my friend. We’re dreadfully in the way right now, as the boys wish to play, and we wouldn’t want to rob them of their sport.”
“I like her, Pierre,” Patrick declared, grinning. “I like that little girl more than I can say.” He rubbed his palms together in anticipation of what he was sure to be some jolly good fun. “Now, what do you want me to do?”
Pierre turned toward the door to the foyer, absently adjusting his snowy cravat with one steady hand. “Just follow my lead, my friend, and I’m sure you’ll pick it up in no time. Father? Are you with us?”
André spoke from the chair he had positioned himself in, his legs crossed negligently at the ankle, his handsome face looking as bright and lively as his son’s. “Need you ask mon fils? Let the farce begin.”
“MR. URSLEY TERWILLIGER, sir,” the loyal Hartley announced as he stood, rolling his eyes, just inside the open door.
Ursley entered the room in a great rush, brandishing a copy of one of the London newspapers, just as Pierre had prophesied, only to collide with the butler as that unfortunate man turned smartly on his heel to return to his post before—from the fierce expression on his face—he gave Terwilliger a pop on the nose.
Ursley’s mother, had she been present, would have cuffed her son on the ear for his clumsiness, and that lowering thought instantly filled him with a firm resolve not to blunder again. “Watch where you’re walking, you dolt!” Ursley blustered, rudely pushing the old man to one side and thereby giving his audience one less reason to love him. “Where do you have her?” he demanded hotly—following the script his mother had written for him—while rushing up to where Pierre stood watching him, idly stroking the crescent-shaped scar on his left cheekbone. “Where do you have my darling Catherine?”
Pierre peered owlishly down at Ursley, his dark eyes raking the smaller man from head to toe and obviously concluding the man was lacking—something or other, exactly what Ursley couldn’t be sure. He only knew he had been judged and found wanting.
“Ter-williger. Terwilli-ger? Ter-will-iger!” Pierre mused aloud, then shook his head sadly. “No, I’m afraid not. I can’t say as I recall the name. But then, I meet so many people. Have we been introduced?”
“Yes…no!…that is…” Ursley floundered into silence. Where was his mother, damn her black soul to hell anyway! She promised she’d be here, to guide him through this. His shifty gaze shot around the large, sunlit room. She hadn’t told him the father was going to be here as well. The only thing that could be worse than one Standish was two Standishes. And who was that grinning fellow over there, for crying out loud? Mama! he cried silently. He wanted his mama!
“Terwilliger,” Patrick drawled silkily, walking up to stand beside Pierre, the two tall, handsome, immaculately dressed men making Ursley feel small and more unlovely than ever. “I once knew a Terwilliger on the Peninsula. Wellington had him hanged from a tree, for looting, I believe. He was a poor dresser, as I remember him, who always looked as if he had made his own trousers. Any relation, old man?”
Ursley ran a finger inside his suddenly too-tight collar. “No!” he exclaimed quickly, guiltily removi
ng the finger. “No relation at all. I—I’m here because of this,” he explained, holding out the newspaper that was folded back to expose André’s advertisement. “Having read it most carefully, I believe your unknown young woman to be none other than dearest Catherine Halliford, my missing fiancée.”
André, his quizzing glass stuck to his eye, rose to walk fully around Ursley’s now noticeably trembling body. “He reads,” he said, as if to assure himself he had heard aright. Turning to Patrick, he repeated, “He reads! I wouldn’t have thought it. It must have been the waistcoat. I’ve always wondered about the mental profundity of gentlemen who prefer pink satin, haven’t you, Patrick?”
The earl could barely suppress his mirth. Marriage was wonderful, but there was nothing like a bit of good fun with one’s male friends to brighten a day. “I’ll reserve my answer until I’ve inspected my own wardrobe, sir, if you don’t mind,” he answered congenially. “But I think we are being sidetracked by this discussion of Mr. Terwilliger’s intellectual prowess. He seems to be inquiring about your houseguest, the woman you called Caroline Addams. I think he is convinced she is his long-lost love.”
Pierre raised a hand to his mouth, feigning shock. “Oh, dear! Patrick, do you really think so? Now here’s a dilemma. How can I do this tactfully?” He turned to look at Ursley, who was perspiring quite freely in the cool room. “Could you perhaps describe to us the young lady in question, Mr. Terwilliger?”
Describe her? Ursley was nonplussed. His mother said they had the dratted girl laid out upstairs. Why couldn’t he just tippy-toe up there and take a quick peep in at her? Something was wrong; he could feel it in his bones. The bitter taste of failure was a familiar one, and it was stinging him now, deep in the back of his throat. “Describe her, you say. Yes, well, um,” he began hesitantly, “she was short. Yes, that’s it, short—and dark.”
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