“I trust your trip was productive?” she asked, pushing herself more upright in the bed and glowering at him.
“Not particularly.”
“How unfortunate. Things did not go well?” she asked.
The others in the room swung their attention back and forth between them.
“The party I was hoping to meet did not show up.”
“Ah. You will have to find the time to tell me about it,” she said. “I insist. I am so interested in English business practices.”
No, he would not find time to tell her anything. He would not spend one more moment alone with Mercy Coltrane. She was blackmailing him—even if he understood her reasons for doing so. She was an impediment to his youngest sister’s marriage—even if she was unaware of it.
But most of all, she threatened all the years he’d spent buffing the chill that encased his heart, all the years he’d spent trying to subdue those feral tendencies.
Being with her simply risked too much.
Outside in the hall Beryl fell into step beside him. “Good Lord, Hart. I would have told you the girl was all right if you’d only paused long enough to listen. Whatever can you have been thinking? How on earth do you suppose it appeared to Lady Acton and her son when you burst into her room like that?”
“I don’t give a bloody damn,” he answered.
She snagged his sleeve, stopping him. She glanced around. They were well away from the interested gazes of the others clustered around Mercy’s doorway.
“Well, you’d better start giving a bloody damn,” she said in a low, tense voice. “Your actions may well jeopardize Annabelle’s future.”
He ground his teeth. She was right. He’d acted like some gauche, ridiculous knight errant. The Dowager would doubtless be asking herself what had given him the right to storm into Mercy’s room and act so possessive. Mercy—as well as Annabelle—could only suffer as a result of his rash act.
“How could you, Hart?” Beryl went on. “Acton has been growing more and more indifferent and Annabelle is beside herself with anguish, the poor lamb.”
He narrowed his eyes on her. He would accept blame, but it was time that some things were made clear. “If Annabelle is beside herself with anguish, it isn’t discernibly different emotion from her rendition of jubilation.”
Beryl gasped. “Hart—”
“No, not ‘Hart.’ Annabelle. Good God, Beryl. If the chit has a tendresse for that blustering oaf, she has a damn odd way of showing it. Padding about like some wan ghost.”
“Hart, what has happened?” Beryl asked, troubled and anxious. “This isn’t like you. Annabelle is a dear, sweet child.”
“Perhaps Acton wishes to wed a woman,” he said, his thought unerringly refocusing on Mercy.
She blinked at him in consternation. “Please, Hart. Don’t be like this. Remember, you’re the head of our family.”
“No, Beryl,” he said intently, “Henley is the head of your family.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, turning pink. “But you’ve always … accomplished things. Annabelle needs your help.”
Annabelle. He had to think of her.
He was exhausted, his side throbbed, he stank of opium, and Mercy’s image imbued his every thought; Mercy, yielding to him; Mercy, laughing at him; Mercy, defiant and fierce; Mercy, pale and slight among white lace pillow shams. He scowled. Something about the gun’s explosion disturbed him. Ridiculous. First a shot in the woods, now this. Accidents did happen. Even twice in as many days. Even to Mercy.
He must force her from his thoughts. Whatever his preoccupation with Mercy, it did not exempt him from his duty to his sisters. “All right, Beryl. I’ll make amends somehow. Smooth things over.”
She nodded, satisfaction marching alongside her obvious relief. “And, Hart, there’s something else.…” Her gaze skittered away from his.
“Yes?”
“Henley. He is having some problems.”
“What sort of problems, and where is Henley, anyway?”
“Political problems,” she said. “That’s why he was gone today and yesterday. He was in Town meeting with various House leaders and some of his constituents.” Her mouth crimped unhappily. “Oh, Hart. They abuse his dedication horribly. Sometimes these meetings go on well into the evening. Often he has to stay in town overnight.”
Henley was having political meetings in Town? During the off-season? It was highly unlikely. No one stayed in Town when Parliament was not in session. Yet one look at Beryl’s intent face and he realized she believed it.
“And what do you want me to do?” he asked.
“I want you to use your influence to smooth Henley’s way so he needn’t work so hard. See that he knows the right people.”
He shook his head. “As I’ve told you before, Beryl, I don’t know the right people. I have no connections, Beryl, whatever you think. I’m rarely even in the country.”
“But you’re the Earl of Perth,” she insisted doggedly. “People listen to you. Even Henley says so.”
He narrowed his eyes on her. “Did Henley ask you to make this request?”
“No,” she said, refusing to meet his gaze. “No. He would be angry if he knew I had. It is my idea. Being the Earl of Perth’s brother-in-law has always lent Henley a certain cachet. I thought … that is, I had hoped that you would be willing to actively exert yourself on his behalf.”
“Beryl,” he said wearily, “my interference wouldn’t do any good. Henley is a brilliant man. He will succeed or fail on his own merit.”
Her fine-drawn vulpine features took on a resigned cast. “As you say, Hart,” she murmured, and left, her shoulders bowing, her face for one brief moment stark with unhappiness.
Henley Wrexhall, Hart thought, had some explaining to do.
Chapter 19
“Well,” the Dowager Duchess said as soon as she had shooed the others from Mercy’s room, “what was that all about?”
“What?” Mercy asked.
The Dowager pursed her thin lips so tightly, they all but disappeared. “Don’t play the innocent with me, young lady. Nothing is going as I’d planned. The Earl of Perth storms in here, demanding explanations in the most proprietary manner. Nathan Hillard looks like a little boy who’s had his sweet taken from him, and my own son, after having arranged this elaborate house party, does nothing, nothing, to conclude his courtship with that young chit.
“Add to that the Whitcombes closeted in their adjoining room—I won’t even begin to tell you the coarse speculation that must be provoking; then young Annabelle Moreland inexplicably finds not only a backbone but one made of steel; and Beryl Wrexhall attends every function without the benefit of her husband as escort. And it is all centering about you, Miss Coltrane. I won’t have it.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Mercy murmured, pleating the lace edge of her bed jacket, her thoughts fixed on the Dowager’s initial charge. Without a doubt Hart’s audacious conduct had landed her in a thicket. Still, a treacherous elation welled up within her. He might not like it, but he cared.
“Have you been doing something you oughtn’t?”
The Dowager’s question caught her off-guard. She dropped the bed jacket’s hem. “No!”
The Dowager gave her a hard look before muttering, “Well, see that you don’t. I have a responsibility to you and Lady Timmons. And I mean to do it … no matter how painful.” She lifted her chin, fixing Mercy with an odd, defiant stare. “I was hoping to avoid this, but it is obvious we need to have A Conversation. You, Miss Coltrane, need guidance.”
You can’t possibly know how much, thought Mercy as she meekly replied, “Yes, Your Grace. I am grateful for any instruction you would be kind enough to offer.”
The Dowager sniffed. “Very pretty, child. I am sure your manner with the gentlemen has been just as circumspect.” She fixed Mercy with an expression that made it clear she was not at all sure of anything of the sort.
The memory of slipping into Hart�
�s bedchamber caused heat to ignite in Mercy’s cheeks. The Dowager’s brows climbed. “Oh, dear,” she breathed. “Worse than I’d expected. We must salvage what we can.”
“Your Grace, really, you misunderstand—”
“I am an elderly woman, Mercy. I have lived a long life, during which I have witnessed too many women ruined because they gave their hearts the whip hand.”
“Ma’am?” Mercy asked.
The Dowager nodded. “We women, Mercy, are by nature foolish, gentle creatures,” she lectured. “We are malleable, trusting, at the mercy of our tender emotions. Altogether sweet and childlike, totally unfit to guide our own destinies.”
“I see,” Mercy murmured. She could almost hear her mother’s voice in the Dowager’s recitation. Pliancy, Mercy, is our gift to the world. It is a woman’s duty to temper the harsh practicality of men with our innate gentleness. But how often, Mercy wondered, did simple impotence masquerade as gentleness? Pliancy certainly wasn’t going to find Will and bring him home. The thought seemed a betrayal of her mother.
“Mercy, do try and attend. I speak only for your own good. Being an American you are doubly handicapped. Your womanly sentimentality is compounded by your American frivolity.”
“Madam?”
The Dowager frowned. She obviously found this frank manner of speech distasteful, but just as obviously felt the need for it. “You American girls are so audacious, so animated, yet so innocent,” the Dowager said with something like surprise. “Especially compared to our serene, self-effacing English girls. Clearly, you have been encouraged to indulge your ebullient, labile emotions to an excessive degree.
“Not that you aren’t perfectly charming, my dear,” she added, “and I do not mean to wound you, but you do want to be a lady, do you not?”
Again, the words were so familiar, Mercy nearly blinked. Familiar and yet it seemed as though she were truly hearing them for the first time. Perhaps it was because this was only the Dowager Duchess of Acton speaking and not her mother and so she could for the first time hear beyond the disappointment to the content.
Her mother had spent her life hoping Mercy would achieve the dreams she herself had abandoned. But now, listening to the Dowager, it struck Mercy that her hostess was very much like her mother. Neither had really relinquished her own aspirations. They had simply bequeathed them to their children.
An idea pricked at Mercy. She had unquestioningly received the burden of those dreams and from the first she had failed to fulfill them. Always before she had been certain that some inherent quality within herself—something unworthy and unwomanly—had resulted in that failure. But perhaps that wasn’t true. Perhaps her mother should not have expected her to achieve secondhand goals.
The idea wouldn’t be ignored. And, Mercy was stunned to realize, instead of guilt she felt a sense of relief, something akin to emancipation.
“… but your ebullience may give rise to unfortunate talk,” the Dowager was saying. “Our English gentlemen may misunderstand you. As the Earl of Perth—and perhaps my own son—has obviously done. And then where are you, m’dear?” she asked.
“I have never acted improperly,” Mercy said distractedly, still overwhelmed by her newfound conjecture.
“Would you even know it if you had?” the Dowager went on. “Society is based on subtlety and nuance, Miss Coltrane. Perhaps unwittingly you have encouraged these gentlemen’s attentions or expectations.” Mercy met her gaze. The Dowager’s did not waver. “I am loath to say this, but their expectations cannot be ones you would welcome.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My point exactly.” There was a hint of bitter triumph in her tone. “You must not think for an instance that your charm and wealth will overcome generations of exclusivity and breeding.”
“Ma’am?”
“I am forced into being unbecomingly coarse,” she said, her face tightening with distaste. “Acton finds you vivacious and intriguing. It is only to be expected. He has had scant intercourse with a woman of your upbringing and subsequently has developed all the signs of becoming besotted with you. But mark me well, my dear, he is, when all is said and done, the Duke of Acton.”
My God, Mercy thought, she is warning me off Acton. That bluff, fusty, sweetly incompetent man! “Your Grace … !” Mercy blurted out in a agony of embarrassment.
The Dowager lifted her hand, waving down her words. “I do not care that the Duke of Manchester’s son has married an American heiress. His profligate behavior had already precluded him from marrying any decent Englishwoman. Not to mention that his mother danced the cancan at a music hall with the Prince.” She sniffed, some mental image offending her. “What more could one expect of her offspring? But that is not the case here, Mercy. Acton has impeccable antecedents and a tradition to uphold.”
Mercy’s sense of humor saved her at the last minute. The Dowager had sat back a little and was watching her expectantly, if compassionately, obviously expecting Mercy to wail with despair that she wasn’t going to be allowed to wed her son. Mercy simply did not have it in her to disappoint such maternal confidence.
“Oh!” She managed to turn a laugh into a shaky breath and bowed her head, her lower lip trembling.
“I know, dear,” Lady Acton said. “But it had to be said. One can only hope that your heart is not already too deeply engaged. Acton can be most charming.”
Mercy sniffed. Three sniffs seemed adequate. “I’m nonplussed, madam. But I shall strive to overcome my … disappointment.”
The Dowager fidgeted. It was so uncharacteristic, that Mercy abruptly left off snuffling. “There is something else, ma’am?”
“Yes.” The Dowager stiffened her spine and edged forward, sitting regally erect, composed and autocratic. She did not flinch from meeting Mercy’s eye. “I am further compelled by my obligation as your hostess and chaperone to warn you that neither is the Earl of Perth a potential suitor. No matter what his extraordinary behavior a few minutes ago.”
She was blindsided by the Dowager’s words. She had not expected to have half-formed dreams, dreams so tenuous and fragile she had not even acknowledged them to herself, so brutally discovered and dismissed. She had no defense against the other woman’s words, she could only stare at the Dowager’s stern face, feeling more exposed and vulnerable than she’d ever been before.
The blood pounded dully in her temples. The room seemed suddenly too large, too cold. She should have expected this, but she’d been intent on deluding herself, experiencing each moment in Hart’s company as a separate thing, without past or future, refusing to acknowledge the emotion that grew each time she saw him.
Love.
God help her, she was in love with Hart Moreland, a man to whom titles and privilege and English society were so important he’d spent a decade serving them for his sisters’ sake.
Fool, she thought bitterly, telling herself Hart cared, quivering with joy when he’d stormed into her room, storing away the memories of his heart beating beneath her cheek, his arms effortlessly lifting her, the scent of tobacco and wool, his lips opening over her own with something she’d foolishly called desire.…
“Perhaps Mr. Hillard might entertain notions of forming a permanent alliance with you, Mercy,” the Dowager went on after a moment. Mercy nearly wept. “He is, after all, an intimate of our Prince, a man who is reported to be quite besotted with young American girls. And Hillard has no title to consider.”
And then the tears did fall, hot and bitter and uncontrollable. She dashed them away, her face averted, staring out the window.
“My dear,” the Dowager said, stiffly reluctant. “Perhaps a Hungarian count. Or a French duc … their titles are mostly formalities anyway.”
“Please, just go,” Mercy said.
“Well. My heavens.” Indignation that she’d been so summarily dismissed filled her tone. Mercy heard the Dowager’s heavy skirts rustle, heard the click of heeled slippers cross the room.
“I will leave you t
o compose yourself.” There was heavy criticism in her voice.
Mercy almost laughed through her tears. No, indeed, she wasn’t acting like a lady, not at all. But a lady probably wouldn’t allow her heart to be shredded on an icy facade and an ancient title.
“I will see what I can do for you. Perhaps when we return to London, I can arrange an introduction to one of the Russian princes. Or an Italian count,” the Dowager said. The door hissed open and quickly shut.
Mercy buried her face in her hands. The Dowager could parade titles and coronets and medals and estates by her until the end of time. She did not want a title.
She wanted a gunfighter.
Hart stared out of his bedroom window as dawn, still a filigree of silver, traced the horizon. He hadn’t slept much. Not that he ever did. Rather than attend dinner last night, he’d gone back to London. There he’d scoured the Soho district, looking for some trace of William Coltrane.
He hadn’t found Coltrane but he had found others: lost eyes and ruined dreams, men feeding a hunger for oblivion and women feeding an irrepressible hunger to survive. Desperation, remorse, and resignation. He’d seen the like before, in North African tent villages and overflowing Eastern seaports, in American cattle towns and in European capitals. He saw the like every time he looked in the mirror.
Finally, a few hours after midnight, a glassy-eyed dandy had told him that he’d shared a pipe with Will Coltrane a few days before. Hart had pressed him. A day to an addict is no more than a notion. But the man had insisted he knew Will well.
Charming chap, for all his American accent, the man had said. Too bad he’d been bankrupted. Rather changed his personality. Became unpleasantly insistent. The man had paused to squint at Hart in perplexity. Why, the dandy had wondered aloud, hadn’t Will’s mentor extradited him from his financial troubles?
Mentor? That had caught Hart’s attention. What mentor? Who was he? “The mentor” was discreet, well spoken, English. Maybe tallish, maybe broad, always wore a slouch hat, didn’t know what color his hair was. The dandy couldn’t say any more than that. He hadn’t paid that much attention.
A Dangerous Man Page 16