by Jane Feather
It occurred to her that there was more than one Hugo contained in that powerful frame. She’d enjoyed the easygoing, humorous companion; she’d felt the sting of the authoritarian commander; and once she’d known the man of passion. Now there was Hugo the musician. Perhaps it was in this form that all the others came together and found expression.
Hugo stopped playing and turned toward her, resting one forearm on the top of the instrument. “Did they teach you to play at that seminary?”
“Oh, yes. I have all the accomplishments,” she assured him earnestly.
Hugo stifled his smile. “Well, let me hear you.” He stood up and gestured to the bench.
“But I couldn’t play that piece,” she said, rising with great reluctance.
“I wouldn’t expect you to. It’s my own composition.” He struck tinder and flint and lit the branched candlestick, then moved it so it would fall over the keyboard. “I’ll find you something simpler.” He riffled through a pile of sheet music and selected a familiar folk song with a pretty lilting melody. “Try this.”
Chloe sat down, feeling as if she were on trial as he placed the music on the stand. She flexed her fingers. “I haven’t practiced in ages.”
“It doesn’t matter. Relax and do the best you can.” He sat in the chair she’d vacated and closed his eyes, prepared to listen. He opened them very rapidly after the first few bars and his expression became inscrutable.
Chloe finished with a flourish and turned to face him with a smile of triumph. It had been easier than she’d expected.
“Mmm,” he said. “That was a slapdash performance, lass.”
“It was perfectly correct,” she protested. “I know I didn’t play a wrong note.”
“Oh, no, you were note perfect,” he agreed. “Your ability to sight-read is not at issue.”
“Then what was wrong with it?” She sounded both hurt and aggrieved.
“Couldn’t you tell? You raced through it as if the only thing on your mind was to get it over with as soon as possible.”
Chloe chewed her lip. She was not enjoying this, but honesty required that she admit the criticism. “I suppose it’s because at the seminary we had to practice until we got a particular piece right. Then we could stop.”
Hugo pulled a disgusted face. “So practicing was punishment for failure. Good God, what a criminal way to teach.” He stood up. “Your mother was a most accomplished musician…. Move up.”
“Was she?” Chloe shifted along the bench as he sat beside her. “I never heard her play.” His thigh was hard and warm against the thin muslin of her gown, and she kept her leg very still, knowing that the minute he became aware of their proximity he would move away. And that was the last thing she wanted.
The laudanum must have killed the artist as effectively as it killed the mother, he thought sadly, too engrossed in music and his train of thought to be aware for once of the slight, fragrant body so close to his. “She was a harpist as well as a pianist, and she sang like an angel.”
“I can sing,” Chloe said, as if this might compensate for her lamentable performance at the keyboard.
“Can you?” He couldn’t help smiling at this anxious interjection. “In a minute, you may sing for me, but now we’re going to improve on your rendering of ‘Larkrise.’ Listen to this.” He played the opening bars. “There’s a bird in there … not a herd of rogue elephants. Try it.”
Chloe produced a faithful rendition of his pauses and tones as he took her through the piece stave by stave. “There’s nothing wrong with your ear,” he commented at the end. “We’ll just have to cure the laziness.”
“I am not lazy,” Chloe protested. “But no one taught me properly, you said so.” Her expression was one of half-laughing indignation as she turned her face toward him in the candlelight. “You can teach me.”
His breath caught. Such heart-stopping beauty didn’t seem possible. She shifted on the bench and her thigh pressed against his, sending a jolt of arousal through his loins.
“Stand up,” he commanded sharply. “You can’t sing sitting down.”
Chloe didn’t move for a second, and her eyes were filled with awareness as they searched his expression. A smile quivered on her lips … a smile of pure sensual invitation.
“Stand up, Chloe,” he repeated, but evenly this time.
She did so slowly, still smiling, her skirt brushing across his knees, her hand resting lightly on his shoulder as if in support. “What shall I sing?”
“ ‘Larkrise,’” he said, clearing his throat. “The tune will be familiar. You can read the words as I play.”
Her voice was true but untrained, lacking Elizabeth’s power and intensity, and she still had a tendency to rush. He wondered as the last note died whether it would be interesting to see how he could improve on what nature had given her.
“There, I told you I can sing,” she declared. “Wasn’t that pretty?”
“My child, you lack discrimination,” he said, embracing the role of mentor and tutor with relief. It gave him much-needed distance. “There’s nothing wrong with your pitch, but your voice is weak because you don’t breathe properly. Why were you in such a hurry?”
Chloe looked somewhat crestfallen and, as he’d intended, the sensual invitation was quite vanished from both face and posture. “I didn’t think I was.”
“Well, you were. But we can do something about it if you’d like to.”
“You would teach me?” A speculative look was in her eye, but she was looking down at the music and he didn’t see it. She was thinking that music lessons would of necessity involve more of this closeness; and the closer they became, the sooner she would be able to overcome his inconvenient sober prudery.
“If you’d like me to,” he repeated. “You have to do it because you want to. And that means practicing because you want to and not because I tell you you must.”
“How long would I have to practice every day?” she asked cautiously.
Hugo threw up his hands. “As long as you feel it’s necessary to achieve what you want to achieve.”
“But what if I don’t achieve what you want me to achieve?”
“Then the lessons will cease, since clearly you won’t be interested.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “How well did you know my mother?”
It was a legitimate question, one he’d been expecting at some point. He made his voice matter-of-fact. “Quite well. But a long time ago.”
“Why didn’t you see her recently? You lived so close and she had no friends. But she must have counted you as a friend. She wouldn’t have made you my guardian otherwise.”
He’d prepared his answer to this during the long night watches of the insomniac. “She withdrew from the world after your father’s death. You know that yourself.”
“So, she didn’t want to see you?”
“I don’t think she wanted to see anyone. But she knew she had my friendship, regardless.”
“I see.” Still frowning, Chloe wandered over to the window. The evening star had appeared, hanging over the valley. “You must have known my father, then.”
He stiffened. All the preparation in the world couldn’t prevent his blood from racing or his palms from sweating. “I knew him.”
“How well?”
There was only one honest answer. “Very well.”
“I don’t remember him at all. I was three when he died, you’d think I’d have some vague memory … a smell, or an impression, or a sensation. Wouldn’t you?”
Stephen had had nothing to do with his daughter. Hugo doubted he’d laid eyes on her more than a couple of times in those three years. He had a son, and the son had a stepson, and only they were important in his scheme of things. If Elizabeth had given him a son, it would have been different. The child would have come under the father’s influence from his earliest moments. A girl child was of considerably less interest than the hunters in his stable.
“He was in London a great deal,” Hugo said.
“What was he like?”
Evil … unimaginably evil … corrupting all who fell under his influence with the devil’s enticements.
“Not unlike Jasper to look at. A bruising rider, a clever man, very popular in Society, which is why he spent so much time in London, I believe … he and your mother were somewhat estranged.”
“And then he died in the accident,” she stated flatly. “I’m surprised a bruising rider should have broken his neck on the hunting field.”
It was the official explanation, one that protected the Congregation’s secrets. Stephen Gresham was buried in the family vault, the victim of a riding accident.
“Supper’s ready.” Samuel appeared in the open doorway.
With relief Hugo ushered his immediately diverted ward out of the library.
Chapter 13
CRISPIN HAD BEEN watching his stepfather throughout dinner. He knew from the signs that Jasper was in one of his more fearsome rages. The morning’s visit from Hugo Lattimer and Chloe had put bellows to the smoldering ashes of his fury at the failure of the previous day. When Crispin had returned empty-handed and with the marks of Hugo’s fingers on his throat, Jasper had held back his wrath at his stepson’s failure. Now Crispin was afraid that the reprieve was to be short-lived. Someone would have to pay for whatever had happened between Lattimer and Jasper that morning.
Louise also recognized her husband’s mood. She sat trembling throughout the meal, terrified that a servant would fumble, or a dish would not be hot enough, or his wineglass wouldn’t be refreshed quickly enough. Any domestic derelictions, however minor, would be visited on her. There would be first the icy request that she correct the fault immediately. Later that night would come the punishment. He would humiliate her with his body while his voice softly taunted until he grew bored with her weeping and he would go to his own bed.
The servants knew their own danger and tiptoed around the gloomy, silent dining hall, keeping their eyes on the floor and standing as far away as possible from their master when they served him.
Jasper looked up suddenly. “What’s the matter with you, my dear wife? You look as blue as a gaffed carp.”
Louise jumped and tried to find something to say. “Oh, nothing … nothing at all, Jasper. Nothing’s the matter … not at all … at all …”
“I take your point,” Jasper interrupted with heavy sarcasm. “There’s no need to belabor it, my dear. However, surely you must have some conversation with which to enliven the dinner table. Some detail of domestic trivia to impart, perhaps … or some piece of news from a friend … but, I was forgetting, you don’t have any friends, do you, my dear?”
Tears filled his wife’s eyes. Desperately she blinked them away, knowing that any sign of distress would only goad him.
Crispin shifted in his chair, wishing his mother weren’t so pathetic. It seemed to him she invited his father’s displeasure with her nervous twitching and stammering.
“Not even the vicar’s wife,” Jasper continued, his shallow eyes skidding over his wife’s pale countenance. “It strikes me as odd that the vicar’s wife should not call upon the wife of the chief landowner. Have you offended our neighbors in some way, my dear?”
Louise pressed her hands together tightly in her lap. Jasper had done the offending, as well he knew. The ungodly goings-on in the crypt, while not known in any detail, were widely speculated upon. And the whole neighborhood knew that Sir Jasper was a bad man to cross. No one would willingly and knowingly set foot across his boundaries.
“I await an answer,” he said silkily, half smiling at the effigy at the other end of the long table. He picked up his wineglass and sipped, his eyes glittering over the lip of the glass.
Louise took a deep breath. Her mouth worked and she pressed her handkerchief to her lips. Her voice shook as she said, “I don’t believe so, Jasper.”
“You don’t believe so? Well, I wonder what the explanation could be. It’s quite a puzzle.”
Louise pushed back her chair. “If you will excuse me, I’ll leave you to your port.” She fled the room with a pitiable lack of dignity that not even the servants could miss.
“Put the decanters on the table and get out!” Jasper said savagely to the butler, who obeyed and left with a degree more sangfroid than his mistress had shown.
Crispin hid his apprehension as he waited for the ax to fall on him now. He knew his only hope was to appear unafraid. Casually, he poured himself a glass of port as his stepfather slid the decanter toward him on the polished surface of the table.
“So what are you going to do, sir?” He asked the question almost nonchalantly, leaning back in his chair, crossing his legs, taking a sip of his port, hoping that by bringing the issue into the open he would avert an explosion.
Jasper gave a sharp crack of laughter. It was not a pleasant sound. “Maybe you have a suggestion, dear boy, since you signally failed to bring off mine.”
“That was hardly my fault, sir.” Crispin defended himself as he knew he must. “Chloe took off before I knew what was happening. If the crowds hadn’t been so thick, I wouldn’t have lost her. If she hadn’t been riding Maid Marion, I might have caught her.”
“So it was my fault, was it?” Jasper stared morosely into the ruby contents of his glass. “Somehow, I don’t believe she would have escaped me. Maid Marion or not.”
“But you weren’t there.” He was daring much, but if anything would work, it was courage.
“No.” Jasper sat back. “For the simple reason, my asinine stepson, that Chloe would go nowhere with me willingly. God knows why she holds me in such dislike … to my knowledge, I’ve always treated her with kid gloves.”
“She’s not afraid of you.”
“No … not yet,” Jasper agreed. “But that will come, make no mistake.” He twisted the stem of the glass between finger and thumb and his mouth thinned to a vicious line.
“So what do we do now?” Crispin knew he was no longer in danger.
“Intimidation,” Jasper said. “I’ll be revenged on Lattimer, and that little sister of mine is going to begin to feel the smart of fear.”
“How?” Crispin sat forward, the candlelight falling across his sharp face, his small brown eyes eager pinpoints in his sallow complexion.
“A little arson,” Jasper said softly. “And I believe one of those ridiculous creatures my sister loves so much must be constrained to suffer a little.”
“Ahh.” Crispin sat back again. He remembered the stinging rebuke she’d administered when he’d commented so carelessly on the condition of the nag. It would be very satisfying to avenge the insult in such appropriate fashion.
For the next two days Chloe played her game discreetly. She entered with enthusiasm into the music lessons but offered Hugo no seductive smiles, and whenever she stood or sat beside him she was careful to behave as if she were unaware of his closeness. When she touched him she made it seem like an accident. But she could feel Hugo responding to every brush of her hand, to every move she made when she was close to him. She knew he watched her when she seemed to be absorbed in the music, and she knew that much of the time he was not watching with the eye of a tutor or of a guardian. And the more she affected ignorance and behaved with the natural ease of a girl who’d never tumbled with him on the faded velvet cushions of the old couch, the more relaxed he became in his responses.
They rode out together around the estate, Chloe on her new horse, a spritely chestnut gelding that almost made up for the loss of Maid Marion. Hugo found her an attentive and intelligent companion as he went about the dreary business of listening to the universal complaints of his tenant farmers, dismally examining the tumbledown cottages, the leaking barn roofs, the broken fences, desperately trying to think of some way to raise the funds to make the necessary repairs.
He sat up late in the kitchen after their ride, the sleeping house creaking quietly around him. His body was tired, but his mind, as always, wouldn’t take a backseat. His first sobe
r overview of his estate had shaken him to his core. He’d allowed an already neglected property to go to rack and ruin in the past years, while he wallowed in brandy-induced self-pity. It was a painful realization and one that prevented all possibility of sleep.
Several times his eye and his mind drifted to the cellar steps. He could picture the racks with their dust-coated bottles of burgundy and claret, madeira, sherry, and brandy. It was a magnificent cellar acquired by his father and grandfather. He himself had added little … he’d been too busy depleting it.
That lash of self-contempt kept him away from the cellar for half an hour. Then he found himself on his feet, inexorably crossing the kitchen, lifting the heavy brass key off its hook by the cellar door. He put the key in the lock and turned it. It grated in the lock and the door swung open with a complaining rasp. The dark flight of stone steps stretched ahead. The cool earth smell of the cellar, overlaid with the musty scents of wine, teased his nostrils. He took a step down, then realized he had no lantern.
He turned back. Abruptly he slammed the door shut at his back. The violence of the sound jarred the night. He turned the key, hung it back on its hook, extinguished the lamps in the kitchen, lit a carrying candle, and went up to bed.
The bang awoke Dante, who leapt from the bed with a growl. Chloe sat up. “What is it?” Dante was at the door, snuffling at the gap beneath, his tail waving joyously in recognition of the familiar.
It must be Hugo coming to bed. Chloe wondered what the time could be. She seemed to have been asleep for hours, but it was still darkest night beyond the window. Was he once again unable to sleep?
She slipped from bed and quietly opened the door onto the corridor. Hugo’s apartments were at the far end, beyond the central hallway. She could see the yellow glimmer of light beneath his door. She waited, shivering slightly, for the light to be extinguished, but it remained for hours, it seemed, much longer than it would take someone to prepare for bed. Thoughtfully, she went back to bed and lay down. Dante settled on her feet again with a sigh that expressed relief that these strange nighttime wanderings had ceased.