“Yes, it does,” he admitted grimly, “but in her case I found it impossible to believe my eyes.”
“I cannot fathom how you managed to get her to Beauchamp without her grandfather’s knowing of it.”
Carlyle, although profoundly shaken, managed to mask his dismay beneath a careless demeanour. “What makes you think that he does not know she is here?”
“Because that old pattern car4 of propriety would never have permitted her to come to Beauchamp under any circumstances. He is such a high stickler that he will no longer allow me even to see her. My morals do not measure up to Lord Eliot’s exacting standards. But compared to you, my dear Richard, I am a paragon of virtue.”
Lord Oldfield’s words at Vauxhall echoed in Carlyle’s mind: “The only woman named Alyssa that I know of lives in Northumberland and is as proper a lady of quality as you would ever want to meet.” Why had he not listened more carefully to what that old windbag was saying? Hoarsely, he demanded, “You are certain that she is Lord Eliot’s granddaughter?”
The duchess looked at Carlyle as though he had taken leave of his senses. “But, of course, I am. I have known her since she was two years old. That was when her father died, and she came to live with her grandfather. Her papa had been Lord Eliot’s heir and favourite son until he allowed himself to be trapped into marrying a vulgar Cit’s daughter. By all accounts, she was a truly dreadful woman.”
Carlyle, remembering the apparition that had accosted him at Vauxhall, could attest to that.
“After young Eliot’s death, she was quite happy to abandon her daughter to her father-in-law to bring up, but poor Alyssa was required to spend two weeks with her each summer,” Selena continued. “The child used to dread those visits with a passion.”
The duke could well imagine that she had At last, he understood the embarrassed blush that had coloured Alyssa’s cheeks when he had told her that he had met her mother.
“Not that living with that tyrant, Lord Eliot, was easy.” Selena’s fingers absently traced the geometrical pattern made by the mahogany-and-rosewood marquetry on a small table beside the sofa. “Try as he might, though, that old curmudgeon never managed to crush Alyssa’s spirit. Perhaps that is why she is the only person on earth that he loves. He hardly lets her out of his sight, the selfish old man. He is determined to keep her tied to him until he dies, guarding her from prospective suitors as if she were the crown jewels. The old wretch would not even permit her a London season for fear some young buck would snatch her away from him. He has kept her hidden away, abroad or at Ormandy Park. Despite that, some very eligible young men came courting, but he drove them all away.”
The duke suppressed a groan. So much that had baffled him about Alyssa was suddenly clear. The only question he still had was why she had sought to ensnare Jeremy. Or had she? “It never was a scheme of mine. I could not resist letting you think so after you put me so out of temper at the Hagars’. I think understandably so, given your provocation.” Good God, what had he done?
Selena asked abruptly, “Who is Miss Raff?”
“Raff is the name of Alyssa’s awful mother. Alyssa has been using it.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea. If only I had known her true surname.”
“I collect, then, that you truly did not know of Alyssa’s connection to Lord Eliot?”
“I knew there was a connection, but I thought that she was his convenient.”
“You were mad,” the duchess said with strong conviction. “Anyone who knows either Lord Eliot or Alyssa will tell you that.” Suddenly she gave Carlyle a sharp, suspicious look. “Alyssa is soft-hearted enough to have been induced to come here to nurse Ellen, but she is much too proper to do so without a chaperon. How did you manage to get her here?”
“I abducted her.”
“How irregular of you.”
“Yes.”
“And stupid, too.”
“Very stupid,” His Grace agreed, “but I was not in possession of all the facts at the time. God, but I could wring her neck. What am I to do with her now?”
The duchess shrugged. “Marry her. Can you do anything else?” Seeing the black look upon his face, she answered her own question. “But yes, of course, you can, and knowing your loathing for matrimony, you will, too.”
“I will not endure a forced marriage of convenience,” he ground out through clenched teeth.
Selena rose from the sofa. “With all due respect, Alyssa deserves better than you. I must go now. I do not wish to see her. It would only increase her humiliation.”
As they reached the door of the library, the duke said, “Swear to me, Selena, that you will say nothing to anyone of Alyssa’s presence here.”
“Of course I shall say nothing. I like her far too much.” She looked at him curiously. “Have you seduced her?”
“No!” he thundered.
“I thought not. But it does not signify. Given your reputation, no one will believe that you have not done so. She is ruined.”
Chapter 23
Alyssa waited impatiently on one of the turquoise settees in the library for Carlyle, hoping that at last he would be willing to listen to the truth. She stared out at the gardens, thinking how much she would miss both their beauty and the company of their owner. What would his reaction be when he learned the true relationship between her and Lord Eliot?
The answer to her question came much sooner than she expected. The door to the library was suddenly flung open and Carlyle bounded in, scowling at her as though he meant to serve her head up on a platter.
“Why did you not tell me the truth, Miss Eliot of Ormandy Park?” he demanded fiercely without preamble.
“You would not have believed me,” she replied mildly, rising to face him.
“You might have tried me,” he said with acerbity. “Why the devil are you not using your own surname?”
She outlined for him the events that led to her living in her mother’s house.
“I’ll wager your mama did not appreciate your effort on her behalf.” Some of the harshness and anger had faded from his voice.
“No,” Alyssa said forlornly.
“Why the devil did you bother with her?”
Alyssa looked at him with agonised eyes. “She is my mother. I could not abandon her.”
“Why not? She abandoned you when you were in leading strings.” Suddenly his scowl disappeared and his golden eyes were disconcertingly sympathetic. “Surely you cannot be happy living with her?”
“No,” Alyssa admitted. “I am miserable.”
“Why did you not go back to Ormandy Park?”
“Grandpapa would not permit it, at least not yet. You have no notion what a rage he was in when I insisted on going to her. I truly feared that he would have a seizure if I did not agree that I would no longer use his name.”
Carlyle began to laugh.
“I fail to see the humour,” Alyssa said coldly.
“I was thinking how much more apoplectic that paragon of virtue would be if he learned that you have been passing yourself off as his convenient.”
“I did not pass myself off!” she exclaimed. “You assumed! You had your mind made up about what I was before we had even met. I was a scheming strumpet.”
He chuckled. “Not to mention a doxy, trollop, vixen, Jezebel, and a few other names that I do not immediately recall.” He placed his hands lightly on her arms. “Accept my sincere apologies for my appalling stupidity.” His smile and his touch made her heart turn over. “I do think, however, that you owe it to imbeciles such as myself to enlighten them to the errors of their thinking.”
She smiled at his self-deprecating humour. How charming he could be. “I am persuaded that even if you had known my true identity, you still would not have wished your son to wed a woman so much older than he.”
“You are right on that score, but why would you have agreed to marry a stripling? It was not, I have now learned, because you lacked for eligible suitors.”
His hands dropped from her arms, and his face darkened into a scowl. “What the devil, then, was your intention in accepting his offer—to break his heart?”
“Just the opposite. To spare both his heart and his pride. You, as much as anyone, must understand how sensitive and easily wounded both are when a calling is in the throes of his first infatuation. I did not actually accept his offer. I only agreed not to reject it. He is so very stubborn that I knew to do so would only make him all the more mulishly determined to win me.”
As Alyssa talked, Carlyle’s expression lightened. “What a masterful understanding you have of my son,” he said admiringly.
His compliment thrilled her, and she flashed him a grateful smile. “You did not believe me, but I do care very much about Jeremy. My affection, however, is that of a sister for a younger brother. I could not bear to trample on either his heart or his pride. I thought it would be so much less painful for him if only he could come to see for himself that I was not the woman for him. I let him think that I would accept his offer while I strove to demonstrate to him that we would not suit. I swore him to secrecy about the betrothal to provide him time to make that discovery. I knew it would not take me long to give him a disgust of me.”
An odd light shone in the duke’s eyes. “I profess an enormous curiosity as to how you thought you could manage to do that.”
“I treated him as an overbearing, criticising matriarch would treat a grandson still in leading strings,” she replied candidly.
His lips twitched. “Were you truly successful in curing his tendre for you?”
“Of course. I was so odious that I could hardly stand myself.”
He laughed softly. “So you were telling me the truth about his crying off the betrothal?”
His laugh warmed her, and she smiled rather shyly at him. “Yes, I told you that the story would have a happy ending for all of us.” But it would not end happily for her. Not now that she had fallen hopelessly in love with Carlyle.
“Which means you were also telling the truth about the real purpose of your journey to Gretna Green. Why the devil did Jeremy not tell me what he was up to?”
“He was certain that you would put a stop to it. He said that you abhorred elopements so much that no circumstances, no matter how dire, would make one acceptable to you.”
“It is true I did tell him that, but only because I was trying to dissuade him from making the border with you,” Carlyle confessed. “In truth, I approve of Sarah Turner’s eloping with George Braden. Stokes would he the death of her. I must say, however, that I never thought that George would have the gumption to do it.”
“He hadn’t. Nor the money, either. That was where Jeremy came in. He provided both.”
“Good for Jeremy,” Carlyle said with a smile that suddenly faded as he regarded Alyssa. “Why the devil didn’t you confide to me what you were about that first night at the Hagars’?”
“I started to, but you cut me off and began calling me all those dreadful names. No one had ever questioned either my character or my virtue before, and I was so outraged I could not resist letting you think the worst.”
“That was stupid.”
“Yes, I know that now,” she admitted, “but at the time I had no notion that you would abduct me.”
“Now that I have,” he asked grimly, “what do you want from me?”
She blinked in surprise at his question. “Your apology. And to be returned to London as quickly as possible.”
“What?” He stared at her incredulously.
Why should he look so thunderstruck? Alyssa wondered. It was not so very much that she was asking. “Surely, Your Grace, you owe me that much!”
“I owe you a good deal more,” he said dryly. “Your stay here without chaperon or maid is the talk of the countryside. The world believes you to be my mistress.”
“But so long as it thinks me to be Miss Raff, it does not signify.”
He regarded her with amazement. “I must congratulate you on how calmly you are taking your ruin.”
“I do not believe that I am ruined yet, although I shall not rest easy on that score until I am back in London. My liveliest fear is that my mama will find out that I am here. She would immediately go to my grandfather.” Alyssa’s voice faltered, and she clenched her hands tightly together. “I could not bear for him to know.”
“Why would she go to him?” Carlyle asked, his voice as gentle as a summer breeze.
“She would not tell me what you said to her at Vauxhall, but whatever it was, she hates you even more than she hates my grandfather. She would like nothing so much as to make enormous trouble for you, and she knows Grandpapa would do so.”
“Would you not like to do so as well, after all that I have said and done to you?” he asked, a curious light in his eyes.
“Of course not. Why should I?”
“I can think of a number of good reasons,” he said softly, regarding her in the oddest way.
She shrugged. “I have no one to blame but myself for not having been honest with you in the beginning. Now that I have seen how much you love your children and have heard the unhappy story of your marriage, I understand why you were so determined to protect Jeremy from similar misery.”
“Who told you about my marriage?” he demanded sharply.
“Lady Hester.” Her answer, however, was drowned out by a loud disturbance in the hail.
“What the devil now?” Carlyle demanded.
An instant later the door of the library was flung open and Jeremy rushed in.
Chapter 24
Carlyle paled at the sight of his note in Jeremy’s hand.
“Papa, I was not...” Jeremy broke off as he saw Alyssa. “So you did come here! I can scarcely believe it. How could you tell my father such lies?”
The duke flinched. “Jeremy, she did not...”
But his son interrupted, crying passionately, “I was not running away with her! I was only helping Sarah Turner and George Braden to elope. Alyssa and I were no longer even betrothed! How glad I am now that I had cried off!” His voice quavered with outrage and scorn as he faced her. “I have never been so excessively shocked in my life as I am by your treacherous behaviour. To dare to tell my father that we were eloping, after I had broken off our engagement. Was that why you were so understanding about it? You were planning to use me to extort a carte blanche from him. You are brazen beyond belief! You are not at all the woman I thought you to be!”
Alyssa saw the bleakness and despair in Carlyle’ s eyes as he started to speak. He meant to tell Jeremy the truth, knowing that the rage now being directed at her would be turned on him. The trusting relationship that he had so carefully built with his son over the years would be irrevocably ruptured. A huge lump swelled in her throat, and she knew that she could not let this happen.
The duke began sadly, “Jeremy, you...”
Alyssa hastily interrupted him, saying icily to Jeremy, “Of course I am not the woman you thought me to be. You had already learned that, had you not? That is why you cried off our betrothal. Why, then, should you be so shocked now?”
Jeremy stared at her in such disgust that she wanted to cry. It broke her heart to have him despise her like this, but better her than his father.
“I hate you, you wicked woman!” he cried, and would have run from the room.
But the doorway was blocked by Mrs Raff who, having been defeated by her huge skirt in her attempt to enter the room in the usual manner, was now sidling into it sideways, looking rather like an inverted purple mushroom.
“Good God!” Carlyle exclaimed in profound shock at the sight of the grapes, strawberries, apricots and tamarinds piled high on Mrs Raff’s hat. “It is a walking orchard.”
Alyssa groaned in despair at the sight of her mother. To her surprise
, the duke reached out and gave her arm a comforting squeeze before turning back to face the latest intruder. Mrs Raff at last managed to clear the doorway, permitting Jeremy to escape, and he slammed the door so hard that Alyssa winced.
Mrs Raff immediately launched her offensive. “You may fob that silly boy off with nonsense about seeking carte blanche, Alyssa, but I know you better. You are such a pattern of propriety that you would never, never consider such a thing.”
You are quite right, madam,” the duke interjected coolly. “It was I who made the offer to her.”
Although clearly startled by this admission, Mrs Raff hastened to take advantage of it. “And when she refused you, you abducted her. But now you will pay the price. Even a duke cannot go about kidnapping innocent ladies of quality and ruining them without paying the piper! I shall see that all England knows of your abduction of my daughter.” She smirked at him triumphantly. “It will be the scandal of the millennium.”
“Mama, no,” Alyssa cried, determined to stop her mother. “It is I who ruined myself. I…”—she closed her eyes for an instant, gathering her courage to utter the lie that was forming on her lips—“I accepted his carte blanche.”
“I do not believe it!” Mrs Raff snapped.
“But I did,” Alyssa replied calmly, “So there is no use in your creating a scandal, for it is we who will be embarrassed, not he.”
“You sapskull!” her mother screeched. “How could you settle for that when you could have had so much more?”
“What more? A loveless marriage to a man who was forced to wed me?” Out of the corner of her eye, Alyssa saw that Carlyle was watching her intently as she spoke. “I prefer a carte blanche, and you can do nothing about it, Mama.”
“Oh, but I can! You will not be so brass-faced when your grandfather comes.”
Alyssa visibly blenched. “Please do not involve Grandpapa in this.”
“I most certainly shall. He will be notified of your scandalous behaviour by the next mail.” She smirked. “I am confident that he will be here post-haste when he learns what you have agreed to.”
“You need not trouble Lord Eliot with word of that, for I have withdrawn my offer to your daughter of a carte blanche,” Carlyle said languidly. “Nothing on earth could induce me to grant her one now.”
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