Mia lay down on her bed and stared out the window as she considered where. Brighton. The Regent’s Pavilion at Brighton attracted all sorts of people, from royal to roué, and would never appeal to the staid Duke of Meryon or his wife. But the Prince Regent was aging with neither wisdom nor grace. His circle of friends did not seem to appreciate music or anything but drink and revelry, something she enjoyed as much as the next person, but in moderation. The Regent himself was proof that nothing ruined one’s looks or health faster than excess.
Mia mulled over several other possibilities, but really she had not seen all that much of England north of London. There was plenty of time to decide. It would be more than a year before she reached her majority. She did not have to make a decision tonight about anything more than what time to retire.
Jumping up from her bed, Mia changed the angle of the clock so she could see the time in the morning.
Lighting a candle, she searched through her bag and found a book that Elena had given her when they first came to London.
She lost herself in the adventures of a girl off to Bath, away from home for the first time. Mia considered the similarity of their stories. The likeness ended when the heroine, whom Mia judged as none too bright, met two young men and found it a challenge to make her preference known, constantly falling under the influence of her brother and her best friend, who had fallen in love with each other.
True, she and Catherine both enjoyed adventure. Mia put her head against the high back of the chair and smiled.
Would Bath suit her? What better spot than a place people visited for relaxation and fun? And Elena disliked Bath.
They had visited once and her guardian had insisted they leave within the week. Mia had loved it, had found herself the center of attention whenever someone came to call. It had been before her come-out and was the scene of her first nasty argument with Elena over Mia’s flirtatious behavior.
Her visit last spring with Mrs. Giddings and her daughters had been disappointing in some ways, but it did prove she had a talent for charming old men. And Bath was full of older, wealthy gentlemen.
When she turned twenty-one Mia would not have to answer to anyone. Not Mrs. Giddings or Elena. She could flirt outrageously, and there would be a constant stream of visitors so that there would be no danger of forming attachments and, if she wished, many, many opportunities for seduction.
Closing her eyes, Mia pictured a house on the Crescent where her salon would be the one everyone visited, as popular with artists as it was with society. A place where gentlemen could mix with men they would never usually meet. It would be easy to find a lover in such a group. Or not. As she wished. And she would send them away when she grew bored.
Yes, Bath might be the perfect spot, she decided, and dozed off with that thought.
Some sound awoke her. She sat still, trying to determine the source of the noise. It wasn’t noise, but the lack of it. The clock had stopped its soothing tick, tick, tick.
Mia jumped up and found the key, winding the mechanism carefully, and then realized that she must find a clock still running to know the correct time. In the next moment it occurred to her that she could wind all the clocks. She could perform that helpful task quite easily without any training at all.
Chapter Thirteen
DAVID CAME IN the kitchen door, tossing the tiny end of the cigarillo into the banked fire. It flared for a moment, and then the room fell into darkness again. Locking the door, he prepared to make the rounds to be sure the house was secured. A silly precaution in a house under quarantine, with a sign on the gates announcing it, but Mrs. Cantwell had asked him to see to it and he would.
As he came down the passage from the back of the house, he heard a low singing as someone, some woman, a woman who could only be Mia Castellano, passed by the passage and went into the main salon. He recognized the tune, “Greensleeves,” but the words were not familiar. He moved closer for a better look at what mischief she had found.
“Midnight, the witching hour,” she sang in an almost charming alto whisper, “when all our dreams are bad ones. Midnight, the wishing hour, when all our dreams are glad ones. Dreams, dreams that blend our world with all we wish and all we fear. Dreams, dreams that blend our world with what we want and all held dear.”
She stopped singing but kept on humming as she found the key for the tall clock and carefully wound it. She had to stretch to reach the keyhole, her lithe body lit in silhouette by the moonlight from the window nearby.
David did not need to be reminded that dreams could be an insane blend of reality and illusion. Without closing his eyes he knew that. He could still feel the warmth of her shoulders under his hands. He could still feel the longing to pull her to him and show her just how much he wanted her. He stepped back behind the door as she left the salon and passed him to go into the small salon, singing her song again.
“Oh, take me back to days gone by when love was new and hearts did plead. Take me back to nights so sweet when dreams of love were filled with need.”
Need. No one so young could understand true need or she would never have used a word so mundane, even if it rhymed. David could hear the turning sound as she wound the clock in there and wondered what possessed her to do this chore at midnight.
He stole into the room she had just left. He could still hear her singing and would know when she had gone to bed.
Seven days of this. Of running into her four or six times a day. As they had proved in the last twelve hours, it was impossible to avoid each other in a house this size.
This was Eros’s idea of hell. To put a man in close confines with temptation in the shape of a girl. One who had no idea what she risked when she did something as simple as let her skirt brush against him.
Add to that the irony that he was her only chaperone, and the one person she needed protection from was him.
He did not want to imagine how Elena and Lyn would react if he could not control himself. No doubt his dreams would be filled with possibilities, up to and including a duel with swords where the duke unmanned him with one well-placed thrust.
Mia came out of the small salon and made her way up the stairs. “Dreams, dreams that curse our souls and wound our hearts. Dreams, dreams that make our lives more worthy of our living.”
He listened for a while and heard the tune fade as she went into her room. David checked the latch on the front door, the windows in the hall and the two salons, and, sure that enough time had passed, made his own way upstairs. He had his hand on the latch to his room when Mia opened the door from the other side. She jumped back, startled, and then laughed. “You frightened me half to death,” she said, stating the obvious.
“I trust you have a very good reason to be visiting the family suite.”
“The double door was wide open and I knew that meant you were not abed yet,” she explained without guile. “I wound your clock.”
He stared at her. She never said exactly what she meant. He had never caught her in a lie, but he knew that she bent the truth to suit her whims. When they talked, he spent half his time trying to decipher the truth and her version of the truth. She was bold, but at the moment looked as insecure as a new midshipman.
She had been winding clocks downstairs. But no matter what the truth, David knew in that moment Mia Castellano was a test he would fail.
He stared at her. Just stared until he spoke his thought without censor. “I can see there is no chance on this sweet earth that you will leave me alone, allow me any peace at all. I am bound for hell. You are like a curse I cannot undo.”
If she had stood there one minute more he would have taken her to his bed whether she wanted it or not. But Mia Castellano must have heard the ultimatum implicit in his tone, if not his words, for she curtsied, swooped under his arm as she had at least two times before, and ran down the passage, pausing at the doorway to whisper, “Good night, Lord David.”
David went into his room, closed the door, and leaned against it. He felt
more than need. This was hunger, aching, longing, craving, and still something that went beyond those words to a desire that blinded one to honor and responsibility. That drove a man to demand what he needed regardless of the consequences.
The first time he had seen Mia Castellano, at his brother’s engagement ball, he had no idea who she was. He had thought her looks exotic, and when she had waltzed past him, the sound of her laughter had stayed in his head all night.
She had caught him watching her and given him a smile that held all the allure of a courtesan.
Surely she was no more than an adventurous girl, he had thought. His brother would never invite anyone but the best of families to his engagement ball.
He’d watched her flirt her way through the ballroom leaving a trail of charmed fools. Not every eye was on her but no one would forget her; she was like a bee wrapped in butterfly camouflage.
When they were finally introduced and he realized she was engaged, to Bendasbrook no less, he had been all but rude to her and ignored her at every meeting since. He did not need the temptation or the trouble it would cause.
Avoiding her now, however, would be a challenge.
David needed those dreams of Lyn’s vengeance. In vivid detail. He knew he needed something, anything, to quell his libidinous thoughts or he would do something that would define failure in an entirely new way.
CLOSING HER DOOR, Mia turned the lock and leaned against it, patting her chest to calm her racing heart. Dio mio, I have been like a child in five different ways.
She went into the dressing room and did no more than toe off her shoes before she sank onto the bench. Covering her face with her hands, Mia tried to decipher what had frightened her so much.
He was like a banked fire. And she behaved like a child who had spent the day adding little bits of kindling, trying to coax the fire to life when it had been simmering underneath and more than ready to flare into flame that would consume anyone fool enough to stand too close.
What she had seen in his eyes so shocked her that she had not even heard what he said.
Disgust and hatred aimed at her, directly at her.
Mia could not pretend that she did not know why, that she had not pressed him, teased him, and played the coquette at a time when he faced a disaster of monumental proportions. Lord David was the one in charge, and no more able to control the situation than she was.
Lowering her hands so that they now only covered her mouth, she stared at the pink and blue patterned carpet. She felt sick, not from some hideous disease but at the thought that he could hate her.
No. She stood and began to undress. He had only needed someone to vent his anger on and she had been standing there. She understood that. She threw things when faced with too much to bear. The hate in his eyes was aimed at the Fates that had put them in this horrible situation.
Leaving him alone would be the best way to make amends. She put her dress on the hook along with her stays and chemise and wriggled into her nightdress, a cool light cotton that was one of her greatest extravagances.
She would spend all day tomorrow reading about the stupid girl at Northanger Abbey. Catherine Morland would be the perfect companion for the stupid girl at Sandleton.
Chapter Fourteen
ON THEIR SECOND MORNING at Sandleton, Lord David Pennistan woke with a headache and swore. He never had headaches. He considered them the province of women, but he could not deny the dull pulse of pain at the back of his head, just above his spine.
He’d seen the surgeon again yesterday and never thought to ask what kind of pain to expect with the illness or where it would start. If he had asked he would have a better idea if this was a very bad sign or merely the result of a poor night’s sleep.
Damn him twelve times twelve for not making the effort to dose himself with Jenner’s vaccine. David pushed himself out of bed, relieved that a headache was his only symptom. The newly risen sun helped him decide that a walk may be all the treatment his headache needed.
Like the morning before, he found hot coffee with bread, chicken, and cold eggs on the table in the dining room. Miss Castellano still slept, no doubt. It would be fine with him if she kept to her room for a week.
He had not seen her at all the day before and by evening had wondered if she had run away. Patently impossible, but how else to explain why someone so ubiquitous one day became invisible twenty-four hours later?
Finally, just before dark last night he heard her making the rounds and winding clocks, singing new words to “Barbara Allen.” Not only did she avoid his room but she had not come into the family suite, leaving all the clocks there unwound.
Whether deliberate or not, her absence had made it easier for him to come to his senses. They were a man and a woman in close company, unusually close company. Add to that her inclination to tease any man close enough to see her face.
He knew that from their first meeting, and only had it confirmed in the harshest of ways, when he and William had found her with Lord Arthur.
He needed only time and distance to talk himself round, to remind himself that he was a gentleman and she a woman without scruples eager to test her wiles on the only man available.
After a hasty breakfast, David hurried up the steep attic stairs on the first of his thrice-daily visits to the sickroom. Basil, the healthy groom whose name David finally thought to ask, sat with John Coachman and Ralph, the other groom. The coachman looked feverish and seriously ill.
“Ralph’s awake, my lord, but he says keeping his eyes closed makes it less likely that he will be sick again.”
“It’s good news that he is on the mend.” Neither one of them mentioned the coachman, who showed no sign of improvement.
“Mrs. Cantwell left to sleep for a few hours. I’m to run for her if either man takes a turn for the worse.”
“Very well. I’m going out for a walk and will stop back when I return.”
“Very good, my lord.”
“Does your head ache, Basil?”
“No, my lord.” The boy shrugged. “My back hurts from all this bending over but my head is clear.”
“Good, good.”
“Yes, sir, my lord.”
David made his way down the narrow stairs. Pressing his fingers into the back of his neck relieved some of the tension, if not the pain. Passing through the dining room again, he grabbed some of the bread and a leg of chicken.
The front door was still bolted from the night before. He pulled it open and stepped out into the sunshine of an already warm day. As he ate, he felt summer fully upon them. He hated the heat and, worse, the damp. It reminded him too easily of Isla Mexicado. The constant steaming humidity had been the only thing worse than the blazing sun.
David headed down to the gate from habit before he remembered that he could not walk to town today. Something rested on the ground just outside the gate and he decided to keep on in that direction.
Two baskets.
He picked up both after checking the contents: some meat pies and a loaf of bread with no indication who had sent them.
As he stood there considering the gifts, David recalled the time in Isla Mexicado when the village chief had been poisoned by an anonymous gift of his favorite fish. The man had been arrogant and stupid to eat the food, or else he had no concept of how much his slaves hated him.
The townspeople here had always seemed amiable and none were beholden to Sandleton or the Pennistans for their income. Most of the land had been sold off years ago and the house kept only because the fishing was so good.
Surely this food would be safe to eat; no villager would be inclined to poison them to eliminate the possibility of contagion. England and Mexicado had more in common than any Englishman would believe, but surely that kind of barbarism was not part of it.
“What a generous offering.”
Still mired in an internal debate, David had not heard Novins approach. Today he drove a two-wheeled dog cart with a single horse. He slowed and stopped on the othe
r side of the gate. Several packages heaped beside him explained the need for the conveyance.
“Yes, very kind.” David opened the gate, but stood back.
“I am coming in.” Novins urged the horse through. “It is impossible to know what illness we are fighting without seeing the patients. I’ve made arrangements for the surgeon in Pegford to call on anyone who has need of care. I will quarantine myself at my own home, which is outside of town anyway. My servants have been sent away for the week.”
“Well thought out, Novins.”
“Thank you, my lord. Would you care to ride up to the house with me? These packages are for you and Miss Castellano, my lord. Sent from Pennford.”
Lord David put the two baskets he had at hand next to the others and hauled himself up into the seat next to Novins. “The packages are for us? I didn’t think Cantwell would be back until tomorrow at the earliest.”
“And you were right, sir.” Novins urged the horse into a trot. “Mr. Cantwell will start back today. The duke sent one of the stable lads with these items. Since the moon is full, the boy offered to travel by night. There are letters as well. They arrived less than an hour ago. Since there seemed to be some urgency I came up immediately.”
The ache in David’s head ratcheted up a notch. What could be so urgent that the boy had to travel at night? Their arrival at the kitchen door precluded any more conversation. David helped Novins unload the cart. In the kitchen, the surgeon shed his hat and began to organize the packages.
He handed David two letters and a weighty satchel similar to the ones that the mail courier used to transport estate papers from Pennford to London.
David accepted the bundle and dropped them on a chair nearby. “Novins, take a minute and tell me who sent these baskets.” He lifted one and nodded at the other.
Novins’s cheeks reddened, though David had no idea why.
“The bread could be from Miss Horner.” The surgeon’s voice hinted that all bread looked the same. “I do not recognize the other, though they look like meat pies.”
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