Daphne gaped at him, her mouth working mutely. When she found her voice she stammered, “You—you’re j-jilting me?”
“I’m afraid so,” he admitted with a moue of remorse. “But it is for your own good. I am convinced that to proceed further with our engagement would bring nothing but misery to either of us.”
“But—but….”
Raeburn sighed. “I will of course accept all the blame, and, fortunately, since the betrothal was not to be announced officially until Christmas night, you will be spared the embarrassment of having to publish a retraction—”
“Damnation, Raeburn,” Lord Crowell exploded, banging his fist on the table, “you can’t just throw my sister over like that! I won’t let you get away with it, there’s too much at stake! Renard Chase, the—the settlement…. I’ll—by God, I’ll sue for breach of—”
“I think not,” Raeburn cut in, his tone changing to one of cool authority. “You would never expose your sister to public scandal….” His voice hardened, and he continued implacably, “Nor, I think, would you care for me to explain under oath that the primary reason I broke the engagement was to prevent my family’s name from being soiled by even collateral alliance with someone like you.” He paused again; then he said meaningly, “Crowell, perhaps I did not make myself clear earlier when I instructed my servants to pack your belongings; from this moment hence, you are no longer welcome in my home.” After glancing dismissively at John Mason, he added, “Your, um, protégé may leave as well.”
Above the collection of stifled gasps echoing about the room, Daphne’s voice rose with uncharacteristic force, strident and enraged, “Goddamn you, Graham Foxe, you—you lying bastard, leave my brother alone!”
Everyone turned to stare in amazement at her, and even Flora Talmadge was moved to reprove shakily, “My lady, you m-mustn’t say things like th-that. Such words are—are….”
Daphne ignored her, glaring up at Raeburn with eyes that glinted with pale fire. “How dare you denounce my brother?” she gritted. “What kind of credulous fools do you take us for? Who are you to talk so pompously of ‘scandal’? In the past two years there has been enough scandal about your family to make the Foxe name notorious for generations!”
Angrily pushing back her chair, she rose to her feet, her muslin skirts flying, and over the heads of the onlookers she pointed a shaky finger at Jessica. “There she is, there’s the real reason you’ve decided to abandon and humiliate me: Jessica, the drawing teacher, the parson’s chit! Everything was fine until she turned up again, her and that squawling red-haired brat of hers who was born so conveniently after her husband’s death. Have you given careful thought to the paternity of that so-called niece of yours, Graham?”
Through clenched teeth Raeburn muttered, “Take care what you say, Daphne. I know you’re upset, but you’re not thinking clearly.”
Daphne laughed raucously, her harsh words utterly devoid of humor. “Not thinking clearly? I think my mind must be working properly for the first time in months!” She watched Jessica’s pallor increase with each new accusation. “A clergyman’s daughter?” she snorted. “Christ, man, everyone knows her own family disowned the little lightskirt after she seduced your brother! God alone knows what you men see in her, what kind of whore’s tricks she’s used to captivate first Andrew, then you….” Nostrils flaring, she glowered again at Raeburn. “I’ve seen the way you look at her. Don’t bother to deny it.”
Raeburn met Daphne’s gaze squarely. “I wouldn’t dream of denying it,” he snapped. “I’m going to marry Jessica.”
At the far end of the table Jessica gasped. The rigor that had kept her silent during Daphne’s tirade softened enough to allow her to stammer uncertainly, “M-marriage, Graham?” Suddenly her green eyes were blind to everything but the face of the man she loved.
He smiled tenderly at her confusion. “I think it would be advisable, don’t you, darling?” He glanced about him wryly, noting his enrapt audience. Mason especially seemed about to explode. Raeburn guessed that they had better become resigned to being caricatured in the gazettes for months. He said, “Of course I hadn’t intended to make my declaration in quite this way or quite so…public, but—”
Claire squealed with delight and hugged Jessica, “How perfectly wonderful; you’ll be my sister twice!”
At Raeburn’s side Daphne reeled. She clutched his sleeve and protested breathlessly, “You can’t make her your wife! Offer her a carte blanche if you must, but to actually marry a woman like that after spurning me, a Templeton….”
“And Graham,” Flora ventured timidly, “have you seriously thought of the consequences? Jessica is poor Andrew’s widow, and for you to wed after living together in the same house…. There could be…gossip….”
With growing frustration Raeburn eyed the circle of people clamoring about him, coming between him and the woman he loved. Except for his sister, he would willingly consign them all to perdition, for he could see that Jessica remained stunned, unconvinced of his sincerity. Oh, God, he needed to be alone with her so that he could talk to her, touch her, reassure her in the most basic and personal of ways….
“But, Graham, think of the scandal,” Flora wailed.
“There will be no scandal when Jessica is my countess,” he retorted hotly. “I will see that no one dares make light of our family name!” He glowered significantly at Mason and Crowell, and be was surprised when the artist lurched to his feet, so agitated that he stumbled against the table and made the crockery rattle.
“Don’t you think it’s a little late for such precautions, my lord?” Mason blurted. Everyone stared. Jessica stood mesmerized as his yellow eyes glinted ferally at her, like those of a jackal closing in on a wounded fawn. “I warned you, madam,” he grated, and she could only nod wretchedly, helpless to stop what was coming, knowing that the fleeting and unexpected glimpse of heaven that Raeburn had just shown her would make her purgatory away from him all the more bitter.
Raeburn watched that exchange of glances, his eyes narrowing menacingly at Jessica’s instinctive recoil. “What the hell is going on here, Mason?” he demanded.
Mason drew himself up to his full height, expanding his sunken chest importantly. A lock of his sandy, thinning hair fell forward over his eyes, and he brushed it back carefully into place across his bald spot. When he saw that his spectators were all attention, he cleared his throat and began unctuously, “My lord, although it is clear that you have misinterpreted my simple desire to spare your sensibilities any distress by not telling you what I knew about Lord Crowell, I am sure—”
“To the point, man; get to the point!” Raeburn interrupted with raw impatience.
“Very well, my lord,” Mason said, deflating slightly as he abandoned his oratorical air, “the point is this: you would be committing a tragic and ironic error of almost monumental proportions if you marry this woman in order to give her the protection of your good name, for she is the one person who has deliberately and insidiously sought to destroy the virtue of that name. Jessica Foxe, your sister-in-law, the woman who lives under your roof and eats at your table, is in truth none other than the scurrilous cartoonist Erinys!”
Time faltered: gray eyes met green across a chasm of disbelief and admission and guilt; then with a guttural squeal Jessica ran.
She darted for the door, but Raeburn intercepted her before she could reach it, before the other people in the dining room could do more than gape in vacant astonishment. When his large hands clamped like manacles over her arms, she cried out in protest and flailed at him, her eyes screwed shut so that she would not have to see the disgust on his beloved face. “Let me go!” she wailed, thrashing wildly, but he restrained her movements with no more effort than if she had been Lottie’s size. As he caught her close against the hard wall of his broad chest he glanced dismissively over the top of her head at the shaken onlookers. “Out. All of you,” he rasped, and no one dared gainsay him.
Magically Barston materialized in t
he archway again, summoned as if by second sight. He drew back the door to make room for the people trooping out, and Raeburn asked him tersely, “Is the carriage ready?”
“Yes, my lord,” the butler replied, impassive as always, giving no notice of the woman squirming in his master’s arms. “The coachman did request that I inform you that because of the snow on the roadway, travel is likely to be slow and extremely uncomfortable, although not impossible.”
Raeburn shrugged. “I expect Lord Crowell and Mr. Mason to be sent on their way at once—snow or no snow.”
“Very good, my lord,” Barston replied again, and this time Raeburn was surprised to note the man’s stern mouth twitch.
“Barston, my luggage also,” Daphne commanded tersely, passing Raeburn with averted eyes as she followed the others from the room. He called her name softly. She glanced over her shoulder, but at the sight of Jessica she quickly looked away again. Raeburn said quietly, “Daphne, I sincerely regret the embarrassment this situation must inevitably cause you. As some slight recompense, if you will permit it, I should like to see that you…are provided for in such a way that your future independence might be assured.”
He could see his former fiancée’s shoulders stiffen with outrage, and he thought she was about to whirl around to confront him. Instead, after a moment she relaxed, murmuring dully, “Thank you, Graham. That is most generous of you.” With an air of odd dignity she lifted her chin and walked out of the Earl of Raeburn’s dining room—and his life.
At the sound of the door closing behind Daphne, Jessica struggled impotently, expending all her strength in a futile attempt to escape him. “Let me go, Graham,” she cried again, moisture squeezing out from under her clenched eyelids and beading on her long lashes. “I can’t bear it!”
“Can’t bear what, Jess?” he demanded grimly. “Can’t bear for me to touch you? I know better than that, my girl!”
She shook her head in furious denial, making tears stream in gleaming but erratic rivulets down her bloodless cheeks. “Yes…no….” Her thrashing stilled, and she collapsed limply against his chest, the steady thud of his heart under her ear a soothing counterpoint to her own frenetic pulse. “Oh, dammit, Graham,” she sniffled, “don’t you understand? I can’t bear for you to look at me and hate me, knowing what I’ve done to you, the way I’ve—I’ve….” Her tongue stumbled over the words.
Raeburn said, “Open your eyes, Jess.” She trembled and burrowed her face deeper into the lapels of his coat. He repeated, “Open your eyes. Don’t be a coward.”
“But I am a coward,” she insisted. “I knew what Mason was going to say, and I—I just couldn’t stand the thought of your anger. I so wanted to be brave, to stand up to the truth the way poor Willa did….”
“Willa Brown is rather a remarkable young woman,” Raeburn observed drily. “I sincerely hope that someday some good man will see beyond the prejudice of society and recognize her many virtues.”
Gradually Jessica was becoming aware that his tone was soft, almost gentle, with only an underlying note of confusion roughening it. When his blunt fingertips stroked across her damp cheek and hooked lightly under her chin, tilting her face upward, she blinked rapidly as she peeked through tear-clumped lashes. “Why aren’t you angry with me?” she asked in puzzlement.
Raeburn said, “Maybe I will be…once I understand what’s going on. Tell me, Jess. Explain to me how in the name of God you came to be a satirical cartoonist.”
Her awkward position was straining her neck, so she pushed at his chest lightly, and he released her. She stepped away from him and faced him directly, sighing wryly. “It was an impulse, Graham, like—like almost everything I do. I’ve always drawn funny sketches of people, especially when I was angry or bored—if you could have seen what I did to the margins of my prayerbook during my father’s sermons!—but I’d never given any thought to the possibility that they might be worth money until after Willa and I reached Brighton.”
“Brighton,” Raeburn said thickly. “I thought—”
“Yes, I know what you thought,” Jessica said. “You thought some man was keeping me….” With a shrug she elaborated, “We stopped in Brighton because that was as far as we could go on the money from pawning my wedding ring. We were getting desperate. Funds were running short, and I was unwell—because of Lottie, you understand. One morning at Willa’s insistence I sent her to the apothecary for a potion that my mother used to take whenever she was increasing. I had written the ingredients on the back of an old scrap of paper, never noticing that on the other side was a drawing of a man we had spotted at an inn, some would-be Corinthian with shirt points so high he almost blinded himself whenever he turned his head…. When Willa came home, she told me that the chemist had been so taken with the sketch that he had accepted it as payment for my medicine; he said it was better than some of the cartoons he had seen in the print shops in London…. That gave me the idea. I knew it was a gamble, yet there seemed little alternative. I sent out samples of my work, and finally Haxton and Welles in Clerkenwell wrote back that they’d buy all the drawings I could produce.”
For a very long moment Raeburn regarded her silently, his wide brow furrowed. At last he asked heavily, “Did they tell you whom they wanted satirized?”
The question she had most dreaded, but the one she was now determined to answer honestly. “No, Graham,” she admitted throatily, “the subjects and treatments were all my ideas.”
“Even the one that likened me to a centaur?”
“Yes, Graham.”
“And that very elaborate one entitled ‘Cornelia Weeps’—the picture that depicted Prinny and me as nasty, spoiled children, with our mother, Britannia, shown as a Roman matron wailing that all her jewels had turned to dross? Was that also your idea?”
“I’m afraid so. But you must understand that I—I had been terribly hurt by you…or so I thought.”
He frowned. “Hurt or not, Jessica, that…that was not very kind.”
She winced. “I know,” she said in a tiny voice.
Silence stretched between them, as cold and taut as her nerves. Then suddenly, startlingly, like the west wind blasting life-giving warmth across the bleak and frozen countryside, Raeburn roared with laughter, “No, it may not have been kind, Jess—but, by God, it was funny!”
She stared in disbelief as his stern expression melted away under the onslaught of his humor; then with a sob she flung herself back into his arms. “Forgive me!” she begged, twining her arms around his neck and planting frantic kisses along the hard line of his jaw. “Please, Graham, tell me you forgive me!”
“Forgive you for what—being brilliant?” he echoed in disbelief. “Talent like yours isn’t something to forgive; it’s a gift to be cherished and nurtured! You idiot, why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me go on thinkin…?”
“I—I was afraid you would take Lottie from me and s-send me away,” she stammered helplessly. “You—you said….”
Raeburn’s arms tightened convulsively about Jessica, crashing the breath from her as he groaned into the inky luster of her hair, “Oh, God, Jess, couldn’t you tell that the only reason I ever uttered those threats was because I loved you so much and I was desperate for some excuse to make you come back to me, where you belonged? Do you truly think me capable of such despicable cruelty that I would separate a mother and her child?”
She shook her head, caught somewhere between her own laughter and tears, glorying in the braising stricture of his embrace. “N-no, of course not!” she insisted shakily. “It’s just—it’s just that I think I’ve been a little mad ever since Andrew died….”
Raeburn growled fiercely, “I’ve been mad longer than that, my girl; ever since that very first day by the roadside when I was insane enough to let you slip through my fingers. God, how blind can a man be? All this talk about looking for a ‘suitable’ bride, when it’s patently obvious that you and I are two of a kind…. It should have been I who swept you up onto my horse a
nd carried you off to Scotland!”
Despite the seduction of his words, Jessica hesitated. She loved this man with all her heart, but there was something she had to make clear, something that had to be faced, no matter how much it might displease him. “Graham,” she said, her voice low and serious, “I did love Andrew.”
She felt the tremor of emotion that passed through him. Jealousy? she wondered. Regret?
The answer was not long in coming. With a wistful sigh that seemed incongruous issuing from someone of his great stature, Raeburn kissed Jessica lightly on the forehead and said, “Yes, sweetheart, I know you loved Andy, and I thank God you did. With my poor brother’s life doomed to be as brief as it was, it’s comforting to know that he had his taste of happiness, that his memory lives on in the child he left behind….”
His broad hands cupped Jessica’s face for a moment; then he reached down and caught her slim fingers in his own. He removed his carved sapphire signet ring and slipped it onto her wedding finger; it was far too large for her, and he had to curl her hand into a fist to keep it from falling off. Pressing his lips against her knuckles, he murmured, “The past is done, Jess, and now you are my wife. You know that, don’t you? In our hearts and minds we are already married, you and I, even if the snow and the holidays mean we must delay a few days before we find a bishop who can issue a special license to make our union a legal fact.”
Jessica stared down at the ring, her pale face glowing. When she made no demur, Raeburn lifted her chin again and grinned wickedly. “Well, wife,” he drawled in a voice weighted with sheer masculine satisfaction, “I do hope you aren’t planning to make your poor husband sleep alone until we can locate that bishop?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Jessica said, her green eyes growing drowsy with anticipation.
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