On his way home, Ashmead’s whiskey-riddled mind had chosen to trot through the orchard that separated Westlake Hall from the Meadows, where he knew Ada would be picking apples the next day. She’d told him so before the argument, promising to save one of Cook’s apple tarts for him if she found enough fruit. Before she’d sent him to the rightabout.
Chas had thought of surprising Ada there, perhaps stealing a kiss or two in the privacy of the empty orchard.
Chas remembered Thunderbolt being spooked by an owl, but he hadn’t fallen, not then. He’d played the mooncalf instead, mourning those lost kisses, regretting that he would not get to admire the sun on Ada’s face, her gown stretched taut as she reached for a branch, her skirts showing a hint of ankle—No, he would not think about the heartless jade. Or her orchard. Or standing up on the back of a nervous, high-strung horse. Oh, God.
No, his lordship assured himself, he would never try such a totty-headed stunt, not even in his cups.
He next remembered arriving at his stables, where his head man, Coggs, was waiting up to put Thunderbolt to bed, no matter how many times the viscount had told the old man he was perfectly competent to rub down his own mount.
“Aye, I can see how competent you are tonight, lad.” Coggs took the chestnut’s reins, muttering, “The fumes on your breath be enough to set the stables on fire. Turned you down again, did she?”
Then Coggs had noticed how awkwardly the viscount dismounted, and how he had his left arm tucked between the buttons of his coat.
“What’s this, then, lad? Here, let’s take a look.” Coggs had let the tired horse stand while he led the viscount toward the hanging lantern and an upended barrel. He whistled through his teeth when he saw the raw scrape on the viscount’s cheek. “B’gad, looks like a peeled tomato.” He gently reached for Ashmead’s arm, starting to feel for swelling. When the viscount winced, the old man made clucking sounds, as he would to soothe a restless horse. “There now, lad, what the devil happened to you?”
Chas had shrugged, a painful mistake. On an indrawn breath, he gasped, “Must have been a rabbit hole.”
“A rabbit hole, you say?” Old Coggs, who had put Chas on his first pony, dropped the viscount’s aching arm like a hot iron to rush to the horse’s side, checking for injuries. Lord Ashmead’s injured wrist bounced against the barrel.
Somehow he’d reached the kitchens, where his valet and his butler, Epps, another old family retainer, had clucked their tongues. “Don’t say it,” Chas had ground out while they searched the housekeeper’s stores for salve to spread on his cheek and the cook’s pantry for a beefsteak to lay on his discolored eye. The dog was pressing herself close to his side for comfort, or for the beefsteak.
When Coggs came in from the stables, he pronounced the viscount’s wrist badly sprained but not broken, as far as he could tell. He decided they’d ought to put it in a splint anyway, to keep the arm from being jostled. “Else the gudgeon’s liable to damage it worse, don’t you know.” Since the old horseman had done more doctoring of man and beast than any sawbones, the others nodded in agreement. By now half the staff was in the kitchen, watching their jug-bitten master being trussed up like a plucked goose, but Lord Ashmead was beyond caring.
“Odd kind of rabbit hole it must of been,” Coggs noted as he spread some foul-smelting substance on the viscount’s fingers to take down the swelling. “Didn’t leave a mark on a single one of the gelding’s legs, not even a smidgen of dirt.”
Lord Ashmead hadn’t commented. He’d passed out ten minutes earlier when Purvis started pulling tree bark splinters out of his cheek.
* * * *
Where was that blessed oblivion when he needed it? Chas wondered, there in the dark. In his houseful of servants, he was alone and aching. His cheek was burning, his wrist was throbbing, and his blasted dog was back on the bed, snoring. The fire was nearly out, and the bellpull might have been on the moon for all the good it was doing him across the room. His throat was too parched to call for help, not that any of his lordship’s loyal retainers would bring him a cup of hemlock. And he stank.
Besides, Viscount Ashmead’s pride was battered worse than his body. His mission for the War Office was a failure, to say nothing of his intended engagement. He’d lost Prelieu’s reward, the respect of his associates, and Ada’s friendship. No one loved him except his dog ... and his mother.
Bloody hell.
Chapter Four
“Turned you down again, did she?”
Chas winced, and not just from the bright light in the morning room. His darling mother’s voice grated on his raw nerves like an unoiled wheel. He felt like stable sweepings, and knew he looked worse, there being only so much damage even Purvis’s hare’s foot could cover. He also knew he had to attend the viscountess this morning or she’d be rapping on his bedroom door. Purvis did not have the spine to deny her. Lud knew, the scarecrow in Cook’s kitchen garden, with a broom for a backbone, couldn’t have stopped Lady Ashmead on a mission. Chas’s diminutive, elegant, well-dressed mother was like a force of nature, going where she wished, shoving aside everything in her way, meanwhile looking like the sweetest, most genteel of ladies, busy about her embroidery.
Lady Ashmead had returned to the Meadows for a visit two years ago, to take her wayward son in hand, she’d declared. She had not left yet, despite frequent lamentations on the gay life she was missing at her home at the Royal Crescent in Bath. Chas lamented louder, but in private, being a dutiful son. Previously, the viscountess had divided her months-long visits between her two daughters. Chas could swear his sister Emily and her family had moved to Boston just to avoid the next maternal stay. His other sister Beth had convinced her diplomat husband to take a posting in India. Chas considered them both traitors, deserters, and lucky.
Chas preferred to meet his mother’s attacks from a position of advantage, by mail being his first choice, but at least standing up, barring that. Hence his appearance in the morning room, where the smell of bacon was roiling his stomach, and the sight of kippers was enough to make both eyes shut, not just the empurpled one.
Having broken her own fast some hours ago, of which fact she reminded Chas by pointedly consulting the watch pinned to her lavender gown, Lady Ashmead was seated on a chintz-covered chair next to the window, her ever-present needlework in hand.
Pouring out a cup of coffee, Chas carried the steaming brew over to the seat beside his mother’s, instead of sitting at the breakfast table, where he would have to view the piles of muffins and eggs.
“Is that all you are having?” Lady Ashmead demanded.
It was all he could carry, with his other arm in a sling, and Chas preferred not having servants about to hear his mother’s diatribe, which was not long in coming.
“When are you going to come to your senses, you muttonhead?” his loving mother snapped. “When are you going to give up this caper-witted nonsense?”
“Good morning to you, too, Mother. Which nonsense might that be? Coffee for breakfast? I know you prefer chocolate, but I cannot think—”
“Obviously,” she said with an inelegant snort. “I meant, as you very well know, when are you going to stop making a cake of yourself over that bacon-brained chit?”
The viscount’s stomach really wished his mother would not keep mentioning food. “Oh, that nonsense. You will undoubtedly be pleased to note, ma’am, that henceforth I shall no longer be courting Miss Ada Westlake.” There, he’d said it without the words trying to strangle him in sorrow. He might even chance a sip of coffee, past the lump in his throat, once the steam dissipated.
“Courtship?” She snorted again, jabbing her needle into the fabric on her lap. “Is that what you call slamming doors and throwing jewelry at each other’s heads?”
Chas had almost forgotten the tiny cut near his eye, a drop in the ocean of agony. His mother had immediately noticed it, of course.
“I never thought a child of mine could be so cow-handed.”
Since that com
ment seemed to require no reply, Chas look another small sip of the hot liquid, praying the coffee would stay where it belonged. Disgracing himself on her favorite Aubusson carpet would find Chas in even less favor with his formidable mother, if such were possible.
“Why, we are the laughingstock of the neighborhood. I cannot hold my head up at the Ladies’ Guild meetings.”
Chas rested his own aching head on the back of his chair, hoping she’d run out of complaints before he ran out of patience. No such luck. When she got down to the vicar’s wife’s sister’s mother-in-law’s opinions of young people’s morals, marriages, and manners, he gave up the effort. “Mother, do you know how old I am, that you address me as you would a child?”
Lady Ashmead put down her sewing and bestowed one comprehensive, entirely unsympathetic, glance upon her son’s sorry state. “Perhaps when you act your age and your station, you will be afforded the dignity they deserve. Tavern brawls, indeed.”
Leaving his midnight mishaps misunderstood seemed a wiser course than trying to explain. He tried wiggling the swollen fingers of his left hand.
“And of course I know how old you are, Charles, to the minute. But do you know how many hours I labored to bring you into this world? Days, I swear, days of agony your piddling injuries cannot come close to duplicating. Your sisters at least recognize the cost, having gone through childbirth themselves. But a son? A son feels he owes his mother no respect, no recompense for the sacrifices she makes.”
He should have had the tea that Purvis recommended.
“If you were a daughter, Charles, you would not be this constant disappointment to me. Your sisters married well and have already provided their husbands heirs. Granted the children are being raised like savages, but—No, do not distract me with your drivel. The least you can do is listen when your own mother speaks.”
Chas had groaned. He apologized, thinking that perhaps he was the one who should have gone into the diplomatic corps.
Lady Ashmead nodded her exquisitely coiffed head. “Where was I? Oh, yes, daughters. Well, if you had been another daughter, then I’d have had to do the whole thing over again, wouldn’t I, to ensure your father’s succession? I knew my duty to the family. Unlike some others I could name.”
Chas wished he’d thought to check the time, to see how long it had taken his mother to get to her inevitable point. Then again, he wished he had a cool cloth to put on his forehead. He grunted in pain, which she took as participation in the conversation, and continued.
“As did your father, of course. Ashmead knew his duty, and did not shirk his responsibilities. Why, if he were alive, and the old baronet, you’d be hitched to that bran-faced female before the cat could lick its ear. If that nodcock Sir Rodney had lived long enough, you could have arranged with him to wed the chit. The wastrel would have been willing enough to hand her over, if you settled a few of his debts in exchange.”
“What, you think I should have forced Ada into marriage?”
“Why not? Gal doesn’t seem to have the sense of a slug, living hand-to-mouth while moneybags wait down the street. Nothing wrong with an arranged marriage anyway. That’s how it was done in our day, and good enough for your father and me. Good enough to see you brought into the world.”
Good enough, when Lady Ashmead lived in Bath, her husband lived in London, and the children were left in Lillington to be reared by servants and schoolmasters? That was not what Chas wanted for his offspring, not by half. Besides, the thought of marrying Ada Westlake against her will was even more nauseating than the coffee.
“Marriages of convenience might have been the norm in your day, ma’am, but I would find such an arrangement dashed inconvenient. I would never consider marrying a woman who did not lo—like me enough to marry me of her own free will.”
“Love? What’s that got to do with anything? Niminy-piminy emotion’s got no place with carrying on the family line. Your father and I managed well enough without that romantical claptrap.”
Of course the previous Lord Ashmead had died in the arms of his mistress, while the viscountess filled her own empty arms with endless embroidery. In an effort to change the subject, Chas asked, “What is that you are working on now, Mother?” The house was already filled with wall-hangings, fire screens, and decorative pillows. Chas had a new pair of slippers every year for his birthday, all embellished with the family’s coat of arms of red and white roses, separated by a winged lion. His closets were filled with them, for how many slippers could a fellow wear out in a year? Chas had a lifetime supply. Handkerchiefs with his monogram, too. The church got a new altar cloth every year, and the dining room chairs had been recovered twice in the last three years. A hoop or a frame or a work basket was never far from the viscountess’s side. The only thing she directed more energy toward, in fact, was her son’s future.
Lady Ashmead held up a small scrap of fine white cloth to which she was adding delicate flower blossoms in tiny stitches.
“Lovely,” Chas said, attempting another swallow of the still too hot coffee. “But what the deuce—That is, what exactly is it, Mother?”
“It’s a baby bonnet, of course, you clunch.”
“Ah, one of the cousins having another child? Be sure to let me know, so we can send a bank draft along with the bonnet.”
The viscountess scowled. “This one is for closer to home.”
“The church bazaar? I thought that was just past. Of course, no reason you cannot work ahead.”
“It’s for your infant, you gossoon! At the rate you are going, my fingers will be too stiff with the arthritics to see the boy dressed according to his station.”
“With flowers?”
She held the fabric out to him and, unthinking, Chas reached out with his splinted arm. The other, after all, held his coffee. It had, at any rate. No matter that his biscuit pantaloons were ruined, or that his privates were so scalded he might never be able to father a child at all, or that his injured wrist was flinging fireballs of hurt through his lordship’s eyeballs, a drop of coffee had landed on the baby bonnet.
Lady Ashmead screamed as if she’d been the one boiled alive. She kept screaming while footmen rushed into the room. “So that’s what you think of me and all my efforts on your behalf. Nothing I do is good enough for you, and you never listen to my advice. All I have ever wanted is my children’s happiness, and this is the thanks I get!” She stalked out in a cloud of spilled threads, scattered needles, and scowling servants, knowing they’d be the ones to suffer now that her nibs was in a snit.
While the footmen worked around him, Chas contemplated the tiny garment he still held. Could an infant truly be so small that its head fit in this scrap of cloth that was almost lost in his hand? He turned it so he could see the intricate needlework on the bonnet’s brim. Those flowers were the roses of the family crest, by Jupiter. What a heavy weight for such a poor little mite to be born carrying... if he was ever born at all.
* * * *
It took the staff a few anxious hours to restore the viscount and baby bonnet. The little cap was soaked, soaped, sponged, and pressed, and looked as good as new. The viscount looked only slightly worse than he had before. By lunchtime, however, he was actually hungry, and able to present the pristine bonnet to his mother.
At least the viscount’s knees were not injured; he could still grovel for the sake of domestic harmony. “I do appreciate your efforts, Mother, and I swear to try to be a more dutiful son.”
Lady Ashmead tossed the cap aside in her eagerness. “Then you’ll let me speak to the Westlake chit about a betrothal?”
“Zeus, no.” Chas wasn’t that repentant. “Ada and I have agreed to remain friends, nothing more.”
The viscountess bit into her veal pie with gusto. “Good.”
Chas was being more cautious about his meal. He put down the buttered roll and repeated, “Good? I thought your life’s mission was to see me in parson’s mousetrap.”
“Do not be vulgar, Charles. I wish to see
you wed, naturally. What mother wouldn’t, especially when there is the question of a succession? But I am quite pleased you have decided not to pursue that particular connection.”
Chas lost his appetite again. “Oh?”
“Yes, I cannot like the blood in that family, you know. The gamester baronet, now that hey-go-mad youngster with no sense of responsibility to his family name. That impossible Lady Westlake who is forever acting above herself.”
“I don’t think you can blame Jane Johnstone on the Westlake blood, Mother.”
“Sir Rodney married her, didn’t he? Bad taste, bad blood, it’s all the same. You wouldn’t want that greedy female hanging on your sleeve, anyway, and you can rest assured she would be if you wed the sister-in-law. Then there is Tess, of course.”
“I am quite fond of Tess, ma’am,” Chas said in a tone of voice seldom heard by his mother.
“As I am fond of organ-grinders’ monkeys. That does not mean I would enjoy having one in the family. I should not like having a grandson who believes he is the reincarnation of some dead Austrian composer.”
“I believe it is a dead Italian sculptor this week, but I could be mistaken.”
Lady Ashmead nodded her regal head. “I know you and Ada insist on seeing no ill in Tess, but not even you can gainsay the gal has a deucedly odd kick to her gallop.”
“We prefer to view Tess’s quirks as the eccentricities of a creative genius.”
“Nuttier than last month’s fruit cake, is what I call it, but that’s irrelevant now, thank my stars and salvation.” She took another bite, then put down her fork. “So, Charles, if you aren’t going to wed the Westlake chit, whom are you going to marry?”
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