Lord Lightning

by Jenny Brown

  “And did you trick Mrs. Atwater, too, to get her to come tonight?”

  “Damn it, Eliza!” he said, bringing his fist down onto the counterpane. “I made a mistake by not taking you into my entire confidence, but surely my hesitation was understandable. There was no need to trick Mrs. Atwater. She was quite happy to appear here in return for fifty pounds.”

  “Then why didn’t you think your money would be enough to convince me, too, to assist you? You know me to have even more need for money than Mrs. Atwater.”

  Lord Hartwood’s lip curled up in that maddening half smile of his. “You are no more like Mrs. Atwater, a woman bought and paid for ten times over, than I am like that vulgar button maker. I may not begin to understand what motivates you, Eliza, but I’ve seen enough to know that whatever drives you, it isn’t money. More like it is some wan hope of reforming me.”

  “If that were so, I should find myself sadly disappointed,” Eliza replied severely. “You are as you will always be. That is the first lesson of character we learn when we study the astrologer’s art. Though the second lesson is that a person need not always express the lineaments of their nature in the lowest possible way.”

  “As I do now?” His brow raised in an ironic question.

  “As you do now. Whatever your feelings about your mother, Mrs. Atwater seemed to me to be a simple, kindly woman. It was cruel to force her to exhibit her shame before the woman who of all people in the world must hate her most. Nor was it right to rub her nose in her son’s bastardy by harping on his resemblance to your father.”

  “You have me there, Eliza. My treatment of Mrs. Atwater was quite wrong. Had I a conscience, it must trouble me now to remember that it was Mrs. Atwater, the person in the room who had the most cause to resent me, who showed me the only bit of family feeling I have experienced these past fifteen years. How strange to think that she still remembers me in my little sailor suit.”

  His voice had grown wistful and a troubled look had returned to his brooding eyes. But only for a moment. Then that hard look surged back, and his voice grew harsh. “But I do not have a conscience, Eliza, as I have repeatedly told you. And you will not be able to reform me.

  “Tax me with being childish all you want—blame Uranus or the Pole Star for my inadequacies. But you haven’t seen the end of my childish pranks. Far from it. Would it disgust you to learn that before setting forth on this journey I bought a box of firecrackers to bring along with me? Big, loud Chinese firecrackers? And that I plan to use them, too, before the fortnight is over.”

  Eliza considered his words before replying. “Are they, too, meant to give your mother another sign that you have forgiven nothing?”

  “How implacable you make me sound,” he said sinking back against the pillows so his eyes were shadowed from the candlelight. “But I brought them only for sport. As you have so rightly explained to me, I think only of play.”

  He let his finger trail lazily along the quilted counterpane on the bed. “But is it not a point in my favor that I should think of play at such a time? For when I stand in my mother’s presence, in my mind I am always eight years old and she is holding a heavy switch with that look of pleasure on her face that comes on right before she hurts me. Do you not think, my little seeress, that being the case, it is better—far better—that I should think of play when I must face her? Consider, for a moment, my alternatives.”

  Despite her resolution to let herself feel nothing more for him, Eliza was touched. “Why then could you not simply have told me all this before?”

  “And admit I was a coward?” Lord Hartwood’s lips clamped shut. “I’ve had enough of this discussion. You’ve been alone with me here in my chamber long enough to preserve my reputation as a libertine.” He waved one languid hand in dismissal. “Take yourself back to your chamber. Muss up your hair and crinkle your gown in case you meet any curious servants on the stairway. I shall see you in the morning—if you haven’t decided to leave me in a fit of insulted virtue because I twisted the truth to get you to be my accomplice.”

  “I shall still be here in the morning,” Eliza assured him quietly. Then she pulled out the combs that secured the back of her new and fashionable hairstyle and grasped a handful of the sensuous satin gown that enfolded her, crushing it until it bore the imprint of her hand. “And I thank you for telling me your story. It is a painful one and it must have been painful for you to share it. But hearing it has convinced me that you really do need my help.”

  Lord Lightning’s eyes gave one last threatening flash. “Perhaps I do, Eliza. And I admit that I should miss you if you were to leave me now. But take care not to let your woman’s heart find excuses to fall in love with me. There must be no womanish softness toward me on your part. I am my father’s son and my brother’s brother, and that makes me a man whom it would be dangerous to love.”

  “I shall keep that in mind, Your Lordship.”

  “And so shall I,” he said softly to himself as she slipped through the doorway. “And so shall I.”

  Chapter 10

  He’d been a fool not to make her his mistress. Had he done what he ought to have done that first night and not given in to mawkish sentimentality, she would now be firmly under his control. More important, had he made her his mistress, she would not hold the fascination she held for him now. Having had her, he would have satisfied his curiosity and begun the usual process of becoming bored by her.

  But he had not, and so Edward found himself lying awake in his bed a good hour after Eliza had made her way upstairs, remembering the enchanting way her freckled cheeks had flushed in response to his gaze during dinner and the charming tendril of copper hair that had fallen forward and framed her honest eyes as she had upbraided him—and trying, too, with very little success, to forget the intense surge of passion that had filled him as he had held her small but luscious body against his own in the hallway.

  It must simply be thwarted lust. There was no other explanation for what he was feeling. And lust could be taken care of.

  That woman at dinner, Lady Hermione, the one the earl had divorced, had sent more than one significant look in his direction. She’d let her arm brush against his leg at dinner, too, as if by accident and then made sure as she had chattered on about things of no consequence that he might overhear where she lived should he wish to pay her a call. If lust was the problem, it could be taken care of. He knew her type well enough to know how little it would take to bed her.

  But that thought brought little comfort. He knew women of her type all too well, knew what she would say after she had sampled his amatory skills and how empty he would feel when it was over. He knew, too, how, within days, all her dearest female friends would get a detailed report about his performance. That was not at all what he wanted.

  Nor did he want to find another Violet.

  It was Eliza he wanted. Eliza who took his money only to save her books, who asked about his life instead of pouring out torrents of information about her own, who could not be tempted with the lure of marriage; Eliza who had, for a few brief hours, seen good in him where no one else had done so, and, by so doing, caused him to act nobly.

  Damn Eliza, and her idiotic claims. It had only taken her spending a second day in his presence for her to take his measure more accurately. She was already beginning to see him for what he truly was and had scolded him soundly. Well, he knew what he was and he’d warned her. If the worst he did to her was confuse her by twisting some words around, she should count herself lucky.

  But it stung him that it had been a lie that had caused her to lose her respect for him, for it was not his nature to lie. He bragged that he did in public what other men kept hidden. It was a source of pride to him that he was not a hypocrite but displayed the ugliest parts of his nature proudly, no matter what it cost him. So why had he lied to Eliza? So she would agree to come to Brighton with him? By God, he had almost behaved as if he really needed her!

  And that was not the worst of it. He
could barely bring himself to remember the way that this evening had concluded. Had he really poured out his heart to her about his childish sufferings like an abused chimney sweep? He was disgusted with himself for having made such a craven pitch for her sympathy just because he could not bear her disgust at his behavior. He had never before told anyone what he had told her tonight about his mother’s cruelty. He had never before felt any need to justify his behavior. He was Lord Lighning, fickle and unpredictable. Why should he care what a penniless nobody thought of him?

  But he did not like to remember what he’d felt when he’d seen her begin to understand that, as he had maintained all along, he was not a decent man. And he had felt guilt, too, when she’d upbraided him about his thoughtless treatment of Mrs. Atwater, who must, in truth, be wishing by now that she had strangled him with the neck cloth of his little sailor suit.

  Well, enough of that. He must pull himself together. He must extricate himself from the connection he had so carelessly entered into. There was no reason to give any woman such power over him, even so unusual a woman as Eliza. Tomorrow he would make it clear that she must give up the over-familiarity with which he had permitted her to behave. He must treat her like the servant she was and caution her to keep her moral judgments to herself. The intimacy that had grown up so swiftly between them—one oddly so much stronger than any he had shared with the women with whom he had enjoyed full sexual congress—must end.

  Meanwhile, he must do something to take his mind off the piercing sexual need Eliza had ignited. He must find some woman who would ease it, and quickly. Lady Hermione was certainly not the answer, but as he drifted off into an uneasy sleep, his body still remembering the way Eliza’s soft, slight form had felt pressing so close to his own in the passageway and the surprising way that she had responded to his brutal caresses, he thought perhaps a visit to that discreet establishment near the Steyne, which catered to fastidious gentlemen like himself, might be in order.

  Eliza, too, was having trouble sleeping. The room assigned to her in the attic was hot and muggy, the bed narrow, and the mattress lumpy, but none of these would have kept her from sleeping had her mind not been in an uproar after her latest interview with Lord Hartwood.

  Though she might have fooled him with her recent show of indifference, she could no longer fool herself. She could not trust herself to submit to any more of his embraces unmoved. Despite all his warnings, she was falling in love with him. Having schooled herself for years to be content with the spinster life her aunt had thought best for her, she had believed herself immune to male attraction and trusted herself safe in the company of a man famed for his profligacy. But now she knew better. Had she not recollected herself at the very end of that mortifying kiss she might well have allowed Lord Hartwood to throw up her skirts and complete her ravishment right there in the hallway.

  A housemaid who exhibited such behavior would have been turned off without a character. When Aunt Celestina had discovered one of her dairymaids in just such a compromising position with the gardener, Eliza remembered well how the girl had protested in vain that the man loved her. But Lord Hartwood had never given Eliza the slightest reason to believe he felt anything for her except, perhaps, a slightly amused lust. To him she was just an oddity—one more oddity in the life of a man notorious for his taste for the unusual.

  How could she have let herself feel such unacceptable emotions, and for such a man? Her aunt would have been appalled. Unable to sleep, she searched through her flowered satchel for the current year’s almanac. Perhaps if she looked carefully at the planets’ current positions in the heavens she could find something new that would cast more light on what was happening to her.

  But she found nothing she didn’t already know in the almanac’s columns of tiny print. Long before she had let Lord Lightning draw her into his coach she had been well aware that this summer would be the time when the planet Saturn would return to the position in the sky it had occupied at the moment of her birth. This happened every twenty-nine years and was a time when astrologers expected to experience events that reflected the nature of stern malefic planet. Loneliness, poverty, fear, and harsh restraint were the tools Saturn used to teach its hard lessons—though Saturn might also give endurance and the ability to persist in the midst of difficulties. But it depended on the nature of the birth chart how severe the events of the Saturn return might be. If Saturn was well placed, the return might pass with only a shadow of difficulty.

  Eliza put down the almanac. She did not need it to tell her how afflicted her own Natal Saturn was. All astrologers liked to boast that their own charts were more afflicted than those of their peers, as if that conferred some sort of status on them. But her aunt’s astrologer friends had been silenced when Aunt Celestina had shown them just how afflicted Eliza’s Saturn was. It stood in the evil House of Self-Undoing and made the worst possible aspect—the square—to her optimistic Sagittarius Sun. That ugly square, her aunt had explained, was why her father had abandoned her. Saturn so often signified the Father on a chart.

  It was because Eliza had known that her Saturn return was coming that she had not been surprised when her father had come back into her life this spring. That knowledge had helped her bear her father’s renewed betrayal. It was exactly what was to be expected when Saturn ruled the hour. But as painful as her father’s new betrayal had been, she had known her Saturn return would pass and she would survive, just as she had when her father had abandoned her the first time.

  But now she wondered. Would she survive the return unscathed? For something had happened she hadn’t anticipated: Saturn, that hard taskmaster, had not been satisfied just to let her father rob her but had found her another unreliable man—one far more attractive than the pathetic wretch her father had become. And true to its placement in her House of Self-Undoing, Saturn would make her love this new man, too.

  She would not do it. She would fight that self undoing with her last breath. But to withstand it, she must face the truth. She was far too attracted by her new protector. She could not afford to allow herself anymore self-deception. She must leave Lord Lightning. She had no other choice.

  She put her things back into the flowered satchel and crawled back into the uncomfortable bed. She would need to get some sleep now. Who knew where she might find herself tomorrow night? But even as she sank into a fevered half dream she found herself unable to escape dire Saturn’s sway, for as she slipped into the world where dreams took place she found Lord Hartwood waiting for her there, his brown eyes soft, his golden body pulsating. And in her treacherous dream his disturbing embrace continued and she welcomed it. When she awoke, she found herself in tears.

  “I shall not be needing you today,” Edward announced airily, when he encountered Eliza in the breakfast room. He spoke with the tone of a master addressing a servant. He was proud of himself for engaging her in that tone and for resisting his immediate reaction upon first seeing her, which had been to greet her with the kind of kiss that a man gave to the woman who had kept him up half the night thinking about her charms.

  But he had taken himself in hand. She must be put in her place. He would not be stern or forbidding, as there was no point in upsetting her, but he must make the situation clear. No matter how adorable she was when she wrinkled her little freckled nose, Eliza must be taught she could not treat him like an equal. She was a hireling and nothing more. Once she was made to remember that—and more important, he thought wryly, once he, too, was made to remember it—they could go on without risking any more scenes like that of the previous night. He shuddered inwardly at the memory of the extent to which he had let himself lose control. It would not happen again.

  But why, he wondered, had she taken it into her head to dress herself again in that dreadful gray gown? He cleared his throat and got down to business. “Since I won’t be needing you today, Eliza, you may take a maid and walk about the town—after you change out of that hideous gown.”

  He reached into his
pocket and brought forth a golden sovereign. “Here.” He tossed it to her. “Use this to buy yourself something pretty from the shops.” He turned on his heel, intent on making a speedy exit before she did anything to upset his resolve. It was time to make discreet inquiries among his male friends as to where this year’s most charming dollybirds could be found. The seaside air seemed to do unexpected things to a man’s need for a woman.

  But as he took a step toward the door, Eliza called out his name, and before he could stop her, she hurried over and handed him back the coin.

  “I cannot take this, Your Lordship,” she said. “After thinking over our conversation last night, I have come to the conclusion that continuing our connection further would be a mistake. I must ask you to release me.”

  He swung back to face her. He could barely believe what his ears had told him. She had decided to leave him? Was that why she had put on her Quaker gown again? His detachment vanished within the instant. “So, that’s it, is it? You, too, have decided to abandon me? Merely because of the way that I twisted a few words? It wasn’t even a decent lie, Eliza!”

  She turned away, unable to look him in the eye. With his angry words he had shown her the way to extricate herself from the trap she had made for herself. She nodded and murmured that, yes, his deception had been the problem, knowing, as she spoke the words, that the lie she was telling was far graver than the one she had chided him for.

  What was the alternative? To humiliate herself further? To tell him she was falling in love with him despite his warnings? To see the scorn that must fill his handsome features when he realized just how foolish she had been? She had no choice, but still, she felt ashamed that she, too, had lied. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him, but remained standing with her back turned, looking out the window at the hazy morning sunshine, pretending the scene outside the window held some intense fascination for her.