Love in Disguise (The Love Trilogy, #1)

by Edith Layton

  It might have been because Warwick saw how downcast she was, or it might have been because he was as glad to be leaving town as he claimed to be, but he’d soon cheered her out of her sullens and into high good spirits. She’d known he was amusing and had often felt the edge of his quick wit, but she hadn’t known how cleverly he could draw other people out. Not only did he have the contessa telling them all about Venice by the time they’d passed the first tollgate, but as he’d been there once, he had them all laughing at his experiences immediately after they’d been subdued by the tale of the contessa’s daring but disappointingly brief marriage. Then he’d had Susannah tell him, without ever meaning to, about all the places she’d ever dreamed of visiting. After that, they played a delightful game he invented, imagining what places they might want to visit if they could travel through time as well as range the world, and then they imagined what it would be like to actually visit with some famous people from history or literature, and by the time the contessa closed her eyes to pass her journey as she always did, in sleep, Warwick had Susannah doubled over with laughter as he acted out all the parts of the dinner party he’d give for Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth, and Casanova.

  So after the coach finally rolled to a halt, and Warwick swung open the door to have a word with Julian, she was still smiling widely as she watched them having a conference in the road. She greeted him with a quizzical grin when he came back in again, and Julian, returned to the driver’s seat, started the coach once more, only at a more moderate pace this time.

  “He wanted to spare me the sight of the Gentleman’s Oak, he planned to make the horses fly so that I’d not notice we were passing it,” he said as he seated himself again. “The clunch,” he said, with a little smile. “I pass it every time I go home, and never turn a hair. In fact,” he said on a skewed smile, “I’m so callous a lout that I’d likely charge tuppence a look if he were still hanging there in chains. It’s an enormous old oak, you’ll see it to our right in a moment. And it is quite famous in certain circles, being,” he explained gently to her polite look of inquiry, “the tree they hanged my highwayman ancestor, Gentleman Jones, upon. Actually,” he said, lowering his voice so as not to waken the contessa again, “it’s a sufficiently gruesome story to merit its fame. For it happens he was every bit as decorative as they’d wished, so they coated him with tar afterward, to keep the birds from spoiling sport, and put him in a gibbet so that he might adorn the old oak until Christmas Day in the morning. And it was only April then.

  “They were overly optimistic. Someone cut him down one dark and windy night and spirited him away, so they never found a hint of him or of their money again. Good heavens, Susannah, don’t look at me like that! You make me want to bawl. I’ve seen merrier faces at funerals. My dear,” he said gently, looking at her woeful face, “he was my ancestor but I didn’t know the chap. Don’t know that I’d much like him, either, though he had the most excellent attributes, being said to be as much like me as he looked like me, which was, by all old accounts, considerably, poor fellow.”

  Susannah remained very silent as the coach went past the ancient oak. It was too early in the season for it to be in full leaf, and too full an old tree for her to imagine which particular broad limb had borne that terrible burden. But she saw Warwick’s reflection interposed on the window glass as she looked out at the oak, and in that moment she could swear she could also see his doomed ancestor as he approached the great tree and his last hour.

  Though Warwick wore the sober hues of his generation, and his ancestor would have been attired in gaudier patterns and colors, there would have been a commonality, for Warwick wore his tailored clothes as though they were velvets and satins, and his ancestor would have been sedate in all his lace and finery. The Gentleman would have worn his soft brown hair back in a queue, not in the fashionable, if overlong, Corinthian style his descendant affected, and he wouldn’t have had a white bandage across one thin dark cheek, of course, unless Cromwell’s men had toyed with him before his sentence was carried out. But he too would have been lean and cool and arrogant, she was sure, even on that final march. She knew he would have quipped as well, and looked down his high nose at the rabble breathlessly awaiting his last breath, and his dark blue eyes would have blazed contempt even as he’d stepped off into eternity.

  But there would have been, she was equally sure, well-concealed tremors coursing up that long back and across those wide shoulders, if not for his untimely end, then for the thought of how the body he’d soon leave behind would be treated—mocked and left to swing in the wind, becoming disfigured and disgusting to be seen. For that long-ago gentleman had great dignity too, she’d swear to it, and that desecration, she suddenly knew as surely as she’d begun to know his descendant, would have been what horrified his fastidious soul the most. Because with all his reserve, she knew that he would be vulnerable, and her lower lip quivered with foolish sorrow when she thought of that painful ending, that long-past suffering, as the coach slowly passed the old tree.

  She swung around suddenly to see if Warwick was indeed as immune to the specter of his ancestor’s misery as he claimed to be, and in that moment she saw all that same vulnerability in his living face, with all that sorrow and despair, but also, to her confusion, saw that he’d not been looking at the old oak at all, but had been instead staring directly at her.

  “I suppose,” he said then, turning quickly to the window, willing to admit to any shameful thing but what he was sure she’d seen, “that I overestimated my coolheadedness. For it’s rather like Hamlet, isn’t it? One can see it several dozen times and still be moved.”

  And then he began to tell her a tale of another highwayman, but this one a fumbling one, that had her laughing so merrily within minutes that he had to shush her so she wouldn’t wake her chaperon with her unrestrained mirth. When he made her laugh, he found he could look at her without her knowing it, and since he took such pleasure in seeing her so close, so joyous and so free, he took great care to keep her laughing. When they stopped for a luncheon and a change of horses at a wayside inn, she stopped him by placing her hand lightly upon his sleeve as he was about to leave the coach.

  “Thank you,” she said sincerely, looking at him directly, her slightly tilted wide brown eyes warm and friendly as the tone of her voice. “You are very kind, Warwick, thank you.”

  And that simple statement kept his spirits so high he had Julian and Susannah and the contessa rocking with mirth all through their stopover, until Julian complained that he’d really like something to eat, so he’d be pleased if his friend would kindly go visit his humor on another table, since it was very difficult to swallow when one was laughing. But it made things no easier for him when Warwick nodded and promptly rose and found an old man dozing at another table and proceeded to chat him up with such animation that soon they were all groaning with the pain from their guffaws. He kept them all merry, in fact, until it was time for the final leg of their journey and Susannah convinced Julian to give up the reins and rest within the coach.

  Then he grew quieter and sat back, disposed to watch Susannah intent upon Julian as he sat opposite her and told her a dozen stories about his coaching days, suitably edited, and yet sufficiently thrilling to keep her watching the storyteller with her eyes on his lips and her heart in her eyes, all the way to Warwick’s country home.

  Then no story, no tale of highwaymen or coachmen could distract her from gazing at Warwick’s home.

  “It is…oh, insufficient to say, I know, but it is…” But she couldn’t find the words at last to express what she thought of his home. “Magnificent,” she thought, was far too stately a word for a home of such warmth and charm, yet “charming” would signify a cottage or a thatched house, and Greenwood Hall was large enough to accommodate a dozen cottages within it. It was a long and rambling house, built before the infamous Gentleman Jones had drawn his first breath, improved upon by the funds he’d doubtless stolen for it, and gently nurtured ever since. Of
golden stone and brick, it took some form from every Jones that had thought to improve upon it, and so was as eccentric and delightful as the gentleman who owned it. And so at last Susannah dared to say, when it seemed she must say something to her host as he watched her remove her gloves in his front hall and waited for her to voice her judgment of his home. Although “eccentric and delightful” might not be the description most gentlemen would like to hear given about their homes, he seemed as genuinely pleased as the contessa was disapproving of her charge’s candid appraisal.

  The contessa’s hasty claims of Greenwood Hall’s being “elegant, graceful, imposing,” were cut off by the sound of a whoop of unrestrained joy. Julian had been handed a message along with a curtsy when he’d been given an introduction to the housekeeper on his arrival. Having been told it had waited for him since morning, he’d taken it and read it instantly. Now he turned and stared at Warwick, Susannah, and the contessa as they all stopped and looked back at him. His smooth fair face bore an expression of almost incandescent joy; it now appeared to be lit from within as brilliantly as his coloring and fair hair illuminated it from without.

  “She’s here!” he whooped, advancing on Susannah and picking her up and lifting her high in the air. “And she wants to see me,” he laughed exultantly as he swung her about, “and at her friend’s house, and at a picnic, and at a ball!” And after he threw his head back in laughter, he put Susannah down again and lowered his golden head to give her a sound and hearty kiss.

  But something on her lips slowed it, or something of the taste of her slowed him, and so something unexpected in the moment turned a kiss of good fellowship to a thing only a heartbeat more languorous. But when he raised his head that extra second later, he paused, a bit disconcerted, to look down into Susannah’s dazed eyes.

  “Sorry,” he murmured then, embarrassed and angry with himself, “sorry, Sukey, I was carried away.”

  “No, that’s wrong,” she stammered, aghast at herself, at how she’d stayed so quiescent in his clasp, willing him to stay a second longer, in her desire to find what might have been discovered there, and desperate to make a recovery, she was grateful for the easy jest that flew to her mind and then to her traitorous lips as well: “I was…and carried far too high, Julian. I hope no one’s around but the Lion next time you get a pleasing message. I’d like to see you fling him to the ceiling.”

  “And kiss him soundly,” Warwick offered with dry humor, from where he’d been watching, although as he continued to observe Susannah’s heightened color and downcast eyes, there was nothing remotely humorous in his dark face.

  13

  The little man was very nervous. It was not so much the tic in his cheek which showed it, for he always had that, and at any rate his face was so grimy that not many people cared to study it long enough to note that the thin cheek pulsed and twitched with clocklike regularity. Nor was it the fact that his sharp light eyes darting this way and that, never resting too long on any object, as though he mistrusted everything in his environment, gave his feelings away. For in his environment he’d be a fool not to cultivate distrust. No, none of these outward signs was necessary to convey his unease. He could, instead, be taken at his word. He said it the once, then he repeated it to be sure it was understood:

  “Not me, sir, no. I’m too nervous is wot I am. I wouldn’t do it, no, and I couldn’t neither. Not me.”

  “But your friend?” his inquisitor asked smoothly.

  “Ho. My friend is even scairter. No, he’s not bright, nothing like, wee Georgie isn’t. But he’s got brain enough to be scairt. No, not him neither, sir.”

  The little man sat on the edge of his chair as though he sat on tacks. It took a great deal of bravery for him to be explaining this to his questioner, and so he’d said it, and so it was. But the gentleman he spoke with didn’t seem grateful or impressed. This frightened the little man even more. He was, he knew, caught between two grinding stones, and could only hope that, as usual, he was small enough and quick enough to slide out from the middle before he was crushed by either one of them.

  They sat at a cracked table in the corner of a low tavern in one of the meaner sections of London. The floor was slick with filth, despite the sawdust over it, the windows evenly grimed except for occasional ragged circles that random sleeves had made now and again in their history so the curious could peep out from them, even though all that would be seen was a cluttered alleyway. The drinking glasses were as opaque with dirt as the windows were, and had almost as many jagged edges as the chairs did, but still, it was a far better sort of place than the little man usually frequented. It was, however, entirely obvious—terrifyingly obvious—to the little man that it was the lowest tavern his visitor had ever entered, much less sat himself within.

  He didn’t belong there any more than the little man did, though their business had caused one to sink lower and the other to rise higher so that they might meet in the middle to discuss it. For if the little man would never even be allowed to linger on the sidewalk outside the sort of place his visitor usually frequented, his visitor would not even step outside his carriage to enter the sort of hostelry the little man passed most of his time in. Even so, it was plain that the higher classes had less mobility than the lower, if only because there were fewer of them, for though the little man was profoundly ill-at-ease, where he sat, he did not look especially out of place. The gentleman who sat opposite him was so wildly mismatched with his surroundings that all conversation had ceased the moment he’d ducked his head down to walk in through the low door.

  Still, they had privacy. The little man’s business was too well known, even here, for sane men to care to overhear what he was up to. The gentleman was too rare a sight to be a healthy one, and he had too dangerous a look to him, anyway, to even tempt a fellow to try to cadge a penny piece from him. The loiterers in the tavern might not be able to read, but they’d learned to read their fellowmen right early on, or else they wouldn’t have been able to survive to adulthood. And they could easily see that not only was the gent too tall and broad and well-set-up for one man to take on alone, but it would be wiser altogether to avoid a bloke with that sort of cold edge to his voice, that forbidding look in his wide, fair face, and that something they saw glittering now and again in those blue eyes that was far too cold for sanity.

  That look sparkled in his light blue eyes now, and the little man shivered, but then, he often did, but then he said a thing he almost never did, for it was the truth, and it had been frightened out of him at last. “Sir,” he said anxiously, “I can’t do nuffink for you. No, and I mean that. It ain’t the job, for that’s my bread an’ butter. Snuffing a cove’s easy. Nuffink simpler. Be he high or low, if the price is right, Jimmy Spiv’s yer man, they told you right in that, all right. There’s not many who’d say it, fewer still who’d do it—takin’ on a highborn gent, for fear of their necks. But mine’s not worth much, an’ I know it. Aye, I’d dance on a rope if they caught me, but for what you’d gimme ’twould be a dance of joy, ’cause I’d die richer than I ever lived. But I can’t.”

  “And why not?” the gentleman asked.

  Jimmy Spiv kept his hand in his ragged jacket, and fingered the sharpest knife he had concealed there over his wildly beating heart, but for once it didn’t comfort him, no, not when he had to look back into those quietly cold eyes.

  “Because of t’ Lion,” he said at last, and swore and then cursed himself for a fool, for as soon as the word was out he knew his mistake and knew he’d have to leave this tavern and then London itself for saying what he had.

  “Ah, Lion, yes,” the gentleman said thoughtfully, “I know the man. But if you don’t fear the rope, Jimmy, why fear the Lion? Death’s death, when all’s said.”

  “No, it ain’t,” the little man said, rising, beginning to dance away from the table sidewise, in a crabbed scuttle. “Lion’s worse’n death, sir. Bank on it. Good day to you, sir, good day.”

  And hopping away from the table
, he backed off, and moving quickly backward, left the tavern, leaving the gentleman alone at his table.

  It was not the first time this day, nor even this week, that he’d been left so. But oddly, now here, where there was no one he knew, or cared to know, to watch him suffer the indignity, he was even angrier than he’d been before. Last week, at Watier’s, he’d been discouraged; the day before, at Madame Felice’s, he’d been displeased; this morning, at his club, he’d been disbelieving; but now he was beyond all that, he was enraged. Lord Moredon had never known defeat; though he’d suffered it before, as all men do, he’d always been able to disguise it for himself. Now he found there was no way to circumvent the thing. It was simplicity itself, that was why it was impossible to get around. He wanted revenge upon Julian Dylan, Viscount Hazelton, he needed revenge upon Mr. Warwick Jones. He could get neither, he could get none. Nor could he forget it.