17
“Mother, this is not going to work!”
Startled, Lady Philberta looked up from her writing to see her elder son storm into her sitting room.
“What won’t work?”
“I can’t continue this.” Garrick ran his fingers through his hair, ruffling the already ruffled strands into a telling whirlwind of madness. “She has got to go.”
“Who?”
“Celeste, I tell you!” His cravat dangled half-off, he’d torn the fastening on his collar and he sported a small, still-bleeding scratch above his eye. “She’s got to go back to Paris, Ellery or no Ellery, spies or no spies.”
“Damn, son, lower your voice.” Lady Philberta stood and hurriedly shut the door. “Now sit down and tell me what’s happened.”
He sank down in the chair she indicated. “She told Lady Hyacinth how to entice Ellery.” He stared at Lady Philberta as if expecting outrage.
He got confusion. “Why would she do that? She says she wants Ellery.”
Leaping to his feet, he paced across to the desk. “Because she’s a virgin, that’s why.”
She was asking questions. He was answering. But somehow the questions and the answers didn’t match. “Garrick, have you been drinking?”
“Not yet.” He shook his finger at her. “It’s a conspiracy of virgins.”
Puzzlement battled with exasperation. “I suppose it’s possible she’s a virgin, I’ll even admit it’s probable, but—”
“Oh, she’s a virgin, all right.” Picking up her inkwell, he held the bottle up to his eye and squinted at the liquid as if he were a jeweler and the ink a diamond. “No doubt about that. I just proved that to my satisfaction.”
Lady Philberta almost choked with horror. God help them, they were going to lose their head gardener.
Not only that—Garrick had lost his mind. “You just proved that . . . Garrick, did you take her?”
“No, I didn’t take her!” He slammed the ink down hard enough she feared for the bottle. “What kind of man do you think I am? Do you think I’m as careless and unthinking as Ellery?”
“No, but—”
“I would hope not. I’m the responsible brother and I wouldn’t despoil Milford’s daughter, virgin or no virgin, although what I did do was . . . but she provoked me.”
Lady Philberta lifted her painted-on eyebrows almost to her hairline. “What did you do to her?”
“I just . . . she just . . . she also told Lady Hyacinth what to expect on her wedding night.” He snatched up her best quill pen and waved it wildly about. “What do you think about that?”
“I think somebody needs to tell these girls what’s about to happen.”
“You would think that.” He glared at her fiercely. “Some mother you are. If she hadn’t been wearing that bodice. And she was nice to Lady Hyacinth. Nice. Genuinely . . . that girl . . . she’s a scheming harlot trying to break up the suitable alliance I worked so hard to bring about. You should have seen how easily it opened.”
“The alliance?” Lady Philberta questioned carefully.
“The bodice!”
She was starting to find logic in this lunacy, and she didn’t know what to think. Garrick, her Garrick, her shrewd, rational, bloodless son, had been carried away on a wave of passion for a girl ten years his junior and miles below his station. Because she’d been nice? “Celeste’s kindness to Lady Hyacinth offended you?”
“I like my people to stay true to type.” He pointed his finger at her. “First there’s Stanhope, spying for the Russians, then Penelope is tying up her nursemaid, and now Celeste is being pleasant . . . have you noticed this whole thing started when she arrived?”
“Penelope tied up her nursemaid?” Lady Philberta grinned. She had always thought her granddaughter was too solemn for a child of such tender years. “Good for her.”
“That’s proof, I say! We’ll have Lady Hyacinth flirting with other men and brushing her breasts against Ellery—”
“I don’t understand this at all.”
“The thing is, Mother, I had my hand up her skirt.”
Lady Philberta was beginning to master this freewheeling conversation. “You had your hand up Celeste’s skirt?”
“All the way. And she . . . she was so shocked, but at the same time, she”—his eyes had gone unfocused, and he brushed the pen’s feather across his cheek—“she was sweet and passionate, and she’s just as beautiful as I imagined. I would have . . . she made me so angry.” His attention snapped back to his mother. “Why the hell can’t people act as they’re supposed to act?”
“Because they act like themselves.” Her imperturbable son had actually sworn and raised his voice, all in the space of a few minutes. If it wouldn’t have hurt her lumbago, Lady Philberta would have jumped for joy.
“Why don’t I always know what that is?” Anguish sounded in his voice.
“Sometimes we don’t read them correctly. That is an occupational hazard.” Something had gone very wrong in Garrick’s youth. Looking back, she couldn’t put her finger on the moment when he began to conceal parts of his personality. She knew when, at the age of three, he gave up that battered stuffed cat, his father had been pleased. When Garrick was eight and learned to control his rages, she had praised him. And when he came back from India at the age of twenty, she’d been proud of the logical, calm, controlled gentleman he had become.
Only recently had she realized that Garrick’s discipline kept him apart from human emotions. Where did Garrick hide the passion, the temper, the emotion that had made him so alive as a child?
“We can’t use Celeste. I’m going to have an escort take her to the train station and all the way to Paris. She’s not going to ruin Ellery’s marriage, and she’s not going to stay here making me do things that . . . I like women, Mother.”
“That gives an old woman comfort.” This whole scene was giving this old woman comfort. She had feared Garrick would never scale the heights of passion, but it appeared little Celeste had dragged him up there by her bodice strings.
“But I don’t let women make me feel like I can’t control . . .” He sank back down in the chair and put his head in his hands. “She’s leaving tomorrow.”
The gardener’s daughter wasn’t the mate Lady Philberta would have chosen for either of her sons. The girl was beautiful and accomplished, true, but common. And what kind of ceremony would it be with the servants on one side of the church and the ton on the other? Lady Philberta’s head ached at the thought.
She took a deep breath. Garrick’s impeccable reputation would survive the scandal, and if Celeste shook that formidable discipline on which he prided himself, then Lady Philberta herself would deliver the chit to his bedchamber tied in a ribbon. “Dear, I know how you feel”—because she had fought her way to passion with her much older, unrespectable husband—“but you must think of our mission. Stanhope has done much damage, we can’t tell how much yet.”
“Celeste has got to go.”
“Celeste is our only chance to rectify the damage.”
“Tomorrow.” His voice was muffled by his down-turned head. “As far away as possible.”
“We don’t even know who Stanhope’s accomplices are yet. Come, Garrick, we only have two days of the house party left. You can fight this thing for two more days.” With a little push from Lady Philberta, neither Garrick nor Celeste stood a chance. He was shaking his head, so she played the guilt card, the one reserved for mothers. “Dear, until I handed this position over to you, nothing like this scandal with Stanhope had ever happened.” That she would admit to him. “I really think you should have seen the signs in your secretary. This is ultimately your fault.”
Slowly, he lifted his head from his hands and glared at her. “Mother, we will find some other way.”
A firm knock sounded on the door, and Dafty stuck her head in. “Lady Philberta. Mr. Throckmorton. I hate to interrupt you, but there’s a messenger here, and it’s serious. There’s been an explosion.
”
Throckmorton opened the door to the nursery, and breathed in the scent of camphor and chamomile, rocking horses and childhood memories. He’d always loved the nursery. His childhood had been of the best kind, with parents who adored him, a tutor who rose to the challenge of an inquiring boy, and a pest of a little brother who always tagged after him.
He didn’t fool himself. Today’s events had fractured the foundation of his assurance. He’d lost control in the most elemental fashion. He’d done things with—to!—Celeste, things he’d only imagined in his most secret carnal dreams. And just when he’d resolved to do the right thing, to save her, and himself, from this madness which possessed him, the news of the blast had arrived. Two Englishmen, one his agent, one a possible traitor, had been in the Crimea when a bomb had gone off.
Coincidence? Of course not. Now one man was buried on foreign soil. Another hung onto life while rocking in a scrubby transport back to England. If MacLean lived . . . well, if he lived, it would be a miracle.
So Celeste would stay and, all unknowing, perform her duty to her country, and Throckmorton would have to dredge his soul for the discipline he usually commanded so effortlessly.
Now he’d come seeking comfort from the old familiar nursery things. The expanse of wood floor, gleaming in the late afternoon sunshine. The red and blue curtains, boldly patterned and thick, designed to keep out drafts. The shelf of books, some worn, some new.
His daughter.
Her face lit up, as it always did when she saw him, and some of his baffled misery faded.
The rocking chair creaked as Mrs. Brown knitted an unending brown scarf. An ample woman in clean, simple garb, she glanced up and saw him, and nodded pleasantly. Penelope sat curled into the corner of the shabby stuffed chair, reading his old copy of Robinson Crusoe.
Just last week, before the houseparty had begun and all hell had broken loose, he’d been reading it aloud to both the little girls. Both little girls.
A curl of alarm rose in him as his gaze searched the nursery. “Where’s Kiki?” he asked Mrs. Brown.
“I don’t know. She’s hidin’, and she’s a good little hider.” Mrs. Brown winked and nodded toward the big toy closet with its louvered doors.
There his old toy soldiers marched beside Penelope’s dolls and Kiki’s soft stuffed animals. A good place to hide—he’d hidden there many a time himself. He relaxed. He wished the children didn’t have to have a guard standing outside their nursery, but most of all, he was glad he’d discovered Stanhope’s treachery and took measures to protect his own. As danger crept ever closer he worried about the girls, helpless and innocent. The men he opposed in this game of espionage had no ethics, no principles. Now that they had discovered his identity, they would not shy from taking the children and using them to manipulate him into doing their bidding. He loved Penelope with a father’s unwavering devotion, and in the last few days of disillusion and confusion, he’d discovered how thoroughly Kiki had worked her way into his affections.
She might exasperate him, but she was his niece. In a deliberately loud voice, he asked Mrs. Brown, “Have you searched for her?”
“Ever so much, but she’s just too clever for me,” Mrs. Brown said comfortably.
They heard a tiny giggle from the closet.
“Then we’ll have to wait until she comes out,” he announced. Truth to tell, he was glad to have time alone with his own little daughter. Walking toward Penelope, he asked, “How are you, sweeting?”
Flinging the book aside, she ran to him. “Papa!”
Big girl that she was, he swung her into his arms and hugged her.
“I’ve missed you.” She kissed his cheek, then drew back. “But I didn’t expect to have time with you until this dratted house party had ceased.”
He grinned to hear her sound so much like him. “No one cares whether I go down to gamble and dance. Your Uncle Ellery owns all the charm, and besides, he’s going to be the bridegroom.”
“I like you best,” she said stoutly.
“No. Do you?” He pulled an amazed face.
She cradled his cheeks between her thin hands. “Of course, you’re my papa.”
He’d dreamed of filling the nursery with his own children, but he had only Penelope. And Kiki was in residence, too, of course . . .
“Would you like me to read to you?” he asked.
“Robinson Crusoe!” she answered.
“But you’re reading it by yourself.” He carried her to the chair and settled in it, her in his lap.
“I don’t know all the words.” She folded her hands and turned her dark, serious eyes on him. “I need to start taking lessons from Miss Milford, Papa. I know she would help me to read.”
He did not want to talk about Miss Milford. “You do wonderfully well.” She did. He thought her unusually bright for a child her age, and he wasn’t at all prejudiced. “But I’ll start where I left off.” He was conscious of Kiki, hiding in the closet. Kiki, who pretended not to understand the words but always managed to hang about when he read. Opening the green, worn leather binding, he found his place and began, loud and clear, to tell the tale of the lonely castaway.
In the closet, Kiki peered through the louvers and snuffled softly.
Her father didn’t read to her. Her father couldn’t bear to look at her. Her father didn’t tell her she did wonderfully well. He didn’t even speak to her. He just laughed when she jumped around and patted her on the head before he walked away from her.
Kiki blinked and swallowed the big lump in her throat. That man who worked in Uncle Garrick’s office had told her all that, and it was true. That man said no one cared for her here in England. He said she ought to go back to where she’d come from.
Back to France, where she understood everybody. Where the sun shone all the time. Where it was always warm.
Where Maman was.
But Maman wasn’t there anymore. No one was there, and before Maman left her in this horrible England she told Kiki she couldn’t stay in Paris because there was nowhere to sleep except in the streets.
Kiki looked through the louvers again. That ugly, selfish, lucky Penelope sat snuggled on her papa’s lap, her head on his chest, his arm around her. He read slowly and loudly. He acted as if he wanted to be around his daughter. Something in Kiki’s chest swelled until it hurt.
Lots of children slept in the streets of Paris, and they were strong and brave, and they would like her. So she resolved then and there she would go back to France. Back to her home.
Pressing her tattered rag doll to her lips, she stifled her sobs.
18
“Celeste!”
Celeste wanted to just keep walking through the music room, through the long gallery, down the stairs and to the kitchen, there to eat her breakfast. This morning, she didn’t want to talk to anyone noble or pretentious, only to people whom she understood—and who understood her. Most especially, she didn’t want to talk to Mr. Stanhope, secretary to the powerful bully, Mr. Garrick Throckmorton.
More insistently, Mr. Stanhope called again, “Celeste!”
She lurched to a stop and wheeled to face him.
His tanned face beamed in a convivial smile. “So good to see you this beautiful morning.”
Suspicious, for she had never viewed his conviviality up close—a glance outside told her it was still raining—she took a step backward.
“I haven’t had a chance to welcome you back since your return.”
Why was he being so charming? “Thank you.” I think.
“It’s been quite the triumphant return for you.”
She didn’t like his height, his open, affable manner, his overripe conceit. Stanhope was completely different from Throckmorton, and although that should have worked in his favor, it did not. “Yes, sir.”
“Come, you’re no longer a schoolgirl. You can call me Mr. Stanhope.”
“Thank you . . . Mr. Stanhope.” And you can call me Miss Milford. As Throckmorton did when he was displea
sed.
“You’re on your way to . . . ?”
“The kitchen,” she said flatly.
“Ah.” Obviously, Stanhope didn’t like being reminded of her background.
She found she liked reminding him. Maybe if she reminded Throckmorton . . . but no, he spoke easily with his servants, especially with her father, according him a respect he showed few aristocrats. No, she couldn’t avoid Throckmorton in that manner.
“I’ll walk with you,” Stanhope said.
As Throckmorton had predicted, Stanhope was interested in the information she’d learned from her translation. She considered just blurting it out, but somehow that seemed too easy, and Mr. Stanhope had always had everything too easy—or so her father had said. Actually, Celeste had heard Mr. Stanhope talk about how he’d soldiered in India, adventured through the towering mountains, fought for his life among treacherous natives. Such hardship wasn’t so easy, but she understood what her father meant.
Mr. Stanhope was an aristocrat who had been given an education, a blueblood background, contacts among the finest people, and now, at Blythe Hall, Throckmorton had made him a trusted companion, ignoring his friend’s idleness and incompetence because of some wayfaring brotherhood.
Which was odd, because she’d never thought of Throckmorton as a wayfarer or an adventurer, but he must have been, as much as Mr. Stanhope. Until two nights ago when Throckmorton had kissed her under the stars, she’d never thought of him as a traveler, but he had seen more of the world than she had.
And yesterday in the conservatory, he had proved he’d learned the art of pleasing a woman, even an unwilling one. Oh, she would never forgive him. Never.
Obviously irked by her lack of response, Stanhope said, “I thought we could take the chance to catch up.”
“We haven’t spoken before.” She stopped at the window overlooking the Roman fountain. Rain still fell in gray sheets, but off to the east the early morning sun lightened the hovering clouds. “How can we catch up?”
“Believe me, if not for my wretched ethics, we would have done more than spoken. From the first time I saw you, I recognized your beauty.” Turning, he leaned against the sill and looked earnestly at her. “But you were so young. It wouldn’t have been fair to either of us to embroil you in . . . conversation.”