She looked down the hall. The door to Lord Hope’s room still stood open. He was in there all alone.
She squared her shoulders and marched to the open door. “I’ve brought some more tea and biscuits,” she announced briskly as she sailed into the room. “I thought you might actually drink it this time.”
Hope was lying in the bed, turned toward the wall, and at first she thought he might be asleep, silly as that notion was after the commotion of before.
He didn’t turn. “Get out.”
“You seem to be under a misapprehension,” she said conversationally.
She started to set the tray on the little table beside the bed, but there were shards scattered in an arc away from the table, comprised of what had once been an ugly china clock and a matching pair of ceramic pugs. Added as it was to the previous tea things she’d brought up before Lord Vale’s visit, it was beginning to be quite a pile.
She turned to a table near the window—well out of reach of the bed.
“What are you babbling about?” Hope muttered.
“Hmm?” The table was already occupied by a vase and a brass candelabra, and Beatrice had to maneuver the tea tray carefully to avoid yet another spill.
“The misapprehension you said I was under,” Hope growled in a testy voice.
“Oh.” The tray settled, Beatrice looked over at him and smiled, even though he still had his back to her. “You seem to think I’m one of the servants.”
There was a silence from the bed as Beatrice poured the tea. Perhaps he was covered in shame at her mild set-down.
“You do keep bringing me tea.”
Or perhaps not.
“Tea is very fortifying, I find, especially when one feels under the weather.” She added sugar to the tea—she’d noticed he seemed to like his tea very sweet—and brought the teacup to the bed. “But that does not mean I enjoy being addressed in such sour tones.”
He still faced the wall. She hesitated a moment, the cup held uncertainly in her hand; then she placed it carefully on the table. It was an ugly cup with an orange and black decoration depicting a rather lopsided bridge, but still. One didn’t like to see the china smashed.
“Would you like some tea?” she asked.
One large shoulder shrugged, but otherwise he didn’t move. What had happened between him and Lord Vale?
“It’ll warm your spirits,” she whispered.
He snorted. “I doubt that.”
“Well.” She smoothed her skirts. “I’ll leave you, then.”
“Don’t.”
The single word was so low she almost missed it. She looked at him. He hadn’t moved, and she wasn’t sure what to do. What he wanted.
His upper arm lay outside the coverlet, and she took a step forward and reached out a hand. It was entirely improper, but for some reason, it seemed right. She touched his hand, large and warm. Slowly she burrowed her fingers under his hand until she grasped it in her own. He squeezed her fingers gently. She felt a point of warmth start in her breast, spreading gradually like a widening pool of warm water until her entire body was lit from within and she identified the feeling. Happiness. He made her wildly, inappropriately happy with just the squeeze of his fingers, and she knew she should be wary of this feeling. Be wary of him.
And then he spoke, low. “He thinks me a traitor.”
Her heart stopped. “What do you mean?”
He turned then, finally, his face a mask, his eyes shadowed, but he did not let go of her hand. “You know our regiment, the Twenty-eighth of Foot, was massacred in the Colonies?”
“Yes.” The massacre was common knowledge—one of the worst tragedies of the war.
“Vale says that someone gave away our position. That we were betrayed to the French and their Indian allies by a man within the ranks of our own regiment.”
Beatrice swallowed. How terrible to know that so many had died because of one person’s perfidy. And the knowledge of a traitor would be even more terrible for Lord Hope. Somehow, she still wasn’t sure how—and really she was just about dying to ask—his seven lost years were connected to Spinner’s Falls and the tragedy there.
All this went through her mind, but Beatrice merely said, “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t understand.” He tugged her hand for emphasis. “The traitor had a French mother. Vale thinks I am the traitor.”
“But… but that’s silly,” Beatrice exclaimed without thought. “I mean, not the French mother part—that makes sense, I suppose—but that anyone would think you a traitor… that… that isn’t right at all.”
He didn’t say anything, merely squeezed her hand again.
“I thought,” Beatrice said cautiously, “that Lord Vale was your friend?”
“As did I. But that was seven years ago, and I fear I no longer know the man.”
“Is that why you struck him?” she asked.
He shrugged.
Beatrice shivered at the confirmation of her fears. She remembered Lord Vale’s warning in the hall: Be careful. Still, she wet her lips and said, “I think anyone who truly knows you would realize that you don’t have it in you to be a traitor.”
“But then you don’t know me.” At last he let her hand drop, and the warmth began to leak from her body with the loss of contact. “You don’t know me at all.”
Beatrice inhaled slowly. “You are correct. I do not know you.” She went to take the tea tray. “But then perhaps the fault for that is not wholly mine.”
She closed the door gently behind her.
EVEN THOUGH BEATRICE visited Jeremy Oates at least once a week—and more often two or three times—his butler, Putley, always pretended he did not know her.
“Who shall I say is calling?” Putley asked early the next afternoon, his pop eyes staring at her in what looked like appalled surprise.
“Miss Beatrice Corning,” Beatrice replied as she always did, suppressing an urge to make up a name.
Putley was only doing his job. Well, at least that was the most charitable explanation, and Beatrice did try to be charitable when she could.
“Very well, miss,” Putley intoned. “Will you wait in the sitting room whilst I ascertain if Mr. Oates is at home?”
Charity was one thing, ridiculous adherence to form was another. “Mr.” Oates was never anywhere but home. Beatrice rolled her eyes. “Yes, Putley.”
He showed her to the second-best sitting room, a musty room with very little light and an overabundance of heavy, dark furniture. She used the time waiting for Putley’s return to compose herself. Beatrice was still a little warm from her discussion with Lord Hope, and she’d felt ever so slightly guilty after she’d left his room. After all, should a lady set a gentleman down so thoroughly when he was bedridden and had just had a falling out with his best friend whom he’d not seen in nearly seven years? Wasn’t she being just a tad mean? But then again, he’d been so very nasty with her. She knew he must be frustrated—enraged, even—by everything that’d happened since his return to England, but really, must he use her as his whipping boy?
Putley returned at that moment with the news that Jeremy would indeed see her, and Beatrice followed the butler’s disapproving back up the two flights of stairs to Jeremy’s room.
“Miss Beatrice Corning to see you, sir,” Putley droned.
Beatrice pushed past the butler and into the room. Enough was enough. She turned a dazzling smile on Putley and said firmly, “That will be all.”
The butler rumbled under his breath but left the room, closing the door behind him.
“He’s getting worse, you know.” Beatrice strode to the window and shoved back one side of the curtains. The light sometimes hurt Jeremy’s eyes, but it couldn’t be good for him to lie in a dark room in the middle of the day, either.
“I try to think of it as a compliment,” Jeremy drawled from the bed.
His voice was weaker than the last time she’d visited. She took a deep breath and pasted on a wide smile before turning back around
. The bed dominated the area, surrounded by the debris of a sickroom. Two tables stood within reach of the bed, their surfaces covered with small bottles, boxes of ointment, books, pens and ink, bandages, and glasses. An old wooden chair was to one side, a silk cord wound around the back, the ends tossed on the seat. Sometimes Jeremy found it easier for the footmen to tie him to the chair when they moved him before the fireplace.
“After all,” Jeremy said, “Putley must have some confidence in my ability to ravish you if he disapproves so much of your visits.”
“Or perhaps he’s simply an idiot,” Beatrice said as she pulled a stuffed chair closer to the bed.
There was an acrid smell; this near the bed—a combination of urine and other noxious bodily emissions—but she took care to keep her face pleasant. When Jeremy had first come home from the war on the Continent five years ago, he’d been horrified at the sickroom smells. She wasn’t sure now if he’d become used to the odors and ignored them or if he simply no longer smelled them, but in any case, she wouldn’t hurt his feelings by drawing attention to them.
“I’ve brought you the news sheets and some pamphlets my footman procured for me,” Beatrice began as she drew the papers from a soft bag.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Jeremy said. His voice was teasing, even in his weakened state.
She looked up to meet his clear blue eyes. Jeremy had the most beautiful eyes of anyone she knew, either woman or man. They were a true light blue, the color of the sky in spring. No other color muddied their depths. He was—or had been—a very handsome man. His hair was a golden brown, his face open and cheerful, but the ravages of his illness had incised lines of pain around his mouth and eyes.
Jeremy’s mother had been a lifelong friend of Beatrice’s aunt Mary, so Beatrice and Jeremy had practically grown up in each other’s pockets. He knew her as no one else did—not even Lottie. When she looked into Jeremy’s eyes, sometimes she felt that those blue orbs saw right past the cheerful mask she put on in his presence, straight to the well of sorrow for him at her middle.
She glanced away, down at the coverlet of his bed. To the place, in fact, where his legs should’ve been. “What—?”
“Don’t pretend innocence with me, Beatrice Corning,” he said with the same grin he’d had at eight years of age. “I may be an invalid, but I still have my sources of gossip, and they are abuzz with the news of your viscount’s return.”
Beatrice wrinkled her nose. “He’s not my viscount.”
Jeremy cocked his head against the pillows. Usually he was sitting erect by this time in the afternoon, but today he was lying on his back. Beatrice felt a frisson of fear bolt through her vitals. Was he worse?
“I can’t think who else’s viscount he might be if not yours,” he teased. “Isn’t this the same man as the pretty youth in that portrait in your sitting room? I’ve watched you moon over that thing for years.”
Beatrice twisted her fingers guiltily. “Was I so obvious as all that?”
“Only to me, darling,” Jeremy replied fondly. “Only to me.”
“Oh, Jeremy, I’m such a wigeon!”
“Well, yes, but an adorable one, you must admit.”
Beatrice sighed forlornly. “It’s just that he’s not at all what I thought he’d be like. Well, if I thought about him still being alive, which of course I didn’t, because we all thought him dead.”
“What? He’s ugly?” Jeremy contorted his features into a grotesque scowl.
“Nooo, although he has a beard and terribly long hair at the moment.”
“Beards are disgusting.”
“Not on ship captains,” Beatrice objected.
“Especially on ship captains,” Jeremy said sternly. “There’s no point in trying to make exceptions. One must be firm on the subject.”
“Granted.” Beatrice waved a hand. “But believe me, the beard is the least of it in Viscount Hope’s case. He’s been tattooed.”
“Scandalous,” Jeremy breathed in delight. Flags of high color were flaming on his cheeks.
“I’m overexciting you.” Beatrice frowned.
“Not at all,” he replied. “But even if you were, I’d beg you to go on. I’m here every day, all day and night, Bea, dear. I need the excitement. So, tell me. What is the real problem with Lord Hope? He may have a bushy beard and tattooed himself with anchors and snakes, but I don’t think that’s what’s troubling you.”
“Triangular birds,” Beatrice said absently.
“What?”
“The tattoos are strange little birds, three of them, around his right eye. What could’ve possessed him to have them placed there?”
“I haven’t the faintest.”
“It’s just that he’s so bitter, Jeremy!” she burst out. “He’s… he’s positively hateful sometimes, as if whatever happened to him seared his very soul.”
Jeremy was silent a moment; then he said, “I’m sorry. He was in the war, wasn’t he? In the Colonies?”
Beatrice nodded.
He sighed and said slowly, “It’s hard to explain to someone who has never experienced it, but war and the things that happen in war, the things one is forced to do and see sometimes… well, they change a man. Make him harsher, if he has any sensitivity at all.”
“You’re right, of course,” she said, twisting her hands. “But it seems more than that somehow. Oh, I wish I knew what he’s been doing for the last seven years!”
Jeremy half smiled. “Whatever it was, I doubt your knowing his history will change anything about him now.”
Beatrice looked at him, into his dear, much too perceptive eyes. “I’m an idiot, aren’t I? Expecting a romantic prince, from a man I knew only from a portrait.”
“Perhaps,” he conceded. “But if it were not for romantic dreams, life would be terribly dull, don’t you think?”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “You always know exactly what to say, Jeremy, dear.”
“Yes, I know,” he said complacently. “Now, tell me. Will he take your uncle’s title from him?”
“I think he must.” Beatrice frowned down at her clasped hands, feeling her chest tighten. “Just this morning, Viscount Vale came to visit him, and although they argued, I don’t think there can be any more doubt that he is, indeed, Viscount Hope.”
“And if he is?”
She glanced at him, wondering if he knew how panicked the prospect made her. “We’ll lose the house.”
“You can always come live with me,” he teased.
She smiled, but her lips trembled. “Uncle Reggie might just have another attack of apoplexy.”
“He’s tougher than you give him credit for,” he said gently.
She bit her lip, not even pretending to smile now. “But if he does become ill, if anything happened to him… Oh, Jeremy, I just don’t know what I’d do.”
She pressed her hand to her chest, rubbing at the constriction.
“It’ll come right in the end, Bea, dear,” Jeremy said soothingly. “There’s no use worrying.”
“I know,” she sighed, and tried to look cheerful for him. “Uncle Reggie had an appointment this morning with his solicitors. He came back just before I left.”
“Hmm. That’ll be a mess. If your uncle doesn’t just hand over the title, I expect they’ll have to present their case to parliament.” Jeremy looked cheerful. “I wonder if there’ll be fisticuffs at Westminster?”
“You needn’t sound so happy at the prospect,” Beatrice scolded.
“Oh, I don’t see why not. It’s things like this that make the English aristocracy so very entertaining.” Despite his words, Jeremy ended with a gasp. His hand on top of the coverlet balled into a tight fist, his knuckles white.
Beatrice started up from her chair. “Are you in pain?”
“No, no. Don’t fuss, Bea, dear.” Jeremy took a breath, and she knew that he was in pain even though he denied it. His face had gone a little gray, save for those ever-present flags of color on his cheeks.
“Her
e, let me help you sit up so you can take some water.”
“Dammit, Bea.”
“Now, don’t you fuss, Jeremy, dear,” she said softly but firmly as she took his shoulders and helped him to sit. Heat radiated off him in waves. “I’ve earned this right, I think.”
“So you have,” he gasped.
She poured water into a small cup and held it out to him.
He sipped some and gave her back the cup. “Have you thought what it would mean if Hope becomes the Earl of Blanchard?”
She set the cup on one of the crowded tables, frowning. “I just told you, Uncle Reggie and I will have to move out of the town house—”
“Yes, but beyond that, Bea.” Jeremy waved aside her loss of a home. “He would replace your uncle Reggie in the House of Lords.”
Beatrice slowly sank back into her seat. “Lord Hasselthorpe would lose a vote.”
“And, more importantly, we might gain one,” Jeremy said with significance. “Do you know what Hope’s political leanings are?”
“I haven’t the faintest.”
“His father was a Tory,” Jeremy mused.
“Oh, then he probably is, too,” Beatrice said, disappointed.
“Sons don’t always follow in their father’s political footsteps. If Hope votes in favor of Mr. Wheaton’s bill, we may win at last.” The high color had spread over Jeremy’s face in his excitement, so now he glowed as if he were being consumed by a fire within. “My men—the soldiers who served and fought so valiantly under me—would get the pension they deserve.”
“I’ll find out which way he leans politically. Perhaps I can convince him to our side.” Beatrice smiled, trying to share Jeremy’s enthusiasm, but inside she was doubtful. Lord Hope seemed solely focused on his own affairs. She’d seen nothing so far to make her think he would care one way or the other about common soldiers.
FIVE DAYS OF a sickbed had made Reynaud damnably restless. Annoying as Miss Corning’s regular visits to his room were—she seemed to think it normal to simply swan in without inquiring first if he wanted her company—the fact was that he’d grown used to her. Used to teasing her and arguing with her. And where was the woman today? He’d seen neither hide nor hair of her.