A Lady of Talent (20 page)

“Except her freedom, her pride, and her independence, not to mention the distinct disadvantage of being forced to endure living under the same roof with a scoundrel.”

Lord Melmouth leapt to his feet, his face suffused with rage. “You will take that back, Charrington! What right do you have to come storming in here like some
preux chevalier
defending a lady’s honor? I have offered her the protection of my name. You have no right to look down your disdainful nose at me.
I
have not sullied my family’s name by going into trade.”

“No, you have not.” The earl’s voice was steely. “Indeed, you sell your canal shares and mining shares so immediately after you win them from your poor benighted victims, and at such an enormous profit, that one wonders if you plan it all well in advance.”

“I... I...” The color drained from Lord Melmouth’s face as he gasped for breath.

“Precisely.” Sebastian smiled with grim satisfaction. “Now, Melmouth, if you do not want it voiced around the clubs of St. James’s, or in the City for that matter, that you are plucking innocent pigeons in the hope of gaining their shares at a most advantageous discount, then I suggest you hand over the Marquess of Shelburne’s vowel immediately and give up all notion of finding yourself a countess anytime soon.”

“You are nothing but a common blackmailer, Charrington. You won’t get away with this. I shall see to it that you are no longer welcome at any club in London. It should be easy enough, once I call into question the reputation of a man who wins at cards as easily as you do,” Melmouth snarled.

But he went to his desk and withdrew a crumpled note covered with the Marquess of Shelburne’s nearly illegible scrawl. “There. Take it and be damned, you meddling fool. You’ll get no thanks from Shelburne for saving his good name and leaving him with that bluestocking of a sister on his hands.”

Stuck in an untenable situation, the Earl of Melmouth was forced to look for satisfaction wherever he could find it, and he was able to derive at least a little bit from the murderous expression that his last sally had sparked in his unwelcome visitor’s eyes. “You have what you came for, Charrington, now get out of here before I call my man and have him throw you out.”

It was the last taunt of a man who had been utterly defeated, and they both knew it.

Sebastian took the vowel, turned on his heel, and left without deigning to reply.

The interview had been no more unpleasant than he had anticipated, and it had, in fact, been settled more quickly than he had dared hope. He wished that he could go straight away to break the news to Cecilia, but he did not wish to run the risk of telling her when Neville was there. For as much as he wanted to free the sister from an impossible situation, he did not want to cause the brother shame or embarrassment by doing so.

Not that Neville did not deserve to be embarrassed. That was the very least of the punishment he deserved for his selfish pursuit of pleasure and indulgence at the expense of his sister’s peace of mind, not to mention her hard-won independence.

No, Sebastian was afraid that if he were to encounter the Marquess of Shelburne at this particular moment, he might be tempted to give him such a piece of his mind that not even his sister would welcome Sebastian into their household any time soon. And that was something that he simply could not risk.

Sebastian had come to look forward to—no, to depend upon—seeing Cecilia on a regular basis. Even when she had been nothing more to him than a picture on his wall, she had brightened his days. Now she filled his thoughts and his heart to a dangerous degree. Every interesting thing he learned, every problem he encountered, every solution he proposed, he wondered what she would think of it. Would she agree with him or disagree, and what new perspective would her artist’s eye, her clever brain, or her knowledge of other places and other cultures reveal that he had not seen? Would she then smile at his blindness and share her thoughts with him in a way that made him feel appreciated and enjoyed as he had never been appreciated or enjoyed before in his life?

Chapter Twenty-three

The Marquess of Shelburne’s canceled vowel arrived at Golden Square inside a note addressed to Lady Cecilia Manners just as Sedley was about to bring in the morning post to his master and mistress at the breakfast table. Sedley took the note from Sebastian’s footman and added it to the pile of correspondence.

It lay on top of the letters from friends in Europe and tradesmen’s bills demanding Cecilia’s attention, the bold, forceful script compelling her to open it up and read the words inside:
You are free.

Cecilia gave an involuntary gasp and dropped the note as if it were a hot poker. The vowel fluttered to the floor.

His sister’s gasp made Neville look up from his buttered eggs to see the blood draining from her face. Curious, he picked up the piece of paper that had floated under the breakfast table. “I say, that is a bit of luck, isn’t it? I wonder—”

“I do not wonder at all,” his sister hissed, rising so rapidly that her chair nearly fell over. “And it won’t do! I tell you, I will not have it. I will pay back every penny myself if it takes the rest of my life to do so.”

“Will not have what, Cecy? What ever are you doing?”

But Cecilia was gone before Neville could finish his sentence, only to sweep past the breakfast room not two minutes later wearing her bonnet and pelisse.

“And where ever are you going?” Neville called after her, as he sat gazing at her retreating figure in utter bewilderment. Carefully folding the vowel, he stuck it in his pocket. It was a great deal too bad that he had been unsuccessful in marrying his sister off to a fortune, but his debt was canceled, so he would not repine. In fact, he might even reward himself by seeing what was on the auction block today at Tattersall’s. He had not been able to touch anything from Crompton’s stable when he had sold up, and it really was a long time since he had had a new hack.

Meanwhile, his sister was in a far less celebratory mood. She had spent an utterly sleepless night fighting a sense of betrayal and loss as great, if not greater, than she had when her father had died. The Marquess of Shelburne’s slow decline and mounting gambling losses had at least forewarned her of the disaster that was about to befall them. But there had been no warning this time, and the resulting pain that came from the discovery of Sebastian’s perfidy was as searing and unexpected as if someone had suddenly stabbed her in the heart.

Which is precisely what had happened that morning, metaphorically speaking, she concluded as, sighing wearily, she watched dawn creep slowly across the sky after a night of restless misery.

Sebastian, the one person she had come to trust as much as she trusted herself, had proven himself unworthy of that trust. Like her, he had appeared to have no patience with the falsity and pretense that so much of the fashionable world seemed to accept as a matter of course. Like her, he appeared to place value in hard work and tasks accomplished rather than outward appearance and social reputation. Like her, he had endured a ruined father and struggled to regain hopelessly mortgaged estates. How could he, then, have failed to admit to her that he had known her father—known him to the extent that he had become an instrument in his downfall? How could he care for her and yet keep the truth hidden from her all at the same time?

At least she had thought he had cared, thought she had read it in the warmth and concern in his dark eyes, seen it in the special half-smile he reserved only for her, sensed it in the intensity of his interest in her hopes and dreams, his very real support for her work, and felt it in that brief but unforgettable kiss. But perhaps she had been wrong, deluding herself into believing that he cared for her simply because she cared so much for him, cared for the pain and loneliness he had suffered as a boy, admired the resourcefulness and courage that had driven him to rebuild his fortune and live a productive life so different from that of his father and the rest of his peers. She cared for him as a kindred spirit, as someone who understood her view of the world as no one else had ever understood it before.

What a fool she had been, deluded by the magic of his touch, and a kiss that had transported her into a world of feelings and desire she had never known existed. Well, she had awakened from that delusion now. All that was left was to tell him that she had.

But when the butler ushered her into the library of the slim house in Curzon Street, and Sebastian rose from his desk to greet her—that special smile of welcome on his face and an oddly intense light in his eyes—her resolution failed her. The sight of the broad shoulder that she had cried on and the strong arms that had held and comforted her made her dizzy with the same nameless longing that had overwhelmed her when they had kissed.

“Lady Cecilia, what a delightful surprise! Do, please, come and sit down.”

Cecilia remained where she was, twisting her hands together in front of her as she faced him. “A surprise, perhaps, but not a delightful one.” Incurably forthright, she went straight to the point while she still had the courage to do so. In his presence, the anger that had fueled her during the walk from Golden Square to Curzon Street was fast ebbing away, and if she did not act quickly, she would never be able to say what she had come to say.

“How
could
you?” she burst out. It was not the cold, relentless cataloguing of his betrayal that she had planned, but when she had gone over and over her speech in the privacy of her bedchamber during the sleepless hours of the previous night, she had not been faced by a man who smiled at her as though she were the greatest treasure in his universe.

“How could I? How could I not do my best to help a friend in trouble? Cecilia, I would do anything for you. How could I stand by and let your life be tied to the life of someone so despicable that his path never should have crossed yours in the first place?”

“It was not your problem to solve. It was mine. And it is not your life. It is my life—a life that would have been a great deal better if you had never come into it.”

“How can you say such a thing?” The blood drained from his face, and he looked as though she had struck him. His eyes became dark holes, the skin stretched tight over the high cheekbones. But instead of exulting in the hurt she had managed to inflict on him, Cecilia suddenly found herself awash in the misery of it all.

Drawing a ragged breath and every ounce of strength that remained in her body, she continued. “If you had not ruined us in the first place, Melmouth and his foul bargains would never have entered our lives at all. How could you do it? How could you lead a man to his destruction when your very own father... oh, I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”

To Cecilia’s horror, tears began to pour down her cheeks. And he stood there, gazing at her impassively, an unreadable expression in his eyes, his face rigid and inscrutable.

Driven to desperation, she raised her hands and beat them against his chest. “You monster of—”

He caught hold of her wrists, whipping them behind her back where one hand held them in a grip of iron while the other tilted her chin, forcing her to look up at him, to look deep into eyes that were now shadowed with pain.

“Cecilia, listen to me. I never meant to deceive you. When I first met you, I did not immediately realize that you were Shelburne’s daughter. Quite simply, you were the angel in my picture, my muse, my companion. It was stupid of me, of course, but I was so happy to have discovered you, to know that the woman, the companion of my dreams was real, that I thought of nothing else.

“It was not until much later that it dawned on me who you were, and by then—God forgive me for being such a coward—I had come to enjoy your company so much that I could not bear the thought of losing you. I know it was wrong. I should have told you the moment I realized.

“But believe me, Cecilia, I did not destroy your father. I did not even ruin him. He was a ruined man before I ever encountered him.”

An inarticulate cry of agony and protest rose in Cecilia’s chest, but her throat was too tight with pain and tears for it to escape.

“When I looked into your father’s eyes that first night at Brooks’s I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him, nothing I could do to save him. Other gamblers’ eyes are alight with the thrill of the game—the challenge and the risk of it all; either that, or they shine, as my father’s did with the fever of it, a fever that can never be assuaged or satisfied. Your father’s eyes were empty, lifeless. There was no glow in them, there was no fever, just the hollow depths of hopelessness. He was already lost when he came into my life.”

She did not want to listen, did not want to hear him point out what she had known all along. Her father’s death had begun the day her mother had died. Young as she was, Cecilia had sensed it. He was loving and caring to the two children left to him to look after for, but the light and the laughter had gone out of his life when she died.

For their sakes, hers and Neville’s, he had gone on—gone to Italy, following his love for art and beauty, surrounded himself with friends who shared that love, and made a life for them away from the memories of his dead wife. He had even entered into his daughter’s life with all the pride and enthusiasm of a devoted parent, sharing her successes with her, comforting her in her frustrations, helping her to learn and grow. But the ebullient man he had once been so long ago was gone. He had been able to take pleasure in their beautiful surroundings, to gratify his senses with the flowers, the food, the wine, and the sunshine, but he had never been truly happy after his wife died.

And then they had had to leave Naples, and he had shriveled up before her very eyes—not physically so much as emotionally and spiritually. He was still her tall, handsome, clever father, but there was a sadness about him, an emptiness that even she had not been able to fill.

But Cecilia was not about to admit all that to herself, much less to the man who had brought it all down around her—her father, her life, and now her dreams. Angrily, she shook her head.
No! No! No!
a voice screamed inside of her.