A Necessary Deception (25 page)

And Christien had sped out of the house as though a man announcing himself as disloyal to the crown had walked past the window. He’d said he would return. She mustn’t fret if he didn’t. England mattered more than a party, indeed.

Yet Father had been so determined they all marry this Season. Why the sudden change in plans or opinion?

Stomach roiling, head spinning, Lydia climbed the steps to Mama’s bedchamber. She didn’t knock. Mama had told her to go away the past two times she’d done that. Lydia simply turned the handle and entered the chamber.

Mama reclined on a chaise longue. Barbara hovered on a stool beside her, waving a fan in one hand and smelling salts in the other. The stench of ammonia permeated the chamber.

“Open the windows.” Lydia trotted across the Wilton carpet to do so for herself. Though smelling of coal smoke and a faint whiff of horses from the stables in the mews, the breeze sweeping into the chamber surpassed the vinaigrette for freshness.

“Night air.” Mama pressed a hand to her brow. “I simply cannot breathe night air.”

“You should have a care for your mother’s health, Lydia,” Barbara scolded.

“I do.” Lydia set her hands on her hips. “But I care for Cassandra and Honore more right now. Mama, this is your youngest daughter. She deserves to have you at her side on this important night. You can drift away after the guests have arrived, but right now you need to be with your daughters.”

“I cannot.” Mama moved her hand to her chest. “My heart.”

Lydia softened her tone. “We all suffered a shock tonight. But it was nothing more than a madman with a private vengeance to settle.” She hoped. “Honore cannot have her coming-out ball with neither parent present.” Lydia spoke with determination and a hint of anger. “What gentleman will wish to court her if he thinks neither of her parents cares enough to be at her side on this important night? Do you wish her to marry? Or would you prefer she join me in Tavistock?”

“Heaven forfend.” Mama struggled to sit up.

Barbara glared. “She wouldn’t.”

“Rather than live with an autocratic father and a mother who apparently doesn’t care with whom she sneaks out of the house, yes, she would, I think.” Not waiting to observe the response for that, Lydia spun on the heel of her silver slipper and stalked from the room.

She hesitated in the corridor, waiting for guilt to slam into her. It didn’t. Instead, a sense of peace washed over her, as though at last she’d done something right.

Yet was it? She’d been raised to honor her mother and father. Wasn’t speaking her mind like that dishonoring them? If she wasn’t to completely fail as a Christian woman, shouldn’t she apologize, beg forgiveness of them, let them have their way in all things? She’d been told that all her life and transferred that belief to her role with a husband. Obedience without question. So she’d let him go without a fight and harbored the bitterness against him for seven years to the extent that marriage seemed like the cruelest state for a woman. Speaking her mind to her mother hadn’t been disobedience. Mama hadn’t told her to do something she hadn’t. Nor had she dishonored her. She’d honored her in knowing the importance of her presence with her daughter.

At that moment, Lydia wanted no part of Mama, Father, or Honore’s ball. She wanted to be rushing through the streets on whatever errand had drawn Christien away with little word. She could forget about family coils then.

But the good of the family came first. So she climbed another flight of steps to Cassandra and Honore’s room to make certain they were ready.

They stood at the window, one fair, one dark, one in white muslin and silver spangles, the other in primrose yellow silk and lavender embroidery, both so pretty and young that shoving them into marriage under any circumstances felt like the real sin.

“What are you looking at?” Lydia asked.

They both jumped and spun around as though guilty.

“I thought I saw Whittaker.” Cassandra blushed. “But my spectacles are in the library, and I couldn’t see that far.”

“I didn’t see anyone that could have been him.” Honore cast Cassandra a sympathetic glance. “But I think I saw Gerald.”

“You mean Mr. Frobisher.” Lydia’s tone gently reproved.

Honore stuck her pert nose in the air. “He was Gerald to me, and I want him at my ball.”

“He will be refused admittance after what he did the other night. Taking you to a gaming hell indeed, not to mention attending the rout with Miss Tarleton.” Lydia gritted her teeth. “Come along. We must persuade Mama to get herself out of bed and into her ball gown.”

“Mama isn’t coming?” Tears flooded Honore’s eyes, and she rushed past Lydia.

“Well, that should work to get Mama ready.” Lydia offered Cassandra her own sympathetic glance. “I’m sorry Whittaker isn’t here, but he hasn’t had time to get your letter yet and reach London.”

Cassandra plucked at a lavender petal on her bodice. “I haven’t sent him a letter.”

“Why not?”

“Too many reasons. All the same reasons. Mostly I don’t want a marriage like yours.”

“You wouldn’t have a marriage like mine. Whittaker isn’t a soldier.”

“No, he engages in that ungentlemanly occupation of running his own mills, and now he has the estate. He hates town. I’ll go mad in the country without bookshops and other scholars.”

“The country is better for ballooning.” Lydia offered Cassandra an encouraging smile.

She merely grimaced. “Which Whittaker disapproves of too. So how can I still love him?”

“I don’t know what makes us love.” The words slipped out unbidden.

Cassandra’s head shot up. “Do you still love Charles? Or—Lydia.” Her eyes widened. “Monsieur de Meuse.”

“I hear the front door knocker. Guests must be arriving.”

That being the truth, Lydia sped toward the steps, slowing only on the final flight in time to see Lemster ushering several guests into the drawing room. Lydia joined them. Soon Cassandra, Honore, Mama, and Barbara followed. Between greeting everyone, listening to people’s repeated exclamations over the assassination of Lord Perceval, and sending new messages to the kitchen over how many guests would grace the dinner table, Lydia found no time to wonder about Father’s whereabouts, whether or not Whittaker had been in the square, or whether or not Christien would keep his word and return for dinner.

The latter came just as Lydia and an elderly earl led the way into the dining room. Other than a brief apology for his tardiness, Christien said nothing more to Lydia before slipping into his assigned place halfway down the table.

More guests than Lydia thought likely had arrived.

“No sense in running about. We all know the next prime minister will be Liverpool,” one peer announced. “No one else makes sense.”

The presence of other noblemen set Father’s absence under a glaring light. If anyone thought it odd that the father of the guest of honor was absent, good breeding led them to keep their opinions to themselves. They expressed it more indirectly through lavish compliments on the dinner, which was excellent, through praising Honore’s looks—stunning—through keeping the conversation light, even amusing.

Except for Christien. He spoke to the ladies on either side of him, served himself and his dinner companions from the dishes at hand, and sipped from the glass in front of him, but his thick lashes veiled his blue eyes more often than not, and he smiled little. Twice, Lydia caught him gazing at her with his mouth set, as though he were annoyed or even angry.

The food everyone declared superb might as well have been lumps of colored clay and congealed oil paints on her plate, for all she tasted them.

At last the meal ended. Instead of the ladies withdrawing while the gentlemen enjoyed their time alone, everyone left together, gathering up wraps and calling up carriages to proceed to Almack’s for the ball.

“My lady?” Christien moved to the side of the steps, where Lydia stood directing everyone’s departure.

She leaned toward him, gripping the banister so she didn’t touch him. “Yes?”

“Will you ride in my carriage with me? Please.”

“I can, yes.” She allowed him to hand her into the carriage, though she knew it was a declaration that they were courting.

But they were. They stood up together twice for dances at Honore’s ball and went into the midnight supper together. Christien drove her home with Cassandra in the carriage, and he held Lydia’s hand beneath the fold of her gauzy skirt as though he never intended to let her go.

Of course he must. “We can’t live in one another’s pockets,” Lydia murmured to him at the door. “I don’t want . . . I can’t . . .”

“Not yet?” He tucked his forefinger beneath her chin, tilted her face up, and brushed his lips across hers.

The contact proved enough to send Lydia to her room on wobbly knees as she attempted not to smile. She must give nothing away, show little emotion. This was merely playacting, a ruse to persuade whomever they must that they were focused on one another, not French agents.

If any existed. Lydia wasn’t convinced any longer. Yet she couldn’t forget the blackmail, the fear, nor Barnaby’s dead body. They haunted her dreams as much as did Christien—

And Charles.

Sometimes, after a drive in the park through sparkling May sunshine, or an afternoon of rain spent near the library fire, talking, reading, or playing a game with Honore and Cassandra, Lydia looked at Christien and pictured a future together, sitting by the fire in his Shropshire home, a mere cottage with only fifteen rooms, he’d told her, set amidst a mere five thousand acres. Not much of a house or lands for a nobleman, but they had prospered in other ways, thanks to his mother’s business sense and good management. The girls would have good dowries, and his life would be comfortable.

But Charles had promised her much the same. They would live in his family home in Lancashire, cozy amidst the rolling hills and meadows of sheep. And nothing came of it. He left. He stayed away. He died without once taking her to his family home, and the home that should have been theirs went to a distant cousin by the laws of inheritance.

“I can’t do it,” she told Christien near the end of May. “I can’t continue with seeing you or I’ll care too much.”

“You don’t care too much now?” His smile was gentle, his fingers caressing her hand gentler still. “I believe you love me.”

“Perhaps I do.” Not perhaps. She knew she did. “But, Christien, you work for the government too. It’s not the Army, but it takes you away. It puts you in danger. It put me in danger. What’s next? My family?”

“It’ll be done with soon.”

“Will it? Nothing has happened since the prime minister was assassinated. You have no clues and no evidence other than someone trying to harm both of us twice.”

“These things take time—months, even years. I’ve told you about—”

“Yes, some of your missions, as though that should comfort me.” She feared she would weep right there in the middle of Hyde Park. “Do I have to wait until this mission is done, or be in fear for your life and mine too? Would you, unlike Charles, resign and settle for being nothing more than a gentleman farmer, husband, and—and father?”

He said nothing in response. His gaze had strayed across a line of open carriages to two persons riding.

“
Tres interessant
,” he murmured. “I haven’t seen Gerald Frobisher in weeks, and he’s keeping august company.”

Lydia suppressed a shriek and managed a calm, “Please take me home. I have my answer. And you may have yours—no future together.”

“Lydia,
je regrette
—”

“Please take me home so you may go about your business unencumbered.”

With a sigh, Christien turned the horses out of the park gate and returned Lydia to Cavendish Square. Head aching, she retreated to her room, where her easel stood empty and her paints dried.

She’d neglected her art for a man.

For the first time, she truly understood why Cassandra questioned the wisdom of marrying Whittaker. Cassandra didn’t want to neglect her interests to have a husband. Father had suppressed their interests enough, and he’d kept Honore from developing any at all so that she appeared to have nothing more to offer the world than her pretty face and form and lively chatter about nothing important.

From his perspective, Father had been doing right by his daughters. Apparently, men wanted an escort, a companion when convenient to them, someone to bear their children and run their homes and nothing more. Christien was no different. His allowing Lisette to remain as the Bainbridge chef for weeks after discovering her presence in their household had given Lydia hope, but when she was no more useful as an informant, he had sent her packing, bundled her onto a coach bound for Shropshire with a dragon of a chaperone to ensure she arrived.

But none of that took away the pain, nor the hope that something would change. The way Lydia’s heart leaped at the announcement that Christien had come to call the next day told her that. He had changed his mind. He was going to resign his position.

Footfalls light, Lydia skimmed down the steps, paused for a moment to tuck a stray curl into its pins and straighten her silk shawl on her shoulders, and glided into the drawing room as though all day would be too soon to arrive.

“
Ma chère.
” Christien turned from the window and held his hands out to her. He didn’t smile.

Lydia gave him her hands and didn’t smile either. “What’s amiss?”

“Ah, you know me well.” Christien indicated the rain streaking down the glass. “The weather is too foul to go out, so let us sit here together and talk very low so no one can hear what I have to say.”

Now a little sick, Lydia followed Christien to a sofa as far from the door and listening servants as possible, and waited.

“Have you seen your father of late?” Christien began.

Lydia stared at him. “Of course.”

“Has he seemed preoccupied?” he asked. “Perhaps not paying attention to his daughters as much?”

“Perhaps. I think he’s resigned himself to our failed Season, but—”

“Lydia, listen.” Christien’s hands fisted on the thighs of his biscuit-colored breeches. “The night of Honore’s ball, your father walked out of this house. He didn’t take a carriage, he walked.” He paused.