Drops of Gold (14 page)

“You told me when I first came here that I needed to learn my place.” Mary shook her head. “I couldn’t—”

Layton quit suppressing his natural instinct and reached up to touch her face lightly, hesitantly. Her cheek was every bit as soft as it looked. He cupped her face in his hand and looked directly into her eyes. “Someone reminded me recently how very little Caroline asks of any of us, especially considering how much she has lost in her short lifetime.” He allowed his hand to drop from her face, though he immediately missed the contact, the closeness he felt caressing her cheek. He seized her hand with his two, needing to regain some degree of contact. “Caroline was so obviously desolate at not being able to acknowledge your birthday. Please let her. You have done so much for her, for us.”

“I really haven’t—”

“Do you know she sat on my lap for a full thirty minutes last night and talked—hardly pausing for breath the entire time?”

A smile spread across Mary’s face. Layton longed to touch her cheek again, to brush back that lock of fiery red hair that constantly flung itself against her temple. He contented himself with gently squeezing her fingers, though it wasn’t nearly as satisfying.

“She can chatter on at times.” Mary laughed lightly. “That is just Caroline.”

“No, Mary.” Layton shook his head. “It is a miracle. A miracle.” The last word he whispered, his own astonishment at the change in his daughter nearly undoing him. He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her fingers almost reverently.

“Sir?”

“No,” he objected, voice low, her fingers mere inches from his lips. “Do not ‘sir’ me to death tonight, Mary. You are a guest this evening.” He held her hand still, astoundingly reluctant to let it go.

“Guest or not, I shall have to ‘sir’ you, as you call it, once your family has arrived. It would be highly improper to do otherwise.” A tender smile touched Mary’s face.

How he longed to hold her to him in that moment, to plead with her to look at him that way always. Her soft reminder, however, put things back in their places, brought back memories of failure he had no desire to relive.

Layton released her hand. “Forgive me, Miss Wood.” He hoped his disappointment was not too obvious. He was, after all, in the wrong, the one encroaching and pushing the bounds of propriety.

She opened her mouth as if to speak. What she meant to say, he would never know. Caroline’s shouts of “They’re here, Papa!” rang through the room, and the moment was lost.

“Count to five, Caroline,” Mary instructed quietly.

Caroline stopped on the spot, her lips moving silently as she transformed before his very eyes from a shouting, jumping child to a calm, demure young girl. He was pleased to see her smile hadn’t faded and even more pleased to see Mary’s smile had grown as she watched Caroline. Smiles hadn’t come so easily at the Meadows since Bridget had left them. Sanders stepped inside the room, his usual look of pomposity firmly fixed on his face. Why Sanders’s stuffy posturing should suddenly bother him, Layton couldn’t say. The butler cleared his throat and announced, his voice full of self-importance, “The Right Honorable the Earl of Lampton. The Right Honorable the Countess of Lampton. The Honorable Captain Stanley Jonquil.”

Layton managed not to roll his eyes. Why must Sanders announce Layton’s own family as if they were visiting nobility? They were visiting, and they were nobility, but it was still ridiculous.

The new arrivals all filed in as Sanders completed his overblown announcement. Stanley, as Layton could have predicted, barely hid a smile at the pompousness of their arrival. Layton had to admit his younger brother cut quite a dash in his blue Dragoon’s uniform. With his arm almost completely healed and much of the pallor he’d borne the past months gone, he looked like a healthy twenty-two-year-old again.

Mater wore her customary black. Her face, as always, was lit in a broad smile, her eyes twinkling merrily. Her smile broadened when she looked at Caroline and softened when she turned to Layton. She sat on a sofa, looking entirely satisfied with life. She nearly always looked that way.

Philip’s appearance made Layton shake his head. Absurd was the best word for it. Philip was considered an out-and-out dandy: bright colors, affected drawl, an excessive number of fobs on his watch chain, quizzing glass ever at hand, and a certain air of careless stupidity. It was truly absurd. Philip was probably the most intelligent person Layton knew and was at times serious to a fault. The charade had begun the year Layton and Bridget had married, and Philip hadn’t dropped it yet.

“Welcome to Farland Meadows, Lord and Lady Lampton, Captain Jonquil,” Caroline said in a tone of voice that told Layton in an instant she’d spent some time memorizing her little speech. She curtsied quite perfectly.

That golden eyebrow of Philip’s arched in surprised amusement. “Miss Jonquil.” He executed a flourishing bow, which set Caroline to giggling.

“Oh, Flip!” She laughed. “You bow almost as good as Mary!”

Philip pressed his hand to his heart as if wounded. “Almost as well as Mary?
Almost
? And who, I must ask, is this Mary, whose bows so far outshine my apparently paltry efforts?”

“He’s silly like you, Papa!” Caroline flashed an enormous smile at Layton that melted his heart in an instant.

“Yes, dear.” Layton smiled back. “Your uncle Flip is excessively silly.”

“I should call you out for that, young man.” Philip eyed Layton through his quizzing glass. “Silly,
indeed
.”

“No, no, Uncle Flip.” Caroline looked up at Philip. She popped her fisted hands onto her hips, elbows jutted out as if ready to read him a deep scold. “Papa is supposed to call
you
out. But only if you give me a handkerchief and tell me to keep it because you think I’m a beautiful, very grown-up girl. But you only say that after I tell you I will clean all my junk off it and give it back to you. You say you don’t want it back even with all the junk scraped off.”

“Then your Papa calls me out?” Philip’s chin quivered, but his voice remained impressively calm.

Caroline nodded with authority. Layton had to bite his lips closed to hold back the laugh ready to burst from him. He looked across the room to where Mary had slid and saw she held a hand over her mouth.

“Why would he do that, Miss Jonquil?” Philip’s eyes danced. “Surely he would understand my allowing you to keep the linen, even though you’d . . . ahem . . .
scraped the junk off
.”

“’Cause, Flip,” she said as though he were completely stupid, “I’m not supposed to keep linens from anyone but Papa. ’Cept I gave back the last one he gave me.”

“Did you scrape off the junk first?” Stanley asked, leaning casually against the mantel and watching Caroline with obvious enjoyment.

“’Course I did. Mary said a very grown-up girl never gives a junky handkerchief back to a gennleman. And she taught me how to be a good hostess.” She skipped to the sofa where Mater watched her with something like shock on her face. “You saw me curtsy, didn’t you, Grammy? Like this.” She bobbed again, grinning from ear to ear. “Mary showed me, and we practiced yesterday until we started laughing. It’s hard to curtsy when you laugh. I kept falling down, so Mary said I didn’t have to practice anymore. Then she told me how to say, ‘Welcome, Lord and Lady Lampton and Captain Jonquil.’ Like that. Only when she said it, she made a silly face like she’d ate a sour apple. And then I laughed again, and she said it was useforless. So we practiced making my hair grown-up and that was fun. Am I a good hostess, Grammy?”

“Oh, child.” Mater gave a watery smile and hugged Caroline to her, kissing the girl’s rosy cheek. She looked up at Layton. “She has so much to say,” Mater said in obvious disbelief. Caroline had always been quiet, even with her family.

“So this Mary is not only an excellent bower but a
coiffeuse
and a model of decorum as well?” Philip looked at Layton with a mixture of amusement and curiosity. “I must ask her opinion on my cravat pin. No doubt she has expertise in such matters also.”

“Caroline.” Layton stepped to the sofa, where Mater was still holding Caroline to her. “You must introduce your uncles and grandmother to our other guest.”

“Oh.” She popped off the sofa. “I forgot.”

Layton nodded his understanding and watched her bounce across the room. But she stopped only feet from Mary and spun back around to face him. “Why didn’t Mr. Sanders announce Mary?” she asked. “She’s a guest.”

“Miss Wood was already here, dear,” Layton explained.

“She should get announced too.” Caroline’s brow furrowed adorably, and she was obviously trying to make sense of the discrepancy. “She could stand outside the door and wait while he said all the ‘Honorable’ things.”

Layton looked at Mary just as she looked at him, her eyes wide with amusement.

“Honorable things?” she mouthed to him silently.

Layton nearly laughed out loud.

“Mr. Sanders is seeing to our dinner, Caroline,” Layton reminded her. “We cannot pull him away from his duties.”

“You could announce her, Papa!” Caroline said quite decisively. “Just pretend you’re the butler.”

“Pretend I’m the—” Layton sputtered out the ending.

“I think you would be an excellent butler, Layton.” Philip swung his quizzing glass on its long purple ribbon. “I daresay you could look every bit as starched up and self-important as Sanders.”

At that, everyone in the room laughed except Caroline, who didn’t understand the observation.

“Please, Papa?” Caroline pleaded with him, looking up with those enormous blue eyes that he knew would be the bane of his existence once she was old enough for young men to begin noticing them. “Announce Mary, please.”

“All right, poppet.” He motioned Mary on with his hand, cupping it behind her elbow once she was close enough. Gads, she smelled good: cinnamon, which fit her perfectly. “Did you put her up to this?” Layton asked under his breath as he walked her toward the door, trying to ignore the all-too-familiar frisson of energy that quaked through him whenever he touched her.

“Caroline invents enough mischief on her own without any help from me,” Mary said.

“She didn’t used to, you know.” Layton bit back a smile as he turned the doorknob and opened the door from the drawing room.

Mary looked back at him as she stepped through the doorway. “Is that a complaint, sir?” she asked with a saucy raise of her eyebrow.

Layton followed her out and leaned a little closer, until he could smell her again. “No,” he whispered. Her answering smile made his heart beat harder. “How shall I announce you, Mary?” he asked, still whispering, still a little too close for his own comfort. “With pomposity and arrogance?”

“Any good butler would.” Her eyes grew big, filling with mischief. She whispered instructions before standing silently in the corridor to wait for his announcement.

Layton returned to the room, trying hard to control his features. His mouth seemed determined to turn up despite his efforts to look serious and stiff like a true butler. He cleared his throat. Mater and Stanley laughed at his flawless imitation of one of Sanders’s more well-known mannerisms. Philip simply raised his quizzing glass.

“Miss Mary Wood,” Layton announced to the guests in the room, “The Right Honorable Governess.”

Sputtering laughs echoed around the room, Philip’s included. Mary stepped inside, chin raised as if she were a duchess. She eyed the room with all the self-importance of the highest-ranking nobility. Anyone watching her would think she was the daughter of a duke or marquess rather than the hired governess in the home of the heir apparent to a minor barony.

Layton watched her make her own flawless curtsies as Caroline introduced her quite properly to his family. He smiled, grateful no one was watching him. Layton knew his heart would show in his eyes and his wholly inappropriate
tendre
would be apparent to anyone watching—that the entire room would know in one glance that he had fallen in love with a woman he could never marry. A gentleman didn’t marry his child’s governess without repercussions. He hadn’t enough standing in society to withstand the scandal
that
would create. He owed it to Caroline not to attach any more unflattering speculation to their already gossip-clogged name.

The Earl of Lampton was a dandy but a harmless one. Marion had come to that conclusion before the first course of Caroline’s dinner last night. He had a knack for saying vastly conceited things without sounding the least bit arrogant. Marion hadn’t laughed so much during a meal since the time Robert had spent an entire dinner hour in a perpetual state of giggles. He had been nine at the time; she’d been six. It remained one of her favorite memories.

Marion sighed quietly to herself, missing her brother. It had been almost a year. How much had happened in those few months.

“Disappointed?”

She looked up at Mr. Jonquil. How long had he been standing there? As always, her heart rate picked up at the sight of him. She knew from hours’ worth of self-reflection that she was half in love with him.

And why shouldn’t she be? Marion watched him from where she was sitting near the fireplace. He was a little rumpled after putting Caroline to bed, but if anything, he looked
more
handsome. And he was smiling. No one could blame her for melting under the power of that smile.

“I am sorry we had to postpone your birthday celebration,” Mr. Jonquil said.

Marion shrugged. “Caroline was all but asleep. I think she’s had a few too many excitements these past few days. What with having her family here for her birthday yesterday.”

“They can be a bit much,” Mr. Jonquil said. “I hope you weren’t overwhelmed, Miss Wood.”

“Not at all.” Marion smiled up at him, setting aside the dress she hoped to complete before the earl’s upcoming wedding. “Not even an earl can intimidate a Right Honorable Governess.”

Mr. Jonquil let an almighty laugh escape before checking himself with a guilty glance toward Caroline’s bedchamber. “I hope I didn’t wake her.”

“So do I,” Marion said dryly. “I’ll be up with her if you have.”