Drops of Gold (18 page)

Lord Cavratt rolled his eyes, but his lady wife pressed on. “But
what
precisely has been weighing on him? Crispin has said many times how very much Layton has changed but has never indicated a reason for the transformation.”

“If I knew precisely what the cause was, I would have addressed it years ago.” Lord Lampton’s tone turned perfectly serious and perceptive. The shift caught Marion’s attention further. She found herself leaning ever so slightly forward to listen closer. “I first noticed a change after Caroline was born, though I am certain
she
is not the cause of his difficulties.”

“Indeed. Caroline is the only person from whom he hasn’t cut himself off,” Lord Cavratt acknowledged.

“But then, Bridget, his wife,” Lord Lampton added with a look at Lady Cavratt, who nodded her understanding, “was ill for several months after the birth. A mysterious illness at that. She didn’t see anyone or go out. She died after only a handful of months had passed.”

“Perhaps he is mourning for his late wife,” Lady Cavratt suggested, though the others didn’t look convinced.

Marion felt like shouting.
He feels responsible! He feels weighed down by lies and guilt!
If only they knew.

“Their marriage wasn’t like that,” Lord Lampton said. “They were fond of each other. Friends. But theirs wasn’t a connection deep enough to account for his dropping out of life for losing her. He would certainly miss her, mourn her loss. It wouldn’t have destroyed him like this though. There must be something more.”

There is
! Marion silently answered. They needed to know; they might be able to help him. And despite all of the pain she’d felt over the dratted man, she wanted to help Layton. She wanted someone to lift this burden for him.

“It seems to me you need to find out what that something more is,” Lady Cavratt said.

“Believe me, Catherine,” Lord Lampton answered, sounding almost fierce, “I have been trying for five years. I’d give anything to know.”

“Perhaps your uncle Flip would like to see the watercolors we created last week,” Marion whispered in Caroline’s ear two mornings later.

With an enthusiastic nod of her head, Caroline scampered from the schoolroom into her bedchamber. Soon the sounds of rummaging floated through the air. It would take Caroline several minutes to locate them, something Marion was counting on.

“That was well maneuvered of you, Miss Wood.” Lord Lampton spoke with obvious curiosity. Marion watched him tug at his cobalt-blue waistcoat and flick an invisible speck of lint from the sleeve of his claret-colored jacket. “I assume you have some business with me.”

He wandered to the schoolroom window, swaggering as always but quite obviously on his guard, every inch the aristocrat. He reminded her rather forcibly of Layton in that moment, of the facade he affected when he meant to squelch someone’s—
hers
, usually—pretensions. Marion swallowed with some difficulty, telling herself she had to do this.
Had
to.

“Yes, my lord.” Her voice quivered.
No need to feel unequal to the task
, she admonished herself. He was only an earl. She’d conversed with dukes and a marquess on a regular basis. Of course, she hadn’t been a servant at the time.

Lord Lampton turned to face her, one golden eyebrow raised in almost haughty inquiry. He spun his quizzing glass on its ribbon as he waited.

“I know I am being terribly presumptuous in even addressing you, but, I—” She took a deep breath to steady her nerves. A slight hint of a smile pulled at Lord Lampton’s lips, and she relaxed a fraction. Layton looked terribly like that when he was holding back a smile. Maybe she wasn’t about to be eaten after all. “I . . . I have this . . . um, friend—No,” she quickly corrected. “Acquaintance, let’s say, who has this . . . problem . . .”

“Perhaps you ought to ask your employer for advice.” Lord Lampton watched her a little more closely.

“That would not be a good idea, my lord. Believe me.”

He chuckled lightly. “I believe you.” His eyes grew a little less cold. “So what is the problem this acquaintance of yours needs so desperately to have addressed?”

“This person is more an acquaintance of yours than mine,” Marion said, though she found the admission painful.

The smile disappeared from Lord Lampton’s face, and Marion saw, for the first time, a man she would be ill-advised to cross. Her heart suddenly began racing.
You
must
do this
, she reminded herself.

“This person has a problem, Lord Lampton.” She pushed the words out so quickly, she struggled to take in the air she needed. “I am not in a position to offer any help, but I know more of it than those who might be able to help him—
this person
, that is.” She looked up nervously. No longer the empty-headed dandy, Lord Lampton was all earl at the moment. Had she made a terrible mistake? Marion thought of Layton’s face, the agony she’d seen there when he’d related his difficult history. No. She
had
to help him.

“This person lost a loved one under less than ideal circumstances. She had been unwell, not in body so much as in mind. Melancholy to the point of . . . I’m not sure how to describe it.” Marion felt flustered, trying to explain without bending confidences too far, needing Lord Lampton to understand something she didn’t understand herself. “Without speaking ill of the dead, my lord, this particular lady seemed, by her own husband’s description, though I think he hardly realizes the implication, almost . . . almost mad. Not in a violent or dangerous way. But unnaturally sad and despondent.

“I am told she refused to so much as hold her infant daughter, whose arrival she had apparently been quite eagerly awaiting. She spurned all efforts by her husband to comfort her.”

Marion began talking faster, feeling guilty and afraid they’d be interrupted at any moment. She hadn’t told Lord Lampton the identity of the person whose history she was spilling, but he listened, slowly nodding his understanding. She was as good as breaking her word to Layton.
For his own good
, she assured herself without much success.

“He didn’t know what to make of it, what could possibly have caused such all-encompassing sadness. He kept it a secret, even from his family, hoping, I imagine, that she would improve somehow.”

Lord Lampton pushed away from the window, his look one of pained concern as he began pacing. Marion kept herself glued to the spot as she rushed on through the recitation she’d practiced for hours the past two nights.

“She didn’t die a natural death, Lord Lampton.”

He looked at her then, eyes nearly as bleak as Layton’s had been when he’d told her what she was telling his brother.

“He didn’t want . . . He wanted to spare her and their daughter the disgrace of . . . of a . . .”

“Suicide’s burial,” Lord Lampton whispered, mercifully finishing the phrase for her.

Marion nodded as she pushed on. “So he kept it secret. The doctor ruled her death the result of a wasting illness, no doubt a favor to . . . this person. It was put about that she had died that way. He never told a soul otherwise. By then, I think, he was too beaten down and overwhelmed to know that they would have supported him rather than condemned him.”

“Condemned him?” Lord Lampton asked, her words obviously causing him pain.

“He passed her death off as something it wasn’t,” Marion tried to explain. “Knowing what she’d done would have implications with the law and the church, he . . .”

“He lied.” Lord Lampton nodded his weary understanding. “He lied to—”

“The government. The church. God.”

Lord Lampton rubbed his face with his hands.

“That bothers him,” Marion pushed the final confession out. “That he is perpetrating a fraud, especially against the Almighty.”

“Of course it would.” Lord Lampton sighed. Then he mumbled as if talking to himself. “He always was the most faithful of all of us. Even more so than Harry, just not as obnoxious about it. Lying to God would bother him a great deal.”

“He told me he doesn’t think God cares one bit about him,” Marion said.

“So all these years, it wasn’t grief.”

Marion shook her head. “Guilt,” she said.

Lord Lampton crossed the floor to her and grasped her hands for a moment. “Thank you, Miss Wood.” He spoke with an intensity that, until that morning, she would have thought entirely foreign to him. “You are indeed a Most Honorable Governess.”

Marion smiled at the reference to the last truly enjoyable evening she’d had. But the smile, she knew, didn’t quite reach her eyes. She wasn’t entirely sure about what she’d just done. “I was told all of this, no doubt, in a temporary fit of thoughtlessness,” she hastened to tell him. “I was made to understand that it was quite a closely guarded secret.”

“Do not worry, Miss Wood.” Lord Lampton smiled reassuringly. “I have no intention of telling this ‘close acquaintance’ of ours that I am in possession of these new bits of knowledge. But they will prove more helpful than I think you know.”

“It would mean my job and my integrity.”

Lord Lampton raised his hand as if to swear an oath. “May my cravats wilt,” he swore, “if I reveal the source of my information.”

Marion smiled in spite of herself.

Lord Lampton’s expression grew mischievous. “That is my betrothed’s favorite of all my oaths.”

“It can be trusted?” she asked, not entirely joking.

“Miss Wood.” Lord Lampton’s tone became serious once more. “I love my brother. Seeing him so nearly himself again only last week was among the happiest moments of my life. I have attempted for half a decade to accomplish what you have now put within my grasp.”

“And, please, Lord Lampton, don’t tell the vicar.”

The request clearly surprised him. “Mr. Throckmorten is the absolute last person I would tell something of this nature. He would likely turn it into a sermon and denounce Layton to the entire neighborhood.”

She’d had that thought herself. Indeed, the more Sundays she spent at Farland Meadows, the more convinced she was that Mr. Throckmorten had added to Layton’s feelings of guilt.

“Thank you, my lord. And thank you for not telling Mr. Jonquil about this conversation. I don’t want him to hate me any more than he already does.”

“If he hates you so much, why are you doing this for him?”

She could feel the color rising in her cheeks. Regardless of his feelings for her, Marion loved Layton. She figured she always would. But it was more than that. In little more than a whisper, she said, “I want him to be happy.”

“Then it seems, Miss Wood, you and I are allies and not enemies. So you needn’t look so petrified the next time you find it necessary to speak with me.”

“I am only the governess, my lord.” Marion felt her low status more by the minute.

“In the Jonquil family, you are poised to be a heroine. Unfortunately, it seems I am the only one likely to know as much.”

“I would appreciate that, my lord.”

“Now, if I am not much mistaken, I am about to be accosted by mounds of watercolors.” Lord Lampton quite suddenly appeared the very picture of a mindless dandy. How did he affect such an all-encompassing transformation so quickly? “Tell me, Most Honorable Governess, shall I clash?” He smoothed out his waistcoat.

“Not at all, Lord Lampton.”

“Ah, the
mademoiselle d’art
.” He bowed rather theatrically, and Caroline giggled as she hurriedly crossed the room to where her Uncle Flip awaited her, paintings clutched in her tiny fingers.

Marion wandered to the window, watching the light flurries, wondering if she’d done the right thing.

Layton stood at the door of the Lampton Park library and watched two of his brothers with confused interest. Philip and Jason, who historically tended to grate on each other, sat at a table, books and papers spread out in front of them, obviously in the midst of an involved and serious discussion.

“What is this, a council of war?” he asked, still leaning against the doorframe.

Philip looked up, the dandified, feather-headed expression he usually wore absent. That, combined with Jason’s uncharacteristically patient look—he was seldom indulgent, especially when faced with Philip, whose posturing seemed to irritate Jason more than any of the other brothers—made Layton wary. What
was
going on? Philip shrugged a little self-deprecatingly, a mannerism he once used quite regularly but which Layton hadn’t seen in many years, since before Philip began acting like a fop. Now Layton really was worried.

“You see before you your usually resourceful elder brother with a rather sticky legal situation on his hands,” Philip answered before turning his head back toward Jason and the papers they were perusing.

Layton’s heart dropped into the pit of his stomach. “Are you in some kind of trouble, Philip?” He heard the panic in his voice. He crossed the room and took a seat beside his two brothers. Philip looked back at him and smiled, though a little uncomfortably. “The legal question isn’t actually mine.” He scratched the back of his neck. Gads, it was good to see him acting more like himself, at least somewhat serious, his actual smile and not the half smirk he usually wore. “A friend, actually. Good
ton
but not a lot of connections, you know. Not sure where to turn. Seems her—”

Layton raised his eyebrow at the “her.” Knowing how ridiculously enamored Philip was of his betrothed, Layton couldn’t resist a little good-humored jesting. Philip made an identical raise of his own eyebrow, and Layton chuckled lightly.

“Her husband has fallen into a remarkably persistent state of blue-devilment, beyond what might be overlooked or explained away. I’ve flipped through a few of Father’s books of medical terminology. This particular friend seems to be suffering from something termed ‘chronic melancholia.’”

Layton’s ears had pricked at the words “persistent state of blue-devilment.” Philip might just as easily have been describing Bridget in those last few months. And “chronic melancholia”? Could there actually have been a name for it?