Elizabeth Mansfield (11 page)

All that now remained was for Chivers to inform Lord Kittridge that Cassie was unwilling to wed him. This announcement would not be as painful for Kittridge to hear as it would be for Chivers to make. Kittridge had no feeling for Cassie, after all. He barely knew her. What he wanted was a rich wife, and any candidate with a wealthy, willing father would do. All Chivers had to do was to inform Lord Kittridge that he’d locate another candidate within the week, and his lordship was bound to be satisfied.

When the ladies rose and excused themselves in order to leave the men to their port, Chivers got to his feet and crossed the room to open the door for them. “Thank ye for comin’ down, my dear,” he said
sotto voce
to his daughter as she was about to leave the room.

“Be sure to bring his lordship to the music room when you’ve finished,” Cassie whispered back as she crossed the threshold.

“But …” Chivers gaped at his daughter stupidly. “That would mean y’re invitin’ ’im to make ’is offer!”

“Yes, I know,” the girl answered briefly as she brushed by him.

The bewildered Chivers followed her out and grabbed her arm. “Are ye sayin’ y’ve changed your
mind?” he hissed, hardly permitting himself to hope.

“Yes.” Cassie gave her father a tiny smile. “Go back to the table, Papa. His lordship will be wondering what’s keeping you.”

When the door of the dining room was safely shut behind him, Miss Penicuick gave an excited little scream. “Oh, my love,” she cried, throwing her arms about Cassie’s shoulders, “are you going to accept him after all?”

Cassie merely nodded.

“Oh, my dear, I’m so
happy
! His lordship is the handsomest, most gentlemanly, most imposing man I’ve ever laid eyes on! But …” She took a step back and, with her hands on Cassie’s shoulders, peered with worried earnestness into the girl’s eyes. “Cassie, you were so
adamant
before, in your refusal of him! Are you now certain of yourself? Are you
sure
you want to do this?”

The girl took her companion’s hands from her shoulders and squeezed them comfortingly. “Yes, Miss Penny, I’m sure.”

“I don’t understand,” Miss Penicuick persisted. “What made you change your mind?”

Cassie drew her shawl more closely about her shoulders and started slowly down the hall. “It was something that Papa said,” she explained.

Miss Penicuick hurried after her. “And what was that, my dear?”

“He said that if
I
didn’t accept his lordship, he’d have to find
another
heiress for him to wed. I decided then and there that if Lord Kittridge was determined to marry without love … to tie himself to
anyone
, no matter whom, so long as she could help him out of his financial fix, well, then …” She paused and gave her friend a wistful smile.” … that ‘anyone’ might just as well be me.”

Chapter Twelve

“You did
what
?” the dowager Lady Kittridge exclaimed when her son informed her of his marital intentions. “I think, Robbie, that you’ve taken leave of your
senses
! How
can
you have agreed to such a thing? Didn’t you give a single thought to
my
feelings? How do you suppose I shall be able to show my face in society after my son marries a
bourgeoise
?”

Her reaction was typical of all the others. Every member of the family was appalled at the news. Gavin complained that he would have “the devil of a time explaining to my friends that my own brother is marrying a cit.” And Eunice burst into tears, demanding to know how Robbie could bear facing the world after the
ton
made their odious comparisons between his lovely former-betrothed, Elinor, and the drab little nobody he intended to wed.

Kittridge kept his temper. He had made a bargain for the salvation of all of them, and although the cost to him—in the pain of lost dreams and savaged hopes—was heavy, he intended to make the best of it. He turned a cold eye on his family and merely let them know that their chagrin would be easily assuaged when they balanced the benefits each of them would derive as a result of his nuptials against the petty discomfort of accepting into the family a person they considered beneath their touch. “You, Mama, will be able to remain in the London house, with a whole staff at your disposal. Eunice, you will now be able to raise your daughters in the luxurious style you yourself enjoyed as a girl. And Gavin will be able to continue to live as he always has, even keeping his beloved Prado. None of these privileges would have been yours, I remind you, if my ‘drab little nobody’ had not come to our rescue. So, if you’re not complete fools, you will think of the advantages to yourselves in my marriage, and you’ll welcome the girl into our midst with proper warmth.”

Within himself Kittridge was not nearly so sanguine about his marriage as he pretended to his family. For one thing, he couldn’t put his feeling for Elinor out of his mind. He had, that very morning, received a letter from his beloved that reminded him too well of what he had lost. Elinor’s letter, posted in Paris, reverberated with loneliness and loss. The magnificence of her surroundings, the adventures of travel, the excitement of seeing famous places for the first time, only made her miss him more.
I had hoped to see Notre Dame and La Chapelle with your hand in mine
, she’d written.
What joy can there be for me to see these sights without you at my side
? His throat had tightened when he’d read those words, and he’d struck his fist against his bedpost with such frustrated fury that he’d knocked it loose from its underpinnings and caused the hangings to come tumbling down about his head.

For another thing, he was troubled about this girl he’d agreed to marry. He’d thought, when he’d first seen her at the linendrapers’, that she was a sweet, innocent little soul. But now he wasn’t so sure, and his ignorance of her real nature made him uneasy. He felt strangely suspicious of her motives. The cause of those suspicions was the fact that she had turned out to be Chivers’s daughter. It was a peculiar coincidence, and it made him so uncomfortable that he mentioned the matter to his friend Sandy.

They had met at White’s and were sitting in the lounge in a pair of wing chairs, brandies in hand, gazing out through the club’s famous bow windows at the strollers parading up and down St. James
Street in spite of a blustery wind that was tugging at shawls and sending high top hats bowling down the street. “What’s so peculiar about the coincidence?” Sandy asked.

“Don’t you think it possible that this isn’t mere coincidence?” Kittridge surmised. “Mightn’t there be some cunning strategy lurking behind it?” Strategy had been Kittridge’s forte in the cavalry; he’d been almost supernaturally adept at anticipating enemy movements. His instincts in matters of strategy had earned him much admiration. Those same instincts were at work now. They set a warning bell ringing in his head. He couldn’t help wondering if the girl were up to something.

“What cunning strategy?” Sandy asked, nonplussed.

Kittridge put a hand to his forehead. “I don’t know. What if
she herself
is behind the financial arrangement Chivers made with me? Having seen me beforehand and having found me useful as a protector, might she have decided that I’m an easy mark? A mollycoddle who’ll be convenient to smooth her way into society?”

Sandy stirred the brandy in his glass, his eyes troubled. “Well, what did you expect? That’s what that sort of arrangement is all about, isn’t it? A cit’s getting herself into society?”

“Yes, but if it were the father’s idea, it’d be, somehow, more acceptable. There’s something
manipulative
about a girl who arranged such matters for herself. Something almost
false
, if she disguises her managing nature behind an oh-so-shy façade.”

“So you think your shy Miss Chivers might turn out to be a manipulating
intrigante
?”

Kittridge peered glumly into his glass. “It is a real, if repellent, possibility.”

“But only a possibility,” Sandy pointed out. “Look on the bright side, old fellow. She may very well be as sweet and innocent as she appears.”

But Kittridge doubted it. Sandy was eternally the optimist, but Kittridge was learning that the dice of fate rarely fell on the bright side.

Not that it mattered very much, he told himself as he got up from the easy chair and stared out the windows with unseeing eyes. If he couldn’t marry Elinor, what did it matter whom he married? And if he were to be honest with himself, he’d have to admit he was as much a schemer as Miss Cassandra Chivers. Just as she was using him to win herself a title and a place in society, he was using her to get the financing he needed. Their relationship was a business matter; each expected to pay a price for value received. If the title of viscountess and the entrée into society that his name provided was the price she’d set, he had no objections to paying it. It seemed little enough to pay in exchange for forty thousand pounds.

But why had she found it necessary to be underhanded … to keep her identity hidden until the bargain had been made? It seemed an odd ploy. Was there something more to the business than met the eye?

Well, he told himself, time would tell. Meanwhile, he made the bargain, and he had every intention of sticking to it. He would make the girl his wife, and he would be, for all intents and purposes, an honorable husband. But there was one thing he promised himself as he stood there in the window—the little schemer would get no more from him than that.

Chapter Thirteen

Shortly before his wedding day, Kittridge asked Mr. Chivers’ permission to hold a private conversation with his bride-to-be. At the appointed time, the night before their wedding day, his lordship called at the house near King’s Cross. Eames admitted him, but Miss Penicuick immediately appeared behind the butler and took over his duties. Handing Eames Lord Kittridge’s hat and cane, she dismissed the butler and, fluttering about nervously, began to make foolish little remarks to his lordship about her delight at the forthcoming nuptials and her concern that this visit, so close to the time of the wedding, would bring bad luck. It was not until Kittridge gave her a reassuring smile and his promise that this interview would not take long that she finally directed him to a small sitting room at the rear of the house (a room she referred to pompously as the Blue Saloon) and took herself off.

Miss Cassandra Chivers, the bride-to-be, was waiting for him. She looked quite pretty—and properly maidenly and shy—in a pale green round-gown covered with a paisley shawl. He couldn’t help admiring her profusion of curly hair which the firelight tipped with glints of reddish gold. Yet the quality that one first noticed about her was her timidity, an impression that was underlined by the heightened color of her cheeks and the trembling of her fingers. It was difficult, seeing her like this, for him to sustain the belief that her shyness was a pose, a ruse that she used to mask her manipulating nature.

She offered him a glass of brandy, which he refused. But he accepted her invitation to be seated in a chair before the fire, facing her. “Thank you for seeing me tonight, Miss Chivers,” he said after a lengthy silence during which they each studied the other with surreptitious glances. “Your Miss Penicuick seems to think this interview will bring a devil’s curse upon our heads.”

“You mustn’t mind her, my lord. She is very superstitious, especially in regard to wedding omens. If it rains tomorrow, she is bound to fall into the dismals.”

“Really? Is rain a bad omen for weddings?”

“Oh, yes, my lord, it is
dire
. Have you never heard the saying ‘Happy is the bride the sun shines on’?”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid I am woefully ignorant of superstitions. And of wedding omens, too. But now that you’ve warned me, I shall get down on my knees and pray for sunshine before I close my eyes tonight.”

She gave a little gurgle of laughter. “Miss Penicuick will be delighted to hear it.”

“But not
you
, ma’am?” he asked in mock alarm. “Have you no concern for the fate of our marital felicity?”

Her expression grew serious. “I must place my hopes for marital felicity on the good sense of the participants, not on the weather.”

“Good for you, Miss Chivers, good for you,” he said, turning serious himself. “I hope you will think it was good sense that brought me here tonight. I came because I imagine that you must find this situation of ours deucedly awkward.”

“Yes,” she said. “I do. Very.”

“I, too,” he admitted. “That’s why it seems to me to be necessary that we come to some clear understanding before we make our final vows.”

“Yes,” she said, quietly encouraging. She sat back against the cushions, feeling a wave of relief. She had agonized all day about the nature of this interview, but now that she saw what his intentions were, her spirits lifted. He wanted to set matters straight between them. If they were to live together in any sort of harmony, they needed to agree on the rules. It was good of him, she thought, to wish to clarify matters beforehand. She peeped over at him and noted that a muscle twitched in his cheek and that his fingers gripped the arm of his chair with white-knuckled tension. She felt a stab of sympathy for him. He was as uneasy about this conversation as she was. This indication of human weakness on his part gave her more confidence in herself.

“We are strangers, after all,” he went on. “And marriage is … is …”

“Intimate?” she offered shyly.

He looked at her thankfully. “Yes, exactly. I want you to know, Miss Chivers, that I have no intention of pushing those … er … intimacies on you.”

Her face grew beet red. “That is … kind of you, my lord.”

“Not at all. Intimacy, after all, is not something one can negotiate on a marriage contract. It must develop naturally, don’t you agree?”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on the hands folded in her lap.

“In the meantime, Miss Chivers,” he went on, “while we learn to be comfortable with each other, I’m sure that we can find ways to … avoid it.”

There was a long, awkward pause. Then, suddenly, she lifted her head and threw him a teasing grin that was as unexpected as it was charming. “Is calling me by my given name one of those ‘intimacies’ you intend to avoid?”