Elizabeth Mansfield (27 page)

He removed her arms from about him with icy formality. “Never mind the effusions, ma’am. I’m sure you’ll understand that, under the circumstances, I don’t care to speak to you. Please be good enough to inform Lady Kittridge that I’m here.”

Eunice blinked at him in stupefaction. “Do you mean Mama? She sitting right behind you.”

“Of course I don’t mean Mama. I mean my wife, as you very well know.”

“Your wife?
Cassie
? Isn’t she with you?”

It was now Robert’s turn to look stupefied. “She left Lincolnshire several days ago. Do you mean she isn’t here?”

“I knew it,” his mother said with some satisfaction. “You’ve quarreled. I knew the marriage was a mistake. I said so from the first.”

“Oh, Mama, do be still,” Eunice snapped, glaring down at her. “Your baseless judgments do you no credit. Cassie is too good for your idiot son, if you ask me. Now be a dear, mama, and do go away. Why don’t you see to Robbie’s baggage or make sure his room is ready? I want to talk to Robbie alone.”

“Eunice, really!” her mother exclaimed, rising in offense. “I have as much right to hear what the
new Lady Kittridge has been up to as you do. More, in fact.”

“It might be best, Mama, to do as Eunice asks,” Robert said. “I have a few words to say to your idiot
daughter
that are not fit for a mother’s ears.”

The dowager Lady Kittridge looked from one to the other of her offspring with raised brows, poised to debate them both. But then, capitulating with a shrug, she turned on her heel and sailed proudly from the room, muttering under her breath that it was a mistake ever to have bred them.

Eunice rounded on her brother as soon as their mother was gone. “What do you mean, a few words not meant for a mother’s ears? Have I done something to offend you?”

“Don’t play the innocent with me, ma’am. I know about the letters.”

“Oh!” Eunice’s eyes fell. “I
told
Cassie it was a terrible idea. But how on earth did you find out?”

“I’m not such a fool as you both seem to think. I can tell the difference between Elinor’s style and Cassie’s.”

“Yes, I thought you might. Cassie has so much more … sincerity.” She looked up at her brother with a troubled crease in her forehead. “I suppose you and Cassie had a dreadful row over it.”

“You suppose correctly.”

“And she’s run off? You must have been horrid to her.”

“Wouldn’t you have been, in my place?” he snapped. “It’s a bit degrading, to say the least, to have one’s privacy invaded and one’s inner feelings mocked by one’s own wife … and one’s own sister.”

“Mocked?” Eunice gaped at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Isn’t that what motivated you both? I admit that I find the whole incident too confusing to comprehend. But you, Eunice, have too strong a character to let Cassie manipulate you into doing something you believe is wrong. So I don’t know what else could have convinced you to agree to such a despicable deception. What else could your purpose have been but to have a vulgar laugh at my expense?”

“You
are
a fool, Robbie. Do you know Cassie so little that you can believe she did this just to laugh at you? And do you know me so little, too?”

He stared at his sister in confusion. “Then why on earth—?”

“To make you happy, confound it! What else?”

“To make me
happy
?” He ran his fingers through his hair in frustration, feeling as though she were speaking gibberish. “That’s the same nonsense I got from Cassie. What would possibly make you believe that forged letters could make me happy?”

Eunice shrugged. “I don’t know any more,” she admitted, sinking down on the sofa as she tried to reconstruct the logic of Cassie’s little scheme. “Cassie was very convincing at the time. Elinor had stopped writing, you see, and you were glooming about the place looking as if you’d lost all chance of salvation. Cassie said you’d sacrificed your future for us, and it wasn’t fair that you had no sunshine in your life, or some such nonsense. She was almost poetic about it. I suppose I was carried off on the tide of her emotion.”

“Are you saying that you both believed that letters from Elinor would bring
sunshine
into my life?” Robert asked in disbelief.

“Well,
didn’t
they?”

He gave a snorting laugh. “All they brought was a sense of guilt. It seemed to me that while Elinor was remaining loyally attached to me, I was disloyally building a life without her.”

“
Really
, Robbie?” Eunice smiled broadly and drew a deep, relieved breath. “Then may I conclude that the latest news of Elinor won’t pain you?”

“How can I say until I know? What news?”

“Your lost love has gotten herself betrothed to an Italian count.”

His eyebrows rose. “Has she, indeed? Is that why she stopped writing?”

“Is that your reaction?” Eunice shook her head in amusement. “And to think we were so afraid of breaking the news to you!”

“Well, you needn’t be so deucedly gleeful,” Robert said sourly. “The news doesn’t have me dancing in the streets. It doesn’t puff up a man’s pride to learn that he’s been superseded in a female’s affections.”

Eunice laughed. “My dear brother, you are as inconsistent as a child. I needn’t remind you, need I, that you can’t have your cake, etcetera? Isn’t the loss of a bit of masculine pride worth the loss of the guilt?”

He sighed. “I suppose so. But all this talk of Elinor has distracted us from the more important question. Where on earth has Cassie gone?”

“Back to her father’s, I assume.”

Robert jumped to his feet. “Yes, of course! I should have thought of that myself. Somehow I always assumed that she’d come here, so that she could play the grand lady and go running about with you and Mama to all the balls and routs and galas.”

“
Cassie
?” Eunice gave her brother a look of disgust. “She doesn’t give a fig for such things. I think, Robbie, that you have much to learn about your wife.”

“So it seems,” he said thoughtfully as he headed for the door.

“Do you intend to go to King’s Cross to find her?”

“Yes. Right now.” But he paused in the doorway. “Eunice,” he said, his brow wrinkled in bewilderment, “I still don’t understand. Why would my wife wish to make me happy by giving me love letters from, supposedly, another woman? It doesn’t make sense.”

Eunice threw him a strange, almost pitying smile. “Doesn’t it, my dear? Think about it. Think about it hard. And if I were you, I wouldn’t go seeking Cassie until the answer was absolutely clear.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

Robert did not take his sister’s advice but rode over at once to King’s Cross and hammered with the knob of his cane on the Chivers’ doorknocker. Eames, the butler, answered the door and was about to admit him when Miss Penicuick loomed up in the doorway and barred his way. “Her ladyship is not at home,” she said firmly.

“Come, come, Miss Penny,” Robert cajoled. “You and I both know she is. Eames as much as admitted it.”

Miss Penicuick glared at the butler. “Then he exceeded his authority, my lord. Her ladyship told us all, quite distinctly, that if Lord Kittridge called, she was not at home.”

“Oh, she did, did she? Then, Miss Penny, will you please go up and tell her ladyship that I have come to apologize? Perhaps that will convince her to admit she’s at home.”

Miss Penicuick looked dubious. “I’ll tell her, my lord, but you know Cassie. She doesn’t change her mind easily once it’s made up.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that. But do try.”

The attempt was not successful. Miss Penicuick repeated that her mistress was “still not at home,” and closed the door before he could say another word.

Robert tried again an hour later. This time Miss Penicuick opened the door only a crack. “Perhaps her ladyship has returned by now,” he suggested, smiling charmingly at the eye that peeped out at him.

“No. Still out,” Miss Penicuick insisted.

“Tell her I must see her … on a matter of immense importance. Enormous importance. Please, Miss Penny. It’s a matter of … of life and death.”

“I’ll try again,” Miss Penicuick said with a sigh, unable to resist him.

Lord Kittridge cooled his heels on the doorstep for fully fifteen minutes. But when the housekeeper returned, the answer was the same. Not at home.

Kittridge went back to Portman Square in a rage. “If she doesn’t want to see me,” he snarled at his sister whom he passed on the stairs on his way up to his room, “then the devil take her! I’m going back to Lincolnshire tomorrow. I have more important things to do than to hang about on her damn doorstep!”

“I told you not to call on her until you understood her better,” Eunice said. “Did you think about the answer to your question?”

“I’ve given the whole business too much thought as it is!” Robert declared. “
I’m
not the one who pried into matters that don’t concern me.
I’m
not the one who forged letters! How have I suddenly become the penitent, standing about with my hat in my hand waiting for absolution?”

Eunice shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said callously, proceeding down the stairs. “Go back to Lincolnshire, then. No one here will stop you.”

Robert shut his bedroom door and threw himself down on the bed. What was his sister trying to tell him in that annoyingly enigmatic way? That he loved Cassie? He’d discovered that already. That fact
had become clearer with each passing day. But that didn’t explain why Cassie had forged the letters. That was the enigma the answer to which seemed to be the crux of his confusion. Why had Cassie done it? Why had she peeped into his private letters? Why had she written him love notes from another woman? What had she hoped to gain by it?

Before he’d left Lincolnshire, he’d crammed Cassie’s three letters into an inside pocket of his coat. He got up from the bed, pulled them out of their storage place, removed them from their envelopes and laid them, side by side, on his bedside table. He read them over, and then over again, but if they held an answer, he could not see it.

They were, however, an interesting puzzle in themselves. Cassie had composed them by pretending to be Elinor—putting herself in Elinor’s place, so to speak. But she’d never even met Elinor and didn’t know anything about her. So where had the ideas in the letters come from? They had to have come from Cassie herself, of course. But where had she learned about those feelings she’d expressed? Had she been in love before? Were these memories she’d stored away from an earlier experience? Had she herself once tried to touch her lover from a distance, “through the ether,” as she’d put it in her letter? Had she sat on a garden bench and yearned to paint her lover’s name across the sky? Had she conjured up his face, that face with the muscle twitching in the jaw? But, wait! That face described in the last letter—wasn’t that
his
? All those “quirks” she’d so carefully detailed, weren’t they his quirks? And hadn’t she described them just as a lover would?

“Good God!” he exclaimed aloud, staring at the letters in front of him with wide eyes. Could
that
be it? His heart began to hammer in his chest as it occurred to him for the first time that Cassie might have been expressing her own feeling toward
him
! Could she really love him, even though she’d kept him at arm’s length, even though their marriage had been a business arrangement, even though he’d kept himself distant from her for Elinor’s sake?

Not trusting himself to answer, he ran out of his room and down the hall to Eunice’s room. “Eunice, may I talk to you?” he asked, banging on her door.

“Of course, you gudgeon,” she answered. “Stop that hammering and come in.”

She was sitting at her dressing table rubbing a strange, greenish liquid on her face. “It’s called Balm of Mecca,” she explained, laughing at his shocked expression. “It is made up of all sorts of magical ingredients, like lemon oil, crushed cucumbers and tincture of turpentine. It is guaranteed to make my complexion as youthful as a schoolgirl’s if I use it every day for a month. I intend to be a glowing bride a month from now.”

“You’ll be a glowing bride whether or not you use that stuff,” he said, perching on her bed. “But I didn’t come here to talk about complexions. Tell me, Eunice, were you hinting this afternoon that you believe Cassie
cares
for me?”

“Any fool could tell that in a moment,” Eunice said in her blunt way.

“Oh, God!” Robert breathed, feeling a glow of joy in his chest.

Eunice beamed at him. “Fool!” she said affectionately.

He eyed her askance. “But I still don’t see why, if she really loves me, she would want me to receive letters from
Elinor
.”

“For some people, Robbie, love is more a matter of giving than taking. I think that Cassie would hand Elinor over to you on a silver platter if she could … and if she thought it would make you happy.”

He expelled a long breath. “Damnation, Loesby was right. I
don’t
deserve her.”

“But she deserves you, so you’d better win her back.”

“How am I supposed to do that,” he asked, turning glum, “if she won’t even see me?”

“Oh, you’ll find a way,” Eunice said airily. “Now, get out of here and let me get on with making
myself ugly so that I can be beautiful. Good night, my dear.”

Yes
, he told himself before he fell sleep that night,
I’ll find a way
. Life had suddenly opened up for him this unexpected new chance for happiness, and he’d be more of a fool than he even thought he was if he failed to grasp it.

* * *

The next morning he was on Cassie’s doorstep early. “Miss Penny,” he said to the housekeeper confidently, “just give her this note. She’ll see me then.”

He’d spent half the night writing it. Love letters were not in his line, so every word had come hard for him. In the end, he’d had to plagiarize some of hers.
Dearest Cassie
, he’d written,
it has slowly dawned on my sluggish brain that I am one of those lucky husbands who truly loves his wife. I have wanted to tell you so for a long time, but many foolish and quite imaginary impediments seem to have gotten in the way. I am not skilled at expressing my feelings, so I can only say
that I’ve been trying since you left me to conjure up your face, but when I try to touch it, the vision dissolves into nothingness. Do not, I beg you, leave me so bereft.