More than a Mistress/No Man's Mistress (17 page)

He had been pacing the hall, leaning heavily on his cane, for two minutes after sending Hawkins up for her before she appeared on the staircase. She stopped on the third stair up and turned into a decent imitation of a statue—a pale, grim statue with its lips set in a thin, hard line, who nevertheless looked like an angel. The light, simply styled muslin dress did wonders for her form, accentuating her tall, slender grace. Her hair—well, he simply could not remove his eyes from it for a long moment. It was not elaborately styled. It was not a mass of curls and ringlets, as he had half expected. It was dressed up, but all the usual severity was gone. It looked soft and healthy and shiny and elegant. And pure gold.

“Well, well,” he said, “the butterfly has fluttered free of its cocoon.”

“It would be much better if we did not do this,” she said.

But he moved to the bottom of the staircase and reached up a hand for hers, holding her eyes with his own.

“You will not turn craven on me now, Jane,” he said. “My guests await my special guest.”

“They will be disappointed,” she warned him.

It was entirely unlike her to cower. Not that she was doing that exactly. She was standing straight with her chin lifted proudly. She also looked as if she might have sent roots down into the third stair.

“Come,” he said, using his eyes shamelessly to compel her.

She came down to the second stair, and when he turned his hand palm down, she set her own hand on his and allowed him to lead her toward the drawing room. She had the bearing of a duchess, he thought with what might have been amusement under different circumstances. And in the same moment he felt as if scales had fallen from his eyes. An orphan? Raised in an orphanage? Turned out on the world to make her own way in life now that she had grown up? He did not think so. He was a fool ever to have been taken in by that story.

Which made Jane Ingleby a liar.

“ ‘Barbara Allen' first,” he said. “Something that is familiar to my fingers while they limber up.”

“Yes. Very well,” she agreed. “Are
all
your guests still here?”

“Hoping that forty-eight or forty-nine of them have retired to their homes for their beauty sleep, are you?” he asked her. “Not one has left, Jane.”

He felt her draw deep, steadying breaths as a liveried footman leaped forward to open the drawing room doors. She lifted her chin a little higher.

She looked like a fresh garden flower amid hothouse plants, he thought as he led her inside and between two lines of chairs, on which his guests were seating themselves
again and from which they looked with curiosity at his guest.

“Oh, I say.” It was Conan Brougham's voice. “It is Miss Ingleby.”

There was a buzz as those who knew who Miss Ingleby was explained to those who did not. They all, of course, knew about the milliner's assistant who had distracted the Duke of Tresham's attention during his duel with Lord Oliver and had then become his nurse.

Jocelyn led her into the open space occupied by the pianoforte at the center of the room. He released her hand.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” he said, “I have persuaded Miss Ingleby to share with you what is surely the most glorious singing voice it has ever been my privilege to hear. Unfortunately she does not have an accompanist who can do her justice, only me. I dabble along, you see, with five thumbs on each hand. But I daresay no one will notice once she begins to sing.”

He arranged the tails of his coat behind him as he seated himself on the bench, set his cane on the floor beside him, and curved his fingers over the keys. Jane was standing exactly where he had left her, but in truth he was not paying her much mind. He was terrified. He who had faced the wrong end of a pistol in four separate duels without flinching shied away from playing the pianoforte for an audience who would not even be listening to him, but to Jane. He felt exposed, almost naked.

He concentrated his mind on the task at hand and began playing the opening bars of “Barbara Allen.”

Her voice was breathless and slightly shaking for the first two lines of the first verse. But then she settled
down, as did he. Indeed, he soon forgot his own task and played more from instinct than deliberate intent. She sang the song better, more feelingly, than he had yet heard it, if that were possible. She was the sort of singer, he realized, who responded instinctively to an audience. And his guests were a very attentive audience indeed. He was sure no one moved in any way at all until the last syllable of the ballad had faded away. And even then there was a pause, a moment of absolute silence.

And then applause. Not the muted applause of a gathering of the
beau monde
being polite to one of its own, but the enthusiastic appreciation of an audience who had for a number of minutes been transported into another dimension by a truly talented artist.

Jane looked surprised and somewhat embarrassed. But quite composed. She inclined her head and waited for the applause to die away and be replaced by an expectant hush.

She sang Handel's “Art Thou Troubled?” It was surely one of the loveliest pieces of music ever composed for a contralto voice. Jocelyn had always thought so. But this evening it seemed that it must have been written especially for her. He forgot about the difficulty he had had in improvising an authentic-sounding accompaniment for the words. He simply played and listened to her rich, disciplined, but emotionally charged voice and found his throat aching, as if with tears.

“ ‘Art thou troubled?' ” she sang. “ ‘Music will calm thee. Art thou weary? Rest shall be thine; rest shall be thine.' ”

He must have been troubled and weary for a long, long time, Jocelyn found himself thinking. He had always known the seductive power of music to soothe.
But it had always been a forbidden balm, a denied rest. Something that was soft, effeminate, not for him, a Dudley, a Duke of Tresham.

“ ‘Music.' ” She drew breath, and her rich voice soared. “ ‘Music calleth, with voice divine.' ”

Ah, yes, with voice divine. But a Dudley only ever spoke with a firm, manly, very human voice and rarely ever listened at all. Not at least to anything that was outside the realm of his active daily life, in which he had established dominance and power. Certainly not to music, or to the whole realm of the spirit that music could tap into, taking its listener beyond the mere self and the finite world of the senses to something that could only be felt, not expressed in words.

The pain in his throat had not eased by the time the song came to its conclusion. He closed his eyes briefly while applause broke the silence again. When he opened them, it was to see that his guests were rising one by one to their feet, still clapping, while Jane looked deeply embarrassed.

He got up from the bench, ignoring his cane, took her right hand in his, and raised it aloft between them. She smiled at last and curtsied.

She sang the light and pretty but intricate “Robin Adair” for an encore. He would doubtless inform her tomorrow that he had told her so, Jocelyn thought, but he knew that tonight he would be unable to tease her.

She would have fled from the room after that. She took a couple of hurried steps toward the opening between the lines of chairs that led to the doors. But his guests had broken ranks and had other ideas. The entertainment was over. It was suppertime. And Ferdinand had stepped into her path.

“I say, Miss Ingleby,” he said with unaffected enthusiasm. “Jolly good show. You sing quite splendidly. Do come to the supper room for refreshments.”

He was bowing and smiling and offering his arm and using all the considerable charm of which he was capable when he turned his mind from horses and hunting and boxing mills and the latest bizarre bets at the clubs.

Jocelyn felt unaccountably murderous.

Jane tried to escape. She offered several excuses, but within seconds Ferdinand was not the only one she had to convince. She was surrounded by guests of both genders eager to speak with her. But though her position at Dudley House as his nurse and the circumstances of her hiring were doubtless intriguing to people who throve on gossip and scandal, Jocelyn did not believe it was those facts alone that drew so much attention her way. It was her voice.

How could he have listened to it two nights ago, he wondered now, without realizing that it was not just an extraordinarily lovely voice? It was also a well-trained voice. And good voice training was surely not something anyone came by at an orphanage, even a superior one.

She was borne off toward the dining room on Ferdinand's arm, with Heyward walking at her other side, engaging her in an earnest discussion of Handel's
Messiah
. Jocelyn turned his attention to his other guests.

H
ER VOICE TEACHER, WHOM
her father had brought to Cornwall at considerable expense, had given it as his opinion that she could sing professionally if she chose, that she could hold her own in Milan, in Vienna, at
Covent Garden—anywhere she liked. That she could be an international star.

Her father had pointed out gently but firmly that a career, even such an illustrious one, was out of the question for the daughter of an earl. Jane had not minded. She had never felt the need to win public acclaim or fame. She sang because she loved to sing and because she liked to entertain friends and relatives.

But this evening's success at Dudley House was seductive, she had to admit. The house itself had been transformed into a splendid wonderland with every candle in every chandelier and candleholder lit and vases of lavish and expertly arranged flowers everywhere. Everyone was flatteringly kind. Almost all the guests approached her in the dining room, some just to smile and tell her how much they had enjoyed her performance, many to talk with her at greater length.

She had never been to London before. She had never moved in exalted circles. But there was a wonderful feeling of
rightness
about being with this company. These were her people. This was the world to which she belonged. If her mother had lived longer, if her father had retained his health, she would as a matter of course have come to London for a Season. She would have been brought to the great marriage mart for the serious business of selecting a suitable husband. She felt at home with the Duke of Tresham's guests.

She had to make a deliberate effort to remind herself that she was not really one of them. Not any longer. There was a huge obstacle between herself and them, put there when Sidney, drunk and offensive, had decided to try to seduce her as an inducement to persuade her to marry him. He had been going to ravish her—with
the full connivance of his equally drunken friends. But she had never been one to endure bullying meekly. She had swung a book at his head.

And so had begun the string of events that had made a fugitive of her. But some fugitive! Here she was in the very midst of a select gathering of the ton, behaving as if she had not a care in the world.

“You must excuse me,” she murmured, smiling and getting to her feet.

“Excuse you?” Lady Heyward regarded her with gracious surprise. “Absolutely not, Miss Ingleby. Can you not see that you have become the guest of honor? Heyward will persuade you to stay, will you not, my love?”

But Lord Heyward was deep in earnest conversation with a dowager in purple topped by a matching plumed turban.

“Allow me,” Viscount Kimble said, taking Jane by the elbow and gesturing to the chair she had just vacated. “You are the mystery of the hour, Miss Ingleby. One moment hurrying to work across Hyde Park, the next nursing Tresh like a gray shadow, and now singing like a trained nightingale. Permit me to interrogate you.” He smiled with practiced charm, softening the effect of his words.

Lady Heyward, still on her feet, was clapping her hands to draw all attention her way.

“I absolutely refuse to allow everyone to drift away after supper,” she said, “when it is scarce past midnight. I refuse to allow Tresham to be the laughingstock tomorrow. We are going to have dancing in the drawing room. Mrs. Marsh will play for us, will you not, ma'am? Shall I give the order for the carpet to be rolled back, Tresham, or will you?”

“Dear me,” his grace said, his fingers curling about the handle of his quizzing glass. “How extraordinarily kind of you to be so solicitous of my reputation, Angeline. I shall give the order.” He left the room.

“You really must excuse me,” Jane said firmly a few minutes later, after giving vague answers to the questions Lord Kimble had asked her. “Good night, my lord.”

“I shall have a new reason for calling upon Tresham during the next few days,” he told her, bowing over her hand, which he raised to his lips. His eyes looked appreciatively into her own.

Another dangerous gentleman, Jane thought as she hurried from the room, bidding several people good night as she went. And one who must surely know how devastatingly attractive pale blue and silver evening clothes looked with his blond hair.

But slipping off to the privacy of her room was not to be easy at all tonight, she saw as she approached the drawing room. The Duke of Tresham was coming out, leaning on his cane. Several of his guests were already back there, she could see through the open door. More were coming from the supper room.

“Going to bed, Jane?” he asked her. “When it is not even an hour past midnight?”

“Yes, your grace,” she said. “Good night.”

“Poppycock!” he told her. “You heard Angeline. In her estimation you have become the guest of honor. And despite her appalling taste in dress—shocking pink, you will have observed, does not become her, especially when accompanied by frills and flounces and those unfortunate blue plumes she has in her hair—despite all that, Jane, there is no higher stickler than my sister. You will come into the drawing room.”

“No,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Insubordination? You will dance, Jane. With me.”