Scandalous Brides: In Scandal in Venice\The Spanish Bride (18 page)

“Well, well. If it isn’t the
secretary.”

It was quite the last voice Nicholas had wanted to hear, aside from Georgina Beaumont’s, when he had come to Florian’s with the express wish to become drunk as a bishop. He knocked back his brandy, and closed his eyes against the warm sting. “Get away from me, Peter.”

“Or what? You will challenge me to a duel, perhaps?” Peter slid into the chair next to his and signaled to the waiter for another brandy. “I would hardly recommend it. You are quite foxed already, and obviously suicidal. It would be no challenge for me at all, and no way to get back into Elizabeth’s good graces. She is quite fond of you, I see, though I scarce could say why.”

Nicholas did not answer, or even look at his friend. He stared fixedly out the window at an arguing couple who had paused beneath the portico. The dark-haired woman threw back her head; her hands gesticulated wildly in the air. If there had been a heavy object to hand, she would no doubt have thrown it at her hapless partner’s head. The man listened to her in stony silence.

If only Elizabeth had flown at him like that! If she had only railed at him, cursed him, thrown paint pots at his head. Instead she had confronted him in chill calm, icy dignity, her lovely silver eyes grave and dark as slate, unforgiving. He knew from his own experience that such anger, pushed deep down inside, was the very worst sort. It would only fester there, getting colder and larger until her hatred for him overcame all her love.

“You knew,” he said, still watching the couple. “You knew that I would fall in love with her.”

Peter shrugged. “Certainly I did not know. Contrary to popular belief, I am no sorcerer possessed of the dark arts. Even I cannot know what a person’s foolish heart will do.”

“Yet you suspected.”

“Um, perhaps, yes. I know Elizabeth, and I know you. Or at least I did once. I knew that your spirits were the same. Wild, and perhaps a bit misguided, but well meaning.”

Nicholas’s fist clenched around the snifter of brandy. “So this was some sort of test you devised.”

“Not at all. Really, Nicholas, you always did make things out to be far more complex than they are. Because you would understand what she was about, I thought you were the one who could persuade her to see reason and give up this silly gypsy life.”

“I hardly think her life is
silly,”
Nicholas snapped. “She is a fine artist, a great one even, and she has many clients and a brilliant future.”

“You see, my friend? You do understand her.”

Nicholas took a deep, steadying breath. “What will you do now? Drag her back to England?”

“I hardly think ‘drag’ is the right word. That conjures up such images of cavemen. And yes. She will come back to England with me. Was that not the point of this absurd exercise?” Peter sighed, and seemed almost pensive as he looked down into his own glass. “I can try to make her understand, perhaps even forgive me, for my behavior, only if we are at home where it is quiet. Here she is too caught up in her wild ways.”

Nicholas’s fierce anger, his desire to plant Peter a sound facer, had subsided to a dull roar behind his eyes. All he really had now was an ineffable sadness. He had lost so much in one morning. He had lost everything—his love, his honor, his future. “How am I to make her forgive
me?”

Peter gave a strange half smile. “That, Nick, I cannot tell you. Will you also be returning to England?”

“Yes. I could not stay in Venice.”

“No. That would not be wise. I hear that Elizabeth’s Amazon friend can shoot the ace from a card at fifty paces. I should not like to encounter her in some dark alleyway.” Peter drained his brandy and stood. “I want you to know, Nick, that I bear you no ill will for how all this turned out. You will always be welcome at Clifton Manor, should you ever choose to call.”

With that, he departed, fading into the milling crowd and leaving Nicholas alone with his drink and his thoughts.

“You
may bear me no ill will, Peter,” he muttered. “But what of your sister? And what of myself?”

As Elizabeth prepared to step into the boat that would carry her from her one true home, Georgina caught her in one last farewell embrace.

“Georgie,” Elizabeth said in a strangled voice. “Write to me very often, and tell me all your doings, every detail. All your commissions, and parties. And tell Stephen I said good-bye.”

Georgina wrinkled her nose. “I will tell him, if that is what you want. And you must write to me of all your doings.”

Elizabeth laughed. “Oh, yes, I shall tell you of the sheep and the grass growing!”

“No, tell me of your painting. I will send all of your work on, and you must not neglect it.”

“I will not neglect it. I couldn’t.”

“Elizabeth,” Peter called impatiently. “It grows late.”

Elizabeth kissed her friend’s cheek one last time. “I will see you soon, Georgie.”

“Yes. Perhaps sooner than you think!”

“Do not do anything foolish, such as follow me to Derbyshire! You would hate it there.”

“Do something foolish? Me? Never!” Georgina pressed a small box into Elizabeth’s gloved hand. “Here.”

“What is this? A gift?”

“Yes, but not from me, I fear.”

“Then who... ?”

Georgina’s lips tightened. “It is from Nicholas. He asked me to give it to you before he left, right before I lost my temper at him utterly and said some very rude things.”

Puzzled, Elizabeth opened the box, and stared down in astonishment.

There, flashing in the late afternoon sunlight, was a sapphire-and-diamond ring. A betrothal ring.

For one instant, Elizabeth wanted only to cry out all her grief and disappointment. Then she wanted to fling the thing into the canal.

In the end, she just closed the box and stuffed it into her reticule. Perhaps, one day, when some of the pain had faded, she would want to take it out and remember how, for a brief while, a man had made the sun shine in her life every day.

Chapter Sixteen

A
new volume of poetry lay open on the lap of

Elizabeth’s new bishop’s blue carriage dress, and her eyes were cast down upon it, but she had not really read a word in ten miles or more. Nor did she see the green glories of the English countryside that flew past the carriage windows, palest blue sky and hedgerows glistening in the morning mist.

She did not see or feel anything at all. She hadn’t since the last of Venice’s golden spires had faded from her view, and she had sensed herself leaving Elizabeth Cheswood behind and becoming Lady Elizabeth Everdean again.

The voyage had been uneventful, a series of ships and carriages and inns, meals she didn’t want to eat, too much wine drunk, and no conversation.

“We should arrive very soon,” Peter commented. He looked stylishly bored, as he had for their entire journey, never dusty or rumpled or insulted by her silences. But now his hands twisted and untwisted on the golden head of his fashionable walking stick.

“Yes. I can recognize some of the countryside.” Elizabeth cut another page of her book.

“I hope you will be quite comfortable there, at Clifton Manor. Your rooms are just as you left them.”

“Yes.” Her gloved fingertip traced the printed lines that she did not see.

“And your maid is still employed there. The silly chit refused to leave, even when Lady Haversham tried to hire her away.”

“Good. I did miss Daisy.”
And nothing else there.

Peter smiled coolly, almost as if he sensed the unspoken words that hung bewteen them. “No one to dress your hair properly in Italy?”

“I am quite capable of dressing my own hair, thank you. Daisy was always so very cheerful, though. A great comfort in such a gloomy household.” Elizabeth knew she was behaving childishly, but she could not seem to help herself. It was either that or weep.

A heavy silence fell in the carriage, broken only by the steady rustle of Elizabeth’s pages turning and the tap of Peter’s stick on the floor. Suddenly, he leaned forward and grasped her wrist.

Elizabeth was so startled that her book fell from her lap with a clatter. She clutched the penknife in her fist. To cover her confusion, she pulled her hand away and bent to retrieve the book.

“It will not be like that at Clifton anymore, Elizabeth,” he said, his voice almost . . . was it beseeching?

“Like what?” Elizabeth murmured, completely taken aback.

“As it was before you left. I was wrong, very wrong to have behaved as I did towards you. The quarrels, that business with the duke . . .”

Elizabeth held up her hand to stop the bewildering flow of his words. “Please. Let us never speak of that again.”

“No. Of course.” Peter sat back, and she could see the old coldness descending on him like a cloak. “I have no excuse. I was not myself when I returned from the Peninsula.”

That Elizabeth could agree with wholeheartedly.

“But you have been gone a long time, Elizabeth,” he continued. “Things have changed. I know that Clifton is not Venice . . .”

Elizabeth snorted.

Peter went on as if he had not heard her lapse in manners. “But I am certain you can be happy here again. I only wish to make amends to you.”

Elizabeth was quite sick of men who felt they knew what was best for her, who thought they could order her life to suit themselves no matter what her own feelings were. “Oh, Peter.” She sighed. “The only amends you could have made was to have left me to my own life and not have sent your flunky after me.”

“Elizabeth, you are wrong about me. I am your brother; I want only what is best for you.”

“You cannot even begin to know what that would be! Only I know what is best for me.”

Peter merely shrugged. “We shall see.” Then he added, very gently, “And you are also wrong about Nick Hollingsworth.”

She was saved from answering when the carriage drew to a halt on the gravel drive curving in front of Clifton Manor. Elizabeth peered out from behind the wispy veil of her bonnet. The house had not changed at all, the grand Tudor façade with its incongruous pillared Georgian side wings, which had been added by her stepfather. It was a good deal tidier than when she had last seen it, however, and a bit less forbidding. The ivy was trimmed back, and the stone front steps gleamed beneath the feet of the servants assembled there.

Despite the polishing, the new flowers spilling from the beds, the crisp curtains behind the windows, the aura remained the same, a miasma of the living of so many generations. So much of her own past was there. The laughter of her beautiful mother, as she let her little daughter try on her gowns; her stepfather carrying her piggyback down the grand staircase; Peter dancing with her at her very first ball. There was also the dead duke. It was all there, waiting for her to take it back up again as if no time had passed at all.

“Are you ready?” Peter asked. “They are waiting to greet you.”

Shaken from her fancies, Elizabeth nodded and hastily tucked the book into her traveling case. “Yes, certainly.”

Jenkins, the elderly butler who had been at Clifton since Elizabeth had come there as a child, was the first to step forward and welcome her as Peter assisted her from the carriage.

“Lady Elizabeth,” Jenkins said. “May I say what a great honor it is to welcome you home again?”

The twinkle in his faded eyes belied his formal manner. Elizabeth smiled as she recalled how he had slipped her extra plum cakes at childhood teatimes. “Thank you, Jenkins,” she answered. “It is very good to see you again.”

“And Mrs. Smith is also quite eager to greet you,” Peter added, indicating the black-clad, rosy-cheeked housekeeper.

“Mrs. Smith!” Elizabeth cried in delight. “Do you still make that exquisite chocolate trifle?”

“I do, my lady, and there is some just waiting for your tea this afternoon.”

Elizabeth kept her careful smile in place as she was introduced to a myriad of unfamiliar housemaids, kitchen maids, footmen, and gardeners. She had quite forgotten how very many people it took to run such a great house, after two years with only Bianca.

When they reached Daisy, and Elizabeth saw the tears shimmering in her lady’s maid’s eyes, her composure slipped, and all the tension of her long voyage melted. She forgot decorum and position entirely, and threw her arms around Daisy’s small figure.

“My lady!” Daisy cried in shock.

“Oh, Daisy!” Elizabeth sobbed. “How I have missed you!”

“I missed you, too, my lady. I knew you would come home one day, so I never let that Lady Haversham entice me away, even when she wanted to send me to London with her daughter.”

“You will never know how I wished you were with me in Italy. You would have adored it, after all those romances we read together! So many ruins and black-eyed counts.” Disregarding propriety even further, Elizabeth took Daisy’s arm and led her into the house, leaving Peter behind. She turned automatically toward the great staircase. “My rooms are ready?”

“Yes, my lady. I supervised the airing of them myself; it’s just as you left it.”

It was indeed. The pink silk curtains and bed hangings, the lace-skirted dressing table with its gilt Cupids cavorting around the mirror, even the porcelain doll (Martha) propped on the marble mantel were all just as she remembered. Even the paintings on the walls, her own early efforts, had not been moved.

“Oh, Daisy, I would vow I was sixteen again!” Elizabeth removed her bonnet and sat down on the cushioned window seat that looked out at the gardens. “And the view is quite unchanged.”

Daisy shooed away the maids who had already set to unpacking Elizabeth’s trunk, and began to shake out the gowns herself. “Italy must have been ever so exciting, my lady.”

“Oh, yes. Italy was... heaven.”

Daisy held up the black velvet and satin gown Elizabeth had worn to the opera on that far-off night, when she had thought to entice Nicholas with its daring neckline. “And these were angel’s robes, my lady?”

Elizabeth laughed. Now she remembered exactly why she had hired Daisy so long ago—her irreverence. “So they were! I wore gowns like that to operas, and balls, and breakfasts, and on gondola rides that lasted all night. And I saw art that only gods could have created. Art everywhere.” She thought with a pang of the unrestored Veronese. “It was heaven.”