Seducing Mr. Heywood (7 page)

Because of George Rowley, she’d had no more to fear from Thomas Eliot, the despicable Earl of Dunhaven, scourge of her young life. She owed George a great deal. The least she could do was acquiesce to the vicar’s request.

Sophia raised her eyes. “You are right, sir. Please proceed with your plans for the memorial. I hope”—she fixed him with a look that could not be gainsayed—“I hope you will keep me informed as to the design of this monument? Perhaps we can collaborate on its construction? I may have some ideas to add.”

Charles raised a prayer of thanks heavenwards.
Thank you, God!
Perhaps, in that ethereal sphere, the baron was displeased with him, but this was the right step to take. Charles was sure of it. The memorial that George had refused to consider would be erected after all.

The Earl of Dunhaven was weary. The channel crossing had been turbulent as usual, and the coach from
Dover ill-sprung. His bones ached; he was not getting any younger. That fact galled him. How many years remained to him? He was determined to make the most of them and access to his late son-in-law’s wealth would guarantee an extremely comfortable old age.

That witling Brent had suggested they stay at Limmer’s Hotel, favored by the sporting crowd. A bad choice! Crowded and dirty, it did not meet the earl’s high standards. Only the excellent gin punch raised it to halfway tolerable. They would have to look for other lodgings. Brent’s father, a stiff-rumped marquess, had declared that his prodigal son and his friend were not welcome at his Mayfair townhouse. Bad luck; they must consult the newspapers or obtain a reference from someone at Limmer’s. They would run out of blunt too fast staying at hotels.

Or, they could hie themselves to Yorkshire. Why not avail themselves of Sophia’s hospitality? The use of a bed, nourishment for his belly…was that so much to ask? Surely the chit owed him that much—he was her father!

And he was eager to introduce her to his new companion. Brent was easy to manipulate; Dunhaven had no doubt the fellow could be coerced into considering marriage to Sophia. The way Brent was piling up gambling debts, he needed a rich wife, and a husband controlled his wife’s fortune. When Sophia’s wealth passed directly into Brent’s hands, it would be the shortest of trips into the earl’s own pockets.

Lewis Alcott leaned back at the vicar’s bountiful Sunday afternoon table, stretching his burly arms wide. The vicar’s capable housekeeper, Mrs. Chipcheese, saw to it that Charles and his guests ate heartily. The remains of a roast capon shared the table’s honors with a half-empty plate of grilled trout, mashed potatoes, a salad of young greens with juicy tomatoes, and a rhubarb pie. Lewis scooped some clotted cream from a blue and white striped pottery bowl to garnish a hearty slice of that pie. Fresh-poured coffee was at his elbow.

It had been a long week, punctuated with lancing Farmer White’s boils and seeing the Willett children through a frightening bout of the croup. It had ended with a frantic call from Mrs. Watkins, the midwife, when the Abbott baby, a breech birth, had showed signs of distress shortly after delivery. Thank God all his patients had improved. Lewis had faith in his medical skills, but he also believed in divine intercession.

“Sometimes I envy the quiet, the calm, of your calling, Charles, after such a week as I have had,” he remarked. “But then, when I think of your volatile relationship with the beauteous widow at Rowley Hall, I welcome all the putrid fevers and abscessed wounds that come my way.” He flicked a crumb of bread in his friend’s direction.

“No playing with your food, Lewis! I am surprised your good mother did not teach you better.” Charles refused to be baited. He was determined to ignore the doctor’s customary teasing. The sermon had been well received that morning. It was one he’d delivered before, but the congregation seemed to enjoy it as much as they had previously. Charles eschewed hellfire-and-damnation lectures, preferring to dwell on goodness and charity and the positive aspects of life. His parishioners left feeling happier than when they arrived, and that always brought them back the next Sunday.

“Ah, that brings up another issue.” Lewis would not be quelled; his exuberant nature was too much a part of his personality.

“And that issue is—?” Charles asked.

“Motherhood. Maternal feelings and the instincts thereof. Are you collaborating with Lady Sophia to revive those long-dormant emotions?” Lewis’s lips quirked with amusement.

Charles shook his head. “You misjudge that lady, Lewis. You misjudge her badly.”

“Oh?” Lewis leaned forward, elbows on the table, all ears.

“She and I have been collaborating to plan the boys’ activities this summer. She has been eager to participate and is looking forward to seeing them again.”

“No doubt,” Lewis commented wryly. “And how does she propose to explain the reason she has been absent from their lives most of this past decade?”

Charles grew sober. “I don’t know, Lewis. Frankly—” He sighed. “I would not want to be in her shoes concerning that particular issue. I believe she harbors a great deal of guilt over her abandonment of them. The baron, however, always told John and William that she loved them with all her heart.”

Lewis shook his head. “Those little fellows probably never entered her mind, much less her heart, poor boys. Your favorite poet, Mr. Wordsworth, will not write poems extolling Lady Sophia Rowley’s maternal nature.” He raised his thick, sandy brown eyebrows and wiggled them at Charles, changing the somber subject of a mother’s neglect of her children, to a teasing topic closer to his mischievous heart. “So, you would not want to be in that lady’s shoes…but is there anything else you would want to b—”

Charles stayed him with a look that belied his otherwise benign countenance. “Don’t, Lewis! Avoid finishing that sentence if you desire to remain my friend! I warn you, man.”

Lewis leaned back again, feigning surprise. “Well, well, well.” He chuckled. “I fear that something deep is going on. Rallying to defend the lady’s good name, refusing to indulge in a little harmless funning…Have you lost your heart to that wicked widow, my dear friend?”

Charles rose from the table and walked to the window that looked out over the graveyard. It was green and quiet. Nothing stirred. “Not wicked, Lewis. That woman, I think, has been more sinned against than sinning. The baron—” Charles paused. He could not discuss the confidences George Rowley had shared with him regarding Sophia.

George had employed a Bow Street Runner to investigate the Eliot family, particularly the earl, Sophia’s father. Sophia had been the victim of her profligate sire for years, and her first husband had been worse than the refuse running through the middle of a London street.
His name was Rushton, and he had been wealthy and titled, but scum through and through. Barely sixteen, she’d been sold into marriage by the Earl of Dunhaven, who’d met his future son-in-law at a particularly unsavory Covent Garden brothel, a house that specialized in providing the most depraved pleasures for jaded gentlemen.

The lady had suffered a great deal. If it was difficult for her to be a loving mother, the reasons were not so arcane. George hoped that Charles could help Sophia become the person she might have been were she not handed over to a brutal husband at such a tender age. George had understood his wife and had felt her pain. He’d asked Charles to be patient with her, to understand her anger and her selfishness, to aid her in regaining her true path before it was too late. George thought that Sophia’s was a soul worth saving, and he hoped that after he passed on, his friend the vicar would try to save his wife’s soul. He had urged Charles to do his best.

But this was not information Charles Heywood would, or could, share with his best friend, Lewis Alcott. Indeed, he could never share what he knew about her with the lady herself.

John, the new young Baron Rowley, stepped out of the handsomely appointed carriage emblazoned with the family seal and hesitated. Behind him, his younger brother, the Honorable William Rowley, bumped into his shoulder. “Ouch!” William piped up. “Do get on, John!” Horatio, the strapping young footman who’d accompanied them on the journey from Eton, stepped back hurriedly to keep from tripping over John like a third domino.

John turned to his younger brother, mischief gleaming in his eyes. “That is
Baron
Rowley to you, peasant!” he joked, cuffing his sibling good-naturedly in the chest.

William snorted, muttering, “Witling!” under his breath.

A scuffle between the two brothers was averted by the young man who greeted them at the imposing stone steps marking the entrance to Rowley Hall.

“Mr. Heywood!” Both boys ran to their tutor, laughing with pleasure. A familiar face! One beloved face, they knew, was gone forever, and an unfamiliar one was about to make its appearance after a long, long absence, but
this was a face they knew and loved. More than a tutor, more than the village parson, Charles was like a young uncle to them.

Charles Heywood accepted the exuberant welcome of his two charges. They threw themselves at him with abandon, John jumping up on him and throwing both arms around his neck, putting the vicar’s immaculate neckcloth into immediate disarray. William took hold of his legs and bounced up and down, greatly endangering Charles’s stability. The long carriage ride over, they released their pent-up energy with all the enthusiasm of youth. Their school uniforms, already rumpled from the long journey, rumpled further.

Unable to stay on his feet, within seconds Charles was on his back and rolling over the gravel path with the Rowley heirs. Great whoops of laughter could be heard, even into the hallway, where Lady Sophia stood with the butler.

“Bentley, what on earth is going on out there?” Lady Sophia’s creamy white brow furrowed in consternation.

Bromley winced. He had more names than a Hindu god had arms! “The young gentlemen, my lady, have arrived. Mr. Heywood is greeting them.”

“Greeting them? Wrestling with them, more like!” Lady Sophia strode forward. She was in a nervous state—indeed, she had not slept most of the previous night—and strove mightily to keep her nerves in check. But long years of practice in dissembling and hiding her innermost feelings stood her in good stead.

“Mr. Heywood!” She called out, standing straight and arrogant in the shadow of the massive oak doorway, a vision in pale lavender sarscenet. Her raised brows seemed to question the rowdy outdoor scene.

“Oops, boys, the game is up! Stand to attention, now, and greet your mother.” Charles smoothed down his clothes, but his neckcloth was beyond smoothing. He flushed with embarrassment.

John brushed pieces of sand and gravel from his brother’s hair, pulled down his own coat and swept a hand over his knees. They were a sight…all three of them.
A lump rose in Sophia’s throat. She checked her admonishing words as something melted inside her.
Her boys!
These two handsome lads…
Hers!
That odd prickling at the back of her eyeballs threatened to erupt in tears. Sophia cleared her throat, trying to ignore the burst of emotion. The boys would not want to see a mother with red, puffy eyes. Oh, but look at them! She viewed them with wonder.

These lovely children had come from her very own body. She unconsciously passed her hands over her flat stomach, twice so full of new life. She had given birth to these boys, labored hard to bring them into this world. How triumphant she had felt then, how thrilled, despite the wrenching pain. For the first time in her young womanhood, she’d had a sense of great accomplishment. The taller had to be John, the new Baron Rowley, and the shorter, William. They were not simply handsome; they were beautiful.

Except for the difference in their heights, John and William could have been twins, so much alike were they. Both were extremely fair-haired; that pale blond shade was an Eliot family trait. She and her young-looking father had often been taken for siblings, with their hair and the unusual blue of their eyes. She winced inwardly as she was prone to do when her father came to mind, praying that the earl’s grandchildren were similar to him only in looks.

Dismissing thoughts of her unspeakable sire, Sophia descended the stone steps, one hand on the decorative wrought-iron railing that curved down to the gravel path. She smiled in welcome, though her stomach was knotting and her heart pumping so madly she thought it would jump out of her chest. Could they see how nervous she was, she wondered? Did they note the wild jumping of her heart?

Charles released the breath he had been holding. He had not realized Sophia was close enough to witness the boys’ exuberant response when he’d greeted them. He had always encouraged physical contact; they had few friends in the area and their father was too old for boys’
play. It had been part of Charles’s relationship with them, but, of course, Lady Sophia knew nothing of that. To her, it had probably seemed an inordinately rowdy display.

But she was smiling. What a brilliant smile! No arrogance there, just…love. Yes, love, that’s what love looked like, Charles knew. And now she held out her arms to her sons. At first, the boys did not seem to know how to proceed. John flashed a quick, sidelong glance at Charles, as if to say,
What now?
Then William ran into his mother’s embrace and John followed his lead.

How natural the trio seemed! Charles was pleased, gratified that the baroness was touching her children, embracing them, fussing over them as much as any natural mother. Charles chided himself quickly: she
was
their natural mother. What she was not, was a mother who had ever, to his knowledge, previously concerned herself overmuch with her children.

The vicar was acquainted with a number of mothers in his pastoral visits, and he also remembered the women in his family’s circle. Maternal instincts were strong and true, but not all women, he knew, had them. He would have easily put Lady Rowley in the latter class, but for the way she was hugging the boys now, holding them close and exclaiming over their growth, her brilliant eyes shining with love. Maternal instincts…He would never have believed it. There might be hope for George’s widow yet.