Since the Surrender (11 page)

He almost smiled. Moving his lip muscles caused him grave pain, so he decided against it.

“Mr. Chase?”

She sounded worried. He would need to make a sound to reassure her.

“Guh,” was the sound he finally made.

Was he dressed? He rolled his eyes—which seemed to have been replaced by hot sandy lead balls in the night—very carefully down to his torso to investigate. He was wearing all of his clothes. Including his boots. And his coat. He wasn’t even under his blankets.

He waited another moment to absorb this.

“In,” he rasped.

She swung open the door, bearing an urn of coffee steaming such thick black fragrance it was purely a miracle he didn’t double over and cast his accounts. She deposited it on the writing desk near the window, paused to regard him prone there on the bed, shook her head, and left again, gently closing the door behind her. It took him long seconds to recover from the pain of the sound of the door being closed.

Why had he gotten into this condition? Ah. Of course. Bloody Rosalind March.

Encounters with Rosalind, he decided, would inevitably end with pain and inconvenience. He ought to have known better. But a memory he’d nearly drowned with whiskey swam to the surface of his brain. That angel in the painting at the Velvet Glove

…he could have sworn it was the same angel in the Rubinetto painting at the Montmorency.

And this he wouldn’t have known if Rosalind hadn’t driven him to drink impractical, rather juvenile, amounts of whiskey. Perhaps it was destiny.

Then again, whiskey and destiny often felt one and the same to the man drinking the whiskey.

Bloody Hell.

He opened one eye to a slit, through which he could see that the housekeeper had also arranged his correspondence on the coffeebearing tray. But given that he couldn’t quite speak just yet, he wasn’t certain he could remember how to read. Correspondence would have to wait.

Getting out of bed was his project for the next hour or so. He managed, at last, treating his body with ginger respect. He drank the whole pot of coffee in shifts, downing more of it the better he felt, his hands trembling a little less with each cup. Next, he bathed ruthlessly in the bedroom basin, scrubbing his face and beneath his arms and down his back and between his legs, all the muskier and sweatier places. He shaved himself with a trembling hand and suffered only one nick.

He’d have a proper bath before the Callender do tonight. In a few hours his head merely ached rather than pounded, and he thought he might be able to eat. And so he made his way down the stairs, his boots and walking stick announcing his resurrection to the household staff, and carried with him his correspondence The house, he discovered, had been pitilessly cleaned while he’d been indisposed. The furniture and mirrors and silver didn’t so much shine as glare. His eyes shriveled in their sockets in torment and he clapped a hand over them.

He took himself and his correspondence rapidly off to the much darker library.

He threw open a window: The air smelled fresh enough, apart from the usual smells of London life carried erratically in by a breeze: dirt and coal and horse and every now and then a dash of salt and brine blown in off the Thames.

Which he could appreciate now that all smells didn’t make him want to cast his accounts. It was time to address his correspondence. The first letter was a very welcome one from Kinkade. Glad you’re in London, you old recluse. Callender’s first, old man, then drinking, and God only knows what then.

Yrs,

K.

Ah, Kinkade. It was reassuring to know that someone still lived in a world of “God only knows what then.” Judging from how he’d felt this morning, he suspected he would have difficulty living in that world now.

It was still difficult for Chase to imagine Kinkade donating the Rubinetto to the Montmorency. Because he did know a bit about Kinkade’s taste in art.

He recalled one typical evening sitting about a fire surrounded by bored soldiers. Kinkade had handed him a sheet of foolscap. “What bored soldiers. Kinkade had handed him a sheet of foolscap. “What say you, Eversea?”

In the margin of a letter he’d received from his brother, with the burnt end of a sharpened stick Kinkade had sketched a nude, improbably buxom woman with nipples erect as cannon fuses.

“I think her breasts might be too small,” Chase critiqued dryly. Kinkade had taken him quite seriously and set to work again with the sharpened stick, refining, tongue between his teeth in concentration.

Tedium was as formidable an enemy as the French during the war. Some men kept journals. Some soldiers, like the Earl of Rawden, the poet known as the Libertine, had written poetry. Some gambled. Kinkade sketched the occasional nude woman, and was generous about passing the sketches around to the men and cheerful about accepting criticisms and suggestions, which he seldom incorporated, as he had his own vision. He signed them O. McCaucus-Bigg.

A new soldier was always puzzled by this, given that this wasn’t Kinkade’s name.

“O. McCaucus-Bigg?”

“Braggart, are you?” Kinkade would roar. “Not as big as mine, laddie!”

A good joke, suitable for thirteen-year-old boys and bored sergeants and subalterns.

In short, unless Kinkade had suffered a conversion to which Chase hadn’t been privy, his tastes in art didn’t run to cows and cherubs and his possession—and subsequent relinquishing—of that and his possession—and subsequent relinquishing—of that painting, if he had indeed donated it to the Montmorency, was puzzling. Perhaps he’d had the paintings foisted upon him as part of an inheritance. Doubtless they came with an interesting story, because Kinkade, thank God, was invariably entertaining. Chase pictured Rosalind gazing at the painting with that fixity of concentration so singularly hers. Such a cool color, her eyes so like spring. It had always struck him as odd that they could burn so when her temper or her intelligence lit them.

He stared out the window. Saw Rosalind. Not London. And sighed. Genevieve would likely know about Rubinetto. He wasn’t certain whom else to ask.

If only he hadn’t seen that damned angel at the Velvet Glove, he wouldn’t feel obligated to ask.

He shook his head roughly free of Rosalind—though it was a bit premature for the rough head shaking, and his stomach lurched in protest—then fished out his next piece of correspondence. This one bore the Eversea seal. He hesitated, burning with selfrighteousness. And then he sighed, capitulating, and broke the seal. Colin’s handwriting. Chase braced himself.

Dear Chase,

The new calf is doing very well, and Madeleine sends her regards. We hope you enjoy your stay in London and look forward to your report about our cousin the potential new vicar. Don’t forget to visit him. We need to know if he’s a bore.

to know if he’s a bore.

P.S. You really ought to marry. It’s marvelous for the nerves.

P.P.S. We’ve named the new calf Charles, after you. His bollocks are impressive. Thought you’d be pleased. Chase stared. His bloody, bloody brother. He was torn between laughing and crunching the message in his fist and hurling it across the room. Colin had no right to make him laugh.

It was Colin’s fault he was here at all. Colin—who’d survived duels, horse races, ill-advised gambling, nearly drowning, plummeting from the trellises of married countesses, the war, and the gallows—in other words, who was historically great fun—had become, of all things, a farmer after he’d married. It was all he talked about: cows this and sheep that and drainage ditches and crops. Night after night Chase, who relied on Colin to distract him from himself, sat across from his brother and waited for him to cease being insufferable.

But four nights ago at the Pig & Thistle, when Colin had begun to pantomime how he’d assisted with the tricky birth of a calf, complete with exuberant thrusts of his arm to illustrate just how his hand had gone up the cow and imitations of distressed cow noises—for the love of God, distressed cow noises!—while his new wife Madeleine leaned forward, glowing with as much pride and held-breath suspense as if Colin were recounting heroics at Salamanca…

Well, it was more than anyone should be expected to endure. And what Chase had muttered—quite rightfully—was:

“I cannot bear it any longer.”

Colin hadn’t even slowed his narrative. But even through his lovely ale haze, Chase saw Colin’s green eyes flick toward his wife, like a smuggler telegraphing a boat off the coast with lanterns—the sort of thing married people do, in which volumes of information are exchanged, decisions reached, and nothing at all said. He could imagine what had happened next: Colin had told his brother Marcus, who was throwing darts in the Pig & Thistle to impress his new wife. Marcus had told their sister Olivia, because the two of them were thick as thieves. Olivia, seeing a way to interfere, had briskly gone to their mother, not to Genevieve, who was far too sympathetic and would have come to him with commiseration and warning. And his mother had told their father, Jacob. Who’d sent him to London, because “it would do him good.”

Bollocks, is what Chase thought.

In all likelihood his family couldn’t bear him any longer. A bird trilled in the garden. It reminded him uncomfortably of the day Colin had been scheduled to hang: the silence in the town house, the oblivious birds singing arias in the garden. He laid his brother’s letter gently down.

Damn, but the town house was quiet without the rest of the Everseas in it.

He told himself righteously that he preferred it that way. He reached for another piece of correspondence.

From the seal, he knew precisely what it was. Anticipation was present, but not powerful; he suspected he knew what he’d find inside. He slid his finger beneath the wax, broke it, and learned that the East India Company would indeed welcome an officer of his the East India Company would indeed welcome an officer of his talents, as he was exceptionally well regarded and came highly recommended, and that the India-man The Courage sailed for India in a fortnight and they would expect to see him on board. He held it, bemused. It was what he was made for, after all: life as officer of the Crown. Odd to see his future succinctly sketched in just a few lines. Satisfying to be reminded of his strengths when his first day in London in years had been one long reminder of his weaknesses.

He fingered a blank sheet of foolscap, deciding what to do about one of those weaknesses now.

Likely there had never been any question that he would do it. He wrote to his sister Genevieve:

Dear Gen,

Rubinetto. Italian Renaissance painter of landscapes

…if you can indeed call this painting a landscape. Has cows, trees, and cherubs. Also busty angel. Very ugly and confusing. Located at Montmorency Museum.

Please advise via messenger straight away.

Yrs,

Chase

He sprinkled sand over and pressed it closed with a disk of wax and the Eversea seal. He would send it by messenger rather than post, which ought to alarm his family, but since Colin had become so dull and everyone else seemed to be sinking into the routine of marriage, Pennyroyal Green doubtless needed a bit of stirring up. Which was really the reason he’d done it.

Not even he believed that.

Ah, Rosalind. He smiled half bitterly, mocking himself. Barely a tip of the lips. See what you’ve made me do for you, despite myself?

He need do nothing more, he told himself.

He pushed himself hard away from the desk, as if to disassociate himself with that letter and what it meant, and took himself downstairs for some more coffee. He would need to fortify himself to prepare for the “God knows what then” that would follow Callender’s ball this evening.

Carriage after carriage had rolled up to the Callender town house to disgorge passengers until the square was quite clogged with motionless conveyances and frustrated horses. New arrivals had no hope of getting anywhere near the house. Philosophical drivers were swigging from flasks and conducting cheerful, ribald shouted conversations to each other across the tops of barouches and landaus and hacks; party guests threaded gingerly and philosophically through it all, prepared to walk miles if necessary. A small price to pay to attend what promised to be a legendary crush. Rosalind peered out the window of her hack. From a distance the house was so extravagantly lit it appeared aflame; closer, she discovered it buzzed like a hive of angry bees, the result of hundreds of voices all shouting at once to be heard. She congratulated herself on her timing: entering the party unnoticed depended upon a substantial crowd already being present. Her hack, like so many others, was forced to stop a good distance from the house. She walked the rest of the way to it, gown clutched up in her fingers, as London streets generally featured a variety of shoe-ruining liquid and solid surprises. But the night was pleasant and still, with a bit of a breeze, and she completed her journey without splashing her shoes or hem or sweating unduly and promptly, surreptitiously attached herself to a large laughing group of men and women who shouldered their way past the footmen. Surely no one would look at her twice, she thought, when the woman next to her was sporting what appeared to be an entire pheasant wing dyed red protruding from a tightly wound turban. The group was laughing uproariously about something, so Rosalind laughed merrily, too, her head thrown back to show her teeth and disguise her face, her fan already out and whirring the air in an attempt to dizzy the gaze of the footman who impassively—but accurately, she would have surmised—studied everyone to ensure no interlopers breached the entrance.

And thus the shiningly groomed human tide swept her through the door, no footman set dogs upon her in order to drive her out, and she was inside the Callender town house, pushed genteelly this way and that like driftwood by all the other humans. Music, lively, lilting, and accomplished, poured up from the ballroom, and down the stairs she went toward it with the rest of the partygoers. Feeling increasingly rash and giddy. When she saw the swarm of people—brunette heads, blond heads, redheads, beplumed and coroneted and complexly coiffed—she was dizzied and mesmerized, as if she were standing on a cliff’s edge staring out onto the sea. How in God’s name had she thought she could find Kinkade in this crowd, when she hadn’t seen him in five years, and when one crisply dressed man here blurred into another? Below her, white smiles were as ubiquitous as strings of pearls, and overhead a chandelier of swooping ropes of crystals pearls, and overhead a chandelier of swooping ropes of crystals and dangling crystal bagatelles presided like a new kind of moon. She’d been too long in the country. The glitter hurt her eyes. Everyone was shouting in order to be heard at all. It was overwhelming.