The Saint (11 page)

He didn't say a word. It was the longest mile that she had ever walked in her life.

She tried to find consolation in the notion that she had proven she was too dangerous to keep around Charlotte, but the idea of leaving Laclere Park unaccountably increased her dismay.

He stopped in the trees near the stable.

“I find that words fail me, Miss Kenwood. My behavior has been abominable, and an apology is not sufficient. I promise that I am not in the habit of importuning young women like that. I have no explanation except that I am clearly not myself this morning.”

Aren't you?
What had occurred suddenly did not impress her as entirely surprising from this man. It struck her as a natural extension of his demeanor, something controlled but always there, like a subcurrent beneath the calm, a depth one sensed but never saw and couldn't name. It had produced a tension between them from the start, like a dangerous undertow. She had felt its effects, but until today she had not understood them.

He still looked down the path, not quite facing her. His words blamed himself, but she wondered what he really thought. That he had proven she could not live like a nun? That she had the nature of a courtesan and should be permitted the ruination which she sought? “Importune” did not really describe what had occurred and they both knew it.

“I was not harmed.”

“If we were seen, you most definitely were.”

“I do not think that we were seen. We would have noticed someone at the portal.”

“If you are right, that only avoids the worst of the potential repercussions. It does not negate the fact that my actions were inexcusable and dishonorable, most significantly because I am responsible for you. I have compromised you, whether anyone else knows it or not. If you require it, I will do the right thing by you.”

“The right thing? You mean … Oh, no, that is an absurd idea.”

“It certainly promises to be a complicated one, what with … well, complicated. All the same …”

“Let us not get carried away by your sense of propriety and duty, please. I do not feel compromised or ruined.”

She received a sharp look for that. “Do you not? You are a remarkably composed young woman.”

So, there it was. The insinuation of unseemly compliance on her part. Of encouragement, if one wanted to face it frankly. That look and question revealed his mind and she was hard-pressed to blame him, considering all those ambiguities she had deliberately dropped regarding her experience.

“Let us say that I do not feel compromised enough to require such an extreme measure as marriage in order to be redeemed. Perhaps we should merely forget about this.”

“Your equanimity impresses me. I should be grateful that you prove so forgiving.”

She didn't feel at all forgiving. She felt shattered, devastated … disappointed. To descend from such glory to this formal discussion on how to expiate that potent sharing … It made her want to hurt him, hit him, strike a blow that would defeat his cool deliberations on how to rectify their imprudence.

“I simply do not choose to complicate things further than necessary, especially in a way that removes my future from my command and requires a sacrifice on both our parts that promises a lifetime of unhappiness. I would not marry you no matter what scandal threatened. However, our further relationship becomes awkward. I think that it would be best if you agreed to my preferences regarding my stay in England. Jane and I will find a house in London and—”

“I will be the one to make myself scarce. I expect my visits to Laclere Park will be infrequent and brief during the next months.”

“It is hardly fair to your sisters.”

“When you come up to the city for the season, my presence will be unavoidable, but by then, perhaps time will have dulled my insult.”

He didn't mean a word of it. He knew there had been no insult, not really. He had hardly forced himself on her.

She turned away, both relieved and saddened that after this house party she would rarely see him again.

chapter
7

D
ante had been right. She would make a splendid mistress.

He tried to block the thought while he strode back to the ruins. It kept blurting into his head, the thoroughly dishonorable reaction of a man who had succumbed to dishonorable inclinations.

His behavior had been disgraceful. Reprehensible.
Insane.

Which did not stop him from reliving it in his mind and experiencing anew her joyful consent. Feeling her soft lips and sweet breast with his mouth. Exploring her throbbing arousal with the pressure of his knee.

If the intruder had not stopped them he would have carried her up to the chamber and made love to her until those stones rang with her cries.

And she would have let him.

He stopped and slammed his palm against a tree, seeking a tangible reality that might obliterate his resurgent desire.

Confusing,
Dante had said. Damn right, she was confusing.

She didn't even like him.
They rarely spoke without arguing. He might have loitered in her presence the last two days, but she never sought out his. To then jump that chasm in such an uninhibited way …

He paced with determination through the trees, a dangerous mood gripping him. Her calm at the stables had been further unsettling. Infuriating. Barely a blush. Total composure. He had been a mess of conflicting impulses, but her demeanor had been incredibly calm.

I was not harmed.

I almost stripped your clothes off and took you on a stone floor.

I do not feel compromised or ruined.

Well, damn it, I
do.
Men who seduce their wards are disgusting.

I would not marry you no matter what scandal threatened.

He paused at the edge of the castle's clearing as those words echoed again and again.

He
should
have been grateful for her abrupt rejection. Instead he had experienced an irrational anger. In part because her composure left him wondering if it had all been a capricious game to her. Mostly because her resolve left him with the depressing awareness that he would never have her the way he wanted.

Just as well. She would make a splendid mistress, but an impossible wife.

Let Dante deal with her.

That notion incited a primitive, possessive resentment. He suppressed it by forcing his attention to the castle's battlements.

A stairway rose at one end of the wall, so badly ruined that whole steps were missing. He could only mount it by stretching his legs for perilous footholds. A few small sections of rock fell into the grass while he climbed. He paused each time, trying to identify whether they resembled the distant sounds he had heard while he held Bianca in the tower.

The wall walk at the top existed in gaps. Someone had replaced some missing sections with new wood, but others consisted of remnants of rotten planks, themselves no doubt repairs from the last century or so. He picked his way along until he came to the spot of the wall where one whole tooth of the crenellations had just fallen away. Down below he could see the new pile of stones.

Who would expect peaceful Laclere Park to be so dangerous?

A damn good question.

He examined the rough surface from where the machicolation had lately risen, and probed at the mortar of the stones still standing. Decayed binding fell in a little shower, joining a pile of coarse dust at his feet.

Nothing so extensive could be seen near the other partial crenellations. He examined the surface of the stones again, feeling for evidence of a tool. Did he only imagine subtle scrapes created by a metal implement?

Poachers who used firearms and now a falling wall. Perhaps just a coincidence. No proof of anything else. All the same, he didn't like it.

He climbed down from the wall, looking for evidence that someone else had come this way recently. The sounds picked up by the tower stones haunted his memory. Not the sounds of someone walking on the paths. Still, that intruder may have merely been one of the guests exploring Laclere Park's picturesque castle.

He returned to the house. When he passed the breakfast room he saw Bianca at the table with Cornell Witherby and Daniel St. John.

She smiled and laughed at some joke Witherby made.

Incredible composure.

Possibly it
had
just been a capricious game to her, a way to show the saint he was not so pure.
Perhaps we should merely forget about this.

He strode to his study, resenting like hell the spot of honesty that admitted she might be able to forget it, but he would not.

I never swoon.

For me you did!

He was reacting like some untried boy and that irritated him even more. He sent a footman for Morton, then threw himself into his chair and pulled out some paper.

Morton arrived while he was finishing his writing.

“I want this letter to Adam Kenwood's solicitor to go to London by express delivery,” he said while he sealed the missive. “Take it to the town yourself, at once.” He handed the paper into Morton's thick fingers. “I may leave you here when I go north again. I do not like the idea of leaving Miss Kenwood at Laclere Park without someone watching over her.”

“You think that she is in some other danger?” By
other,
Vergil knew that Morton referred to any lovely woman's danger from Dante.

Possibly she was in danger. He didn't know. However, between poachers and falling walls and assaults by the Viscount Laclere, her danger from a rake might have become the least of her concerns.

After dinner Bianca found herself sitting between Fleur and Mrs. Gaston, chatting with Pen and Cornell Witherby.

“It will be a series of epics,” Mrs. Gaston explained. “Sold by subscription, although I will finance the printing. Mr. Witherby's poem will be first.”

Cornell Witherby smiled modestly. Penelope bestowed an admiring gaze on him.

Mrs. Gaston held herself like a queen accepting homage and bestowing favors. Her reddish brown hair glowed like copper in the firelight and her contentment in her significance showed on her face. “The printers are at work even as we speak. I expect it to be a sensation, and for many editions to be required. Not that the profit matters, of course. Exposing people of high taste and sensibility to Mr. Witherby's prodigious talent is my goal.”

She spoke as if divine guidance dictated her patronage, but Bianca suspected that Mrs. Gaston's own importance as a patron drove her as much as any love of art.

“Who will the other poets be?” Fleur asked.

A discussion ensued on the merits of young poets who might deserve such patronage.

Bianca barely heard what anyone said.

An afternoon of Fleur's gentle company had induced a horrible guilt. Vergil's cool displays of courtesy had instilled a hollow devastation. An internal clock noted the passage of every minute of the very long day with ticks of agony.

She had tried never to look at Vergil or have cause to address him, but she was aware of him at every instant. She felt him when he was nearby. She heard every word he spoke, if even from across the room.

Two Biancas reacted to his every move. The old one, the smart one, cataloged his deficiencies with a scathing anger. A new one prayed for some sign of the lord's favor. This new Bianca demeaned herself with pitiful sighs, but the old Bianca could not make her disappear.

Somehow,
somehow,
she would get through this day.

“… there will be hell to pay if we repeal the Combination Act,” Lord Calne intoned as he and Vergil and Mr. St. John walked toward their little group. “If the lower classes are permitted to mass, order is threatened. Can't have it. Too dangerous. It could end up like France in '93. You'll be regretting it, Laclere.”

Little fires appeared in Daniel St. John's eyes. He looked at Lord Calne as if the man was an ass. “It sounds as if you know little of what happened in France. If you did, you would know that the people cannot be kept under a boot forever.”

Lord Calne's face turned red.

Vergil spoke appeasingly. “England cannot create policy based upon the excesses of the French people a generation ago, Calne.”

“Oh, spare us all. Politics,” Cornell Witherby moaned softly to the ladies. “It is good for nothing but satire.”

A special warmth sparkled in his eyes as he turned his good humor on Pen when she giggled. It looked as if Dante had been correct about the special friendship.

Feeling in a critical frame of mind where men were concerned, Bianca gave him a thorough scrutiny. He cut a good figure and was of average height, but his posture possessed a very unpoetic strictness, as if a rod of steel had been welded to his backbone. Blond hair fell around his forehead and cheeks. His face was a bit too long, but he was a nice-looking man of about twenty-five years of age.

That he wooed a woman who was officially married counted for nothing in her deliberations of whether he was good enough for Pen. More significant by far was his thoroughly engaged expression right now as he looked at Penelope.

She had never seen Vergil Duclairc look at any woman like that, not even Fleur. When the Viscount Laclere examined a woman, she got the impression that he was assessing her shortcomings.

Unless, of course, he was listening to her music.

Or deciding to kiss her.

Or pulling off her dress.

Or …

“Well, at least these political deliberations keep your printer busy,” Mrs. Gaston said.

Witherby sighed. “It was only to support the literary arts that I took on the hobby of that press. I would rather tell the men to refuse every commission that was not poetic. However, the tracts subsidize the important work very nicely. As does the patronage of great ladies like yourself.”

Mrs. Gaston appeared pleased with the flattery, and with her success in diverting his attention back to her.

“The repeal is a moral necessity. It is unconscionable to prohibit free men free assembly,” St. John was saying to the men standing nearby.

“If they are so dissatisfied, let them leave,” Mrs. Gaston said, joining the conversation. “Free passage to New South Wales for malcontents. I do not understand why no one proposes such a bill. It makes perfect sense to me.”

“Give all men the vote so they can affect their futures, and there will be less discontent,” St. John said.

“Should the rabble of Manchester be making laws?” Lord Calne asked. “The Commons is disrupted enough, what with radicals and Irishmen.”

Pen gave St. John a beseeching, quelling smile. The shipper bit back whatever disruptive retort he contemplated.

“The people of Manchester are not rabble,” Vergil said. “They are helping England become the wealthiest nation in the world. Industrial cities like Manchester cannot remain disenfranchised because of borough rights drawn up centuries ago. Reform of Parliament is inevitable.”

Pen rolled her eyes at her brother, reproving him for encouraging this argument.

Lord Calne looked like he would suffer apoplexy. “I'll be damned first. Support that, Laclere, and you betray your blood. Those northern cities are terrible places. Filthy with mills and machines and base men made rich by stinking trade. Worse than London, I hear. No, give me clean country air and a good hunt. We will never let them take that from us.”

Pen saw her chance. “And how is the game at your estate this year? Can everyone expect the usual magnificent shoots?”

“Looks good, looks good. A continuous battle with the poachers, though. Had to bring five men up at the Quarter sessions… .”

The shift in topic gave Bianca an opportunity for escape from Vergil's close proximity. She excused herself.

The less politically minded men had fanned out in the room. Nigel spoke with Catalani and Mrs. Monley near a window. Her cousin favored her with a warm, inviting smile as she passed.

She joined Diane St. John, Charlotte, and Dante instead.

They were discussing the St. Johns' two children. Dante displayed more interest in the little boys' antics than Bianca would have expected, but he moved to sit beside her and allowed the ladies to carry the conversation soon after she arrived.

“You have been very quiet today,” he said softly. “I hope that you are not distraught by my bad behavior.”

She had all but forgotten that kiss in the library. “I am overwhelmed by so many new faces. I have little to talk to them about.”

“Well, here comes St. John. He is in shipping, as your grandfather was, so you have a bit in common with him.”

Daniel St. John had removed himself from Lord Calne's company and now approached theirs.

“St. John, you knew Adam Kenwood, didn't you?” Dante asked, to make things easy for her.

“I first met him when I was very young. In fact, my first voyage as a boy was on one of his ships. That was long before he moved into finance, of course.”