The Temptation of the Night Jasmine (3 page)

No one needed to be asked twice. The gentlemen trooped gratefully into the entrance hall, where a fire crackled in one of the two great hearths. The other lay empty, waiting for the Yule log, which would be ceremonially dragged in later that evening. The dowager duchess kept to the old traditions at Girdings. The holly, the ivy, and the Yule log were always brought in on Christmas Eve and not a moment sooner.

Robert looked ruefully at the red ribbons Charlotte had tied around the carved balusters on the stairs. ‘We hadn’t meant to intrude on Christmas Eve.’

‘Can you really intrude on your own house?’ asked Charlotte.

‘Is it?’ Robert said. His eyes roamed along the high ceiling with its panorama of inquisitive gods and goddesses, leaning out of Olympus to rest their elbows on the gilded frame. His gaze made the circuit of the hall, passing over the vibrant murals depicting the noble lineage of the House of Dovedale, from the mythical Sir Guillaume de Lansdowne receiving his spurs from William the Conqueror on the field of Hastings, past Charlotte’s favourite hero of Agincourt, all the way up to the first Duke of Dovedale himself, boosting a rakish-looking Charles II into an oak tree near Worcester as perplexed Parliamentarian troops peered about nearby. ‘I keep forgetting.’

‘It is a bit overwhelming, isn’t it?’ Charlotte automatically reached out to touch his arm and then thought better of it. Letting her hand fall to her side, she tilted her head back to stare at the familiar figure of Sir William Lansdowne, who really did look remarkably like Robert, if he had been wearing gauntlets and breastplate and waving a bloodied sword. ‘I felt that way, too, initially.’

‘I remember,’ Robert said, looking not at the murals but at her. And then: ‘I was sorry to hear about your father.’

Charlotte bit down hard on her lower lip, willing away a sudden prickle of tears. It was ridiculous to turn into a watering pot over something that had happened so very long ago. Eleven years ago, to be precise. By the time her father died, Robert had been five months gone from Girdings, far away across the sea.

‘It was a very long time ago,’ Charlotte said honestly.

‘Even so.’

Lieutenant Fluellen looked curiously from one to the other, his brown eyes as bright and inquisitive as a squirrel’s. Fortunately, Charlotte was spared explanations by the intrusion of a rumbling noise, which became steadily louder.

Both Penelope and Charlotte, who recognised it instantly for what it was, stepped back out of the way as the noise resolved itself into the synchronized rhythm of four pairs of feet. The four sets of feet belonged to four bewigged and powdered footmen, who bore on their shoulders a litter covered with enough gold leaf to beggar Cleopatra. On a thronelike chair in the centre of the litter, draped in purple silk fringed with gold, perched none other than the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale, the woman who had launched a thousand ships – as their crews rowed for their lives in the opposite direction. She inspired horses to rear, jaded roués to blanch beneath their rouge, and young fops to jump out of ballroom windows. And she enjoyed every moment of it.

The skimpy dresses in vogue had struck the dowager duchess as dangerously republican. The dowager preferred the fashions of her youth, so she had never stopped wearing them. In honour of Christmas Eve, she was garbed in a gown of rich green brocade glittering with gold thread. Her hair had been piled into a coiffure reminiscent of the work of agitated spiders, crowned with a jaunty sprig of mistletoe.

As the duchess rapped her fabled cane against the side of the litter, her four bearers came to a practiced halt.

‘Good evening, Grandmama,’ said Charlotte primly. ‘You do remember Cousin Robert—’

‘Of course, I remember him! I may have lost my looks, but I still have my wits. So, you’ve come home at last, have you? Took you long enough.’

‘Had I known I would receive such a gracious welcome, I would have come sooner.’

‘Hogwash,’ the duchess snorted. She gestured imperiously with her cane. ‘Don’t stand there gawking! Help me out of this thing!’

The footmen stood, impassive, holding their gilded poles, as Lieutenant Fluellen rushed into attendance.

‘Wouldn’t a wheeled chair have sufficed?’ enquired the prodigal duke blandly.

The dowager paused with her hand on Lieutenant Fluellen’s arm, one leg extended over the side. ‘And break my neck on the stairs? You only wish, my boy! I used to have these lot’ – she waved a dismissive hand at the footmen – ‘carrying me around, but I didn’t want them to get too familiar. Gave them ideas above their station.’

Robert’s mind boggled at the notion of the blank-faced footmen being stirred to uncontrollable passion by the dowager’s wrinkled face and grasshopper arms.

Tommy simply looked stunned, although that could, in part, have been because the dowager had landed on his foot in passing.

‘Ah, these old legs aren’t what they once were,’ mused the dowager, wiggling a red-heeled shoe. ‘In my day I could out-dance half the men in London. Outrun them, too.’ She emitted a short bark of laughter. ‘Except when I wanted to be caught, that is. Those were the days.’ She shook her cane in the face of a practically paralytic Tommy. ‘Who’s this young sprig and what is he doing in my hall?’

Robert very nobly refrained from pointing out that it was, in fact, his hall. ‘May I present Tommy Fluellen, late of His Majesty’s service?’

‘Welsh?’ demanded the duchess.

‘With the leek to prove it,’ Tommy replied cheerfully.

The dowager regarded him thoughtfully. ‘There was a Welsh princess married into the family in the twelfth century. Angharad, they called her. I doubt you are related.’

The dowager duchess turned her gimlet gaze on the duke, for an inspection that went from his bare head straight down to the mud on the toes of his boots.

‘You do have the Lansdowne look about you,’ she admitted grudgingly. ‘At least you would, if you weren’t burnt brown as a savage. What were you thinking, boy?’

‘Not of my complexion.’

‘Hmph. That’s clear enough. Still, you look more of a Lansdowne than Charlotte.’ The dowager jerked her head in Charlotte’s direction by way of acknowledgment. ‘
She
favours her mother’s people.’

Charlotte was well aware of that. She had heard it often enough over the years she had lived under her grandmother’s care. The dowager duchess had never forgiven Charlotte’s father, the future Duke of Dovedale, for running off with a humble vicar’s daughter.

It hadn’t mattered one whit to the duchess that the vicar had been the grandson of an earl or that Charlotte’s mother had been undeniably a gentleman’s daughter. The duchess had had her heart set on a grand match for her only son, the sort of match that could be counted in guineas and acres and influence in Parliament.

They had been happy, though, even in exile. Or perhaps they were happy because they were in exile. When she tried very hard, Charlotte could remember a golden age before she had come to Girdings, when she and her father and mother had lived together in a little house in Surrey, a quaint little two-storied house with dormer windows and ivy growing over the walls and a stone sundial in the garden that professed only to count the happy hours.

The duchess had never forgiven them for being happy, either.

Ignoring the duchess, Robert bent his head towards Charlotte. ‘I regret I never had the honour of meeting your mother.’

‘
She
was not a Lansdowne,’ the duchess sniffed.

Robert cocked an eyebrow at the duchess. ‘If everyone were a Lansdowne, where would be the distinction in being one?’

‘Impertinence!’ The duchess’s cane cracked against the tiles like one of Jove’s thunderbolts. ‘I like that in a man.’

Her cousin caught her eye, making a face of such mock desperation that Charlotte had to bite her lip to keep from smiling. His friend simply looked mesmerised.

‘You’ll have the ducal chambers, of course,’ said the duchess. ‘Don’t look so frightened, boy! You shan’t find me through the connecting door.’

‘I wouldn’t want to dispossess you.’

‘I occupy the
queen
’
s
chambers.’ Having established her proper position, somewhere just to the right of Elizabeth I, the duchess waved a dismissive hand. ‘These gels will introduce you to the rest of the party. You may find some acquaintances from India among them. Not a one worth knowing in the lot of them.’

She snapped her fingers, and the pole-bearers dutifully sank to their knees.

‘You!’ she barked, and four different potential yous stood to attention all at once. ‘Yes, you! The one with the leek!’

Lieutenant Fluellen snapped into parade-ground pose.

‘Well?’ the duchess demanded, batting arthritic eyelashes. ‘Don’t you know to help a lady into her litter?’

‘It would be my honour?’ ventured Lieutenant Fluellen.

The duchess favoured him with a smile as her pole-bearers struggled to their feet. ‘Correct answer. You may keep your head. For now.’

And with that, she swept off, her bearers’ feet beating a staccato tattoo against the marble floor.

‘Good Lord,’ breathed Lieutenant Fluellen. It wasn’t a prayer.

‘Grandmama seems to have taken a fancy to you.’

‘A fancy?’ echoed Lieutenant Fluellen incredulously. ‘I’d hate to see her take against someone.’

‘Oh, no,’ Charlotte hastened to reassure him. ‘Grandmama generally just ignores people she doesn’t like. She doesn’t believe in wasting her energy on them.’ She caught Robert’s eyes on her again, too shrewd for comfort, and hastened to change the subject. ‘Do you have any baggage?’

‘Our bags are in Dovedale village. We thought it better not to presume upon our welcome.’

There it was again, the past, jabbing at them. Charlotte lowered her eyes. ‘I’m sorry if Grandmama was … unkind, all those years ago. She—’

‘She had every right to be,’ her cousin interrupted flatly. ‘She was remarkably well behaved under the circumstances.’

Lieutenant Fluellen looked from one to the other with undisguised curiosity. ‘I feel as though I’m missing something.’

‘Most of your wits,’ countered Robert amiably.

‘I packed them in my other case. Which, by the way, is still at the Rusty Dove in Dovedale village.’ He turned to Charlotte. ‘What
is
a rusty dove?’

It was too clumsy a change of subject not to be deliberate. Charlotte liked him tremendously for it.

‘It’s my guess that rusty is a corruption of “russet,”’ she explained earnestly. ‘The first Duke of Dovedale had red hair, you see. Hence the Russet Dove, in compliment to the duke.’

Lieutenant Fluellen looked critically at his friend. ‘If they named a tavern for Rob, it would have to be the Muddy Dove. Did you leave any dirt on the road between here and Dovedale, Rob?’

‘An adage about pots and kettles comes to mind.’ The duke turned his attention back to Charlotte with an alacrity that would have been flattering if she hadn’t had the impression that his thoughts were a million miles away. Or perhaps only several thousand miles away, across the seas in India. ‘The duchess mentioned visitors from India?’

‘Only one,’ Charlotte said apologetically, wishing she could offer him more. ‘Lord Frederick Staines.’ Something in Robert’s expression prompted her to add, ‘Do you know him?’

‘Only by reputation,’ said Robert smoothly. ‘But I look forward to knowing him better. We old India hands tend to band together.’

Penelope swung her basket in the direction of the door. ‘Lord Frederick and the rest of the party should be outside already, cutting holly and mistletoe. If you join us, you can meet him.’

‘Although I imagine you’d probably prefer to stay by a hot fire at this point,’ Charlotte put in, with a glance at her cousin’s chapped cheeks. Much as she wished he would join them, it would be cruel to drag him back out into the cold. It was silly to imagine that if she let him out of her sight, he would disappear again, like a cavalier in a daydream, riding back off into the haze of her imagination.

Or, as he had twelve years ago, packing and stealing away without a word to any of them at all.

‘Rather,’ agreed Lieutenant Fluellen wholeheartedly. ‘A hot fire, a hot fire, my kingdom for a hot fire.’

He looked like he might have expatiated on that theme, but the duke preempted him by strolling deliberately towards the door. Glancing back over his shoulder, the duke winked at Charlotte in a way that made her stomach flutter like five and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

‘Come, Tommy,’ he said easily. ‘Where’s your seasonal spirit? How often does one have the chance to participate in a proper country Christmas?’

Lieutenant Fluellen held out both hands palms up, in the traditional gesture of surrender. ‘How could one refuse?’

T
here were many emotions Robert Lansdowne, fifth Duke of Dovedale, might have experienced upon returning to his ancestral home. Elation. Triumph. Fear. Mostly, he just felt cold.

Charlotte was right: He was longing for a hot fire. Preferably a dozen of them all at once. After a decade overseas, he had nearly forgotten the merciless chill of an English winter. Robert thought back to all those soldiers he had known in India who had spent half their time mooning over memories of England, saying fatuous things like, ‘Oh, to see a good English winter.’ Madmen, the lot of them. He had lost the ability to feel his feet somewhere just west of King’s Lynn. Since he was upright, he assumed they were still attached to his legs, but he wouldn’t have been willing to vouch to their presence in any court of law. As to the rest of him … well, it didn’t bear thinking about. At this point, fire and brimstone were beginning to sound more like a promise than a threat. The Devil could have his soul for the price of a hot water bottle.

Yet here he was, turning his back on the promise of whatever warmth might be available in this frosty and unpleasant land, and going voluntarily out into that cold night. It was only just past five, but the early winter dusk had already fallen, turning the ground of Girdings House dark as night. The great parkland stretched before them like the uncharted seas of a medieval explorer’s map, the topiary rearing from the landscape like sea serpents along the way. The torches placed at intervals along the uneven paths served more to cast shadows than to illuminate, making two of every shrub and tree.

Ahead of him, his cousin bobbed around, peeking over her shoulder. Wisps of blond hair had escaped from her hood, sparkling like angel dust in the light of the torches interspersed along the path. At the sight of him there behind her, she looked – pleased. As though she had actually meant those words of welcome. They did say time healed all wounds. But then, people said a lot of bloody silly things. Didn’t she realise that she wasn’t supposed to be happy to see him?

Robert decided it probably wasn’t in his own best interest to remind her of that.

He sent a warm smile her way, undoubtedly a wasted gesture given the uncertainty of the lighting and the fact that her friend was already claiming her attention with a hand on her arm and a whispered comment that made his cousin laugh and shake her hooded head.

Little Charlotte. Who would have thought it? She was still very much Little Charlotte, Robert thought with a slight smile, for all that she must be turned twenty. The top of her bright red hood came up just to her taller friend’s ear, and she walked with a bouncing step that was nearly a skip. He remembered her as she had been, a whimsical, wide-eyed little thing with rumpled blond curls that no one ever bothered to brush and a disconcertingly adult way of speaking.

He hadn’t thought to find her back at Girdings. To be honest, he hadn’t thought about her at all. Cultivating family ties hadn’t been high on his list of objectives in returning to Girdings. Coming back to Girdings had been no more than a necessary evil, a means to an end.

Next to him, Tommy sunk his chin as deeply into his collar as it would go, which made him look like a disgruntled turtle. ‘Feather beds,’ he muttered. ‘Mulled wine. A fire. Remind me why we’re here again?’

It required only one word. ‘Staines.’

‘Oh. Right.’ Tommy sunk his head even deeper into his collar. ‘If he has any sense, he won’t be out here, either.’

‘Sense isn’t something he’s known for.’

Tommy wrinkled his brow, the only bit of him still visible over his collar. ‘Who’s the less sensible – he for being out here, or we for following him?’ When Robert didn’t answer him, his tone turned serious. Swiping wool out of the way of his mouth, he said very carefully, ‘Rob – are you sure this is a good idea?’

Since that wasn’t a question Rob wanted to examine too closely, he countered it with one of his own. As he had learnt from Colonel Arbuthnot, a good offensive was always the best approach when one was on weak territory. ‘Do you have a better one?’

Tommy looked wistfully back along the alleyway to the great house behind him, the windows ablaze with light. ‘This is a nice little place you have here. We could just forget about this whole revenge thing, have some mulled wine, enjoy the holiday …’

Robert’s spine stiffened beneath layers of wool. ‘It’s not about revenge. It’s about justice.’

‘I take it that’s a no to the mulled wine, then.’

‘Don’t you want to see justice served?’

‘General Wellesley—’

‘—has other things to worry about.’ When Robert had tried to voice his suspicions to the general’s aides, he had been laughed out of the mess.

But, then, what commander wanted to hear that one of his own officers had betrayed him? In the flush of victory after Assaye, no one had wanted to talk about what might have gone wrong. What was one murdered colonel when the day had been so gloriously won? People die in battle. And if a man died from a shot in the back from his own side, well, that was regrettable but far from unheard of. It was battle. People lunged and mingled and dashed about. It was not always possible to make sure that bullets went where they were supposed to go. That was what they had said, in a patronising tone that suggested that, after a decade in the army, he ought to have known that, too.

Except that this bullet had gone exactly where it was supposed to go – right into Colonel Arbuthnot’s back.

For the thousandth time, Robert wandered the torturous paths of might have been. It might have all turned out so differently if only he had paid more attention to the colonel that night, when the colonel had told him that he suspected Arthur Wrothan of selling secrets to the enemy. Robert had been ready enough to believe it. He had never liked Wrothan, with his sly quips, his toadying ways, and that absurd sprig of jasmine he affected, more suited to a London dandy rather than a commissioned officer in His Majesty’s army. But Robert had been preoccupied with the day to come, with the battle to be fought. There would be plenty of time to deal with Wrothan later, after the battle; plenty of time to interest the proper authorities and turn the whole bloody mess over to them. It had never occurred to Robert that Wrothan might strike first and strike fatally.

It had never occurred to him – but it ought to have. The scent of jasmine still made his stomach churn with remembered guilt.

That, however, was not something he was going to admit to Tommy. ‘If Wrothan did it once, what makes you think he won’t betray us again? Who will die next time? Are you willing to take that risk?’

‘You make it bloody hard to argue with you,’ muttered Tommy from the depths of his collar. ‘It’s deuced unfair.’

‘Maybe that’s because I’m right.’

‘Or just bloody-minded.’

‘That, too,’ agreed Robert genially. ‘Are you in?’

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

‘Are you sure it’s not just for the feather beds?’

Tommy sunk his chin deeper into his scarf. ‘I’ll let you know when I see one,’ he said dourly.

Robert clapped a friendly hand on his shoulder. ‘Good chap. Once this business is done …’

And there he stuck. Once Wrothan had been brought to justice, preferably on the point of his sword, he hadn’t the foggiest notion what to do next. He had sold his commission before leaving India, selling with it the only life he knew. There was a big blank stretch beyond, terra incognita, as forbidding and faceless as the winter-dark grounds of Girdings House.

If he had any sense, he would take Tommy’s perfectly logical suggestion and make his pretended return to Girdings a real one, settle the ducal mantle around his shoulders, and … what? He hadn’t the foggiest notion of what a duke was supposed to do. He wasn’t even sure if dukes wore mantles.

He was a mistake, a fluke, a duke by accident, and when it came down to it, he’d rather face an oncoming Mahratta army. At least he would know what to do with the army.

For a moment, it almost seemed as though his wish had been granted. As they rounded a curve in the path, heading towards a stand of trees, torches flared into view and what had been a low rumble escalated into a full-fledged din.

Man-high torches sent orange flames into the sky, casting a satanic glow over the men disporting themselves about the edge of the forest. If it was an army, it was an unusually well-dressed one. The flames licked lovingly over silver watch fobs and polished boot tops, scintillating off signet rings and diamond stickpins. Charcoal crackled in low, three-legged braziers, emitting heat and plumes of sullen, dark smoke. To add to the confusion, dogs darted barking underfoot, worrying at fallen leaves, snapping at boot tassels, and getting in the way of the liveried servants who circulated among the mob offering steaming glasses balanced on silver trays.

Judging from the raucous tone of the men’s voices, the liquid was not tea but something much, much stronger.

‘Ah,’ Robert said smoothly. ‘We seem to have found the rest of the party.’

Tommy eyed the dogs and torches with deep suspicion. ‘They look like they’re about to hunt down a head of peasant.’

Robert stuck his hands in his pockets and assumed a superior expression. ‘Don’t be absurd. Peasant is too tough and stringy. Hardly worth the bother.’

He wished he felt quite so sure as he sounded. For all his urbane words, there was something distinctly off-putting about the pampered lordlings prancing along the edge of the forest. The torchlight distended their open jaws and lent a yellow cast to their teeth, making exaggerated caricatures of their features, turning them into something predatory, primal, their faces florid in the flaring light of the torches.

These were the sort of men Arthur Wrothan had collected around him in India, the spoilt, the bored, the wealthy. That was how Wrothan had operated. He had battened on the young aristocrats playing at soldier, winning their loyalty by introducing them to all the vices the Orient had to offer. He had made a very special sort of club out of it, one that operated by invitation only. It was a group Robert had steered well clear of – he had no use for amateur officers dabbling in debauchery and even less for bottom-feeders like Wrothan – but in such a small world, it was impossible not to know of them.

They had tended to travel en masse, Wrothan’s lordlings, clattering into the officers’ mess in a burst of clanking spurs, gleaming silver buttons, and shouted ribaldries, well-groomed hair as burnished as their buttons, cheeks flushed with drink rather than sun. They reminded Robert of the thoroughbred horses his father used to take him to see race at Newmarket, glossy on the surface, but skittish underneath. In the midst of those animal high spirits, one would invariably find Wrothan, calm and contained, the dark kernel at the centre of the storm.

Lord Frederick Staines had been Wrothan’s greatest coup and most devoted acolyte. His selling out of the army at the same time as Wrothan might have been coincidence – but Robert doubted it.

Under pretence of adjusting his collar, Robert scanned the group of men under the trees. Aside from his cousin and her friend, the group consisted almost entirely of men, shrouded in many-caped greatcoats, boots shining as though they had never touched anything so mundane as earth. Between high collars and low hat brims, it was next to impossible to make out individual features. To Robert’s prejudiced eyes, they all seemed cast from the same mould: overbred, overdressed, and distinctly overrated.

Robert strolled casually over to Charlotte. ‘I take it this is the rest of the house party?’

She had to tip her head back to look at him, bumping her nose on the side of her hood. ‘Only those who weren’t afraid to brave the cold. The faint of heart decided to stay in and toast by the fire.’

Despite himself, Robert’s frozen lips cracked into a smile. ‘After all these years, you still speak like a book.’

‘That’s because she generally has her head buried in one,’ put in her friend, with equal parts affection and scorn.

‘I like books,’ said Charlotte disingenuously. ‘They’re so much grander than real life.’

‘Certainly grander than this lot,’ snorted her friend, sounding more like the dowager duchess than the duchess herself, but she ruined the effect by raising a hand and acknowledging the enthusiastic halloos of the gentlemen, several of whom seemed quite delighted to see her. Two men broke off from the group, starting forwards in their direction, one considerably ahead of the other.

The man in the vanguard might, just might, have been Freddy Staines. He was certainly of the same type. His coat possessed enough cloaks to garb a small Indian village and his many watch fobs jangled like a dancing girl’s bracelets as he walked. His light brown hair had been brushed into careful disarray before being topped with a high-crowned beaver hat. Rings jostled for precedence on his fingers, a signet ring bumping up against a curiously scratched ruby in an overly ornate setting.

‘Miss Deveraux!’ he exclaimed, before adding, as an after thought, ‘Lady Charlotte.’

He raised his glass in a toast to the two ladies, sloshing mulled wine over the side in the process. It made a sticky trail through the mud on Robert’s boot.

No, decided Robert. It wasn’t Staines. This man’s skin was too fair ever to have weathered an Indian summer, and the pronounced veins beginning to show along his nose suggested a prolonged course of heavy drinking with the best smuggled brandy London had to offer.

He eyed Robert arrogantly through a slightly grimy quizzing glass. ‘And you are?’

‘This is Dovedale,’ Miss Deveraux said bluntly, before Robert could get a word in edgewise. ‘It’s his mistletoe you’re cutting.’

‘Good Gad! You’re
Dovedale
?’

If a duke fell in the forest, there was no doubt that the entire
ton
would hear it. The mention of his title commanded universal attention. Conversations stopped. Baskets dropped. Even the dogs ceased barking, except for one spaniel who yipped out of turn before whimpering into silence.

Robert sketched a wave. ‘Hullo. Carry on.’

‘Makes me feel like I ought to curtsy,’ murmured Tommy.