To Seduce an Angel (10 page)

The mention of Fausto worked every time. When Fausto was on duty, they went hungry rather than touch the soup. Fausto was the only man who'd ever kissed Emma. She had endured his kisses for an interminable week in order to escape. Fausto's kiss was like taking a dying fish in one's mouth. When Fausto pulled her face to the bars, she already tasted fish and felt her stomach churn. Daventry's gray gaze had quite a different effect on her stomach. Maybe it was the silk dress that made her feel a glad leap of welcome when Daventry's eyes turned her way. Tonight there was the silk dress and no Fausto. Emma's stays seemed less a confinement than a necessary frame to keep her limbs from melting into the liquid flow of the gown.

A footman placed the soup in front of her. Mrs. Wardlow had changed her menu. The soup was a delicious potato and leek. Emma wished she could concentrate on it instead of on her employer, but her breasts felt his glance. They tightened and seemed to swell against her corset, and they sent out strange flashes of sensation to the rest of her body. The thought brought a memory up from the depths.

One of the great finds of their prison life had been a piece of broken mirror scooped up from the path on their way home from chapel one day. She and Tatty had used it to signal Leo across the fortress courtyard on their way to and from chapel. With that mirror they had arranged meetings in the confessionals. The guards never took the sacrament. An old priest had married Tatty and Leo as they knelt on either side of him and spoke through the grate.

Footmen cleared the first course. Emma did not know what the conversation had been. She felt Daventry's cool, aloof look as if it were a hot ray of sunlight that seemed to glance off her breasts and shoot heat deep inside her.

Daventry could look at her, and her stomach seemed to drop away. Femaleness, which had been hiding inside her, a shadow creature, wanted to come out in his presence and stretch and move and show itself in the light.

That was a bad idea. She didn't need one of Tatty's sayings to know it. A mouse didn't need to be told that the hawk was not his friend.

He stopped her at the end of the meal, as the boys hurried off to their hour of games.

“Miss Portland, do you think you can handle them at supper as well as during the day?”

“Handle them?”

“Instruct them in civilized behavior at a meal.”

“Of course.”

“Good. I have other engagements, so I'll leave you to it then. You'll dine with them from now on.”

She nodded. He had his charges and his estate on his mind, not his wards' tutor and her dairies.

FIFTY years into her marriage, nothing could daunt Charlotte, Duchess of Wenlocke, certainly not one of the duke's imperious footmen on guard outside her husband's library on a frosty morning. She waved the man away with a flick of her wrist and entered.

Her husband looked up from his chair, a snarl forming on his stern lips. Charlotte merely raised a brow, conscious of an unexpected stab of dismay. Her husband, who had sought all his life to dominate his fellow men rather than conciliate them, sat at his fire, a woolen carriage rug over his knees, his gold-headed black cane at his side, dwarfed by the baroque splendor of his own library.

As she strode toward him she could see that he read no book, no papers. He was brooding. Charlotte had no use for brooding, a self-consuming act. She picked up a copy of the
Morning Chronicle
from his table and dropped it in his lap.

“Go away, wife.”

“I've returned safely, you see, so no need for any concern on your part.” Charlotte could properly claim to be the only living person who had ever heard Wenlocke laugh. Twenty years had passed since he could laugh.

“I was aware of your return.” He brushed the newspaper to the floor.

“Our daughter is well. Our granddaughter Sarah has recovered from the measles.” For a time there had been a genuine camaraderie between them when Anne and Granville were children. Wenlocke Castle, for all its cavernous rooms suitable for bivouacking the local militia, its seventeen staircases, its endless frigid passages, had been a home.

“I rejoice in the news.” His familiar icy voice lacked spirit.

Charlotte stirred the fire. Age had been kinder to her than youth. At thirteen she had reached her full height just shy of six feet. The fashions of the time on a woman of her stature had given her the appearance throughout her adolescence of a circus figure lurching about on stilts. At seventy, she could use her height to her advantage in her lifelong struggle with her husband.

She came to stand over him, feeling the unreachableness of his isolation, and chose as her weapon the arrows of outrage rather than strokes of kindness. She launched the question on her mind. “What have you done with my Emma?”

He did not pretend to misunderstand her. Annoyance flickered in his gaze as he looked up, momentarily provoked out of his inner retreat. “The little murderess?”

“Nothing of the sort. Emma is the granddaughter of a dear friend of mine.” Charlotte chose her next words carefully. She had promised to keep Emma's secret after all. “She's an impecunious gentlewoman of good birth and unfortunate circumstances.”

“Not according to the request for her pardon, which you wished me to sign.”

“A small matter for a man of your influence.”

“You think the law should bend to suit you?”

“We agreed never to meddle in each other's spheres. Emma Portland was under
my
protection. That alone should have guaranteed your signature on the document.”

He stared at the fire, his harsh profile frozen. Years earlier Charlotte's mother, assessing Charlotte's dismal prospects on the marriage mart, had simply removed her daughter from London. She had sent Charlotte abroad in the company of her childhood friend Louisa, whose parents had married her to the prince of a minor duchy in the north of Italy. Charlotte had loved Italy, felt herself very much of use to her friend, and returned to England if no shorter, at least very handsome, with a poise and self-mastery equal to the social demands of a London season.

To her great good fortune changing fashions favored her tall, spare figure, and the surprise of her reappearance in society had been enough to draw the attentions of the haughty Duke of Wenlocke, whose height gave Charlotte the agreeable sensation for the first time in her life of being petite and feminine. If he was not as warm in nature as Charlotte would have liked a husband to be, he was as rich and titled as her parents liked.

Now she towered over her husband, huddled in his chair, his power to pass Wenlocke on to his self-appointed heir usurped by the courts. Charlotte was not deceived by his manner. Forgiveness was not in her husband's nature.

“Your murderess has a favor to do for me if she is to earn that pardon.”

The words knocked the confidence right out of her. She thought she understood his anger at the woman who had stolen their son, but Wenlocke's enmity had taken a darker turn when he attacked an innocent. A wounded dragon was the most dangerous sort. “Where is she?”

“She is in Aubrey's care. He has a man looking out for her. She won't escape, and if—”

“—Escape? What have you done with her?”

He waved a dismissive hand. “The law has a claim on her, and it shall have her if she crosses me.”

“You did not turn her over to the magistrates?”

“I will if she fails me.”

Charlotte's mind raced. Word had not yet come from Tatty. If the law got hold of Emma, she would not save herself, and the verdict would go against her. To think of Emma imprisoned again, in danger, sent a surge of anger through Charlotte, propelling her into motion. She spun and strode to her husband's grand desk.

She tore through his papers, scattering them like fallen leaves under her onslaught.

With a roar Wenlocke threw off the carriage rug over his knees and hoisted himself upright, swaying briefly, then seized his cane and leaned heavily upon it. “Madam, you overreach yourself.”

“And you overestimate yourself, old man. I have not interfered for four years as you persecuted that boy and his family.” Charlotte yanked open drawers and upended files. “This girl, this poor child, has nothing to do with your war on our grandson. I'll not let you destroy her, too. It is a wrong I cannot allow.”

Wenlocke reached the desk and grabbed its edge with a gnarled hand, getting his balance. “Wife,” he snarled.

Charlotte went on turning over papers, heedless of his presence.

He slammed his cane down. It struck beside Charlotte's hand, trapping the fluttering papers. “That whore's get has no right to Wenlocke.”

Charlotte took a steadying breath. Her hand looked old and shrunken but steady next to the black cane. The diamond her husband had given her on their wedding day was loose on her long lean finger, and the large square-cut center stone had slipped from its upright position, but it still sparkled with cold brilliance. She straightened to her full height and lifted her hand from the desk. She had found the pardon request and held it up triumphantly. “I will find Emma and free her.”

She stepped around the desk. From the door she looked back. “Beware of the law, Wenlocke. The law says that boy is my grandson, all that I have left of Granville. I will see him for myself.”

“I will destroy him, wife. Make no mistake. Courts, lawyers, they can't take what is mine. Mine—”

Charlotte closed the library door, cutting off his last angry syllable.

Rage carried her to her own distant suite of apartments in the opposite wing of the castle. Then it left her shaken and empty. She sank into her desk chair and let the past have its way with her.

It lay in wait for her these days. In London her daughter had shared with her the papers' accounts of the court case concerning Wenlocke's purported heir. Those troubling accounts rather than her granddaughter's illness had kept her in London. The young man himself remained a mystery.

Such a zest for life her own sweet boy Granville had had. Such treasures he'd brought her from the estate. Even when he'd become a young man on his own in town, he'd written letters to amuse and delight her. She had early understood that he was not going to be cold like Wenlocke. He had such a ready laugh.

When he had fallen scandalously in love with the most notorious courtesan in London, Charlotte knew that he was seeking warmth. Recalling her own mother's wisdom, Charlotte tried to offer a little distraction to turn the boy away from Sophie Rhys-Jones. She reasoned that a young man bursting with energy under the control of a father who gave him nothing to do needed a chance to exercise his powers in the world.

Charlotte insisted they settle upon him one of Wenlocke's lesser properties, Daventry Hall. But while her son had immediately taken charge of the hall, it had not lessened his attachment to that woman. Only when he purchased a commission and sailed for India in the spring of 1803 did the affair end. Relieved, Charlotte had set herself to wait for Granville's eventual return.

Shortly before Christmas in the midst of a killing frost the news reached them that Granville had perished in September at a place called Assaye. A more permanent frost settled on Wenlocke. Haughty and cold as her husband had always been, he then became unreachable.

When the formal rites of mourning had passed, Wenlocke became a house divided. Charlotte thought to visit her friends in Italy for a change of scene and a respite from her husband's austere way of grieving, so unlike her own, but French armies were on the march everywhere, and after one troubling letter, there was no further word from her friend Louisa while the newspapers were filled with the worst accounts of the French in Italy.

So Charlotte remained in England as Napoleon consumed the continent, and Arthur Wellesley, the man under whom her son had died in India returned to lead the fight against Bonaparte.

Wenlocke's coldness became legendary. In time Aubrey, her sister-in-law's strapping son, found some favor from his grandfather, and Wenlocke was again busy in his world. Charlotte left her husband alone. Briefly, with the birth of their daughter Anne's child, Charlotte had hoped for a thaw in Wenlocke's perpetual wintry aspect, but a girl grandchild had had no power to move him.

So Charlotte's life remained centered around her position as duchess, caring for the people of Wenlocke. She saw to the running of two schools, one for the children of tenants and another for the offspring of her large household staff and her groundsmen. She maintained correspondence with a great number of artists and naturalists and supported their work. And she took a direct hand in the naming of vicars to all the livings in her husband's gift.