The Conquest of Lady Cassandra

by Madeline Hunter

  It was a big risk to double back his own dare at him. Sophie would probably scold, and say bedazzlement would have been the better choice. Only she did not want to dazzle Ambury. She just wanted her damned money.

  They stood locked in a mutual challenge. Slowly, she turned her head, demanding that he release his hold on her chin. Belatedly, he did so. It felt as if she had to yank herself out of his fingers. Free, she stepped away, then turned to face him squarely.

  Ambury hardly appeared friendly, but he retreated enough to speak with firm calm. “You need only have your aunt tell you what she knows of the earrings’ history to end any game.”

  She tried to see into his mind. Would it really be that simple?

  More to the point, did he think her aunt had stolen the earrings? Aunt Sophie had purloined the letter right out of his library, after all. He had to be wondering if she had experience in such things.

  First Gerald and now Ambury. Poor Aunt Sophie. The only person protecting her was Cassandra herself, and every plan for doing so required more money than she had, until Ambury paid for those jewels.

  Rather suddenly the air of danger left him. He became the amiable Ambury that the world knew. He gave her a charming smile.

  “I know you have waited too long, and are suspicious about ever seeing a conclusion to this. To reassure you, I suggest giving the price of the earrings to a solicitor to hold, along with the earrings, until this is resolved. It should not take long. You have only to put a few questions to your aunt, and all will be settled. That is fair, don’t you agree?”

  It was fair. Suspiciously so. There was more to this. She sensed that, mostly due to the intensity with which Ambury looked at her.

  “Why do I feel as though you have backed me into the corner of a chamber?”

  “I only do that with women in very private chambers, and for very different purposes.”

  “Yet I am feeling importuned all the same, Ambury.”

  “It is in both of our interests for this to be settled well, don’t you think?”

  She debated it. “I will do what I can, but I will not press the question if she chooses not to answer.”

  “I only ask that you try. I will arrange for us to meet with a solicitor when I return to town Monday, and write to you with the time. You bring the earrings, and I will bring the payment, and he will hold both until you learn what I need to know, or until I learn it another way if you cannot.”

  “That could take forever. I cannot wait too long.”

  “Shall we say a month from today? If I know no more than I do now, you will receive the earrings back.”

  It seemed a big delay, but it would probably take at least that long to make travel arrangements to get Sophie away from Gerald.

  She reluctantly agreed to his proposal.

  “I cannot promise that my aunt can satisfy your curiosity, Ambury,” she said as he began to take his leave of her. “You may have to give up on the earrings if you require so many details before you make a gift of them to your future bride. The person who filled your ear with gossip about their being stolen is probably waiting to buy them from me on the cheap.”

  He cocked his head. “Why do you say that I bought them for a future bride?”

  “It is past time for you to marry. Considering their price, I assume that you have found your future countess. But do not worry. I promise to start no gossip.”

  Yates perused the documents on the desk in front of him. Another stack waited on a nearby table. He judged that he would be lucky to finish with all of them before Christmas.

  Scents of the late country summer blew in through the window on a breeze that tickled the edges of several pages. He moved a weight to ensure the careful arrangement would not be disturbed. He felt a bit like those documents himself, weighted in place by responsibility.

  He did not mind the duty he had committed to, but it was not one with any joy. Even the fact that he would inherit the estate being so meticulously examined did not raise his spirits when he came down from town and made his way to this study in Elmswood Manor. The whole business made him feel too much like an executor before the fact of his father’s passing, and the ill health of the earl cast a pall over the entire household.

  They had spent more than eight months on this now, and would spend more, perhaps whatever months were left. As his physical side wasted away, the earl seemed to cling all the more to the part of him that had no end. What energy he possessed, he spent on the title and estate, on the parts of his life that made him one Highburton in an ongoing line of them.

  Is it your peace offering? Your attempt to mend the differences that grew over the years? Cassandra Vernham might be irreverent and irritating, but she possessed a quick insight. It was an attempt at doing just that. A poor one, but it was all he had.

  Thinking of her led him to pull the papers forward that dealt with those earrings. If he coerced Cassandra to learn what she could from her aunt, it was past time to learn what he could from this household. Normally, unraveling a mystery fascinated him, and in his discreet investigations he did not shirk from asking the questions necessary. But then normally the questions did not have to be asked of his own family.

  He reviewed the papers, set them down, and stood. As he left the chamber, he passed the violin case that had lived here with him for too long now. The temptation to stop and play tugged. Deciding he could put off the next chore for a short while, he picked up the instrument and tuned it.

  A tutor had introduced him to playing the violin when he was ten. For years he had only dabbled, but at university, the exercise suddenly had greater appeal. He went through a period of several years back then when he practiced hours every day, taking as much satisfaction in mastering a new piece of music as he did in hitting the marks when he shot his pistol.

  He picked up the bow, and within ten notes, he hit his stride. He barely felt the strings as his fingers moved over them. The bow served as an extension of himself. The music formed a cloud that hovered above the world and in which he floated. On good days like today, it proved so dense that nothing seemed to exist outside of it.

  Sometimes even his own thoughts did not survive the sound. The notes would intrude and merge with his consciousness. They would dissolve him. That was a rare occurrence, and not something he especially enjoyed. He could not predict it either, which made performing too capricious.

  Today that did not happen. Instead, the progressions and skill disciplined his thoughts. The separateness of the cloud provided a rare isolation that permitted clear thinking. There was no chaos in music.

  His mind took the opportunity to categorize things done and things that needed doing. He exerted no effort and did not direct his thoughts. It just happened. Playing aided his obligations to the estate just as they had aided his studies. In his investigative work, he came to rely on the way an hour with the bow helped him see patterns he had not noticed on his own, and explanations obscured by too many facts. Something similar happened now, regarding those earrings.

  When he finished the piece, he set the violin aside and left the study to do his duty.

  The door to his father’s chambers stood ajar. He looked in and saw his father sleeping in a chair set near a window of his sitting room.

  His mother sat in another chair nearby. Tall, thin, and white-haired, with sharp features and sharper eyes, she was a formidable woman. Right now her eyes were closed, but her posture remained rigid. The control symbolized her life and her nature. The daughter of a marquess, she had always been even more upright than his father, if that were possible. It had been a good match, if mutual severity could ever make one.

  Her eyes opened on his entry. “Surely it can wait, Yates,” she said softly. “He has just fallen asleep.”

  “I did not come to see him. I would like to speak with you, if you don’t mind.”

  With a sigh she stood. “I expected you to temper his zeal regarding the estate, not encourage it.”

  “It is important
to him. He only rests because he knows I do it in his stead.”

  She walked over and joined him at the door. “I hope that when I see the end coming, I do not waste the time left counting hairpins. That is all this is when you get down to it. Counting and organizing hairpins.”

  He could not disagree. The vast majority of the estate had been handed down with precise documentation. Good lands and high rents waited for Yates, just as they had for his father. The stacks up on that desk were indeed the hairpins of Highburton’s legacy, not the jewels. For the most part.

  His mother followed him toward the library. They passed through the gallery on the way. Yates stopped midway.

  He pointed up at a portrait hung high, near the ceiling, the uppermost in one of the rows of paintings that covered the wall. “I was always told that I look like her.”

  His mother tipped her head back and squinted. “It needs to be cleaned. She is barely visible. But your great-grandmother was a handsome woman and, yes, you do look like her.”

  “That is probably why I always noticed the painting when we came down here to Elmswood Manor, despite its location and dark varnish. Because people always said that. She is wearing earrings. Blue-and-gold ones. Sapphires, I would guess.”

  “Your eyes are much better than mine.”

  “Don’t you recognize them? You received the earrings when you married. Just as Grandmother had when she married Grandfather.”

  “Perhaps. I received boxes of jewels, most of them too old-fashioned to wear, just as those are.”

  “They were in Grandfather’s inventory. Sapphire-and-diamond-and-gold earrings.”

  His mother started toward the library again. “If you say so. Now, what is it you need to talk about?”

  He waited until they were sitting in the library before he answered. “I want to talk about those earrings. As I said, they were in the inventory taken by Grandfather five years before his death. However, they are no longer in any of those boxes you received.”

  “You have gone into my jewels?” Her tone was indignant. Expressing annoyance was unusual for her. She had never been a woman to show her emotions. Not to his father, and not to him. His parents’ union had been an arranged marriage, and his had been an arranged birth. Other than the arguments he had caused with his father, there had been little in the way of temper or love expressed within the family, which only made those rows more dramatic.

  “Highburton’s jewels,” he corrected. “Father instructed the solicitor to do another inventory last winter.”

  “He wants to count every single hairpin, it appears. Is poor Prebles making lists of the silver service and linens?”

  “Yes.”

  “Goodness, did Prebles count my stays and corsets too?”

  “I expect not, since your personal property is not the concern of this endless endeavor.”

  “I did not lose the earrings, if that is what you want to know.”

  “Father thinks they were stolen. He charged me with finding out what happened to them.”

  That surprised her.

  “What a lot of bother over some ugly earrings. I have never even worn them.”

  “They are worth hundreds, mother. He has tracts of land not as valuable. The diamonds are of good size.”

  Yates remembered the dismay in his father’s tired eyes when he learned of the missing earrings.

  Yates had thought that buying the jewels at the auction would take care of it. They would return to the estate, after all. His father had expressed anger at the solution, and surprise that they had found their way into Cassandra Vernham’s possession. Damnation, someone has betrayed this family. Find out from the chit how she got them.

  “Did you by any chance pawn them?” he asked.

  His mother leveled a gaze at him such as he had not been subjected to in years. Not since gossip about his first mistress had circulated ten years ago, and she had learned that the woman was the married daughter of one of her friends.

  Her demeanor turned imperious. “I have no reason to pawn jewels, or anything else. A Countess of Highburton does not gamble. She does not spend more than her pin money, and she certainly does not sell family jewels that are not hers to sell. She honors the family traditions of abstemious and moral behavior that her position has inherited, even if her son does not do the same regarding his more exalted expectations.”

  There was much he could say in response, unpleasant things mostly, but he would not. She had been a good countess, and even now she sat with the earl for hours on end. There may have never been a great passion between them, but few could surpass her when it came to performing her duties.

  “Do not dare accuse my maid of theft, if that is your next intention, Yates. She has been with me for decades, and I will not have you browbeat her. I have heard about your secret avocation of turning over rocks, looking for dirt, and I will not tolerate your playing that sordid role with this family.”

  “I will not accuse her of anything, merely talk to her. Father has asked me to find out what happened. I don’t give a damn myself, but I will give him this if he wants it.”

  It was not really true that he did not give a damn. The matter seemed most peculiar. Then again, perhaps he had become too much the investigator, and could not resist untangling the knot to see how the earrings in that portrait ended up at Fairbourne’s auction.

  The weariness of the last six months could be heard in her next words. “Do what you must, of course.” She stood, and he rose as well. “Before he slept, he again spoke of returning to town. I could not dissuade him from the notion. Perhaps this evening you will try instead.”

  He would try, but it would do no good. Word had just come this morning that French forces had landed in Ireland. In the morning, he and his father would pack up all those documents and remove to London. Now that his father felt a little better, he would not be kept from the discussions taking place in the government about this disastrous development. He was Highburton.

  Chapter 5

  London emptied of society in August. Even the theater people and other members of artistic circles who might hold parties were scarce. Last August, Cassandra had been able to visit with Emma at least, but now Emma was in the country too.

  All of this left her with too much time to ponder Ambury’s unspoken insinuations. She was all too tempted to sell the earrings to someone else and to hell with Ambury. Unfortunately, it was unlikely she would get the same price from someone else, and she badly needed every penny those earrings would bring.

  That Sunday Cassandra pondered her dilemma while she drank lemonade on the terrace where she sat with Aunt Sophie.

  “The weather is too hot even for August,” Aunt Sophie said. She looked up from her book and gazed out at the riot of color in the flower beds. Those plantings knew no restraint and possessed a lush, vivid beauty, much like Sophie herself.

  “Of course, not nearly as hot as that August that I spent in Naples. Goodness, I was naked the better part of most days, and all of the nights, back then, but still the heat was not to be borne. Although, perhaps it felt especially warm that month because of Leonardo.” She puzzled over it for a moment, then smiled to herself at the memory and returned to her book.

  Cassandra had never heard of Leonardo before. There had been other men who had made other months unseasonably warm for her aunt over the years, and Cassandra was enough aware of them to take mention of Leonardo in stride.

  She watched the pages of Sophie’s book turn with regularity beneath a few dangling curls of her aunt’s fashionably dressed, graying dark hair. Obviously her mind handled the content of that book perfectly. Nothing supported Gerald’s claim that Sophie’s faculties had become impaired. True, her aunt lived a peculiar, reclusive life now, but after all of the Leonardos, perhaps that was to be expected. A woman with such a colorful, energetic past might be tired by the time she reached sixty-four years in age.

  “Aunt Sophie, how much money do you have?”

  “Not enou
gh to lend you any, dear.” Sophie did not even look up from her book. “That is what is meant when it is said one has a respectable income, as I do. There is enough for a decent, if modest, life, and even the occasional luxury, but never enough to make ill-advised loans.”

  “I do not want to borrow. I was thinking that if, between the two of us, we had enough, we might sail to the Continent before autumn sets in.”

  “There is a war on the Continent. Paris is out of the question, and I have no desire to visit Vienna now that Franz has married. It would be bad form for me to do so.”

  Franz was another Leonardo, a man from Sophie’s past. “Perhaps Naples then, or—”

  “I never thought I would say it, but I have had my fill of travel. Besides, I gave you most of my jewels, and there is little else to pawn.”

  “I believe it would be healthier if we went to the country, at least. Perhaps we can visit the lake district.”

  “I am touched by your concern for me, but you worry too much.” Aunt Sophie no longer read her book. Rather she peered over and read Cassandra. Her handsome face firmed while her eyes turned remarkably shrewd. “Your brother does not frighten me, Cassandra. He will never be so bold as to make a move. Should he find the courage to try, your mother will stop him.”

  Cassandra did not think they could depend on either of those assumptions. Gerald had developed an arrogance during the last few years that exceeded anything she ever expected to see. As for their mother—Aunt Sophie did not need to know how often Mama wrote letters scolding Cassandra for living under Sophie’s roof and influence.

  Cassandra patted her aunt’s hand, as if agreeing with her. The skin of that hand felt very thin and cool, and the hand itself frail. Sophie had aged rather suddenly, the way that women did sometimes when time caught up with them. The face under Sophie’s lace-edged cap still reflected the great beauty she had been, however, and her eyes, while paler now, often contained the sparks of wit and life that had made men by the score fall in love with her.

  Two years ago, Cassandra would have never doubted that Aunt Sophie could keep Gerald at bay with one withering joke. Today, however, that hand felt very small and her aunt seemed vulnerable, and indeed in need of care and protection.