Lady in Blue

by Lynn Kerstan

  “Gotta talk, Bryn,” he stammered. “Now.”

  Max bowed. “Under the circumstances, I’ll be on my way. Until tomorrow, Caradoc.”

  When he was gone, Lacey seized Bryn’s elbow and drew him into the private room. “We’ve got trouble, old man. Ernestine is back.”

  “So what? Lucky for us we moved Clare yesterday.”

  Lacey shook his head. “She knows. How much, and from what source, I’ve no idea, because Isabella swears she hasn’t said a word. But Ernie wants to see the two of us tomorrow afternoon, me at one o’clock and you an hour later. We’re in it up to our eyebrows. Got to get our stories straight.”

  “You think we can bluff her? Not a chance.”

  Slumping onto a chair, Lacey buried his head between his hands. “Wouldn’t be surprised if she knew everything already.”

  After some consideration, Bryn shrugged. “What does it matter?”

  Lacey raised his head, a woebegone expression on his face. “My aunt can slice a roast at twenty paces with her tongue. Easier for you, Bryn. You ain’t family. Well, most ways you are, but you never come to the house at holidays, so you don’t know what it’s like when everybody’s mad at you.”

  “I should think you’d be used to that by now, Lace. But you are right on one count. I have no wish to get on the bad side of the duchess.”

  “Already are. Thing is, what do we tell her?”

  “The truth, I expect. It will be easier to remember. There is no reason,” he added pointedly, “to volunteer details.”

  “Face it, she’ll have everything out of me before you get there. At least we can say with a straight face that you never slept with Clare while she was in residence.”

  Bryn frowned. “As to that, perhaps we need to agree on a definition of terms. The night Elizabeth stayed there, so did I. After you left, I realized I’d stranded myself.”

  “What? You bedded your mistress right under Ernie’s roof?” The viscount loosened his cravat. “I might as well sign onto the first ship bound for the Indies. Suggest you come along, Bryndle. We’re both doomed.”

  “I slept with her, Lace. In her room and in her bed, but nothing more.”

  “You think Ernie will believe that? Hell, I don’t believe it.”

  “I hardly believe it myself, but that’s how it was. A deplorably innocent affair.” Bryn sighed. “Don’t worry, I’ll take full responsibility for everything. I am responsible.”

  “Not for Beth. I did that.”

  “And Ernestine will commend you for it. Do the best you can and, if she asks, deny being aware I stayed there overnight. I’ll confess to that, unless I figure out she doesn’t know.”

  Lacey rose and stared down at him with a grim expression. “Two o’clock, and don’t be late. I’ll meet you here when it’s over, to compare notes. Assuming we are still alive.”

  16

  The duchess kept her nephew well past the allotted hour, while Bryn cooled his heels in the foyer. When Lacey finally emerged, wiping his brow with a handkerchief, he waved a hand in a gesture of futility and stumbled past without a word.

  A broken man, thought the earl with some amusement as he headed down the long hall to the library. But nothing Ernestine could do or say would possibly affect him. He was not, as Robert had pointed out, family. After an unpleasant few minutes, during which he would apologize sincerely, he’d be on his way.

  Everything would be different had the duchess returned one day earlier, to find Clare in this house. He shuddered to think of it. Not for the world would he want Clare subjected to one of Ernie’s tirades. But the two women would never meet, thank the stars.

  The duchess had chosen to conduct her inquisition from behind an imposing desk of vaguely oriental design. When he came into the room, she glanced up from some papers she was studying. “I’ll be with you in a minute, Caradoc. Do sit down.”

  With a theatricality he admired, she had placed a spindly hard-backed chair directly in front of her desk to increase the discomfort of her victims. He arranged his long body in a pose of apparent disinterest, with legs stretched out and arms folded across his chest.

  He had not seen her for years, but she never really changed. Tall, thin, and angular, her gray-streaked blond hair clipped in a mannish bob, she was the most eccentric of the unconventional Laceys. Decades ago, she’d come to stay at Heydon Manor after her husband was killed at Santa Cruz. Ernie, who freely admitted she married Roger Fitzwalter only for the independence his money gave her, had chafed at the bit while the period of mourning dragged out. That was, coincidentally, the happiest time of Bryn’s life, the last year before his father came home to die. He was eleven, Robert ten, and the two of them ran mad together.

  Robert’s parents rarely disciplined their children, and Bryn privately considered Lace and Izzy a tribute to loose reins. But Aunt Ernestine was less tolerant of their misdeeds, although she never raised a hand to them. A beating would have been preferable to the way she picked a miscreant apart flaw by flaw and left the pieces writhing on the floor.

  It was almost twenty-five years since she’d called him on the carpet for some prank, but his mouth felt similarly dry and his fingers twitched. This is ridiculous, he thought, watching her through narrowed eyes as she pretended to ignore him. He was a grown man. Damned if he’d be intimidated.

  “If I apologize humbly, and with remorse,” he drawled into the silence, “you will be free to read your letters without an audience.”

  The duchess pushed her round wire-rimmed glasses up her nose. “Still insolent, after all these years. You astound me, Caradoc.”

  “I doubt that,” he replied easily. “But I have offended you and abused your household. For that I am genuinely sorry.”

  “I intend to make certain you are. Did you actually hope to escape with a few glib words and without an explanation?”

  “I assumed you’d have sucked Robert dry by now. Surely there is nothing I can add to the story. But I am curious how you found us out. We took great care to conceal our presence here.”

  She tapped a finger on the table. “Thank heavens you were not a strategist on Wellington’s staff. We’d have lost the war.”

  “I was a strategist with Wellington,” he murmured uncomfortably. Did she not know that? But of course she did.

  “Indeed? Since you were unable to smuggle one female in and out of this house without the world knowing about it, however did you manage to put anything over on Bonaparte?”

  His collar began to feel tight. “Two females. There were two.”

  “Under the circumstances, Miss Landry was welcome, and that situation is nothing to the point. I am only surprised Robert had the presence of mind to hide her here. My business with you concerns a bit of muslin.”

  “Clare,” he said icily, “is not to be insulted. She did not want to stay in your house, but I assured her you would not object so long as we were discreet.”

  Clasping her hands on the desk like a headmistress, she regarded him as she might a schoolboy who had sneaked a frog into the classroom. “And what did you imagine I’d think, returning to find my staff happily recounting an extended holiday while the neighbors carried tales of unmarked coaches and men skulking in and out through the back door?”

  “Nosey old gossips. The fact is, I’d nowhere else to put her until Clouds was refurbished.”

  She harrumphed. “Your mistress is too refined for a hotel?”

  He swallowed an oath. “I wasn’t altogether certain this house was prime enough for the young lady. But we made do.”

  “Hoity-toity.” Ernestine bit back a smile. Caradoc’s arrogance never failed to divert her. She also remembered the brave young man too proud to accept help as he tended his dying father. Bryn had tried desperately to protect Owen Talgarth from humiliation and spare his friends the horrors he endured all those years.

  She had respected him then, far more than now, and preferred the boy who struggled to restore the family fortune to the self-indulgent c
reature he became once he succeeded. Not that she blamed him. She was only sorry for it.

  During her long, silent appraisal, Caradoc began to wriggle slightly on his chair. Again, she suppressed a smile. “What should be your punishment, I wonder?”

  He sat straighter. “Whatever you decide, Your Grace, reserve it for me. Lacey is not to blame, because this muddle was all my doing. Tell me how I can make it up to you and I will, although I never imagined you’d give a fig for the scandal.”

  “What scandal?” she inquired serenely. “I have lived in this house nigh forty years, and my neighbors are as close-mouthed as they are observant. What they saw was conveyed to me only. If word is out elsewhere, it is due only to your ham-handed conduct.”

  He frowned. “If I understand you,” he said carefully, “I am here not because your reputation has been in any way compromised but only so you can ring a peal over me.”

  “Precisely. And because the neighbors could only report what transpired in the alley behind the house. I want to know what went on behind closed doors. And how it was you and Robert dared to stash a Cyprian in my home. Heydon never did have good sense, but I hadn’t thought you’d risk the Talgarth reputation, what’s left of it, with a bumble-broth.”

  The earl studied the tips of his polished boots. “Nor I,” he admitted. “The situation was … unusual. And I assure you, Miss Easton was not my mistress while she remained in your house. She came here, and left, as innocent as Miss Landry.”

  “Balderdash. That defies all credibility.”

  “As I said, the situation was unusual.” He chuckled. “And not at all to my liking. So, now that you are acquainted with the facts, what do you intend to do?”

  “Make further inquiries,” said the duchess with a glint in her eyes. “I shall meet this mysterious Clare Easton and determine if she was a suitable houseguest. If I approve her, you may yet escape my wrath.”

  Bryn came to his feet and leaned over the desk, his palms flat against the lacquered ebony wood. “Clare is not to blame, in any way, for this tangle. I’ll not have her subjected to one of your inquisitions.”

  “You forget who I am, Caradoc.”

  “And you forget I am no longer a child.”

  “Indeed? From where I sit, you have behaved exactly like a randy young buck with no thought beyond the satisfaction of his own pleasures. Brynmore, you are a great disappointment to me. I expected better things, after an admirable beginning, although I do not wholly fault you. Nevertheless, it is past time you consider exactly what you have become.”

  Straightening, he gave her his most imperious stare. “What I am, or what I do, is none of your damned business.”

  “Now stamp your foot, there’s a good boy. I do so enjoy a tantrum.”

  Feeling suddenly breathless, Bryn lowered himself onto the frail chair. “I am beginning to admire Lace for walking out of here on his own two feet,” he muttered. “But under no circumstances will I introduce you to Clare. It is out of the question.”

  “Are you ashamed of her?”

  He fixed the duchess with a look that would have shattered anything less solid than granite. “Leave her alone,” he said in a commanding voice. “She hated staying here and was terrified you would find out. I don’t want her to know that you did.”

  “So that’s how it is.” With an ominously smug expression, Ernestine leaned back and waved her hand. “You may go now.”

  He regarded her suspiciously. “What does that mean?”

  “Heavens, boy, all words of one syllable. You may go. Now. I’m done with you.”

  He felt he’d just lost the game without ever knowing the rules. “You’ll stay away from Clare?”

  She rose and stared down her nose at him. “Like you, impertinent young man, I shall do exactly as I please. And if you’ve a remnant of good sense you’ll hie yourself out of here before I ask why the tapestry in my salon is torn to shreds, and why the carpet smells as if something pissed on it.”

  Without another word, Bryn made a hurried exit.

  A few minutes later, Ernestine stepped into her carriage and directed John Coachman to the house on Half-Moon Street where Bryn usually stored his mistresses.

  THE HARLOT, ERNESTINE decided, was far more poised than Caradoc or her reprobate nephew had been.

  With consummate grace, Miss Easton invited her surprise visitor into a tastefully fitted salon lined with bookshelves, requested refreshments, and sat regally on a Sheridan chair with her hands clasped in her lap. She seemed not at all apprehensive, gazing at the duchess with the unblinking calm of a young woman physically in the room but otherwise very far away.

  “I trust you enjoyed my hospitality,” Ernestine said, reaching for a biscuit.

  “Your home,” Clare replied in a soft voice, “is vastly intriguing. Like a map of the world in art. I felt everything there had been chosen for a special reason, because it meant something to you. Although I saw only a few rooms, your touch was everywhere. What an interesting life you have led.”

  Ernestine caught her breath, sensing a blow to the heart. “Liked it, did you? When you come to call, I’ll show you the rooms you didn’t see. Most everything was under Holland covers, but I’ve antiquities the British Museum would pay a pretty penny to own, not counting what I brought back from this last trip. Shame to take them out of the country, of course, but they’re not being properly cared for now. One day, I hope to send them back.”

  “Certainly they must be preserved,” Clare agreed sedately. “His lordship took me to see the Elgin marbles, and I was horrified to think of them being cut up for building blocks like so many other Greek temples. We are fortunate the war did not reach here and destroy our own heritage. I expect Napoleon would have carted off the Tower of London, if he’d got the chance, and reconstructed it on the Champs-Élysées.”

  A harlot with an appreciation of history. Ernestine bit her lip. Were she introduced to this young woman at Almack’s, she’d have been taken by her intelligence and good breeding.

  Clare felt her heart beating wildly and wondered if the duchess could hear it. She had never in her life been so nervous, not even when Bryn commanded her to remove her clothes. For that, she had prepared herself, but the ordeal seemed trivial compared to sitting across from this imperious aristocrat who had every reason to despise her.

  “I won’t bite you, girl,” said the duchess, as if sensing her agitation. “It was fortunate I was from home when you required the use of my house. To be frank, I’d not have welcomed you there, which would have been my loss. But as things played out, we shall now have the opportunity to become friends.”

  At that, Clare’s poise dissolved. “Indeed, we cannot,” she stammered. “I never expected to escape easily, whatever Lord Caradoc and the viscount said. Men see only what they wish to see. Of course you must be angry with me, and furious that I violated your home. I only hope my being there will not reflect badly on you, and cannot think what to do except beg your forgiveness.”

  “For now,” said the duchess, holding out a small plate, “you must have something to eat. One is always uncomfortable chewing alone, don’t you think? And I cannot resist Eccles cakes. Indulge me, for I’ve just come from where such treats are unobtainable.”

  Reluctantly, Clare picked up a cake and nibbled it, her gaze lowered.

  “It has been my profound pleasure,” Ernestine continued, “to strip a piece from the hides of Caradoc and Heydon. The earl was somewhat less humbled than I intended, but he is a difficult man to stagger. My nephew crumbled immediately and will not make so free with my abode in future. Although he does not know it, he is to inherit everything—with the provision he cherishes my antiquities and sends them home when times permit. I would rather you did not let him in on the secret. The boy is overfond of gaming, and I don’t want him wagering on his expectations before I’ve popped off. If he ever grows up, takes a wife, and sets about a decent occupation, there will be something for his old age and his children. A good man,
my nephew, but he’s not got his feet on the ground.”

  Clare regarded her blankly, nonplussed by the confidences entrusted to her.

  “As for Caradoc, he has his two feet planted firmly in a rut. It never ceases to amaze me how long a stubborn man will continue on a given road before realizing it does not lead where he wishes to go. Bryn chose his direction when he was barely out of short pants and has never looked back. Now he’s stumbled into a mire, which may be his salvation.” She took a sip of tea. “I am making no sense to you at all, I daresay, but you must know that all Laceys are passing mad.”

  Clare had no idea how to respond to that. “I am surprised to hear that you spoke with him today. The earl told me he would be leaving town on business.”

  The duchess grinned. “My summons took precedence, and rightly so, but no doubt he is on his way as we speak. I expect he will keep his distance as long as possible. In the meantime, we can become better acquainted.”

  “Surely that is impossible,” Clare murmured helplessly. “You must know what I am.”

  “I do not. Nor does Caradoc, and neither do you. So while we all stumble about in the dark, let us at least hold hands. Come for luncheon tomorrow. I shall invite Isabella, for Robert told me that you and she have become great friends. The three of us will have a pleasant coze together.”

  Clare rose and crossed to the window, clutching her skirt with both hands. Indeed the Laceys were mad, all of them. Robert and Isabella treated her as an equal, although she was so far beneath them she scarcely breathed the same air. Now this forbidding and oddly charming woman offered her own friendship. To a whore.

  It made no sense. She didn’t understand. She stared into the small garden, eyes burning.

  The duchess came up behind her. “You must learn to trust, Miss Easton. I would not lie to you.”

  “Of course not.” She sucked in a deep breath. “But what am I to do?”

  “Whatever I say. Caradoc would tell you I am relentless. And since he is headed out of town, you are free to spend the day with me tomorrow.”