“Yes, of course I do.” She slid the shoes into the trunk, and shut the lid with a bang. “Under the right circumstances.”
“Isabella is very disappointed not to be going to Lady Elizabeth’s party.”
Carmen sighed. “Yes, I know. She was inconsolable. But I told her there would be no other children there, and she would be very bored.” She sat down at her dressing table and picked up a hairbrush, only to put it back down again. Her hands simply would not be still. “Do you mind staying in Town alone for a few days, Esperanza?”
Esperanza shook her head. “Not a bit! The little one and I will have a splendid time. I have promised her we could have ices at Gunter’s again, and go to that Astley’s you told her about.”
“She will adore that!” Carmen picked up the brush again and ran it quickly through her hair. “I simply could not take her with me this time.”
Peter was sure to be there, and she was not at all prepared to tell Isabella’s father of her existence, even though she knew it would have to be done. If only she could be certain of Peter’s reaction ...
One day she would tell him. Just not yet.
“Pardon me, Condesa.”
Carmen looked up to find Rose, their new housemaid, standing in the doorway, her arms filled with flowers. “What is it, Rose?”
“These just came for you, Condesa.”
“Thank you. Just put them down by the bed.”
There were two bouquets: one a large mass of deep red roses, one a posy of lilies in a delicate silver filigree holder. Carmen plucked the note from the roses.
“They are from Robert Means,” she told Esperanza. “How very sweet!” Such a gentleman, even after a rebuff.
She placed the card down carefully on her dressing table, eyeing the looped handwriting thoughtfully. Robert did seem so very guileless, so full of admiration for her ...
“Well?” Esperanza said, her voice impatient.
“Well, what?”
“Who are the others from?”
Carmen put aside the roses and reached for the other note.
The words were scrawled across the paper, bold and black. “I must speak with you—Peter.”
“Rose,” she said, not lifting her gaze from the note. “Can you have the footman take a message to Clifton House for me?”
“Yes, of course, Condesa.”
“Have him tell the earl I will meet him at three o’clock in Green Park.”
Chapter Ten
Peter saw her before she saw him, and he pulled his horse up, hidden behind a tree, to watch her.
She was perched sidesaddle on her gray mare, graceful in a deep purple velvet habit. Her face was half hidden by the small net veil of her tall-crowned hat, but she was smiling as she watched a group of children frolicking.
Peter remembered then the first time he had ever seen her. She had ridden her horse hell-for-leather through their encampment in the middle of a quiet afternoon, the plumes on her outrageous, wide-brimmed green hat flying. Never had he seen anyone more dazzlingly alive.
He had thought on the night he married her that no woman could ever be more lovely. Yet he had been wrong, because the years had only made Carmen more beautiful. More elegant, more alive.
She looked up then, and found him watching her. At first her gloved grip tightened on the reins, and he feared she would flee before he said what he had come to say. Then she raised one hand and beckoned him nearer.
“Hello, Peter,” she said quietly as he drew up beside her.
“Hello, Carmen.”
“I was rather surprised to receive your flowers and your note.”
“I wanted to apologize,” he said, watching her hands as she fidgeted with the reins.
“What? The famous Ice Earl is apologizing yet again?” She laughed. “Whatever for?”
“For my behavior at the Carstairs rout, of course. Causing such a ridiculous scene. It is not at all like me; I cannot fathom what came over me.”
“No, it is not like you. But then, we find ourselves in such a very unusual situation. I am not at all certain what the proper behavior should be.”
“Quite right. But Elizabeth has been at great pains to point out how foolish I have been. I have been rude to you, have endured sleepless nights trying to think what could have gone wrong all those years ago. Then I realized that Elizabeth’s advice that I simply ask you makes a great deal of sense.”
Carmen’s dark gaze was wide and unwavering behind the veil. “So that is why you asked me to meet you? To ask me what happened?”
“Of course. What else could it be?”
“I—well, I thought you were here to obtain an annulment.”
“An annulment?”
“Yes. In order to make a proper offer to Lady Deidra. It would be quite the scandal if the Earl of Clifton was discovered to be a bigamist, yes? And divorce is so protracted.”
To his great horror, Peter felt a flush spreading across his face. He coughed and looked away from her steady regard. “Er, well, we should take things one step at a time, don’t you think?”
“Certainly.”
“And I think the first step ought to be a clearing of the air between us. We must let the past go before we can truly look to the future.”
“Yes,” she murmured. “The future. We cannot speak properly here, though.”
He almost expected her to invite him to her town house, but she fell silent. “Would you care to come to Clifton House? Elizabeth has gone out shopping with her friend Georgina Beaumont, so we can talk quietly.”
“I think that would be best.”
Carmen was not exactly sure what she had been expecting of a house with such a grand name as Clifton House. Marble halls and gilded ceilings, perhaps. Yet what she found instead was a house she herself might have decorated and lived in.
It was large to be sure, but there was no gilding and very little marble. Instead, the floors were brightly polished parquet, overlaid with brilliant red and blue Persian rugs. The furnishings in the vast foyer were heavy carved medieval pieces. A large oversize Velazquez painting hung on the wall, no doubt a souvenir from the war. There were no dainty little gold and satin Parisian chairs, or Dresden shepherdesses.
She could almost have thought herself home again.
“Your home is lovely,” she said as he led her down a small hall into his book-lined library.
“You sound surprised, as if you expected me to live in some dusty mausoleum of an ancestral pile.” He held out a chair for her beside the fireplace.
“I am not surprised.” Her gaze went to the portrait of Peter that hung above the mantel; it was a wonderful painting, completely lifelike, to the very glow in the ice-blue eyes. “Is that one of Elizabeth’s works?”
“Indeed it is.”
“She is very talented.”
“My sister is the finest portraitist in England,” he answered with a note of rare pride in his voice. “Would you care for some sherry, Carmen? I have some particularly fine Amontillado.”
She smiled. “You remember.”
“Of course I remember you like sherry. Very dry, right?” He poured some of the brownish-red liquid into a crystal goblet and pressed it into her hands.
“But then, I remember many things about you, Carmen.”
She took a long sip of the sherry, relishing the warm bite of it at the back of her throat. She had a feeling she was going to be in great need of it for the afternoon ahead.
“So,” she said, “you wish to know what happened in Spain, on the day we parted?”
“Please.”
She looked up at him, at his serious, beautiful face. “Then, I will tell you. And after, you can believe what you will. You will know the truth—all of it.”
Then she put aside her glass, folded her hands in her lap, closed her eyes, and told him the whole sorry tale of her capture by Chauvin. Of being shot and tortured. Of how she in turn killed Chauvin, and made her escape.
She relived every bit of the pai
n and despair of that dark afternoon.
She fell silent when her tale ended; she stared down at her hands, so neatly folded in her lap, and tried not to break down in helpless sobs. She had not thought of that time in a very long while; it had been almost the worst day of her life, and she had never, ever wanted to think of it, let alone speak of it, again.
The very worst had been that day, weeks after she had fled the French encampment, when she had stumbled into a hospital and discovered that her husband was dead. Then all the pride, all the fortitude that had kept her moving forward, had quite broken down, and she had almost wished that Chauvin had killed her.
If she had not carried Isabella, the most precious gift, inside her, she did not know what she would have done.
Only when she was very certain that she would not start crying, did she open her eyes and look up at Peter.
He stared out of the window, half facing away from her as he watched the street below. What she could see of his face was expressionless, as pale and perfect and composed as a Renaissance statue.
The faint, very faint hope that Carmen had allowed herself to feel, the hope that he would believe her and all would be right again, now tasted like cold ashes in her mouth. There was too much time, too much anger between them. They could never again be the couple who danced on riverbanks, made love on army cots.
She had known, of course, that those days could never return. But she had harbored the hope, so very deep inside that she had not even known it until now, that the people they had become could find a common ground. A place to begin again.
Now, in the face of his silence, that hope faded.
She schooled her own features into a careful, almost mocking smoothness, and reached for her gloves.
“Well,” she said, rising to her feet. She was not at all certain her shaking legs could support her, but, through willpower, they did. She lowered the veil of her hat to cover her face again. “I will incommode you no longer, my lord. I certainly did not mean to bore you with my long tale.”
“I looked for you.”
His voice, low and thick, stopped her from leaving the room as she intended. She looked back at him, the sunlit room now hazy behind the veil. “What did you say?”
“I looked for you, after I recovered from my wound. I was meant to be invalided home to England, but I had to go back and see what had become of you.”
He looked at her, piercing her with pale blue eyes that were now nothing like ice. They were pure blue flame.
Carmen fell back onto her chair. “What did you find?”
“I found the priest who had married us. He was the only person left within miles. He told me that the remains of the French regiment had been ambushed, wiped out by partisans after a Spanish woman died there. A Spanish noblewoman.” His hands fisted on the window sash, his knuckles white. His gaze never wavered from her face. “You, I thought.”
Carmen pressed her hand to her mouth. She had not known, had not wanted to know what occurred at Alvaro after she had left there.
“You did not know,” Peter said.
“No. I went home to Seville. I was ill, I needed to recover.” To give birth. “Then, when the war was over, I left Spain and began my travels. I could no longer bear the memories of my home.”
“Did you find what you searched for on those travels?”
Carmen shrugged. “Not yet. But I do have one thing I would like to ask you, Peter.”
“What is that?”
She pushed back her veil, and looked him full in the face. “If the Spanish partisans did not believe me to be in league with the French, and indeed sought vengeance for my death, then why did you?”
He came and sat down in the chair across from her, his golden hair haloed in the setting sun. “The fact that I saw you riding away with Chauvin was not the only evidence I had of treachery, Carmen,” he said quietly.
“What else could there possibly have been?”
“Someone told me that you had—had been Chauvin’s lover in Seville, that you had shared secrets with him, news of the British Army.” His gaze fell away from her in shame. “I was drunk, grief-stricken. I fear I believed it true, and went on believing it for all these years.”
Carmen’s chalk-white fingers clutched at the arms of her chair. She shook her head, disbelieving. “Who? Who told you such vile lies?”
“It was—Robert Means,” Peter whispered.
Carmen’s jaw sagged. She fell back against the chair, no longer able to remain upright. “Robert? How can that be? He just called on me this morning, to express his—admiration. Why should he do such a thing?”
“I could not say. Jealousy, perhaps.”
“Jealousy?”
“That you loved me, and not him, I suppose.”
“But what proof did he present?”
“He had recently been to Seville. He said he had heard it from a friend of yours, Elena, oh, I cannot recall ...”
Carmen’s jaw tightened. “Granjero. Elena Granjero.”
“Yes. He said she was your best friend, that she had told him because she so hated the French.”
“Ha!” Carmen laughed humorlessly. “Elena did not have two thoughts to put together in her head. She thought the French so dashing in their blue uniforms. Oh, we were friends at school, but we hardly spoke after the French invaded Spain.” She drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair, her mind racing with the thought of all the treachery that had surrounded her.
Yet even as she shook her head in disbelief, she could see the awful logic of it. A girl with no conscience who had been jealous of Carmen’s young marriage to the Conde de Santiago, and a man jealous of her love for Peter.
She berated herself roundly for her utter lack of suspicion, her blindness—she, who had built her life on correct judgment of the motives of others had not seen Robert Mean’s perfidy at all.
And it had cost her greatly.
In the silence that followed these revelations, Peter came to her and knelt on the floor beside her chair.
His hands, those long, elegant hands she had dreamed of for so many lonely years, reached for the tiny ebony buttons that marched up the front of her habit. He began to unfasten them, beginning with the one on the high collar. He paused at each button, as if to give her time to utter a protest, to stop him.
She did not protest.
He peeled back the close-fitting bodice and the thin silk of her chemise, to reveal the pink, puckered scar at her shoulder. The jagged mark of Chauvin’s bullet.
Then, as she held her breath, he leaned forward and touched the scar with his warm, healing mouth.
Carmen cried then, hot tears that fell unchecked down her cheeks, dripping from her chin onto his bent head like a new baptism of truth. She placed her hands on his shoulders, felt their tremble beneath the wool of his jacket. And she felt love, love she had thought gone from her life forever.
“I am so sorry, Carmen,” he said, his voice echoing against her skin. He leaned his cheek against her bare shoulder. “So very, very sorry. I can never say that to you enough.”
“Peter,” she murmured. “Querido. If only you knew how many things I must tell you ...”
The library door opened, Elizabeth and Nicholas standing on the threshold. They gaped at the tableau before them, Carmen half dressed, Peter kneeling before her with his face pressed to her bosom.
Carmen was so frozen she could not even pull her bodice closed. She could only gape at them in return.
She saw Elizabeth’s face, grinning in delight, in the instant before they shut the door and left.
Soon after Carmen’s ignominious departure from Clifton House, with her bodice buttoned crookedly and her cheeks stained with tears, Peter himself left the house. He meant to pay a very important call indeed.
On Robert Means.
When Robert opened the door to his lodgings, Peter wasted no time on preliminaries. He grabbed Robert by his shirtfront and shoved him back against the wall. Robert’s booted feet da
ngled from the floor, and he flailed helplessly against Peter’s iron grasp.
Robert was a strong man, from all the riding and walking he did in the country. But Peter had always been stronger, and now he had the fire of his fury behind him. He did not even notice the effort it took to keep Robert pinned against the wall.
“Wh-what is this, Clifton?” Robert gasped. His voice was rather faint, due to the fact that his shirtfront was pressed to his larynx.
“I have come to defend a lady’s honor,” Peter replied calmly. “Surely you have been expecting this.”
“What lady?”
“Why, how many ladies have you so defamed? How many ladies have you spread vile falsehoods about?” Peter pressed harder, until Robert’s face went quite purple. “Or have you lost count?”
“No, Clifton! I ...”
“I refer, of course, to only one lady. My wife.”
“Your wife? Carmen?”
“Just so.” Peter released Robert, and watched as he fell into a heap on the floor, gasping. “I demand satisfaction.”
Robert stared up at him. He struggled to his feet, but was careful to stay a goodly distance from Peter.
“You are challenging me to a duel?”
“Did you, or did you not, tell me the lie that Carmen was Chauvin’s lover and a French spy?”
Robert turned away. “I—I suppose I did. But I did not know it was a lie!”
“Then, I have no choice. Name your seconds.”
Robert slid back down the wall to a seated position, his face hidden in his hands. His shoulders shook, and Peter suspected he was crying. Or shamming it.
That was a bit discomposing. What was a gentleman supposed to do when the man he had just challenged to a duel burst into tears? Peter was not at all certain, having never fought a duel before.
He reached for a straight-backed chair, swung it about, and straddled it, crossing his arms across the top. “Oh, for pity’s sake, don’t cry, Robert.” He tossed him a handkerchief.
Robert wiped at his face and looked up, still not meeting Peter’s gaze. “I never meant for it to be like this. I thought her dead.”
“Oh, so it is quite all right to sully a dead woman’s reputation?”
Scandalous Brides Page 27
