The Many Sins of Cris De Feaux (Lords of Disgrace)

by Louise Allen

  Send whatever intelligence you can find—and especially anything about Chelford’s relationship with his aunt, Miss Holt, of this address, and his inheritance of her estate after her death.

  He put down the pen and stared out of the window as he ran through the things he wanted Gabe to find out.

  He wished he could ask him to send down a couple of burly Bow Street Runners, or better still, a couple of doormen from one of the tougher gambling hells, but they would stick out like daffodils in a coal cellar down here. Then his eyes focused on the stony track and he smiled. Of course, that would kill two birds with one stone. He dipped the pen again.

  You recall that little incident in Bath and our two Irish friends? If you can locate them and send them here with their equipment, I have use of both their old trade and their willingness to use their fists.

  All correspondence should be directed to Mr C. Defoe.

  He folded and sealed the letter, addressed it to The Earl of Edenbridge, then folded it within a second sheet and addressed that to his solicitor in the City, sealing it for the second time. However scrupulous his hostesses might be about other people’s correspondence, there was no need to raise questions over letters to the aristocracy.

  ‘Thank you, Collins. If you take that down I am told someone will take it to the receiving office in the village. That will be all for the moment.’

  Alone, he got up and prowled around the room as he finally allowed himself to think about Tamsyn and that kiss. It was like unravelling tangled string, sorting out what he felt, what he ought to feel, what she wanted—what was right. She was not an innocent, but neither was she experienced with men other than her husband, he could tell that. Whatever she had been doing since Jory Perowne’s death, Tamsyn had not been sharing the beds of any local gentlemen. This was a tiny, unsophisticated community where everyone knew everyone else’s business and where a reputation lost would be common currency within hours. If this…attraction…flirtation…madness…whatever it was, went any further, then he would have to be very careful indeed.

  And what was he thinking of anyway? Part of his anatomy was sending him very clear signals indeed, but it had been months since he had lain with a woman, not since he had set eyes on Katerina. He could simply be suffering from an attack of lust, which was something very different from what he had felt for Katerina. To have even thought of another woman while he was seeing her every day had been impossible. But she was far away and unobtainable and always would be, and he, as he kept reminding himself, was not cut out for celibacy.

  Cris sat on the window seat and stared at a clump of gorse. It was sentimental tosh to feel that kissing another woman was disloyal to Katerina. She had never been his, he had never been hers, they had never spoken the words he read in her gaze, that he felt in his heart.

  But the desire he felt for Tamsyn was shaking his certainty about his feelings for Katerina. Was it love? He felt uncomfortable with the doubt. It had certainly been more than pure lust. But was desiring Tamsyn just a selfish need to lose himself in a passionate encounter that he would walk away from in a few days?

  Perhaps he should tell her who he was. Cris examined the idea and realised he was enjoying the freedom too much. For the first time as an adult he had none of the burdens of his title on his shoulders, none of the demands or the expectations. He was just Cris, a man who was attracted to a woman and who saw the need to protect her from the danger that threatened them. It would do them no good to know who he was, only make them feel awkward.

  The whole thing was academic, anyway. He had kissed Tamsyn as though he was about to rip off her clothing, there and then in the hallway. He had almost had her standing up against the door, like some drab in a back alley, and he had topped off a thoroughly unpolished performance by informing her that she was not from the sophisticated world he inhabited. If Tamsyn would give him the time of day next time they met, then it was more than he deserved.

  Something moved on the road. Cris focused and saw it was Jason, a satchel slung on his shoulder, riding up the track. The mail was on its way. Now he just had to remind himself who he was, what he was, and somehow recapture the man he had been before that wild impulse had sent him off the road at Newark, driving across country into oblivion.

  *

  There was absolutely nothing like a pile of account books for setting a woman’s feet firmly on the ground. Or, in the case of the farm’s accounts, in the mire. Nothing was adding up this afternoon, not the price of oats, not the farrier’s bill, not even the egg money. Tamsyn gritted her teeth, turned over a sheet of paper covered in crossings-out and started again. All that was wrong with her, as she was very well aware, was that her brain was off with the fairies, her body was pulsing with desire and more than half her attention was focused on listening for footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘Letters, Mizz Tamsyn.’

  She jumped, sending her pen in one direction, the account book in another and a large ink blot on to her page of calculations. ‘Jason, you startled me.’

  ‘Sorry, Mizz Tamsyn.’ He came into the room and emptied the contents of the satchel on to the table. ‘You were daydreaming, it looked like.’

  ‘Er…yes.’

  Dreams of night, not of day. Of beds and rumpled sheets and mindless pleasure. And impossible dreams. There had been a moment as she daydreamed that she had heard wedding bells. And that would never be. Her stomach cramped with remembered pain and she bit her lip before she could turn back to the waiting groom.

  ‘Thank you, Jason.’ She dabbed at the spreading blot, made it worse, screwed up the whole sheet in sudden exasperation and began to sift through the pile of post. Several newspapers, two days out of date, a notification from the circulating library that three novels she had asked for were now available. Several bills, including another from the farrier, an invitation to dine at the vicarage in a week’s time when the moon was full and the roads consequently less hazardous, and a letter with their solicitor’s seal.

  Something about leases, or perhaps an answer to her query about buying that small warehouse in Barnstaple she’d had her eye on. The heavy paper, expensive, like Mr Pentire’s excellent services, crackled as she broke the seal and started to read.

  ‘What?’ The shriek hurt her throat, but that did not stop the next words being wrenched out. ‘The swine. The utter, unmitigated swine.’

  There was a thunder of boot heels down the stairs, Aunt Izzy’s cry of, ‘Tamsyn? What is wrong?’, then the door flew open to reveal Cris with, of all things, a pistol in his hand.

  ‘What is it?’ He cast one searching look around the room, then strode in, jerked her out of the chair and into the curve of his arm. ‘Who was it? Where did they go?’

  Aunt Izzy hurtled into the room, gave a cry at the sight of her niece in the clutches of a man holding a gun, and collapsed into the nearest chair. ‘What happened? Why do you have a gun?’

  ‘What gun?’ The question came from the doorway where Aunt Rosie, grim-faced and clutching the poker in one arthritic hand, clung to the doorpost.

  ‘There is nobody, Aunt Izzy, please be calm. Cris, put that thing down and let me go. Aunt Rosie, let me help you.’

  He beat her to the doorway, taking her aunt gently by the arm and thrusting the gun into the waistband of his breeches. ‘It isn’t loaded, which is more than I can say for this poker. Do let me take it, Miss Pritchard. Mrs Perowne, what provoked that scream?’

  ‘Pure temper.’ She picked up the letter and flapped it at them. ‘This is from Mr Pentire, our man of business. Our bankers wrote to him because they had received information that we were about to withdraw all our funds to meet sudden and unexpected debts. In effect, that our credit was no longer good. And half today’s post is bills—word must be spreading. Pentire has reassured the bank, but now we may expect a flood of demands for payment of all our accounts and it may take months for confidence in our credit to be restored.’

  All energy gone, Tamsyn sank down in the chair and d
ropped the letter.

  ‘Can you afford to meet all your creditors in full?’ Cris asked.

  ‘Yes, I never let accounts run on and we always settle up completely. Luckily we are almost at quarter-day when the rents will come in. But it is the principle of the thing and it will put doubts into the minds of people who do not know us well. This must be the work of Franklin, I cannot believe anyone else has a grudge against us and would do a thing like this.’

  ‘But Franklin can have no grudge,’ Aunt Izzy protested. ‘I know you do not like him, dear, and I have to admit he is a sore disappointment as a nephew, but—’

  ‘But nothing,’ said Aunt Rosie. ‘Tamsyn’s right. The man wants us out of here. I just wish I could work out why.’

  ‘We are not moving and that is that,’ Aunt Izzy said, with remarkable firmness.

  ‘Forgive me, but does your right of possession here rely upon your residence?’ Cris hitched one hip on the table edge and looked round at the three of them. ‘If you move away, what becomes of Barbary Combe House and the estate?’

  ‘I retain ownership and the revenues,’ Izzy said promptly.

  ‘And your nephew knows this?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘So he would not gain control of it until, forgive me again for being so blunt, your death?’

  Izzy gasped, Rosie went pale. Tamsyn got a firm hold on her panicking imagination. ‘But Franklin offered you a house on his estate, Aunt Izzy. I agree he wants us out of here, but I do not think he is too worried about the estate as such. The farms brings in enough for our needs, but hardly the sort of income that will rescue him from some financial crisis, and land prices are very poor, so selling it would hardly help either.’

  She looked at Cris and found his gaze fixed on her face. Of course, there was Jory’s mythical treasure. If Franklin got them out of the house he could helpfully supervise getting it prepared for tenants—all to help his dear aunt Isobel—and search to his heart’s content. ‘There is no need for alarm about your personal safety, Aunt Izzy.’ She directed a narrow-eyed look at Cris, daring him to say any more. ‘I have organised some watchers for the livestock and we are quite secure down here. Any stranger would be spotted a mile away, we are so remote.’

  ‘Of course. I am being over-cautious, and over-imaginative, too.’ Cris stood up. ‘I am sorry, Miss Holt, ladies, for alarming you.’

  ‘No need for that.’ Aunt Rosie was brisk. ‘You talk a lot of sense, we should take more care. Help me back to the drawing room, Isobel. No, you stay here.’ She waved a twisted hand at Cris as he came forward to help her. ‘Soothe Tamsyn’s ruffled feathers before she calls Franklin out for his idiocy.’ She gave a wicked little cackle of laughter. ‘I would lay several guineas on her being the better shot.’

  Cris closed the door behind her and turned back. ‘My apologies.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For alarming your aunts…and for what happened in the summer house.’

  ‘They are made of sterner stuff than it might seem,’ she said. ‘And nothing happened in the summer house.’

  ‘That, perhaps, is what I should be apologising for.’

  Chapter Nine

  Now, perhaps, was the moment to be bold, to reach out and admit, frankly, that she would welcome him as her lover, that she wanted him, that he had nothing to fear from her, that she would not cling or make demands. But that shadow—the one that had killed the heat of desire in his eyes—that haunted her. She would not be a substitute for another woman, nor would she demand he forget.

  ‘There is nothing to apologise for in behaving like a gentleman.’ She shrugged and smiled, making it light, slightly flirtatious. Unimportant. ‘I was uncertain and you, very thoughtfully, did not press me. Now, if you will excuse me, I must finish these accounts or we really will be in a pickle if any more demands for payment come in.’

  She thought he was going to offer his help with the books, but a smile, as meaningless and pleasant as her own, curved his mouth and he nodded. ‘Of course. I will leave you in peace.’

  Tamsyn stared at the account books for a long while after he had gone. The path of virtue was the right one to take, and the least embarrassing, as well as the decision that would carry no risks at all, for either of them. Safe.

  ‘Safe is dull, safe kills you with rust and boredom,’ Jory’s voice seemed to whisper in her ear.

  ‘Take care,’ she had pleaded with him so often. ‘Do not take risks.’

  ‘Risk makes your blood beat, fear tells you that you are alive,’ he would respond with that charming flash of teeth, the smile that was as enchanting as Hamelin’s Piper must have been. The smile he had given her before he had turned and sprinted for the cliff edge and oblivion.

  And risk made you dead, Jory, Tamsyn argued back now, in her thoughts.

  Yes, his voice seemed to echo back. But I lived to the end.

  *

  A week later Cris was still installed in the back bedchamber, Collins had his feet firmly under the table in the kitchen and both of the older ladies protested strongly whenever Cris suggested that he really should be moving on. Not that he wanted to, not until he heard from Gabe and had a clearer idea of what Chelford might be up to, and not until his surprise for Aunt Rosie arrived.

  The ladies insisted he call them Aunt Izzy and Aunt Rosie, exclaimed with pleasure over each small service he did for them, made a great fuss over him—even when he tangled Izzy’s knitting wool into a rat’s nest or beat Rosie at chess. He needed a holiday, they insisted, and his presence was as good as one for them, too. Again, as it did almost every day, the truth was on the tip of his tongue, and once again he closed his lips on it. Hiding his identity was becoming dangerously addictive, like losing himself in drink, and he justified it to himself again, as he did every time. He needed the rest, he was doing no harm to anyone.

  The only blight on this amiable arrangement was Tamsyn. She protested that they should not detain him, that he must be bored or uncomfortable or, when he choked over one of her more blatant attempts to dislodge him one dinner time, in need of a London doctor.

  None of this made him want her any less. He found himself in a state of arousal which long punishing walks along the cliffs, or up through the woods, did nothing to subdue. If he couldn’t stop reacting like a sixteen-year-old youth soon he was going to have to resort to several cold swims a day. That particular form of exercise he had been avoiding, wary of encountering Tamsyn, who apparently saw no reason to curtail her own daily swims just because there was a man in the house.

  He wanted her, he admired her spirit and her directness, her love of her aunts, her work ethic, her courage and her humour. Taking her as his lover would be healing, he sensed, provided he could manage a short-lived affaire without harming her in any way. On the other hand, finding a bride, plighting his lifelong fidelity and affection, that was another matter altogether. That would be a betrayal of Katerina. As soon as he thought it he felt uncomfortable, as though he was dramatising himself and his feelings. But if he was in love with Katerina…

  He came in through the front door that morning after an unsatisfactory, brooding, walk on the beach, trying to conjure up the memory of Katerina and finding it damnably difficult, and found Tamsyn in the hallway arranging flowers in the big urn at the foot of the stairs. ‘Can I be of any help? That looks heavy.’

  ‘It will be staying here, thank you for offering.’ A polite smile, a polite exchange, a not-very-polite urge to sweep the basket of foliage on to the floor and take her here and now, on the half-moon table amidst the flowers and the moss.

  Cris pushed the fantasy back into the darker recesses of his imagination, from whence it should never have escaped in the first place, and took the stairs to his bedchamber two at a time. Increasingly he found it difficult to be in Tamsyn’s company and pretend there was nothing else he wanted beyond a polite social friendship.

  Collins was sorting out laundry and managing to take up most of the space in the roo
m in the process. ‘I’ll be out of your way in a moment, sir. I’ve just got to put these shirts away, the rest can wait.’

  ‘No, carry on.’ Cris took off his coat, tugged loose his neckcloth as he went to stand in the window embrasure and stare out over the roofs of the stable yard to the steep lane. Someone was coming, a rider, low-crowned beaver hat jammed on over windswept curling black hair, and behind him the roof of a carriage was just visible with, strapped on top, something that looked like a giant coffin with windows.

  It was Gabriel. He had come himself without warning, riding into a situation he knew hardly anything about and quite apt to let all of Cris’s secrets out of the bag if he wasn’t stopped. Cris threw up the casement, climbed over the sill and dropped the ten feet to the rough grass path behind the house.

  ‘Sir!’ He looked up to see Collins leaning out. ‘May I assist, sir?’ He kept his voice to a discreet whisper. It was not the first time both he and Cris had left a building by way of the window and Cris suspected that the valet enjoyed missions where there was a strong element of cloak and dagger work as much as he did.

  ‘Lord Edenbridge is riding down the lane, I need to head him off.’ He was off, running, before Collins could reply, shouldered his way through the narrow gap in the shrubbery behind the house and sprinted up the lane past the entrance to the service yard.

  Gabriel reined in, his hand on the hilt of his sword, the moment Cris emerged. The horse, battle-trained, went down on its haunches, ready to kick out, then Gabriel relaxed, clicked his tongue and the horse was still.

  ‘My good fellow,’ he drawled as Cris arrived at his stirrup. ‘I am looking for my friend Cris de Feaux. Elegant, well-dressed gentleman, a certain dignity and refinement in his manner. Anyone answering to that description around here?’