“I’m not certain you’ll be any more comfortable astride,” St. Clare said, his gaze riveted to her stocking-clad legs. They were slim and shapely, culminating in a well-turned pair of ankles.
“As comfortable as you are without a saddle.” She straightened her skirts and her cloak, concealing as much of her legs as she was able. “That’s better. Now you won’t have to hold me so tightly.”
His arm came back around her waist. “I like holding you tightly.”
“For six more miles?”
“Forever.” He rubbed his cheek against the silken softness of her hair. “That was the plan, anyway.”
She covered his arm with her own. Her head was tucked just beneath his chin, the feminine curve of her back nestled snugly against his front, fitting so perfectly to his body it was an agony.
“You frightened me tonight,” she said.
“Did I?”
“A little.”
He nuzzled her cheek. “It seemed to me that you got right into the spirit of things.”
“I was frightened when you wouldn’t stop pummeling Fred. You looked quite wild. As if you’d kill him with your bare hands.” She frowned up at him. “And you had no care at all for your injury. I thought the pain of it might stop you eventually, but you didn’t seem to regard it.”
“No more than Fred regarded his wound. It’s often the way when a man’s blood is up.” St. Clare had felt it, of course. The stitches had pulled, and there was a burning pain, as if some of them had burst. It had been the least of his worries.
As for Fred, he had seemed to wince and grunt with extra vigor whenever St. Clare connected with his shoulder, but Fred’s arm had worked well enough. He’d had no difficulty throwing punches—and landing them, too. St. Clare would be lucky if he could move tomorrow. He was already aching in one hundred different places.
“Do you still hate him so very much?” Maggie asked.
“No,” he said. And then, grudgingly, “Yes. In that moment at the tavern, I did hate him. It all came back to me. The injustice of it. What he did to me—and what he’s done to you. I’m afraid I lost my head.”
An understatement.
When Fred had insulted Maggie in the taproom, something had snapped inside of St. Clare. He’d been overcome with the urge to spill Fred’s blood. To make him suffer the way St. Clare had suffered. The way Maggie had suffered.
“Yes. You did.” She turned her face to his. “It was rather thrilling.”
He smiled. “I thought you said you were afraid?”
“I was. Thrilled. Frightened. I do believe this has been the most exciting night of my life.”
A laugh rumbled in his chest. “You mad creature. What am I to do with you?”
But he knew precisely what to do.
He found her lips in the moonlight and kissed her softly, deeply. Her mouth yielded to his, lush and sweet. His heart thudded hard.
“I’m a Honeywell,” she said. The words were a mingled whisper of breath as she kissed him back with warm, half-parted lips, making his blood sing. “We can’t help enjoying a bit of danger.”
“That was more than a bit, my love.” He kissed her swiftly once more before guiding his horse back onto the road. Enzo fell in step beside them. “At any moment, one of those men in the tavern could have turned on us. Or worse. Not to mention the fact that you might have killed Lionel’s valet.”
“Neither possibility is very likely,” she said. “Firstly, I’m an excellent shot.”
“True,” he acknowledged.
“And secondly, those men recognized you as soon as we walked in the door. I didn’t think of it then, but your resemblance to your father must be quite striking indeed.”
“Uncanny, apparently.”
“Quite. And Gentleman Jim is all but a folk hero to those villains. Naturally they’d take your side in a quarrel. Especially if your adversary was someone like Fred or your cousin, coming into the place and threatening to summon the magistrate of all people.”
“Fred is a fool. He’s always been a fool. That doesn’t make him any less of a threat.” St. Clare’s mood darkened. “He’s going to make things very difficult for you, Maggie.”
“He’ll try.”
“We must marry at once. As soon as I can procure a license.” He wanted her away from this place. Away from Fred and the malice of the Beresfords. Somewhere St. Clare could keep an eye on her. In his bed to start with.
“Of course we must. But in the meanwhile, I won’t let him drive me from my home, not one single minute sooner than Papa’s will requires. Beasley Park is still mine for the time being. And the first thing I’m going to do when I return is to eject your cousin and his mother from the premises. I want them out of my house by dawn.”
“By all means. But we’re not going to Beasley Park.”
She wiggled around in front of him, attempting to meet his gaze, even as he urged his horse into a canter. “We’re not?”
He shook his head. “We’re going to the Hart and Hound.”
Maggie stood in front of the fireplace, warming her hands over the freshly kindled blaze. The Hart and Hound was nothing at all like the Crossed Daggers. It was a respectable inn run by respectable people—people who were slavishly deferential to the earl and his grandson.
Indeed, when Maggie and St. Clare had arrived, the husband and wife proprietors hadn’t been at all cross about being rudely awakened from their beds in the early hours before dawn. Instead, they’d averted their eyes from St. Clare’s battered face, from his torn shirt and blood-stained waistcoat, and all but bowed him and Maggie into a private parlor.
After seeing her settled there, St. Clare had withdrawn almost immediately to speak to his grandfather. Ten minutes passed before he returned to her, washed, groomed, and wearing a fresh suit of clothes.
Her pulse gave a little leap, just as it always did whenever she first laid eyes on him.
But he wasn’t alone.
Lord Allendale entered the private parlor after him. “Miss Honeywell.”
“My lord.” She curtsied. The room was lit by the fire, and by a branch of candles. The flames flickered and snapped, casting patterns over the earl’s face, making his already unwelcoming expression look almost sinister.
“This is a fine mess the pair of you have got us into,” he said. A wooden table graced the center of the parlor, four straight-backed wooden chairs arrayed around it. Allendale drew one out and sat down. “A public declaration of my grandson’s former identity? In a hedge tavern, no less?”
St. Clare pulled out a chair for Maggie. As she passed him to sit down, their bare hands brushed, fingers tangling for the briefest instant. It sent a rush of warmth through her belly, making her knees go weak.
She didn’t dare meet his eyes for fear of blushing. “No one of importance was there,” she said to the earl. “No one save Mr. Burton-Smythe and Mr. Beresford.”
“Burton-Smythe might be persuaded to keep silent. He has your reputation to think of. But Beresford? That duplicitous jackanapes and his mother will have the tale in all the papers by morning.”
St. Clare sat down in the chair next to her. “It is morning.”
Allendale’s frown deepened. “You must have taken leave of your senses. To be out all hours brawling, and with a lady in tow. Is this the outlandish behavior you inspire in my grandson, ma’am? And you. Look at yourself, sir. Cut and bruised. Your lip split and your eye blackened like a criminal of the lower orders. Haven’t I told you that nothing can be learned from digging up the past?”
“But we did learn something.” Maggie looked at St. Clare in confusion. “Didn’t you tell him?”
Allendale’s gaze narrowed. “Tell me what?”
St. Clare ran a hand over his face. “It’s nothing. Old rumors about my father and mother.”
“What rumors?”
Allendale asked.
St. Clare was silent.
Maggie understood why he might be reluctant to share the results of their investigation. She, however, felt no such inhibitions. “I believe there’s a chance that Lord St. Clare’s parents may have been married.”
“What?” Blood surged in Allendale’s face. He turned on St. Clare.
The innkeeper chose that inauspicious moment to enter with a tray. “Beg pardon, my lords. I’ve brought tea and some seed cake for you.” He set the tray on the table. “The wife can make you breakfast if you’d rather. Some eggs and sausage, or porridge if—”
“That will be all,” St. Clare said.
“Yes, your lordship.” The innkeeper bowed. “Apologies for interrupting.” He bowed again, backing himself out of the room. The door clicked shut behind him.
There was a second of silence as the man’s footsteps receded down the hall. And then, once again assured of their privacy, Allendale asked, “What do you mean my son may have been married?”
“It’s nothing,” St. Clare said. “Just something Miss Honeywell has surmised from a remark made by my late mother.”
“A deathbed remark,” Maggie said, on her dignity. “And that isn’t all. There’s more.”
With that, she proceeded to tell the earl everything Jenny had said when she was in the final hours of her illness, and everything they’d since discovered about Father Tuck, including the latest bits of information gleaned from Mr. Mullens.
After she’d finished, Allendale was quiet for a long moment. When at last he spoke, it was to utter a single word: “Devonshire.”
Maggie nodded. “That’s what Mr. Mullens said. He could be no more specific.”
“It doesn’t mean anything,” St. Clare said. “Nothing but the ramblings of a dying woman and an aged former tavern keeper. It’s a false hope, at best.”
“You disagree, Miss Honeywell?” Allendale looked at her steadily, as if her opinion mattered as much to him as that of his grandson. “You think there might be something in this business about this Devonshire clergyman?”
Maggie cast a troubled glance at St. Clare. He’d lived an entirely different life since they’d parted. Had become a man of elegance and sophistication—a well-read and well-traveled gentleman, far outside the realm of her own experience.
But this reluctance of his to entertain the idea that his parents might have been married was no mystery. It was pure Nicholas. The anxiety of a boy who had been disappointed too many times in regards to his family. A boy who wouldn’t permit himself to hope.
“Yes,” she said carefully. “I think there might be something to it.”
Allendale’s brows lowered.
Maggie took a breath. “What if Father Tuck married Jenny and Gentleman Jim—that is, Jenny and your son. And what if, after they were wed—after your son left England, Jenny went into the Crossed Daggers and saw Father Tuck there, falling down drunk? The men in the tavern laughed at her for thinking he was a clergyman, which might have led her to believe it had all been a prank. That she wasn’t married to your son at all. He was known for playing pranks on people, wasn’t he?”
Allendale said nothing. Neither did St. Clare. Both men were somber and still, not moving a muscle. The tea tray sat between them, untouched. A ribbon of steam drifted from the spout of the teapot, swirling up toward the beamed ceiling.
Maggie went on. “Mr. Mullens said that Jenny left after that, and that they all assumed she’d returned to her parents’ farm. But by the time she arrived at Beasley Park, she was in a dreadful condition. Not only with child, but half starving, my father said. As if she’d been wandering a good long while. By that time, she believed her baby was illegitimate.”
“And you suggest that my son would have married a gel like that? A tavern wench?” Allendale scowled. “Impossible. He must have known he would come home one day. That I would forgive him. To have attached himself to such an unsuitable female…” He shook his head. “No. Not James.”
“Might he have done it out of spite?” St. Clare asked. “To punish you for casting him off?”
The question hung in the air for a moment. It had a strange effect, changing the very atmosphere around them. As if the suggestion opened a Pandora’s box of painful possibilities.
“Spite?” Allendale echoed at last. Something in his face seemed to crumple. A light in his gray eyes dimming slightly, as if he had absorbed a blow. He grew smaller before Maggie’s eyes, and for the briefest moment, looked every bit of his age. “He might have done.”
Maggie averted her gaze. She felt as though she were witnessing a private moment. One she wasn’t meant to observe. The moment when the Earl of Allendale fully accepted that his late son had been a rogue and a villain, not merely a lad who had gone a bit wild.
“I was too hard on him,” Allendale said. “After he killed Penworthy’s boy. It was the final straw, I told him. I was washing my hands of him. But the breach wasn’t meant to be permanent. He was still my heir. Still my son.”
“You didn’t drive him away,” St. Clare said quietly. “And even if you did, he was a man grown. A man with a child of his own on the way. He could have come back. He should have done, if not for you, then for me.”
Allendale cleared his throat. “No point being maudlin. We are where we are. And you, Miss Honeywell—” He fixed her with a look, no longer soft with memory but hard with disapproval. “You have no business being abroad at this hour. I’ve ordered my carriage to see you home.”
“Thank you, my lord.” She affected a meek expression. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“My grandson and I will call upon you tomorrow. I trust you mean to proceed with this dinner party of yours?”
Maggie blinked. “You still intend to come?” She flashed St. Clare an alarmed glance. He looked as bewildered as she was. “Mr. Burton-Smythe will be there, and so will his father.”
“And that idiot son of my second cousin’s,” Allendale added. “And his mother.”
“You’re wrong on that score.” St. Clare’s mouth hitched in a fleeting smile. “Miss Honeywell means to cast them out.”
Maggie flushed. “Well, I did think I might.”
“Nonsense,” Allendale said. “Let them remain for the moment. I would see them all when I arrive tomorrow evening. Every last scheming one of them.”
Maggie didn’t relish the prospect. “If that’s what you wish but…it’s bound to be uncomfortable for all concerned.”
“Exceedingly so,” Allendale replied, “more for some than for others, I’d wager.”
The next day, at seven o’clock precisely, St. Clare arrived at the front door of Beasley Park, dressed in an impeccably cut black evening suit with a light-colored waistcoat and elegantly arranged cravat.
Maggie met him at the threshold. She looked behind him, down the stone steps and over the torchlit drive. There was no sign of the earl’s carriage. Nor of the earl.
A flicker of apprehension quickened her pulse. “Where is Lord Allendale?”
St. Clare’s expression was grim, made worse by the heavy bruising that had emerged on his face. He had a spectacular black eye, and a cut on his brow and on his lip. “Gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?” A footman approached, but Maggie waved him away. She let St. Clare into the hall herself, shutting the door behind him.
“I have my suspicions.” He scanned her face. “How are you?”
“Perfectly well.”
“Your guests haven’t been bullying you?”
“No. That is, Fred has been a trifle difficult. He called earlier, and then again this afternoon, trying to speak to me alone, but Jane refused to budge from my side. Fred was very nearly ready to throttle her.”
St. Clare’s mouth curved. “God bless Jane Trumble. And what of my meddling relations? Have they been difficult?”
“Not exactly. Not to me, at any rate. They’ve kept to their rooms for much of the day. I fear they’ve been writing letters, spreading the news of your identity to all and sundry. They came into the drawing room this evening looking as satisfied as two cats who had just stolen the cream.”
St. Clare didn’t appear at all worried. Indeed, he seemed far more concerned about Maggie’s well-being than his own. “I would have come sooner, but I thought it better to let tempers cool. Otherwise we might have had a reenactment of that unfortunate scene at the tavern.”
“Lord, I hope not. Things are quite tense enough without adding another brawl to the mix.”
Tense didn’t begin to explain it.
On returning home in the earl’s carriage, Maggie had gone straight to Jane and told her all. Jane had been an absolute brick, sitting up with Maggie until dawn. She’d also been a little hurt that Maggie had been keeping such an enormous secret. That she hadn’t trusted Jane enough to confide in her.
“It wasn’t my secret to tell,” Maggie had explained.
Jane had professed to understand. But Maggie couldn’t help feeling as though her friend was disappointed in her.
Fred was disappointed in her, too. Terminally disappointed. This evening, when he’d arrived for dinner, he’d fixed Maggie with a contemptuous glare, condemning her without saying a word.
She didn’t have to guess what he was thinking. He’d said it plain enough at the tavern. She was a light-skirt. A ruined woman. Someone who had thrown her innocence away on a scoundrel, and whose reputation was now past the point of recovery.
“It doesn’t matter about any of them,” Maggie said. “My only concern is for you.” She searched St. Clare’s eyes. There was an expression in them that was hard to read. “Will your grandfather be joining us later?”
“I don’t know. He left no word for me. He was already gone when I awoke this morning. According to the innkeeper, he departed in the early hours, shortly after I retired to bed. Just climbed into his carriage with his luggage and…” St. Clare shrugged.
Maggie’s heart clenched. The earl had abandoned him. Now that St. Clare’s true identity had been exposed, Allendale had no more use for his grandson. No more affection for him either, it seemed. As if St. Clare were as disposable as a piece of counterfeit paper. Something that, once revealed to be a fake, had no value at all.
Gentleman Jim Page 28
