Lady Gwendolyn, fully occupied in trying to rein in her tender, slightly wine-befogged emotions, merely nodded her agreement. Sophie happily turned back to the jewelry box, intending to locate the triple strand of pearls she remembered her ladyship wearing the other evening to Almack’s.
And there it was.
Not the necklace, although it was in the drawer, pushed to the back in the haphazard way Lady Gwendolyn had about her jewelry.
Sophie put out her hand and lifted Isadora Waverley’s garnet brooch from the deep blue velvet, turning toward the windows while presenting her back to Lady Gwendolyn, the better to inspect the piece of jewelry, the better to think.
She’d seen other strange things in Lady Gwendolyn’s chamber over the past days. A paperweight fashioned of thick glass, with a gold coin suspended inside. A lovely thing. Odd that it had been stuck in Aunt Gwen’s shoe cupboard rather than displayed on a table.
There had also been that small, carved, jade elephant she’d seen in the curio cabinet in the drawing room her first day in Portland Square, seen the next day on Lady Gwendolyn’s night table, and the third day back downstairs, on display inside the curio cabinet once more.
And then there was the snuffbox, the one with the initials Q.R.T. engraved on its lid. Sophie had passed that off as a gift from a long-ago admirer, or something her ladyship had admired and picked up in some secondhand shop.
Which didn’t explain the snuffbox’s disappearance the very next day, or the fact that Peggy, her ladyship’s maid, seemed to make a fairly thorough inspection of her mistress’s chamber each morning, as if looking to locate something that had been mislaid and needed to be found.
“Oh, dear,” Sophie breathed quietly, recognizing the signs. After all, she had Giuseppe, who also had a way of seeing things that caught his fancy, and then picking them up.
She turned the brooch in her fingers, the stone hot and all but throbbing brightly, guiltily against her skin. How had Her Ladyship said it the other day, when they’d all gone for their drive in the Park? Oh, yes, she remembered now. That’s a lovely brooch you’re wearing, Miss Waverley. I do so adore garnets. May I have it?
“Oh dear, oh dear,” Sophie whispered again, tucking the brooch into the pocket of her dressing gown, then turning about to smile brightly at the darling old lady she’d already come to adore. Quickly snatching up the pearls, she made a great business of opening and closing the many drawers of the jewelry cabinet. She pretended to be having trouble locating the earbobs that went with the necklace, but all the time she was hoping against hope she wouldn’t discover other bits of admired property.
At the same time, she was already planning just how she would return the brooch to Bramwell’s fiancée without Isadora, not a stupid woman, taking it into her head that the duke of Selbourne’s aunt was a common thief.
Or worse.
After all, Isadora could, and without censure, believe that Lady Gwendolyn was mad. Dotty. Insane. She could prevail on her husband to have the woman sent to the country, away from the London Society she so loved. Perhaps even have her incarcerated in one of those asylums people found to house inconvenient, embarrassing relations.
Because, obviously, Lady Gwendolyn’s penchant for admiring, then taking things, did not begin and end with rearranging the contents of Portland Square. There was the snuffbox, for one. And now Isadora’s garnet brooch. Lord only knew what else was secreted here, in the lady’s bedchamber, cached where Peggy’s daily inspections failed to find all that had been hidden.
Should she tell Bramwell?
No. What was the sense of that? He probably already knew. After all, who else would have commissioned Peggy to do her daily searches? What a good man Bramwell was, to be so kind to his aunt, who doubtless had no idea her nephew had discovered her admiring tendencies.
Sophie’s gentle heart swelled at the thought of the duke of Selbourne’s affection for his aunt, the difficulties he must endure finding ways to replace the snuffboxes and other trinkets his aunt must surely pilfer wherever she went. For Lady Gwendolyn probably indulged herself whenever something took her fancy, just as Giuseppe often fancied shiny things, crackly things (like the paper upon which the infamous wager had been penned), pretty little things that made the palms itch to hold them.
Well, at least Bramwell didn’t have to know about Isadora’s brooch. She’d save him that embarrassment. It would be easy enough for Sophie to return the thing herself, saying she’d found it lying on the carpet in the drawing room, or stuffed down a cushion somewhere. Isadora wouldn’t question her. Why should she? The clasp on the brooch might very easily have slipped open, allowing the piece to fall and become temporarily misplaced.
Yes, that’s what she’d do. And then she’d have a little talk with Peggy about Lady Gwendolyn’s shoe cupboard, and the paperweight stuffed behind a pair of half boots. She didn’t know where it belonged, but its owner must miss it.
“Did you find the earbobs, Sophie?” Lady Gwendolyn asked, having poured and then drunk a second glass of wine while Sophie was arguing with herself.
“Indeed I did find them, Aunt Gwendolyn,” Sophie said, returning to her chair and placing the jewelry on the table that sat between them. “But do you know what? We never did look through that mass of jewelry I brought with me, did we? We’ll have to do that tomorrow, yes? I think I owe you a garnet brooch.”
Lady Gwendolyn frowned. “A garnet brooch? Do you know, Sophie, I think I might just have gotten one of those.” She sighed, obviously content, her belly warm with wine. “But a woman can never have too much jewelry, can she, Sophie?”
“Never, Aunt Gwendolyn,” Sophie agreed, pouring herself a second glass of wine, for her own nerves were still a bit unsteady. “Especially when a woman is preparing to dazzle a man such as the estimable Sir Wilford, yes?”
“Pshaw!” Lady Gwendolyn said, blushing to the roots of her gray hair even as she fought a yawn, so that Sophie began to think the lady would be snoring in her bed long before the curtain rose at the theater that night. “Oh, Sophie, how glad I am you’re here. Don’t go away, please. Don’t ever go away. Because you’re so right. We’re here to be happy, aren’t we? Ah,” she ended, closing her eyes as Sophie bent to push a footstool close, for her ladyship’s feet, “there is nothing more to desire of the world than to be happy.”
Sophie located a shawl at the bottom of Lady Gwendolyn’s bed and gently tucked it across the woman’s shoulders before tiptoeing out into the hallway, leaving the lady to her nap—and herself with Isadora’s garnet brooch tucked up in the pocket of her dressing gown.
Sophie went looking for Bramwell before dinner but could not seem to run him to ground, even when she’d dared to look for him in his own chambers—not that Sophie really thought such things to be daring. She had, however, then spent a few fruitless minutes attempting to hold a conversation with his grace’s valet, Reese.
As she walked down the staircase, on her way to the drawing room, she still wondered how one man could possibly be so nervous. She’d been watching Reese off and on since her arrival in Portland Square, as he had such queer ways about him. Amusing. Although, or so it seemed, not to him. Starting at shadows. Always knocking three times before entering a room, always entering that room slowly, peeking behind the door as he entered, as if some bogeyman might be hiding there to jump out at him. Strange man, Reese. Perhaps if she spent some time with him, talking to him, she could discover a way to make him less tense. She would, that is, the moment he seemed more comfortable around her, and not as if he’d just seen a ghost.
Sophie walked into the drawing room, still on the lookout for His Grace, but found only Mrs. Farraday. The woman would knit forever, for Heaven only knew what purpose, and be happy as a clam dug deep in the sand.
“Good evening, Mrs. Farraday!” Sophie called out loudly, then stepped right up to the lady and waved a hand in front of her face, just to make sure she had the woman’s attention.
Edith Farraday looked u
p at her ward, her smile tentative, her eyebrows climbing on her forehead as if this maneuver, that tended to make her look permanently startled, would help open up her ears. “Miss Sophie,” she shouted, laying her needles in her lap, “is it time for dinner, then? I’m hoping for a standing rib tonight, I must confess.”
Mrs. Farraday didn’t have to confess to anything, Sophie knew, because the woman’s appetite was quite obvious to anyone who had ever shared the table with her. For a thin woman, a very thin woman, she could probably eat an entire cow at every sitting, with room left over for two slices of pie. “I think Cook said something about veal tonight, I’m afraid,” she answered, trying to keep her own voice somewhere below a bellow, as Mrs. Farraday spoke seldom, but always with enough force to command an army to charge, probably so that she could hear herself speak.
The already arched brows climbed higher. “You’re afraid the cook steals?” she asked in a near shout. She shook her head, clucking her tongue in time with each sad shake. “Well, then, that puts paid to my standing rib, don’t it, Miss Sophie?”
Sophie bent and hugged the old lady, kissing her cheek. What a dear she was. The shoemaker’s penniless widow probably still didn’t have the faintest idea why she and Desiree had rescued her from the local poorhouse and set her up as Sophie’s guardian. And she didn’t care, either. She had just stood still for fittings for her new gowns, sat when she was told, gone where she was told to go and, as long as she had her knitting, never asked more of life than a clean bed to sleep in and a good standing rib at least once a week.
“Ah, how touching,” Bramwell drawled from the doorway, and Sophie straightened, turning to go meet him halfway as he walked into the room. “The guardian and the grateful ward,” he whispered. “Strange, it seems more like the dear, oblivious lady is a beloved pet, rather like Giuseppe and Ignatius. Lord knows you treat her like one, almost as if your roles were reversed. Is that why you’re so grateful, Sophie? Because Mrs. Farraday may be your guardian but, in reality, it is you who guards her?”
Sophie grinned. “No need to whisper, Bramwell,” she said, deciding to be as informal as he, since it seemed that they had cried friends the other night at Almack’s—not that he had gone out of his way to be in her presence these past days. Perhaps he didn’t enjoy being part of a crowd? “Mrs. Farraday couldn’t hear you from here if you were to cup your hands around your mouth and shout until the chandeliers shook.”
Bramwell eyed both the distance and Mrs. Farraday owlishly as that woman went back to her endless knitting. “You’re jesting.”
“No, I’m not. Go ahead,” she encouraged him, an imp of mischief invading her, hopefully invading him as well. “Go on. Try it.”
His Grace stood for a moment, his head tilted to one side as if considering what he should do, then he called out in his robust baritone: “Mrs. Farraday—run! The room is on fire!”
Three alarmed footmen raced in from the foyer, eyes wide and frightened, reluctantly ready to battle the blaze. Bramwell immediately looked abashed.
Sophie collapsed in giggles into a nearby chair.
And Edith Farraday just kept on knitting.
“My turn,” Sophie said, as a rather red-faced Bramwell apologized, then shooed the footmen back to their posts. She got up and walked closer to Mrs. Farraday. “His Grace has just offered to set me up as his mistress, Mrs. Farraday!” she said loudly, but not too loudly—for the footmen had already heard more than enough, hadn’t they? “He says he longs to ravish me tonight until my eyes roll up in my head!”
Edith Farraday lifted her head and smiled vacantly at the duke. “No, no, Your Grace,” she bellowed. “Don’t be distressed. My eyes are quite fine, thank you. I always knit in this light.”
Sophie grinned triumphantly even as Bramwell unsuccessfully tried to bite back a laugh, then told her that she was poking fun at a poor, innocent old lady who could not help that she couldn’t hear anything below a violent clap of thunder.
“Oh, no, no!” Sophie protested as she gently helped Mrs. Farraday to her feet. She then gathered up the woman’s knitting and the bag she kept with her at all times, all the while pantomiming the sound of the first dinner gong going, so that the old woman knew it was time to go upstairs and prepare for the evening meal.
As Sophie watched her guardian leave, a spring in the old woman’s step as she contemplated swallowing down whatever the thieving cook had left them to eat, she explained: “I would never make fun of Mrs. Farraday. She’s the sweetest thing, and I consider myself lucky to have her as my guardian. And, as she didn’t hear me, there was no harm done, now was there? I was only proving my point to you, Bramwell. And perhaps funning with you a little, yes? At least you’re smiling now. You weren’t when you came in, you know. In fact, you still seem rather on edge. Shall I pour you a glass of wine?”
She watched as his expression cooled, and he opened his mouth to freeze her with an automatic refusal. But he stopped himself, smiled, and agreed that she could fetch him a glass, and one for herself while she was at it, so they could sit and have a comfortable coze.
Phrases such as “comfortable coze” did not trip lightly from the duke’s tongue, so it was probably those words that alerted Sophie that all was not well. Was very much less than well. She’d never be quite sure exactly what had warned her. But one thing was obvious: Bramwell was not a happy man. Therefore, she immediately set out to make him happy again, for his own sake as well as hers. Mostly for hers, if she wanted to be strictly honest about the thing.
As she poured the wine and carried the glasses and sat down on the couch and motioned for him to join her—all the time smiling openly while secretly measuring the depth of his unhappiness, his discomfort—she chattered nineteen to the dozen about the afternoon just past.
She told him of her various suitors. She gave a wonderfully visual recreation of Giuseppe’s antics, including the tug-o-war that had resulted when one of her callers had refused to give up his poem to the monkey. She informed him that he must be prepared for an onslaught of suitors asking for permission to court his aunt.
And Bramwell never laughed. He never smiled. Not once. He didn’t even pick up his glass. He just sat there, very politely, looking at her, and making her feel as if he were waiting until she ran down, until she had no more silly stories to tell—and then he was going to say something dreadful. Something awful. Something Sophie was certain she did not wish to hear.
It had to have been the kiss. That’s what had done it. He hadn’t wanted to kiss her; she knew that. She also knew he’d wanted to kiss her again since. A woman, she’d decided, just knew these things. And, probably, he wanted to do more than kiss her. That’s what men did. That’s what, as she’d come to determine from her readings of her maman’s journals, from Desiree’s lessons, men thought women were put on this earth for in the first place—to accommodate men and their need for kisses—for more, always for more.
The duke must be going out of his mind with wanting her. Wanting her as his father had wanted her mother. Except that Bramwell Seaton, Ninth Duke of Selbourne, was not his father. What his father had done had shamed him, and he’d probably rather face a firing squad at dawn than believe himself capable of repeating what he saw as his father’s weakness.
How could her mother have believed it wonderful to be desired? It was terrible; terrifying! Even more terrifying was to desire in return, for Sophie could not deny that she was attracted to Bramwell. Attracted to him as a man of intelligence, of compassion, even of a rather delicious humor—when he forgot to hide it.
Panic seized her. Sophie didn’t want to leave Portland Square. She didn’t want to leave Aunt Gwendolyn and all the other wonderful people she’d met since coming to London. But to leave Bramwell?
The romantic heart she’d always sworn she did not possess began to ache inside her breast. Her ears rang; she felt dizzy. Fear slid its tentacles around her, gripping her, hurting her, stealing her breath. The pain she’d vowed never to feel slamm
ed into her all at once, robbing her of everything she’d yet to possess.
Was this how her mother had felt when the uncles had said their good-byes? Hollow? Frightened past all reason? Lonely, once again to be alone? Love did not exist. Sophie knew that, believed that. Therefore, she couldn’t have unknowingly tumbled into love with Bramwell Seaton. She couldn’t. But, oh, how she very much did like him. How very much she did, God help her, desire him. Yearn for his touch, his kiss.
“Sophie, there’s something I must say to you, tell you,” Bramwell said at last, when she’d subsided into nervous silence, when they both had been silent for endless moments, nerve-snapping moments, He took her hand in his, took both her hands in his, looking at her earnestly.
Don’t touch me, please don’t touch me, she cried silently, closing her eyes against the strange, unreadable expression in his. Even your fingers against my hand melt me into a puddle of nerves. Maman’s journals spoke of desire as delicious, wonderful, exciting. How could she have been so mistaken? There will be no looking back at this moment in fond memory. This is wrong. This feeling hurts.
So unfair, so unfair! He was going to send her packing. Sophie was convinced of it. And it wasn’t just because of that stupid, impulsive kiss, or because he might want her, long to have her in his bed. Why, he might not want her at all! As her mother’s daughter, and while also being judged on her own merits and faults, she might disgust him rather than ignite his passions.
Yes! That was it! She had been too much of a bother to him from the very beginning, as much as she had tried to be a help. Giuseppe had pilfered His Grace’s favorite stickpin, or something, and Ignatius had probably been squawking out naughty ditties again. The duke was tired of having gentlemen clogging up his drawing room. She’d thrown that stupid brandy snifter when she’d been angry enough, idiotic enough, careless enough, to let him see her dreadful temper. There had to be something. Something. She had embarrassed him somehow.
The Straight-Laced Duke Selbourne Page 15
